Between her emotional outbursts I said, “Gigi, I want you to meet my good friend Miss Orchestra Solomon.”
“Hello,” the suddenly shy and definitely suffering child murmured.
Alice Fabricant came up to us around then.
“What are you doing here, Mr. Rawlins?” she asked, without even a hint of friendly concern.
“Came to see my girl.”
“She’s not yours,” the social worker intoned.
“Oh,” I said, “of course. Have you met my friend Orchestra Solomon? Sadie,” I then said to Orchestra, “this is Mrs. Alice Fabricant, the woman who controls the fate of this child.”
“I see,” the billionaire said solemnly.
For her part, Alice was dumbfounded. Everyone who had anything to do with fundraising knew about Sadie Solomon.
“It’s such a pleasure to meet you,” Fabricant sputtered. “Your, your generosity—”
“Mr. Rawlins tells me that this child needs a home,” Sadie said.
“Yes, yes, certainly.”
“Call my office. Talk to my lawyer.”
We left the somber LaCraig funeral with Gigi in tow.
I had to explain to the girl that I was unable to be there for a child and that Sadie, who lived right next door, wanted to adopt a little girl just like her.
“You can come to my house, play with my dogs, and my daughter can teach you all the different things that swimmers know,” I explained.
“But... but... but what about that man, that man in the house?”
“You mean the one wearin’ the yellow checkerboard?”
“Uh-huh.”
“He’s dead.”
“He really is?”
“They said so on the radio.”
With that she finally accepted the new life. And she loved the mountain once we got there.
Cosmo’s burial was the next day, on Orchestra’s mountainside. The mourners were all residents of the mountain, people who saw Cosmo nearly every day. Erculi thanked me for telling him where to find his son’s killers. He said that it meant that Cosmo could rest in peace.
Two days later we laid Santangelo Burris to rest at Forest Lawn. It was a small affair attended by Anger, Violet, Hannibal, Amethystine, me, and an old guy from the BFNE named Howard Loftus. No one spoke over the grave. We just bowed our heads while he was laid to rest. Amethystine held Anger’s hand through the entire ritual, until the backhoe had filled the grave with soil.
Walking down to the parking lot, Loftus fell in step beside me and said, “You know, he was a good man. Not so good with words or ideas that wasn’t real. But he believed in his own freedom and the freedom of all Black people. Some’a my brothers at the BFNE didn’t agree. They done started to think that bein’ more like the white man that made us slaves was the only way to liberation. But Santangelo knew that wasn’t true. He knew it in his bones.”
Loftus was one of those Black men with great power packed in a small frame. Something about his words, their presentation, reeked of truth.
Down at the parking lot Anger was standing next to the WRENS-L Lincoln Continental. Amethystine and Violet were climbing into the burgundy Buick that Hannibal drove.
“You mind givin’ me a ride down to the restaurant, Easy?” my first true love asked.
“No, ma’am.”
We went for quite a while without talking. I turned on the radio but she turned it off.
“I’m sorry, Easy.”
“That’s okay. I don’t need to hear nuthin’.”
“Not the radio, fool,” she said with a grin. “Back in the day I looked at you like you were a child. Like a little brother, or even my son. I realize now that I done you a disservice. You always been the best man I ever known.”
Most times in life I hear words and consider them. But in this case I felt what Anger was saying. Her words pressed down like heavy stones lodged on top of my mind.
“I hope that you and your crooked girlfriend make it,” she said into my silence. “And even if you crash and burn, I hope you have a good time on the way down.”
Later on that day, back at the house, in the rooftop rose garden, I was sitting with Hannibal. He told me some things about his younger brother.
“He was just mad sometimes,” Hannibal told me. “Because he was so rough he thought that people were laughin’ at him. But I loved him, you know what I mean?”
What I knew was to let him have his own feelings.
After a decent wait I asked, “What do you plan to do?”
“I don’t know. Mama’s goin’ back down Texas. She said I could come wit’ ’er, but them rednecks are too much for me. I got a double degree in literature and economics. I was thinkin’ that maybe I could get a job workin’ for a financial institution of some kind. Maybe a charity.”
“I got an in at P9.”
“You do?”
“Yeah.”
“What kinda in?”
“If I call the president and say I need to meet, he’ll ask when and where.”
Surprise showed on the Princeton graduate’s face.
“But,” I added.
“But what?”
“There might be a way that you could work for yourself.”
“Like how?”
“The man who was after Sasha and you, the man that had Santangelo killed, that was Waynesmith Von Crudock.”
“Uh-huh,” he grunted. “Who did that?”
“The police don’t know.”
My carefully chosen words had the desired effect. Hannibal nodded sagely.
“What’s that got to do with me having my own business?”
“Crudock was the one wanted that deed.”
“Yeah?”
“I have it now, and I know the rightful heir. I think we three could work out a contract where you could manage her properties for sumpin’ like a five percent fee. You do that and you’ll be wearin’ vicuna before next year is over.”
“Vicuna?”
35
Funerals wear on me. I’ve been living through friends’ and relatives’ last rites for nearly fifty years. First my mother, then my father, and the numbers just rose from there, like levees that are bound to overflow.
I had experienced an entire war zone of dying, and so the marriage between Millicent Roram and John the bartender was a necessary pleasure. Everybody was there. Mouse and Vu Von Lihn; EttaMae and her white servant boy turned lover, Peter Rhone; Jackson Blue; Jewelle Blue; Lynn Hua, the Hong Kong movie star who happened to be in town for a new film; Melvin Suggs, Mary Donovan, and Anatole McCourt; the disbarred lawyer — cum — bail bondsman Milo Sweet; Paris Minton; and Mama Jo in one of her rare public appearances. Fearless Jones was there, of course, along with a hundred and fifty other sundry souls.
Bertrand Hollis and his nine-piece jazz band played the old kind of jazz, not the kind that made you think but the underground rumble that came before, the music that forced you to dance.
Bourbon flowed like water and there was so much food that you couldn’t make up your mind. There was fried chicken, barbecued ribs, chitterlings and hog maws, three kinds of greens, corn bread, macaroni and cheese, white rice, turtle soup, and pies of all kinds.
The full range of humanity was there: eighty- and ninety-year-old men and women, at least three dozen squealing kids, beautiful ladies and their decked-out men. Charcoal Joe came accompanied by a small, well-dressed entourage. My sons, Jesus and Hannibal, wore matching blue suits. Violet and Benita and Feather wore silver dresses.
Amethystine was tightly bound in a white silk gown that had been tie-dyed with an entire rainbow of hues. She was the most beautiful person, next to my child’s-eye view of my mother, I had ever seen. When she smiled at me, I felt an emotion I would have sworn, before that day, that only women could experience. The feeling caught in my throat, brought my left hand to my chest. All the deaths I had known were with me then, telling me to live harder, better, brighter.