Babylon Sisters (6 page)

12

There are only two kinds of offices that house black newspapers. One is at the top of a long, rickety set of wooden stairs that would drive the fire marshal crazy if he ever inspected anything in these neighborhoods, which he doesn’t. The second is the ground-floor storefront in some bustling black commercial strip with the name of the paper printed in big white letters across the plate-glass window in the front. The
Sentinel
took the second option and occupied a row of four connected storefronts on Martin Luther King Jr. Drive.

At the
Sentinel,
just like at every other black newspaper office I’ve ever visited, the first person you encounter when you come through the front door is a middle-aged-to-ancient black woman who answers the phone, routes calls, greets visitors, and keeps up with who’s in and who’s out and when they’ll be back. In the midst of these duties, she also clips newspapers—her own home publication and as many others as the editor deems appropriate. Her desk is always piled high with well-stuffed folders that need to be filed under headings like,
Black Mayors, 1974–1976,
or
Police Brutality
or
Denzel Washington.
They are also the ones who rewrite the church news column so it’s ready for the world, open the mail, and remind the editor to go home and get some sleep every once in a while.

It was a full-time job back in the days when the
Sentinel
had six full-time reporters, four in town and two traveling the South to bring back coverage that placed Atlanta in the wider context of
region.
The
Sentinel
was the only black newspaper in town to send a reporter to the Pettus Bridge. They even had a reporter jailed in Albany and held without bail until Louis Sr. drove down with a lawyer from the Gate City Bar Association and brought him home. In those days, it wasn’t unusual for the crusading editor to sleep on the big, well-worn leather sofa in his office. After his mother died, Louis Jr. was accustomed to waking up alone at home and calling his father at the
Sentinel
to say he was making breakfast and did Louis Sr. want him to cook enough eggs for two, as if this were the normal exchange between father and son.

But the
Sentinel
’s glory days were behind it now, and the full-time staff had dwindled to Louis and Miss Iona Williams, who was still holding down the position of honor just inside the front door. Miss Iona, as everyone called her, had been the voice on the
Sentinel
’s answering machine for as long as anyone could remember, urging callers to leave a message and “don’t forget to do something for freedom today.” She had also been Louis Sr.’s longtime companion after he was widowed young, but had never married him out of loyalty to his wife, who was one of her best friends from girlhood.

At sixty-plus, Miss Iona was still a beauty. Her skin was smooth under the flawless makeup she was never seen without, and her salt-and-pepper hair was cut in a short pixie that had been her trademark style as long as I’d known her. One of those rare people who truly understands the difference between style and fashion, Miss Iona was wearing a dark green dress from the fifties that looked as modern as today. She was my role model. Sixty-five and sexy was a goal worth striving for, but today I doubted I’d make forty before my insane child gave me a heart attack.

When I walked in looking for Louis, Miss Iona greeted me warmly. “Hey, girl! Where have you been hiding?”

“Just trying to stay out of trouble,” I said, hoping I didn’t look or sound as agitated as I felt.

She cocked her head to the side and raised her eyebrows. “Is it working?”

That made me laugh. “It’s not working worth a damn!”

She laughed, too. “I didn’t think so. How’s my Baby Doll doing?”

My mother’s friends always called her “Dolly,” which is why we first started calling Phoebe “Baby Doll.” When she was an infant, she looked just like my mother. It was almost as if they had used me as their conduit. To Dolly’s buddies, Phoebe would always be Baby Doll.

“She’s her grandmother’s child. That’s all I’ve got to say.”

“Nobody up there at that school is bothering her, are they?”

Old black people always assume overt hostility runs rampant in environments like Fairfield, but it’s almost never like that anymore. There are so many people from so many places that national boundaries are more likely to cause friction than squabbling between citizens of the same country. “No. She’s fine. She’s driving me crazy all by herself.”

Her desk sat just outside of the glassed-in cubicle that was Louis’s office and had once been his father’s private sanctum. I could see him in his office talking animatedly with a young woman who was frantically taking notes. “I need some advice from her godfather. What’s he up to?”

“One of the freelancers brought in something about migrant workers in south Georgia, but she doesn’t know how to follow it up. He’s trying to help her find the thread.”

Louis was always talking to reporters about finding the thread that ran through a story and held it all together.

“Otherwise,” he’d explain patiently, “all you’ve got is a bunch of facts. What’s holding it all together?”

For Louis, what was holding it all together was a deep and abiding love for and faith in black people. He believed we could do better, and he lived his life as if we already were.

When he looked up and saw me, he smiled and held up one finger to say he was wrapping things up. The young reporter had one more question, which Louis answered as he walked her to the door. “How soon can I get that rewrite?” Louis said, sounding like the editor in the
Superman
movies.

“Before five,” the woman said over her shoulder, already headed back to her desk.

Miss Iona turned away to answer another call with her trademark greeting. “This is the
Sentinel,
black Atlanta’s beacon of truth; how can I help you?”

Louis leaned over and kissed my cheek as he walked me into his office and closed the door. “I’ve been expecting you all morning. Did your mail come late?”

I was carrying Phoebe’s letter in my purse to read it to Louis, but it seemed he had already seen it.

“You knew?”

He nodded. “She copied me.”

“And you didn’t call me?”

“I’ve been trying to call her.”

“Did she really change her number?”

“She did, and her roommate says she’s living off campus but she’s not at liberty to tell me where. I left word for her to call me. I think she will.”

“This is a nightmare.” I sat down on the big brown leather couch that took up half the space in the room. “What am I going to do?”

Louis sat down at the other end of the couch and took my hand. On the other side of the glass, Miss Iona was charming a FedEx man half her age.

“Do you think she really did it?”

He wanted to say,
Of course she didn’t do it,
but he couldn’t lie, especially not to me. He clutched at the only available straw. “Did she really take the diaries?”

Louis, of course, knew all about what had once seemed like a great plan and now seemed like the gateway to hell.

“Yes.”

“Did you list first and last names?”

“Of course.”

“Don’t say, ‘of course,’ ” Louis said calmly. “I can’t be expected to know the correct form for young girls’ diaries. It could as easily be first name, last initial, or something like that.”

“Sorry. Yes, I listed first and last to make it more convincing.”

“That makes them pretty easy to find. All she has to do is Google these guys.”

I groaned. “This is beyond awful. I can’t even imagine what the letter she’s sending them says. She didn’t send you a copy of that, too, did she?”

“No. Just her letter to you and a little note asking me not to be mad and to contact her old roommate in case of emergency.”

“This is an emergency!”

“Calm down,” Louis said in that soothing way men have when they just don’t get it. “If anybody contacts you, tell them your daughter made a mistake. What can they do?”

I groaned again. “Show up? Be indignant? Ruin my reputation for having at least the sense I was born with? Ask me what the hell I’m talking about, since I never had sex with a single one of them?”

“Am I in there?” Louis said with a grin to show he wouldn’t mind if I’d thrown his name in the pot for good measure.

“Of course not!”

“Always the friend, never the fantasy,” he said, and shook his head in mock despair.

“If you can get serious for a minute,” I snapped, “I could use some advice.”

“Okay, okay,” he said soothingly. “Don’t worry. She’ll get it out of her system. Your secret remains intact, and, truth be told, these guys will probably be flattered you ever thought of them that way. Don’t forget, you were a
babe
back then!”

The almost-flattery didn’t distract me from the can of worms my daughter had opened and put down before me like an episode of
Fear Factor.
“I’m still a babe, but I can’t even remember whose names I listed!”

“Well, that means I still have a chance,” Louis said, grinning, determined to tease. “Maybe you put me on there and just forgot.”

He still wasn’t taking this as seriously as I wanted him to. “That’s not funny.”

“Yes, it is,” he said, standing up and grabbing his jacket off the back of his chair.

“I’ll bet their wives won’t think it’s so funny.”

“Are they all married?”

“That’s the point, Louis.” I stood up, too. “I don’t know! I haven’t seen these guys in seventeen years!”

“Come have lunch with me and Amelia.” He pronounced it like it was all one word.
MeandAmelia.
“I’ll buy you a couple of apple martinis and you’ll begin to see the humor in all this.”

“No, I won’t. What if these guys start showing up at my door?”

“Tell them to come see me,” he said. “I’ll explain everything.”

“Phoebe is the one who’s got some explaining to do.”

“Soon as we find her,” he said, ushering me out the door like a man with a lunch date he didn’t want to miss. “I promise.”

“Don’t tell Amelia,” I said as we left the office in Miss Iona’s capable hands and headed over to Paschal’s. Louis Sr. had been a regular at the old Paschal’s in the days when the original owner fed civil rights workers his world-famous chicken on the house as his contribution to the movement. Louis Jr. carried on his father’s tradition from a booth in the corner of their expanded new place over on Northside Drive.

“Why not?”

“I don’t want her to say I told you so.”

He laughed. “Amelia never says I told you so.”

“This is so stupid, she’ll make an exception.”

“All right,” he said, taking my arm as we crossed the street. “Then so will I. Just for you, my lips are sealed.”

13

“Am I glad to see you,” Amelia said, standing up to hug me as soon as we walked in. “Phoebe copied me on that insane letter!”

“So much for secrets,” I said, taking a seat next to my friend.

“I got one, too,” Louis said, sliding in on the other side of Amelia and giving her a quick peck on the cheek. “A letter, not a secret.”

She beamed at him for a second before turning back to me. “Secrets are a waste of time. We need to put our heads together and come up with a way to handle this girl’s madness. Are you okay?”

Madness was what it felt like to me, too.

“It never dawned on me she’d ever do something like this.”

“Me, either,” Amelia said. “She never even mentioned the diaries to me.”

“She asked me about them once or twice,” Louis said. “Right after you left them out for her to find a couple of years ago.”

“And you’re just now telling me? What did she say?”

He shrugged, looking uncomfortable.
How did I ever think I could pull this off?

“She asked me if I thought they were true.”

“What did you tell her?”

“I told her somebody would have to be pretty crazy to lie in something they wrote just for themselves.”

Amelia was beaming again like she could just eat him up. I wanted to smack both of them for being so happy when my life was suddenly such a mess.

“Thanks a lot,” I said, signaling the waiter.

“What was I supposed to say?” Louis asked me after ordering a round of drinks. Alcohol for me. Sweet tea for them.

“Fake diaries don’t do much good if nobody vouches for them,” he said gently, and he was right.

“Why don’t you just call these guys?” Amelia said. “Maybe you can head them off at the pass.”

“I can’t call them. I don’t even have a list of their names, much less current phone numbers.”

“Don’t you remember who you wrote down?” Amelia said, sounding surprised as the waiter returned and put our drinks down, hovering discreetly for a moment, then gliding away when ordering didn’t seem to be on anybody’s immediate agenda. Paschal’s waiters never rushed their customers. If you wanted to linger, they were prepared to let you. The candied yams weren’t going anywhere, and neither were the collard greens.

“I didn’t want to remember them,” I said, trying once more to explain my convoluted reasoning. “They were just guys I had classes with. Friends of friends. Lab partners. Imaginary lovers, not the real thing.”

Amelia was nodding like she was in the process of taking a deposition. “Nobody who maintained contact with you?”

“Not a one. They barely knew me.”

“Then you know what?” Amelia looked at Louis, then back to me. I could tell she was rolling the facts over in her mind to clarify her thinking before she gave me an opinion.

“What?” All I needed was for Ezola Mandeville to hear some sleazy stuff like this on the wire. Atlanta’s black community is a small universe, and gossip travels fast, especially when you’re riding high and the fun is seeing you fall.

“I wouldn’t do anything at all,” Amelia said. “If they don’t contact you, let sleeping dogs lie.”

That sounded too easy, and even if it worked, there was still the question of the appropriate punishment for my daughter. She was too old to spank.

“What about Phoebe?”

Amelia shrugged. “Honor her request and don’t contact her at all. She’ll come to her senses.”

“Sometimes I wonder.”

“I’ll make sure I find out who she’s staying with and where,” Louis said. “Just give her some space.”

“
Space?
I’d like to give her a piece of my mind!”

Sometimes this modern-mother stuff requires a little too much understanding for me.

“Didn’t you drive your mother crazy?” Amelia said, reaching for the menu now that she had given me a survival strategy that made sense, at least temporarily.

“It skips a generation,” I said. “Like twins.”

“That’s not how I remember it,” Louis said, grinning at me like he was fully prepared to give me a few choice examples.

“Change the subject,” I said. “Please!”

Amelia immediately obliged by launching into a funny story about a case she had just tried where the defendant spoke French, her client spoke Cambodian, and the translator was certified only in Spanish. Louis followed up until the food arrived by telling us about his upcoming appointment to talk to some young black entrepreneurs from Detroit who had contacted him about investing in the
Sentinel.
By the time we were finishing our meal, I had decided that my friends were right. The best thing I could do right now was just be still, be patient, and wait for the storm to pass.