The Supremes at Earl's All-You-Can-Eat (26 page)

In the years that came later, Barbara Jean would imagine what might have happened if she had been more like Odette when she was young. Maybe if she’d had more courage, she could have told common sense to kiss her ass and run straight at that sweet vision of a life with Chick in Detroit or Chicago or anywhere. Maybe if she had been braver, her boy would have lived.

On April 4, 1968, the night after Barbara Jean talked with Odette and Clarice in Mrs. Jackson’s gazebo, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was murdered in Memphis. Both Chicago and Detroit, the potential escape routes for Chick and Barbara Jean, went up in flames.

Barbara Jean, Miss Thelma, and Little Earl watched TV as a parade of solemn white male faces tried to explain to white America just what had been lost that day. Big Earl came home late that night. As soon as he’d shut the front door, Miss Thelma asked, “Where you been? I saw the lights go out over across the street almost an hour ago. You had me worried.”

“I drove Ray to his brother’s place,” he said.

“What? You went over there with them crazy-ass hillbillies? Are you outta your mind?”

Big Earl said, “Those folks are too damn happy to be thinkin’ about me, or Chick, or anything but their good news. Besides, there was some trouble over at the restaurant, and I didn’t want him to be there by himself all night.”

Miss Thelma saved Barbara Jean from having to ask what had happened by saying, “What kinda trouble?”

“Not much, just Ramsey and some of his friends actin’ stupid. They lost what little sense they have and decided they had to beat down a white man. So Ramsey started in on Ray.”

Barbara Jean’s heart began pounding so hard that she was sure everyone in the room could hear it.

Miss Thelma asked, “Ray all right?”

Big Earl laughed. “He’s fine. Odette and James was there, and they stepped into it. Make that girl mad and you got somethin’ fierce on
your hands. I had to pull her off of Ramsey myself. And he’s gonna have a nasty black eye tomorrow. That’ll teach ’im not to act a fool.”

“No, it won’t,” Miss Thelma said.

Big Earl nodded. “You’re right. It won’t.”

“You shoulda brought Ray over here to stay, ’stead of takin’ him to his brother,” Miss Thelma said.

“I asked, but he said he didn’t wanna come. Something’s goin’ on with him.”

When Big Earl said that, Barbara Jean could’ve sworn he was staring at her. But she told herself it had to be her imagination; she hadn’t been able to think straight since Lester had asked her to marry him. As she sat with the McIntyres and took in replay after replay of the ugly story on the TV news, she thought about the boy she loved, sitting in a cold shack in a section of town where people were at that moment firing shotguns into the air in celebration.

Plainview shut down in the days after Dr. King was killed. The university was so afraid that its handful of black students would start a riot that classes were canceled. Some white neighborhoods put up barricades. People were afraid to travel about, so businesses temporarily closed their doors. Some business owners who had seen what was happening in big cities around the country stayed in their places twenty-four hours a day with shotguns on their laps, waiting for looters. Big Earl was one of the few people who understood from the beginning that Plainview wasn’t going to explode. He kept his restaurant open every day.

The afternoon after Dr. King died, Barbara Jean stopped by the All-You-Can-Eat. Clarice met her just inside the door. She grabbed Barbara Jean’s arm and pulled her toward their window table, where Odette sat waiting. After she led Barbara Jean to her seat, words rushed from Clarice’s mouth. “I’m so sorry, Barbara Jean. The only person I told was my mother.”

Barbara Jean didn’t understand what Clarice was saying at first. But she figured it out fast enough when she glanced around and realized that most of the eyes in the room were on her. She realized then that she was looking at a restaurant full of people who knew her secrets.

“Jesus Christ, Clarice,” she said.

“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. Everybody was so upset last night. I was trying to think of good things to keep our minds off of the bad stuff on TV and it just slipped out. Mother said she wouldn’t tell, but she must’ve told Aunt Glory and Aunt Glory must’ve told Veronica. And, well, you know that Veronica. She’s got such a big mouth.”

Odette spoke for the first time. “
Veronica’s
got a big mouth?” Then Odette slapped Clarice’s arm so hard it made her cry out, “Ouch!”

Veronica and two other girls from school started walking their way. As they came closer, Clarice whispered, “I never said a word about Chick, I swear to God. Just Lester.”

Veronica smirked that way people do when they know more of someone else’s business than they should. She said, “So your work paid off, I guess. I’ve got to hand it to you. It didn’t even look like you were trying. So, when’s the wedding?”

Her friends joined in asking questions. They didn’t really care if Barbara Jean responded at all. This was the stage of gossip when getting the facts from the horse’s mouth only interfered with the fun of it all.

Barbara Jean couldn’t have answered anyway; she was too busy looking around the room for Chick. Until then, the notion of becoming engaged to Lester had been kind of like a fantasy to her, an interesting story to share with her best girlfriends. Now it was out in the world, the property of others, not just Barbara Jean and the other Supremes. It was something real. Now it had the power to hurt people. She excused herself from the window table, brushing past Veronica and her friends on her way to Chick.

He was sitting on the corner of his bed when she walked into the storeroom. He wore his food-stained work apron and his hair was covered with a net. Before Barbara Jean could say anything, he spat out, “Were you going to tell me about it, or were you just going to invite me to the wedding?”

“I didn’t tell you about it because I knew you’d get upset. And there was really nothing to say. I didn’t tell Lester I was going to marry him.”

“What did you tell him, then?”

“I told him I’d think about it.”

Chick stood up from the bed then and said, “
Think about it?
What’s there to think about?”

“There’s a whole lot to think about, Chick. There’s my life to think about. There’s my future to think about.” In the voice of her mother, Barbara Jean heard herself say, “I’ve got to be a forward-thinking woman. And a forward-thinking woman looks out for herself.”

Chick’s voice cracked as he spoke. His usual deep, smooth tone went high, almost childlike. “I thought you were going to let
me
look out for you. I thought you were going to be with
me
.”

“I can’t be with you, and you know it. We’ve been back here playing around and pretending like it could work out, but we both know it can’t.”

“We can get married. It’s been legal here for two years.”

“Legal’s one thing. What they’ll beat you down and string you up for is another.”

“Then we’ll get married and go someplace else. We’ve talked about it before. We could go to Chicago or Detroit. There are couples like us there and nobody even thinks a thing about it.”

“Haven’t you heard the news? The Promised Lands are on fire. If we tried walking down the street together in Chicago or Detroit, we wouldn’t make it half a block before our heads got busted open.”

He said, “I’ll figure out a way to make it work. There are plenty of other places we can go.”

“No, there aren’t, and you know it. The best we can hope for is to run away somewhere and find somebody like Big Earl who’d let us hole up in a little dump of a room like this.” She gestured around the storeroom. “And what about your brother? He’s been driving up and down the street for months now waiting for his chance to catch you outside alone just because you work for a black man. Now you want to tell him that you’re going to have a black wife? Do you honestly think he’d let you shame him by marrying me? You think he wouldn’t hunt you down and hurt you worse than he ever has? And wherever we go, we’d be lucky to get through a day without getting spit on. Chick,
you don’t know what it’s like to have everybody look down on you, point at you, and treat you like you’re less than nothing. You think you know, but you don’t. I lived that way almost all my life until this last year and I can’t go back to it. I can’t.”

“What are you saying, Barbara Jean?”

She took a deep breath and tried to hold back the tears that wanted so badly to come out, and then she said what she had avoided saying all week. “I’m saying I’m going to marry Lester.”

Chick didn’t try to, or couldn’t, stop tears from flowing down his cheeks as he yelled, “You love me. I know you love me,” making it sound like an accusation.

She answered automatically and honestly without thinking. She said, “Yes. I love you.” Barbara Jean felt her will beginning to dissolve. She wanted to grab him and pull him into the bed with her with no thought of who might find them together. But then she felt the hand of her mother pushing her toward the door of the room just as surely as if Loretta had been alive and breathing. As Barbara Jean backed out of the storeroom, Loretta used her daughter’s mouth to say, “But love ain’t never put a bite of food on any table.”

She couldn’t face her friends or the gossipmongers in the dining room of the All-You-Can-Eat, so Barbara Jean slipped out the back door. In the alley behind the restaurant, she felt her stomach lurch and she had to bend over and gasp for air. When she got her nerves and her stomach calmed down, she walked around the block. Then she hurried over to the alley behind the next street, so she could enter Big Earl and Miss Thelma’s house from the back and not be seen by her friends at the restaurant. By the time Barbara Jean let herself into the back door of the house, she had started to feel a little bit better. She told herself that she had done the right thing for herself, and for Chick, too. This was the first step into a new and improved life, the life she deserved. But she hadn’t anticipated what that old comedian God had in mind for her.

I never thought I’d live to see the day when Clarice walked out on Richmond. I’d thought of them as a couple since we were children and he would tease her by hurling walnuts at her and yelling “Time bomb!” as she ran away. They were lovers before any of us knew what lovers were. Now Clarice had gone and shocked me by moving to Leaning Tree. I couldn’t help but join the crowd who studied them like they were a couple of curiosities in a traveling freak show.

Many things were still the same. Clarice and Richmond got together each Sunday to attend morning services at Calvary Baptist. They still came to the All-You-Can-Eat and sat at their usual places at the table.

But Clarice had given up pretending to have a good time at Calvary. The hardcore, fire-and-brimstone services she once used as a yardstick to measure all other churches with—and find the others lacking—weren’t bringing her the same satisfaction anymore. She’d started complaining about how judgmental the congregation was encouraged to be—which, frankly, I’d always thought was one of the things she enjoyed most about the place. And she didn’t bother to hide her annoyance with Reverend Peterson, who had met with her twice already to remind her of her duties as a Christian wife and to express his disappointment at her “unfortunate recent behavior.” She had some especially harsh words for Calvary Baptist and her pastor after she opened the weekly bulletin at church and found her name on the prayer list alongside the names of misfits, troubled children, and other notorious backsliders from the congregation.

There were physical changes, too. I had called upon Barbara Jean’s old hairdressing skills one Saturday and had her shave what was left
of my hair until it was just a bit of black and gray fluff clinging to my scalp. The second I vacated the makeshift barber chair we’d set up in my kitchen, Clarice hopped into it and ordered Barbara Jean to cut her hair almost as short. She claimed she did it because, after fifty years of dealing with heat, rollers, chemicals, and pins to keep her long hair perfectly styled, she wanted something that required less maintenance. But Barbara Jean and I both thought she did it to get back at Richmond for having her name put on the backsliders’ prayer list. She’d kept her hair long for years because he liked it that way. Now Clarice was determined to show him that she had laid claim to her own head in more ways than one.

I could tell that Clarice was filling at least some of her post-Richmond time with music. She had fallen back into her habit of humming quietly to herself and absentmindedly tapping out piano fingerings on whatever surface her hands happened to land on, a practice we’d teased her about back when we were young and she was still performing regularly. Clarice was more cheerful and more relaxed than I’d seen her in years, maybe ever.

Richmond changed even more than Clarice. Without his wife around to dress and tend to him, our stylish, pressed, and polished Richmond was revealed to be a color-blind man who clearly didn’t know how to operate a steam iron. Richmond, who had always been so easygoing and relaxed, now spent most of our Sunday suppers staring at Clarice and chewing on his lower lip. Depending on his mood, he either ate the most diabetic-friendly things on the buffet, showing his plate to Clarice for her approval, or he took heaping bowls of sweets from the dessert table and dug into them with a fury while glaring at her. But he couldn’t get a rise out of her. The most Clarice would say in response was “Try not to kill yourself. It might upset the kids.”

The biggest change, though, was that now it was Richmond, not Clarice, who presented a fantasy to the world about their relationship. He had spread the word that Clarice had rented Mama and Daddy’s old house in Leaning Tree because so many of her piano students lived in the new subdivisions over there. Everyone who knew them
knew that she had moved out, but he insisted on repeating the fiction that Clarice went to her studio in Leaning Tree to practice and teach every day and then came back to him each night. I always thought I’d enjoy seeing Richmond get a good hard kick in the ass, but it was sad to see the mighty Richmond Baker reduced to spreading such tales.