No Crystal Stair (39 page)

“Okay, asshole!”Ted planted his bulky frame in front of her. “What's with you? Fucking up my meeting with all that do-gooder shit. Taking charge like whitey!”

“Oh, yeah!” Sue sneered. “Didn't you know? She's making out with that white dude.” She turned to the others, her words thick with menace. “She ain't with us, I say we trash the bitch.”

Maggie tried to step back, tried to stifle the fear.

“Cool it!” Ken's voice was quiet this time, but just as threatening. “Any trashing around here comes through me and the brotherhood. Thought I already told you this sister works her butt off for the kids. I ain't seen you down there.” He pointed at Sue.

“Another thing!” Ken held up a hand. The people who'd started to melt away froze in their tracks. “The brotherhood don't give a damn who's screwing who. You all doing it.” He said as he flashed a look at Ted.

Maggie would have laughed at the expression on Ted's face had she not felt so faint with relief. She stared up at Ken, wanting to speak, but she couldn't swallow the lump in her throat. Timidly she touched the sleeve of his leather jacket.

He gave a thumbs-up. “Right on, sister.”

She smiled at him and walked from the room.

Steve was waiting outside. Together they walked down the hall, out of the building across the campus.

Going public.

August 1999

 

A
nn Elizabeth stood alone in the kitchen trying to remember where Cindy kept the coffee. They had come to Atlanta for Helen Rose's granddaughter's wedding and were staying, as always now, with Bobby and Cindy in their fabulous house on the lake. A
real
lake, with their own small dock and boat, convenient for sailing and visiting their neighbors, black and white. She smiled. Dad had been right. Cindy's house was grander than most.

The coffee...

She remembered. French Roast, in the fridge in this everything-in-its-place house. Thank goodness she didn't have to grind coffee beans. She had breakfast almost ready when Rob came in.

“Bobby gone?” he asked.

“Long ago. Early surgery.” She always felt proud when she said that. Like her mother, she thought.
Your dad's at the hospital.
Well, she had a right to be proud of Bobby! “Sit down. I'm just doing the eggs.”

“I'll bet Maggie's mad at you for stealing her daughter,” Rob said when she joined him at the sunny breakfast table.

“She's been with them all summer.” In the Greek Isles where Steve was heading some project, doing whatever marine biologists do. Whitney, their nineteen-year-old, had flown in to meet her grandparents in Atlanta—at Ann Elizabeth's request.

“She'd have had to come back early, anyway, to register.”

“Bull. Classes don't begin at Stanford until mid-September.” Rob chuckled. “You just want her with you.”

“And someone to shop and go visiting with while you're on the golf course.”

“And who else but your favorite grandchild.”

“Nonsense, I love all six of them—equally!” She did.

Bobby's handsome sons. Jerry, the oldest, a contractor who had a big stake in all the real-estate development going on in Atlanta. Todd, a broker in New York. And Lyndon, who'd decided to follow in his father's footsteps.
He's only just finished his residency in neurosurgery, of all things. Dear me, seems only yesterday that he was a wriggling baby in my arms.

It seemed that they had all grown up so fast. Maggie's eldest Robbie, with his own family in New York, was deeply involved in the Pearson family business, which had never interested his father. Ann Elizabeth chuckled. Robbie was busy building up the family fortune with Richard, the younger son, was busy giving it away. Emulating his Uncle Bobby, Richard had also become a doctor. But like his mother, Maggie he was full of compassion and generosity. He practiced at a family clinic in the poor Brooklyn neighborhood of Bedford Stuyvesant.

Anyway, they were all doing well and that was what mattered. “Do you ever think how lucky we are?” she said now. “To have children and grandchildren who are all successful and happy in such varied careers?”

“And taking it all for granted!”

She knew he was thinking of the struggle he'd endured just to fly a plane. She touched his hand. “They're so young. But they're taking advantage of what's available to them, and I'm proud.”

“Me, too,” he said, getting up. They'd both heard grandson Jerry's horn outside. “Gotta go. Tee time.” He kissed her and went out.

Might as well catch the news, she thought, and switched on the television. A commentator was interviewing Rosa Parks, who had received the Congressional Medal of Honor in June. She's still beautiful, Ann Elizabeth thought, and she certainly deserves the honor. Hers was the first step. Toward the marches and sit-ins. Toward change. Toward our entry into all hotels, hospitals, schools, new careers and neighborhoods and parks like the one where Rob's playing golf right now, instead of the crummy little one at the colored Lincoln Country Club. She gave the television a little salute.
Thank you, Rosa Parks.
One woman alone. That took guts!

One person alone often made a difference in this crazy mixed up world, she thought as she refilled her coffee cup. If it hadn't been for that doctor who took Bobby to the white hospital in Atlanta or Mrs. Levine who'd walked Maggie to that school, or Chief Jenkins in Atlanta...

My goodness, why was she thinking backward? She concentrated on what she and Whitney would do today.

She smiled. Rob was right. Whitney was her heart. Maybe because she'd come a bit later than the boys, when Ann Elizabeth had despaired of there ever being a granddaughter. It never ceased to amaze her that Steve and Maggie, who lived like Gypsies, jumping from one marine project to another, could produce such a sedate, sophisticated and very sweet daughter. Never mind that they'd named her Whitney Alyson Elliot Pearson after her paternal grandmother. At least they hadn't tacked on Richardson, her second husband's surname.

And I'm grateful to Whitney Richardson. Had it not been for her, Steve and Maggie might never have married!

That had been one of the tough times. Only a week or so after that fateful Christmas, Maggie had announced that she was moving in with Steve. He wanted to get married but she didn't, not right away. She wanted to wait, to avoid an irreparable rift
with his family, to give his parents time to get use to the idea of their only son marrying a black woman.

Had it not been for Whitney Alyson Elliott Richardson... She was a Boston Elliott, “Too far above everyone else to give a damn about race or color,” Rob had said. But it was really Maggie, who'd won her over. Beneath the tattered bell bottoms she had Julia Belle Washington Carter's proud bearing. Those years in Europe at the International School had given her a polish and a sophistication that Whitney Richardson had sniffed out. Maggie's French was more than just passable. Her ability to handle the escargot tongs at that exclusive French restaurant where Mrs. Richardson had taken them may have been the final test.

Ann Elizabeth smiled, remembering. A week after Maggie's graduation from Berkeley, the small family ceremony on the Mendocino headlands over looking the blue Pacific, had been more touching than any wedding she'd ever witnessed. Both Steve's parents had been there. Julia Belle and Whitney Richardson met at the wedding and discovered a connection. Both lifelong Congregationalists had stained glass windows dedicated to their families, one at a white church in Boston, the other, a black church in Atlanta.

“My, you were up early,” Cindy said, entering the kitchen.

“Whitney still asleep?”

Ann Elizabeth nodded. “I made breakfast for Rob. He and Jerry had an early tee time.”

“And there's still coffee. Good!” Cindy poured herself a cup. She looked pretty, energetic and still young but putting on weight, Ann Elizabeth noticed as she watched Cindy reach for a cinnamon roll.

“Only five days before the wedding, and there are still so many things to do,” Cindy said, and began to list them.

Ann Elizabeth, listening, marveled how some things never changed. Cindy, grandmother of the flower girl, Jerry's
three-year-old, was as involved as Helen Rose, grandmother of the bride, each determined that this wedding should outdo any other.

And you're being spiteful, Ann Elizabeth Metcalf! You can see for yourself that your dad was right. Cindy has been the best wife for Bobby. Perfect with the social life, the boys and the budget.

But Bobby made himself what he is—one of the most respected pediatric surgeons in the country. People brought special cases to him, and he lectured everywhere and experimented with new techniques. Last night, he said that the time was coming when most surgery would be done by computer without the necessity or cutting into the body at all! Ann Elizabeth could hardly imagine such a thing. But she was glad her son was part of it all. She thought of her dad. Wherever he is, he's smiling!

Cindy left to get dressed. She hadn't been gone five minutes when Whitney, sun-kissed cheeks glowing, bounced in, still in pajamas.

“Hi, Grandma.” Whitney said, kissing her

“Hi, honey. What do you want for breakfast?”

“Just cereal. I'll get it.”

She may have her other grandma's name, Ann Elizabeth thought, but she looks like me. Her brothers, with their fair skin, could be mistaken for white. Not Whitney. Her eyes were blue, like her father's and Randy's, but her hair was black and curly and her skin, dark, not quite as dark as her mother's, more like mine, she thought, secretly pleased by that. Her daughter Maggie, the former black radical, traveled in white circles almost exclusively now. She would never say it out loud but Ann Elizabeth didn't want her black heritage or color to fade away.

“Where are we going today, Grandma?” Whitney looked up from her bowl.

“I thought we might take in the Sweet Auburn Heritage Festival. There's an item in the Journal about it.”

“Good. You can show me your dad's old office.”

Ann Elizabeth kissed her on the forehead. She was so sweet, so willing to do things with her old grandmother. Yesterday they'd toured the university complex that had grown bigger and more crowded than it was in 1992, when she'd come for the class of '42's fiftieth reunion. All the Negro institutions had merged now, with the addition of Morehouse Medical School. There were new stadiums and dormitories from the Olympics in 1996, a new library and other buildings paid for by philanthropists and entertainment stars whose children had attended one of the colleges. It was all bigger and grander.

With a pang of nostalgia, she remembered what it had been like more than half a century earlier. She'd sat on the old library steps—

“We didn't go by your old house yet.”

“No. Not yet,”That too gave her a pang. She'd avoided going down Hunter—oops! Martin Luther King Drive, past her old house, although Bobby said the current owners had refurbished it and the neighborhood hadn't deteriorated that much, and goodness, Mom and Dad had sold the house in 1975 and moved into a senior citizen's complex on Peachtree. They'd enjoyed three years there before Dad died, and Mom a year after him.

Feeling tears in her eyes, Ann Elizabeth reminded herself that both her parents had retained fairly good health and complete mental clarity before their sudden deaths. She was grateful they hadn't lingered like Aunt Sophie, who lived five years longer, suffering from Alzheimer's, unable to recognize even Helen Rose.

Sadie and Dan were gone too. He'd succumbed to lung cancer. Those cigarettes that she thought had made him look so sophisticated when they were young. Their only child, a son,
an architect, lived in Chicago. Summoned by their son a few years ago Ann Elizabeth had rushed to Sadie's death bed. Sadie slipped a tiny box in her hand. It was her engagement ring from Randy. “Give it to your granddaughter she said,” tears glistening in her eyes.

Senior citizens' complexes were popping up everywhere now. After Rob retired they'd bought into one but hadn't moved yet. Not as long as Whitney was at Stanford and bringing her friends up almost every weekend, for “exotic” home made fare, fried chicken, colored greens, cornbread, a welcome break from dorm food.

With Whitney, there was none of the upheaval of Bobby's or Maggie's college days. Her friends were everything, not just black and white but Vietnamese Americans, Mexican Americans, Muslim Americans and endless mixtures of all those ethnic groups and more.

Anyway, Whitney seemed uninterested in politics. She liked music. She had the lead in the college production of La Boheme last year.

Imagine. Opera, and most in some foreign language, which she handles like a native, a byproduct of living in all those places with her parents. But she got her voice from Thelma. Oh, she's a soprano, not contralto, but the range the clarity, the color—that's Thelma Metcalf.

“Grandma! You're not listening.”

“Oh!” Goodness, her mind was rambling again. “I'm sorry. What did you say?”

“I was reading this article, and I was wondering why they call it ‘Sweet Auburn'.”

“Because that's what it was, Whitney, sweet. Don't believe all you read about those bad old days of segregation. Yes we suffered discrimination, but we were happy then. Auburn Avenue is where we went to shop and meet our boy fiends and well just everything. And it was sweet,” Ann Elizabeth trailed off,
remembering the long-ago treks to the colored library, swimming at the colored Y . . .

“And now the slogan is ‘Making Auburn Sweeter'?”

“They're renovating and refurbishing, adding so much that's new—the Martin Luther King Center, a performing Arts Center, the new bank and insurance company buildings and more. And they're expanding.” Just as our lives have, she thought. Rob's and mine, our children's and grandchildren's, as well as the lives of so many others.

She grinned at her granddaughter. “We're moving right on uptown with everybody else,” she said. “It's going to be even bigger. Better. Sweeter!”