Till You Hear From Me: A Novel (5 page)

“If there is any punishing to be done,” she said, unbuttoning her blouse and dropping it to the floor, “I will be the one doing it.”

“Oh, yeah?” he said, but as he pulled her close, she suddenly grabbed his balls and squeezed them hard enough that he actually yelped in protest.
“Hey!”

“Now who’s the screamer?” she cooed, releasing him with a grin.

He pulled her down onto his lap and buried his face between her breasts. He was going to miss this girl when her man finally finished med school and made an honest woman of her. But for tonight, her heart belonged to Daddy.

FIVE

W
HEN
I
PULLED UP IN FRONT OF MY FATHER’S HOUSE, IN MY LITTLE
white rental car, I was glad he wouldn’t be there. Not because I didn’t want to see him. In spite of everything, I love the Rev like I love my life, but coming home has a certain rhythm to it if it’s going to be done right. A certain sacredness, and a big dose of self-preservation. That’s why I always try to arrive when the Rev is occupied elsewhere, so that I can close that big front door behind me and spend a few minutes alone, greeting the ghosts and reviewing the protocols.

This is, after all, the house of Rev. Horace A. Dunbar, gifted orator, fearless Civil Rights warrior, Founding Pastor, now Pastor Emeritus at Rock of Faith Community Church, advisor to mayors, congressmen, and even a president or two. Loving father, misunderstood husband, lifelong servant of the people. Attention must be paid. My father was one of the lions of the Atlanta Civil Rights Movement and although his name is not as well known as some of his contemporaries, his courage is legendary, his contributions undeniable.
I grew up in a house where a bona fide hero sat at the head of our table, and we all knew it.

If you doubted it for a minute, the photographs are everywhere to remind you. There he is hanging on the wall in the hallway, leading a picket line in front of Rich’s Department Store downtown because black folks could buy clothes there, they just weren’t allowed to try them on first. There he is on the desk in his study, shaking hands with Martin Luther King Jr., two days before The March on Washington, or on the living room mantel talking head-to-head with Brother Malcolm, or on the wall of the breakfast nook, receiving a proclamation for Rev. Horace A. Dunbar Day from Mayor Maynard Jackson, or even in a candid shot, laughing in the backyard with Mr. Eddie. It doesn’t matter what he’s doing, it’s always there. In his eyes. In the way he smiles. There’s that
certainty
. That absolute conviction that there is a right and wrong of things; that the arc of the universe is long, but it does bend toward justice.

I took my suitcase upstairs to my old bedroom, still decorated with the pale pink wallpaper my mother let me pick out for my tenth birthday. The one picture of her the Rev allows in the house sits on my dresser in a little silver frame. It’s a picture of the three of us on Tybee Island, near Savannah, when I was still a toddler. I don’t know who took it, probably Mr. Eddie, but my mother is young and beautiful and happy to be standing in the crook of my father’s arm. She’s holding me by the hand, but she’s looking up at the Rev, who is looking right back, and it is such an intimate, sensual glance between them that whenever I see it, I feel almost like I’m intruding on their privacy, even all these years later.

That photograph used to be downstairs on the mantel, but after Mom left, he moved it up here. I guess he couldn’t stand to put it away, but he couldn’t take seeing it every day either. I don’t remember my parents being in love like that. By the time I was old enough to notice, things had already cooled considerably. Sometimes I think she was just waiting for me to graduate and go off to college before
she made her move. I always appreciated that. They’ve been separated now almost as long as they lived together, but neither one of them has ever gotten around to filing for divorce. They talk to each other more than either one ever admits to me, but unless they drag me into those discussions, I steer clear. My parents did not raise a fool.

This house is full of ghosts. Not the chain clanking,
boo
in the night kind. More like spirits. Energy left behind when the courageous souls who used to fill this house with endless talk of revolution and resistance, the possibility of transformation and the necessity of love, finally passed on, or moved on, or in my case, moved
out
. And not a moment too soon, I might add. That self-preservation thing again. It was hard to find room to breathe in this house when I was growing up, much less get a word in edgewise. My father needed all the air and he sure had a lock on all the words.

His voice seemed to have an infinite capacity to convey every human emotion, but no ability to modulate itself to everyday exchanges. The Rev’s voice didn’t just resonate. It
boomed
, commanding the attention of everyone within the sound of it. Whether he was calling for a march on City Hall or complimenting Miss Iona on her Easter Sunday hat, when he spoke, you had to listen. Or if you had any sense you did, because that was the other thing about my father. He was always right. I was twenty-five before I ever heard him admit to a mistake, and it was, of course, a minor infraction. That’s what makes him such a great leader. He’s always absolutely certain that what he’s suggesting is the right thing to do.

I need somebody like that in my life again. Somebody who can look me in the eye and say,
This is what is happening and this is what you need to do about it
. My father used to fill that role, but since he stopped speaking to me five months ago, or, let me be fair, since we stopped speaking to each other, I’m kind of out here on my own. My mother is entirely too ideological to be much good in the personal advice area. Tell my mother that some dude just broke your heart
and she will tell you why the patriarchy is the root of all evil, which may or may not be true, but which is not very useful to a recently deflowered sixteen-year-old who just realized her first lover wasn’t going to be her only one.

I know as a thirty-four-year-old woman, I’m supposed to be able to do that for myself, but lately I’ve been kind of falling down on the job and I don’t really trust myself to do the right thing anymore. Take my
Sitting at the Right Hand of Obama
fantasy. Where did that come from? I’ve been trying to figure it out for weeks and I still don’t know how I could have been so wrong. Maybe it was just the unavoidable spillover of an extended idealistic perfect moment, or maybe it was a grievously overinflated sense of my own importance to the campaign, but whatever it was, I was so sure I was going to get a White House job offered to me that I didn’t even have a backup plan.
I still don’t!

When my old boss called me while I was working on the campaign in New Mexico to tell me that there were going to be cutbacks in my area, I wasn’t worried. I just knew I would have other options. After all, I had carried out my first few assignments without a hitch and moved up in the campaign hierarchy quickly. I’m not going to lie and say I was flying around with Valerie Jarrett and David Axel-rod, but I met the candidate enough times for him to remember my name once and for the first lady to compliment my haircut at an event in Santa Fe.

The campaign was an exciting, all-consuming, alternate universe. There was so much work to do, and I was good at most of it. I was surrounded by a steady stream of interesting people who were as passionate about the possibilities as I was and we worked nonstop at whatever tasks were at hand. In the early days, there were more computer geeks around than community organizers. Most of the young people who were volunteering had all the technical expertise in the world, but when it came time to motivate a bunch of hopeful voters huddled together in a community center some place where
people still get most of their mail deposited out front by a guy who knows their names, these kids were clueless.

But being the Rev’s daughter, I was right at home. That kind of house-by-house organizing is in my blood. My father is still the best I ever saw at taking a scared group of nervous neighbors and helping them shape themselves into a cohesive political unit, capable of great courage in the face of even the most implacable foe. The lessons I’d learned riding all over Georgia with the Rev and Mr. Eddie came back strong and those basics became part of one of the most successful grassroots campaigns the country has ever seen. The president gets big respect for using the Internet in revolutionary ways, but he deserves equal praise for his ability to adapt old-school techniques to new-school possibilities. I’m as proud of the role I played in all of it as I’ve ever been of anything I’ve ever done. The Rev would be, too, if he could ever stop fussing long enough to enjoy it.

For the first time, I felt like I was part of something that was going to change America forever. I wondered if this was what the best of the sixties felt like to my father’s generation. When I asked him, he laughed and said I was what they used to call
freedom high
, drunk with the possibility of living free. Whatever you call it, I was caught up in a moment unlike any other I had experienced and I was prepared to go where it took me. The campaign became my whole world and whatever pitiful personal life I’d had fell by the wayside without a whimper.

To tell the truth, it wasn’t much of a loss. A halfhearted boyfriend who didn’t like oral sex. (The giving of; he was fine with the receiving.) A circle of girlfriends who were getting increasingly antsy as the years went by and nobody in our group was even close to a serious, committed relationship, regardless of gender, much less marriage. Professionally, I had been working my ass off for the last eight years as a fund-raising consultant for struggling nonprofits, but the economy had forced many of our clients to close their doors
and the others were too broke to hire us to tell them what to do about it.
Like we knew
. When I asked for an unpaid leave to work full-time for the Obama campaign, I think my boss was glad to see me go. It meant she didn’t have to tell me face-to-face that I wouldn’t be coming back.

When I called her last week, she was struggling to keep on her two remaining staffers, so even if she had wanted to rehire me, there was no money to make it happen. I wasn’t in panic mode yet. I’ve always been careful not to pile up a lot of debt and I’d had a couple of interviews that seemed promising, but everybody was scrambling to meet existing payroll and they couldn’t commit right now. All I could do was wait and hope to pick up a little freelancing here and there to see me through.

The other problem was, neither job was even remotely connected to the world I’d been moving around in for the last eighteen months or so and I wasn’t ready to give it all up and go back to trying to change the world by inches. I didn’t believe my political life was over because I had helped elect one amazing president. I knew there was more work I wanted to do and more work he needed me to do, even if I wasn’t going to be able to do it sitting at his right hand. Sure, my feelings were hurt. My ego was a little bruised, but I’m a big girl. I’ll get over it.

This might not be a bad time to get out of town for a minute, all things considered. In D.C., the first question anybody asked, no matter where they saw you—restaurant, grocery store, health club—was
Where are you working now?
I tried to stick with a mysterious smile and that old line about being “between engagements,” but everybody knew I had worked my ass off in the campaign and it was no secret that I was hoping to get tapped for the White House. Realistically, I know that the inauguration was only two weeks ago and there are still spaces to be filled, but try explaining that to the person who’s just asked what you’ve been up to lately and it comes out sounding more desperate than devil-may-care. Any whiff of
panic as the great jobs were picked off one by one was sure to be reported back to the community at large and would not improve my increasingly shaky place on the A-list. Making myself scarce for a few weeks might be the best move I could make.