Common Ground (115 page)

The girls got a charge out of Daisy, relishing her earth-mother style and street lingo. But she was their mother’s friend, a middle-aged woman with middle-aged notions, an authority figure bound to support other authority figures. They never called for “bad bitch” lessons.

In the weeks that followed, Cassandra and Rachel plunged deeper into the South End’s street life. Gradually they shifted their base from the dim recesses of the Venice to the brighter lights and faster pace of Massachusetts Avenue. Long known as “the Great Black Way” or “Black Broadway,” that thoroughfare had once boasted some of the country’s premier jazz clubs. But Kelly’s, the Wig-Wam, and the Savoy had gone the way of all flesh. Wally’s Paradise lingered on, but surrounded now by a dingy array of bars, luncheonettes, pool halls, video arcades, fast-food joints, and massage parlors. Only at night did
the street retrieve some of its old glamour. Then arc lights cast an orange glow over the sooty façades; disco sounds washed from the doorways, backed by the click of billiard balls; and dudes in wide-brimmed hats paraded their fancy ladies up the boulevard.

Habitués of “the Avenue” were always on the lookout for fresh talent. Not surprisingly, the Twymon girls quickly took up with older men: Cassandra with Ricky, a thirty-nine-year-old married guy she encountered in a South End fish market; Rachel with Horace, a twenty-seven-year-old sport she met through mutual friends. Soon the girls were spending every available hour with their lovers. Often they skipped school, leaving home in the morning as if to board the bus, then slipping off to meet their friends. When their mother discovered what they were up to, she cracked the whip. Every morning for several weeks she walked the girls down the street to make sure they got on the bus. And she proclaimed a tough new curfew: ten on weeknights, eleven on Fridays and Saturdays. But these strict measures only intensified family tensions.

On the evening of November 16, Mrs. Twymon accompanied her friend Teresa Saunders to Channel 7, where Teresa was to sing and play the piano on the NAACP’s weekly program,
Lift Every Voice
. Cassandra was out that night, but as the two women left for the station they asked young Rachel if she wanted to go along. She said no, and her mother found that a little peculiar. Like most teenagers, Rachel was fascinated by television, spending endless hours in front of the set. Why wouldn’t she seize the chance to look behind the scenes?

Later, as she listened to Teresa soaring through the spirituals, Mrs. Twymon felt a premonition. Try as she might to focus on the music, she was nagged by a suspicion that something was terribly wrong at home. After the taping, the producer took the two women to the Playboy Club for dinner, and when they returned to Methunion Manor at about eleven, neither Cassandra nor Rachel was there. Taking a hurried look around, Mrs. Twymon noticed a suitcase missing from the hall closet, some of Rachel’s clothes gone from her room. “Oh my God,” she told Teresa, “I think Rachel’s run away.”

About midnight Cassandra returned from a late date with Ricky. Her mother said nothing, hoping she would drop some clue to Rachel’s whereabouts, but Cassandra went straight to bed. For hours, Mrs. Twymon lay awake, listening for the door, hoping her fears would prove exaggerated, but at dawn Rachel’s bed was still empty.

That morning, she asked Cassandra where Rachel was. Cassandra clearly knew, but wasn’t telling. “She’s doing what she wants to do,” she said. “What’s wrong with that?” Her mother flew into a rage, demanding an answer and suggesting that if Cassandra didn’t cooperate, she could leave too.

Over the next few days she kept her daughter’s flight a secret, telling only her brother Arnold, who said, “Rachel left on her own. She packed her bags and took off. The best thing we can do is wait. One day she’s going to get tired out there on her own. She’ll come home.”

Instead, on the evening of November 19, Cassandra left too.

Mrs. Twymon was numb with disbelief. Every day she put in her time at the project office, but so preoccupied was she with her daughters’ disappearance that when night fell she could scarcely remember what she’d done all day. By then Thanksgiving was drawing near, always a festive but tumultuous time for the Walkers. Appropriately for a family which felt so deeply rooted in the New England experience, the Walkers had long celebrated that most colonial of all holidays with a gathering of the clan. Even in years when they had little to be grateful for, grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles, brothers, and sisters assembled that day—usually at Alva’s house—for a marathon of eating, drinking, dancing, talking, and card playing. In their childhood it had been a joyous occasion, but as family misunderstandings proliferated, the dinner’s geniality frequently unraveled in bitter squabbles. The quarreling usually began at the evening whist game when one player accused another of cheating, provoking a bout of mutual recriminations which invariably ended with a couple of guests walking out. Nonetheless, Thanksgiving retained a powerful hold on the Walker imagination.

This year’s gathering was to be a special reunion, for Daisy Voigt, her new boyfriend, Ron, and her teenage children, Eric and Madeleine, were due in from New York to spend the weekend at Alva’s house. A popular figure with the Walker clan, Daisy was a powerful attraction, her visit a topic of conversation for weeks in advance. Cassandra—who was particularly close to Eric and Madeleine—had eagerly looked forward to their arrival. Now, growing lonely in her self-imposed exile, she yearned for their company. Indeed, the longer she stayed away from home, the more her thoughts turned toward Thanksgiving and the friends and family who would be descending on Alva’s house that day.

Since November 19, Cassandra had been living with her friend Barbara in an apartment on Ruthven Street while spending most of her time with her lover, Ricky. That arrangement provided romance and adventure, but little of the security she’d taken for granted at Methunion Manor. Every morning she talked on the telephone with her sister Rachel, ensconced in another friend’s apartment on Massachusetts Avenue. Often they talked for hours, exchanging intimate revelations, making plans for their fugitive existence, speculating on what their mother was doing to get them back. But disembodied conversations were no substitute for the palpable warmth of friends and family.

On Thanksgiving morning, Cassandra took the bus up Blue Hill Avenue to Alva’s house. When she encountered her friend Madeleine, the two girls fell into each other’s arms. When Daisy saw Cassandra, she rushed to call Methunion Manor. “Rachel!” she cried. “There’s one daughter you don’t have to worry about. Cassandra just walked through the door.”

“Oh my God!” Rachel exclaimed. “At least I’ve got something to be thankful for today.”

“Why don’t you come out and see her?”

“You know I can’t do that. Alva and I aren’t speaking.”

Alva’s feud with her sister—which had begun over Little Rachel’s baby
three years before—had steadily intensified. All through the siege of Centre Street the previous spring and summer, as other family members rallied to Alva’s defense, Big Rachel resolutely kept her distance. She had never set foot in her sister’s embattled house.

“I’m not coming out there,” she told Daisy that morning. “If Cassandra wants to see me, tell her to come over here.”

Once she hung up, Rachel was swept by alternating waves of relief and rage. At least Cassandra was safe. And if she was all right, then Little Rachel might be okay too. But what was Cassandra doing at Alva’s? The notion that Cassandra might feel more comfortable with Alva than with her own mother drilled a painful spike through Rachel’s chest.

In midmorning, Teresa Saunders stopped by to see if Rachel wanted to go to the Ministerial Alliance’s Thanksgiving Day service. Rachel rarely missed a church service of any kind, but that day she didn’t think she could sit still for an hour. Later her son Wayne urged her to come out to Alva’s, but Rachel refused, so Wayne went by himself, arriving just as twenty-three people sat down to dinner where only months before the sentries of Racial Unity Now had stood guard with clubs, cameras, and walkie-talkies.

Alva had roasted a magnificent goose. There was pungent stuffing, sweet potato pie, rice, peas, mince pie, pumpkin pie, ice cream, fruit, and cookies, all washed down with prodigious quantities of soda and beer. By dusk the dinner dishes had been cleared away, whiskey and brandy began flowing, and the adults sat down to play whist. They didn’t have to wait long for the traditional fight to break out, this time between Alva’s brothers Tommy and Frederick. Nobody quite knew what triggered it, but suddenly there was Tommy weaving unsteadily in the middle of the living room, brandishing a silver-plated revolver at Frederick. Two other brothers—Arnold and Walter—crept across the floor, murmuring soothing words, until they persuaded Tommy to set the revolver down next to his pony glass, filled with thirty-year-old brandy.

With things getting out of hand, Alva drove her mother home. That was the opportunity Daisy had been waiting for. Somehow, she thought, mother and daughter had to be reconciled. Walter Walker drove Daisy down to Methunion Manor, where eventually she persuaded Teresa, Rachel, and Freddie to return with her to Centre Street. “Okay,” said Rachel, “as long as Alva isn’t there.” But when they arrived at about 8:00 p.m., Cassandra wouldn’t talk with her mother. She nodded perfunctorily, promising only to visit Methunion Manor in a couple of days.

Gradually the conversation at Centre Street turned to a party many of the Walkers were planning to attend that evening. Susan Page was a formidable black woman who had bought a house in nearby Hyde Park. About the time that Alva’s house had come under attack, Ms. Page and her three children became similar targets of neighborhood youths. Soon Susan and Alva were appearing together on platforms throughout the city, appealing for action to halt racial harassment, so when Susan summoned her friends and supporters
to a Thanksgiving-night party, she invited not only Alva but the rest of the Walker clan.

As Rachel stood in her sister’s living room, talking uneasily with friends and family, Tommy—who always enjoyed baiting his “churchy sister”—harangued her about the party. “Hey, Rach,” he said, “we’re going to have everything over there—liquor, dancing—you’ll love it.”

Rachel gave him a cold stare. “No, thank you, Thomas,” she said. “That’s not my kind of party.”

Of her three children planning to attend—Cassandra, Wayne, and Freddie—Rachel worried most about Freddie, who had his problems with the law and shouldn’t be hanging around that kind of party. “Frederick,” she said, “I don’t think you ought to go. You won’t have any way of getting back, you know. There’s no public transportation from Hyde Park at that time of night.”

“There you go again, Rachel,” said Tommy. “Trying to run everybody’s life. Freddie’s a man. He can do anything he wants.”

“Frederick,” said Rachel. “You going with them or with us? Because we’re leaving. Now.”

“I’ll go with them,” said Freddie.

“Fine,” snapped Rachel. “Goodbye.”

At about 9:30, the remaining guests piled into two cars and went off to Susan Page’s party. When they arrived, about seventy-five people—two-thirds black and one-third white—were milling around the house. On the ground floor, folks were eating and drinking, while in the basement rec room, under a flashing strobe light, the young people were dancing to disco sounds from a record player. It was such a good party nobody wanted to leave. Not until nearly 2:00 a.m. did the Walker family return to Alva’s house—everyone, that is, except Freddie, who had wandered off earlier in the evening.

The next morning Alva had her first opportunity to ask Cassandra why she’d run away. “I was tired of the hassle,” she said. “I just wanted to be on my own.” What about Rachel? Did Cassandra know where she was? Yes. But she wasn’t saying. She and Rachel had promised never to disclose each other’s whereabouts.

“But, Cassandra,” Alva pleaded, “your sister’s only fifteen. She can’t manage by herself. And she’s too damn young to be messin’ around with some dude twice her age. Now tell me where she is!”

Cassandra refused. All Friday morning they worked on her in relays, wheedling, cajoling, and threatening. The most Cassandra would do was to call Rachel and invite her out to the house. She showed up late that afternoon. Alva told her she could stay there if she promised to stop seeing Horace. Rachel agreed and went off to get her clothes, but she never returned.

On Sunday morning, Alva decided to take Cassandra home. Calling her mother, she said, “Rachel, I know you’re a big-time Christian, but don’t go to church this morning. I’m coming down to see you.”

“What we got to talk about?” Rachel asked.

“It’s important. I’ll be right there.”

Only in the car on the way to Methunion Manor did Cassandra finally relent, agreeing to point out where Little Rachel was staying. As they passed a crumbling tenement near Wally’s Paradise, Cassandra said, “She’s in there.”

When Alva buzzed the fourth-floor apartment, Rachel was still in bed with Horace. Stumbling to the squawk box, she asked, “Who is it?”

“Rachel!” Alva shouted. “This is your aunt. Get your ass down here.”

“Shit!” said Rachel. Pulling on her nightgown, she hurried downstairs.

“Okay, baby,” Alva said. “The game’s up. Let’s get your stuff and get out of here.” Following Rachel back upstairs, she confronted a sleepy-eyed Horace sprawled on a mattress in the middle of the living-room floor. He never said a word as Rachel quickly threw her stuff into a suitcase and left.

Driving to Methunion Manor, Alva herded the girls into their mother’s apartment. “Here are your daughters, Rachel,” she said. “The wandering ladies return.”

Once again, Rachel was assaulted by conflicting emotions. The girls were back at last. But it was Alva who had brought them. “What am I supposed to do?” she asked, her voice heavy with sarcasm. “Throw my arms around them and say all is forgiven?” She paused, staring at the girls sitting side by side on the couch across the room. They seemed so young and vulnerable. “Rachel, baby,” she asked. “What made you run away?”