Till You Hear From Me: A Novel (32 page)

Toni squinted at the card just like I had, but had no more definitive answer. “Corrina?”

“Is that one of the cards?” Wes said, reaching for it, but Miss Iona snatched it back first. Startled, Wes drew back his hand.

“What else would it be?”

I shot her a look and jumped in. “One of many,” I said, crossing to the Rev’s closet and pulling open the door to reveal the neatly stacked boxes taking every inch of available space. The one box that Miss Iona was ostensibly working on had left the only opening when we slid it out carefully to complete our charade. The sight of all that very raw, and very valuable, data seemed to render Wes and Toni temporarily speechless.

Miss Iona was happy to fill the void. “The man’s crazy. When he first showed me all these cards and started talking about me typing them up into some kind of master list, I said, are you crazy? And he said, Iona, you’re the only one I trust to do it. And I said, I ain’t studyin’ you, Horace Dunbar. My days of typing up mailing lists for men who can’t be bothered are over.”

Toni and Wes walked slowly over to the closet. They still
couldn’t believe it, but there they were, all two hundred boxes, neatly labeled with the date they joined in the stack, waiting patiently for processing.

“He wanted you to type all these up?” Toni said.

“He didn’t
want
me to; he
expected
me to,” Miss Iona said. “That’s the way the Rev is.”

“All by yourself?” Wes said, reaching out to run his hand over the stack closest to him.

“Of course all by myself. That’s the whole point. The Rev won’t hardly let anybody even look at these cards. I think you’re the first ones other than me and Eddie. Ida B hadn’t even laid eyes on them until yesterday.”

“And not a moment too soon.” Toni turned from the cards back to Miss Iona. “We’ll get some guys in here to load up everything and I’ll take it from there.”

“The Rev didn’t say anything to me about moving them,” I said calmly. “It’s my understanding that he wants the cards to stay here. For security reasons.”

Toni looked at me. “So how do you propose we get it done?”

“Don’t worry,” Miss Iona said. “I’ve had a change of heart. Call it a Black History Month miracle, but I’ve decided to take on the task myself, as per the Rev’s expectations.”

“Miss Iona, if you’ll forgive me …”

“Don’t have much choice really,” she said. “Ida B isn’t much of a typist on her best day.”

She was laying it on thick and they were getting more confused by the minute. Wes smiled at Miss Iona again, totally unaware that his charms had no effect on her at all. “Do you have any idea how long that will take you?”

She shrugged as if the question were beside the point. “I have no idea. As long as I’m done in time enough for Precious Hargrove to use it when she gets ready to run for governor, I’m good to go.”

“That’s two years from now!” Wes looked shocked.

Miss Iona actually patted his hand reassuringly. “It shouldn’t take me any longer than that.”

Toni looked at Wes and raised her eyebrows like
you’ve got to be kidding
. He turned to me.

“I thought we were on the same page about this,” he said, chiding me gently.

“It’s not my choice,” I said. “What happens to these cards—where and when and how—is up to the Rev. I thought
you
understood that,” I chided him right back.

“I’m going with the first initial only,” Miss Iona said, squinting at the
Corrina/Calinda
card again as she typed it into the computer and reached for another.

Wes’s smile was less sincere, but he offered it anyway. “You’re right, of course. It’s clearly something I should take up with the Rev.”

Recognizing an exit line when she heard one, Toni tucked her purse under her arm.

“He’ll be back tomorrow,” I said, like I was being helpful. “But he’s preaching at Rock of Faith on Sunday, so he probably won’t be available until Monday.”

That would give us time enough to make our case and get the Rev back on the good foot.

“You got that right.” Miss Iona nodded in agreement. “Don’t nobody disturb that man when he’s getting ready for Founder’s Day, even if they are
almost
family.” She underlined that
almost
with her voice.

“Monday it is then,” Wes said.

“I’ll be here,” Miss Iona said brightly, the sound of her tap-tapping receding behind us as I showed them to the door.

FORTY-SIX

“S
EE WHAT
I
MEAN ABOUT PEOPLE WRITING IN PENCIL?”
T
ONI SAID AS
they left West End and headed back to midtown. “You can go blind trying to read that shit.”

“Nobody’s asking you to read it,” Wes said. “How many guys you think we’ll need to get the damn things out of there?”

“Wouldn’t it be easier to just call the man and try to talk him into letting us come and get them?”

“You heard them! He can’t be disturbed until Monday. That’s too late. I told you what Oscar said. We’ve got to do it Sunday when they’re all in church.”

“All right,” she said. “Get me one guy. The smaller the crew, the safer the secret. You got anybody in mind?”

“Yeah, I do,” he said, reaching for his cell phone and punching in a very recent number. “Estes? I need to talk to your son.”

FORTY-SEVEN

I
HAD CONVINCED
M
ISS
I
ONA THAT IT MIGHT BE EASIER IF
I
TALKED TO
the Rev alone and she reluctantly agreed. She made me promise to call her as soon as I could and helped me fix the Rev a dinner fit for a king. She was a firm believer that the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach and even though I reminded her that we were aiming at the brain, she said it couldn’t hurt.

After we got it all done, I set the kitchen table for two since he’d know something was up for sure if I tried to get him to eat in the dining room, and went to get the card I’d bought at the CVS that afternoon when I realized Saturday was Valentine’s Day. It was a kid card, something an eight-year-old would sign and seal with a kiss, which was probably appropriate since I felt like an eight-year-old. The closer it came to the Rev’s estimated time of arrival, the more nervous I got. The last and only time I’d tried to question my father’s judgment was a disaster. He wasn’t used to it, least of all when it came to how he handled his business. I was his child and even though I had carved out a niche where my opinions were sought and
my skills were valued and people who knew about such things bandied around the idea that I might be invited to work at the White House one day, in the Rev’s eyes, I was still his baby girl. It was outside the realm of his possibility that we could exchange ideas with something of value being offered from both sides. His role was to teach and lead and my role was to follow. But not this time. There was too much at stake, for him and for me.

My grandmother told me a story once about how she and her father were crossing the tracks in their old Model-T Ford and her father, who had lost an eye in a hunting accident years before, didn’t see the train backing up in their direction. My grandmother, who was about six or seven years old at the time, saw it bearing down on them, but didn’t want to embarrass her father by implying he hadn’t seen it first and removed them from the danger, so she said nothing.

My grandmother would laugh when she told this story because the train was going so slowly it just pushed them gently a few hundred yards down the track. The car was slightly damaged, but they walked home just fine. My mother, of course, saw this as a story about how little girls are trained from birth to protect the male ego, even at the cost of their own lives.

The hard thing about this conversation wasn’t going to be telling the Rev there was a nefarious plot heading his way from the twisted minds huddled in the heart of darkness. He already understood that kind of evil. He’d spent his life fighting it. The hard thing was that this time he didn’t see the train coming. This time he wasn’t the one providing the protection. He was the one who needed protecting. And maybe that was because he was getting older and wasn’t quite as sharp as he used to be, or maybe it was because they sent his godson to bring the bait and as the Rev likes to say,
when the brother holds the door for the murderer, the deed is unstoppable
.

But maybe it was just that as much as we want to make the Rev and Martin and Malcolm and Mandela all perfect, godlike creatures, deigning to walk the earth in human form in order to lead us mere
mortals to the mountaintop, they are only men, fully and completely as human and as flawed as any of the rest of us. The quality that makes them different is that they can look at us and where other folks only see a bunch of wild, scary, defeated, disheartened, disorganized people, they see what we might look like if we would stand up once and for all and take responsibility for being the free men and women all people are born to be. They see the best of us even when we can’t and their words paint such a vivid picture that for just a moment,
we get it, we feel it, we see it
, and somewhere deep, deep down, we know that
we can be it
.

The saddest thing to me about the whole Jeremiah Wright episode was that he is one of those who has always been able to see how beautiful we are. He’s spent his life holding up that mirror and one day, to even his surprise, one of his parishioners saw a president looking back, but now all we remember is the incendiary ten-second sound bites and the ignominy of his appearance at the Press Club. I wasn’t going to let that happen to the Rev. My father needed for me to speak to him as a grown woman and make him listen. Otherwise, I might as well pull up a chair at the children’s table and sit on down.

I signed the card “all my love,” and then heard the front door open and the Rev’s voice booming out a greeting.

“Where are you, daughter? I’m home from the wars!”

In the kitchen, nervous despite my self-pep talk, I tucked the card in my mother’s apron pocket and reached in the refrigerator for a bottle of cold white wine, poured two glasses, and met him in the hallway as he shuffled through the mail I had left lying on the key table.