Memphis: A Novel(39)

August moved like lightning. She pulled the fork from Miss Dawn’s long fingers expertly. Her lips closed around Miss Dawn’s fork, and she tasted the decadence of the cake.

Miss Dawn threw her head back and roared. “You Hera in the flesh,” she said and pulled August to her breast. Because August was almost her height, and because August still held the fork in her mouth like a popsicle, Miss Dawn kissed the side of her cheek.

Then sunlight pierced the dark hall as the front door of the Officers’ Club was thrown wide open. The midday light blinded August momentarily. Even Miss Dawn held up a billowy sleeve to shield her eyes from the imposing sun. A figure appeared in the doorway, but the figure was so slight it did little to block out the overwhelming sun.

“Where he at?”

The accent. August would always remember how sharp, how short the vowels were. She hadn’t heard anything like it until a few weeks prior, when some Yankee in a beautiful Marine Corps uniform interrupted her piano practice that Sunday.

“Where he at?” the stranger repeated.

The door closed behind him, and August’s eyes were able to adjust, able to take in the Chicago man.

He was the spitting image of Jax. Anyone could see that. Reading their faces was like reading a lineage: They looked like clones. The singular difference being height. This man, a whole head shorter, this twin, threw his head this way and that, scanning the room for Jax.

August did the same. She spotted the ivory Marine Corps uniform in the center of the dense dance floor. Jax spun her sister around to Stevie Wonder’s “I Was Made to Love Her.” Miriam’s train was tucked into the front of her dress. They both were in a trance of new love and did not notice the flash of sunlight, the newcomer.

The wedding crasher.

She heard him over the twang of Stevie’s harmonica, the laughter from the couples on the dance floor, the stomping of heeled feet. August’s musical genius made her strangely acute to sounds, vibrations, echoes. And her formative years sitting in her family’s plum tree and listening in on adult conversations had only strengthened her auditory prowess. She had an ear for all sounds. She distinctly heard the stranger’s indignation over the roar of the music.

“I know for a fact this honky not touching me.”

A middle-aged waiter in a white dinner jacket and a thick black bow tie that matched his sideburns had stopped the stranger from entering the hall further. He had his palm on the slight man’s chest and shook his long, wavy Bee Gees hair back and forth fervently.

August heard, “I’m not telling you twice to get your white hands off me.”

August saw a gleam of pearl. The man had reached to his left side and pulled out a pistol. Clenching the barrel, the stranger swung the pearl handle down across the white man’s face, and down the white man went, his body twisting from the force of the blow the same way August spun jacks and marbles on the kitchen tile. August swore she saw a tooth fly loose as the waiter careened to the floor.

“Where he at?” the stranger demanded as he placed his pistol back into a holster hidden in his dark suit jacket. He adjusted himself, his cuff links. Straightened the tie at his collar, then rocked his neck back and forth, settling it back into a comfortable place. Dusted off his jacket.

The white man was still a heap on the floor. The slight man had knocked him out cold.

As he stepped over the waiter, like he was nothing but a dead cockroach on the floor, the intruder said something inaudible even August could not make out. But after all her years of living in the South, she didn’t have to. She had seen the angry mouths of white men and women hurl this at her and her loved ones too often to count. The newcomer had spat out “nigger” as he stepped over the unconscious white man.

“And that right there,” Miss Dawn said between bites of red velvet cake, “is Hades himself.”

“Where he at? Where my twin brother at?” the man shouted over Stevie Wonder. He continued, “Bird’s here now. Yessir. Bird’s in town. Where my new sister?”

August knew he meant Miriam, but that did little to stop her from leaving her place by Miss Dawn, striding up to her new brother-in-law with the confidence of an Asafo woman riding off into battle, extending her hand, and declaring, “She right here. And she think you too damn loud.”

The new siblings danced all evening.

Later that night, underneath piles of quilts her mother had made, the taste of red velvet cake still in her mouth, August thought that perhaps not all Yankees should be killed.





CHAPTER 18


Miriam


1997


Miriam was waiting in line to buy her second cup of black, sugary coffee of the day when she heard the news. Formerly named Southwestern, Rhodes College was a small liberal arts school in ritzy Midtown, built in gothic stone and covered in ivy. Miriam was enrolled in the same fast-track nursing program her mother had taken some thirty-odd years before. Both she and Joan would have the same graduation date.

The program was intense and all-consuming. When she wasn’t in class, Miriam shadowed the nurses and attendings at Mount Zion Baptist Memorial. Miriam’s pillow became whatever medical book she had open, her bedroom whatever private space she could find. She made her household study with her. Often, Joan and Mya would hold up flashcards of intricate anatomy and quiz her over dinner. Mya would call out, “By Jove, she’s got it!” whenever Miriam got one right. Joan would clap, slow and deliberate and proud.