The Supremes at Earl's All-You-Can-Eat

Chapter 25





On April 4, 1968, the night after Barbara Jean talked with Odette and Clarice in Mrs. Jackson’s gazebo, Dr. Martin Luther King,

Jr., was murdered in Memphis. Both Chicago and Detroit, the potential escape routes for Chick and Barbara Jean, went up in flames.

Barbara Jean, Miss Thelma, and Little Earl watched TV as a parade of solemn white male faces tried to explain to white America

just what had been lost that day. Big Earl came home late that night. As soon as he’d shut the front door, Miss Thelma asked,

“Where you been? I saw the lights go out over across the street almost an hour ago. You had me worried.”

“I drove Ray to his brother’s place,” he said.

“What? You went over there with them crazy-ass hillbillies? Are you outta your mind?”

Big Earl said, “Those folks are too damn happy to be thinkin’ about me, or Chick, or anything but their good news. Besides,

there was some trouble over at the restaurant, and I didn’t want him to be there by himself all night.”

Miss Thelma saved Barbara Jean from having to ask what had happened by saying, “What kinda trouble?”

“Not much, just Ramsey and some of his friends actin’ stupid. They lost what little sense they have and decided they had to beat

down a white man. So Ramsey started in on Ray.”

Barbara Jean’s heart began pounding so hard that she was sure everyone in the room could hear it.

Miss Thelma asked, “Ray all right?”

Big Earl laughed. “He’s fine. Odette and James was there, and they stepped into it. Make that girl mad and you got somethin’

fierce on your hands. I had to pull her off of Ramsey myself. And he’s gonna have a nasty black eye tomorrow. That’ll teach ’im

not to act a fool.”

“No, it won’t,” Miss Thelma said.

Big Earl nodded. “You’re right. It won’t.”

“You shoulda brought Ray over here to stay, ’stead of takin’ him to his brother,” Miss Thelma said.

“I asked, but he said he didn’t wanna come. Something’s goin’ on with him.”

When Big Earl said that, Barbara Jean could’ve sworn he was staring at her. But she told herself it had to be her imagination;

she hadn’t been able to think straight since Lester had asked her to marry him. As she sat with the McIntyres and took in replay

after replay of the ugly story on the TV news, she thought about the boy she loved, sitting in a cold shack in a section of town

where people were at that moment firing shotguns into the air in celebration.

Plainview shut down in the days after Dr. King was killed. The university was so afraid that its handful of black students would

start a riot that classes were canceled. Some white neighborhoods put up barricades. People were afraid to travel about, so

businesses temporarily closed their doors. Some business owners who had seen what was happening in big cities around the country

stayed in their places twenty-four hours a day with shotguns on their laps, waiting for looters. Big Earl was one of the few

people who understood from the beginning that Plainview wasn’t going to explode. He kept his restaurant open every day.

The afternoon after Dr. King died, Barbara Jean stopped by the All-You-Can-Eat. Clarice met her just inside the door. She grabbed

Barbara Jean’s arm and pulled her toward their window table, where Odette sat waiting. After she led Barbara Jean to her seat,

words rushed from Clarice’s mouth. “I’m so sorry, Barbara Jean. The only person I told was my mother.”

Barbara Jean didn’t understand what Clarice was saying at first. But she figured it out fast enough when she glanced around and

realized that most of the eyes in the room were on her. She realized then that she was looking at a restaurant full of people who

knew her secrets.

“Jesus Christ, Clarice,” she said.

“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. Everybody was so upset last night. I was trying to think of good things to keep our minds off of the

bad stuff on TV and it just slipped out. Mother said she wouldn’t tell, but she must’ve told Aunt Glory and Aunt Glory must’ve

told Veronica. And, well, you know that Veronica. She’s got such a big mouth.”

Odette spoke for the first time. “Veronica’s got a big mouth?” Then Odette slapped Clarice’s arm so hard it made her cry out,

“Ouch!”

Veronica and two other girls from school started walking their way. As they came closer, Clarice whispered, “I never said a word

about Chick, I swear to God. Just Lester.”

Veronica smirked that way people do when they know more of someone else’s business than they should. She said, “So your work

paid off, I guess. I’ve got to hand it to you. It didn’t even look like you were trying. So, when’s the wedding?”

Her friends joined in asking questions. They didn’t really care if Barbara Jean responded at all. This was the stage of gossip

when getting the facts from the horse’s mouth only interfered with the fun of it all.

Barbara Jean couldn’t have answered anyway; she was too busy looking around the room for Chick. Until then, the notion of

becoming engaged to Lester had been kind of like a fantasy to her, an interesting story to share with her best girlfriends. Now it

was out in the world, the property of others, not just Barbara Jean and the other Supremes. It was something real. Now it had the

power to hurt people. She excused herself from the window table, brushing past Veronica and her friends on her way to Chick.

He was sitting on the corner of his bed when she walked into the storeroom. He wore his food-stained work apron and his hair was

covered with a net. Before Barbara Jean could say anything, he spat out, “Were you going to tell me about it, or were you just

going to invite me to the wedding?”

“I didn’t tell you about it because I knew you’d get upset. And there was really nothing to say. I didn’t tell Lester I was

going to marry him.”

“What did you tell him, then?”

“I told him I’d think about it.”

Chick stood up from the bed then and said, “Think about it? What’s there to think about?”

“There’s a whole lot to think about, Chick. There’s my life to think about. There’s my future to think about.” In the voice

of her mother, Barbara Jean heard herself say, “I’ve got to be a forward-thinking woman. And a forward-thinking woman looks out

for herself.”

Chick’s voice cracked as he spoke. His usual deep, smooth tone went high, almost childlike. “I thought you were going to let me

look out for you. I thought you were going to be with me.”

“I can’t be with you, and you know it. We’ve been back here playing around and pretending like it could work out, but we both

know it can’t.”

“We can get married. It’s been legal here for two years.”

“Legal’s one thing. What they’ll beat you down and string you up for is another.”

“Then we’ll get married and go someplace else. We’ve talked about it before. We could go to Chicago or Detroit. There are

couples like us there and nobody even thinks a thing about it.”

“Haven’t you heard the news? The Promised Lands are on fire. If we tried walking down the street together in Chicago or Detroit,

we wouldn’t make it half a block before our heads got busted open.”

He said, “I’ll figure out a way to make it work. There are plenty of other places we can go.”

“No, there aren’t, and you know it. The best we can hope for is to run away somewhere and find somebody like Big Earl who’d let

us hole up in a little dump of a room like this.” She gestured around the storeroom. “And what about your brother? He’s been

driving up and down the street for months now waiting for his chance to catch you outside alone just because you work for a black

man. Now you want to tell him that you’re going to have a black wife? Do you honestly think he’d let you shame him by marrying

me? You think he wouldn’t hunt you down and hurt you worse than he ever has? And wherever we go, we’d be lucky to get through a

day without getting spit on. Chick, you don’t know what it’s like to have everybody look down on you, point at you, and treat

you like you’re less than nothing. You think you know, but you don’t. I lived that way almost all my life until this last year

and I can’t go back to it. I can’t.”

“What are you saying, Barbara Jean?”

She took a deep breath and tried to hold back the tears that wanted so badly to come out, and then she said what she had avoided

saying all week. “I’m saying I’m going to marry Lester.”

Chick didn’t try to, or couldn’t, stop tears from flowing down his cheeks as he yelled, “You love me. I know you love me,”

making it sound like an accusation.

She answered automatically and honestly without thinking. She said, “Yes. I love you.” Barbara Jean felt her will beginning to

dissolve. She wanted to grab him and pull him into the bed with her with no thought of who might find them together. But then she

felt the hand of her mother pushing her toward the door of the room just as surely as if Loretta had been alive and breathing. As

Barbara Jean backed out of the storeroom, Loretta used her daughter’s mouth to say, “But love ain’t never put a bite of food on

any table.”

She couldn’t face her friends or the gossipmongers in the dining room of the All-You-Can-Eat, so Barbara Jean slipped out the

back door. In the alley behind the restaurant, she felt her stomach lurch and she had to bend over and gasp for air. When she got

her nerves and her stomach calmed down, she walked around the block. Then she hurried over to the alley behind the next street, so

she could enter Big Earl and Miss Thelma’s house from the back and not be seen by her friends at the restaurant. By the time

Barbara Jean let herself into the back door of the house, she had started to feel a little bit better. She told herself that she

had done the right thing for herself, and for Chick, too. This was the first step into a new and improved life, the life she

deserved. But she hadn’t anticipated what that old comedian God had in mind for her.