She drew a shuddering breath, half a sob, then whispered, “I just needed to see him, try to get him to touch me again, the way he had that summer. But, like I said, I was pretending I had some bigger, purer reason.”
Once she’d let her shameful memory out, her breathing came more easily, and her voice returned to a deeper pitch. “I found him, or, anyway, I saw him, at the corner of Sixty-third and Morgan. He was with Johnny Merton, going into the Waltz Right Inn—you know, the old blues joint there? It’s been gone twenty years now, but, back then, it was the center of entertainment in my part of town. Not for me, not for Pastor Hebert’s girl, but for all the kids I went to high school with—”
“So what were Johnny and Lamont doing?” I asked when she broke off.
“Oh, I couldn’t follow them! Daddy would have heard faster than you can spit! I just sat across the street, watching the door, watching kids I’d known my whole life passing in and out. Wednesday was church night, but it was also jam night. Alberta Hunter came sometimes, Tampa Red, all the big names, along with guys starting out. You don’t know how much I wanted to be there, instead of at church.” The phone vibrated from the passion in her voice.
“Did you see them come out again, Johnny Merton and Lamont?”
“Daddy found me before Lamont came out. I was sitting across the street in my coat, even though it was still warm. I couldn’t go outdoors in January without my winter coat, not in my family. I remember thinking how stupid it was, sixty degrees and me in that heavy wool thing, and then Daddy came along. He hit me, told me what a common girl I was, what a sinner, what a bringer of shame, to Jesus and to him, lingering outside a bar like a street girl.”
The words tumbled out like water from a fire hydrant, spraying me with their force.
“The next day was the snow. I went on down to school in the morning, even though my face was all purple and swollen from where Daddy hit me. And I was so thankful for the blizzard. I had to spend two nights there at the college, sleeping on the floor with all the other girls. It was the only time in my life where I got to be just one of the girls. White girls, black girls, we all just lay there in the dark, talking about our families and our boyfriends, and I even acted like Lamont was my boy . . . Well, anyway, when the snow ended and I got back home, Lamont was gone. No one ever saw him again, not that I knew. And I couldn’t go to Johnny Merton. Someone would have told Daddy, and I couldn’t take another—”
Another beating, I filled in silently when she clipped off the sentence. “Did you ask any of Lamont’s friends about him? Anyone who might have known why he was talking to Merton?”
“I did, but not till later. At first, when I didn’t see him around, I thought Lamont was avoiding me. I thought God was punishing me. I was so confused in my head, I couldn’t decide if God was punishing me for not going off with Lamont when he asked me that past September or if He was punishing me for letting Lamont touch me.” She gave an embarrassed snort of laughter.
“I finally asked Curtis Rivers, but that wasn’t until maybe a month or six weeks went by, and he was just as puzzled as me.”
“Was Curtis Rivers with the Anacondas, too?” I asked.
“I never did know for sure who was, who wasn’t. I was the preacher’s kid, I was the stuck-up girl, they didn’t talk to me the way they did the other girls in the neighborhood. I don’t think Curtis was—he shipped out to Vietnam, anyway, round about May of ’sixty-seven—he was just the boy everyone trusted. Gang, straight, whatever . . . Curtis, he didn’t play sides. Should have been him I broke my heart over, not a no-good street boy like Lamont.” She laughed again, less bitterly this time.
“So is Miss Ella right? Was Lamont dealing drugs?”
“Not the way she meant. I mean, she makes it sound like the South Side was floating on Lamont Gadsden’s heroin sales. But she’s like my daddy: you move a quarter inch off the straight and narrow, you’re Satan’s child for sure. And after Lamont disappeared, Sister Ella, she carried on as if nothing had happened. Just held herself straighter, if any back not made out of cast iron could be held so straight. But Sister Claudia, Lamont’s going just about broke her heart.”
“Miss Ella says she and Miss Claudia went to the police. Did you ever hear anything about that?”
“Oh, they went. But the cops, they were so ugly. It was like they did this work they hated, looking after Dr. King that summer—1966, I mean—and then couldn’t wait to take it out on any black person who crossed their path. I went with Sister Ella and Claudia to the station house, and the way those cops acted, you’d think those two women had shot the president. Pigs? My, yes, they were pigs.”
I felt the jolt that the insult always gave me.