CHAPTER EIGHT UNEXPECTED ATTENTION
CHAPTER
EIGHT
Unexpected Attention
After the Pittsburgh Courier story ran, other Negro presses picked it up. A few months later, Uncle Drew stopped by Cora’s place with news: a reporter from the Chicago Tribune wanted to run the story.
‘But that’s a white paper.’ She took a steadying breath as a buzzing excitement washed over her. People all the way up in Chicago were sitting up and listening. ‘Well, would you look at that.’
‘He called to let us know it’ll be in the paper on Friday.’
She felt flustered by the news, like her story had sprouted legs and started running on its own. ‘But I … That’s so fast.’
‘I’m having a paper sent down so we can read what he’s written, and then we can think about next steps. This is big, Cora. A white paper reporting on this is exactly what we were hoping for.’
In the kitchen, Momma slammed a pot onto the counter.
‘You all right, Momma?’
She crashed a cupboard door shut.
Cora stepped into the kitchen. ‘If you’ve got something to say about all this, I wish you’d just say it instead of tearing the kitchen to pieces.’
‘You don’t know what you’re doing,’ she said. ‘You don’t remember what they did to John Evans or Sam Carter or Fulton Smith or your own father.’
Tucked up under Momma’s blazing anger was a deep reservoir of fear. Cora looked to Uncle Drew for reassurance that they were doing the right thing.
‘It’s a Chicago paper,’ Uncle Drew said. ‘Chances are, nobody in Mangrove Bay will read it.’
‘But you’re not the one they’d come after if somebody does.’
‘We need the coverage, Janie. It’s the only way we’ll get the government to listen. This could mean so much to so many people, and they won’t even use her real name.’
Momma leaned her hip against the counter and folded her arms tight across her chest. ‘What do you think’s gonna happen? That reporter prints his story and Cora gets to buy her house?’ She sucked her teeth and glared at them side-eyed.
‘I had to speak up, Momma. Nothing’ll ever change if we don’t.’
‘Cora, baby.’ She studied her daughter’s face with frustration dancing in her eyes. ‘You speaking up could lose me my job. And what if they find out about Benny, with you stirring things up like this? You could bring a whole world of trouble down on all of us.’
‘You know I don’t want that, but you can’t ask me to stay quiet.’ Cora drew back from Momma. ‘There are people on the other side of the country wanting to hear what I have to say. I finally have a voice, Momma. I mean to use it.’
When the story ran on the Friday, it took a week for Uncle Drew’s copy to arrive.
The article was factually true if a little sensationalist. Two weeks after that, a Florida paper got wind of it and wrote their own piece, painting Cora as a meddling gossip and Roscoe as a lazy bum.
The Gator Gazette reported that if anyone in Florida didn’t get their benefits, it was because they didn’t deserve them.
The Pittsburgh Courier and the Chicago Tribune hadn’t used real names, but the Florida reporter promised his readers he’d track down the identity of the troublemakers. For two weeks, letters to the editor flooded in, speculating on who they could be.
Roscoe raged at Cora for putting a target on their backs and Momma took to locking herself in her room.
Cora told them that no one knew who they were, but the situation had her worried.
She felt calmer at work, away from the two of them and close to Lee, who praised her for being brave and said he was proud of her.
Then one Monday when she drove to Lee’s, she found a clump of reporters huddled outside. They’d traced her to Green’s Whiskey. They rushed toward her as she stepped out of her car. One shoved a camera in her face and a bulb flashed.
‘There is no discrimination, is there?’ someone shouted.
‘Aren’t you just playing the system for benefits?’ another voice called.
Alarmed and overwhelmed, she tried to push past them. ‘Let me through. Please, leave me alone.’
‘Who’s to blame for cutting the Negro out of the GI bill?’ another reporter called.
‘Is the Negro too lazy to take advantage of the opportunities?’
Pulse surging, she clenched her teeth, determined not to let them get to her.
Another flashbulb went off in her face, momentarily blinding her. She blinked, trying to get her vision to settle back into her eyes, wondering if she should say something, but with her thoughts scuttling around like crabs running from the cook-pot, she had no idea what.
‘No,’ Lee said, suddenly at her side. ‘The Negro is not too lazy, he is too naive for thinking that bleeding and dying for America will get this country to treat us with the respect and decency that’s our God-given right, declared in the Declaration of Independence and promised in the Constitution. ’
That brought on a new wave of questions and flashing light bulbs pointed at Lee.
‘Do you blame the president?’
‘Are you anti-American?’
‘Look this way.’ Flash. Flash.
‘Do you think coloreds are equal to whites?’
‘Are you a Communist?’
Lee stood with his shoulders back and his chest high, like he was about to salute to somebody. Then he spoke in a quiet voice, low and measured, making the whole group of them hush up to hear him. ‘We saved the Jews from the Germans. So now, I ask you, who’s going to save the Negro from America?’
Some of the reporters gasped. Some shouted in a flood of angry questions.
‘If America’s so terrible, why don’t you get out?’
‘Do you hate America?’
‘Are you an anarchist?’
Flashbulbs exploded as Lee tugged Cora back to his lean-to beside the whiskey barn, pulse racing.
Inside Cora drew the curtains with shaking hands.
‘Can you believe them?’ Lee said.
She wrapped her arms around herself, her panic rising. ‘They know where to find us, Lee. They weren’t supposed to know who we are.’
‘Anti-American? I fought a war for this country.’
‘You can’t rile them like that when they know who we are.’ She paced in tight circles.
‘I bet you not one of those cowards served. Not one.’
‘Momma was right. Roscoe was right. We should never have spoken up.’ She was starting to hyperventilate.
He came up to her, calmer than she thought he had a right to be, and held her shoulders to stop her pacing. ‘We still did the right thing.’
She shook her head. ‘But—’
‘Knowing who we are makes us targets,’ he said, ‘but it also protects us. When these articles come out, they’ll want to try to prove us wrong. How will it look if they come after us? It’ll prove we were right all along.’
‘But they still might.’
‘They won’t.’
‘You don’t know that. There’re plenty of ways they can get at us. I should never have done this.’
‘Cora,’ he said, taking her face in his hands, his nose nearly touching hers.
‘This is how we get things to change. Not by brooding in your living room.’ Cora bristled.
He meant Roscoe. ‘Not by taking your own good advantage and ignoring the rest of us.’ She closed her eyes at the sting of his words, aimed at Benny, but somehow touching her just the same.
Lee wrapped his arms around her and pulled her trembling frame close. ‘It’s going to be all right.’ He rubbed her back slowly until her quivering eased. ‘We’re in this together.’
She leaned into him, resting in the warmth of his chest, the curve of his arms. There was an ease to the way she fit with him that made them linger like that, holding each other close. Lee caressed her back, kissed the top of her head, dipped his head and brushed his lips over her ear.
‘I almost forgot how good you feel pressed up against me,’ he said.
She stiffened and pulled away from him.
‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.’ He reached for her hands.
She shook her head. ‘I can’t.’
‘Can’t let me comfort you when you’re scared?’
‘Roscoe,’ she said.
Lee ran his hand over his face and looked at her with tired eyes. ‘How did we get here, Cora? I watch you two together, and I don’t get it.’
‘It is what it is.’
‘No.’ He shook his head. ‘We had something real going. And then you just …’ He drew his lips together, his jaw tightening, his breath shortening.
‘I thought you’d wait for me.’ He stepped in close and dropped his voice.
‘I loved you.’ He pinned her with a demanding stare.
‘But you married him two months after I left. Do you have any idea what that feels like?’
She looked away from him to the window, covered with a gray-green curtain.
He took her chin and turned her head back to face him. ‘Why did you marry him?’
She felt the tears welling up in her eyes. She blinked them away and swallowed the lump building in her throat. ‘Because you left when I begged you to stay.’
A flash of pain shot across his handsome features.
‘And because he cared enough to try to protect me.’
‘I would have protected you.’
‘How, Lee? You left.’
‘I was going to come back for you.’
‘You had no way of knowing if you would ever make it back.’
‘Neither did he.’
‘That was the point.’
Lee’s eyes went wide, and he took a step back.
Cora worked to keep her voice from wavering. ‘He and Benny thought it would be like insurance in case anything happened.’ It sounded so stupid now. So short-sighted and cold.
Lee opened his mouth to say something, but seconds passed and the words didn’t come.
‘I was so afraid you would all … that you wouldn’t …’ She leaned against the wall. Exhaustion overwhelmed her and she sank to the floor, her knees tucked up to her chest.
Lee knelt in front of her, laying his hands on her feet. ‘I left for you.’
Cora shook her head. ‘How can you say that when I wanted you to stay?’
He reached up to cradle her knees. ‘What could I have been to you if I’d stayed? The hooligan with the rough past you saw in secret?’
She winced, ashamed she had insisted on hiding him.
‘Your momma and the rest were never going to approve of me. And I saw a chance to go from hooligan to war hero. To acceptance. To you. I wanted to be good enough for you.’
She let her tears fall freely as she reached out to cup his face. ‘You are, Lee. You’re the best man I’ve ever known, and you are more than good enough.’
Lee leaned in, his lips hovering over hers and when she didn’t push him away, he kissed her, gentle and searching, hungry and yearning.
He wrapped his arms around her and pulled her onto his lap.
She gripped the back of his neck, pressing her mouth tightly against his.
She let her mind go blank, erasing the wrongness of what she was doing with the rightness of Lee.
‘I still want you, Cora,’ he said. Hands sliding down her back, nestling over her rear, pulling her closer up his thighs until she could feel the proof of his words. He brushed his lips along her jaw to her ear. ‘I still love you,’ he said.
She smiled with her whole body, a whizzing energy lighting her up from the inside.
‘Tell me.’ He rubbed into her and she gasped. ‘Tell me if you still want me.’
‘I do,’ she said. ‘You know I do.’
It was wrong to let him lift her into his arms. It was a mistake to let him carry her into his bedroom.
She knew she should tell him to stop. Instead, she buried her face in his neck and breathed him in.
She wrapped her legs around his waist. She arched her back and called out his name. She did not tell him no.