13. Chapter 10 | Dom
Getting up the stairs was humiliating.
Oretha had an arm around Dom's waist, bearing most of her weight.
Dom's ribs screamed with every step, her breath short and shallow, sweat beading on her forehead though it wasn't hot.
She'd climbed these stairs a thousand times — drunk, tired, carrying groceries, carrying CJ when he was sick. Never once had they beaten her.
Lewis Jordan had done what a lifetime of stairs couldn't: made her weak.
"Almost there," Oretha murmured.
"I live here. I don't need directions."
"I'm just trying to help."
"Yeah. You're real good at that."
Oretha's grip tightened, not enough to hurt, just enough to remind Dom she was the one holding her up.
They made it to the landing. Dom's vision swam. She leaned against the wall, taking careful, shallow breaths.
"You shouldn't have come downstairs," Oretha said. "Let's get you back in bed."
Dom ignored her. "Put me in the sitting room. Not the bedroom."
"You should be in bed—"
"If I wanted bed I'd say bed. I said the sitting room." The thought of being alone with Oretha in her own bedroom made her sweat worse than the stairs had. At least the sitting room had a television — something to fill the space between them besides staring.
The family's upstairs sitting room was tiny, an afterthought — they spent most of their life downstairs in the bar itself, and this room had never needed to be more than a couch and a small television and a window over the street.
Dom lowered herself down with a groan that came from somewhere deep.
"Louie still has this thing?" Oretha eyed the couch like it might bite her. "It's more dust than furniture by now."
"It's comfortable."
"It's ancient."
"So's Papa Louie. You complaining about him too?"
Oretha didn't answer, just stood there, weight shifted onto one hip, arms not quite crossed. Dom sized her up like an opponent before she could stop herself: open stance, chin up, hands empty. Wide open for a punch.
She hated that her mind still went there. Since that night in the cell, she'd pictured hitting Oretha more than once — wanted her to feel a fraction of what two days in a holding cell felt like. She'd wanted to hit plenty of people over the years, most of whom deserved it.
But she didn't want to hit Oretha anymore. She was just tired — of the anger, of carrying the hurt around like something too precious to put down.
"Sit or stand there looking guilty," Dom said. "Either way, turn on the TV."
"We should talk—"
"TV first."
Oretha's jaw hardened, but she crossed to the television and clicked it to a news broadcast. Birmingham filled the screen — fire hoses knocking people down, police dogs tearing at clothes, at flesh. It was harrowing. It was still less than being alone with Oretha's face.
Oretha perched on the edge of the couch, not quite sitting, not quite standing.
"That's going to be us in September," Oretha said. "When we march." A pause. "CJ's been asking if he can march up front."
Dom kept her attention on the screen. That boy, always wanting to be in the middle of things.
Oretha paused, as if working up to something. "If I tell him yes, I need you to trust I'll protect him. Not the movement's idea of him. Him." She twisted her hands together. "And I know I haven't earned that yet. That's why I need to explain. About three years ago."
"You don't have to."
"Yes, I do." She stared at the floor. "CORE wasn't the NAACP.
We weren't even SNCC — just college kids with no money, no lawyers, no backing.
Every time we pushed, they came at us. Communists, agitators, perverts.
I thought if we could just be respectable enough, not give them ammunition—" Her voice cracked.
"I was nineteen. I was terrified. When you got arrested, I thought bailing you out would burn down everything we were building. "
A cold dread settled in Dom's chest. She'd known this already, had known it sitting in that cell.
"So you left me," Dom said. Not a question.
"So I left you." Oretha's eyes were wet.
Dom watched people getting knocked down on the screen and getting back up.
"No one is free," she said, "until everyone is.
You left me in that cell thinking the movement mattered more than I did.
But I am the movement, Oretha. CJ is. Every person they say isn't respectable enough — we're the ones who need it most."
"I know." The words barely made it out. "I'm sorry."
Dom wanted to stay angry — anger was simple, didn't ask anything of her. But she was tired down to the marrow, and Oretha was her cousin. Her family.
"Okay," Dom said.
"Okay?"
"Not okay, I forgive you. Just — okay, I hear you."
Oretha nodded, wiped her face. They sat there a while, Birmingham still playing behind them.
"I'm trying to do better," Oretha said. "Especially with CJ."
"Why especially CJ?"
"He's my nephew."
Dom blinked. "We're not even blood cousins. He's some twice-removed—"
"Nobody gives a fuck about that." Oretha's voice was matter-of-fact. "You're his mother, you're my cousin. That makes him my nephew. Period."
"I'm not his—" Dom started automatically. Then stopped.
Because she was. She was CJ's mother.
Oretha couldn't know what that cost to hear out loud.
Dom had spent years wondering if she'd turned out wrong somehow — if losing her own mother young had broken something in her, made her miss some lesson about how to be a woman, left her stuck too broad, too hard, too masculine.
Papa Louie had done what he could, but a man raising a girl alone only goes so far, and it was his sister Virgie — Oretha and Doris Jean's mother — who'd stepped in and done the rest, taken Dom in like one more daughter of her own.
Dom had watched her for years, trying to learn how to be soft the way a woman was supposed to be soft.
It never took.
Oretha grew up graceful and strategic; Doris Jean too. Both of them had Virgie their whole lives and turned out nothing like Dom. Which meant it was never about the mother she'd lost. It meant Dom was just born like this.
Maybe that was okay. Maybe CJ was just born the way he was, too, and neither of them needed fixing.
She didn't look like the mothers on The Dick Van Dyke Show. No pearls, no casseroles, no husband, no picket fence. But she couldn't have loved that boy more if she'd carried him herself, and it was good, sometimes, to have someone else see it too.
Oretha still watched her, waiting.
"Yeah," Dom said quietly.
"I'll protect him," Oretha said. "I promise. That's what family does."
"How's your mama?" Dom asked. She hadn't sat at Virgie's table in three years — not since that day in the cell.
Oretha's face softened. She dropped her voice half an octave, doing her mother without seeming to notice she was doing it. "When's Dom coming back." Her own voice again. "Doris Jean misses you too. Won't say it like that, but she does."
Dom's throat tightened. "Tell them I miss them."
"Tell them yourself. Come to dinner."
"Maybe."
The news ended. The anchor signed off. Then the music started — campy, dramatic, and Dom's blood chilled.
A rerun of The Sable Hour.
Dom lunged for the television, pain exploding through her ribs, stealing her breath before she got anywhere near it.
"Turn it off! Oretha — TURN IT OFF—"
Oretha was already moving, but slow, confused by the panic, and the theme kept swelling behind her, credits rolling across the screen.
Footsteps on the stairs, fast and then faster. Dom's own shouting had done exactly what she was trying to stop — brought Elle and CJ running. CJ appeared in the doorway first, breathless. Elle right behind him.
Too late.
Elle stared at the screen, and for a second nobody in the room breathed.
Purple letters swam up out of the dark — The Sable Hour — and then her own face took over the screen entirely, lit from every angle, not a bruise on it, not a hesitation in it.
STARRING THELMA BLAKE AS NIGHTSHADE, smiling and flirting with the camera like she owned the air around it.
Even buried under all that eyeliner and studio gloss, she was beautiful in a way that made Dom's chest hurt a little — dressed up as someone who'd never once had to be afraid of anything.
Dom looked from the screen to the doorway and back, same as Oretha — the woman on the television and the woman six feet away in a plain cotton dress, hair pulled back, hollow under the eyes in a way no camera would ever have been allowed to catch.
Same face. Impossible to look at both at once and believe it.
Some useless animal part of Dom wanted to throw herself at the television anyway, ribs be damned, and put her fist through the screen before Oretha's mouth could catch up to her face. It wouldn't have changed anything. She wanted to do it regardless.
Elle put a hand on CJ's shoulder without looking away from the screen. "Go back downstairs and finish helping Papa clean up."
"But—"
"Now, CJ." Whatever he saw on either of their faces sent him back down the stairs without another word.
Elle's shoulders trembled now, fingers flexing for something to grasp that wasn't there.
Oretha stood completely still. "Oh my God." Then, certain: "You're Thelma Blake. You're Nightshade."
Elle didn't move. Didn't speak. Her breathing went shallow and fast.
Her legs gave first. She stumbled onto the couch beside Dom, the jolt sending pain through Dom's ribs that barely registered under the adrenaline. Dom reached for her hand — ice cold, trembling all through her.
Oretha stood there, one hand pressed over her own mouth. "I thought — I read that you—" She couldn't finish it.
"She said something true to the First Lady at a fundraiser," Dom said, when it was clear Elle couldn't get the words out herself.
"Got blacklisted for it. So she made sure there was nothing left of her career or her identity for anybody else to destroy.
" Dom's voice stayed flat, daring Oretha to make something of it. "She's been Elle Brown ever since."