18. Chapter 15 | Elle
Elle woke to Dom's breathing and morning light filtering through yellowed curtains.
For nearly two weeks, she has woken in this room instead of the one down the hall, which had gone back to holding spare linens almost as soon as she'd stopped using it. Nobody had said anything about the switch. Nobody had needed to.
Dom's eyes opened, finding hers immediately.
"Morning," Dom said, voice rough with sleep.
"Morning." Elle let her see the truth of it, and Dom's gaze sharpened, awake all at once.
"Yeah?"
"Yeah."
They kissed, slow and unhurried, before the day could get its hands on them.
Downstairs, CJ was working the stove alongside Papa Louie, and the kitchen smelled like coffee and butter and the thing Elle had started, without meaning to, calling home.
CJ was agitated before they'd even sat down, spatula waving. "Registration opens at nine. We've been working toward this for six weeks, and you're going to make us late."
"Good morning to you too," Dom said, kissing the top of his head.
Six Saturdays now, the three of them plus a rotating handful of volunteers crowded into Papa Louie's back room, running through the same drill until it stopped feeling like a drill and started feeling like armor.
Dom and CJ had come back from Atlanta at the start of April with a notebook full of it: citizenship school techniques picked up from SCLC organizers down there, back when Elle had still been a stranger to both of them, a name in the papers and nothing more.
CJ reciting sections of the Louisiana constitution until he could do it in his sleep.
Elle running mock interviews, playing registrar, cold and impatient and looking for any excuse.
A shaky signature, a stumbled word, a form filled out in the wrong order, because that was exactly what the real one would do.
She'd learned fast that the "interpretation clause" wasn't a test of literacy at all.
It was a loaded gun the registrar got to point wherever he pleased, and the only defense anyone had was not flinching.
Six weeks. That was all it had been, start to finish. A stranger's name in the papers to this, a kitchen table and a spatula and a boy who trusted her to steady his hands. Elle still hadn't found the seam where one life had ended and this one started. It should have frightened her more than it did.
"You've got Mrs. Deslonde's whole family going today," CJ said. "Five people. If even one of them freezes up in there—"
"They won't freeze," Elle said. "We ran the Fourteenth Amendment with her Tuesday night for two hours. She could recite it in her sleep by the end."
"CJ." Dom's tone held a warning. "You're not going in that courthouse. You're fifteen. You hand out water, you keep the list of who's inside how long, and you stay where I can see you."
"I know the rules better than half the people who are actually eligible to register." He said it flat, not bragging, just fact. "That has to count for something."
"It counts for you staying safe," Dom said. "A courthouse full of white deputies and a line of Black folks trying to register. That's plenty of danger on its own without you standing at that window."
"Fine." He didn't look happy, but he didn't push.
Under the table, Elle found Dom's hand. "Let me ask Louie if he needs me this morning.
But I can go until my shift starts. I'll wear the sunglasses.
" She hadn't had a recognition scare in weeks, and that mattered more than she let on.
Proof, however small, that she could still move through a crowd and just be a woman in it.
He hugged her hard enough to knock the breath out of her. "Good. We need you. Mrs. Deslonde asked for you specifically. Said you were the only one who didn't make her feel stupid for asking questions twice."
Papa Louie shuffled in from the back room, catching the tail end. "Sounds like I'm holding down the fort by myself, then."
"Do you mind?" Elle asked.
He shook his head, already reaching for his apron. "Somebody's got to keep this place standing while the revolution's out marching." A quip, but warmth colored it. "Go on. Watch after each other."
?
The line outside the registrar's office wrapped halfway around the courthouse by nine, forty or fifty people standing in the heat with their papers close, poll tax receipts folded into billfolds, birth certificates in envelopes gone soft from handling.
Two deputies stood at the top of the steps, thumbs hooked in their belts, watching the line with the bored, proprietary look of men guarding what already belonged to them.
"Mornin'," one of them said as the line inched forward, not unfriendly, which was somehow worse. "Y'all know the office only takes twenty a day, no matter how long you stand out here."
A murmur went down the line. Elle had heard about this: the arbitrary caps, the sudden lunch breaks that lasted two hours, the registrar who'd once closed the window at 12:58 with three people from the front. Rules that existed nowhere on paper and everywhere in practice.
Elle found the woman she was looking for near the middle of the line. Sixties, purse clutched in both hands like a shield, four grown children fanned out around her trying to look calmer than they were.
"Mrs. Deslonde." Elle crouched by her, kept her voice low and even. "You remember the Fourteenth."
"Section one." The older woman stared straight ahead, but her voice, when it came, was steady. "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside."
"That's it exactly. If he asks you something else, something you don't know, don't guess. Just say, 'I'd like to give you my best understanding, sir,' and then say what you do know slowly. Slow reads as sure. Fast reads as scared."
"Slow reads as sure," Mrs. Deslonde repeated, her shoulders relaxing.
Elle moved down the line doing the same thing for six more people: steadying a young man's hands around his own birth certificate, running through the signature one more time with a woman whose penmanship had gone shaky with nerves, telling a teenager who looked older than sixteen to leave the ID card that said otherwise in his pocket.
Old instincts, repurposed. A director had once taught her how to walk into a room like she owned it even when her hands were shaking underneath the costume.
It turned out the trick worked just as well on a sidewalk in front of a Parish courthouse.
She was midway through resetting a young mother's grip on her documents when a man came around the corner on foot, moving with the rolling, overcareful walk of someone working hard to appear steadier than he was.
Even from here Elle could place the type: the salt-stiff canvas trousers, the undershirt gone gray, the smell that would hit you a beat before he did, sweat and cheap whiskey and the low-tide reek that clung to men who worked the docks.
Then, a half second later, she placed the face itself, and her stomach dropped clean through the sidewalk.
Lewis Jordan. She'd only ever seen him once, at that horrible boxing match at the Saturn Bar, half in the bag even then, shouting things at the ring that had made her want to leave before Dom had even finished her first round. She'd hoped never to see that face again.
He was climbing toward the registrar's line, papers gone soft and creased in his fist like he'd carried them around in his pocket for a week deciding whether to come.
Elle moved, cutting him off at the base of the steps.
"What are you doing here?"
Lewis blinked at her, slow, working to place her.
"I'm here to register." Said plain, almost offended she'd asked, like it was the most reasonable thing in the world.
Then he glanced past her shoulder and found Dom by the water table, lifting a hand in an easy, careless wave.
"Dominique! Claudette said I might see you here. "
"You need to leave," Elle said, stepping into his line of sight to block the wave. "Right now."
Dom was moving. Water pitcher abandoned on the table, cutting through the line so fast two people had to step out of her way.
The two deputies at the top of the steps gave Lewis a lazy, familiar nod. One of them called out a joke Elle didn't catch, and Lewis laughed too loud over her shoulder, the laugh of a man who knew exactly which jokes bought him goodwill with men like that.
"Get away from her," Dom said, arriving hard enough that Elle felt the air move.
Lewis looked at her properly now. Whatever he'd been braced to feel, if he'd had any warning at all, didn't show. Just surprise, glassy and slow to focus, curdling fast into something meaner.
"Well," he said, words loose at the edges, looking her up and down. "You look no worse for the wear. Thought I cleaned your clock pretty good, last time."
CJ stood rigid beside the water table.
Lewis's gaze slid past Dom to find him, and the careful mask he'd been holding together cracked into a wider, more dangerous warmth. "And Charlene. Look at you."
CJ flinched as if struck.
"Don't." Dom wasn't sure if she meant it for CJ or for herself.
"I go by CJ." His voice came out too high, cracking straight through the middle of it, not the flat, rehearsed correction Elle had heard him give strangers a dozen times, but raw, unpracticed, like the name had reached in and yanked something loose he hadn't braced to protect.
"Charlene," Lewis said again, softer this time, almost gentle, which was worse than if he'd shouted it. "That's not your name. You know that. It's been a long time, baby girl. It's good to see you... even dressed like a damn paperboy. What are you doing here? This ain't no place for you."
CJ's face crumpled. Not fear. Past fear, into somewhere with no floor under it at all.
"Stop calling me that." It came out ragged, too loud, cracking on every word. "Stop it. Stop saying that name."
"Charlene—"