chapter twenty-three “YOU HEAR ME?”
For the first time in God knows how many years, I traveled to Derringdo alone. A civilian.
The general admission tickets I’d bought with my personal credit card gave me no special privileges. After an eight-hour drive that should have taken six—in a standard-shift white pickup that was the only weekend rental available so last-minute in Brooklyn—I parked a little after noon in a cheap, sun-exposed lot miles away from the festival site in Lancaster, New Hampshire. There was no helpful Derringdo staffer holding up a sign to meet me, no assigned golf cart to tool me around. Instead I followed the masses toward a fleet of belching shuttle buses, then waited on line for forty minutes to board.
But as soon as I disembarked, I began to feel better about experiencing the festival sans VIP pass. The day of Opal & Nev’s show was bright and beautiful, the sky a clean blue above the huge wooden Derringdo arch. The last time I’d been here, we media colleagues had made small talk about the vodka sponsor that year, and what variety of mini-quiche might be on the breakfast buffet. But all around me now the mood was less snarky, more merry. The stages had officially opened, and the echoes of bass and drum wafted to where we newcomers stood waiting. In line directly in front of me, a young woman with a gold bauble glittering in a mass of wavy brown hair burst into a can’t-help-it “Woooo!” and up ahead, a similar call rang back. Everyone was laughing and excited. Giddy, goofy. A guy wearing a T-shirt that said ASK ME ABOUT BERNIE SANDERS jogged up and down the line, offering strangers a handful of his homemade Chex Mix before security made him toss it out. Where are you from? people asked each other. Who did you come to see? They traded phones and posed for photos, hugging the legs of the great carved arch as we passed under it toward the will call booths. Someone pressed their cheek hard against the wood, and came away with a reddened imprint of a Fender Stratocaster.
Friday had always been my favorite day of this festival. For the past twelve years, that night’s headlining main stage slot had been reserved for the return of the nostalgic alternative act you didn’t even know you missed. New Order, Big Audio Dynamite, the Celebrity Skin iteration of Hole…. Some years the festival organizers kept the Friday headliners a total secret; other years, like this one, they dropped big hints to gin up the buzz. “Nev Charles and a Very Special Guest!” the shareable graphic had teased for weeks, in an enlarged font sitting atop a jumble of other names, and everyone on Twitter was rolling their eyes at the obviousness of who that guest could be. Still, even after Aural exclusively confirmed the news, part of me wished that Opal, ever mercurial, would decide to drop out of Derringdo at the last minute. That she’d consider what I’d said outside Bob Hize’s apartment, maybe comb back over her own memories for answers to the questions I’d asked. But as the line inched toward the official festival entrance, the fact of it was inescapable: I saw her face next to Nev’s on signage tied to the guideposts. A new black-and-white shot of the two of them standing back-to-back, heads turned and looking into the camera with aloof expressions.
I noticed the young white woman with the gold hair bauble glancing over her shoulder at me with several shy smiles. “I like your dreads,” she finally said, and I thanked her. We chatted a bit; she was from Northern California and traveling with friends, all of them celebrating their recent high school graduation. I told her I was trying to finish a book about Opal & Nev. I asked: Did she want to be in it?
ALISON “AL” ELIZABETH DAUGHTRY, 18; SAN JOSE, CALIFORNIA; BROWN UNIVERSITY INCOMING FRESHMAN, CLASS OF 2020, ON WHAT EXCITED SOMEONE SO YOUNG ABOUT AN OPAL & NEV REUNION:
It’s really cool. I mean, I know he’s a legend and a great pop songwriter, but I actually didn’t know much deep about her until I went on my campus visits. Brown threw this welcome weekend where they had the student organizations set up in an auditorium to hand out information, and this girl I saw at the Black Lives Matter booth had on a T-shirt with that old photo of them on it. I was thinking to myself, Hey, that’s “Damn it, Becky, get it together!” Why is she riding on top of Nev Charles? [Covering her face with her hands] I know, I know! I thought it was totally random or, like, a joke? But anyway, I liked the shirt a lot so I googled it on my phone trying to find it. And then when the results came up I was like, Whaaaaaat? I called my aunt because she loves Nev so much, and I go, “Did you know Nev Charles started out totally punk?” and she was like, Derrrr.
Inside the gates, after a shockingly thorough security process that stripped me of my DERRINGDO 2009 swag parasol and the bobby pins that held up my hair, I took a moment to get my bearings. The map for Derringdo ’16 showed five different stages, four satellites and one main. A Ferris wheel rose up in the background, a north star by which festivalgoers could figure out, with help from a few signs, where they were versus where they needed to be. The four satellite stages were genre-specific—EDM, hip-hop, indie rock, hardcore/punk—but the main stage at the festival’s heart featured a delegation of representatives. It was most efficient to stick close to the center, inching toward the stage and deeper into the crowd during the opening sets.
But first: sustenance. I found among the food trucks nearest the main stage one that sold falafel, and the woman stuffing my pita, I noticed, was wearing a button on her uniform with Opal Jewel’s face on it.
JESSICA RAMIREZ, 26; BOSTON; COOK, MOST RECENTLY AT TGI FRIDAYS:
My older brothers are into punk, and I got close with one of their ex-girlfriends who was into that scene too. She made me a playlist of classic stuff she thought I might dig. “Red-Handed” was on it and, I think, the only song with vocals by a girl on the whole thing. I fell in love with it and just went deeper from there. Me volunteering to work the festival is the only way I could get in—the tickets are way too fucking expensive.
I dunno, it kinda freaks me out how everybody claims to love them now. I was watching this Drew Barrymore thing on Netflix and one of their songs was playing in the background, and that was completely weird. Like, I’m happy that people are finally recognizing how much better Opal & Nev were than his lame solo shit, but at the same time it’s like, Nooooo, please don’t ruin my thing.
Munching and wandering through the crowd before Foals, I spotted the Bernie Sanders supporter who’d been jogging down the line at the entrance and handing out the Chex Mix. As his shirt directed, I asked him first about his candidate (“It’s not over yet! We’re gonna get big money out of politics!”) before getting his take on the night’s other supposed revolutionaries.
CHRIS DELANO, 34; DENVER; MEDICAL DISPENSARY MANAGER:
It’s incredible that Opal is back, you know? And I’m so happy to see more people like yourself here to support her. [When asked to explain what he meant by this] Oh. It’s, like, I don’t know… Like, she was always so keyed into the politics having to do with your, um, with the African American community, right? And I just wonder, like, why wasn’t her music ever at the top of, like, the urban charts? It’s a shame that people, that sometimes they prefer the mindless stuff that goes against their own interests, but anyway, yeah, I’m just glad that they’re back.
I chatted with a few other festivalgoers who’d showed up at the main stage to see Halsey and Kygo. Most of them didn’t seem to know a whole lot about Opal & Nev, but expressed general enthusiasm about their show anyway. Lots of “cool”; too much “awesome.” But just before SZA, when the area around me got more noticeably Black, I did speak with one fan who had a lot more to say.
RYANNE SIWANDEE, 27; NEW YORK; ACTRESS, PLAYWRIGHT, BLOGGER, FREELANCE MAKEUP ARTIST, AND HANDBAG DESIGNER:
Honestly, I would have loved it more if Opal were headlining solo. Which is a fantasy, I know, living in capitalism and systemic white supremacy. But I feel like her aesthetic and the power of her work have been co-opted for so long, and the least a music festival of this size could do is give a trailblazing elder her flowers.
Yeah, a lot of her shit is challenging to listen to. I can’t say every song on Weird O. is a bop—but that shit is vibrating high on some other frequency, right? When you talk about challenging to absorb, so is Bob Dylan’s whiny ass, in my opinion, and that fucking Ulysses book I had to read in college. Nigga, what? But aren’t we supposed to be better and smarter because of the challenging art that makes us uncomfortable? Isn’t the culture better for it? Or does that only apply when heterosexual cisgender white men do the challenging? [As her companions snap their fingers behind her] You see what I’m saying, sis?
That’s not to knock Nev Charles and whatever way they work together. Maybe it’s true they make each other better when it comes to the music. But Nev Charles has had his moment and he sure don’t need another fan. All I’m saying is, it would be nice if a Black woman got this big a moment to claim as her own. I doubt she’ll ever get another.
Dusk fell over the fairgrounds, an orange band clinging to the horizon like a layer of stone fruit sunk to the bottom of a casserole. Deep purple pressed down until night had suddenly, fully descended, at least ten degrees cooler on this late-spring night. The done-up girls let down their hair, if they had it, and readjusted their decorative flowers. They reached in their bags for sweaters or else nestled goose-bumped skin into the warmth of friends and partners. I caught eyes with a young woman in a romper, pulled through the horde by a bullish guy in a backward baseball cap, and as they passed she tried to smile an “excuse me” through chattering teeth.
The Ferris wheel, though still lit up neon, had shut down for the night, and all but a couple of the satellite stages had run through their allotted hours. Every minute or so the crowd that was gathered around the main stage grew in number and then constricted, heaving forward and into a tighter weave, so that even the festivalgoers stubbornly trying to squat on their picnic blankets were forced to stand or else get sneakers and sandals to their spines.
I found myself pushed closer to the stage than I’d intended. Had I stretched a hand between the limbs of the people standing in front of me, I might have touched the metal barricade marking the narrow space where credentialed photographers were allowed to shoot the first three songs of every set. That meant close enough to make out the tattoos of the stagehands who tuned the instruments, and to hear them murmuring, “Check, check,” underneath the music a DJ somewhere was playing to keep the crowd hyped. Every so often behind me, a round of rhythmic clapping would start up, the audience signaling their excitement for the show to start. I wasn’t about to clap, but despite myself, my pulse had quickened.
The stagehands jogged off and the backing band—Nev’s regular touring guys, from Vegas to Kyoto, Gotham Hall to the Hollywood Bowl—marched out to claim their places. I took special note of the drummer: a bald, baby-faced Black guy with a belly, a thick beard, and a pair of glasses like the ones toddlers and NBA players wear, with the rubber strap to hold them in place. Workmanlike, he struck the skins and the cymbal, then settled calmly onto his stool, waiting for the bassist and lead guitarist to get through their adjustments. Soon the DJ’s mix faded; the lights clicked off completely. A low vibrating noise, like what you might hear in a popcorn movie before the UFO lands, rolled over the crowd, which commenced to “wooo!” even louder. I put my head down to dig out, from the pocket of my jeans, my pair of rubber earplugs, and I stuffed them in not a moment too soon: I heard a click, the sound of a light popped back on, then that wild human roar that insists, Entertain us.
I looked up again at the stage. A figure stood alone at the center, backlit so that he and the guitar slung around his shoulder made a perfect rock-idol silhouette. On the three jumbotron screens, one at each side of the stage and one hovering huge in the middle, he was epically tall, trench coat collar popped, and the tip-top of him—his hair—was molded into a familiar sideways swoop and curl. The flame, from Things We’ve Seen.
For a good minute he stood statuesque through the screaming, as acrid swirls of theatrical fog climbed his body. On either side of me people held up their phones, recording or snapping photos of him, while in front, the professionals slipped into the pit and aimed their lenses up too. That’s when I recognized, with a start, Pooja from Aural—my last and best hire. How she’d finagled it I’ll never know, but the girl had gotten a photo/video credential. I spotted her in that pit darting between guys twice her size, an unselfconscious grin making her look even younger as she leaned slightly backward to get all of Nev Charles to fit within the screen limits of her smartphone.
Finally, movement from the figure on the stage: a tilting of the guitar’s neck, a pop-chart jangle, a funny herky-jerky dance. “Daphne, Don’t,” right off the bat. A bright white spotlight hit center stage, at the exact moment that the drummer kicked in, and Nev, on the huge high-def screens, was revealed in three bright dimensions. This was the crowd-goes-wild moment, but by instinct I felt an urge to look away. In the bright light, to me, Nev looked ridiculous, his face too aged for such stiff, unnaturally colored hair, the long black trench coming off like Matrix cosplay. How long had it been since he’d had to try this hard?
And yet everyone around me seemed to be game. The fans up at the front, mostly very young white women, hopped and sang along to the solo Nev hit I imagined most of them had learned from their mothers, from repeat plays during the eighties block on their satellite radios, a soundtrack for the ride to Saturday’s soccer. I was old enough, though, to remember when it first came out, and how undeniable it was—how a group of popular older girls at Haviland Day choreographed an aerobics routine to it for a stupid gym-class assignment, how the doo-doo-doo, oh, don’t! part of the chorus compelled me to tap my foot discreetly while glowering high up in the bleachers.
I had to admit Nev was in good voice this night, and the crackerjack band was reenergized and album-quality. The brother behind the drums got damn near jolly in the pocket, swinging like Ringo. As they jammed toward the bridge Nev loosened up too, hiked a foot on an amp and leaned into the crowd, holding the microphone out for a massive sing-along. On the jumbotron screens, his smile was ecstatic, and I wondered suddenly when he’d gotten veneers. These weren’t the same teeth from ’76.
“Hello, Derring-duh-doo-doo-doo!” he sang, three fist pumps accompanied by three hits of snare, and then the bass and guitar fell out and the drummer switched into the rabbity pace of “Shot in the Arm,” an entirely different Nev fave from Recovery (1978). Heart race / Gun chase / Round the bend with you… Taking his place back behind the microphone stand, Nev deadpanned the lyrics again and again over that breathless-fast beat. He was teasing us, holding off the guitar riff that opened into the rest of the song. He pointed at the audience and nodded encouragement, and as they picked up the chant he shrugged out of the trench to reveal a simple white button-down with sleeves pre-rolled, skinny blue jeans, Chelsea boots. As soon as the coat dropped, an assistant darted from stage right to retrieve it. Here we go, I thought. Time was collapsing and this was the bridge, from pure pop into a harder, trickier sound; my mouth went dry riding over it. I stood on tiptoe and searched for Pooja in the pit, rooting for her to be ready, but when I spotted her she was huddled among the other photographers, her cameraphone trained on the side of the stage where the assistant had entered. “No, no,” I would have told her, if it were still my place. “Opal would never come in that easy.”
Finally, the guitar riff rang out and the crowd gave a roar as Nev and the band launched into the full song. But we weren’t satisfied, not quite yet. Not with the promise of Opal still such a tease.
Something—someone—knocked into me from behind; the crowd was rearranging, reconfiguring, jostling me out of the place where I’d been standing. I turned to see three Black women holding hands and coming up fast, snaking their way through the crowd to claim a better spot. The navigator wore a fisherman’s hat over long green braids, a three-strand nose-to-ear gold chain, and an X-Ray Spex T-shirt cut into a midriff. The friends she steered had painted their faces with white marks in different, artful patterns: dotting one eyelid and down the bridge of the nose, striping the cheekbones and center of the chin. I stepped aside as much as I could to make room for them, these kindred Black girls a generation removed, and turned back around to face the stage. I expected to feel the brush of them as they passed, even hoped to maybe ask one of them for an interview later, but as “Shot in the Arm” boiled back down to a quick beat and Nev’s vocal, the only thing I felt was another rough shove.
“Wow… Don’t you know how to say ‘excuse me’?”
The reprimand came from directly behind me, the ess sounds particularly harsh. I glanced over my shoulder to see the Black girlfriends had squeezed next to a short white woman in pigtails and a bikini top whose crossed-arm stance and sour face told me she was the one who’d called them rude.
“I did say ‘excuse me,’ but you didn’t move,” the navigator muttered.
“And in case you weren’t aware?” said the friend with the dots, a little louder. “You don’t own the grass here, love. We paid exactly a fortune for these tickets, just like you.”
There was a little more sniping, but once it quieted I went back to minding my business. Almost as soon as I turned back around, I felt a tap on my shoulder. It was the offended white woman, signaling for me to bend down to her.
“I’m so sorry for knocking into you just now,” she said in my ear, her hand lingering on my shoulder. “Some people…” She rolled her eyes in the direction of the young Black women, who at this point were completely unbothered, their attention focused on the jumbotron screens.
“Not a problem,” I said, and gave a tight smile.
Again I turned around, hoping that this was the end of it. Because we were getting closer, closer now to the moment nobody wanted to miss. Up onstage Nev was prancing, dragging the mic stand around, sweaty and beatific. “Bloody hell, you maniacs!” he shouted. He pulled the fabric of his shirt in and out and approached the drummer. “These old tunes are a decent workout, yeah, Jordan?”
In response, Jordan grinned and switched to an even more complicated rhythm, heavy on the kick. On the jumbotron screens Nev’s brows shot skyward, and he tossed back his head and laughed. “Looks like my friends are in rare form tonight,” he said, strolling back toward the audience.
“Come on, Opaaaaaaal!” someone far back in the crowd screamed.
“Well, then,” Nev said. “Speaking of friends, and rare forms…”
The low, vibrating noise sounded again underneath Jordan’s relentless new rhythm, and a spotlight hit the floor near the front of the stage. The three Black Opal Jewel fans were jumping up and down now, hugging each other. The bass and lead guitar came in, and suddenly we had landed inside “Chalk White.” Opal’s vocals invaded us, it seemed, from everywhere at once. Hi, hello / I need to know / You hear me… Some clever producer was twiddling with a recording of her, so that her voice was isolated and zipping to the left, the right, the front, the back… But where would Opal herself come from? Ludicrously I looked up to the night sky, as if she were going to drop in on a ride from a meteor. The Derringdo cameraman filming the show for the jumbotrons panned over the front of the audience, made us the butt of the joke: We could see ourselves now on the screens, swiveling around, anxious and confused. I picked out the green-haired leader among the three Black girls, and she suddenly pointed straight ahead at something that, I could see when I turned back toward the stage, had shifted on the floor. Her friends, seeing this too, started thrashing up and down, one of them grasping the sides of her head and screaming to anyone around her, “Oh my God, this bitch! This biiiiitch!”
“Hey!” yelped the touchy white woman behind me. “Could you please watch your arms?”
But nobody had time for saying “sorry,” because inch by inch Opal Jewel was emerging, sprouting through a trapdoor in the stage. Her first live performance in twenty-five years… The photographers in the pit scrambled to get it on record, and the clever Derringdo cameraman trained his lens in that direction too.
First came the headpiece: a towering pile of shimmering black, with an African violet blooming 3D from a crack in the front. At the heart of the huge purple petals, a shoot tipped with yellow—the pistil, it’s called—reached out toward us, pulsing. And then came Opal’s ageless face, that enviable ebony skin…. Her eyes were closed, finished with a fringe of babydoll lashes. Her lips, plump and lacquered purple, with a vertical line of bright yellow dribbling from the bow at the top through the V of her chin. Her neck was outrageously long, her shoulders bare—collarbones popping, arms toned and akimbo in an at-ease position. She rose and she rose: With her carriage so peaceful, with the remnants of fog still swamping the stage and coiling around the giant violet, she looked as if she were being pulled from a nap at a cryogenic day spa.
“Wait, is she out here naked?” one of the Black friends asked in awe as a faint shadow of cleavage came into view.
Hi, hello / I need to know / You hear me….
But of course she was dressed—Virgil LaFleur had seen to that. Soon we saw the twin rounds of a strapless black bodice, pleated origami-style. A bright yellow line ran from cleavage to crotch, mimicking the detail that split Opal’s lips, and a shiny thin belt of the same electric hue intersected this line at her trim little waist. From there, the legs of the jumpsuit split off, tapering into cuffs just above her bare feet. The platform was not done elevating her yet—it lifted past floor level, rising like a round layer of cake with Opal the avant figure on top. A mural of raised fists in every color decorated the sides of the platform, and when it reached about five feet above stage level, it began to slowly rotate, counterclockwise. From his position at the base of the platform, the jumbotron guy let us admire Opal from every angle in close-up. We saw the yellow zipper detail on the back of the jumpsuit; the impeccable tailoring that gave her halfway the shape she’d always envied; the sparkly violet mic at rest in her hands. On display in her LaFleur original, Opal Jewel was indeed everything: classic and modern, petite and immense, formal and casual, bold and restrained. Virgil must have been, should have been very proud.
When one full revolution was complete, Opal facing us once again, the platform stopped turning and her eyes popped open. The rest of her face remained impassive, but as the vocal recording continued to flit from speaker to speaker she turned her head to follow it, coolly considering the screaming sea of us—the largest live audience she had ever commanded. Twenty thousand paying festivalgoers out on this chilly spring night, waiting to see what Opal Jewel would do—at least 150 times the number who’d once cheered a weird-looking Black girl on the stage of the Smythe, despite not even knowing her name. Now, decades after she’d been infamous and loudmouthed and then relegated to the cultish margins, the edgy B story to Nev Charles’s A, here was the kind of critical mass she’d always dreamed she could galvanize. And the crowd was not only here in the flesh, but also swarming virtual, sending a steady flow of hearts and thumbs-up floating across the Derringdo livestream. I don’t know to what extent Opal understood the enormity of that, claiming as she did to distrust fame and the potential fickleness of this “moment” she was having—and yet I couldn’t ignore how well rehearsed she seemed to be in seizing it. She stomped a bare foot along with the beat, pulled her arms from around her back, and dipped into a miraculously controlled and sexy squat.
Hi, hello / I need to know—
Suddenly the sound dropped out—her recorded voice, the drums, and eventually the crowd’s screams. All of us reverent inside the same swell of anticipation. Then Opal Jewel brought the mic to her mouth, took a breath, and screamed:
“YOU HEAR ME!”
The next twenty or so minutes… Christ, I don’t know. It’s hard to pick out distinct notes, but I’ll try to piece them together in some sort of string that makes temporal sense: Somehow, a set of stairs appeared by the platform and Opal was stomping down them. Somehow, Nev was holding his hand out to her, bowing down toward the African violet, taking theatrical sniffs. Somehow the two of them were playing off each other, wriggling back-to-back, lunging front-to-front, trading lyrics and growls and coos and winks. Somehow she fucked up his flame, yanked the moussed stiffness out of his hair with her fingers so he looked younger, wilder, oddly handsome again. Somehow he was playing the hell out of his guitar, and made me forget the Doritos commercial, or his head popping out of that apple pie, or 2013’s snoozy Las Vegas residency. Somehow they were twenty-something again, conducting the energy of a young, hungry audience.
But what lingers most from Opal & Nev’s first and last reunion show was, ironically, their breather—the moment the music settled down, for a medley of “Ginger’s Lament” and “Ron Is Gone.” Pooja and the other photographers had long since been hustled out, back to the media room backstage to upload their digital content, and Opal sat at the lip of the stage in the spotlight, her legs dangling into the emptied-out space. A softer, bluish gel lit Nev at stage left—he had switched to acoustic guitar and harmonies, and standing behind his mic, he was her only accompaniment. These selections required Opal to sing, to show a more nuanced and tender side, and I noticed a new quality and texture to her voice. It was richer and deeper… markedly older. Was her voice where she’d been keeping the wisdom and wear of sixty-seven years? I wondered. But soon my attention was pulled to the images flickering across the huge center screen that seemed to hang in midair behind the band. It had switched off from the live feed to display a series of photos, a slideshow of Bob Hize at work, including the joyful candid shot I’d seen atop his baby grand. That one held steady a moment, inspiring scattered, respectful applause from the Mercurials who happened to recognize him, and then the screen rotated through a longer memorial montage. There was a snapshot from Opal’s last Chinese feast in Detroit, and the image on the screen zoomed in on her mother, Ruby Robinson, with her proud grin and her glass of white zinfandel. A black-and-white of Nev in his Boys from Birmingham tough-guy getup and guitar, standing in front of his mismatched parents, Morris and Helen Charles. Opal and Virgil in eighties attire flanking their good friend Christopher Givens, hollow-cheeked and smiling weakly from a recliner, a blanket over his lap and a Christmas tree dripping gold tinsel behind him. The melancholy but beautiful photo of Star Acadia from her one and only album cover, released twelve years before her heroin addiction finally claimed her life.
Oh, God… I knew what had to be coming.
And there it was, the photo of Jimmy from Opal’s house in Baldwin Hills. Ironic, how it seemed even more intimate in this context… With it blown up so giant, so unexpectedly crisp, from where I was standing I could raise a finger in the air and trace that trickle of sweat on his forehead. With my thumb I could rub the worry lines between his brows, like my mother would do to me when I was a child, in our living room reading or sunk deep in thought.
There was more polite applause from the audience, and Opal hit a climactic note while Nev’s guitar wore down slow and deliberate. I could see a stagehand waiting to give Nev back his electric, and I realized the medley was nearing its end. No, no, wait! I panicked, desperate for the photo of Jimmy to stay as long as possible.
“If you don’t know the beautiful man in this picture,” Opal was saying now to her audience, “he was our drummer, and his name was James Curtis the Third. Say… his… name!”
“James Curtis the Third!” the crowd roared back.
“Yes, yes,” said Opal. “Almost forty-five years ago now we lost him to the same rot that eats away at this country today. Me and Nev, we were lucky to get out alive, but I’m not exaggerating when I say it was the worst night of our young, dumb lives…”
I scrabbled inside my tote bag for my phone, praying I had enough juice left to record.
“Some days I think I have a handle on it, you know?” she said. “Like it’s in the past and I dealt with it the best way I knew how.” She shook her head and laughed, Tuh. “But then I see Black people are still murdered with impunity, I hear us having to scream in the year 2016 that Black lives have value, I see the news trying to blame us in our own stories of injustice, and then I’m snatched right back, struggling to understand what doesn’t make sense.”
Opal was rising to her feet now, and I hadn’t found my phone, and the center screen that held the image of Jimmy switched to a blank bright white. Immediately the rest of the band kicked in, charging back into a high and hard, familiar energy… The breather was over, then, and we were moving on. To “Who’s the Nigger Now?”
Of course. Of course.
“Now, I debated whether we should even do this old song,” Opal was saying over the music, pacing the stage as the crowd exploded around me. “But you know what? I think it’s still relevant. Because the more things change, the more they stay the same—that’s what Jimmy would say. What’s the same right now is I’m still pissed off… and white people, be warned: You still can’t say ‘nigger.’ ”
I heard laughter and screams, including Nev’s crazed cackle amplified, as Opal launched into the verse. Behind me there were waves upon waves of people, an intimidating current to push against. I endured most of the song with my eyes closed and my teeth clenched. Trying to mentally transport myself, to swallow what felt like seasickness mixed with unbridled, unbidden nostalgia.
Later, via several snatches of shaky amateur footage posted to YouTube, I saw the start of the intermittent light that would force me back into my body. Not a strobe from the stage, but distracting flashes moving quick through the right perimeter of the crowd and toward the center, where I was standing. At one point a flash hit me directly in the face and I was knocked nearly off my feet by a violent charge. When I opened my eyes I saw three Derringdo security guards, one of them flicking the beam of his powerful flashlight on and off right into my face.
“Her?” another one said, meaning me. After a couple seconds of blinding light I saw the short, offended white woman from earlier, now in hysterical tears and rubbing a red mark on her forehead. She’d sustained some kind of injury, it seemed, but it was unclear whether the redness was from an accidental elbow or a balled fist or simply from her constant rubbing. She shook her head and indicated to the guards another place in the crowd. Where she pointed I could see the back of the young Black woman with the fisherman hat and green braids, bouncing joyously, obliviously, atop the railing of the metal barricade. I’d later learn that her name was Jamilah Reid, and that she and the friends who’d come with her were in a punk band called the Uppity Negresses, and that they had pooled their money and driven overnight from Baltimore, just to see their idol Opal Jewel. They had plans to drive back as soon the show was over; one of them had to work the next afternoon. In the meantime they were making the most of this time that they had. And Jamilah Reid had made it right there, as close to Opal as any of us general-admission folks could get. As she told media outlets the next day, she was thrilled when Opal saw her—though we must not have been too hard to spot, us Black folks rocking out at the front of this Derringdo crowd—and the two of them had locked eyes and souls, Jamilah said, scream-singing and pumping their fists at each other. I heard he wore that hood, and flew that flag / I poured gasoline on a dirty old rag / I found where he lived, I set it ablaze / I was going to have my say….
When the Derringdo guards reached her, Jamilah recounted to reporters the following day, she told them she hadn’t assaulted anybody—she’d only been excited, only wanted to get closer to the stage. Wasn’t everybody excited; wasn’t this a rock-and-roll show? Wasn’t everybody pushing and shoving for space, and didn’t accidents happen? Couldn’t she get the benefit of the doubt? Still, one of the guards had grabbed Jamilah under her arms and pulled her down, because no matter what, she was standing on the metal barricade, and that was clearly against the rules. Her friends had grabbed her waist, trying to hold on to her, and they only let go when her X-Ray Spex shirt nearly ripped off in the struggle and the guards refused to stop pulling.
I was standing not far from where this unfolded in real time, but because of all the people blocking the view I got only snatches of what happened. “Jesus Christ!” someone tall near me shouted, then, “What the fuck, dude?” and, “Oh, come on!” I saw a different light around me now, the light of several cameraphones pointing up, trying to catch whatever was going on. There were so many bodies in the way. When I looked up at the side screens, though, I saw that Opal was frowning. She had stopped singing, and the pistil of her African violet was pointing down. Whatever was happening, Opal could see it.
“Hold up, hold up, guys,” she said into the mic, but the band charged on behind her. Just as she squatted to her knees and cocked her head, saying something indistinguishable into the audience, perhaps to the security guys, the jumbotron camera careened away and then the image of Nev, behind his standing mic at stage left, filled up all the screens.
I saw it that night but you can see it for yourself, if you slow down the replay of the livestream: When you hear Opal again shout into the mic, “Stop, stop,” Nev glances over her way, then turns toward his touring band and shakes his head, Don’t. It seemed that he’d heard Opal very clearly, then, that he’d gotten at least a hint of something objectionable happening below. But when the most exciting and urgent gig he’d enjoyed in years was on the verge of being inconveniently interrupted, he’d ignored her. He’d simply gone on with the show.
On the amateur videos that would hit the internet later, the shaky ones that showed the Derringdo security guards dragging Jamilah Reid backward out of the crowd and toward some on-site holding station, you can hear several outraged people. They’re nearly drowned out by the music from the band and Nev’s vocals, but you can hear them, ever so slightly, and some of those who posted to YouTube include subtitles to help you make out their words. They stand back and they get out of the way when the guards come through, but they shout things like “Where are you taking her?” and “What are you doing?” “Taping you is completely legal,” says a fan, when one of the three guards breaks off from the other two and orders him to shut off his phone. On another video, there’s a fuzzy, overly zoomed-in picture of Opal Jewel on her knees gesturing with her hands, shouting something indecipherable.
But here in real time, the vast majority of the Derringdo audience—that is, those outside the cluster of direct eyewitnesses—had no clue what was going on, why Opal Jewel had stopped singing so abruptly. There were a few seconds of confusion, with “Who’s the Nigger Now?” trailing off clumsily before Nev guided the band into “The Lane Where I Lived.” That weird hiccupy moment smoothed right on out, and the set was back on track. Nev sang and he played; he kept his eyes closed, as if deeply focused and moved by the music.
Though the spotlight had skipped away from her, and the jumbotron camera too, I stood on tiptoe and watched Opal in miniature, watching Nev. For a moment she just stood there at the center of the stage, her hands loose at her sides. Then she lifted her sparkly mic to her mouth and tried to say something into it, but suddenly it wasn’t working. She tapped it and tapped it, but when no sound came out, she dropped it.
When I saw Opal heading for Nev, it seemed to me to be happening in slow motion; those with their attention trained on him via the big screens, though, tell me she invaded quick and sudden from the right. In any case, what happened next is recorded and indisputable: As he opens his eyes at the last moment, sees her coming at him, and visibly flinches, Opal reaches up with both her hands, grasps both sides of his face, and pulls him down to her in a hard, deep kiss.
For a moment Nev was frozen in shock—he finally, finally stopped playing his guitar. Then the crowd whooped and he waved his arms comically behind him, as if Opal were really socking it to him, as if the two of them were cartoon characters with songbirds and hearts flying around their heads. When she let him go, she knelt to pick up the headwrap, which had slipped off during the course of all this, revealing her shiny bald head. And then she was gone, down a set of steps at the back of the stage.
Running off, like so many times before. The most predictable part of her show.
In her wake, Nev swayed on his feet behind his microphone, putting on like a stumbling drunk. A mess of purple and yellow smeared the bottom of his reddening face. “Ladies and gentlemen…” He began to laugh in a wheezing, unfamiliar way; he could barely get words out as the audience “woo!”-ed and laughed along at his flustered state. The camera caught the drummer and bassist, who’d also stopped playing and were laughing too, shaking their heads. “Oh, God,” Nev said, struggling to get himself together. “Isn’t she something, friends? Opal Jewel, everyone!”
“Wait, that’s it?” I heard someone shout.
“She’s coming back, right?” a man-bunned guy standing beside me asked, as if I could possibly know.
Three Nev songs later, when it became clear Opal wasn’t, in fact, coming back, the energy of the show began to wane. Without her there to sing the Mercurial favorites with him, without even a backup singer who might have filled Opal’s shoes, Nev and his band leaned fully into his regular solo repertoire. But he’d already spun through the biggest hits that weren’t ballads, that had the right tempo and tone for this crowd. There was a moment of restlessness, and then people started to leave, to talk to each other about taking off early and beating the traffic. With the sea of festivalgoers receding behind me, I was free to go now too. That’s it, I told myself, that’s enough. I turned away from the stage, looking for the guideposts that would lead me back to the shuttle buses.
I was trudging in that direction, with the Britpoppy melodies from Nev’s nineties phase trailing behind me, when a vibration tickled my hip. I stopped and sighed: My phone had been inside my jacket pocket this whole time. When I pulled it out, it was lit with a news alert from Aural.com—like a true masochist, I still hadn’t unsubscribed. Goggling at the headline, freezing in the stream of fans heading toward the exit, I opened the story and read.
BREAKING: “OPAL CALLS REUNION WITH NEV ‘A MISTAKE,’ ” AURAL.COM, JUNE 10, 2016
By Pooja Banerjee
Protesting alleged abuses against a Black fan in the audience of the Derringdo Festival on Friday night, Opal Jewel walked off the stage in the middle of her highly anticipated set with Nev Charles and took hopes for a larger reunion tour with her.
“I will not in good conscience perform in environments that are unsafe for my fans,” she said, after she stunned reporters by crashing the backstage press tent immediately after her sudden, dramatic exit. “It became obvious to me tonight that trying to do this was a mistake, because my former partner doesn’t feel—maybe has never felt—the same way that I do. And I won’t have that. I’m too old and too close to the grave, you hear me?”
When asked to clarify her assertions, Jewel, 67, claimed that Charles saw the same thing she did as their performance of “Who’s the N***** Now?” reached its peak—a young Black woman allegedly being dragged roughly by festival security off a barricade and out of the audience. When she signaled to Charles to stop the show and try de-escalating the altercation, she claims, he blatantly refused to do so.
“[Stylist] Virgil [LaFleur] and I were in the greenroom all damn day watching the other acts on these same screens,” she told reporters, motioning to the monitors behind her on which Charles was still playing to a dwindling audience, “and dozens of white boys were hanging off those barricades at various points. And nobody did nothing to them. So why’d the Black girl get dragged, then? I’m not gonna stand for that, not with my name attached. Not right in front of my face. These Derringdo folks need to apologize to that girl on behalf of their thugs, and Nev Charles should be ashamed for closing his eyes.”
When asked whether rumors of a reunion tour with Nev were true, Opal Jewel confirmed that they had been in talks about it. “But all that’s done now,” she said. The big kiss she planted on Charles before leaving, she said, was merely her way of sealing that fact. “That,” she said, “was goodbye.”
This is a developing story. More to come…
Aural’s Instagram account featured a snippet from the quickie news conference. The backs of several reporters’ heads undulated in the foreground, and Opal’s head was like a dot surfing them at the top of the screen. I couldn’t hear any of what she was saying, even with the phone on speaker and pressed to my ear. The shuttle buses were closer now than the stage, so I broke into a light jog toward them, anxious to get back to the rented white pickup. At least there I could watch for myself in quiet.
On the ten-minute bus ride, the news of Opal’s protest, zipping through social media, proved to be an uneasy topic. Two strangers commiserated about tweeting @Derringdo with their complaints. “I mean, I get it, but it’s about professionalism,” said one woman behind me. “You have to finish the show people paid to see first, and then you can bring up whatever issues.”
“I don’t know what anybody expected,” said someone else from the front, and the rest of the bus fell silent. “Opal’s not about the bullshit.”
“Well, that’s fine, but she needs to give me a refund,” grumbled another passenger.
But the comment was loud enough for Opal’s defender at front to hear. “So your entertainment is more important than somebody’s actual life, sir? Did you even hear what she said on the stage? Fuck outta here.”
As the two of them parried in an escalating argument about who needed to get the fuck off the bus, as the other passengers gazed in silent titillation, my phone buzzed again—this time an incoming call. Virgil.
“Ms. Shelton, where are you?” His voice full of comforting, familiar rebuke.
Opal had been expecting to see me backstage in the media tent, he said. Now they were at “a twenty-four-hour waffle establishment” a few miles down the freeway. “Mad has just ordered half of the menu,” he reported. “I’m assuming this means you have time to arrive.”
The diner swarmed with a post-Derringdo crowd, and I had to look hard to find her. She was huddled in a back booth, squeezed into a corner next to Virgil and half-eclipsed by his heft. Looking like a teenager, anonymous and androgynous: swallowed by a black hoodie, wearing a black baseball cap with an X in white stitching. The only trace of the show I saw was a faint streak of purple lipstick on a balled-up napkin.
By the time I slid into the booth opposite them, Opal had demolished two plates. Dregs of syrup and crushed pecans clung to one, and to the other, a half-moon of congealed grits. She was working on a third now, bacon burnt crispy and a mound of hash browns. Virgil also wore black, a button-down shirt with the sleeves fashionably rolled up his meaty forearms. A tiny bowl of what the diner touted as a “fruit plate” sat in front of him, and I watched him pick out the grapes in favor of the discs of banana. None of us spoke for a while.
Opal reached for her red plastic cup of ice water and sucked down nearly three-quarters of it. She sat back, finally sated. “I forgot what this felt like,” she said. “Being so hungry after the show, and then eating too much.”
“How’d you get here so quick?” I whispered. “I’d imagine the Derringdo people are hunting you.”
Virgil and Opal glanced at each other and Opal’s shoulders began shaking with laughter. Virgil’s face twitched around the corners of his mouth with the effort to keep in his own.
“What am I missing?”
“As soon as I saw Mad on the monitors leaving the stage,” started Virgil, clearing his throat, “I gathered her comfort clothing from the dressing room and I—”
“He stole a golf cart,” blurted Opal, tears beginning to roll down her cheeks now, and finally Virgil let out a low laugh, a huh-huh-huh I’d never heard come out of him before. “Oh Jesus, oh God, okay…” Opal inhaled and exhaled, dabbed at her tears with a napkin. “He was waiting for me outside the media tent, like the damn getaway driver. We tore off through the woods till we found a main road, then Uber did the rest. Presto change-o in the back.” She looked around and lifted the bottom of the hoodie up quick, as if flashing me, and I saw the neon piping of the jumpsuit underneath. They fell against each other in a new round of laughter. Their deliriousness irked me.
“As if you’re not in enough trouble already.”
“Then I guess it really is like old times,” said Opal. Both of them settled down after that. When the waitress came to clear away a few plates, Opal ducked her head low and turned toward the window.
On the table, Virgil’s phone buzzed and lit up with a photo of Han Ishi. “Speaking of being in trouble…”
“Take it, baby,” said Opal. “Go smooth-talk that handsome man of yours.”
Virgil got out of the booth with a grimace, and we watched him limp out the door of the diner to take the call.
“He forgot his cane in the greenroom.” Opal surveyed the remaining food on the table, then glanced up at me. “You want some French fries?”
“No, I don’t want any fucking fries,” I said.
“Go on, I see you looking at ’em. Don’t worry, they’re paid for. I’m not one to dine and dash.” She nudged the plate toward me and I wriggled one fry from the pile, dragging it through a streak of mustard. “And I didn’t take their money, at least not all of it, if that’s what you’re so worked up about,” she said. “The festival people, I mean. They only pay half up front and don’t pay the rest till the whole thing’s done. I’m sure they’ll dock me the golf cart and more. Satisfied?”
I ate the fry silently, savagely.
“Why weren’t you in the media tent, anyway?” she asked. “I went in there looking for you, but then the other ones jacked me up with their questions…. You know how my mouth can be, once it gets going.”
“I wasn’t in the tent, Opal, because I didn’t have the credentials this year,” I said. “Didn’t you hear? I no longer work for Aural, as of that gathering for Bob.” I swallowed the lump of potato. “You remember, right? That time you helped to make me look nuts?”
When I reached out to snatch another fry, she put her hand atop mine.
“I’m sorry about that,” she said. “That’s part of what I had wanted to tell you. If, you know, you’d been in the tent.”
I stared down at the table, at my gnawed, naked nails underneath hers, tapered and violet. “You’re sorry about my job, or…?”
“I’m sorry for disrespecting you and your work,” she said, “and you can take that any number of ways that you want.” She squeezed my hand once, then took hers away.
Outside Virgil was talking animatedly into the phone, under the parking lot lights. Around us, a cacophony: the clattering of silverware, sizzles of sausage, bursts of laughter, country pop. In the window’s reflection I noticed Opal Jewel was now staring up at something across the restaurant; I turned around to see what it was. On a television hung above the diner’s register, CNN was playing on mute: the clip of Nev glancing over and shutting his eyes, spliced with cameraphone footage of Jamilah Reid’s body being dragged through the crowd.
“Even if I didn’t believe that ugly thing you told me,” I heard Opal say, “I shouldn’t have stuck my head in the sand.”
When I turned back around to finally look at her, I saw an invitation in her face. By now my phone was nearly dead, but inside my bag was a pen, my notebook. I pulled them out.
“So after what you saw him do tonight,” I said, “you believe that old story about Nev might be true?”
She met my eyes. “I don’t know,” she said, and then, slumping back as if exhausted: “But not knowing is scary enough for me.”
I wrote down what she’d said exactly as she’d said it. I slid the notebook across to her side of the booth. “This is your statement, for the record?”
Peering down at it, tugging at the bill of her Malcolm X hat, she said, “That is my statement, for the record.”
There in my scraggly cursive was the kind of clear, honest response I had tried and failed to eke from Opal in the hallway that day. Could I call this moment closure, then? Victory? I stared at the page and gripped my pen.
“And what else?” Opal’s voice was very soft now. “Ask me whatever you want.”
I sighed, struggling to put my lingering dissatisfaction into words. “I guess I’m still curious….”
“About?”
“Just, you waited so long for this shot. I saw how bad you wanted it, how much you loved being up on that stage, how good you still are—God, as mad as I’ve been, even I couldn’t help rooting for you. You must have felt that, right? The energy, the love? That legacy I know you’ve been dreaming about, just waiting for you to bring it on home?”
“Yeah,” she said, grinning, “I felt it all.”
“So there you were: Opal Jewel, right at the threshold of what could be a whole new adventure. And after making it that far, after getting that glimpse of the future, you just walked away? I mean, I admire what you did tonight, but it damn sure wasn’t wise. Do you understand what you’ve done to yourself? There’s a chance you might never work again; Derringdo might sue you—shit, who knows, Nev might even sue you—and then you could lose what you already have. And I want to know… Not why you did it, because you’ve told the world that, but how. How could you bear to put everything at risk?”
“Oh, come on,” Opal scoffed. “You’re a smart girl. No—you’re a brilliant woman. You have the pieces. Put them together, SarahLena.”
I considered admonishing her again—reminding her that my professional name was Sunny, that good journalists avoid working off assumptions. Instead, I found myself offering an answer.
“My dad,” I said. “Because my dad was up on that stage with you.”
From her hoodie’s kangaroo pocket, Opal pulled out the picture of Jimmy behind his drums. “And how could I not take a risk standing up for that girl,” she murmured, handing it over as I set down my pen, “when Jimmy did the same for me?”
I cradled the image in my palms. The print was old, spotted, creased at the corners—the original. It had been carried from New York to Paris, Los Angeles to the fairgrounds in New Hampshire. It had survived tears, framing, unframing, elevation….
“I’ll make a copy of it,” I breathed, “I’ll be sure to return it.”
“No,” said Opal. “It belongs with you.”
“But don’t you want…?”
“Don’t you worry about me,” she said. “I’ll be fine.” She shrugged and shook her head. “It’ll all be fine.”
So I said, “Okay,” and shut my mouth.
Virgil came limping back, dropping heavily into the booth. Han wasn’t coming, he said, and was certainly not driving them back to New York this time of night. He and Virgil had booked a B&B for the long weekend, with plans to tour wineries and Robert Frost’s farmhouse, and Han intended to stick to the itinerary. “With or without me, he claims,” said Virgil, darkly.
“Well, with you, obviously,” said Opal. “Go on and call a car. I can find my way back to the city.”
“Oh, stop with the martyr-y shit,” I said, and slipped the photo of my father safe inside the notebook. “You’ll ride back with me.”
And so Opal dropped a few twenties on the table, bid Virgil adieu, and climbed into the cab of the horrible white pickup, heading toward New York. She dozed for most of the drive, hood up, while I steered us down the highway and searched for a radio station that would hold for more than a few miles.
How she could be sleeping, how I could be singing… Perhaps this was odd in the context of that night, both of us having blown up our careers. We couldn’t have foreseen that in the fall, we would restart with new allies: for me, blessed shepherds for this book,I and for Opal, a host of young artists and activists who would help her to build the kind of platforms she had never imagined.II We were unaware too of the grim hangover that loomed ahead, the aftermath of a November blitz that would blast us back inside the most heinous loops of American history. Yes: On this trip through the dark, we were completely ignorant of specifics, on which side of progress or regress we’d land. But Opal had offered her assurance and I had received it, and this felt to me like a mutual leap of faith: If one of us could be brave in facing whatever came next, then so would the other.
Somewhere near Hartford I found an oldies station with a strong signal, and when a good tune came on I turned it up loud. “Everyday People,” Sly & the Family Stone. Opal stirred in the passenger seat, as I’d hoped that she would. In the headlights of a passing car I caught her drowsy smile, and by the time Rose’s part on the chorus came back around she was sitting all the way up, pulling some weird shoulder shimmy.
“What is that?” I teased, but Opal was caught up now. Doing her thing, rocking it wild.
I. Following the conversation Opal ignited at Derringdo, culminating in an apology from the festival’s organizers and a short-lived “Nev Charles is canceled!” online outrage, Aural Media expressed renewed interest in publishing this book. Though my former employer’s bid was flattering, ultimately I accepted an offer from Sojourner Books, an imprint dedicated to stories of African American history and culture. My sincere gratitude to the Sojourner team, for believing in this project and embracing its risks.
II. At publication time, Opal had been invited to speak at the Essence and Aspen Ideas festivals, and to preside over a planned tribute to her career at Afropunk 2018. She hired Jamilah Reid to run her new verified Twitter and Instagram accounts, @RealOpalJewel, where, on Inauguration Day, she directed Jamilah to post a photo of orange-feathered chickens roosting.