Motherfucker, WHAT?!?!
Chet Bond’s final revelations throbbed in my head as we wrapped up our interview, as he led me back through his house and down the steps of his screened-in front porch in Live Oak, Florida. His Pomeranians, awakened from their spread-eagle naps, yapped at my heels. It was early December, but at the peak of the afternoon the temperature had hit an ungodly eighty-one degrees. The silver Prius I’d rented was molten in the driveway, painful to look at straight on. I guess that Chet noticed me wince. He took off his MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN ball cap and tried to hand it to me.
“You can have it if you want,” he said, grinning. “Brutal hot out here.”
Stripped of the cap, his hair, I saw, was as long as it had ever been but stringy now, strands of it gathered at the base of his skull in a cigarette-thin ponytail. I dug frantically inside my messenger bag while walking toward the car, searching for the keys. Chet had paused in my path, holding his monstrosity out like a holy offering. It was a bright and triggering red, this thing—similar, I imagine, to the flash of flag that provoked Opal backstage that night. And I felt sick to realize that Chet Bond thought he was some kind of gallant. That he was still, after all these years, either oblivious to the terror he was capable of conjuring or reveling in it.
“Go on, take it,” Chet said, “it ain’t no thing. I got a whole family-and-friends box of ’em inside the house.”
We were beside the Prius now, and I propped the bag against the broiling door, the better to quickly paw through it. “I’m sorry but I can’t say I’m a fan of your… candidate.”
“Well. I figured that, you tooling around in this piece a’ shit.” He pounded a fist on the Prius’s hood. “You liberal types are such suckers. Don’t you know that climate change is a lie put out there by the Chinese? All to destroy the American economy. It’s about the money, honey, and don’t let her tell ya different. But you know what?” He poked me in the arm, when I didn’t respond. “You know what?”
“Mmm?” A water bottle, two notebooks, a granola bar, a compact… everything but the goddamn keys…
“I’ll tell you what: Just to show you Chet Bond’s not a bad guy, I’ll let you borrow a truck my boys just fixed up at the garage. It’ll do you right on mileage and you’ll have more power for getting around while you’re down here. ’Cause believe it or not, at some point today these skies are gonna cloud over just as black and open up into a storm. And then what’re you gonna do?” He fiddled with the adjustable strap on the back of the hat; snapping it, unsnapping it. “Get blown off the road, is what.”
“I appreciate the offer,” I said, “but I’m leaving. For the airport. Right away.”
“Oh yeah? All right, then. That’s too bad.” He paused. “I hope it wasn’t something I said.”
I caught the smug grin, the twinkle in his eye. The same look he’d had while rattling me moments ago, pontificating from a recliner in his sunken living room. He had explained it to me again and again, with disturbing consistency. How Nev had almost got himself cold-cocked that night, touching Chet on his back that way. How Nev had then said, “Aren’t you missing something?” and pointed toward the wings at my father. How Beau had overheard all this and tried to defuse the situation, tried to bring Chet down from his high, telling his brother to keep looking for the flag because none of it sounded right to him. How Chet had reluctantly agreed to cool down, but then heard that draft-dodging song he hated. How he and his buddies ran up to the wings to boo, just in time to catch Opal disrespecting his flag. How he figured Jimmy and Opal were in cahoots, because birds of a feather, they sure flock together…. How he got so mad in that moment that he kicked his baby brother out on the stage—literally kicked Beau in the ass—to prove there wasn’t a Bond alive who was a pussy, who’d sit back for that kind of an insult….
“There’s a big holiday concert ’round Jacksonville way,” Chet was saying now. “I thought you might like to come with, meet some folks and check it out for your magazine. Truth is, I play in a new band on the weekends. Just a little something to give my old lady a thrill.” I heard a nervousness in his laugh. “Y’all still cover country music?”
“Mmm, not so much anymore.”
Finally, my hand hit jagged metal, sunk down in a bottom corner of the bag, and I nearly kicked the dogs as I unlocked the door and shut myself inside the hotbox. Chet made a signal for me to roll down the window, which I pretended not to see. I cranked the ignition, smiled tightly, nodded, and hit reverse, backing down his gravel driveway. Skidding away from his lot, I could feel him standing there, watching me, and when I dared a glance in the rearview mirror I saw him waving goodbye in his dead, dry front yard. I saw the dust my tires had kicked up swirling around his flip-flops, and the giant American flag in the back poking up over the tree line. Saw him put the hat back on as the dogs scrabbled around the cuffs of his jeans.
“Jesus Christ,” I gasped as I played hot potato with the steering wheel, merged onto US Route 90, and angled the full blast of the AC vents in the direction of my face. I punched the buttons on the satellite radio, searching for NPR, any soothing voice. “Asshole!” I screamed once I was twenty miles safe down the road. A bigot and a boor. An idiot, a denier of facts and science, an egg-scrambled motherfucking ex-junkie…
But—oh Jesus, oh Christ!—what if Chet Bond, king of deplorables, last and least on my interview list, had accidentally turned himself into a star witness? What if this one time, the idiot ex-junkie bigot was the one telling the God’s honest truth? Had I really gotten him on tape exposing Nev Charles as a liar and a schemer? As guilty of instigating the Rivington Showcase riot, in pointing the finger at Jimmy, as Opal Jewel or the Bonds themselves had been? Could it be that in the end Nev Charles, that slick sonofabitch, had played every single one of us?
Four hours later I had returned the Prius to Enterprise, but still I sat in the airport bar next to my gate, stuck on a weather delay. The heat had finally broken and a vicious storm was raging through, just as Chet had predicted it would. Sheets of hard rain pummeled the arcing picture windows, and the jet bridge connecting the gate to the tin can due to carry me home bounced and wavered like the bellows of a giant accordion.
I pulled out my laptop. I was supposed to be answering emails related to a crisis back at the office—four advertisers had dropped out of the next issue, meaning our page count would have to be chopped down, again—but I found myself instead scrolling through a folder of interview transcriptions for the Aural History. There was one portion of an interview with Bob Hize that I’d underlined, a portion that had piqued me. I couldn’t say why at the time. Now I read it again with fresh eyes:
[Immediately following the riot] I was with Nev [in triage] at the hospital, waiting for all his [X-ray] results. Of course I was worried as well about Opal, but I didn’t know at the time where they’d carried her off to, and I certainly didn’t know she was being targeted in anyone’s investigation. And Nev was essentially my boarder, my charge, so it was my responsibility to take note of everything the doctors said, because I was the one who’d have to call and inform his father. [The doctors] thought he might have a concussion and there was the concern over his broken ribs [dangerous for their potential to puncture a lung]. Until they knew for sure, they’d told him to rest, to be as still as possible.
We could hear the other patients all around us, we could hear them telling their loved ones the stories of what had happened to them…. And right next to us there was a teenage boy whose mother had rushed in hysterical, and he was telling her to calm down because at the end of the day he was lucky to walk away with a broken finger—at least they hadn’t carried him out on a gurney with the white sheet draped over. And I’d wanted to pull back the curtain separating us and ask that young man, “Did you actually see that? You saw that someone’s been killed?” Because we didn’t know. But I looked over to Nev and he was trembling all over; even his teeth were chattering. I saw him take a breath as if to speak, but the pain level was obviously high, because he gasped and squeezed his eyes shut. I told him to hush, to sit back like a good lad and relax as the doctors had said that he should.
It was nearing daybreak, and I went in search of a coffee, maybe something with which Nev could write down what he’d been trying to say, and in the café I saw someone had abandoned the morning paper. I picked it up and saw the story, saw your father’s name. I found the chapel, sank down to the floor, down to my knees, and I… [Pauses, overcome] I want you to know, Ms. Shelton, how sorry I felt. I feel.
To be honest I stalled [before returning to Nev’s side]. I wasn’t sure how to break that kind of news to him, and I didn’t know how he would handle it with his head so foggy. I finally asked a nurse for a pad and pen, and then I gathered myself and went back in. But he’d got the Times already—I guess someone had recognized him in it and thought he’d want to see it. And it was opened in his lap to the page with Marion’s huge photograph, and he was staring at it. Staring at his and Opal’s faces staring back at him. Well, he was shattered, obviously. I wanted so badly to hug him but I didn’t want to hurt him. I said, “Nev, are you all right? Do you have something you want to say, something you want to ask?” and I gave him the pen and the pad. His hand was still shaking but he managed to write it down. He gave me a look of such fear and sorrow as I’ll never forget, and he held up the pad and he’d written, “IT’S ME.” That broke my heart all over again. I didn’t know what to do to comfort him; I just said, “Right, that’s you there in the newspaper, Nevs, and it’s unthinkable what’s happened. But we’re so very glad that you got out. And look how strong you are! Look how brave.”
I signaled the bartender to bring me a second bourbon, to dull the damning tape that looped in my head: the private jet I’d taken with Nev, his interminable nap, his well-tuned anecdotes, his rat-a-tat deflections about being a victim of trauma. Rewinding to a couple days before all that: I remembered arranging the interview with his publicist/gatekeeper Lizzie Harris, and her insistence that Nev’s schedule was hopeless, that he had one available window and if I wanted it I had to jump on it now, yes, as in two days from now, that’s right, and I’m sorry but what do I care about your other interviews, do you want his participation or not, and really, he’ll only do it out of respect for Bob Hize, otherwise this would be a total no-go, understand, so consider yourself lucky, all right, doll, we’re set? I remembered that I’d sent Lizzie an orchid to thank her for the interview, and later an email asking, as I usually do, if I could get in touch with her client regarding any follow-up questions I might have. I remembered I never got any reply to that.
Now, I understood, Lizzie had never intended to send me one.
Clever, clever. I raised my glass of Maker’s in salute. Tipped back the pour till the ice cubes knocked against my teeth.
“Hey there, Kayleigh, it’s Sunny Shelton from Aural. Lizzie there?”
“Oh hiiii-eeee! Gosh, you just missed her.”
“Any idea when she’ll be back?”
“She won’t be back today—for the rest of the week, actually. She’s got a meeting off-site and then she’s going up to Chappaqua to pitch in on the campaign for a couple of weeks before Christmas, isn’t that so exciting? But I’m sure she’ll get back to you as soon as she can!”
“Well, besides bugging you daily, ha ha, I’ve been leaving voice mails on her cell twice a day, emailing her too, and she’s still not getting back to me.”
“No?”
“No.”
“Gosh, that’s weird.”
[Audible sigh] “Do you have a number where I could reach her in Chappaqua, then?”
“I mean, um, I’m sorry, but is this, like, an emergency?”
“Yes, I would say it is like an emergency. As far as emergencies in this business go.”
[Fake laughter; fake laughter]
“I mean, I have to ask because she stressed to me that I should only call her with, like, emergencies? And I—”
“Okay, Kayleigh, let’s do this instead: When she calls in for her messages—and I know Lizzie calls in every day for her messages, right?—I want you to say to her these exact words. Do you have a pen?”
“Yes. Ready!”
“Great! Tell her I said, ‘He’s not fooling me with the memory-loss act.’ ”
“Mm-hmmm…”
“Then tell her, ‘I will’—emphasis on the ‘will,’ please, can you say it like it’s all-caps and underlined, Kayleigh?—‘I WILL continue without his participation. But maybe he’d want a chance to comment.’ Got it? Can you read it back to me?”
“ ‘He’s not fooling me with the memory-loss act. I WILL continue without his participation. But maybe he’d want a chance to comment. Got it?’ ”
“Good, good, except kill the ‘got it?’ at the end. That bit was for you, not for Lizzie.”
“Ohh… got it!”
[Fake laughter; fake laughter]
“I’ll tell her, Sunny, okay thanks by-eeee!”
[Ten minutes later, when an undisclosed number lights up my personal cell]
“Hi, this is Sunny.”
“How dare you harass my girl?”
“You have been getting my messages, then.”
“Screw your messages. Here’s a statement from me to you: Neither my client nor I will respond to any kind of trumped-up nonsense.”
“Really? All due respect, Lizzie, but that’s what you want to say? I haven’t even told you exactly what the allegations are, or what they relate to.”
“You don’t have to tell me. I already know whatever you’ve got is bullshit. Don’t you think I’ve seen and heard it all? Gold diggers, lawyers, industry wannabes, hacks… all of them have tried to go the rounds with me and all of them turn out to be liars. Tell me, whose lies are you spreading now?”
“I don’t feel, ah, comfortable just yet. Revealing my sources.”
“Is it really that serious? You know, I’m not trying to disrespect you, I understand that this probably feels very high-stakes, considering the circumstances around your dad. But Sunny, come on. We’ve worked well together a long, long time. I’ve got more important things to do, and you’re better than peddling trash.”
“It’s not trash, it’s—”
“What’s this all about, then? Something he did back on the pills? Something crazy he said? Who cares? It’s been forty-five years! He’s earned the crazy!”
“I know what he did at the showcase.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about, doll, and I don’t have the time to play Agatha Christie.”
“My sources tell me Nev ratted to Chet and Beau Bond that their flag had been snatched, to cause a distraction and get his time slot back—”
“Oh my God, is that all? Chet Bond, she says. Who is he, anyway? That’s a whopper of a story you’re cooking. I can see the headline now… ‘Breaking News: Rock Star’s a Narcissist.’ I’ll send Kayleigh over to come clear your desk for that Pulitzer.”
“Hold on, wait—I’m not finished. I’m also told that when Chet yoked him up and asked him what he knew, asked him who swiped that flag, Nev pointed the finger at my father.”
[The briefest silence, followed by a disbelieving peal of laughter]
“So I want to ask Nev for a comment. Is it true, and if so, why would he do that? I mean, I get him trying to slip back onto the schedule, but why go the extra step of setting up my father? Was he that jealous over Opal, over what he thought he was entitled to? Was it some kind of weird revenge? What?”
“You of all people should know how much Nev Charles has done for civil rights causes, for women…. You’re going to give Chet Bond sway over him?”
“Maybe Chet’s a liar; he’s most certainly an asshole. But the thing that’s bugging me is, he’s owned up to his part. He’s damn near proud! I can’t say the same for your client. He can’t remember, Lizzie? Really?”
“Yes. Really. I don’t know what’s wrong with you, but clearly you’ve lost all perspective. Next thing I know, you’ll be one of these idiots saying Hillary and Trump are the same. Have you given to the campaign yet, by the way? Hillary supports expanded coverage for mental health care, and clearly you could use it.”
“Let Nev tell me himself that I’m crazy, then. Let him deny this on the record.”
“Sunny, listen to me: I’d never advise him to dignify such nonsense with a response.”
“Are you sure about that? I mean, imagine what it means if I’m able to confirm this. All these years, my God, Lizzie… Your client’s been so happy to play the rescuing hero, this great political activist, Opal Jewel’s ally, when maybe the truth is he’s only a thirsty, selfish opportunist who put a target on a Black man’s back.”
[Heavy breathing (mine)]
“I don’t see any problem, then, because it’s impossible to confirm a pack of lies. Best of luck while you waste your time.”
[The click of a phone disconnecting (hers)]
My plan was to tell Opal right away. Tell her what, I wasn’t entirely sure, but at least give her notice I’d be quitting this project. Much as I hated to admit it, Lizzie had called my bluff. It would be impossible to verify what amounted to hearsay four decades later, and so soon after I’d been forced to lay off five Aural editors due to JBJ-mandated budget cuts; I had neither the time nor the money to track down Beau Bond as a corroborating witness. But how could I continue feeding into the legend of Opal & Nev if I suspected that it was riddled with holes? If I thought even a shred of what Chet had said about Nev was true, how could I stomach putting together the kind of hagiography his team—hell, my team—hoped could be sold in merch booths to adoring fans across North America? As Jimmy Curtis’s daughter, I couldn’t be a part of that. I had no choice but to recuse myself. I will tell Opal I am done to her face, I decided as I clicked the purchase button on a 6 a.m. flight to Los Angeles. I will thank her for this opportunity. I will wish her the best and move on with my life. I will figure out later how I’m supposed to do that.
But then Opal answered her doorbell in Baldwin Hills, wearing a beanie and a denim jacket. She was clutching fresh-cut sprigs of basil, and with a terse hello she led me quickly through the house and past the curtained French doors that opened onto the backyard.
She had relegated me to her garden. Again.
Surely by now, I thought, she knew I’d be curious about the interior of the house. The Harlem brownstone was Virgil LaFleur’s style, but this one, presumably, was 100 percent hers. Since the beginning I’d wanted to linger over the decor, analyze the mementos and material things that held personal meaning to her, but the most I’d been able to glimpse, dashing through on my previous visits, was a palette of cream upholstery, throw pillows covered in tangerine-and-aqua kente, a tribal totem standing guard in a corner, the hint of a kitchen as suggested by a citrusy smell wafting from my left, and, to my right, a hallway lined with framed photos I’d been eager to explore. Now it occurred to me that maybe, like Nev, Opal had been in full control of the terms of these talks, parsing out what stingy morsels I was allowed to know. That whatever “opportunity” she had given me was nothing but a farce.
She’d moved the patio table to a patch of direct sun, and, as usual, she’d prepared it with two place settings. I sat down as she rinsed the basil in the trickle of a garden hose. In the center of the table, one platter held a baguette and a large serrated knife propped against its edge, and another was spread across with heirloom tomatoes and burrata, sliced and layered in alternating rounds, peppered and glistening with olive oil. Opal shook the excess water from the basil, sending droplets everywhere, then sat down and began tearing the leaves, making piles on both our plates.
I shivered in a small breeze. “Aren’t you kind of chilly out here?”
“I’m good in the sun.”
It was clear she wasn’t moving an inch. She’d barely spoken since I arrived, and she seemed to be waiting for me to get to the point. I’d been mysterious on the phone with her to arrange this new interview, our fourth so far—an annoyance, I guess, considering the original schedule had called for us to wrap up in three. To get the additional sit-down tacked on, I’d only said that I wanted to close the loop on a few things about the making of Polychrome. Now I found myself driven by a growing rage, and barreling in another direction.
“Do you remember where the Smythe used to be?” I asked her.
A small grunt of assent, eyes still on the task.
“You wouldn’t recognize it,” I said. I told her about a field trip I’d made to the site of the riot, where developers have built an EDM dance club catering mostly to European tourists—sleek and neon-new, the grand old horror erased down to the studs. “To be honest,” I said, “I found my visit disconcerting.”
“Well,” she said. And nothing else.
“Opal. You don’t have a single thought about that?”
“About what part?” she said, still tearing that basil.
“About the fact that nobody seems to care at all. I mean, I know that sounds unfair, I know it’s not the club’s fault, or the fault of the kids who go there. But it’s crazy to me that Jimmy was killed on those grounds and now the place is like…” I made farting and hiccupping noises, trying to imitate the beats-by-computer. “You know?”
“Not really.” She sighed. “I guess it’s been ages. Damn near forty-five years. What were you expecting?”
She’d meant the question to be rhetorical, I knew—flippant, at worst. And yet, even as I felt resigned to abandon the Aural History I had been planning, I was also frustrated that I’d gotten nothing out of my work to this point. That Opal had teased me into revisiting this story in the first place, only to throw a fence around her heart at the moments I needed her to give me new insight. How was it, I wondered, that I had come so far to get where I was, and yet here I sat as if twelve again, flailing through familiar games of keep-away? I stared at this woman I’d held up for so long as an illicit fascination. I watched her fussing over her stupid hors d’oeuvres and wondered how she could give more care to that task than this offhand way she was speaking to me. How dare she be so cavalier, knowing the familial wreckage into which I’d been born? Had she been so busy mouthing off to the Man and the pigs that she’d raced past all us collateral damage? Oh, us poor, proverbial “little people”: stuck in the past, clinging bitterly to our grief and resentments, to our Establishment-issued pieces of paper…. Perhaps she’d forgotten I descended from them, from Jimmy’s true survivors. Perhaps it was time I flashed that credential. Reminded her, exactly, who the fuck asked the questions.
“What I’d rather know,” I said, struggling to match her cool tone, “is what you were expecting.”
She glanced up.
“I mean, I’m the one in the dark here, right?” I said. “The one who doesn’t understand a damn thing? So enlighten me: What were you expecting, choosing to go out there with Nev that night?”
“Didn’t we go through this, the last time we talked?”
“Let’s go through it again,” I said, pulling my phone out of the bag at my feet and turning on the recorder. “Tell me more about your carrying on with Jimmy in the first fucking place. What kind of a future were you expecting, Opal Jewel, with somebody else’s husband?”
“With somebody’s daddy, you’re trying to say.”
“Yes,” I said, “with mine.”
“SarahLena, it wasn’t like… You weren’t even born yet.”
“But I was about to be,” I said. “And you knew that, right? Wasn’t it enough, to know? Wasn’t it enough for you to stop and think about the consequences for him? To have some sense of shame? Did you ever even love him?”
Opal laughed and smacked the table, as if I’d just said the darnedest thing. The knife clattered against the plate.
“There she is!” she hooted to the sky. “Finally, the girl shows some heart!” She stuck out her hand for me to shake, put it back down when I wouldn’t. “Okay, fine, come on with it now. What else you got? Drill, baby, drill! Hit all the angles! Give me every damn bit of that master’s degree.”
“I hope it was expensive,” I spat.
“Oh honey, it sure as hell was,” she said, laughing again.
“But you don’t own me,” I said, the words coming hot and furious now. “Nobody does. You understand that, right?”
“Well, now I do,” she said. “Which means I can relax. So go ahead, shoot.”
I fought an urge to pick up a round of cheese and squish it through my fist.
“Girl, calm down, I’m not making fun,” Opal said. “It’s just that I didn’t know what kind of a person you were. You were starting to remind me of all those others.”
“What ‘others’?”
“Those reporters who used to come sniffing around back in the day after Nev got real big. They were always saying they wanted to tell the story, but they didn’t give much of a damn about us. Your daddy was just a tidbit of tragedy to them, a bump for Nev to overcome. And after a certain point in the story, I was too.”
“What in the world made you think I would ever be like them?”
“Honestly?”
“Jesus Christ, yes. Honestly.”
“We’ve been talking awhile, and until right this minute you never pushed back, never challenged me. You let me off so easy; you didn’t say boo. It was like you didn’t want to be told any different from what you’d already assumed.”
“Wait a minute, what kind of a… Were you testing me?” I thrust my notebook toward her face and jabbed at it. “I was trying,” I said, “to be calm. Professional!”
“Well, this isn’t completely about the ‘professional,’ is it? All of it is personal to me. And it should be to you too, to get every drop of this story right. That’s the advantage you have, SarahLena. You care more than anybody else who could ever try to tell it. Go on—shoot me a question now.”
“I don’t have a new question! I’ve asked them already. Same questions I’ve been trying to get answered my whole fucking life.”
“Maybe so,” she said, “but do you feel the same way when you fix your mouth to ask them? Now that you actually know me, and don’t just have me pinned up to your wall? Look at me now, Sunny, and tell me what you think.”
I glared at her. The smooth, hairless skin over her left eye, raised and demanding, her lips twisted in a smirk. I remembered a moment from our first official interview, at this same table, in this same garden—buttering her up about her work on Things We’ve Seen, telling her how I’d just had her photo from Vogue matted and framed for my office. Wondering what I’d said wrong when her face seemed to freeze. I breathed in the mulch smell of her garden. Made sure my voice came out slow and even when I opened my mouth again to speak.
“What do I think?” I repeated. “I think you and Nev are the most arrogant, self-centered, manipulative people I’ve ever met.”
She closed her eyes for a few seconds, and it seemed as if I’d hurt her. But she switched it off quick. “Whew,” she sighed, “thank God. My ears were popping up on that pedestal.”
That day, Opal finally showed me around her house. I had imagined that its facade was deceiving, that it would open up at some magical crux into grandness, but it turned out the garden was the most impressive thing about it. There were two bedrooms not much bigger than the quilted queen-size beds set inside them, one and a half baths, and an eat-in kitchen with yellow accents—alternating octagonal tiles on the backsplash, the rim of a wall clock whose hands had frozen, a shiny teakettle on an old gas stove, a glass bowl of lemons on a small island. I was surprised by how normal, how humble it was.
“I was lucky to get this house when I did,” she said, running a hand across the Formica counter. “Hell of a year, 1993. But I scraped together every cent I still had to buy this place.”
“Why did you come out here, anyway? I thought you said New York was your people. Your place.”
“Got too cold, in more ways than one.” She pulled a joint from the waistband of her harem pants, turned a knob on the stove, and lit up in the leaping blue flame. I watched as she exhaled smoke up to the ceiling and kicked off her slip-ons, pointing and flexing one naked foot and then the other against the linoleum. I couldn’t help staring at those discarded shoes, at the shadows of her feet imprinted inside them, and the way they listed slightly to the left, worn down at the heels. “Come,” she said suddenly, grabbing a coffee mug for her ashes.
I followed her into the hallway, the one with the framed mementoes I’d been wanting to study. She clicked on a light so I could see them better. The arrangement was wild but artful, frames of different sizes, shapes, and finishes clustered together, their outer edges almost but not quite lined up. Opal hung back, toking and ashing, while I took my time going down the line. The paint-splattered cover of her second solo album, Temper… A letter from the Debbie Allen Dance Academy thanking Opal for her contributions… A collection of campaign buttons for Shirley Chisholm… Wallet-size school portraits of Pearl’s children. One of Opal’s nephews, snaggletoothed and wearing a gold cross around his neck, had been doodled over with a Sharpie, cartoon horns sprouting from the sides of his high-top fade. (“That’s my little devil Isaiah,” Opal said in a startling burst of baby talk. “Pearl’s youngest. He’s thirty-four now. Got kids of his own.”) I stopped to study a grainy but glamorous black-and-white portrait of Stephanie St. Clair, the formidable “Queenie” of Harlem,I and to read the French on a 1974 flyer announcing an engagement by Opal Jewel, la chanteuse fascinante. Underneath those words was an illustration that reminded me of a Toulouse-Lautrec sketch, the lines of a woman with twisting lips and hips, a round bare head, gloves up to her elbows.
“I never knew you did shows while you were in Paris,” I said.
“They were tiny little things. In a cramped record shop some friends turned into a cabaret. I wrote some original songs there too, but they never saw the light of day.” I heard her give a huff of a laugh.
“See, why haven’t you ever talked about that?” I said, moving down the hallway. “It’s hard for people to ask about what they don’t—”
My breath caught in my throat at that moment, as my eyes fell upon a rectangle hanging from the wall slightly above eye level. There was my father, inside the frame.
Handsome, talented Jimmy Curtis, captured in a four-by-six color snapshot turning orange with age… I’d never seen this one among my mother’s collection. In it Jimmy sits behind his kit with the sticks in his hand, holding them in the traditional grip—one overhand, blurred in motion at the hi-hat; the other underhand and poised at the snare. He stares intently up at something, or someone, as if tensed for a cue. A trail of sweat courses from his thick hair into the horizontal furrows of his brow. He has a goatee. A goatee?!?
“That was the last day of the Polychrome sessions,” Opal said softly behind me. “I had a bad stomachache that morning before I went down to Rivington—I took a swig of Miss Ernestine’s Pepto, and I could still taste the chalk of it on my tongue when it was time for me to sing. That ache I felt, it wasn’t nothing but dread. I knew something major was ending, something special that I’d had a part in, and all I wanted was to keep it going. I tried to drag out the last song as long as I could, asking the guys to do just one more take, again and again. When it got to be one, two o’clock in the morning, Jimmy pulled me aside on a break and said, ‘Girl…’ ” Here Opal cleared her throat and paused. “He said, ‘Girl, what are you up to?’ ”
So I said, “All right, just one more time, I promise,” and I took the camera I’d borrowed from Virgil out of my purse and I handed it over to Bob. I asked him to take this picture of Jimmy. It was the only way I could think to hold on to him in this moment, in this phase. I had already made it up in my mind that whatever grasp we had on each other, it wouldn’t last outside of this context.
In some ways I was right about that. After we wrapped up the record we’d still get together, but every time there was a little less magic, a little less need. I had started going to the parties and art shows, having my nights out with Virgil, and that wasn’t frivolous; that wasn’t nothing. That was the start of my spirit expanding, the start of me trying to make my way.
Your father was a lot older than me, though, more traditional. He didn’t really get what I was doing with my performance style and why I gave it so much energy. In the time when we were working together, he seemed not to mind it so much; maybe it even tickled him some. But later, if he’d get a hotel room for us and I’d agree to meet him after one of my late nights out at Max’s or wherever, he’d look at me and say, “Please take that mess off.” I’d have to come out my lashes, my wig, the makeup, the wraps and layers, the bangles and anklets before he would want to touch me. It would make a pile in a corner of the bathroom, or if we had more time and the room was nice, with one of those wingback armchairs, I would set my things tidy on the seat. He’d be sweet to me then—he’d ask me to sing something to him, he’d tell me to go ahead and fall asleep in his arms—but I’d still be staring at that pile, all the dead and disconnected pieces of whatever fabulous creation I’d been that day, and without them… A terrible shame ate at me. For being with Jimmy in the first place, yeah, but mostly because I felt disloyal to myself. See, I was too young, too convinced I was ugly, to get that maybe Jimmy wanted me without the armor—but that was impossible, understand? My armor was me, my best asset. It kept me protected in this world. A world that either hated me or just didn’t know what to do with me.
When Jimmy told me he was expecting a baby, I was truly happy, for him and me both. He had to accept the woman I was, whatever wild ways I chose to show up, because he was the one with the pregnant wife—what say could he have in the life I was building? And me, I felt better about what we were doing, because no matter what escapes we enjoyed, I knew that Jimmy would always go home.
What Jimmy and me became, in the absence of pressure, was better than lovers. We became actual friends. And that understanding between us freed him up in a beautiful way. Those last few times we saw each other, he could be an open book. He could talk about everything that was going on in his life. His ambitions, his worries… Yes, even you. Because no matter what was happening in his career or his marriage, there was no question that man was over the moon about his baby on the way. He loved you already, I swear that he did.
One time he tagged along with me to a record shop in the Village—sometimes we just liked to flip through the covers and ask to sample whatever was new—and while we were browsing he told me about these dreams he was having, dreams about a little girl running around someplace warm and bright. He knew you’d be a girl. He couldn’t see your face, just the back of your head—two big ol’ Afro puffs. I asked him did he know what your name was and he said, “I was chasing after her and calling her Seraphina, like she was an angel or something. What you think?” I told him I liked the music and rhythm, but it sounded like it belonged to a little Italian girl. And right then we hit the section for female jazz vocalists, all those beautiful old albums by those beautiful Black queens, and just like that [snaps fingers] Jimmy knew your name. He laughed in that funny way he did, ssss-ssss-ssss, and he said, “Yeah, that’s right. It’s SarahLena.” The Sarah for Vaughan, the Lena for Horne. That’s how Jimmy and I could inspire each other, just riffing free and easy. Digging through records in the middle of a Wednesday.
That laid-back vibe snapped the night of the showcase. When we were arguing in the wings, I had it in my mind Jimmy was back to bossing me—telling me who to be, how to act. And that roar in the crowd was going back and forth, this intense wave pitching and sloshing inside the walls of that theater, inside my blood, and… I don’t know, it’s hard to describe in a way that a real pretty, put-together girl like you could ever understand, but that noise was drowning out whatever sense Jimmy was trying to drum into me. On one side of the curtain was this man who I loved very deeply, on multiple levels, yes… and who I also knew would not, could not go to the diner with me after the show. But on the other side of that curtain? Past him blocking my way? Out there was a stage and a crowd and a chance.
I looked down to where your daddy was holding and rubbing my arms, saying, “Please, baby, don’t.” And I can’t remember exactly the words that I spoke, or if I even spoke words at all. But I must’ve told him, in some way, that he had to let me go. And for the moment he did. Pushed a puff of air through his teeth—tuh! Snatched his hands away from me as if I’d burned them, stuck them up in the air as if to surrender. He looked at me like he was seeing me for the first time in his life, and the last thing he ever said to me was, “You ain’t nothing but a child.”
And he was right. When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child… The fact that I didn’t listen to Jimmy in that moment was tied to a childishness that I grew out of immediately after that night: an illusion that I was unstoppable, that I was supreme, that I could play as white and as male as any of them who wanted a thing and set out to have it. It was an illusion that led me to do something very foolish and then fall on my ass, with a perfect view of your daddy paying the price.
You asked me about that other damn photo? Well, that’s why I don’t talk about it. I refuse to discuss and critique it how people like to, because it is not a piece of art. There was no intention on our parts to end up that way, stuck forever in a moment of great distress. And people think time gives them the right to switch up the lens, to romanticize a thing and make up meaning from it. But no matter how much time passes, one year or forty-five, it will always hurt to hear people—brilliant people, people who I like and support!—describe this moment of that night as fascinating or political or inspiring or provocative.
I know what people will say when they read this—“But Opal Jewel, you and your people let us talk that way! It benefited you, you’ve crafted your whole image around it!” Well, I can’t speak for the motivations of all the people I’ve worked with over the years. As for myself: What I would say to you is yes, I pushed very hard after that night to steer in those directions—political and provocative and, I hope, inspiring. But the reason was because I wanted to take my power and my intention back. I wanted to succeed in being all those admirable things they said we were, in ways that I knew to be authentic, clear, deliberate—different from that clueless, impetuous girl getting hauled out the theater.
As for that simple snapshot of Jimmy up there on the wall? I had Virgil develop the roll after Jimmy died, and I spent so many days before I went back to work forcing myself to look at it. Searing it into my mind, and onto my heart.
Taking deep breaths in my hotel room that night, Opal’s stories still haunting me, I called Jonathan Benjus Jr. Despite the late hour on the East Coast, he picked up right away, frazzled. Not only was the new issue coming undone, he said, but now Lizzie Harris was phoning in threats. She’d called him while I was in flight to Los Angeles, claiming she’d deny Aural all future interview requests with her other clients if I continued to pursue “ridiculous theories” regarding Nev Charles. “I was totally fucking blindsided,” JBJ said. “Sunny, you’ve got me twisting in the wind here.”
Just a day earlier, I’d been ready to give up—plotting ways to reassure my boss that everything soon would get fixed. No worries, I would have said, I was planning to back off the Opal & Nev thing anyway. It’s turned out to be a headache and a half. And then I would pitch, from a list I’d prepared, other potential book subjects, synergies, wins. Ooh, maybe we can do a collection of Phil Francisco columns!, I would have suggested. Such high ROI, such low-hanging fruit! A perfect gift for your dad or your uncle! I would have tap-danced a doozy to make sure that by the time he hung up, Jonathan Benjus Jr. was appeased. Comfortable again in his decision to give me the reins.
But hearing my young boss’s panic on the other end of the line, I felt strangely calm. “She’s bluffing,” I said of Lizzie. “Nev’s the biggest client she’s got left anyway—as soon as Clinton wins next year, she’s defecting to an arts council somewhere.”
“Okay, but what happened? What’s going on?”
Now, maybe I should have given JBJ credit. Maybe I should have at least tried to explain—how I’d realized, once Opal finally opened up to me, that if I chose the right direction for the rest of this book, I could resist the typical narratives: that Black people don’t sell, that our stories don’t appeal to the so-called mainstream. From this point on, I knew, I wanted to curate this story standing on the premise that the lives and legacies of Black men, like my father, cannot be reduced to the awful shit white men do to them. That the voices of Black women like Opal should not be discounted or diminished in deference to those who have hijacked our shine whenever it suits. We could aim for something higher here, I would have said to my boss, in this ideal world. Something much more exciting and unique than another tired rehash of white-dude rock-and-roll lore. But I remembered the thin line of his lips in that meeting, and so I didn’t bother verbalizing my argument like that. I answered his question with the only one I knew really mattered.
“Do you trust me, Jonathan?” I asked. “As the editor you hired?”
“She’s saying Nev won’t do promotions for the book anymore, she says it’s totally off the table!” he squeaked. “I mean, what the fuck did you do to piss her off? Listen, Sunny, if he’s not gonna sell the book on his tour, I don’t know what the point of continuing—”
“Do you trust me, I’m asking, or do I need to just go on and quit right now?”
“Wait, what? Sunny, I trust you, but—”
“Jonathan: Do you trust me or no?”
I can’t say what JBJ thought of me then. I’d like to believe his father handed him the company because the kid had solid judgment. Or maybe he was calculating the damage it would do to the brand to have its much-touted first Black editor resign, disgruntled, after scarcely nine months in the job, eager to spill about the undeserving heir who’d kowtowed at the smallest twitch of a PR strong-arm….
Whatever JBJ was thinking, he gave in: “Okay, I’ll trust you—for now.”
“Good enough,” I said. “Then don’t worry about Lizzie Harris. I won’t be bothering her or her people with any more questions regarding Nev. I realized today I got all I wanted from him already—you’ll see.”
“See what?”
“That his story is pretty much done,” I said. “It’s all about Opal Jewel now.”
I. Besides ruling a Harlem policy-banking enterprise through the 1920s and mid-1930s, the West Indian–born St. Clair was an activist who invested her wealth back into her community and educated Black people about their civil and legal rights. A mentor to Ellsworth Raymond “Bumpy” Johnson, she was ruthless about her business and her personal affairs; through schemes and sometimes violence, the glamorous and quick-tempered St. Clair hit back at Mafia rivals, dirty cops, and several unwise men who dared try abuse or betray her. Opal Jewel auditioned to play her in the 1997 film Hoodlum; Cicely Tyson was ultimately cast in the small role.