My first urge was to barge into Josh’s bed-room, flip on the lights like interrogation spots, and confront him with the poster. Mentally I was already yelling, “Why didn’t you tell us where you were going? Who put you up to this? Do you even know what groups sponsored this protest? What time did you get in tonight?”
A speck of wisdom in my brain woke up long enough to stifle my cannon fodder. Whoa. Back up. Okay. At the very least, I needed to wait till morning, tell Denny, and have a sit-down with Josh. Then we could ground him for the rest of his natural life.
By this time I was wide awake, so I padded silently into the kitchen, warmed a mug of milk and honey in the microwave, and took it into the living room, lit only by the dim streetlight from outside. I pulled an afghan around my shoulders and curled up on the couch, sipping the warm, sweet milk.Willie Wonka stood in front of me, tail drooping, muzzle in my lap, as if to say, “Okay. I’m here. Dog on duty—but can’t we go back to bed now?”
“In a few minutes,Wonka,” I murmured, stroking his silky ears . . . but my mind was already spinning off in half a dozen directions.Why hadn’t Josh told us what he was going to do? What was it with my kids and parades? First, it was Amanda, telling us she was going to the Mexican Independence Day parade with Edesa—then sneaking off with José. Now it was Josh, carrying a sign in a huge antiwar protest. Except, wisdom prompted, Josh is eighteen—old enough to vote, old enough to go to war, and old enough to protest against it.
I swallowed the last of the milk. But not too old to let his parents know where he is and what he’s doing. We still have rules in this house as long as he’s under our roof.
In the dark stillness of our front room, the Voice inside my head said, This isn’t about rules, Jodi. It’s about Josh. The main question isn’t why didn’t he tell you, but why did he go? Ask him. Have a conversation. These are tough times. Kids are trying to figure out what’s happening to their world—and if they have any say-so.
I sat still so long, Willie Wonka gave up and fell asleep standing up, his muzzle still in my lap. In my head I heard myself telling Peter Douglass that God was using Yada Yada to “remake my life” . . . what did that mean at this moment? Remaking Jodi the parent?
If Yada Yada were meeting in my living room right this minute, they’d encourage me to do first things first: pray. Pray for Josh. Pray for wisdom. Pray to under-stand. Commit him to God. Not only that, but they’d pray for our national leaders and pray for our enemies—Saddam was our enemy, wasn’t he? Pray for our troops that might soon be in harm’s way. Pray for those who felt compelled to protest a war that was beginning to feel inevitable, and thank God that was their right in a democracy.
And so I did. I even got down on my knees beside Willie and just talked to God. Out loud—mostly to keep me awake. It didn’t matter to Willie. He couldn’t hear me.
And thank You, Jesus, I added, as I finally tiptoed into Josh’s room and slid the poster back under his bed. Thank You for keeping me from going off half-cocked a while ago. Maybe what I told Peter Douglass about Yada Yada had some truth after all.
DENNY AND I did have a conversation with Josh later that day after church. Had to admit Denny seemed more surprised that I was calm and rational when I told him about the poster than he did about Josh taking part in the antiwar protest. Josh, too, seemed surprised that we wanted to hear why he’d wanted to take part. Relieved, actually. He admitted he had mixed feelings. 9/11 was a terrible thing, and he knew terrorists had to be stopped. Yet some folks at Jesus People had strong questions about invading Iraq—and that made him think. It wasn’t just politics, but kind of “What would Jesus do?”
“Who are our enemies? How did Jesus tell us to treat enemies?” Then he added defensively, “But if I’d asked your permission, I’d have had to justify it somehow, and . . . I’m not sure I can. Yet.”
Uh-huh. The debater wanted to be sure he had a winning argument.
“Personal enemies and national enemies are two different things, Josh,” Denny said.
“Maybe. Though some people make national enemies into personal enemies—it’s happened right here in Rogers Park! Targeting innocent people because they look Middle Eastern.” Our son slouched silently for a long moment, and I remembered the uneasy comment of our waiter at Gandhi India: “It has been difficult since 9/11.” Josh spoke again, as if thinking out loud. “I know our country has the right to defend itself, but I guess I wanted to at least ask the question: is war the best way to make peace?”
For once I kept my lip zipped and just listened. If I was honest with my mother heart, my primary upset was that a protest might’ve gotten out of hand—belated worry about my child’s safety.Yet Josh was wrestling with the big issues. My heart suddenly swelled with respect for my son. Agree or disagree . . . right or wrong . . . wise or unwise—he was becoming his own man.
We still took away his car keys for a week for not telling us where he’d gone on Saturday.
EVEN WITH THE PRESIDENT’S Day holiday on Monday—or maybe because of it—the week leading up to Amanda’s quinceañera was busy.When I got to school on Tuesday, there was a note in my teacher box in the office asking me to excuse Hakim Porter on Tuesdays and Thursdays right after lunch to meet with Ms. Gray, the school social worker. Thank You, Jesus, I thought. But I was a bit unnerved when Hakim said after lunch, “You gonna go with me, Miz B?”
My mind scrambled. “Um, I’ll walk you there and pick you up if you want.” After the first day, though, he shrugged me off. “I can go by myself.”
Just as well. I had my hands full! February was Black History Month, and each class was doing a project for a special assembly at the end of the month. I’d decided to highlight the story of Mary McLeod Bethune since our school bore her name. I took the whole class to the library to use the school computers to see what they could find out about her on the Internet, printed out various articles, and assigned reports. The kids got excited, not even realizing they were learning reading, writing, and computer-research skills along the way. And I loved the facts the kids pounced on:
“Mary McLeod’s parents were former slaves, but Mary was born free!”
“Mary was ‘plain but smart,’ so she was the one who got to go to school.”
“When Mary grew up, she went to Moody Bible Institute right here in Chicago because she wanted to be a missionary to Africa, but she couldn’t go because nobody had ever heard of a black missionary. She was so dis-appointed she cried.”
I wondered how that would go over in a public-school assembly; still, I determined to let the kids dig up the facts themselves.
At least the all-school assembly wasn’t until the fol-lowing week, so after school one day I stopped at the Rogers Park branch of the Chicago Public Library and checked out all the “readable” books I could find about Mary Bethune. I let the kids take them home overnight, trying not to think about all the fines I might have to pay for missing books. Frankly, I didn’t care. Every day hands waved as my third graders eagerly spilled new facts about Mary.
She started a school for five little girls whose dad-dies worked on the Florida railroad . . .
She had a school motto: “Enter to Learn; Depart to Serve” . . .
She stopped the Ku Klux Klan from burning down her school because she was so brave and she trusted God . . .
She helped people register to vote . . .
She advised President and Eleanor Roosevelt . . .
Her school grew and grew until it became Bethune-Cookman College in Dayton, Florida . . .
“That’s where I’m going to go to school when I’m big,” Kaya announced on Friday when I helped her put on her backpack, stuffed with two books about Mary McLeod Bethune.
I blinked rapidly, but tears slid down my cheeks any-way. Kaya struggled so hard with reading—maybe “Mary the teacher” was just the inspiration Kaya needed to live into the meaning of her name: “wise child.”
With all that was going on at school, I barely noticed that the temperature had edged upward the last couple of days. As I walked home that Friday, I realized not one speck of ice or snow edged the sidewalks, sparrows and chickadees chirped happily in the bare trees, and joggers passed me in shorts. Shorts?! I checked the back porch thermometer when I let Willie Wonka out after I got home. Fifty degrees! In February!
I smiled. What a gift! Springlike temperatures for Amanda’s quinceañera. Then I yelped. “Aack! That’s tomorrow!”
THE LITTLE BELL TINKLED over the doorway as Amanda and I pushed open the door to Adele’s Hair and Nails the next morning. Gospel music welcomed us, as though we’d arrived for a worship service. It was only nine o’clock, but all three chairs were busy already. Adele glanced up, pins in her mouth, and gave a wave with a plastic-gloved hand; next to her Takeisha, the other hair-stylist, was coloring an older woman’s hair. Behind the third chair, a young man I’d never seen before was using electric clippers to give a middle-aged man a trim. All three stylists wore matching dark green T-shirts with Adele’s Hair and Nails stitched in white script on the breast pocket.
“The T-shirts look great, Adele,” I called over the music as I sank down on the overstuffed couch under the front window and picked up an issue of Essence. Amanda headed straight for the plastic-covered cake server on the coffee stand in the corner, which held a stack of tempting sweet rolls.
Adele took the pins out of her mouth and anchored them in the woman’s hair. “Takeisha will be with you in five, Amanda.” She smiled big, revealing the tiny space between her front teeth. “Ready for your big day?”
Amanda, her mouth full of sweet roll, grinned. “Uhnn-hunnh.”
Five minutes later, Amanda was in the second chair and laughing with Takeisha, who was probably shy of twenty-five. Small snips of honey-colored hair began falling to the floor. Just a trim, Takeisha! I wanted to shout. But I just flipped the pages of the magazine, not reading a thing.
“What about you, Jodi?” Adele whisked the black plastic cape off her pinned and rolled customer and sat her under a hair dryer. “Those split ends should come off—needs conditioning too.”
I grimaced. “I know. Next paycheck.”
“Adele!” a familiar voice screeched from the back. “Get me outta this chair! I gotta go to the sto’!”
“Just a minute, MaDear!” Adele yelled toward the back. She stopped beside her customer under the dryer. “That too hot?” She adjusted the temperature. “Okay.” She headed toward the back room.
Suddenly snapshots of MaDear clicked in my mind like the old View-Master I used to play with as a child. Click . . . MaDear charging toward the front door of the hair salon, complaining loudly about the “rotten food in this rest’runt.” Click . . . MaDear throwing a hairbrush at Denny and clipping him on the forehead when he came to pick me up after my anniversary makeover. Click . . . Adele wrestling her spry little mother into the back room where she spent most of her days. Click . . . MaDear tied in her wheelchair with the cloth belt from an old bathrobe to keep her from falling out—or escaping—while Adele worked.
The poor lady just needs to get out and about.
The thought had no sooner entered my head than I called out, “Adele, wait!” I tossed the magazine on the coffee table and scurried after her. “Could I . . . do you think she’d let me take her for a walk? Outside, I mean. It’s nearly fifty degrees out there.”
Adele hesitated. Was she worried that seeing me would once again raise the specter of that lynching long ago? Suddenly, I was worried too. Why MaDear’s con-fused mind thought Denny was the one who’d done that evil deed, we’d probably never know. Adele and MaDear, Denny and I—we’d all suffered last fall because of her delusion. But Denny’s willingness to seek her forgiveness for a crime he hadn’t committed had brought a measure of peace to the old lady. And to us. Though I was still pondering Denny’s contention that we all need to take responsibility for our nation’s racist past.
I opened my mouth to say, “Maybe it’s not a good idea.” But a funny look took over Adele’s face . . . like relief. “Would you, Jodi? She’d love it. Better take the chair the first time—she can be a handful if she’s on the loose.”
I grinned. MaDear on the loose . . . I’d bet she’d been a spitfire in her day.
A few minutes later I headed out the front door pushing MaDear’s wheelchair, a lap blanket covering her bony knees, both of us wearing our jackets unzipped. I tossed a wave at Amanda, who was getting her hair spritzed and rolled up by this time. She’d have to sit under the dryer, then get a comb-out and spiffy hairdo for her party that afternoon. I had a good forty-five minutes at least.
MaDear twisted in her chair and squinted up at me. “Does I know ya, sugah?”
I leaned forward and gave her a kiss on her upturned face. “Sure you do. I’m your friend Jodi—remember?” As I pushed her slowly down Clark Street’s sidewalk, pausing to window-shop everything from little girls’ white communion dresses to the tempting smells of a Pakistani café, I had a brilliant idea.
Yada Yada needed to spell R-E-L-I-E-F for Adele—and her mother—by getting MaDear out of the shop regularly. Wouldn’t we do it for our own mothers? But how many of us had mothers in town?
Nope. For most of us, MaDear was it.