Babylon Sisters Read online

  But I always knew that was a fantasy. He was a great boyfriend, but that didn’t mean he was prepared to be a great father. So I pushed that hopeful thought as far back in my mind—and my heart—as I could and I called the Feminist Women’s Health Center to schedule the procedure as soon as they could take me.

  I waited until the week before he was leaving to tell my lover I was carrying our child, and his face told me my fantasy was just that. He didn’t look happy. He just looked scared, disappointed, maybe a little pissed. So I hurried to tell him that he didn’t need to worry because I was going to get rid of it. I cringe now when I think of using those actual words. Don’t worry. I’m going to get rid of it. Like she was a cockroach or something.

  To his credit, he winced when I said it and reached out to pull me close. “Are you sure?” His voice was gentle, nonjudgmental. We were playing the parts we had learned. It was a woman’s right to choose and the progressive man’s role to be supportive.

  There are probably more terrible questions, but at that moment I couldn’t think of one. Of course I wasn’t sure! I loved him and I wanted him, and something in me really wanted to have this baby, but I didn’t know how to tell him that. I couldn’t even admit it to myself yet. My generation is still struggling to find the balance between love and freedom, sex and romance, family and career. Sometimes we get it right, but more often, we don’t. That struggle is the legacy of the women’s movement and our mothers’ efforts to incorporate the theories of middle-class, white feminism into their highly untheoretical black female lives.

  As my mother told me once when I was quoting Gloria Steinem as the ultimate authority on all things feminist, “What you have to understand is that colored women weren’t involved in the women’s movement. We were the women who moved!” She was right, of course, but moved where?

  “I’m sure. I’ve already made the appointment for next week.”

  “Oh, baby,” he said. “I’m so sorry.” And he sat down with me on his lap and rocked me back and forth until I had worked up enough nerve to ask the question.

  “Will you go with me?” I whispered.

  “Of course I will,” he said, and tightened his arms around me. “Of course I will.”

  After that, we didn’t talk about it anymore. We made love one more time, but everything was so different, we might as well have been total strangers. The next day I went back to my apartment, and he kissed me at the door like it was the last time. And it was.

  I called him that night, and when he answered the phone he was so drunk he wasn’t making any sense. He just kept telling me how sorry he was until I told him I’d talk to him tomorrow and hung up. But I didn’t talk to him in the morning, or that afternoon, or late that night, or ever again. When I finally went by his place, frantic, and let myself in, all his clothes were gone and there was an envelope for me on the coffee table with three hundred-dollar bills and a note that said, I’m so sorry, baby. I can’t do this with you. Be strong. B.J.

  I think it was the be strong that pushed me over the edge. I sat down on that bed we’d rolled around on together so many times and I cried as hard as I ever cried for anything or anybody. I felt a part of me that loving him had opened up closing like a steel door as the hip, undemanding, unconventional woman I was pretending to be dissolved in those tears. Because he had done the worst thing a lover can do. He had committed the unpardonable, unforgivable sin. He had left before I had a chance to stop loving him.

  Phoebe was watching me, and I realized she was still waiting for me to answer her question. “I think my relationship with my father made me a more independent woman.”

  “But did it lead you to my father?”

  She was pressing me, so I tried another sidestep. “It probably influenced all the men I was close to in different ways.”

  “But did it influence you when you picked my father?”

  “Your father was one of the men I was close to, so I guess it did.”

  Phoebe stood up then, dragging her blanket with her so she looked a little like one of the old Hollywood depictions of Native Americans gathered outside their tepees with winter rolling in. She walked over to the window and pulled the drape aside to look out into the dark street, then turned back to me.

  “If you don’t tell me who my father is, I’ll never be able to figure out men. You’re dooming me to a lifetime of heartache and you don’t even seem to care!”

  I let that slide and tried to remain calm. “We talked about this before. It wasn’t a period of my life I’m particularly proud of, but I can’t sanitize it now just to make you happy. Your father could be one of several men I was sleeping with at the time. They were nice guys, but nobody I wanted to invite into the rest of our lives. So after graduation, we went our separate ways. They have their lives and I have you.”

  This lie evolved out of my desire to be absolutely sure she’d never be able to narrow down the possibilities and stumble upon her real father because he was standing around in my past all alone. I even went so far as to construct fake diaries to cover my college years, which listed four or five boyfriends, as young girls’ diaries often do, but never once mentioned her father. I left the diaries around where she could find them to bolster my story, so I figured she had believed what I had told her. I was wrong.

  “I don’t believe you. You’re not that kind of woman.”

  Her tone irked me. A broken heart gives you a little leeway, but it doesn’t give you license. “What kind of woman is that? Nonmonogamous?”

  “Indiscriminate!” She spit the word in my direction defiantly.

  Uh-oh. I thought. She’s pushing it. Then she walked back over to the couch, sat back down, and crossed the line.

  “How many are we talking about anyway, Mom? Can you narrow it down a little? Two or three? Five or six? Ten?”

  This is what I get for sending her to private school with a bunch of rich white girls. From what Phoebe says, they talk to their mothers any kind of way, and their mamas let them, but this conversation was over. I stood up.

  “Let me tell you something, and I’m not going to say it again. The way you were conceived is none of your business. The number of lovers I’ve had, or never had, is none of your business either.” She tried to say something, but I held up my hand and she was silent, proving that she’s not completely crazy. “You are a blessed child because you have a mother who loves you more than life itself. A mother who has given you the tools you need to be an independent woman who won’t have to take shit from a living soul. A mother who is going to pay your way through college.”

  I was getting angry, and the good mother is never supposed to get angry. What kind of example does that set for your child? I took a deep breath. “I’m sorry, Phoebe, but if that’s not good enough, then I can’t help you.”

  Tears were running down her face again, but I was too mad to offer her sympathy or a tissue.

  “I’m going to the newsstand to pick up tomorrow’s papers,” I said. “There’s plenty of food in the kitchen if you’re hungry. I won’t be long.”

  She wiped her face with a corner of the blanket and issued a shaky last word. “I just . . . don’t know how . . . you can say . . . you love me . . . and still not tell me . . . who my own father is.”

  “I’ve told you what I know, sweetie,” I said, grabbing my keys and heading for the door. “That’s the best I can do.”

  Which was, of course, not true. A lie is never the best you can do, even when you tell yourself it is. It’s just a way of buying some breathing room until you can work up enough courage to tell the truth. And that can take a lifetime.

  4

  The air outside was warm and moist and smelled like rain. I took a deep breath and started walking. There was no reason for me to go to the newsstand now. That was just an excuse to let me and Phoebe have a little cooling-off period while I collected my thoughts. Phoebe’s father is the only operatic moment in my otherwise pretty routine life. I don’t mean boring. I love my work.
I love my friends. I adore my daughter. But it’s all contained within the twenty-four hours of an ordinary day. The stories begin, run their course, and then come to an end. But not B.J.

  Burghardt Johnson is the one moment in my life that made me feel everything bigger and wider and deeper than I ever had before. I loved him from the moment I laid eyes on him, and I probably always will, but that doesn’t mean I can explain why to anybody. Even his daughter. Maybe especially his daughter.

  As I walked down Peeples Street and turned down Abernathy Boulevard, a man passed me with a tip of his Braves cap and a pleasant “Good evening.” I returned the greeting with no thought that he might do me harm and realized again how lucky I was to live here. Pick any spot on earth these days, and nine times out of ten it isn’t safe for a woman to be out alone there after dark. In some places, she isn’t much better off in daylight. Here, women could walk around without fearing for their lives. I could take my problems outside for an airing and not have to worry that I wouldn’t make it home in one piece. That’s one of the reasons I live in this neighborhood. It’s why I raised Phoebe here. I wanted her to be fearless.

  On the surface, West End is just another African-American urban community on Atlanta’s southwest side. The main commercial strip, named for Rev. Ralph David Abernathy, a giant of the civil rights movement, has the classic inner-city mix of fast-food joints, soul- and health-food restaurants, beauty supply stores, barbershops, wig palaces, mom-and-pop grocery stores, and a liquor store or two. Of course, there are churches, from the Shrine of the Black Madonna to St. Anthony’s of Padua and all manner of Baptists, Methodists, Muslims, and mystics in between.

  The Mall West End, crowded with shoppers any day of the week, has an array of nail shops, dollar stores, discount books, clothes on a budget, and a dizzying range of athletic-shoe outlets. Across from the mall, the new Krispy Kreme doughnut shop has relocated to a spiffy new facility with the added temptation of a truly dangerous-to-the-waistline drive-through. New condos are going up across from the mass transit station, and the omnipresent, ever-charming street vendors now do a booming business with nearly as many residents as train riders. A few blocks away, the Atlanta University Center adds five thousand college students to the mixture in a way that guarantees a pizza joint will stay open, a sandwich shop will thrive, and a smattering of Jamaican and Chinese take-out places will always have a line on Saturday night.

  The streets are free of litter and loiterers. Buildings and landscaping are neat and well kept. Streetlights shine unbroken and potholes are nonexistent. Walking by the twenty-four-hour beauty salon on my way to the West End News, I could see two stylists working with clients in side-by-side chairs. All four women were laughing and talking as easily as if they’d been in somebody’s kitchen on Saturday afternoon, heating their hot combs in the stove, telling the stories that women tell when they’re safe and happy and there’re no men around.

  Next door, the florist who closes at midnight was putting the finishing touches on the bouquet that would be featured in tomorrow’s front window. It was a wild profusion of tropical blooms, heavy on the shop’s signature birds-of-paradise and sure to be snapped up by a romantic with a sense of adventure. There is only one word to describe West End’s nighttime streets: peaceful. That’s what makes this neighborhood different. But it wasn’t always this way.

  A few years ago it went through a period of economic transition that left it fragmented and newly vulnerable to the same crimes that plague poor communities from Los Angeles to Washington, D.C. Rape, robbery, street crime, domestic violence, and child abuse were rampant, and then crack came and the situation became almost intolerable.

  My father had died by then, and my mother wasn’t sure it was safe for us to stay in our house without him. For a long time, things just slid from bad to worse. Then suddenly, inexplicably, the bodies of black women began showing up in neighborhood Dumpsters, behind vacant homes, in the trunks of abandoned cars. A little girl was murdered by two crackheads who stole her lunch money. Finally, a young mother was raped and killed on her way home from the grocery store and her body left on the railroad tracks. Her funeral was crowded with mourners, and when her brother collapsed in despair over his baby sister’s casket, he was led away by one Mr. Blue Hamilton, who was heard reassuring his friend that this crime would not go unpunished.

  And it didn’t. A series of tips led to the identification of the man responsible for the murders, and he was arrested. When the court released him on a technicality, despite overwhelming evidence that he was guilty and without remorse, the neighborhood prepared for the worst, but two days after he returned home, the man disappeared and was never seen again.

  That was how Blue Hamilton became a neighborhood legend and the unofficial patron saint of southwest Atlanta. He had transformed our ordinary African-American urban community into a peaceful, crime-free zone where women could walk unmolested any hour of the day, and the crack houses had been replaced by carefully tended gardens and community playgrounds. It was the safest eight or ten square miles in Atlanta. On the streets Blue controlled, going out after dark was as safe as going out at high noon. Some people argued with his methods and called him a gangster, but I remember what it was like before he took charge of the men around here and I’m proud to call him a friend. He’s the reason I can be out here, walking in the moonlight, thinking.

  Phoebe is going to have to get over herself. My solution may not have been the best one, but she’s always had one hundred percent of me, and she has a great godfather in my best friend Louis.

  Louis is the only other person who knows Phoebe’s real father, but he had been sworn to secrecy by me right after I told him I was pregnant. I knew I could trust him. We’d been keeping each other’s secrets for years. We first met as infants when our mothers, who were best friends and lived around the corner from each other by design, delivered us within a few months of each other. Louis arrived in the fall and I made my appearance on what is now Martin Luther King Jr. Day, but back then was only January fifteenth.

  We were thrown together immediately, and there is ample photographic evidence of us grinning in the bathtub, naked as jaybirds, or napping in the same crib, piled up together like puppies. Our mothers found these photographs endearing. As teenagers, we found them mortifying. As adults, they provided us with hours of teasing as well as evidence of our lifelong bond. We tried to go steady once when we were thirteen, but it was a disaster. We called it off after one excruciatingly awkward kiss, renewed our pledge to be friends for life, and never looked back.

  Louis was the only person I considered asking to go with me to the clinic. He was standing right beside me when they did the preabortion sonogram and showed me the little peanut-shaped thing that was, or was not, going to grow up to be a real live baby, depending on what I decided in the next few hours. He held my hand when we sat there, surrounded by every kind and color and class of woman, some with partners, some with friends, some grimly alone, all just waiting. He heard them finally call my name and felt my hesitation just like I did. And when I turned to him in tears and told him I didn’t want to do it, he just hugged me real hard and took me home so I could tell my mother.

  Her reaction didn’t worry me. My mother had been wealthy and unconventional all her life. She was only eighteen when she fell in love with my father, a professional gambler twice her age. Horrified, her parents disowned her and moved to Florida. She married my father immediately, and when she got pregnant with me two years later, he bought her this house. She spent most of my childhood traveling with my father while I stayed with a series of nannies until I was thirteen and convinced them I could stay by myself.

  Once she determined having a baby was really what I wanted, the idea of a grandchild delighted her. She encouraged me to give up my ratty little student apartment and move in with her. She had plenty of space and she was lonely in that big old house. For my part, I was talking a lot bolder than I felt. I knew raising a child alone was a huge
responsibility, and I had sense enough to welcome her assistance. As for the identity of the father, she didn’t press me. My mother and I settled on a version of don’t ask, don’t tell that suited us both.

  Too bad she wasn’t around tonight, I thought, opening the door of the West End News and stepping inside. Maybe she could help me make her granddaughter stop asking the one question I was not prepared to answer. In the meantime, I’d grab the New York Times and a few fashion magazines for Phoebe as a peace offering. Maybe spending a few hours with the rich, famous, and disturbingly thin would take her mind off her troubles and my past. Otherwise, it was going to be a very long night.

  5

  When I got home, my daughter had left a short note: I’m at Louis’s house. I’ll be late. She didn’t even sign it. To tell the truth, I was relieved. Louis had limitless patience for Phoebe’s dramas, major and minor. I probably wouldn’t have survived her adolescence without him, and tonight he was just the port in a storm she needed.

  I put the newspaper in my office, took the magazines upstairs, and laid them on her bed. The candle had been extinguished, but the smell of roses was overpowering in the hot stillness. I turned on the ceiling fan and opened the window to get some air moving. That’s when I spotted Amelia doing laps in her pool. When she works late, she often swims at night. She was moving through the water with barely a ripple, strong and graceful as a creature who was born for the sea. One of the reasons she bought that house ten years ago was because of the pool. It was full-size, completely tiled in shades of blue, green, and gray, and on the bottom it boasted a life-size mermaid mosaic that had fascinated me all my life. The mermaid was inexplicably and beautifully brown, and her long black hair flowed out from her head in curling tendrils that wound around the entire floor of the pool. She wore the mysterious smile that seems to be every self-respecting mermaid’s expression of choice, and she was holding a pale pink conch shell up to her ear as if to listen for the ocean’s roar or a midnight confession.