Chapter Two

A little boy was sitting on the floor peeling some old wall-paper off the plaster, and none of the women gathered at the "Uptown Salon" were saying anything about it. He looked to be about five years old. As he crawled beneath the chairs that were lined up against the wall, the harsh, florescent lights scanned his creamy, brown skin like an x-ray revealing a foundation of yellow and red tones, the texture of an artist’s pallet slathered with oil paint. His face wore a curious expression. Rial looked around the shop for the mother, but the boy didn’t resemble anyone there. She watched vigilantly for the inevitable moment when he would put one of the glue-stained strips into his mouth. "James," came a booming voice from under a hair dryer. It was the mother. She peeked briefly out from beneath the dryer, tortoise-like, startling the boy, then she retreated back into the mindless whrrrrrrr of the shell. The boy immediately crawled on to one of the green art-deco chairs against the wall and sat frozen, his eyes staring emptily into space. Rial looked on disapprovingly. She thought the mother was doing a poor job of supervising her child. Then the mother slowly peeked her head out from under the dryer again and said, "Peek-a-boo." James burst out laughing and crawled back under the chair. And it dawned on Rial that they were just playing. She felt guilty. She was thinking like a white woman. Assuming the worst. The girl who took her braids out didn’t talk much at first, but occasionally she joined in the conversation taking place around her making Rial feel like even more of an outsider. She had tried to talk Rial into waiting a few days before relaxing her hair, but Rial wanted everything done in one day. "It’s gonna burn," warned the girl. "I can’t afford to wait," replied Rial, impatiently. Overhearing the conversation, the owner shouted at the girl for arguing with the customers and after that they were uncomfortably silent. Rial used to have her hair styled at an exclusive salon on Michigan Avenue, but she was unable to get an appointment on short notice. She was no longer a regular customer, having made the difficult decision to go natural after spending a lifetime of sitting for hours on end straightening her hair and paying a small fortune every six weeks or so to relax the new growth. Her old beautician seemed to be punishing her now for this decision, for in the old days she’d take Rial on a moment’s notice. Desperate, Rial had decided to take a chance on a neighborhood salon. She didn’t care how it looked so long as it was straight. From the time she was a little girl her mother used to take her to the neighborhood beauty shop and watch her writhe in pain as they applied Lustrasilk and other toxins to her scalp. When money was tight, her mother straightened her hair with the pressing comb. After a while, her hair became so brittle it fell out in clumps or she was left with burns and scabs on her scalp. All of her life, she associated her hair with pain. And now, after finally making up her mind to be herself and accept what God had given her, she was back in the chair. She had arrived there at nine a.m. and the prospect of sitting there until Midnight with no one to talk to seemed likely. The other women had pegged her right away. She could tell by the way they had looked at her, the way they spoke to her. They were mainly lower middle-class African-American women, and Rial felt self conscious about attempting to enter into the conversation. It was nothing new to her. She remembered the first time one of her classmates asked her, "Why you trying to act white?" All she’d done wrong was get straight A’s and accept the approval of her mostly white teachers. Her friends were accusing her of a betrayal, but it was she who felt betrayed. Why couldn’t they see that she was doing it for them? For she was preparing to take on a white society where her every movement would be scrutinized. In that crowd she would always stand out. What could be more black than that? It was then, as a little girl, that she first began to wish that she could hide. It was then that she first became curious about the Jews. Rial went to college. She became a top scholar, eventually finishing in the top ten percent of her law school class. She served as the editor of the law review. And when the law firms began to recruit her, she took great pleasure in turning them down sensing they were looking for a token. She decided instead to become a federal prosecutor, to embrace the laws of the land, because she believed that as they were written, they were just, when in fact she had simply not read them closely enough. She had wanted to be a prosecutor since she was a girl. A professor once complimented her on her superior intelligence. Later she overheard him discussing her with a teacher’s aide, hinting around as to whether she possessed an unusually high percentage of "white blood." Ah yes. White blood coursing through her veins bringing clarity to her addled black brain. She was born ten years after Brown vs. Board of Education, the year of the Civil Rights Act, four years before King’s assassination, and one of her earliest memories as a child was watching her Chicago neighborhood explode into angry riots during the long hot summers of 1968. What the women around her did not know, these disapproving black women who sometimes treated her like a race traitor, was that she knew so much more than they could ever understand about what it was to be Black in America. She put herself out there every day, on their turf, and she took the brunt of white America’s racism on the chin, and just to maintain a modicum of dignity was a struggle that most of them would never, never understand. After several hours of sitting in the chair in silence, Rial became so bored that she attempted a tentative foray into conversation with the girl who was now putting relaxer in her hair. Just as she had warned, Rial felt her sensitive scalp begin to burn. "You were right. I just want it over with," groaned Rial, but the girl said nothing. Rial noticed a photograph of a new born baby on the counter behind the girl. "Yours?" "That’s my angel," responded the girl with a plaintive expression. "She’s beautiful," replied Rial, noticing the pink blanket. "What’s her name?" "She doesn’t have one." "I don’t understand," said Rial. "I never got the chance to name her. She died a few minutes after she was born." It occurred to Rial then that the baby in the photograph was dead. She did not know what to say. She turned away and the girl seemed to tug her hair so that she had to look again. It was disturbing. Rial’s heart-rate surged and she briefly tried to get up from the chair, but the girl put her hands on her shoulders and pushed her down. She felt claustrophobic. "Still beautiful?" muttered the girl quietly, so that Rial wasn’t certain she heard her right. Rial’s scalp burned. She felt light-headed. She heard the girl begin to speak of Christ. Christ had a plan and her angel was not meant to suffer here in this evil world. She was with God in heaven. Rial could not take her eyes off the baby. She had a full head of black curls and skin the color of almonds. They had cleaned her off and put a white ribbon in her hair. Her eyes were closed as if she were asleep and her full lips formed a slight pout, a pout formed with one final breath. Rial tried to look away but she could not. Why would she do that, she wondered? So morbid. And yet she stared for a long time, remembering. Remembering against her will. "Do you have children," asked the girl. Rial choked back tears. She did not. She had an abortion in college. And the way things were going with Lenny, she wondered whether she would ever get another chance. The father paid for it. He was white too. Actually his father paid for it. They never tried to talk her out of it and they were devout Catholics. After that, he stopped coming around. He ended up marrying some white girl. He called her once but never managed to say what was on his mind. As if deep down, he knew it was wrong. But there was no one to whom he could confess. "No," replied Rial, clearing her throat. "I feel blessed, even though she only lived a few minutes. Because I know what it feels like to have life inside me." There were times Rial felt as if there was nothing inside of her. There was a time when she would take the needles from her mother’s sewing kit and stick them into her arms and legs just to watch the blood flow. She saw a psychologist about that. The woman helped her understand that she was not to blame for shutting down the Reverend Wiley’s First United Methodist Church. After that, the Felton boys down the block cornered her and called her a whore and even her own Aunt Faye questioned whether she was really telling the truth. "I know that man, Rial. He baptized your cousins," insisted Aunt Faye. "He’s a god fearing man." At court, most of the congregation rallied around the Reverend in a show of support. Some said the prosecutor was putting Rial up to it. Prayers were said. Vigils held. Christ was squarely in the Reverend’s camp. Her mother was on her side. How else would a nine year old girl’s hymen get torn away. There were old scars too. It had been going on for a while. Right there in the converted store front the Reverend Wiley called a house of God. She had to tell it again and again. First to the teacher who saw her acting out in school. Next to the police with their faces of stone like false idols. Then to the lady prosecutor who told her it wasn’t her fault and promised that she wouldn’t let anyone hurt her anymore. She gave her candy and her mom said it was ok. Then to the social worker who had her play with anatomically correct dolls. They were funny. Fun until she made her undress the dolls and show them what the Reverend had done. The worst was her mother who cried when she described how he would take her out of her Sunday school class. He always had a pretext. It was always a reward for some act of kindness or charity on her part. He told her that it was a secret between them and God. That it would be wrong to tell God’s secret. It was hard to talk about. She didn’t cry. She spoke so calmly about it. Aunt Faye had noted that. At trial, the prosecutor argued that the Reverend Wiley had killed the little girl inside of her. Before the jury could return a verdict, the Reverend entered a guilty plea in exchange for two years in jail. It degenerated quickly into an issue of race. All the white people believed her. The Johnson’s next door were quick to point out that it wasn’t hard to convince a white person of a black man’s guilt. LeAndre Morris across the street told her that his parents said she had turned against her own. Things got better after they moved away. Rial stared at the photograph of the dead baby girl and it might as well have been a mirror. She wanted to feel life inside of her again. She wanted a baby. It would either drive Lenny away or bond them together forever. She resolved to confront him on the issue again, to deliver an ultimatum. Just then her pager went off. It was work paging her, punctuating the message with a "911". The girl had just rinsed the relaxer from her hair and she was about to apply a neutralizer. "I have to get to a phone," said Rial, looking around anxiously. "You can’t get up now," replied the girl. "Unless you want to go bald." Rial sat there, helplessly. She elected to wait until the girl finished. She knew that it was Dan Frost, her boss, and that he would be angry. There was no way she could explain her dilemma. He’d see it as an issue of race that was getting in the way of her fitness to do the job. He wouldn’t say it, but there was a look in his eye she’d seen before. Suddenly she jumped out of the chair and ran for a pay phone, dripping neutralizer on the floor. She found some change and dialed the number. Her scalp was numb. The phone rang forever, but when Dan Frost finally picked up the phone he skipped the pleasantries and got right down to business. "Have I got a case for you," he said.