Eddie did a lot of asking that night. He encountered many peculiar people, etched in fluorescent light outside ratty convenience stores, walking across empty parking lots whose fault lines sprouted crabgrass and sparkled with nuggets of safety glass, peeking from inside dark concrete motel rooms with broken doors. Nobody remembered Darlene; some people did not know if they remembered remembering. Others forgot that they did not remember. Some spoke fast, for a very long time, and did not stop. Some people could not form words.
One skinny lady with sunken eyes claimed that she definitely had seen Darlene. Without question, she said, absolutely, on this very road. But she also insisted that it had happened ten years ago. We shared a slice of pizza, she went on, because we only had enough money for one, and your moms wanted olives on it, I member that clearly, and we had a little argument about that because I hate olives.
Eddie somehow knew not to mention that his mother also hated olives.
Minimart clerks at gas stations shrugged, a man in a tool belt who claimed to be an electrician said he lived two hours away in Nacogdoches, and a nervous man with slick black hair and a tattoo of his dead Rottweiler on his naked pec kept reaching into the small of his back and telling Eddie, You better go home, kid, ’cause shit’s finna go down right the fuck here, son. He pointed to the ground with both index fingers. Eddie met two kids younger than himself who wanted money for a Butterfinger. At first they threatened him verbally, but after he turned his pockets inside out and explained his journey, one of them offered to help him find his mother. Eddie declined, and as he walked away sideways, it occurred to him that nobody else had volunteered to help. Two or three dark sedans slowed by the roadside, powering down their tinted passenger-side windows. Eddie ran from them.
On his second night of searching, drawn to the bright pink and orange of a 24-hour donut shop, he thought he might finally find people inside who would not only know and remember but also know what they knew and remember what they remembered, and have some of it turn out true. He understood that he couldn’t rely on the night people, who frightened and angered him, and he experienced a deep burn in his stomach when he thought about how his mother had joined them or died with them, like his father, and at best they had engulfed her and made her vanish into this ruined land where true and false didn’t matter, where the differences disappeared among memories, dreams, and a young man standing in front of them asking a desperate question.
3.
Conjure
Not long after Darlene arrived at Grambling State University, she gained a sorority sister, Hazel, who transferred in from Florida State. Hazel had a vivacious, confrontational attitude, fueled by her determination to override the social strikes against her—a mahogany complexion, features too small to fit her face, a large mole muscling in on her nose, unusual height for a woman, a tough demeanor.
All this Southern gentility baffles me, Hazel sometimes said. I always feel like I’m playing the trumpet at a tea party. She made up for her brashness with camaraderie. Hazel organized the group’s bowling outings, oversaw the decoration of the house, and made an astounding barbecued brisket packed with smokiness. Her flowing red-and-turquoise blouses often had African designs or palm trees printed on them, and the loud clothing seemed to complement her frank conversation—often about her main vices, chocolate, bourbon, and sex—and her bawdy sense of humor. Everybody took to her, especially several doe-like, unremarkable Sigma Tau Tau sisters, and Darlene, who, as she grew into womanhood, joined Hazel’s shocked but delighted audience and found it hard to avoid imitating her infectious insolence. April Woods, a light-skinned, straight-nosed, and polite senior beauty queen, served the function of official role model, but Hazel’s charisma got everybody wearing brighter clothing. She loosened their tongues, their attitudes, and their belts.
Hazel ignored her presumed lack of status and thereby overcame it. She accepted herself and demanded reciprocation as the price of her esteem. In association with these strong values, a sense of moral outrage ran like an underground stream through her sense of humor. She took the greatest delight in skewering hypocrites and had immediate and unforgiving scorn for anyone who gave even the appearance of doing something unethical for personal gain. At one point, Tanya Humphrey (It’s Tan-ya, not Tahn-ya, she would say) insisted that Sigma tap Jamalya Raudigan, a notoriously self-involved cheerleader whose father ran a black Atlanta law firm where Tanya aspired to intern, and in the middle of a potluck supper, Hazel quieted everybody, stood on a coffee table, and told Tanya, Stop promoting this annoying social climber because you want to work for Curtis, Gitlin, Raudigan, and Sindell. When Hazel exposed your failings, she made you feel like she’d stuck a blowtorch full of truth up your nose. Rarely did she turn her anger on a sister, but everybody knew not to butt heads with such a sharp-tongued, obstinate powerhouse.
More than one Grambling linebacker had called Hazel a lesbian, though never to her face, and the notion that it might be so rumbled under Hazel’s frequent complaints about men and was tacitly reinforced by her perpetual singleness. Darlene had heard these rumors about Hazel and had listened to her comments about men, head cocked in wonder. While she didn’t completely believe what everybody said, she accepted the possibility. In those sophomore days, in the rare instances when her friends said the word lesbian, it was always a slur, never a person.