Free Some Things I Never Thought I'd Do by Pearl Cleage Page A

going to tell him?”
    “Not me. She can tell him if she wants to, but unless she's ready for him to fly in with a chastity belt, I'd advise her to keep it to herself.” She looked at me, patting the greens. “Did you tell your father?”
    My father was an intensely shy man whose desire for human companionship began and ended with my mother.
    I shook my head. “No way. I don't think I ever said the word period in front of him.”
    “I didn't have a chance to decide. My mother told my dad and then they both sat me down and had this excruciating conversation with me about how they trusted me to act like a lady and not bring any babies home for them to raise.”
    I groaned. “What did you say?”
    “I said I wouldn't!” She laughed. “What do you think I said?”
    Flora squeezed the greens into the refrigerator, and I handed her back the photograph.
    “Hank's still in Detroit,” she said, returning it to its place on the refrigerator. “That's where we live, but Hank got a big case where they really have a chance to send some crack dealers away for a long time, and it just got too dangerous. So Hank sent us down here to stay with Blue. He knew we'd be safe here.”
    I'll bet. “Your husband's a lawyer?”
    “A prosecutor. One of the best.” Love and pride shone through in her voice and her deep brown eyes. “They've been after these guys for years, but they're not going down easy. I could take the phone calls. After a while you get used to that, but when they threw a fire bomb in Lu's window in the middle of the night, I just freaked.”
    “They threw a fire bomb in your house?”
    It sounded like a sixties story, but it wasn't. No white folks around this time. Just us.
    “We weren't hurt, thank God, but we lost a ton of stuff. I was handling it pretty well, I think, but then I realized they had burned up our wedding pictures. That's when I really started bawling, but then Hank said don't even trip about some pictures because all he had to do was look in my face and he could see that whole day in his mind, just like it was a movie or something.”
    She touched the photograph lightly with her fingertips. “I know somebody has to stand up and say there are still men here , and I'm really proud of everything Hank's doing, but we've been here since October and it seems like forever .”
    She stepped out of her gardening boots and into a pair of equally well-worn clogs. “How long are you going to be here?”
    “Not long,” I said, feeling like I had moved into some kind of halfway house for women in need of safe haven. “I have to finish my project by May fifth and then I'll go back to Washington.”
    “Oh!”
    She seemed surprised.
    “What?”
    “Nothing. I just thought Blue said you were going to be here longer than that.”
    “He must have misunderstood me.”
    She shook her head. “Blue doesn't misunderstand. He must have another plan in mind for you.”
    “What kind of plan?” How could he have a plan for me? He didn't even know me.
    “Who knows? Blue is always plotting something. He never tells you until you walk up on it yourself, then he asks what took you so long.” She smiled and picked up her keys. “Ready?”

10
    T HE S OUL V EGETARIAN RESTAURANT is nestled between a store selling traditional African clothing and a banquet hall whose price list for wedding receptions, graduation, anniversary, and Kwanzaa parties, and the occasional high school reunion was posted in the window. I told Flora I was doing a project at the school about the life and work of Son Davis, and she was pleased to hear it.
    “He deserves that,” she said. “I never met him, but the way his mother writes about him, and from all I've read, he seemed like a good man. He was always talking to the men as hard as his mama was talking to the women, which is the only way it makes sense to me.”
    When we stepped inside the restaurant, the spicy aromas and warm atmosphere appealed to me immediately. This was clearly my new