Free Till You Hear From Me: A Novel by Pearl Cleage

braids and a girl in a bright pink sweater who looked to be about sixteen or seventeen.
    “Ida B. Dunbar, you are a sight for sore eyes!” he said, wrapping his long arms around me in one of many welcome home hugs I anticipated before the evening was over. I had known Mr. Charles as long as I had known Mr. Eddie, which is to say my whole life. “Welcome home, baby girl!”
    “Thank you,” I said, kissing his cheek and pointing to the writing on his apron. “Should I be concerned?”
    “Not for one second, darlin’,” he said. “Louie Baptiste gave us all one of these for Christmas.”
    Louie Baptiste was a wonderful chef who had been permanently displaced by Hurricane Katrina and was now the chef at Sweet Abbie’s, a new Tybee Island restaurant owned by Peachy Nolan and named after Miss Abbie, Regina Hamilton’s aunt and West End’s self-proclaimed
visionary advisor
.
    “You know those New Orleans folks are serious about their food.” Mr. Charles laughed and waved one long arm to include his two other guests in our moment. “Miss Ida B, meet two of the finest women in West End, Miss Flora Lumumba, gardener extraordinaire, and her daughter, the lovely and talented Fannie Lu Lumumba.”
    “You better stop all that before your wife hears you.” Flora laughed and reached out a warm hand. “Good to meet you.”
    “You, too,” I said.
    “Everybody calls me Lu,” her daughter said, also offering a handshake and a smile.
    “I’m just Ida,” I said, smiling back.
    Miss Iona appeared in the doorway wearing a frilly white apron that tied at her trim waistline with a bow and carrying a tray of ice tea with a wedge of lemon delicately balanced on the lip of each tall glass. Summer or winter, sweet tea was a Sunday staple.
    “So did everybody meet everybody?”
    Mr. Charles hurried across the room to take the tray and set it down on the coffee table.
    “You know I took care of my duties as official host,” he said. “Tell her, Lu.”
    “He said we were two of the finest women in West End.” Lu grinned at Mr. Charles, who grinned back.
    “I said it and I’ll say it again,” he said, handing a glass of tea to me and one to Flora.
    “They heard you the first time,” Miss Iona said. “Come on back and taste these collard greens for me. You know I never get them hot enough for you.”
    “I’ve been tasting all day,” he said. “We need a clear palate. Come on, Lu.”
    She shook her head. Her hair was pulled into two big Afro puffs, one over each ear. “I can’t. It’s got pork.”
    Lu had Flora’s face, but not her cocoa brown skin. Her sandy hair framed a light tan face with a delicate dusting of freckles across the bridge of her nose.
    Mr. Charles groaned. “Oh, Lord, are you still on that
no meat
kick?”
    “It’s not a kick.” She looked at me. “We go through this every Sunday. Don’t pay us any mind.”
    “You come do it then, Flora. You’re not swearing off pork, too, are you?”
    “Not me,” Flora said. “All things in moderation.”
    “Find some more music, Lu,” said Miss Iona as the two cooks and their official taster headed back down the hall. “And get the doorbell if it rings, will you?”
    “Yes, ma’am,” Lu said, smiling at me and heading for Mr. Charles’s well-organized album collection that was heavy on blues and a little pre-bebop jazz, and Miss Iona’s CDs, which included mostly female vocalists from the fifties as well as a healthy dose of Motown, the complete Anita Baker collection, every album Aretha Franklin ever made, and a recording of Leontyne Price singing
Aida
. As I recall, there’s also a pretty good selection of Mahalia Jackson. I wondered what Lu would pick.
    She squatted down in front of Mr. Charles’s two shelves of albums and began to flip through them. I sat down on the couch, took a sip of my perfectly sweet tea, and relaxed a little more. Lu pulled out John Coltrane’s
My Favorite Things
and flipped over to the liner notes. I wondered if