Ernie's Ark (17 page)

Francine Love, student and community volunteer

On the first day of spring, Francine Love asks to ride in to work with her father.

“What for?” he asks. He looks up from his paper—not a regular newspaper, with the regular front-page news of the strike, now in its fourteenth month. No. Francine’s father, who is trolling for tenure, takes
The Chronicle of Higher Education
with his morning coffee.

“She doesn’t need a reason, Bruce,” Cindy says. “She’s your daughter, it’s a Saturday, she’d like to ride in with you.”

“I need something from the library,” Francine explains.

Her father—not a papermaker, not on strike, not interested in matters of social justice except for the occasional policy change at Blaine College that might directly affect him—says, “You’re in the eighth grade, Francine. What could you possibly need from a college library?”

“What does she have to do, Bruce?” Cindy asks. “Fill out an application? Take her, for crying out loud.”

He looks annoyed, then ashamed. Francine is used to these rearrangements of his face. “Sure, all right,” he says. “I’ll take you in.”

Francine pretends to forgive him, to have no idea why he wants to go to work on a Saturday.

It is noon, a soupy rain befalling the town, by the time they finally leave. Cindy waves from the doorway, haloed by fluffy, reddish-blond hair, so beautiful and sweet that Francine cannot imagine what in the world her father could still be looking for. They’ve been married three years—the best three years of Francine’s life, so far.

“All buckled in,” she says to her father, who has made no mention of safety.

Her father flings a hand through the shiny long waves of his hair and starts the car. “What’s your report about?” he asks as they round the long, wet curve of River Road. It has been raining for days, the snow disappearing in gulps from the winter-weary woods. Across the footbridge, near the mill’s south gate, Francine can just make out a group of picketers, quiet and tightly thronged in mid-shift. At shift change there will be more of them, to make a noisy gauntlet. She knows many of them by name.

“Jesse Jackson,” she tells her father. “The Reverend Jesse Jackson.”

Her father slides her a half-smile. “What is it, Black History Month at Abbott Falls Middle School?” He says this because there are no black people in Abbott Falls, a place where he is marking time, a very long time, it seems, until he can get seduced—that’s the word he uses,
seduced
—away from this backwater to a place where you can get a decent latté and find somebody to hold a conversation with besides a papermaker with bad teeth.

“He’s coming to speak to the strikers next week,” Francine says. Her father’s crack about white Abbott Falls feels like a prejudice
all its own, a paradox she cannot articulate. It’s true the strikers hate the black men who came up to take their jobs, but they hate the white ones, too. If there were vile words for being a white person, Francine is pretty sure she’d have heard some by now. In her father’s talk, which is always smart and well-turned, she hears his desperation, his smallness. He likes to tell people he chose Abbott Falls because it is a real place inhabited by real people, but in truth he can’t afford a house on College Row.

Francine grasps all this, fleetingly, in the grayish privacy of her own head, where she works out the problem of family as if it were algebra, coming up with formulas that work cleanly, both sides equal. But in practice the formulas don’t hold, they never hold, they crumble into pieces so fine they can’t be put back.

Blaine College, about forty miles and fifteen solar systems west of Abbott Falls, is a formidable stonemasoned sanctuary where sixteen hundred students study philosophy and art and rarely venture off campus. The library, where her father drops her off, reminds Francine of a castle—it even has a turret. It occurs to her that steady exposure to a place like this might have a tendency to make some people feel royal.

The librarian, the queen of the castle in a tight dress, wears a ceramic badge that says
LIBRARIAN
. “Call me Gloria,” she tells Francine, then, leaning into a whisper: “I’m one of the few here who properly apprehend the full meaning of your father’s gifts.”

“Well, he’s very frustrated,” Francine agrees.

Gloria’s peachy face hovers, composed and hopeful. “Yes, he is.” She straightens up. “Let me grab the keys and I’ll take you to AV.”

Francine, stranded in the carpeted atrium, glances furtively around the library. Almost everyone here is white, as it turns out, despite her father’s smirkiness about Abbott Falls. Through the window, across the soaked campus green, gallops a bronze-colored student with a letter jacket hunched over his head to combat the rain. Except for his color he looks a lot like those galootish full-backs on the Abbott Falls football team. She would like to find someone more stately, charismatic, possessed of a dignified anger, someone who can look at what he is seeing and express it exactly. Someone like the Reverend Jesse Jackson. She does spot one other black person, a girl slouched in a chair by the window, her hair smoothed into an old-fashioned pageboy. But she looks kind of dopey, maybe hungover, like a sorority sister who had a bad night, and she’s talking to a white girl in dreadlocks with a jewel in her forehead. What does this mean?

In her head she calls him Jesse. Just plain Jesse. Her friend Jesse.

She has come here armed with the facts of his life: his illegitimate birth, his absent father, his Greenville childhood, his faultless forward march toward nobility.
I was born in the slum, but the slum was not born in me.
Into Jesse’s childhood street, Haney Street (in which she pictures a lonely, gifted black boy, so lonely and searching), she has placed tin cans rattling mournfully in the gutter, a single broken streetlight, and two dogs that pack together, one black, one white—little Jesse’s first metaphor.
We sit here together, a rainbow, a coalition
.... She has acquired two photographs: one, the fragile Jesse, a little child with chestnut cheeks and parted hair; the other, the rakish preacher, broad shouldered and mustachioed,
arms folded, an immaculate handkerchief triangled out from his breast pocket.

Gloria is back, rattling keys. “Now,” she says, all business: “You wanted to see some footage?”

Francine nods, eyeing the stacks. “Whatever you have. I just want to hear him talk.”

Gloria unlocks a room cluttered with sound and video equipment and leads Francine to a computer terminal. “Most of what we have is on CD,” she explains, sitting Francine down and reaching over her to scroll through an index, then another, and another. Francine, who notes several shortcuts that Gloria either doesn’t know or does not wish to take, waits patiently until Gloria finishes her orientation and leaves.

The first thing Francine notices, watching the screen version of her friend Jesse striding to the podium at the 1988 Democratic Convention, is that he walks like a man with no intention of ever stopping. It is almost a surprise when he does. His voice is melodic, with certain imperfections of speech, a stoppage here and there as certain syllables blot together. His mouth fills with poetry, then the poetry floats out, not perfectly. She is entranced. Although she has memorized whole sections of his speeches, and this speech in particular, Jesse’s voice visits her as something both familiar and strange, as if she’d stepped into her morning shower and out poured gold dust, or feathers, or butterflies. Francine does not understand that she is falling, that Jesse Jackson is the first in what will be a series of miserable crushes, that when the news of Jesse’s love child breaks two years hence, she will be sick with betrayal. Instead, she feels as if she is rising.
Rising toward knowledge. She waits for the feeling to pass, and mercifully, it doesn’t. By the time Jesse Jackson lifts his chin and exhorts his listeners to “keep hope alive, keep hope alive, keep hope alive,” she believes he is talking directly to her.

Her father does not turn up at the appointed time, so Francine takes in Jesse’s speeches again, each one of them, before turning in the disks, thanking Gloria, and crossing the soggy campus. Though she thinks rarely of her mother, who lives in London and hates rain, this kind of weather does bring her to mind. She clops over the granite steps of the art building, which is smallish, old, one of the last to merit renovation. It smells of turpentine and other chemicals, and also of must and ancient wood and a different century. She climbs the worn stairs to the third floor, fearful of finding something she has not heretofore imagined in any detail, but when she creeps down the hall, past the splattered art rooms to her father’s gloomy office, she finds the door ajar and her father alone at his desk. He gets up when he sees her and gathers his things. “Finished already?” he asks.

Francine just stands there. “You said four. It’s five-thirty.”

He makes a show of inspecting his watch. He taps it a few times, as if Francine is too young to tell time and cannot see that his watch is fine. “Well, kiddo,” he says, “I guess it’s time to go.”

His closed briefcase sits upon his desk. There are two coffee cups, one half-drunk, the other full, on a table by the one window. He has a couch in there. It is then she sees the girl, so dark in the murk of her father’s office that at first glance she appears one with the long, soft drape. Their eyes lock. Her face is angled, plum-colored, her lips billowed and shiny. Her irises resemble
burnt holes in a white, white eye. She steps into the room, revealing herself, and her father says, “This is Shaleese,” as if he were introducing someone from the office next door. The girl nods, then leaves, her hair rattling with beads. Francine listens to the rattling echo:
tapa-tapa-tapa-tapa-tapa.
Down one flight,
tapa-tapa-tapa-tapa
, down the next flight,
tapa-tapa-tapa
, fainter now, like a far-off musical instrument, an instrument used for sending signals, fainter and fainter, then the soft hush of a door.

Her father grabs his briefcase, cool, offhand, lips pursed. He touches the small of her back and hustles her out the door. On the way downstairs, he asks, “So, kiddo, get lots of info on Dr. King?”

“Yeah,” she says. “Lots.” Outside the sky has cleared. It seems impossible that the bloated clouds have disintegrated in so short a time, and yet they have, leaving an ordinary late-afternoon sky, low-lit and clear, as if it had not rained at all.

They get into the car and head home. Her father is talking, but Francine’s head fills with Jesse’s voice, grand and comforting.
I understand. I know abandonment.
Jesse’s passion makes her feel enfolded, taken in, thrillingly blue-collar. For a moment the contrast is such that she imagines she hates her father. But the ride home is long and quiet, and by the time they reach Abbott Falls, her hate has dissolved into the usual yearning, that soft, monotonous ache, like a bruise that keeps getting whacked afresh.

On Monday afternoon, last period, Mrs. Therriault, whose husband is the treasurer of Local 20, gives Francine an A on the spot, casting a disapproving eye over Francine’s classmates, who have done run-of-the-mill reports on historical figures like
Paul Revere. Francine is glad enough to get the A, but the public nature of her triumph is bound to strain her relationship with her classmates, which isn’t very chummy to begin with.

“You will note Francine’s emphasis on the Reverend Jackson’s efforts on behalf of the American labor movement,” Mrs. Therriault informs the class. Her glasses slide down her long nose, giving her the appearance of an educated giraffe. “Very timely, considering his forthcoming visit.” Francine leans forward, hoping for another of Mrs. T’s pro-union diatribes, which she finds enthralling. Mrs. T, however, has been informally enjoined from expressing in-class opinions about Atlantic Pulp & Paper—a clear violation of her civil rights, she announced to the class a month ago, and that was the last she was going to say about the matter.

Now it seems she is about to disobey her gag order. She gathers herself, sliding her glasses back up. Most of the kids look eager. Not Cora Spencer, whose father and aunt crossed the picket line; not Marty Fallon, whose mother manages Laverdiere’s Drug and was the one to complain about Mrs. T’s current-events lessons. “I hope you will all turn out next Saturday for the Reverend’s speech,” she intones, “a speech that is sure to soothe the heart of many a foot soldier in the war against—”