me, has been mostly silent; and even Russell, who has been on his cell phone more often than not since I met him, has not made or taken a single call. The subject matter... the people whose story is being told through all the artifacts... and photos... and certificates before us deserve some reverence, and we all seem to “get” that.
As we keep moving about, I’m intrigued when I see Wavonne and Sherry, one of whom I know typically doesn’t read anything that is not directly related to Beyoncé’s beauty regimen or Rihanna’s love life, engrossed in a document displayed in a glass case. I shuffle toward them, and see they are reading a small copy of the Emancipation Proclamation. The description notes that it was one of many printed for Union soldiers to read aloud as they advanced in the Southern states in the final days of the Civil War. It does my heart good to see two young women, from a generation often more concerned about where the Kardashians are vacationing or where to get braids like Zoë Kravitz than anything educational, taking an interest in African American history.
As I head up the landing to the next floor, I hear someone sneeze from behind. I’m not surprised to see Vera when I turn around. She catches up to me and reads the signage outside the next section of the History Galleries. “Defending Freedom, Defining Freedom: The Era of Segregation: 1877 to 1968,” she recites. “My momma grew up in the segregated South,” she adds.
“Really?” I ask, thinking of how my own mother grew up in Washington, DC—not quite the “segregated South,” but she’s told me stories of segregated lunch counters and department stores in which she and my grandmother were allowed to shop, but not to try on any clothing. Desegregation of private businesses came earlier to DC than in many parts of the South, but schools did not integrate until the Supreme Court’s infamous Brown v. Board of Education decision, so Momma went to an all-black elementary school until the ruling allowed her to attend classes alongside white students in junior high.
“Yes. Birmingham, Alabama. She worked in restaurants after high school in the sixties. She wasn’t allowed to eat in any of them, but waiting tables was apparently okay,” Vera says as we walk through the exhibits about the post-Civil war years and Jim Crow laws. “She met my father at a restaurant called Molly’s, named after the owner’s wife. They would let black people order takeout, but that was it—we were not allowed to stay for table service. She and my daddy decided to leave both Molly’s and Alabama when the owner legally challenged the Civil Rights Act to avoid having to offer sit-down service to African Americans. They went to New York... to Harlem, where I grew up, and eventually ended up in DC.”
I’m about to ask why her parents chose New York, but before I have a chance to speak, I hear Cynthia’s voice from behind. “Can you repeat that for the camera?” she asks Vera, waving one of the camera guys over.
“Repeat what?” Vera asks.
“The story about your mother working at Ollies and leaving Arkansas or whatever... and segregation blah blah,” Cynthia responds.
“Blah blah?” Vera raises her eyebrows.
“It’s a great story,” Cynthia says. “Viewers will eat it up.”
“Um,” Vera says. Not only is an intrusive camera pointed directly at her but, at Cynthia’s direction, someone has also shown up with some sort of light box and is projecting its beam on Vera. “My momma grew up in the segregated South—”
“Can you say it with a little more feeling?” Cynthia asks. “Maybe don’t look directly at the camera... look off into the distance... imagine your grandmother sweating over a steaming pot—”
“It was her mother,” I correct.
“And I don’t think she sweated over a steaming pot—she was a waitress,” Vera says.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, work with me here,” Cynthia says. “Give me a good story... and, if you can tear up a bit while telling it, even better.”
Vera directs her eyes toward me and throws a look that says, “Is she freakin’ serious?” my way before taking a breath, looking off into the distance as directed, and starting again. “You see.” She clears her throat. “It was summertime and the cotton was high in the fields,” she says, a wicked gleam in her eye. “My rich daddy and my good-looking momma were living easy.”
“Wait, wait,” Cynthia, who has clearly never seen Porgy and Bess, says. “I thought you said your father worked at a restaurant with your mother. Why did he work at a restaurant if he was rich?”
“He was rich in spirit, not money—he was always losing money playing craps on Catfish Row.” Vera’s allergies are upping the drama of her tale. Her sniffling and stuffy nose makes it sound like she’s been crying.
Vera continues to borrow from, and take a few liberties with, the plot of Porgy and Bess as she tells a totally made-up story about her parents, complete with a fisherman named Mingo, something called “happy dust,” and a tale about how, once during a hurricane, her parents sang “Oh, Doctor Jesus” to drown out the sound of the storm. To her credit, she manages to not crack up, but Cynthia senses something is amiss when I can’t help but let out a snicker or two, and the guy holding the light box completely loses it when she talks about how her parents got married on Kittiwah Island and her father’s best man was someone by the name of Sportin’ Life.
“What? Why is everyone laughing?”
“Because Vera’s playin’ with you,” Wavonne, who apparently crept up behind me at some point during Vera’s little spiel, says. “She’s been goin’ on about the plot of Raisin in the Sun.”
“Porgy and Bess,” I correct.
“Whateva’... I knew it was some play you made me sit through when I was a kid.”
“Very funny, Vera,” Cynthia says, clearly not amused. “Can we start from the beginning with the truth... or something resembling the truth?”
I listen as Vera talks, honestly this time, about how her parents met while her mother was a waitress and her father was a cook. And how they eventually left Alabama for a brighter future in New York, where they worked in a handful of restaurants before her father landed a job with a bank, rose through the ranks, and eventually moved to DC to take a branch manager position. “He retired from banking about ten years ago, but, fortunately for me, he never forgot everything he learned about cooking in all those restaurants. To this day he can grill a rib eye to perfection and can tell whether it’s rare, medium, or well done with just a little touch.... He can poach a salmon until it’s perfectly pink and flakey and, on Sundays, he fries up some of the crispiest fried chicken you’ll ever have—I learned everything I know about cooking from him, and I still use his fried chicken recipe.”
“Okay. I think we have usable stuff here,” Cynthia says when she feels like she’s gotten enough of Vera’s family history.
“If you have some Visine, I can make it look like thoughts of fried chicken are making me cry,” Vera, ever the smart aleck, offers.
“Get out of here, would you,” Cynthia says with a chuckle. “You’ve caused enough mayhem for the time being.”
“I do my best,” Vera replies, and Wavonne and I follow her as she steps into the Era of Segregation exhibit.
Chapter 9
“You better be careful. I heard you talkin’ about the crispiest fried chicken ‘you’ll
