even though he tried to be gentle when he took her in his arms. He tells these things in his best just-the-facts voice, but as he talks he rends his clothes. Not just his suit coat pocket and sleeve, but first one lapel and then the other. He yanks off his tie and rips it in two. Then the shirt right down the front, popping off the buttons.
The dream either fades before he can go to work on the trousers of his suit, or her conscious mind refuses to remember it the next morning when her phone alarm goes off. In any case, she wakes feeling unrested, and she eats her egg and toast with no pleasure, just fueling up for what will be a trying day. She usually enjoys a road trip, but the prospect of this one sits on her shoulders like a physical weight.
Her little blue bag—what she thinks of as her notions bag—is by the door, packed with a clean change of clothes and her toiletries, in case she has to spend the night. She slides the strap onto her shoulder, takes the elevator down from her cozy little apartment, opens the door, and there is Jerome Robinson sitting on the front step. He’s drinking a Coke and his backpack with its JERRY GARCIA LIVES sticker is resting beside him.
“Jerome? What are you doing here?” And because she can’t help it: “And drinking Coke at seven-thirty in the morning, oough!”
“I’m going with you,” he says, and the look he gives her says that arguing will do no good. That’s okay, because she doesn’t want to.
“Thanks, Jerome,” Holly says. It’s hard, but she manages not to cry. “That’s very good of you.”
3
Jerome drives the first half of the journey, and at the gas-and-pee stop on the turnpike, they switch. Holly feels her sense of dread at what’s awaiting her (us, she corrects herself) starting to close in as they get closer to the Cleveland suburb of Covington. To keep it at bay, she asks Jerome how his project is going. His book.
“Of course, if you don’t want to talk about it, I know some authors don’t—”
But Jerome is willing enough. It began as a required assignment for a class called Sociology in Black and White. Jerome decided to write about his great-great-grandfather, born of former slaves in 1878. Alton Robinson spent his childhood and early adulthood in Memphis, where a thriving black middle class existed in the latter years of the nineteenth century. When yellow fever and white vigilante gangs struck at that nicely balanced sub-economy, much of the black community simply pulled up stakes, leaving the white folks they’d worked for to cook their own food, dispose of their own garbage, and wipe their own babies’ beshitted bottoms.
Alton settled in Chicago, where he worked in a meat-packing plant, saved his money, and opened a juke joint two years before Prohibition. Rather than close down when “the biddies started busting the barrels” (this from a letter Alton wrote to his sister—Jerome has found a trove of letters and documents in storage), he changed locations and opened a South Side speakeasy that became known as the Black Owl.
The more Jerome discovered about Alton Robinson—his dealings with Alphonse Capone, his three escapes from assassination (the fourth did not go so well), his probable sideline in blackmail, his political kingmaking—the more his paper grew, and the more his work for other classes seemed insignificant in comparison. He turned the long essay in and received a laudatory grade.
“Which was sort of a joke,” he tells Holly as they roll into the last fifty miles of their journey. “That paper was just, you know, the tip of the iceberg. Or like the first verse in one of those endless English ballads. But by then I was halfway through spring semester, and I had to pick up the slack in my other courses. Make the mater and pater proud, you know.”
“That was very adult of you,” says the woman who feels she never succeeded in making her mother and late father proud. “But it must have been hard.”
“It was hard,” Jerome says. “I was on fire, kiddo. Wanted to drop everything else and chase great-great-Grandpa Alton. That man had a fabulous life. Diamonds and pearl stickpins and a mink coat. But letting it age a little was the right thing to do. When I went back to it—this was last June—I saw how it had a theme, or could have, if I did