the weight of my words, but I kept going.
“I like the color of your skin and the curl in your hair and the curve of your waist and the tilt of your head and the shape of your ears and the length of your neck and the wiggle in your walk. I like the way you hold yourself. The way you push your shoulders back and keep your spine so straight, like you are daring the world to take you on. I like that you’re small, but mighty. Little, but loud. And when you laugh I forget my own name.”
“All that?” she asked, her voice faint, her lower lip tucked between her teeth. And I liked that too.
“All that, and a million more things. I like you, Baby Ruth.”
She didn’t lean in to kiss me. She just stared down at me with such naked devotion that I had to fill the silence or I would roll her beneath me, Money, Alvin, and Lee Otis be damned.
“I don’t think I told you one other thing,” I murmured.
“Told me what?”
“I was so proud of you. In Pittsburgh, standing up there on that stage and taking on the whole world. I was so proud of you.”
“Why?” she whispered.
“You are just like him. Just like Bo Johnson. You’re a fighter. You’re one hell of a fighter.”
“You’re a fighter too, Benny Lament. It’s our heritage.”
“Yeah. I guess it is.”
She leaned in and kissed me then, but she didn’t tarry. She straightened almost immediately, one last thing—one big thing—left to say. She tucked her knees underneath her so she was sitting beside me, looking down at me. I crossed my arms beneath my head, waiting.
“I came in here to tell you I couldn’t marry you,” she said in a rush. She pressed her fingers to my lips when I started to protest. “Shh. Just listen. I told myself it was the right thing to do.”
“The right thing for who?” I asked, arguing around her fingers, but she ignored the question.
“The thing is . . . when you’re close to me, everything inside me goes still. My heart stops. My breath slows. And my mind opens up, like I’m pushing open the windows and breathing in spring. Everything is so quiet that it’s . . . loud. So loud that it drowns out everything else. That’s what you do to me. And I like it,” she confessed.
Emotion was rising in my throat and tickling the backs of my eyes.
“So I’m not going to think about how hard this is going to be for you and how scared I am, and how people are going to try to take that stillness from us. We won’t have any peace, Benny. You won’t have any peace. And all that hurt you’re carrying inside you, the hurt you don’t talk about, I’m probably not gonna fix that. I can’t give you that same stillness you give me. But I am going to marry you, because it’s what I want. And for once in my life, I’m taking what I want, lines be damned.”
Lines be damned.
“So don’t let me down, Benny Lament,” she said, shaking her finger in warning. Then she flopped down beside me like she hadn’t just handed me her heart and soul and taken mine in return.
“That’s another thing I like,” I muttered.
“What’s that?”
“You’re smart.”
“Because I said I’d marry you?” she teased.
“Yeah.” I kissed the top of her head again.
“Can I sleep here?” she asked, yawning so wide she could have swallowed the bed whole.
“Do you snore?” I asked.
“Probably.”
“Me too.”
Her hand crept up to my cheek and the other joined it. She cradled my face like I was dear to her, even as she turned her head into my chest and became boneless against me.
I was going to tell her that she would have to wake up before her brothers, and go back to her own bed, but I was asleep before I got the words out.
The Barry Gray Show
WMCA Radio
Guest: Benny Lament
December 30, 1969
“You just showed up in Detroit, at Motown Records, and knocked on Berry Gordy’s door?” Barry Gray asks Benny Lament.
“Yeah. Berry and I knew each other. He’d tried to hire me only a few months earlier. He thought having a mob guy”—Benny laughs at the description—“pushing his labels made all kinds of sense. He was determined to create a sound and a system that transcended race music, which was what people were still calling songs released by Negro artists. Berry Gordy wanted to be mainstream.