long. I don’t know if my hands will cooperate, but Esther can sing.”
“Esther can sing, you can play, and the stage will be set,” Sal said. “We’ll be at the show tomorrow too, Benito. No one will get near you.”
“We?”
“Me and Theresa. The Reinas. The Tonys.”
“All right.”
“Fifteen minutes.”
I hung up the phone and rose from the bed, swearing when my head swam and my stomach lurched.
“We’re performing?” Esther asked.
“Yeah . . . singing for our supper,” I grunted. Singing for our lives.
“Can you do it, baby?” she whispered.
It was the first time she’d ever called me “baby.” The first time she’d ever used an endearment at all. I was Benny Lament, even when she was kissing me.
It’d been a while since she’d kissed me.
Actually, she’d hardly touched me since leaving Detroit. She was afraid to hurt me, I knew that. Afraid that her touch would cause pain.
I wrapped my arms around her, careful not to tread on her newly painted toes.
“I can do it if you’re with me,” I said.
“I’m with you, Benny. I’m with you.”
“For better or worse?” I asked.
“Better or worse. Richer or poorer. In sickness and in health.”
“Till death us do part,” I finished. We’d applied for a marriage license that morning but had to wait the mandatory twenty-four hours before we could use it. In all this mess, it was the only thing I wasn’t unsure of, the only choice I didn’t doubt.
“Don’t say that. Don’t ever say that,” she reproached.
“What?”
“I hate that line. We aren’t going to talk about death. Or dying. We aren’t going to think about it. We aren’t going to invite it to our wedding. I want to live with you, Benny. Live. Not part. So I won’t be saying that gloomy garbage when I marry you tomorrow.”
“No? Then what will you say?”
“I’m going to say ‘I do.’”
“Okay.”
“I do, I will, and I promise. And that’s all.”
“I do, I will, I promise, and that’s all,” I repeated, the words sounding like a mantra . . . or a song lyric.
“Are you going to start singing, baby?” she whispered, smiling, reading my mind. Damn, I liked the way that word sounded on her lips.
“It sounds like a lyric.”
“It does.” She lifted her face to mine, and I brushed my sore mouth over hers.
“I do. I will. I promise . . . to never let you go. I do, I will, I promise. And that’s all,” she said, half singing it.
“That’s all?” I sang back, my voice raspy.
“That’s all,” she answered.
The Barry Gray Show
WMCA Radio
Guest: Benny Lament
December 30, 1969
“You’re listening to The Barry Gray Show, the last show of the year, the last show of the sixties, and I’m chatting with Benny Lament, renowned singer and songwriter. Some might even call you an activist,” Barry Gray says.
“It’s an honor to be here,” Benny Lament replies, not acknowledging any of the labels Mr. Gray has just used to describe him.
“Let’s switch gears, shall we? We can’t talk about Esther Mine and Benny Lament without discussing civil rights in America.”
“It’s always the elephant in the living room,” Benny Lament says.
“In 1958, a Gallup poll showed that ninety-four percent of Americans thought interracial marriage was a bad idea,” Barry Gray says, his voice taking on a new seriousness as he begins to rattle off the stats. “Now, a little more than a decade later, those numbers have started to change. Miscegenation laws have been struck down in every state. In 1967, in the Loving v. Virginia case, the Supreme Court ruled that the choice to marry whomever one wishes, regardless of religion or race, is a constitutional right. But you married Esther in 1960, years before the Supreme Court weighed in. In many northern states, there were no laws prohibiting marriage between the races,” Barry Gray summarizes.
“There weren’t laws, but that didn’t mean very many people were doing it. The problem was community. A white woman marries a Negro man, or vice versa—where do they live? Even in the places like Chicago or Detroit, where there were no laws against it, there were lines. Where do you go, how do you make a home, when the unspoken rule is whites live here, coloreds live there?” Benny Lament says. “What do you do?”
24
AVE MARIA
I lost my nerve in the elevator. I saw my reflection in the mirror, my pummeled face sitting above my crisp collar and knotted tie. Blue, bloodshot eyes peering out from puffy, blackened skin. I saw Esther standing beside me in her red dress, her