His Last Wife

“A lot of us thought he was. He did some great things for all of us. You know? The short time he was in office. Most of those fucking politicians—by the time they make it into office riding that black vote—they forget all about their people. He didn’t. We had a lot of expectations for Brother Taylor.”

Kerry hardly nodded, but she agreed with everything Auset was saying. Jamison had taken his run and win so seriously. When he’d first told Kerry he was thinking of running for mayor and offered to sell her 10 percent of his dividends from Rake it Up so he could have campaign funds, she thought he was just bored with running the company and wanted a quick out. Selling her that 10 percent would put her in control and he’d just be on the sidelines as they restructured and got a new CEO and president. But he stepped all the way back and when he emerged with his actual platform for mayor, she realized he was really going to do it. He wasn’t happy with the sitting mayor’s decision to shut down all of the midnight basketball programs in the city and use the money to build a new wing at the airport. Like most of the moves of the controversial “New Atlanta” mayor, the action felt like another nod toward the gentrification that was pushing all of the color out of the city. Where there was once public housing, there were now high-priced condos. Affordable and once family-friendly shopping centers and entertainment venues were replaced by urban “live, work, play” enclaves that attracted yuppies and buppies and anyone else who could afford a ten-dollar panini and eight-dollar craft beer for lunch. Jamison wanted to challenge this notion that a new Atlanta had to mean a white or rich Atlanta. The city had to be for everyone. All races. All classes. His campaign slogan: “For every resident, a new promise.” He won. And when he got into office, he went straight to work and hustled his way through like the old Jamison Kerry knew and loved . . . before the divorce.

“A lot of people didn’t like that stuff he was doing,” Auset reminded Kerry. “Not those rich crackers trying to buy out the city. You know at the height of the recession they was setting us all up.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Mean?” Auset looked at Kerry, surprised by her question. “You don’t know? They set it up. What happens when a good man loses his job? He can’t pay his mortgage. He loses his home. Funny how when that happened, people showed up with cash, ready to buy those houses. They auctioned off half of Southwest Atlanta on the courthouse steps. Now they got this Beltline coming through the city. New everything. That ain’t nothing but the big lockout and lockdown. Black people won’t be able to move in this city in ten years without a fucking ankle bracelet on. That’s why they wanted to get rid of Mayor Taylor.” Auset looked into Kerry’s eyes. “He was in the way.”

“I don’t think it was that deep. Yes, he was bumping heads with some folks, Governor Cade and those guys, but it was just politics as usual,” Kerry said.

“Politics as usual? Is that what got Ras killed?” Auset asked, bringing up Jamison’s old Morehouse roommate who’d become a community activist and was working with Jamison on some projects to get scholarships for college-bound black males from Atlanta’s poorest neighborhoods. He’d been mysteriously gunned down after Jamison denied an indirect order from the governor to end the program in favor of labor-training initiatives he’d wanted to institute for black males in the city.

It was a sobering moment for Kerry. She knew Alfred Jenkins from the Atlanta University Center before he was “Ras” Baruti, before he’d grown out his dreadlocks and became a leader of local grassroots organizations. Though she and Jamison had already split when Jamison and Ras started working together, she didn’t believe any of the charges the district attorney came up with to put Ras behind bars before he was killed. They’d painted him as a drug kingpin and an arms dealer.

For the first time, Kerry picked up that little dot and connected it to the line of dots leading to her current situation.

“What happened to Ras didn’t have anything to do with what happened to Jamison,” Kerry said, though she was really just thinking aloud.

“That’s what they want you to believe, sis. But that’s not what the people believe. We—and by ‘we’ this time I mean black people, conscious people, the community—know why they killed Ras. Why they wanted to kill Jamison.”

Kerry got up from the bench and looked toward the door leading back into the jail. It was almost time for her to be in the kitchen to help start dinner service. But that wasn’t why she’d suddenly felt prickled and wanted to go inside. She’d heard all of this before. When Ras died, there was a whole grassroots movement mobilizing that painted pictures of Ras and Jamison like they were starting some new Black Panther Party. There were even rumors that they’d both joined some militant organization that had camps in Israel, Cuba, even Venezuela. To Kerry, this was just as much of a myth as the idea Auset was sharing about “the man” and that old, haunting “they” who were out there trying to enact genocide on any black person with a brain.

“Look, I’m happy you believed in Jamison. He really did enjoy being mayor and if he’d stayed in office I know he would’ve done some good, but there is no ‘they’ in his case,” Kerry said in her corporate voice. “I was there when he died. And there wasn’t any ‘they’ up there on the roof. It was his past. That’s what killed Jamison. His past. Saw it with my own eyes.”

“But what if I told you your eyes haven’t been made to see things the way they re

ally are? That you’re asleep to everything that’s really going on? You’ve been programmed?”

“Programmed? Right.” Kerry laughed like Auset had said something that was totally ludicrous. She started heading toward the door. “Maybe you and the sistren should stop smuggling weed into the jail. Makes you do and say crazy things, you know?” Kerry smiled at Auset once more and turned her back. “Programmed?” she repeated, still laughing. “Right.”

After dinner, Garcia-Bell was in Kerry’s cell. They were talking and laughing in what had become a kind of nightly routine since Kerry’s fight with Thompson. Their once-convenient friendship had taken on a new depth and on some nights anyone listening outside the door might think the women were at an adult slumber party. They mostly chatted about their mothers. Their dreams. How their mothers had ruined their dreams. Talking to Garcia-Bell, Kerry remembered how badly she’d wanted to be a doctor. That she’d had her heart set on Cornell Medical School and when she didn’t get in, she was crushed. So much so that she could hardly get out of bed. And though Jamison had gotten into Cornell, he decided to stay in Atlanta to wait for her. Garcia-Bell wanted to own a trucking fleet. Five or six haulers moving whatever from wherever to someplace else. She’d been a certified truck driver for ten years. She had a business plan and all the contacts she needed. But her criminal record made financing her own truck impossible.

Though the talks were quite therapeutic and actually often the highlight of Kerry’s day—not that there was much competition there—there were some odd things she was noticing about her blossoming friendship with Garcia-Bell. Although they often talked about past loves, Garcia-Bell never sexed her lovers. It was never “him” or “he” and always “they” and “them.” This wasn’t a surprise to Kerry. Looking at Garcia-Bell’s muscles and mannish way of taking up space and even hearing her voice, purposefully gruff and decidedly confident, it was pretty obvious to Kerry that she was not only a lesbian, but also a masculine lesbian—in Kerry’s mind she’d identified Garcia-Bell as the “man” in any lesbian relationship she had.

Kerry really didn’t care, though. She didn’t have a slew of debutantes and sorors waiting to chat her up in her jail cell each night. She just wondered if Garcia-Bell thought she knew, how long she was going to hold out saying what she was, and if she ever intended on coming out to Kerry. Well, maybe she was already out of the closet. With those bright circus-themed tattoos of naked women on her arms, she certainly wasn’t in the closet. Still, Kerry was willing to pretend she didn’t see all of that until Garcia-Bell gave her some indication she wanted to be open about her sex life. But she knew it couldn’t be far off. Because there was also the matter of how long the slumber sessions were lasting. That Garcia-Bell would wait until the very last call for bed before she’d leave Kerry’s side. And she’d be grinning and giggling like a little boy leaving his girlfriend when she did. Things had gotten pretty awkward on some nights when Kerry had to break down and just say, “Go to bed,” in her own gruff voice. They couldn’t continue on like that much longer. Someone would have to say something soon.

“The crazy part was that she was dead serious. I looked into her eyes and I could see she believed what she was saying,” Kerry said in the middle of retelling her account of what happened on the jail yard that afternoon with Auset. She was lying across the bed and Garcia-Bell was sitting on the edge. “It’s like she’s painting Jamison to be some kind of martyr. She actually called me Betty Shabazz. Can you believe that?” Kerry chuckled.

“She ain’t too far from what other people be saying. On one of the video blogs on YouTube some guy calling himself ‘the Green Pill’ said Jamison was alive. A lot of people saying that now,” Garcia-Bell revealed.

Kerry pushed up on her elbows and looked at her as the woman in the cell beside hers walked past, staring into Kerry’s cell.

“People are saying he’s not dead?” Kerry repeated.

“Just crazy rumors that people spotted him on One Hundred and Twenty-Fifth Street. One guy said he had a video of him,” Garcia-Bell added.

“Was it him?” Kerry asked before she could remind herself that there was no way it could be.

“No. It was some dude who looked more like Fifty Cent,” Garcia-Bell revealed, referring to the hip-hop star who had muscles like armor and a tough demeanor that Jamison had lost long ago.

The women laughed.

“I guess Jamison would like being compared to Fifty Cent,” Kerry said. “Could you imagine if that fool was really alive? If he was hanging out on One Hundred and Twenty-Fifth Street in Harlem looking like Fifty Cent while I was in here just . . . dying?” Kerry looked off.

“Don’t get all fucked up about it now. It’s just people talking. You know that. I only watch the shit online because there’s nothing else to do in the computer lab,” Garcia-Bell said. “And whatever Auset was saying was that jail-yard talk. People in here blow things all the way up to make themselves look better. By the time they finish with a story, they can make themselves look like Martin Luther King or somebody.”

After a long pause, Kerry said softy, “The thing is, she wasn’t talking about herself; she was talking about me.”