Singing in the comeback choir - fiction - excerpted from, 'Singing in the Comeback Choir'

Bebe Moore Campbell, an Essence contributing writer, has for years tackled tough issues that touch the lives of Black folk in general and sisters in particular. Her books read like a backdrop for contemporary African-American history: Brothers and Sisters, her hard-hitting novel on corporate race wars in postriot Los Angeles; Your Blues Ain't Like Mine, a lyrical tale of family and loyalty in the segregated South; her affectionate memoir Sweet Summer: Growing Up With and Without My Dad; and the tell-it-like-it-is analyses in Successful Women, Angry Men: Backlash in the Two-Career Marriage. In her latest novel, Singing in the Comeback Choir (G.P. Putnam's Sons), arriving in bookstores on February 16, Campbell returns to the heart of our culture, the family. Maxine Lott McCoy, a strong-willed but vulnerable television executive producer in L.A., struggles to maintain her relationship with her once-wayward husband,. Satchel; her place in the high-stakes TV game; and the care of Lindy, her aging grandmother who reared her up and out of a declining Philadelphia neighborhood. in this very special sneak-preview excerpt, Maxine confronts bittersweet memories of her old North Philly, and a new generation headed for trouble.

Philadelphia was gray in the early-Friday-morning light. The crisp coolness in the late-april air felt transitional, a sweet pause before the heat and humidity of an urban summer. The people Maxine saw outside the airport seemed newly unbundled. The men servicing cars on the National lot walked around with jackets unzipped and moved slowly, like bulky mammals just waking from hibernation. Their faces were starkly white. The longer she lived in Los Angeles, the more jarring it was to her to see White people from the Midwest and the East Coast. These men and women were authentically pale and European in a way that made those Whites in California seem like bronzed hybrids.

By the time she drove her rental car off the lot, it was nearly eight o'clock, and rush-hour traffic was in full force. Cars jammed the Schuylkill Expressway, drivers blaring their horns in frustration. The pace picked up just beyond downtown. When she turned off the exit to get to Lindy's house, she was on streets that were like dances she'd committed to memory. These were the blocks she'd skated on, raced across on her bicycle, her braids flying behind her. On those same streets she'd toppled from her bike and broken her arm, slid into first and scraped her knees. More than once she'd stumbled on a crack in the sidewalk.

Maxine's smile waned as she looked beyond her nostalgia. The neighborhood wasn't in any worse shape than the last time she'd seen it, four months ago at Christmas, but that didn't make her feel any better. There were boarded-up houses on every street. The rows of houses seemed to be sagging, as if some great power had played tug-of-war with entire blocks and won. The sidewalks were littered with paper, cigarette butts, malt-liquor bottles, empty McDonald's cartons. Young men and boys lolled on corners, their idleness claiming their lives like stray bullets. Maxine stepped on the gas, hoping that if she traveled fast enough, everything would blur.

Her old neighborhood had always had dirt under its fingernails; even when Lindy had bought her house, Sutherlard Street had seen better times. Still, there had been an air of hardscrabble prosperity, as men and women who'd come up from rural Virginia and the Carolinas set off for factories in the morning. The children were left in the care of stern southern grandmothers, bilingual women fluent in both English and Leather Belt. The constant chorus of their brooms against the sidewalk set the tempo for the neighborhood. Dust and scraps of paper had no chance. As Maxine looked around her now, the same question she'd been asking herself for years rose in her mind: How could we have fallen so far?

When she turned onto her grandmother's block, she felt even worse; Sutherland Street looked just as bad as it had four months earlier: The potholes that had been there for years remained; a broken mailbox on the corner, its heavy metal opening ripped clean off, was still there, as were the boarded windows of the mom-and-pop grocery store at the end of the block, where Vietnamese merchants conducted business behind a plate-glass partition that separated them from the customers they feared. Three houses proclaimed their vacancy in angry swipes of spray paint across the city's boards. Maxine sighed.

She parked the car and got out. Standing across the street were identical twin boys. They were dressed neatly, in navy pants and sweaters, white shirts and bow ties. Maxine walked toward them. "Hello, Kane. Hello, Able," she called to Darvelle Randolph's grandchildren. A woman i n her sixties, her grandmother's neighbor had been forced to take a crash course in Motherhood Part Two when her daughter Bobbi began to worship first Lord Cocaine and then the merciless god of crack. The 10-year-old twins were born in the second year of their mother's addiction. Darvelle retrieved her grandsons just as they were about to become social-service detritus. She decided to keep the names her daughter had chosen ("The one time that heifer cracks the Bible, and what does she come up with?"), but she insisted on new spellings, as though the alphabet might have the power to change fate.

"Hey, Maxine."

"Hey, Maxine."

When the twins fidgeted and looked away from her, she recognized their reticence as the fear of being uncool in front of a group of friends at the corner -- youths who were older than the twins by a few years and had the rowdy demeanor associated with their age. Their backpacks and jackets were strewn on the ground. Filling the streets with their hoots of laughter, they lobbed insults and tossed derisive retorts back and forth.

Maxine knew that it would embarrass the twins if she said more, but she couldn't resist. "How's your grandmother?"

"She's doing good," Able said. Kane looked away.

They shuffled their feet, and the older boys gave them a glance. Kane and Able looked stricken. Maxine stifled a giggle, then said pointedly to the other boys, "And how are you young brothers doing?"

They were just muttering an answer that Maxine interpreted as "fine," when all mouths closed instantly.

Maxine turned. A tall boy, an older teen, had approached without her noticing. He was so close she jumped a little. His dark eyes plundered her body limb by limb. She didn't know him, but she vaguely recognized his face. Behind him were two other youths about his age, with the same prematurely hardened expressions.

Maxine smiled, more amused than insulted by the young man's glance. "Good morning, son."

He stepped forward. He was large, more man than boy, with a long, thick torso. He had a sprinkling of acne on his forehead and a nick in one of his eyebrows. The mark gave him a vicious quality: It might have been conceived in violence. "I could make your morning a whole lot better," he said, and he licked his lips very slowly.

Several boys hooted. "I heard that, C.J.," one of them said. Kane and Able were like sponges, absorbing C.J.'s movements, trying on his brand of manhood for size.

They were standing in front of a boarded-up place where her friend Peaches used to live. But the house that had once been Maxine's second home was now a gathering place for crack addicts.

Maxine searched C.J.'s face, looking for a tender spot in the belligerence. She found nothing, no softness she could appeal to, no store of good home training for her to mine. Those eyes hadn't been to Sunday school or to a Boy Scout meeting. God only knew what they'd seen. "C.J., help yourself do better," Maxine said. "Go on to school and try to learn something."

The boy flinched. Perhaps he hadn't expected her to call him by name. The other boys were watching him. Just two steps and he was in her face. Don't nobody, wanna f--- you anyway, bitch."

She had expected rudeness, but the vehemence of his cursing stunned her.

Kane and Able looked at each other and then at their feet. Then walked away. The rest of the group trudged toward the bus stop. C.J. spoke up: "Hey, you two shorties, run down to the store and get me a bag of barbecued potato chips from the gook. I'll be right there," he said, pointing at the crack house. He had money in his hand, a $5 bill that he brandished like a gun

The boys glanced at each other, excitement in Kane's face, fear in Able's. Kane reached toward the money, but Able grabbed his arm. A moment later, C.J. was going into Peaches' old house, and Able was racing toward the bus stop, pulling Kane with him.

As she watched the twins board a bus that has swooped onto the street, Maxine summoned her armor -- that invisible hard shell was her protection against wayward boys with filthy mouths, against garbage in the streets and crack houses. With her armor, she could see but not feel. And that was the point. She was here to take care of her grandmother, not to submit to the indignities of a place she no longer cared about.

She crossed the street to her grandmother's home, a narrow row house identical to all the others. Maxine climbed the front steps. Looking at the decay all around her, she felt her mood darken. Maxinegirl, you better buck up, she told herself.

But Maxine soon discovered that her life was linked to C.J. s. A confrontation was inevitable.

She returned to Sutherland Street from dinner with a friend late one evening a few days later. There was no parking near Lindy's house; the only space available was across the street.

She heard music coming from the driveway. Young male voices chanted poetry, and a tenor drenched the block in sweetness. The singer was extraordinary, truly gifted. Maxine wondered who he was. She felt the music swaddling her, warding off the nighttime chill as she walked home. She found the rhythm and started bopping, stretching out her arm as though she had a partner. The darkness was pierced by light coming from the open door of the crack house.

The odor of reefer floated toward her on a rush of night air. In the doorway, bright light streamed across a face, and the sight of it made her rhythm vanish. "Bobbi?" She spoke softly, more to herself than to the person on the other side of the steps.

Bobbi?" This time she called out the name, as she put one foot on the bottom step, not knowing what she might be climbing toward. The door opened wide enough for her to get a better look at Darvelle's daughter: arms and legs almost fleshless, purple gums where teeth should have been, eyes huge and unrecognizing, gullies where the cheeks were once round and full. Now Bobbi looked like an old woman, beaten up by life. The little girl Maxine had walked to the library, helped with homework, bad disappeared.

Bobbi peered toward her, eyes narrowed but unseeing. "Somebody call me?" From inside, an unseen hand pushed at the door.

"Hey, mama."

The voice came from behind her. When Maxine turned around, the light from the house glinted off C.J.'s scarred eyebrow.

"I'm not your mama," Maxine said. She felt calm, ready.

Alone, he seemed to lack the bravado that he summoned up for an audience. He looked away when she continued to stare him down, and seemed startled when she moved toward him and said, "C.J., I want you to stop buying cigarettes and whiskey for my grandmother. She's old and sick."

"Who you talkin' about?"

"Lindy Walker." She pointed to the house. "She lives there. You brought her cigarettes and Scotch this morning."

"Oh, yeah. Her." He looked at her impassively. "Bitch is grown."

"What did you say?" Maxine asked.

You heard me." She could barely see him, but his defiance was clear.

"Didn't your mother teach you not to call people out of their names? Her name is Lindy Walker, Miss Walker to you." Later she would wonder why she wasn't afraid to stand in the darkness and try to reason with a young thug who had no expectation of seeing his twenty-first birthday. She was already his victim, and so was everybody else on Sutherland Street.

"F--- you."

Maxine could feel her heart slamming against her chest, but she moved closer to C.J. anyway. "You may have all these old women scared, but you don't scare me. You better stay away from my grandmother."

"What you gone do, bitch?" He sneered at her.

He had her. She suddenly felt tired and defeated. "Don't you love anybody, C.J.?"

She saw the wavy outline of his movement, a leaning to the side and then a sudden straightening, as though he were yanking himself upright. He turned and walked up the steps into the boarded-up house.

In a quiet place inside her, Maxine felt a sadness that was almost grief. She thought of a time when boys like C.J. weren't her enemy or their own. There in the darkness, she wondered if that time would ever come again.

COPYRIGHT 1998 Essence Communications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group