Chicago
1975

BRENDA, LIKE EVERYONE ELSE WHO HAD FOUGHT SEGREGATION, still had bad memories of things that had happened, not directly to her, but to other members of her family and to friends. After college, full of idealism, she had moved to Chicago to work as a teacher in the inner city. But most of her students raised in the projects at Cabrini-Green had seen too much too soon, and by the time she got them, she looked out on a room full of dead eyes. She tried so hard to reach them and thought she had helped a few of the girls but then, a few years later, she would drive by and see them working on a street corner, strung out on drugs. It was a heartbreaking experience. Having grown up in a nice middle-class neighborhood, she had not been prepared to deal with the harsh realities of kids who had been raised in the tough ghettos of the North. And that last year, when one of her students had pulled a gun on her after she had refused to let her go out in the hall to hang out with her boyfriend, she’d known it was time to quit. Like a lot of her friends who had moved north, she missed home, and when things eased up, they all started coming back to Birmingham. It wasn’t perfect. Just like everywhere else, there were still stupid people around, black and white. Unfortunately for Brenda, three of the stupid people happened to be her nephews Curtis, DeWayne, and Anthony.

When she was growing up, her heroes had been people like Sojourner Truth, Thurgood Marshall, and Martin Luther King, but the nephews had their walls plastered with pictures of their favorite rap stars. Every one with a police record a mile long.

At present, all three nephews were strutting around town, sporting gold chains and diamond earrings, wearing baseball hats perched sideways on top of do-rags, with their underwear sticking out of baggy pants. Their grandparents and parents had been college graduates, but all three had dropped out of high school at fifteen and now, between them, they couldn’t string a sentence together. If they said, “You know what I’m sayin’ ” one more time, she would scream. Instead of going forward, they had gone backward.

She was so disgusted with them that she wouldn’t let them come over to the house anymore. Thank God for Arthur, her other nephew. He had a good job in Atlanta with CNN, and her niece Sandra, Robbie’s daughter, was majoring in history at Birmingham-Southern College. Sandra had a head on her shoulders. But the nephews were driving Brenda crazy. She wished all three had one neck and she had her hands around it right now. They might be fooling other people, but she knew darn well what they were up to. When she got elected mayor, one of the first things she was going to do was round up every dope dealer and pimp in town, black or white, and sling every one of them in jail. And if she had to build new jails to hold them all, she’d do that, too.

Although Birmingham had had a black mayor since 1979, she would be the first woman mayor, and it was about time. She had no doubt she would win. Hazel had assured her she could do anything she wanted, and Hazel was never wrong. And after she became mayor, she just might go on to become the first black governor. Some of her friends were still a little apprehensive about her getting too hopeful. They said, “Obama or not, this is still Alabama.” Maybe if she had been beaten or, like her sister Tonya, had been knocked down by the fire hoses or thrown in jail, she might think differently. Those who had gone through the marches said she had never really had the real “black experience,” and they could be right. But, sadly, she couldn’t change the past. She had to think about the present. She wanted people to do better right now.

Of course, she was angry about what had happened in the past, and she hated with a passion how her ancestors got here. But selfishly, she was glad she was here now. She loved her home, and besides that, Brenda believed with all her heart that God had a special plan for her and she was exactly where she was supposed to be at the exact right time. And who knew? The way things were changing so fast, anything could happen. A black woman from Birmingham had already been America’s secretary of state, and Regina Benjamin, a black woman from southern Alabama, had just been named surgeon general of the United States. As Hazel had said, where else in the world could a three-foot-four woman become a millionaire? Or a black woman like Oprah become a billionaire? Brenda couldn’t help but be a little hopeful. But as always, progress had not come without a price.