“Sam, it’s Ellie. You really need to call me back. I need to know what’s going on. Call me right away.” I rubbed the huge knot on my head and looked back at the small dark house.
Sam. Where the hell are you and what have you done this time?
Charlotte, North Carolina, December 1981
The rolling green hills of Coventry Academy in Virginia were a stark contrast to the red clay dirt of my cloistered East Georgia upbringing. The kids at Coventry wore their wealth and privilege like a new set of clothes. They fell into little cliques divided by their background and family income: the kids who traveled to the Swiss Alps or Aspen for holiday skiing trips fell into one clique while the kids who attended exclusive tennis and equestrian camps landed in another. And then there were the scholarship kids like me, straddling and code-switching between two vastly different worlds: a school where I worked twice as hard, as Vera had advised; and a school where white boys quietly told me in class I was pretty “for a Black girl” but wouldn’t ask me to dance at the school mixers. And as for those mixers, I liked Aerosmith, Elton John, and Queen just as much as they did. I just wished the DJ would round out the music and play some Michael Jackson, Luther Vandross, or a little bass line and horn section from Earth, Wind & Fire.
For months during my freshman year, I was stumped about where I would go for school holidays. Vera said I shouldn’t return to Chillicothe. She said it was too soon and we needed to let things die down. Fortunately, Coventry stayed open for Thanksgiving, but the dormitories and cafeteria closed for Christmas and summer breaks. But, like everything else, Vera had a solution. She always had this endless network of cousins and extended family. Her solution: I would spend holidays at her cousin’s house and she and Sam would catch the bus up from Chillicothe to join me. Everything at Coventry Academy paled in comparison to my excitement at seeing Sam and Vera on holiday breaks.
Benson Randolph Harris, or Uncle B as everybody called him, had a sprawling house in Raleigh, North Carolina. Thank God for Uncle B’s house. He was my first introduction to the practice of law. Uncle B graduated from Howard University Law School with honors in 1957. He told me he had dreams of becoming a partner at one of Raleigh’s silk-stocking law firms. But after graduation, none of the white firms in town would hire him. He had a wife and two young daughters to feed. So he took a job at the post office sorting mail at night while he set up his own law firm. He handled anything Black folks brought his way—slip-and-falls, landlord-tenant issues—any kind of case that put food on the table for his family. He once told me a funny story from back in the day about a lady who came to him and asked if he could sue a numbers runner she claimed cheated her out of her money when she hit the number. By 1981, Uncle B owned the largest Black law firm in North Carolina. This was after the early days when his law office was torched and he suffered threats for taking away business from the white lawyers in town.
Myrtle, Uncle B’s wife, was like a movie star to me. She had bronze skin and dyed her hair scarlet red. She wore the most beautiful dresses, read Essence and Ebony magazines, and always left the sensual jasmine scent of Shalimar perfume lingering in the room. Aunt Myrtle showed me how to apply makeup, style my hair, and gave me tips on how to clap back at the rich kids who tried to put me down.
At Christmas, Aunt Myrtle always made sure there were presents for me and Sam under that old silver Christmas tree in the corner of the living room. Uncle B said the rotating color wheel for the tree stopped working back in the 1960s, but Aunt Myrtle said she loved that tree and would continue to put it up until the silver fell off it. Like Vera’s house back in Chillicothe, on Christmas Eve the house would be filled with the loud cackle of a dozen or more people laughing while Sam and I drank Cheerwine, clinking our glasses together and pretending to toast like the adults. The smell of red velvet cakes and roasted turkey crawled through the entire house. And there was the ever-present thump-thumping beat of the Temptations or Ray Charles spilling from the record player—“good music” as Uncle B called it, not the “be-bop-de-bang” he called the R&B music Sam and I liked. Without fail, before I returned to school, Uncle B would slip some money in my bag, telling me I could do anything I wanted to do because God’s hand was on me.
My senior year, I finished my exams early and headed to North Carolina. Aunt Myrtle picked me up from the bus station—a real bus station with indoor seating and a small concession stand in the lobby. I could hardly contain myself as we pulled up to the house. I hadn’t seen Vera or Sam since the summer.