Eleanor Douglas Bennett, born Coventina Lyncook, took the news in her stride. She was the daughter of a gambling man. She had already died and come back twice. She had always gone against the odds. But what if she didn’t make it this time, she asked Charles. She couldn’t leave her kids like this. There was something she needed to tell him.
The Rest of the Story
Charles is only here today, going through the excruciating process of hearing Eleanor tell her story again, because he made a promise to her, as her attorney and as her friend. He promised Eleanor that he would help her children get through this. It would be a lot for them to take in. But who is helping Charles?
In 1970, there were fewer than four thousand black students enrolled in law schools throughout the United States. One of them was Charles Garvey Mitch. In the nearly forty years that followed until his semiretirement, Charles had seen or heard a bit of everything, both professionally and personally. So he wouldn’t say that he was shocked when Eleanor Bennett, still using a cane after the surfing incident, came zigzagging into his office and said that she needed to tell Charles the rest of her story, the part involving a baby. In his experience, most people never told you the whole truth the first time around, anyhow. Especially not your lover.
To this day, Charles hasn’t decided if Eleanor had been extremely unfortunate in her life or far luckier than most people, having survived the particular twists of fate that she described to him that day. She’d come to his office, she said, because this needed to be a strictly professional visit and things had already become intimate between them. She had come to his office, she said, because she was going to need his help. That was when she told him about her daughter. Not the one she hadn’t been talking to. Another one.
Charles agreed to help Eleanor, and he went on to conduct his research and offer his professional advice to her as an attorney. But it wouldn’t be easy to play this dual role. Charles had seen his share of difficult situations. He’d grown up a pale black kid in the fifties and sixties. He had lost his wife way too young, to a fast-moving disease that he cursed to this day. He had raised two African American boys and he’d lost some sleep wondering how to protect them from the world. He had learned to control his emotions. But that didn’t mean that he didn’t have feelings.
After his wife died, Charles had dated some. But with Eleanor, it was different. This was love. He couldn’t help but suffer when Eleanor finally told him what she had gone through as a young woman. No man should ever have to hear these things. No woman should have to live them. Charles went home alone after their meeting, stumbled over the threshold of his townhome, shut the front door, and leaned his forehead against it until he turned and slid down to the floor.
In the early 1970s, Bert and Eleanor Bennett moved into a pastel-colored, bungalow-style home in a small city near Anaheim where real estate agents had agreed to show properties to black families. Orange County had Disneyland and Marine bases and beaches, and Los Angeles to the north. There were aerospace, auto, and rubber plants within commuting distance. There were plenty of jobs, even for a black couple. Southern California became the answer to the young pair’s search for a place to build a new life together. It was as far as they could get from other Caribbeans in New York, from the risk of being recognized, without leaving the States.
Bert found employment at a rubber plant and Eleanor found an administrative post with the government. Eleanor’s bosses quickly recognized her eye for detail and facility with numbers and promoted her over the years, paying for her classes in accounting. By the time Benny started school, Los Angeles had elected its first black mayor and Bert had become an attorney, his prior legal studies having made it easier for him to face the daunting law school admissions process in the States and squeeze through the invisible gates that had kept so many black and Latino Americans from being accepted into law schools.
On the night of the day that their grown son finally began his doctoral program down in San Diego, Bert and Eleanor leaned back on their pillows, clinked their wedding rings together as if in a toast, and held hands. They breathed in their good fortune, having seen worse, and told each other that they and their children would continue to see better. And better. And better.
In all those years, Bert and Eleanor couldn’t go back to the island, but Eleanor wanted to hand some kind of family tradition down to the kids. Like the black cake. That cake was all she had from her childhood, she kept saying, and she insisted it take its rightful place in their children’s lives, too. This boiled down to her cordoning off the kitchen like a military zone for a couple of weekends every winter, with her and Benny on the inside and Bert and Byron hovering outside, just when they wanted to wallow in the slovenly feel of a morning about the house.