When Scrappy
came home from college for the Thanksgiving holiday, Mama and Daddy gave him an
early Christmas present. It was a black and white Studebaker over
six-years-old, but he didn’t care. He treated that car like it was a new T-Bird.
Even gave it a name: Tinka Belle, of all things.
He came home
again right after Christmas for a few days and seemed determined to badger me
to death. Mama told him that I had been moping around all week and she was sick
of it.
“So this is
the deal, Boo,” he said. “You are coming with me. Big Brother reporting for
duty, here to rescue the fair maiden little sister.”
Maiden, my
foot. Ha! If Scrappy knew about Maynard Taylor and me, the boy who dropped me
flat after all we’d been through together, he would have thought twice about
calling me a maiden, fair or otherwise.
My pride was
dragging around in the dirt and I didn’t want to go anywhere with my brother
who thought he was hot stuff having a car of his own. Besides, I was getting
good mileage out of licking my wounds. The only thing I wanted to do was polish
my toenails and feel sorry for myself. “Go away, Scrappy.”
He put both
hands on his hips. “Hey, kiddo. I ain’t just whistling Dixie.”
“They teach
you to say ain’t at Carolina, Scrappy? Mrs. Sparks would flunk you for that.”
He rolled his eyes. Between him and Daddy, that eye-rolling thing was getting
on my last nerve.
“Look, Boo,
I don’t care if you nurse your po’ little broken heart till you turn the color
of a blueberry as long as you do it when I’m not around. Besides, you’re
wasting your tears on that jerk. He ain’t ... isn’t worth the salt in
your tears. I told you a long time ago that he’s a lightweight diddlysquat
poot. Now, c’mon. Let’s go downtown.”
He came over
to where I was perched on a lounge chair trying to look tragic and dragged me to
his car. I got in because I realized that, in his own way, my brother cared
that Maynard had hurt me. All the same, I was not going to stop being miserable
simply because he was taking pity on me. I had a little bit of pride left.
“Scrappy, I
don’t want to go downtown. I don’t want to go anywhere. I hate it when you make
me do stuff like this. Hate it hate it hate it.”
We were
driving by the Calhoun College entrance at the time. The college was a
Methodist supported school for colored people and it had been there for as long
as I could remember. It was a landmark, I guess, but people paid no attention
to the college or to the kids who attended unless it was to say how uppity the
students became after they were enrolled at Calhoun.
“Scrappy,
I’ve got a bunch of stuff to do today, so I can’t be gone long. Mama said I
have to get all my dirty clothes washed and dried before she gets home and I
haven’t even started.”
“Big deal,”
my brother said, bored.
“It is a big
deal. Zetty comes tomorrow and if I want her to do my ironing, Mama says I have
to have it ready. Lord, she babies that woman to death. You’d think as much as
we pay her, Zetty would be happy to do a little ironing when we need her to.”
Scrappy gave
me a withering look. “Boo, five dollars a day is not much money. Zetty
works her tail off for the little bit we pay her.”
“She’s got
five jobs. Do the math, Mr. College Boy. That’s over a hundred dollars a month.
Huh! I get paid a measly $2.33 to work all day long at the Singer Store selling
sewing needles to prissy old ladies.”
I turned
away from my brother and stared out the window. Scrappy always knew how to set
my teeth on edge. Zetty had worked for us since I was a little girl and I loved
her, I really did. But a hundred dollars a month was a ton of money and what
right did Scrappy have taking her side against his own sister?
“Zetty has a
family to feed, clothe and educate.” His superior tone of voice made me even
madder. He always had to have the last word.
“I know
she’s got a family, Scrappy. Do you think I moved to Mars when you left for
college? Quit spouting off at me like I’m stone stupid.”
Scrappy eyed
me hard and said, “Then don’t act stupid, Stupid. You don’t know the first
thing about Zetty and her people, do you?”
“I most
certainly do!”
He looked me
in the eye with the smirk on his face that I’ve hated since the day I drew
breath. “Really? Tell me everything, Miss Know-it-All.”
I smirked
right back at him. “Okay, I will. Zetty’s son Jeremy is seventeen, maybe
eighteen now and he’ll graduate this year. That makes Eula Mae fourteen. Zetty
told me the other day that Eulie was elected head cheerleader at Williams
High.”
Scrappy’s
smirk got smirkier. “She couldn’t have, you dumb ass, because Jeremy and Eula
Mae are both students at Calhoun College. Not only that, they’re two years
apart in age, not four. Jeremy is a 4.0 student and plans to go to med school
after he graduates. Eula Mae is majoring in journalism and is already a
published author. Zetty does our dirty work for very little money so that her
kids can have a better life than she’s had.”
“Just stop
trying to sound like Martin Luther King, Jr., Scrappy. So I was mixed up, okay?
Can’t a person get confused about stuff every now and then without being
preached at by a big brother who loves to show off? Holy cow!”
“I’m not
showing off. I’m trying to get you to see something outside of the minuscule
world you live in. Imagine, Miss Pea Brain, how hard it must be to send two
kids to college on a hundred dollars a month and still make ends meet. It’s
damn near impossible and I don’t know how she does it.”
I decided to
let him have the last word so we rode in silence after that. I stared out the
window breathing fire and Scrappy roared down Brawton Street with his eyes
glued to the road ahead like it might lead him to the Holy Grail.
He turned
the corner by the dime store way too fast and I told him to stop the car right
that minute and let me out.
“One of
these days Daddy’s going to catch you driving like a bat out of hell and if you
don’t meet me in the Square in exactly one hour, I’m going to tell on you.”
“Oooh, I’m
so scared. Somebody help me.” Then he gave me a look that said I bored him. I
stuck my tongue out at him, slammed the car door, and huffed over to Good’s
Five & Dime. I didn’t need or want to buy anything, but I liked wandering
around in there when I had a few minutes. The store smelled of hot popcorn,
chocolate covered peanuts and waxed floors that had been walked on for too many
years to count.
“Hey, Mrs.
Waddell,” I said to the middle-aged woman arranging a pile of thin nylon
scarves near the front display window. Inhaling the store smell made me grin in
spite of my bad mood. I couldn’t help myself.
Mrs. Waddell
had worked at Good’s Five & Dime for as long as I could remember. Her son,
Raymond, was a year ahead of me in school and I liked him even though he was a
sissy and he was kind of fat too. Raymond could sit down at a piano and play
anything you asked him to even though he never took a lesson in his life. Mama
said he was gifted.
“Well, hey,
Boo,” Mrs. Waddell flashed me a big, toothy grin. She had a mouth and-a-half
full of the teeth she was born with and she was proud of every one of them.
“Haven’t
seen much of you or your friend Patsy in a coon’s age, Boo,” she said. “What
y’all been up to?”
“Oh, nothing
much. Patsy’s in Columbia at her grandmother’s and Scrappy talked me into
coming downtown with him in his new old car. This is as far as we got.” I
picked up a lime green neck scarf and held it up to the light. “How’s Raymond?
I haven’t seen him lately.”
Mrs. Waddell
flashed me her mouthful of god-given teeth. “He’s doing fine, honey. He’s
playing the piano for Merleen Culpepper now. Afternoons and weekends. She’s
opened up that new dancing school what everybody sends their little girls to?
Won’t be long before he’ll have saved up enough money to start up his own band.
I want him to play over to the VFW on Saturday nights because that prissy
little trio they got playing now is tacky.”
She’s one to
talk, I thought, but what I said was, “Good for Raymond.” I wandered over to
the cosmetics counter to look for a lighter shade of Tangee lipstick. With my
pale skin, real red lipstick made me look like Lady Dracula eating a heavy
meal. Mrs. Waddell followed behind me talking a mile a minute while fingering
the scarves she’d grabbed up in one hand.
The store
was empty of customers except for me, but I didn’t notice and would not notice
until some time later. My mind was flitting from one thought to another so I
only half listened to the old bat carry on about Raymond. The other half of me
pulled the tops off tubes of Tangee. Every now and then I’d look at her, smile
and say, “I declare.”
I was right
in the middle of sniffing a dark blue bottle of “Evening in Paris” perfume when
a piece of one of her sentences caught up to my brain.
“... they’s
always trying to stir up trouble for decent white folks. Like we need outsiders
to tell us how to live?” She sounded angry.
I was
puzzled. “Trouble? What kind of trouble you talking about, Mrs. Waddell?”
“Those
blamed Calhoun College niggahs, honey. They ain’t never gonna be satisfied, no
matter what. Give ‘em a inch and they’ll take a mile.”
All my life
I’d heard people use the “inch and a mile” expression, usually referring to
colored people or children. I shrugged and said, “I reckon so,” but my skin
crawled when I said it. She probably thought I agreed with her.
Mrs. Waddell
kept talking about the students at Calhoun organizing what she said was a
so-called peaceful demonstration. She talked with a sneer on her face. I must
have looked uneasy, because she stopped in mid-sentence and eyed me like I was
a Russian spy.
“Your daddy
knows all about it, Boo. Ask him.”
My heart
skipped a dozen beats. In a panic, I wondered how my Daddy had crept into this
crazy one-way conversation. Being the child of the local law was not unlike
being a preacher’s kid, or a PK as they were called. The unwritten law in our
family was that Greenburg police business was never repeated. Children were
supposed to be seen and not heard. It was how my parents had been raised, and
it was how they were raising Scrappy and me. Thinking I had accidentally
divulged privileged information scared me into the middle of next week.
“What’s my
daddy’s got to do with anything, Mrs. Waddell?” My voice did the St. Vida’s
Dance while my mind tried to figure out what I might have said.
“Shoot! He’s
the one got to deal with this mess —them Yankee agitators coming down here from
New York City for one reason only: to stir things up.”
“Mrs.
Waddell, I don’t know anything about it.” Hoping to get her off the subject, I
walked down the center aisle to the stationery department. I had a habit of
borrowing notebook paper, so I decided to spring for a jumbo pack of Blue Horse
and start paying back. But even when I turned away from her she continued to
talk in that whiney voice.
“Well, if
they start marching today, they better coloreds trying to show off like they
had the right. And them Yankee agitators need to stay up North where they
belong. Ask your daddy. He knows.”
I had
overheard Daddy talking with Mama about an earlier sit-in at Kress’ Dime Store.
He told her then that he expected more trouble, but he couldn’t have meant
today or he would have made sure Scrappy and I didn’t leave the yard.
“You think
there’ll be a protest today, Mrs. Waddell?”
“Yes ma’am,
I sho’ do. A big march right through the middle of town. Miz Adden come in here
right before you and said when she passed by the college in her car there was
black faces everywhere she looked.”
That
Scrappy! I knew there had to be a reason (other than me) why he was itching to
come downtown. Daddy was going to throw a fit when he found out.
Mrs. Waddell
smacked her lips together. “They ain’t gonna get far, ‘cause the City didn’t
give ‘em no permit. Ha! Miz Marree Darcy said she’s gonna shut down her
newsstand, and my husband called me up and told me I needed to do the same
thing. ‘Close up that store and git on home,” he said.
She shook
her head and shifted from one foot to the other. “Ittn’t that just like a man? I’m
supposed to walk out of this store like it’s a shoeshine stand. I asked him
what he thought Mr. Good would say about me leaving without his permission. You
know what he told me?
“He said,
‘Who the hell’s gonna be shopping with them crazy students strutting their
stuff all up and down the street?’ Still, I can’t just close up the store on my
own.”
She shrugged
her shoulders and started separating a bunch of pink and red silk scarves into
two piles. That creepy crawly feeling washed over me again, and I had trouble
looking at her.
I turned
around to glance out the windows facing Main Street, and that’s when te absence
of people both inside the store and out hit me. Except for one or two walking
toward Belk’s, the entire street looked like it does on Sunday mornings during
church.
“I think I
see Scrappy over there waiting for me,” I lied, and then quickly brushed past
Mrs. Waddell without buying even one sheet of notebook paper. As the heavy door
swung shut behind me, she bawled out, “Come back to see me.” Then, “Say hey to
your Mama for me,” which she probably didn’t mean.
Out on the
street, I opened my mouth wide and gulped fresh, clean air. It was not yet
springtime so the hot, sticky weather that would smother the entire South in
another few months had not arrived. The stale air inside the dime store that I
had loved up until a few minutes before, made me sick to my stomach. I looked
up and down the street for Scrappy’s Studebaker but the full hour was not up,
so I wandered over to the Square to wait for him.
There was
one bench not covered in pigeon poop so I grabbed it. I was there for only a
few minutes when I sensed a kind of a buzz in the air that settled all around.
I looked
behind me and that’s when I saw that people were lining up on both sides of the
street. They were staring off in a northerly direction as though they were listening
for a far-off marching band to start the parade. Some clerks from Penney’s had
edged out of the front door or were peering out windows, craning their necks
for a glimpse of whatever was down the street and about to come their way.
I jumped up
then, sixteen-years-old and nosy as a kitten, to see for myself what was going
on. What I discovered in the next few moments snatched my breath away.
The
approaching marchers, over six hundred in all, made barely a sound. Their shoes
should have made some noise on the pavement, but the drum of expected marching
feet was not there. They might just as well have been barefooted.
They walked
slowly, maybe eight abreast, a sea of black and brown faces aimed toward the
Square and me. Their heads were held high, spines stiff, eyes directed forward.
It was a sight to see yet one that would haunt me for years to come.
The Calhoun
College students trudged along with a dignified, clear-cut purpose. In what
seemed like no time at all, they surrounded the people in the Square who were
gawking at them.
I looked all
over for Scrappy. Where was he? However, on the other side of the Square police
cars and fire trucks were lining up barricades in front of Good’s Five &
Dime. Daddy was there, too, but he was much too busy to notice me or I would be
on restriction for the rest of my life. My mind, like a seesaw, went up and
down, not knowing where to go or what to do.
I was sizing
up the growing number of quiet marchers when a sharp noise behind me broke
through the eerie silence. I whipped around so fast it made me dizzy. The noise
was a metal chair scraping on cement and made by a saleslady from Penney’s when
she placed it on the sidewalk near the curb. She sat down, tore open a bag of
Lays Potato Chips and started eating them while watching the parade.
By this time
the marchers had surrounded the Square on three sides. They were lined up in
tight formation like a high school band. They were marching, still very
quietly, in rows at least five deep. All I could do was stare. Eventually, I
tore my eyes away in order to look again for my brother. In addition to being
furious at him for abandoning me, I was scared. I needed to go to the bathroom,
but I didn’t know how to get around the protesters. I couldn’t walk up to them
and say, “I hate to break up your little party, but I need to tee tee.”
At that
moment, while standing stock-still trying to think of an escape, I got real mad
at myself for feeling helpless. I didn’t know what was going on, but it didn’t
seem right for Boo Sandifer to stand around wringing her hands and waiting for
her stupid, stupid brother. So what did I do? I took myself lickity-split to
the edge of the curb, not too far from the woman smacking on potato chips.
I wanted to
know how many students were protesting and what it was all about. I wanted to
look into their faces, get close enough to hear what, if anything, they might
say. I didn’t think about danger or the consequences of my actions.
When I
reached the curb, I could see many more students than I’d imagined. They moved
forward at a snail’s pace, closing in quietly, seriously. I kept hoping to hear
a chant or singing, but they marched on in stony silence while the air all
around us crackled with tension.
At that
moment I wished I believed in something as strongly as those students.
Anything. Even the raw passion I experienced the night I lost my virginity to
Maynard Taylor didn’t compare. I didn’t just want what those students
had; I yearned to be a part of it.
I stood at
the red painted curb and anxiously breathed in and out through my mouth while
waiting for something else to happen. I sensed it would come, and it would be
big and would make my being there worth the risk. Maybe I was in the wrong
place at the wrong time, I thought, because if my parents knew I might as well
join a convent.
When I
looked around, I saw a lot of angry white people itching for a confrontation,
so I knew Daddy’s hands would be full for a while. Maybe he wouldn’t see me.
Actually, the risk that he might, added to my excited state. It was like
dancing with the devil, being pulled one way, then yanked another. I was so
caught up in everything, that when Scrappy came up behind me and grabbed my
arm, I barely felt it.
“Boo, are
you nuts? If Daddy sees us here, he’ll…” He glanced behind him at the blockade
of police and firemen busy pulling thick hoses from fire trucks and then he
turned to me again.
“Jesus H.
Christ, Boo. You act like you don’t have a lick of sense.”
I’d never
seen him so mad. “My car’s parked behind the church. Come on, let’s go!”
Something
flared up inside of me right then. I can’t explain it. All I know is that the
harder Scrappy yanked me, the harder I resisted. I didn’t want to go with my
brother; I didn’t want to leave this place. Not yet. I didn’t know why, I just
knew I needed to be in that spot.
My mind
willed my body to twist away from his pull, and when I did I sprawled flat on
my butt. In an instant, I was laid-out in the middle of the marchers while hot
pain jabbed at my ankle and ran up my leg.
I wanted to
get up but I knew if I did I would be crushed by the moving throngs of marchers.
I quickly ducked back down and covered my head with my hands and listened as
the students moved forward despite me. They walked arm and arm at a steady
pace, detouring only slightly at the hole created by my flailing arms and legs.
I had never been so scared in my life.
My breath
came in short puffs. Sweating like a packhorse, I was about to start crying
when my body was suddenly lifted up. I looked down to find the white skin of my
arms next to strong black hands, hands that lifted and guided me to the safety
of the sidewalk.
I twisted around
and saw that it was Jeremy who had picked me up, Zetty’s Jeremy. I felt like
Scarlett O’Hara when Big Sam rescued her from the Shantytown white trash.
Scrappy
grabbed my other arm and the two boys elbowed their way through the tide of
undistracted marchers. When we reached the sidewalk, Jeremy’s sister Eula Mae
stooped down and retrieved my pocketbook from where I’d dropped it at the curb.
She handed it to me and we looked into each other’s eyes for a moment. I’ll
never forget the depth of Eula Mae’s eyes that day, thick as Hershey’s
chocolate syrup. Those brown eyes made me feel like a foreigner in my own
familiar town. She didn’t say anything, not one word, but she didn’t need to.
The expression on her face commanded me to get out of the way and to stay out
of the way. Her look told me that this march was none of my business.
I turned
away from Eula Mae and when I looked back again, my fears were no longer for
myself, but for her and for Jeremy. Before I could put my thoughts into words
of warning, the other brother and sister had slipped away as silently as they
had appeared, swallowed up in a sea of quiet passion.
“Come on,
Boo,” my brother shouted, jerking my arm nearly out of its socket. He pulled me
toward the monument of the Civil War soldier who had guarded our town’s Square
for almost a century. I balked.
“I can’t,
Scrappy,” I yelled. “My ankle.”
He scooped
me up in his arms and ran diagonally across the dormant centipede lawn that
would, in the next few months, turn from brown to lush green. At that moment, a
scream ripped through the Square. Seconds later, what had been a peaceful
demonstration was chaos.
Scrappy
whirled us around until we were face-to-face with a nightmare defined by
unmistakable howls and shrieks. A hundred years of anguish. Bodies were hurled
through the air, landing one on top of the other, making the rank and file of
marchers fall back and ultimately down onto the street.
There was
water everywhere. It gushed through the air with amazing power, smashing
treetops and phone wires and shattering store windows into glass splinters.
Most of the students toppled over when struck full-force by the water, hitting
the ground with bone breaking thuds. They screamed, unlike the silence they had
demonstrated earlier, and they no longer looked human.
Ants. They
looked like the ants that invaded our driveway last summer. Mama made Scrappy
turn the garden hose on them and he blasted them away. That’s what the fire
hoses did to those kids, students who had gathered to protest an injustice. Ants.
My brother
and I watched as one student after another got knocked down to the pavement. He
would scramble back up only to be squashed again with another blast from an
arrogant fire hose. My mind refused to grasp it. This was not New York City.
Not Chicago. Ugly things didn’t belong in my safe, little town.
Suddenly we
were jolted out of our stupor by Daddy’s voice shouting into a bullhorn.
“Disperse at
once or you will be arrested.”
The fire
hoses continued to erupt with a powerful sea of water that spun the youthful
bodies around in mid-air, ultimately knocking them to the ground. A few of the
students would pick themselves up and continue pressing forward, but others,
rising briefly, were quickly knocked down to be trampled by their fellow
compatriots. It was horrible. It was the war I had only seen in movies. The
passionate parade I had envied only minutes before was a battlefield, mean and
violent. For the first time in my young life, I saw what human beings were
capable of doing to one another. It was real and it was brutal.
Shaking all
over, I said, “Scrappy, get us out of here.”
My brother
held me close for a moment and then we escaped to the safety of his black and
white Studebaker parked behind the First Baptist Church. We drove away in
silence, neither of us knowing how to put into words the horror we had
experienced.
I knew
Scrappy wouldn’t drive us directly home; he would take us to Rocky Bottom.
Within minutes, we were staring blindly at the deadly Cherokee River rushing
by. We sat for a long time without saying anything before my brother sighed
from somewhere deep in his soul, started the car and drove us on home.
While Daddy
washed up for supper later that night, Mama called Scrappy and me to the table.
After Daddy was seated, we all bowed our heads for him to say grace. Usually,
he said it so fast it sounded like a sneeze.
That night,
however, Daddy didn’t say the blessing; he just bowed his head. The three of us
waited, feeling ill at ease in the stillness. Pretty soon, he took the napkin
off his lap and put it down next to his plate. Scraping his chair back from the
table, he said, “Mary Francis, thank you for cooking another fine meal but I
don’t have much of an appetite tonight. Y’all go on ahead.” He left the room
with his head still bowed.
“Scrappy,”
Mama said, “why don’t you say grace for us tonight?”
Scrappy
mumbled something that was a carbon copy of Daddy’s sneezy blessing, then
silence dropped down on top of us like heavy humidity.
I wasn’t
hungry either. Mama had fixed liver and onions, my favorite, but when I looked
at my plate, I felt sick. My stomach twisted and rolled, and no wonder. Every
time I closed my eyes, I saw bodies flying through the air, landing on top of
each other. I saw broken bones sticking out of bloody arms and legs.
I threw down
my napkin and jumped out of my chair. “I’m not surprised Daddy can’t eat his
supper after what he did today!” Pools of fresh tears spilled from my eyes and
I could no more have stopped them than I could have stopped a moving train with
my bare hands.
Mama stared
at me in confusion, but Scrappy’s expression was one of fury. Until I opened my
big mouth, Mama hadn’t known that we were downtown and Scrappy had not planned
to mention it.
“Boo,” Mama
said, “what are you talking about?”
I looked at
Scrappy for a moment and then at her. “You know what I’m talking about, Mama.
You know as well as I do what Daddy did this afternoon. He turned fire hoses on
those students from the college and they were not breaking any laws. They were
quietly marching down the street. What’s wrong with that?”
Mama glared
at me. Her eyes looked like small pieces of coal. “You and your brother were in
the middle of that mess today?”
“Yes!” I
shouted between gasps. “And we weren’t the only ones. Jeremy and Eula Mae were
there too, and they might be dead or hurt or in jail right now while we sit
here saying grace. I saw daddy hurt people today and I’m ashamed of him. Why
does he have to be a policeman? Why can’t he dig ditches?”
Scrappy
never took his eyes from me. Not once. Mama looked down at the liver and onions
beginning to congeal on her plate. The gravy, shiny only minutes before, looked
like dried mud.
“Sit down
and shut up, Boo,” Scrappy ordered. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I do so,” I
shouted at my brother. “I saw it with my own eyes and I’ll see it in my mind
for the rest of my life, so don’t tell me to shut up, Scrappy. Don’t you ever
say that to me again!”
His eyes
still did not leave mine. In a level voice, sounding much too grown-up, he
said, “Sit down and be quiet, Boo. I understand that you’re upset. But if
you’ll quit acting like a brat long enough for us to talk about what happened,
things might look different.”
Nobody said
anything more until I had cried myself out. Then Scrappy said, “Those students
you saw today did break the law when they disturbed the peace which, as you
well know, is against the law. Daddy was just doing his job.”
Earlier that
day, my brother had made me feel like a bigot because of what I’d said about
Zetty ironing my clothes. He had seen bodies flying through the air and he had
heard their cries of pain when their bones broke on the hard pavement. Scrappy
had been as much a witness to the chaos as I. How then, could he absolve Daddy
of his part in what happened? How could he say Daddy was only doing his job?
“Scrappy,
that’s pathetic. People have been using that flimsy excuse for doing bad things
since God was a baby. Following orders —doing their job. Those kids today were
peaceful; they didn’t disturb anybody; they didn’t break the law. Following
orders doesn’t even come close to excusing what happened to them.”
“Yes, it
does,” Mama said. She placed her napkin on the table and carefully folded it,
making a strong crease down the side with her fingers. She cleared her throat.
“Boo, your
daddy’s responsibility as Chief of Police is to keep order in this town. It is
what he is paid to do. That job you wish he didn’t have, young lady, is what
puts food on our table and buys you the new clothes you love so much. God
willing, it will provide you and your brother with a decent education. Don’t
you criticize my husband. He was doing his job, and knowing him like I do, he
was doing it the best he could. Don’t you dare criticize him, young lady.”
“Mama, you
don’t know what it was like because you weren’t there. I wouldn’t have known
they were there if people hadn’t been staring so hard. Mama, the only time
peace was disturbed was when Daddy gave the order to turn the fire hoses on
them.”
In my eyes,
Daddy had tried to drown the passion of those black students, passion I had
seen for the first time, passion I had envied. But it was beyond my ability to
say how furious I was at him and why. I was young, confused, and torn up
inside. Until that afternoon, I had trusted my father more than anybody in the
world, believed him to be a fair man who did the right thing, no matter what.
“Mama,” I
said. She lifted her chin and looked up at me. “What if those students had been
white? Would it have been disturbing the peace if Scrappy or I had been
marching for something we believed in?”
Before
either of them could respond, I ran out of the house. Grabbing my bike, I rode
like the wind until I gave out of angry fuel at Rocky Bottom. I sat on the
banks crying for a long time before Scrappy’s car eased up behind me.
He got out
of the car, walked over to where I sat and plopped himself down next to me.
Stretching his long legs out in front of him, he put his arm around my shoulder
and pulled me close. Neither of us said anything and I was glad. There were
thousands of angry and confused feelings in my heart, but I wasn’t ready to let
them out and I didn’t want my brother to take away my anger. Not yet.
His voice,
when he finally spoke, felt like salve smoothed over a sidewalk knee scrape.
“Daddy’s not
a bad man, Boo. He looks out for us and for the town, too. You need to remember
that.”
I didn’t say
anything.
“Do you
think he woke up this morning and said, ‘I’m going over to the Fire Department
first thing and make sure those hoses are ready to knock down the Calhoun
College students when they march.” Naah. He left the house like he does every
day and went to work thinking he’d fix a parking ticket or two, or maybe — if
the day got exciting, he’d arrest a shoplifter.”
I continued
to gaze at the river.
“Who knows
why things happen? Maybe because they’re supposed to. The thing is, life can’t
always be as well defined as you want it to be, Boo. Issues are not always
black and white.”
I looked up
sharply at my brother, thinking he had intentionally made the black/white pun,
and I was fixing to let him have it. It surprised me to read on his face that
he’d meant nothing by it. It was just an underline.
“Before you
judge Daddy too hard, think how you would have handled things if you had been
in his shoes. What if you had a job to keep, a family to support, a town to
protect?”
He didn’t
say anything more and it was the last time we ever mentioned that day.
I tossed and
turned before I finally got out of bed and padded softly to the kitchen for a
glass of water. A light was on in the breakfast room making me wonder who else
couldn’t sleep.
Daddy was
sitting alone at the kitchen table in front of what was left of a bottle of
Ancient Age. His shoulders were slumped, his head bent.
I stood
back, shielded by the night shadows. A part of me wanted to put my arms around
the man who had been my hero and who obviously needed to be comforted. But I
was young and ignorant of adult pain, so I remained in the shadows.
I felt his
sadness and it hurt my heart, but something big had happened to me during that
long, horrible day, something unexpected and still very raw. A new piece of me
had reared its head from the cocoon existence of my self-absorbed adolescence,
and it was this new feeling in my soul that compelled me to keep still.
When six
hundred black college students publicly opposed the status quo, it changed
everything for me. If, years from that night, I were to write my life story, I
would be obliged to say, “That day in the Square is when my core belief system
shifted.”
They had
marched in silence even knowing that they would be taunted and sneered at by
intolerant, frightened white people. Prepared to suffer physical abuse or God
knows what, they kept on because they so believed in their cause. I was able to
catch only a measure of that passion, but it was provocative and I was
determined to protect the smattering of transfused spirit I stole from them.
I would no
longer be a naive young girl when, through a different set of eyes, I was able
to be generous in my judgment of Daddy’s involvement that fateful day.
Generosity of spirit came easily when I thought of the students, however. I
sensed the courage it took for them to demand a better way of life for
themselves and their people but Daddy’s part in it was something else. He
followed orders instead of his innate sense of fairness.
And therein
lies the rub.
In my mind’s
eye, I can see Daddy giving the order to turn fire hoses on those students. It
makes me very sad, but I can do it. The thing is, he is long dead and I am left
with only a pocketful of memories of the man who was once my hero.
Other people
can do the blaming, the criticizing. Let them. I choose to remember him on the
night I saw him as a human being. I choose to keep the vision of my father as
he sat all alone in the middle of the night at the kitchen table weeping for
having played a part in man’s inhumanity to man.
That image
remains to remind me that all of us are fallible. Even parents.
