Andersen, Kurt (15 page)

“Violet? What’d you think of the march on Washington?”

“Haven’t read my paper yet today.”

“But it was on TV! Live! Mom and I and the little kids all watched.”

“Didn’t see it. The Stuarts”—the family in Highland Park for whom she worked two days a week—”won’t have no TV or radio on in the house during the day. And by the time I got home,
Huntley-Brinkley
already talked about it, I guess.” She was peeling, not looking at me. “They’re about to make the news thirty minutes long starting next week. So maybe I can get to see it sometimes.”

Perhaps Violet complained more—more slyly—than I’d realized as a child. “Well, there’s a lot more news to cover these days.”

“Uh-huh,” she said, “that’s true.” She plonked her peeled potato into the water. “My neighbor says movie stars were there, the
Ben-Hur
man—”

“Charlton Heston.”

“—and that cute colored boy, Sidney Portoo …”

“Sidney Poitier. He was. And Bob Dylan sang.”

“Who’s that?” Violet asked.

“That singer you say looks like Chuck who you think can’t sing worth a darn?”

She smiled. “So it was a whole
show,
huh?”

“Yeah, and the biggest demonstration ever in Washington.
Ever,
in history. Martin Luther King’s speech came at the end. It was on all three channels at once, the whole speech, live, for like fifteen minutes. I don’t think that’s ever happened before, either, in history.”

She stopped peeling and looked at me. “What’d Dr. King say?”

“Well, you know. He said he has a dream of everybody being equal and everybody treating everybody else fairly.”

“Huh. That’s what he said for a quarter of an hour?”

“No. He said that—” I stopped. “Is it okay—do you mind if I say ‘Negro’?” Violet referred to Negroes exclusively as “colored people.”

“It’s okay, honey.”

“He said that Negroes aren’t free in America, even in the North, because of segregation and discrimination. That it’s shameful for America to be this rich, rich country where Negroes are forced to live on a poor island. That America gave the Negroes a bad check and now we won’t cash it.”

She chuckled. “Dr. King called it that? ‘A bad check’?”

“Yeah, and that we can’t have freedom happen
gradually,
that we have to do it right now, immediately. That he’s leading a revolt that won’t stop.”

I could see she was a little shocked. “A
revolt
? He used that word?”

“Yup.”

“Well,” she said, shaking her head, just barely smiling again. “I’ll be.”

“And you could hear people in the audience shouting back at him,
‘Yes,’
‘Uh
-huh,
’ ‘
Say
it.’ It gave me goose pimples.”

“Did it upset you, Kay-Ray?”

“
No!
It made me excited. And he said that Negroes shouldn’t hate white people, and they need to let the
good
white people, who want to help them, help them.”

“Mm-hm,” she said, and started peeling another potato.

“Have you ever seen police brutality, Violet? He talked about the ‘horrors of police brutality’.”

“I seen a horror all right. A great big horror with the police right there. That’s why I live in Chicago and not in Arkansas no more.”

“What happened?” In the hundreds of hours I’d talked with Violet over the previous decade, I’d learned that she’d been born in Arkansas, had arrived in Chicago as a girl, and had lived in the same neighborhood ever since, somewhere between Hyde Park and the Loop, although she’d recently moved to a smaller apartment, since her three boys were grown. Her ex-husband had worked at a meatpacking plant. Her eldest son’s wife had been murdered in 1957. Violet’s friends were always “pushing on” her to attend church, which she called “the A.M.E.” Lady’s slipper orchids were her favorite flower, fried chicken livers her favorite food, and
The Real McCoys
her favorite TV show. Her left hip hurt lately. She loved country music and horse racing. She had asthma. Those were the facts I knew about Violet Woods. “What was the big horror that made you move here?” I asked.

She used her asthma inhaler and took a deep breath and looked at me, and in the moment I saw her deciding that I was old enough to hear the truth, I felt the enormous pleasure of being taken seriously. She stood up with her potatoes and bowl and asked me to “skooch the bench a little, would you, out of the sun,” then sat down again and proceeded to tell me her story. Violet was not ordinarily chatty.

Violet said she’d lived outside the town of Moscow, Arkansas. Her parents were tenant farmers growing cotton—”renters, not croppers,” she made a point of saying. The winter and spring she was eleven, in 1927, it rained and rained, and the levees on the Mississippi and all the other rivers broke, and on Easter Sunday the land flooded “just like it says in the Bible. Everything washed away, our little place, all the equipment, the mules, everything. I saw the Arkansas River run
backwards.
The land was an ocean, with a few islands where we gathered up. At the Red Cross camp, my little brother Joe caught sick and died right away.”

“My gosh, it sounds like a nightmare.”

“Uh-huh, that’s right, exactly what it was, like a terrible dream. It didn’t seem like it could be real. It was like a
story.
”

“That was the horror that made your parents decide to move to Chicago?”

She shook her head. She said they weren’t allowed to leave the Red Cross camp until the man—she did not say “the white man”—who owned the land they farmed came and signed them out. This made her father angry—”since Daddy wasn’t no
cropper,
he was a
renter
”—which in turn made a policeman hit him with a club. Then the National Guard soldiers arrived and forced her father to work rebuilding a levy, standing in the cold floodwater heaving sandbags all day long. After another week, the family escaped the camp in the middle of the night.

“Escaped?”
I said, astonished.
Slaves
escaped, not people thirty years ago, not someone I
knew.
“Oh my God!”

“Uh-huh.”

She started peeling the last potato. I reminded myself that my parents paid Violet twelve dollars a day for six hours of work—way above the minimum wage, Dad said.

“Then you came to Chicago?” I asked.

She shook her head again. “To Little Rock, where my mama’s people lived at. We got to Little Rock on a cool, bright Sunday, the first of May. First city I ever saw.
That
was like a story, too, so big and busy and fine.” She plopped the last naked white potato into the bowl of water, rolled up the paper sack full of peels, and gripped it with both hands as she continued.

“Right away we found out Little Rock was all terrified. The day before, they found a girl murdered in a church, a white girl, and they’d caught the one who did it, the janitor at the church, a colored man. So the white people in Little Rock was angry and upset. And then, after we been in the city just a couple days, some white woman said
another
colored man attacked
her
and her daughter. The man they said did
that
turned out to be a cousin of ours—he was simple, Mama said. You know, retarded? Anyhow, at dusk, this whole parade of cars come driving slow down the big main street where we was staying at, honking horns. Cars and cars full of white men, and in the colored neighborhood there. We all looking out the front windows, watching, and then one of my aunties shouts, ‘Holy Jesus, it’s
Johnny,
they
killed
Johnny!’

“This colored man, his body, was tied onto the bumper of a car, just dragging and bouncing along the road half-naked. And he
already
been hung.
And
shot. First time I ever saw Cousin John, he was all bloody and ragged like some dirty side of hog meat. Then they stopped, and pretty soon there was
so
many white people, hundreds, all excited, and they lit a great big fire right in the street and burned him up.”

“Oh my God, Violet!” Tears were dribbling from my eyes. Once again, as when I’d watched the Birmingham police with their fire hoses and German shepherds, along with shock and disgust, I felt excited to be getting the plain and ugly truth firsthand. “You must have been so scared. Didn’t the police come?”

“They came. But didn’t do nothing to stop it. Even when people was tearing apart that boy’s burned-up body.”

“Oh, God, no!
No!
”

“My daddy saw a man carrying and waving John’s burned arm like it was a prize he won at a fair.”

“People are evil. People are
monsters.
”

“Mm-hm, some people.”

I wiped away my tears and took a deep quivering breath. “I don’t know why all colored people don’t hate all white people.
Seriously.
”

She leaned over and hugged me. “No, no, I’m sorry, Kay-Ray, honey, I didn’t mean to make you cry.”

“You know what? I wish I could travel back in time, and take a gun, and go to that street in Little Rock, and shoot all those people.” I made fists and vibrated them close together, firing a big machine gun like in a war movie, mowing down that lynch mob around the bonfire in Little Rock.

I could see that I’d upset her a little. Suddenly, Peter ran out onto the porch—”Hi, Violet!”—and past us, down the wooden stairs straight out to the backyard. My mother caught the screen door before it sprang shut. She looked at Violet and me. She sensed the unusual emotional weather.

Violet stood and picked up the bowl of potatoes—not wanting to seem like a shirker or troublemaker, I understood. “Morning, Mrs. Hollaender.”

“What’s going on here?” Mom asked with a big smile, her voice in a high register. Strenuous good cheer with a strong undercurrent of anxiety became her default affect for dealing with my adolescence and the 1960s.

“Karen was telling me all about Dr. King and the march on TV yesterday.”

“Oh, you didn’t get to see it, Violet? It was
so moving.
The Lincoln Memorial looked beautiful. It was just wonderful. It made us proud.”

“Proud?”
I said. “Really? I don’t know how any white people in America can
ever
feel proud, Mom. Even people like us.”

In
Newsweek
a few days later, I would read every word about the March on Washington and the Negro revolution, and I’d fill five pages of my final scrapbook with the articles. I would circle certain paragraphs. I would underline the quote by Roy Wilkins, the nice, moderate Negro who ran the NAACP: “The Negro citizen has come to the point where he is not afraid of violence. He no longer shrinks back. He will assert himself, and if violence comes, so be it.”

11

Because I’m conscientious to a fault, I phone my hotel in Washington. Despite our on-time takeoff from LAX, I tell the clerk, it turns out I will arrive two hours late, due to an unscheduled stop in Omaha, Nebraska.

Just after we crossed the Rockies, a large, middle-aged Hispanic woman in a fringed leather jacket who was reading Ron Paul’s book
The Revolution: A Manifesto,
became convinced that a Sikh man in the seat next to her was “a Tibetan terrorist.” She stood declaiming—”We are in
danger
! Dear
God,
somebody tell the damn pilot to take this aircraft down
right away
!” People got nervous. A woman across the aisle started crying. The guy sitting next to me seemed less terrified than resigned. “If it’s your time, it’s your time,” he kept repeating until I asked him to stop.

By the time we landed in Omaha, a lot of the passengers were under the impression that the loud woman was the alleged terrorist—the shouting, the “God,” the “damn pilot” the “take this aircraft down,” maybe her brown skin, maybe the title of her book—but in any event, FBI agents hustled both her and the Sikh off the plane. Somewhere over Iowa, the captain came on the speaker and calmly explained: the woman had misunderstood her neighbor when he’d mentioned that he was a breeder of Tibetan
terriers,
that he had “three good boys” in the cargo hold who weren’t a bit scared but whose tranquilizers fortunately would wear off before the plane reached the nation’s capital. “The gentleman and his three puppies,” the chuckling pilot said, “will be put on the first flight east in the morning, with our sincere apologies.” We all applauded and laughed and shook our heads and have been guzzling free wine and cocktails ever since.

The terror caused by the 9/11 attacks had a half-life, it seems to me, of eighteen months. By the spring of 2003, we were definitely half as scared as we’d been on September 12, 2001. The half-life of the terror following the Boca Raton yacht bomb has been about a year, although we’ve all learned of a new acronym (RDD, for radiation dispersal device) and a new radioactive element (californium), and we have opinions about dispersal radii and an obscure new Muslim country (Mauritania). Given how ineffectual the attack was by 9/11 standards—eleven deaths, four pleasure boats, and a pier—the fear it whipped up seems remarkable to me. Even now, tourism to Miami and the rest of South Florida is two thirds what it was before the bomb.

For a few years when I was young, we had political bombings in this country, and not just a couple. Believe it or not, during 1969 and 1970 there was an average of eight bombings
every day
in America. Security at office buildings and government facilities did not get noticeably tighter. Travel didn’t become more difficult. No squads of soldiers with automatic weapons appeared. Sweeping new law enforcement protocols were not passed by Congress. Those hundreds of bombings caused no wholesale national freakout. Maybe people who had endured the Great Depression and World War II were not so easily spooked by bombings of police stations and recruiting offices and banks. Or maybe that same generation had been so utterly discombobulated already by the spectacle of the previous few years—assassinations and race riots, a bewildering, unstoppable hedonism at home and a bewildering, unstoppable asceticism in Vietnam—that by 1970 they simply had no more outrage and panic to spare for the small-bore dynamite antics of a few far-left freaks. And most of our homegrown bombers back then did scruple to avoid killing people.