Blue Highways (16 page)

I let it pass. Headline: Y
ANKEE
H
ALF-BREED
K
NIFED
.

He waited, then said, “I’ll tell you this too. Problems we got ain’t so much from niggers. They’re more likely from Northern jacks comin’ down here messin’ where it ain’t their concern. Tellin’ us how to live. That’s what’s got everbody riled includin’ niggers. You a reporter?”

“Just traveling through. Wanted to see what’s changed in Selma.”

“Way we do bidness what’s changed. For the worse. But the thinkin’ ain’t. We live ever man like he wants. Take Bernita here. She wants to get on the bar and strip and show off her bidness, ain’t no man gonna stop her.”

“Would anybody stop a black man if he wanted a drink in here?”

“I’ll be go to hell. Shit. I been all through this. I’m sick of it.” He turned away and talked to Bernita. She left to serve a table, and he looked at me again. “Cain’t figure what you’re gettin’ at.”

“Just want to see how things are. All I know is from books or TV.”

“There it is. That whole march was a TV stunt. Niggers knew what would happen here. That’s why they came. Hardly none of them lived here. They knew the sheriff had himself a reputation. They picked him, not the town. Well, they got what they were lookin’ for. I’m sick of goin’ over and over it.” He went to the toilet. When he came back, he had another drink. “Cain’t figure what you’re drivin’ at.”

I didn’t answer. He kept turning to the topic as if I were pushing him into it. He wanted to talk it through, and he blamed me for that.

“Those marchers rolled their own dice, and we got flammed. Course it ain’t hard to flam George Wallace.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m tellin’ you sickin’ dogs and poundin’ the niggers was a lack of ignorance. We shoulda paid no mind. Then the cameras woulda stayed in the bags. That’s what ruined us—photographers and reporters. Like with the Klan. Some Grand Genie comes crawlin’ outa his rotten stump, and there go the cameras and the tongue-cluckin’ over the poor South.” He stared into the dark mirror. “Used to be everbody stayed in their place. That’s what’s got all mixed round. I’m sick of talkin’ about it.”

“Don’t get the wrong idea,” Bernita said. “Selma’s a nice town. We got Coloreds in city hall and places. Only thing I don’t like is people are two-faced—friendly at first, then you see the truth.”

Ray said, “Don’t know what he’s tryin’ to get at. Hell, I got niggers workin’ for me over at the dealership. I hire them, but they up and quit.”

“What kind of work?”

“Washin’ cars.”

“They ever get to sell a car?”

“You know anything? I’d lose ever one of my customers.”

“Looks like you’ve got each other by the balls. Somebody needs to let go.”

He leaned back on the stool. “Well, well, well. Got a lot of advice, don’t you now? You don’t know a damn thing. Come in for a day and got the answers. No use explainin’ to you. Tell me, you talk with any niggers?”

“Not here.”

“Not here. You got a picture in your brain all made up like a bed. Know all about it. We never burned our cities.”

“Who said it was a Southern problem? It’s a world problem.”

“You finally come up with somethin’.”

As we talked, he said
nigger
less, as if he’d drained the poison for a while. He didn’t soften; he just expressed himself in other terms, although at no time did he try to hide where he stood. But he held more sorrow and regret than hatred. He was more empty than malicious.

M
ARTIN
Luther King, Jr., Drive used to be Sylvan Street. Some whites in Selma still called it Sylvan Street. It’s the main route through the so-called project—a typical federally sponsored housing district—and the street the Southern Christian Leadership Conference assembled the marchers on, using the block under the high steeple of Brown’s Chapel as the starting point. The first marchers walked down Sylvan (as it was then), up Water Avenue, turned left, and started across Pettus Bridge. About half a mile. At the other end of the bridge, deputies and troopers, shouting to the people they had no permit to march, forced them back to Water Street. But for once, chants and signs and feet were better weapons than anything the state could summon. Whitman, the egalitarian, said it a century before:

I will make a song for the ears of the President, full of weapons with menacing points,

And behind the weapons countless dissatisfied faces.

When King assembled the marchers again two weeks later, he had not only a permit, he had also the protection—albeit spotty—of federal troops called out by President Johnson, the man with the big ears. People gathered at Brown’s Chapel and walked fifty miles to Montgomery. The two marches roused Washington as none of the other SCLC confrontations had, and a few months later the Congress passed the Federal Voting Rights Act.

It was dark and moonless when I started looking for Brown’s Chapel. I planned just to drive by, but I stopped near a big brick church that fit the description to ask a black man if it was the chapel. “That’s it,” he said. “What difference does it make?”

Without knowing it, he had asked me the question I’d come to Selma to answer. “Isn’t this where King started the march?”

“What they say. So who cares?”

I stood on the step of the van. “I’m trying to find out if things have changed since the march.”

“Tell you in three words.
Ain’t nothin’ changed.
”

“Let me ask another question. Could you get a drink in Mickey’s tonight?”

“Go ask me if I
want
in there, because I’ll tell you they don’t gotta keep this man out because he don’t want in.”

“I hear you, but
could
you?”

“Minute I do it’s membership time.”

“I just went in and nobody said anything about membership.”

“Your membership’s got a way of standin’ out—just like mine.”

Several teenagers gathered around. I was the wrong color on the wrong street, but no one said anything. The man talking to me was James Walker, born and raised in the Selma project and just discharged from four years in the Air Force. “Been almost ten years to the day since King got shot,” he said, “and the movement’s been dead that long. Things slippin’. Black man’s losin’ ground again. My momma’s afraid to talk to a white, and my grandmomma don’t care. She just worries about the kids.”

“Didn’t the march do anything you can see?”

“Say what? Last week I went to get my driver’s license. Twelve-thirty. Lunchtime. Sign on the door says they open again at one. I wanted to wait inside, so I pulled on the door. Trooper comes out and says, ‘What’s wrong, fool? Cain’t read? Get off that door less you want me next time comin’ out shootin’.’ There’s your change.”

“Where?”

“Ten years ago he woulda come out shootin’ the first time.”

“What happened?”

“Nothin’, dude. This man’s not stupid. I know when to shut up and I know when to talk. This man knows when he’s got a chance.”

A police car cruised by. A teenager said, “That’s twice.” A Buick pulled up and Walker got in. He said, “You’re makin’ people nervous comin’ in down here. You ain’t the right color, you know. Better watch your ass tonight.” The car jumped forward then backed up. “If you ain’t jivin’ about the church, come round the basketball court in the mornin’.”

I drove out to George Corley Wallace Community College, one of three new schools by that name in the state. Sometime after midnight, the Ghost shook a little and I woke up. It shook again. I crept to the front curtain. A man standing on the bumper played a light over the seats. Just as I opened the door, he got into a squadcar. “What’s wrong?” I called out.

“Only checking, neighbor.” He drove off quickly.

I closed up again and went back to bed. Checking? What the hell for?

A
T
ten the next morning, I was back on King Drive, a block south of where it crosses Jefferson Davis Avenue. On the basketball court, Walker was alone, juking and shooting. “Hey! You showed up.” For the first time I saw him smile. “Just workin’ on my game till school starts. Didn’t get out of the Air Force in time to make spring term.”

“What school?”

“Alabama Lutheran here in Selma. All-black, which is what I want. I’m tired of hasslin’ with whites. Got enough in the Force.”

“You don’t want to go North or West?”

“And be a minority? That ain’t my land.”

“What’ll you do here?”

“Study guidance counselin’. I’m stayin’ where I can do some good. Fifty-five percent of Selma’s black. We got potential. First, though, brothers gotta see what’s on the other side of Pettus Bridge, see where to go from here.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean figurin’ a new course. King said turn the other cheek. Malcolm X said fight fire with fire. I don’t want that. But we gotta show the brothers they can do more than just hang cool like meat in a locker.”

“Maybe things haven’t changed because of apathy in the project.”

“I ain’t lettin’ nobody off that easy. A man shouldn’t gotta care so much about gettin’ a fair game.
You
gotta worry every day about a fair game?”

“Not usually.”

“So why should this man? Sure, the brothers could do more, and they would if they didn’t spend so much time gettin’ and keepin’ a job. Wearies a man out. It never quits. If a brother gets hired and then gets active—there goes the job he worked his ass off to get.”

“Can’t legally let a man go if he’s not talking around on company time.”

“They don’t fire him—ain’t that clean. They hassle him. Get him thinkin’ new ideas ain’t worth it. Stay on him till he quits. A mover gets to stay only if boss-man’s under quota. Otherwise, carry your hat in your hand.”

A friend of Walker’s came up. “Saw you down here last night,” he said. “We doan get many calls from your people.” His name was Charles Davis. He worked the middle shift at a battery factory. “I’ll tell you about jobs. If I quit mine and go over to the job office, they’ll hand me a shovel or send me to Florida to pick oranges. I can do more than dig a hole or cut a weed.”

“Lotta people in the project feel like they cain’t be nobody,” Walker said. “Me? I feel I can be President of the United States.”

“Sheeeit, man!” Davis said. “Force musta did your brain-housing group in.”

“I know things ain’t changed, but things gonna change.”

“Young, and mad, and believe so much,” Davis said.

“I’m twenty-four and he’s thirty-one. So I
am
from nowhere. I’m talkin’ future. Anyway, this man wants to know about the march.”

“Think I was fifteen,” Davis said. “Made both marches. People be sayin’ we wasted our time, but things are better. Least a little bit.”

“Ain’t nothin’ changed didn’t have to change,” Walker said.

“Some of those things be important, though. But lotta times it’s like always. Take yesterday. I put a quarter in a sodapop machine at the gas station. Money keeps comin’ down. Two honkies sit watchin’. I ask if the machine was broke, and one honker says it takes thirty cents now. Machine says twenty-five on it. Then he says, ‘Wondered how long fore you figured it out.’ He couldn’t tell me they changed it. I said, ‘Don’t take long to figure you,’ and walked off. Other honker says, ‘Want me to whup the nigger?’ Five years ago I’da fought him. Now I try to ignore it. But hey, I used to follow Malcolm X.”

“I’ll tell you one,” Walker said. “Alabama state motto is ‘Defendin’ Our Rights.’ And that’s all we’re doin’. All the time.”

“Motto doan have you in mind, James.”

“Better start.”

“Hey, we finally got a black Santa Claus at the mall. Only thing, he scared hell out of the little black kids. They be dreamin’ of a white Christmas.”

“That’s just education,” I said.

“Yeah, but you see how far it goes. Littlest thing’s work and worry. Gotta always have your back in the air, and that wears you down, just like they want. Here’s another one. Six people killed in the project last year, and nobody’s gone uptown for murder yet. If a white dude gets it, somebody goes uptown inside three weeks. Maybe the wrong man, but somebody’s goan. Law don’t care what we do to ourself. Black on black’s outside their law.”

“No black police?”

“They be worsen a honky pig. Those black motherheads’ll manhandle you. Nothin’ but Oreos—black out, white in.”

“All honky law wants is get a man in jail so’s they know where he’s at.”

“But whiteys that run things here don’t mind a little black poontang now and then. That’s their contribution to equality—hump a nigger.”

“Yeah, but let a black dude even walk down the street next to a white woman, and in six months they goan frame you. Goan plant some dope in your ride or your house. Put a white bitch on you and pay her to yell rape. They come up with somethin’. They want our best women, but they take you uptown if you say ‘hey’ to a honky woman none of them would touch with a fence rail.”

We walked around to a small, windowless, brick sweetshop run by a blindman named Louie. Davis bought three cigarettes, lit one, and put two under his hat. A white candy vendor came in. Louie asked how many of each item he was leaving. They conducted the transaction on trust.

Davis said, “Saw whitey rip you, Louie.”

“Naw, you didn’t. Candyman ain’t rippin’ off old Louie.”

Walker and I drank grape Nehi. He said, “Louie, tell the man here what it was like when we all did the march.”

“Louie done a business like he never seen.”

“Just business to you, ain’t that right, Louie?”

“Business be business.”

Outside the shop, Davis said, “I’ll tell you a funny one. Last week watchin’ at the ballgame. A couple of us sittin’ on the fender of some Pontiac. Little bitty white dude comes up draggin’ a baseball bat. He’s just learnin’ to talk. He says, ‘You niggers get off my daddy’s car!’ Couldn’t hardly pronounce
nigger
. We laughed. Then Daddy comes up and moves the car and never says nothin’. We never blamed the kid. We know where it’s comin’ from.”

A uniformed man drove by in a Bell Telephone truck. Walker nudged Davis. “That’s four today. Two last night.”