Downtown (46 page)

She wore bell-bottom blue jeans and a peasant blouse, and had sandals on her stubby, sturdy feet. She could not have been long past her teens.

“This is Luella Hatfield,” Luke said. “She helps Mrs. Strauss out and does entirely more for me than I deserve. I think she gets extra hardship pay for keeping after my place. I’m teaching her photography and she’s teaching me to sing.”

“A lost cause,” John Howard said, smiling. “He sings like a forty-dollar mule with the colic. It’s good to meet you, Luella. I’m John Howard.”

“And this is Smoky O’Donnell,” Luke said.

The girl gave John and me a sweet, shy smile.

“You done the Andre piece,” she said. “Luke showed me.

I know you from Selma, Mr. Howard.”

“No kidding,” John Howard said. “Were you marching?

You look too young.”

“No. My daddy wouldn’t let me march till I was sixteen and I wasn’t but fifteen then. I was singin’.”

“Luella was a Freedom Singer,” Luke said. “You remember Bernice Reagon’s bunch? Those great spirituals and movement songs? She had a bunch she took around the South just to sing, and God, sing they did—I never heard such music. They sang us all across that 371 / DOWNTOWN

bridge in Selma. This gal can flat sing; Aretha Franklin hasn’t got anything on her. Folks think there’s an earth-quake when she lets go.”

“I remember,” John Howard said, smiling. “It was the best singing I ever heard. So did you come up here to sing, or what?”

“Well, I just came up here after Selma because it was where Dr. King and all y’all were,” she said, ducking her head. “My daddy wanted me to try to get a scholarship and go on to study somewhere, but I knew I had to be up here where y’all were. So I came on up here with my cousin.”

“Where do you live? Are you studying?” John said. “You ought to be training somewhere—”

“Not much call for singin’ now, don’t look like,” the girl said. Her smile was sunny and without regret. “And my cousin got married and moved to Columbus. I got a job with Miz Strauss right after that. I live in with her. She’s real good to work for. She gives me money and her daughter’s clothes and all the time off I want. She’s trying to see if somebody in the orchestra can get me some training. Her husband used to be the boss of it, you know.”

I felt my heart squeeze. From the valiant verges of the Edmund Pettus Bridge, from the ranks of the best and bravest young voices in the country, to a spare room in a white woman’s house and the cast-off clothes of a white girl. It did not seem much of a trade-off.

I felt my eyes fill. Luke must have seen them. He caught my attention and gave me a stern look and shook his head slightly. Aloud he said, “A person could do worse than work for Mrs. Strauss. She’s a fire-breathing liberal and a soft-hearted romantic at the same time. Luella and I both reap the benefits of that.”

“Sho do,” Luella said.

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“I’ll ask around at AU. I think maybe we can work out some training for you,” John Howard said. He smiled at her with no suggestion of patronization, no sense of the difference between them. “What was your favorite song? Did you have one?”

“I always liked ’Eyes on the Prize,’” she said. “You remember that one?”

“Do I not,” John Howard said. He was silent for a moment, still smiling, as at some lost memory, and then suddenly he closed his eyes and threw his head back and began to sing:
The only chain that a man can stand
Is the chain of hand in hand.

Keep your eyes on the prize,
Hold on, hold on.

He had a voice like a great bronze bell, dark and strong and full of the ancient resonances of Africa, the red clay of Southern fields, that gave the spirituals and the songs of the movement their poignance and power. It was a rich voice, timeless, compelling. I stood with my breath held.

Luella Hatfield clapped her hands and took it up:
We’re gonna board that old Greyhound,
Carrying love from town to town.

Keep your eyes on the prize,
Hold on, hold on.

I have never heard a voice like that since that afternoon.

It swelled and soared until it filled the room and spilled out into the waning afternoon; it was honey, smoke, crystal, fire, wind, water, earth. My hair stood up at the base of my neck.

My spine crawled.

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John moved close to her and put his arm around her and they sang together:

The only thing we did wrong,
Stayed in the wilderness a day too long.

Keep your eyes on the prize,
Hold on, hold on.

But the one thing we did right
Was the day we started to fight.

Keep your eyes on the prize,
Hold on, hold on.

When they stopped, neither Luke nor I spoke. The two intertwined voices seemed to hover in the room like the breath of gods. The silence spun out. From outside, down on the street, came the sound of clapping.

We clapped too, then, and John Howard and Luella Hatfield hugged and laughed, and she ducked her head and slipped out the screen door.

“Pleased to meetch’all,” drifted back.

“‘But the one thing we did right was the day we started to fight,’” John Howard said softly to Luke, and Luke lifted his palms and said, “Who am I to argue with destiny?”

“’Scuse me,” I mumbled, and went into the bathroom and shut the door and ran the water so that they would not hear me cry.

13

I
THINK THAT SOMETIMES THE GREAT CHANGES IN OUR

LIVES, the ones that divide time, happen so deep down and silently that we don’t even know when they occur. I’ve never been good at sensing them. Only with hindsight can I see clearly that yes, this was such an event, that was such a time. It frequently happens that the seasons of the greatest change are the times that feel the most tranquil, the most suspended, the most…timeless, I guess. But if you could read them, as if on some interior seismograph, you could see the sharp peaks and valleys that marked the tiny, silent earthquakes. I suppose it would save everybody a lot of grief if those seismographs were actual, but of course that’s not the way life works. Not mine, anyway.

That fall was one of those times. Earthquake season.

Miniature earthquakes, of course; largely personal ones, but upheavals, certainly. Alterers of lives. But I did not feel them.

I wonder if any of us did, really, in that glorious bronze autumn. Just as I will remember the fall of 1967 as the time that the change began, so will I remember it as the loveliest autumn I have ever seen.

374

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I think it was because it was my first real autumn. We do not have them in Savannah, not really. On the coast of Georgia and the sea islands of the Carolinas, we get a change of seasons, but it would be hard to think of it as conventional autumn. It is too subtle, too slow to ripen. It stays warm for one thing, though the great, suffocating wet heat of summer withdraws. The sea and sky go deep blue and seem to widen, and the sun turns from white to gold, and the light on the marshes becomes strange and luminous, as tawny as the marshes themselves when the green of summer fades. It is lovely and magical, but it is not, to me, autumn.

Fall in the foothill country just below the Blue Ridge Mountains is another matter entirely. That year the heat left swiftly, overnight. A gust of cold air from some faraway Canadian peak swept in at the end of September, driving a great rainstorm ahead of it; a wind that first tickled and shivered, then lashed the pallid, dusty trees, summoning from them a booming shouting chorus they—and we—had almost forgotten. Rain then, in buckets, sheets, shrouds, waves, that drenched the matted ghost of grass in the park across the street from Luke’s apartment, and filled the little stream so that it poured over the waterfall in a flood of tea-brown water. Luke and I were caught in it, coming home from the Atlanta Falcons camp on Black Mountain, North Carolina, where he had been photographing the team at practice, and by the time we got the top of the Morgan up, we were soaked and shivering and laughing with the exhilaration of the promise of fall.

And the next morning, there it was. Waking pressed together in the waterbed, chilly for the first time since I had been sleeping there, we heard the furnace come on in the carriage house, and smelled the familiar, evocative smell of dusty heat. You forget that smell from autumn to autumn, but it means fall to me as surely as the smell ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 376

of sweet smoke from burning leaves, and the perfume of cold winesap apples bought at roadside stands in the mountains.

In a few weeks the great sea of hardwoods from which Atlanta is carved was wildfire. Early frost bit the leaves to scarlet and yellow and bronze, and they skirled down like flaming snow all over the city. The air was clean and bronze-blue, and the sky was a color I had never seen before. We could not seem to get enough of the outdoors. On weekends we took the Morgan and packed lunches and drove into the flaming foothills, or simply took sandwiches and thermoses of coffee into the little park across the street and lay on our backs on an old blanket of the widow’s, the air chilly around us but the high sun lying like thick honey on our closed lids.

We went to football games, we went to craft shows and folk fairs and flea markets. The Southeastern World’s Fair wheeled by in a Technicolor blur of sawdust and cotton candy; we went to the freak shows and the nude revues and rode everything, and Luke won me a truly dreadful Barbie doll look-alike dressed up like Scarlett O’Hara. It was the worst prize he could find in the entire hideous pantheon.

When we made love that night, burrowed deep under the nest of blankets and quilts that covered the waterbed now, that smelled of smoke from the fires that we never quite made properly, the Scarlett doll simpered at us from the corner of Luke’s bureau until he got up and draped his shorts over her.

“Lawdy, Miss Scarlett, you don’t know nothin’ ’bout no fuckin’,” he growled into my neck, and I laughed with joy and a kind of happiness that was deeper and quieter than joy. They say that spring is for lovers, but to me autumn will always be the very living country of love.

Love? Dear Lord, but I was in love. Teddy had been right; I was impossible. I had thought I had loved people 377 / DOWNTOWN

before, but I simply had not known what the word meant.

I could not even remember what I had felt for Brad Hunt, and I had thought, for a time, that surely I loved him.

He had called several times while he was in Huntsville, unable to believe that I would not forgive him that single lapse and I could not think what to say to him that would not hurt him. Finally I had said, badly and without preface, that I was in love with Luke Geary, and he had said that that was quick work even for a couple of micks, and hung up on me. I felt a kind of dim, generic regret, but mostly relief.

Nothing, now, stood between me and Luke.

Teddy said more than once that fall that many people went all their lives and never felt what I felt for Lucas Geary, and did very well, and maybe, in the long run, better with lesser passions. It was her fond but exasperated contention that I had turned as stupid as a sheep with my feelings for him, though I tried very hard, when I thought about it, not to allow this consuming new emotion to affect my work. I suppose it did, though; how could it not have? I was not at all the same person I had been before the night at La Carrousel, not even remotely. That person was untouched. This one was used, involved, consumed. It had to show.

I did not see him nearly as much as I had before, certainly not every day. We soon found that there had to be, as Kahlil Gibran said in
The Prophet
, spaces in our togetherness.

Otherwise I think the intensity might have burnt up something vital and healthy in both of us. It certainly would have annoyed the people around us badly; almost everyone in
Downtown
’s orbit knew about Luke and me, and almost no one seemed sanguine about it. No one wished us ill, I don’t think, except perhaps Matt, who openly disliked the relationship. But it

ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 378

seemed to unsettle everyone who was a part of that tight, shining entity known as Comfort’s People. Everybody in the inner circle grumped or teased or laughed about Luke and me. I remembered what Teddy had said, in one of the first talks we had ever had together: that Comfort’s People did not have interrelationships, but were faithful to the whole.

I had not paid a great deal of attention at the time; it had not, then, occurred to me that I would ever want to be anything but one of Comfort’s People. Now, I wondered peevishly, when Teddy rolled her eyes or Hank jibed at me or Matt bellowed in frustration when he needed Luke and found him in my office or gone entirely, why it was not possible to be Luke Geary’s person as well as one of Matt Comfort’s.

We had both begun as Matt’s people. But the part of me that was not drowned in Luke knew, wearily and well, that it was not. I realized many times that fall that we had broken the code, but it was beyond me to care.

Unlike me, Luke did not seem to change at all. Luke was so inalterably Luke that Luke in love was indistinguishable from Luke not in love. In the office he did everything he always had: he lounged on office floors and shot lazy, lewd photographs of female underpants; he baited Sister and bantered with Hank and went to lunch with Matt and let him pick up the check; he grinned ostentatiously at Culver Carnes and photographed Culver’s stiff, furious, retreating behind when he steamed out of the office on yet another unsuccessful mission to catch the Caped Cupholder Crusader in the act; he signed Culver’s name to several more luncheon checks for Francis Brewton and the lank, wild-eyed young gospel preacher on the corner of Spring and Peachtree Streets; he borrowed endless dimes from petty cash for stamps and coffee and candy bars, and never paid them back.

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But at night, and on weekends, he was solely and wholly with me.

How could I have known anything like it existed? Not many people get in a lifetime what I had with Luke in those first few weeks, I don’t think. Or perhaps they do, and handle it better. But I don’t see how a great many could, and get the world’s work done. It was more a tribute to Luke and his insistence on workaday normalcy that I got mine done, than to my own powers of concentration. I was, in those days, purely drunk on sensation.