Downtown (53 page)

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mountain, over the fields and everywhere…. Go tell it on the mountain…that Jesus Christ is born….”

The crowd gasped and broke into spontaneous applause.

It went on and on. Her voice was as I had remembered it: a pure and stunning element of nature. She stood quietly smiling until the applause stopped and then went on. The piano and organ swelled behind her. When she finished, the audience was on its feet, clapping, whistling, shouting. It was a most unchurchlike reaction, and the only one possible for the voice of Luella Hatfield. In front of us the Panthers stood and clapped too, as hard as anyone. Flashbulbs bloomed.

“Oh, John,” I whispered, tears trembling on my lower lashes. He did not turn to look at me, but I saw the corners of his mouth lift in a little smile.

After that the chorus led the audience in “Silent Night,”

and then, without a pause, segued into “We Shall Overcome.”

I don’t know why it took me so by surprise. I imagine all concerts in black churches and halls ended with it in those days. I stood holding Luke’s hand, his other hand linked in John Howard’s, and swayed with the crowd, and felt my heart rise out of my body and my tears spill over as we sang:

“Deep in my heart…I do believe…that we shall overcome some day.”

What if I had never come up here from Savannah? I thought. What if I had never had a chance to do this? I will never forget this moment as long as I live.

In front of me the Panthers stood at respectful attention, but they did not clasp hands, and they did not sing.

Over it all the joyous voice of Luella Hatfield rode like a great golden flute.

When the last note had faded, lying like smoke in the still air, no one moved in their seat. It was as if no one wanted to break the tender, perfect skin of the night. Everyone sat silently for another moment, and then the ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 428

Panthers rose in a unit and filed out of their rows and back up the aisle, two by two, tall and black and royal in their silence. Not one of them, I thought, had made a sound the entire evening, except to clap.

Only then did the crowd rise from their seats and reach for their coats and begin to laugh and chat with their neighbors. It was as if a cadre of great black birds of prey had hovered over a woodland for a time, done no harm, and moved on. Only then did life come back into the forest. By the time I had risen and turned to face the departing audience, the Panthers were nowhere in sight, gone out the great double doors onto the porch.

“Well, it went off pretty smoothly, didn’t it?” I said to John Howard. “Where will they go now?”

“Back to their bus,” he said. “They’ll be riding all night.

They’ve got to be in Montgomery in the morning.”

“What for?”

“Going to do a Bar Mitzvah over there,” he said, and I stared at him before I realized he was teasing me. He smiled a little, but he did not take his eyes off the door and the crowd moving toward it.

“Do you think you got anything?” I said to Luke, as he helped me into my coat.

“Not a lot. Maybe some good stuff of faces—” he began.

The first sound broke in then.

It was a confused babel of sound, like a crowd scene in an old movie, spotty and inconsequential, but definitely not the sound of an ordinary crowd leaving a concert. Then shouts rang out, and the thumping and rustling of many feet, and a shrill female scream, and then others. I turned to ice; I could not move.

The double doors burst open and the crowd, that had been streaming out into the night, stampeded back into the church.

Men shouted hoarsely; women screamed; here and there the silvery shriek of a small child tore 429 / DOWNTOWN

over the other sounds. The crowd eddied and swarmed like a living thing, surging back down the aisles toward us, away from the outside. I could see lights out there, brighter than anything I could imagine, seeming to bounce off the spinning wisps of fog and ice that fell steadily into the light, and a deep, monotonous chugging, like the beating of a great inhu-man heart. Ringing, metallic shouts rose over the noise of the crowd. It was only long seconds later that I realized someone was using a bullhorn.

Luke leaped onto the pew and strained to see over the milling crowd.

“That motherfucking Boy has called out the troopers,” he said in a strangely calm voice. “They’ve got a goddamned riot going on out there. Holy Mother of God, somebody should shoot him.”

He leaped down off the seat and took off up the aisle without looking back. I started after him, screaming “Luke, Luke, don’t! Wait, don’t go out there…”

He could not have heard me. Without a backward look he was swallowed up into the crowd trying to press back into the safety of the auditorium. I stood numbly, hands pressed to my mouth, staring at the place he had vanished.

As if in slow motion, as if in the clarity of a dream, or a drugged state, I thought, this is only the first time. All my life, if I spend it with him, I will stand in a crowd watching him rush away into danger, without ever looking back at me….

Beside me John Howard stood stone still, and I turned to him.

“John, go get him,” I said in a silly small voice. “You can get through. I’m afraid something’s going to happen to him….”

He did not look at me. He did not move. He stood staring toward the door. His face was as gray as dead ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 430

ashes. His mouth was open. His eyes looked as if he had been blinded.

We heard the shots then, first one and then a stuttering stitchery of them, and more screams, and, far away, the first shrill keening of an incoming siren. John Howard’s body jerked as if he had been hit by the bullets, and he gave a great, guttural wordless cry and started forward, clumsily, as if he could not make his arms and legs work properly.

I grabbed him around the waist; I all but tackled him and dragged him to the floor. I held on with all my strength, my face buried in his back, screaming, screaming.

“Don’t you dare!” I screamed. “Don’t you dare go out there! Damn you, John Howard, don’t you dare go out there and get yourself killed; I can’t stand it! I won’t let you! What the hell is the matter with you….”

Even as I screamed, even as I held him with all my strength, feeling the muscles in his back and legs straining away from me, feeling the wool of his suit coat scrubbing into my face, I thought, I can’t stop Luke now, but I will die before I let John go. I will die before I do. And I held on, and I held on, and I sobbed.

Abruptly the tension went out of his body and he slumped down onto the seat. I fell backward onto it, too, and sat gasping for breath and staring wildly at him, shuddering with my terror. He sat quietly for a moment, his hands pressed together in front of him as if in prayer, and then he began to cry. It was a terrible crying; a grotesque, choking weeping; an anguished sobbing wrung from a man whom you knew had not wept for a very long time, and never in public. He sat with his hands raised in front of him like a child, his mouth squared away from his teeth in a rictus of grief, his eyes blind with tears. They left opaque silver tracks on his bronze face. He made an awful sound, a keening, but it was very low.

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“I never meant this,” he gasped. “Before Christ, I never meant this….”

I slid over on the seat and put my arms around him and drew his head down on my shoulder, and he slumped against me, and we sat like that for a long time, both of us weeping, he by far the hardest, his sobs racking me as if he had taken my shoulders in his hands and shaken me. I could feel every ragged breath he drew; feel his face hot and wet in my neck; feel the muscles of his body contorted against my hands. We sat like that for a long time. I do not remember how long.

In the pew behind us, a white woman in a fur coat, her hair mussed and her dress over her thighs, massaged her crushed instep and said over, and over, “This is ridiculous.

We only came because our chauffeur’s boy was singing. This is absolutely ridiculous.”

It was not much of a riot, really, as riots go. The icy rain defused it. The Panthers melted away like ground mist and were, as Luke said, halfway to Montgomery before Boy Slattery’s hastily summoned state troopers got their bearings.

There was no threat at all in the concert crowd. There had never been; the Panthers had been nothing if not orderly.

But the ring of troopers and the television lights and cameras, and the chugging generators, and the spinning lights, and the city police screaming in soon after, and the screaming spectators and the students running from the dormitories to see what was going on, all gave it the immediacy and menace of yet another of the awful scenes we had all seen during the summer before, burning on television screens from half a dozen cities. It was the students, confused and furious, who had thrown the first rocks at the troopers, and it had been the cold and panicked

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young troopers, first one and then another, who had shot into the crowd.

No one was killed. Only a few were injured. One Buckhead attorney had a bullet in his shoulder; he had been treated at Piedmont and released. A small black boy, brother of one of the singers, had been shot in the foot, and was in Grady Memorial Hospital, resting after surgery. There were some sprains and fractures. Two or three troopers had stone and brick injuries, and many of the crowd were treated for minor cuts and abrasions suffered in the backwash of the panicked retreat into the chapel. An elderly woman had a heart attack and died in the projects after she got home from the concert, but no one could positively link the attack with the riot. She was very old. Her great-grandson had been singing.

For Atlanta, however, the City Too Busy to Hate, it was a stinging, shameful blow. It was a fiasco of a riot, a joke, a laughing matter: the fat, racist lieutenant governor of Georgia had gotten wind that the Panthers were attending a concert of Christmas carols—Christmas carols, for God’s sake—and called in the state troopers and the media, the troopers managed to shoot a rich lawyer and a little black boy, and then the lieutenant governor holed up in his office under heavy personal guard. Ben Cameron was grim and furious in the newspapers and on television news the next day, de-nouncing Boy Slattery and calling for calm heads to prevail.

Don’t go down to Atlanta University looking for trouble, Ben said. There is no trouble there in that fine institution.

The trouble sits barricaded in the governor’s office, laughing with his racist cronies and counting his votes in the next gubernatorial election. Don’t compound his dirty work, Ben said. Let this sorry thing die.

And it did. The Panthers were long gone to Montgomery or wherever. They had no comment; never did. The university was quiet under a blanket of debris and ice. The 433 / DOWNTOWN

ice rained down all the next day, and Atlanta’s sad, silly Christmas Carol riot was history. Luke barely got enough good shots for a spread in
Life
.

John Howard left Atlanta the day after that.

Luke had gone by to see how he was doing, and found him packing his Mustang. He was silent and stricken and would not tell Luke, at first, where he was going. But he did, finally. Luke told me that night, tears in his eyes for the first time I had ever known him, that John was going to try and make some sort of peace with his wife in Detroit, and to see his child. It had been a long time since he had tried. His wife had never let him before, but now he wanted to try again.

“He needs a family,” he had told Luke. “Everybody needs that. I should have done this long before.”

“Did Dr. King make him leave?” I said.

“No. He says not. He says Dr. King wanted him to come on back to the SCLC office and get on with things. He doesn’t blame John. I think a lot of the other guys do, though.”

“Do you think he’ll ever come back?”

I was beginning to cry now. I could not bear the thought of John Howard driving, in his sorrow and pain, out of town alone in the flashy Mustang.

“I really don’t know, babe. Want to go see him off?”

“Yes. Yes I do, Luke.”

And so the next morning, before full daylight, Luke and I stood beside the icy curb on the Atlanta University campus as John Howard slammed the trunk of the Mustang on the last of his bags and few belongings. Ice glazed, crazily, an old electric fan; roped piles of books were covered with it.

He turned to us.

“I’ll be in touch,” he said to Luke, and hesitated, and then hugged him, hard. Luke hugged him back, and hit him lightly on the bicep with his fist.

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“Smoky,” John Howard said, and looked down at me. I said nothing, only looked up at him, trying not to cry.

“You always go the distance, don’t you, Smokes?” John Howard said softly, and smiled, and touched me on the cheek.

And then he got in the Mustang and drove away, traveling, as he always had, alone.

15

O
N THE SECOND SUNDAY OF JANUARY, LUKE AND I WENT over to Teddy’s apartment to watch the pro playoff game with her and Hank. It was still nominally my apartment too, I suppose; my name was still on the lease, and what little mail I got came there. But I had paid no rent since I had moved in with Luke in the weeks after we had begun our relationship. Teddy would not allow it. She had a trust fund from her grandmother that made rent a small matter, she said. Better I pooled my share with Luke. And it did make a difference to us. Movies and an occasional dinner at an Italian restaurant and even one or two budget weekends in the Georgia mountains were not out of range now.

I never thought about it being a duplicitous arrangement.

Many young Atlanta women were, I knew, keeping nominal apartments in one place and living with their young men in others. I wonder how many mothers were fooled. It was, if not the first wave of the new permissiveness, the last gasp of the old nonpermissiveness. The pill was a great enabler in more ways than one.

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It was good to get out of the dark apartment in Ansley Park for an evening, good to sprawl on the familiar old furniture laughing and jibing with friends, good to mooch about the tiny kitchen, laughing helplessly as Teddy’s and my attempt at a cheese soufflé fell flatter than an old inner tube.