Five Smooth Stones (113 page)

"Without trying."

"Now the ban is even stricter, although, of course, it's not a legal one. They're beginning to smell something. I get here by devious routes, sneaking out the back door of the bus station across from the Grand, or I drive either north or south of town, make a swing around the side roads and come in the back way, the way you came this morning."

"For me it comes naturally. Back doors, back roads."

"All right. We're not kidding ourselves that the whites don't know about it. Hummer, you want to take over?"

"You're doing fine, Reverend, doing fine. You make a mistake, I'll stop you. You just keep a-going while I rests my voice."

"I don't know whether Brad told you, but we were planning one, perhaps two, demonstrations."

"Red herrings, as I understand it."

"Yes. Aimed, of course, at voter registration. But we want to keep them within the law. Not as a matter of principle but as a matter of expediency. Too much friction, any violence, could throw a monkey wrench in our more important project."

"A guy sitting in a jail cell saying he won't work isn't as effective as a man sitting on his porch saying the same thing."

"You still catch on quickly, don't you? Now, there's considerable profanity called for in this next bit, and I ought to let Brad or Fred take over, but I'll keep on and try and restrain myself. Day before yesterday, Sunday, there was a wildcat demonstration. It was just after sundown, close to dark. A torchlight parade, a 'Light of Freedom' parade, according to the placards."

"Wait," said David. "Wait, Chuck." A little crippled boy named Billy was a long way off now, and he was kicking himself mentally for ever having changed his plans to go to Boston. He was sure he knew what was coming. "YPCF? Mostly kids?"

"Nothing but. The dear, dedicated Young People's Committee for Freedom."

"Oh, God!" said David. "Why didn't I stay in bed!"

"I reckon it's because basically you haven't got good sense. Anyhow—"

"Chuck." Brad was walking back from the kitchen to the table, a cup of fresh coffee in his hand. "Let me pick it up here for a while. You see, David, we have no right to feel too angry. In a large measure it was our own damned fault. Hummer has had to be away every now and then, frying other fish—"

"At least, getting the fat ready," said Hummer. "But you still got no business faulting yourselves, Brad. I should of thought."

"Not of everything, Hummer," said Brad. "No man can. The point is that we failed to take one important factor into consideration. The young people. It's difficult to include kids too young to work in a project like this. If we'd been smart, we would have started a youth project, moving along with the other, perhaps a 'Future Voters' organization, something like that. These kids, as you well know, can't be left at loose ends now; some of them went to Heliopolis, took part in that demonstration you got caught up in. They've smelled action. Siege tactics don't appeal to them."

The telephone rang, and Hummer Sweeton answered it softly, and when he had finished talking, stood and touched Brad's shoulder gently. "I have to run along, Brad. You and Chuck's doing fine. If you need me, I'll be over at the Zion Church. They waiting for me there for a meeting with some young folks. I ain't too worried. I think we can get them young uns back in line."

Les Forsyte came in from the kitchen. "You're not going riding around this town alone, Reverend, the way things are. I'm coming along. One of you guys here can take over on the dishes."

"After that meeting you get some rest, Hummer," called Brad.

"Lawd! Who can rest!" Sweeton paused in the doorway and waved his hand, palm outward, the same quick wave David had seen in Montgomery. It was an infinitely gentle gesture, inexplicably touching. When he had left, Brad turned back to David.

"As I was saying: by the time we realized that we had slipped up it was damned near too late. These kids have been out of school since June; they're ripe for trouble, easily led—"

David leaned forward, pushing back plates and cup and saucer to assume his favorite position, arms splayed out, chin touching the knuckles of his clasped hands. "Brad. Hold on a minute. I have a question. When I talked to you on the telephone last week, before you came down to New Orleans, you mentioned Garnett. Has he been around?"

"Yes. He was here a while back, when we had the first demonstration; then he went to Heliopolis, and from there he went, I think, to Chicago. Then he came back here."

"When?"

"Last Friday. Two days before I did. To help the Reverend, he said."

"Sweeton?"

"Yes."

David looked across the table at Winters, who had been sitting quietly beside Chuck, listening. After a moment Winters shrugged. "I'm on a spot, Champlin. Officially, I'm not in this. You know our policy. Follow your own course, don't obstruct other groups, give, along with ALEC, all possible legal assistances—and above all, don't interfere. We've lost credit for a hell of a lot of things we've done, and been blamed for a lot we haven't. Right now one of the heaviest crosses we have to bear, in our relationships with our own people, is the way the whites pat us on the back." He sighed. "As for Garnett. We had him. And we told him to get lost. He's got an armor-plate hide either by nature or because it suits his purposes. Right now, for the time being, he's got Hummer Sweeton sold. I've tried warning Hummer, and Les is watching out, but Hummer's such a livin' saint himself—" Winters shrugged again.

"We can't put all the blame on this character," said Chuck. "There's someone else here. A woman named Sue-Ellen Moore."

"Jesus have moicy!" David laid his forehead on his clasped hands, and his shoulders shook with something that was both laugh and shudder.

Brad said, "You know her, too?"

David looked up. "Yeah, I know her." When he and Brad were alone he'd tell Brad of his last meeting with Sue-Ellen. "Any suggestions?" asked Brad.

"No. Hell, no. Not at this point. What did they do to the demonstrators? And you don't need to tell me they were all kids, fifteen to seventeen. Or under."

"They jailed them, of course. They turned the youngest ones—and some of them were damned near babies—loose that night. The rest they fined heavily and turned loose the next morning and gave them an ultimatum. County juvenile detention home the next time."

"That something new?"

"Yes. Born of the present crisis. Crises, I should say. God forbid any child of mine should go there!"

"Sue-Ellen?"

"They didn't turn her loose till this morning."

"So there was no trouble last night."

"Let's say the natives were restless. Hummer took advantage of the situation to get it under control."

Fred Winters interrupted. "The night the kids were in jail they called an emergency council meeting, passed an emergency curfew ordinance. No one on the streets under the age of eighteen after seven o'clock at night. White or colored. The next day they built the stockade. You'll see it. There is—or was—a large parking lot between the jail and the City Hall. It's now a stockade, with cyclone fencing along the street side, and barbed wire along the top."

"David, what's this woman's general technique?" asked Brad.

"She doesn't have what you could call a technique. But she's very militant in her approach to the problem, and she thinks anyone older than twenty-one in the South has already had it, so she works entirely with the youngsters. From what I hear she often gets overzealous and goes ahead with her own plans, and more than once she's loused up some other group's project that had a wider-range goal. Trouble is, she means well, yet at the same time the result is often to place the whites in a position where it's easy to double-cross us."

"Is it ever difficult?" asked Brad.

"I know. Look, I'm not saying the Negro has any obligation whatsoever to adhere to any so-called code of ethics with the whites. We never learned one. No one ever practiced one on us. We weren't worth it. It's just more practical sometimes, that's all. Even my grandfather never taught me you had to play fair with the whites. What the hell! Our life's been a course in survival, not ethics. I'm not low-rating Sue-Ellen for that, or being moralistic about it." David looked over at Chuck who was silently setting up matchsticks in a geometric design on the table. "Sorry, Chuck," he said. "That's the way it is."

"I'm learning," said Chuck slowly. "I thought I knew a lot, but I didn't."

"All right," said Winters. "Let's not waste time on abstractions. What do you advise that we do about Sunshine Sue? Leave her to Hummer for handling by sweet reason?"

"Don't look to me for answers," said David. "I just came in to get warm. You fellows want to paralyze this town; use a sort of nerve gas, in a sense. I'm saying, quite honestly, that I have my doubts you'll be able to swing it. But it's worth chancing. The ordered massive demonstrations you're planning are the first step. But it's another something when someone makes it easy for teen-age youngsters to release their aggressions by heaving rocks through windows or at cops. Who hasn't, at one time or another, wanted to heave a rock through a window? Or at a cop? Most of these kids are doing it that way, for that reason; most of them in these parts are so poorly educated they can't tell you what the Bill of Rights really is. If you're going to throw rocks at cops or anything else, for God's sake know why you're doing it. I hate violence, always have, hate the sound and smell and sight of it. It makes me sick. But I've learned to accept its inevitability. Only—not for its own sake."

He was wandering, he knew that. And, worse, he was preaching. It was more than ironic, it was just damned bad luck, that he had come to Cainsville hoping for an off-chance victory that would not be Pyrrhic, that might focus the eyes of the South on the enraged Negro as more than a threat to life and property, as a very potent and dire threat to southern economy and material well-being. And what had he walked into? Sue-Ellen.

"David." Chuck spoke without looking up from his matchstick abstraction. "Until night before last we were in the right row to make a hundred. I'm convinced of that, plumb convinced. Where are we now?"

"I don't know. One thing's for damned sure. There's no time to waste."

Chuck stood up, long legs looking like knobbed stilts below the short seersucker robe. "I'm going to get dressed and go back over there," he said. "Not that it will do any good. They look at me as though I had some loathsome social disease."

"You have," said David. "To them."

"So? Which one?"

"Belief in a universal God." David looked up at Chuck and smiled.

"We share it," said Chuck.

"But on you it looks better because it came harder."

"What do you mean?"

"You didn't grow up with it. The God of your childhood was a very pertickler and choosy gent. Mine wasn't."

"You win, Stoopid."

CHAPTER 72

Later in the day Brad asked David, "Care to do some sight-seeing?"

"I'd probably better. Then I'll know which way to run.

Let's use my car."

"Calhoun Road's the one you came in on, the one that passes the Towers land, and comes on by here, then goes straight on into Main Street. It deadends there. Let's head that way first."

There was no need for Brad to point out Main Street when, after a little more than a mile of dusty, jolting travel they reached a slight rise about a quarter mile from it. The street ran like a wide river below them, a river that separated barren desert from fertile field, a selective river whose waters nourished but one side of its wide stream, leaving the other parched and dry.

"A lot more things than just Calhoun Road stop at Main Street," said David.

"True. The buildings on the north, on your left, across Main Street, are the paper-box factory, the cigar factory behind that, and still farther away and a little more to the north

a bottling works. It employs a fair number of colored in unskilled capacities."

"Enough to hurt if they walked out?"

"I would say so, yes. Actually, that company's fairly sympathetic. They felt the pinch of a good-sized boycott a while back. Murfree tells me they're pleading for talks and get-togethers."

"When do you and this guy Murfree manage these little chats?"

"Cloak-and-dagger stuff. We meet up at the waterfall. Notes are passed by elevator operators. We've had to do it that way. He's got youngsters, and he's received some nasty threats."

"Where does this man Haskin have his store?"

"Right down there, at the very end of Calhoun, on the left. The side fence of his backyard—unloading area, actually— runs along this side of Main Street. His store and house face Calhoun. It's well away from the business center of our side of town, but it's still the main store; everyone over here gets there at least two or three times a week. I think it's because the store is somewhere to go for the nondrinkers and non-pool players. Also, he orders in larger quantities because of the volume, and his prices are lower." Brad was thoughtful for a moment, then said, "Until I came south, I never knew, never realized, how important two cents off on sugar could be, one cent off on apples, one cent off on bread."

"Yet you honestly think these people will give up earning those important pennies for two weeks?"

"Wait till you've been here a while before you pass judgment."

"Yes, sir. Sorry, Chief."

"Almost directly across Main Street from Haskin's store is the City Hall. You can see the cupola and the top of the upper floor. Go on down the road."

David drove on slowly, drew to the shoulder, and braked to a stop at a word from Brad.

"The stockade," said Brad. "See it?"

"It would be hard to miss."

The cyclone fencing stretched from the edge of the City Hall building to the edge of another, larger building that even from this distance could be identified as a police station and jail, a concrete building that managed to look gray and dirty, although it was obviously considerably newer than the white-frame City Hall. From where they were parked they could see the white, diagonal markings for cars on the black asphalt paving of the stockade. The back wall was an extension of the jail.