Five Smooth Stones (127 page)

CHAPTER
80

As they approached the town from the west, David and Brad saw people on the porches of the homes and in the yards, standing, sitting, leaning. Some of the people waved to Brad and he returned the wave; others stood or sat without moving, silent, watching them pass without apparent emotion, and in some of the faces David thought he saw hostility. Whether the hostility was for what they had done or what they had left undone there was no way of telling, or whether it was because they had moved too fast or too slowly. Some of these houses, most of them rundown, many of them little more than cabins, he knew were home to the children in the stockade and in the jail.

At the start of the straight unpaved stretch of Calhoun Road that led to the center of town, Brad slowed abruptly. "My God," he said, without emphasis. "My God."

David put a hand on his arm. "Stop here," he said. "Pull over into the weeds and turn it around and stop."

Brad obeyed without comment, and David stepped out, turning his back to the sun just beginning to slip to the west from overhead, catching the scene before him in the full heat and blaze of its rays. "Jesus!" he said. "Sweet Jesus!"

He saw no faces, only the backs of what seemed, in that first glimpse, to be thousands of quiet, waiting people, almost unmoving in their silent grimness. There were male backs in sweat-soaked shirts and blue jeans, khaki, T-shirts gray with dust and sweat; female backs in cotton dresses, sweat-soaked like the clothes of the men, once-bright prints dark with dampness. Here and there sunshades and umbrellas held back the sun, and scarves and old straw hats, and here and there bare heads took its full attack. The crowd was faceless because each man and woman looked toward the east and the stockade where their children waited.

David stood without advancing, his feet lead weights and his belly crawling, knotting with tension.

Brad came up to him and David jerked a thumb over his shoulder, westward. "I wanta go thataway," he said. "Way back yonder."

"You think I don't? At least we can admit it to each other."

David ran somber eyes over the crowd, the backs of the quiet people. "I wonder," he said. "I wonder if they know that in Leesburg, Georgia, twenty girls, young ones like those in that stockade, were kept for a month in a single jail room without bed or blankets? Do they know what's happened to kids like that in Jackson? In Planterstown? In Birmingham? In Maryland and Virginia? Do they?"

"Of course they do, David. What are you getting at?"

"Courage. That's what I'm getting at. Courage, for God's sake. After what we've seen, Brad, I'll spit in the eye of the first man or woman who gives me the 'self-preservation is the first law of nature' routine."

Brad started forward, but David remained standing, making no move. "There's no hurry, Brad. We've got fifty years; we've got a century." He smiled, and the teeth his lips parted over were clenched.

Brad turned, waiting. "We'd better get going and account for a day of it," he said.

For the first time there was a definable sound from the crowd, a woman's high-pitched, carrying "Yoo-hoo!" and near the front of the massed people a brown arm shot up, a brown hand waved, and David thought that he could hear, more faintly, from the direction of the stockade, an answering "Yoo-hoo!", like a distant echo. He moved forward then to join Brad.

They walked slowly. They both knew that to run or seem to hurry could mean trouble. There was no sound from the crowd in front of them now except that of moving feet, shuffling, shifting to ease strain. A man on the edge of the crowd looked over his shoulder, saw them, and came to meet them, a craggy black cliff of a man. He shook hands with Brad and without waiting for an introduction turned to David.

"How you feeling, young fella?"

"Who, me?" The inanity of his own response made him smile. "I'm fine." The man must have been in the crowd last night. "Been thrown out of a helluva lot of places lately. Getting used to it."

"You're Mr. Champlin, ain't you?" asked the man. "Lawyer fella?"

David nodded.

"We been hearing about you. Jenkins is my name. They calls me Topper. Topper Jenkins." They shook hands, and the man they called Topper turned and walked between them toward the crowd. "We're doing our best," he went on. "Yes-sir, doing our best. Trying to make it right, do it right, till the law helps us. The law of the land and the law of the Lord. That's what Reverend Sweeton says. Tired of waiting for the law of the land to catch up with the law of the Lord; got to give it a shove here and there. We sure appreciates it, you guys coming down here."

"Getting tossed on our cans," said David. He smiled and felt some of the tension going from him. The man who had come out of the crowd to join them had made the people real, made the crowd more than a massed symbol of dark and patient anger, had divided it into individuals, men and women like him who could say "How you feeling, young fella?" and "We're doing our best." Now that Topper Jenkins had joined them the crowd had broken down into men and women, become more—and less—than a silent, brooding menace.

***

As they drew nearer, Topper slowed almost to a stop, and David matched his step, his limp more pronounced as he involuntarily favored bruised muscles. They were joined by a small group of people he had seen crossing a vacant lot from the other side of the section. David shook hands all around, wishing he had not heard the note of pride in Topper's voice when he said "Lawyer Champlin." Topper, Abra'm, so many he had met in the past three years, were what he called in the inner places of his mind "Gramp-oriented Negroes"; men with black skins, denied their birthright yet possessing it none the less, staking indisputable claim to universal manhood by some divine authority, and proud—warmly, deeply proud— of those of their race who had "made it." The old feeling of guilt took over, the old feeling that nothing he had become really belonged to him, that it had all been luck, a feeling that he was in some way inferior to these quiet, patient people by very reason of what he was. And with the guilt, as always, came the shyness.

He heard one of the women saying, "You mighty young to have been doing all we hears about you, Lawyer Champlin."

"Yes'm," he said, and glanced at Brad and caught suppressed laughter in his eyes. "But I'm near thirty. I just look this way."

A man in the group said, "Where's Ruby Brown? Where'd that woman get to?"

"She's here," said Topper. "She's out there in the crowd. Seen her just a bit ago. We gets her to go over to Haskin's every now and again and lie down. Been here since daybreak. She's near crazy, worrying about that girl Effie of hers. Last she seen of Effie the girl was sitting on the ground, leaning up against the jailhouse wall, holding on to her stummick. Ruby's near crazy."

"Is the girl sick?" asked David.

The woman who had remarked on his youthfulness answered. "She been sick; she been sick more'n a week. Doc Anderson, he say she got appendix trouble. He was planning to drive her to the County Hospital yestiddy to get 'em X-rayed, get 'em out. Then all the trouble started. Her ma come home from work early, and Effie'd done got out of the bed and gone someplace. Next thing she knowed she seen the police pushing her down the street to the jailhouse. And talking filthy. Them po-lice sure talks filthy." She turned to the others. "Let's go see can we find Ruby."

"Wait a minute!" Brad stepped forward, lips thin and tight. "Wait a minute. Are you saying there's a girl in that jail with appendicitis—and she's had no medical attention?"

"That's what Doc Anderson say she's got," said the woman. "Haskin and Reverend Sweeton and Doc, they tried to get the law to turn loose of her, but the po-lice say she putting it on. She ain't, but they says that."

"Once upon a time," said David slowly, under his breath, though the words were audible, "there was a great big, wonderful country, with great big, wonderful laws. And the greatest of these was habeas corpus—"

Brad turned to him, his eyes green ice. "Washington?" he said. "Now? Without waiting?"

"I'll wire," said David bitterly. "Yessir, I'll wire. I can do it in my sleep by now. Saves time that way. What do you want me to say, boss? 'Send the Surgeon General down'? Or maybe those Army troops they've got stationed just over the state line—"

"You think they're still there?"

"They were yesterday, according to a guy I talked to in a restaurant. They're still expecting more trouble at the university."

Brad lowered his voice so no one nearby could overhear. "Suppose she dies? She could."

David did not answer, merely turned toward the silent people massed before the barriers and nodded his head in their direction.

"We've got to do something, David."

"Yes?" said David. The bitterness of his tone had sharpened. "Yes? Right now I'm inclined to leave it up to them."

"Pull yourself together, David. I'm talking about saving one girl's life; you're talking about something that could mean the deaths of a hell of a lot more. You out of your mind?"

"After this, maybe." He plunged his hands into his pocket, gave his head a quick shake. "All right, Chief, all right. I was only sounding off. Call Washington. It won't matter if that call's tapped. If they can't do anything else, they can send an extra supply of polish for the troops' buttons; give 'em something to do while they're waiting around up there outside Capitol City."

"Take it easy, son. When this one's over you're going to take a long rest. Let's go. These roadside sessions won't look right to the others."

***

As they worked their way through the edge of the crowd, David felt that the pressure of emotion was almost more than he could bear. It was like being deep in the sea with immeasurable tons of dark water above and below him, pressing on every inch of his body, constricting him so that he felt actual physical symptoms; his arteries and veins and lungs seemed to be bursting, and he felt as though his eyeballs were starting from his head.

He reached the threshold of Haskin's store just behind Topper, and the noise that came from within the store deafened him momentarily after the quiet outside. At first he saw no one in the packed room who was not talking, and he remembered Gramp saying once: "Trouble with colored is they talks too damn much."

As he followed Topper to a doorway in the rear, he saw that there were some in the room who were silent, men and women both, and he feared the ugliness in their eyes. Brad was beside him, and he put his lips close to the other's ear: "We need Sweeton here."

In the back room there were not so many people, and only a few of them were talking, but even as it was men and women filled it wall to wall. They were facing Haskin, who sat on a straight chair against the far wall, flanked by two of the other committee members. Haskin looked smaller than he had the night before; the skin of his face seemed more taut, the lines in it black and deep. Garnett was standing in front of him, bald head beaded with sweat, and his voice was a high whine as he answered something Haskin had just said.

"That's what I thought he meant!" he was saying. "I told you right!"

"You lying!" It was the shrill voice of a woman. "You ain't told him right! Get them chilren outa there! How long you think their folks gonna wait? You don' want vi'lence, vi'lence what you gonna get you don't get them kids outa there!"

"Amen!" It was a man's voice, and David's scalp prickled at the tone. The room seemed to be occupied now by a single rage-filled entity, and David knew that someone had to act, something had to be done to break that solid, massed anger, to scatter it, and then its fragments must be gathered together and welded into something other than what he had felt when he entered, a force that had seemed to push him bodily backward through the door.

He had not been conscious of any hostility toward himself in the outer room or outside the building; here it was as evident as though they had met him with fixed bayonets. Unsmiling, he limped directly toward the tableau at the far side of the room and stood behind Garnett for a moment, gathering his forces. He could not, no one of them could, admit to any mistake, not now, not during this period of intense emotionalism. To hold leadership, to keep the reins of control, to prevent a savage, tragic outbreak that might do their cause irreparable harm, he and the others could not appear in any light other than that of their own confidence, even though that confidence must be whistled up in the dark. And somewhere in the crowd, either inside or outside, was a woman who had gone thirty-six hours without sleep, a woman whose child was suffering and ill not more than a hundred yards away and to whom she could not go. He reached for the chair from which Haskin had risen, steadied it against the wall, and mounted it. The first person he saw as he looked out over the room from his stand on the chair was Brad, just inside the door on the far side of the room. There was no expression in the green eyes, but the gaze was so steady and strong he felt that he could almost lean on it physically, and it was like the cool, quick comfort of a drink at the end of a rough day. There had been no time to confer with Haskin; their telephone conversation was all that he knew of what had gone on that morning in the building across the road.

Although his throat felt choked with phlegm he did not clear it because to do so might be evidence of uncertainty. He remembered Brad advising him about relaxing throat and jaw and lip muscles, and even in his own ears his voice sounded full and clear when he spoke.

"In just a little while—" he said, and as he said it he glanced at his wristwatch because he knew the gesture would give a sense of more immediate action—"In just a little while your committee will cross that street outside again, the street the whites believe separates the sheep from the goats; the street we know to be the dividing line between good and evil." Someone must be with him, he thought, because he heard a man say, "Tha's right." Now he dared clear his throat, and he felt someone steady the rickety chair beneath his feet and knew that it was Haskin, standing beside him. "Let's keep it that way!" he cried. "Let's keep the good and the decent on this side, and the evil on that side! Let's not let the evil spill over, crawl across that roadway like a snake, poison us with its venom! Let the rest of the country know what Main Street is today in Cainsville—the roadway that separates good from evil!"