Five Smooth Stones (35 page)

"They contribute—"

"Pee on their contributions! You don't see none of 'em down around our way, do you? Down in the South trying to do something for the wonderful, wonderful Negro? Scholarships! Why they got to have scholarships just for us? Why can't they just have scholarships, period? You know enough, you get 'em; you don't know enough you don't. But hell, they got to send scouts out, like houn' dogs, smelling us out. Go find us a smart Negro so's we can show how good we are."

"Look, you dope! You just said—"

"Don't make no difference what I just said. I don't know why in hell I got sucked into coming here, why I didn't go to Howard or Dillard or some other college. Or maybe no place. All this shit here, trying to be white, trying to act like whites, imitating the whites—"

"Oh, for cripe's sake! Speak for yourself. I'm not imitating any whites. Grew up around 'em, didn't we? Wore the same kind of clothes when we were kids, didn't we? Wear the same kind now, don't we? I mean, in general. Pants, shirts, shoes. Talk the same language—"

"Live under the same laws? Look the same to a cop? You're fixing to walk right into a trap, arguing like that"

"O.K. What do you want? Go get yourself a lion skin and some white paint. Go ahead. Wear a lion skin and paint stripes on your face. I'll take you back to New Orleans, and they'll run you out of every colored place in town. Negro colleges! You think you'd be any better off? That's where they really imitate the whites! Sororities and fraternities and class distinctions and color distinctions. Man, black as you are you wouldn't be anywhere! That's where they're really messing up, lots of 'em. You ask Rudy Lopez. You ask a lot of 'em. You aren't making sense, Ne'miah. You want two worlds—"

"What the hell we got now? Two worlds, that's what we got now; only, we haven't got the sense to keep it that way till we're stronger."

David sighed. "You go round and round and you don't come out anywhere. Why don't you just try for a while to stop worrying yourself with it all and try and catch the rest of your schedule up with your math? You got more going for you than any guy on campus and you're standing still on it—"

Nehemiah's eyes grew flat and lusterless, anger smoldering behind them. David didn't give the anger chance to flare up, said quickly: "What the hell, man. Who knows? Maybe you're right. I don't know. I'm going along with things. You said it once: Law, that's the thing to yense 'em with. And I'm not messing up; not till I get what I came for."

Flare up, give in, take a stand—and then retreat. You couldn't do it differently with guys like Nehemiah because there was a fire inside them that burned your words up, destroyed your reasoning before it reached their minds and their own reasoning faculties.

David was surprised when Nehemiah said he was going to the ALEC meeting too, but he was sure Nehemiah was going out of a certain bitter curiosity and, perhaps, looking for a reason to say "I told you so."

The meetings were held in the "social hall" of St. John's Episcopal Church, almost directly across from the garage where Suds kept his car. The rector of the church, though named James McCartney, was known to parishioners and students as "Father Mac," a nickname in which he found great satisfaction. David had commented to Sara once, "Sure seems funny to call a man with a wife and three kids 'Father.'" Sara had explained carefully that the church was of the "high" persuasion, and he had answered, "I know all about that. I still wonder what would happen if I called him 'Preacher.'"

"He'd love it," said Sara.

"Sure would," said David. "He'd think it was quaint as all hell—"

"David—" and then she had fallen silent.

On this night David was delayed, and told Nehemiah and Chuck to go on. As he reached the entrance to the campus, he saw Margaret ahead of him, and whistled softly to her. After the first half of freshman year Margaret had shown refreshing symptoms of being a human being after all, the shell of her scholasticism cracking when she was with David. They had dated a few times, and after the first one David found himself looking forward to kidding her into laughter and a quick, relaxed humor that answered his own. Tonight, however, the shell was around her again, and they walked solemnly along—as though, thought David, they were going to a funeral.

When they reached the hall Nehemiah had already settled down to an attitude Of exaggerated ease, one leg thrown over the arm of his chair, his quick, small eyes darting around the room, taking in everything. He was ill at ease, thought David, hostile, and showboating to cover it up. His voice was resentful, high, when he called out, "Where you been, man?"

"I got held up."

Father McCartney came forward, shook hands with David, and said, "Glad you persuaded Wilson to come, Champlin."

The damn fool; in the first place, he hadn't persuaded Nehemiah to come, but even if he had, this man should have let Nehemiah keep on giving the impression he had come of his own accord. Maybe someday he'd grow to like this minister the way everyone else seemed to, but it was going to be tough going. The closest he could come to pinpointing his reasons for disliking him was that the minister kept harping on how race relations were God's business, that race prejudice was a spiritual shortcoming, instead of getting at the crux of the situation. David knew that people didn't give a damn whether God liked prejudice or not or whether it was a sin or not—they knew damned well it was. The crux of the situation was that the maintaining of a second-class citizenry was uncivilized, illegal, an economic crime, and just plain stupid. He didn't go along with all this yuk-yuk about changing men's hearts first. Let the kids go to school together, get in fights together at recess, share gripes at teachers together, sit together in a library, laugh together in a movie, and let their hearts take care of themselves; don't go messing around with the people's damned little lily-white souls and hearts, because the only way you could change 'em was to bring about a sharing of common experiences. And besides, Father McCartney didn't know the first thing about what he talked of so glibly. An illiterate Negro riding in the back of a New Orleans bus could give him cards and spades on God and what He thought of backs of buses for His people—any of 'em.

Sara Kent came in from the kitchen, carrying soft drinks. She saw him and called, "David!" then distributed the bottles and sat down, patting the chair next to her. When David took it, she said, "I'd rather you sat over there—" and pointed to an upright piano standing against the wall near the door.

"Fine thing. Ask a guy to sit next to you and then tell him you wish he was across the room."

"Dames." Tom Evans was seated now on his other side. "We've been fighting all evening. She's hard to get along with. Always was. You know what she used to do when she was a kid?"

"Shut up, Tom. David likes me and he didn't know me when I was a kid—"

"That's why he likes you. Fiend, that's what she was—"

"Pipe down," said David. Father McCartney's voice could be heard now, over the others, calling the meeting to order informally. David glanced toward Nehemiah and saw that he was talking to Margaret, saw Margaret nudge him and direct his attention to Father McCartney, who was straddling a chair in the center of the room, arms crossed on its back. Earnest as all hell, thought David, and for gosh sake, Champlin, quit disliking the poor bastard because he honest-to-God wants to help. Again he glanced at Nehemiah, and immediately wished he hadn't. Nehemiah wasn't having any of this, least of all Father McCartney.

Chuck Martin caught his eye, raised a hamlike hand, palm out, grinned and said "Peace" with his lips, and David grinned back. Sitting on the floor beside Chuck was Suds, and he glared at David balefully and David's grin broadened. Suds was going to give him hell later for the Latin exercise he'd given him to translate.

David heard the words "tonal" and "Africa," and sank lower in his chair. He glanced at the blackboard, saw that someone had drawn a complicated percussion pattern, sighed heavily, and didn't care who heard him. They were off again, buckety-buckety, riding the good reverend's favorite hobbyhorse: the links of the chain that bound modern popular music to Africa. By this means everyone was supposed to arrive gradually and happily at their destination: the problems of Negroes in today's world, arrive relaxed and easy, and it was, to David—and, he was sure, to several of the others—a stupid, self-indulgent approach. It didn't have a Goddamned thing to do with some poor devil of a taxpaying black man Whose kids couldn't take books out of a tax-supported library, or cool their brown bodies broiled by a southern sun in the waters of a tax-provided swimming pool.

He wanted to say "Oh, balls!" out loud, and didn't even dare mutter it because Sara was so close. He crossed his ankles and wagged his good foot back and forth, noting morosely a tiny V-shaped tear in the toe of one shoe, hoping he could get the loose scrap of leather stuck back down. He was debating between just plain spit or some kind of thin glue when he heard his name. He started guiltily, drew up his legs till his feet were flat on the floor, pushed himself upright, and tried to look bright.

"Wouldn't you, David?" Father McCartney was looking at him from under unevenly raised eyebrows, a mannerism that never failed to irritate David.

"I—I'm sorry, Father McCartney. I was thinking— What is it I wouldn't?"

"The piano, David? And, maybe, if we can induce someone to take over on the piano in a while, perhaps some drums?"

"Piano. Period." He stood and started forward, working his way around chairs. "I'm no drummer."

"Liar!" called Tom, from behind him.

He spun the stool to the right height and struck a few chords, wishing he was in his room, even though Sara wouldn't be nearby. He started a boogie rhythm with his left hand, knowing it wasn't what McCartney wanted, but not wanting to just sit. Father McCartney came over to the piano, tall, reflective. "That's fine, David," he said. "But along the lines of our discussion perhaps you'd dig down in your memory and give us some of the spirituals and hymns you heard as a boy, the ones you were telling us about earlier in the year."

Old loose-lips Champlin, he thought; what'd you do that for? Let yourself be conned into talking about church music. "Needs singing," he said, and knew he'd done it again before the second word was out

"I don't hear any symptoms of laryngitis in your voice tonight, David. Come on, that's a good chap—"

Margaret. Hers was the voice Father McCartney wanted, and didn't know he wanted because he had never heard it. David remembered the first time he had listened to her in chapel, her voice like a muted bell, a voice with chimes in it, only held back, muffled. It was a voice like Gram's had been, but instead of letting it carry her she reined it in taut, tight, as though she were afraid of it. As far as he was concerned, at this point ALEC could get 'em another boy. It wasn't the songs dear old Grandma and Grandpa used to sing that should be taking up ALEC's time; it was the songs their li'l ol' gran'chilren were learning. Different songs, with different meanings, their message clear as crystal, a message to the world and a challenge, a threat to those whose ears could not hear. But Father McCartney wanted the songs of a folk, the songs of sorrow and despair and of faith triumphant. Beyond those, David doubted he could hear.

He started off with "Lord, Lord, Lord, you sure been good to me—" knowing that if no one else did Sara would start them off. He remembered his surprise the first time he heard her sing it, and on his first night in Laurel.

Sara didn't disappoint him. She was humming it, then singing, and Father McCartney was humming, off key, and in back of him someone's hands—probably Tom Evans's—were clapping softly. He said to Father McCartney, "Get Margaret Benjamin up here, Father, and you'll hear a real voice." If McCartney wanted a damned singsong session instead of intelligent discussion, let him have it. Nehemiah was sure to join in, wouldn't be able to help himself. Nehemiah didn't have too bad a voice, a little thin, high, almost falsetto, but compelling.

Father McCartney had come back to the piano now with Margaret. She stood where the rector had been standing, beside the piano, facing the room. She was fussing and holding back, saying, "Really, Father. I'm not a soloist—" and David said, "The hell you aren't—" then "Oops! Sorry, Father." As Father McCartney moved away, David looked up at Margaret. "What'll it be?"

She smiled self-consciously, poked at the bridge of her eyeglasses with a forefinger, said, "Something everybody knows, don't you think? Like 'Abide with Me'—"

"Cripes!" He played louder, striking random chords, to cover his voice. "Y'all know better than that, sugah. That ain't what the man wants. We going to give 'em what the man wants." That would rile her, really rile her, especially "the man." And that was good, because maybe she'd turn loose and sing.

He let the chords run naturally into the opening of "He's My Lily of the Valley," singing it himself with a low, soft insistence. " 'He's my lily of the valley,' " stopped singing to say under his breath, "Come on, Margaret. You know it; you have to know it, coming from where you do. It's a good one. You can sing the devil out of it—'... everybody don't know, everybody don't know, what Jesus means, what Jesus means...' Come on. I'll start her over again." He brought it into a key her voice could handle better, confined his own voice to low humming answers to the phrases, then heard her really take hold of the melody, knew by the sureness of her attack that he had been right when he said, "You got to know it"; knew she had heard and sung it in childhood in some little church or hall in Louisiana, a piano behind the voices, breaking the melody up, rippling beneath it, stating it with a voice of its own. He upped the tempo a little, transposed to a slightly higher key, and had his reward: Margaret's voice soaring, as Gram's used to, over everyone's head, then beyond them, through the walls and the windows, soaring over the endless expanses of the world. Now Nehemiah's voice came from behind him, piercing, poignant, and he gave them both the support of his own voice, rich and strong, and they rode it out together.