Four Spirits (6 page)

“LET'S GO FISHING, DAD. PLEASE, DAD,” LITTLE BOBBY
Jones begged his father.

“I promised your mom I'd stake up them tomatoes.”

Bobby saw the twelve plants sprawled over the backyard. But this afternoon provided Bobby with a rare opportunity for fishing. His dad's service station was close to town, and they'd shut down because of the demonstrations. His little brother and sister—Tommy and Shirley—were playing in the sandbox. It was just an old truck tire that held sand. Bobby had seen cats nasty in it, and he didn't want to have anything to do with the sandbox. His mom was pinning a sheet on the clothesline. It was the kind of clothespin he liked, not the two sticks with a spring that could snap your fingers hard as a mousetrap.

“Please, Mom?” he whined.

“Oh, Ryder, y'all go on,” she said. “It won't hurt the tomatoes none to wait.”

“Where you want to go, son?”

“Village Creek! Village Creek! And I'll take my galoshes and wade.”

“What'll we use for a pole?”

“Cut a pole!”

“Son, if we was to catch anything we couldn't eat it. That creek's too dirty. Nobody but niggers eats out of Village Creek.”

Bobby had no reply. He'd only heard about Village Creek. He'd never seen it. He'd heard a white boy went over the Village Creek Falls in a barrel and it made him a half-wit. He asked his father about it.

“Them falls ain't but two feet high,” Ryder answered. “And the water ain't more than a yard deep anyplace. It's an open sewer.”

Bobby tried to hold back his tears. He had imagined the water of the creek to be a bright blue with a fish hopping out of it, smiling, like in Shirley's coloring book. Village Creek was the only body of water he'd ever heard of.

“Tell you what,” his father said. “We'll go explore.”

Bobby watched his father take off his black cowboy hat and smooth back his hair. He watched his parents squint their eyes in the sunshine and smile at each other. Bobby put his hands on his hips, grinned, triumphant. He felt as though he were holding a Brownie camera and taking their picture.

“We need a emergency plan,” his father said, “case the house catches fire.”

Bobby glanced a nxiously at his house. Gray-white, it sat securely on the dirt.

“You carry out the kids and the TV,” his father said to Bobby's mother, “and I'll get the guns and my recliner.”

She just cracked her gum and smiled. “All right, hon.”

The house was safe and square: four rooms not counting the bathroom. It was perfect.

Bobby reached down to pick up his child-size football—a lumpy, waddy thing, stuffed with rags. His mother had made the football for his last Christmas, stitched it up on her machine out of brown oilcloth.

Bobby threw a sure, spiraling pass toward his father, who snagged the ball with one hand.

WHEN TJ LOOKED OVER KELLY INGRAM PARK, FULL AND
pulsing with demonstrators—his people—he thought
This is the heart of it
and then he thought of a real heart, how it pulsed and surged.
How many days can it go on?

He wasn't a part of it. But today he would take its pulse.

When he was a boy, Kelly Ingram Park had no importance—a place where a few bums sat on the few benches under the big shade trees, a place more hopeless than a cemetery, a dull place for the exhausted. Now it was the beating heart of the protest movement in Birmingham, and Birmingham was the heated-up heart of Alabama, and Alabama was the Heart of Dixie.

The streets that lead from Kelly Ingram Park into the city, only short blocks away, became blood vessels: black people, black children flowing down the streets till they met the blockage of police, of fire hoses. So far, it was just city firemen and police, but TJ wondered how long till Governor Wallace sent the state troopers, men who thought of themselves as soldiers, who wanted to fire on people with something more deadly than fire hoses—how long?

A man who has a job at night, a man such as himself, he can use a spring day for his own. He can go down to Kelly Ingram Park, witness the scene in person instead of reading the paper, or watching the TV. He can stand on the high steps of Sixteenth Street Baptist Church right across from the park. He can get his
own
overview. So thought TJ, a steady man, night porter at the Bankhead Hotel.

He'd gotten work at the hotel just after he came back from World War II,
still hardly more than a boy. During the war, he'd seen Europe like a tourist and never fired a shot. He'd worked steady once back in Birmingham, and they held the job for him when he went to Korea. Still a stupid boy then who thought he wanted to see Asia.

What TJ saw from the high church steps was a park full of children, faces shining, small, sharp voices twittering like a vast flock of starlings. And here came another covey, streaming down the steps of the church, boys and girls, all eagerness. Eager as water babbling down the steps. Been trained inside—he gathered that—been trained in the ways of nonviolence. In limpness, in silence. Just schoolchildren. His wife, Agnes, went to night school, a special school for people who'd dropped out, never finished high school.

Your body speak for you,
he heard one boy say to another, pulling on his friend's arm.
No cussing
. The friend squawked out his own version of their instructions like a startled jay:
Your body on the line
. And they were gone—down the steps—crossing the street to the park. Remembering Korea, TJ wondered with dread about the new fighting in Vietnam. Yesterday another lone picture in the back of the newspaper. Yes, he'd noticed it, being a vet himself: another black boy killed 'cross the Pacific Ocean. All his family got left, a photo of a handsome boy, dead forever, in a uniform.

Yes, there the blue uniforms, the Birmingham police, forming up. Warm enough already in May to be in their uniform shirtsleeves. Wearing ties. Hadn't worn any
ties
in Korea.

During the first attacks of the Chinese against his company, he remembered, a red flare soared high over the ridge to the west, and he said to his buddies, “That flare is telling us. Our bodies are on the line.” He could see the dark shadows of the Communist Chinese coming silently over the ridge. Bent over with packs on their backs, they moved close to the frozen grass. Many were cut down by his company's fire, but others leapt forward and scrambled into the outlying foxholes. He heard screams and the occasional blast of a grenade. Later, after more than forty-eight hours of fighting, he had fallen down exhausted near the top of a low hill, near frozen in the bitter cold. With the members of his company scattered around him in clumps on the hill, he had looked up into the rolling clouds and felt a strange sense of peace.

The Chinese Communists moved past his company in the dark, pushing south to cut off the route of escape. Chinks, he thought. We called them
chinks. TJ wondered what their lives were like now. Looking down on Kelly Ingram Park, he thought,
It looks tough in the park today. I've seen worse
.

Moving down the church steps, he began weaving himself into the riffraff bystanders, trained in nothing. He bargained with himself—well, okay, he'd stand in with the unemployed, for a moment. Dirty men, ragged. They had nothing better to do. The unemployed. Even as a boy, he'd shunned them. Curiosity, that was all they had left of their minds. Probably couldn't half read even the newspaper. Idle curiosity. He had to admit, he was curious, too. Wanted to see for himself.

Why had children flowed into the jails, filling them up, when the adults were too afraid to demonstrate? TJ had heard that children filled not only the Birmingham jail, but the Jefferson County jail, some held in the Bessemer jail, some kept penned up in dormitories at the fairgrounds—904 juveniles. Children! He'd seen a little Korean girl lying in a ditch, turned into a crisp of flesh by a flamethrower. He remembered the weight of the bazooka on his shoulder as he aimed at other almost brown faces.

He saw the Birmingham police lower their clear visors over their white faces.

He thought he recognized some of the policemen and firemen in the park. More than a thousand men and women from Birmingham had fought in the Korean War. Returning home, many white men chose to be policemen or firemen. Blacks were excluded. TJ looked at a middle-aged policeman lowering the visor over his thin face. Doug Carter, Fox Company, 9th Infantry. They had ridden out of Birmingham together on the same bus at the start of the Korean War. TJ remembered how his company fought to protect the flank of Fox company in the desperate firefight at Ch'ongch'on River. Looking at Doug now, TJ felt anger rising in his arms and shoulders.
We were men enough to cover their asses in the war, but we're not men enough now to drink from the same water fountain.

If his side won, would he want to become a black policeman? Maybe they'd want him. His war experience—he knew weapons, discipline. Had his Honorable. Could show his medal. That had been one of Shuttlesworth's demands of the early demonstrations: we want, we need, we demand some black police.

King said Birmingham was the most segregated city in the South. Only city over 50,000 with no black men on the police force. Shuttlesworth had petitioned years ago.
Not gonna arrest white folks. Just let us have black officers in our
own neighborhood. We need police who won't wink at crime in our communities.
But TJ knew he'd arrest a white man quick as a black man, quick as he'd shot yellow men. He wasn't a racist.

He shouldered his way through the riffraff surrounding the demonstrators. The fringe. Maybe Agnes would work in ladies' shoes at Loveman's, maybe Pizitz. He could see her, dressed so neat, soft but not fat—no babies for them—kneeling with her eyes down, helping some well-dressed white lady try on a shoe. He'd always liked that gadget for measuring feet, that metal plate with a slide to measure length, and especially the slide for taking the width snugged up against the big toe joint inside a clean sock.

TJ didn't like these riffraff men brushing up against him. He could smell beer breath, saw a fellow tilt up his bottle wrapped in a greasy sack, the paper all twisted up around the long neck of the bottle.
Vagrant!
But TJ appreciated the colors of the schoolchildren's clothes. All colors, bright red and blue and yellow, pretty as a painting, a giant, dangerous picnic. TV couldn't catch all this pretty color. He noticed the nice white shirts on some of the boys, some patent leather shoes on girls' feet with white socks and a ring of lace on the sock cuff.
Upgrade employment for blacks in the stores
—that was a demand. Agnes, his own wife, was as neat and clean and more pleasant than any white woman.

Never mind Loveman's. Fielding's Department Store—that was where a black woman might hope to work. Not just be the bathroom maid, run the elevator. The Fielding brothers were Methodists, supported the Salvation Army. They had an annual Christmas party, and last year, Agnes phoned the Fielding's switchboard and asked if black people could come, and she said the telephone operator girl just sang it out: “Everybody welcome, black and white”—she had a white voice for sure—“come on down. We got cheese and crackers and cider and Santa Claus.”

When she hung up the receiver, Agnes just sang it out again, in an imitation white voice right at the decorated tree: “We got cheese and crackers and cider and Santa Claus,” but she was happy, not making fun. “That what the girl said.”

And something else about Fielding's. No
COLORED
and
WHITE
signs on the drinking fountains. Just one fountain, and a plastic tube of paper cups beside it. You could pull down a cup, step on the foot treadle, and when the water arced up, catch your drink in the little white cup. Pretty little cup, sides all folded into pleats and a rolled rim around the top. Kind you could put mints in, or nuts, for a child's birthday party. Agnes could work in Accessories, not be
back in Shoes in the corner. Accessories right there in the front of the store soon as you walked in.

TJ watched the back door opening on a police wagon and a German shepherd dog stepped out—Lord, God!—on a chain, then the dark blue leg and the whole of a policeman. And another pair—dog and man, linked by a leash. And another dog and man. Dogs always panting, muscles straining against the harness. The sun glinted from the metal snap that connected harness to leash. Several more pairs of dogs and handlers coming out of the truck, leaping down to the ground.

Over on the south side of Kelly Ingram Park the fire trucks began to pull up, and the kids drifted that way, wanted to see the trucks the way kids always love a red truck. He'd seen kids in the neighborhood, so excited to see a fire engine. Suddenly, like a flock of pretty birds, the children all veered away from the fire truck—a jumble of bright clothing—and started for the street to downtown. Somebody had given a signal.

It was early, TJ checked his watch, only around one o'clock, and the papers said the demonstrations usually started at three. Already on the city schedule—demonstrations at three. Acted like black folks was weather. Something mindless in nature they could observe. Predict like nature. (But he was surprised; he'd thought the demonstrations wouldn't start till three.) Police weren't ready at one o'clock. Now the bystanders were laughing at the police and ridiculing them. Five girls in a line played “Strut Miss Lizzie” in front of them, shaking their shoulders, noses in the air. Then a policeman shoved the big girl, last in the line. Big girl, might be fourteen, playing like a child, but shaking her new tits like a woman. She scowled at the police like any woman might scowl at a man who pushed her, then put her hand over her mouth and giggled like a child. The first gush of water scattered a patch of adults.

TJ marveled at how the flat fire hose went plump, how water leapt powerfully from the hose. Took two firemen to hold the brass nozzle between them. In a flash of sunlit water, a little girl in her Sunday best—pale blue—was drenched and smacked onto the pavement. TJ saw the riffraff man next to him change his grip on the neck of his bottle: now he had a short club.

Over there an explosion of rocks rained down on the helmets of the police, and the police raised nightsticks above their heads. Pulling their handlers behind them, the dogs lunged barking toward a human wall of retreating demonstrators. Black folks were commencing to run, and TJ found himself
running toward what was becoming a riot. He saw a Negro man exhorting the children to nonviolence, and they waited or moved at the commands of the adults, their hands empty, their faces stunned, as though they were dreaming.

The children were wary but not afraid. Some excited. Some closed their eyes, held hands, and sang the freedom songs with all their might. At the end of a blasting fire hose, a woman went skittering down the street, swept over the pavement by the water, her face bleeding. The dogs leapt at a boy, trapped against a wall, surrounded by popping flashbulbs, a TV camera, and TJ found himself picking up a rock. Five policemen held a fat woman down in the gutter. Every pound of her was piety and innocence.

“God! God!”

Was that her shrieking? Some other voice gone high as a woman's?

Like an avenging angel, TJ hurled his rock toward a police face.

TJ was a trained soldier. No dogs on children! He'd show riffraff how to charge. He stooped for a broken brick as he ran. Heard the curses and scuffling feet of his platoon behind him. Way too many fighting folks to arrest 'em all.
Not gonna blast no chile! No sweet fat woman in the gutter. Get 'em! Get 'em! No snarling dogs leaping for a boy, just a boy.

TJ wanted to sink his own teeth in their necks.