Original Sins (34 page)

“People here in the North, they all the time saying, ‘Hey, man, what you wanna go sit in some rat-trap Southern bus station for anyhow?' And Southerners, they sez to me, sez, ‘Son, you just keep quiet about it, and you can sit wherever you want with whoever you want. But don't you go stirring up no trouble now, hear?' Well, I sez to them, ‘Baby, I
want
to stir up trouble.' Hell, I don't give a shit bout no bus station, man. I'm talking serious revo-loo-shun.

“We can't wait no more on the courts. The brothers and sisters in the South
been
waiting on the courts for a hunnert years. We got to grassroots it, baby! We want Freedom! We want Justice! We want Brotherhood! We want them for all the people! And we want them
now!

“We going out in the streets—of the Mississippi Delta, of southwest Georgia, of the en-tire state of Alabama! Wallace, Eastland, Thurmond, they ain't stopping us! We gon march through Dixie like Sherman through Georgia, and we gon burn ole Jim Crow down!”

The crowd went crazy. Bearded young men, holding bed sheets taut, moved through the crowd yelling, “Support the brothers and sisters in the South!” People threw coins and wadded bills. The young men shook the sheets so the change jingled like a camel caravan. Emily held Joan's and Corinne's hands and swayed and sang “We Shall Overcome.” As they hummed, tears streamed down everyone's face. Back home, Emily reflected, people who intended to lead a new life in Christ would now have been called down front by the preacher.

Corinne, who lived in the room next door to Emily, was the daughter of an investment banker. She had stringy blonde hair, baleful blue eyes, and a way of cringing that made Emily want to slug her. She was constantly hocking her ancestral jewelry and turning over the proceeds to startled blind Negro amputees who sold pencils on the corner of Forty-second Street. A trip downtown with her was like a tour through a leper colony with a Sister of Mercy.

Corinne dated Negro musicians whom she met at coffee houses in the Village. She usually sported a few stitches or a chipped tooth because they didn't hesitate, as Emily did, to slug her when she cringed. Emily had gone to listen to Corinne's latest boyfriend play the drums. The marble-topped tables were filled with white students disguised as field hands who sat with closed eyes, nodding their heads to the music.

“Have you ever had a Negro boyfriend?” Corinne asked. Emily nodded no.

“They're wonderful. So … oh, I don't know. So forceful. So sure of themselves compared to white boys. They're men, not boys. They've coped with adversity all their lives. Maybe I can get Fishbait to fix you up.” Fishbait, who had a black patch over one eye, came over, saving Emily from trying to shoehorn Donny into this description of Negro Male.

“Well, well. Look here what the cat's dragged in.” Corinne cringed. “How come you always look like shit, mama? I swear, don't white girls know how to dress. Or do much of anything else.” He laughed. “Ain't that so, mama?” Corinne nodded obediently. “Shit, woman, you so ugly tonight I can't hardly look at you.”

“I
try
, Fishbait.”

“Look to me like you don't hardly try enough.” He took a handful of her stringy blonde hair and pulled it until tears came to her eyes. “You call this hair, mama? Look like dirty spaghetti to me. Can't you put no curl in it?”

“I'm sorry, Fishbait. I thought you liked it straight.”

“Well, guess I'd better be going.” Emily stood up, feeling as if she were sitting in on someone's lovemaking.

“What did you think of Fishbait?” Corinne asked Emily the next day as she powdered a black eye in the bathroom mirror.

“He's really something.”

Corinne laughed. “Yes, isn't he wonderful?”

After supper in the cafeteria, Emily, Joan, Corinne, and Lou would gather in Joan's room to drink instant coffee, smoke, listen to records—Joan Baez; Peter, Paul, and Mary; Ma Rainey; Billie Holiday; Bessie Smith—and to discuss their classes and their autobiographies. Corinne and Joan also discussed the news, which usually concerned the racial situation in the South.

“Those bastards! Those redneck bastards! They should rot!” Joan raged.

“Those poor
people.
And all because of the color of their skin,” Corinne moaned.

“I'm ashamed to be a citizen of the same nation,” announced Joan one night.

“We did try to pull out,” Emily pointed out. “You wouldn't let us.”

“Me? Listen, I had nothing to do with that. My family came from Russia in 1903.”

“And after all,” Corinne said, “that was a hundred years ago.”

“That's right. Only a hundred years ago.”

Lou was sitting in silence sipping coffee. At this, she closed her eyes and threw her head back, smiled faintly, and made a noise that sounded like “huh.” Lou, who lived across the hall, was up from Charlotte on an exchange program designed to rescue promising Negro students from unpromising Southern colleges. Though it wasn't strictly an “exchange,” since no students from up here went down to Lou's college. Emily and Lou nodded to each other warily from time to time. Emily, having discovered she was the Oppressor, no longer knew how to behave around her victims. But she was very aware of Lou's “huh,” which was halfway between a mirthless laugh and a snort of disdain. The first time Emily noticed it, she had just made a response Joan and Corinne found politically acceptable. Corinne said, “It's so nice, Emily, to hear you say something intelligent in that accent of yours.”

Lou closed her eyes, threw back her head, smiled wearily, and said, “Huh.” Emily wasn't sure what it meant.

After the rally, Joan and Corinne were heading for the Village. Emily declined Corinne's offer to fix her up with a friend of Fishbait's. “I have to work on a paper,” she mumbled. She received from Joan and Corinne gazes accusing her of racism. “I
do,”
Emily pleaded.

She walked west toward the Hudson. As she crossed West End Avenue, she saw a white woman in a nanny uniform holding the hands of two well-dressed young Negro children. Emily stared at them until they turned a corner.

The sidewalks were sprinkled with tattered yellow and rust leaves. As her feet crunched them, their acrid scent rose to her nostrils. She recalled The Five's raking leaves into great piles; then jumping off branches into the soft centers yelling “Geronimo!” Burrowing through the piles like earthworms through topsoil. Leaping out to terrify passing first-graders. Prancing around huge bonfires, pretending they were burning cavalry officers.

If she wasn't incarcerated in Freedom City right now, she'd be at a football game with Earl, wearing a Chi O blazer and plaid pleated skirt, instead of wheat jeans. He'd have his arm around her, and they'd be sipping bourbon from his silver flask. The cheerleaders, the marching band, the teams in bright jerseys working out their intricate square dance on the green field with its pattern of white lines. Afterward she and Earl would drink more bourbon at the KT bar, and sing fight songs, and upstairs in his room … Why had this seemed so unappealing a few months earlier?

She climbed the tower of Riverside Church and looked out, turning around time after time like a dog unable to find its spot. Across the Hudson, the high-rises of New Jersey lurked behind a veil of smog. Southward stretched the apartment buildings of Riverside Drive, in their decaying, multi-windowed elegance. Inland lay brick row houses and redevelopment projects. But even if she could have looked in every direction at once, the city was too vast to take in. She'd gone on a boat tour up the East River to the Harlem River and into the Hudson. The rivers intermingled. The boat cut through the exact same mix of waterlogged crates, candy wrappers, and rat corpses. The city sat on a small island. But it was composed of hundreds of self-contained worlds. Getting a fix on it was like trying to do a jigsaw puzzle with pieces from many different puzzles. From the Castle Tree you could take in all Newland at once. Most everyone you ever saw you already knew. You knew what church they went to and which dentist cleaned their teeth. You knew which shop the clothes they were wearing came from and how much they cost. You knew which movie they'd seen last weekend and with whom. You knew whose third cousin once removed they were, and which three houses in town their family had previously occupied. And they knew all those things about you. You could sit on the beach at a TVA lake with the ageless cliffs and perennial forests behind you, and the billions of receding stars overhead—and know exactly where you fit. Here in New York she didn't have a clue.

At home at this time of day the sun would have been at a forty-five-degree angle with the horizon. Here it was almost setting. At this time of year The Five used to pluck persimmons from the trees behind her house. If they'd been frost-struck enough, they'd be transformed from hard sour opaque balls into sweet juicy translucent orange delicacies. When they'd eaten their fill, they'd gather handfuls and hurl them at each other in roiling battles through the woods and fields …

She put her face in her hands and cried.

The cafeteria was almost empty that evening as she and Lou ate in silence. It was the first time they'd been alone together. Emily couldn't think of things to say. “Uh, how was the football game?”

“Oh, fine,” Lou said. “Didn't realize how much I'd been missing them.”

“You watch a lot of football in Charlotte?”

“Oh, yeah. Every weekend. Nothing else to do. How bout you?”

“Same.”

“How come you to miss the game today?”

“Went to that rally at Columbus Circle.”

“Huh,” said Lou. “And how was it?”

“Fine.” They glanced at each other. Emily wanted to ask how come Lou hadn't gone to the rally, what she thought of it. But she didn't.

Emily asked Lou back to her room for coffee. She surveyed her record collection, wishing she had some Bob Dylan or something that might indicate to Lou her racial good will. But all she had was rock and roll and Honey Sweet. She settled for Chuck Berry. She handed a mug of coffee to Lou and sat down, then she jumped up and opened her window. In the middle of Broadway right outside her second-floor room was a pothole. Each car that hit it clattered like a skeleton falling off a tin roof.

Emily sat back down and sipped her coffee. She looked at Lou, who smiled and sipped her coffee. Emily felt an anxious need to convey to Lou that she liked her, a need to elicit from Lou that same reassurance. Then she was seized with irritation and wished Lou would leave.

“What would you be doing in Tennessee right now?” Lou asked.

“Dancing. Drinking. Making out”

“Huh.”

“You?”

“Same.”

“Did you go to that mixer the other night?”

“No. How was it?”

“I got stuck with this guy from the Business School who spent a half hour explaining pork belly futures to me.”

Lou laughed. Emily wanted to ask whether she was dating. If Corinne and Joan wanted to fix Emily up with Fishbait's friends, were they trying to fix Lou up with white men? She couldn't think how to phrase it, so she asked about Charlotte instead. Lou said her father was an undertaker, and they lived in a big house on a street that formed a border of the Negro section. Growing up, she played with Negro children in one direction and poor white children in the other.

“My mother used to make me take ballet lessons and piano lessons. Filled our house up with all this china and silver and linen and junk. Huh.”

Emily was stunned. Nobody in Pine Woods had owned china or taken ballet lessons. She felt a twinge of indignation. Then guilt over the indignation.

“I always thought I was just about the hottest thing on two legs. We were rich, and all my playmates were poor. They were dirty. I was sparkling clean. I could do an arabesque, and they couldn't. Huh. It was the shock of my life one day when I was playing house with these trashy white kids and they made me be the maid.
The maid?
Hell, my mama had a maid, and none of theirs did. I wasn't about to be no maid, so I stopped going over there.” Her accent was getting thicker.

Emily relaxed listening to the emerging accent but was uneasy about the content. But hell, what did a bunch of rude little children in North Carolina have to do with
her?
Emily announced brusquely that she had to work.

“Yeah, me too,” said Lou, standing up. “You going to the library?”

“Guess I'll work here.” She was swept with relief as Lou left.

The showing of Raymond's new documentary took place in a loft on the Lower East Side. Emily brought Joan and Corinne, who were impressed. “You actually
know
someone in FORWARD?” Joan interrogated.

“Sure.”

“Who?”

“A friend from home.”

“From
Tennessee?”

“Yeah.I guess he's been rehabilitated.”

The room was packed with people in sharecropper disguises. The background to the film was songs by Pete Seeger and Joan Baez. The film itself consisted of news clips: the Montgomery bus boycott, the National Guard barring students from Little Rock High, Negroes being beaten in North Carolina during a lunch counter sit-in, Freedom Riders being spat on in Montgomery, the corpse of Herbert Lee, Meredith entering Ole Miss while whites rioted outside, King arrested in Birmingham, Wallace in the University of Alabama doorway, the corpse of Medgar Evers, the bombed-out Birmingham church, the ruins of Donley High. Flailing nightsticks, snarling police dogs, share-croppers' shacks, Negro faces looking through prison bars; chain gangs. Greensboro, Clinton, Selma, Montgomery, Birmingham, Little Rock, were read off in the background like a litany. Black faces gaunt with hunger, eyes wide with fear, mouths screaming with pain. Fat pale faces in white helmets and reflecting sunglasses.

The lights came on, and the audience buzzed. Raymond was soon surrounded, having his wrists shaken, his fists pounded, and his back slapped. Joan and Corinne demanded that Emily introduce them. Raymond in turn introduced her to Maria, a woman in a tight black turtleneck and African trading beads, to Justin, a tall thin man with a Pancho Villa mustache; to Ralph, a Negro in overalls and a cap made from a lady's stocking.