“Somebody pulled my hair.”
“Well, don’t look at me,” said Violet-Curl, affronted, and Tamonette and Ida were two aisles away examining notebooks with mottled black and white covers, not even smiling. (Ida bought one of the twenty-nine-cent notebooks: she had already started scribbling down certain things she heard.) Later they got a girl with long red hair parted in the middle, then changed to another store and Tamonette got a youth with long straggles, and still neither one of them even smiled, not even on the long walk back, though it was pent up in them until they were safe in Ida’s house when they roared and screamed and reenacted sidling up to this one and that one, selecting a single hair, the sharp yank, the drift away with poker faces.
Lamb was home, sewing some old rag of Mrs. Astraddle’s into something Ida or Marie-Pearl would end up wearing and hating. The radio was blasting Reverend Ike, pouring out words like handfuls of BBs: “I am the greatest, I am stupendous, I am beyond all little kinds of measuring sticks and ordinary classifications, I am somebody, I am something coming to you like a BULLDOZER and I am looking good and smelling twice as good and I am telling you, get out of the ghet-to and get into the get-mo. Get some money, honey. You and me, we not interested in a harp tomorrow, we interested in a dollar today. We want it NOW. We want it in a big sack or a box or a railroad car but we WANT it. Stick with me. Nothing for free. Want to shake that money tree. There is something missing from that old proverb, you all know it, money is the root of all evil. I say LACK OF money is the root of all evil. The best thing you can do for poor folks is not be one of them. No way, don’t stay. Don’t stay poor, it’s pure manure, and that’s for sure. I want you to know—”
Lamb believed in Reverend Ike, sucked up the stories of the blind beggar woman who bought one of his prayer cloths and minutes later the phone rang and she had won a Cadillac in a sweepstakes, and a man rewarded with a South Seas cruise or the one who found, on a bus seat, a wallet of crisp bills with no identification. She ordered her own prayer cloth, kept it hidden in the toe of her patent-leather Sunday shoe and waited for it to start working, said every morning “I feel and pray that God will make me rich sometime.”
Ida gets in it
In 1960 Ida was eighteen and Tamonette, who had dropped out of school in the ninth grade, was as big as a house with her second baby.
Ida graduated and came up against the dead end she had always known was there. There were no jobs for black women except housework and field work. What was the point of social studies and algebra if the best thing out there was scrubbing some white woman’s rancid toilet? Lamb said something to Mrs. Astraddle, maybe Ida could help in the kitchen, maybe part time, but Mrs. Astraddle glanced at Ida, standing there scowling and swinging her big arms, said, I don’t think so, Lamb.
Her notebooks and papers were all over the house, pages curled, loose papers gliding to the floor when anyone came in off the porch.
“Can’t you get rid of this shit?” said Lamb.
“Shit? You don’t know what I got here, do you?”
“No, and don’t give a care. All I see is one great big papery mess. All I see is you gettin bunches a writin paper from some old woman. What you doin with those old woman papers? Scratchin away instead of lookin for work.”
“It’s stuff they tells me.”
“Better get a job,” her mother said bitterly.
Joe McNeil, Franklin McCain, David Richmond and Ezell Blair, Jr., sat at the Woolworth’s lunch counter up in North Carolina on the first day in February and in a few months sitins were happening everywhere. Ida dumped all the notebooks and papers in a box, pushed it under the bed.
“I got to get in it, got to get in it. I’m going up to North Car’lina,” said Ida.
“You fool,” said her mother. “You be killed. Those white men kill you. You are not going. It’s college kids, college students doin these things, black ones and white ones, they got it all organized, you just don’t go runnin up and say ‘here I am, little Miss Ida from Bayou Féroce.’ These people got charm bracelets, wearing pink shirts. You don’t know nobody. You don’t be part of no organization. I’m tellin you, it is dangerous, girl, like you don’t even understand—I’m talkin mortal unto death dangerous. You be picked off like a drumstick on a platter.”
“I can march. Can sit in.”
“March? You can’t even walk to the store without complainin. Look at you, solid blubber, you melt before you walk a mile. You haven’t got the sense of a potato bug. I swear, I rather see you scribble on them old woman papers. Go all the way to North Car’lina to get killed.”
“I won’t get killed.”
“Happen every day to quicker, smarter, better-lookin ones than you. I bet that’s what poor Mr. Willie Edwards thought over there in Alabama the first day on his truck route when the Ku Kluxes made him fall off a high bridge and die, hammered his fingers with guns to make him let go. For nothin. I could tell you things all day and into the night but I might as well save my breath.”
(A few years later Redneck Bub, on his way to record his only hit, “Kajun King of the Ku Klux Klan,” “for segregationists only,” broke down in front of Lamb’s house. He came up to the door. “You got a phone?” he said. “Lemme use it.” She knew who he was, let him use it. He drove home the same way two days later, and as he passed Lamb’s house again the worst headache of his life came down and stayed for a week, caused him to throw up in his car.)
Reverend Veazie’s grease bath
Tamonette snorted, choked on smoke. “You don’t need to go to no Montgomery Alabama or no North Car’lina for a sit-in. They having a bad sit-in over in Stifle Mississip’ Saturday afternoon. At the Woolworth’s lunch counter.”
“How you know that?”
“Because me and my mother and the Baptist Young People gonna be in it. Reverend Veazie takin us down there in the church bus and we gonna sit in.”
“You? Girl, since when you interested in sit-ins?” That mealy-mouthed old chicken-eater Reverend Veazie at a sit-in, driving a bus full of people to it, was too much to imagine, and Tamonette’s mother was not the sit-in type. Tamonette herself, a watermelon balanced on a pair of toothpicks, had never said a thing about civil rights in her life.
“I’m coming, then.”
“Don’t say nothin to nobody about it.”
The sit-in
She didn’t dress up; they didn’t make dress-up clothes big enough to fit her. It was the same old men’s blue jeans and men’s work boots unless Lamb sewed up a tent-sized skirt for her, roughly ironed with cat’s-face wrinkles all over. Tamonette couldn’t fit into anything but her old orange maternity dress, but the boys wore their go-to-church jackets and pressed pants, the other girls and women were henned-up in good rayon prints, belted and nyloned, and some wearing hats and even gloves in spite of the heat. Up front she saw Tamonette’s ex-boyfriend, Relton, the father of the unborn baby, sitting beside Moira Root, his long narrow feet in tan boots.
“That why you so interested in the sit-in,” she hissed to Tamonette.
“You hush your mouth. It is NOT.” But it was. Ida’s hard eye saw Tamonette’s coming life, letting men walk all over her, and she’d have one baby after another, wearing the old orange maternity dress until it fell off her, things never working out.
On the church bus Tamonette’s mother and Reverend Veazie, sad-looking and bumpy-cheeked, a white handkerchief sticking up from his pocket like the peak of Everest, sat in front, and Tamonette’s mother started singing as soon as the bus rolled, a woman who could not resist harmonizing with engine hum.
“Now, they don’t know we coming,” called Reverend Veazie. “Remember, just take a seat and sit quiet and if the waitress ask what you want, order a Co’-Cola. Everybody got fifteen cents to pay for it if she serve it? But she won’t. No matter what they do to you, remember, you can keep ordering your Co’-Cola in a quiet, cool voice. Stay cool. Do not destroy or touch anybody or anything except your Co’-Cola—if she serve it. But s
he won’t. When the police come and try to force you away, hang on to that counter. Don’t say nothing, just hang on, Jesus Christ with you, make them drag you away, don’t offer no resistance beyond hanging on to the counter. Passive resistance, coolness, think of Reverend King and remember you are doing an important and brave thing for all the brothers and sisters, for your people, for everybody, for the legions of justice, so stay cool.”
It was an ordinary little town, hot, a few big trees, half the main street stores with FOR RENT signs in the windows. They went right through, and on the far side of town, past a tire dump, pulled into the Dixie Belle Mall. They were nervous, went in through the Woolworth’s doors in a bunch, the girls gripping their purse handles, the boys stretching their necks in the starched collars and ties, stomach muscles clenched stiff. They walked to the lunch counter in single file. A middle-aged white farmer, dirt-stiff hair and crusty overalls, was swallowing the last of a milk shake, tuna sandwich crusts and blobs of grey fish on his plate. They sat on the empty stools. The man looked up, startled, put some money on the counter and went. The only visible waitress, cleaning the stainless-steel spigots and machine parts, took her time in glancing up in the mirror to see who needed a menu. She froze, did not turn to confront the row of dark faces but scuttled into the kitchen. They could hear her shrill voice asking, where’s Mr. Seaplane, we got a problem out front, and the cook, old and white-haired, coming to the porthole in the swinging door and looking out, one arm up in the air so the wet grey in his armpit showed, then his face disappeared, replaced by that of the dishwasher and the other waitress.
She could feel the round little seat under her behind, wanted to try its spin capability, but could also feel the crowd gathering in back of them and looked up in the mirror to see them, mostly mean-looking white men, saying, what the hell’s goin on here, what is this, what are them niggers doin, looks like we got us a problem here, hey nig, what you tryin to pull off here. A tall white man in a brown suit came out from the kitchen—the manager or the boss, nobody was sure.
“All right, you niggers, you clear out of here right now or I’ll call the sheriff. I’m gon’ count to three and if you ain’t hightailin it for the door by the count of three I can guarantee you some trouble. One! Two! Three!” When no one moved except Tamonette’s boyfriend who raised his hand as if he were in school and said, I’ll have a Co’-Cola, please, Brown Suit paid no attention and counted again, said, that does it, I’m calling the sheriff and the cops, and went back into the kitchen. The police were there before the door stopped swinging so they knew he’d called before counting. A voice from the crowd said, you want a Co’-Cola? to Tamonette’s faithless boyfriend. A sandy-headed short man, pack of cigarettes rolled up in his t-shirt sleeve, got behind him, held a bottle of Coca-Cola high, poured it, spattering, on his head.
“Taste pretty good, boy? Must be runnin down the crack of your ass where you got all your taste.” Suddenly hands and arms were thrusting between them, seizing the ketchup bottles, the salt and pepper. She felt something like sand strike the back of her neck and started sneezing—someone had unscrewed the cap from a pepper shaker and tossed the contents. The men were behind the counter, grabbing cream and milk, butter, pie, mayonnaise, mustard, eggs, a tiny white man seized the rancid cold cooking oil, a three-gallon stainless-steel vat, poured the entire contents over Reverend Veazie. (Later Reverend Veazie said in a sermon, “God was watchin over me because that oil MIGHT a been HOT.”)
Ida felt wet substances cascade down her neck and face, sneezed convulsively as pepper flew and mustard dripped, someone mashed an egg in her hair, another poured icy milk down her shoulder and breast, they were hurling handfuls of Wheaties, drizzling Karo syrup, throwing Jell-O bombs. “Food fight,” said the tiny man, hurling a banana at Tamonette’s mother who flinched as it struck and then began to sing “We shall NOT BE MOO-OO-OOVED,” and they sang with her, sneezing and crying, but singing and still sitting at the counter when the two cops and then some of the men in the crowd began to drag them off the stools with hard little strikes from their batons, and arm-twists and quick knee-thrusts and savage guttural promises of what they were going to do. She felt hard fingers squeezing at her breast, then wiping the mustard onto her back, saying, disgusting nigger cunt, you big fat giant ugly nigger whore, move it or I’ll shove this up your twat, jabbing with a sawed-off pool cue at her groin, hitting the pubic bone hard and painfully so that she cried out and half sank to her knees, hearing the reverend shout, be cool be cool be cool, and he was so slippery with oil they couldn’t get a grip on him but kept falling down in his slick.
She got up. The man with the cue was in the crowd, back to her, trying to get a good lick in on Reverend Veazie. With all her force she kicked him in the behind and he went down under the boots of the others, shouting, aaah, aaah, hold it, goddammit, git off’n me, my back is broke, goddammit, git me up.
What next?
“Oh baby girl,” moaned Lamb when she came home three days later, both eyes swollen shut, skinned up and barefoot, stinking of condiments, vomit and jail. “What I tell you? Look at you, you half dead, they half kill you. I follow my first mind, would of kept you from goin. I gonna lose my job with Mrs. Astraddle she hear about this. What you doin?”
Ida stripped and washed in the cold shower Octave had rigged before he went up north, came out and pulled on old blue jeans, her run-over black sneakers, got a plastic shopping bag from under the sink and began folding her clothes and packing them in it.
“Think you doin?”
“Gettin out a here. I’m in it. They ain’t gonna stop me, neither. I’m goin with Tamonette’s boyfriend. And don’t you touch my papers and books. I be back to get ’em. We gonna look for some more sit-ins.”
“You a living example, cast your bread upon the waters, it come back moldy.”
“I’m in it.”
A year later she was out of it. She turned every sit-in into a riot, fought and kicked and shouted, jumped up slugging. Her idea of passive resistance was to lean on mean little white deputies pretending she was fainting, then claw their flesh in a hard grip while saying “where am I?”
“You don’t understand passive resistance,” a group leader told her. “You hurtin the cause. You got too much top anger, sister. We got to channel rage, else it eat us up, destroy us too. You go home, figure out a different kind a way to help your brothers and sisters.”
She went back to Bayou Féroce, packed the books and papers under the beds into eighteen boxes and moved to Philadelphia, got a job with Foodaire, a company specializing in the preparation and packaging of airline snacks, and there she stayed for three decades, driving her little car into the south on weekends, traveling around, getting into conversations with grey-headed women and asking those questions.
(Years later in a Los Angeles hospital bed recovering from a gallbladder operation and digesting the news that she had tested positive for tuberculosis, she read the paper: in Jackson, Mississippi, a black man stopped for speeding was taken to jail and beaten dead, the coroner ruled a heart attack; on another page, forty black men had hanged themselves in Mississippi jails in six years; Mr. Bill Simpson, forced out of Vidor, Texas, back to Beaumont, was shot dead within the week. So forth and so forth and so forth. The paper slid to the floor. It never stopped. Hadn’t they done something fine back in the sixties? Hadn’t people died getting the voting and civil rights laws? And since then, what? Seemed like some had got money and power, but they’d left the others behind, curling like shrimps in the smoking fry pans of cities where bodies of children were discovered in trash compactors, blood dripped through ceilings onto somebody’s plate of dinner, babies got shot in cross fire, and the names of cities meant something deep bad, unfixable and wrong. Money was rolling in big waves but not even the foam touched the black shore. All those notebooks wouldn’t save a single one from the hot pan, all those histories of black women, those invisible suffering ones at the bottom of the bag. Her apartment was filled wi
th notebooks, yellow snapshots, studio photographs, diaries written on paper bags, ill-spelled pages of herbal cures illustrated with leaves and flowers and colored with dyes squeezed from stems and petals, a sharecrop account written on a shingle with a burnt stick, a letter printed on a piece of apron by a woman homesteader in Kansas describing the death of her husband, a thick manuscript in beautiful cursive script on pages fashioned from cut-up circus posters, My So-called Life with the O.K. Minstrel Circus, recipes written on scrap wood with a nail dipped in soot ink, the midnight thoughts of a charwoman who cleaned federal offices during the Second World War, scrawled on pages gleaned from wastebaskets, the lines of anonymous poets, scraps of lives of thousands of black women. She’d done it on her lousy salary: used-book shops, church bazaars, yard sales, dim, dusty boxes in thrift stores, trash cans and Dumpsters, asking everyone she met, you got any books or letters or whatnot about black women, any black women, everywoman? She thought of Octave and his green accordion in Chicago: was he still alive? She’d sent a letter years ago, sent it by way of Lamb, sure would like to hear you play a little zydeco on that old green accordion. Never heard. Wasn’t that the old evil thing, brothers and sisters losing each other? Wasn’t it the old, old thing, families torn up like scrap paper, the home place left and lost forever?)
Old Green
Octave, drowsing through a bad spell that hinged on a long layoff—he’d never gotten his union ticket and there were too damn many people wanting work out there; he’d tried it all, worked fifty short jobs as a plasterer, carpenter, carpet installer, trashman, furniture mover, taxi driver, hearse driver, grocery delivery boy, short-order cook, maintenance man, awning installer, TV deliveryman, fired or quit after a week or ten or eleven days until it got to the point where he couldn’t kill nothin and wouldn’t nothin die; everything was turning ugly and anyway he was in no shape for construction work anymore—couldn’t make out what the letter said. He discovered it again some weeks later under a chair and this time read it through. Old Green, shit, Old Green gone to the pawnshop long ago. “Yes,” he said, “too bad, baby sister, but Old Green is doin time in the pawnshop for anyway three years, know what I’m sayin?”