“That’s the truth, Cat,” Mrs. Taylor agreed.
“If I really thought that if Stella and I went away, your problems would be over, I’d go.” It was hard for Miss Cat to get out a long sentence. “But I don’t think so. They want to intimidate you in every way.” She had to swallow and lick her lips, but she was determined to keep going. “They want to split us up.” She said it like she was proud. “I’ll bet you within one week (swallow, swallow), even if Stella and I left (swallow) and never set foot on the Miles College campus again (swallow), there’d be some redneck out there with a bullhorn (swallow) telling you that school was out for the summer. Permanently out. (Pause) We take a stand now, or there’s not going to be anyplace left to stand.”
“That’s right,” Mrs. Taylor said. But her face looked strange. Like she was going to cry. “I say it with Cat.” Her voice was all quiet, like she could hardly get the words out. “Let’s stand up for ourselves.”
TJ looked at the class. They looked stunned. Then his Agnes does it. She stands up. A sob catches in TJ’s throat. She’s misunderstood—they were just talking the word—but she’s standing there beside her school desk. Then Miss Arcola stands up and beams a lightbulb smile at everybody else. And Miss Gloria pops like a little short cork right out of her seat. Mrs. Taylor is up with her. One by one all the black folks are standing. In the doorframe, Mr. Parrish straightens up like a soldier. Stretches himself up on tiptoe, bounces on the balls of his feet. Last of all, white girl called Miss Stella gets up. She looks around at them. She wants to be brave, too.
Only person left seated is Miss Cat in her wheelchair. She suddenly shoots up her hand—reckon they know she can’t stand up—and the whole room whoops with triumph.
Four Spirits
HER FOOT PRESSING THE GAS PEDAL, STELLA REMEMBERED the imperative in the classroom thus:stand up—and it was Christine’s voice from inside Stella telling her what she must do. But also, and at the same time, her mother’s voice, as though time had no power at all to separate events. Speaking not so much before Christine’s injunction, but on top of it and before it, finally simultaneously with it:Stand up straight, Ruben, Timothy, Stella. Blessed boys, blessed guns. And again, the troops marched by, the waves of khaki legs swept forward, row on row, down Twentieth Street, past the Tutwiler Hotel, past the reviewing stand:General Omar Bradley.
Stella glanced across the car seat at Cat, lost in her own thoughts. Courageous Cat. Stella felt alone with her fear. Though she spoke of marrying Donny, already he was gone in the mists. Though her maiden aunt planted scraggly rosebushes and expected them to become a garden wall for a wedding, the groom had become a ghost in the bright sunshine of the South Pacific. Unreal.
Real was a sweltering classroom and the command to rise. To rise and face fear.
Lines from T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land, came to her, of London, Unreal City. Unreal. Had so many passed over London Bridge? Had Death undone so many?
And then a quartet of voices swirled in her head, sang just above the metal roof of the car, for her who seemed so normal:
How can you ever know us?
You will never know us.
We live like air
We are the air.
Like four stars, not voices, they seemed to wink out, tuck themselves back into blackness. Like four navels, they were round, shallow, and open, then they closed into a seam. Like four closed mouths with sealed lips. But they had sung to her. Would they sing again? Four silver voices, an ethereal descant.
And they sang again, immediately:
And already Stella learned: it is the third voice who loves me most. It is the third child who makes things clear: “We live like air,” that voice had sung on top of and beneath and simultaneously with the others.
Come to haunt her: a quartet of spirits, as high as any random four stars, as inward as the four chambers of her heart. Voices like cloud-high birds. Too high to hear well. Specks hard to discern. Specks entering the ear. “Your living contains us.”
Her ear could hear the uniqueness of each silvery edge. Their voices four wires on an ethereal lyre plucked simultaneously. But Stella liked the third voice best, the open one that didn’t quite cease, and she would follow it, choose it to trust. “Your living contains us.”
She had not gone, could not have gone to their funeral because she was not worthy. And Don was not worthy either. Only Cat had been worthy, and how she got there and how she got home again, she and Don would never know. “Perhaps as mundane as a taxi?” Don seemed to suggest in his dry, ironic voice, almost a monotone but a little lilt at the end:taxi? She cherished that particular tone of Don. She cherished it.
And wasn’t the word cherish part of the marriage ceremony?
All four chambers of her heart contracted, signaled news too subtle to decipher. Perhaps the little twigs of rosebushes planted all along her aunts’ wire fence would grow into a wall of white roses. Those spare green skeletal stems fanning out of the ground might become the backdrop for a white wedding, a garden wedding in two years. No, in only sixteen months, now. Eight months had passed since Donny left.
Donny, that was Cat’s name for her brother, not Stella’s. For Stella, that name registered less intimacy, not more. She squeezed her eyes tightly to envision the wedding.
Stella and Aunt Krit wanted large drooping white roses. Roses hanging like white silk handkerchiefs, heavy with virginity. On their silky petals would be a defiant touch of brown, or speckled red, here and there, marring and perfecting their pristine bloodlessness. Stella imagined the large, white roses gathered into a bridal bouquet and herself looking modestly down into their snowy petals. Brown spots for the nights she’d lain beside Darl kissing and kissing, her virginity intact.
“Good night, Kitty-Cat,” Stella said. (She had taken the chair from the trunk, unfolded the smelly chair, helped Cat into it. Dear Cat.)
“Good night, Stella.”
They had driven home in silence because their minds could not separate from the solidarity of the classroom.
Stella watched Cat muster the energy to propel her wheelchair up the ramp. She didn’t want help. They had not discussed it: what of that terrifying promise to return tomorrow night to the death trap? Stella visualized the lighted building consisting of only one room, a small porch, Greek columns, and a single step at its front. What about that place? But Cat had wheeled away into her world, and now Stella must walk home, leaving the car for Mr. Cartwright to drive to work.
From the leafy summer trees, three voices, not four, sang together for Stella. She recognized them from the opera; she and Don had dressed up before he went to Tonga, attended, inhabited an impressionist painting that night. From The Magic Flute, in German, they sang. Three spirit voices teasing Papageno out of his aloneness, out of his desire to die for lack of a mate. So quick and silvery those Mozartian voices, high and nimble, singing in close harmony, singing a parallel melody. Singing from a time of powdered wigs and knee britches and a place far from Birmingham. But where was the voice she trusted, the voice of the lost child whom she loved most?
Lions Lounging
IN THE GLOAMING, THE NEXT NIGHT, STELLA WALKED ACROSS the Miles campus toward her shadowy friends, three women and a man, sitting on the step of the portico. Though Cat was home sick, Stella, yes, she, had driven alone to the college. Before this night, Stella had willed herself to have courage—just enough to help Cat. When Cat’s telephone voice had said I can’t come, Stella had quivered with fear. So she would have to stand up for herself, or not stand up. But she knew she would go. I have to go by myself to Courage College, Stella told herself. She would not have the crutch of altruism for support.
Stella watched her new friends sitting on the step of the strangely classical portico. They stirred with uncertainty. Who was that approaching, in the gloaming?—they must be asking. She must seem disembodied without the wheelchair before her. No doubt they usually recognized her and Cat as a unit, a rolling sculpture: two female figures joined
by her hands on the handles of the back of the wheelchair.
And what could she make of their shapes, lounging on the step? Three women. A fourth figure, a man who was a little apart. A man in a suit, handsome Lionel Parrish waiting with Christine, Arcola, and Gloria to see who would come back to school this night. He lounged like a lion on the banister slab beside the step, his back to the last streaks of sunset.
“You look like four shadows,” Stella called to them, “haints risen from Hades.”
Christine stood up, approached her.
“That you, Stella?”
“Who else? Without her better half.”
“I sure thought Cat would of come.” Arcola’s voice floated musingly on the dusk.
“She would have. She’s sick. She’s flooding.”
The three women shifted their positions uncomfortably, each in her own way. They hadn’t expected this news in their conversation: menstrual blood. Mr. Parrish remained still as a stone lion. Somehow it was necessary, Stella thought, to say this in front of him.
Gloria spoke softly, in her high sweet voice. (She reminded Stella of the voice of the third spirit, the one she trusted. The one who wanted there to be meaning, as much as she longed for beauty. Who could look at the newspaper photographs of the four girls killed in the bombing and not feel her heart go out? Sometimes one countenance or another would stir the heart in a special way.) Gloria said, high and sweet, “I guess you’re not a southern lady anymore, are you?”
“No,” Stella said. “It’s more important to be something else.”
“Amen,” Mr. Parrish said.
Stella felt the rareness of the moment. Could it only happen in the gloaming, in the gloaming? Did it happen every day when the seam between day and dark was smudged? Was this the moment to catch, the devotional moment: the last redness of the sun, the first starlight?
“Here’s eternity,” Stella said, and she gestured at them, the college campus, the sky.
“Come sit with us,” Christine answered.
“Will the students come?” Arcola asked.
“They’ll come.” Mr. Parrish spoke without moving, as though stone were emanating sound.
“Where’s your braid?” Stella asked Arcola.
“Home in a drawer.”
“That’s fine,” Gloria murmured.
“My hair’s short,” Arcola said.
“And straight,” Stella observed. The women, too, were like patient lionesses, sitting randomly on the steps in the dusk. And then she asked Arcola because she had to, or night would fall like a quick curtain: “Do you straighten it?”
“Yeah.”
Then they became four women (because Stella joined the others) plus Lionel Parrish who were sitting in the comfortable twilight. Their quiet was a constituent of the moment; silence was essential to this distilled droplet of time. Mosquitoes began to gather, to visit their arms and legs and cheeks. When Mr. Parrish slapped at one on the back of his neck, the spell dissolved. The sun set.
“Not quite so hot tonight,” he said.
“It was good of Agnes to bring fans,” Gloria said.
Gloria was taking part; she was saying her sentences, the same as anybody. Such sweetness in her voice, Stella thought. I love Gloria. Until now, she had liked Arcola; she had struggled with Christine; she had neglected Gloria. And here Gloria was, a human being, carved out of space, as real sitting on the steps as any lioness or person.
Stella spread her hand on the cool stone. She felt its gritty texture, welcomed its solid and mute reality.
“I might write a short story someday,” Stella said.
“What about?” Gloria asked, more promptly than anyone.
“About us.” Stella pressed her hand into the stone. Of course she could leave no print. Maybe a fast-fading palm print of moisture on the stone. “Of course it wouldn’t really be about us. I’d change everything.”
“That would be all right,” Mr. Parrish said. “We can’t help but change things. No matter how good they are.”
“Or how bad,” Christine said.
Someone cleared her throat, but it was impossible to say who. The night whispered into Stella’s ear:
Define us, O Lord!
Stella remembered the glow from the cigarette lighter the night before on Christine’s face. How it had transformed her, made her beautiful. She remembered Darl, in the cemetery, the circle of young black men around them, how Darl and they had smoked cigarettes together. Suddenly she missed him. She heard indistinct words, high as a mosquito
Wistful…wishing…
Darl seemed like a kind of cousin—distant but someone to whom she would ever be connected. Someone she might see years later; she would say something and he would answer, “Only you would remember that, Stella.” And if that happened, she would be exquisitely affirmed. But what hovered in the gloaming?
Eternity in a…
“Can you remember,” Stella asked, “when you were first aware of racial prejudice?”
They were silent.
Finally, Mr. Parrish said, “It’s in the air. Like breathing.”
A frozen, jagged sea.
“Like particulate matter,” Stella said. “From the steel mills.”
But Stella was remembering Jack, a little boy she had played football with when she was very young. Jack’s face had been freckled, too, like Darl’s, and she had thought him indescribably cute. The essence of what a boy should be. After they were grown up, she’d turned around and there was Jack again, downtown, coming out of Thom McAn shoe store, tall now and lanky, not the compact little boy she had hurled her body against while she pressed the football into her ribs. When she saw him, all grown, she pressed a phantom football tight against her ribs; it became like a large heart, and she could feel it beating against her side.
In front of Thom McAn, looking thoughtfully at people jostling on the sidewalk, tall Jack had told her when he had first been aware of racial prejudice. Back then, when they were children, there were a few colored houses across the alley, behind his house. One day he had been sitting on a cinder block at the edge of the alley. He was just sitting there. Maybe he was staring. A Negro girl had come up to him and said, “What you looking at, you freckle-faced bastard?” His story had jolted Stella; she had thought prejudice was the burden of only white people.
Piano music trickled onto the Miles campus into the new night: Chopin.
Stella sat up straight. “Is there a music department?” she asked.
It was an old piano, rattly. Still, it was Chopin. A nocturne her mother had played. Four mosquitoes sang at Stella’s ear.
Zing zing zing zing
zing zing zing
Sometimes we just zing
Zing zing zing zing.
“Christine?” Stella said.
“Uh-huh,” Christine answered, relaxed.
“We’ve always been integrated. Our lives.”
“What you mean, Stella?” The question sounded sharp. Then Christine modulated her tone, put her question in a sheath. “What you trying to say?”
“Our lives have always been layered together. We know each other. I don’t think northern people always understand that.”
“Separate and unequal,” Christine said.
“That’s right,” Stella said. “But together. Inseparable, anyhow.”
Stella saw that students were beginning to drift toward them from all parts of the campus. She couldn’t see who. She wondered if somewhere the Klan was gathering like that. Converging toward some center, feeling their solidarity.
There was Agnes LaFayt. Walking slowly. She was carrying her shopping bag again.
“Time to get started,” Mr. Parrish said. He stood up, became unglued from the slab where he had lounged casually on one elbow in his good clothes.
The four women stood up, shook out their skirts, dusted their hands against each other, leaned down to pick up their purses.
“Whatcha got this evening?” Christine asked Agnes.
Agnes smiled a tired little smile. She reached in her bag and brought out a handful of short white sticks. Six inches long, white, waxy.
“Candles,” she said. “In case the ’lectricity go off again. I got us some candles.”
An Office Call
THE STUDENTS WERE CONGREGATING DESPITE THE THREAT.
When Lionel Parrish went back to his office, he flicked on the overhead light and opened his desk drawer. He got out a life insurance form. He tossed it onto the desk and twisted the scored stem on his desk light between his thumb and forefinger. More light. Candles. The woman made him ashamed. He would rather think of ingenuity, feel the details of invention between his thumb and forefinger. His face twitched with shame.
He was ashamed that he hadn’t taken better care of his own mother. Ashamed about all the soft, middle-aged black women who were floating on through their lives toward some uncertain certain end with so little fulfillment. Maybe moments of pleasure in their marriage beds. At least at first, when it was all new to them. Transcendent moments in church when they were singing or praying. There should have been more for them. Not just crocheting their afghans and baking their pineapple upside-down cake. He and all the other black men should have seen to it for their sakes.
He turned out the overhead fluorescent light and sat again at his lamp-lit desk. He wanted to dwell in the circle of intimacy provided by the desk lamp. It was the way a scholar should look: cut off from the larger space, focused on what he was doing, on what he must do—his papers, his books. He would sit in a circle of light like a white man in a Rembrandt painting.