“Birmingham,” Mr. Constantine answered, but the image of his kind uncle passed like mist through his mind. He saw Uncle Theo leaning on his staff on the hillside, daydreaming of the dome of Saint Sophia in Constantinople. “This Birmingham,” Mr. Constantine repeated firmly.
“Birmingham’s half mythological, too,” Gloria said. Then she asked firmly, “What about tomorrow?”
Under her tutelage, Christine saw, Gloria would make progress. Even on the third word, tomorrow, Gloria managed to maintain her gaze, to look Christine full in the eyes. Suddenly Gloria was as striking as a Polynesian idol with her rich, red-brown skin and jade eyes. Fierce. Christine blinked.
Gloria at Home
IT WAS CARD NIGHT IN THE BACKYARD IN THE GARAGE apartment where her father’s four sisters lived. Gloria’s mother never joined the maiden aunties for cards, but she sent Gloria over to wait on them. For five days a week, the four aunts cleaned for and waited on twenty rich families of Mountain Brook and Vestavia. They wore starched pearl gray uniforms and white aprons. But on Friday nights, they put on their tight, jewel-tone toreador pants and played bridge.
When each of them placed a jeweled clip in her hair, they became the Queen of Spades and the Queen of Clubs, the Queen of Diamonds and the Queen of Hearts. The older sisters were the black queens and the two younger ones were the red queens. Emerald, topaz, ruby, and rhinestone—the glass jewels twinkled in their hair.
“ ’Cept your daddy, we got no use for menfolks,” they said to Gloria, from time to time. Born right in the middle of the sisters, Gloria’s father was the Exceptional One—a successful man who had brought his sisters in from the country and installed them all in his garage apartment behind the new house. While they played cards, Gloria made popcorn and fudge for them. As they slapped the cards down on the flimsy table, the aunts cracked their gum, threw back their heads so you could see the arch of their teeth, and laughed their big laughs.
Gloria loved the oldest one and the youngest one most—the Queen of Spades, Alice, with her ample hips stuffed into the cerise pants, and the Queen of Hearts, Lily Bit, who had green eyes like Gloria, but something of the color of Lily Bit’s eyes was in her skin so she looked almost khaki in her skinny yellow, raw-silk pants.
Among them, Gloria felt as light and salty as a kernel of the popped corn she piled into big blue bowls. They wouldn’t let her be shy. But she didn’t tell them her new secret: I went to a beer joint. I, the silent sophomore, have a new friend, a senior. You can’t guess what I might do next.
Two weeks ago, I went with Christine to Mr. Parrish’s office. I’m teaching in the night school: H.O.P.E. I speak in a low, quiet tone, but the students pull up their desks close to mine. They listen to me. I teach them the facts of history, but I could teach poetry or music or almost anything you could name.
Gloria wouldn’t tell any of that, but she would show off: she tossed a handful of popcorn up over her head and caught some of it in her mouth. The aunts hollered and clapped and tossed popcorn up over their heads till it was snowing popcorn. Gloria wouldn’t let them clean it up; she got down on all fours and picked up every piece. Then she boiled up a pan of glossy fudge.
That night, under the influence of fudge, Gloria dreamed dreams of things no one could possibly see: a chart of the human skeleton came off the wall and danced and sang like Mr. Bones in a minstrel show. She had seen a skeleton poster in handsome Mr. Parrish’s office for H.O.P. E. at the college. Mr. Parrish had introduced her to the poster: “Meet Mr. Bones.”
In her dreams, a cloud whizzed by like a bus full of schoolchildren singing gospel music, their bright young faces framed by puffs of whipped-cream clouds, on their way to jail. The sun rose like a plate of fudge, scored crisscross, in a diamond pattern. Her four aunts, their colorful pants tight as tree bark, grew four stories tall, uprooted themselves, stalked the earth, and Gloria leapt high on her cello, which had turned into a pogo stick.
Edmund at Home
WHEN EDMUND CAME HOME FROM VISITING HIS PASTOR IN the hospital, he said to his mother, “Mama, tomorrow I’m going to be arrested.” (He didn’t tell her that he’d seen his big brother lying on the pavement. Just about lifted off the pavement by the fire hose shooting him. Charles was grown, had quit school, and moved out long ago.)
“You make me shamed I do so little,” his mother answered. She set down her cracked coffee cup.
“Mama, you’ll come get me, won’t you?”
Christine Walking
EIGHT WHITE MINISTERS, CHRISTINE KNEW, HAD WRITTEN King a letter (she thought about this as she walked home through the stifling night from the Athens Cafe and Bar). Eight white ministers had told him his coming to Birmingham was untimely, unwise. King was an outsider; he ought to let Birmingham folks work out Birmingham problems, in the name of Our Lord and Savior, so said eight white ministers in the spring of 1963. Christine’s beautiful martini ran in her veins while she walked the night street toward home.
Gloria? Green-eyed Gloria might amount to something. She was smart; she was willing to try to teach in the night school. Gloria had sat in the bar for an hour, asked for ice water, not even beer.
Christine enjoyed walking home. This my neighborhood, she’d explained when she declined Gloria’s offer of a lift. Christine didn’t envy anybody anything, but she wouldn’t be beholden.
Such a quiet, still night closing down the screaming day. The sea-fight tomorrow: it was a phrase from Greek philosophy. It meant you couldn’t know the outcome, who would win. Next to physics, Christine loved best to study philosophy. From physics to metaphysics—she aimed to know it all. She aimed to put her will to the wheel till it turned round to freedom.
Reverend Shuttlesworth, Reverend King, said love always wins. But Aristotle—or was it Plato?—pointed at the ships in the Aegean and asked mysteriously, philosophically, about how you couldn’t know who would win the sea-fight tomorrow. Christine pictured the white sails against Aegean blue, wished she lived close to the sea or at least a big river. She wished away the dark street with a picture of sunlight on sparkling water.
But the small Greek ships in the offing disappeared because a black man down the street was unzipping his trousers. Christine watched the man aim his piss into the storm sewer. Once she had squeezed down that same dark rectangular sewer opening, squeezed her little-girl body underneath the heavy steel cover because her playmates had dared her to. She had known there was a kind of shelf to stand on down there. Nine years old, she had gone down. Had hoped no rat would dash out of the pipe to bite her ankle.
Christine walked on toward home, past the grown man pissing under cover of darkness, pissing into the same sewer where once she had stood. She imagined her little-girl head peeping out through the rectangular slot, eyes just above the level of the pavement, triumphant. How, after she climbed out, she had held out her hand to receive the nickel into her palm.
In the wake of the memory, for all its bravado, came anger.
King had written back to the white ministers, written to anybody who would read his letter from the jail, that his people could no longer wait. It was wrong to wait. The smooth sheen of martini evaporated. The heat of the sultry May night pressed against her. She felt anger in the way her feet came down on the sidewalk.
While she walked home through the night, it was as though she had decided to squat before an ember, to blow on it. Her heart flared big and red-hot, became a cauldron, a crucible of rage. As a child she’d seen a photo of a crucible conveying molten steel from the furnace, and the bright liquid seemed to be leaping at the sides of its container, as mobile as water in a gigantic bucket.
Touching the bone between her breasts, Christine wished as she walked that she could reach in, pluck out the cauldron with its seething contents. If only she could spill that anger out of her, onto the ground. Piss it away.
She would let the anger out, stamp it through the soles of her feet.
She tried to love the quiet of the hot, still night—her neighbo
rhood—so far from the little yelps, the police shouting, the sirens and the scuttling feet. We shall overcome. She tried to think of King’s letter, so strong and dignified. He refused to strut his stuff; with all his brilliance and all his knowledge, he refused to show off. Christine loved the tone of his writing—reasonable, sad, dedicated, brave. They couldn’t make him mad. King had no use for her rage; he wanted her to love. His sentences were the cool breeze she needed in the smoldering of the night. Let the night be sweet and kind, but she could hear the day again, the movement of feet, the assault of firemen, police, the crowd of black people, a solid square block of people set on freedom.
With the dissipation of the alcohol, every step jolted her backbone, made it ache.
A block ahead, under the streetlight stood a group of teenage boys, colored boys smoking cigarettes. They stood in a mist of humidity, six of them, almost grown, passing a flask among them, the tips of their cigarettes burning red through the mist. In the light, the moisture hung in the air like dust motes in a shaft of sunlight.
The boys with their smooth brown faces, sixteen, nineteen years old, their flask, the burning cigarettes—all appeared fuzzy. Their noses emanated twin streams of smoke as though these teens were young dragons swaddled in a gauze of light from the streetlamp.
The sea-fight tomorrow.
Christine wished for a wooden sword. She would run the dragon boys through their worthless bodies. One by one she would slay their street booze, their cigarettes, them, if necessary. But why did she wish her sword was only wood? Like something from the funnies. Just two pieces of wood, like a cross.
“Onward, Christian Soldiers” hummed in her brain. “Onward, onward!”—the Reverend Shuttlesworth would break away from the song to exhort his people with plain words. The congregation kept singing straight ahead: “With the Cross of Je-sus going on before.” Shuttlesworth was a man like an electric spark. Small, potent, a force of nature.
She thought of King, when he was first on TV; he had looked down—like Gloria;he had ducked the camera’s eye. When he had spoken for the Montgomery bus boycott, King had been quiet and humble-seeming. Close to scared, she had thought. (But it was Rosa Parks who had sat down on the bus in the all-white section; it was a woman who had led King into history.) Now Martin Luther King Jr. was putting on weight—adding ballast—looking into the camera, his eyes full of sorrow. A Man of Sorrows, as much as Christ himself, Christine thought, but others didn’t see him as she saw him, didn’t see the deep sorrow.
She knew Shuttlesworth was the Survivor. It was Shuttlesworth in 1956 who had risen up from the bombing of his own house. The bomb had been tossed up under the house on Christmas Day, and it had exploded just under the floorboards beneath his bed. He had been in the bed. It was Shuttlesworth who was truly fearless. Shuttlesworth might have his church in Cincinnati—but so what?—he had toiled long in the vineyard of Birmingham. Shuttlesworth would always have one foot in this city. No, his heart.
Christine thought of the popular song “I Left My Heart in San Francisco.” She wished she could see San Francisco. She imagined the bay full of sailboats. Of the sea-fight tomorrow. How would it turn out, their struggle for freedom? Like Susan B. Anthony had said long ago about women’s rights, “Defeat is impossible.”
Christine pictured the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth as a mighty colossus; one foot in Birmingham, one in Cincinnati, he straddled the Ohio River. His stature was a matter of his spirit. The paddle wheel boats and the barges passed between his legs.
In the flesh, Reverend Shuttlesworth was little and wiry. Not as tall as the shortest of the six boys who stood under the streetlight, smoking and drinking, but he would have no fear of them. She was as tall as Shuttlesworth. Steadily, the sound of her feet on the sidewalk closed the distance between her and the tough boys.
How Shuttlesworth loved the children! Saw the future in them. Smiled at her three like they were important. He believed in them. His quick mind enlivened theirs.
And what about her boss, Lionel Parrish, organizer of the night school, handsome as Martin Luther King? (Those pretending to be dragons ought to take their minds to night school. But no, they wanted numb minds, lazy bodies.) Less important, sure, but Lionel Parrish was stamped from the same dough as Martin Luther King.
Christine pictured rolling out biscuit dough on her metal cook-top table, of taking the mouth of a glass and pressing it into the dough, cutting out biscuits. She liked to think of the ministers all over the South, how now they lifted up their heads, became little Kings, little Shuttlesworths. Ready to encourage if not to lead.
She imagined Lionel Parrish, part-time minister, full-time schoolteacher—Lionel Parrish—sitting at her own table, a cloth printed with faded fruit but clean and without stain, her tablecloth, on the table, Lionel Parrish eating breakfast, lifting a fragrant biscuit, butter visible at its sides, lifting the beautifully browned, hot, fresh biscuit to his lips. Lionel Parrish had never been in her house.
Lionel Parrish looked like Martin Luther King, with that smooth, benign face, and Lionel Parrish was fighting his own doubt and fear about something. It was something in himself he sorrowed about, as though he felt ashamed to be proud of his leadership. That sorrow might not have much to do with leadership, with freedom for the people. What did she see behind Lionel Parrish’s handsome eyes? What kind of freedom did Lionel want for himself? Christine wondered. What did King want, for that matter, in his heart of hearts?
She knew what Shuttlesworth wanted. Victory! Unequivocal victory for her children, for herself, for all the people he knew. In Birmingham, let freedom ring! King might come and go from Birmingham, but Shuttlesworth would always be back.
One of the boys, the tallest one, detached himself from the group, held out his hand.
“Lady, can you let me have a quarter?” he said. He didn’t smile.
She shook her head no, folded her lips tight in on themselves. Don’t you beg from me.
Another one reached out and took her arm; he talked with his cigarette waggling in his lips. “Didn’t you hear the man?”
“Get your hand off me.”
They all shifted around her. She kept walking. They walked with her. She speeded up, and they snickered.
“This here some fast-moving woman.”
“Run!” one of them roared in her ear, and she jerked and ran a few steps, them laughing around her, running, too.
Then she made herself stop. No, she wouldn’t run. They stopped, surrounded her. She clasped her purse hard against her side. Her bruised side. She didn’t know these boys. Not from her neighborhood. She was safe long as strangers stayed out.
From nowhere, she heard loud humming. She herself was humming “Onward Christian Soldiers.” It came from deep in her like the low pedal of a pipe organ on TV church. A grainy, buzzing sound she didn’t know she had.
Slowly, she started to walk forward. She hummed from the lowest pipes on the organ. Not one took a step after her. They snickered, but they let her go.
With the Cross of Jesus, she hummed loudly, knowing the knot of boys (now watching her go on without them) must have heard the song sometime in their past. They had to be remembering the words to that hummed music, With the Cross of Jesus going on before. They knew her for a Christian, churchgoing woman just like their mamas.
As Christine walked toward the dark middle of the block, she projected herself toward the streetlamp at the next corner. Safe again. In the warm night air of May in Birmingham, her song and fear evaporated like a nightmare. But they’d scared her. She felt herself starting to fill with anger. She didn’t want anger now.
She thought of home, her apartment in the basement. It was a big old house, and many years ago white people had lived there. Christine would step down into the kitchen. Her three kids would be there and her sister watching them. There’d be four empty Pabst Blue Ribbon bottles on the counter, but her sister would be there in her beer haze, keeping them safe. (Gloria wouldn’t even drink beer in a beer
joint.) Her sister ought to be in night school herself, but then how could she, Christine, teach in it? She was grateful to her sister, keeping her kids safe, free of charge.
Soon Christine would go down the steps, use her key, open the door, step into the kitchen light, and they’d all be there, safe. Her woozy sister with one straightened lock of hair sticking up from her head, the hair clamped at the bottom with a brown barrette.
Christine hurried on down the sidewalk; like heaps of dirty rags, last fall’s leaves still lay on the ground in places. One yard had iris blooms, white and lavender, rising above the old leaves. I am the Resurrection and the Life. Christine felt her own life had been resurrected, by Reverend Shuttlesworth’s preaching, by going to school.
Baptized! Yes, that was what had happened to her today. Baptism by hose water. Let my heart be clean and fresh, she prayed. Free of hatred. That’s what she owed Jesus, who had saved her from the rough boys. She hated her anger sometimes, and yet to hate it was like hating herself.
So many schoolchildren in the demonstrations now. Not her kids, too young for school, too little for trouble. Yet. Demonstrating was for grown-ups. Shuttlesworth believed the children in the protests were as invulnerable as himself. He gloried in their numbers, their willingness. King was in agony—suppose a child was hurt? Although King was afraid for them every minute and every hour, just as she was, publicly King said the children had already suffered abuse because of the society they lived in.
In the Christian Crusades, in medieval times, there had been a Children’s Crusade. Did King know that? Of course. Did Shuttlesworth? The freedom struggle had never called on children before, and she wondered if calling out the children was a tactic out of desperation—if no more adults could be recruited.
(She could see the big old house, her home, up ahead.) How could a person such as herself, how could a woman, live like Shuttlesworth, like Rosa Parks—unafraid? Rosa Parks was the start of it all. Christine wanted to remember that. One brave, middle-aged Montgomery, Alabama, black woman.