Alma left, and the men in the front could hear her knocking on a door down the hall and talking to the children. Everyone except Mack Henderson was still watching Phillip, who was trying to think how and where to begin.
Phillip unloosened his necktie, then took it off completely and laid it on top of the piano. He turned back to the men sitting on the couch. They were still waiting. Alma had returned to the room. Phillip looked only at her for a moment.
“I wanted you to be the first one to know,” he said. “But I see now you have to hear it with the rest. He wouldn’t take money. I offered him any reasonable amount. But he wouldn’t take it.”
“Who wouldn’t take money?” Mills asked. “What you talking about?”
“Nolan. Who else?”
“What Nolan got to do with this?”
“Didn’t ’Varice daughter tell you?”
“No. She said Chenal was celebrating,” Mills said. “Didn’t say nothing ’bout Nolan celebrating too. We talking ’bout Chenal. The deal you made with Chenal.”
“You know me better than that, Mills,” Phillip said. “You think I’d go to Chenal for anything else but to break him?”
“Well, what’s he up there celebrating for?” Mills asked. “What they smoking cigars and eating cup cakes for? Mack?”
Little Mack Henderson sitting next to Mills nodded his bald head, but he didn’t look at anyone.
“It was between me and Nolan,” Phillip said. “Me and Nolan. I went up there to get the boy. Nolan wouldn’t take money.”
“You still ain’t making sense, Phillip,” Mills said. “That boy, what he got to do with all this?”
“You mean you still don’t know, Mills?” Phillip asked him.
“No,” Mills said. “I don’t know.”
But Phillip could see him thinking.
“Wait,” Mills said. “Wait.”
Phillip nodded his head.
“Boot,” Mills said. “Boot Rey. Mack?”
Mack Henderson looked at Mills. But even after Mills had called his name, Mills would look at no one else but Phillip. Then suddenly he started nodding his head.
“That’s who I seen in that face Saturday. That’s who I seen. I knowed it, I knowed it, I knowed I had seen that face somewhere before. It been bothering me ever since. Sunday in church it bothered me. Bothered me last night in bed. Boot Rey. Lucille brother. This boy here grandmother’s brother. You remember Boot, don’t you, Mack? Boot?”
Mack Henderson nodded his head. “Went North back there in the thirties,” he said quietly.
“Had to go,” Mills said, still looking at Phillip. “Got in that trouble with them Cajuns on the river and had to go. Had to go fast.”
“Yes,” Phillip said. “Boot Rey’s grandnephew—my son. That’s how come I fell. I wasn’t tired. I’m not tired now. I recognized my boy cross the room last Saturday. When I started toward him, my legs—my legs just give out from under me.”
Alma, who had been listening to all of this as if she couldn’t believe what she was hearing, covered her face with her hands and left the room crying. But only Phillip noticed her leaving. The rest of the men looked at him as if they couldn’t believe what they had heard either. Mack Henderson, a painfully shy little man, shook his bald head and looked down at the floor. Jonathan, standing by the piano and slightly behind Phillip, looked at him with increasing disgust.
No one said anything for a while, then finally Mills, who had never taken his eyes off Phillip, took in a deep breath and exhaled noisily through his mouth.
“Why you waiting so long to say this, Phillip?” he asked him.
“I wanted to tell somebody, Mills,” Phillip said, his voice nearly cracking. “I wanted to say it Saturday. I wanted to say it Sunday when you came in the room. I had a feeling that’s what you had on your mind.”
“Yes,” Mills said. “I hadn’t made the connection yet, but I knowed I knowed that bone. That’s what I wanted to talk to you about, but I couldn’t think of it in that room for nothing. Thought about it in church, thought about it when I got home. But I hadn’t made the connection, and I didn’t think I ought to bother you.”
“I knowed that was it,” Phillip said. “I just had that feeling.”
Mills looked across the room at him, his face showing no sympathy at all.
“That’s been four days,” he said. “Four days you kept this a secret. Telling nobody—not even your wife.”
“I wanted to tell her, Mills,” Phillip said. “I wanted to tell everybody. I tried to get up. Jonathan is my witness, I tried to get up. More than once I tried to get up.”
“The people was still here after you got up,” Mills said. “How come you didn’t tell them then? Instead of letting Octave tell them that lie?”
“I don’t know why I let him do it, Mills,” Phillip said. “I don’t know why. I been asking myself that same question ever since.”
Peter Hebert and Aaron Brown looked across the room at the minister and lowered their eyes. Mack Henderson wouldn’t look at him any more. He was fumbling with his hat between his knees. Jonathan standing behind Phillip didn’t look at him any more either, but he made it obvious to the others how disgusted he was.
“That was the last time I saw the boy till today,” Phillip said to Mills. “I been standing at that window day and night, hoping he would pass by the house again.”
“If you wanted to see him so bad, how come you didn’t go up there?” Mills asked. “Virginia ain’t no more than—what?—seven, eight blocks from here?”
“I know.”
“Well, what stopped you?”
“I don’t know, Mills. I reckon the same thing that kept me from getting off that floor.”
Mills looked at him without sympathy, but as though he had much on his mind.
“So when you heard he was arrested, you went to Nolan?” he asked.
“Yes,” Phillip said. “Shepherd came by last night and told me, and I went up there this morning to bail him out. But Nolan wouldn’t take money. I told him—I told him I couldn’t do it. I told him this was just between me and him, not the people. But he wouldn’t hear it. If I wanted my boy—I wanted my boy, Mills. I wanted him bad. I didn’t know no other way to get him.”
“We have McVay there,” Mills said. “These the kind of things he suppose to handle.”
“It was personal, Mills. Not political.”
“Not political?” Jonathan said, behind Phillip’s back. “Not political? Soon as you involved Chenal it was political.”
Phillip wouldn’t look round at Jonathan. “He’s my son, Mills,” he said. “I wanted my son.”
“We all have sons,” Mills said. “Every last one of us in here have sons except Jonathan there. Peter got a son in that same jail right now. I’m sure Nolan would let him out this minute, this minute, if all us went up there and told him we wouldn’t demonstrate here no more.”
“I couldn’t do that,” Peter Hebert said, looking cross the room at Phillip. “Not long as we got one Chenal left. No one man got a right to do that.”
“I wanted my son, Peter,” Phillip said.
“I want mine too,” Peter Hebert said. “I want mine out of that jail right now. But I know I don’t have no right to ask the people to sacrifice everything for him. No one person can come before the cause, Reverend. Not even you.”
“I agree there a hundred percent,” Jonathan said, behind Phillip’s back.
“The question is what we do about Chenal now?” Aaron Brown asked from his chair.
“We can’t do nothing now,” Phillip said. “We’ll have to wait for another chance.”
“You mean you can’t do nothing,” Jonathan said.
“You neither, boy,” Phillip said, without looking round at him. He was getting more and more irritated with Jonathan.
“You’re not speaking for me any more,” Jonathan said.
Phillip looked back over his shoulder at him this time. “No?” he said.
“No,??
? Jonathan said.
“Then go up there,” Phillip said. “Go on up there. He’ll pack that jail and throw away the key.”
“Because of your mistakes?” Jonathan said. “Your deals? Now everybody must suffer—is that it? Just stop everything we’ve been working toward, just stop—is that it? Well, not this boy.”
Phillip tried to stare him down, but Jonathan wouldn’t avert his eyes. Phillip turned back to the others.
“Yes, I made a mistake,” he said. “Yes, I shoulda got up off that floor and said who he was. When I didn’t do that I shoulda called Mills Saturday night. I shoulda told him about it Sunday morning. Maybe I shoulda called McVay this morning too. These the things I shoulda done—yes, these things I shoulda done. But let’s not forget the things I have done in this town, in this parish.”
“We’ve all been out there,” Jonathan said, behind his back. “We’ve all walked the picket line.”
“You haven’t walked, boy,” Phillip said, over his shoulder. “You don’t know what walk is.”
“I’ve been out there ever since it started,” Jonathan said. “I’ve been out there since I was fourteen, I’m twenty-two now. I’ve been kicked, beaten. I’ve got the scars.”
“Trouble with you, you think everything started with the sixties,” Phillip said, turning on him. “You don’t think there was even a world before the sixties.”
“There wasn’t any kind of civil rights organization in this town before sixty—sixty-two,” Jonathan said. “I know that for a fact, because I was at the first meeting.”
“And do you know for a fact, boy, who started the first civil rights organization?”
“You did, Reverend,” Jonathan said. “You did. But you couldn’t do it by yourself. Without the people behind you, them white people out there wouldn’ta heard a thing you were saying. I’m speaking for the people, Reverend. Something you didn’t consider this morning.”
“You speaking for one person—Jonathan Robillard,” Phillip said. “You envious, you ambitious. You been from the start.”
“I’m speaking for the people,” Jonathan said. “I’m speaking as a member of this committee. Anybody in the committee feel I’m wrong, let him say so.”
“He speaks for me,” Peter Hebert said, from the couch.
Phillip jerked round to face the others. Howard Mills was nodding his gray head.
“He speaks for us, Phillip,” Mills said.
“I’m president of this committee,” Phillip said, thumping his chest. “Me. Not Jonathan. Me.”
“You might be president, Phillip,” Mills said. “But they got seven of us. Any time four of us decide on any one thing, that’s the way the thing go. The president vote’s just one vote. Even you ’greed to that.”
“What you trying to say to me, Mills?” Phillip asked. “You trying to say y’all done elected Jonathan behind my back? Jonathan is the great spokesman now?”
“Nobody ain’t elected nobody, Phillip,” Mills said, getting to his feet. “But we been talking—no point trying to hide that.” He dropped his hat on the couch where he had been sitting, then he turned back to Phillip. “I know how you must feel,” he said. “I know how you musta felt this morning with Nolan. I have sons too. One I ain’t seen nearly long as you hadn’t seen that boy. I hear from him, he send me little money now and then, but he won’t come home. That’s what we working for, Phillip, so our boys will come back home. So they won’t have to leave from home. That’s why people like Chenal have to go.”
“You think I didn’t think about that this morning?” Phillip asked.
“Maybe you did, maybe you didn’t.”
“Maybe, Mills? Maybe?”
“I wasn’t there, Phillip. None of us was there. Just you and Nolan.”
“You want to call Nolan on that telephone?”
Mills stood back, very straight and tall, and looked him fully in the face.
“I’m not interested in Nolan, Phillip. I’m interested in that old peckerwood up there called Albert Chenal. That’s the only person I’m interested in.”
“Chenal is just another battle. Not the war, Mills.”
“He was my war,” Mills said. “I’m old, I don’t have too many more battles left in me. This might be my last one—and I wanted to go out winning. I wanted Chenal. Because I know Chenal. I’ve knowed Chenal long as I’ve knowed you, Phillip. I knowed his daddy. They didn’t have that big store then—a smaller one little farther up the river. Thomas Chenal—I knowed him. I worked for him. I know what he was. I know how he felt about black women. No black woman looking any way presentable couldn’t come in his store if he didn’t go after her. I remember when he raped Elliot Toussaint daughter. I was working for him—I remember the day. Winter, just like now. He raped her, and she run out the store crying. He grabbed up one of them old cheap pocketbooks and stuffed a pair stockings in it and throwed it out after her. Told the people she had enticed him, and that’s what he had paid her with. That she dropped it out there on the sidewalk when she left. But I knowed he raped her. I knowed it then. I was just too scared to say a word.”
Mills walked around the room as he spoke. He wasn’t talking only to Phillip, but to the rest of the men as well. They were all listening, but, except for Jonathan, they wouldn’t look at him. They felt that he was talking about their cowardice as well as his own.
“That wasn’t the only one,” Mills said, from the door. He had just pulled the curtains aside to look out on the street. But now he was facing the men again. “That wasn’t the only one he raped one way or another. That mulatto schoolteacher, Christophe, that’s his boy. No more Christophe than I’m a Christophe. Just go by Joe Christophe’s name because he can’t go by Chenal. That’s Tom Chenal boy—Albert Chenal brother. They had more—many more. It was depression. Sometime the woman was the only one putting bread on that table. I done seen it, I done seen it. This time a dress for your little girl; next time pants for your little boy. Next time fifty cents—six bits—a dollar. I done seen it. I hated it, but I was too coward. I told myself was nothing I could do. That’s how you live with yourself; you tell yourself ain’t nothing you can do.”
He stopped again and looked at Phillip. But neither Phillip, nor any of the others, except for Jonathan, would look back at him. Jonathan felt that Mills was talking only about the older men in the room.
“You told Jonathan they had a world out there ’fore the sixties,” Mills went on. “You right, they had a world out there. But ’fore the sixties people round here wasn’t doing nothing to change that world. Sixty I was already an old man—in my seventies—I’m eighty-four now. But not till then, till the sixties, I found a way to go ’gainst Chenal, and the likes of Chenal. Tom was dead, but his son car’ his seeds, and he ain’t no better. He’s got no more respect for me, for you, for any other black man or woman than his paw had. We animals far as he’s concerned. Baboons, monkeys, apes. Me? He call me an old gray coon. Don’t think I’m even good enough for the ape family.”
Mills laughed to himself. Peter Hebert and Aaron Brown laughed too. Aaron was very light-skinned, and his face turned quite red when he laughed. Jonathan didn’t see any humor in it at all.
“No, Chenal ain’t just another battle, Phillip,” Mills was saying. “It’s war. Plain, cold war. ‘Look, Chenal, we ain’t baboons and apes—I’m sure no old gray coon. We men, Chenal, and we ’tend to fight you till we change you or destroy you. We got nothing but our bodies to use for weapons, but we go’n use that till we get what we want. Respect for our women, our children, respect for the dead who couldn’t get respect from your paw.’ ”
Mills stopped again to look at Phillip. Phillip kept his eyes to the floor. But everyone else was looking at Mills now. Even little Mack Henderson would occasionally raise his head.
“But now I hear from my leader I can’t even use that—the only weapon I have—my own body. This got to be the worse thing happen to us since we organized this committee. We been beatened—all us in here. Th
rowed in that jail—every last one of us. But we held the committee together. We put this little town on the map, ’cause we held together. Newspapers, television, done visited us from all over the state, ’cause we was like a tight fist—holding together. All over the country people been watching—’cause we been holding together. Till today.”
He was quiet again, but never taking his eyes off Phillip. Phillip, who had been staring down at the floor all the time, now raised his head to look back at Mills.
“I told you why I did it, Mills,” he said calmly. “But it look like I’m the only one in here who woulda done so. We all love our children, want our children, but it look like I’m the only one who woulda done what I did.”
“We want this world better fit for everybody children, Phillip,” Mills said. “Not just for one man.”
“Still, I’m only a man,” Phillip said. “Only a man—and a father.”
“Every last man in here is a father, except for Jonathan over there,” Mills said. “And one day he’ll be one too. But till we get rid of people like Chenal, change people like Chenal, Jonathan sonll have to go through the same thing mine did. His sonll have to work for Chenal for nothing—or, worse yet, leave home. We want Jonathan son to stay home, Phillip.”
“That’s all I wanted too, Mills, my son in my home,” Phillip said. “That’s all. Nothing else. And I still say Chenal is a battle, not the war. And one day we’ll get Chenal. I have that kind of faith in my people.”
“But will I be here?” Mills asked.
“I don’t know if I’ll be here,” Phillip told him. “Maybe none of us. Maybe not even Jonathan there. But the people will be. We done put something in the mind of the people, they won’t let go that easy.”
“The people wasn’t thinking about next year, or year after next, Phillip,” Mills said. “They been thinking about Friday. With you in front. You, me, Jonathan—the rest. But you in front.”
“Ain’t I been out front all the time, Mills?”
“All the time, Phillip,” Mills agreed, nodding his head. “That’s why they expected you out there this time too. Well, what do we say to the people?”