Читать книгу Eden Rise - Robert Jeff Norrell - Страница 8

1965

Our freshman year at Duke University completed, Jackie Herndon and I met outside my dorm at 6 a.m. and loaded our stuff into the trunk of my Ford, a cherry-red 1963 Galaxie hardtop I’d inherited from my grandfather. We drove to the dorm where Alma Jones lived. We were picking her up and driving to Alabama to begin our summer break.

Alma’s dorm door was locked. We tried all the doors, and all were locked. “You told her six o’clock, right?” I said.

Jackie shrugged. “Yeah, I told her twice to be packed and ready to go.”

At 6:30, a girl came out the door dragging a big suitcase. I offered to carry her suitcase to her car if she would go tell Alma that her ride was waiting. She agreed. In a few minutes Alma appeared at the door.

“What’s the damn hurry?” she grumbled.

“It’s a long way to Alabama, at least twelve hours,” I said.

She scowled. “All right, all right, I’ll be down in a few minutes.”

A grimace flashed across Jackie’s face. “I’m sorry, man.”

Jackie grabbed his basketball and began twirling it on his finger. He raised the ball high above his lean, six-foot-seven-inch frame. His unlined, mocha-colored face studied the spinning orb intently. I noticed again what I had observed when the two of us were studying in the cafeteria—Jackie’s hands. His very long fingers wrapped effortlessly around a basketball. He had long, perfect fingernails and unblemished brown skin on the backs of his hands, but nearly white palms.

The fact that Negroes had white palms had fascinated me since I first noticed it as a five-year-old and had asked my grandmother’s cook about it. “Orene, why your hands two colors? You wash ’em hard?”

She had smiled. “They just that way, Tommy.” The mystery of Negro hands.

We waited an entire hour before Alma came down bearing two big suitcases. She looked over at Jackie. “Put those in the car.” No “please,” just a command. Not a word of apology about making us almost two hours late leaving.

Even angry at her, I was awed by Alma’s presence. At six feet, she came closer to looking me in the eye than any girl I had ever known. Tight jeans accentuated her endless legs and the round butt perched atop them. Her skin was smooth and about the color brown of the Hershey’s chocolate wrapper. She had a small gap in her flashing, proud grin. There was no question about why she started Jackie’s engine. She started mine too, and watching her fold herself into the Ford’s back seat, I felt for the first time desire for a black woman.

I was starved and desperate for a cup of coffee. At the drive-through window of a donut shop, I ordered a dozen donuts and coffee. Alma demanded milk. Still no “please,” and no offer of money. Full of donuts and milk, she lay down in the seat as we pulled away.

I headed southwest down the North Carolina piedmont toward Charlotte. From there I would move through the South Carolina upcountry and the northern Georgia hills to Atlanta. There was no cloud in the sky, and the air was already warm. Jackie tuned the radio to Junior Walker and his All-Stars. He tapped time on the red leather seat between us as the saxophone trilled and the backups sang “Shotgun. Shoot ’em ’fore they run now. . . .”

“Damn it, turn that off!” Alma said in a shriek.

I should have stopped the car right then and had it out with her. But I was chickenshit. Jackie shook his head, either as intimidated by her as I was, or unwilling to offend the sexy woman with whom he was spending the summer. Jackie would have all summer to woo Alma or be terrified of her: she had persuaded him to help her teach at a “freedom school,” a special school for black kids from segregated schools in a small Alabama town not that far from my home in Eden Rise. Alma was Duke’s leading civil rights activist.

Jackie wanted me to join them at the freedom school, and I had said I would think about it, which was why she sat up in the back seat after two hours of sleep and said “Well, are you going to work with us or not?”

I shook my head. “I don’t think so.”

“Why not?” There was a challenge in her tone. “What you got better to do?”

“That’s just not what I want to do.” In fact I didn’t know what I wanted to do that summer except to eat my mother’s cooking and visit my sick grandmother. The idea of teaching at a freedom school made me nervous. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught the disappointment on Jackie’s face.

“Anything’s better than trying to help a few little niggers, huh?”

Jackie jerked around to face her. “Leave him alone or we’ll be walking to Alabama.”

Why was she so hostile to me? I hardly knew her and could count on one hand the number of sentences we had exchanged before our ride that morning. I had never said or done a contrary thing toward her. I figured she had to dislike me for what I was, a white Southerner, or what she assumed I was from my accent, my haircut, and my button-down shirt and penny loafers—a bigot in training.

When she fell asleep again, Jackie and I talked in low tones. “Is she always like this?”

Jackie groaned. “Man, I knew she liked to run things, but I thought that was because she was older, not ’cause she’s a bitch. I dread being with her in that little-assed town.”

“You could bail out too and go home with me.”

Jackie squinted at me. “What about your parents?”

I said, acting my most confident, they would be fine with it. Jackie and I had never talked about my parents, and I wondered if he also thought I was a typical Alabama bigot like the ones who appeared in the newspaper jeering at black people marching for the right to vote.

“You sure?”

“Yeah, I’m sure.” I was, of course, lying out my ass. Mama and Daddy would be startled that I brought home a colored guy, but Mama probably would recover quickly. If it turned out to be uncomfortable in Eden Rise, we’d just jump in the car and head back to Jackie’s home in the Virginia tidewater. We could be longshoremen or paint ships, or something.

Jackie nodded. “Don’t say nothin’ till we get there.”

It felt like a late July sun on the boring new interstate through the piedmont of South Carolina. The outcroppings of clay might have been heaps of hickory wood on fire, and the signs offering the premature peaches of the season—sadly enough, the most interesting sight in my vision on this ride—glared back at me in orange and black. The white rays boiled me the whole way, though some of the heat emanated from within, so intensely did I dread the scene I imagined would take place at the freedom school.

After Atlanta, spindly pines monopolized the roadside to Newnan, past LaGrange, and on into Alabama. As we drove on, the sun hovered over the horizon in front of us. It now cast a light much easier to use, and its angle threw multilateral shadows across the pastures that covered much of this part of the Alabama Black Belt. When I was no longer driving directly into the orange mass on the horizon, I could appreciate the delicate shades of white in the Queen Anne’s lace and the brilliant yellow of the Brown-Eyed Susans that decorated the roadsides. But to remind you that these beautiful ladies didn’t rule the roads unchallenged, sprinkled among them were the tall, prickly stems of the noxious rusty weed my daddy called “dock.”

Herds of cattle had wandered away from the lonesome pecan trees and now they munched their supper of fescue and clover, swinging their tails to swat away the horseflies that tortured them. A yearling steer, the black and white scion of an Angus-Hereford intermarriage, had backed his rump against a cedar fence post and was scratching himself in a furious war against lice, sending shimmers for hundreds of feet down the barbed-wire fence line. The air had cooled off a lot, which always made it easier for me to appreciate the beauty of Alabama farmland—the jades and olives and emeralds among the crops and grass and leaves and of the accents of gold and ginger and bronze from the soil and trees and animals. The bitter odor of herbicides recently applied to the young crops of cotton and soybeans bore through the open car windows. But I also got the sweetness of honeysuckle and the fecund stink of cow manure.

I liked all the smells, even the cow shit, because they reminded me of Eden Rise and being a boy there who watched and helped things grow that I would harvest, knowing I had participated in a cycle of nature God had ordained. That cycle, I knew from my father and mother, was what we were here to partake of. I grew up in Eden Rise believing I knew why God made us and why He placed us here, as stewards of His soil.

I turned the radio up louder, needing the sound to keep me awake. I was listening to “1-2-3,” in which Len Barry declared that finding love was as easy as taking candy from a baby. I didn’t share his confidence. Love had not come easy for me this year at Duke, or ever. Beth, my college girlfriend for a time, had enticed me into the sweet excitement of sex and then cast me off like a wool cardigan in a heat wave. I was still smarting.

“I gotta go to the bathroom.”

Alma could have said so in Montgomery, through which we had just passed and where there were plenty of gas stations and drive-ins with bathrooms. But now there was none in sight, and I stayed silent.

“I said I need to stop.”

“You wanta go on the side of the road?”

“No, damn it, find a bathroom.”

We were several miles farther down the barren county road when she pointed over the seat. “There’s a gas station up there.”

It was actually a country store, signaled by a faded sign and surrounded by three or four junk cars and two dilapidated outbuildings. I doubted that it had public bathrooms. But I stopped anyway just to shut her up. I pulled up to the gas pump, topped with a glass Esso sign. The store’s unpainted plank walls were faded to a dull gray. Red tin signs advertising Pepsi-Cola and Prince Albert smoking tobacco looked like they had been new when Granddaddy was a boy. The screen-wire door hung partly open when I went inside to pay for the gas.

Empty boxes cluttered the tongue-and-groove pine floor, which needed sweeping. Dusty cans of Del Monte corn, Van Camp’s pork-and-beans, and Possum sardines and faded boxes of saltines only partly filled the two rows of shelving. I inhaled dust and mold—there had to be a leak in the roof or a broken window somewhere. At the front of the store, adjacent to the pay counter, a glass case held a few loaves of Velveeta and some bright red tubes of baloney. A drink box was pushed against a nearby wall, and I went to it and fished out a bottle of Dr Pepper. I pulled a pack of Planters peanuts off a wire rack and approached the cash register, which rested on a counter that was serving as a landing field for a squadron of houseflies.

The heavyset white man at the cash register looked me over as if he’d never seen a customer before. He wore faded bib overalls, a stained tee shirt, and a straw hat. His potbelly made inoperable the waist buttons on the overalls, exposing dingy boxer shorts. Three days of white beard covered his face, and a large plug of tobacco distended his left cheek.

As he reached out to take my money, the old man looked out the window at the gas pump and frowned. He turned slowly back toward me. “What are you and them niggers doing here?”

I didn’t look at the man and put my hands in my pockets. “We’re just passing through.”

“Y’all some them freedom riders?” I glanced over his shoulder at the double-barrel shotgun leaned against the wall. “No, sir,” I said. “We’re just passing through.”

I eased myself out the door and stopped Jackie on his way into the store. “Not a good place to stop,” I said. I jerked my head toward the store. “The guy’s real hostile.” I looked over at Alma, who was still in the backseat tying her sneakers, the car door open. “Tell her we need to go on, okay? I’ll fill the car up as fast as I can.”

Jackie went over to the car and talked to her in a low voice. “To hell with that,” she said loudly. “I got a right to use the toilet.” She pushed past Jackie and headed for the store.

For almost thirty years now, I have cursed myself for not shoving Alma back in the car, diving into the driver’s seat, and peeling out of that particular acre of hell. It never occurred to me that I didn’t have to put the damn gas in the car. Five fucking dollars worth of twenty-five-fucking-cent-a-gallon gas. But I had paid for it, and the limits of the nineteen-year-old mind kept me from fleeing immediately, gas or no gas.

Still, I had almost finished gassing up when I heard Alma shouting inside the store.

I looked through the dirty front window and saw her gesturing at the man. I couldn’t make out everything, but I heard her say “bathroom.” A pause. “You can’t run a damn Jim Crow store no longer!” and “Who you calling . . . ” and then “What the hell…”

I was behind the gas pumps, Jackie in front of them. He looked over his shoulder at me. “I better go get her.” I let him go first, and surely I shouldn’t have.

He moved quickly toward the door and I was following when Alma appeared in the door frame. “That motherfucker’s got a gun!” Pure hatred, not fear, in her voice.

“Come on, Alma, let’s get out of here.” Jackie was half pleading, half ordering her.

She looked back in the store. “Fuck you!” Jackie got to her just then and started pulling her toward the car. Alma was shouting. “Let go of me! I’m going to the bathroom! He can’t do that shit no more.”

The old man appeared in the door with his gun in the crook of his left arm, his right hand cradling the barrel about halfway down. He was glaring at Alma as Jackie dragged her toward the car. I ran to crank the car so we could get the hell away from there. Just as the key slipped into the ignition, I heard a deafening boom. I knew that sound. I had heard it often from the time I started hunting quail and dove with Granddaddy. The boom came from about the same distance that I was taught hunters should stay apart from each other when shooting at birds—thirty feet. The storekeeper had the shotgun at his left shoulder.

I reflexively sprawled flat across the seat but then realized I had to rise and help. I was squirming from under the steering wheel when the second boom went off.

The ringing in my ear had just subsided when the man spoke. “You goddamn agitators. We orta killed every one of you sonsabitches.”

I had a gun, too. Granddaddy’s pistol.

I rolled out of the car and onto my knees outside. My hands were trembling so badly that I fumbled under the seat trying to jerk the pistol out of its holster. It was heavy and slippery, and it took three tries to get the safety catch off. Move, move, move. When I came around the back of the car, I saw Jackie lying motionless and silent on his side. Alma was on all fours. “He shot me! He shot me!” She had wet herself.

I heard a snap. The old man had reloaded the double-barrel. He looked at me and Alma.

“We shoulda killed all you bastards when you first started coming down here.” He raised the shotgun again.

I lifted the pistol in the direction of the man and started firing. The first bullet shattered the window to the man’s left. His eyes flicked at the crumbling glass. My second shot hit the door frame above his head. He jerked the shotgun up and aimed at me.

Shoot, shoot, a voice screamed in my ear. I aimed at the man and pulled the trigger. I pulled it again and then again. The man fired simultaneously with my last shots, but one of my bullets hit high in his right leg and his aim jerked. I felt a sting in my shoulder, but it was glass, not buckshot, from the shattered Esso sign above me.

I lowered my gun, deafened, stunned. The man had pitched forward on his belly and I saw him crawling toward his gun, which had fallen a few feet to his side. I ran over and stomped my foot on his outstretched left hand. With the pistol pointed at his head, I snatched the shotgun off the ground.

“You move,” I said, “I swear I’ll kill you.” The man stared back at me with a look not of fear or hatred or pain but of blankness. His eyes were open wide but unfocused. It was as if there was no content to him, no recognition that he had tried to kill three people just because we happened by and two were Negroes. It was as if he had scratched an itch on his chin.

I knelt over Jackie and pulled him on his back. My hands went red. His torso was drenched in blood. I raised his tee shirt and saw mutilated skin and tissue down his right side. He was bleeding from several places on his neck. I wanted to howl at the horror of what I saw, at the mutilation of this beautiful body. I flashed back to the hog-killings I had witnessed as a boy—the gushes of pig blood as the teams of black men held steady a scalded Hampshire carcass and the strongest of them pulled a twelve-inch blade the full length of its belly.

My lunch rushed upward into my throat, and it took two deep swallows to get it back down. Jackie’s eyes were wide but I wasn’t sure that he could see me. His mouth was open and he was panting rapidly.

I yanked off my tee shirt and pressed it against the neck wounds leaking so much blood. “Hold on, buddy, we going to get outta here.”

Jackie’s eyes started to flick from side to side, as if he were looking urgently for something. I wiped some of the sweat off his forehead. I felt the clenched muscles of his brow.

Alma was screaming. “That motherfucker tried to kill us!”

“Are you hurt?”

“Yes!” She held out her left arm. I saw a lot of welts and small wounds from the shotgun but not much blood. She wasn’t hurt badly.

“Call an ambulance!”

I knew we didn’t have time for that. We were at least a half hour from a Montgomery hospital. Jackie needed to be at a hospital now. Getting an ambulance would take twice the time.

“Call an ambulance right now!”

My fear flashed into anger. I jumped toward her, opened my right hand, and slapped her as hard as I could. She staggered sideways. She was stunned into silence but only for a moment.

“You white bastard!”

“Shut the fuck up and help me get him in the car, or I swear I’ll leave you right here.”

She started to say something but she stopped when I drew back my hand. I looked at Jackie, and she followed my gaze. His desperate condition channeled our anger into action. I lifted up his torso and put my arms around him and lifted. “Pick up his feet.” She did.

I backed around the gas pump, slid into the backseat, and pulled Jackie in to lie lengthwise on it. Something told me that Jackie shouldn’t lie flat. He needed pressure applied to those neck wounds. I told Alma to come and take my place, hold Jackie’s torso up, and keep the tee shirt pressed against his neck. She was crying again now, but she did what I said. I threw the shotgun in the front seat, jumped behind the wheel, and made a sliding U-turn in the gravel beyond the gas pumps. As we pulled away, the old man was sitting up, his left hand clamped on his injured leg. He’d live, the sorry piece of shit.

The sun was gone now and dusk was fading to night. Fireflies blinked all around as if to switch off the light and spread the darkness. Crickets chirped incessantly, and a whippoorwill rang out a call that had always sounded like doom to me. The trouble it had summoned for so long had surely arrived.

I glanced at my watch. Almost 8:45. I had checked the time when we stopped at the store, because I had been trying to calculate when Jackie and I would get to Eden Rise. All this had happened in less than ten minutes. I didn’t have a second to think about it, and I couldn’t have known it anyway, but in that time—only enough to smoke a cigarette, or chew the sugar out of a piece of gun, or listen to a couple of good songs by the Supremes—I lost Eden Rise. I wouldn’t get there that night, and when I did find my way, it wasn’t the place I had left.