Читать книгу Stranger at the Gates - Tracy Sugarman - Страница 11

The dining room wore an unmistakable “morning after” look. The morning light illumined the room, and talk bubbled at each large round table.

“I’ll never forget last night,” said the girl.

She bent to her coffee cup, and I noticed a long dark braid of hair which made her seem even younger than the rest at the table. She caught my eye and smiled shyly.

“It was like a gift.”

The kids at the table paused over their food, and the large boy with the straw hair put down his glass of milk. He looked around the table.

“I’m glad we’re all going together. I decided last night.” He fished an envelope from his back pocket and he waved it at them. “My old man wrote me that the Mississippi papers are calling this an ‘invasion.’” His eyes moved along the queue of students who were stacking their dirty dishes in the wire trays. “Some invaders!” he laughed.

A bored Negro busboy leaned against the counter, his eyes moving from the stacks of dirty cups to the clock at the end of the hall. I watched him lift a loaded tray and push backward into the kitchen. A wisp of steam escaped as the door swung closed behind him. The line moved forward, and the wire stacks were carefully refilled as the students moved, chattering, down the counter. The busboy reappeared from the damp steam of the kitchen. His sleepy eyes glanced from the clock to the loaded trays. He lifted the pile, moved backward against the swinging door, and paused. His eyes slid unseeing past the line of students and rested one more time on the clock. A line of Martin Luther King’s made me smile: “Don’t sleep through a revolution.”

The brown face moved backward into the steam and the door swung shut.

“This is my second invasion,” I said to the blond boy.

The talk at the table paused, and the young heads bent forward to listen.

“No kidding! Were you in Mississippi?”

“No,” I said. “Normandy.” I grinned at him. “World War Two.”

The dark-eyed girl opposite carefully took a cigarette from the pack in her purse and lit it. Her eyes moved to mine and she said lightly, “You’re very old.” She smiled, but her eyes were bright and serious. “Were you frightened?”

“Of course. If you weren’t scared, you didn’t understand the situation!”

They laughed, but the girl pressed forward. “Could you work—being scared?”

“Honey,” I said, “we won the war, and everybody was scared.”

One of the boys leaned toward me. His sunburned face was frowning, and he rubbed his finger along a fresh shaving nick on his jaw. “Look. You say you were frightened. You were all frightened.” He swallowed and looked hard at me. “Are you frightened now?”

The girl slowly ground out the cigarette in her saucer. The table was silent.

“As we used to say in the Navy, I’m ‘scaired shit.’ I’m older than you, and I understand the situation.”

The boy nodded and rested back in his chair.

The tables were emptying, but the kids at the table hunched over their coffee. No one spoke, and they waited for me to continue.

“Listen. In the war I was a small-boat officer. Amphibious. I was in charge of six invasion craft. They were Higgins boats, half-inch plywood, and they were slow as hell. We mounted two thirty-caliber machine guns for the invasion, but the boats bounced so much you couldn’t aim them. So we were sitting ducks and we all knew it. The night we left Salcombe for D-Day on our LST, I was so scared I couldn’t sleep. There was a doctor on the ship, and we walked the wet decks for hours together. He had been through the invasions of North Africa, Sicily, and Salerno, and I asked him, like you’re asking me, ‘How can I keep from being so scared I won’t do my job?’ He laughed and said, ‘It’s simple arithmetic. Most guys don’t get killed. Most guys don’t get hit. If you’re hit, most likely you’re not going to get hit bad. If you’re hit bad, most guys recover. So the odds are pretty good.’ And I remember him looking at me on that blacked-out deck in the middle of the rough channel and asking me, ‘Would you really want to be somewhere else tonight?’ And I knew, really, that I didn’t.”

I looked at the faces of these boys and girls who were about to leave for Mississippi. (Was I really that young in Normandy?)

“You’re here because you want to be.” I smiled at their young, solemn faces. “But the arithmetic can help!”

The audience seemed restless. I was perched on the first step leading to the stage, watching the students and the energetic figure that moved back and forth behind the lectern. I put down my sketchbook and gave full attention to the students. They were intent, leaning on elbows against the chairs of the row ahead. Their fidgeting was not from boredom. The lecture the previous morning by the Negro educator had annoyed them because of the lack of scholarship. They knew more Negro history than he did, and they had been bored. But this morning they were irritated, and it showed itself in the sharp negative shakes of the head, in the angry rebuttal whispered to a neighbor. Reverend Lawson seemed to sense the antagonism. He paused for a brief moment, touched his lips with a white handkerchief, and then, frowning slightly, thrust ahead. He was an attractive young man, his rangy body controlled and athletic, and one felt a vitality that moved through him and lifted his words. He looked alert and at ease, but his voice snapped with conviction. He leaned toward the lectern on the balls of his feet, and one brown hand stabbed up and out as he challenged his audience.

“I tell you—there is a power, a real power in being good.”

I had walked over from breakfast with the volunteers from my table. I knew they were thinking about surviving a summer in Mississippi. They had welcomed Lawson’s lecture on nonviolence, for it was a tactic that might help them make it. Their displeasure now was the impatience of the pragmatist who is confronted with an idealistic theorizer. Unlike the volunteers, Lawson was a student of the whole philosophy of nonviolence. For him it was the light and the way, and he refused to deal with it as a tactical ploy. Power was important to the speaker and his audience, but I knew they read “power” very differently. I had listened to the talk in the lounges and at the dining tables, and I had come to realize that terms like “white power structure” had become alive and real to the volunteers. To them it conjured a vision of a tyranny that had imprisoned Mississippi and threatened their safety. This was “power” to them, and they wanted only to talk about ways of circumventing, upsetting, and disarming it.

Lawson pounded his fist into the other hand, and his voice rose. “Without a real moral growth you topple a political hack and replace him with another political hack. It’s only by a real moral confrontation with evil that you replace a bad society with a good one.”

“There is a power, a real power in being good.

The questions erupted from the audience, and the anger was directed not at the minister but at a thesis that seemed mystical and theological at best, and hopelessly abstract at worst.

“We’ve got to get people the vote. Then they can ‘morally confront’ the power structure,” argued a strident voice from the rear of the hall.

“Get people the vote!” snorted Lawson, “so they can send a Dawson from Chicago or a Powell from New York to Congress?”

The challenges and responses continued, and I glanced at the wall clock. The morning was being trapped in a swamp of personal theorizing. What would have been grist for a philosophy seminar was serving no affirmative function here, and it distressed me to see the gulf widening between this good man and the young people who wanted only to be told how best to perform good acts. Lawson stepped back from the apron of the stage and smiled ruefully at Bob Zellner who sat listening. He knew he had lost his audience, and he sensed that pursuit of semantic victory was pointless. He was a veteran of the first “sit-ins,” and had been a passenger on the first “Freedom Rides.” This was no fuzzy theologian selling “pie in the sky” to a rube congregation. He had witnessed the effectiveness of moral confrontation and had borne Christian witness to the disarming impact of love. But he sensed that a current was running here whose depth he could not plumb. He shrugged his shoulders and spread his hands parallel to the floor. As he nodded to Zellner to take the rostrum, a troubled smile seemed to flatten his mobile face. He stepped quickly to his seat and sat down.

Zellner sat for a moment, his elbows resting on his knees. He looked toward the rear rows and slowly moved his gaze down the hall. He found the last questioner and stood up. The morning sun played across the dusty stage from the tall east window and touched his straight blond hair. He looked like a college student home on holiday. Like the rest of the SNCC staff, he wore jeans and a blue work shirt. His usually smiling face was serious, and his soft, southern voice spoke gravely.

“Politics without morality is chaos,” he said to the student.

He turned slightly toward Reverend Lawson who watched with narrowed eyes. A deep dimple moved fleetingly in Zellner’s cheek, but he didn’t quite smile.

“And morality without politics is irrelevant.”

He thrust his hands into the rear pockets of his jeans, and he spoke with deliberate emphasis to the hushed hall.

“You must understand that nonviolence is essential to our program this summer.”

His eyes were hard now, and the soft drawl had a cutting edge. “The program is more important than your hesitations. It is academic whether you embrace nonviolence philosophically or not. But if you are going to work in Mississippi with us this summer, you must be prepared to accept the ground rules. Whatever your reservations or hesitations may be in this, you can only act nonviolently in COFO.”

His hands moved to his side and he stood motionless looking at the students. They listened, for this was one of them. They knew he had moved from a white campus in the South into the Movement, and they knew he had been arrested often and beaten by the police.

The strong, warm voice moved across the hall, gently splintering the hushed silence. “If you can’t accept this, don’t, please don’t come with us.”

Everyone stood in the June sunshine in front of the Administration building. The talk was muted, for we were all uneasy at what was about to take place. Kids smoked and shifted nervously as they watched the newsreel and television technicians lead wires and cables through the crowd and across the soft turf. I found Jack Preiss standing quietly on the edge of the lawn, arms folded, squinting in the bright glare of the sun.

“How do they do it, Jack?”

He nodded toward a group of staff who were working their way to the center of the crowd, carrying chairs from the dining hall over their heads.

“They’ll set up a make-believe lunch counter. Then they’ll integrate it!”

He laughed quietly. We watched as the crowd moved back, leaving a small cleared arena of grass.

A slight Negro youngster in a red turtle-neck sweater stepped into the center of the clearing. He held up his arms and the murmur of the crowd ceased. One suddenly heard the whir of the cameras.

“This is the way you protect your body,” he said. His voice was flat. “The vital parts of your body are your head, your neck, and your groin. You can protect them best by curling up like a baby, your legs together, your knees pulled up to protect your gut and your privates, your hands and arms shielding your head and the back of your neck.” He bent forward, rolling into a fetal position, his arms lacing across his bent head and his hands cradling the back of his head and neck. The girl next to me sucked in a deep breath. The boy rose from the lawn and led a volunteer from the press of bodies at the edge of the crowd.

“Let me see you protect yourself,” he said.

The volunteer assumed the position and the staff man pulled back his sneakered foot, gently tapping the exposed areas of the supine volunteer.

“Your legs, your thighs, your buttocks, your kidneys, your back can take a kick or a billy club. So can your arms and your hands. Your head can’t. Your neck can’t. Your groin can’t.” The flat voice continued its dispassionate litany. “When your companion is being beaten or stomped while lying on the ground, you must protect him, or her. You do it by shielding his head with your body. Your back can take it.”

Once more the demonstration, and again I became aware of the whine of the cameras. Everything would be recorded for the great spectator public except the nausea and the outrage of having to learn the arts of protecting yourself from American police who were waiting to assault you. I lifted my eyes from the red sweater of the staff worker. John Strickland stood ashen, staring at the lad curled up on the ground. Like the rest of the crowd, he was silent. Their eyes stayed riveted to the frozen tableau of a violence that till that moment had existed for them only in grade-B movies and tabloid spreads.

The afternoon was a nightmarish theatre, and the loveliness of that June afternoon would not be remembered by the students in the time ahead. The sky was a high delicate blue, and a sun-washed breeze played across the intent children play-acting on the green lawn.

The SNCC staff moved into their mock roles of white registrars, judges, paternalistic sheriffs, and frightened field hands with a sureness that was startling. They enacted the rituals of denial and humiliation they had learned from childhood, and no one had to coach a response or prompt a line. It was an incredible theatrical experience for me. But this was raw and unadorned, not a sublimation or transformation of life. This was the reality of the black man in white Mississippi. It was an afternoon that assaulted your sensibilities and moved you to anger and shame. The dry, bitter humor, the sardonic shrug, the earthy contempt, the endless guile of half-truth, the limitless capacity to ingratiate; all these were revealed naked and unashamed during those remarkable pieces of theatre. At one point a young Negro woman came to the “registrar” with her reluctant mother to try to register. The quick dismissal was sidestepped, and she persisted in pressing for the registration form. He exploded with anger.

“You get your goddam nigger ass out of my office!”

Once more the agile maneuvering by the girl, as she slid into a whining, feminine, ingratiating voice.

“Mistah Jameson, Suh, don’ you remembuh me? Emmaline Jones? And my mama here, Aunty Lou? Why y’all talk to me like that, Mistuh Jameson, Suh? You knows us your whole life. Please, Suh, just the regis’ papuh and and we’ll be goin’ home, Mistuh Jameson. How is Mastuh William and Miss Ann? My, what a pretty thing she is! Lawdy, I remembuh her Chrisnin’.” The acrid, despised, and despising words hung in the air. Words set to curry the scorning condescension and approval of a master. We watched the sly transformation that turned his bright, Negro coed into a shuffling supplicant, a contemptible slattern using an ageless guile to ward off the blow of a white man.

The sun was dipping below tall elms that ringed the college, and the shadow of the Administration building wrapped the tiny stage and the intent audience. I remember the last sketch that was acted out on that June afternoon.

Two white volunteers and a SNCC worker approached the aged Negro who sat rocking on the make-believe porch. He watched the youngsters approach, sucked on his corncob pipe, and remained silent. The SNCC boy was first up the steps, and he paused respectfully before the old man.

“G’morning, Mr. Davis. How are you today?”

The old man continued to rock, but he removed the pipe and nodded his head. “Pretty well, Crosby. How’s your daddy?”

“Feelin’ much better now, Mr. Davis. I expect you’ll see him at the chapel on Sunday. Mr. Davis, I’d like you to meet two friends of mine, John Suter and Jim Dann. John and Jim have come down here to work on the voter registration with us, Mr. Davis. Jim here goes to college way out west in Oregon, and John is studying at Wesleyan, up North—in Connecticut.”

Jim stepped forward and extended his hand.

“I’m very happy to meet you, Mr. Davis.”

The old man started to rise from the chair and very tentatively took the white hand in his own. I watched Jim Forman playing the role of this bent, reticent, field hand. The strangeness felt by a Mississippi Negro who is approached by a white man who treats him with deference was transmitted to the whole crowd.

The white volunteer shook his hand and said, “Mr. Davis, we hope you and your two sons will go with us to the courthouse in Clarksdale on Saturday. We’re all going to drive down together in the morning. I know you understand how important it is for you all to register to vote this summer.”

Forman resumed his rocking and carefully relit his pipe. He was polite and attentive, but he made it clear that he was not about to let his boys go down to the courthouse on Saturday or any day.

“Well, we’ll have to see, Mr. Dann. Votin’s never been our concern. We has all we can do to chop enough to get through the winter. My boys are good boys. But they got a lot to do right here on the place.”

All the canny delays and evasions, the whole bureau full of the ancient nostrums guaranteed to make you survive in a white man’s land were skillfully displayed by Forman. Never once the exaggeration that would tear the mood or turn the moment into a dialect parody. As I watched this sophisticated man move so effortlessly into a primitive role, I began to see and understand. The Negro in American society has been acting since he was weaned. The subtle nuances of a theatrical craft and discipline are blood and bone of a race response, a ghetto memory. They are the daily lessons of the alleys, the employment offices, the backs of buses, the “nigger-heavens,” the “nigger churches.” They conspire to protect the Negro from being hurt, from being destroyed, and in the process we have come to know only the façade that says “Negro.” Like a lovely moth shedding its cocoon, layer upon layer, the beautiful complexity of the person beneath the façade began to emerge for me that afternoon. As if for the first time, I began to see the people. Not victims, I thought. Not causes. Not heroes. Not colored people. Not Negro people.

I raised my head and looked across the crowd. Charles McLaurin leaned against a pillar at the entrance to the building. He looked ill, and I knew that his teeth were still loose from the beating two weeks before. His dark glasses shielded his eyes, but I could see him wince as he touched his jaw tenderly.

Not heroes, I thought. Not Negro heroes. People.