When Luther got home from his new job, he went to see how the citrus plaid couch, delivered that day, looked with the Baton Rouge sunshine streaming through the window. Pleased, he slipped his arm around my waist. “You’ve made our house mighty nice, baby. It’s beginning to feel like home.”
Our consolation prize house was a three-bedroom ranch in an older neighborhood of small quarter-acre lots, the nicest we could comfortably afford. The day we closed, Luther had planted a palm tree in the backyard where we could see it from the dining room, a flag planting of our conversion to southerners.
After dinner, we snuggled up on our new couch, watching TV, me in my nightgown. About halfway through the program, an insistent banging started on the front door, so loud Luther and I both jumped. He approached the door cautiously while I ran back to the bedroom to pull a dress over my head. I heard the door latch open, then nothing.
“Come out here,” Luther said.
He stood just inside the threshold, looking ahead like he was nailed in place. Standing beside him, I saw nobody was out there, anywhere. The street was silent and dark, except for the blaze illuminating the night sky. On our front lawn, flames jumped off a burning wooden cross, hammered into our lawn near a tree.
“Good God Almighty,” I said, a sharp tingle electrifying my spine.
We took in that symbol of hate, scared to go out. Scanning our hundred-foot frontage and then the street, we couldn’t see anybody moving. It was eerie, how still the night was, no neighbor coming outside when a fire crackled on a crucifix. Luther stepped out a few feet, and when no one appeared or spoke, he ran for the garden hose and tried to subdue the flames.
“Do you think they’re going to kill us?” I whispered.
He hesitated. “Not tonight, I don’t. There’s no mob in sheets out here. Otherwise we’d already be hurt, or dead.”
I called the police on the dining room wall phone, pulling the curly cord to the window to see if anybody was hiding out back.
“What’s the nature of your emergency?” the responder asked.
“There’s a cross burning on our lawn,” I shouted.
“Anybody hurt?”
“No.”
He took the address and said, “Do not go outside. We’re on our way.”
I lit up the property with all the outdoor lights and told Luther to let the hose go and come back in. Inside, he pulled me down to the floor and put his finger to his lips. Somebody might still be out there, he said. And there we crouched, listening and watching, pressing our fears into the wall we braced against.
Blue lights flashed as squad cars sped up to the house, stopping sharply at crazy angles in the street. Uniformed policemen waited beside their cars until the ranking officer stepped out, dressed in a wide-brimmed hat with a thick band around it, the kind a Canadian Mountie would wear. We turned on the dining room light and let him in the carport door. His men headed over to the cross.
“Y’all sit down here to the table,” he said, without introduction, and began to interview us. What were we doing when the knock came on the door? Did we see anybody? Had we had arguments with anyone? Who did we think did this? Where were we from? What were we doing in Baton Rouge? How long had we been in this house?
“Y’all stay there and don’t come out,” he said, walking toward the curb. In the blue lights, his all-white officers gathered around for instructions. Then, one guarded the front of our house while the others fanned out in the dark. One moved slowly through the backyard with a flashlight.
Luther shook his head, his lips pressed into a flat line. We waited at our table, the one where we ate our meals and admired the palm tree, the table where we got up extra early in the morning to play three games of Scrabble before work. “Best two out of three,” Luther always said, “so we have an undisputed champion of the day.”
I squeezed his hand as the minutes crawled by, my mind running wild with scenarios from Luther swinging from a tree to a court conviction that sent those bastards to prison. But with Luther’s stern eyes doing the talking, I knew not to up the ante by saying those things out loud. So, we waited, steeped in our impotent fright.
The uniforms returned to talk with the chief, who stood wide-legged in the street, his arms crossed. I couldn’t hear, so I tried to interpret what was going on by their gestures. One shook his head, another pointed down the street. A third hunched his shoulders like “I don’t know.” Their talk was too calm; nobody running around or shouting like they meant to catch somebody.
When the chief came inside, he motioned for us to sit down at the table while he stood over us. “Well,” he said, “you must be some good nigras.” Luther shot a hard look at me when I opened my mouth. With one small nod of his head left, he told me to keep quiet. His men had talked to our neighbors, the chief went on, and nobody had any complaints about us. It was impossible to process much of what he said after that, something about not finding any suspects.
“Call if you have more trouble,” he said.
Luther raised his hand to shake, but the chief had already turned to go. When he was a few steps away, the click of Luther’s tongue was as loud as a soda can popping.
I clutched a handful of his shirt and asked, “Are we safe?”
He led me to the couch and held me, rocking gently. “Shhh,” he said, “shhh,” then reached under the coffee table for the phone directory. “I’m calling the builder,” Luther said. “He’s the only one in this town we can trust.”
It was true. We hardly knew anybody in Baton Rouge when that black contractor had invited us to Thanksgiving. A generation older than us, that six foot three manly man had sprinkled stories of the legion atrocities perpetrated against Baton Rouge blacks between showings of his too-expensive houses. He said we Yankees must be crazy, moving south to a place like Baton Rouge.
Luther’s call the night of the cross burning woke the builder up. His tone went from foggy to furious when he understood what happened to us. Minutes later he parked his pickup in our driveway and strode through with a warlike gait and a piercing focus, a rifle gripped in his right hand. There was a power in him born of a burning rage.
Without saying hello, the builder started. “We been fighting these goddamned peckerwoods down here for years. But I got something right here for ’em.” His belligerence was one with the big gun he set upright on its wooden butt right beside him at the table. He turned to me. “Get me something to drink, darlin’, would you? Bourbon if you have it.”
When I brought back the bottle and glasses, he poured a double and threw it back. Leaning in, he said he was going to take over our “situation.” Luther pulled his chair closer.
“Now, listen,” he said. “Y’all have to stop wearing your fear. It’s in your eyes, your backs, your voices. They’re like wild dogs,” he said. “You show fear, they attack. Understand?”
He wanted us to know what happened to other black families who moved into white neighborhoods. They all got death threats. One got a handwritten note in their curbside mailbox when their kid brought in the mail. “MOVE OR DIE,” it said. They left the house, sold at a loss, and went somewhere else. He didn’t know where.
Another hadn’t even unpacked when the phone calls started. The phone rang off the hook at all hours and whoever answered, man, woman, or child, was called a dead nigger. The wife and kids went to stay with her family. But the man stood on his front lawn and howled, “I am a man! I am a man!” The builder and other black men in town made a show of their guns on his property, which put a stop to the harassment. But that family moved away, too.
“The peckerwoods won back then,” the builder said. “But we gonna put a stop to this.”
“Were those men going to shoot somebody?” Luther asked.
“If they had to.”
“What about the police?” Luther asked.
The builder snorted. “You mean the police okeydoke? Half of them are in the Klan, don’t you know? They could’ve sent the people who set your fire.”
He said since we were from up north, we didn’t understand how it was. He saw how naive we were when we asked about building in white subdivisions, before he showed us the black ones. Did we even know we were smack dab in the middle of Klan country where David Duke, the Grand Wizard, held huge cross-burning rallies for the faithful in white robes and hoods?
“Don’t expect to get justice in Louseyanna. Down here blacks only get Just-Us,” he said. “Those same freedom fighters are still ’round here. They’ll bring their guns tonight and camp out here ’til this bull crap stops. The white man will know we’re not afraid of no crackers if we shoot one of ’em.”
“What do you mean, shoot?” Luther asked, eying the big man.
The builder poured another shot. It would go like this. Some men would guard the house around the clock, in shifts. They would stay until they were sure no more white folks were coming back. If they had to, they’d shoot—to make it plain we would not be run off.
“Wait now,” Luther said, shaking his head. “I’m not down with shooting folks.”
“Might not have to shoot them cowards, once they see our threat and we make some noise. But if we have to, we will shoot.”
He sat back in his chair, locking eyes with Luther. “OK?”
Luther stroked his moustache a few times. “Can’t do it, man. It’s too violent.”
“Me neither,” I said, shaking my head. A race war in my living room? I didn’t know which was crazier, the white racists or the black freedom fighters.
Luther put his hand on the builder’s shoulder. “Man, I’m grateful. But see, the only gun I ever held was when my pop drug me hunting one time. Just like I couldn’t shoot the deer in front of us, I can’t be part of shooting people.”
“Then what you gonna do?”
“I don’t know, but I’m gonna take my chances ’til I figure something out.”
The builder grunted and stood silent for a moment. Then he poured us each a shot. “I’ll be here if you change your mind,” he said, and raised his glass. “No matter what, take care of this gal here.”
Their handshake was a brothers’ pact, one we knew would stand whenever needed. He moved down the driveway, peering closely around our property. He rustled the monkey grass border curled over its own long blades like cotton pickers, poking with the barrel of his rifle like a western lawman.
I looked over to see what the cross looked like up close, but it was gone. The police had taken it. Instead, I saw they’d pulled us back into their time warp, tried to negate all we’d worked for, and left us with only a lingering smoky odor, the hole in our lawn, and their slap in our face.
The next day Luther and I went to see Larry, a more mild-mannered black man than the builder, to tell him about the cross burning. He gave us his advice in his family room, where his collection of long guns and handguns were locked inside a glass wall display that centered the room.
“You gotta defend yourself against these rednecks,” Larry said. “Most everybody down here carries something. You should too.”
We didn’t say so, but of course we had no intention of getting a gun. Nobody in New York we knew carried a gun, or thought one was necessary. As far as I knew, guns were for criminals, hunters, and crazies. Not for people like us.
Our black friends from Luther’s job asked if we weren’t going to move. Their concern palpable, one asked, “Is staying in that house worth it?”
In the next days, our house was egged, then another morning we found garbage strewn on the lawn: coffee grounds and dirty diapers, empty soup cans and newspapers, leftover chili and chicken bones. Luther called the police, who said they couldn’t do anything about it after the fact. So, we cleaned it up and hosed down the house and grass.
We were just sick, sitting on that citrus couch. The barrage of racism in housing, schools, jobs, and just common decency we’d endured earlier in our lives now looked like mere waystations on the road to hate this big. But as weary as that made us, we were angry and insulted too. Enough so that it was plain we had to straighten our backs and not let these white people take us down.