FROM MANY PLACES IN THE VALLEY THAT CRADLED BIRMINGHAM, you could lift up your eyes, in 1963, to see the gigantic cast-iron statue of Vulcan, the Roman god of the forge, atop his stone pedestal. Silhouetted against the pale blue skyline, atop Red Mountain, Vulcan held up a torch in one outstretched, soaring arm. In other mountain ridges surrounding the city, the ore lay hidden, but the city had honored this outcropping of iron ore named Red Mountain, as a reminder of the source of its prosperity (such as it was—most of the wealth of the steel industry was exported to magnates living in the great cities of the Northeast), by raising Vulcan high above the populace, south of the city.
Fanciful and well-educated children liked to pretend that Vulcan, who looked north, had a romance with the Statue of Liberty, also made of metal. But she was the largest such statue in the world, and he was second to her, and that violated the children’s sense of romance, for they understood hierarchy in romance to be as natural as hierarchy among whites and blacks.
Looking down from Vulcan—his pedestal housed stairs, and around the top of the tower ran an observation platform—you could see the entire city of Birmingham filling the valley between the last ridges of the Appalachian mountain chain as it stretched from high in the northeast to southwest.
In early May 1963, Stella’s freckle-faced boyfriend, a scant half inch taller (but therefore presentable as a boyfriend, if she wore flats), had persuaded her to drive from their college, across the city, avoiding the areas where Negroes were congregating for demonstrations, to Red Mountain. From the observation balcony just below Vulcan’s feet, Stella and Darl hoped for a safe overview.
I believe if outsiders would just stay out…Darl had told her. Let Birmingham solve…Don’t you?
But Stella hadn’t answered. Instead, she’d said, I’d like to see. I’m afraid to go close.
We can go up on Vulcan, Darl had offered, for he was a man who wanted to accommodate women; a man who loved his mother. Stella had met her.
He’d brought along his bird-watching binoculars. Darl could recognize birds by their songs alone; he could imitate each sound;he kept a life list of all the birds he had ever seen. His actual name was Darling, his mother’s maiden name, and though Stella dared not call him Darling, she longed to do so.
“Do you know the average altitude for the flight of robins?” he asked.
A spurt of laughter flew from between Stella’s lips. She imagined the giggle as though it had heft and was falling rapidly down from the pedestal, down the mountain, into the valley.
“I don’t have the foggiest idea,” she said.
“About thirty inches.”
“What a waste!” she said. “To have the gift of flight and to fly so low.”
She thought Darl might laugh at her sentence—half serious, half comic—but he didn’t.
Stella glanced up the massive, shining body of Vulcan, past his classical and bare heinie, up his lifted arm to his unilluminated torch. At a distance, she had often observed that the nighttime neon “flame” made the torch resemble a Popsicle. Cherry red, if someone had died in an auto accident; lime green, otherwise. Even this close and looking up his skirt, Vulcan’s frontal parts were completely covered by his short blacksmith’s apron.
Though it was May and the police were already into short sleeves, on the open observation balcony, Darl and Stella were lifted above the heat into a layer of air with cool breezes. Stella wished she’d worn a sweater. Darl put his arm around her—just for warmth, she told herself with determined naïveté, but she thrilled at his encircling arm diagonally crossing her back. His fingers fitted the spaces between her curving ribs. They were alone up in the air; they weren’t some trashy couple smooching in public. Yes, this was what she had been wanting. Perhaps for years. Someone’s arm around her, making her safe.
Stella knew her breasts were terribly small. If they had been plumper, Darl’s fingertips might have found the beginnings of roundness. Sex, sex, sex, she thought. His hand slid down to her waist; her mind careened. Do I feel slender enough there? Inviting? With his other hand, Darl trained the binoculars on the city. With one finger, he adjusted the ridged wheel between the twin eyepieces. The black leather strap looped gracefully around the back of his neck.
Darl was the complete darling: a lover of nature, a lover of music, a lover of God, considerate, a gentleman—if only he loved her. And best of all he was an organist, a master of the king of instruments. When Darl played Bach’s “O Sacred Head, Now Wounded,” creating his own improvisations, Stella felt understood. It was she who had been wounded, and the music was what she missed and needed. The way Darl played promised wholeness, profundity. Almost it seemed that the spirit of her father was hovering around Darl and her on this high place.
She placed her hand just below Darl’s waist; she shivered as though to say “I only seek closeness for warmth, against the chill.” Her palm loved the unfamiliar grain of the cloth of his trousers, and underneath, the firm flesh of his buttock just beginning to flare. How tantalized her hand felt, the hand itself wishing it dare move down to know the curve of his butt. She glanced again at the side of his cheek, the binoculars trained on the city. His hair was a rich brown, and his freckles almost matched his hair.
She wanted to brush the field glasses aside, to stand in front of him, for his eyes to look into hers and see in her more than a city’s worth of complex feeling, then she would tilt her face up a bare half inch and kiss his lips, her whole front against his whole front. They would lose their bodies, become a shared streak of warmth.
Darl pointed to the rectangular finger of the Comer Building, twenty-one stories tall, Birmingham’s lonely skyscraper. Down in the valley, the sweep of buildings was scarved with a haze from the steel mills. After finding the Comer Building, they looked west and north, searching for the parks—Woodrow Wilson Park adjacent to the beautiful library (only for whites) and a few blocks away, Kelly Ingram Park, for Negroes (no library). The demonstrations were launched toward city hall from the Negro park. But trees, already in full leaf, blocked their view, even with binoculars, of the violent attack of Bull Connor’s police on the freedom demonstrators. Birmingham appeared as peaceful, from this distance, as when, long ago, Stella had stood here with her mother and brothers—one of their day trips.
Suddenly Stella felt like a coward. If she wanted to see, she should have the nerve to go downtown. If she wanted to participate…but the idea frightened her too much.
Darl said quietly, “May the Lord bless you and keep you…” He was saying it over the whole city, the Methodist benediction. “May the Lord lift up his countenance upon you…” Darl was trying, with words, to soothe the hidden unrest and violence of his city. It was one of the things she loved about Darl, his sincere belief. Her own belief was in chaos. Down below, the confrontation was hidden completely from their view, but Darl was addressing both sides someplace in the distance, under the greenery.
“We should go down,” Darl said quietly. “You’re cold.”
“Amen,” she answered, and she let herself smile. She imagined somebody with a tape measure, holding it, impossibly, from a flying robin down to the ground. She loved the idea—so unexpected, silly but fascinating, to juxtapose a flying robin and a floppy yellow tape measure.
What was humor? one of their professors had posed, and he had answered, nondangerous, unexpectedly inappropriate juxtaposition.
But as they began to descend the spiral stairs inside Vulcan’s tower, Stella grew sober. She thought of the force of the powerful fire hoses turned on the Negroes peacefully congregating and marching for equality. She thought of the police dogs, standing on their hind legs, mouths open, snarling and barking.
In Birmingham, there was no romance between Vulcan and Lady Liberty.