IN THEIR BOOTH AT THE ATHENS CAFE AND BAR, GLORIA said quietly to Christine, “Well, I missed out then, didn’t I?”
“You might of missed out this spring. There’ll be more.”
Christine felt as though she would jump out of her skin if she didn’t get some calming alcohol into her blood. Too much had happened. Too much done and too much not done. She wanted to storm into the streets, shout for people to turn out of their houses, march again. She’d even embrace the savage energy of the fire hose, let it spin her again.
Gloria sipped her 7UP. If she had anything with caffeine in it, then she couldn’t get to sleep. She tilted her green eyes toward the ice in the glass and said in a low voice, “But Reverend King said it was a victory. Said it on national TV.”
“You see any big change?” Christine’s nerves jittered as though they wanted to play the bones. She could almost hear the sounds of bones clacking together in some artful hands.
“He said there was a committee—white store owners, A. G. Gaston—” Even to herself Gloria sounded pious and naive.
“While Shuttlesworth in the hospital, King just took over.” Christine waved her hands over her drink, seemed to clear back the air. “King made a deal. Now he move on. Shuttlesworth try to tell him, ‘Brother, don’t just scald the hog on one side, you got to scald him on both sides.’ ”
Despite Christine’s gestures and intense voice, Gloria was half listening to the jukebox playing Elvis: “Love me tender, love me true…” Gloria thought Elvis was the prettiest white man she had ever seen a picture of. But why didn’t anybody say he was pretty? The idea felt like her own secret observation, even though everybody had seen the same pictures.
“What I don’t understand”—Gloria looked full in Christine’s eyes. Yes, she could look somebody in the eyes if she started out about how she didn’t understand. “Why King want to shut down?”
“He white-collar. Shuttlesworth blue-collar. That’s the difference. Birmingham a stepping-stone for King. He fail in Georgia ’cause police play it smart and cool there. Wasn’t nothing to put on national TV. Not no fire hoses and dogs. Not no Bull. King got to have his national coverage, and Bull Connor played right to him.”
To Christine, Gloria’s green-eyed stare meant she knew nothing at all about how the world worked. Gloria’s innocence and ignorance mesmerized Christine. Just books, poetry—that was all good little Gloria understood.
Christine explained, “And King got to stop now ’cause Birmingham out of control and fighting back. Those guys on the sidelines? They ain’t studying no nonviolence. Gandhi just some foreign nigger far as they care.”
“King made everything work in Montgomery.”
After Gloria uttered this undeniable fact, she waited to see how far it would take her. She felt that she’d dropped a stone down a well and was waiting for the splash.
“Let me tell you something,” Christine began. “Montgomery ain’t Birmingham. This steel town. Wasn’t nothing here before the Civil War—Elyton Village, that’s all. Birmingham grew up violent. Nothing plantation ’bout steel city. We more like Pittsburgh than Montgomery.” Christine fished out her green olive and ate it. “And we so poor here. Black folks so desperate.” But Christine knew that was inaccurate: very few were desperate for justice; most were afraid, worn down, cowed.
“Didn’t we win something?” Gloria wondered how a martini would taste. “You want to come to Sixteenth Street with me some Sunday?”
“I might. Got to be at Bethel if Reverend Shuttlesworth preaching. You want to come with me?”
“Didn’t we win something?” Gloria asked again.
“Yeah. Now educated, rich Negroes talking to rich white folks.”
Gloria knew it was half true: they at Sixteenth Street weren’t much involved with Shuttlesworth’s organizing till King came to town. Sixteenth Street was the biggest and the richest of the black churches in Birmingham. Their class of colored wanted to negotiate. Here was the other half of what King had done: in the black community, he had smoothed over between those who wanted to wait and those who were already acting. Gloria’s idea of victory contracted, became smaller, seemed more clear and hard-edged. Now well-off blacks were talking with working-class blacks.
In Gloria’s wide-eyed silence, Christine heard the conclusion to her own thought. “Remember this,” Christine added, the idea calming her better than gin as she articulated words: “This be about class—it not just about color.”And that class thing could scare Washington more than race, she thought but did not say. What if poor white was to realize they really in the same boat with poor black? They just fool themselves thinking they in the boat with rich white.
Boldly, Gloria asked Christine, “How come you talk black when we in here?”
“ ’Cause I’m home, and I mean what I say.” Christine sipped her martini. Sometimes Christine thought she didn’t half know what she was thinking till she heard herself saying it to Gloria. Nonetheless, mockery rose in Christine’s throat. “ ‘Didn’t we win?’ you asking me.” A mean energy surged in her arms and spine. “What you mean we? I didn’t see any Gloria Miss Green Eyes marching, did I? I miss something?”
She wanted to hit Gloria, slap her hard, her and her cello, into reality.