THAT FALL, THE FIRST SEPTEMBER SATURDAY, SHOPPING downtown, Christine pointed to a man entering a drugstore and asked Gloria if she knew who he was.
No, Gloria answered. She didn’t know the man. She saw he wore an old brown hat, felt, even though the summer heat was still on them. Everything about his posture bespoke dejection. He slumped into his old clothes. The hat was too large and shielded much of his head.
Who wanted to look at that? Gloria lifted her eyes to the sky between the high buildings.
She intended to feel wonderful on this fine September day. The sky was a real blue; no gray haze from steel mills filtering out the color. A wind had come through, down between the office buildings and stores of Birmingham, and swept the air clean. Cleared the air all the way to the top of the sky.
Gloria was shopping with her friend—first time they’d gone out sauntering the sidewalk together, shopping. At least right now, that was all they were doing. Yes, over the summer, Christine, a grown-up with three kids, had taken her as a friend.
“That’s Judge Aaron,” Christine said. She grabbed Gloria’s arm, pinched it hard.
Why did Christine sound stricken? “Naw. He can’t be any judge,” Gloria replied. The man was dirty. Moreover, he was black.
“That’s his name, I reckon. His mama gave him the first name Judge.”
When Christine tightened the pressure on Gloria’s arm, Gloria was annoyed. She didn’t want any desperate clutching on a fine September day. She didn’t want to stir up trouble. The time wasn’t ripe.
Politics! Had to be something about the Movement, something about Rights for Christine to seize up like that. Gloria’s father had said, “You want to get ahead, you work. It’s simple as that. You get mixed up in demonstration trouble, you lose what you got.”
Her mouth at Gloria’s ear, Christine dropped her voice to a sad, confidential monotone: “His ma wanted her newborn, chocolate-cream baby boy to be addressed with respect, just like I want for my boys.” While they walked in step, Christine’s voice mused on, the voice of a hurt mother. “So his mother she gave her baby boy Judge for his name. ‘Judge, what you ask for mowing the lawn? I give you a quarter,’ some white man have to say, and her little boy hear that word Judge and he hearing respect.”
Had her own mother named her Gloria, trying to put her forward? She doubted the naming tactic would work. “How come you didn’t sign up for an economics course this fall?” her mother had asked. “How come you don’t learn something about George Washington Carver instead of William Butler Yeats out at Miles College?” But her mother always supported her music.
Gloria raised her eyes again to the sky between the tall store buildings on Eighteenth Street. She loved for the clouds to puff up like that, so white against the blue.
“Well, how come you know that man?” Gloria asked Christine.
“I only saw him once before. I think it could be him. Somebody pointed him out. Just like I’m doing you.”
“What for?”
“Klan did him.” Christine’s voice was flat and sad. “If that’s Judge Aaron—they did him.”
Gloria looked at Christine’s face. All the energy was drained away; she’d never seen Christine quiet and drained. Did him?
“When Reverend Shuttlesworth tried to integrate Phillips High School,” Christine went on, “that night, they just caught some black man at random.” Christine’s defeated voice began to recharge itself.
Gloria looked up and wished the heavenly blue would come right down between the buildings and envelop her. She wanted to stand swirled in soft blue. “Lavender’s blue, dilly dilly…” Gloria wanted to live enrapt in a smooth song. Something more peaceful than “Blueberry Hill,” something like Burl Ives sang when she was a little girl—“Lavender’s blue, dilly dilly…” Just for today, just now, it would be fine to relax into lavender.
“Judge Aaron didn’t have nothing to do with no Phillips High School!” Christine hissed. “Klan say Judge Aaron must tell Shuttlesworth what they will do to him.”
Gloria gazed across the street at the slow-moving man. Did him? She couldn’t see his face for the slouch of the hat.
“But they don’t dare to touch Shuttlesworth,” Christine added softly, malevolently. “No. He walk away from every assault. He say God with him; he a man afraid of nothing.”
The soft blue stayed inaccessibly high above them. She had to listen to Christine. Couldn’t turn a deaf ear.
The street looked more grimy. The people, colored like herself, more lost and lonely. Gloria felt her heart sinking because she knew to please Christine, to satisfy her own conscience, she would have to go with her to Woolworth’s; she would have to sit up on a stool at the white lunch counter like any other human being.
Never mind the blue day; it didn’t count anymore. Something that should never happen under any sky—she didn’t know what—had happened to the defeated man across the street. This was the day of the brown felt hat.
There on the street, Gloria put her hand over her heart—like her grandmother—as though to calm its rapid beating. Grandma Susan, dead since Gloria was five. Grandma Susan, named for her grandma who had been a slave, always trying to soothe herself. It just making a racket in there, her grandma used to explain. Gloria felt her grandma within her own body, her grandmother’s desire and her own for quiet and peace within herself. For her grandmother, for herself, Gloria pressed her palm between her breasts.
“You all right?” Christine asked sharply.
“I’ll do it,” Gloria answered.
“When?”
Gloria knew that Christine knew what she meant.
“Today,” Gloria answered. “Before I lose my nerve.”
The clothing of the shoppers grew vivid, swirled before Gloria like a hallucination. Bits of color here and there, like a flag undone. Gloria pressed her hand against her chest. Then she recognized her gesture as something new: hand on her heart, as though her body, without her consent or guidance, was already making a pledge of allegiance. I pledge allegiance to this street, to my people, and to their need. To the slouch of an old brown hat.