BECAUSE ONE OF THE DEAD GIRLS WAS HER COUSIN, CHRISTINE had a reserved space in the church. Across the crowded sanctuary, she saw Charles Powers and his little brother Edmund. She set her lips hard against each other to try to keep from crying.
She hadn’t seen Charles or Edmund since May, drenched with water, in the pandemonium of the demonstrations. Charles had stopped attending night school after last May. Edmund had grown. Like herself, Charles and Edmund were wearing the same clothes they had worn to the demonstration, not because they wanted to say that and this are the same, but because these were their Sunday clothes, their dress-up. She pressed her lips firmly against each other.
She could not think about the dead children. She could not. She could look at the coffins, at the flowers. She pictured the explosion, like the hoof of the devil, splitting the church open; herself standing in the cloud of plaster dust, soul blown out of her body. Like an empty vessel, she had filled, first with rage. Now with despair. Things would never change. Things had to change now. Else this would be in vain. God couldn’t let this be in vain. Four lambs left on a bloody altar. “Sow in sorrow; reap in joy”—wasn’t that Scripture?
Christine determined to look at folks’ clothes. She always took an interest in clothes, loved stylish clothes. She herself looked fine in her navy blue suit; because it was polyester, it had washed up in the kitchen sink, by hand, good as new. Christine remembered the sludge of plaster dust in the bottom of the sink, how she had swabbed it out with a used paper towel so the plaster couldn’t clog up the plumbing;then she rinsed what little bit was left down the drain. She had an impulse to catch and save a bit of the milky water, but she had just let it swirl down. She hung her outfit up over the sink to drip dry. And now the skirt and jacket were crisp, good as new.
Polyester was a blessing. She was grateful to those who invented, to George Washington Carver for inventing peanut butter, so cheap and so nutritious, to whoever invented polyester and No Iron.
Edmund’s and Charles’s clothes looked good, too. None the worse for hard wearing.
Lots of navy blue, black dotted around the church.
There was Lionel Parrish, her night school boss but now a part-time minister, a dancer at the Gaslight (with a woman, his cousin, not his wife), standing with another minister, now sitting down near the front, both in fine gray suits. She looked at the composure of Lionel’s smooth, handsome face and thought of King, but then she saw his eye flash, and she thought of Shuttlesworth. She’d never seen Lionel Parrish flash out that way before now.
Lionel Parrish wasn’t beaten—she could see that. He sat proudly in his expensive gray suit. He wasn’t in despair, but then, it wasn’t his kids dead. For that matter, wasn’t hers. She tried to make herself glad. What was it Gloria said to try to cheer her? Gloria’s grandmother’s verse: “This is the day that the Lord hath made. Let us rejoice. Be glad in it.”
But Christine imagined the electric chair. She imagined four electric chairs and four white men, one for each dead child, strapped into them. “And there shall be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth.” That was Scripture, too.
She knew how she wanted the service to start: she wanted somebody to say, loud and ringing, “Vengeance is mine! I shall repay—thus saith the Lord!”
BECAUSE THE CHURCH WAS tightly packed, TJ was squeezed against Agnes. He was thankful for the pressure of her soft body against his. She hadn’t wanted to go to the March on Washington, and he had felt alone without her. He had stood close to the Reflecting Pool. He’d faced the front, but that fine, sunny day, King was too far away for TJ to even tell which figure he was. But his voice was everywhere, amplified by the loudspeakers. It had surprised TJ to see the number of white people participating in the Washington march. White touching black in a friendly way. He couldn’t help but be suspicious. Couldn’t stop himself from wondering who do they think they are? Almost he hadn’t wanted them there. But what sense did that make? This was about integration. Equality and integration. He knew he wanted the equality part.
And where were the white faces? Where were the white people of Birmingham who were supposed to care and regret and detest violence?
He glanced around the church, people trying for dignified silence, but sobs breaking, some low, some spurting up loud, in spite of handkerchiefs and veils. But there was King. Here in Birmingham, TJ could see him fine. Here at home, he could see King.
In Washington, D.C., TJ’d looked in the Reflecting Pool, seen the wavering representation of the great pointed monument and the clouds, and King’s amplified voice everywhere as though it emanated from the clouds.
Here to preach, King must be thinking of his own family. Was it safer over in Atlanta than it was in Birmingham? Over there they bombed Jewish churches. TJ had felt abandoned when King moved from Alabama back to Atlanta. King had four little children himself. TJ could see the sorrow in the man. He looked humble and beaten. What could he say? Four children blasted into eternity. What could any man say?
There was Fred Shuttlesworth embracing King like a brother, though some people said Shuttlesworth had had hard feelings last May about King. There was something fierce about Fred Shuttlesworth. The man was made out of energy and courage. He bristled with it.
When TJ looked at the coffins, he thought he was going to howl. He didn’t want to do that. He made himself look at the leaders. He had to look at them now. They had to lead him through this. He heard Agnes crying beside him.
“Don’t look at the families,” he whispered to her. “Look. There’s Dr. King. See there’s Reverend Shuttlesworth.” But she buried her eyes into his suit shoulder and sobbed. TJ knew that part of her grief was that they never could have their own children. And here were four gone to waste.
When Dr. Martin Luther King took his turn behind the pulpit, TJ thought, clear as day, Somebody’s gonna shoot him someday.