WHAT LIONEL PARRISH THOUGHT WHILE HE WAITED FOR the white girls was: (1) they both had B.A.s and one was Phi Beta Kappa and (2) they were from here, and what did that mean? Not like white Judy Cohen from Berkeley, California, whose smile was…strained, should he say? Couldn’t be friendly, since she didn’t know anybody down here and there hadn’t been time to make friends, but maybe hopeful of making friends, yes, call it hopeful. Hope was something he could relate to. It stood for what he was trying to do:H elp; O pportunity;P otential E nergy—the capital letters spelled out the word.
Lionel Parrish had talked it over with Mr. Bones, and when Mr. Bones sneered in derision, then Mr. Parrish knew it was the right name, just what the community needed: hope. Right on cue, yes, he could expect Mr. Bones often these days, and here he was!
With a skittering and a crash, a scrolled-up drawing of the human skeleton rolled down behind Lionel Parrish’s desk. The bottom pole of the wall diagram dropped right into the chalk tray like the sharp rap of a ruler. When he was a boy, teacher had laid the ruler cross the palm of little Lionel’s hands many a time like that.
Mr. Parrish sighed. “What you want to say this time, Mr. Bones?” he said, addressing the chart of the skeleton.
Trouble coming. That’s all.
“Uh-uh. Future coming. Let the means reflect the ends. That’s what I say. That’s what Martin says Gandhi says. That’s what Fred Shuttlesworth says. Now let’s see what Joe Rumore says. You hush.”
Mr. Parrish flicked on his small radio. And now the weather, brought to you by Golden Eagle Table Syrup, Pride of Alabam. Temperatures soared to ninety-nine degrees today in Birmingham, and now at five o’clock in the evening, the thermometer reads ninety-eight degrees in the downtown area. Relative humidity ninety-eight percent. Zero chance of precipitation, and folks, it looks like it’s going to be another scorcher tomorrow in Birmingham, your Magic City. Predicted high of a hundred degrees in our sizzling Magic City….
The sound of the phone pierced the radio patter. Well, he’d answer it. Maybe the white girls were canceling. He answered cheerfully, “H-O-P-E, Help Opportunity Potential Energy here.”
A stream of white-voice obscenities machine-gunned into his ear. Mr. Parrish gently set the receiver back in its cradle. He hummed a little church tune to himself. He picked up a pencil to be busy.
Push it out of your mind with a pencil. Might of been Mr. Bones; might of been his own good voice giving him good advice. But the gray pencil lead, sharp above the yellow pad of paper, did its own little nervous dance. He glanced over his shoulder at the grinning skeleton on the wall. Now the Lord said to Lot’s wife, Don’t you look back.
Okay. That was what he, Lionel Parrish, should have told himself about Matilda, what with Jenny and the children so good at home. But he had gone back to Matilda, and she had heated him up till blood boiled in his veins. Mr. Parrish rose from his chair and looked out the window across the city to see Vulcan standing on Red Mountain. Help me, Iron Man! He ought not pray to a pagan god, he knew that. You’d burn in hell for that.
Timid knock, timid white voice: “Mr. Parrish, Mr. Parrish.”
And there was one: slender as a willow switch.
“There’re too many steps.”
What did that crazy white girl mean?
One in a wheelchair! Hey, come on! And she mad as a hornet, sitting in her chariot at the bottom of the steps.
“You said your office was street level,” the crippled one said.
“Well, more or less. It is.”
The standing one (hair straight and smooth, almost to her shoulders, then flip!) said her name, Stella Silver, and that she could get Catherine’s chair up one step but not three, and he said that wouldn’t be any problem for him, and when he reached out to pull her up, that Catherine commanded Wait! And then explained she had to release the brakes first (looked like her hands, too, were weak, kind of flipped back at the knuckles). She released the brake very slowly; he could have done that in half a second. Her hands moved like they owned the brakes, like they were little flesh clouds hovering over their own territory, but after she’d done it, she smiled up at him and wasn’t any doubt: she liked him and wanted him to like her. Just as natural as could be.
It was heavy, chair and all, and he understood why that willow switch was smart not to try to pull wheelchair and passenger up three steps. He’d supposed all along they were smart, well educated, but turned out, after they got settled inside, and the phone rang and he ignored it, and the radio turned on by itself, and he laughed and said Haints, I reckon and they laughed, too, and they had got each other’s names straight, turned out it was the crippled one who was the Phi Beta Kappa and she was also the one he’d talked to on the phone. Her voice was a little bit impaired, too, but that was faint.
“My name’s Catherine,” she said, “but everybody calls me Cat. ’Cause I’m so light on my feet.” When she smiled, so slow, then he got it, her joke, and they all laughed together. Well, they’d swapped jokes, and right off the bat, too.
But they wanted to know what they’d be paid. He pussyfooted around a little, but he knew they could tell, and yes he had advertised in the Birmingham News like he was up and running, but…Truth was, H.O.P.E. was not yet funded.
“Matter of time,” he added. “Washington knows about us.”
“Federal funding?” Stella’s voice near ’bout as full of doubt as Mr. Bones’s.
“I do have a friend in Washington, D.C., and he has talked to a congress-man, and there was reassurances. I assure you there were reassurances. See, we have a better chance we be actually operating. They look at deeds, not words. Not what we planning to do, what we are doing.”
“Mr. Parrish,” Cat said in her slow, thoughtful way, “is it the same for your other teachers. They’re not being paid yet either?”
“They are volunteers. But see, they still college students at Miles. They still working on their B.A.s.” He looked her square in the eyes. “I know it’s different for you and Miss Silver.” Suddenly the skeleton flew up, rolled itself up and shut. “ ’Nother haint,” he said, but this time nobody laughed.
“No.” Cat spoke so slowly. “I reckon it’s not different for us. We want to help.” Then she quickly added, “Don’t we, Stella?” like a burst of energy came down her nerve line.
Stella reached over on his desk and picked up the little Vulcan paperweight as though she owned it.
“Sure,” Stella said, but she didn’t look at him.
“There’s something else I want.” Cat waited before she went on. She swallowed like her tongue might be a little bit too big to manage.
“What’s that?” he asked.
“When it’s over, I want you to write a letter of recommendation to the Birmingham Board of Education saying I did a fine job and I managed my students by myself and never had a bit of trouble.”
“Suppose you do have trouble?”
Now Stella had more to say: “They won’t hire her. She’s Phi Beta Kappa, but they won’t take her. She did her practice teaching. The regular teacher was out sick two weeks, and Cat managed by herself entirely. She was fine. But the board said it didn’t count because the teacher didn’t observe Cat’s teaching. And if somebody was in there observing, then Cat wouldn’t be alone with the students, and they’d never know if she could do the job.”
“They said it would make the insurance go up to have a teacher in a wheelchair,” the crippled girl explained.
“Suppose you do have trouble, Cat?”
“I won’t,” she said.
(Boy Howdy! Like his Texas grandpa used to say. Her eyes bored at you like two pistol barrels.) “Yes, I’ll write for you. Be glad to.” The words just popped out. You didn’t say no to pistols.
(No white Birmingham Board of Education cared what a black man said anyway.)
They were all sweating. He felt a great gush come out of his right armpit, and Stella had a little sweat-bead mustache. Cat’s glasses having slid down the slick slant of her nose, she pushed them back to the bridge. (Her finger, like her hand, had a strange swayback appearance.)
“Mighty hot night,” Mr. Parrish mumbled, “just like the radio say.”
The white women looked at each other, settling it without speaking that they would volunteer, expect pay if it came down from Washington.
Mr. Parrish heard a mosquito at his ear.
“How safe is it for us to come out here?” Stella asked.
“What place is this?” he asked them. No evasion; his voice was hard, direct.
Cat chuckled. “Bombingham.”