SECOND STRAIGHT NIGHT, FOLKS, OF ONE HUNDRED BURNING-hot degrees after sunset! Brought to you by Golden Eagle Table Syrup, Pride of Alabam, and by me, Joe Rumore, Alabama’s only Eye-talian redneck. We sure wish we had a better forecast, but tomorrow looks just the same. No change anytime soon….
Lionel Parrish snapped off the radio and said in his heartiest voice, “Come in, girls!” He appreciated that Arcola and Gloria, both fine students according to the dean, had come early. Oh, that Arcola, how she could smile! “Won’t you have a seat.” Arcola had a 1,000-kilowatt smile. Gloria had told him, shyly, she wanted to do something for her community.
“Your fan work, Mr. Parrish?” Arcola asked.
“No. Just look at it and think cool.”
He wished he could get Gloria to look at anything other than her hands folded in her lap. How such a mole—she was a mole, Gloria, always hiding—thought she could teach high school dropouts was beyond his imagining. But somehow she had.
“What you want to see us about?” Arcola was not there to waste time, but she looked at him like she expected candy. She had a big braid (probably artificial) across the top of her head; made it look as if she had a crown above her pretty face.
What was that murmur? Why, Gloria had said something! (She had a good college record. Surely she talked sometime.) She said it again, a little louder. “Aren’t we going to wait for Christine?”
He shrugged. “I ’spect Mrs. Taylor’s going to be late.” (Arcola smiled cheerfully. Her teeth were slightly outward spreading, but that just made it look like her smile was bursting right out.) Mr. Parrish went on. “What I want to know is, how things going?”
Arcola almost laughed. “Well, you know we not got any books, but things going ’bout as well as they can, considering.”
“How ’bout the boys from Neighborhood Youth Corps?”
“Only reason they come to school is they’re paid for it.” (Did Arcola wink at him?)
“How they fitting in?” he asked.
“I smell a little cough syrup, don’t you, Gloria?” (Gloria seemed deaf to all questions.) “Some of ’em nippin’ codeine. No problem.”
“They worn out time they come to class,” Mr. Parrish said. He wished Arcola had higher expectations for her students than mere physical presence. “Most hasn’t ever had a job before,” he added.
“They okay,” she answered. “I can’t complain.”
“Gloria, what do you think of them?”
“Yes, sir.” Gloria spoke to her hands. (Like his wife, Jenny, Gloria hadn’t learned the importance of looking a person in the eye.)
“Everything okay?”
“Yes, sir.” (Matilda, his mistress, would look into the gizzard of anybody—boldly. He loved the bold overtures she made to him.)
“They aren’t giving you any smart talk?”
“Well, Mr. Parrish.” (Gloria had a pretty little voice, but she wouldn’t look up.) “I’m a little bit afraid of them.”
Arcola quickly said, “You scared? After you done sat in at Woolworth’s?” She didn’t wait for Gloria to answer. “Aw, these boys not any trouble. We got it under control, Mr. Parrish.”
Like an arrow, the shriek of the telephone entered Mr. Parrish’s heart. He didn’t want obscenities coming in over the phone line when the girls were in his office. But they were looking at him. He had to answer. He could scarcely believe Gloria was somebody who would sit in. But she had been with Christine at the Gaslight. The sensation of dancing with Matilda passed through his body.
Turned out, the telephone questions were civil. He watched Arcola and Gloria listening to his side of the call; naturally, his volunteer teachers were curious to know how the head of H.O.P.E. would respond to inquiries. Efficiently, with dignity. “Yes, we run the night school here…. It’s open to anybody…. Yes, black or white. It’s for people who want to pass the GED test…. You’re welcome.”
“Only we ain’t never had,” Arcola spoke sassily, “a single white student.”
“I’m thinking about taking on a couple of white lady teachers, though.”
There, he’d said it.
“I be glad to work with ’em.” (Blessed nonchalance. This was one well-balanced young woman.) “How come you want ’em?” she asked and picked up Vulcan to suck on his head. (Mr. Parrish wanted to tell her that wasn’t a sanitary thing to do, but she sure did look cute, her tongue running over Vulcan’s curls just like he was a lollipop.)
“Funding. Funding, for one thing.”
“Suits me. Gloria, too.”
He might as well tell them his concern: “I’m a little bit worried about Mrs. Taylor.”
“She get along with Judy Cohen all right,” Arcola reassured.
“Berkeley, California. These two new are from here.”
“Well, what they like?”
“They both got brand fresh B.A. degrees.”
“Guess that means they’ll be over us.”
The whole head of Vulcan had disappeared into her mouth. God! How did she expect him to ignore that.
“Do you have a B.A. degree?” he asked.
“I don’t care,” Arcola said. (Where did she get the ability to relax like that. Practically limp.) “I’m just stating facts, ain’t I, Gloria? Christine’s not going to like this.” She smiled at him again. “You send ’em to me. I’ll take care of ’em.” (Yes, Arcola’s fat braid across the top of her head was like a coronet.)
Gloria said quietly, “Reason Christine so bitter—one of those little girls at the church last September—she was Christine’s cousin.”
Mr. Parrish stared at Gloria as though she were some kind of bomb that had just detonated without exploding. Then he heard it again, the blast erupting through black children gathering after Sunday school. Burning through their bodies, through brick walls. He knew Arcola and Gloria were hearing the blast, too. The exact cadence of that sound, of what you had hoped it wasn’t and knew it was. Sunday morning, September 15, 1963, in Birmingham. You knew where you were when the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bomb exploded, you knew whose face you looked into next. Into Jenny’s. Thank God they were late that day. With Jenny and his children, he had heard the thud of the bomb, then the first grief screaming over the rooftops.
That moment was like a place in his brain. He could visit it anytime. They all could.
“I didn’t know she was related,” Arcola said, her voice flat.
“Christine was there with me at Sixteenth Street,” Gloria said. “That day.”
Mr. Parrish reached for the ringing phone. When the small, cramped voice of obscenity probed his ear, he shouted, “Go to hell, you mother-fucking bastard!” He slammed down the receiver and held it down. He couldn’t let loose. His hand trembled.
“Everybody gets crank calls sometime,” Arcola said soberly. “We bound to get some. Sooner or later.”
Mr. Parrish decided to sound official: “Thanks for stopping by.” He lifted his hand from the receiver. It was hard to do, as though magnetism or electricity bonded his hand to the black phone. “Any problems—let me know. I want to keep those kids in school if we can. Keep the local white teachers, too.”