ON HIS EVENING OFF, TJ SAT OUT IN THE CAR IN THE dark parking lot and watched the small brick building that held his precious Agnes. If he could have done so, he would have watched it every night. To let some air in, he unbuttoned his shirt a couple of buttons.
On top of a slope the building sat low to the ground. One step led up to a small porch held up by round white columns at each end, with two more columns flanking the step in the middle. Both sides of the one-room building had five big windows in a row. Despite the distance, TJ could see right in the lighted classroom—the young folks, the teachers (one white in a wheelchair), and his beloved wife.
As he sat in the car waiting, another car pulled into the lot. Three white men got out, but they didn’t notice TJ. He was wearing dark clothing; he supposed he just blended right in. One of the men was carrying something horn-shaped in his hand, attached to a box. They moved like men on patrol—stealthy and purposeful. There was a stand of willows between the parking lot and Agnes’s building, and TJ lost sight of them when they slipped among the long fronds of the trees. They were dressed in dark clothing, too.
TJ got out of his car and stood beside it. He saw the men emerge from the woods, but they headed toward the bigger buildings that sat up high on their foundations, not the little isolated one. It was cooler outside the car than inside.
TJ listened to the cicadas and the tree frogs screaming for rain. Agnes had taken fans to the school. When she hurried away from him, he had thought, Slow down, Aggie. It don’t matter, you one minute late.
Suddenly the lights in the little low building went out. And the lights in the closest big building, too, just winked and were gone. TJ began to run. Before he got out of the lot, he determined he would kill them. If anything happened to Agnes, he would track them down and kill them. He stopped, went back. Read the license number on the back of the car. He had a hotel ballpoint in his pocket, and he wrote the tag number down in the palm of his hand. This way he could find them. He hated wasting time standing there, checking what he’d written against the Alabama tag, but he made himself do it.
Then he ran like a demon.
While he was in the grove of willows, his feet began to sink into the muck, up to his ankles. He heard a voice saying Niggers…niggers, and he began to think just how he would choke them one by one. His hands itched, and he remembered how, blind with dust, he had lifted the bricks and plaster in the bombed church. He saw the blood on brown arms and faces. He pictured again how people had moved like ghosts all covered in gray dust after the bombing. And that moment when he saw Agnes again, standing in the rubble, saw her knees buckle and her fall as though she were shot through the heart, and then he saw what she saw. The horror of it. Like John the Baptist, but a child, a young girl.
He charged the hill and was halfway up when the lights came back on. From this angle, he couldn’t see as well, but the night class was all sitting down. He saw Agnes, from her neck up. Not even upset.
He’d been a fool. It was just the electricity had gone off. No, he had heard the voice:Niggers…niggers. But maybe he’d imagined that. Agnes was all right. He slowed down. His heart was beating hard, too hard. He ought not run uphill any more than Agnes should hurry. Her head looked so pretty, rising above the windowsill. She looked happy.
He saw three colored boys go in the door. Here came a man dressed up in a suit. Somebody in charge, probably. Mr. Parrish. TJ had seen this very man at the Gaslight with a beautiful high-style woman. Agnes had leaned over and said in TJ’s ear:I’m afraid it’s not his wife. Then Agnes had put her fingers to her lips—a secret—and he had nodded, agreeing. They didn’t want to tear anybody down. That kind of carrying-on was too bad, but they had no intention of gossiping. Not about a fine-looking man like Mr. Lionel Parrish, director of the night school. And a preacher.
Mr. Parrish stepped up onto the little porch like he owned the place. Then he stopped in the doorway. He put one hand on the doorframe and stopped there. Real casual. TJ heard him say to everybody simply “Good evening,” and TJ moved closer to listen.
“Sorry ’bout that, folks,” Mr. Parrish said pleasantly. “I have people out looking on the campus for those guys. Everything all right?”
TJ heard a car motor starting down in the parking lot.
A wiry woman in a white dress printed with circles said, “Yeah, we cool.” She had to be one of the teachers. Mrs. Taylor. Agnes had said Mrs. Taylor was the head teacher.
There were two white women, and the one with gleaming blond hair said, “Christine was magnificent.”Magnificent—a word from a different world than TJ’s world.
Mrs. Taylor’s quick reply: “Hey, I thought that was Stella teaching this class, didn’t you all?”
And then the voice of his Agnes, though somebody blocked his view of her: “Miss Stella sure do make it plain.” Yes, that was Agnes. Never losing an opportunity to give a compliment, to raise somebody up:she sure do make it plain.
Then the blond white girl said, “Maybe it would be better if Cat and I didn’t—”
Mrs. Taylor shot back, “Better for who? I thought I heard you conjugating verbs in the dark. I thought I hear you saying ‘Who has friends?’ You have friends, we friends on a first-name basis.”
But the white girl was upset. Afraid. “Wait a minute,” she said. “You know what I mean. You heard what they said at the window. It’s Cat and me they don’t want out here.”
“Yes, and you know why?” Mrs. Taylor asked. She was getting mad. Yes, Agnes had talked about her. The Impatient One, Agnes had labeled her when she told TJ about school goings-on. “We already doing what they trying to stop,” Mrs. Taylor declared. “We integrated. Yes, we are. Say the word, class.”
And TJ heard his Agnes lead off, quietly, “Integrated.”
“And that’s not the end of it,” Mrs. Taylor said, agitating herself. (TJ felt a chill. His feet were wet, his body soaked with sweat.) “They don’t want anybody learning. In the slavery days, it was illegal for a colored person to learn to read and write. Learning is power.”
The blond girl answered, “Y’all better face the fact—all of you—if Cat and I come back here, we’ll be putting you in danger.”
TJ moved so he could see better. See their faces. Who cared about integration? he wondered. This was about getting a diploma. Black teachers good as white ones for that.
But the crippled girl was talking again. Her hands were handicapped, as well as her legs, and she seemed to have something wrong with her throat. She said the bigots weren’t worried about integration. Everybody sat still when she—Miss Cat—talked, gave her extra quiet and courtesy. She had trouble getting the words out, as though she had to squeeze them so they could fit through a constricted passage. “They’re talking about keeping people as ignorant as they can,” she said.
“That’s the truth, Cat,” Mrs. Taylor agreed.
“If I really thought that if Stella and I went away, your problems would be over, I’d go.” It was hard for Miss Cat to get out a long sentence. “But I don’t think so. They want to intimidate you in every way.” She had to swallow and lick her lips, but she was determined to keep going. “They want to split us up.” She said it like she was proud. “I’ll bet you within one week (swallow, swallow), even if Stella and I left (swallow) and never set foot on the Miles College campus again (swallow), there’d be some redneck out there with a bullhorn (swallow) telling you that school was out for the summer. Permanently out. (Pause) We take a stand now, or there’s not going to be anyplace left to stand.”
“That’s right,” Mrs. Taylor said. But her face looked strange. Like she was going to cry. “I say it with Cat.” Her voice was all quiet, like she could hardly get the words out. “Let’s stand up for ourselves.”
TJ looked at the class. They looked stunned. Then his Agnes does it. She stands up. A sob catches in TJ’s throat. She’s misunderstood—they were just talking the word—but she’s standing there beside her school desk. Then Miss Arcola stands up and beams a lightbulb smile at everybody else. And Miss Gloria pops like a little short cork right out of her seat. Mrs. Taylor is up with her. One by one all the black folks are standing. In the doorframe, Mr. Parrish straightens up like a soldier. Stretches himself up on tiptoe, bounces on the balls of his feet. Last of all, white girl called Miss Stella gets up. She looks around at them. She wants to be brave, too.
Only person left seated is Miss Cat in her wheelchair. She suddenly shoots up her hand—reckon they know she can’t stand up—and the whole room whoops with triumph.