IN THE GLOAMING, THE NEXT NIGHT, STELLA WALKED ACROSS the Miles campus toward her shadowy friends, three women and a man, sitting on the step of the portico. Though Cat was home sick, Stella, yes, she, had driven alone to the college. Before this night, Stella had willed herself to have courage—just enough to help Cat. When Cat’s telephone voice had said I can’t come, Stella had quivered with fear. So she would have to stand up for herself, or not stand up. But she knew she would go. I have to go by myself to Courage College, Stella told herself. She would not have the crutch of altruism for support.
Stella watched her new friends sitting on the step of the strangely classical portico. They stirred with uncertainty. Who was that approaching, in the gloaming?—they must be asking. She must seem disembodied without the wheelchair before her. No doubt they usually recognized her and Cat as a unit, a rolling sculpture: two female figures joined by her hands on the handles of the back of the wheelchair.
And what could she make of their shapes, lounging on the step? Three women. A fourth figure, a man who was a little apart. A man in a suit, handsome Lionel Parrish waiting with Christine, Arcola, and Gloria to see who would come back to school this night. He lounged like a lion on the banister slab beside the step, his back to the last streaks of sunset.
“You look like four shadows,” Stella called to them, “haints risen from Hades.”
Christine stood up, approached her.
“That you, Stella?”
“Who else? Without her better half.”
“I sure thought Cat would of come.” Arcola’s voice floated musingly on the dusk.
“She would have. She’s sick. She’s flooding.”
The three women shifted their positions uncomfortably, each in her own way. They hadn’t expected this news in their conversation: menstrual blood. Mr. Parrish remained still as a stone lion. Somehow it was necessary, Stella thought, to say this in front of him.
Gloria spoke softly, in her high sweet voice. (She reminded Stella of the voice of the third spirit, the one she trusted. The one who wanted there to be meaning, as much as she longed for beauty. Who could look at the newspaper photographs of the four girls killed in the bombing and not feel her heart go out? Sometimes one countenance or another would stir the heart in a special way.) Gloria said, high and sweet, “I guess you’re not a southern lady anymore, are you?”
“No,” Stella said. “It’s more important to be something else.”
“Amen,” Mr. Parrish said.
Stella felt the rareness of the moment. Could it only happen in the gloaming, in the gloaming? Did it happen every day when the seam between day and dark was smudged? Was this the moment to catch, the devotional moment: the last redness of the sun, the first starlight?
“Here’s eternity,” Stella said, and she gestured at them, the college campus, the sky.
“Come sit with us,” Christine answered.
“Will the students come?” Arcola asked.
“They’ll come.” Mr. Parrish spoke without moving, as though stone were emanating sound.
“Where’s your braid?” Stella asked Arcola.
“Home in a drawer.”
“That’s fine,” Gloria murmured.
“My hair’s short,” Arcola said.
“And straight,” Stella observed. The women, too, were like patient lionesses, sitting randomly on the steps in the dusk. And then she asked Arcola because she had to, or night would fall like a quick curtain: “Do you straighten it?”
“Yeah.”
Then they became four women (because Stella joined the others) plus Lionel Parrish who were sitting in the comfortable twilight. Their quiet was a constituent of the moment; silence was essential to this distilled droplet of time. Mosquitoes began to gather, to visit their arms and legs and cheeks. When Mr. Parrish slapped at one on the back of his neck, the spell dissolved. The sun set.
“Not quite so hot tonight,” he said.
“It was good of Agnes to bring fans,” Gloria said.
Gloria was taking part; she was saying her sentences, the same as anybody. Such sweetness in her voice, Stella thought. I love Gloria. Until now, she had liked Arcola; she had struggled with Christine; she had neglected Gloria. And here Gloria was, a human being, carved out of space, as real sitting on the steps as any lioness or person.
Stella spread her hand on the cool stone. She felt its gritty texture, welcomed its solid and mute reality.
“I might write a short story someday,” Stella said.
“What about?” Gloria asked, more promptly than anyone.
“About us.” Stella pressed her hand into the stone. Of course she could leave no print. Maybe a fast-fading palm print of moisture on the stone. “Of course it wouldn’t really be about us. I’d change everything.”
“That would be all right,” Mr. Parrish said. “We can’t help but change things. No matter how good they are.”
“Or how bad,” Christine said.
Someone cleared her throat, but it was impossible to say who. The night whispered into Stella’s ear:
Define us, O Lord!
Stella remembered the glow from the cigarette lighter the night before on Christine’s face. How it had transformed her, made her beautiful. She remembered Darl, in the cemetery, the circle of young black men around them, how Darl and they had smoked cigarettes together. Suddenly she missed him. She heard indistinct words, high as a mosquito
Wistful…wishing…
Darl seemed like a kind of cousin—distant but someone to whom she would ever be connected. Someone she might see years later; she would say something and he would answer, “Only you would remember that, Stella.” And if that happened, she would be exquisitely affirmed. But what hovered in the gloaming?
Eternity in a…
“Can you remember,” Stella asked, “when you were first aware of racial prejudice?”
They were silent.
Finally, Mr. Parrish said, “It’s in the air. Like breathing.”
A frozen, jagged sea.
“Like particulate matter,” Stella said. “From the steel mills.”
But Stella was remembering Jack, a little boy she had played football with when she was very young. Jack’s face had been freckled, too, like Darl’s, and she had thought him indescribably cute. The essence of what a boy should be. After they were grown up, she’d turned around and there was Jack again, downtown, coming out of Thom McAn shoe store, tall now and lanky, not the compact little boy she had hurled her body against while she pressed the football into her ribs. When she saw him, all grown, she pressed a phantom football tight against her ribs; it became like a large heart, and she could feel it beating against her side.
In front of Thom McAn, looking thoughtfully at people jostling on the sidewalk, tall Jack had told her when he had first been aware of racial prejudice. Back then, when they were children, there were a few colored houses across the alley, behind his house. One day he had been sitting on a cinder block at the edge of the alley. He was just sitting there. Maybe he was staring. A Negro girl had come up to him and said, “What you looking at, you freckle-faced bastard?” His story had jolted Stella; she had thought prejudice was the burden of only white people.
Piano music trickled onto the Miles campus into the new night: Chopin.
Stella sat up straight. “Is there a music department?” she asked.
It was an old piano, rattly. Still, it was Chopin. A nocturne her mother had played. Four mosquitoes sang at Stella’s ear.
Zing zing zing zing
zing zing zing
Sometimes we just zing
Zing zing zing zing.
“Christine?” Stella said.
“Uh-huh,” Christine answered, relaxed.
“We’ve always been integrated. Our lives.”
“What you mean, Stella?” The question sounded sharp. Then Christine modulated her tone, put her question in a sheath. “What you trying to say?”
“Our lives have always been layered together. We know each other. I don’t think northern people always understand that.”
“Separate and unequal,” Christine said.
“That’s right,” Stella said. “But together. Inseparable, anyhow.”
Stella saw that students were beginning to drift toward them from all parts of the campus. She couldn’t see who. She wondered if somewhere the Klan was gathering like that. Converging toward some center, feeling their solidarity.
There was Agnes LaFayt. Walking slowly. She was carrying her shopping bag again.
“Time to get started,” Mr. Parrish said. He stood up, became unglued from the slab where he had lounged casually on one elbow in his good clothes.
The four women stood up, shook out their skirts, dusted their hands against each other, leaned down to pick up their purses.
“Whatcha got this evening?” Christine asked Agnes.
Agnes smiled a tired little smile. She reached in her bag and brought out a handful of short white sticks. Six inches long, white, waxy.
“Candles,” she said. “In case the ’lectricity go off again. I got us some candles.”