YOU DON’T GET THROUGH WITH BEING AFRAID, GLORIA thought but did not say. They’d learn.
Did white people know anything about pity and terror? Could white women know anything beyond personal tragedy? Who you, she asked herself scornfully, to dismiss personal tragedy? Pain is pain. Who you, Gloria Callahan, but somebody who never hurt for nothing in your life but a pony. She looked at her friend Arcola, who deserved to be the queen of the world. But now, I hurt. I hurt for my people.
With her left thumb, Gloria surreptitiously caressed the hard calluses on the tips of the four fingers of her left hand. As she watched the students, refreshed now, come to their desks, Gloria wished she’d stepped outside, too, for the night air. She picked up her fan, which was Jesus at age twelve teaching in the temple. The skin of his face looked like porcelain, and he had been painted with a luminous brown eye. Vulnerable Jesus before his beard.
At least he had gotten to grow up.
When her church exploded, the terror came first in the sound, not just the heavy boom, but the quick snatch of plaster and bricks ripped from the lathes and studs of the building. The bones broken and thrown down so fast it was unimaginable. And then the rising pillars of dust dissipating into a dense cloud, the sanctuary suddenly a box of dust. Even before the dust settled, there was blue sky where the face of Christ should have been.
Gloria had saved a little of the pulverized wall, just scooped it up off the floor and put it in her pocket. Now the souvenir was at home in a little test tube she had stolen from the rack in the chemistry lab. The memento lay beneath her underwear. It was whitish, like the ashy residue from cremation, and she had stuck a cork in one end of the tube.
The classroom disappeared. She was home; with the brass pull, she opened the mahogany drawer of her highboy. She reached beneath the fine silky underwear to feel the glass tube and dry cork. She thought of the four young girls, killed. One decapitated. Others cooked to a crisp. Although the images were in her mind and could not be kept out, she closed her eyes. She felt as though she were welding her eyelids together.
“Miss Gloria,” Mrs. LaFayt called her. “You feeling bad, honey?”
Gloria went and sat beside her, even though Mrs. LaFayt was in Stella’s group. Stella wouldn’t mind if Gloria took her seat for a few minutes.
“I was thinking about Sixteenth Street,” Gloria said.
“I cry for them all the time. And for their parents.”
“We don’t talk about it as much as maybe we should,” Gloria said.
“You got to move on.” Mrs. LaFayt sighed as though she had the weight of the world on her. “Keep going.” She paused, then leaned close. “Sometimes they sing to me.”
“What do you mean?”
“Real high. All four together. High as angels, all four of them.”
“Do they sing hymns?”
“No. I can’t make out the words. I think they beyond any particular words now.”
Gloria was intently curious. “But what do they sound like?” She realized she was holding Mrs. LaFayt’s gaze with her own. She was looking right into her eyes. This is the way I look at everybody now: straight on.
“Kind of like little honeybees. Sort of humming a little golden song. All about honey and clovers and roses.”
Suddenly Gloria felt brimful of tears. She got up. “We have to get started.”
As she walked away, she heard Mrs. LaFayt humming her own little high, grating tune, as though she were trying to catch some remnant of their ethereal song, gasping for breath between phrases. Gloria glanced back at her, and saw Mrs. LaFayt gulp air, then close her ample lips firmly together, humming.
Gloria swallowed her tears, went back, and kissed Agnes on the forehead. Inside there, inside her mind, did Agnes really believe she heard spirits singing?
“Oh, honey,” Mrs. LaFayt said, suddenly crying out. “The Klan near ’bout beat TJ to death last night.”
“No!” Gloria said. “No.” She knelt down in front of Mrs. LaFayt and pressed both Agnes’s hands together inside her own.
Mrs. LaFayt straightened herself tall in her seat with a huge intake of air. She sniffed up her tears, collected herself. “But he’ll be all right,” she said. “Go on now. He’s alive. He wants me to be here. Go on to your teaching. I’ll talk with you later.” And she pushed Gloria away.
Blindly, Gloria found her way back to her desk. History, she thought. This is the real history. I ought to bring the newspaper to class for history lesson. Not that it tells. Not the Birmingham News anyway. And New York too far away to know. She’d seen postcards of it at night: New York City, with its skyscrapers and all its lights shining. The whole city was like a gigantic lantern for the rest of the country.
And New York cared: Goodman and Schwerner, who died with Chaney in Mississippi, who worked for freedom, were from New York.
Someday she, Gloria Callahan, would play the cello in Carnegie Hall. Maybe Jonathan Bernstein Green would help her. As her left thumb caressed the row of calluses across the tips of her four fingers, she thought just about hard enough, tough enough. Callused enough to stand up to the days, months, years of practice.
In a long, jagged agony of breath, Mrs. LaFayt was snuffing up. Gloria’s vision of New York shattered. Her little artistic toughness was nothing in the defense of what life could deal. She wondered what TJ had done.
Not just the four girls but Judge Aaron, in 1957, had done absolutely nothing. It was Fred Shuttlesworth who’d tried to integrate Phillips High School. And Judge Aaron, who had been castrated. Cause and effect didn’t fit. That was the way it was with terror. There was no individual linking of cause and effect. Allegiance to justice was replaced by criminal rage. The world was broken, and you lived in fear. The four girls and Judge Aaron had just been black and available for slaughter. In the South, there wasn’t any terrible thing that could happen that hadn’t happened. Pandora’s box had been wide open a long time.
When Jonathan spoke after church, Gloria had been shocked by his approach to change. He had said: “Never mind integrating education. Negro people have got to register to vote. Then come the jobs, the transportation, the education, the housing, the recreation, and the libraries.” And she had spoken right up and said that she believed they had to work on all fronts at once. (That meeting was when she last saw TJ, small and natty in his Sunday suit. About the size of Sammy Davis Jr. Quick and vital.) And Jonathan had said Maybe, but he felt too many projects dissipated energy. Voting meant power.
Gloria slid into her seat; now she was supposed to try to make her students remember the basic steps in the creation of democracy.
At the Gaslight Club—she had seen TJ dancing that evening, dancing with his wife. She realized there had been a white girl at the nightclub, in a wheelchair—that might have been Cat, but she couldn’t remember the face, just the big wheels on each side of the chair, and her neighbor Eddie, the waiter, had taken the wheelchair person out on the dance floor and twirled her, chair and all. Eddie swished. She knew that Eddie had been in bed two weeks after other colored boys beat him in Oak Hill Cemetery, threatened to cut him.
Now to teach.
“Y’all ever heard of Nat Turner?” she asked.
No one had.
“Between the War for Independence and the Civil War, a slave rose up in Virginia against slavery—1830s maybe.” But then she stopped. Nat Turner rose up murderously. She didn’t want to hold that up as an example.
They all looked at the floor.
“Nat Turner hadn’t learned the lesson, yet, of nonviolence. He didn’t have any Martin Luther King Jr. to teach him. He didn’t have any Mahatma Gandhi over in India showing the way. The things that history surely teaches us is that violence never solves anything. That’s history’s biggest lesson. If you don’t remember anything else from this school, remember that.”
“I don’t know about that,” Charles said politely. “We won the War for Independence, didn’t we?”
Mr. Parrish was standing in the doorway.
“Could I have your attention, please,” he said calmly.
Surprised by his presence, everybody looked up. They didn’t quite believe he was standing there;they expected him to disappear in a moment, and then they’d all go on with their lessons.
“We’ve had a bomb threat telephone call in my office.” Gloria felt the ripple of alarm run through the room. “The police have been called. Now we want to calmly evacuate this building. I want everybody to stand up, don’t run, just walk quickly over to me and through the door.” Already the students were on their feet and moving. “Keep moving, and move outside, and keep going.” The students were converging on the exit. “Move over all the way to the side of the music building, and I’ll join you when everybody’s out.” He added, “Just follow the music.” Gloria guessed he was trying to sound light. Yes, Jonathan B. Green was practicing the piano—Mozart. Gloria thought of Marie Antoinette, decapitated. Maybe only the Nazis were more bloodthirsty than the leaders of the French Revolution, or Stalin.
Stella was standing behind Cat’s chair, already trying to push.
“Release the brakes,” Stella said.
“No.”
As though she didn’t hear, Stella pushed harder, but the chair didn’t budge.
“Stop, Stella,” Cat ordered, though she hadn’t raised her voice.
“What?”
Gloria saw Mrs. LaFayt was still sitting in her chair. Her hands were folded in front of her; her head was bowed, her lips moved in prayer. Gloria touched her shoulder.
“Let’s go out now,” Gloria said. “We’ll pray when we get outside.”
Obediently, Mrs. LaFayt rose to her feet. “Let me take my fan,” she said. And she picked up the image of the Good Shepherd and held it to her bosom like a shield. “ ‘The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want,’ ” she quoted. She managed a smile.
Gloria saw that Stella was talking earnestly to Cat, whose feeble hands were covering the brake releases on her chair.
“Gloria,” Stella called anxiously. “Cat doesn’t want to leave.”
Gloria saw that Mrs. LaFayt was headed for the door, rather slowly, but moving. Not looking back.
“What’s wrong, Cat?” Gloria asked.
“I made a vow to myself,” Cat said. “I’m not going to be intimidated anymore.”
“It’s a bomb threat!” Stella reiterated.
Gloria could feel hysteria just under the imperative tone of Stella’s voice, and as she did, she felt the necessary strength in her own bones. The strength started in her shins and thighs; it was her legs reassuring her. Stay or go, her bones said. We serve your will.
“ ’Course you could stay,” Gloria said to Cat. She was careful not to move toward Cat. “But what’s the point?”
Standing by the door, Mr. Parrish said impatiently, “Hurry up, everyone.”
“Let’s all go now,” Gloria said.
But she stood still and calm. What was Cat thinking of, to want to stay?
Gloria felt that she was standing in between the pews in the church again; the same strength was in her now that she had offered to Christine.
“Your brakes stuck?” Christine called and bustled over.
Cat rotated her head to address Christine.
“I believe it’s a bluff,” Cat said. She spoke so determinedly, it felt like hate behind her voice. No, Gloria thought, it’s power. Cat doesn’t hate Christine. It’s will against will, that’s all. And Gloria knew Cat would win. No need to take sides. Hadn’t she known when she lifted her eyes to the face of Jesus that it would be gone? Some things you knew in advance. Jesus himself couldn’t stand to look at what hate had done on September 15.
“They just want to disrupt. Make people afraid to come,” Cat explained with murderous intensity to Christine.
“We got to leave. Now!” Christine said. “Now!” Her voice spanked the air.
“Please listen, Cat,” Stella implored. “They’re right.”
“No.”
“You want to die?” The words burst out of Christine. “Maybe you don’t care you live or die. I got children!”
“I won’t go,” Cat said, but the murder had gone out of her voice. Just flat fact was left.
“Mr. Parrish,” Christine called. “This white girl gone crazy.”
Stella tried to push the chair. She reached to remove Cat’s hand hovering over the brake mechanism.
“Don’t do that,” Gloria said. “She got her rights.”
And Stella obeyed Gloria. She lifted her hand away from Cat.
“I’m leaving!” Christine announced. Her glance seared Gloria.
Mr. Parrish approached. “Gloria, you go on now, too.”
“Yessir,” she said. “It probably is a bluff,” Gloria said, but she followed Christine.
“Cat.” Mr. Parrish sighed. “Black groups always getting bomb threats. Still we got to evacuate.”
“I won’t,” she said. “They’re watching. You know that.” She smiled. “I’m going to hold down the fort.”
“No, you’re not, Cat,” he said.
“Please, Cat,” Stella begged.
Through the open door, Gloria called, “Come on, Stella. Let Mr. Parrish talk to Cat.”
“You don’t have to stay,” Cat said to her friend.
“I promised you. I promised,” Stella said.
“That was if we decided to run,” Cat said. “I don’t want to run.”
“Stella, you leave now,” Mr. Parrish said.
Over her shoulder Gloria watched Stella walk jerkily to the door and out. She passed Gloria, and then Stella began to run across the grass toward the others. Gloria moved only to the edge of the porch and stopped again to look back.
The open doorway framed Cat in her chair and Mr. Parrish leaning a little toward Cat, trying to reason with her. Around the campus, throughout the college, Gloria saw the lights were going out. First the science building, now the music building and the few lamps above the sidewalks. Somebody was at the switches. Gloria imagined him at the box. Somebody wearing a white robe and a white hood;a man’s white-gloved hand was at the controls.
Students were huddling against the side of the music building. No, somebody was leading them around the corner to put the mass of the building between them and the H.O.P.E. classroom. No, Mrs. LaFayt was leaving the group and walking back to Gloria. Agnes LaFayt! Gloria started to call to her to retreat, but then Gloria stopped herself. Who am I to say? she asked.
When she looked back inside, what she saw sent her body rigid.
Cat’s hand was coming slowly out of her purse. Cat’s hand had a gun in it, and she was pointing it at Mr. Parrish.
“Now put that away,” he said loudly, raising his hands.
“I won’t,” she said. “Back off.”
“I could rush you, Cat.”
“Better not.”
“I could carry you out of here.”
“My choice,” she said. “Raise your hands higher.”
Slowly Mr. Parrish raised his hands, his open palms toward Cat.
“I don’t want to have to come get you,” he said. But Gloria knew he was complying.
“Mr. Parrish, I like you a lot,” Cat said. “I respect you and admire you. You rush me, and I’ll fire. Don’t doubt it. I know how to shoot.”
“I’m your friend, Cat. We’re in this together,” he said. “We leave now, we come back tomorrow.”
“You leave,” she said. “I don’t want to endanger you. Or anybody.”
Gloria realized that Agnes LaFayt had come to stand beside her. Agnes reached down and took Gloria’s hand.
“Mr. Parrish,” Mrs. LaFayt called sweetly. Surely she was seeing the gun in Cat’s hand, too. “Mr. Parrish, I want you to come on out here with the rest of us. Your family needs you, Mr. Parrish.”
She sounds like she’s his mother, Gloria thought.
Slowly Mr. Parrish lowered his hands. He turned toward the door. Already Cat was lowering the barrel of the gun.
“The Lord bless you, and keep you, Cat,” he said.
Gloria held her breath. Now was the moment to turn and rush her, if he chose to. He walked out. He walked past Gloria and Mrs. LaFayt and kept walking. “Y’all come on,” he said as he passed.
But Gloria and Mrs. LaFayt stood on the porch, looking in.
Just as Cat let the gun rest in her lap, the lights inside the classroom went dark.
“Maybe we hear police siren soon,” Agnes said.
Gloria surveyed the campus. Not a light. At the outskirts, a little traffic passed. A few cars slowly pushed their headlights along, minding their own business.
From across the campus, Gloria heard sprightly piano music played in the dark: “The Marseillaise.” There was something ironic in the way the man played the piece—too jaunty. Why did that madman from New York choose to play the anthem of the French Revolution? She shuddered to think of the French awash in blood, but their cause—one of class, not race—had been just.
Another song, the anthem of nonviolence, bloomed slowly in the dark:
We shall o-ver-co-o-ome
We shall o-ver-co-o-ome
We shall o-ver-come some-da-a-a-a-ay
Gloria felt as though she was on the moon. Through darkness from a great distance, she seemed to hear and watch the ways of human beings. But it was just over there, across the campus. Le jour de gloire n’est pas arrivé. The day of glory. Gloire. Another name for herself, a revolutionary name, a secret name of her own for her own inner strength:Gloire. An ugly word that stuck in the throat like swallowing a raw egg the way old country people did.
Agnes squeezed her hand. Inside the dark classroom, Cat was striking a match to light her candle. Gloria marveled that Cat’s grip could manage striking a match. She saw Cat moving the candle away and trying to blow out the match. The aim of her breath was uncertain; her head bobbed. Gloria supposed Cat’s gun was resting in her lap. The match blinked out, and the candle wavered and glowed.
Agnes LaFayt shuffled through the door. “Cat baby, I come to sit with you,” she said as though she were speaking to a six-year-old.
“Is that you, Agnes?”
“Yes, it is,” she said.
And Mrs. LaFayt was pulling a desk into Cat’s circle of light.
“I was afraid,” Cat said.
“I know,” Agnes said. “Don’t nobody like to sit by herself in the dark. But I sit with you.”
“I knew if I gave in, I’d never come back,” Cat said. She was pleading. To be understood, to understand herself. “I need my job. For my future.”
“God willing, we all live to see the sun rise and the sun set, and we be back studying tomorrow night, thanking him.”
“It’s always a bluff,” Cat said. “These bomb threats.”
“Sometimes yes, sometimes no. It’s in God’s hands now.” Agnes paused. “You want me to hold your hand?”
“Yes.”
“Let me just get my own candle lit, then we hold hands. Then we feel brave.”
Gloria watched Agnes dig into her purse, come up with the little wax cylinder. She touched her wick to Cat’s flame. “This is what I bought these candles for,” Mrs. LaFayt said. She reached out and held Cat’s hand. “I used to be nursemaid to lots of white children,” Agnes said.
“But not now?” Cat asked.
“I didn’t have none of my own. That the only thing ever make me doubt God. TJ and I never had none. Too late now. But we try. We still try, remember Sarah and Abraham.”
Gloria felt shocked. She could imagine Agnes and TJ dancing together but not trying to make babies. She felt the lean emptiness of her own youthful body and was grateful for her virginal intactness.
“But few years back,” Agnes continued, “I couldn’t work for white folks no more. TJ, he say he understand.”
Gloria saw that Cat was growing more frightened, could hardly speak, while Mrs. LaFayt settled more and more calmly into her waiting. Gloria wanted both to leave and to stay to witness. In the wink of an eye, this quiet tableau could be transformed: blast and crashing down of walls, the room filling with dust, the building collapsing. The end of their lives.
Agnes went on speaking, keeping up both ends of the conversation. “And you know why I left taking care of white children? Well, it was one reason only. I loved ’em too much. Loved ’em too much.”
“Sing,” Cat said suddenly. “Please sing.”
And Agnes’s voice rose up like the wind rising in an organ, full and rich:
Trust and obey, for there’s no other way
To be happy in Jesus, but to trust and obey
When we walk with the Lord
In the light of His Word….
Gloria found herself walking into the room.
“I come to sit with you,” Gloria said.
“Well, pull up a chair and sing,” Mrs. LaFayt said.
With all her heart, Gloria joined the song. She wasn’t sure she even believed in Jesus, but now she was inside the movement. This was protest and determination. Beside her, Cat was trying to belt it out, but with her speech problem, she only got a few tones.
“You got your candle?” Mrs. LaFayt asked Gloria between verses.
“Naw.”
“Don’t matter. We got two already.”
Mrs. LaFayt began to pump her body at the waist, forward and backward.
Then a strong, male tenor voice—“To be hap-py in Jes-us”—entered the song, and Jonathan Green came into the room. “Hope you guys don’t mind I join in.”
He pulled a chair between Gloria and Agnes. Gloria felt that ten people had joined them instead of one. The room was almost crowded. He reached out his ivory hands on both sides. In the candlelight, his face was very pale, his hair a dark red. And then his voice took off, singing complicated running notes, weaving all around and in and out of the melody. He leaned back in his chair and sang as nonchalantly as though he were alone on the riverbank, fishing. Gloria and Agnes had to sing louder to hold their own.
Despite his being an ugly man, Gloria decided, he glowed. At the end, Agnes said quickly, “I believe your name must be Michael,” and then she launched into singing “Michael, row the boat ashore, hal-le-lu-jah….”
Gloria began her own riff, ornamenting the hallelujah so that it ran like a holy fire above all their heads.