Four Spirits (16 page)

WHEN PEOPLE WENT DOWN TO MORRIS AVENUE, THEY KNEW
they'd gone back—not to the trappings of an earlier time, but back in a way you can never go back. Paved with brick, Morris Avenue didn't want any modern asphalt. It had warehouses, wholesalers, a black nightclub or two. It might have had a cathouse or two, who could say? When you came to Morris Avenue, dark in spite of the old-fashioned streetlamps, the whole street slung low, sort of under the viaduct that rumbled overhead with automobiles, you were getting past brick streets and gas streetlamps. Back to some destination. Back inside, to someplace in yourself you wanted.

 

THERE'S MAGIC HERE,
Christine thought. Not the temporary relief of the Athens Cafe and Bar. Permanent magic—it was always there, if you just thought of the Gaslight nightclub. If you just thought of the throng of people, and you in the midst of it, a whole community ready for a good good time. And Gloria was beside Christine; Gloria trusted Christine to introduce her to the world of the nightclub.

Better than church, Christine thought. Better than preaching. Something wild here. Something that cost more money than Christine wanted to pay, but worth more than it cost. She knew the name of the magic. It was music, and her body was already singing, her feet wanting to tap, but they could only shuffle now 'cause the crowd was so large and moving slow to get in the door.

Everybody so well dressed and pleasant. Not like church. Not like Sunday
clothes. Here you show a little cleavage, give out with the glitter. Wear bright and tight. Gloria's face—bright and eager. Christine loved the excitement on the women's faces. Giddy. And the proud glow of the men. Night out. Celebrating big.

But Christine didn't need any man. No, not her.

But wasn't that Lionel Parrish over there? Mr. Boss of the H.O.P.E. night school? And that woman in emerald green, rhinestone pin on the wide shawl collar. That wasn't his wife. Never see Jenny dressed up that stylish.

Lionel jumped when he saw Christine and Gloria. Rose up off his feet from the soles of his no-doubt well-polished shoes three inches straight up in the air. Him in the air, like hair levitates itself if you see a ghost.

He hurried to them, oh soooo friendly. Left his pretty lady standing, looking like nothing but cool and pretty in emerald green.

“Evening, girls.” Big, overpuffed smile. “Didn't know my teachers was part of the nightclub set.”

“It's my second time,” Christine said. My, he did smell good.

“First time, here,” Gloria said shyly. But then she looked up and her eyes darted round, reflecting the happy excitement. “I like it,” she declared.

Lifting his eyebrows, Lionel Parrish said to Gloria, “Girl, I believe this place good for you.” Pleased with her, pleased for Gloria.

“You come alone, Mr. Parrish?” Christine asked.

“Well.” He shrugged his shoulders. Nice dark-striped suit. Touched the knot of his tie, smoothed down the length of the sapphire blue tie. “My cousin Matilda in town. She said she sure would like to hear the Man play the piano.”

“He something,” Christine answered.

“But she don't want Jenny to know we come. Jenny got no use for night-clubbing. You wouldn't mention this to Jenny, you happen to see her.”

“I don't ever see Jenny often,” Christine said. But she didn't like his request; it had the power to blight her good time—pollution in her blue sky.

“Gotta run,” he said. “Thanks, girls.”

He pecked Christine on the cheek, and oh my, she did stretch out her neck, did lean to meet that kiss, whiff in that good-smelling man. She embarrassed herself.

The crowd pressed toward the entrance.

“Must be several hundred us trying to get in,” Gloria said.

“We'll get in,” Christine reassured. “Just relax. Enjoy the crowd.”

“You see anybody else we know?”

“Just Mr. Parrish.” Christine watched him regain his lady, whisper in her ear, saw her face light up. She was extremely pretty, tall and thin, straightened hair, beautiful eyes and teeth. But mostly it was the glad expression, the flash of her.

 

EVEN DON FOUND IT
hard to push his sister's wheelchair over the cobblestone brick of Morris Avenue. Stella would find it impossible to manage the chair, Cat had said, and he ought to come along, therefore, to help them. Besides, he'd enjoy it. Get to hear a truly famous man. An intimate nightclub. In Birmingham. “You won't have to go to St. Louis or New York City to hear him,” Cat had told her brother.

Won't the audience be mostly colored?
Don had asked.

That's the point,
his sister had replied.
We're integrating
.

Don was surprised that Stella had jumped at the chance. Such a bookworm. But he liked her. She admired his paintings. Stella had asked for four and had hung one on each of the walls of her bedroom. He'd asked her,
What do your aunts think of them?
And she'd laughed to show herself risen above the opinions of others:
Aunt Krit says she likes pictures
of
something, a scene. And Aunt Pratt hollers from her room, “I think they're pretty,” and Aunt Krit says, “You haven't even seen them,” and Aunt Pratt lies and says, “Yes I have. I peeked when Stella brought them home.”

It was slow work and tough going to get the chair wheels over the humped bricks.

“Got any teeth left, Sister?”

“One or two,” she answered.

“These heels are killing me,” Stella answered. “But I thought everybody'd be dressed to kill.” She grumbled about how all the weight of her body (which wasn't much) was funneled down on her toes and how her ankles were wobbling because of the stiletto hells.

“You look nice, Stella,” Don said, in his self-conscious, semiembarrassed way. It was hard to look an overdressed woman in the eyes, even harmless Stella, and give her a compliment. Now he just glanced at her. So thin. She wore a white sheath dress with a very wide pink satin cummerbund. The dress had a few sparkly moments and some small pink, silk-covered buttons up on the left
shoulder, with a companion decoration on her flank just below the cummerbund on the right side—diagonal interest. Her shoes were pink satin, dyed to match. Don hadn't imagined Stella owned such a getup. The pink silk buttons and the silver dashes on the shoulder were set right into the fabric, probably took a grommet setter to embed the decorations into the fabric that way.

“Your dress from Fielding's?” he asked.

“No. Pizitz.”

Women thought Pizitz's line of clothes was more dashing than those of the other big stores, more New York, but Don thought Stella looked like the Gainsborough pink girl elongated, with accents on the diagonal, and set up in high heels.

“How do I look?” Cat asked her brother and the air in general.

“You both look awfully white,” Don answered. He made it a point to tease Cat about her feminine vanity.

“Maybe I shouldn't have worn white,” Stella said anxiously. “I didn't think.”

“Nobody cares,” Cat answered authoritatively.

Don saw they were ignored by the crowd for the most part. Despite the spectacle of a wheelchair bumping along a dark lamplit street in the warehouse district where it had no business trying to go, despite two young white women and a white man in a crowd of well-dressed Negroes, they were almost transparent. A few people glanced at them, inspected their faces.

Don noted one perfectly beautiful woman in emerald green had turned her head back as she and her beau passed by, had turned her head back to look Don in the eye and smile. Completely friendly and at ease. Probably visiting from the North. A rhinestone pin of a leaping fish with a ruby eye glittered on her half-turned shoulder. She moved over the bricks as though she were floating, though her shoes were just as ridiculous as the hobbling Stella's. She swung her high hips like a dancer, as though she were in an opera—
Carmen.

Don thought he'd almost never seen a beautiful woman look so happy.

“I like being here,” his sister said, glancing back at him behind her wheel chair.

Stella said nothing, and Don knew that she had come because his sister asked her to. Stella was too bookish to enjoy a club scene.

From time to time, Don took it on himself to caution Cat not to ask Stella to do too much for her.
“You don't want to drive her off,”
he'd said, and Cat had answered,
“But she's my friend. She wants to.”

Just in front of the entrance, they rolled onto some smooth pavement. People were polite, gave them room to maneuver through the doors, stood back while he tilted up the chair, lowered it, reared up, down five stairs. This was the part Stella really couldn't have managed. He wished the soles of his dress shoes weren't slick leather. He hardly ever took Sister anyplace that required being dressed up. When he dressed up, Don claimed the outing for himself, his own time.

By himself, he visited the artificial worlds: the Birmingham Civic Ballet, Town and Gown Theatre, the Birmingham Symphony Orchestra at the lovely Temple Theatre. He'd never met any of the orchestral musicians, but he'd learned the names of some of them from the program while he waited for the crowd to flow in. The faces in the crowd, like those in the orchestra—Herbert Levinson, concertmaster;Robert Montgomery, principal cello; handsome John Davis, principal French horn, who played the most exposed passages with perfect, piercing confidence—were becoming familiar. He wanted to know the people in this world, those up there on the stage, purified by bright light.

One time when Don had looked up from studying the concert program, there in the audience was Stella's dear friend Nancy and her friend Lallie, who was married. Nancy and Lallie had crossed the theater to come over to speak to him. Nancy was always at ease, and Lallie was like her and said,
I often have tickets to things and Bob doesn't want to go. I'll call you sometime,
and Nancy said,
She invited me this time;you'd enjoy it.

After the precipice of steps, Don steered his sister's chair to a small round table nearby in the back of the Gaslight. Their table for three had a “reserved” sign that sat up like a little paper pup tent:
RESERVED
—
CARTWRIGHT PARTY
. Two folding chairs, nothing at all fancy, snugged up to the table, and a chair had been removed so that the wheelchair could fit. Except for the polished wooden dance floor, the floor inside the club was brick. The nightclub was a cellar with a low ceiling, probably a warehouse above, and many ceiling supports interrupted the view of the performance area. The piano was pulled up to one side of the dance floor. No stage. Spotlights were already focused on the piano, but it was just a big upright, like a vault.

The place was full and already buzzing with joy. Don looked to see if he could locate the woman in emerald green again, but instead his eyes locked for a moment with those of an older black man, whose face was wrinkled in a scowl. Immediately, Don started his eyes moving again, and he saw two other
white people. Two young men—he might have seen them on the college campus, when he picked up Sister occasionally. The college boys each had a beer and were smoking cigarettes, trying to look suave. Not dressed up enough; short-sleeved cotton shirts, one plaid, one striped. Everyday clothes that didn't show enough respect. You respect celebration, celebrities. Don adjusted the collar of his tan sports jacket to make sure it was lying right; he touched the knot of his woven tie that almost matched the color of the coat but added a new texture.

This was a loud group at the Gaslight. Women's voices screeched high and penetrant. Men's voices suddenly boomed on recognizing a friend. Laughter bounced up and down the scale.

These people let go,
Don thought. Not bohemian Paris, not the Village (he'd been there), but the South letting go, at its best. Unafraid. And the energy all flowed around their whiteness or went right through them, made them nonexistent.

 

TJ FELT HIS
wife's gentle hand covering his, her kind lips right at his ear. “What you looking all scowled up and worried bout, TJ? Relax.”

“That's why I'm here,” he said. “And just look over there, at the steps.”

“White girl in a wheelchair.”

“Yeah, and over there. Two white boys. Smoking like they own this place. We don't want no trouble here.”

“Do you see trouble?” she asked in her soothing, sugarcoated voice. “Once the lights down, you won't be able to tell black from white. They all right. Let it go.”

“Not a month gone by, and four black folks beat bad. Who they think they are, coming here?”

The kid at the bus stop—he thought, but did not remind his wife—why
had
the white boys got him? He wasn't demonstrating. Just wrong place, wrong time. They didn't have nothing against that boy. And the newspaper! Hardly acted like anything happened.
Assault, murder!
That's what white folks did and got away with. The newspaper needed to scream.

Underneath his wife's warm hand, TJ's fingers twitched. At the demonstration, his fingers had picked up first a rock, then a chunk of brick. He remembered the thunk the brick made against the side of the policeman's helmet. The man had stumbled forward, but he hadn't fallen; he'd regained himself and
kept running. Like a soldier, his buddy running beside him had reached out to steady him.

TJ had snatched the bottle from the wino next to him, thrown it dead at the back of the buddy, but the man hadn't flinched. And then a dog was at TJ's elbow, pulling off a patch of his denim jacket with his teeth, but TJ had jerked away from the snarling teeth, melted into the mob running at his left.

“Look at all these pretty clothes,” Agnes said. “There's Matildy Jones with some handsome man. Look at his tie. I believe I'll get you a pale blue tie like that.”