Four Spirits (19 page)

“THEY DID IT FIRST IN GREENSBORO, NORTH CAROLINA,”
Christine told Gloria. “We're just gonna sit up on a stool.”

Gloria looked at the circles of green leatherette on the seats of the stools at Woolworth's lunch counter. They reminded her of lily pads in her grandpa's pond in the country. She would just perch up there, like a frog on a lily pad.
Feet, move!
Gloria told herself.

She felt the rim of the stool against her hip. She put her foot on the dirty metal bar under the counter to step up.

Because she had already decided to do it, now it was just one step leading to another. She slid onto the leatherette. She didn't have to think;she'd already made a decision. Christine sat on the stool beside her. The countergirl looked down, scared of them; she didn't know what to do.

Gloria put her hand on her heart to still its beating. “I'd like to order, please.”

“You can't,” the girl said in a high birdlike voice.

Gloria could feel a strange calm rising inside her.

“I believe I'll have a hamburger with onions,” Christine said into the air in front of her.

White customers at the counter were staring at them. A woman with blond hair clutched a slim tan-and-brown-striped Loveman's bag to her chest. “Oh no,” the woman whispered, “not here,” and she slid off her seat and stood there staring.

Other white people left their stools and melted away.

“Come on, Ryder!” the blond woman reached back for her husband, timidly touched his elbow. “Come on,” she said urgently. She seemed terrified.

“I ain't leaving 'cause of two nigger bitches.”

“Manager! Manager!” the countergirl shrieked.

Then the stubborn white man dismounted from the stool. His face was red and his slitty eyes were bugging out. He swaggered toward Gloria and Christine.

He stopped behind Christine, sniffing. “Stinking Communists!” he said.

He swung his head around to look at Christine, who sat like stone. Then he circled around to Gloria. He cleared his throat as loudly as he could. Then he spat on Gloria's cheek.

Christine suddenly clamped onto Gloria's wrist. “Let's go,” she said.

The man retreated, put his arm around his wife.

“Don't y'all come back,” his woman said vehemently. “Don't you ever come back sit down here no more!”

Gloria pulled a napkin from the napkin box to wipe her cheek. The man was still holding his Coke in a glass. Suddenly he tossed the contents toward Christine, but the ice cubes fell short, onto the floor. He slammed the glass on the counter, and it broke in a big jagged peak, but he didn't get cut. And he didn't pick it up, didn't aim it at her or Christine. Gloria placed her used napkin on the counter.

“I had a gun, I'd shoot you right now,” the man said.

“He would,” his wife said.

He stood there scowling with his hands on his hips. His wife put her hands on her hips, just like him.

Gloria took another napkin; then she let herself be led away. She let Christine pull her along gently. She felt sick. Wanted desperately to find a rest room she could use to wash her face with soap.

Christine whispered, “Next time, we'll come with a group. Plan ahead.”

Gloria rubbed her cheek with the flat paper napkin.

WHEN GLORIA GOT HOME, SHE WENT TO THE KITCHEN SINK
and scrubbed her cheek with dish detergent, then with raspy baking soda. She hated that man! Hated him! Her skin was getting irritated. And his ridiculous wife! Greasy blond hair. Her brown eyes—wide and pathetic. The way she had held the Loveman's hosiery bag in front of her chest. When Gloria glanced back, she had noticed how the woman held the slender paper bag with both hands, delicate fingers, from its top, like a shield or breastplate.

Gloria hurried to the bathroom and washed with Cashmere Bouquet. She wouldn't tell her mother. It would break her mother's heart.

Then she went to the family treasure chest. It was a sea chest, painted a worn green. Nobody had any idea where it had come from, but it was large enough to hold a small person. The women in the family had passed it down and down to the oldest daughter.

Gloria knelt before the chest and opened it. She found the photo she wanted. There she was, faint with age, but the cheek of Susan, her ancestor, branded forever. Somehow Susan had learned to write and to read, though before the Civil War the law had prohibited her learning. On the back of a daguerreotype, her great-great-grandmother had written her name in her own beautiful hand: Susan Spenser Oaks. She was an old woman in the picture, the imprint of a wrinkled oak leaf on her wrinkled cheek.

The only other artifact they had of Susan was a book, but there were many other treasures in the chest. Each mother had added one or two items, specified
before her death, to the heritage. Gloria wondered what her own mother would leave; what she herself would leave. Perhaps a worn cake of rosin.

To keep the binding together, an old navy blue strip of cloth and a faded green ribbon had been bound around the middle of Susan's book:
Nature,
by Ralph Waldo Emerson. Maybe the piece of cloth had belonged to Susan, too. The navy color had held in the cloth, but the grosgrain ribbon had faded to the color of sick grass. Gloria untied the cloth and the ribbon, like a double belly-band, and opened the cover. Inside the book, in a different hand than her ancestor's, Gloria read:
To my friend Susan, with love and joy on the occasion of our reunion, from Una, September 15, 1867, Nantucket
.

Her great-great-grandmother had had a loving, literate friend. With the book in her hand, Gloria sat down on the floor. How far back could she remember? How far back in her own life?

She remembered shopping when she was a little girl, with her mother, and streetcars still ran in Birmingham. They'd only been in the city a month or two, and lived in a little house, not this big one on Dynamite Hill. From the beginning, her mother had insisted on shopping at the best stores. At Loveman's and Pizitz, at Blach's and Burger-Phillips, with its electric eyes mounted on brass posts to open the door for you, regardless of color.

Back then, when Gloria was four or five, even little girls wore hats, secured with a cord, and white cloth gloves to town. Back in the streetcar days, when Gloria and Mama were shopping inside Loveman's, Gloria had taken the black elastic cord from under her chin. Her hat was a yellow straw, with a narrow brim; half a wreath of blue, red, and white cloth flowers decorated the front seam between the brim and crown of the hat. The hat's elastic always pinched the skin under Gloria's soft little chin. She forgot to put it back on when they walked outside, and a gust of wind blew the straw hat off her head and tumbled it into the street between the streetcar tracks.

“Stay here,” her mother had ordered, and she ran on her high heels after the hat.

Down the street between the shining tracks she ran, glancing this way and that for safety. Then she bent from the waist and pounced on the crown. Gloria could see her fingertips dimpling the straw. And Gloria had obeyed perfectly—still and good on the sidewalk. Triumphantly her mother came back to her, fitted the hat onto Gloria's head, securing the elastic under her chin, where it promptly pinched. “Just like a cat,” her mother said, “I
pounced on it just like Purrfect catching a mouse.” And she had. Never had Gloria been so proud of her sedate mother. Her short and buxom mother so quick and brave, saving her hat from the steel wheels of the streetcar. Her brave mother making a streetcar full of white people wait while she saved her daughter's hat.

 

HER MOTHER WOULD NEVER
know a white man had spat in her daughter's face.

But then Gloria thought,
I'm going to have to do this again. Christine and I
.

THE REST OF HER LIFE, LEE WOULD TELL PEOPLE THAT SHE
had known when the bombing happened. She had been in Sunday school. Her class was still in session in the sanctuary that day. In the front near the altar, the twelve ladies had all stood up to sing. The hymn was “Fairest Lord Jesus,” which Lee had always considered to be a beautiful, lady-type hymn. She had glanced up at the metallic vase of five white gladioli stalks, right in front of the pulpit. And she felt an explosion, very muffled, come up through her feet. It was quite some ways from Sixteenth Street Church to hers, but Lee always swore she had felt it, when it happened, September 15, 1963. And she
knew
something awful had happened. She just knew it as soon as she felt that vibration coming up through her shoe soles. And Lee was willing to tell anybody—then or now—the church bombing was shameful. That was really and truly wrong.
And it had to been white folks what done it.
BOOM. But muffled. Kind of like a growl.

It could have been her kids, those four girls.

Suppose they started bombing our churches?

In church, you have a right to be safe. Surely?

SIX SUNDAYS OUT OF SEVEN, LIONEL PARRISH PREACHED
to his own little congregation, but on the seventh Sunday, he had explained to them, he needed to be preached
to.
Needed some refreshment for his own soul.

He never had been to Sixteenth Street Baptist, and he wanted his family with him. Two boys and two girls, a double double blessing from the Lord. They'd missed Sunday school, taking so much time with their outfits, but he was the one who, when they were all ready to go, made the delay. He told the boys to shine their shoes with spit, and the girls to go back and daub a new coat of white over the scuff marks.

“These shoes been wore all summer,” Jenny said. “They can't look brand-new.” But she smiled at him.

Her dress was pale blue, with a white eyelet collar and wide, matching cuffs on the short sleeves. Jenny hoped he noticed how sweetly she complied with his wishes. She hoped he thought it was good to have such a wife. She turned around on a dime to go help the children find the shoe polish, stowed under the bathroom sink.

“I do like that color combination,” Lionel called after his wife. “The blue with the white.” (He
had
noticed how nice she looked. It had taken him all summer, but this morning he noticed.) He added, “Think I'll change to my blue tie.”

Glancing back, she smiled at him again. “That's the flashy tie,” she said.

Lionel Parrish was a good-looking man, and they both knew it. Jenny didn't mind if she just kind of quietly set him off. He
needed
to shine.

Crowding into the bathroom to work on their shoes, her daughters both took after him—so pretty, both Lizzie and Vicky—and the two boys looked like her—kind of homely, but that was okay. Resigned, the boys sat on the sofa to wait for everybody else. Put any man in a suit, and he looked good. George and Andy could just concentrate on their studies and be like their smart daddy in
that
way.

Jenny put down the toilet lid and used it to sit on. She lifted her foot; yes, there was a black streak, heavy, on the inside heel of her white pumps, where she accidentally kicked herself while she walked. She took the swab from Vicky and rubbed white over the streak, but it was too dark and still showed through. Still, the polish did veil the black mark to some extent; it was certainly less noticeable.

Lifting the pink terry cloth curtain (it matched a whole set of bath towels, hand towels, and washcloths), Jenny glanced out the window:
what a fine day.
Last day for summer shoes maybe. All four of the kids, ages six, seven, eight, and nine, were in school this September. A sparrow fluttered across the window. And today, as a family, an American family living right, her whole family would visi tSixteenth Street Baptist. She felt as though they had all been promoted.

But they were late. The children wouldn't get to meet the other children in Sunday school. Jenny rounded everybody up to leave the house again.

While they drove around the park, they saw quite a few others coming in just for church who hadn't been to Sunday school. Some girls were playing while they walked—tossing a purse like a football between them.

Lionel had to leave the car three blocks from the church, clear on the other side of Kelly Ingram Park.

“Y'all walk behind us,” Lionel instructed the kids. “Two by two. Two girls, two boys.”

Jenny knew he was proud. She felt just right. No need to hurry, get hot and sweaty. After a summer of wear, her white Sunday pumps were comfortable enough for a little walking. She tried not to let one foot kick the other. It was always the right one kicked the left.

“Jenny, I'm thinking I might apply for some grant money for the dropout kids,” Lionel said as they walked toward the church. He took her hand—she was wearing white gloves—not a smudge on them. But the thick cloth muted the sense of his touch.

“Oh, yes,” she answered. Surely he was proud of her, of her spotless white gloves, each finger enclosed in its own long little white box of cloth, the seams
forming the edges. They were a family visiting an important church; two by two they walked on the sidewalk between the street and the park, the trees still green in September. They made their own little parade, like the animals marching to Noah's Ark.

“Use the grant to hire teachers,” he said. Yes, he was proud of her, satisfied with her, she was sure of it. She was the mother of his four fine children: two boys, two girls. “Not just volunteers,” her husband went on. “Try to give more kids, anybody, a second school chance who dropped by the wayside.”

“There's way too many dropped out,” she said because he wanted his echo. She noticed the magnolia tree leaves in the park were coated with a thick layer of dust and grime. They needed some rain to wash them off.

“With grant money, I could hire more teachers. Take more students. Maybe start something big.” He purchased the word
big
up from his belly, rasped it in his throat.

“You already doing so much.” Now he wanted her to plunge ahead; take the machete of her mind and make a swath through the jungle—“Pay
yourself
something,” Jenny urged.

The air convulsed.

Shock waves grabbed their bones, collapsed their hearing. A terrific explosion.

There. Ahead.

At the church.

Jenny froze still, shrieked, and the girls started to cry.

Without turning around, Lionel held out his arms on both sides. “Children, come close,” he said, but Jenny felt terrified by the timbre of his voice, which was surely not his own tone of speaking but the voice of God.

Huddled together, the family watched smoke and dust rising up above the greenery of the trees, yes, over in the direction of the church. They waited for another explosion. On both sides of his body, he hugged the children tight to him. Jenny stepped in front of the girls.
The atomic bomb,
she thought as the billow of smoke rose into the sky.

 

EVEN AS HIS OWN
arms gathered his children, Lionel felt the arm of God across his own broad shoulders, God gathering him close, ready to protect the man who would be shepherd.

Lionel's four children imagined the sound again, though it had ceased, felt their souls rise up a little, try to leave their bodies, try to untether, then settle back into their unwounded flesh, burrow deep into the marrow of their bones. They felt their souls scurrying from danger. Each assured his soul in hiding,
Stay there, stay there. Don't come out. Not for years and years, you needn't come out
.

Their mother thought
What if we hadn't turned back to polish our shoes?
She remembered herself sitting on the closed toilet lid, her left shoe in one hand, the shoe sideways so she could paint white over the black streaks across the inside of the heel. She saw the polish applicator in her right hand, with the thick white polish impregnating the fabric of the swab; a wire stem connected the swab to its handle, which was also the screw-top lid for the bottle of polish. The lid was white to indicate the color of the contents of the bottle. Jenny pictured the applicator again and again. The shoe polish applicator had been the instrument of their salvation.

Beyond the trees was screaming and screaming.