Four Spirits (54 page)

TRAFFIC ON TWENTIETH STREET HAD PICKED UP RIGHT
smart, Agnes noticed, with a lot of police cars circling the Tutwiler Hotel. Where Twentieth Street T'ed into Woodrow Wilson Park, one of the police was standing close to the bronze statue of a World War II soldier throwing a hand grenade. Though it was a green statue, of course it depicted a white man, and that was another white man inside the bright blue uniform standing beside the metal statue.

What is love?
She mouthed the question without making a sound, as her eye fell on a little shoeshine boy industriously snapping his rag while he polished a white man's foot. With complete confidence she answered,
God is Love
.

And it was right to tithe; it meant
I love
. She hadn't deprived TJ or herself of anything
significant
. Her haint was kind of like Satan. TJ had given her her pill when she'd come in last night. He had told her it was stress making her mind act up—his getting beat up so bad. She hadn't added to TJ's load of worry by mentioning the bomb scare. Now her mind was almost clear.
Get thee behind me, Satan
, she mouthed, soundlessly.

Then an exclamation burst into the air—“Oh, no!”—for across Twentieth over at the White Palace Grill, she saw Christine and pretty Arcola wearing her braid. Agnes wasn't the only one looking. Just at that moment, a policeman with a shepherd on a short leash stepped out of the Tutwiler Drugstore.
The Lord is my shepherd
.

The police turned his head from side to side, looking all up and down Twentieth Street. He waved down the street to Woodrow Wilson Park where
his blue buddy stood near the green hand grenade soldier, up on his pedestal. When TJ was a young man back from World War II, he had marched down this same street in a parade. Wasn't no statue to TJ.

Finished with his job, the shoeshine boy stood up and took his pay. The white man dropped the coins in the boy's palm, then he reached out and touched the little boy's nappy head! Agnes felt alarmed at so unusual a gesture; then she calmed herself and thought,
I guess that's progress
. Then she prayed with all her heart that that little boy would never have to go off to war.

She hurried up to the traffic light so she could cross over to speak to Christine and Arcola.

Them so glad to see her, Agnes hated that she must mention the cruising of the police cars, the flocking of the bluebirds, and the dog.

“Dogs!” Christine said, looking down the street.

The warning conveyed, Agnes let herself admire Christine, wiry and straight, in her navy blue polyester church suit. Arcola had on a neat pair of khaki slacks and a red-plaid blouse with short sleeves. Neat as a pin, like she'd stepped out of a Sears catalog.

“Just one,” Agnes answered, but as she spoke, two more dogs and their uniformed handlers stepped out of the hotel lobby.

“Lady, I guess we better teach you to count,” Christine said, trying to make a joke.

Arcola gripped Christine's arm. “If there's anything I'm scared of,” Arcola said, “it's big dogs.”

“They on leashes,” Christine answered.

“Yes, they are,” Agnes reassured. But the dogs were always kept on leashes till the moment of attack. “You know they can unsnap a leash so fast you can't hardly see what happened.”

“Why shouldn't any black person, Arcola or me, sit at White Palace and order a hamburger?” Christine put her hands on her hips. “Don't talk scare talk, Mrs. LaFayt,” she scolded. “The old laws being struck down every day.”

“What you-all down here for?” Agnes scolded back. “You want to die with a half-eaten hamburger in your mouth?” She hadn't expected herself to talk back to Christine. The words were just in her mouth, and she let them pop out.

“I don't have dying in mind. I'm talking protest. Demonstration.”

“Sit-in,” Arcola added and flashed her sunshine smile. “Progress.”

Agnes sighed. Wasn't any use to try to scold your teachers, she could tell
that right off. Her impertinent words ringing in her mind, she could feel a headache trying to begin. She'd have to put a soothing tone on top of that. She spoke slowly, quietly, like the voice of history. “Back in the old days, you would hear ‘So-and-so got a cross blazing in his yard.' And ‘So-and-so she got rocks throwed at her walking from the bus stop.' And ‘So-and-so, he dead.' ”

Agnes remembered standing on her porch out in the country. Maggie was her neighbor then, too, and, long ago, Maggie had whispered words that still echoed in Agnes's mind. Well, she'd try to use the words for good, for warning these young women who had come up in a better time.

“ ‘Jim, he dead. He found hangin' on a peach tree down round Alabaster. His parts gone and they cut out his tongue.' ”

“How change gonna happen,” Christine asked impatiently, “we don't push a little? Who Jim anyway?”

“I'm thinking of your kids, Christine,” Agnes softly continued.
His parts gone and they cut out his tongue
. “Who gonna take care of them—something happen to you?”

“I don't want to think about my kids right now.”

“See what I mean?” But Agnes heard the resignation in her own voice. Wisdom was what you got from your own living; it couldn't be shared. Learning—that could be shared. Maybe. Not wisdom.

Christine put her hands on Agnes's shoulders. Softly, she looked into her eyes. “I don't want to think of my own kids, Agnes,'cause I'm thinking of four little girls. My cousin and three others blowed up in church.”

Agnes shook her head. “They don't want any violence done in their name. I know that. They gone to a better world.”

Then Agnes recognized Charles Powers approaching them, from night school. He was smiling, looked so happy and pleasant.

“I knew I could count on you,” Christine said to him.

“I've graduated from marching to sitting,” Charles answered. “Howdy-do, Miss Arcola, Mrs. LaFayt.” Suddenly, he crouched down as though he were sitting. He scooted fast, even though he was almost sitting down and made them all laugh.

“You don't have to ‘Miss' me,” Arcola said. “We not at school now.”

“Your daddy know you down here?” Charles asked her. When he stood up straight, he towered over her. A big man. Agnes and TJ looked straight across
into each other's eyes when they stood together. With hooded eyes, Charles looked down at Arcola affectionately.

Agnes was shocked that he reached out and touched Arcola's shoulder, but then, lots of schoolteachers ended up marrying their students. As Arcola said, they weren't at school now. And Charles was probably as old as Arcola.
People need to reach beyond their station in life
, Agnes told herself.
I'm not against that. He's a nice young man
.

“It's the dogs I'm scared of,” Arcola answered. “I got bit once.”

Fondly Charles said, “I ain't letting any dog bite you.”

“May '63. I didn't know you then.” She smiled a sweet smile.

“You go limp,” Christine said aggressively. “We can't fight back. You know that.”

Charles spoke right up to her. “I'm not so sure women ought to be involved.”

“Don't give me that shit,” Christine said. “Pardon my French, Mrs. Agnes.”

But Agnes was reeling with shock.

Christine lowered her voice, but still Agnes marveled at the force in her voice.

“Martin Luther King got his start from Rosa Parks,” Christine hissed. “She just one woman, and the South ain't never been the same since. And you think of those dead children at Sixteenth Street. Didn't nobody say, ‘Now you send four little Negro boys down to prepare for Youth Service 'cause we don't want to blow up four little colored girls.' ”

Why was Christine mad at Charles?
Agnes wondered.

“You see some police dragging Arcola off by the hair of her head,” she harangued on, “and you don't do
nothing
. When they grab you, Charles Powers, you go limp as a dead fish.”

Her palms tingling, Agnes could feel how she'd grasped her pumps in both hands, how she had beat those men who were on TJ with the heels of her shoes as hard as she could.
You got to defend your own,
she thought, but she knew Martin Luther King would be ashamed of her. Still, he'd understand. Surely he would. Charles Powers was a fine young man, clean and straight, tall, hadn't filled out all the way yet. And his clothes were pressed and respectable. She remembered how he'd come the first time to night school, wrinkled and worn out, codeine cough syrup in his pocket.

“You and Arcola go walk around the block,” Christine said to Charles and Arcola.

Christine just had to be bossy.

“We got an hour or more. We need to spread out,” Christine went on. “Agnes, I need to talk to you.”

Agnes thought that Christine wanted to apologize again:
I ain't taking none of that shit!
She sure ought to apologize, her a teacher, whether she was on school grounds or not. Agnes watched Charles and Arcola stop to talk to the shoeshine boy. Then she noticed the family resemblance between them. “Why, I believe that's Charles's little brother,” Agnes said.

Christine said nothing. She fidgeted as though she wanted to talk, but she said nothing.

Agnes thought
Cat got your tongue for once?
but she said with dignity, “Mrs. Christine, can I do something for you?”

Christine sighed. Agnes waited. She knew Christine, shifting her feet on the pavement, would finally decide to get on with it. When she did speak, Christine's voice was tired and meek, as though it were coming from the lamppost nearby.

“I always kind of got the feeling that you and your husband done done all right?”

Now, Agnes was surprised, but she decided just to answer truthfully. She wouldn't be offended. “Yes, that's the truth,” she said. “We both always been regular first at Eighth Avenue A.M.E., and now at Sixteenth Street. We save our money. We tithe, least I did when I was working, and we save. We gonna have a good retirement, I believe.”

Still Christine looked worried, as though she hadn't gotten the answer she wanted.

“I know you ain't never gonna be no millionaire like A. G. Gaston, but you got some extra now, ain't you?”

“Yes, I do,” Agnes said directly. “You need some money, Christine?”

“No.” Then Christine hesitated again. She walked over to the lamppost and knocked on it, knuckles on metal.
Why she knocking on a lamppost like it some kind of door?
“But I kind of got one eye on the future,” Christine said.

“What would you like for me to do?”

“I know you right about a lot, Agnes. And I do apologize for my language. I know life ain't no multiple-choice, machine-graded test. Once I go in that door
to White Palace Grill, I don't know what might happen. You right. I might never come back out. Cat—she smart—she know that better than anybody. Cat called me up on the phone this morning at my house—”

“I'm scared these phones is tapped.”

“They don't know me from any other nigger.” Now Christine was impatient with Agnes for interrupting. “They ain't tapped my home phone. Cat didn't call at school. Anyway, she say in her little slow way, swallowing now and then, ‘I been thinking about you, Christine. You and Agnes. You know Agnes is really a fine person, and she really brave—' ”

“Oh, go on. She didn't say that.” Agnes's heart was swelling with pleasure. Cat was the brave one, her holding her little white wax candle in both her hands, sitting waiting in the dark schoolroom for the bomb.

“Yes, she did, and she say a lot more good about you, too. She say that it take a lot of courage for a late-middle-aged woman like you to come back to school, try to get her GED. She say it take a lot of
determination
for you to come night after night.” Christine went right on retelling, as though she were in a trance. “Every night sitting in that classroom with all the windows up and not a breath of air, and it just about a hundred degrees, and mosquitoes and moths and june bugs flying in, crawling on your clothes, in our hair—”

“She there, too.” Agnes wished she'd taken care of Cat when Cat was a little girl. That was how much Agnes loved Cat, all of a sudden, with the cars going up and down Twentieth Street, and the police strolling along, king of the world. If she'd taken care of Cat, kept her clean and well fed, made her take naps, maybe she never would have gotten her disease.

“Let me get to what I'm trying my best to tell,” Christine said. She shifted her weight from one foot to the other. “Cat say, ‘But you know, Christine, there's a tragedy in Agnes's life. She never had no kids—' ”

Agnes couldn't keep herself from gasping.
She never had any kids
—that was the way Cat would have said it.

“ ‘—She never had no kids and she was made to take care of children. Made for it.' ” Christine was speaking more and more rapidly. “ ‘And the sit-in coming on,' this is what Cat told me on the phone, ‘it may be that there be a tragedy in your life, Christine. Or in my life.' And she say, ‘You talk to Agnes, before time, you tell her anything happen to you, maybe she and her husband take care of your children.' And that's what I'm asking you, Agnes. Could you take 'em?”

Agnes threw her arms around Christine and burst into sobs of fear and gratitude. “Oh, honey, you don't have to ask me that. You know I'd take 'em. TJ and me, we ain't gonna leave your babies without no parents. Oh, honey—” Agnes grabbed Christine to her, tried to keep her safe with her own body. “Anything happen to you, they come right to our house, we got a three-bedroom house—we prepared for children, boys and girls—and they be just like our own flesh and blood.”