Morning Is a Long Time Coming (4 page)

Once I even went so far as to position my nails on my cheeks. See Anton, I threatened myself, or take the consequences! When no matter how hard I tried, I still could not bring him back, I screamed, “Last chance!” But still no images came, so without any more warning, both nails plowed beneath the skin’s white surface to open a ragged row of red.

I guess it was that experience of pain self-inflicted which, more than anything else, taught me that there are still some things that not even violence can effect.

What I have learned is that I can find Anton just at those times when I’m least needy, least demanding. Last Monday—it might have been Tuesday—I rode my bike a couple of miles up Highway 64 until I reached the secluded banks of the St. Francis River. As I settled down among the knee-high river grasses with a single bent Lucky Strike stolen from my father’s pack, it came to me that if only I closed my eyes, he would be there waiting for me. And I saw him too. Exactly as he was during that summer.

With my eyes still closed, I spoke to the vision that was sealed somewhere between my pupils and my lids. “I’m
happy to see you again.” But when he didn’t respond to my greeting, I went on. “I think I’ve told you all this before, Anton, but in some ways your death is still very fresh to me.”

When something funny happens, like when Jimmy Wells gave us his impression of one of Coach Begley’s pep talks and I’ll be right in the middle of a laughing jag and then it’ll hit me ... hit me hard. Anton is dead and I am alone so why am I laughing? Why in the world am I laughing?

Sometimes I ask myself, knowing as I do that the only way to avoid the pain is to have never met you, would I choose that? But what I get is not so much an answer as a remembering. Like the first time I saw you. You had come into my father’s store with a bunch of prisoners-of-war. And everybody (even the guards) wanted field hats, but not you, Anton. Why was that? They made you chop cotton too, didn’t they? Was it because you knew you wouldn’t be hanging around those fields very long? Or was it because field hats weren’t your style? Just another symbol of your servitude.

The next time I saw you was just minutes after the escape. You were running along the railroad embankment. Even from the distance of the room above our garage, I knew that it had to be you and I also knew that I’d never allow the 5:15 to take you away.

But it wasn’t until you stopped running, to hide yourself against the railroad embankment, that I caught up with you. I called your name; you turned in terror. I told you it was okay; it was only me. Only Patty. But what I was thinking was that you don’t ever have to be afraid again because I
don’t ever intend to let anything bad happen to you. Not ever!

I took you to a safe place, too, because ever since the stair boards were ripped off, nobody else had ever been up here.

Right off, I thought you were the smartest person that I’ve ever known and so I asked you to teach me to be smart too. And you know what you said? Without so much as a hesitation or a phony emphasis, you said, “You already are.” And I began to believe that too.

You see, not in school or anywhere else could I do anything well, so naturally enough people thought me dumb, and yet—and I wouldn’t tell this to anybody but you—sometimes I think I know what people are meaning even when they’re a long way from saying what it is they’re meaning.

And other times, I even think I know what people are feeling even when they’re doing their best to hide just what it is they’re feeling. Right away you noticed that about me. You were the only person to have ever noticed that about me. I was so thrilled that I can still hear your words. “You have,” you said while pantomiming an aerial over your own head, “an incredible set of antennae.”

So I guess the fact that outside of Ruth you were the first person to ever treat me as though I had value was the first thing that I liked about you. But there was more. Oh, there was so much more!

There was your face. That was one thing that I loved about you. I considered it the very face that God would use should He ever decide to make an earthly visit. And did you know that it revealed as much—more sometimes—than even your words. But don’t go thinking that your words were just Arkansas-ordinary ’cause they weren’t! Sometimes they
made me laugh and lots of times they made me think. And I even remember one time when they made me cry.

That was the night that you left the hideout for the last time. Through the darkness, I led you to the spot where the trains always slow down before taking on the big curve. Well, somewhere en route, you asked me if you were still my teacher.

I must have answered yes. At any rate, I’m not vague about what came next. That’s when you said, “Then I want you to learn this, our last lesson. Even if you forget everything else I want you to always remember that you are a person of value.”

Then with a dignity that bordered on ceremony, you placed your ring on my finger and added, “And I want you never to forget that you had a friend who loved you enough to give you his most valued possession.”

I cried because this was the most beautiful moment I had ever known and I cried because the loneliness that I was soon to know was going to have more reality than any I had ever known before.

And, Anton, it’s still a struggle trying to see myself through your more loving view of me. Still I try. ...

There was so much that you made me feel. To this day, I don’t know whether there was one feeling that was more important than any other, but there was something that I felt all during those days that we spent together. And I feel it still. Probably you’ll think this the ranting of an eighteen-year-old. Just the same, I’m going to tell you: Your friendship honored me. Far beyond anything that has happened to me either before or after, your friendship honored me.

Sometimes I read about somebody being honored for writing
a newspaper story: the Pulitzer Prize. Or for stopping a war: the Nobel Prize. And I think the only advantage that their honor has over mine is that they can talk on and on about theirs. While I? I must never even speak of mine.

4

A
T SIX O’CLOCK ON
W
EDNESDAY MORNING
, the alarm clock went off. I wanted plenty of time to bathe, dress, and finish packing without having to rush down to the depot to catch the 8:15 to Memphis.

I walked up Silk Stocking Street, which most folks refer to as Jenkinsville’s only residential street without taking into consideration that jelly-roll shaped street where the blacktop ends known to one and all as “Nigger Bottoms.” Dragging
behind me was my father’s heavy brown leather suitcase which had been on so many buying trips to St. Louis that my father says it’s perfectly capable of making the trip alone. That’s one of his jokes.

I looked overhead into the full face of the morning sun and made myself the promise that I was not going to spend my life in a place where the sun is able to sear away the freshness of morning even before eight.

“Hey, Patty, where you heading with a suitcase this time of the morning?” asked Mrs. Burton Benn, the strict-faced wife of the Baptist minister, who was standing on her front porch with a head that looked as though it was sprouting a fresh crop of bobby pins.

“I’m eloping.”

There was a thinking woman’s silence before a knowing smile came over Mrs. Benn’s face. “Now, you don’t mean it.”

I laughed. “No, I guess I don’t. I’m going to Memphis to visit my grandparents for a week.”

“Them’s your mother’s folks? The ones I met at your graduation last week?”

“That’s right.”

Miriam Benn waved from the fingers. “Well, you just tell ’em that I said hi.”

As I walked up the steep gravelly grade of the station house, more dragging than carrying the increasingly heavy suitcase, I saw her. She was looking down the opposite track so that she couldn’t possibly have seen me. Thank God for that! I backed far enough down the grade to stay out of sight. Maybe I could find somebody to drive me the ten miles to Earle; I could pick up the train a few miles farther down
the track. What’s the bus schedule? Doesn’t matter. Grandmother is meeting me at Union Station, not at Trailways.

I looked at my watch. Not yet eight o’clock. Still time to unscramble my brains. I sat on the edge of my suitcase and began unscrambling: Number one, there is absolutely no way that I can reach Memphis’s Union Station by 9:35 other than by catching the 8:15 from Jenkinsville.

And number two: Why does an old Negro woman, of all people, scare me so very much?

She doesn’t—at least not in the “I’m gonna getcha” sense of that word. Just maybe the problem is that more than anybody else, Ruth understands me. And that scares me! When I was released from the Bolton School, I wanted to show everybody in this town that what I went through was no big deal. I was not one bit beaten down because the reformatory was just another punishment, not all that different from being kept in after school.

So to convince everybody, I became a clown. Whee! I’m having so much fun just a-talking too much and laughing too loudly.

Maybe I convinced them all, but I could never have convinced Ruth. She would have known better.

For it was her body that I threw myself against while crying that she couldn’t leave me. “You can’t leave me here!” And even though I kept reminding myself that I was very young then, having “celebrated” my thirteenth birthday at Bolton, I still couldn’t face up to the raw self-exposure.

Knowing that Ruth can never again see me as being strong, because somewhere during her Bolton visit I admitted to her what I had never before admitted, even to myself. That I needed someone. I needed her. And there’s still
another phrase that no matter how hard I try, I cannot scrub from my consciousness. Clinging to her as though she were my life raft and I was so far from land, I said, “I’m afraid to be without you.”

In all my life, nobody had ever seen me so weak and vulnerable. The illusion of my strength had shattered a lot like the Harrisburg levee after the river came crashing through.

I had always believed that if I ever exhibited any weakness then I couldn’t survive. Or if I did, I would be treated with all the open contempt that I deserved. That’s what I thought up until sometime only days before last Christmas when I was with my friend the reporter Charlene Madlee in the parking lot of the
Commercial Appeal.

I had been up to see Mr. Chuck Brennan, the paper’s mid-South editor, about an idea that I had for a feature story. And not only did he agree to the idea provided I could get proper documentation, but my old friend Charlene, one of the paper’s star reporters, said that she was going to make time from an impossible day to go out for a sandwich with me.

Six years ago, it was the same Mr. Brennan who sent Charlene to Jenkinsville to cover the story of the escaped prisoner-of-war. And later when I became a prisoner, it was Charlene who suggested to Mr. Brennan that maybe I could try to write a story about the “real” conditions inside the Bolton reformatory.

Well, the article with my fancy pen name was released (in all five editions) upon the people of Memphis and the mid-South even before I was released from the reform school. I can still see the headline:

REFORM SCHOOL NEEDS REFORMING

BY

ANTONIA ALEXANDER

As Charlene and I crossed the back lot, a large, dark, prosperous-looking car rolled backward, striking her. But since the brakes had been released without the motor being on, she was not so much struck as bumped.

The purple-tinted head of a shocked matronly lady extended out the car window. “Are you all right?”

At that, Charlene went limp. Turning toward me and dropping her head against my shoulder, she answered with a “noooo ...” which trailed off into a continuum of sobs.

Even so I understood that Charlene’s injury was more psychological than physiological. The last emotional trauma of a traumatic day. My first thought was that this extraordinarily capable lady couldn’t possibly want comforting from me. Not from someone half a head shorter and a dozen years younger. My second thought was that she did. That by God, she did!

I closed my arms around Charlene, pressing her forearm with my hand to show her that she wasn’t alone. Not a bit! And taking care of somebody else made me feel good. Like discovering you’re more than you thought you were. More even than you hoped to be.

As Charlene’s control began returning, she explained that she was okay. “It’s just that every goddamn soul on the city desk is on my back.”

I was pleased that Charlene was visibly returning to herself, and I was pleased that I had been able to give her some comfort, but I was still feeling a sadness from an unspecified direction descending upon me.

As we continued our walk down busy Union Avenue toward Taylor’s Grill, she spoke of the new city editor brought in from Louisville “to tighten up the ship. But hell, does all his tightening have to be accomplished by driving his nails into me?”

I was able to make appropriate comments on my friend’s dilemma even though most of my energies were reserved for trying to find my way through my own spiritual confusion. It wasn’t until hours later. that evening on a chilly Trailways bus on my way back to Jenkinsville that I even began to stumble around and about the source of my discontent.

It had something to do with giving something to somebody else. From experiencing the pleasure and the pain of giving something to somebody else that nobody since Ruth had ever given to me.

Ruth! How long had I been lost in old memories? I looked at my watch. Already eight o’clock. The train may already be on this side of Earle. And I still haven’t cleared all the emotional debris from my brain.

What I don’t understand is why I can so easily accept Charlene’s weakness, but not my own. Never my own. I searched myself for long forgotten (however fleeting) feelings of revulsion upon first seeing Charlene cry, but I didn’t find any. Actually, I think the opposite may have been true. Because, more than anything else, it was her tears that made her real to me.