Half a block away, three cops held a dozen winos at gunpoint, their hands and faces pressed into the brick wall of a graffiti-covered school. The mayor was cracking down on the homeless by putting on this show for the Sunday morning set en route to the baseball stadium in the next block. The sun flew straight overhead, a furry white ball seen through thick wet air that threatened to burst. Hez had to wonder why Birmingham didn’t sink and disappear from sheer disgrace deep into the earth.
Some unwanted and unloved kid out there had dropped a condom in the collection plate and the old deacon who laid the offering
on the altar table either hadn’t seen it or, more likely, didn’t know what it was. It was sealed in a cellophane package that was decorated with a rebel flag. One of the pale yellow silk flowers in the milk glass bowl on the altar table under the portrait of Doctor King fell dryly to the floor. Hezekiah talked on.
His congregation wanted something more tangible than mighty arched words and phrases dipped in Old Testament righteousness. He knew that they had been born into despair and that most of them would die in deeper despair. The holy beacon of that great movement which had flooded them with hope twenty years before had been snuffed out. His people had tasted hope and smelled change and felt freedom in the air. They had stood arm-in-arm, an undefeated, holy power against fire hoses and dogs and the private armies of the demagogues who had held them in chains. They had sung of the ancient promises and become, for a moment, a pure and shining light. Then, one by one, they had watched in horror as the forces of darkness conspired to rob them of their leaders.
They had witnessed the assassinations of their dreams in Dallas and Memphis and Los Angeles and New York. Now they foundered in the returning dark.
There was a cry from the street followed by a disturbing series of small shrieks and then what sounded like several gunshots.
“Rise up, my people!” He was sweating profusely. His voice rang out. It was a true and living witness to the faith it embodied. But it failed to move them. He could fight with the city utilities people for single mothers. He could argue with the biased conservatism of the local press. He could do ceaseless battle; he could stand bruised and dumbstruck and unvanquished against police brutality. But his words were powerless to resurrect the spirit of his congregation.
“And the light shineth in darkness, and the darkness comprehends it not!”
A siren in the street drowned out the benediction. A bobbing sea of mostly gray heads slid into the aisles. Someone broke through the back doors of the church and spread the news. By the time Hezekiah reached the front steps of the church, the boy’s mother, still in her choir robe, was wailing over his bloody corpse in the
street. There was sixty-three cents in the red plastic purse they had to pry from his already stiff fingers. The old woman, his victim, was sitting on a car hood up the block holding her head. Someone had loosened her collar. Someone else had handed her a melting Coca-Cola. In a minute she stood up, declared herself all right and, leaning on her cane, hobbled quickly up the block before the cops took her name. On the corner a truck driver asked a passerby what happened, and he said, “A white man shot a nigger trying to steal an old nigger woman’s purse.” They put the boy’s body in the back of an ambulance and the crowd thinned down immediately. They had been in Sunday school and church all morning. Their clothes itched and they were hungry. Hezekiah ran to get his car so the boy’s mother wouldn’t have to ride home on the bus.
Fifteen minutes later some junked down kid took a monkey wrench and loosed the fire hydrant. You could see the boy’s blood mixing with the water as the puddle grew by the church. A couple kids got into the spray. But the same cops came back and the kids ran. They cut off the hydrant. When the street dried where the water had run into the sewer, it dried clean and new and the blood had washed away.
W
ell, hell, you know, you work to have a life. You sweat in some windowless factory, eating dust, taking gump, listening to threats, and all you want is maybe a couple acres someplace quiet, a little piece of a boat to go fishing in, a few friends, and in between, the thrill of decent whiskey rolling down your throat. You spend a third of your life sleeping, another third working and you want some recreation in between.
You do the marriage bit, you get a kid, you listen to your wife complain, you try to go on believing in life as long as you can, but then somewhere around fifty, you see the crest behind you and think, Christ, that was it? Maybe it was a trip down to Orlando to Disney World. Maybe it’s watching the boy you never had the time to know graduate from college. Then it’s back to work fifteen more years, if the plant don’t close on you, if your back don’t go out or lung or prostate cancer doesn’t get you or maybe it’s just the weariness. Weariness is a bigger problem than most pointy-headed politicians know. You’d think they would. Since according to most of them, they never sleep. Hell, no, they never sleep, they’re all out chasing call girls and movie stars all night and spending yours and my money on it, which is what went with the once proud military of this country. The niggers took the schools. Well, Kennedy give our schools to the niggers in between diddling Marilyn Monroe and
handing the Caribbean over to Castro and Miami, Florida, to his greasy Cuban convicts. If you could stand on a mountain and regard this once proud nation in total, you’d see nothing but Republican drug runners and Democratic nigger-lovers from sea to shining sea.
It’s not but a handful of us left who even cares to notice. But it’s like I tell Jake, it don’t take but a handful of the right minds, shoulder to shoulder, standing up and refusing to take it no more. Take what, you say?
I worked down in Birmingham twelve years. We had our first house. It was a good, square brick house and we had plenty of yard for a bird dog run and a garden. She had her kitchen. The kid had his room. I had my woodworking table in the garage. Sunday afternoons she’d let me grab ahold of her and take what I needed. We didn’t bother nobody and nobody bothered us.
One day I come home from work, and I’m turning up the main street alongside our subdivision, and I see a great big old nigger lamp in a picture window. All the goddamned room in this world, and these niggers got to take a piece of mine. Well, I’m no fool, I seen what was coming. We was five blocks away. I had a little time, enough to sell the house and find another a little farther out from the city before it hit most of the neighbors what was happening. Because one nigger lamp in a picture window brings more nigger lamps in more picture windows, and if you don’t believe me, then you go on over there and have a look today. Go have a look at what happened to some decent, hardworking people’s American dream. Torn screens, rusted cars in the yards, rutted driveways, nigger babies all over the place, crack cocaine, AIDS, and it’s all being funded by that one third of your paycheck the U.S. Government steals from you.
Like I say, we got another house, a bigger one. She had the living room all blue and fancy. I never did sit on that couch she bought with her discount at Pizitz. She went crazy when we got that house. The kid’s room had two beds and red carpet and bookcases crammed with TV, stereo and VCR and then a goddamned computer for college. We had a guest bedroom that was only used
twice—once by her mama when the boy graduated high school, and once by a cousin of mine from Joliet, Illinois, who was on his way to Florida. She wouldn’t put no vegetable garden in the backyard on account of the neighbors.
Well, that was some time after Kennedy handed the schools to the niggers, so it wasn’t long before we had this nigger superintendent of schools moving in down the block. We just barely did get Carmen, our boy, all the way graduated before it became essential to send white kids to private school. I tried to talk it up in the neighborhood that we should band together and go down to that school and run those niggers out of it, because it gnaws at my fundamental American beliefs when I think of hardworking people having to come up with private school tuition. But they had all gone Reagan crazy, Reagan blind. It was like that son of a bitch laid a blinder on all the guts and the decency left in white America. People actually talked like they believed in a minute or two they was all going to be rich enough to move away from the niggers forever and ever.
She was nuts over that house, kept little cans of paint and touched up the walls twice a month, waxed down the paneling in the den every other minute, and everybody who come to the door had to endure a walking tour of every square inch of it. She dug in against me about selling out. She said that nigger superintendent made her no never mind. She was Reagan blind too. She didn’t want to see he was the first wave.
Hell, I let her think that for a few months. In that day and time, you could sit on a house in Birmingham fifteen minutes and the value would go up a thousand dollars. I figured it being such a decent neighborhood, we had a little more time before the niggers run it over. Right before my boy was killed, I heard tell some niggers had been seen looking at a house three blocks over.
That was when I decided there was nothing to do but go back up home to the one true white haven left in this great state, and that’s what we done. You can drive every road in this county and you won’t find one nigger shack, beer drinking dive, beat-up Cadillac or coon pusher. If you find a Jew, you can bet your ass he’s for Jesus. It’s no official NIGGERS KEEP OUT sign on the county line. But it’s
known for miles. So when that woolhead showed up on the lake a while back, we took it for the sacrilege it was. Any nigger who has ever read his Bible knows it says quite clearly the birds of the air do not mix. Abel Thompkins knows how to take a person’s license number and run it through a computer at his job. He’s the one who got us his phone number. I called that coon’s house sixteen times warning him to keep out of Prince George. When that didn’t work, being Christian men, we thought to make the message a little stronger by shooting a hole in his boat. When he failed to grasp that, we let the air out of his tires.
I wrote him a note telling him clear what he could expect if he showed up again, and I left it on his dashboard. That seemed to work for a week or two, but a nigger brain can only hold on to an idea for so long, or maybe it’s that mule’s tenacity built into them. He was back. This time, as always with niggers, he had multiplied. There were three in his boat. One of them used the rest room in Wiley’s bait shop. Wiley was gone and his wife was there alone, and in fear of rape, she didn’t say nothing to them. A week later, he’s back, alone this time with a tent, planning to camp on the ground on the opposite side of the lake. We had no personal truck with that nigger, and we regret any sorrow or hardship that was caused, but sometimes a thing has to be done for the greater good, to send out a message to all the blacks and to be a beacon of hope to a downtrodden white race. It was as easy as taking a sleeping duck on still water. We played one hand of five card stud for the honor, and I won. In order that we could all feel a part of the mission, I used Jake’s pistol, and we loaded it with Wiley’s bullets. We took Billy’s truck, and Mickey drove. It was done quick and clean. Ping.
That’s not to say even a mission as pure and necessary as ours can ever be completed without regret or second thought. That’s not to wonder if we couldn’t have used some other persuasive means. Hindsight is built into any great act. But we have our brotherhood to bind and hold us up and carry us through whatever difficult acts are required. Our task is a holy task and we are knotted together and welded to it. We have that oneness of spirit and purpose. We’re united up and down this lake, except for that harlot’s husband.
He has yet to make his position clear. Our bond has been offered, and he has declined to respond. He has been told that his wife’s mouth is unwelcome here and we have given him the opportunity to silence it. He has been made to understand that whatever must be done will be done. He has been told to think it over fast and sign on or get out. It’s a pretty place, and I’d hate to see it burn.
D
ashnell slept late, and that was bad, because sometimes after a drunk night, he’ll get up early, still under the effects of the alcohol, and he’s not feeling his hangover yet. That makes him a little easier to deal with. I heard him back there in the kitchen opening a beer. I waited. He showered. He came back into the kitchen and drank another and then opened a third. He filled the doorway. I couldn’t see him, but I knew he was there by that awful sweat and soap and alcohol smell he has sometimes.
“I believe I’ve figured it out,” he says. He swung the door open and stepped out onto the porch. I never knew Dashnell to have a problem that I wasn’t the direct cause of, so I wasn’t surprised at what he said. “You’ve lost what little mind you once had.”
You’d have to know Dashnell as well as I do to know that was his notion of making an amend. He wanted to erase the slate.
“No, Dashnell, I haven’t lost my mind. I haven’t forgotten one bit of last night either.”
I don’t know how a person can forget something as important as this, but one thing that came back to me while I was sitting out there in the boat in the night mist was the fact that right before Carmen died, I’d had several long talks with Carmen about leaving Dashnell. Carmen agreed that I’d be better off in some ways, but he cautioned me not to wind up with nothing. Carmen had a love of
material things. No, I’ll say that right. Carmen was educated and had expectations for himself. His goals included many things a person like me might only consider dreams. Even that’s not the whole truth, because I descended to that way of thinking as I lived with Dashnell year after year. If Dashnell Lawler ever made an effort to communicate with me, he did that morning. He came and sat down opposite me at the table, something he generally tries to avoid, and said, “Rosie, you’ve lost yourself completely. Nothing you do or say here lately is you.”