The Legacy (29 page)

They spent that night at a motel outside of Fredericksburg, Virginia, spreading a road map on the floor of Fred's room and sprawling around it to plan their journey. There had been a brief argument over getting Jones into the place, but since they were so close to Washington, they felt it was safe to assert their strength, and they bullied the room clerk into allowing Jones to share a room with Strong and Katz. From here on in, they decided that they would put up at black lodgings or camp out. They decided that they would take Interstate 85 as far as it was completed, then Route 78 to Birmingham, and then continue on Route 11 and Interstate 20 into Mississippi. Without pushing too hard, they would reach Greenville, South Carolina, the following day, Birmingham a day later, and then push on early in the morning into Mississippi. It was well past midnight when they got into bed, and Fred was drifting into sleep when he recalled that he had forgotten to call his mother. Well, it could wait. She knew how he was about telephone calls, and anyway, nothing was going to happen. Even getting Jones into the motel had been a lead-pipe cinch.

“You know,” Fred said to Jones the following day, “I would have come anyway. You didn't have to blackmail me. This is good stuff.”

“It's a turning point in history,” Katz said. “You don't want to tell your grandchildren you just sat on your ass when history turned.”

“We are now in enemy territory,” Jones told them, “so you white boys just watch your step.”

When they stopped for gas outside of Durham in North Carolina, the cold, hard look of the man at the pump underlined Jones's words. Pulled over by a police car in Charlotte, Fred showed his driver's license, and the cop, studying it, and then looking from the license to Bert Jones, remarked that Fred was a long way from home. “He is, I ain't, officer,” Phil Strong drawled. “School closed and we're spending two weeks with my aunt in Mobile.” The officer was still staring at Bert Jones. “This colored boy here,” Strong said, “we picked him up back a ways, and we're riding him to Greenville. We had some carburetor trouble and he fixed it, so it just don't seem fair we should leave the boy standing there on the road.”

“O.K., move it,” the cop said, and when they pulled away, Jones snorted, “Colored boy indeed!”

The others burst into laughter.

“Phil, where'd you find that accent?”

“Beautiful.”

“Next step Hollywood. Man, you're an actor.”

“That was heavy stuff coming down there,” Strong said. “Maybe we ought to just dump old Jones onto the roadside. One thing they don't cotton to down here is a dark boy riding with light boys.”

“The next one of you calls me a boy, I am going to bust his head. Do you read me?”

Just before darkness, they pulled off the road and made camp in a clump of woods. The land dropped down to a beautiful lake in the distance, the setting sun beyond it, red-gold on the lake, all of it visible through a scrim of great oaks and dripping Spanish moss.

“So damned beautiful,” Greenberg said.

Katz and Jones built a fire. They had two pounds of frankfurters, cans of beans, and a six-pack of beer. With Phil Strong, Fred pored over the road map, trying to determine precisely where they were, certainly not far from Atlanta. “I think we ought to shift to 29, right down to Montgomery.”

“Any reason?”

“It just looks like a better road. It's about the same distance. If we cut out of here like at dawn, we should be there by one or two in the afternoon.”

“Where?”

“In Mississippi. I'd like to make Jackson before dark.”

“That would be nice and cool, to see some friendly faces and be told what we're supposed to do.”

They sat around the fire, eating frankfurters and beans, drinking beer, and talking in curiously muted tones. Perhaps more than the others, Fred had the feeling of being in another world and another time, an eternity away from the gentle, sundrenched Napa Valley, where there was a tribal affinity with friends and relatives. Enemy country. No, he didn't buy that. It was still the United States. He put himself in the position of relating his adventures to May Ling and Joshua and Sam. He could really make something of Phil Strong's performance with the cop.

“How about a song,” Greenberg suggested.

But it was a lame effort, and they let it go with a single attempt. The darkness closed in. They spread their blankets around the fire, but sleep came slowly. It was a warm evening, and no one made any attempt to keep the fire burning, as if they were together in their desire to have the darkness enclose them and protect them.

A hand gently shaking him awakened Fred, still in the darkness, and Jones's voice: “Time to rise and shine, California boy, if we want to make Jackson by dark.”

It was four o'clock. Four hours later, when they stopped for breakfast, they were almost to Montgomery, and Jones said to them, “I am sitting right here with a very low profile. Just bring me an egg sandwich.”

“He's right,” Strong said. “We have snotty middle-class kids written all over us.”

“Speak for yourself,” Katz said. “My father runs a candy store in Brooklyn.”

“Stop boasting. I just don't like these roadside places. We'll stop at a grocery store and load up with bread and cheese and Coke. It's just one more day, and maybe we can stay out of trouble.”

“My God,” Fred said, “I think we're all getting spooked over nothing.”

“Maybe yes, maybe no,” Jones said. “I grew up in Boston, so I'm no expert on the South. But this is an angry place. I can smell it.”

They didn't find a grocery that suited their needs until they were on the outskirts of Montgomery, and even then, people passing looked at them with suspicion and hostility. They drove on, munching on the bread and cheese.

“Maybe it's dumb the way we did it,” Katz said. “We don't look like anyone around here, except maybe for Freddie and Phil. Freddie looks like a valid, slightly decadent character out of Faulkner ——”

“I always fancied F. Scott Fitzgerald,” Fred said.

“— and Phil sort of looks like a redneck. But everything else is wrong, the California plates, the jeans. I always figured folks around here would wear Levi's. Most of them don't. They wear old, beat-up khakis.”

“It's always smart too late.”

“Relax. We've just about made it,” Strong said.

“Look at it like this,” Katz said, “because like you, all I know is what I read, and the way I've been reading it they never liked us since the Civil War and maybe before then, but just look at it this way. Here there are maybe three, four, maybe five thousand guys like us, with school over, convinced we know how to straighten out something that's been going on for a hundred years. They have to hate us.”

“Well, what in hell do you want to do? Turn around and go back?”

“Who said anything about going back?”

“You can't saw sawdust.”

“Meaning what?”

“It's done. Here we are.”

“Before you go jumping on Herb,” Bert Jones said, “you got to admit he's right. None of us are heroes. This is a spooky place. So I say Freddie keeps this old can rolling steadily until we get to Jackson, and we can sit down with some local talent.”

“You know, Bert,” Fred said, “I never thought to ask before, but what's your major?”

“English lit, which I will one day teach, God willing.”

“And God willing, I'll call my mother. I muffed it again. You know, twelve days from now we graduate from the ivy halls, and they're coming in and they're sore as hell with me taking off like this.”

“You told them?”

“He told them.”

“I couldn't just disappear.”

“Invent something,” Greenberg said. “Can you see me telling my mother I'm off to Mississippi with the ghost of old John Brown?”

“I like the way you put that.”

“I think we're coming to the state line.”

“What makes you think so?”

“We passed through Demopolis back a while. That's about fifty miles from the state line.”

It muted their voices. Suddenly, they were talking in whispers. Katz said with annoyance, “What the devil has gotten into us? We've sailed through the Carolinas and Georgia and Alabama, and now you're all spooked crazy over Mississippi.”

“Man, because that's where it is at.”

Fred was thinking of a song they played back at the winery. The kids would be crowded into his room, May Ling and Sam and Joshua and sometimes Rubio Truaz and his sister Carla — Carla, oh, I sure did fuck up things with Carla — and he'd put the record on. Was it the Weavers? Or was it Peter, Paul, and Mary? One or the other. “Old John Brown, he said to me, The Negro people must be free. He went from Harpers Ferry to Torrington, and he saw a lot of slaves and he told them, Run.”

“God damn it, Freddie,” Jones said, “you're pushing seventy miles an hour!”

“Cool it, Freddie,” Strong added. “What we don't need is to be picked up by the local cops.”

Fred dropped his speed to fifty.

“Forty-five would be even better,” Strong said.

“You want to get to Jackson before dark, don't you?”

“We have all the time in the world. The day is young. You remember what they told us back in Washington. The local cops would just as soon dump us into the cooler as not.”

“Never been in jail,” Greenberg said.

“We'll arrange it, sonny. All in good time. Meanwhile, everything cool and easy.”

It was about two o'clock when they stopped for gas at Meridian, satisfying their hunger with chocolate bars and Cokes. The man at the pump, heavyset, cold-eyed, served them in silence.

“A nice, friendly place,” Katz said.

“Where you boys headed for?” the garageman asked them.

“Going to my uncle's place,” Strong said, his imitation of a Southern accent somewhat sour.

“Is that your nigger?” the garageman asked, pointing to Jones.

There was a long silence, and then Jones said, “I'm nobody's nigger, you fat sonofabitch.”

The garageman started toward Jones, thought better of it, turned on his heel and strode toward his shack. Fred had paid for the gas, and now he raced around the car into the driver's seat. “Get in, get in,” Strong snapped. They piled into the car, and Fred ripped the car away like a contender in a drag race and sent it screaming down the highway. Twisting around, Katz said, “You won't believe it, but that crazy bastard's standing there with a shotgun.”

“That was one dumb crack,” Strong told Jones.

The gas station was out of sight; Fred had cut his speed. “I don't believe it,” he said softly. “I just don't believe it.”

“Did you hear what he said?” Jones protested.

“You and your fuckin' pride.”

“God damn it, Strong, what in hell do you expect! You want me to knuckle down and say, Yowsa, mistah gas jockey, I is sho ‘nuf mistah Strong's nigger boy.”

“No,” Katz said, “you could have told him we all have shares.”

“Oh, funny, funny! You're all such hotshot liberals, but when push comes to shove, it's Jones, do your minstrel act.”

“That's not fair,” Fred protested. “That crazy bastard went for a gun.”

“I'm sorry,” Strong said. “We're all shook up. I had no business lacing you down. No one appointed me the captain of this contingent. And Katz's sense of humor stinks.”

“It stinks,” Katz agreed.

“How do you think I feel?” Jones demanded. “This place is as crazy to me as it is to you. The fact that I'm black gives me no insight into lunatics. We're packed into this car, four white kids and one black kid, with California plates and a Princeton sticker on the windshield — we're just as plain as the time of day.”

“Let's cool it,” Greenberg said. “We're all sorry, Bert, and we're all insensitive and we're all scared.”

“Maybe. Or maybe you don't even know what scared is. I know.”

Then they were silent, and Fred drove on, more slowly now, very carefully. Somewhere between Meridian and Jackson, he saw the barrier across the highway, two wooden sawhorses, two workmen and a third man in boots, whipcord breeches, brown shirt, and a Western hat. He wore a deputy's star, and as Fred pulled to a stop in front of the barrier, the deputy walked up to the car and studied its occupants. After thirty seconds or so, he said, “Princeton College,” and nodded. The boys waited in silence. The deputy was silent another thirty seconds, and then he said, “Road's out ahead. Take the detour.”

“What detour?” Fred asked him.

“Right there, sonny.” He pointed a few feet down the road, behind them, to where a dirt track led into the jack pine.

“It doesn't look like much of a road,” Fred said slowly.

“What's wrong with the main road?” Strong asked.

“Washed out. The cutoff's all right. Just drive slow.” He smiled. The two workmen smiled. “Lead you back to the main road two miles up ahead.”

“I don't like it,” Strong whispered to Fred.

“What else can we do?”

Strong shrugged. The deputy pointed to the side road again. Fred hesitated, praying for another car to come along from either direction; but except for their car and the deputy's squad car, parked on the shoulder beyond the barrier, the road remained deserted.

“Better get going, sonny,” the deputy said.

“Anything to get out of here,” Katz whispered.

Fred nodded, put the car into reverse, and then turned onto the side road. He drove slowly into the thickness of the tall, gaunt jack pines, the car lurching over the ruts in the road. After seven or eight minutes, during which the others sat in uncertain silence, Fred stopped the car.

“How far have we come?” Strong asked him.

“More than two miles.”