Those Bones Are Not My Child (47 page)

“Is that what Speaker was talking about, going to the UN for protection?”

“… Not exactly. Well, yes.”

“Well, what if the killers took a shortcut and got to the UN first? And what if they told them a bunch of lies and then—”

“You sure got a lot of what-ifs. All I want is some cookies and some choc’late milk. Ainchu hongry?”

“Dad?”

“Kenti, we can have dessert later. Now, please.”

“Dad?”

“We don’t seem to be early after all,” Zala said when they turned onto Hightower. Vehicles were parked bumper to bumper. Buses were making unscheduled stops in the middle of the street for passengers come for the meeting.

“I hope this amounts to something,” Spence said grimly.

“Dad, would you listen. You think the mayor and them know something?”

“Might.”

“Do you? Like, maybe you sort of know who’s doing the killing?”

“I’ve got thirty-two years’ worth of informed suspicions,” Spence said, sitting up straight; Kofi was about to tear the back of the seat out from under him.

“What if they know you know? What if they come after you, after all of us?”

“Kofi, don’t work yourself up.”

“Tell him to be quiet. He’s scaring me.”

“I gotta know what ya gonna do onnaconna they might come after us. Answer me! Dag!” He flung himself hard against the seat. “Mize well be dead awready, cuz you ain’ gonna do nuthin’.”

“Daddy got a gun, stupid. Anybody bother us, he blow they head off, scaredy cat.”

“Somebody better tell her to quit pulling on my clothes, ’cuz when I hit her y’all gonna say it’s my fault.”

“Kofi, would you leave it.”

“See—see there! I knew it. Gettin’ on me and don’t even care if them killers come after us.”

“Kofi.” Zala turned around. “Try to calm down. That’s the trouble with people, they get too scared to do their own thinking. Then anybody can tell them anything. You remember what your grandaddy use to say about the Ku Klux Klan, when they’d announce they were going to parade and everybody better get off the streets? They’d turn the power off in the Black community, remember? Just to show they could do it, just to have people shaking in the dark, afraid to defend themselves. And what did people do? Did they hide under the bed? Did they get paralyzed with fear? That’s what the newspapers said. But what did Grandaddy tell you?”

“Said they pulled ropes across the roads if they were coming on horses. Said they dug up the roads and made ruts if they were coming in trucks. They put bottles in the trees and stakes in the ground and nails and tacks and stuff like that. Sent the dogs out to get ’em when they climbed out of the trucks. Got them some rakes and pickaxes if they tried to set things on fire. Said they drove ’em off.”

“In other words, they didn’t panic. They got together and made plans. Well, that’s what this meeting is for,” she concluded, watching folding chairs being unloaded from the back of a van and handed along a line and up the steps of the Greater Fairhill Baptist Church.

“But what if they throw a bomb in the house? Whatchu gonna do then?”

“They think you the mayor, Daddy.” Several people had rushed forward to look into the limo as they cruised past.

“Dad, if you were the mayor, would you tell people to get their guns?”

“Why don’t we wait and see what the real mayor has to say,” Spence sighed. Far from early, they were late, Spence realized. Hosea Williams and other SCLC heads were talking with groups of people clustered around the church steps.

“But what if—”

“Enough. Period.” Zala looked for somewhere to park. She spotted Mattie directing a Buick onto the sidewalk, its radio drowning out her instructions. Zala scanned the crowd scattered along the sidewalk, looking for STOP members. Near the corner she recognized several of the radical newsdealers from Central City Park. Kenti was leaning over her, staring at a priest heading for Fairhill, his rosary chain swinging against his robes.

“You just missed a space, Spence.”

“I think I’d like to miss the whole thing,” he said wearily.

“What are they doing here?” Kenti tapped her.

Zala leaned her head back against Kenti’s hands.

“Are they light people or white people?”

“Whatchu got against white people all of a sudden? You was just with some white people, stupid.”

“Was? Was I, Daddy?”

Kofi sucked his teeth and caught Spence’s eye in the mirror. He was smiling.

Light bread or white bread, which your Uncle Rayfield eat, Nathaniel? Miss Sudie holding the fish on the spatula, waiting on an answer. Wrong answer. His uncle had ribbed him mercilessly all day about bringing some funny-looking Silvercup into the house.

“We getting out or what?” The car was parked and someone was rapping on the window, but nobody moved. “Ain’t we going in, Dad?”

Mattie held Zala’s hand as she got out, then pulled her toward her in a motherly embrace. “Looks like everybody’s here,” she said, pointing. “Undercover police, plainclothes nuns. Political ragamuffins on one side, telltales on the other. That’s what you call working both sides of the street. They evidently suspect the worst,” she added, walking Zala toward the church. “Puts me in mind of a story my research mentor use to tell—”

“Let’s go in,” Zala interrupted. She was in no mood for stories, especially shouted over the Buick radio the children were running past, their hands over their ears. Why would anyone play music that loud and
in front of a church and on this day of all days? Zala pulled away from Mattie. She didn’t want to be mothered either, not by someone whose arm trembled.

“I’d rather be a blind girl,” Etta James sang out of the Buick window as Commissioner Brown was accompanied up the steps by back-slappers and by those anxious to have their questions answered immediately. “I’d rather be a blind girl than see you turn your back on me, babe.”

Zala raced up the steps, breaking the grip of two men in the doorway shaking hands. This was no time for pressing flesh and asking after each other’s grandmothers. Were people going to see to it that justice was done, that the bombers were caught, that people organized and brought the terror to a halt?—those were the questions. She moved swiftly down the carpeted aisle to a pew near the front, not noticing who was there, not seeing her children waving from the side section, or her husband motioning her toward two chairs set at the end of a row. She coughed up grit into a tissue and did not sit down. She wanted to be on her feet when the meeting began. And if they were slow to begin, every minister in the hall eager to individually lead them in prayer, she wanted to be ready to cut short any delay. She scrutinized the leaders as they took their places on the pulpit two feet above the congregation. She feared the worst but muttered “Keep the faith,” keepthefaith, hanging on to the back of the pew in front of her, digging her nails into the wood.

T
he wall loaded now with glistening statements, the graffiti artists capped their markers, wiped clean the nozzles of their spray cans, then looked in the direction of Ashby and Thurmond, where the music was coming from. A piano rendition of “We’ll Understand It Better By and By” had begun when they first surveyed the wall, asked access of the three men sitting on the chain in front of it drinking, then bit off their cold-stiff gloves to draft their urgent communiqués to the neighborhood. From the Mount Moriah Tabernacle came the old song, the left hand brooding, somber chords of resignation sounding the bass line while the right hand skittered up and down the keyboard improvising sly comments till the thick bass chords broke into a nervous olio of signature themes from other anthems, hymns, and spirituals.

“That’s one crazy fool up there on the ivories,” one of the wine drinkers said over his shoulder. The graffiti writers packed their tools inside their jackets, zipped up, and headed toward Thurmond. “Make more sense to put your backs to the wind,” he called to them, then huddled under his scarf and hat as the wind whipped across Ashby, spinning garbage can lids into the middle of halting traffic.

Clusters of notes tumbled free-form, crossing the axis and turning the left hand loose to blues some, gospel, bop-doo-wop, as the writers trudged backward up the street. The left hand chased the right in a relentless effort to do it—to make the terrible bearable. Both hands stretched out in self-generating rhythms, the pedal pumped to the floor to state it, music rolling, rolling, rolling thro’ an unfriendly world. And ain’t we got a right to the tree of life? God, the inexhaustible possibilities. Lord, help us. Oh, must Jesus bear the cross alone and all the world go free. Take up the cross. Whomp. Take it up. Whomp. Even as we
stumble through another Golgotha of bones. Whomp. Take up the cross.

Then both piano hands collected themselves below middle C to take refuge in a bit of “Go Down” and “Swing Low” and “Nobody Knows” before “We’ll Understand It” thundered up again, shaking the rafters. The writers mounted the steps and saw the lock rattling in the tabernacle door. They opened it and were shoved in by the wind.

Bundled to the eyes, Zala turned the corner. The wind digging branches through chinks in chimneys was no less fierce than the testifying piano. It gusted litter up out of hiding places and hurled it against windshields, slowing traffic to a crawl. It swept under coats, blew away hats, stole the greetings out of the mouths of neighbors. Sent brittle leaves skidding down the gutters to dam up the sewers. Newspapers plastered thick against the back of Zala’s legs. She turned, stomped, turned again, and papers glued themselves to the front of her legs tripping her up.

Their legs shivering, the three men held. They would not be unseated from the stout chain links that they sat on, swung on, their heels rooted in depressions in the sidewalk. They passed judgment on females who swept by and voiced warnings to the endangered on skateboards. Bloodshot but sharp, their eyes condemned cars that slowed too near children dawdling with schoolbooks. They kept steely watch on strangers walking too near the candy store. Taking turns on the bottle, they kept all four corners under surveillance while they sang songs worth braving the cold to sing.

“ ‘The way you mooooove, you know you coulda been a—’ ”

“Jailbait,” one of the men sang out, getting raunchy with a young girl coming out of the cleaners, the wind ripping the plastic from the clothes slung over her back. His companions pulled him back down by his coat and leaned against him on either side to remind him what he was supposed to be doing.

Zala used her package to anchor her coat down and inched carefully across a patch of ice browned in spots by the contents of a bottle that lay smashed up ahead, the shards offering noisy traction. No way then to slip past the men singing and carousing beneath the wall that urged the people to unite their wrath and take control of the city before it was too late.

“ ‘The way you loooook, you know you coulda been a—’ ”

“Hey, sweetmeat, you married?”

The wino tried to peer in through Zala’s coat collar and scarf, smiling blearily. His buddies yanked him back to his seat, apologizing to her through wool. The three men seemed to be well fortified against the cold.

Whatever they were drinking was more powerful than the half-jar of Mama Lovey’s brew she’d downed when she could no longer take typing the tapes. Next door Mrs. Grier had been rinsing rice over and over, running the tap, shaking a colander, scraping it against the sink. There were more typos than Zala could handle with the thickened white-out. She had yanked out the used-up typewriter ribbon and gone to the sink. She ran her tap on, off, on. Distress signals ignored, she drank down the last of the wide-mouth jars and bundled up, the underarm seams of her coat straining over two sweaters. Despite petroleum jelly, hat, scarf, and collar, cold had needled her face before she’d reached the hedges. By the time she got to the corner where the wind battled the piano for attention, her face felt like cheap silk crepe.

“Ha, ha, ha!” the drinkers were laughing, their voices loud in her ears long after she was seated on the bus, loosening her wraps.

Near a lot slated to be a park in the spring, four boys threw down a piece of corrugated cardboard and got ready to practice, cold as it was. Passengers on the bus fussed with their holly and silver bell corsages, clucking about children allowed to roam about like that. Others rubbed circles in the glass to watch when a neighbor woman taking plants in from her sunporch called out to the boys to go home before they broke their necks or got them broken. The boys were respectful. More, they looked grateful. For if someone called you by name, or only “son,” “junior,” “boy,” even if they were scolding, then you were alive, alive to that community that named you. They ma’amed the woman until she took in the last of the plants. Then they dragged their dance floor closer to the lot and threw it down again.

“They’re not going to let cold nor fear keep them from the dance,” the man next to Zala said. “You have to admire these kids.”

Zala nodded, but several people across the aisle disagreed. That led to a general discussion about the curfew, the puzzle and pain of it. Camille Bell of STOP had pointed out on TV that most of the children
had disappeared in broad daylight, so what was the 7:00 p.m. ban but another way of blurring the facts and dumping on parents?