Two
The Slaughter of
the Innocents, September 1963
Gloria
THAT FALL, THE FIRST SEPTEMBER SATURDAY, SHOPPING downtown, Christine pointed to a man entering a drugstore and asked Gloria if she knew who he was.
No, Gloria answered. She didn’t know the man. She saw he wore an old brown hat, felt, even though the summer heat was still on them. Everything about his posture bespoke dejection. He slumped into his old clothes. The hat was too large and shielded much of his head.
Who wanted to look at that? Gloria lifted her eyes to the sky between the high buildings.
She intended to feel wonderful on this fine September day. The sky was a real blue; no gray haze from steel mills filtering out the color. A wind had come through, down between the office buildings and stores of Birmingham, and swept the air clean. Cleared the air all the way to the top of the sky.
Gloria was shopping with her friend—first time they’d gone out sauntering the sidewalk together, shopping. At least right now, that was all they were doing. Yes, over the summer, Christine, a grown-up with three kids, had taken her as a friend.
“That’s Judge Aaron,” Christine said. She grabbed Gloria’s arm, pinched it hard.
Why did Christine sound stricken? “Naw. He can’t be any judge,” Gloria replied. The man was dirty. Moreover, he was black.
“That’s his name, I reckon. His mama gave him the first name Judge.”
When Christine tightened the pressure on Gloria’s arm, Gloria was annoyed. She didn’t want any desperate clutching on a fine September day. She didn’t want to stir up trouble. The time wasn’t ripe.
Politics! Had to be something about the Movement, something about Rights for Christine to seize up like that. Gloria’s father had said, “You want to get ahead, you work. It’s simple as that. You get mixed up in demonstration trouble, you lose what you got.”
Her mouth at Gloria’s ear, Christine dropped her voice to a sad, confidential monotone: “His ma wanted her newborn, chocolate-cream baby boy to be addressed with respect, just like I want for my boys.” While they walked in step, Christine’s voice mused on, the voice of a hurt mother. “So his mother she gave her baby boy Judge for his name. ‘Judge, what you ask for mowing the lawn? I give you a quarter,’ some white man have to say, and her little boy hear that word Judge and he hearing respect.”
Had her own mother named her Gloria, trying to put her forward? She doubted the naming tactic would work. “How come you didn’t sign up for an economics course this fall?” her mother had asked. “How come you don’t learn something about George Washington Carver instead of William Butler Yeats out at Miles College?” But her mother always supported her music.
Gloria raised her eyes again to the sky between the tall store buildings on Eighteenth Street. She loved for the clouds to puff up like that, so white against the blue.
“Well, how come you know that man?” Gloria asked Christine.
“I only saw him once before. I think it could be him. Somebody pointed him out. Just like I’m doing you.”
“What for?”
“Klan did him.” Christine’s voice was flat and sad. “If that’s Judge Aaron—they did him.”
Gloria looked at Christine’s face. All the energy was drained away; she’d never seen Christine quiet and drained. Did him?
“When Reverend Shuttlesworth tried to integrate Phillips High School,” Christine went on, “that night, they just caught some black man at random.” Christine’s defeated voice began to recharge itself.
Gloria looked up and wished the heavenly blue would come right down between the buildings and envelop her. She wanted to stand swirled in soft blue. “Lavender’s blue, dilly dilly…” Gloria wanted to live enrapt in a smooth song. Something more peaceful than “Blueberry Hill,” something like Burl Ives sang when she was a little girl—“Lavender’s blue, dilly dilly…” Just for today, just now, it would be fine to relax into lavender.
“Judge Aaron didn’t have nothing to do with no Phillips High School!” Christine hissed. “Klan say Judge Aaron must tell Shuttlesworth what they will do to him.”
Gloria gazed across the street at the slow-moving man. Did him? She couldn’t see his face for the slouch of the hat.
“But they don’t dare to touch Shuttlesworth,” Christine added softly, malevolently. “No. He walk away from every assault. He say God with him; he a man afraid of nothing.”
The soft blue stayed inaccessibly high above them. She had to listen to Christine. Couldn’t turn a deaf ear.
The street looked more grimy. The people, colored like herself, more lost and lonely. Gloria felt her heart sinking because she knew to please Christine, to satisfy her own conscience, she would have to go with her to Woolworth’s; she would have to sit up on a stool at the white lunch counter like any other human being.
Never mind the blue day; it didn’t count anymore. Something that should never happen under any sky—she didn’t know what—had happened to the defeated man across the street. This was the day of the brown felt hat.
There on the street, Gloria put her hand over her heart—like her grandmother—as though to calm its rapid beating. Grandma Susan, dead since Gloria was five. Grandma Susan, named for her grandma who had been a slave, always trying to soothe herself. It just making a racket in there, her grandma used to explain. Gloria felt her grandma within her own body, her grandmother’s desire and her own for quiet and peace within herself. For her grandmother, for herself, Gloria pressed her palm between her breasts.
“You all right?” Christine asked sharply.
“I’ll do it,” Gloria answered.
“When?”
Gloria knew that Christine knew what she meant.
“Today,” Gloria answered. “Before I lose my nerve.”
The clothing of the shoppers grew vivid, swirled before Gloria like a hallucination. Bits of color here and there, like a flag undone. Gloria pressed her hand against her chest. Then she recognized her gesture as something new: hand on her heart, as though her body, without her consent or guidance, was already making a pledge of allegiance. I pledge allegiance to this street, to my people, and to their need. To the slouch of an old brown hat.
Pimento Dream
“OH, NO,” RYDER SAID, HIS HAND POINTING INVOLUNTARILY at someone or something beyond the car windshield.
When Lee saw her husband’s pointing finger, she wanted to bite it, like it was a wiener.
Ryder was pointing to a black man coming out of a drugstore.
“What?” Lee asked. The word barked out of her. She knew she ought to sound more sweet. But he’d gone too far. For what Ryder done last night, she hated him. Would hate him forever.
She noticed that Ryder hesitated.
What? she thought impatiently. Staring at the closed glove compartment, she waited with her lips sealed. She wouldn’t ask again.
Finally he said softly, “He’s one we got good. Least I think it’s him.”
He stopped the car for a red light and streams of colored passed in front of them. They had to wait. She had nothing but contempt for Ryder mumbling about how he hadn’t meant to come this way on the niggers’ streets. Niggers doing their Saturday shopping.
But actually she felt safe enough. It was broad daylight. Sunny.
“Lock your door,” he said.
He had insisted on taking her downtown so she could get some decent hose with a seam in the back, like the Lord intended. Ryder had claimed he just hated those panty hose things. That was why he done what he done, he had claimed afterward. He let her wear them all summer long, but they made her legs look naked. Like she wasn’t dressed decent for the public.
Last night, he had taken his knife and cut out a diamond in the crotch. Yeah, he was a little drunk—it was Friday night—but he said he’d been wanting to do it over a month. He said he could taste how bad he wanted to.
He had held up the panty hose, laughed, and showed her the empty diamond, laughed. Lee b
urst into tears. She just sobbed. She blubbered out about how she had been specially selected by the company, selected at random, to test out panty hose. Through the mail. It meant she was special. Specially selected.
Finally he had said, “It’s my Friday night and you don’t stop that blubbering, I’ll have to whup you.”
“Just go ahead. Just go ahead,” she had said, banging her hand on the kitchen tabletop. She was sure he wouldn’t;he’d already gone too far.
So he had had to. He just grabbed up her rolling pin off the sink drain—the wood still looked a little damp from where she’d rinsed it off—and hit her on the shoulder with it. There was a crunch that must have scared him, so he turned her around to beat her butt where she was well padded.
Then she had gotten down on all fours and tried to crawl under the table. He grabbed the back of her hair and said, “Now you bark, Lee, you want to go on all fours.”
“Wolf!” she said. She was crying. “Woolf, wooolf.”
“I want you to say ‘bow-wow,’ ” he sneered. “Like in Dick and Jane.”
No real dog ever said bow-wow. He made her ridiculous.
“Bow-wow,” she had sobbed. “Bow-wow.”
But he was sorry afterward, he said. He’d meant it as a joke, cutting a hole in her panty hose. (But secretly she knew he thought it might be fun to do her through the diamond sometime. Yes, that was what he wanted.)
To prove he was sorry, he had gotten up this Saturday morning to take her to Loveman’s. He loved her, he really did, and he wanted her to have nice things from the nicest store in town.
And there was that colored man coming out of the drugstore. Oh no! he’d exclaimed.
“What’d y’all do to the colored?” Lee finally asked. She knew he liked her to say nigger, but really that was pretty low-class talk when you could just as well say colored.
She wondered if she’d have had such hurt feelings about her panty hose if he’d just used her scissors instead of his knife. Trimmed it neat, instead of stabbing into the mesh.
“Well, we hurt him pretty bad,” Ryder said soberly. “Him or somebody who looks like him.” Not his usual tone at all.
And what could make Ryder sound like that? Almost she liked him a little better.
Lee clicked her Juicy Fruit gum in her teeth a few times. Its flavor was about worn out.
Juicy Fruit gum! Long ago a lady in a pretty house off Norwood Boulevard had introduced her to Juicy Fruit, when Lee was a little girl, maybe eleven or so. Such a sweet, soft-spoken woman, old, with her leg in a heavy brace. Lee saw it all again—sometimes her mind just left like that and stood on the edge of her pictures. Now she was seeing Norwood Boulevard and long ago. Her imagination just worked that way—just carried her on off.
Lee had approached a door with fifteen little glass windowpanes to sell some of their extra tomatoes from the garden, door to door. “I don’t need any tomatoes,” the lady with the leg brace had said, “but let Aunt Pratt give you a stick of gum.” Juicy Fruit was the gum.
And then, after she said thank you so nicely, the old lady invited her in and had the maid fix Lee a pimento cheese sandwich, with the crust cut off the bread.
“What you daydreaming about, Lee?”
“Just a sweet old lady who gave me a sandwich when I was a kid. Off Norwood Boulevard. Aunt Pratt, she called herself.”
“I know her,” Ryder said. “We’re kin.”
Lee didn’t believe him for a minute. She knew he’d make up anything that made him sound important.
After a silence Ryder mumbled, “I kind of hate to say it.” He swallowed. “We took his balls off.”
“Oh, no, Ryder.” She made herself say it so sweet.
When you’re afraid, be sweet: it was as though the woman behind the glass door were telling her how to act. Aunt Pratt was trying to help her. Lee replayed how she’d just spoken—so soft, as though she was pleading with Ryder to be good. But that had already happened. He couldn’t change cutting that black man’s balls no matter how sweet she said Oh, no, with her chin tucked down and her mysterious brown eyes looking up at him.
And besides, he would hit her no matter how she looked up at him, pleaded with her eyes. She never could be too sweet or too pretty not to hit.
“You can look back at him,” Ryder said generously. (Whenever they drove downtown, he told her she must always look just at him, at the side of his face, that he would point out to her anything she ought to see on the street.)
Lee glanced back quickly at the colored man. All dressed in brown.
“I’d do it again,” he said. “We should of done a dozen. Should of, last spring.”
“Thing’s quieted down now,” she answered, her own voice quiet with fear.
“Don’t you ever sit by no nigger on no bus. You get off and walk if you have to. I don’t want Birmingham to end up like Montgomery. We can’t have that.”
She didn’t say anything. She didn’t have to. She knew he knew she wouldn’t dare or want to do such a thing. Her thoughts speeded up as though they were running away. Sometimes when he was bad, she knew he really had meant to be funny. Maybe she ought to laugh when he seemed mad. Maybe he got madder if she didn’t recognize his joking. He was sorry about the rolling pin; he had as good as said so. They were shopping now.
She heard his regretful voice again:We took his balls off. She saw him holding out the crotch of her panty hose, both his hands up in the panty hose, the ends of his fingers caught against the stretched film. The diamond shape was empty, the fabric cut away, jagged. She saw the palm of his hand through the clear space, saw his fingers stretching out the mesh away from the diamond space. His knife lay on the scratched metal top of the cook table.
“Didn’t I ever tell you how we done it?” He hesitated. (Was he regretful? Did he want her to say it was all right?) “Thought I had.”
“No, hon,” she whispered. She kept her eyes on him. Saw him swallow and his Adam’s apple go up and down. He licked his lips. Maybe he didn’t want to describe it. Or maybe he was relishing it. His high cheekbones seemed to press his eyes into slits. He popped in a square of Chiclets gum; she could hear his teeth crunching through the candy coating. She watched his hands. She thought, Unlock the car door—run!
“I held his shoulders. Helped to hold anyways.”
She could feel his hand on her own shoulders, last night, pushing her down, her crawling away fast, almost under the table.
“He was on his back, on the floor. Kicked like a jackrabbit.”
If it was her, she’d want to bite. She shivered. Bite like a werewolf woman. There were some, but just in that one comic book (quick, quick, she would picture them). There had been one werewolf woman just as powerful as any of the pack loping over moonlit hills. If Ryder was to come at her with a knife in his hand, she’d spring to bite his neck on the jugular vein.
“Took two to hold each leg. Two others just jerked his pants down. We had took him to a deserted house.”
He stopped again. Maybe he was sorry. But he glanced at her, made her ask.
“Then what?” she whispered obediently. She was almost too afraid for her voice to work, but he’d be mad if she didn’t ask.
“One held up his pecker. Other stretched out his balls a little—” Something like a sob escaped from Ryder. Suppose it was Ryder on his back, Lee thought. Ryder went on quietly, “Then they just did it.”
She sat silent, horrified. The silence was a ringing in her ears. The people on the street disappeared. She could feel the man’s balls in her own fingers. His parts were soft and helpless. She could feel the soft marbles inside the sack, the skin of the sack corrugated like corduroy with fear. His body trying to suck in his balls to hide them.
Again, she heard the strange rattle, or hiccup that had come from Ryder’s throat.
“Straight razor. Just a few swipes,” Ryder said. “That’s all it took.”
She couldn’t speak. It was like a hand was to her own throat. The stomach bile was
wanting to rise, and she fought to keep it down.
Suddenly, Ryder slapped the top of the steering wheel with the flat of his hand as though he was slapping a horse. “Man,” he said enthusiastically, “we poured turpentine on him. Still screaming like he’d gone crazy. Scalded him good with a quart can of turpentine so as he wouldn’t forget. Gave him the warning. Tell Shuttlesworth.”
Ryder gripped the steering wheel, tucked his lips into his mouth, wagged his head from side to side. “Man!” Then he laughed. “That turpentine saved his life. We didn’t mean to, but it stanched the blood flow. Saved him. We didn’t kill him. That was him, walking around.”
“I don’t remember when you did it.”
She didn’t want to remember. What had he done to her about that time? She wanted to think of something else.
What might she do to him, if she couldn’t stop herself and he was asleep on his back?
No: she wanted to think of something nice for right now.
Something for this moment driving to Loveman’s Department Store, something that had nothing to do with blood and screaming in an empty house. She wanted him to step on the gas; she didn’t want to look at colored Birmingham, all those colored folks looking at fall clothes in the windows. Step on the gas.
But those white robes she sewed—those robes, she saw them haunting, weaving around a black man. White-hooded men floating in robes she herself might of sewed, those men, one holding a straight razor, doing what they did. The colored man, pants gone, his naked brown legs kicking, and he would never be a man like them again. Bright blood on the hems of the starched white robes, robes they had given away on hangers, Christmas presents, with a big red bow at the base of the hanger hook.
But who’d want to be a man like them? Not her. She just hoped he’d had his children, that poor man. That man in the old brown hat, walking beside the Rexall drugstore.
Too much traffic to hurry, but Lee determined to put that stuff out of her mind. It was a fine, clear day. Actually, you couldn’t see the face beyond the hat brim.