Four Spirits

  After Krit climbed into the high bed, she always communed first with her dead mother, whose last illness with pneumonia and death had occurred in that same narrow hospital bed. To comfort herself and signal their union, Krit pressed her body into the mattress where Mama had lain. If we stayed in Crenshaw County at Helicon, none of this would have happened.

  Krit let herself drift back to childhood, back to South Alabama, when they’d all been together and no one had seen an automobile. World War I was still in the future. Sometimes Krit had ridden with Jenny, her friend from down the road, in her pony cart. Jenny’s hair, the color of taffy candy, was always caught up by a blue satin ribbon and hung in perfect long sausage curls down her back. Time to drift on back to when they’d all been happy. Someday I’ll have to tell the colored people to move out of my house.

  IN PRATT’S DREAMING HEAD, bombs exploded—World War II—and she feared her only son had been caught by the army, sent to the front lines, might be hurt or dying! Son! Son! And then his face under the helmet changed to Stella’s when she was a little girl and had run over wearing her mama’s cerise beret to entertain her crippled aunt. Stella brought her little friend Nancy with the big blue eyes and fringe eyelashes of a child movie star. “Let me be your nurse,” they’d both clamored, struggling over a glass of water and spilling most of it. What was it: that speech Stella always recited, so perfectly with such confidence, with such expression? Ladies and gentlemen, I stand before you to sit behind you, to tell you something I know nothing about. Admission is free; pay at the door; pull up a chair;and sit on the floor!

  Help! Pratt saw Son, bleeding, sitting on the floor, his body gushing from machine-gun fire in a hundred places. But now she was awake. And World War II had been over for years. Son was safe hidden somewhere. Maybe at Helicon. Maybe Chris slipped him food in the woods. Pratt hoped Krit wouldn’t ever turn the colored folks out from the house. Admission is free, pay at the door. Stella said the words as though they meant something.

  People all said Stella would probably be the first woman president of the United States. Someday everybody would forget the war. Pratt imagined the child president—I stand before you to sit behind you—who would grant her beloved Son a full pardon for desertion.

  AND STELLA? HER DREAM was of a white rose, lying centered on a piece of graph paper, where blue coordinates crossed. The pure white flower represented God. Careful of thorns, she picked up the rose, unreal flower, with a hand you could see through, like clear plastic. Very lightly, she tapped her crotch with the white rose. Suddenly, in Stella’s dream, a white dog, Pal, vomited a vile green substance. A bullet was fired along the trajectory of a hyperbola: it traveled past the slender tree trunks in the woods out through all space and time. Then it curved—because space, like a boomerang, is curved—and began rapidly to return.

  IN CAT CARTWRIGHT’S DREAMS, every night, not just this night when she got her first job but day after day, week after week, year after year, she was running, gloriously running till morning came. Over a field, she ran this June night, 1964, in Alabama, holding the hand of her beloved brother, Don, who was going to marry her dear friend Stella.

  Lionel’s Office

  SECOND STRAIGHT NIGHT, FOLKS, OF ONE HUNDRED BURNING-hot degrees after sunset! Brought to you by Golden Eagle Table Syrup, Pride of Alabam, and by me, Joe Rumore, Alabama’s only Eye-talian redneck. We sure wish we had a better forecast, but tomorrow looks just the same. No change anytime soon….

  Lionel Parrish snapped off the radio and said in his heartiest voice, “Come in, girls!” He appreciated that Arcola and Gloria, both fine students according to the dean, had come early. Oh, that Arcola, how she could smile! “Won’t you have a seat.” Arcola had a 1,000-kilowatt smile. Gloria had told him, shyly, she wanted to do something for her community.

  “Your fan work, Mr. Parrish?” Arcola asked.

  “No. Just look at it and think cool.”

  He wished he could get Gloria to look at anything other than her hands folded in her lap. How such a mole—she was a mole, Gloria, always hiding—thought she could teach high school dropouts was beyond his imagining. But somehow she had.

  “What you want to see us about?” Arcola was not there to waste time, but she looked at him like she expected candy. She had a big braid (probably artificial) across the top of her head; made it look as if she had a crown above her pretty face.

  What was that murmur? Why, Gloria had said something! (She had a good college record. Surely she talked sometime.) She said it again, a little louder. “Aren’t we going to wait for Christine?”

  He shrugged. “I ’spect Mrs. Taylor’s going to be late.” (Arcola smiled cheerfully. Her teeth were slightly outward spreading, but that just made it look like her smile was bursting right out.) Mr. Parrish went on. “What I want to know is, how things going?”

  Arcola almost laughed. “Well, you know we not got any books, but things going ’bout as well as they can, considering.”

  “How ’bout the boys from Neighborhood Youth Corps?”

  “Only reason they come to school is they’re paid for it.” (Did Arcola wink at him?)

  “How they fitting in?” he asked.

  “I smell a little cough syrup, don’t you, Gloria?” (Gloria seemed deaf to all questions.) “Some of ’em nippin’ codeine. No problem.”

  “They worn out time they come to class,” Mr. Parrish said. He wished Arcola had higher expectations for her students than mere physical presence. “Most hasn’t ever had a job before,” he added.

  “They okay,” she answered. “I can’t complain.”

  “Gloria, what do you think of them?”

  “Yes, sir.” Gloria spoke to her hands. (Like his wife, Jenny, Gloria hadn’t learned the importance of looking a person in the eye.)

  “Everything okay?”

  “Yes, sir.” (Matilda, his mistress, would look into the gizzard of anybody—boldly. He loved the bold overtures she made to him.)

  “They aren’t giving you any smart talk?”

  “Well, Mr. Parrish.” (Gloria had a pretty little voice, but she wouldn’t look up.) “I’m a little bit afraid of them.”

  Arcola quickly said, “You scared? After you done sat in at Woolworth’s?” She didn’t wait for Gloria to answer. “Aw, these boys not any trouble. We got it under control, Mr. Parrish.”

  Like an arrow, the shriek of the telephone entered Mr. Parrish’s heart. He didn’t want obscenities coming in over the phone line when the girls were in his office. But they were looking at him. He had to answer. He could scarcely believe Gloria was somebody who would sit in. But she had been with Christine at the Gaslight. The sensation of dancing with Matilda passed through his body.

  Turned out, the telephone questions were civil. He watched Arcola and Gloria listening to his side of the call; naturally, his volunteer teachers were curious to know how the head of H.O.P.E. would respond to inquiries. Efficiently, with dignity. “Yes, we run the night school here…. It’s open to anybody…. Yes, black or white. It’s for people who want to pass the GED test…. You’re welcome.”

  “Only we ain’t never had,” Arcola spoke sassily, “a single white student.”

  “I’m thinking about taking on a couple of white lady teachers, though.”

  There, he’d said it.

  “I be glad to work with ’em.” (Blessed nonchalance. This was one well-balanced young woman.) “How come you want ’em?” she asked and picked up Vulcan to suck on his head. (Mr. Parrish wanted to tell her that wasn’t a sanitary thing to do, but she sure did look cute, her tongue running over Vulcan’s curls just like he was a lollipop.)

  “Funding. Funding, for one thing.”

  “Suits me. Gloria, too.”

  He might as well tell them his concern: “I’m a little bit worried about Mrs. Taylor.”

  “She get along with Judy Cohen all right,” Arcola reassured.

  “Berkeley, California. These two new are from here.”

  “Well, w
hat they like?”

  “They both got brand fresh B.A. degrees.”

  “Guess that means they’ll be over us.”

  The whole head of Vulcan had disappeared into her mouth. God! How did she expect him to ignore that.

  “Do you have a B.A. degree?” he asked.

  “I don’t care,” Arcola said. (Where did she get the ability to relax like that. Practically limp.) “I’m just stating facts, ain’t I, Gloria? Christine’s not going to like this.” She smiled at him again. “You send ’em to me. I’ll take care of ’em.” (Yes, Arcola’s fat braid across the top of her head was like a coronet.)

  Gloria said quietly, “Reason Christine so bitter—one of those little girls at the church last September—she was Christine’s cousin.”

  Mr. Parrish stared at Gloria as though she were some kind of bomb that had just detonated without exploding. Then he heard it again, the blast erupting through black children gathering after Sunday school. Burning through their bodies, through brick walls. He knew Arcola and Gloria were hearing the blast, too. The exact cadence of that sound, of what you had hoped it wasn’t and knew it was. Sunday morning, September 15, 1963, in Birmingham. You knew where you were when the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bomb exploded, you knew whose face you looked into next. Into Jenny’s. Thank God they were late that day. With Jenny and his children, he had heard the thud of the bomb, then the first grief screaming over the rooftops.

  That moment was like a place in his brain. He could visit it anytime. They all could.

  “I didn’t know she was related,” Arcola said, her voice flat.

  “Christine was there with me at Sixteenth Street,” Gloria said. “That day.”

  Mr. Parrish reached for the ringing phone. When the small, cramped voice of obscenity probed his ear, he shouted, “Go to hell, you mother-fucking bastard!” He slammed down the receiver and held it down. He couldn’t let loose. His hand trembled.

  “Everybody gets crank calls sometime,” Arcola said soberly. “We bound to get some. Sooner or later.”

  Mr. Parrish decided to sound official: “Thanks for stopping by.” He lifted his hand from the receiver. It was hard to do, as though magnetism or electricity bonded his hand to the black phone. “Any problems—let me know. I want to keep those kids in school if we can. Keep the local white teachers, too.”

  In the Oven

  THERE THEY ARE, GLORIA THINKS, PALE BROWN HAIR IN the wheelchair. Thin woman pushing. Blond. How can Arcola just go up to people like that. Broken leg I reckon but no cast. Can’t look anymore, but they right in front of me! Sound pleasant. I want to look again. I got to look. There! I must of said “Hello.” Short boy-hair and blond shoulder-flip. We got your groups ready. Go there! Go there! You can’t hear the crippled one move, her chair just roll so silent. She roll over to the science area. Arcola gonna help her. Yes, she does. Arcola pulls down the wall chart: human body, skin all gone; some muscles pulled back, heart showing, naked eyeball.

  Gloria wishes she was home practicing the cello, or had it here to hide behind. She makes herself begin to teach the small group whose chair-desks encircle her.

  “I want you to study these history dates. See how much you can remember. I wrote it out for you. Each got a page to study, but I want it back. Just start learning.”

  (Because I’ve got to listen and my heart thumping so bad: This is integration! Here it is in this room. This is what they all talking about!)

  “I’M MISS STELLA SILVER—” (Gloria listens to her prissy white voice) “—and I’d like to know who you are. Would you sign this page, and also, please introduce yourselves.”

  “My name Charles Powers.”

  “I’m Mrs. Agnes LaFayt. It’s spelled F-A-Y-T, but said Fate, like our Fate is in his hands.”So gentle and kind, Mrs. LaFayt, near ’bout fifty. Comes every night. Good influence on the young students. Mrs. LaFayt reminds Gloria of her grandmother in the country.

  “My name Samuel Powers.”

  Teacher says, “Oh, you’re brothers then?”But they’re not and his name isn’t Sam Powers.

  “Yes, ma’am,”they both say, and she don’t know any better.

  “I’m Michael Powers.”

  “Really?” she says. My group starting to listen in, too. Let ’em.

  “We all brothers.”

  Next boy, number four—I ought to learn their names. “I’m Charles Powers.”

  “I thought he was Charles Powers.”

  “We first cousins. Our mothers was identical twins.”

  “You sure do have a pretty name, Miss Silver.”That’s Agnes LaFayt. She trying to help out. “My niece’s named Stella.”

  “How many nieces you got, Sam-Man?”Don’t you mock Mrs. Agnes, smarty boy.

  “Miss Silver, you want to know my nieces’ names?”Smarty, he’s going nasty. “They named Denise, Carole, Cynthia, Addie Mae…. You ever heard of my nieces?”

  Agnes says, “That’s not true, and you know it.” She sounds so sad. “Don’t do dishonor.”

  Miss Silver just says she’ll get the names off the paper, but they won’t stop.

  “Truth is we all kin,” one says like he’s doing her a favor to explain it.

  “Yeah, we one big family,” another says, but Miss Silver is through with all their nonsense.

  “My job is to help you to be able to pass the high school equivalency test in English.”

  “How can this be a school when they don’t give us no books?”

  She scoots her chair up closer to them. She’s not going to let on scared. No. She move closer, her knee just about touching his.

  “I wish there were books, but the program can’t afford them. We just have to cope.”

  Mrs. LaFayt nods her head in agreement. “When Jesus taught the multitude, he didn’t use any book. I don’t think we need books, necessarily, to learn.”

  “That’s right. Least I hope it’s right.” Miss Silver gives Mrs. LaFayt a little smile. Gloria thinks that Miss Silver isn’t stupid; she knows who’s on her side. “Would you all please move in closer so we don’t disturb the other groups.”

  “It most too hot to sit close together,” Charles says, but the others give their chair-desks a little scoot up. Charles rocks his desk, but it doesn’t go anywhere. Charles demonstrated in May, got knocked down by the fire hose.

  Mrs. LaFayt acknowledges Charles’s point: “It sure is hot. Maybe I can bring us some fans one day before too long.”

  Charles glares at Miss Silver like everything’s her fault.

  “Bring yourself close. I don’t bite.”Miss Silver wants them to like her, be in with her. She takes one big breath, sits up straight and tall—maybe she’s done this before—and she’s going to just pitch in:

  “A lot of people say, ‘He don’t do this or that’ but that’s not correct. You’re supposed to say, ‘He doesn’t do this or that.’ Let’s each make up a sentence using ‘he doesn’t’ properly. For example—I’ll start—‘He doesn’t chew gum in class.’ Now, Agnes—”

  “He doesn’t…understand the lesson.”

  Agnes is trying to tell her something more than grammar, but Miss Silver she’s going to just go ahead, after a little nod to Agnes. Then she nods to Mr. Next-to-Agnes.

  “He doesn’t like…the heat.”

  And who would? My dress sticking to my back; sweat balls rolling down between my breasts. Windows jammed down ’cause there ain’t no screens, and one billion mosquitoes waiting outside. You be outside in the dark, you looking in, you see us here, all our little groups, light on, working away.

  “He doesn’t like the fuzz.”

  Ulna, radius, humerus—the science group with the crippled girl, all in unison. Suddenly Gloria remembers where she’s seen Cat before—at the funeral. Sitting outside the church in the crowd. In her wheelchair. Yes, Gloria remembers the girl in the wheelchair.

  “He doesn’t like to work on no Bessemer Highway.”

  “Good,” Miss Stella says, like she’s breat
hing out a balloon. “Good grammar is the highway to a better job.”

  “He don’t like the teacher,” Charles Powers says. And the house of breath pops just like a pin pricks a balloon.

  But she says, “Doesn’t. He doesn’t like—”

  “The teacher,” Charles insists.

  “Right. He doesn’t like the teacher,” she says, like it was any old sentence. “You say it.”

  “He doesn’t like the teacher.” But Mr. Smarty-Pants Charles mumbles because he’s embarrassed.

  “But we do like the teacher,” Mrs. LaFayt says. So calm.

  “Thanks. Now let’s try the positive side: ‘He does work hard.’ ”

  Mrs. LaFayt catches the ball: “He does like school.”

  “He like to have a cigarette. You mind if we smoke?” Sam West trying to follow the leader.

  If she lets hers, then mine sure tell me what to do. All my students want to leave off important dates in American history and go smoke.

  “Not supposed to smoke in school,” she says. “I’m sort of allergic to smoke. Now, if you were describing someone smoking a cigarette, what would you say? ‘He smokes Winstons,’ or ‘He smoke Winstons’?”

  “He smoke Winstons.”

  “No, that’s not correct. It’s ‘He smokes Winstons. I smoke;you smoke;he, she, or it smokes.”

  “I burning up in here,” Charles says, tugging at his shirt collar. His clothes look like he’s slept in them a week.

  “Miss, you mind if I be excused to get a drink of water?” Sam West asks.

  “ ’Course not. You don’t have to ask about that sort of thing. You know. Just go get a drink when you want one.”

  Wrong answer, Miss Stella Silver. Give an inch they take a mile. There they go! One, two, three, four, five. Ain’t but Mrs. LaFayt left. Oh-oh. Here’s Christine steaming through the classroom door like a late battleship.