CHAPTER FIVE
“Rachel told me your daddy got a telephone call kinda early that night,” Hubert Templeton says. “She said he said hello and then he just listened. When he hung up, he started hollerin’ for your mother. They was all dressed to go to some party at Miss Eulalie and Mister Clayton’s house that night, but they changed their minds about all that. They went into a room to talk private, and when they come out, your mama was pale as a ghost, Rachel told me. Your mama grabbed up Rachel and said, we got to get the baby dressed, and your daddy, he called me on the phone to ask me to get over there quick as possible in my car. So that’s what I did.”
I ask him, “What did my father tell you?”
“He said it was better if I didn’t know.”
“He didn’t give you any explanation?”
Hubert shakes his head, no. “You got to understand, we was used to jumpin’ into action without no explanation. That’s how Hostel was. Quick action, your daddy allus said, quick response. Move, he allus said, before anybody knows you’re gone. Somebody would give us a name and alocation and we’d go hurryin’ off to pick that person up. Take ’em to a safe place like your mama and daddy’s house. So when he said, come on over, I just did what he said, and I didn’t think nothing about it, not until I saw this time was different.”
“My heart is breaking.”
Michael Folletino supposedly said that to his wife when he took the baby from her arms. There were three people, not counting Lyda, who were there to hear him say it, although only one of them remembers it like that and the other two kind of doubt it. But whether he actually said those words, or not, apparently they all saw the truth of it in his face. They say he looked shattered. He appeared to be a man who was desperately going through the motions of trying to save himself and everyone he loved, but who had already lost all hope that he could manage to do that. The witnesses—one maid, one cook, one yardman, all black—saw and heard how Lyda, herself, refused to give in to that despair until Michael and the baby were out of her sight, driving away in their car. Then, supposedly, Lyda leaned her face against the back of the front door and wept hard and deep.
“It has all gone wrong,” she is alleged to have said.
One of the witnesses claims that Lyda also said “my baby,” and another witness thinks she said “we can’t escape from this.”
But memory is short and time is long, so who knows if that is true?
When Hubert drove up, Michael and the baby went off with him.
“We took you to a black motel and rented a room and left you in it.”
Hubert, former Hostel member, former employee andfriend of my parents, isn’t glad to meet me, and he’s even less happy to tell me what he remembers of the night my parents vanished. Apparently, he used to love them, but no more.
He explains that it was a “black” motel catering only to Negroes and that my father was extraordinarily lucky it even existed on that road between Sebastion and Birmingham. Most black families, when they traveled, stayed in homes of kinfolk, he tells me, or they slept in their vehicles for lack of any hotel that would accept them along their routes. But there was a tiny sprinkling of black-owned lodgings and the highway between my hometown and the “big city” had one of them.
“Rundown, nasty place,” Hubert describes it. “Where nobody’d think to look for a white child. I rented the room with the cash your daddy gave to me. One buck fifty for the night, pay in advance at the front desk, and I asked for a crib, like he told me to. I remember the old man, the owner, he said, you not gonna let that baby cry, is you? I assured him that you were already asleep, that you slept as sound as money all through the nights. I think you were, in fact, asleep in the backseat where you daddy had laid you down on blankets your mamma gave him. I expect you were lulled to sleep in the car on the ride to the motel. I don’t remember you even letting out so much as a squeak. And you hardly stirred when I carried you inside—your daddy stayed hidden down low so nobody’d see him and wonder. I took you in and waited for the owner to bring up the crib. When he did, I didn’t let him see you, kept your face and your little hands hidden deep in your blankets. He didn’t care. He wasn’t a grandma who’d want a peek at you. He didn’t even bother to make up the crib for me, as I remember. But that was good. I just closed the door in his face and made up your crib and laid you in it and even then I don’t think you let out a peep.”
Hubert then walked out of the room, closing the doorwithout locking it, and then he got back in the car with Michael.
“But your daddy, he couldn’t bear it, to drive off like that without seeing you were safe in the room. He felt like a coward, I expect, huddling down like that, asking me to take you in. So real quick, he got out and ran into the room where you were sleeping. I imagine he just looked down at you, because he would have been afraid to wake you up with a hug or a kiss. It was important for nobody to find you yet. Later, later, we were counting on your crying to bring people around to look in on you. Eventually, somebody was going to complain about the baby crying. Or the maid was going to find you.”
The two men left a bottle of milk in the crib with the baby.
“Your mama, she wrote out a card where she spelled out your name and little things about you like what you would eat and what you wouldn’t eat, and how whoever found you should take you to your aunt and uncle and show them the card, which said to give them a good reward.
“It scares me now,” Hubert admits, “to think of doing that, of trusting strangers to do right with a baby. Couldn’t ask nobody who actually knew your folks to go get you, for fear of getting them in awful trouble by association. We had to leave you to the proverbial kindness of strangers. Lord, I don’t know if I could do such a thing today. The things that could have happened to you, it chills my blood to consider them.
“But I guess we did right. Nobody harmed you, or took you for their own, or tried to sell you, or gave you away to bad people. They just did exactly what your mama’s card asked them to do. Your aunt and uncle gave a twenty-dollar reward.”
His smile is sardonic.
“I suspect your mama and daddy thought you wasworth a little more than that. They’d have been angry at your aunt and uncle for being so cheap.”
Then he leans toward me. “Listen here to me. Maybe you wish your mama had left a letter for you. Maybe you think they should both have written to you, for you to read later about what happened and how they loved you. But you’ve got to understand there wasn’t time, for one thing, and that people didn’t do that kind of thing then, you know, like today practically every grandparent leaves a video for their grandkids to hear about their lives. Everybody’s got memoirs and albums and such. But your folks were too young and too busy for that, and I kind of wonder if they couldn’t leave any written words for you because they knew they couldn’t tell the truth, not all of it anyway. Anyway, they turned—whatever they said—they took a chance of getting their friends in trouble and most of us had already lived through near all the trouble that we or our families could stand.
“When your father came back to the car he looked sad and grim as death, but he wasn’t crying and he didn’t say a word to me. I didn’t talk either, as I recall. What was there to say by that time? We drove back fast to pick up your mother, and when she got in the car, she insisted on me staying up front with your daddy. Lyda, your mama, she got in back and sat there rigid as stone, staring out the car windows. I’ll never forget. I thought she looked held together by nothin’ but sheer will. I think for a little while she was mad at your daddy, mad at him for being the child of Communists, mad at him for not protecting her and you, mad because he couldn’t keep their fate from coming down on them like it did.
“The three of us, we rode silent out of Sebastion.
“I was past being scared, I guess.
“Eventually, I don’t recall where, I sensed your mama move. I turned my head to look at her and I saw her placeher right hand on your daddy’s right shoulder. She sc
ooched up to the edge of the backseat until she could lay her head against the back of his driver’s seat, with her hand pressed down on his shoulder. Your daddy, he tilted his head back, as if he wanted to lay it against her head, but they couldn’t quite reach. But they drove like that for a long way, with nobody talkin’.
“They let me out at a safe house. Safe for me, not for them, I thought. I shook hands with both of them. Your mother, she said, ‘Thank you, Hubert,’ and your daddy told me to watch my rear end, and then I stepped out of the car and watched them drive away.
“I never saw either of them again.”
He grimaces, looks me in the eye. In my ears, his rendition has sounded like the memories of a conflicted man who can’t quite make up his mind whether my parents betrayed him, or not. One minute, in the telling, he’s portraying Michael as a loving father; the next minute, he acts as if I’m pulling memories out of him that are even more bitter than they sound on the surface. But what he says now is unambiguous. “Later, after I heard what they done, I was glad of it. I been glad never to see them again.”
“But you must have asked, didn’t you? Didn’t you ask my father what was going on? I mean, you left his baby in a motel, you hurried back to get my mother. You must have wanted to know—”
“Yeah, I did, but like I said, he told me I was better off not knowin’.”
“What did you thinkwas happening?”
“Well, I figured some ol’ cracker white boys had found out your mama and daddy was helpin’ Negroes and they was out to kill ’em for it. It seemed like a logical explanation to me. And if that was the case, your daddy was right—it was surely better for me, the less I knew.”
“What if that wasn’tthe case?”
He shakes his head again. “That’s why I get so confused when I tell about it. I get mixed up between telling it how it felt to me at the time, and telling it like it really was.”
“But how do you know?”
Hubert looks at me as if I’m the backward child of those parents. “Because they was on the crackers’ side, that’s how. That’s what Mister Clayton found out. We all know that now.”
Lyda looked as shocked as any of them when the car came back up the driveway less than twenty minutes after leaving for the motel. Nobody had expected it to go that quickly.
Michael left the engine running, with Hubert sitting inside the car.
From behind curtains, they all watched him run back up to get her. Hubert’s fiancée, Rachel, kept an eye on him, still in the car, as well.
“I haven’t had time to pack anything,” Lyda protested, when he said, “Come on.”
He put an arm around her and pulled her out of their house without giving her any chance to grab a sweater or even her purse. “It won’t matter,” the witnesses heard him say. “We have to go now. Leave everything—” They say that he looked back over her shoulder in the direction of the three dark people standing in the deepest shadows of the front hall. His eyes seemed to say to them, We’re sorry. You’ll be safe. Don’t worry.
The three of them knew that was true. He was sorry. Look what he was losing. And they themselves were most likely in no danger. And they wouldn’t worry. They were good at not worrying about things they couldn’t control, especially when it came to white people. They didn’t, any of them, assume their employers would get out of this all right; they just knew to their bones that this no longer involved them.
They say that Lyda didn’t look back.
How could she have, one of the witnesses had thought, sympathetically, at the time. If Mrs. Folletino looked back she would surely turn into the salt of tears.
As for the child . . .
They had, themselves, lost children—at least one child each—to poverty and its attendant, stalking weaknesses, illnesses, and deaths. Their own hearts had already been broken and scarred over. They couldn’t feel for the child without aching for their own lost babies, and so they didn’t. To a person, they chose to believe she would survive, and they were right.
I did.
Almost forty years later, Eulalie Fisher recalls it.
“I should have been paying attention to his speech, I suppose, but all I could think of was: where are they? Why didn’t they come to my party? Every single person I invited had R.S.V.P.’d yes to me. So either they were lying then, or something had happened since then. I sat there in my living room with the Wiegans, the Goodwins, and the Reeses, and all I could think of was, how come not a single one of those bigoted bastards and their mean ol’ wives has crossed my threshold tonight? I remember somebody suggested that maybe they were making some kind of a ‘statement.’ But a statement of what? What were they trying to get across to us by being so rude to me like that? Did they know about Hostel? Or did they finally figure out we thought different from them? Were they drawing a line in the dirt?”
The only people left to watch the big speech were the Hostel members.
They were also the only ones who had fully realized that something dangerous might be up. “The more we sat around there by ourselves,” Eulalie recalls, “the morenervouswe got. Then the speech came on—the one where Kennedy said he was going to fully commit the federal government to the cause of civil rights, because it was the moral thing to do. I know there are people who still say he had a lot of nerve talking about morality, but nobody ever said Kennedy didn’t knowthe difference between right and wrong. Anyway, you’d have thought we’d of cheered, being all by ourselves like that, in good company, so to speak, with nobody to have to pretend in front of. But we didn’t. The truth is, we were scared as the dickens. That fat Lackley kept walkin’ to my living room windows, pulling back my drapes, and peeking outside until I finally had to tell him to sit down. I don’t remember a single sound of traffic. The whole town seemed to have gone silent on us.”
Eulalie sent her extra party help on home to their black part of town. And then just a few minutes later, she even told the live-in help to leave.
“Go to your daughter’s,” she instructed her maid.
“Stay with your mama,” she advised their gardener/driver.
“Eulalie,” Clayton commented upon overhearing her, “don’t you think they can decide for themselves where they want to spend the night?”
She started to snap at him but suddenly realized the truth of what he was implying—that she was treating a grown woman and man as if they were children or slaves—and Eulalie Fisher flushed with embarrassment. She leaned forward so that Clayton caught her in his arms and gently embraced her.
“So much of the worst of us is purely habit,” she murmured.
“That’s the truth, my darling,” he said. “We’re all unconscious creatures, even the best of us, and even at the best of times.”
“I’m frightened, Clayton.”
“Don’t be, Eulalie. We’ll be all right.”
“Oh, Clay!” She pulled away from him in exasperation. “Even you can’t possibly find a silver lining in this!”
He smiled tenderly at her. “But my dear, we haven’t even seen a cloud yet.”
“No cloud! What do you call the absence of thirty-two guests at my party?”
“Good riddance?”
“Oh, Clay, you’re impossible!”
Even in her indignation and anxiety, Eulalie had to laugh at his joke. That’s what he could always do for her, make her laugh when she didn’t want to. It annoyed her no end, but she needed it, and she knew that she did, especially tonight. With a grimace of exasperation, she took his hand and pulled him back into the living room to be with their guests.
When the speech was over—and just shortly before Medgar Evers got ambushed in Philadelphia, Mississippi—the remaining six guests started nervously gathering their belongings. One by one, and fairly quickly, they moved up to Eulalie to give her a peck on the cheek and to Clayton, who kissed the ladies good night and shook their husbands’ hands. To one another they said ambiguously, though the meaning was clear to all of them, “Y’all call us if
you need anything tonight, y’hear?”
“And that’s when it happened,” Eulalie remembers, with a shudder.
The first sign of trouble was the sound of the doorbell, which Clayton went to answer by himself. His guests were still in the living room, finishing their good nights to his wife. He returned to them with two suited FBI agents at his back. Twenty additional agents and local police officerscame around each side of the great old house, all of them carrying weapons, and some of those guns were drawn.
“As if it wasn’t Miss Eulalie’s house!” Eulalie, herself, remarks indignantly, many years later. “As if I had submachine guns stashed in my potato salad and Bolsheviks under my bed!”
That was bad enough, but it was going to get a lot worse.
The eight members of Hostel—Goodwins, Wiegans, Reeves, and Fishers—were walked—not driven—down to the Sebastion jail that night.
It was a deliberate public spectacle that drew vicious attention: hollering, name-calling, tomatoes and rocks thrown, horns honking, even a few hotheads flinging themselves at the detainees and getting in a few punches at the men before the agents or cops slowly . . . so slowly . . . pulled them off.
“That parade they made of us, that was the point,” Eulalie recalls from the safety of her boudoir forty years later. “They had put out the word before we even set foot downtown. They wanted to show us off so everybody in town would know who their enemies were.” She takes a puff, more like a sip, from her cigarette and delicately releases the smoke into the pretty room. “Nothing was ever the same in Sebastion after that, which is maybe the way it should have been, all along.”
They were paraded to the jail, fearing for their lives with every step.
But nobody in the dinner party was arrested that night, and not ever.
Frightened to death, yes, and threatened with prosecution, jail time, and worse, but not a single one arrested. They were all released after an hour of hassling, and they were even driven back to their homes.