The meeting was called to order by Don Gilmore, a fiftyish, white-haired fellow who owned a hardware store. He favored plaid shirts and corduroys. The first few minutes passed tediously as he thanked the various women who’d provided baked goods for the meeting and the men who’d hung signs to spread word about tonight.
“To go over financials real quick, first of all thank you to everyone who has contributed to the fund. We’ve spoken to two of the Negro households so far and plan to meet with the third soon. We don’t yet have a sale, I’m sorry to say. I think they’re hesitant to sell at too much of a loss, but if we can come close to raising what they all paid, I’m sure we can convince them. What’s the latest number, Paul?”
In the front row sat Thames, the plumber, who apparently served as CAHP treasurer. He replied from his seat that they were up to four and a half thousand dollars, with one half of households contributing.
“Now, that’s just what I’m talking about,” Gilmore said. “It’s great we have that much, and there’s still half the neighborhood that hasn’t contributed yet. If you haven’t, please do your part, folks. The more contributors we get, the less each household needs to give. Now, I’m just a humble carpenter but I get simple math like that.”
Cassie looked around the audience and saw only one of the police officers she knew who lived in Hanford Park. Like Denny, most of them worked nights.
She raised her hand and stood. “In addition to giving money, I was wondering what else people could be doing to help. Like you said, we can’t wait too long, and I’m not someone who thinks we can just talk away problems.”
“You’re my kind of lady,” Gilmore said. “There are definitely some steps we all can take. First of all, be extra visible; it’s a great time of year for it, but really, make a point of taking walks and being out in your front yards, gardening and whatnot. And I’m not just saying that because we sell gardening equipment at my shop.” An awkward laugh. “Although we do. And we got a sale going. Point is, be out there and keep your eyes open. If you see any Negroes driving down your street, make note of it: the kind of car, the license plate, time of day. If they appear to be with a Realtor of some sort, then definitely make note of that. We have allies on real estate boards and we know lawyers, so we can make life difficult for them.
“Second, if any Realtor should come knocking on your door asking you to sell, tell ’em no. Be real clear about that.” Applause, first a bit and then the whole room. “No matter how strong some of us are, we cannot preserve Hanford Park if even a sizable minority of folks choose this as the time to move out. So even if you were considering selling for unrelated reasons, like you’re older and want a smaller place, I beseech you, folks: just wait a little while longer, because if you list your property now—even if you have no intention of selling to Negroes—you could still be taken advantage of. These realty folks have done all kinds of dirty tricks—they might make you think you’re selling to a nice white couple, and a white man even signs the papers at the closing, but then on moving day who should show up but some Negroes. So hold off. We need to hold each other accountable—sometimes all it takes is one more house.”
A man toward the back raised his hand and asked, “If we do see Negroes looking around, what should we say to them?”
“I would politely inform them that this is not a transitional neighborhood. They’ve most likely been told it is, which is why they’re looking here. We need to let them know in no uncertain terms that they’ve been misinformed, and that they should do their shopping elsewhere.” Applause. Gilmore added, “But we want to avoid confrontation. Assume good intentions, clear up their misunderstandings, and ask them to leave.”
Dale muttered under his breath, “Gimme a break.”
“I expect most of you have heard this by now,” Gilmore said, “but there was an incident here a couple of nights ago. One of the Negroes in Hanford Park was roughed up. We don’t—”
He was cut off by applause. First just one pair of hands, then several. Dale was especially quick to join in, Cassie noticed, but she and Sue Ellen held back.
Gilmore held out his hands. “Now, now.” He grinned awkwardly. “I don’t condone that, and that’s not what this association is about. I helped form this group so we could resolve things without violence, all right?” A few murmurs of assent, a few grumbles. “We all know there are different ways this can go, but I believe we can save our neighborhood without having incidents like that. I don’t know who roughed the Negro up, and I hope that person isn’t in this room and isn’t a part of CAHP.”
Dale made a scoffing sound, quietly. Sue Ellen hushed him.
Gilmore continued, “It shows how important it is that we get to work, because a few more events like that could backfire. If people start thinking violence can break out at any time, that ruffians rule our streets, then we all lose.”
When the meeting ended, Cassie waded through the crowd and approached Thames.
“Excuse me, Mr. Thames? Cassie Rakestraw. You were by a few nights ago and my husband wasn’t in. Please add this to the till.” She handed him forty dollars.
“Thank you so much,” the plumber said, he and his wife smiling.
When Cassie stepped back, Sue Ellen and Dale were right behind her. Her sister-in-law said quietly, “We should give, too, Dale.”
“Aw, thing is, I left my wallet at home.” He patted his pockets sheepishly. “We’ll get ’em next time.”
20
THREE KNOCKS, THE third extra hard. He could hear shushing from inside.
“Get outta here!” Mrs. Cannon said through the door.
“Please open up, ma’am. I just want to talk to you.”
Silence. Then a small, hidden sound. Its very smallness was what made it so noticeable, the pitch of it, how unlike everything else in the environment: different from the sounds of engines driving past, from the occasional honks, even from the birds calling out above. My son.
“Don’t be coming here, Jeremiah! My husband owns a gun.”
“I’m not here for no trouble, I just want to talk. Please, Mrs. Cannon.”
He counted, one, two, three, and at about five the door opened.
“What do you want?” demanded Julie’s mother. She was very short, almost a dwarf. Lord only knew how she had produced a beauty like Julie. They did have the same eyes, though, long and narrow and capable of seeing through you, into you, wherever you didn’t want them to see.
“You tossed all my letters, didn’t you?”
“What are you talking about?”
“She said I never wrote her. I wrote her every week. Letter after letter. She sent me a few in the beginning, then they stopped.”
“Don’t ask me to explain how that girl makes her decisions.”
“She thought I stopped writing her because you were throwing out my letters before she could see ’em. You wanted me gone from her life.”
“You were gone from her life. You were in jail, boy.”
“I know where I was. I know very well where I was.”
“You got Julie in a fix and then you got yourself into even more trouble, and that’s that. She’s moved on to better things.”
“I was expecting more of an apology.”
“From me? Please. Find your people up in Chicago, Jeremiah. They can help you, but we can’t. Julie has herself a real man now and she ain’t wasting no time on you.”
He saw movement behind her. She noticed the track of his eyes and she tried to block his view, but he spotted the boy down the hallway, in overalls and a white T-shirt. Lamplight framed his face perfectly, an almost Christ-like aura around his hair.
“Hey, there, son.” Jeremiah smiled without meaning to. “Do you know who I am?”
“Don’t you talk to him!”
This was why Jeremiah was still alive. This was why he had been spared. This was why his time in prison had finally ended and he was breathing again in this strange world.
“Come on out and say hello.”
“I said, don’t you talk to him!” She tried to close the door, but he stuck his foot in it. The shoe was an old and half-rotten one he’d found in a garbage barrel, and her surprising strength nearly broke his foot. He leaned a shoulder into the door and forced it back open. As he stepped into the room he saw her fall, the squat body and its surrounding robe billowing out, a wooden table toppling, a dish shattering on the floor.
She screamed at him to leave, her scream less loud than he’d expected, pain cutting it down. The boy was running away.
“No, come back, boy!” He’d frightened the kid, and he didn’t want that and didn’t want the old lady on the floor, either, even though she deserved it, just punishment for how she’d come between him and Julie. Not even jail would have been enough to break that love, he knew, but the old lady had thwarted them, had probably even thrown some Gullah hex on him. The kid was running, turning a corner in the hallway, and a door slammed.
“Come on, boy, I didn’t mean to hurt her!”
He stepped around Mrs. Cannon, who was cursing him now in her ancient tongue, surely setting pagan spirits upon him, and he arrived at the narrow door the kid had slammed. He didn’t even know the boy’s name! The kid was so many worlds away from Jeremiah, yet also so close, just this thin door between them. It was locked.
“Jeremiah, you leave that boy be!”
He rattled the knob. “Come on, boy, I just want to talk to you. Daddy wants to meet you.”
He could hear the boy crying now, screaming for his grammy.
Faster than he would have thought, Mrs. Cannon was on her feet and upon him, hitting him with an umbrella. He knocked it away after a few blows. She winced, gripping one of her wrists.
“I’m calling the police! You get out of here!”
He transferred his rage to the door now, pounding on it again and again and not relenting even after he felt the door give and heard the soft crunch of old wood tearing from its hinges.
The little boy inside was still crying and screaming.
Lord, what am I doing? What have I done? And what would you have me do?
He paused for a moment, overcome. The old lady was screaming for help. He screamed, too, for the child to come out, explaining that he was his father, that he must be obedient, and Jeremiah was still in the midst of this torrent of parental advice when one of his hands was pulled behind his back.
Another arm across his chest and someone was hitting him, jabbing him hard in the back of the ribs. The air went out of him and he tried to get away but even as his feet moved some other force was guiding him, manipulating him, and then he was across the room and into the side of a couch, whose arm came just a crucial inch below his privates but still he hit against it so hard that he doubled over and collapsed on it, someone very heavy pinning him down.
He heard the click and felt metal around his wrists. In a way, he had felt not completely dressed without it these last few days.
The man wouldn’t stop yelling, so Champ Jennings pressed his head down a bit to muffle his voice with pillows.
“I said can it.”
“Ma’am, do you know this man?” Dewey Edmunds asked. This was always the first or second question asked in such a dispute, sometimes following, “Are you all right?”
She didn’t answer the question, instead running to the door that Jeremiah had been pounding on.
“Who’s in there?” Dewey asked. He was still holding his club, though he didn’t expect he’d need it again on this fellow.
“My grandbaby!” the old lady replied. She knocked on the door, trying to soothe the terrified child, coaxing him to open up, explaining that he was safe now.
“That’s my son!” the man screamed after managing to lift his head off the pillow enough.
Dewey and Champ exchanged glances. “Is that true, ma’am?” Dewey asked.
“He’s no good! He a thief and a crook and he just now got outta jail! We don’t want nothing to do with him!”
They had been only a block away when they’d heard the screaming, and as they’d run down the street they’d seen the door wide open, the old lady on the floor. These calls were never pleasant, and this one was becoming as complicated as the rest.
“Ma’am, is this the boy’s father?”
Even with the pillow again muffling Jeremiah’s mouth, he was clearly screaming, “Yes!”
“He a murderer! He not welcome in this house!”
Champ reached into the man’s pockets. “Got any ID, buddy?”
He did, one that had been issued mere days ago, probably when he’d been released from prison. Jeremiah Tanner, twenty-four, his address listed simply as the “City of Atlanta,” as if prison officials thought Negroes were animals who wandered rootless through the streets.
The kid was still screaming on the other side of the bathroom door and Dewey, father of two, couldn’t think with it. Calls involving children were the worst. After only a year on the job, he felt himself hardening, a certain stoicism creeping into his psyche, but when the kid screamed Dewey heard his own boys. He desperately needed it to stop.
The bathroom door had been torn from its hinges, so he gently moved it aside and laid it against the wall. A little boy in overalls stood by the toilet, his cheeks and the crotch of his pants wet. Dewey crouched down on one knee.
“Son, my name is Officer Dewey Edmunds. Everything is all right now, so you can come out. I’ll let you look at my shiny badge.”
“Are you . . . ?” the kid sniffled as he tried to speak. He looked about four or five. “Ar-Are you Lucius’s friend?”
Dewey wondered whether he’d heard the kid right. He looked at the old lady, who shifted her eyes to the floor. “Yes. Yes, I’m friends with Officer Lucius Boggs. How do you know him?”
“He’s gonna be my daddy.”
The man on the sofa’s “No!” would have been far louder had Champ not pressed him into the cushions again.
Dewey looked at the old lady, who met his eyes this time and nodded. Some odd mixture of shame and pride, pleading and defiance. Then he stepped back and looked at Champ, the two of them realizing this was not a typical domestic incident after all.
Julie’s courtship with Lucius had been founded on lies.
She knew Lucius had once had another fiancée, a proper lady named Cecilia. Daughter to one of the wealthiest Negroes in Atlanta, who owned five barbershops across town, the proceeds of which he’d used to amass an empire of apartment buildings. Lucius wasn’t one to divulge much, but Julie learned that he and his former love had courted for well over a year, in the mannered way of the Negro elite: attending church services together, sitting stiffly beside each other—no hand-holding, she assumed—while listening to his father’s sermons. Attending church socials, visiting each other’s homes for tea, always with witnesses. She hated herself for imagining it, Lucius in his finest clothes sitting in a plush chair opposite Cecilia, no doubt a high-yellow octoroon in a pretty ruffled dress, maybe chiffon, perched on a fine sofa beside her matronly mother, whose husband had managed to buy them a grand home with sitting room and a piano. The kind of house Julie herself worked in. But things hadn’t worked out, the dainty Cecilia deciding she couldn’t handle the stress of being a policeman’s wife.
Which was when Julie met Lucius, two years ago now. She’d been working at a congressman’s, and Lucius had been investigating the death of another maid. After the chaos that followed, Julie found herself out of a job, so Lucius stepped in with some leads on other white families who needed help. At first she’d been angry at him for costing her a good job, poking his nose into other folks’ business, but the fact that he’d taken the time to drum up names of future employers spoke well of him. That was Lucius for you: so noble and dignified he’d see his duties to the end, cleaning a mess others would have walked away from. The fact that he wanted to bed her certainly didn’t hurt.
Maybe that was crass, but she’d known it from the start. Those churchgoing boys were the worst about da
rting their eyes at the supposedly sinful parts of your body. Like he’d never seen a good-looking woman before. She’d known men who were far more forward, and at first it bothered her that he was so proper.
After she’d found another job, he’d stopped by to check on her. “I just wanted to make sure you’d gotten on your feet again,” was how he’d put it when he surprised her one fall day.
By which he meant, I just want to get you off your feet.
“I’m doing just fine, no thanks to you.”
He raised an eyebrow. “I helped you find that job, didn’t I?”
“After you cost me that last one.”
“You wouldn’t have wanted to stay there, trust me.”
“I’m sure you’re the kind of fellow who’s used to people trusting him,” she said, and he didn’t contradict her. “Is there any other reason you came by?”
Her directness seemed to throw him. “Well, yes. Matter of fact, I was wondering if you’d like to join me for lunch sometime.”
“Why, so you can question me about some other crime?”
“No, this would be a crime-free conversation.”
“You allowed to do that?” She was stringing him along, enjoying how desperate and unmoored he looked. So different from the polished, upright veneer he’d worn before. “Me being a former witness and all? That don’t break no police ethics laws or nothing?”
“I’m confident the city of Atlanta would have no issue whatsoever with me taking you out to Etta’s Spot sometime.”
They’d shared only three dates over the first few months. On their first date, he’d asked her which church she worshipped at, and he’d seemed just short of horrified when she mentioned her family didn’t strictly belong to any.
Lucius had invited her to come to his father’s church, said she could sit with him, but she declined, intimidated by the idea of sharing an aisle with his extended family. Instead, they started making the occasional Sunday lunch date, and she later learned that the only reason he’d been able to get away from his family and the ritual of after-services socials was because he’d lied to them about being needed at the precinct. Surely he knew that, in a community as small as Sweet Auburn, word would spread that the son of Reverend Boggs was out with some common gal on Sunday afternoons.
Lightning Men Page 17