They were silent for a moment, looking at each other, and then Tom said, “I can do that, yes. But I’d hate to. Listen, Shep, don’t do anything ill-considered or hasty. I know things haven’t always been…roses and clover with you and your dad, but everything’s changed now. You just can’t up and walk away from this.”
“This isn’t hasty, Tom, and it’s been considered every way it can be,” I said. “And I can indeed just up and walk away from it. In fact, I can run. All this stuff is nothing to me, and that’s the way it’s going to stay.”
His face was wintry and disapproving. “I’d say it was everything to you, on the face of it,” he said. “Of course, it’s your business.”
“Yes,” I said. “It is. And this is what I choose to do with it. I want you to go ahead and do it for me right away, Tom, or I’ll do it myself, and it will undoubtedly be done wrong if I do. Okay?”
“I…okay,” he said. “All right. I ask only that you think it over for a day or two, talk with your mother—”
“That’s the last thing I’m going to do, and if I hear that you’ve breathed a word of it to her, I’ll have your hide,” I said. I did not know why I was being so hard on him; he was a man of dignity and substance, and had served my father well for a long time. It felt wonderful, though. Marshall Haynes’s eyes on me were watchful and held a glint of grudging respect, and that felt even better.
“Surely you mean to tell her what you’ve told us,” Tom Carmichael said frostily. “You can’t just flit out of here without telling her. Her own holdings are substantial, to say the least—”
“Of course I’ll tell her,” I said. “I may be a classicist, but I’m not an ogre. But I’m not going to tell her until later. Next week, just before I flit out of here, I think. She’s got too much else on her mind now. I don’t want to upset her before I have to.”
Seeing that I could not be swayed, they went away, undoubtedly to the Capital City Club to lick their wounds and plan, over the Catch of the Day and a nice little Chardonnay, how best to circumvent me. They need not have bothered.
I was back in the library the next morning, deep in Bulfinch, when Shem Cater put his head into the door, grinning like a bad imitation of Rochester, and said, “Comp’ny to see you, Mr. Shep,” and Ben Cameron walked into the room behind him.
He stood in a patch of pale midmorning sunlight on the faded old Oriental, hands in the pockets of a beautiful dark blue cashmere topcoat, his ruddy hair like rusted iron in the weak morning light. He was not smiling.
“Morning, Ben,” I said, getting up from the morris chair I had been slumped in. “Sit down. Can I offer you some coffee?”
“No,” he said. “I’ve got a thermos in the car. Get your coat and a muffler and gloves, Shep, and come with me, if you’ve got a little time to spare. I want to show you something.”
“What is it?” I asked.
“I’d rather show you,” he said. “Indulge me if you will. I’ll have you back in a couple of hours. We can get some lunch downtown, or at Brookhaven, if you’d rather. You’re not in the middle of something that can’t wait, are you?” He looked pointedly at the Bulfinch, and I laughed.
“No,” I said. “Nothing that won’t wait. Let me get my stuff.”
When I came back from the summerhouse in my coat and an old Princeton muffler, he was already waiting in the big black Lincoln on the front drive. He was sitting in the backseat, and I was profoundly surprised to see Glenn Pickens sitting at the wheel in a neat, dark suit and tie, gray driving gloves on his hands. The Lincoln’s powerful motor was idling, and Glenn eased it into motion as soon as I closed the door on my side behind me. He, too, was unsmiling, and said nothing beyond his neutral “Good morning, Shep” in response to my greeting. Looking at his impassive yellow face, I found it impossible to believe that not four months before we had shared a night of unease and transcendence at La Carrousel. I did not know he still drove for Ben Cameron; somehow I thought that chore had ended when he had graduated from Morehouse and law school. But then, remembering that it was Ben who had put him through both, I figured that he was probably grateful enough to oblige Ben whenever he could. His greeting was the last time he spoke until nearly the end of the drive.
“Am I being kidnapped?” I asked, accepting a cup of coffee from Ben’s thermos, and grinning as he added a dollop of brandy from a silver flask in his pocket.
“As a matter of fact, you are,” he said. “This is in the nature of a command performance. And there’s a condition. No questions—not until we’ve seen what I have to show you. Agreed?”
“Sure,” I said. “Just keep that brandy coming and you won’t hear a peep out of me.”
He was silent and preoccupied, and I stole an occasional quick glance at the clean, sharp profile I had known all my life and yet did not know, feeling oddly constrained to be bowling down Peachtree Road toward the downtown section beside the mayor-to-be of the city, drinking his brandy and being driven by a life-long acquaintance. I wondered if he did not feel strange himself sometimes, out of context and ambushed by his own life. He hardly spoke as we floated along, the big Lincoln, a new one, eating up the familiar miles into the city’s heart. Once, as we gained Five Points, the epicenter of the business and financial district, he turned to me and said, “You knew that Sarah is pregnant, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” I said. “Charlie told me Christmas Eve. Is she all right?”
“No,” Ben Cameron said somberly. “She’s not. She looks like hell, and she’s sicker than a dog. Dorothy tells me that’s temporary, but it bothers the hell out of me. Sarah’s never sick.”
“I’m really sorry,” I said lamely. For some reason his tone made me feel as guilty as if I had caused Sarah’s morning nausea.
“You ought to be,” he said. He withdrew again into abstracted silence, whistling soundlessly between his teeth and drumming his fingers on his knee, and I fell silent too, affronted. Whatever his daughter suffered, I was sure my pain was the greater.
Glenn Pickens slid the Lincoln through Five Points and east on Mitchell Street, past the courthouse, the beautiful Art Deco spire of City Hall and the dirty granite and marble pile of the state capitol. In this hiatus between Christmas and the New Year, the streets were nearly bare of traffic, and only a few pedestrians, Negroes mainly, scurried up the long hill beside the capitol building thin coats and jackets pulled close against the icy wind that had come booming in with the long-hidden sun. The dead, brown mats of lawn and bare peach tree saplings around the government buildings looked desolate and forsaken, and the big Christmas tree on the Capitol lawn, beside the statue of Tom Watson, whipped in the gusts from the west. Occasionally, in the wide, clear spaces around the government buildings, the Lincoln rocked softly from side to side in the wind’s unbroken force. I closed my eyes against the glare arrowing off the hood of the Lincoln, and Ben put black sun-glasses on his narrow brown face. With his clear gray eyes shielded, he looked dangerous and foreign, like a Sicilian bandit.
Glenn Pickens turned behind the Capitol onto Capitol Avenue and we slid down into the great, and to me featureless, wasteland to the south and east, where much of Atlanta’s Negro population lived. I had been down into the Southeast before, usually with Shem Cater in the Chrysler, to fetch or return one or another of my family’s servants, but to my blind white eyes, the streets on which the Negroes lived were much like the Negroes themselves: they all looked alike. I looked questioningly at Ben, and he gave me back the look, but he did not speak. Glenn Pickens did not, either. I felt a very faint tremor of uneasiness, like a foreshock to an earthquake that only a bird or an animal might sense. What could there be, in this back landscape, that Ben Cameron wanted to show me?
One by one, we ghosted through the black communities to the south of the city’s heart: Summerhill, Peoplestown, Joyland. The desolation and poverty of these small communities seemed to me as unredeemed as they were uniform; I could not tell where one left off and the other picked up. But Ben knew; he
pointed them out by name as we passed through, and in the same conversational tone as he had spoken earlier of Sarah and the weather, talked of their distinct characters, their particularities. Every now and then he’d say, “Am I right, Glenn?” and Glenn Pickens would say, “That’s right, Ben,” or, “Not exactly. That’s Mule Coggins’s poolroom, not Morley’s.” How in the world, I wondered, in the course of his crowded juggernaut life, had Ben Cameron had time to learn the geography and ethnology of these dismal little black habitats in the bowels of the city? Were there, in his quicksilver mind, faces to go with the names? Another man entirely might have been sitting beside me, and I felt shy and stupid and young. In point of fact, I was all those things.
The Negro communities were comprised of warrens of small, narrow streets, many unpaved, with wooden and cinder-block and brick one-and, infrequently, two-story houses crowded so close together that often not even a driveway separated them—which did not seem to matter so much. I saw few automobiles. Most sat squarely on the streets, or sidewalks where such, with only a few feet of dirt or concrete for yard space, these littered with broken toys and bottles and trash. Most of the houses had long since lost their paint and some had lost their windowpanes, and had blind eyes of cardboard or newspaper. Steps up to sagging porches were pilled bricks or cinder blocks, and outhouses leaned crazily in some of the weed-choked backyards. I knew there was city water—I saw fire hydrants, and open sewage stood frozen in gutters—but still the outhouses prevailed. Occasional vacant lots choked with the brown skeletons of kudzu vines broke the monotonous rows of shacks and tenements; I knew that in the summer whole blocks here would wear the virulent, poison green mantles of the kudzu, and would be the better for it. Smoke billowed from many crazed and tumbled chimneys, and I wondered if those houses did not have any other sources of heat. The wind down here, unbroken by any of the tall buildings that shielded the city’s heart, was truly brutal. All of the puddles I saw were solid with dun-colored ice. I saw few people in the residential neighborhoods, but the ones I did see were thin, underdressed children and old women.
Through each neighborhood ran a larger cross street with a shabby grocery store, a drugstore, liquor stores, pawnshops, and a cafeè or two. There were more people here, men mainly, teenaged and young and middle-aged, lounging in and out of stores and cafés, standing in frozen-breathed groups on street corners beneath shattered streetlights, shoulders raised against the cold, prowling eyes following us in the Lincoln as Glenn idled it past. I felt like ducking my head against the dead inexorability of those eyes, but Ben met them squarely and measuringly, and Glenn Pickens lifted a hand occasionally to someone he knew, and received in return a languid salute. I wondered if any of them knew who Ben Cameron was, riding by in the Christmas cold in his great black Lincoln. I had a feeling many of them did.
“Where are all the women?” I said, forgetting that I was not supposed to ask questions. I had not seen a single woman who appeared to be under the age of seventy since we had entered the Southeast.
It was Glenn Pickens who answered me.
“They’re all back where we came from, Shep,” he said, not turning his head. “They’re working in the kitchens in Buckhead.”
My face burned. I should have known that. I had walked into it. Beside me, Ben Cameron smiled, a half-smile.
Once, driving through Summerhill, he gestured toward a nest of streets to the right. More of the miserable little houses, as lunar and unpeopled as the others, huddled there.
“That’s where the new freeway will go through, and where the stadium will go, we hope,” he said. “It’s the best site we’ve got, and the plans are complete for it.”
“Where will those people go?” I said. “The ones who live there?”
He laughed. There was no mirth in it.
“Good question. I’m sure they’d like to know the answer,” he said. “Holy Christ. We can raise eighteen millions for a new stadium, and the housing authority can pledge fifty million to wipe out the slums in a decade, but they can’t seem to relocate a single black family whose home they knock down, or spend a penny on communities like Vine City or Buttermilk Bottom. We’ve got to do better than this. We’ve got to do a lot better.”
“I thought there was some public housing,” I said, despite the fact that I was pretty sure it was not to me that he spoke.
“Oh, God. Four. Exactly four public housing projects since 1936. We’re going to be mighty lucky if we get through this next summer without somebody literally lighting the fires under us.”
Glenn drove us through Mechanicsville and Pittsburgh, where I remembered calling for Amos and Lottie, and then over to Boulevard and up through Chosewood Park and Grant Park, with its prim green middle-class haven of the zoo and cyclorama, and across Memorial Drive and past the oasis of Oakland Cemetery. I took an involuntary deep breath of pure relief, back now on familiar and hallowed ground, and then we were heading east on DeKalb. We skirted the odd, half-familiar little linear enclave of Cabbagetown, which, though desperately poor as the other neighborhoods, was relentlessly all white, and the great, crouching jumble of Fulton Bag and Cotton that brooked over it, and then, just beyond it, Glenn Pickens turned down into another little neighborhood and stopped the Lincoln.
“We’ll walk from here,” Ben said. “Better wrap that scarf your head, and take a gulp of this brandy. We’ve got a ways to go, and the wind’s picking up.”
“Where are we?” I said. I had never been this far east before, never ventured beyond the part of Cabbagetown that I could see from our family plot on its myrtle-shaded hill in Oakland Cemetery. This was literally the back of the moon to me.
“It’s called Pumphouse Hill,” Ben said. “The only water up in here used to be an old public hand pump on the top of that hill yonder. If you wanted to wash or drink or flush or douse your fire, you toted water from that pump.”
“Most people up here still do,” Glenn Pickens said. He had gotten silently out of the car and come up beside us, a covert-gray cloth overcoat pulled up around his ears. “City ran some water up here in the fifties, but not many families can afford it. I don’t think two thirds of the fire hydrants up here have worked for ten years.”
Ben frowned. “That’s the city’s bailiwick, not the citizens’” he said. “There’s no excuse for that. I’m going to get on Dan Roberts’s ass when I get back.”
“We stay on Dan Roberts’s ass,” Glenn said. “To be fair, it’s not all his fault. Kids pound the mains open the minute the crews leave in the summer, to get cool in the spray, and then he’s just got to get a crew back up here and fix them all over again. He does the best he can. He hasn’t got that many crews.”
“Well, I’ll get on his ass anyway, just to set a precedent,” Ben said. “No sense waiting till January second for that.”
We Walked down the first street in Pumphouse Hill. We had not gone three houses in before I began to wonder if I was going to be able to bear this. As wretched as the other neighborhoods had been, Pumphouse Hill made them look nearly palatial in comparison. I had never seen anything like it. The tiny houses were all decades older and in far worse repair than in the other neighborhoods, some without whole roofs, most without one or more windowpanes, all made of unpainted, rotting, green-scummed wood. Virtually no electric lights burned here, though light poles and power lines yawned and drooped, and few of the chimneys had smoke coming from them. In Pumphouse Hill I saw no people, not even the old.
The unpaved street was thick with filth and unspeakable things. I was, for the first time that day, glad of the subfreezing temperatures; the stench would have been unbearable if the excrement that lay clotted in ditches and under windows had not been frozen. At front and side doors, frozen garbage and refuse and piles of frozen, rotted vegetables lay where they had been tossed. I saw several newly dead dogs and cats, not crushed by automobiles, but simply lying stiff and banal and hopeless, as if they had fallen and frozen to death in the night. Once I stumbled, and caught on t
o Ben Cameron’s arm, and looked down to see what I had steeped on. It was the crushed and frozen carcass of a rat the size of a small fox terrier. I felt the gorge risk, thick and sour, in my throat.
There were no more than six or seven streets in Pumphouse Hill; it occupied an area of perhaps no more than four city blocks. But the human misery and degradation on them was enormous, immense; it filled the world; smote my heart and my tongue to silence. I remembered a letter Sarah had written me last spring, about a trip she had taken to Naples and the literal communities she had seen dug out of the bomb rubble, left when Mark Clark took his troops up Monte Cassino. Pitiful, terrible, heartbreaking burrows dug in rubble, each with a family living in it like some mutant, subterranean species, wild and wretched, she had said. Screaming their hate at whoever passed. Pumphouse Hill reminded me of that letter. We walked up and down each street, only the sound of our footsteps scrunching on the ice-bristles in the red clay, and the whistling wind, and the occasional thin yelp of a dog breaking the radiant, terrible, sun-frozen silence.
Only once did I bring myself to speak.
“Is there anyone down here? Does anybody live here?” I said. I had seen no one, literally, since we started out from the Lincoln. I realized that I had spoken hopefully.
“Oh yeah,” Glenn Pickens said. “Lots of folks live here. They’re all inside in bed.”
“Bed?” I said stupidly. Did he mean they were making love, or sleeping? Ill? What?
“Yeah, bed,” he said. “You’ve heard of bed. It’s where the folks up here go to keep warm, when they can’t pay the electric or gas bill and they can’t find firewood. You can always pile on another dog or young’un.”
Once again I reddened. We walked the rest of the terrible, blasted frozen neighborhood in silence. When we got back to the Lincoln and climbed into it, I was shaking with cold and shock. Under the shock, far down, was a profound anger.
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