The King of Colored Town

by Darryl Wimberley

  “ALL ABOARD!”

  That got a giggle. I could see the smaller children loosen up a little, could see, even in the rearview mirror, Mr. Raymond’s calm, professional smile.

  “Yawl stay in your seats,” came the gentle command. “We’ll be there in less than five minutes.”

  The transmission swapped cogs and the buses lurched out of Colored Town in a stolid caravan. An unnatural quiet fell over our bus. Pudding and Chicken Swamp, normally irrepressible, perched mute in their seats. I noticed that Chicken Swamp had gotten a belt for his always-too-loose trousers. And socks for his brogans. Pudding had taken his rooster-comb out of his hair and stuck it in his pocket. Nobody wanted to stand out.

  “What’s gonna happen?” I looked down to see Shirley Lee squeezing the blood out of my hand.

  I turned with her fear to find Joe Billy.

  “We’re gonna be all right,” Joe Billy announced loudly, calmly. “Just do what Miss Chandler tole’ us. Don’ look. Don’ listen. Now, Pudding, Chicken—”

  “Yeah?”

  “Let’s pair up the older children with the little ones.”

  That took some organization, pairing up names back and forth. Mr. Raymond glanced up to his mirror, but did not interrupt. I took the Sykes twins under my wing together. I knew they would not want to be paired off from each other.

  “It’ll be us three,” I told them. “We get off, ya’ll just stick with me.”

  “Everybody hold hands off the bus.” Joe Billy just took natural command. “Just get off, look straight ahead. We’ll all be fine.”

  “I need to pee,” a tiny voice broke in, on the edge of panic.

  “So do I, baby,” Joe Billy turned to reassure Pudding’s little sister. “But I know they got a restroom in that school.”

  He looked back at me. “It won’t be long.”

  The bus shuddered again as Mr. Raymond swapped cogs to pull past the courthouse, past the white-steepled churches and through the red light. You could see the entry to the school just ahead, the school-zone marked in broad fading stripes across the street.

  “COURTHOUSE, CHURCHHOUSE, OUTHOUSE STRAIGHT AHEAD,” Mr. Raymond sang out, but the scene before us strangled that stretch for humor.

  A gauntlet was gathered at Lafayette County Consolidated School. Garner Hewitt and the Citizen’s Council had organized a call for “peaceful protest” that had brought a hundred white folks to the thick-strawed yard where the buses stopped to debark their children. White people lined up in phalanxes five deep on either side of the narrow sidewalk spanning the gap between the bus and the wide doors granting entrance to the school. That twenty yards of cement looked like a mile.

  Garner was there himself to lead his minions, the flesh around his eye purple with the mark of birth, like he’d just got out of a fight. Working ringside in those seersucker slacks, those wingtipped shoes. Both of Garner’s sons were there. J.T. patrolled up and down the line, his rattlesnake belt winking silver. Cody pulled up in his fire-red Ford, blatantly ignoring the court’s restriction of his license.

  The Council were passing out signs and placards to augment the hastily-scrawled cards wielded like clubs along the line that now pressed against the sides of the school buses bringing Kerbo’s children to their new school. “KERBO NOT WELCOME,” was the first and tamest expression of sentiment that I saw. “WHITE SCHOOL ONLY!” read another. There were other signs citing scripture from Leviticus or Ecclesiastes or one of those books ripe for interpretation.

  Most remarks required no interpreter.

  “NIGGER GO HOME!” a white woman screamed, and a volley of eggs were launched at our bus.

  The little ones in our bus began to cry, to scream. Mr. Raymond pulled to a halt but kept his hand firmly on the bus door’s long pull.

  “NIGGERS GO HOME!” I thought it was J.T. Hewitt starting the chant that picked up quickly.

  “NIGGERS GO HOME, NIGGERS GO HOME!”

  “Mr. Raymond—?!” a panicking child gripped the back of my seat.

  I looked down and saw urine pooling on the floorboard.

  “I GOT TO PEE!”

  “KEEP YOUR SEATS!” Joe Billy’s command got Mr. Raymond’s attention.

  “What you sayin’, boy? We’re here.”

  “Mr. Raymond. Nobody’s getting out just yet. Just stay in your seats.”

  Another volley of eggs splattered on the bus. One egg sailed through an open window and caught Pudding right up side the head.

  “GOOD ’UN, CODY!” I heard a commendation.

  The line of teachers began to waver. The slender alley giving us a causeway to the school was close to collapse. Then I saw Principal Wilburn nod over to Garner Hewitt.

  “Jesus, Joe Billy, they gonna rush the bus!” I said, and a surge of white faces confirmed that tender prophecy. But then I heard the angry growl of a siren.

  It’s amazing how people react to a siren and a police car.

  Garner and his citizens hesitated with the cruiser’s approach. The teachers stiffened.

  “LOCK HANDS,” I heard Miss Chandler command and I’ll be damned if white teachers on both sides didn’t take her hand. The cruiser cut a path right through the middle of the mob, right up to the sidewalk. The door opened. Only one lawman, familiar to us all, got out.

  The Sheriff of Lafayette County strolled straight over to Garner Hewitt. An angry murmur was stalled. Collard Jackson stepped directly into that breach.

  “Ain’t you got nuthin’ better to do, Garner?”

  He spoke loudly enough to have been heard across the football field.

  “Just a peaceful protest, Sheriff.” Garner’s nasal reply was weak by comparison. “Just exercisin’ our rights.”

  “Exercise,” Collard chuckled. “Garner, you ain’t exercised anything but your lip since Christ was a corporal.”

  I thought surely then the crowd would turn on him, that Garner and the rest would simply overwhelm the county’s sheriff. But Collard knew what dog was leading that pack. And Garner, pressed close on all sides by the mob he created, could not disguise the fear he felt when face to face with Sheriff Jackson.

  Collard Jackson placed one hand on his revolver, propped a foot up on the bumper of our bus and looked around calmly. Staring them down.

  “Harvey Land, the hell you doin’ here, you got a store to run! Thurman. Randall. Surprised you boys could get talked into a stunt like this.”

  The Sheriff turned, then, to Principal Ben Wilburn.

  “Ben, that a watch on your wrist? What about it?”

  “Ahmmm. Yes, Sheriff.”

  “Give it here. Come on.”

  Wilburn extended his wristwatch to Collard gingerly, his arm stretching like a stick.

  “Thank you, sir.”

  Collard took it casually with one hand. And with the other he took out his firearm.

  “FIVE MINUTES!” The sudden thunder in his voice surprised us all.

  “FIVE MINUTES THERE BETTER NOT BE ANYBODY ON THIS PROPERTY THAT AIN’T A STUDENT OR TEACHER. THERE BETTER NOT BE ANYBODY HERE AFTERWARDS, NEITHER. NOT TODAY. NOT TOMORROW.”

  “You got no right, Sheriff,” Garner growled.

  Collard stepped over to Garner briefly, inclined his head to the chairman’s hairy ear and Mr. Hewitt disappeared beneath the broad rim of the sheriff’s hat. A short conversation was overheard by Ben Wilburn and Garner’s eldest. It went something like this:

  “You burnt any churches I oughta know about, Garner? Or more likely J.T.? Or how ’bout Cody?”

  Garner’s head jerked out from the blind of Collard’s Stetson.

  “The hell you talkin’ about?”

  “Got a call from Tallahassee, is all. Something about a vehicle fleeing the scene. Red pickup, Ford. Partial plates. Spinner hubs.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “No. They didn’t say anything about bullshit, Garner. Just a church, some dynamite. And then the truck.”

  Even from the bus you could tell Garner was apoplectic.

/>   “Are you fucking with me, Collard?!”

  “Stay here four and a half more minutes,” Collard assured him, “and I’ll make damn sure you find out.”

  Garner’s head snatched back. Collard consulted his watch.

  “FOUR MINUTES.”

  Time to fish or cut bait.

  “Daddy?” J.T. shoved over to intercept his father.

  “Go on back to the house.”

  “Go back ?”

  “You heard me goddamn it!” J.T. followed his father out of the pack like a whipped pup. With their chairman gone the remaining citizens shifted uneasily, wavering in their purpose.

  “THREE AND A HALF MINUTES,” Collard announced loudly.

  That did it. People dispersed like oil poured on water, tossing their signs, their eggs. One or two of Garner’s crew shouted defiant curses, although only once safely distant from Collard’s truncheon. The Sheriff did not reply to those minor iniquities, did not budge until the last second of the last minute was run from the Principal’s cheap watch.

  Jackson then returned the Principal’s timepiece.

  “Ben—”

  “Yes, Sheriff?”

  “I better not have to do your job for you again.”

  Principal Wilburn stood mute as Collard Jackson pulled away in his police car. Miss Chandler bustled forward. Those great hips, that fold of face.

  “Let’s get these children to their rooms.”

  The white teachers stepped forward in the vacuum created by their principal’s voided command to follow Miss Chandler’s. I was stunned, even in the turmoil of that moment, to see white people follow a black woman’s direction.

  “PAIR UP!”

  Joe Billy’s was the voice of command in our bus. “Older ones with little ones. Don’t forget to hold hands.”

  I found the Sykes twins.

  “We gonna be all right?” They shivered in unison like they’d been out in the cold.

  “’Course we are, babies,” I reassured them. “Can’t you see Miss Chandler? And the Sheriff? They ain’ gonna let nuthin’ bad happen to nobody.”

  The first day went by in a blur. We had names and room numbers to remember. Where the restroom was. Cafeteria was easy, you just followed the crowd. And of course I knew all about the band hall. I didn’t know anything about homeroom, though. Homeroom for me and Shirley Lee and Joe Billy fell under the domain of Myron Putnal, a distant relation to Latrelle, our distinguished representative at the State Legislature. Myron resembled a politician himself, specifically, Abraham Lincoln. In fact if you took Honest Abe, cut about three feet off his legs and left him his beard, he’d be the spitting image of our homeroom teacher.

  A distinguishing characteristic of our integration with Laureate’s student body was that we newcomers already knew many of the white students. In fact, one of the worst trials for me that first day of integration came from the cold shoulders I endured from white girls with whom I was very familiar. Take Sherry Pridgeon, for instance. Sherry was acknowledged to be the prettiest girl in the county. Every male past puberty at Laureate High School had, I’m sure, dreamed of getting in Sherry’s pants or beneath her bra. I used to love stringing tobacco beside Sherry. She had a pile of gorevan hair that cascaded over suntanned shoulders wide as a weightlifter’s to a flatiron belly. Her legs looked to be as long as mine, even though she was a head shorter.

  I liked to watch the muscles of her abdomen work as she leaned over her stringhorse, snatching hands of tobacco faster than we could pull them from the sled, each bundle of leaves looped and tied, hand after hand, stick after stick, a strand of twine feeding from a ball secreted in a blouse damp with sweat. The easy sway of her hips and belly. As sexy to me as a rock star.

  Sherry asked me after one particularly long day in the sun if I’d put some Solarcaine on her back, at which point I instantly became the envy of all boys present, my hands freely wandering a torso they could not approach, the long spine tan with exposure, the lotion cool and white ejaculating onto that bared skin, the moan of contact, her rump finally beneath my hands, my dark hands, black hands.

  White boys holding themselves.

  We used to chatter over our labor like sorority sisters. We’d talk about anything: boys, grownups, picture shows. Sherry loved the drive-in, could capture accents and repeat dialogue word-perfect, Jimmy Stewart and Sandra Dee, or Bogart and Bacall, or Marlon Brando. She was the Corrie Jean of movies. Most of the filmed narratives familiar to me were gained from Sherry Pridgeon’s re-enactments. I must have heard On The Waterfront a dozen times before I ever saw it.

  “I coulda been a contendah—!”

  Of course, there was segregation, even at a tobacco barn. We did not drink water from the same cup. We did not take meals at the same table. We did not use the same restroom, which in my case meant that I had no restroom to use at all. But we did talk. We exchanged harmless anecdotes and intimacies. We were warm at the Henderson’s barn in a way unrelated to the climate.

  So it was natural, for me, entering a new homeroom and seeing my summertime companion to offer some small pleasantry, to say hello. To smile. To meet her wide jade-colored eyes. In fact, Sherry Pridgeon’s were the only eyes I made an effort to meet that first day of class. I looked straight at her.

  “’Lo, Sherry.”

  She didn’t even turn her head. Just looked past me as though I were not present. As though I were truly invisible.

  “Sherry P…?”

  The protest on my lips died with the bruise on my heart. She would not acknowledge me. Would not meet my eye. The easy congress I had come to take for granted was replaced by this icy distance. I wanted to shout at that injustice, to say, “Here I am! Here I am! Look at me!” but I did not. Instead I replied to her indifference with feigned nonchalance of my own.

  I refused any but the most necessary of communications. I kept my eyes averted from any kind of contact with Sherry or any other white classmate. The ugly gauntlet that greeted our arrival would have been trauma enough for my first day at lhs. But the ostracism imposed on me by students whom I knew well and with whom I had imagined some kind of mutual regard scratched like sandspurs over my heart.

  There were only seven of us from Kerbo in that senior homeroom: Lonnie Hines and Shirley Lee Lewis, Pudding and Chicken Swamp and Johnny Boy and Joe Billy and I. Seven black students. Thirty-three whites. The Kerbo students took pretty much the same classes during the day, except for Chicken and Johnny Boy who were not, as polite speech put it, ‘prepared’ for an algebra course.

  I didn’t think I was prepared for algebra, either; I had never heard the word. But Miss Chandler assured me that the course would not be over my head.

  “Your test scores indicate you have a gift for mathematics, Cilla.”

  “But won’t the white students be a leg up? Haven’t they got courses before this? To get ready?”

  “It’s not a big jump from fractions and geometry to algebra,” my teacher assured me. “Even word problems are algebraic in function. If you run into a snag, I’ll be here to help out.”

  “How ’bout Joe Billy? He’s signed up, too.”

  “That boy,” Miss Chandler shook her head. “We’ll have to go on faith.”

  I wasn’t faithful enough to be reassured, but in the event faith was not needed. I was not embarrassed in homeroom. The gaps in my education were not explored or revealed. In fact, Myron Putnal did not call me to the board at all. Fact was, he never called on any student with suspicious skin, not even if we raised our hands. Our teacher did, however, let us know exactly what place we would have in his class.

  The first day, for instance, we began our introduction to algebra with something like this chalked on the board:

  25 < 100 a < b

  “What is an inequality?” Mr. Putnal inquired breezily, before he even reached his desk. Before he even took roll.

  “An inequality, what is it? What things can we say are unequal?”

  “Niggers and whites,” Cody mutter
ed, and snickers rippled through the class.

  Mr. Putnal appeared not to have heard a thing.

  The contrast between Myron’s class and Miss Chandler’s English and Lit. could not have been more striking.

  “I would begin by introducing myself,” Miss Chandler waited until we were all seated, “but that would presume that we all don’t know each other and that would be dishonest, wouldn’t it? I know Miss Bonnie Hart, for instance, and Miss Bonnie knows me. Ya’ll might not know that Miss Bonnie’s father helped me move my furniture when I first came to Laureate. Loaned me his truck. Helped me get my things. I shall never forget that kindness.