Black & White

by Lewis Shiner

  And then, spent and defeated, he would have to explain to Mercy what had happened. He would have to protect the lie he had just told, and the lies would build and build until they filled his entire life.

  “No,” he said.

  “Robert!” She jumped back, startled. “Don’t shout at me! You scared me.” She began to cry. “I don’t know you anymore.”

  “It’s over, Ruth. You can keep the house. I’ll move my things out this weekend. I’ll see to it that you’re taken care of. You have your family. You’ll be okay.”

  Her mood changed again, and her voice was suddenly cold and clipped. “You will not take anything out of the house, do you understand?”

  “What?”

  “We are not getting a divorce, or a separation, or living apart, or anything of the kind.”

  Robert stared. He had never seen her like this.

  “Listen carefully to me,” she said. “Like Greg said, my father has many friends, many powerful friends. If you leave me, my father will use his friends to destroy you. You will lose your job, and you will not find another one in North Carolina. No one will rent or sell a house to you. If you leave the state, I won’t answer for your physical safety.”

  “You can’t be serious.”

  “I advise you not to test me.”

  “How can you want to live like that? Knowing that I don’t love you?”

  “I believe you do love me. I saw how you reacted just now. You’re confused, that’s all. Do you think I don’t know about your nigger whore? I knew the first day you came home to our house stinking of her. When you have that out of your system, you’ll come around to loving me again. And I won’t let you destroy both our lives over her.”

  Robert’s legs felt weak. He sat in the parched grass.

  “You need to look on the bright side,” Ruth said. “You’ve finally got your highway to build. You’ve got our beautiful house, and a wife who loves you more than anything. You can even keep your mistress, as long as you behave and don’t embarrass me with her. But as far as the rest of the world knows, we have a happy marriage. Do you understand?”

  Robert couldn’t speak or move.

  “Good,” Ruth said. “We understand each other. I feel so much better already. Now stand up. We’re going to go in the house and visit with my father. You’ll stay for supper, and then, if you want, you can go.”

  *

  It was 9:30 by the time he got to Bentonville. Mercy took one look at his face and told her mother they had to leave.

  Robert told her everything as he drove. She sat against the passenger door watching him as he talked, and when he finished she curled next to him. “So what happens now?”

  “We can leave North Carolina. This guy Arthur that I went to school with is in Texas now. He says there’s lots of work there.”

  “I don’t want to leave my mother. Not now, not yet. And you don’t want to give up your road.”

  “No.”

  “It’s not so bad, baby. At least you don’t have to pretend with her now. We’re young yet, as the poet said. Something will work out.”

  *

  Bismarck had called politics “the art of the possible.” For Robert it was the perfect description of highway construction. More factors went into the final decisions than in any other kind of work. To get federal funds, the design had to meet standards of lane width, materials, access, and dozens of other criteria. Acquiring right of way was hard enough for the main freeway; getting additional land for entrances and exits was even more difficult. Then there were the existing roads, and whether to go under them, over them, or break them in half.

  While the actual design was done in the Department of Transportation offices in Raleigh, Robert had to know exactly where he could deviate and what aspects were sacrosanct. He had to constantly balance cost against benefit, grade versus additional length, time versus quality. It was the hardest, most satisfying work Robert had ever done.

  At the end of it, one or two nights during the week and all weekend long, was Mercy. He left changes of clothes there and would go straight to work from her house on Monday morning. The days of swing bands at the Biltmore were over as the slow death of Hayti took its toll on the hotel, but there were occasional dances at the Durham Armory or the Stallion Club—the former mostly white, the latter mostly black—where they could disappear in the crowd.

  Other nights they spent in the kitchen. Mercy cooked huge Caribbean meals—pork griots and tropical fruit from Haiti, arroz con pollo from Cuba, jerk chicken from Jamaica—and then distributed the leftovers among her neighbors. Robert would help with the prep work and then sit and drink beer and enjoy the smells.

  Mercy didn’t own a television and had refused Robert’s offer to buy her one of the new Japanese portables. Instead they went to the movies most weekends. Durham’s theaters were desegregated now, at least in theory, and Mercy would have had no problem in any case. Still they preferred to stay in Hayti, or go to the Starlight Drive-In, where Robert would not be recognized.

  In the house on Woodrow Street, Ruth smiled and made dinner and slept with her back to him. This, Robert understood, was what they called an “understanding.” It was not ideal, but he could live with it.

  *

  The first blow came on March 31, 1968. On national television, at the end of a long speech about his failure to achieve peace in Vietnam, President Johnson said, “There is divisiveness among us all tonight.”

  Mercy had gone to visit her mother, and Robert was spending a rare Sunday night with Ruth. Though Johnson’s words were hardly news, it shocked Robert to hear them come from this paternal, kindly-looking man.

  Johnson went on to say, “I have concluded that I should not permit the Presidency to become involved in the partisan divisions that are developing in this political year.” Then, in the final words of the speech, he dropped the bombshell. “Accordingly I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your President.”

  Ruth, who had no love for Johnson, had the grace to hold her tongue. Robert, always cynical about politics, felt a profound unease that no national news had given him before.

  *

  The next Thursday, Robert spent the day grading what would be the Fayetteville Street eastbound entrance ramp to the East-West Freeway. Robert’s crews had dug expressway-sized canyons on either side of Fayetteville Street in the raw, red, ferrous clay. When he squinted his eyes, it became an overpass and not merely an earthen dam with a road on top. He thought a sculptor might feel something similar when a recognizable shape started to emerge from the marble. It was a life-size, dirt-road model of a freeway, and in it he could see the finished form.

  He hadn’t planned to go to Mercy’s after work. It was after six when he finally left the job site, his clothes saturated with dust, his shoulder and leg muscles burning with fatigue. He had just turned onto Club Boulevard when a voice broke in on the radio with the news that Martin Luther King had been shot on the balcony of a Memphis motel room. Robert turned left at the next corner and headed for Mercy’s house.

  Robert found her sitting at the kitchen table, listening to her old Bakelite radio. She got up to hug him as he came in and stayed in his arms.

  “This is bad,” she said.

  “Do they know who shot him?”

  “They’re not saying. It doesn’t matter, really. I mean, probably it was some crazed cracker, but it could have been the Panthers. It could have been the government.” In the last months, King had turned increasingly radical and disillusioned, opposing the Vietnam War and fighting for a guaranteed annual income. He’d recently threatened to shut Washington down with an army of the unemployed. “Whoever it was, nonviolence is over.”

  They listened for a while, sitting at the table and holding hands. There was not much information. King had been in Memphis in support of a sanitation workers’ strike, which black radicals had broken up. He’d been working on a sermon in room 306 of the Lorraine Motel, and
he and his entourage had walked out onto the balcony on their way to dinner. The title of the sermon he’d been working on was, “Why America May Go to Hell.”

  The phone rang. Mercy answered in monosyllables, then came back to the kitchen. “People are going up to Pettigrew Street,” she said. “Nobody’s organizing it, it just seems to be happening.”

  “Sounds like trouble.”

  “It could be.” She paused, then she said, “I think Barrett’s down there.”

  “Have you talked to him?”

  She shook her head. Robert didn’t doubt her. She’d given him reasons enough to believe that any relationship she’d had with Howard, sexual or otherwise, was long over. “My friend Wilma, works at the bank, said he was down there talking crazy,” she said. “I’m worried about him.”

  “Yeah,” Robert said. “Me too. Maybe we better go see.”

  “Do you mean it? Like you say, it could be dangerous. It could turn into a riot. And anywhere we go, one of us is going to be the wrong color.”

  Robert shrugged. “If you want to go, I’m going with you.”

  They took Robert’s car and parked south of St. Joseph’s Church. By that point the traffic on Fayetteville Road had ceased to move. Robert led her across the huge red scar of the coming freeway and into the ghostly downtown of Hayti. The abandoned and broken buildings, the cracked and plywood-covered windows, the missing streetlights and fractured sidewalks looked the way Robert felt inside. A freight train huffed by on the north side of the street, blowing a low and mournful whistle.

  Barrett Howard was in front of the boarded-up Regal Theater, next to the Biltmore. He sat with his back against the wall, and at first Robert thought he was drunk. “It’s over,” he said as Robert and Mercy walked up. His voice was clear and strong, his eyes bloodshot red. “It’s over.”

  Robert hunkered down next to him. “Let’s go, Barrett,” he said. “We’ll take you home.”

  “Didn’t ask for half of what we had coming,” Barrett said. “Didn’t get half of that. Even that was too much. So they taking it back.” He looked earnestly at Robert. “Motherfuckers.”

  Mercy seemed more annoyed than sympathetic. “Come on, Barrett. You can’t sit here in the street.”

  “Why not?” Barrett said.

  A deep voice behind them said, “Barrett. What’s happening?”

  Robert looked up to see a knot of black men, all younger than himself, older than teenagers. There might have been ten or twelve of them. They wore T-shirts, work pants, jeans.

  Barrett stared at them without apparent recognition.

  “Barrett, man, we got to do something,” said the baritone. He wore a checked short-sleeve shirt open over a sleeveless undershirt. He’d made a start on an Afro. He was over six feet tall, and the contours of his dark muscles shone in the headlights that crawled slowly by.

  “Nothing left to do,” Barrett said, looking away.

  “Don’t talk that way, man, I can’t deal with this. We can’t just sit here, let them do this to us. Come on, Barrett, stand up like a man.” He kicked the bottom of Barrett’s shoe.

  “Stop that,” Mercy said.

  “Stay out of this, sister,” said one of the other men.

  So far, Robert knew, he’d been lucky. But this day had been waiting for him, inevitable as rain. He stood up. “We’re friends of Barrett’s,” he said. “We’re going to take him home.”

  “Ain’t no wheyface no friend of Barrett’s or any black man,” said a voice from the rear of the crowd, high-pitched and fast, almost comical. Other voices chorused around it: “I know that’s right.” “Uh huh.” “That’s what I’m talking about.”

  A police car eased to a stop in front of them. Robert felt a surge of relief, then saw that its windows were rolled up and the officers inside faced forward, eyes glazed. As soon as the car in front of them inched forward, the police closed the gap.

  If I try to run for it, Robert thought, I won’t make it to the curb.

  “What do you say, Barrett?” said the baritone. “These your friends, here? ‘Cause I don’t think I like them too well.” The man started to shift his weight back and forth, working himself up to something.

  We shouldn’t have done this, Robert told himself. It was the only thought he could manage; fear held the rest of his brain hostage.

  “Barrett?” Mercy said. “Stand up.”

  There was a power in her voice Robert had never heard before. Barrett felt it too. He reached for Robert’s hand, and Robert pulled him to his feet. Mercy was staring at Barrett. Barrett blinked, put one hand on Robert’s shoulder for balance.

  “Barrett, what the fuck?” said a voice from the crowd. The nervous movement rippled through them all now, building momentum.

  Barrett took his hand away and straightened his shoulders and the confusion left his eyes.

  “Y’all look at yourselves,” he said. “What y’all doing? Pissing in you own food, burning down you own houses, going to teach the Man a lesson?”

  The baritone took a step back, glanced at one of the men next to him.

  “Y’all go on home now,” Barrett said. “You want to fight, fight somebody needs fighting.” He pointed to Robert. “You don’t know these people. You too ignorant to be anything but a danger to your own self and everybody around you.”

  The man took another step backward, wounded. “What about this cracker here, messing with our women?”

  “She ain’t ‘your’ woman, and he ain’t ‘messing.’ They man and wife. Now get along out of here. You want to do something, be here tomorrow, 12 noon. Bring your friends.”

  “What happens then?”

  “You be here, you find out.”

  The men moved on. Robert walked over to the brick wall of the theater and leaned against it. His relief was so profound he wasn’t sure his legs would hold him.

  “What are you planning tomorrow?” Mercy asked him.

  Barrett said, “I don’t know yet. All I know is, everybody’s judgment likely to be better tomorrow than tonight. Speaking of which,” he said to Robert, “what the hell are you doing here?”

  “Looking for you.”

  “There’s a line between good intentions and being naïve. You understand what I’m saying? You keep acting like this ain’t serious, you going to wind up dead.”

  “I think I got the message.”

  “Y’all need to get out of here. The crackers all out celebrating with they dogs and guns, no telling what could happen. Only a damn fool would tangle with them tonight, and they plenty of damn fools around.”

  “Come with us,” Robert said. Mercy’s hand reached out for Robert’s and he squeezed it. Barrett’s eyes registered the gesture and Robert hated the sadness there.

  “I’m all right,” Barrett said. “I got work to do.”

  “Five minutes ago you were sitting on the street ready to give up,” Robert said.

  “I’m on my feet now. Y’all go on home. Go on, get out of here.”

  In the car, Robert said, “What did you do to him?”

  “I used to hang out with some very powerful spirits. I guess you pick up a thing or two along the way. There’s certain ways to talk to people when you need to get their attention.”

  Robert wound his way through back streets to avoid the worst of the traffic. “ ‘Man and wife,’ he said. I wonder where he got that.”

  Mercy slid over next to him in the seat. “From seeing us together.”

  “Someday,” he said. “Someday, I swear to you.”

  *

  The next day, April fifth, black activist Howard Fuller led a peaceful march from NCC to downtown Durham in tribute to King, under the eyes of police snipers on rooftops. The night before he had singlehandedly turned back demonstrators from NCC who were headed up Fayetteville Street with violent intent. There was no Howard Fuller in Raleigh, where that same night students from Shaw University had thrown rocks and smashed windows and been beaten down by the police.

  If Barr
ett Howard had tried to orchestrate anything, it didn’t make the news.

  In June, Bobby Kennedy was gunned down in Los Angeles and died the next day. On August 8, Richard Nixon won the nomination at the Republican National Convention in Miami. Meanwhile, across the bay in Liberty City, a police attack on a black rights rally left four dead.

  At the end of August, all-out war erupted between Chicago police and demonstrators at the Democratic National Convention. Robert was unable to watch the footage that aired on TV every night. The rage of the police, the screams of the victims, the clouds of teargas and the image trails from the arc of nightsticks left him sick and fearful.

  Even as he knew that the East-West Expressway was part of the ongoing disaster that had once been Civil Rights, he allowed himself to be drawn more and more deeply into the work.

  Mitch Antree, faced with the same contradictions, seemed not to feel them. “A highway is a separate space,” he tried to explain. “I mean, that’s why they call it limited access, can you dig? It’s not a part of the neighborhood that it goes through. If you live near the expressway, the people that pass you in the night are not your neighbors. If you drive that highway, you can’t say you’ve been to the places it passes through, not unless you get off the road and stop. When we drive, we are part of the journey, we inhabit another world.”

  Robert stared at him. Mitch was wearing a purple paisley shirt and an orange tie. His hair was combed down over his forehead, covering the tops of his yellow-tinted glasses.

  “It’s not the highway’s fault that somebody knocked down the wrong buildings to clear the right of way. You can’t blame the highway for the mistakes of the people that planned it.

  “Once the Interstate system is finished, and all the expressways that feed into it, there’s going to be one superhighway that covers the entire country, this one long, continuous, single piece of concrete. How amazing is that? The only job we have now is to build our part of it and make it the best highway we can, so people can get from anywhere they are to anywhere they want to be with the least possible friction.”