Makeda

  For years, we blacks had looked with Pavlovian suspicion at the stools—saw them spinning languidly behind a ruddy diner’s retreat, saw them bracing up ravenous white patrons leaning into steaming plates, saw them standing straight and empty, waiting, watching, eyeing us passing near to them like hostile sentinels.

  The four freshmen, scarcely six months in college, just upped and left campus, went to downtown Greensboro, found four empty stools, and sat down on them, just like that. I’m ashamed to admit that I could never have done that, been that brave. Amidst the lynchings still very much going on across the South. With storied old lawyers jousting still in the highest courts. No mass meetings. No Kings. No Shuttlesworths. No C.T. Vivians. Just four college freshmen who looked like me and had scarcely even begun to shave.

  Four young men, boys really, walked to downtown Greensboro with only each other for comfort, for reassurance, and covered a wretched symbol of the old South with their bottoms. Turned the place on its head. Four boys. Hell, man, that was really something. Bad-ass something.

  After that, I had to do something. I thought then that we all had to. And Gordon and I did. Lots of us did. We knew Mama and Daddy wanted us to be safe. They would be against us getting involved like this, but we did it anyway.

  Though we were still mere boys, we wanted—needed—very much to be men, not grown-ups of course, but men in the spinal sense.

  Ironically, the whole thing was Gordon’s idea. It happened only days after the news flashed around the country about what had happened in Greensboro. Gordon and I went downtown after school on Friday to buy a stylus for the Philco phonograph machine in the living room. The specialty shop that sold it was located on Broad Street between 5th and 6th next to the big new G.C. Murphy store with the running plate-glass window that gave onto Broad Street. I was walking ahead of Gordon when he stopped to look through the big window. I walked back to find him peering through the glass at the store’s long L-shaped confectionery counter and the fifteen gleaming pedestal stools standing empty around it, watching us, daring us.

  “Let’s do it,” Gordon said.

  “Let’s do what?” I asked.

  “Let’s go in and sit down—and order something.”

  “Mama and Daddy will kill us.”

  “They don’t have to know about it.”

  “But what if we get arrested?”

  “We’ll deal with that when it happens.”

  “Jesus, Gordon. Do you know what you’re doing? You of all people. What about your scholarships? You know what could happen to you?”

  He did not seem himself, or at least not the deliberate mulling, measuring himself that I had always counted upon as a firebreak to my own natural heedlessness. Only then did I realize how opaque to me he had always been. How veneered was his self-discipline. Looking in the window, he gave every appearance of someone who’d tipped over and given in to some urgent irresistible exigency that required him to address smack-dab, with this one rashly considered act, a short shame-soaked lifetime of tacit accommodation and quiet cowardliness.

  “I have to do this. I have to do it. If I don’t do it now, I never will.” If he had deliberated upon his decision, I did not know of it. He had always been serious about everything. In that respect, at least, he had remained consistent.

  “Okay, man, I’m with you. Let’s go.”

  With that, the March brothers walked into the G.C. Murphy store and took two center seats on the long side of the L-shaped confectionery counter.

  The store was virtually empty. The waitress, a plump fair-skinned white girl whose face was framed by parentheses of blond Shirley Temple curls, refused to serve us or even acknowledge our presence. Without uttering so much as a word, she walked off, leaving us alone at the counter. No doubt surveilled by watching eyes somewhere, we sat there facing a wall-mounted menu for fifteen minutes. Having no thought-out idea of what to do next, Gordon and I eventually got up and went home.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Sunday week, Mama and Daddy invited the Reverend C.C. Boynton and Grandma to the house for dinner. Mama fussed over the table a good part of the day, sending Daddy just after breakfast to fetch the folding table pad from its box in the hot airless little storage attic that was reached with a pull-down retractable ladder in the upstairs ceiling.

  Gordon and I had been assigned by Mama the task of “thoroughly cleaning” the house on Saturday.

  Mama kept the kitchen door shut all Sunday so as to keep “the whole house from smelling like pot roast.”

  Dinner was set for two o’clock. Grandma rode home from church in the backseat of the car between Gordon and me. She had changed in the church cloaking room out of her white deaconess dress and into an elaborately embroidered orange African gown that a taken-aback Reverend C.C. Boynton would affect to like, but would, in fact, distinctly detest. It was the first time Reverend Boynton had seen my grandmother outside of church.

  Just as Daddy pulled to the curb in front of our house, a neighbor’s collie ran at the car and leapt about it barking playfully. This terrified my grandmother, who’d professed a fear of dogs for as long as anyone could remember.

  She pressed her Braille leather-bound gold-embossed Bible fast to her chest, interposing it like a shield between her and the loud baying voice of the dog. My father got out of the car and shooed the animal in the direction of its owner’s house. My grandmother sat straight-backed between Gordon and me on the car’s rear seat until she was well enough composed and confident that the dog would not return. This would be the only time that I would ever see her appear frightened.

  While Mama and Daddy and Gordon and I busied ourselves with last-minute preparations, Grandma sat quietly in the living room in a leather armchair awaiting dinner which would not begin until Reverend Boynton arrived. Sitting alone with her thoughts for periods of time never seemed to bother my grandmother. She appeared to live more from within than from without, as if she were of an unknowable place, to which no one of us could be made privy, even were such a view into her deepest cerebrations hers to grant.

  At ten minutes after two o’clock, Mama, peering through the venetian slats at the dining room window, called out to Daddy, “David, Reverend Boynton is here,” speaking with the slightly elevated pace of one expecting the arrival of a special personage, a measure that squared entirely with the Reverend Boynton’s view of himself as he hoisted his considerable bulk from the driver’s-side seat of the big black four-door Lincoln sedan the church had given him on the silver anniversary of his pastorate.

  My recollection is that Reverend Boynton never spoke in conversational English, but rather in a relentless pulpitese spoken loudly (even when mouth-to-ear) and with an overlaid relish for pontifical enunciation. Indeed, he must have been well-educated in the formal sense of it, at least. His doctorate, real, not honorary, had been conferred by the Yale Divinity School. Still, his booming sermons, for me, were tedious affairs, filling the hall but not the heart.

  Daddy’s hand disappeared into the Reverend’s paw.

  “So good of you to have me, David. So good of you to have me.” Pulling off his knee-length gray camel-hair chesterfield and turning toward my mother: “Aah, Alma, my dear, so good of you to have me, so good of you to have me.”

  My mother steered Reverend Boynton from the vestibule into the living room where my grandmother sat composed with her fingers laced over the Bible which lay closed on her lap. Upon noticing her sitting quietly with her gown of brilliant orange spread over the arms of the chair, Reverend Boynton spoke more moderately, “Sister Mattie, what a nice surprise. And don’t you look pretty.” Reverend Boynton then seemed to sustain a temporary loss of confidence. Blind people had always affected him in this way. He likely sensed that they could see him better than sighted people could, and thus he lost with them the considerable advantage of his imposing physical presence.

  Had my grandmother been sighted, she would have noticed on Reverend Boynton’s face features that confessed an enfe
ebled soul.

  I can’t recall what my grandmother said in response.

  I only remember that whatever it was amounted to little more than a word or two. I can still visualize the subtle tilt and nod of her elegant head which gave the impression of a royal receiving a subject.

  Recovering with relief his bonhomous bearing, Reverend Boynton elevated his voice and said, “Gordon, Gordon. Aren’t you something, young man. Which is it going to be, Harvard or Stanford?” Not waiting for an answer, the reverend bore forward: “And why didn’t you apply to Yale, young man? Better than Harvard, really.”

  Reverend Boynton was not an unkind man. He was simply one of those people who’d been born uncomfortably without a talent for gauging their effect on the people they encountered.

  As the group moved through the vestibule en route to the dining room, Reverend Boynton rested his hand on my shoulder and said disinterestedly, “Graylon, you’re looking more like your mother every day.”

  Years later, my mother would confess to me that she had worried a great deal days before that Sunday that the dinner conversation would founder in controversy and tension. In the weeks after she had extended the invitation to Reverend Boynton, the country had been roiled by an incipient, but startlingly fast-growing civil disobedience movement ignited by the bold act of the four young men in Greensboro.

  I was ten years old when our new seventeen-inch Dumont television set had arrived in the back of our neighbor Mr. Yelverton’s panel truck. Before then, I had not yet gotten the full sharp point of segregation. I knew of course that, pretty much, all Southern white people did not like Negroes, and because of that kept us from going to various places they went to. But this did not affect me at the time in any conscious way. In fact, I would go for weeks, and often months, without seeing a white person, and even then it would happen only when my mother took Gordon and me along when she went shopping downtown. Later, of course, I would see white people on the television. But before this, when I was small, I never doubted that all the Negro grown-ups who wore suits and dresses with big elaborate hats to our church on Sundays were estimable people, and not just to me who addressed them deferentially as Mister This and Mrs. That, but to the wider world as well. It was not until later that I learned full on the heart how white folks really saw us—Grandma, Mama, Daddy, Reverend Boynton, the lot of us—and that was as a faceless gob of menial service providers.

  My mother and father contorted all reason to shield Gordon and me from the truth, but in the end they failed as they had to. What really frightened us, however, was seeing them have no choice but to accept their complete inability to protect us.

  Reverend Boynton, for many years, had been a member of the National Baptist Convention, a powerful black church organization whose president, Reverend Joseph H. Jackson, had supported Reverend King’s Montgomery bus boycott, but strongly opposed the burgeoning nonviolent civil disobedience campaign that was igniting the country’s black youth.

  Through most of the Saturday before Reverend Boynton’s visit, my mother had washed, stripped, and boiled the collards, grated the cheese, and baked the macaroni. By nine o’clock Sunday morning, she had roasted the meat, made and rolled the dough, remembered to add the yeast, shaped the dollops, and spaced them on a pan to grow as we all went off to church to hear Reverend Boynton hold sumptuously forth on the jailing of Saint Paul in Ephesus.

  Incongruously, like his spiritual leader Reverend Jackson, Reverend Boynton strongly opposed the students who were offering themselves for arrest at lunch counters across America. For all of Saturday and most of Sunday, my mother seasoned and sautéed and kneaded and baked, all the while worrying that Reverend Boynton’s first visit to our home would collapse in a ruin of sharply differing opinions.

  Mama and Daddy knew that Gordon and I supported the new civil rights movement. It was pretty plain that they did as well, although they did not want their sons to get themselves arrested. We had not told them about the episode at G.C. Murphy.

  No one in the family could predict what my grandmother would say should the dinner discussion drift into politics. Although they knew nothing of my grandmother’s strange dream experience, they did know well by then that Makeda Gee Florida Harris March was possessed of a spirit that was different from that of anybody they had ever known.

  Mama and Daddy sat at the ends of the table while Gordon and I sat side-by-side across from my grandmother and Reverend Boynton. I suspect it may have been Reverend Boynton’s bottom choice of a place to sit, with him pinioned between Daddy, the doubter, and my grandmother, the mystic, while looking across the table at two strapping young men who were on the other side of six feet and taller than he.

  The only time that I had been this close to Reverend Boynton for anything more than a handshake was three years ago on the Sunday I was baptized by him in the new baptismal pool beneath the floor of the old church’s pulpit. He was a strong man with thick spatulate fingers that he placed behind my neck and waist to take me down into and up from the water in less time than it took to wake the nerves the cold water had shocked numb.

  Mama and Daddy had not reared Gordon and me to speak to adults as equals, thus it would have upset them had we joined in the dinner discussion as such. We were taught a manner, befitting our years, of polite observation, and the importance of responding intelligently to adults’ questions with complete grammatical, well-enunciated sentences ending with the word sir or ma’am. The attitude of our speech, however, had been cultivated to bear no color of shyness or fear or servility. My grandmother and my parents had been of one mind on this point, although my grandmother seemed to have thought the purpose of this through rather more tactically.

  “These are your best years for learnin’,” she had said to me once, “and you can’t learn when you’re talkin’.” She had chuckled before going on, “You’ll learn when you grow up that most everybody is a stranger, even folks you know well, or think you know well, and when strangers talk too much, it’s because somethin’ is wrong inside them. The more they talk, the more you learn about them, the less they learn about you. It’s a good thing to learn to talk only when somethin’ needs to be said, when you’re addin’, not subtractin’.” On another occasion she had said to me, “Never rate people by the jobs they hold or the money they have. That stuff comes and goes like a suit of clothes. Look deeper. Find the soul of a person. See how decent it is. Then make a judgment.”

  I looked across at Reverend Boynton through the lens of my grandmother’s advice.

  “… We’re planning a glorious twenty-fifth revival week for next summer, Sister Alma. We’ve got preachers coming from as far away as Atlanta, Georgia. Pastor B. David Riddick told me that he’s gonna try to make it in from Chicago if he can get a break in his schedule. You know, everybody’s trying to get the man. Lord, can he preach. It’s gonna be a great time …”

  I looked at Daddy looking at Mama looking at him, and knew well the measure of his love for Mama which could be calculated in the units of his sufferance of Reverend Boynton who bore on. Oblivious.

  “… We should be able to complete the air-conditioning project before next summer hits … Sister Mattie, we got to put a stop to Sister Ann and Deacon Short’s campaign to pull away from the church and buy Big Bethel’s building in Northside … This morning, the youth ushers turned the wrong way with the offering … So what do you young men think about all of this civil disobedience?”

  Mama gave Daddy a covert look of dread. Then Daddy, in a single cleanly said word, interposed a choice: “Gordon.”

  I glanced at Grandma and saw her handsome features form into a betrayal of sympathy and understanding that fought the old hurt which raked over me once again.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  My feelings had been crushed when my father called upon Gordon, and not me, to speak at Sunday dinner in the pontifical Reverend Boynton’s presence. The blood had rushed into my defenseless fifteen-year-old face for all except, of course, my grandmother to s
ee. Yet only she seemed to register my adolescent humiliation.

  Monday, the next day, was unseasonably warm for April. Wanting my grandmother’s company, perspiring heavily, I reached the walk-up on Duvall Street after school shortly before four.

  I could see when she opened the door that she was tired. Turning to leave, “You get some rest, Grandma. I’ll come back tomorrow.”

  “I’ll not hear of it, son. Get yourself in here.” Revivified.

  We sat in the magical little parlor and were silent for a time. As always, I waited for her to speak first. As always, she would somehow know.

  Suddenly and without preface, she said, “He didn’t mean anything, Gray. He doesn’t mean to hurt you. His soul is not the giver of yours. Your spirit knows not from seeing, but from feeling. He is not like that. We won’t be. He can’t be.”

  “Why am I always getting my feelings hurt?”

  “See it as the price of your gift.”

  “What gift?”

  “To understand with the heart what cannot be seen with the eyes. To know what pictures to show and value in your head, and what pictures not to keep there.”

  She sensed that I did not understand her. Then, out of the blue, she said, “You know that fellow Einstein, he never learned how to drive a car. Said a car was too complicated. What do you think that means?”

  I was surprised by what she said, and did not know how to answer her.

  “Most people live enclosed in small yards behind tall fences, son. They don’t look out. They don’t try to look out … They spend their lives looking at—even worshipping— the fence.”