Four Spirits

by Sena Jeter Naslund

  To her own children, she thought, Now if you waiting for me to die fore you light out for the city, you barking up the wrong tree. You be here forever, you waiting for that event. I ain’t making you leave, but I was you, I’d go while I still had some gumption.

  Here was the patch of oak trees to pass. Acorns still clung in clusters up among the green leaves. Charlotte thought an oak leaf was the prettiest shape in the world—the kind with lobes, not the red oak leaf. Too pointy. When she was just a girl, long long ago, she’d seen a woman with an oak leaf branded into her cheek.

  And there was a dogwood with one red leaf on it already. Always the first sign of earliest fall when the dogwood started to turn red. Now they were onto the road leading to the church.

  “One foot in front of the other,” she encouraged her children. Y’all ought to just keep walking. I want you to be free.

  She could hear a cardinal sing, and she sang back to it out loud, “Pretty bird, pretty bird.” Birds always sang prettiest on a Sunday morning. “I love to hear the bird choir,” Charlotte said.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Victoria said with a snap in that spring steel voice.

  “I do too, Mama,” Chris said, muted, and his mother pinched his arm a little so as he would know her thought:You such a good boy.

  One foot in front of the other. Charlotte wished folks pent up in the cities could look down on them from one of their high buildings, see how peaceful and good things were here in the woods. Here everything just grew as it would, no matter who lived here or who didn’t. They had the prettiest woods in the world. She saw goldenrod beside the road.

  In the country, they didn’t have much, but they didn’t need much.

  In the country, folks got along with one another. Acted right.

  She wondered sadly about the four girls and why they’d passed on so young. Good girls. Dressed so nice. They needed to be here.

  Ought to have been with her, in the country. They ought to have been four real girls come to visit their grannie in the country for the summer. Well, she guessed this was autumn coming on. She remembered the dark red leaf on the dogwood. School time.

  The girls needed to be here, whenever it was, enjoying the birds and the green trees.

  By the time Charlotte and Victoria and Chris reached the church, those inside were saying the benediction, in unison: “The Lord bless you and keep you; the Lord make his face to shine upon you. And give you peace. Amen.” It was as though the building itself had a voice.

  The sun glinted on the chrome of the cars parked all around the church. The cars were like a herd of little piglets snouting up to a sow.

  “Quick, quick,” Charlotte told her children. “Let me sit here on the stump. I got to see’em come out. You all hurry on, then come back and get me. Hide now.”

  Charlotte settled herself on the stump. Yes, they were coming out now, first a few men—Charlotte eagerly looked at their faces, their arms—then the women—Charlotte held her breath, appalled—then couples emerged from the door under the steeple. Every white face, their hands and arms were marked.

  Covered with blood, they were. Every one of them. Stained with guilt. She could see.

  Smiling and pleasant, as though nothing had happened.

  No, to them nothing bad had happened for the last hundred years.

  At the Cartwrights’

  “WE COULD GO TO THE FUNERAL,” CAT SAID.

  “We don’t know them,” Stella answered. “We didn’t know the girls.” Stella stroked the arm of the sofa. She could hardly bring herself to look at her friends.

  “We don’t know their families,” Don said.

  They sat in the Cartwrights’ living room.

  “Did this really happen?” Don asked. He jumped up and paced back and forth over the bare wooden floor, Goliath at his heels. “I find it so hard to believe.” Don pressed the palms of his hands together, and they trembled with the force of his pressing. “That someone would do this.”

  Stella had no trouble believing in disaster. She remembered the rolling of the family car, how they had all tumbled, like clothes in a washing machine, the wash of blood. She stroked the sofa arm as though it were a cat. But to bomb a church! Not a chance accident, but someone’s plan. Someone who called himself human.

  “It’s important for some white faces to be seen at the funeral,” Cat said firmly. She looked at her brother, at her friend.

  “There’ll be an enormous press of people,” Don replied, and Cat knew he was saying it would be too hard to get her chair through.

  “There’s quite a bank of steps,” Stella added.

  “We could just be in the crowd. Outside,” Cat answered.

  His toenails clicking, her little dog ran across the bare floor. He leapt into Cat’s lap, and automatically, she smoothed his head, as soon as he had turned and settled himself. He was part Chihuahua, and he cocked his head, flared his big ears, and looked inquisitively from face to face.

  “Goliath’s puzzled,” Don said, with dignified irony. “He’s never heard us talk about this before.”

  “I don’t want to stand outside,” Stella said. “We’d be like spectators. It would be offensive to them.”

  “The one family wanted their privacy. A small gathering,” Don said. “I’d certainly prefer that.”

  “The TV cameras will be there,” Stella said. She imagined the coffins—three dead girls inside. No, the cameras could not look inside, see the little girls in their dark containers. She imagined their ruined bodies lying in their boxes. Stella felt herself there in the church, though the funeral had not yet happened.

  No one else was there, just the empty sanctuary, gloomy, in twilight and silence. Tranced, Stella walked alone down the aisle. Three matching coffins were at the front, the fourth already in the ground. Stella pictured herself walking down the aisle of the church, hesitating beside a front pew, close to the coffins. Like three little boats at a dock, the coffins almost bumped the altar rail. Stella lay down on a pew, on her back. She closed her eyes. She folded one hand over the other, placed both over her heart.

  “What do you think, Miss Silver?” Don asked her, and the spell was broken.

  “I’d feel strange, pretentious going to the funeral of people I didn’t know.”

  “The world knows them now,” Cat answered. “At least their faces.”

  They heard the postman stuffing letters into the metal mailbox.

  “Bombingham,” Cat said, and they all were suffused with shame.

  Goliath leapt from Cat’s lap to run barking toward the closed front door.

  “Goliath!” Cat called once, sharply, but she did not persist.

  Except for the yapping of the dog, they listened in silence to the postman’s steps resounding on the wooden wheelchair ramp, and he was gone.

  After another volley of barks, Goliath turned, wagged his tail with satisfaction.

  “It’s too awful,” Stella said. It was a stupid thing to say, but she wanted them to keep talking. She wanted somebody to find the right words. She stopped petting the sofa arm.

  “Birmingham will never be the same,” Cat said. Her sentence launched itself into the air above the bare boards of the living room and sank.

  “King’s coming back to speak,” Don said hopefully.

  Stella did not know how a person could be so brave as Martin Luther King. So calm. She wished his words would inspire her. She always listened respectfully. She admired him. Yet he seemed masked to her. She didn’t know him; his message remained impersonal for her.

  “I want us to go,” Cat repeated.

  Stella thought of those households where parents must be dressing to attend their daughter’s funeral. No matter what their pain, no matter how wrung with grief, now the families must put on their socks or their hose. They must cover their naked feet appropriately. They must slip their arms through the sleeves of a shirt or dress; they must tighten a belt, glance in a mirror. Other family members, friends would be there to help them, find
ing things, touching their shoulders, fighting their own tears. Glasses of water would be urged on the distraught. Sometimes lovingly, sometimes with a gruffness to hide inadequacy: “Here.”

  “I’ve brought you a glass of water,” Aunt Krit had said to her, when she herself—only a child of five—had sat in the front row at the funeral parlor.

  Aunt Pratt had sat in her wheelchair beside her. Stella remembered how small and young she’d been when her family was crushed. She was just a little girl, and at the funeral parlor Aunt Pratt, parked in the aisle, had reached over the rim of her wheel to hold Stella’s hand.

  Nancy sat on the other side, small as Stella, and held her other hand. Nancy’s mother sat just beyond, with her arm around Nancy.

  Stella studied Aunt Pratt’s hand, which was sheathed in a flesh-colored nylon glove. Pratt wore such gloves to hide the ugly veins in the back of her hand and to conceal her thin fingers, twisted with arthritis.

  Aunt Krit sat across the aisle, on the end of the row, so she could get in and out easily.

  People were crying among the four closed coffins.

  “Now he’s dead,” Stella had whispered to Nancy, but Stella felt even her lips were numb, almost too stiff to form words. “No,” Stella managed to add. “Now they’re all dead.”

  Nancy’s beautiful eyes were full of sadness, but she kept her promise. She didn’t cry. Stella had made Nancy promise they wouldn’t cry.

  “When they all go by,” Aunt Krit had said, thrusting a glass of water at her, “we’ll follow down the aisle. I’ll hold your hand.”

  STELLA WONDERED WHERE Darl was this September morning, where was her betrothed, why had he not telephoned her nor she him? Why was she at the Cartwrights’ with Cat and Don and not Darl?

  Suddenly Don said, “How can anybody ever paint or dance or put on a play again in this city?” He jumped up and left the room.

  “He’s been crying all morning,” Cat said.

  “Have you?”

  “Some.”

  “I can’t. I feel numb.”

  From his seat in Cat’s lap, Goliath cocked his head at Stella.

  Four Lambs

  BECAUSE ONE OF THE DEAD GIRLS WAS HER COUSIN, CHRISTINE had a reserved space in the church. Across the crowded sanctuary, she saw Charles Powers and his little brother Edmund. She set her lips hard against each other to try to keep from crying.

  She hadn’t seen Charles or Edmund since May, drenched with water, in the pandemonium of the demonstrations. Charles had stopped attending night school after last May. Edmund had grown. Like herself, Charles and Edmund were wearing the same clothes they had worn to the demonstration, not because they wanted to say that and this are the same, but because these were their Sunday clothes, their dress-up. She pressed her lips firmly against each other.

  She could not think about the dead children. She could not. She could look at the coffins, at the flowers. She pictured the explosion, like the hoof of the devil, splitting the church open; herself standing in the cloud of plaster dust, soul blown out of her body. Like an empty vessel, she had filled, first with rage. Now with despair. Things would never change. Things had to change now. Else this would be in vain. God couldn’t let this be in vain. Four lambs left on a bloody altar. “Sow in sorrow; reap in joy”—wasn’t that Scripture?

  Christine determined to look at folks’ clothes. She always took an interest in clothes, loved stylish clothes. She herself looked fine in her navy blue suit; because it was polyester, it had washed up in the kitchen sink, by hand, good as new. Christine remembered the sludge of plaster dust in the bottom of the sink, how she had swabbed it out with a used paper towel so the plaster couldn’t clog up the plumbing;then she rinsed what little bit was left down the drain. She had an impulse to catch and save a bit of the milky water, but she had just let it swirl down. She hung her outfit up over the sink to drip dry. And now the skirt and jacket were crisp, good as new.

  Polyester was a blessing. She was grateful to those who invented, to George Washington Carver for inventing peanut butter, so cheap and so nutritious, to whoever invented polyester and No Iron.

  Edmund’s and Charles’s clothes looked good, too. None the worse for hard wearing.

  Lots of navy blue, black dotted around the church.

  There was Lionel Parrish, her night school boss but now a part-time minister, a dancer at the Gaslight (with a woman, his cousin, not his wife), standing with another minister, now sitting down near the front, both in fine gray suits. She looked at the composure of Lionel’s smooth, handsome face and thought of King, but then she saw his eye flash, and she thought of Shuttlesworth. She’d never seen Lionel Parrish flash out that way before now.

  Lionel Parrish wasn’t beaten—she could see that. He sat proudly in his expensive gray suit. He wasn’t in despair, but then, it wasn’t his kids dead. For that matter, wasn’t hers. She tried to make herself glad. What was it Gloria said to try to cheer her? Gloria’s grandmother’s verse: “This is the day that the Lord hath made. Let us rejoice. Be glad in it.”

  But Christine imagined the electric chair. She imagined four electric chairs and four white men, one for each dead child, strapped into them. “And there shall be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth.” That was Scripture, too.

  She knew how she wanted the service to start: she wanted somebody to say, loud and ringing, “Vengeance is mine! I shall repay—thus saith the Lord!”

  BECAUSE THE CHURCH WAS tightly packed, TJ was squeezed against Agnes. He was thankful for the pressure of her soft body against his. She hadn’t wanted to go to the March on Washington, and he had felt alone without her. He had stood close to the Reflecting Pool. He’d faced the front, but that fine, sunny day, King was too far away for TJ to even tell which figure he was. But his voice was everywhere, amplified by the loudspeakers. It had surprised TJ to see the number of white people participating in the Washington march. White touching black in a friendly way. He couldn’t help but be suspicious. Couldn’t stop himself from wondering who do they think they are? Almost he hadn’t wanted them there. But what sense did that make? This was about integration. Equality and integration. He knew he wanted the equality part.

  And where were the white faces? Where were the white people of Birmingham who were supposed to care and regret and detest violence?

  He glanced around the church, people trying for dignified silence, but sobs breaking, some low, some spurting up loud, in spite of handkerchiefs and veils. But there was King. Here in Birmingham, TJ could see him fine. Here at home, he could see King.

  In Washington, D.C., TJ’d looked in the Reflecting Pool, seen the wavering representation of the great pointed monument and the clouds, and King’s amplified voice everywhere as though it emanated from the clouds.

  Here to preach, King must be thinking of his own family. Was it safer over in Atlanta than it was in Birmingham? Over there they bombed Jewish churches. TJ had felt abandoned when King moved from Alabama back to Atlanta. King had four little children himself. TJ could see the sorrow in the man. He looked humble and beaten. What could he say? Four children blasted into eternity. What could any man say?

  There was Fred Shuttlesworth embracing King like a brother, though some people said Shuttlesworth had had hard feelings last May about King. There was something fierce about Fred Shuttlesworth. The man was made out of energy and courage. He bristled with it.

  When TJ looked at the coffins, he thought he was going to howl. He didn’t want to do that. He made himself look at the leaders. He had to look at them now. They had to lead him through this. He heard Agnes crying beside him.

  “Don’t look at the families,” he whispered to her. “Look. There’s Dr. King. See there’s Reverend Shuttlesworth.” But she buried her eyes into his suit shoulder and sobbed. TJ knew that part of her grief was that they never could have their own children. And here were four gone to waste.

  When Dr. Martin Luther King took his turn behind the pulpit, TJ thought, clear as day, Somebody�
��s gonna shoot him someday.

  Trials

  THEY WERE OLDER THAN EDMUND, BUT HE’D NOTICED THEM. Carole was already buried. Once Addie had let him look through her eyeglasses. He knew them when they were alive. Before the service was over, Edmund decided he’d squeeze out of the sanctuary. He wanted to be standing on the church steps when they carried the coffins out. He had to be there to say good-bye.

  He wished he could hug their mamas down near the front of the sanctuary, but they had family, women all around them. He’d just be a fly to them. A troublesome fly buzzing too close. Still, as he squeezed past all the knees, he kept his eyes on the parents. He knew that even though he was just a little boy, never again in his life would he be a witness to such pain.

  But he had to be standing on the steps when the coffins were carried from the church, so he squeezed out.

  Outside, Edmund saw a throng of grown people, everybody dressed up, crying and waiting. When he was grown, this would be something he’d do—go to funerals. But he was already here.

  The steps were jam-packed. Grown people didn’t want to make room for him, but he was little and they did.

  He could hear the groaning and moaning swell inside the church. His mama had said God had to send trials and tribulations to test us. But why? Yes, the service must be ending. That must be the sound of hell, all that pain, all those tears and wailing inside the sanctuary. The crowd outside became silent. The TV folks got their cameras ready.

  There was the end of the first coffin coming out the door, coming out like something being born, riding high up and unsteady on the shoulders of the men. Now the crowd groaned, and the pallbearers were trying to hold the box level, not let it fall, and the front tilted down to descend the steps. Here came the next coffin, and Edmund heard himself wailing. He stood stock-still, he didn’t blink, but his mouth was open and spread, turned down like a sad clown’s, and the sound was coming out.