Four Spirits

by Sena Jeter Naslund

  But the morning after the bullhorn man had threatened, she looked in the mirror and said, “You are a sniveling coward.” It was morning, but she knew she could not go back. Not that night. Yes, she got her period, but she wasn’t flooding, as she told Stella she was. She was afraid. “You talk big,” she told her seated self. “But you are trembling, and it’s only ten o’clock in the morning. You’re afraid not that you’ll be shot through the window but that you’ll wet yourself.”

  She stared hard at herself and at the objects in her bedroom reflected in the narrow mirror. The room was very sparsely furnished, because she needed so much room to maneuver. Even if she had a comfortable, overstuffed chair in the room for reading, it would be too much trouble to get in and out of it. Though she never used them anymore, she looked at her crutches over in the corner. She decided to ask Stella to take them out, to replace them in the corner with a nice vase, and to put peacock feathers in the vase.

  She missed her mother and thought of her grave near the little country church she had always loved. They had chosen a grave site near the cemetery driveway, so Catherine wouldn’t have to get out of the car to visit it. Viewing the nearly vacant room, she missed her mother ferociously. Her mother wouldn’t want her to risk her life to educate what she called “coloreds.” For all her loving kindness, her mother had thought the races were different and should be separate, except where “necessity” dictated otherwise. “You can’t hardly build two separate cities,” her mother had said. “You’ve got to share electricity and water and things.”

  The room was full of sunshine, but it wasn’t too hot yet. Donny had given her a new kind of blanket—a thermal blanket for fall—and it was very lightweight. In the mirror, Cat contemplated the bed. She used the loose-woven white cotton blanket as a spread, and she loved how modern it was. That it could be tossed into the washer and dryer and never needed to be ironed.

  When she looked again into her own smart and mild blue eyes, she knew she saw fear. And it was not fear of wetting. She wanted to live. Suppose this was all there was to life? Sunshine and an almost empty room, a bed with a new-washed thermal blanket, smoothly made up. If that was all there could be to life—a certain domestic beauty and convenience—it was enough, and she would keep it as long as she could.

  I will contend with thee, she promised the image of her seated self, the young woman in the wheelchair filling the lower third of the long mirror. Neither disease nor danger will rob me of what’s left.

  Then as clearly as though he were there, she heard Donny saying, “And what is life without honor?” In her mind’s eye, she saw him walking the beach of his South Pacific island; he was wearing a sarong, his chest was bare, held high, covered with golden hair. So clear was the image, it seemed as though she were watching a movie. Donny had a walking staff in his hand, the kind you could cut in Alabama, one shaped by a twining vine into a baroque spiral, and she wondered where her old walking stick was, the one her father had brought to her when he had first noticed and yet denied the onset of her clumsy disease. With the beach sand in the background, Donny stopped walking, and skeptically said, “And what is life without honor?”

  I’ll go back tomorrow night, she promised herself. Not tonight, but tomorrow night. A little compromise with death. I promise you, she told her image, I’ll go back tomorrow night.

  And she would spend the day as an activist in her own cause and in the cause of people like herself. She rolled herself toward the living room and the typewriter. She would type a letter to the managers of each movie theater in town suggesting that they remove a few seats (perhaps in the back?) so that wheelchair patrons could sit in the row in their own chairs, so that two women could go to a movie together and not need a brother or father to lift one of them into a seat. She would write to the three city commissions (racists all, of one stripe or another) and suggest they not discriminate against wheelchair users of the public streets downtown, that at the busiest corners they make cuts in the curbs, little ramps, so that, unaided, people in wheelchairs might roll themselves from the corners of Pizitz or Loveman’s to other stores across the street.

  She would tell them that she was the president of a new group; she named it Access Available. As she laboriously rolled the typing paper into the platen, she thought that there really could be such a group. She would talk to handicapped people she’d met at Spain Rehab. Once the roller grasped the paper, she could press the Load button. She could go to the waiting rooms of hospitals and recruit other handicapped persons. And I’ll bet nobody would want to shoot us, she thought. And none of us would be packing switchblades or guns.

  With her hands suspended over the keyboard, she suddenly remembered her father had brought her a gun of her own. If she went back tomorrow night, she need not go defenseless. She could carry her gun.

  Dear Donny

  OUR KITTY-CAT WAS SICK THIS EVENING—NOTHING SERIOUS, she’ll be fine tomorrow—but I went out to Miles and taught anyway. Without incident. But that is not what I want to write about. I’m sitting up in my bed at my aunts’ to write to you. Everything is quiet, and I have been looking forward to this moment. I have plumped up two pillows and have them at my back. I write in a kind of still heat. I hope you are painting, at least small watercolors. Lots of green. An ocean breeze.

  What I want to write you about are my mother’s flowers, when I was five. Not her flower garden, for she didn’t have one, but just the flowers that came up perennially scattered around the yard in their designated spots.

  I start with the yellow of the New Year. Beside the front steps, when I lived next door, at the top, on either side were scraggly forsythia bushes. They were never allowed to grow large, and I always felt sorry for them, pruned into little square footstools. But on the side of the house was another forsythia, growing on the bank that led down to the sunken, red-clay driveway. And that bush grew in a lovely golden arch, close to the ground. Once when I was mad at the family, I hid inside that golden cave, and no one could find me. So strange to see their feet go by on the little dirt path, not twelve inches from my eyes. I was both in the world and not in it, for they had no consciousness of me. Is that like being dead?

  I don’t know, but it was thrilling.

  In a way, I died when my family died. Sometimes the driveway is like the Lethe River: having crossed over from one house to the other, I forget what it was to be alive.

  Also, on our bank were irises, deep purple, lavender, and white. They came back strongly each spring (still do, from my vantage point now on the other side of the driveway). I loved their stalwart stems and the spearhead buds as much as the unfolded flowers. Yet surely the shape of the iris flower, with three upright standards and three falls is among the most satisfying of all flower shapes. The fleur-de-lis. Why is there such satisfaction in shapes? Perhaps you, as an artist, can tell me. And in the case of iris, the large size makes the beautiful structure more accessible.

  You left Norwood for Tonga so quickly after our engagement that, of course, we scarcely know each other in terms of the deeper recesses of the mind. I treasure our one opera outing, though, and how we identified with the bird catcher. I imagine you now among orchids, their lavender petals lolling obscenely at your bare shoulder. I like our agreement not to know one another and to write only once a month. That thrills me! That we are committed and yet barely acquainted, except through Cat.

  It is the indulgence of writing this letter that thrills me. That you are with me, listening, and yet of course that is illusion, since time must be bridged and transport accomplished before you read, and then I shall be in another place and time, not sitting propped up on pillows, on a loosely woven, lime green cotton spread. Yet we seem to be together in this moment. And I make you up. Yes, I know I do. I have imagined you. Now! You’re not real! Boo! (That’s just a playful taunt. If you, whoever you are, read this: then you are real.)

  Such magic in language, as much as in painting!

  From the flower kingdom of my chil
dhood, I’ve given you forsythia in two locations and irises in three colors, dear friend. Almost Monet! Also imagine on the top of the slope between the house and red clay driveway, three weak pink rosebushes. They struggle for enough light, their soil is thin, and they’re never given fertilizer. We are proud of them when they bloom each summer; Mother and I (age five) are pleased with the few puffy blooms that we do get, and they, with stems almost too weak to hold them upright, are lovingly snipped and brought inside for the dining room table.

  These roses are not like the small, superabundant ones of the tennis court—the Norwood tennis court where I play, sometimes, with Nancy, my friend since age three. The tennis court roses are fantastically robust, multitudinous, the stems sprouting billions of stiff thorns. At home, our pink roses have spare thorns, big limp, loose blooms. We prop the chins of our roses on the rim of a tall, clear drinking glass.

  In kindergarten, a teacher brought glasses with thick bottoms to class for us to decorate with sharp holly leaves and berries as Christmas gifts for our parents. How thrilled I was to get to create something beautiful and useful for my parents. I guess I thought they would share the one glass. It amazed me that the teacher brought in the glasses by the carton. We looked down into the open box and saw the cardboard partitions and the open rims of the glasses looking up at us, like so many fish waiting to be fed. Which to choose? They were without individuality. I chose the one from the middle of the grid—that was where I myself wanted to be: in the middle of things, surrounded by kindred spirits.

  Anyway, one child pulled out a broken glass (from a corner position) and badly cut her hand. It was a terrible baptism of blood over all those pristine glasses. Not over my box, but another, and I saw the blood on the glasses.

  What an awful image. Why do I write to you of the joy of forsythia, iris, and rose and then of blood?

  Because I must display myself to you. We must be known to each other, and we have made a terrible mistake to think that mere acquaintance is enough. Because I must display my mind, like a bouquet of stalwart irises, emerging forsythia, and weak-stemmed roses, if you are to know me and thus care about my fate. Isn’t that what we all ardently want? To be known? And it is possible.

  I learned it at Miles. (Sometimes I call it Courage College.) There is no “other.” We are all the same. Knowable. Last night at school we had a threat, but tonight everything went smoothly. No shattered glass, no bloody melee.

  Don, I want to pray tonight for safety and wisdom. How far to go in working for change? When to stop? And I need to stop writing.

  Dogwood! That was the tree my mother loved most. Ours was scrawny but glorious with white blossoms.

  He Doesn’t

  WHILE AGNES DROVE HOME, SHE FEARED A CARLOAD OF white men might be following her. At one corner, she took an unexpected turn. When they went straight, she was relieved, but a few blocks later, they were behind her again. She tried not to think about it. Just don’t go down any dark alleys, she told herself. You be all right. She knew sometimes a Negro was followed and nothing happened. It was their way of keeping people off balance.

  It wasn’t usual to see a car full of white men in the Miles neighborhood. Surely they didn’t object to a harmless middle-aged woman trying to get a GED. Maybe they didn’t see it that way. Maybe they were part of the bullhorn gang.

  Well, her car was cooled off enough, she could roll up the window.

  Wrong about that! Within two blocks, the car was an oven without any fresh air. At the next stop sign, she reached her hand down in her shopping bag to pull out a Jesus fan. It was the Good Shepherd, her favorite. She drove with one hand and fanned with the other. Occasionally she glanced in the rearview mirror.

  Still there, but farther back. Or maybe that was a different car. It was dropping on back, thank the Lord.

  She wished she could have books to take home to study on. She missed the science class, and she hoped Miss Cat was all right. Those words for the bones were hard to remember, except the upper arm bone, the humerus. The funny bone, Miss Cat had said. She was a good teacher. But it was Miss Stella who was the fanatic. She just went over and over the lesson. Not, he “don’t.” Instead, he “doesn’t.” Miss Stella said, “I know it doesn’t sound right to you. But if we say it over and over, it will start to sound right. You’ve just got to memorize it for now, and trust me.”

  Just young girls but they were trying to help out. Agnes decided to step on the gas a little more. I’ll just widen the gap. But she couldn’t restrain her toe, how it wanted to press down, press down. The tree trunks on the sides of the street were zipping by in a blur.

  Suddenly their brights were bouncing into the mirror and into her eyes. She heard them gun the engine, gather speed. They might try to make her run into a tree.

  “Lord Jesus,” she said aloud. “Into thy hands.” And she gripped the steering wheel. She put on the brake, as though it could stop this from happening.

  Noise big as a freight train, horn blaring they bore down on her.

  And swerved safely around.

  Her car shuddered to a dead halt. Their red taillights were disappearing down the dark street. They were putting on the gas. Speeding away. She hadn’t been shot. No eggs or nothing thrown on the car. They were just gone.

  “Thank you, Jesus.”

  But she was shaking. Both feet were on the brake pedal. She’d killed the motor. As fast as she could, she pressed in the clutch, turned the key, gave a little gas. Not to flood, Lord, not to flood. And she was slowly letting out the clutch, and she was moving forward. As she drove, she cautiously swept her head from side to side. Sweep clean, sweep clean. They done gone. Swing low, sweet chariot.

  In ten minutes, she would be home. TJ would be at work, but she’d call her neighbor to come over and sit with her till her nerves quieted. Maggie would read the Bible and pray with her. Then they’d get to talking about church or sewing circle. They’d drink ice tea and stir it round with the long-handled teaspoons. Her hands were sweating so bad, the steering wheel was slippery. Maggie and she would have a nice evening till bedtime. She’d go right to sleep; she always did, and she’d wake up to TJ making a pot of coffee.

  Honestly, she didn’t care if the world changed or not. The white people she had always known were good enough. They spoke softly, cherished politeness. But now these strange, mean ones coming out of the woodwork. She just wanted to get her education and then a new job. She rolled her window down to get a breath of night air. God would make society change in his own good time. In the meantime, it was getting a good job that mattered. She would better herself. Let other folks better themselves, if they had the gumption. She rolled the window down six inches. Some kind of job for her to add to TJ’s and they’d work and save maybe twenty more years, retire, and then they’d be done. She didn’t want to cause trouble.

  “You-all barking up the wrong tree,” she said out loud to the empty street before her.

  WHEN SHE GOT HOME, TJ opened the door before she could get out her key.

  His face was troubled. Sad.

  She put her arms around him. But what was wrong? Then he took her hand and led her to the sofa.

  “Are you all right, darling?” he asked her.

  “Just fine.”

  “Two things happened this afternoon,” he said. He held up two fingers in a V, as though she couldn’t count. She reached out and caught his hand in hers. She brought his two knuckles to her lips and kissed them.

  “One was that I tried to register to vote this afternoon. I went down with the redheaded white man who spoke at church. Mr. Green.”

  “Did you make it?” She felt a rush of pride and hope.

  “No. I failed to put a comma between the day and the year. I can try again in a month.”

  “That’s not so bad,” she said. And then it just blurted out of her, “Did you get to the part to put down our address?”

  “Yes,” he said. His voice was solid and polished. It reminded her of hickory wood—s
trong and smooth. Just what it was, nothing fancy. She loved him almost to idolatry.

  “Let’s go on to bed, then,” she said. “I got mixed up and thought you’d be at work tonight. I’m tired out.” She glanced at him to see if she might tell now. “I had a little scare,” she added.

  “Wait,” he said. “There was two things I gots to tell you. Number two is this evening I lost my job.”

  “TJ!”

  He didn’t speak. While he just looked into her eyes, she found an answering awareness rising in her. He was the steadiest man in the world. It had never crossed her mind to worry that he might lose his job. And then the two pieces of news ticked like a clock in her brain: vote, job. Tried to vote; lost his job.

  “ ’Cause you tried to register?” she said.

  “I believe so.”

  “That fast?”

  “Let’s sit on the sofa,” he said. Still holding her hand, he took her to the couch. “They all connected, these white people. I put down where I worked. I had to.”

  “Bankhead Hotel—why’d they say you let go?” She was relieved to be off her feet.

  “They say…” He paused to gather the story in his mind. He always took his time, Agnes thought. Got things straight, told it true. He licked his lips and spoke quietly, staring at the floor. “First, Mr. Armstrong say, ‘We want a younger man.’ And I say, ‘I’m a veteran. I done fought two wars.’ And then Mr. Armstrong say, ‘That’s what I told Mr. McCormick.’ And I say, ‘You question him?’ ‘Yes, I did,’ he says. I just look at him and he look at me, and the whole thing start to dawn on me. Then I say, ‘I’d like to speak to Mr. McCormick. He in?’ And Mr. Armstrong say, ‘I phone upstairs and tell him. I don’t know, but I’ll tell him.’ Meanwhile I straighten my tie, shine my shoes just like I’m going on the job. Then Mr. McCormick himself come busting through the door, talking ’fore I can say anything. He say, ‘I know you fought, TJ, and got honorable discharge, but I can’t have any nigras what want to stir up trouble. Now if you want to take a week off to think, and then come back, you might get your job back.’ ”