“Yes, it is,” Cat said. It wasn’t them she was afraid of anymore. It was what was outside. The Klan, always ready to pull the trigger, to light the fuse. And the students and teachers were sitting ducks in the lighted room on the ground level. To keep from baking, they had to throw the sashes up, and still the schoolhouse was a brick oven. A white-skinned hand with a pistol in it would thrust over the windowsill, and the pistol would fire. No! She would fire first. She fingered the zipper on her purse.
“The skin serves the whole body. It protects us from germs,” she explained. “It regulates temperature;without the sweat glands, which are part of the skin, we couldn’t sweat and cool off. The skin has little holes in it, called pores, so the skin can breathe.”
“I thought lungs was for breathing. That’s what you said.”
“They are. But the skin has to let in air, too. Through the pores. Now tell me three functions of the body’s largest organ, the skin.”
But they could only remember two. No one remembered that the skin kept out germs.
“If you have a cut,” Cat explained, “then germs can enter the body through the skin. The tissue can become infected. You have to put disinfectant on a wound, if the skin is broached.” Across the room, Agnes was looking at her, leaning toward her to learn.
“Don’t ever give in to fear,” Cat said.
They just stared at her.
Finally Charles said, “No, ma’am. We won’t.”
“If you do,” she said, “it just makes it that much harder next time.”
“It can be a habit,” one said, as though he knew.
Cat took a deep breath. She had never been so afraid. She could feel the hair of her head trying to rise. Stella crazy in love. And yet it was just an ordinary night, sweltering hot. The mosquitoes were hungry. The moths were visiting. Out there, the tree frogs and cicadas were yelling for rain. Beyond the open windows, it was pitch-black.
“Would somebody mind fanning me hard, just for a minute?” Cat asked.
“I’ll fan you, Miss Cartwright,” Charles said gently. “We know you been sick.” He took the Jesus fan out of her lap and flapped it vigorously.
She closed her eyes. “That feels so good.” They all just sat there. You ought to be a nurse, she heard herself murmur to Charles Powers. And he murmured in reply, Just womens is nurses. Finally, she said, “I guess that was a minute.”
Sam West said, “I fan you, too, if you want?”
“Thank you,” she said. “But for now, back to human anatomy. Another thing about skin. Our hair follicles are located in the skin, and we also have oil glands in the skin. Two more things to remember about skin.” She could feel her forehead breaking out in new sweat. “And skin has pigment in it. Different colors of pigment.”
A moth flew against Cat’s cheek, and she prayed, Make me brave. Please, God, make me brave tonight. But never had she wanted so much to be able to run. If only she could get up out of her chair, run to the car, wings on her feet, drive home fast, the cooling wind on her face.
Soon it would be break time, she told herself, and the night would be half over. And she would have to talk to Stella about Donny. Stella was firing machine-gun questions at the students; she was relentless. They would learn; every one of them. She pushed too much. Like Christine. Not like Christine. Stella was completely organized and confident about what she knew. Christine was less certain, had a leading edge of aggression instead of confidence. Stella’s students were starting to squirm. At break time, Cat would remind her of step four: introduce humor. Break the tension.
In the distance, there was an explosion. Everyone in the room fell silent. The sound was muffled and far away. They couldn’t be sure. How many times had bombs wrecked the homes, churches, businesses of Negro people in Birmingham? Around forty, and increasing. But, thank God, only four dead. Denise, Carole, Cynthia, Addie Mae—how could one thank God for that?
“Now I do believe,” Agnes said, “that was just something letting down at the steel mill.”
“Let’s take a break now,” Christine said.
The students scraped their wooden desk legs over the floor as they got up. It sounded like a great clearing of the throat. Cat rolled herself closer to an open window. Hoping for a breeze, she held her hands out the opening.
“Squeeze hard,” Arcola said, behind Cat, “and I believe you wring water out of this air.”
“I like your braid,” Cat said.
“Yeah, I thought I’d better look like a queen, hot night like this.”
But Arcola didn’t look hot, and she smelled like Evening in Paris. Just the thought of the little dark blue bottle and the idea of eau de cologne made Cat feel cooler. Stella came over: and Cat noted critically that Stella was wearing faded red pedal pushers; they were old, and the fabric would be worn thin and cool. She’d had them when she was thirteen, an underage high school freshman, when she came to visit Cat on Saturdays. How easily Stella walked; how thoroughly she took movement for granted. Just below the knee the faded pedal pushers fastened modestly with metal D-rings.
“You feeling okay, Cat? You look flushed.”
“I’m the one what’s flushed,” Christine said. “I’m just too dark-complected for you to see.” She smiled at Stella. “You sure on ’em tonight. Like a duck on a line of june bugs.” Exuberantly, Christine snatched a bug out of the air. She threw it on the floor and stepped on the shell. Cat heard it crunch, but she refused to look at the mess of fluid and broken shell on the floor. She might vomit.
“I’m inspired,” Stella said. And then she commanded, “Listen!” She paused. “He’s playing again.”
“He been visiting the churches,” Gloria said. “Talking ’bout voter registration. I told him, come over here and practice his music.”
“It’s Chopin,” Stella said. “ ‘The Revolutionary Etude.’ ”
“Stella’s smitten,” Cat said.
“Naw!” Arcola said. “You tell us you gonna marry Cat’s brother!”
That was Arcola going to the heart of the matter—quick and unafraid.
“But you don’t have to,” Gloria said softly. “I’d marry that music, I was you.”
For a moment, Cat hated Gloria.
“Marry him yourself,” Cat snapped.
“I don’t find white men attractive,” Gloria said, smiling. “I want to marry somebody like my daddy.”
“Don’t you marry a Yankee, Stella,” Arcola teased. “We want you to stay down here with us.”
Cat pictured Donny sitting under a palm tree on the sand, looking out at the ocean, and opening a disengagement letter from Stella. Maybe the piano guy was married. Stella couldn’t be serious. And even if she was, she couldn’t make it happen. But how would Donny feel?
Stillness welled up in Cat. How would he feel to be disengaged? Donny wouldn’t much care.
He liked Stella. He respected her. But Donny didn’t love her. (Cat imagined she was sitting with Donny in the sand.) He wouldn’t much care if they never married. It was she, Cat, who cared. And if Donny did love Stella, she herself would be jealous. That was why it had seemed all right for Donny to marry her.
She pictured him alone reading the letter, then he looked up, looked out at sea. “Well,” he said. He frowned slightly. A thousand times she’d seen that slight frown of disapproval about something that really mattered very little. He got up from the sand.
“What you thinking about?” Gloria asked.
But Cat said nothing. She looked anew at the people around her: pretty Arcola with her brilliant smile; Gloria with the lime green eyes, strange and startling; wiry Christine, all efficiency and ambition, softening every day. Over in her student seat, dear Mrs. Agnes LaFayt, who had come to them finished, soft and wise, always ready for lessons to begin again, slowly waving her fan. Now Agnes took out a dainty white handkerchief, edged with crocheted lace. These were Cat’s new friends. They were chatting all around her, grabbing a few minutes to relax. People she more than liked; people she
would protect. She touched her purse to feel the shape of her gun inside. She felt alone in her weakness and power.
“Stella,” she said, “sometimes I think about what if we needed to move fast.”
Stella uncocked her ear from the window. She reached over and pressed Cat’s hand against her purse. “We’d run for our lives. You’d be going the same speed as I would. Only you’d be in front.”
Cat felt tears glaze her eyes. “It’s just so damn hot,” she said.
“Cat!” all her friends chorused, except for Agnes, who hadn’t heard, sitting at a remove.
Cat smiled, pleased to have shocked them. She took a deep breath, smelled the odor of the students’ cigarettes from out on the portico. “What’s he playing now?” Cat asked. Sometimes she feared that her hearing was duller than it used to be, and that her eyesight was a little worse.
“It’s the movement called ‘The Funeral March.’ ”
“Yeah,” Arcola said. Her quick hand snatched a moth out of the air. “Movie music.”
Christine walked to the door. “Intermission’s over,” she called to the students.
Cat felt something stiffening around her, as though her chair had become a giant metal fist. “But you know what?” Cat said to Stella. “I’m through with being afraid.”
“I am, too,” Stella said. “Almost.” Then she smiled at Cat, and Cat basked in that loving smile, light without heat. Stella added, as though she could read Cat’s mind, “May Vulcan hold you in the palm of his hand.”
Answers
YOU DON’T GET THROUGH WITH BEING AFRAID, GLORIA thought but did not say. They’d learn.
Did white people know anything about pity and terror? Could white women know anything beyond personal tragedy? Who you, she asked herself scornfully, to dismiss personal tragedy? Pain is pain. Who you, Gloria Callahan, but somebody who never hurt for nothing in your life but a pony. She looked at her friend Arcola, who deserved to be the queen of the world. But now, I hurt. I hurt for my people.
With her left thumb, Gloria surreptitiously caressed the hard calluses on the tips of the four fingers of her left hand. As she watched the students, refreshed now, come to their desks, Gloria wished she’d stepped outside, too, for the night air. She picked up her fan, which was Jesus at age twelve teaching in the temple. The skin of his face looked like porcelain, and he had been painted with a luminous brown eye. Vulnerable Jesus before his beard.
At least he had gotten to grow up.
When her church exploded, the terror came first in the sound, not just the heavy boom, but the quick snatch of plaster and bricks ripped from the lathes and studs of the building. The bones broken and thrown down so fast it was unimaginable. And then the rising pillars of dust dissipating into a dense cloud, the sanctuary suddenly a box of dust. Even before the dust settled, there was blue sky where the face of Christ should have been.
Gloria had saved a little of the pulverized wall, just scooped it up off the floor and put it in her pocket. Now the souvenir was at home in a little test tube she had stolen from the rack in the chemistry lab. The memento lay beneath her underwear. It was whitish, like the ashy residue from cremation, and she had stuck a cork in one end of the tube.
The classroom disappeared. She was home; with the brass pull, she opened the mahogany drawer of her highboy. She reached beneath the fine silky underwear to feel the glass tube and dry cork. She thought of the four young girls, killed. One decapitated. Others cooked to a crisp. Although the images were in her mind and could not be kept out, she closed her eyes. She felt as though she were welding her eyelids together.
“Miss Gloria,” Mrs. LaFayt called her. “You feeling bad, honey?”
Gloria went and sat beside her, even though Mrs. LaFayt was in Stella’s group. Stella wouldn’t mind if Gloria took her seat for a few minutes.
“I was thinking about Sixteenth Street,” Gloria said.
“I cry for them all the time. And for their parents.”
“We don’t talk about it as much as maybe we should,” Gloria said.
“You got to move on.” Mrs. LaFayt sighed as though she had the weight of the world on her. “Keep going.” She paused, then leaned close. “Sometimes they sing to me.”
“What do you mean?”
“Real high. All four together. High as angels, all four of them.”
“Do they sing hymns?”
“No. I can’t make out the words. I think they beyond any particular words now.”
Gloria was intently curious. “But what do they sound like?” She realized she was holding Mrs. LaFayt’s gaze with her own. She was looking right into her eyes. This is the way I look at everybody now: straight on.
“Kind of like little honeybees. Sort of humming a little golden song. All about honey and clovers and roses.”
Suddenly Gloria felt brimful of tears. She got up. “We have to get started.”
As she walked away, she heard Mrs. LaFayt humming her own little high, grating tune, as though she were trying to catch some remnant of their ethereal song, gasping for breath between phrases. Gloria glanced back at her, and saw Mrs. LaFayt gulp air, then close her ample lips firmly together, humming.
Gloria swallowed her tears, went back, and kissed Agnes on the forehead. Inside there, inside her mind, did Agnes really believe she heard spirits singing?
“Oh, honey,” Mrs. LaFayt said, suddenly crying out. “The Klan near ’bout beat TJ to death last night.”
“No!” Gloria said. “No.” She knelt down in front of Mrs. LaFayt and pressed both Agnes’s hands together inside her own.
Mrs. LaFayt straightened herself tall in her seat with a huge intake of air. She sniffed up her tears, collected herself. “But he’ll be all right,” she said. “Go on now. He’s alive. He wants me to be here. Go on to your teaching. I’ll talk with you later.” And she pushed Gloria away.
Blindly, Gloria found her way back to her desk. History, she thought. This is the real history. I ought to bring the newspaper to class for history lesson. Not that it tells. Not the Birmingham News anyway. And New York too far away to know. She’d seen postcards of it at night: New York City, with its skyscrapers and all its lights shining. The whole city was like a gigantic lantern for the rest of the country.
And New York cared: Goodman and Schwerner, who died with Chaney in Mississippi, who worked for freedom, were from New York.
Someday she, Gloria Callahan, would play the cello in Carnegie Hall. Maybe Jonathan Bernstein Green would help her. As her left thumb caressed the row of calluses across the tips of her four fingers, she thought just about hard enough, tough enough. Callused enough to stand up to the days, months, years of practice.
In a long, jagged agony of breath, Mrs. LaFayt was snuffing up. Gloria’s vision of New York shattered. Her little artistic toughness was nothing in the defense of what life could deal. She wondered what TJ had done.
Not just the four girls but Judge Aaron, in 1957, had done absolutely nothing. It was Fred Shuttlesworth who’d tried to integrate Phillips High School. And Judge Aaron, who had been castrated. Cause and effect didn’t fit. That was the way it was with terror. There was no individual linking of cause and effect. Allegiance to justice was replaced by criminal rage. The world was broken, and you lived in fear. The four girls and Judge Aaron had just been black and available for slaughter. In the South, there wasn’t any terrible thing that could happen that hadn’t happened. Pandora’s box had been wide open a long time.
When Jonathan spoke after church, Gloria had been shocked by his approach to change. He had said: “Never mind integrating education. Negro people have got to register to vote. Then come the jobs, the transportation, the education, the housing, the recreation, and the libraries.” And she had spoken right up and said that she believed they had to work on all fronts at once. (That meeting was when she last saw TJ, small and natty in his Sunday suit. About the size of Sammy Davis Jr. Quick and vital.) And Jonathan had said Maybe, but he felt too many projects dissipat
ed energy. Voting meant power.
Gloria slid into her seat; now she was supposed to try to make her students remember the basic steps in the creation of democracy.
At the Gaslight Club—she had seen TJ dancing that evening, dancing with his wife. She realized there had been a white girl at the nightclub, in a wheelchair—that might have been Cat, but she couldn’t remember the face, just the big wheels on each side of the chair, and her neighbor Eddie, the waiter, had taken the wheelchair person out on the dance floor and twirled her, chair and all. Eddie swished. She knew that Eddie had been in bed two weeks after other colored boys beat him in Oak Hill Cemetery, threatened to cut him.
Now to teach.
“Y’all ever heard of Nat Turner?” she asked.
No one had.
“Between the War for Independence and the Civil War, a slave rose up in Virginia against slavery—1830s maybe.” But then she stopped. Nat Turner rose up murderously. She didn’t want to hold that up as an example.
They all looked at the floor.
“Nat Turner hadn’t learned the lesson, yet, of nonviolence. He didn’t have any Martin Luther King Jr. to teach him. He didn’t have any Mahatma Gandhi over in India showing the way. The things that history surely teaches us is that violence never solves anything. That’s history’s biggest lesson. If you don’t remember anything else from this school, remember that.”
“I don’t know about that,” Charles said politely. “We won the War for Independence, didn’t we?”
Mr. Parrish was standing in the doorway.
“Could I have your attention, please,” he said calmly.
Surprised by his presence, everybody looked up. They didn’t quite believe he was standing there;they expected him to disappear in a moment, and then they’d all go on with their lessons.
“We’ve had a bomb threat telephone call in my office.” Gloria felt the ripple of alarm run through the room. “The police have been called. Now we want to calmly evacuate this building. I want everybody to stand up, don’t run, just walk quickly over to me and through the door.” Already the students were on their feet and moving. “Keep moving, and move outside, and keep going.” The students were converging on the exit. “Move over all the way to the side of the music building, and I’ll join you when everybody’s out.” He added, “Just follow the music.” Gloria guessed he was trying to sound light. Yes, Jonathan B. Green was practicing the piano—Mozart. Gloria thought of Marie Antoinette, decapitated. Maybe only the Nazis were more bloodthirsty than the leaders of the French Revolution, or Stalin.
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