Four Spirits

by Sena Jeter Naslund

  Stella was standing behind Cat’s chair, already trying to push.

  “Release the brakes,” Stella said.

  “No.”

  As though she didn’t hear, Stella pushed harder, but the chair didn’t budge.

  “Stop, Stella,” Cat ordered, though she hadn’t raised her voice.

  “What?”

  Gloria saw Mrs. LaFayt was still sitting in her chair. Her hands were folded in front of her; her head was bowed, her lips moved in prayer. Gloria touched her shoulder.

  “Let’s go out now,” Gloria said. “We’ll pray when we get outside.”

  Obediently, Mrs. LaFayt rose to her feet. “Let me take my fan,” she said. And she picked up the image of the Good Shepherd and held it to her bosom like a shield. “ ‘The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want,’ ” she quoted. She managed a smile.

  Gloria saw that Stella was talking earnestly to Cat, whose feeble hands were covering the brake releases on her chair.

  “Gloria,” Stella called anxiously. “Cat doesn’t want to leave.”

  Gloria saw that Mrs. LaFayt was headed for the door, rather slowly, but moving. Not looking back.

  “What’s wrong, Cat?” Gloria asked.

  “I made a vow to myself,” Cat said. “I’m not going to be intimidated anymore.”

  “It’s a bomb threat!” Stella reiterated.

  Gloria could feel hysteria just under the imperative tone of Stella’s voice, and as she did, she felt the necessary strength in her own bones. The strength started in her shins and thighs; it was her legs reassuring her. Stay or go, her bones said. We serve your will.

  “ ’Course you could stay,” Gloria said to Cat. She was careful not to move toward Cat. “But what’s the point?”

  Standing by the door, Mr. Parrish said impatiently, “Hurry up, everyone.”

  “Let’s all go now,” Gloria said.

  But she stood still and calm. What was Cat thinking of, to want to stay?

  Gloria felt that she was standing in between the pews in the church again; the same strength was in her now that she had offered to Christine.

  “Your brakes stuck?” Christine called and bustled over.

  Cat rotated her head to address Christine.

  “I believe it’s a bluff,” Cat said. She spoke so determinedly, it felt like hate behind her voice. No, Gloria thought, it’s power. Cat doesn’t hate Christine. It’s will against will, that’s all. And Gloria knew Cat would win. No need to take sides. Hadn’t she known when she lifted her eyes to the face of Jesus that it would be gone? Some things you knew in advance. Jesus himself couldn’t stand to look at what hate had done on September 15.

  “They just want to disrupt. Make people afraid to come,” Cat explained with murderous intensity to Christine.

  “We got to leave. Now!” Christine said. “Now!” Her voice spanked the air.

  “Please listen, Cat,” Stella implored. “They’re right.”

  “No.”

  “You want to die?” The words burst out of Christine. “Maybe you don’t care you live or die. I got children!”

  “I won’t go,” Cat said, but the murder had gone out of her voice. Just flat fact was left.

  “Mr. Parrish,” Christine called. “This white girl gone crazy.”

  Stella tried to push the chair. She reached to remove Cat’s hand hovering over the brake mechanism.

  “Don’t do that,” Gloria said. “She got her rights.”

  And Stella obeyed Gloria. She lifted her hand away from Cat.

  “I’m leaving!” Christine announced. Her glance seared Gloria.

  Mr. Parrish approached. “Gloria, you go on now, too.”

  “Yessir,” she said. “It probably is a bluff,” Gloria said, but she followed Christine.

  “Cat.” Mr. Parrish sighed. “Black groups always getting bomb threats. Still we got to evacuate.”

  “I won’t,” she said. “They’re watching. You know that.” She smiled. “I’m going to hold down the fort.”

  “No, you’re not, Cat,” he said.

  “Please, Cat,” Stella begged.

  Through the open door, Gloria called, “Come on, Stella. Let Mr. Parrish talk to Cat.”

  “You don’t have to stay,” Cat said to her friend.

  “I promised you. I promised,” Stella said.

  “That was if we decided to run,” Cat said. “I don’t want to run.”

  “Stella, you leave now,” Mr. Parrish said.

  Over her shoulder Gloria watched Stella walk jerkily to the door and out. She passed Gloria, and then Stella began to run across the grass toward the others. Gloria moved only to the edge of the porch and stopped again to look back.

  The open doorway framed Cat in her chair and Mr. Parrish leaning a little toward Cat, trying to reason with her. Around the campus, throughout the college, Gloria saw the lights were going out. First the science building, now the music building and the few lamps above the sidewalks. Somebody was at the switches. Gloria imagined him at the box. Somebody wearing a white robe and a white hood;a man’s white-gloved hand was at the controls.

  Students were huddling against the side of the music building. No, somebody was leading them around the corner to put the mass of the building between them and the H.O.P.E. classroom. No, Mrs. LaFayt was leaving the group and walking back to Gloria. Agnes LaFayt! Gloria started to call to her to retreat, but then Gloria stopped herself. Who am I to say? she asked.

  When she looked back inside, what she saw sent her body rigid.

  Cat’s hand was coming slowly out of her purse. Cat’s hand had a gun in it, and she was pointing it at Mr. Parrish.

  “Now put that away,” he said loudly, raising his hands.

  “I won’t,” she said. “Back off.”

  “I could rush you, Cat.”

  “Better not.”

  “I could carry you out of here.”

  “My choice,” she said. “Raise your hands higher.”

  Slowly Mr. Parrish raised his hands, his open palms toward Cat.

  “I don’t want to have to come get you,” he said. But Gloria knew he was complying.

  “Mr. Parrish, I like you a lot,” Cat said. “I respect you and admire you. You rush me, and I’ll fire. Don’t doubt it. I know how to shoot.”

  “I’m your friend, Cat. We’re in this together,” he said. “We leave now, we come back tomorrow.”

  “You leave,” she said. “I don’t want to endanger you. Or anybody.”

  Gloria realized that Agnes LaFayt had come to stand beside her. Agnes reached down and took Gloria’s hand.

  “Mr. Parrish,” Mrs. LaFayt called sweetly. Surely she was seeing the gun in Cat’s hand, too. “Mr. Parrish, I want you to come on out here with the rest of us. Your family needs you, Mr. Parrish.”

  She sounds like she’s his mother, Gloria thought.

  Slowly Mr. Parrish lowered his hands. He turned toward the door. Already Cat was lowering the barrel of the gun.

  “The Lord bless you, and keep you, Cat,” he said.

  Gloria held her breath. Now was the moment to turn and rush her, if he chose to. He walked out. He walked past Gloria and Mrs. LaFayt and kept walking. “Y’all come on,” he said as he passed.

  But Gloria and Mrs. LaFayt stood on the porch, looking in.

  Just as Cat let the gun rest in her lap, the lights inside the classroom went dark.

  “Maybe we hear police siren soon,” Agnes said.

  Gloria surveyed the campus. Not a light. At the outskirts, a little traffic passed. A few cars slowly pushed their headlights along, minding their own business.

  From across the campus, Gloria heard sprightly piano music played in the dark: “The Marseillaise.” There was something ironic in the way the man played the piece—too jaunty. Why did that madman from New York choose to play the anthem of the French Revolution? She shuddered to think of the French awash in blood, but their cause—one of class, not race—had been just.

  Another
song, the anthem of nonviolence, bloomed slowly in the dark:

  We shall o-ver-co-o-ome

  We shall o-ver-co-o-ome

  We shall o-ver-come some-da-a-a-a-ay

  Gloria felt as though she was on the moon. Through darkness from a great distance, she seemed to hear and watch the ways of human beings. But it was just over there, across the campus. Le jour de gloire n’est pas arrivé. The day of glory. Gloire. Another name for herself, a revolutionary name, a secret name of her own for her own inner strength:Gloire. An ugly word that stuck in the throat like swallowing a raw egg the way old country people did.

  Agnes squeezed her hand. Inside the dark classroom, Cat was striking a match to light her candle. Gloria marveled that Cat’s grip could manage striking a match. She saw Cat moving the candle away and trying to blow out the match. The aim of her breath was uncertain; her head bobbed. Gloria supposed Cat’s gun was resting in her lap. The match blinked out, and the candle wavered and glowed.

  Agnes LaFayt shuffled through the door. “Cat baby, I come to sit with you,” she said as though she were speaking to a six-year-old.

  “Is that you, Agnes?”

  “Yes, it is,” she said.

  And Mrs. LaFayt was pulling a desk into Cat’s circle of light.

  “I was afraid,” Cat said.

  “I know,” Agnes said. “Don’t nobody like to sit by herself in the dark. But I sit with you.”

  “I knew if I gave in, I’d never come back,” Cat said. She was pleading. To be understood, to understand herself. “I need my job. For my future.”

  “God willing, we all live to see the sun rise and the sun set, and we be back studying tomorrow night, thanking him.”

  “It’s always a bluff,” Cat said. “These bomb threats.”

  “Sometimes yes, sometimes no. It’s in God’s hands now.” Agnes paused. “You want me to hold your hand?”

  “Yes.”

  “Let me just get my own candle lit, then we hold hands. Then we feel brave.”

  Gloria watched Agnes dig into her purse, come up with the little wax cylinder. She touched her wick to Cat’s flame. “This is what I bought these candles for,” Mrs. LaFayt said. She reached out and held Cat’s hand. “I used to be nursemaid to lots of white children,” Agnes said.

  “But not now?” Cat asked.

  “I didn’t have none of my own. That the only thing ever make me doubt God. TJ and I never had none. Too late now. But we try. We still try, remember Sarah and Abraham.”

  Gloria felt shocked. She could imagine Agnes and TJ dancing together but not trying to make babies. She felt the lean emptiness of her own youthful body and was grateful for her virginal intactness.

  “But few years back,” Agnes continued, “I couldn’t work for white folks no more. TJ, he say he understand.”

  Gloria saw that Cat was growing more frightened, could hardly speak, while Mrs. LaFayt settled more and more calmly into her waiting. Gloria wanted both to leave and to stay to witness. In the wink of an eye, this quiet tableau could be transformed: blast and crashing down of walls, the room filling with dust, the building collapsing. The end of their lives.

  Agnes went on speaking, keeping up both ends of the conversation. “And you know why I left taking care of white children? Well, it was one reason only. I loved ’em too much. Loved ’em too much.”

  “Sing,” Cat said suddenly. “Please sing.”

  And Agnes’s voice rose up like the wind rising in an organ, full and rich:

  Trust and obey, for there’s no other way

  To be happy in Jesus, but to trust and obey

  When we walk with the Lord

  In the light of His Word….

  Gloria found herself walking into the room.

  “I come to sit with you,” Gloria said.

  “Well, pull up a chair and sing,” Mrs. LaFayt said.

  With all her heart, Gloria joined the song. She wasn’t sure she even believed in Jesus, but now she was inside the movement. This was protest and determination. Beside her, Cat was trying to belt it out, but with her speech problem, she only got a few tones.

  “You got your candle?” Mrs. LaFayt asked Gloria between verses.

  “Naw.”

  “Don’t matter. We got two already.”

  Mrs. LaFayt began to pump her body at the waist, forward and backward.

  Then a strong, male tenor voice—“To be hap-py in Jes-us”—entered the song, and Jonathan Green came into the room. “Hope you guys don’t mind I join in.”

  He pulled a chair between Gloria and Agnes. Gloria felt that ten people had joined them instead of one. The room was almost crowded. He reached out his ivory hands on both sides. In the candlelight, his face was very pale, his hair a dark red. And then his voice took off, singing complicated running notes, weaving all around and in and out of the melody. He leaned back in his chair and sang as nonchalantly as though he were alone on the riverbank, fishing. Gloria and Agnes had to sing louder to hold their own.

  Despite his being an ugly man, Gloria decided, he glowed. At the end, Agnes said quickly, “I believe your name must be Michael,” and then she launched into singing “Michael, row the boat ashore, hal-le-lu-jah….”

  Gloria began her own riff, ornamenting the hallelujah so that it ran like a holy fire above all their heads.

  Lionel Watching

  WHILE LIONEL WATCHED THE FLICKERING CANDLELIGHT from inside the H.O.P.E. classroom from a safe distance, he cursed himself. He had left the crippled girl in there, but she had pulled a gun on him. If the place blew up, he couldn’t say that she pulled a gun. The school was pledged to nonviolence. That was what the grant proposal to Washington had said: “In the tradition of Martin Luther King Jr. H.O.P.E. offers the opportunity to earn equality in the nonviolent quiet of the classroom.”

  Lionel Parrish couldn’t believe somebody as helpless as Cat Cartwright would pack a gun. He’d seen how her hands wavered. She’d blow her own head off before she’d defend herself.

  At his ear, Christine said, “It could go any second.” She grasped his hand.

  “Yes.” He squeezed back. He didn’t want Christine running off to die. Gloria, that mouse. And Mrs. LaFayt, the meekest of the meek!

  They stared across the campus. The low one-room brick building hunkered close to the earth. The columned portico looked stately to Lionel, as though it were quietly proud of itself. The students had stopped singing; the dim light still flickered from inside their classroom. A profound silence settled on the gathered group. He began to count his sheep. All the students stared at the building.

  Impulsively, Lionel held up his hand and closed his eyes. “Dear Heavenly Father,” he said. “We pray for their lives. We pray for this campus and all the students, and for the buildings. We pray for peace and justice in Birmingham, and all of Alabama, and the world over, dear Lord. Give us courage. Give us wisdom. Help us to trust in Thee. Not our will, but Thine be done. In the name of Him who taught us to pray, ‘Our Father, Who art in Heaven….’ ” The group joined in the prayer. When Lionel opened his eyes the building was still there. He felt better.

  At Lionel’s ear, Charlie Powers spoke. “Who’s that left inside? We ought to tell ’em to come on out.” His tone was manly—one man speaking to another.

  “I tried,” Lionel said. “They insist on being where they are. They think the bomb call is a bluff.”

  “We ought to do something,” Charlie insisted. “Tell ’em to come on out now.”

  “I tried,” Lionel said again.

  Stella said, “It’s just five minutes till school will be out for the night. They’ll come out then. That’s their point. Nothing is going to cut out school.” Every few moments, she flicked up her wrist to read her watch; the figures on it glowed a faint green.

  Lionel wouldn’t let himself ask how much longer? The group fell silent and waited. As the minutes ticked by, he became increasingly angry. The person who telephoned was a white, a redneck woman. He hated to admit it, but
she had sounded concerned for them. He had believed they were really in danger. And now these women still in the building, one of them with a gun, of all things. All over the South, women were trying to take over the leadership roles. But he didn’t want the school to close down in fear. Look what education was doing for Charlie Powers already.

  Christine said, “Once they safe, everybody come over to my house. Let’s talk about what we can do. In Birmingham.”

  “I can’t do that,” Lionel said. “As the director, I can’t be involved in any sort of planning of protests.” He dropped her hand.

  “That’s okay, Mr. Parrish,” Christine said. “We understand.” When she touched his bare arm, her fingertips almost burned his flesh.

  “I think it’s best just to continue what we’re doing,” he said. “Getting ready to take the GED.”

  “If you want to, you can come over later,” Christine said.

  Lionel reached over and lightly touched her. “Thank you. I’d like that. Cup of tea?”

  Then Cat wheeled herself out onto the porch slab. The students clapped and hollered. Mrs. LaFayt emerged and stood beside her, clasping her purse to her stomach. All around Lionel, the students raised the volume of their approval. Gloria stood behind the chair, but nobody seemed to notice her. When Gloria tried to push Cat’s chair toward the step, Cat looked back at her, made a circling motion—“turn me around”—with her hand. Lionel saw nothing of the gun.

  After Cat’s instructions to Gloria, Gloria turned the chair to take it down the one step backward, big wheels first.