Four Spirits
Page 55
With both hands she pushes aside the guns, breaks through their circle, leaps monuments as though they are tennis nets, and runs again through the snow for her life, her life, her life.
When she awakes, her tensed legs trembling with joy, her body cradled in her lover’s arms, she fears only that what is real—her life, her love—might be imagined.
Postlude
Bringing in the Sheaves
Helicon Homecoming
IN THE WOODS, A VERY OLD MAN IS TALKING TO HIS mother, whom white people have called, for long years, Old Aunt Charlotte.
They stand at the edge of a clearing where their ancient shanty leans into a mean wind.
“Mama, I gots to go,” he says. “They say there’s a march coming to Montgomery. Black folks marching for freedom.”
“Look at the sky,” she says. To the south, the sky is blue, but from the north gray fluffs, shoulder to shoulder, are coming in. “There’s snow in them clouds,” she adds. “I seen it before.”
“Been so long—”
“I can remember. You could, too, if you tried. Forty, fifty years ago. It snowed. Way down here. You remember. Snowed from Birmingham all the way down here and to Mobile and the Gulf.”
“Mama, I was just a boy then.”
“No, you wasn’t. Not any more than you’s a boy now.” Not quarreling. Banter. Entertainment. Making the time pass with a few sparkles in it.
“I had white hair, then?”
“Sure ’nuff.”
They stand together in front of the small dun house with boards soft as worn denim and look at the sky. Each can see that a few specks of white are striking the face of the other, skittering off their cheeks.
“Mama, I gots to go. I got to take my own steps. I come home again.”
But if he raises up like that, Charlotte knows what could happen, what has happened to the uppity.
She holds out her hands and snowflakes float into her palms. The sky has become a uniform gray except for a few bays and inlets of blue far to the south.
“I’m leaving,” Chris says. “Gots to freedom walk.”
“We’ll send for you,” Charlotte says to her son, “when the roof’s back on.”
He looks at her strangely. “I loves you, Mama. You done the best you could, by everybody. White and dark.” He starts to walk the path through the woods.
CHARLOTTE SPITS HER snuff onto the ground. “I can make snow, too,” she says. “Brown snow.” She chuckles, looks wickedly at her daughter. But Victoria has her blunt nose tilted up, studying the clouds. Charlotte looks with her. What a multitude of snowflakes!
“It’s cold,” Victoria says. “We need to move inside.”
“You can go, baby. Hurry and you’ll catch Chris on the path.”
In a few patches around the yard, the snow is beginning to stick. It looks like white scabs.
Victoria turns toward the house. She slowly crosses the yard and climbs up the step.
“I’m going to enjoy this snowfall,” Charlotte says to no one.
It’s good to be alone. Just herself and the house and yard. The sky. She settles herself on one of the two steps to the dogtrot. Soon all the rake marks in the red dust will be covered. She’ll see a pure field of snow, whiter than the best field of cotton. “Y’all should of left long, long ago,” Charlotte says quietly to the vacancy. “This ain’t no place for y’all younguns.”
Now there is enough snow on the yard to resemble a threadbare quilt. In the woods, snow is nesting in bright white clumps in the pine needles. “Come on, snow,” she says. “Let’s cover this.”
She holds out her hand. On her palm, she catches a clump of snowflakes. She can see a few sparkling spines sticking out from the glob. After the snow melts in her palm, she tastes the moisture that came down as snow. Her tongue is a warm dove on a cold nest. She wipes her wet hand on her dress.
From behind her, Victoria silently leans down to place a folded quilt over her shoulders. Charlotte looks down at the pad of quilt to see which one it might be. A thick, nice one, pieced curvy to suggest an inlay of blue and yellow ribbons on a white background.
She relaxes under the thick warmth. Then she says, “This be so pretty. All this.” The house faces east, and she looks at the land from north to south. “I’m thankful I’m here to see it.”
She sits for half an hour, and all the cold red dust is blanketed with snow. Charlotte smiles broader and broader at the falling snow. “Tha’s right,” she says from time to time. “Come on.”
Birds are flying around like they’ve gone crazy. A blue jay cuts across the yard screaming. Some smart sparrows are perching on a limb, fluffing out their feathers. “Y’all better eat,” she advises them. “Ain’t night yet.”
She sits on the steps till she begins to turn to stone. The gray sky is darker now with the approach of night, and still the snow is falling. The woods and the yard are beautiful. The quilt slides from her narrow shoulders, but Charlotte no longer feels the cold. She tries pinching her cheek, but the flesh is too stiff and hard with cold to pinch up. She can feel her fingernails scratching at her skin.
“Time to come in,” Victoria says behind her.
Charlotte prepares to enter her home. Her daughter’s hand is under her elbow, helping her. It takes a while to unfold her body, but once standing, Charlotte looks up once more. From on high, the snow comes right down into her eyes. She blinks and looks and blinks again. She can scarcely get her fill of it, thick as it falls. All that long drifting down of snowflakes, just to fall on her! But she goes inside.
A FEW EMBERS glow in the fireplace.
Victoria takes a newspaper from the top of the knee-high stack and crumples it fiercely into a loose ball, which she throws onto the embers. While the paper ball flares up, she lays fat pine kindling in the flame, and then with her bare hands she lifts a big lump of coal from the scuttle and throws it into the grate. The kindling catches right up and begins to snap and pop. Charlotte smells the burning turpentine in the pine sticks and draws the aroma deep into her lungs. For a moment she feels she is a pine tree, a young one, ready to grow tall and strong.
Crawl in bed.
Charlotte looks up and sees the ceiling. She has forgotten the ceiling. She wishes it was gone and the roof, too, so she could look right up through the rafters and see the sky, have the snow fall on her face while she lies down.
Plenty of covers. Charlotte has always kept her winter bed with three quilts. A soft, old-friend quilt closest to her. Old on bottom, newer, newest. Newest, hardest, and prettiest on top. Still, she wishes she’d not left the freshest quilt outdoors, the white one with the wavy blue and yellow ribbon design.
Fend for yourself, she says to it. She means to sound encouraging, but the pretty young quilt is too far away to hear; she feels sorry for such a pretty quilt out there, alone in the cold.
“Live forever,” she says out loud. She remembers them all in the room: Doctor and Mrs., the three children. “I will,” she promises the little girl. Blessed girl.
“Victoria,” she calls. She hears her voice like a dry leaf, full of veins and fissures, spreading and crackling itself across the room. “See you in the morning.”
Victoria backs up to the fire, lifts her skirts high in back to roast her legs and fanny.
Now close, eyes, so I can see.
THERE ARE HER FOUR schoolgirls, hovering.
Sing me, she says to the Birmingham girls, the bombed Sunday school girls. Sing high, sweet cherubims, and not a hint of hate.
With a wish, the ceiling is gone, and the roof.
Lying straight and comfortable under her quilts, she begins to rise. She tilts slightly to pass between the open, snowcapped rafters. From the top of a rafter, she pinches a little snow and puts it like snuff between her lower lip and gum. Rising higher, she passes into swirls of snow. Her mattress comes right along under her, the quilts flapping at the sides while she ascends. Jesus is raising the dead, like he’d promised he’d do and did do, when he
walked the earth.
Black is the night. She reaches out her hand through the snow to try to catch a sparkling star, tiny as a wedding diamond. But oh, the groaning below, mouths distorted in pain. Still, she can ask it of them, and she does. Sing me!
From all around her, through veils of falling snow, the spirits are gathering.
Author’s Note
WHEN I WAS A COLLEGE STUDENT IN THE EARLY SIXTIES in Birmingham, Alabama, I promised myself, if I ever did become a novelist, that I would write about the acts of courage and tragedy taking place in my city. I would try to re-create through words what it was like to be alive then: how ordinary life went on, how people fell in and out of love, how family members got sick, how people worked ordinary jobs, tried to get an education, worshiped, looked for entertainment, grew up, died, participated in the great changes of the civil rights struggle or stood aside and watched the world change.
There were many horrors and haunting events but none more powerful than the murder of the four young girls to whom this book is dedicated. In my imagination they stand in a sacred circle, a ring of fire around them. I do not step into that circle. That is to say, I do not try to re-create them. Their families and friends are holding them dear the way they really were.
I have created fictive characters for the reader to know and mourn. The event at the White Palace is meant to stand not for any particular historic event but to suggest some of the many atrocities that occurred between May 17, 1954, when the United States Supreme Court outlawed school segregation in Brownv. Board of Education and the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, 1968, in Memphis, Tennessee, a death preceded by the deaths of many less well known people, including, on February 8, 1968, those of Samuel Hammond Jr., Delano Middleton, and Henry Smith, students in Orangeburg, South Carolina, killed when highway patrolmen fired on protestors.
For the sake of readers too young to remember, some of the historical events alluded to or presented in a fictive framework in Four Spirits include the beating of the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth in front of Phillips High School (where I was a student) in 1957, and the repeated bombings of his home and church; the castration of Judge Aaron; the appearance and speech making of Birmingham Public Safety Commissioner Eugene “Bull” Connor at Ku Klux Klan rallies; the peaceful and unnoted occasional integration of the Gaslight nightclub on Morris Avenue in Birmingham; the demonstrations of May 1963 led by Reverend Shuttlesworth and Dr. Martin Luther King, among others; the assault on those demonstrators by fire hoses and police dogs, as ordered by Bull Connor; the jailing of thousands of schoolchildren protestors, as well as Dr. King and other leaders; the joining of mass meetings by a few white college students, such as Marti Turnipseed; the bombing of Sixteenth Street Baptist Church and the deaths of four schoolgirls; the 1963 and 1964 Mississippi murders of Medgar Evers, of James Chaney, and of New York activists Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman; the assassination of President John F. Kennedy; the educational effort made on the Miles College campus by a number of white people, including myself and my friend Carol Countryman, who, like Catherine Cartwright in this story, came to the campus in her wheelchair. Carol lived to become a pioneer for rights for the handicapped, eventually making a trip to Washington, D.C., assisted by our mutual friend Nancy Brooks Moore, to speak out in that cause.
Acknowledgments
TO MY LITERARY AGENT, JOY HARRIS, AND TO MY EDITOR, Marjorie Braman, I owe a joyful debt of gratitude for their belief in me and this book and their indefatigable work on our behalf. They have become dear friends.
My thanks must also begin with my gratitude to my husband, John C. Morrison, for his constant support in the writing of this book and for his considered comments that helped to shape it. I also offer a special thanks, within my family, to my brother John Sims Jeter, who encouraged me and corrected many of my mistakes, while working on his own first novel, and to his wife Derelene Brooks Jeter, for her heartfelt praise and astute suggestions. My daughter Flora Naslund and her partner, Marty Kelley, always cheer me on in my efforts to write, as do Sara and Michael McQuilling; Debora, Paul, David, and Ryan Morrison, my stepchildren; and David Rizzolo, Debora’s husband. I also thank my brother and sister-in-law, Marvin Jeter and Charlotte Copeland, for their support.
For reading every draft of the novel and freely giving of their time and insights, while completing their own novels, I thank especially Lucinda Dixon Sullivan and Karen Mann. Other writer friends whose critiques I have cherished include Julie Brickman, Marcia Woodruff Dalton, Greg Ellis, Robin Lippincott, Eleanor Morse, Jeanie Thompson, Neela Vaswani, Mary Welp, and the actor/director Sheila O’Neill Ellis. I can never thank each of you enough for your generous advice.
A very special thanks to Nancy Brooks Moore, my lifelong friend, and Ron Countryman for their careful reading and much-needed encouragement. I also thank Richard M. Sullivan and Elizabeth Chadwick for their advice about the opening sequence. I thank Callie Hausman and Thelma Wyland for directing me to essential reading in my research and for their faith in me.
Many other friends—including Lynn Greenberg, Maura Stanton, Richard Cecil, Alan Naslund, Paul Bresnick, Leslie Daniels, Deborah and David Stewart, Ralph Raby, Maureen Morehead, Nana Lampton, Charles and Patricia Gaines, Jake Reiss, Frank and Diana Richmond, Elizabeth Sulzby, Luke Wallin, Daly Walker, Bill Pearce, Denzil Strickland, Katy Yocom, Jim Rooney, and Susan Soper—have encouraged me in ways for which I am profoundly grateful.
I thank all my colleagues and friends at the University of Louisville, especially Tom Byers, Suzette Henke, and Karen Chandler, and all my colleagues and students of the Spalding University M.F.A. in Writing Program. I thank the University of Louisville for granting me a sabbatical leave, during which I worked on research and the writing of this novel, English Department Chairperson Debra Journet, and Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences Jim Brennan. Over the years, grants from the Kentucky Foundation for Women have been particularly sustaining, as well as from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Kentucky Arts Council. The Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, Kelly Ingram Park and the Birmingham Public Library, the Rosa Parks Museum and the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, and the Martin Luther King Jr. Museum in Atlanta have provided places of inspiration and reflection for me, as has the King memorial of rushing waters in San Francisco.
A special thanks to the University of Montevallo, Alabama, where my husband and I shared the Pascal P. Vacca Chair of Liberal Arts during the spring of 2003, and to Elaine and Bobby Hughes, and Bill and Loretta Cobb, among many other new Montevallo friends.
And to my newest friend, Chris McNair—how can I ever thank you enough for letting me into your life and for taking the author photograph for Four Spirits?
Sena Jeter Naslund
MONTEVALLO AND BIRMINGHAM,
MARCH 2003
About the Author
Sena Jeter Naslund is a native of Birmingham and winner of the Harper Lee Award. She is Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Louisville; program director of the Spalding University brief-residency MFA in writing; and 2003 Vacca Professor at the University of Montevallo, Alabama. Her published works are Four Spirits; Ahab’s Wife or, The Star-Gazer; The Disobedience of Water; Sherlock in Love; The Animal Way to Love; and Ice Skating at the North Pole.
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By Sena Jeter Naslund
Four Spirits*
Ahab’s Wife, or the Star-Gazer*
The Disobedience of Water
Sherlock in Love
The Animal Way to Love
Ice Skating at the North Pole
*Available from HarperCollins e-books
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locales are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity, and are used fictitiously. All other characters, and all inci
dents and dialogue, are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.
FOUR SPIRITS. Copyright © 2003 by Sena Jeter Naslund. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
E-Book Extra: “The Facts behind the Fiction: Key Dates in the Civil Rights Movement.” Copyright © 2003 by the Southern Poverty Law Center. These materials were adapted from www.splcenter.org and are reprinted with permission.
E-Book Extra: “Promise of the Past: An Interview with Sena Jeter Naslund.” Copyright © 2003 by HarperCollins Audio.
EPub Edition © SEPTEMBER 2003 ISBN: 9780061862816
FIRST EDITION
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