The Emancipation of Evan Walls

by Jeffrey Blount

  I was sitting with Bojack that day, up front and close to the pulpit. One row behind Mama and the deacon wives, who were one row behind Daddy and the other deacons. I really didn’t want to be there. None of us kids liked to be that close to the deacons and their wives, or Mrs. Walker and other authority figures. Such proximity compelled you to pay attention to the sermon, which meant you ran a greater chance of getting into trouble for falling asleep. Bojack assured me that the risk was well worth it—that I would want to see what was going to happen from as close a position as possible. “Something you be telling your children ’bout one day,” he said.

  I questioned him, hoping to get him to tell me what was in the offing, but I had no luck.

  Things were going on as usual. Deacon Wells had awakened from a deep sleep twice to yell “Amen!” I had to turn all the way around in my seat to keep tabs, but Miss Betsy Williams was well into the rocking back and forth.

  When it all finally began, I was fighting sleep. Reverend Walker was preaching that Negro children should be directing themselves toward a good trade, having started the sermon with the verse, “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.” Bojack elbowed me in the side, and I looked up to see the most notorious and the smartest black woman in Canaan storming down the middle aisle. Immediately, like everyone else, I tried to figure out why she was heading toward the pulpit with no indication that she would stop short of it. I turned to Bojack.

  “What’s she gonna do?” I asked.

  “Just wait and see,” he said.

  What she did was simply outrageous. She stepped up onto the pulpit during the sermon and interrupted the minister.

  “Excuse me, Reverend Walker. I need to speak to the congregation.”

  “You can’t just be walking up here taking over as you please, woman. Where is your respect for the Lord?’

  “In my heart, and when I see him, I’ll give it to him.”

  “Well, I’m his representative, so maybe you should be extending me the same sort of respect.”

  “If you were representing the Lord properly, you wouldn’t be telling these children that all they can be is bricklayers and carpenters. Not that there is anything wrong with those occupations, except that black children are capable of that and more.”

  “Please, Eliza. It ain’t enough you feel you got to interrupt my sermon, but now you trying to rewrite it, too!”

  She put her hand on his chest and shoved him out of her way.

  “Step aside, Reverend,” she said.

  A great roar of confusion overtook the sanctuary. Miss Betsy Williams stood and yelled, “Six six six! It’s her! Revelations is coming to pass, and that woman be the anti-Christ!”

  Eliza Blizzard raised her hands and asked for quiet. Reverend Walker stood behind her, embarrassed and amazed. It took a few minutes, but people finally calmed down, though many remained standing and angry.

  “Now listen up,” Miss Blizzard said. “I have some surprising news for you. At the last school-board meeting, Mr. Bojack Johnson and Mr. Ezra Thomas from this church, along with a few from other churches, some people from the federal government and myself, watched the white board members, much to their disgust, make the integration of Canaan schools official. Yes, that means all of your children will be going to school with white children.”

  Another roar of confusion took place as I turned and faced a truly astonished congregation of popping eyes and dropped chins. I realized how sad it was that many members of this church did not know about the integration plan, that they had to be told by Eliza Blizzard, that black parents hadn’t had enough interest in their children’s education to keep tabs on who they would be in school with, that Bojack’s constant pestering at the sessions as to how much black children might benefit from integration didn’t make the adults suspect that it was in the works.

  To me, all this was the ultimate example of how the blacks of Canaan had accepted their place and never looked beyond it. I was outraged that they were angry at someone who was trying to help them escape. Maybe they were mad that someone was deciding this for them—although they weren’t interested enough to find out about it and go fight it. Or maybe they knew in their hearts that it was good for them, but they were afraid. Either way, I wasn’t in the mood to offer sympathy. All my feelings were with Eliza Blizzard, who was trying to restore some order. In the middle of the continuing bewilderment, I asked Bojack what he had to do with it all.

  “Nothing but general support!” he yelled, even though he was sitting next to me. “That’s one helluva woman. I told her about you. Gonna get you to meet her one of these days.”

  “Listen to me!” she shouted from the pulpit. “It’s over now. We might as well talk about how to deal with it.”

  But if anyone was willing to listen, I couldn’t find them. Some people shouted back at her, and others yelled at each other back and forth across the sanctuary. It reminded me of the roar you would expect in a football stadium when the home team scores the winning touchdown at the last second. Even Bojack got caught up in the fray. He was standing up yelling. “Y’all let the lady talk. Shut the hell up, goddamnit!”

  When it was obvious to him that no one was going to listen, he sat back down and shouted in my ear, “Whole lotta no-counts hollering like a bunch of stuck pigs. They don’t even know the whole of what they hollering about.”

  I had never seen anything like it. There was so much going on that I couldn’t focus my attention on any one particular thing. I did hear Betsy Williams still calling out to her anti-Christ, and I did see Cozy Pitts with tears in her eyes, standing next to Taliferro, who looked as if he could kill Eliza Blizzard.

  From Eliza, I only grasped bits and pieces. Someone trying to shut her up had cut off the PA system. Her voice was strong, though, and still carried proudly into the barrage of anger coming back at her. From her I heard fragments of sentences. Things like “Court’s ruling . . . Integration is good for us . . . Brown decision of 1954 . . . Equal education . . . Save yourselves through it.”

  Apparently, the reception given to Eliza Blizzard by Grace Street Baptist was the same that she had received from almost every congregation she visited that June morning. By noon that day, she had managed to send the entire black community of Canaan into chaos. The following Thursday found the session members still in an uproar.

  I hid out in the kitchen after Kool-Aid and potato chips had been distributed. First I overheard Aunt Mary.

  “That bitch must be crazy,” she said. “It’s a wonder somebody ain’t knocked her upside the head by now.”

  “Yeah,” Chauncey Mae said. “How in the hell do she get off deciding for us what’s best for our children?”

  “You ain’t been showing nobody that you interested,” Bojack said. “Whenever they was looking for parents to come to PTA meetings, y’all always got something to do. Whenever they was looking for a PTA president, y’all always be passing the buck. ‘Naw, not me. I’m busy. I ain’t got time for no nonsense such as that.’ When what you was really saying was you ain’t had no time for your own children. Now all of a sudden you act like you give a good goddamn.”

  “Don’t you be lecturing me, boy. I’ll sho’ nuff put a cap in your black ass. I’m fired up now.”

  “I ain’t having no shooting talk on my porch,” Mama said.

  “’Scuse me, Treeny,” Chauncey Mae said. “This fool done got me all upset now.”

  “At least when we was on our own, we could do what we wanted,” Ethel Brown said. “Now the children got to be right up under ’em. And they gone be stepping down on our children, too.”

  “I agree with that,” Daddy said.

  I couldn’t see him, so I don’t know for sure, but I felt Bojack shaking his head.

  “Is y’all blind or what?” he asked. “You ain’t doing what you want. You doing what they gives you. What they allows you. Old books and bad equipment to work with. They got you right where they wants right now, and you running around sa
ying how happy you is to be treated inferior. On one hand you complaining about crackers keeping you down, and on the other hand you helping ’em out.”

  I thought about Mama Jennie and her story of crabs in a bushel basket.

  “White folks got everything. If we stays to ourselves and keep doing what we doing, our kids be just as bored with life as we is. We got to get in there and fight with them white folks for a piece of the action.”

  “And you crazy if you thank they gone give our children something just ’cause they go to school with ’em,” Jim Brown said.

  “Well, let’s hope that if we gets to school with ’em, that it’ll be kids learning to like each other. Then when they grows up, they won’t be hating each other like we do. Maybe they might even help each other along the way.”

  “Is you shitting us or what, boy?” Aunt Mary huffed.

  “No, I ain’t shitting you. I’m trying to look at this hopefully. If I can’t look at it that way, then I might as well be dead, ’cause otherwise what hope has we got? What choice do we have?”

  “I ain’t going to school when it open,” Eugenia said. “Taliferro, neither.”

  “You’ll go if your mama say you will,” Bojack said.

  “And I might not tell ’em they has to,” Cozy shot back at him. “Ain’t by myself, neither. Lotta folks be feeling this way.”

  “How long, Lord?” Bojack said. “How long?”

  “I hope you don’t be living to regret helping that lady do what she done to us,” Cozy replied.

  Things were never the same again in Canaan. New lines in the battle of the races had been drawn, penned with deep resentment, increased fear, and even deadlier hatred from both sides.

  But both sides also took more interest in the other. I’d seen this myself.

  Before, I didn’t pay much attention to white people. I saw them through something akin to waves of heat rising from a desert floor—pink blurs walking on the other side of the street, on the other side of life. Now that I was forced to bring my focus into line, I didn’t feel comfortable about what I saw and felt.

  My first real exposure came at the town library. It was an old Queen Anne Victorian, which sat on a little hill next to the post office and looked down on Main Street. It stood three stories tall, square with cylindrical towers at the corners that reminded me of farm silos but with big windows. In the front, there were balconies between the towers off the second and third floors. It was painted white, with a burgundy roof, trim, and shutters. A grand covered veranda, decorated with all sorts of spindle-work ornamentation and lacy spandrels, wrapped completely around the house. It seemed to be as wide as the street.

  I had passed this place all my life, never really noticing it until I fell in love with reading. Then, I couldn’t keep my eyes off it. I craved it, but I didn’t go inside. I felt I couldn’t. There were unwritten laws in Canaan; it was understood that no black people went into this building even after the Whites Only sign came down.

  The library was like the tennis courts, the football fields with goal posts, the nicely manicured baseball diamonds, the swimming pools and golf courts throughout Canaan. They were built as “public facilities” and were kept up with public money, but only for a specific public. These places, like the white churches, were sacred to whites.

  I haven’t been the first at many things, but I was the first black person to break the rule and set foot in the Canaan library. I decided that since we were going to go to school together, we might as well read together. Also, I had run out of books to read with school being closed and my aunt Frances without any more throwaways to send.

  The day I did it, I remember walking up the wide, front steps. I looked all around, trying to detect whether or not any white people saw me, and if so, were they coming to stop me? But no one came, and I opened the big mahogany door. The smell of old books and dusty silence greeted me.

  It was not what I expected. No walls had been knocked down to make wide-open spaces for rows and rows of bookshelves. The house was still a house, and as I would soon find out, each room had a certain type of book. The living room held autobiographies and biographies. The dining room had the classics, and so on.

  I waited in the vestibule by a table that looked to be the desk of the librarian. In a few minutes, a white woman and man came into the hall, looking at a book. When they looked up, they stopped in their tracks. The woman slapped the book closed, tucked it under her arm, and marched toward me, her shoe heels pounding against the floor. I backed up, afraid and thinking that I had made a huge mistake.

  She was tall and skinny, maybe fifty. Her shoulder-length hair was streaked with gray. By the time she got to me, her face had gone from pasty white to a deep pink.

  “What are you doing in here, nigger boy?” she said.

  I didn’t get too mad. It wasn’t as if I had expected her to call me anything else.

  “Are you the librarian?” I asked.

  “So what if I am!” she shouted.

  “I want to check out a book.”

  The man joined us. He was young and stocky, wearing a business suit, and his face was red. “Why don’t you go somewhere and get some nigger book to read?”

  I didn’t know exactly what he meant by “nigger book.” As far as I knew, black people didn’t write the kind of books I was looking for. That is how isolated I was in Canaan.

  “We don’t have a library.”

  “Because y’all so ignorant you can’t put a bunch of books together in a room somewhere,” he said. “Do you realize that you have dirtied this place? It’s not clean anymore!”

  “And what makes you think you can read anything that’s in here?” the librarian asked.

  “I can read,” I said.

  She grabbed a newspaper off her table, turned it to the international section, scanned for a second, and then thrust it toward me. “Read that!” she said, and I did. She snatched it from me and threw it back onto the table.

  “What makes you think I have to let you in here?”

  “I don’t guess you have to, ma’am. It says it’s a public library, though.”

  The man shook his head. “I guess it was going to happen. The damn federal government give the niggers the right to go to school with white children, and now they want more. Give ’em an inch, by God.”

  “Can I check out a book?” I asked.

  “No!” she yelled. “You can read something here, but I’m not letting you take a book out of here. I know you people. Either you steal and never come back, or you’ll come back crying about how you lost it. Thieves and incompetents is what y’all are.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said.

  What was I to do? I couldn’t convince her otherwise. This woman wasn’t important enough to argue with and lose my opportunity to read more books.

  “Go on in there and find something,” she said. “And don’t let your black ass out of my sight.”

  I walked into the parlor directly across from her. I was looking for children’s stories, but it was just general fiction. The first book I focused on was Stoner, so I picked it up and sat down to read. As I began, I heard the man say, “We gone have to do something about things like this.”

  There was a heavy threat lodged in that statement, and it made me afraid. I thought of days before my time when people like Reverend Ellis and his wife could be lynched and left hanging from a church steeple. It was the first time that I wondered if Bojack and Eliza Blizzard were indeed wrong.

  I went back every day, though, with my dictionary in hand. I read that book and more. I hoped that little by little I would change the woman’s mind. That she would see that I was honest and fairly competent. She didn’t speak to me much, so I never knew if I made any headway with her. I doubted I ever could. Some minds cannot be changed, I figured. Minds like the ones that built the town’s first private school, Canaan Academy.

  •••

  Its foundation was laid the week after it was announced that schools would be int
egrated. By the third week of August, enough prefabricated buildings were in place to get them started. It had a full complement of teachers, many of whom were hired away from the public school system. Many Canaan whites wasted no time in creating ways to keep their children away from blacks, no matter what the federal government said.

  Blacks, who had no money to build an academy, had no choice but to attend the public schools. So, throughout the black community, people set out to prepare their children for their upcoming meeting with the whites. Churches held seminars at their summer Bible school sessions, teaching children what to expect from white people. Mostly, they taught them to expect to be treated like dirt without exception, and how to band together for support when said treatment began.

  Daddy took Mark to our church’s seminar. I heard about it all secondhand because my presence was not welcome.

  One Saturday morning, just before noon, I was sitting in the cornfield with a spiral notebook that was my diary. In it, I held conversations with an imaginary friend who I called Martin, after MLK. But I wasn’t writing. I was just sitting there looking at the shadows from the stalks bend in elegant angles across my paper, listening to the hum of the morning breeze and sound of the stalks’ leaves scratching against each other. So I was shocked when I looked up to see Bojack carrying a football and staring at me.

  “I can’t do this like I used to,” he said. “Walk through the corn, that is.”

  “How did you know to look for me in here?”

  “I was a boy once,” he said, sitting. “In my time, I done searched for peace and quiet in all sorts of fields. Besides, I saw Bullet coming out of the field.” He smiled. “What you up to?”