by Ravi Howard
“Figured it was Kilby. Boys go to Atmore and come out too old for this here.”
The knock on the door was light, but enough to remind me of the time. The college tower was close enough to hear the quarter tolls, so my second hour had come and gone. She set her drink on the night table.
“You squared away, friend?”
“I believe so.”
“All right, then,” she said. “Fresh towels in the closet.”
She nodded toward the bathroom.
“Don’t worry, we got store-bought soap.”
They charged an extra dime to use the shower, and a customer dropped his money in the can next to the Dixie Cups and Listerine. When the hot water filled the bowl, that ammonia cream on the porcelain burned my nostrils. The towels from the linen closet smelled like bleach. I didn’t mind, because if I ever held a Kilby towel to my nose, I was liable to smell the last man’s funk, so the cathouse bleach, heavy enough to water my eyes, was welcome. Once the last of the prison soap was gone, I walked out of Mama Nonie’s cleaner than that Kilby water had ever gotten me.
Marie had told me where I could find Mattie, and I was in decent shape to see her then. The Women’s Political Council had no standing office. Organizing made some folks nervous, and they’d been called communists and the like. They worked from places that were hidden and temporary. For most of November, they had worked out of the needlework shop above Pearletta’s Cleaners. Marie said that Mattie still taught two or three English classes at the college, and in the afternoons, she worked on the newsletter that most weeks had a headline about the women thrown off the busses. If I wanted to find her, that’s where she’d be. Marie wasn’t sure if it was a good idea, but of course, neither was I. Just something that had to be done.
The door next to Pearletta’s opened to a flight of stairs. The sign above the railing said ALTERATIONS with an arrow pointing the way. I stopped near the top, and I looked through the railings and the picture windows that lined the wall. The room was as wide as the two storefronts downstairs, and the ceiling was high enough for two rows of clothes on the walls. Each work stall had a wardrobe rack and a sewing machine, some old and foot-powered and others electric. The downtown seamstresses from Loveman’s and Montgomery Fair made their side money on Union Street. The place had not changed since the times I’d gone there as a boy, dropping off our school uniforms.
The machines were still, and the evening work waited on the racks. Hours on the door said 5:30 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. or by appointment. It was just after four o’clock. The only seamstress working, red-and-white measuring tape draped around her neck, leaned over a cutting table folding papers instead of fabric. She worked in front of a row of curtains that cut the room in two.
She turned and spoke to someone on the other side, Mattie. I got a quick glance before the seamstress turned the curtain loose. I could have let seeing her be enough and turned around, but I didn’t. I walked up to the door, and the seamstress saw me before I knocked. Her look was pleasant and cautious. She folded a corner of fabric over her work before she walked to the door.
“Hello, ma’am. Nathaniel Weary, and I’m looking for—Mrs. Allen. Matilda Allen.”
“Oh, you’re Marie’s brother. She and Pete are friends of mine,” she said, extending her hand. “Louise McCauley. My husband cuts your nephew’s hair.”
The room had been quiet, but motors started turning behind the curtain. One, then a second and a third revved with enough power to blink the lights. It was too strong for sewing machines, and a clockwork rumbling filled the place with a hum.
Mrs. McCauley was behind the curtain for some time, longer than it should take to give a name. The sound wouldn’t let me listen to what was being said, but then the spinning slowed, and each machine went quiet. I would have liked the noise to stay with us.
“Mr. Weary, come on back,” she said. “Oh, and welcome. Welcome back home.”
I was already holding my hat, so I dipped my head instead. I moved back the curtain to see Mattie clutching her arms. It felt like everything in me tightened until it froze, except for my heart and my breathing, too fast to do me any good.
“All this time.” She unfolded her arms and hugged me close, a touch that used to mean the world to me. “Prayed for you every day.”
If anyone had walked through the door it would have looked exactly like it was, me and her holding on too long and too tight. But that was all that was left for us. That little bit of time.
“Marie told me I could find you here,” I said, stepping away then. Looking around. “Hasn’t changed much has it?”
“No. I’m still bringing our Easter clothes and school uniforms. My children.”
“How old?”
“Five. Twins. Clara and Reginald.”
“That’s good, Mattie.”
That was the best I could say.
“I’m here more than I’m home. Marie told you about the busses?”
“Heard it got worse.”
“We’ve been saying we’re going to do something for the longest. Here we are.”
She had found herself a good fight at least. That time she would have spent fighting for me, if only in her heart and her thinking, might have taken everything. Maybe she’d have been too spent to think twice about a bus or a life anything close to whole. We both might have been too thankful for the half measures the world had given us.
“You did something,” she told me. “I watched you do what nobody should ever have to.”
“Look where it got me.”
“Look where it got Nat Cole. Alive. Those men didn’t think anybody would get there in time. They thought they could do what they wanted and when. They can’t think like that forever. Got to end sometime.”
She studied my face while I did hers, taking in the changes all at once.
“There’s something else,” she said, reaching for the bag on a chair in the corner. “I knew your day was coming soon, and I’ve been carrying this. I was meaning to take this to Marie to give to you. In case I didn’t get a chance.”
She opened an envelope and pulled out the photograph that I had never seen, me and the Nat Cole Trio in the Empire’s dressing room. The look on my face those years ago made me feel like a stranger. Cocksure and smiling, as I should have been in that army uniform, smiling because Mattie had told me to.
“Marie told me about your job, and I wanted you to have it before you left.”
As much good as it did me to see it, I wondered about the other pictures. The ones with me and her together. Asking about them would have sounded ungrateful in the face of her kindness.
Someone knocked on the door, then two hands, small ones, knocking at once. Then came Mrs. McCauley’s steps as she opened it, setting the door chimes to ringing. Mattie pulled back the curtains as her children came through the door. They had on the Saint John plaid that some of the schoolchildren wore walking back and forth on Union Street.
“Clara. Reginald. This is my friend, Mr. Weary,” she said.
They introduced themselves, but the whole time distracted by the picture I held. The unmistakable face of Nat King Cole.
“I know who that is,” the boy said.
“Me, too,” I told them.
“Me, three. He’s on the radio,” said Clara.
She told her mother about her day, good news first. A gold star in spelling and a torn hem on the swing set. Mrs. McCauley, across the room with a pincushion and thread, called the girl over. Clara stood on a Nehi crate as the hem was repaired. She had been singing and twirling about, but when Mrs. McCauley took to the hem, she stood still. Whatever song she had started continued a little softer as she mouthed it and worked her fingers, playing the tune in her head. Mattie’s son marked his place in an Alice and Jerry book with a baseball card. Roy Campanella. When he started reading, he put that bookmark through the spokes of the Singer and worked the foot pedal, filling the place with the tap of that metal on the card.
“Thank you,” I told her, s
peaking low. That was the appropriate thing to let her hear. The rest of the old feelings weren’t dead yet, but I didn’t want to stir them. Maybe the moving and the working and the new life would clear it all out.
“It’s all in front of you now.”
This was the Montgomery I had returned to. A young girl had been thrown off a bus, handled like she was a grown man and not a child. Mattie Green Allen couldn’t let that go. And it did me well knowing. We were joined in something at least, in what we thought about the city. We both needed to be some other place. Mine I’d find by leaving, and hers she’d make by changing things at home. Making that new place together was a bygone notion. I had to be fine with that.
I made my way out of the door, and Mattie set her machines to spinning once more. They had heated up enough that I could smell the oil and the ink, something like kerosene, a smell that stayed with me until I got outside. When I got to the street, I stood on the corner with the late-afternoon riders waiting for the City Lines. Some held transfers and the others dimes. A couple stretched and leaned, trying to get a better view down the street. You expect a certain posture from people when work is over. But no. Where people might have been at ease, they got rigid, as though more work waited. One man had his hat clutched already, revealing a head full of hair, every bit of it gray. A nervous smile crossed his face. Maybe he was ready to throw some kindness in the driver’s face and pray that man was feeling too good or was too tired for mess.
In the copy of Mattie’s newsletter I’d taken, the right column listed names of harassed and assaulted bus riders. Claudette Colvin. Geneva Johnson. Viola White. Katie Wingfield. Epsie Worthy. Mary Louise Smith. Hilliard Brooks. The police shot and killed him when he wouldn’t get off. The stories were followed by a question. “Do we want these to end up like Emmett Till?” I rolled the newsletter in my hands as a woman passed me on the way to the stop.
“You didn’t see the bus coming?”
“No ma’am. Can’t say I did.”
“Thanks all the same.”
“Ma’am,” I told her, “something to read along with your paper.”
I showed her the newsletter.
“Thank you, sweetheart, but that’s all right.” She told me this as she pulled from her pocketbook a copy of the same. She slipped it back in and retrieved her fare from an inside pocket. From the sound of the rattling, she had enough change at the ready and wouldn’t have to search while the driver waited. They gave people hell for that.
“And don’t look so sad,” she told me, and smiled enough for the both of us.
Then I saw it coming over her shoulder. It shifted gears to take the hill, and the noise announced it to anyone who had not yet seen. She heard it but didn’t turn around. Her face went blank, and she was ready to get on. After she climbed the steps, she dropped her fare. The driver didn’t wait for her to find a place to sit. She was still walking to the back as the bus rolled away.
Chapter 11
I had already packed the car for California, so my trunk dipped as Dane and I sat parked on High Street. Dane had ridden with me up Highway 31 and back, while I burned the carbon off my engine. We took it up some of the back roads in pine country, about half a tank’s worth of driving, and then we came on back to town. Evening settled in outside my window, and brought with it my last Saturday night in Montgomery.
We parked across from the State Theater, where a group stood, teenagers and college kids, deciding which of the movies to see. One side of the marquee said Blackboard Jungle, and the other listed a James Dean double feature. Rebel Without a Cause and East of Eden ran back-to-back. When I’d gone the day before, the girl making popcorn had told me why. He had died two months before. I wish I hadn’t known, because I thought about it the whole time I watched him fighting on a mountainside. I didn’t stay for the second show.
The third screening room wasn’t listed on the marquee, and Dane told me why. A coalition too new to have a name had rented it out to discuss the busses. They talked about staying off for a day and asking for Negro seating that was first-come, first-serve, from the back to the front. Some wanted more, and some wanted nothing. Folks had been gathering separately all over the city. Professors. Taxi drivers. Voters League. Women’s Council. And for the first time they would be in one place at one time to talk about what to do next. They did not want to attract the attention of the police or informants, so they hid their meeting in the middle of Saturday night, on a strip of town where it was easy to blend in.
The taxi drivers had learned the hard way. When I was young, they had tried to organize to get Negro drivers in the taxi line at Union Station. They had meetings, too many and too public, and before long the taxi commission and the police got wind of it. Any number of things could make a driver think twice. Sugar in the gas tanks, broken windows, and slashed tires were the kinds of things done in the dark. The rest the police did in broad daylight without the slightest hesitation. A handful of parking tickets left a driver owing the city more than he made. That was enough to make most think twice about changing things. With the busses, they had learned to be more careful. No more meetings in schools or homes. It was better if a meeting looked like a party or a funeral or a picture show, where cabs lined up on a side street was to be expected.
Dane had been elected sergeant at arms for the Taxi Guild. In the early days, he was just in charge of bringing the folding tables and coffee cups. But the job had changed as the times required. He still showed up at every meeting, but he sat outside in his cab. He watched who was going into the State Theater, and he looked out for anybody cruising and paying too much attention to cars and license plate numbers.
“There,” Dane said, nodding. “Blue Ford. Sam Collins. Can’t say he’s the last one I’d suspect, but, you just don’t know ’til you know.”
ALLIED TAXI was hand-painted on the side of his car. Sam had driven by slowly once before, but he wasn’t looking for fares. A couple coming out of Hilltoppers Barbeque had their hands raised, and the man even whistled. Sam Collins didn’t even see or hear them, because by then he was off the brake and heading back around the corner.
I remembered him. He had worked for Centennial off and on, but he’d worked for pretty much anybody who’d let him pick up a shift or two. He couldn’t hold his liquor any better than he could hold a dollar. Dane heard he’d had a couple of misdemeanors, and he’d done a little time in county jail. I had done time with men just like him. If the only thing between getting out and dropping some years was to give the police a name, then they’d tell everything.
He came back around and stopped right next to us. He stared right in my face, and then he saw Dane.
“All right now, Sam.”
“Hey there, Dane. Heard some of the guild folks called a meeting over this way.”
“Yeah. You know Rita Tucker? Owns a little hot dog stand down on Catoma?”
He nodded, kind of.
“Wants to make a little parking lot and a cabstand on her property. Getting her paperwork together for the zoning board. She asked the guild to come down and speak at the hearing.”
“Oh.”
“Be nice, won’t it? Shed and a picnic table. Pay phone. Won’t have to worry ’bout parking tickets on your windshield down at Union Station.”
“Didn’t know a thing about it. Heard some of the boys say they were headed over here.”
“I just got called this morning. Rita just got word from zoning yesterday. They meet Monday. All kind of paperwork.”
He nodded, and then he looked at me for a good little while.
“Been a while, Nathaniel.”
“While and a half, Sam. Good to see you.”
“How long you been home?”
“Couple-three days.”
“I know you happy to be out from ’round there.”
“Yes, indeed.”
“I know the feeling.”
There was something in Sam’s face that I didn’t want to read, so I looked away. Maybe he was
working the only hustle he had. Tell his handlers old news too stale to hurt anybody. Maybe he loved the way it made him feel to tell something. Maybe it was just money.
His Ford idled too hard. Most folk who made a living driving a car wouldn’t let it ride that bad. He kept looking back toward the theater. A couple of drivers from Metropolitan and Carver Park walked inside. While Sam looked away, an old woman walked out of the tobacco store with a carton of Old Golds under her arm.
“Evening,” she said. Looked at us and said it again.
Sam didn’t pay attention to the woman until she opened the door and was halfway in the backseat.
“Evening, ma’am.”
“You working?”
Seems like he had to think about it. “Yes, ma’am.”
“Washington Park, please. Roosevelt and Hill.”
He looked at us, and was still glancing toward the theater.
“Go ahead and make your money, Sam,” Dane told him. “Stop by the stand Monday, we’ll have some minutes typed up for you and the boys who couldn’t make the meeting.”
And with a last look and a so long, he was off.
“What happens when he finds out you lied to him?”
“No lie. If he carries his ass to the zoning meeting, he’ll see Rita Parker waiting for a hearing. If he’s telling on us, whatever he says has to be right. Not all the time, but enough. Else they’ll find another one we don’t know about.”
With Sam Collins gone, Dane could relax. He had been sitting up looking stiff and a little nervous, too tense to sink deep into his seat. He leaned back on the headrest and took in some of Saturday night. Thanksgiving was coming, and the cool weather had brought out the heavy coats. The football team had a game that afternoon, and college kids had come from campus in black-and-gold sweaters. Some stood in front of the movie house, and others gathered at Hilltoppers, waiting to get a bite to eat before curfew came and the dorm mothers locked the doors.
“Hope you plan to say good-bye before you leave,” Dane told me. “I know you lied and said Monday, but this trunk is too heavy.”