by Caryl Rivers
Thirty minutes after the meeting was scheduled to start, a large woman strolled in, wearing what appeared to be a floor-length white toga. She wore, also, a white headdress that reminded Jay of the garb of a desert sheikh, and a pair of glittering eyes peered out through gold-rimmed glasses. He had seen her before, too. Her title and garments were of her own choosing, and she was accepted as a person of stature in the community despite her vague theological credentials. She examined Jay and Mary closely and then, apparently satisfied, said, “I’m Sister Eulah Hill. God bless you, children.”
In a few minutes the minister’s nephew arrived, accompanied by three other men and a young woman. The young men were dressed in dark suits and wore ties, but the woman was more casual, wearing a sweater and skirt. Jay stared at her as she walked past the pew. God, she was magnificent! Coffee skin and a body that was perfect in its proportions. Her long, black hair was swept up and pulled back tightly, accenting the perfection of her face. It should have been the face, he thought, of some Ashanti princess, ruling over a biblical kingdom of long ago. He had never seen a woman more beautiful.
The minister opened the meeting with a prayer and introduced his nephew. The young man was tall and slim, with a finely molded head and erect carriage. There was something in the way he held himself that set him apart from the other men, even though one of them was much older. He was clearly the leader of the group.
“One of the lessons we learned in the South,” he said, “is that nothing changes unless we make it change. No one would have given the bus boycott in Montgomery a chance. A lot of people said, ‘Don’t waste your time. It won’t change anything.’ But it did. The Freedom Rides did. In his speech last week President Kennedy said, ‘Those who do nothing are inviting shame as well as violence. Those who act boldly are recognizing right as well as reality.’ Belvedere invites shame if we do nothing. In the South, they keep us out with laws. In the North, they do it with urban renewal plans, with architects’ drawings and double-talk. It’s all the same. They are going to run you out. That’s what they’ll do, unless you stop them.”
The people in the church listened and nodded politely when he finished. Annoyance flickered across his face. The smiles of the people in the church were a wall, Jay thought. He wanted anger, and he was getting smiles. The young man might break his heart against that wall. Would it ever move for him? Did things change? Did they only seem to move, but not really change at all?
He shook his head. He was getting like Mary, asking questions that had no answers.
Donald Johnson introduced the young woman who had come with him, and she spoke of the first wave of Freedom Rides in the South.
“Were we frightened? Yes, we were, all the time. We got threats that we were going to be dragged out of the buses and lynched, or that there were going to be bombs on the bus. But the best part for me was the people who helped us anyway. Teachers, housewives, ministers, farmers — sometimes sharecroppers who had nothing but a tar-paper roof over their heads. We were just passing through, but they had to stay and face whatever happened. Their courage made us know we were right, that we weren’t going to be stopped.”
Jay slipped out of the pew and began to photograph her as she spoke, transfixed by her beauty, the way she moved her hands with a fluid grace. Her perfection intoxicated him; he lost himself in it through his lens. When she stopped speaking, he slid back into the pew again. As he rewound his film, he felt a prickly sensation: someone watching him. He turned around in time to see Mary’s eyes dart away. Did it show that much? Probably. What was she thinking about the way he had looked at the beautiful brown woman? Did she care? Something in her eyes told him that she did.
He looked at her out of the corner of his eyes. She had taken off her raincoat. She was wearing a brown shirtdress, a terrible color, too much like a uniform. It occurred to him that she had little style or flair in the way she dressed. Next to the Ashanti princess, she looked small and plain. He wondered if she had small, round Debra Paget shoulders.
He stopped thinking about it. He didn’t want Mary with her small face and shirtwaist dresses. He didn’t want Debra Paget with her bee-stung lips, or the Ashanti princess, or beautiful Jacqueline. Somewhere in the world there was a woman who moved with grace and beauty, created only for him. He would find her, someday.
There was a lively murmur of approval as the young woman finished speaking and stepped back to her seat. The minister rose, but before he could speak, Sister Eulah Hill lifted herself out of the pew.
“Sister Hill, would you like to speak?”
The woman did not reply, but she moved out into the aisle and walked to the front of the church, rocking from side to side; she reminded Jay of a large goose. She turned to face the group.
“I been livin’ here since nineteen thirty-seven. Back then, we didn’t have no electricity and no running water. We had to burn our own trash because the city wouldn’t come out and pick it up.”
A few heads nodded in the audience.
“I been here a long time, and I know one thing, you got to believe in the Lord.”
“Amen!” Several voices, with feeling.
“The Lord, he don’t fix no broken windows or pick up no trash. But the Lord Jesus is Salvation.”
Her voice deepened; the words were almost melody. It was the meter of the gospel service, and the people in the church understood it.
“Fancy homes and fancy cars don’t do no good if you forget about the Lord.”
“That’s right.”
“Amen!”
“Amen!”
“Jesus!”
Heads bobbed and nodded. The whole church seemed alive now, charged with emotion and melody. Jay felt his own body flow into the sound and the cadence. He sat back luxuriating in it, wishing it would not end. But he looked at the minister’s nephew and saw that he was frowning. Their eyes met, and the young man looked away. Jay wondered if he were embarrassed that white people should see this. Did it have too much of the Happy Darkie for him? He understood, and yet … There was a depth of feeling, a joy in this old church that had vanished from the fancier churches all over town. When all these people got middle class, when they had dishwashers and Oldsmobiles and prayed like Episcopalians, would that be better? Was change always for the better?
Shit, he was doing it again. All this thinking was making him tired.
When Sister Eulah Hill finished, the son of the woman in the wheelchair stood up. He had been silent through the chanting.
“I’m James Washington. And I think Mr. Johnson is right about what’s being done here. We’re being shoved out. I don’t think we ought to sit back and take it.”
There were a few sounds of approval from the crowd.
“If anybody wants to get a group together to try and fight this thing, we can use my house anytime. If we don’t do something, we’re going to find ourselves pushed right out of our city, before we even know it!”
Several other people in the church, three women and two men, volunteered to form the committee and to meet in a few nights. The Reverend Johnson suggested that they end the meeting by having everyone rise and sing “We Shall Overcome.”
Feet shuffled, people moved, and a haphazard circle formed. With their arms crossed, gripping other hands, the people stood and swayed, singing:
Deep in my heart I do believe,
We shall overcome someday.
Sister Eulah Hill was standing next to the Ashanti princess, and Jay moved to photograph them, liking the juxtaposition of their shapes, the one solid and round but surprisingly graceful, the other lithe and limber. They were both survivors, he knew instinctively, because they could bend with the wind, but they would not break.
When the song ended, the people began to drift away; Jay saw Mary, talking intently to the minister’s nephew, and she was nodding and taking notes.
She walked with Jay out of the church as the visitors climbed in a car to go back to D.C., and t
hey both stood by the curb and watched it go.
“They’re making history, you know. They are history. It’s going to be the big event of our generation, Jay, the civil rights movement. And we’re seeing a part of it.”
Her face was animated, and she was charged with excitement; he thought he could hear it crackling on her skin.
“You do like the action, don’t you?” he said.
“Oh, yeah, I do. But he’s right. Nothing changes unless you make it change.”
“Sometimes.”
“No, all the time. President Kennedy said it. ‘A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.’ That’s what I want to do, Jay, make things happen.”
“You think you can?”
“Tonight I do. After hearing them. Don’t you?”
“I don’t know. Maybe it’s all written down somewhere, what’s going to happen.”
She laughed. “You sound like some kind of mystic. I didn’t think Catholics believed in predestination.”
“They don’t. I don’t. Not all the time. But sometimes.”
“Maybe when you’re born and when you die. But in between, you can make something of life, not let it float away.” She smiled. “Oh shit, that’s so Protestant. I sound like Cotton Mather.”
“Cotton, baby, can I give you a lift to the paper?”
“I’m going back to Reverend Johnson’s house. I want to talk to him some more. My house is pretty near here, so I walked over. I’ll walk back. I need the exercise.”
“You’re going to be physically fit, like the prez says.”
“I’m trying.”
“You did beat me in a race, as I remember. In high heels.”
“And drunk.”
“Jesus, I’d challenge you to a rematch, but I’d probably get beat again.”
“Do I look all that athletic?”
“You do look a little bit like Wonder Woman, now that you mention it.”
“Hey, don’t knock Wonder Woman. She was my favorite. I used to pretend I could stop bullets with my bracelets too.”
“I liked the tight blue short-shorts. Do you have those?”
“No, but I have these steel bracelets.”
“Pat, for God’s sakes, why are you walking around the living room with just your panties and steel bracelets on?”
“Living out my fantasies, Dick. Don’t you have fantasies?”
“Yeah, I have this fantasy that I shaved before the debates and I used Man Tan.”
“Oh well, I guess it’s back to the freezer.”
They both laughed, and the minister came out, and she got into the car with him. Much later, as he was lying in bed, tired but unable to sleep, he thought about her standing on the curb saying, “That’s what I want to do, make things happen.”
He was afraid for her. You didn’t say things like that out loud. You whispered them and you might escape the notice of the gods. His mother had never mentioned good fortune without invoking a litany of saints. He himself had decided he was going to die in the most colorful and romantic way possible, maybe taking a bullet in some exotic war in the high valleys of the Hindu Kush, before the kidneys got him. His grandfather had died of complications of kidney disease, and then his father. He pictured his own kidneys as a pair of lamb chops (biology was not his strong suit) tucked away inside him, ready at any minute to swoon and spread poison inside him. You could live, with bad kidneys, if you spent half your life plugged into some fucking machine, but what was the point of that? He pictured his funeral, if he never made it to the Hindu Kush, if it was kidneys after all. His uncles would be there, and Father Hannigan and the old ladies in the parish who liked to come to wakes, and he’d be stretched out in the coffin, his face pale and pasty as wax.
“My, doesn’t he look lovely, Agnes.”
“Oh yes, Hanlon’s does a beautiful job.”
“Such a fine looking man. What a pity.”
“Very nice suit. Too bad it’s going to be put in the ground to rot.”
“Oh, it’ll probably last longer than he does. In a couple of weeks, he’ll be crumbling to pieces.”
“And he never made it to Life, Agnes. He just stayed in Belvedere, Maryland.”
“You couldn’t tell, from looking at him now, Brigit, that he drank.”
“Did he now! His complexion is so nice.”
“They are very good at Hanlon’s. Mr. O’Malley, last week, shot himself in the head, but you’d never have guessed.”
“Did he start drinking when he got fired from that newspaper?”
“Yes. And then tried shooting weddings, but one day he passed out right in the wedding cake. They had to scrape the frosting off the negatives.”
“Oh my.”
“And then he couldn’t afford the rent, and he started living in his car with the police radio, taking pictures of car wrecks and trying to sell them to the tabloids. That’s how he died; his kidneys burst on the Baltimore-Washington Expressway, near Glen Burnie, just after a drunk plowed into a family of five.”
He reached over, lit a cigarette and inhaled, but he knew he was going to throw it away before he smoked half of it. The night terrors were coming on him again. It was what he called the black and hopeless mood that ambushed him sometimes, late at night, when the busyness of the day was not there to screen it out. The night terrors had begun after his father died, and they came without warning like a sea squall. They brought with them a nameless dread, a sense that the universe was hollow at the center, that no God existed beyond the stars to hear his prayers, that safety was an illusion and meaning a sham. There was nothing to be done about the night terrors. Drink didn’t drive them away, or pills, or getting in his car and driving. Once he had called Norma at 2:00 A.M., and she was willing, but he felt more alone than ever with her arms around him. She stared at him as if he were mad when he tried to talk about it. Night terrors were not in Norma’s vocabulary. The night terrors simply had to be ridden out, and so he rode them, alone and frightened, a sailor on an unknown sea. He knew, when they were on him, why people killed themselves.
He thought again of Mary, throwing her brave words against the gathering night. She fairly shone in his mind; he saw her eyes, the shaft of her nose, the curve of her breasts. And then a peculiar thing happened. The terrors were gone. Glinda, the good witch, had simply waved her wand and ordered them away.
He laughed and said to the image of her in his head, “The Munchkins thank you.”
Suddenly, he wanted her desperately. Not just carnally, though that was part of it. He wanted to devour her, meld with her, own her luminescence. He had the absurd notion that, with her, he could not die. It was crazy, he was crazy. She was only a girl in a raincoat, why should she gleam like an archangel? The future was sealed, he could not change it.
Or could he?
“I felt happy today,” he said. “Not special, not magic, but happy. It sort of snuck up on me. I think that’s a good sign.”
The people sitting near him on the metal chairs nodded. There was Jim, the postman, who used to carry more than just the U.S. mail in his bag; Old Marge; Sherri, the young housewife who used to hide it in the maple syrup bottle and Mark, who had been a successful lawyer until he drank it all away — house, wife, kids — and ended up getting gang-raped and nearly beaten to death in an alley.
At first he had resented them, bitterly. Who were they? A bunch of drunks, losers. He sat, sullen, on the chair, listening to them, thinking, I don’t belong here. But then Sherri had looked at him and said, “You don’t want to be here with us, a bunch of alkies, right? That’s how I felt too. ‘I’m not like them.’” Then she had laughed. “But I was, Harry. And so are you.”
And to his shame, he had suddenly begun to cry. But they weren’t shocked or surprised.
“We’ve all cried here, Harry. Comes with the territory.”
He looked at them now, astounded by how much a part of his life they had become. He had told
them things he had never told anyone, not his mother or father. They were the only ones who knew how hard it was, and they were smiling at him.
“It feels good, doesn’t it?” Sherrie asked. “To feel happy. Not the kind that comes from a bottle.”
“I think,” he said, “I think maybe I can be happy, even if I’m not spécial. If I’m just like everybody else. I think I could be good at business. I’m organized. I can keep three or four balls in the air at once. I never knew that.”
“You’re no dummy, kid,” Marge said. “We knew that right off the bat.”
“I think maybe I am smart,” he said. “I didn’t think so because my wife — she’s so smart it used to intimidate me. But I’m smart in a different way. I see how things fit together. Putting this deal together, for the new laundry. I just knew how to do it. So the owner’s been letting me carry the ball.”
“You’re on your way, Harry,” said Jim.
Harry leaned back in his chair. “I only thank God I didn’t wreck it all. I could have lost my wife and my daughter, if I hadn’t come here…” He let the sentence drift off into the air.
“It’s easy to lose everything,” Mark said, quietly. He was forty and looked sixty. His wife had remarried, moved out of state with the children. “People can only take so much. They see you killing yourself, and they can’t make you stop.”
“My wife never gave up on me,” he said. “We had screaming fights, and finally she threw me out, but the door’s open. The night I hit bottom, she came with my father to bail me out. He yelled at me and called me a stinking drunk. She looked at me and gave it to me straight. ‘Harry, you’re doing this to yourself. You can stop it if you want to.’”
“Smart girl,” Jim said.
“Yeah, like I said, she’s real smart. She’s real pretty, too. My daughter looks just like her. She had to put up with a lot of crap from me, but she’s never given up on me. I think she’s been — a saint.”
“Nobody’s a saint, kid,” Marge said.
“I know, but she comes close. I always felt she was … judging me, all the time. But she was right, and it was me that was wrong. I was terrible. I went with“— he looked around — “I don’t know if I should say this in mixed company —”