Lay that Trumpet in Our Hands

by Susan Carol McCarthy

  Dear Reesa,

  I just got back from a big family dinner at my Granddaddy’s. It was fun, cousins galore, but nothing like a rattler race which, by the way, nobody believes I really saw! After dessert, I got the chance to ask Granddaddy the real scoop on Great-Aunt Maybelle.

  Oh, Reesa, it’s even sadder than we imagined. The battle her fiancé was killed in was the very last one of the war. Even though he was supposed to come home before it, he volunteered to stay! Granddaddy says the news hit Great-Aunt Maybelle so hard she wouldn’t leave her room for months, not even for Christmas dinner. When she finally did come out, she told the family she didn’t want to talk about her fiancé or what happened—ever again! And as far as Granddaddy knows, she never has.

  Granddaddy told me the young man was Mr. and Mrs. Swann’s only son and that his mother was so upset that she died the next spring of a shattered heart. Isn’t this just the saddest thing you ever heard?

  I asked him if that’s the reason why Great-Aunt Maybelle is so mean to everybody and all he’d say is “Everybody’s got their reasons, Vaylie, whether you know ’em or not.”

  Are you excited that summer’s here? Write SOON!!!

  Love, VAYLIE

  P.S. If what Granddaddy says is true, that we all have our reasons, I’ve been trying to figure what mine are. Do you know yours?

  I’ve brought pen and paper with me to reply:

  Dear Vaylie,

  If your grandfather’s right, if everyone has their reasons, then somebody stole my share.

  These days, the reasons behind just about everything baffle me. Like what really happened to Miss Maybelle and why? Or, how can a bunch of men murder my friend Marvin and the whole of Mayflower act as if it never happened?

  Marvin’s mother Armetta says, “Time in the fire prepares us for what’s ahead.” But that doesn’t make sense to me. Did God kill Miss Maybelle’s fiancé so she could spend her life sorting envelopes? Protecting U.S. property from my brother and me? Did Marvin die so those of us who loved him could su fer while his killers walk around scot-free?

  What do you think, Vaylie? Do bad things happen because God wills it so? Or is evil something else, with a mind of its own? Like the serpent in the Garden of Eden, or an alligator at the edge of a swimming hole?

  Down here, people think of alligators as “a necessary evil.” “Take the good with bad,” they say. Do you think maybe good and bad are stuck together, like two sides of a dime?

  I’m sorry for going on about this. But every question I come up with just seems to lead to another one. Most days, I feel like a dog chasing its tail.

  If you come up with any answers, or reasons either, please let me know. And write again soon!

  Love, Reesa

  Chapter 14

  Summer’s heat settles on us like a mother hen. We locals know enough to stay in the shade, but the summer tourists, skin white as eggshells heading south, are blistered stiff going north and reeking of Coppertone applied too late.

  Today, Mother and I are tending customers in the showroom while Daddy and Luther prune the last of the spring-bearing Valencia trees in the grove out back. The big fruit-processing equipment on the raised platform behind the showroom walls is quiet: the washer with its giant water tank and big bristle brushes; the waxer with its rubber rollers, preservative spray, drying fan and hood; and the long conveyor belts that transport the washed-and-waxed fruit to the sizing bins are all at rest between summer’s relaxed, twice-a-week runs.

  Mid-morning, the big black pickup truck wheels into the parking lot, oversize tires splaying gravel, large chrome bumper and Confederate flag plate glaring in the sun.

  Local, I think at my post behind the juice counter; nobody I know, seeing the packed metal gun rack behind the seat.

  The driver gets out, skinny, on the short side, with an upright stride that’s soldier-like. War veteran, I guess. Although he’s a stranger to me, the two same-size boys with different clothes and identical faces with him are familiar. The Bowman twins, I remember, first graders, and the only identical twins in the history of Opalakee Elementary. I’ve helped them find picture books in the school library.

  The three of them move quickly into the shade of the front awning, get their bearings, then strut over to me.

  “We’d like some of that ice-cold orange juice you’re advertisin’,” the man says, pulling a forearm across his forehead to wipe back the sweat. He has the flushed red coloring and the slow-rolling accent of people from south Georgia. “Three for a dime, right?”

  “No, sir,” I say with a smile. “It’s all you can drink for a dime, limit three per customer. We say that to keep the tourists from drinking too much and getting sick to their stomachs.”

  “You tellin’ me you want thirty cents instead of a dime?” His eyelashes are thick and orangey around pale eyes that have turned suspicious.

  “Yes, sir.” I smile again. “A dime apiece. After your first glass, you can have two more each, if you want.” The boys are staring at me, trying to sort why I’m familiar. The man sees it, too.

  “Y’all know this girl?” he asks them.

  The boys nod and say, “Yes, from school.” “The library, right?” They have the habit of finishing each other’s sentences.

  “You go to their school?” the man asks me, leaning forward to get a closer look.

  “Yes, sir. I’ve helped your boys find their library books.”

  “That’s funny,” he says without smiling. A fat drop of sweat pops out at his hairline. It swerves down the flat of his temple, the hollow of his cheek, and hangs off his jaw. “I didn’t think we had any Jew girls at our school.”

  “Pardon me?” His tone turns my arm trembly. Without my telling them to, my hands grip the edge of the counter.

  “Well, anybody that advertises three glasses for a dime then tries to charge thirty cents must be a Jew.” His glint across the counter is ugly. The drop of sweat falls off his chin and splats on the counter between us.

  “No, sir, we’re Baptists.” My heart’s pummeling my chest with a fear I don’t understand. What if I was Jewish? What would be wrong with that?

  His eyes sweep the showroom, taking in Mother and the customers in the shell-lamp section.

  “Well, looky here, little Baptist Jew girl,” he drawls in a voice that pricks the back of my neck. “I think we’ve changed our minds about that juice. I think we’ll just head on down to Voight’s for some Coke-Cola. C’mon, you two. Git in the truck.” His words cut the space between the twins like a knife. The boys quit and run, fast, toward the truck.

  The man glares at me across the counter some more, then slowly, like a dare, parts his fat pink lips into an unpleasant smile. He turns, unhurried, on his boot heel, and swaggers away, under and out from the awning. When the sun hits his back, I gasp. Mother, returning to the counter carrying a conch lamp for checkout, turns. “Reesa? What’s wrong?”

  As the man’s boots crunch across the gravel toward the truck, the letters “J.D.,” tooled on the back of his black leather belt, get smaller, harder and harder to read.

  “Reesa, what is it?” Mother asks, coming close to look me in the eye.

  “That man, that’s J. D. Bowman, the one who shot Marvin.”

  “Good Lord, Reesa, are you all right? Did he say something? Did he do anything to you?”

  “He called me a Jew.”

  That night, the nightmare, the horror where I’m trapped in the crowd and can’t save Marvin; that dream changes. Now, one of the men in the center of the circle stops and turns to scan the spectators. In this new nightmare, J. D. Bowman singles me out, points and yells, “Grab her, too. She’s a Jew!”

  The next day, at the border between two Miami neighborhoods, all hell breaks loose.

  Daddy’s family, genetically inclined toward quick thinking and fast acting, are the first to call. I answer the phone and Uncle Harry, in a voice that sounds like Daddy’s, mistakes me for Mother.

  “Lizbeth, what the
hell’s going on down there?” he wants to know.

  That night, we hear from Doto and Aunt Eleanor.

  “Warren, you’ve had fourteen years to whip that state into shape. What the hell’s wrong with it?” my father’s only sister demands.

  “The hell” they refer to, the one everyone’s talking about, is the bombing of the Carver Village Housing Project for Negroes in Miami. The story’s all over the news. Bombs gutted two buildings in the recently refurbished section of what used to be all-white Knights Manor. “The largest blast ever detonated in the state of Florida,” the papers say, “possibly the entire Eastern Seaboard.” The boom of it pitched people living five blocks away out of their beds, and rattled the balcony windows of the fancy hotels down at the beachfront.

  One picture in the paper shows the garage owner across the street from the project pointing at the mangled cars, which leaped eight feet in the air, crashing their roofs against his ceiling.

  Despite the fact that a number of people suffered cuts and bruises from flying glass, block and wood, everybody swears it’s a miracle nobody’s dead. The lucky thing is, the two eight-unit buildings were empty; their new occupants hoped to move in next month.

  “My guess is that the local whites weren’t inclined to form a welcoming committee,” Daddy tells us grimly. “This thing’s got the Klan written all over it.”

  When the investigators uncover the remains of two 100-pound bundles of dynamite, they find a third bundle of eighty sticks which failed to explode. One war veteran, looking things over, tells reporters it reminds him of “the block-buster bombs we used to rout the Krauts out of Bastogne and Coblenz.”

  On the radio, the Miami police chief says he’s certain the Ku Klux Klan “had no involvement whatsoever”; in fact, he has “reason to believe that Reds are responsible.” One Negro has been arrested.

  “Idiots!” Doto rages on the phone (so loud the whole family can hear her) and declares she’s calling her Congressman first thing in the morning.

  After Doto rings off, we hear from our mother’s only brother, Gordy, and our other grandmother, Nana. Like Mother, they’re the sensitive side of the family:

  “We’re just a nervous wreck over this, Lizbeth. Aren’t you? Why not pack up the kids and come back to Chicago for a few weeks? We’ll have a nice visit while the police settle things down down there.”

  Mother and Daddy hand the phone back and forth, each reassuring the other’s family, “Everything’s fine, we’re all fine.”

  As bad as the bombing appears to be, there is, in fact, the slightest flicker of a silver lining in this storm cloud. In today’s paper, the remarks of Mr. Harry T. Moore and Mr. Thurgood Marshall are startling:

  “I call on Mr. J. Edgar Hoover and the Federal Bureau of Investigation to come to Miami, help us sort this thing out,” Mr. Moore, Executive Secretary of the State N.A.A.C.P., is quoted as saying.

  “And when they get here, I have a list of other things to look into,” Mr. Thurgood Marshall, attorney for the National N.A.A.C.P. said, “including the mistreatment of my clients, Walter Lee Irvin and Samuel Shepherd, in Lake County’s Raiford Prison, and the murder of Marvin Cully, a fruit picker, outside Opalakee, in central Florida.”

  It is the first official acknowledgment of anything to do with Marvin, who was killed three whole months ago. And, to me, it means, it surely must mean something will happen now.

  Chapter 15

  In the middle of July, at the peak of our summer season, here’s what should have happened:

  At six o’clock, Daddy, having placed the big “Closed For The Day” signs out front, should’ve joined the rest of us at the already bustling party in the back.

  Our friends Sal and Sophia Tomasini, having closed their own store an hour earlier, should’ve been holding court over the stove’s steaming, boiling, baking pots, bubbling Italian, brimming laughter. Armetta should’ve been basking in our communal admiration for her heavenly cloud cake—three light-as-air layers floating in creamy coconut—the very one Marvin calls her “Ain’t-None-Betta Cake.” Luther and Marvin should’ve been corralling the boys to take their turns cranking the homemade strawberry ice cream. My parents should’ve looked and felt young again when, after our dinner, we laughed until we cried at the stories of that other summer thirteen years ago:

  They remember the swim in the lake followed by polio’s headaches, high fever and paralysis. But it’s Armetta who tells the one about Doto best. “Miz Doto was a wildcat. You shoulda seen ol’ Doc Johnny go bug-eyed when she tol’ him, ‘What kinda doctor are you? I want those splints off Warren’s arm and leg this minute! Moist heat and massage is what he needs, you old fool!’ She was right, too!”

  Old Sal should’ve told the one about the big day itself: the men tending Daddy’s muscle spasms in one room; the women helping Mother with her contractions in the next while, downstairs, Doto railed at the doctor on the phone, “They’re coming too close! We’ll never make it to Orange Hospital in Orlando, get in your damn car and get over here now!” It was serene Sophia who held Mother while Armetta “caught” me on my birth day. Doto was downstairs at the door, hauling in poor Doc Johnny, who luckily arrived in time for cleanup. “It’s a wonder he’s even speaking to us,” Mother should’ve said.

  After dinner and the stories, Marvin should’ve turned on the radio and coaxed us all out to dance, something lively and fun like Teresa Brewer and the Dixieland All-Stars “Choo’n Gum.” This very minute, we should’ve been howling at Marvin trying to teach a shuffling Sal the latest fancy dance step.

  Truth is, all of this should’ve happened and would’ve happened—as it always had on this particular day—if only Marvin hadn’t been murdered, and the Klan stayed out of everybody’s business in Miami.

  Instead of loud music, the radio plays low, everyone half listening for the latest news update. Instead of funny stories, my parents, Sal and Sophia, and Luther and Armetta sit softly discussing the latest fearful developments. Last month’s massive bombing of Carver Village was only the beginning. On the Fourth of July, dynamite bundles were hurled at the steps of the Miami Jewish Center and, just today, a blast blew up the doors of St. Stephen’s Catholic Church.

  “First da Negroes, den da Jews, now Catholics.” Sal’s eyes behind thick glasses sink into the shadows of his bushy gray brows. Next to him, Sophia, his wife, bows her silver-streaked head.

  “It’s the Klan’s holy trinity of hate. Nobody else is so obviously ecumenical,” Daddy says.

  I wonder if it occurs to him how nearly our little group resembles that triangle. Luther and Armetta are Negroes; the Tomasinis, Catholic transplants from New York; and we’ve been called Jews by the very man who murdered Marvin!

  Except for Daddy who’s angry, we’re an anxious, apprehensive group. As Ren and Mitchell quit us to search outside for fireflies, it’s Luther who lays out the night’s most troublesome question.

  “How long ’fore the Opalakee Klan stirs things up ’round here again?” he asks quietly.

  “Hard to say, isn’t it?” Daddy says. “Since nobody’s doing anything to stop the Miami crowd, this business could easily get out of hand. It’s not surprising their police are looking the other way—they’re probably half Klanners themselves. We know Thurgood and Harry are doing all they can. But you’d think the big hotel owners would be screaming their heads off. It won’t be long, it can’t be long before the wealthy tourists start making other plans. Once the cancellations start rolling in, the Miami bigwigs will be howling for the governor, somebody, to do something. Nothing like an endangered pocketbook to help a businessman find his conscience.”

  “In the meantime . . . ?” Mother’s eyes are dark with worry.

  “In the meantime, what are we supposed to do?” Daddy wonders, his stare challenging the table, his jaw hardened in frustration. “What choice do we have but to sit tight and keep our heads down?” he asks in a tone that tells me that’s the last thing he wants to do.

  I was Mi
tchell’s age when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. I have no memory of President Roosevelt saying the day will live in infamy, but I know he said it. I was Ren’s age when we dropped the A-bomb on Hiroshima. These were Acts of War. Everybody knew it. What with Europe, Japan and Korea, my country’s been at war with somebody, somewhere, practically my entire life. But it was today, July 14, 1951, that the Klan bombed St. Stephen’s Catholic Church and declared war on the people of this state. It was a lousy gift in the worst year I’ve ever known. It ruined my thirteenth birthday, which, by all rights, should’ve been a happy day.

  The one and only bit of good news this month comes from Ren: the Brooklyn Dodgers, who captured first place in their league in April, and held on to it throughout May and June, win ten games in a row in July. At midseason’s All-Star break, they’re still way ahead of everybody else—which, Ren says, “is a sure sign they’ll win the pennant and make it into the Series!” Ren, old Sal, and the fans from The Quarters go crazy when a record seven Brooklyn Dodgers make it onto the National League’s All-Star team, including Negroes Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella and Don Newcombe. These days, what Marvin called “baseball’s Heaven on Earth” offers the only hopeful respite from our real lives in central Florida.

  Chapter 16

  The high, humid heat of August presses on us with an unkind hand. This is, officially, the hottest Florida summer on record. Everything, from traffic on the Trail to Buddy’s tail-wagging, has slowed to a crawl.

  In Miami, denied protection by local police (“We will not make night watchmen out of our officers,” the chief says), Jewish war veterans patrol their communities to protect their families from further bombings. In the Negro neighborhood surrounding Carver Village, leaders request but are denied the same privilege.

  The F.B.I., citing “no apparent violation of any federally guaranteed civil rights,” remains elsewhere. The bombings continue.

  This week’s explosion is at the Coral Gables Jewish Center, seven miles south-west of Miami. As usual, the police report no suspects. No official actions are taken.