Old Dogs and Children

by Robert Inman

  “I think you can leave that here,” Bright said gently, reaching for the book. “You can’t read and try on overalls at the same time.” Jimbo reluctantly handed her the book and she put it down on the table next to her. He seemed almost naked without it, unsure of what to do with his hands. He jammed them finally into his pockets.

  “We’ll probably stop somewhere and get a hamburger when we’re finished,” Buster said, putting his hand on Jimbo’s shoulder. “Take your time at Flavo’s.”

  Bright stared at him, felt herself soften. “Thank you, Buster.”

  He gave her a little salute, a flip of the hand at his forehead, and then he and Jimbo walked down the steps together and across the yard to the old green pickup truck parked in his driveway. Bright sat for a moment longer and watched them back out of the driveway into Claxton and ease off toward the downtown business district with a clashing of gears and a growl of ancient engine. And she thought, as she watched them go, Yes, he’s right. It has become decidedly unquiet over here. And then she wondered to herself, Will it become quiet again? And how will I act if it doesn’t?

  12

  They had gone together to Harley Gibbons thirteen years before, she and Flavo, to integrate the high school. It was near the end of the school year in 1966, and the newspapers were full of the fire and blood of the civil rights movement all across the South, the aftermath of Selma and the beginning of Black Power. Their small town had been a quiet backwater, virtually untouched except for a small group of blacks, led by Flavo Richardson, who had marched one hot morning to the county courthouse to drink from the WHITE ONLY water fountain. They had done it in a dignified, peaceful fashion and the county commissioners, in a rare fit of good judgment, had decided to pretty much ignore the gesture. Flavo and his band drank, milled about the first-floor hallway for a moment, and then left. Several days later, the WHITE ONLY sign disappeared. And that was that. White folks didn’t talk much about it, hoping it would go away and leave them alone. What they didn’t want was the kind of thing you saw nightly on television —chanting, surging mobs of Nigras led by white-collared preachers, bearing down on stolid-faced rows of truncheon-carrying state troopers and deputies. No, if it meant giving up the WHITE ONLY sign on the courthouse water fountain, so be it. White folks could get a drink of water at home before they went to transact their business.

  The schools were a different matter. Bright’s fellow members on the school board dug in their heels stubbornly.

  “Sooner or later, we’ve got to face it,” Bright said. “It’s the law.”

  “Later,” the others said. “Wait for a court order. That’s what the community expects us to do.”

  And Bright figured for a while that that was what everybody —black and white —was waiting for.

  Then Flavo Richardson came alone to her door one evening about nine o’clock.

  They sat in the wicker chairs on the front porch in the soft, fragrant late-spring dark, watching an occasional automobile pass on what would later be named Birdsong Boulevard. Nine o’clock, and already the town was at rest. Downtown, along Bascombe Street, only the pool hall and a single service station would be open. In another hour, the service station would close. A quiet, peaceful town.

  “It’s time, Bright,” Flavo said.

  Bright sighed, wishing for a moment that they could just sit here and pass the evening, two old friends who transcended time and space. Finally she said, “You know that, and I know that, but getting the people who run this town to realize it is a different matter.”

  “You’re one of the people who run this town,” Flavo said, and there was a little bit of accusation in his voice.

  Bright bristled. “Don’t you pull that on me, Flavo Richardson,” she said. “I’ve done what I could.”

  And she had. For thirty years, she had quietly and insistently pleaded the case of the black schools before the school board —indoor plumbing, playground equipment, better books, a blackboard for each room, lunchrooms with hot meals, the list went on and on. She had stepped on toes and raised ires and pricked consciences. And the community had borne her as graciously as it could, reminding itself that her father, Dorsey Bascombe, had worked only Negroes in his lumber operation years before and that the Bascombes had deep ties to the Negro community. On top of that, Bright was a single-minded woman, in the mold of her father. So over time, the school board reluctantly did most of what she asked. And Flavo Richardson, she decided now, need not try to burden her with guilt.

  “I don’t mean I’m ungrateful,” Flavo said. “But I’m not here with my hat in my hand, shuffling my feet and saying ‘Yazzum,’ neither.”

  “What are you doing, Flavo?”

  “I’m here to close a school.”

  She turned to him in the dark. “What?”

  “I want to close Booker T. Washington.”

  It took a moment to sink in. She sat there, wondering how many Booker T. Washington high schools there were across the South, how many white school boards had named their local Negro high school for that one man. Booker T. Washington was fairly safe. He had educated black youngsters with their own kind and he hadn’t been uppity about it. To speak of closing a Booker T. Washington said everything about a black world turning its back on its own past, throwing a deep, inbred caution to the winds, and all the upheaval that went along with that.

  “They’ll never do it,” Bright said after a moment. “It’s too much, too quick.”

  “They will if you tell them to.”

  “Me?”

  “Yes, you. You’re Dorsey Bascombe’s daughter.”

  “No.” She shook her head. “That’s not enough, Flavo. Not anymore. There have been a few things I could do because of that, but not this. They’ve got to have a better reason.”

  “How about because it’s right.”

  “It’s been right for a hundred years, but that hasn’t made a hill of beans.”

  Flavo stood up suddenly, the force of it setting the chair to rocking violently. “Then how about fear?” he snapped. “Black folks understand it. I wonder if white folks do?” He strode to the edge of the porch, bent forward with his hands on the banister, looking out across the lawn. She could see, even here in the dim light of the porch, how agitated he was. His shoulders shook.

  Bright sat quietly for a moment. Then she said, “It’s come to that?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t want to see this town torn up, Flavo.”

  “I know you don’t. Like I said, you’re Dorsey Bascombe’s daughter.” He fell silent and the night sounds took over —the rustling of a bird in a pecan tree on the front lawn, the singing of crickets in the grass, the rumble of a tractor-trailer up at the end of Claxton, making the turn at the stoplight and groaning up over the bridge on its way to Columbus. “Bright, there are people on both sides who have more to gain out of this by an uproar. The question is, Are we gonna let ’em? One way or the other, it’s gonna get done. It’s right. And it’s time.”

  “The school board will never make a move on its own,” she said.

  He turned with a jerk, his eyes flashing now. “They’ll move, by God, or we’ll move ’em.”

  She considered all that it would mean —to the town, to Bright herself as keeper of a kind of legacy her father had left, to Congressman Fitzhugh Birdsong, nervous about an election year when the mere mention of civil rights set people to howling. And she decided, very quickly, before she could talk herself out of it. “No,” she said, “they’ll move if Harley Gibbons tells them to.”

  They met two days later in Bright’s parlor —Harley stiff and nervous, Flavo cloaked in a kind of calm stubbornness. Bright served them iced tea and they sat for a moment staring into their glasses before Bright finally said, “Harley, I think we ought to close Booker T. Washington High School.”

  The color drained from Harley’s angular face. He had been reluctant to come. Now he plainly wished he had refused, as difficult as it was to say no to Bright Birdsong. Ha
rley Gibbons was a good banker, like his father before him, a man of probity and discretion, and a middling good mayor. Not progressive in the way Dorsey Bascombe had been, but a servant who took the public trust seriously. Harley and Bright had grown up together, and long ago in high school he had been a beau of sorts. But he had never known quite what to do with her, even back then.

  “You know what that means,” he said quietly now.

  “Yes.”

  “Everybody in one place.” She could see his banker’s mind ticking off the numbers. More than two hundred black students, all at once, plopped down in the middle of what had been for its entire history a lily-white high school. Almost half the student body in grades nine through twelve. A sea of black faces in the Wednesday assembly program, in the stands at the Friday night football games, marching in the band, using the bathrooms, eating in the lunchroom. No Little Rocks or Tuscaloosas here, one or two black students making the first bold token step. Everybody in one place. All at once. A tremor shuddered through Harley Gibbons’s broad shoulders.

  “Yes,” Bright said. “All at once. Over and done with, at least at the high school.”

  “And the rest?” Harley asked, his voice faint.

  “Later,” Flavo said. “But not too much later.”

  Harley set his jaw. “The school board won’t do it. They want a court order.”

  Bright could see the anger rising in Flavo. “No,” she said quickly, shaking her head. “They aren’t waiting for a court order, Harley, they’re waiting for some leadership. I think you call it biting the bullet.”

  “It’s not my place,” Harley protested.

  “Yes,” she said firmly. “It’s your place. And mine. And Flavo’s. This —this town —is our place. We can make of it what we will, Harley.”

  Harley looked from one to the other. Flavo had himself under control now, and he said quietly, “Mayor, I want to make this as easy on everybody as possible. I’m determined to make it work from my side. It won’t be easy for those little black young’uns to leave what they know. And they’ll have to be on their p’s and q’s. Every time one of ’em slips up, folks will say, ‘See, it didn’t work.’ I’m going to do everything in my power to see that they mind their business and their manners.”

  Harley tightened, fixed Flavo with a steely stare. “You? What makes you think I’m going to deal with you, Flavo?”

  “Because,” Flavo said gently, “you can either deal with me or you can deal with folks like Stokely Carmichael and Rap Brown.” Harley blanched and Flavo leaned forward, boring in on him. “We got a young firebrand minister up there in the Quarter, name of Whitelaw Pinckney. Came last month. You ain’t heard much about him, I imagine, because he’s gathering hisself. ‘Scuse the expression, Bright, but the young man is full of piss and vinegar and he’d like nothing better than to make a name for hisself right here. He’s got friends” —he drew out the word—“who’d like nothing better than to come here and help him do it.”

  Bright could see the pictures parading across Harley’s mind, images from the six o’clock news. The nice little towns of the South with their quiet tree-lined streets and gracious courthouse squares never looked as attractive in the black and white of television.

  “Now,” Flavo continued, “if we was to do something like Bright here just suggested, don’t you reckon it would pull the rug out from under the Reverend Whitelaw Pinckney? And don’t you imagine he and his friends would look for greener pastures?”

  Still, Harley toughed it out. “Or,” he said, “we could insist that everybody in this community abide by the law, as soon as we find out what the law is in this case.”

  “Who you want running this town,” Flavo flashed, “Whitelaw Pinckney and the highway patrol?”

  “Look here, dammit …,” Harley sputtered.

  “Would you gentlemen like some more iced tea?” Bright asked calmly. They both stared at her as if she had suddenly grown tusks. She was buying time, searching desperately in her mind for just the right thing to say before this all fell apart right there in front of her. Then she thought of something her father had said a long time ago, something about Harley’s father, Pegram Gibbons. Get a man to see the future as you see it, Dorsey Bascombe had said, and he will help you get there.

  “This is a good town, Harley,” she said, choosing her words carefully. “It has had the good sense to elect you mayor for a long time now because this town believes deep down in what is decent.” Harley grunted. He was having nothing of flattery and smooth talk. Make him see. “I can see two towns from here on out, and one of them I don’t even want to think about. The other is a town that other folks look at and say, ‘They took care of their own business. They didn’t need the governor or some judge or the National Guard or any outside agitators of one stripe or another to tell them what to do. A town with good people, a good mayor. A good town to do business in.’ ”

  Bright drew out her words, let them hang there in the air, and then sat back in her chair and let everything marinate for a moment. She thought, If we could all just go home right now and sleep on it and let good sense take its course. But we don’t have time for that. We need a little luck. She offered up a silent prayer for good sense and luck and then sat and listened to the quiet of the house, the clock on the mantel and the gentle hum of the Kelvinator back in the kitchen and Gladys bumping and banging under the house. O Lord, just a little luck.

  It took a long time, a long spinning out of the afternoon in the quiet. But finally, Harley Gibbons breathed a great sigh and said, “I can’t do it by myself.”

  And Bright Birdsong knew then that the Lord, once in a very great while, when things were at their trickiest, did meddle in the squalid and pitiful affairs of mankind. He must take a certain perverse pleasure in deciding just when and where. This time, he had.

  “No, Harley,” she said, committing herself in a way that she realized full well was fraught with danger of a very personal kind. “You won’t have to.”

  Bright and Harley started quietly making the rounds of the people who molded opinion in the community —town council and school board members, ministers, teachers, businessmen, club women. With some, they used logic; with others, religion. With a few, they invoked the names of the Reverend Whitelaw Pinckney’s friends who were itching to get their hands on a virgin town, unscathed by the civil rights uproar. Bright and Harley worked hard and fast, sunup to midnight for five days, wheedling and cajoling and pushing and shoving the white community while Flavo carried the message to his own people: make this work, or risk chaos. Several times during the enterprise, faced with stubborn resistance from a handful, Harley grew fainthearted. He was a cautious man at heart, a conservative banker, a path-of-least-resistance politician.

  At one point, when O. P. Putnam smacked his hand on the counter at Putnam’s Mercantile and declared his undying and violent enmity of anything resembling race mixing, Bright thought she had lost Harley. He began backing toward the door, and Bright grabbed him by the arm and held him fast while she just kept talking, scarcely knowing what she said, wearing O. P. down and finally conjuring up the image of a good number of steady black customers taking their business elsewhere. They finally extracted from O. P. a promise to leave his gun at home and stay off the school grounds. That was all.

  But for every O. P. Putnam, there were a surprising number who grudgingly accepted the idea, and a handful who actually welcomed it. Yes, they said. Get it over with. It’s not what we agree with, but it’s immutable, like crabgrass. We want no tackiness, no unseemly and unsightly milling about in the streets.

  It was, Bright reminded herself, a moderate community —nothing like the fevered towns of the Southern Black Belt where white minorities hunkered behind barricades of what they perceived to be self-preservation, where Kluxers and White Citizens Council firebrands with their shotguns and torches and Rebel flags made it virtually impossible to speak with any sense of sanity. This, Bright’s town, had little of that. And perhaps t
hat was one of Dorsey Bascombe’s abiding legacies. Some had called Dorsey in his prime a civic dictator, a man who ran pell-mell over dissent. And they said in their darkest mutterings that he had left it a dull town, without much character to it. But better dull than bloody. And now, faced with this business of the schools, most people seemed to come to a consensus: this is nobody’s business but ours.

  Bright and Harley worked all week, and then on Friday night the school board met in special session. Acting on Bright’s motion, they threw everybody out except the school superintendent, closed the door, and went at it tooth and tong. Ortho Noblett, the editor of the newspaper, stood pounding on the door and yelling threats for fifteen minutes until Police Chief Homer Sipsey escorted him bodily from City Hall and locked the front door behind him.

  It started mildly enough, the five members of the school board stepping softly and couching their debate in careful terms while Harley sat at the end of the table, legs crossed and one fist propped pensively under his chin, watching and keeping his own counsel. That lasted for an hour, and then the air conditioner broke and they got down to business. Going in, Bright knew she could count on two votes —hers and Harley’s. As mayor, he was also the chairman of the school board, a quirk in local law that dated from Dorsey Bascombe’s day. But then there were two other men and Xuripha Deloach. Xuripha, Bright thought, might well be the most difficult. Simply because she was Xuripha.

  After two hours of pitched battle, one of the men, a Church of God preacher, reluctantly agreed to the idea. That was when Xuripha stood up abruptly and turned her chair over with a clatter and said, “Well, the hell with you all. You’ve got the votes to do it now. I’m going home.”

  “Sit down, Xuripha,” Bright said. “Nobody’s leaving until we get a unanimous vote. We’ve got to go out of here of a single mind, or else it won’t work.”

  Harley Gibbons gave her a grateful look.