Old Dogs and Children

by Robert Inman

Xuripha drew herself up, nostrils flaring. “I can leave when I damn well please, Bright Birdsong. You’re not the chairman of the school board.”

  And that was when Harley, God bless his heart, took charge. “No, you can’t, Xuripha,” Harley said. “The doors are locked and Homer Sipsey’s got the key and he’s not going to open up until I tell him to.”

  Xuripha glowered at him for a moment and Harley sat there unmoved, blinking back at her. And then Xuripha sat back down and they went at it for another hour, working on Xuripha and the fifth member, an insurance salesman who was O. P. Putnam’s second cousin. They brought the school superintendent into it and began to talk about how it would work —squeezing all the students into the aging school buildings, organizing teachers to patrol the halls and bathrooms and keep order. Xuripha held out stubbornly, and the insurance salesman kept nodding every time she raised an objection.

  Finally, near midnight, Xuripha began to wear down. They were all limp and exhausted in the heat, but they didn’t dare raise a window and let the rest of the community hear the ruckus. Xuripha got up out of her chair again and began to pace back and forth at one end of the room, sweat trickling in rivulets down the side of her face, hair matted. “It’s not right,” she said. “And I’ll tell you one thing for sure.” She stopped, faced them. “Hubert and I are not going to sit in the stands at the football games and let folks from these other towns yell about us being Jigaboo High.”

  “Is that it?” Bright said quietly. “The football team?”

  Monkey Deloach was the head of the Football Boosters’ Club, and he and Xuripha were a Friday night fixture in the bleachers, twelfth row, fifty-yard line. Xuripha might not have known a tackle from a water bucket, but she took high school football, or at least the social occasion, very seriously. She had a grandson who played snare drum in the band. “Yes,” she said. “That’s some of it. And the band and the glee club. And clubs and such. Social activities.”

  “For God’s sake, Xuripha,” Harley started, “the glee club —“

  Bright interrupted. “If we didn’t integrate the football team and the band and the glee club, would that make you happy, Xuripha?”

  “None of it’s going to make me happy.”

  “But would you be less unhappy?”

  Xuripha looked down her nose at Bright for a long moment. Finally she said, “Perhaps.”

  Bright looked over at Harley Gibbons. “Harley, may I use your telephone?”

  His eyebrows went up. “Of course, Bright.”

  She stepped into his office next to the council room and called Flavo Richardson.

  “Did I wake you?”

  “I’ve been waiting for you to call.”

  “Flavo, I need a favor.”

  She could hear the suspicion in his voice. “What?”

  “I want you to get the Booker T. Washington students to agree not to go out for the football team or the band or the glee club. Just go to school. That’s all. No extracurricular activities.”

  “What the hell kind of high school is that?” he exploded.

  “Wait a minute, before you get your bowels in an uproar. Just for the first year.”

  “Why?”

  “Because we need a unanimous vote from the school board, and we won’t get it unless we can satisfy Xuripha Deloach. And she has the football team and the band and such stuck in her craw. Sideways.”

  There was a long pause on the other end and she could hear a radio playing softly in the background, some late-night boogie music. “I’ll have to think about it,” he said finally.

  “No. I need a commitment right now.”

  “Hah! You think I can just hand you two hundred young’uns on a platter, Bright?”

  “Yes, I do.” She let that sink in for a moment, and then she said, “We’ve been cooped up in a sweaty, smelly room for five hours, saying nasty things to each other, for exactly that reason. Because of you. It’s your idea, but we’re doing the dirty work. Now you can either help us make this work, or we can turn out the lights and go home and you can deal with the Reverend Whitelaw Pinckney.”

  It stung him, as she meant it to. Flavo had pretty much had things his way for a long time in the black community, dispensing wisdom and direction from behind the counter at his small grocery store and from his deacon’s pew in the A.M.E. Zion Church. It was a matter of power, and beyond that, a man’s vanity. So she waited now while Flavo wrestled with his archangel and finally said, “All right.”

  “Thank you,” she said and hung up.

  And just after one o’clock in the morning, the school board took a unanimous vote to close Booker T. Washington High School.

  What she wasn’t prepared for was Fitzhugh’s reaction. An aide was waiting to give him the news, passed on from a political crony back home in the district, when he stepped off a plane at Andrews Air Force Base from a trip to inspect U.S. military installations in the Mediterranean. He came straight home, and when he walked in the house, his jaw was tight with barely controlled anger.

  “Three weeks before the primary!” he cried, dropping his suitcase with a clatter just inside the door.

  Bright was sitting in her wing-back chair, reading Ortho Noblett’s account of the school board decision in the paper. She folded it carefully and laid it on the ottoman at her feet.

  “Why now, for God’s sake? Couldn’t you have waited at least three weeks before you got the entire congressional district in an uproar over this cockeyed …” He lost the word and waved the air with his arms, indicating the general political mess he had arrived home to.

  In truth, she thought, she had scarcely given Fitzhugh a thought once the idea of closing Booker T. Washington had taken hold in her mind. She had just done it because it seemed the thing to do, and once you decided a thing needed doing, it did little good to cogitate over it. You could think yourself right out of doing it. But she could not admit that now because it would be acknowledgment of the dimensions of the rift between them.

  Instead, she said, “We had to do it before school’s out, to give everybody the summer to get used to the idea and give the school people time to get ready.”

  “We.”

  “Harley, the school board …”

  “Flavo Richardson.”

  “Yes. And Flavo.”

  “It was his idea, wasn’t it.”

  “Yes. It was his idea, at the beginning. But it was my doing, at least a good deal of it.”

  “Well,” he said bitterly, “I’m glad you took care of Flavo Richardson’s agenda.” He towered above her, fairly trembling with anger. She had never seen him quite so upset. It would do no good to argue with him. So she stood, reached for his hand. He drew back, sat heavily on the sofa across from her.

  “I’m sorry,” she said after a moment. “If I had thought it would have any effect…”

  He sat very straight, very rigid, looking away from her out the window. He was wearing a three-piece pin-striped suit, a nice dark gray, and he looked very distinguished, very statesmanlike, very Washington. Except for his agitation. Fitzhugh rarely looked agitated.

  Bright sat down beside him, determined to take the edge off his anger if she possibly could. “It will be all right,” she said firmly. “You’d be surprised how people have accepted the idea.”

  “One town! Bright, I’ve got a nine-county district to worry about, and parts of it are as hard-nosed as anyplace in the South.”

  “But you have practically no opposition,” she protested. “A … what is he … storekeeper?”

  “A rival! Somebody people can vote for. An alternative. And even if I get past him, there’s the general election.”

  “A Republican? For goodness’ sake, Fitzhugh. This district hasn’t elected a Republican dogcatcher since Reconstruction.”

  He stared at her. “Maybe not here, Bright. But do you realize how many Republicans got elected across the South two years ago on Goldwater’s coattails? Nobodies, most of them. All because of Goldwater, because Sout
hern whites thought for some reason that he could keep the place in the Dark Ages. Great God!” His eyes flashed and he chopped the air angrily with his hands. “They turned out county commissioners, sheriffs, legislators —all by marking the Republican slate so they could make sure they voted for Goldwater. Then they woke up the next morning and realized how stupid they had been. But they’re perfectly capable of doing it again, because stupidity lasts a lifetime.” His shoulders slumped then, the fire gone out of him, and he sat kneading his hands while she watched and waited. “Bright,” he said finally, “you don’t understand what it’s like.”

  “Civil rights.”

  “Yes. There’s no way to win. If you win, you lose.”

  There was a touch of naked desperation in his voice, and she did understand a bit how it must be for him, always having to be so careful, using the right code words, dodging the messier aspects. Especially Fitzhugh, who was a decent and honorable man and who did take what he did in Washington so earnestly to heart. She understood a bit how much it had taken out of him to vote against the Civil Rights Bill and the Voting Rights Bill —legislation he considered both common decency and political suicide. Civil rights was not something he ever talked about unless pressed, and then only to recite by rote, unenthusiastically, the worn phrases about states’ rights and self-determination. The politics of avoidance, practiced by Fitzhugh and dozens of otherwise forthright Southerners for whom it was inevitably a private shame. He and they paid a price for being Southern.

  Bright thought about all that as they sat there for a long time with the house sad and exhausted around them and finally she said, “Come home, Fitzhugh.”

  “Don’t start on me again,” he snapped. “Not now, for God’s sake. Come home? When we’re up to our eyeballs in Vietnam and Johnson’s acting like it’s a damned range war or something? Come home? No, by God, I’m going to stay as long as I have to. Unless” —he stood now and turned on his bitterness full-bore —“you and Flavo Richardson have pulled the rug out from under me.”

  He was spooked. She could see it in his eyes, hear it in his voice. Desperately afraid of losing his seat, and more than that, a way of life, something that was as natural to him as breathing. He walked out, letting the screen door bang shut behind him. She watched out the front window as he crossed the lawn in long strides, heading toward downtown, toward the small storefront headquarters his campaign was operating on Bascombe Street near City Hall. He didn’t come home until late in the night, after she had already gone to bed. She heard him at the door, then watched his slim, shadowy form as he undressed in the near-dark and slipped into bed beside her.

  She waited. “I’m sorry,” she said quietly. “Have I ruined it for you?”

  He sighed. “I don’t know. I’ve been on the phone. It may hold together.”

  That was all he said. And he made no move toward her. It was a long time before she slept.

  Fitzhugh Birdsong survived the election. His opponent, the storekeeper, kicked up a minor fuss about the school business, but he had neither the time nor the moneyed political organization to orchestrate the kind of smear and innuendo campaign that could have toppled Fitzhugh. In September, the white high school absorbed its new black population with a minimum of trouble and the 1966 general election turned out to be a disappointment for Republicans all over the South. The dentist from Columbus who ran against Fitzhugh got barely forty percent of the vote, though it was the best anyone had done against him —primary or general election —in years.

  They rarely spoke of it. But the wound was there, scabbed over and visible if you knew where to look for it. And the business seemed to weary him like a slow-acting poison, leaving the smell and taste of bile.

  On election night in 1968, as they sat watching the national returns on television —the sore, angry nation giving the presidency reluctantly to Richard Nixon —Fitzhugh took her hand quietly and said, “That’s it. I’ve run the course.” And when he went back to Washington, he announced on the floor of the House that it would be his last term. There was no victory in it for Bright, only a pale sense of relief that it would finally be over, that he would come home and they would see what could be made of their lives.

  >

  She thought about Booker T. Washington as she drove the Plymouth, running smoothly now, through the late June morning toward Flavo’s house. It seemed like a very long time ago —ancient battles, inscribed on parchment. And after all that, still unfinished business.

  It was like going back in time, entering the black section of town. Physically, there were still a good number of landmarks from her childhood: clapboard houses, the white frame A.M.E. Zion Church her father had built at the same time he had erected the new Methodist Church for the white folks. But beyond the physicality was the feel of the place, a mysterious and fascinating world to which she had always had entrée because she was Dorsey Bascombe’s daughter. Sitting beside him in the front seat of their motorcar years ago as they took Hosanna home after supper, she could sense the crossing-over, almost a change of seasons —the smell of fatback and greens cooking, the fine powder boiling up from the dirt road behind their car, the impassive faces of the children watching from the bare yards and sagging porches of the houses as they passed, dusk settling over everything and softening edges like a watercolor.

  She knew from the beginning that there was much more here than met the eye. It was like watching a pond, sensing a vibrancy below the placid surface, lives intermingled in a teeming stew. On Wednesday nights when Hosanna would take her to prayer meeting at the church, she sat deep in the pew surrounded by the close, powerful presence of the people and the great harmonious blend of their voices and felt things stir inside her —the essence of all things musical, the roots of life itself.

  She sensed instinctively that she could never truly know this place, only its surfaces and perhaps a bit more. But still she felt, in the crossing-over, that in some strange way a part of her belonged here, even if she was only allowed because she was Dorsey Bascombe’s daughter. More than any other man in town, white or black, Dorsey Bascombe had been the economic lifeblood of this black enclave. She came to understand over the years that life was hard here, close to the bone. But it would have been a good deal harder and closer had it not been for Dorsey’s lumber company. Dorsey paid regularly and in cash. More than that, he took care of his people and their kin.

  Things had changed over the years, most of them long after Dorsey was gone. Most of the streets were paved now and the main thoroughfare had street lamps. There were a number of fairly new houses —brick and mason-board siding with neatly kept yards. But there was the same feel about the place —much of it the mystery of the unknowable.

  Flavo Richardson’s small grocery store and attached house were at the center of the Quarter, both literally and figuratively. In the years before Dorsey had built the A.M.E. Zion Church, the community gathering place had been a huge oak tree in a clearing beside a small creek. Flavo had built his store in the clearing with the creek at its back side and the oak tree at its front. And this, as much as anything else, marked him as an essential man in the community. Directly across the street was Booker T. Washington High School —now just a boarded-up hulk.

  The small parking area around the oak tree in front of Flavo’s store was crowded with cars this morning, so she eased her Plymouth onto the shaded grass in front of the school building. She turned the engine off and sat there for a moment, looking at the school and thinking of Dorsey Bascombe. Dorsey would not have approved of the closing of Booker T., because he was of a different era and his vision did not stretch that far. But she thought Dorsey would have understood Bright’s seeing a need for change in a changed time and acting upon it. When you lived in a place, you made an investment in it. He had truly believed that. And he most certainly would have approved of her being here this morning, of doing a difficult thing because it was the right and decent thing to do. What Dorsey Bascombe had taught her was right and decent had
guided virtually everything she did for an entire lifetime. It had never occurred to her to be guided any differently.

  She stepped out of the car now and crossed the street and threaded her way through the tangle of cars, past the oak tree, to the front of Flavo’s store. It had a low porch with a smooth-worn floor, benches on either side of the wide front door, and there was a small crowd of people this morning, mostly men and a couple of women, lounging about the benches and leaning against the porch posts. Beyond them she could see that the door to the store was closed and a black wreath hung upon it, next to the Nehi Grape thermometer.

  Conversation froze when they spotted her, and Bright, about to speak, stopped in her tracks. There was a shifting about on the porch, an uneasy silence, a looking away. And then she sensed the hostility, like a low growl from an animal. They don’t want me here. I don’t belong. It stung her. She had never, in all the years she had come here, felt shut out. Something had changed. Something ominous was happening. And she could only link it to the small brown body being lifted from the river last night. But why? Do they blame me? Flavo, what have you done here?

  “Where is Mr. Richardson?” she asked finally.

  Nobody said anything for a moment, and then one of the women turned her head aside and said, just loud enough so that Bright could hear her, “Shit.” It dropped into the silence like a rock into water and rippled out into the morning, and Bright felt her cheeks flush. She clutched her purse tightly and almost turned to go, retreat to her car and drive away. Then suddenly one of the men pushed his way through the crowd and stepped off the porch. She recognized Luther Fox, the man she had seen in the checkout line at the Dixie Vittles the evening before. Babe Fox’s boy, probably the only man in this crowd who had ever heard of Dorsey Bascombe.

  “Flavo’s in the house, Miz Birdsong,” Luther Fox said.

  “I’d like to see him if I could,” Bright said.

  “He’s wore out this morning. We trying to let him get a little rest.”

  “Is he asleep?”