by Robert Inman
Then she opened the door of the car and the major backed away a couple of steps to let her out. She reached in and got her purse and tucked it under her arm, closed the door and said, “All right. If you won’t let me drive into the Quarter, I’ll walk. But I’m going to see Flavo.”
“No, you’re not,” the major said flatly.
“You might shoot an old lady,” Bright said, “but I don’t think you’ll shoot the governor’s mother. Will you?”
The major pursed his lips and then he took off his wide-brimmed hat and ran his fingers through his hair. And then he put his hat back on. And then he took off his sunglasses and blinked at her in the bright morning and put them back on. And finally he said, “No.”
So Bright was on foot, feeling the sun on her scalp, wishing she had thought to bring a hat. A hot breeze riffled the drooping leaves on the trees at the edge of the roadway, but it was the only thing stirring. The street was deserted, the porches of the houses empty, the windows gaping blankly as she walked toward Flavo’s grocery store. Every single time she had been here before, going back to her girlhood, she had had a sense of the street watching her, eyes that saw more than they let on. But now, there was none of that. Simply emptiness. And she began to wonder if Flavo had indeed evacuated, if they had all lit out for the promised land. She wished for someone to come to a front door and at least look at her, acknowledge her presence. If no one looks at you, are you truly there? Perhaps not.
She had gone scarcely a block when she rounded the bend in the road and saw the ruin of Booker T. Washington High School. The fire had somehow spared much of one side wall, but the rest of it was a blackened hulk, charred timbers poking crazily from the rubble, thin wisps of smoke still rising here and there. Bright stopped for a moment to look at it, to pay her respects. Lumber from Dorsey’s sprawling yard by the river had built this school fifty years ago, in a time before most towns their size had even considered a high school for Negroes. Dorsey had seen it as a measure of the town’s progressivism. Now look at it. Another piece of the past—mine, his, theirs—gone.
She was struck again by the emptiness, the quiet. There was no sound here except the singing of some crickets in the tall grass at the edge of the burned-out building, the raucous call of a crow in a tree down the way. Across the street, the yard in front of Flavo Richardson’s store and house was bare—no cars, no people. Bright felt the hair on the back of her neck tingle. There was something ominously wrong here. Will a shot ring out? Will a rock come sailing from behind a bush to bounce off her skull? Run! somebody cried out, and she looked around wildly, searching for cover, jerking her head this way and that, gripping her purse with both hands. Then she realized that the voice was in her own head, terrified of the unknown. Stop it! Of course there’s something wrong here. Flavo’s grandson is dead and the school-house has burned down and the highway patrol is up the road with shotguns. But not a soul has raised a finger or a voice against you. The worst of it is, they’re ignoring you.
She took a deep breath and crossed the street, took refuge for a moment in the shade of the big oak tree in front of the store. The ground was bare and hard-packed and oil-stained from the comings and goings of four generations of vehicles and people. Flavo had built the store in the late thirties, when times were still desperate, when white folks had little and black folks had nothing at all. People had marveled at his ability to keep it going in those first years until the war and economic revival came along. It had never been closed on a weekday, not even when Flavo’s wife or his mother, Hosanna, died. He had returned from the funeral and opened for business. But now a black wreath hung on the shuttered door, holding commerce at bay.
Bright heard a siren now back toward town, heading in her general direction. Homer Sipsey, she guessed, called to the battlefront by the highway patrol major. Come do something about this squirrelly old woman! Poor Homer. The siren grew louder and then groaned to a halt about the spot where the patrol cars were blocking the road. The old bat’s down there! Just tucked her purse under her arm and started walking! Like she owned the place!
Well, they would come after her before long, Bright imagined. Engines roaring, sirens blaring, shotguns bristling. A SWAT team, perhaps, in an armored car. Coming to rescue the governor’s mother. So she walked across the yard to Flavo’s house and up the steps and knocked at the front door. After a moment, Flavo opened it and blinked out at her.
“Good morning,” Bright said.
“Good morning yourself.”
Bright looked around at the empty morning. “Where is everybody?”
Flavo took stock of the street. “Probably at the church.” Bright thought he looked calm, well rested. Like a man who had set things in motion and then sat back to watch what happened. He stood there now with the screen between them, giving Bright Birdsong a good sizing up.
“Ah, yes,” she said. “The funeral is at ten.”
“That’s right.”
“I imagine everybody will be there.”
“Not much else to do, I suppose,” Flavo said, deadpan. “Travel is somewhat restricted this morning.”
“I noticed. Well, are you going to invite me in?”
“No,” he said, “I believe I’ll invite myself out.” He opened the screen and stepped onto the porch. “Too nice a morning to be settin’ inside in the gloom.” He indicated two aging cane-bottomed rocking chairs at one end of the porch. “Why don’t we just sit down over here and take the mornin’ for a few minutes before I have to get off to the service.”
“That would be fine,” Bright said, and they sat down and rocked with the smoking hulk of Booker T. Washington High School staring at them from across the street. “You’ve had a fire, I see,” Bright said eventually.
“Yes, we certainly have.”
Bright decided to get right to the point. “Did you burn down the schoolhouse, Flavo?”
He turned to her with a jerk, eyes wide with wounded surprise. “Of course not. What makes you think anybody burned it down? That”—he pointed to the ruin—“is an ancient building, made entirely of wood. Heart pine in the floors. Burns like a lightwood knot when it gets caught. Probably a million ways it could have caught fire. Who knows? Who will ever know?”
Bright unsnapped her purse, took out a handkerchief, and dabbed at the perspiration on her forehead, wished again she had fetched a hat from the house. “Well, I get the distinct impression that folks in town think you torched it. You or somebody”—she waved at the Quarter—“up here.”
“Hmmmm,” Flavo hummed. “I can see how they might think that. Especially after some young ruffian threw a rock at the fire truck when it came up here last night.”
“A rock.”
“A single rock. I was standing here on the porch and I distinctly heard it bounce off the fire truck. That was right before the explosion.”
“What explosion?”
“Oh, I think some of the brothers had been storing a little lightnin’ in a closet over at Booker T. It gave off a pretty good bang when it went up.”
“Good Lord. What happened then?”
Flavo crossed one knee slowly over the other and massaged the top kneecap for a moment. Then he smiled a tiny smile and said, “The brave volunteers of the fire department cut and ran. They turned around and went lickety-split back to town and let old Booker T. burn. Never put a drop of water on it.”
Bright studied him for a moment. When Flavo Richardson wanted you to know exactly what he was thinking, exactly what he was up to, he would tell you in exact terms. Right now was not one of those times. He wore a black mask, and all you could see was the eyes. And they revealed little. But they saw everything you did. And were.
“How long has the roadblock been up?”
“I have no idea,” Flavo said with an impatient wave of his hand. “That’s not something I’m concerned about just now.”
“Maybe later,” she said.
“Oh, yes,” he said. “Definitely later. I’ll want some ans
wers, I ‘spect.”
“I believe Harley Gibbons and the highway patrol think you are about to rampage through town burning and looting.”
Flavo snorted. “We may be.” He stood up and walked to the edge of the porch, looked across the road at the school building. Then he turned back to her. “I told you to take care of things.”
“Told me?”
“Told you, asked you. Whatever. I explained things so you could understand them, I think.”
“Well, I tried,” she said. Then she felt a rush of anger, remembering the town council meeting, the blank stares, the pigheaded recitation of rules and procedures. “I tried!” she said again, hotly. “I did your dirty work, just like I’ve done it before, Flavo Richardson!”
“My dirty work?”
Bright shrugged. “A bad choice of words. But you always come to me, Flavo. Always in the past, you come lay the burden on my doorstep.”
“This time, you failed,” he said flatly.
She was on her feet then, brandishing her purse. “Yes. And what did you go and do? Bum down the schoolhouse and bring the highway patrol out in force!”
“I tell you again, I did not burn down the schoolhouse!” he thundered, and they stood there for a moment, glowering at each other. Just the two of them alone in the hot vacant morning, squared off like aging gladiators. The mask was down now and Flavo Richardson had fire in his eyes. Daggers flew. And then just as suddenly they broke it off and both sat back down and looked at Booker T. for a while.
“All right,” Bright said after a moment. “What are you going to do now?”
“I’m going to go bury my grandbaby,” Flavo said softly, sadly.
“Then what?”
“Still depends on you, Bright.”
“Me? Why me?”
“We been through all this before.”
“I can’t answer for my daddy any longer!” Bright snapped. “I’ve toted him around on my shoulders long enough! I’ve come to the realization over the past couple of days that I made some bad mistakes trying to do that. So I’m finished with that business. No more guilt over Papa, Flavo. So just don’t try that tactic with me anymore.”
Flavo turned and looked at her for a long time. “All right, then don’t,” he said. “Do it because you matter.”
“Did, perhaps.”
“Still do. Good people always do, Bright. When things need doing, good people have to matter. You’ve done some good in this town in your time, Bright. Regardless of why. Your daddy did some good in his day, and some bad.” He sat rocking for a moment, pondering. Then: “I never told you this, but he gave me the money to start my store. It was not long before he died, and I don’t think he really had it to give.” Flavo shook his head. “But that’s all really beside the point. He’s been dead and gone for a long time, Bright. Any old debts involving Dorsey Bascombe have long been settled. Yours and mine. But you and me, we’re still here.”
Bright sighed, feeling the dead weight of an ancient burden. “Flavo, you have been using me for a long, long time. Manipulating me to get what you wanted. And putting me in tight places because of it.”
She expected him to take hot issue with that, but instead he rubbed his chin for a moment and looked out across the yard. Finally he said, “I’m sad to hear you put that kind of definition on it.”
“I always thought of you as my friend,” she went on. “But I don’t know that friends do that to each other.”
“Well,” he said slowly, “I like to think of it this way: I came to you as a friend in need and you recognized the need and helped. And did a lot of good in the process. A friend does that, and if she says ‘Damn the consequences’ in doing that, it’s a great measure of the friendship.”
Bright nodded. “And you’re doing that again.”
“No,” he said firmly, “it’s different this time. I’m quite prepared to meet my own need, if you’re not willing or able. And damn the consequences. You will still be my friend, but not my friend in need.”
“And that makes the friendship different.”
“Yes. That it does.”
They sat and rocked for a while longer, and then Flavo got up from his chair, took his watch out of his pocket, flipped open the cover and looked at it. “Time to go,” he said.
“Do you want me to go with you?”
“No. This is a private grief, Bright.”
She stood alongside him. “What’s going to happen after the funeral, Flavo?”
“I suspect there will have to be an accounting of some sort. Folks are mad as hell.”
“Are you going to disrupt the parade?”
“No. Not that. I won’t let that happen.”
Bright nodded. “I’m glad. I wouldn’t have Fitz come home this morning and be humiliated. I would not take kindly to anyone who did that or allowed that.”
“Neither would I.”
Flavo got his hat from the rack just inside the door and they walked together down the steps and stood for a moment in the yard. Bright could hear singing now up the way, about the place where the small white frame church would be. The church Dorsey Bascombe had built. The one where she had sat with Hosanna and heard God in the powerful dusky voices. Where now a small casket would sit in front of the altar, covered with greenery. She turned to Flavo. “I’m sorry,” she said gently, taking his hand. “I grieve with you.”
“I know.” And she saw the deep, abiding pain in his eyes, the great loss.
“I hope you don’t want retribution,” she said.
“No. I just want a wrong made right.”
She sighed, released his hand. “We hand down our history like family Bibles, don’t we.”
“Yes.”
And then they parted, he toward the church and she toward the roadblock where the highway patrol waited with their shotguns. She understood, as she walked, that it was a deadly serious business here, that it could become very nasty. And that just would not do.
But what to do? What could she do, even if she were inclined to act? She hadn’t the foggiest idea at the moment. Perhaps, just this one more time, something would turn up.
Meantime, there was this other thing.
>
The Winnebago was in the parking lot at the hospital, baking in the midmorning sun, dancing in its own heat shimmers. Bright parked the Plymouth beside it, sat for a moment and gathered her wits before she went in. Now. Perhaps the hardest part of all.
Jimbo was sitting on the side of Roseann’s bed and Rupert was perched on the edge of a chair when Bright edged the door open and peered in. “Anybody home?”
“Hi, Mama Bright!” Jimbo cried, hopping off the bed. “Didja know the highway patrol’s captured all the black people?”
“No, they haven’t,” Bright said, pushing the door farther open. “I’ve just been there. They’ve got a roadblock and a bunch of young men with shotguns. But there’s no trouble.” His next visit, she thought, she would take him to the Quarter. Let him spend a day at Flavo Richardson’s grocery store, maybe go to Wednesday night prayer meeting at the little white frame church. A child should know more than what he’s told by adults. He should see for himself.
The room was dim, a haven against the bright day outside. The venetian blinds were drawn and only slivers of light peeked around the edges. Bright stepped into the room and closed the door behind her. The head of the hospital bed had been raised and Roseann was sitting up, pillows fluffed at her back. She stared at Bright for a moment and then said, “What are you doing here?” Her voice was thick.
Rupert cleared his throat and then stood up and jammed his pipe in his mouth. The first line of defense. “Ahhhh, hummmm,” he said around the stem of the pipe. “Jimbo, let’s you and me give the ladies a few minutes by themselves.”
Jimbo’s eyes darted from Bright to Roseann. Uncertainty there, perhaps a little fear. Something is wrong, something mysterious and grown-up. Was it his fault? Bright wanted to kneel and reassure him. But this was not the time.
Bright stood at the foot of Roseann’s bed for a moment; then she sat down in the chair and folded her hands across her purse. Roseann was disheveled and bleary-eyed. She seemed for a moment to have a hard time focusing on Bright and she turned her head away, looked at a spot high up on the wall across from her bed. Then her jaw tightened and she said, “That was a terrible thing to do.”
“It was the wrong way to do it,” Bright said, “but Jimbo and I had a wonderful time. He’s a right remarkable young man.”
“I would kill anyone who touched a hair on his head,” Roseann said, her voice flat and hard. “You put me through hell, Mama. I’ll never forgive you for that.”
Bright sat for a moment thinking how, oddly, that tied together so much of what had happened already this morning—the fierce protectiveness of parents. Flavo with his grandson, Roseann with Jimbo, Bright with Fitz. And how that same thread ran through much of her own life, her great dilemma. We shelter our children from harm, as Dorsey had done with Bright, and Bright in turn had done with Fitz and Roseann. And now full circle. It was the most natural thing on earth. And damn the consequences. If that was a sin, surely it was a sin of the heart. But there were consequences just the same. And sometimes you find that despite all good intention, you have failed in some basic ways.
She got up after a moment and opened the venetian blinds, flooding the room with the bright morning. Outside, the parking lot was nearly empty except for the Winnebago and the Plymouth. Nobody wanted to go to the hospital in June if they could help it. You would choose a quiet riverbank in June, or a cool place on the front porch, but not a hospital.
Bright sat back down in the chair and studied the dust motes dancing in the air between them. “I came to say I’m sorry,” she said. “For the fight, for frightening you. For anything else you think I ought to be sorry about.”