He would have laughed, there in the darkness, if only he could. He hadn’t expected Afterwards to be like this. He didn’t know how he’d expected it to be, but not like this. Again, though, what could he do about it?
I can remember. I can try to remember, anyways . Again, he would have laughed if he could. Why the hell not? I’ve got all the time in the world.
* * * *
Light. An explosion of light. Afternoon sunshine blasting through the dirty, streaky windshield of the beat-up old Ford station wagon bouncing west down Highway 16 toward Philadelphia.
A bigger explosion of light inside his mind. A name! He had a name! He was Cecil, Cecil Price, Cecil Ray Price. He knew it like ... like a man knows his name, that’s how. That time without light, without self? A dream, he told himself. Must have been a dream.
Those were his hands on the wheel, pink and square and hard from years of labor in the fields. He was only twenty-seven, but he’d already done a lifetime’s worth of hard work. It felt like a long lifetime’s worth, too.
He took one hand off the wheel for a second to run it through his brown hair, already falling back at the temples. Had he dozed for a second while he was driving? He didn’t think so, but what else could it have been? Lucky he didn’t drive the wagon off the road into the cotton fields, into the red dirt.
They would love that. They would laugh their asses off. Well, they weren’t going to get the chance.
Sweat ran down his face. His clothes felt welded to him. The air was thick with water, damn near thick enough to slice. The start of summer in Mississippi. It would stay like this for months.
He had the window open to give himself a breeze. It didn’t help much. When it got this hot and sticky, nothing helped much. He ran his hand through his hair again, to try to keep it out of his eyes.
“You all right, Cecil?” That was Muhammad Shabazz. Along with Tariq Abdul-Rashid, he crouched down in the back seat. The two young Black Muslims didn’t want the law, or what passed for the law in Mississippi in 1964, spotting them. They’d come down from the North to give the oppressed and disenfranchised whites in the state a helping hand, and the powers that be hated them worse than anybody.
“I’m okay,” Cecil Price answered. I’m okay now, he thought. I know who I am. Hell, I know that I am. He shook his head. That moment of lightless namelessness was fading, and a good thing, too.
“We get to Meridian, everything’ll be fine,” Muhammad Shabazz said.
“Sure,” Cecil said. “Sure.” The night before, the locals had torched a white church over by Longdale. He’d taken the Northern blacks over there to do what they could for the congregation. Now...
Now they had to get through NeshobaCounty. They had to get past Philadelphia. They had to run the gauntlet of lawmen who hated white people and Black Knights of Voodoo who hated whites even more—and of lawmen who were Black Knights of Voodoo and hated whites most of all. And they had to do it in the Racial Alliance for Complete Equality’s beat-up station wagon. If RACE’s old blue Ford wasn’t the best-known car in eastern Mississippi, Price was damned if he knew another one that would be.
Of course, he might be damned any which way. So might the two idealistic young Negroes who’d come down from New York and Ohio to give his downtrodden race a hand. If the law spotted this much too spottable car...
Cecil Price wished he hadn’t had that thought right then, in the instant before he saw the flashing red light in his rear-view mirror, in the instant before he heard the siren’s scream. Panic stabbed at him. “What do I do?” he said hoarsely. He wanted to floor the gas pedal. He wanted to, but he didn’t. The main thing that held him back was the certain knowledge that the old wagon couldn’t break sixty unless you flung it off a cliff.
“Pull over.” Muhammad Shabazz’s voice was calm. “Don’t let ‘em get us for evading arrest or any real charge. We haven’t done anything wrong, so they can’t do anything to us.”
“You sure of that, man?” Tariq Abdul-Rashid sounded nervous.
“This is all about the rule of law,” Muhammad Shabazz said patiently. “For us, for them, for everybody.”
He respected the rule of law. It meant more to him than anything else. Cecil Price could only hope it meant something to the man in the car with the light and the siren. He could hope so, yeah. Could he believe it? That was a different story.
But Price didn’t see that he had any choice here. He pulled off onto the shoulder. The brakes squeaked as he brought the blue Ford to a stop. Pebbles rattled against the car’s underpanels. Red dust swirled up around it.
The black-and-white pulled up behind the Ford. A great big Negro in a deputy sheriff’s uniform got out and swaggered up toward the station wagon. Cecil Price watched him in the mirror, not wanting to turn around. That arrogant strut—and the pistol in the lawman’s hand—spoke volumes about the way things in Mississippi had been since time out of mind.
Coming up to the driver’s-side door, the sheriff peered in through sunglasses that made him look more like a machine, a hate-driven machine, than a man. “Son of a bitch!” he exploded. “You ain’t Larry Rainey!”
“No, sir,” Price said. Part of that deference was RACE training—don’t give the authorities an excuse to beat on you. And part of it was drilled into whites in the South from the time they could toddle and lisp. If they didn’t show respect, they often didn’t live to get a whole lot older than that.
Larry Rainey was older than Cecil Price and smarter than Cecil and tougher than Cecil, too. He’d been in RACE a lot longer than Cecil had. The Black Knights of Voodoo probably hated him more than any other white man from this part of the state.
But the way they hated Larry Rainey was like nothing next to the way they hated what they called the black agitators from the North. Even behind the deputy sheriff’s shades, Cecil could see his eyes widen when he got a look at Muhammad Shabazz and Tariq Abdul-Rashid. “Well, well!” he boomed, the way a man with a shotgun will when a couple of big, fat ducks fly right over his blind. “Looky what we got here! We got us a couple of buckra-lovin’ ragheads!”
“Sheriff,” Muhammad Shabazz said tightly. He didn’t wear a turban, and never had. Neither did Tariq Abdul-Rashid, who nodded like somebody trying hard not to show how scared he was. Cecil Price was scared, too, damn near scared shitless, and hoped the black man with the the gun and the Smokey-the-Bear hat couldn’t tell.
The deputy went on as if the Black Muslim hadn’t spoken: “We got us a couple of Northern radicals who reckon they’re better’n other folks their color, so they can hop on a bus and come down here and tell us how to live. And we got us one uppity buckra, too, sneakin’ around and stirrin’ up what oughta be damn well left alone. Well, I got news for y’all. That don’t fly, not in NeshobaCounty it don’t. What the hell you doin’ here, anyway?”
“We were looking at what’s left of MountZionChurch in Longdale,” Muhammad Shabazz answered.
“Yeah, I just bet you were. Fat lot your kind cares about churches,” the big black deputy jeered.
“We care about justice, sir.” Muhammad Shabazz spoke with respect that didn’t come close to hiding the anger underneath. “I do, and Mr. Abdul-Rashid does, and Mr. Price does, too. Do you, sir? Does justice mean anything to you at all?”
“It means I know better’n to call a lousy, lazy, no-account buckra Mister. Ain’t that right, Cecil?” When Price didn’t answer fast enough to suit the deputy sheriff, the man stuck the pistol in his face and roared, “Ain’t that right, boy?”
Muhammad Shabazz had nerve. If he didn’t have nerve, he never would have ridden down to Mississippi from Cleveland in the first place. “We didn’t do anything wrong, sir,” he told the deputy. “We didn’t even break any traffic laws. You have no good reason to pull us over. Why aren’t you investigating real crimes, like a firebombed church?”
To Cecil Price’s amazement, the deputy smiled the broadest, nastiest, wickedest smile he’d ever seen, and he’d seen some lulus.
“What do you reckon I’m doin’?” he said. “What the hell do you reckon I’m doin’? All three of you sons of bitches are under arrest for suspicion of arson. A charge like that, you can rot in jail the rest of your worthless lives. Serve y’all right, too, you want to know what I think.”
“You’re out of your mind,” Muhammad Shabazz exclaimed.
“We wouldn’t burn a church,” Tariq Abdul-Rashid agreed, startled out of his frightened silence. “That is crazy.”
“We’ve got no reason to do anything like that. Why would we, sir?” Cecil Price tried to make the deputy forget his comrades didn’t stay polite.
It didn’t work. He might have known it wouldn’t. Hell, he had known it wouldn’t. “Why? I’ll tell you why,” the Negro in the lawman’s uniform said. “So decent, God-fearing folks get blamed for it, that’s why. You agitators’ll try and pin it all on us, make us look bad on the TV, give the Federal government an excuse to stick its nose in affairs that ain’t none of its business and never will be. So hell, yes, you’re under arrest. Suspicion of arson, like I said. I’ll throw your sorry asses in jail right now. You drive on into Philadelphia quiet-like, or you gonna do something stupid like try and escape?”
Cecil Price didn’t need to be a college-educated fellow like the two blacks in the car with him to know what that meant. You do anything but drive straight to jail and I’ll kill all of you. “I won’t do anything dumb,” he told the deputy.
“Better not, boy, or it’s the last fuckup you ever pull.” The big black man threw back his head and laughed. “Unless you already pulled your last one, that is.” Laughing still, he walked back to the black-and-white. He opened the door, got in—the shocks sagged under his bulk—and slammed it shut.
“Let him jail us on that stupid trumped-up charge,” Muhammad Shabazz said as Price started the Ford’s engine. “It’ll do just as much to help the cause as the church bombing.”
“I hope you’re right,” Price said, pulling back onto the highway, “but he’s a mean one. The Neshoba County Sheriff’s meaner, but the deputy’s bad enough and then some.”
“You think he’s BKV?” Tariq Abdul-Rashid asked.
“Black Knights of Voodoo?” Price shrugged. “I don’t know for sure, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he goes night-riding with a mask and a shield and a spear.”
In Philadelphia, a few people stared at the car with the white and the two blacks in it. Cecil Price didn’t care for those stares, not even a little bit. He didn’t care for any part of what was going on, but he couldn’t do a thing about it. He parked in front of the jail. The deputy’s car pulled up right behind the RACE wagon.
Another black deputy sat behind the front desk when Price and Muhammad Shabazz and Tariq Abdul-Rashid walked into the jail. “What the hell’s goin’ on here?” he asked the man who’d arrested the civil-rights workers.
“Suspicion of arson,” the first deputy answered. “I reckon they must’ve had somethin’ to do with torchin’ the white folks’ church over by Longdale.”
“That’s the—” What was the man behind the desk about to say? That’s the silliest goddamn thing I ever heard? Something like that—Cecil Price was sure of it. But then the other Negro’s eyes narrowed. “Fuck me,” he said, and pointed first to Muhammad Shabazz and then to Tariq Abdul-Rashid. “Ain’t these the raghead bastards who came down from the North to raise trouble?”
“That’s them, all right,” said the deputy who’d arrested them. “And this here buckra’s Cecil Price. I thought at first I got me Larry Rainey—you know how all these white folks look alike. But what the hell? If you can’t grab a big fish, a little fish’ll do.”
“That’s a fact,” said the deputy behind the desk. “That sure as hell is a fact, all right. Yeah, lock ‘em up. We can figure out what to do with ‘em later.”
“You betcha.” The first deputy marched his prisoners to the cells farther back in the jail. “In here, you two,” he told Muhammad Shabazz and Tariq Abdul-Rashid, and herded them into the first cell on the right. He stuck Cecil Price in the second cell on the right. Even at a time like this, even in a situation like this, he never thought to put a white man in with Negroes. That was part of what was wrong in Philadelphia, right there.
After Price and Muhammad Shabazz and Tariq Abdul-Rashid were safely locked away, the man who’d arrested them clumped up the corridor and then out the front door. “Where you goin’?” called the man behind the desk.
“Got to see the Priest,” the first deputy answered. “Anybody asks after those assholes, you never seen ‘em, you never heard nothin’ about ‘em. You got that?”
“All right by me,” the other deputy said. The first one slammed the door after him as he went out. He seemed to have to slam any door he came to.
Cecil Price had only thought he was scared shitless before. Not letting anybody know he and his friends were in jail was bad. Going to see the Priest was a hell of a lot worse. The Priest was a tall, scrawny, bald black man who hated whites with a fierce and simple passion. He was also the chief NeshobaCounty recruiting officer for the Black Knights of Voodoo. Trouble followed him the way thunder followed lightning.
Price wondered whether Muhammad Shabazz and Tariq Abdul-Rashid knew enough to be as frightened as he was. The Priest had been trouble for years, while they’d been down here only a couple of months. The Priest would still be trouble long after they went back to the North ... if they ever got the chance to go North again.
It must have been about half past five when the phone at the front desk jangled loudly. “Neshoba County Jail,” the deputy there said. He paused to listen, then went on, “No, I ain’t seen ‘em. Jesus Christ! You lose your garbage, you expect me to go pickin’ it up for you?” He slammed the phone down again.
“Deputy!” Muhammad Shabazz called through the bars of his cell. “Deputy, can I speak to you for a minute?”
A scrape of chair legs against cheap linoleum. Slow, heavy, arrogant footsteps. A deep, angry voice: “What the hell you want?”
“I’d like to make a telephone call, please.”
A pause. Cecil Price looked out of his cell just in time to see the deputy sheriff shake his head. His big, round belly shook, too, but it didn’t remind Price of a bowlful of jelly—more of a wrecking ball that would smash anything in its way. “No, I don’t reckon so,” he said. “You ain’t callin’ nobody.”
“I have a Constitutional right to make a telephone call,” Muhammad Shabazz insisted, politely but firmly.
“Don’t you give me none of your Northern bullshit,” the Negro deputy said. “Constitution doesn’t say jack shit about telephone calls. How could it? No telephones when they wrote the damn thing, were there? Were there, smartass?”
“No, but—” Muhammad Shabazz broke off.
“Constitutional right, my ass,” the deputy sheriff said. “You got a Constitutional right to get what’s comin’ to you, and you will. You just bet you will.” He lumbered back to the desk.
In a low voice, Cecil Price said, “We’re in deep now.”
“No kidding.” Muhammad Shabazz sounded like a man who wanted to make a joke but was too worried to bring it off.
“They aren’t gonna let us out of here,” Tariq Abdul-Rashid said. “Not in one piece, they aren’t.”
“We’ll see what happens, that’s all,” Muhammad Shabazz said. “They can’t think they’ll get away with it.” To Cecil Price, that only proved the man who’d come down from the North didn’t understand how things really worked in Mississippi. Of course the deputy sheriffs thought they’d get away with it. Why wouldn’t they? Blacks had been getting away with things against whites who stepped out of line ever since slavery days. Times were starting to change; Negroes of goodwill like Muhammad Shabazz and Tariq Abdul-Rashid were helping to make them change. But they hadn’t changed yet—and the deputies and their pals were determined they wouldn’t change no matter what. And so...
And so we’re in deep for sure , Cecil Price thoug
ht, fighting despair.
* * * *
The first deputy sheriff, the one who’d arrested them, returned to the jail not long after the sun went down. He walked back to the cells to look at the prisoners, laughed a gloating laugh, and then went up front again.
“What’s the Priest got to say?” asked the man at the front desk.
“It’s all taken care of,” the first deputy answered.
“They comin’ here?”
“Nah.” The first deputy sounded faintly disappointed. “It’d be too damn raw. We’d end up with the fuckin’ Feds on our case for sure.”
“What’s going on, then?”
The first deputy told him. He pitched his voice too low to let Cecil Price make it out. By the way the desk man laughed, he thought it was pretty good. Price was sure he wouldn’t.
Time crawled by on hands and knees. The phone rang once, but it had nothing to do with Price and Muhammad Shabazz and Tariq Abdul-Rashid. It was a woman calling to find out if her no-account husband was sleeping off another binge in the drunk tank. He wasn’t. But it only went to show that, despite the struggle for whites’ civil rights, ordinary life in Philadelphia went on.
Around half past ten, the first deputy came tramping back to the cells again. To Cecil Price’s amazement, he had a jingling bunch of keys on a big brass key ring with him. He opened the door to Price’s cell. “Come on out, boy,” he said. “Reckon I’ve got to turn you loose.”
Price wanted to stick a finger in his ear to make sure he’d heard right. “You sure?” he blurted.
“Yeah, I’m sure,” the deputy said. “I been askin’ around. You weren’t at the church when it went up. Neither were these assholes.” He pointed into the cell that held Muhammad Shabazz and Tariq Abdul-Rashid. “Gotta let them go, too, dammit.”
“You’ll hear from our lawyers,” Muhammad Shabazz promised. “False arrest is false arrest, even if you think twice about it later. This is still a free country, whether you know it or not.”
Short Stories Page 4