by Glenn Taylor
“I’m an original,” the young woman answered. It was what they called the three hundred marchers who’d walked all fifty miles from Selma.
“No shit?” Harold said.
“Watch your language.” She unscrewed the cap of her Thermos. It was strung bandolier-style across her torso. Under it were three or four layers of clothing in various stages of disrepair. She squinted at Harold.
“Where you from?”
“West Virginia,” he answered.
She scrunched her nose and frowned. She looked at Mary, who carried her camera at her side. “You from the press?”
“No, just filming.”
“You two together?”
“No,” Harold said.
“Good.” She took another swig from her canteen. “That might fly in West Virginia, but down here they lynch you for that.”
Harold wondered why she didn’t wear an orange vest like the other originals up front.
She shook her head at them and peeled off.
The young man with the flag turned and handed it to Harold, then started passing out oranges from his knapsack. Mary rolled tape of Harold shouldering the flag. She nearly tripped on the heels of those in front of her.
Fields of dry stickweed lined one side of the highway, and spectators looked on through sunglasses. Some stood and some sat. One man slept with his arm over his head. Another crouched low and filmed the procession, at one point aiming his camera at Mary, who aimed hers back at him. They waved.
As they came into Montgomery, the fields turned to houses and filling stations. Black folks stood in packs at the roadside and watched. They waved and sang “This Little Light of Mine” in time with the marchers and clapped. Some had to wipe at their eyes. A woman in a white rain scarf raised her arms above her head and wept at a sight she could scarcely believe possible.
The clouds bunched up and a drizzle let down. As they turned onto Oak Street and narrowed their column, people stood in front of their clapboard homes and waved endlessly. Stoops were broken down. Every other porch board was missing. Homes sagged on their block foundations and tiny faces peeked from broken windowpanes stuffed with rags. Staples was reminded of the homes around Marrowbone. The children possessed the same knowing eye.
In the business district, no one was there to watch them. They could hear “The Star-Spangled Banner” though they were still blocks from the capitol.
Here and there, white women in fitted skirts began to appear on city sidewalks. They watched and talked while their husbands stood in suits and smoked cigars and tried to keep their customary smirks in the face of all that change.
On Dexter Street, Mary trained her camera on the far-off stage, where Rosa Parks had just stepped out to a roaring ovation. When she spoke of hiding from the Klan as a girl, Mary ran out of film. She lowered her camera. Only then did she feel the weight of where she was.
Harold looked all around, past the Guardsmen and the plywood barriers lining the wide street. He looked in the windows of the office-supply company and the big bank building. Now all the faces were white. On the balcony of the Jefferson Davis Hotel the white men gathered. Some slumped on the rail and some stood tall. None wore his customary smirk. And Harold beheld in them the open-mouthed realization that a new day had truly come. “This is it,” he said to himself, a whisper amongst the masses.
Like everyone else, the three of them locked arms. And like everyone else, they roared when Martin Luther King took the stage and declared that segregation was on its deathbed in Alabama.
Staples nearly broke down listening to the man. It was as if King were a prophet sent straight from God. As television cameras rolled, he stood and gave a history lesson to the country.
He told of how those in power had engineered Jim Crow to keep poor whites separate from poor blacks.
He reached back and drew a line from slavery to the very place they stood. “We are on the move now,” he said.
Time fell away for Staples. He could have listened for a thousand years.
The people raised their voices in “Glory Hallelujah” again and again, and the three who had driven from West Virginia vowed to carry back with them what they now possessed.
As they filed away from the white columns of the capitol, a voice came over the loudspeaker. The voice said, “Stragglers must not remain.” Hurried travel was now in order, for it was true that to be caught in Alabama after dark was death.
APRIL 1965
STAPLES HAD COME HOME from Alabama inspired. He coughed less. Said things like, “We witnessed, in the course of a few hours, a permanent change in the South. Things will never be the same.” He wanted to take that energy and organization he’d seen and funnel it into the War on Poverty in Wayne County. Huntington, too. “In Alabama,” he said, “they’ve got a drive to register voters. Here, we’re going to de-register.” Everyone knew that the rolls in Wayne were stacked deep with dead folks and out-of-district names. It was one of the ways men like Charlie Ball stayed in office.
When you got the votes of dead men, you damn sure got elected. But it was difficult to sustain Staples’ energy. Harold went back to Morgantown, and Mary was quiet as ever.
On a cold Saturday, Staples worked the gift shop cash register. The No Sale flag was stuck again. He slid a one under the bill weight, smiled, and handed a dime to the customer.
They’d opened the shop inside the community center for tourists, who’d started showing up. Like most Saturdays, rich folks from Huntington had come out to the Cut in droves. Word had spread that the “commune” was selling its wares, and everybody wanted to gawk. Ledford said that was just fine with him, as long as they bought a bag of marbles or made a donation to the food and clothing pantry. Most didn’t. Most only took pictures.
Ledford eyeballed a fat woman at the display counter. She was admiring a blue paperweight he’d blown. Her pocketbook straps left red imprints on her forearm. He wondered what she hefted inside.
At the register, Staples rang up a twenty-five-count marble bag and a Ringer cross rack. “Thank you kindly,” he said to the man across from him. The man wore expensive sunglasses and his hands were shaky. Staples told him, “Come on back out tomorrow for church services if the feeling grabs you. I’ll be preaching on the righteousness of fair play.”
The man nodded and walked away.
Ledford walked over to Staples. “You ought to have told him we’d be picking up serpents,” he said.
Staples nodded. “That’s just the kind of thing we need in the papers.” He coughed hard, then got it under control.
“I take it you haven’t seen today’s paper?”
Staples said he hadn’t. There was a crash at the open door. The wind had blown it shut, the brick door stop too light to hold. Mary tended to it. She was stationed there, handing out pamphlets on community action.
Ledford pulled a rolled-up newspaper from his back pocket and slapped it on the counter. “Why don’t you go on break, do a little reading.”
Staples picked it up. “Don’t you need to be up at the furnace?”
“Stretch is tending.”
“All right,” Staples said. “I’ll get another brick for that door on my way back.”
Ledford watched him go. He walked past the fat woman who had moved on to a miniature marble tree. It was a display item, and she dropped a marble on top and listened to the musical plunks. When it got to the bottom, she picked the marble up and cupped it in her hand. Then she dropped it into her open pocketbook and walked toward the door. Mary offered her a pamphlet as she left, but the woman declined.
Ledford left the register and walked to the tall display shelf. The blue paperweight was missing. He walked over to Mary and pointed at the fat woman where she strolled across the Cut. “See her?” he said. “She just stole a paperweight and a marble from us.”
“Why?” Mary smiled at an approaching couple.
Ledford sidestepped to let them in. “Welcome,” he said. Then stepped back to the open doorway an
d put his arm around Mary. “Why?” he said. “Hell if I know. But I’ll bet you a dollar she’s walkin to a Cadillac over there at the lot. Full tank a gas. Stocked fridge at the house. Lord knows she’s well fed.”
“Be nice Daddy,” Mary said. She jabbed him in the rib cage.
“Just tellin it like I see it,” Ledford said. “If you can figure why somebody’d do what she just did, you can figure how to fix it.”
Staples retired to his bed for an afternoon nap. He spread the paper before him and read the headline. US Jets Challenged by Migs in Viet Raid, it read. Below, another article charged Russia with harassing U.S. warships. Reds were in the air and on the water. They were east and west and in between, and they were looking for a fight. Staples quit after a sentence and looked for something else. Down the page, a smaller headline read Burnt Cross Found in Yard of Martyr. It hadn’t been enough to murder Viola Liuzzo in Alabama on the night stragglers should not have remained. Now they’d tracked her to Detroit and lit a pyre of hatred while her husband and children slept inside.
If there was any residual hope left from Staples’ moment in Montgomery, it was fast being drained.
Rachel came to his door with some canned tomatoes and pickled beets she’d put up back in August. The beets were his favorite. She was worried about the old man.
He told her thank you, handed her the paper to take away, and lay back down on the bed. “They make it awful hard, don’t they?” he said.
Rachel looked down at the newspaper. “I guess they do,” she said.
MAY 1966
SOMEONE HAD SET FIRE to the glass tree. Its stump was black and jagged. Its limbs littered the ground. Here and there, warped hunks of glass cooled, wrapping themselves around twigs and swallowing ground-cover, translucent. Mack shot water at the steaming mess from a wide hose. He thought back to the cross burnt on his West End yard. “More slack!” he hollered to Jerry, who unwound hose from the big coil.
Dimple and Wimpy bent at the knees and touched the ground and sniffed their fingertips. Nothing. Somebody had known how to cover his tracks.
Staples stood on the top step of his chapel and looked down at them. He wore an old bathrobe with holes in the pockets. Above him, the moon was a sliver. He looked at it, then back at the burnt stump. Flashlight beams waved at the ground around it. It was four a.m. “Well,” Staples said. “I reckon the evil spirits can no longer be warded away.”
Ledford sniffed at a hunk of singed bark. There was something familiar to it. He looked up at the ridge in the distance. He had an idea who had set the fire, and he knew why. Interim election primaries were a week off, and this had been a message to stay home. To cease giving poor folks a voice at meetings, and a reason to walk to the polls.
The headlights of a truck shone through the front gate. It pulled into the lot and went black.
“It’s Paul Maynard,” Staples said from his perch. “I called him.”
Dimple and Wimpy went back to tracking, but both of them knew there was nothing left behind.
When Paul had said his hellos and surveyed the damage, Ledford took him aside. They stood next to the chapel stilts and spoke in hushed tones. “I don’t want this kind of thing gettin started again,” Ledford said. “It’ll turn Dimple and Wimpy a way we don’t want to see.”
“I know it,” Paul said.
Ledford tried to read the other man’s loyalties. All he could see in the face before him was sadness. Maybe fear.
“Shine a light over here,” Mack called out. “I think I see a footprint.” Paul walked over to the rest of them.
Ledford turned and headed for the ridge.
The sun was coming up by the time he crawled through Shorty Maynard’s front window. His boots were muddy so he’d taken them off, left them on the wide porch. He surveyed the laundry room and got what he came for. He admired the living room, sat back in the wing chair, and put his feet up on the coffee table.
When Shorty came downstairs, he didn’t notice Ledford. He walked to the kitchen and yawned and stretched. Started a pot of coffee.
Ledford watched him walk to the side door and look out the thick pane. He wore a T-shirt and briefs. “Nice new house you got here Shorty,” Ledford said.
Shorty’s nerves electrified. He whirled on Ledford, a look of true panic in his eyes.
“What?” Ledford said. “You didn’t think somebody’d show up right off?”
Shorty wished to God he’d put his pants on before he came down. “Where are your shoes?” he asked.
“On the porch. I didn’t want to soil your prime floors.” Ledford repositioned his back. “I could sit in a wingback like this here all day,” he said.
“What the fuck are you doing in my house?” Shorty eyeballed the rifle over the fireplace mantel.
“Collecting evidence,” Ledford said. He pointed to a pile of clothes beside the chair legs. He’d gotten them from the laundry room, folded and stacked them on the floor. “Gasoline, scorched thumb on the work glove. There’s even a length of wick in the shirt pocket,” Ledford said.
“Why you didn’t think to burn your getup, I’ll never know. You just set it right there by your fancy laundry machine.” He pointed past the kitchen. “I guess you figure anything’ll wash out in such a contraption.” He smiled at Shorty. “But my bet is you don’t even know how to work it. You was waitin on your wife or daughter to rise and shine.”
Shorty breathed fast through his nose. He could hear a squirrel scurrying in the chimney. He thought about the rifle again. Wondered if Ledford had a pistol on him.
The grandfather clock chimed seven o’clock. Its gong echoed in the corner. The two men were still as they listened.
“Look here Shorty,” Ledford said. “I don’t intend to do a damn thing about this. Far as I’m concerned, you set fire to a tree, and that isn’t enough to put me over the edge.”
Shorty picked up a road map from the dining room table and covered himself with it.
Ledford continued. “I’ve made a promise to Don Staples, to myself and my family, that I will not be baited. I will not raise my hand in anger any longer.” He held his hands up as if to show evidence. Shorty looked at them, blank. Ledford stood and walked to the back door. “I still can’t figure how you covered your tracks like you did,” he said. He nearly slipped in his socks on the polished hardwood. “But it doesn’t matter. This is over. I was never here.” He looked at the pile of stinking clothes on the floor one last time, then opened the door. He stepped onto the porch, sat down, and pulled his boots back on. The laces were half rotten. He was careful not to pull too hard.
He knew Shorty Maynard watched him cross the yard to the woods, and he wondered if his head was centered in the sights of the big mantel rifle. It didn’t matter. He’d said what he came to say, and he’d gotten out with nobody dead. He’d be home by nine.
Mary would be studying her sociology book. Willy would be out on a run. Orb would be at the Ringer circle.
Ledford walked through the woods and pledged to himself that he’d keep his temper down. He’d make them all safe. The oldest, he’d chaperone at rallies. The middle, he’d keep in the gym. The youngest, he’d forever watch over, sure to avoid anything that would cause him to bleed.
Halfway up the ridge, the rain picked up. It soon beat down in torrents, tearing through leaf canopy like the downpours at Guadalcanal. It had the same sound, the same smell on the air.
The floods were coming again.
PEOPLE PULLED THE plastic curtain hard as they stepped inside the rectangle. It was not unlike a shower stall, the voting booth. Inside, they made their selections quickly. Most voted the slate, and most had no idea who they voted for. School boards, county clerk, names typed on paper, names they’d seen their whole lives and been told to vote on. Primaries, mid-term or not, brought out more corruption than the general elections. No Republican stood a chance. A Democrat who won in May could rest easy that he’d win again in November. Voters fell in line like always. They had to
. Every polling official at Poke Branch School had been picked by Noah and Charlie Ball, and every one of them whispered a word or two to voters as they took their paper ticket.
Staples and Ledford had sent a handwritten letter to the president and the Department of Justice, pleading for the federal government to send in poll observers, listing instance after instance of past vote fraud and intimidation. It hadn’t worked.
Now they stood against the gym wall at Poke Branch. They observed and wrote in spiral notebooks. Beside them, Mary rolled film.
At other polling stations, Marrowbone residents worked alongside young people from VISTA and the Appalachian Volunteers, writing down any suspicious behavior.
By noon, there was already word that a boy from New York had gotten his nose broken for smart-mouthing one of Noah Ball’s men. It was the first violence to visit in a year.
Since Ledford had spoken to Shorty Maynard, there had been relative calm on the land. Floods had come and washed the footbridges away, but their waters had stopped an inch shy of the threshold of the Land of Canaan Congregational.
At three p.m., a janitor pushed ammonia water across the gym floor. Staples had a coughing fit and had to be helped outside. Ledford stood with him by an oak tree on the school lawn, the old man hacking blood and struggling to breathe.
When it was apparent he wouldn’t catch his breath, Ledford stuck his head in the gym doorway. “Mary,” he called. “I’ve got to get him to a hospital. Mack’ll be by shortly.”
And then they were gone.
Inside a minute, a man with a crew cut and a lisp approached Mary. “Turn that thing off,” he said, pointing to her camera. He was barrel-chested. Sweaty. He grabbed her by the elbow and pulled her to a voting booth. Noah Ball stood inside. The big man closed the curtain behind them and put his hand over her mouth. He’d tucked her camera in his armpit and he held Mary so that she faced him, her chest pressed to his, her backside pressed to Noah Ball.