by John Lawton
‘It was you?’
‘Yes. Now—do you still think I might be your kind of guy?’
‘No—but you might be my kind of idiot.’
I have never been so coyly or so easily pulled. Ms Harris moved herself in on me. I never did get to finish my Freedom Ride. I never did go back to Mississippi, but truth to tell that was fine by me.
When Mel flung all this in my face in ’68 I was not at all surprised. Of course we’d gone in there expecting violence—but we’d also gone in hoping to avoid it. It was that rare thing, a clear-cut black and white situation. White men were beating up on black men. In a world made up of the shifting shades of gray it was about as simple as that, and we’d gone to Mississippi to tackle the forces of night in the firm belief that we could expose and destroy them. Seven years later it seemed a lot different. It seemed to me that in the mind of Amerika we had legitimized the export of the forces of night. The violence of Jackson and Montgomery was now to be found everywhere in Amerika. We had taken on the beast in its lair and turned it loose on the nation. I could not see how this had happened. But a line was crossed—choose your war, choose your line. Mine was August ’68 in Chicago. We had internalised the beast—taken a piece of the night into ourselves. The beast dwelt in night and the night was us. The only black and white thing about Chicago was the pig.
§
1969. Early the next morning Lois drove me back to the airport.
‘When will you be back?’ she asked.
‘Not long,’ I lied.
And then I made a big mistake. I was in need of clothes. I needed to sort out money. I needed to touch base. So I flew to New York.
There was no sign of Rose. I checked my mail. Stuffed a bag with clean clothes. Called the Voice. Some woman told me Rose was spending an extra week in England. I left a note for her. Got myself out on a night flight the same day to Jackson, Mississippi. In and out of New York in less than eight hours. Big mistake.
I left the airport at Jackson looking for a car rental. It wasn’t like Kennedy or O’Hare. There were two to choose from, one of which had nothing—‘we don’t have but six vehicles’—and the other had only a fat gas-guzzling Chrysler in powder blue. A car about as subtle as a giant zit in the middle of your forehead. It was a take it or leave situation. I took it. I could not manage without. Lazarus was fifty miles or more up the Delta. And it was dark. Dark, hot and humid. Mississippi had a way of falling on you like a wet wool blanket. All I wanted now was to shower and to sleep. I drove into Jackson in a car that was all but luminous and found a hotel. I felt better about myself in the morning. I could not feel better about the car. What more could a private detective want than a car that said ‘here I am’ in blue paint nineteen feet long?
I got to Lazarus late in the morning. It was what I’d thought it would be. The highway ripped right by, the railroad tracks ripped right through. It was one of those small southern towns untouched by money, a backwater where white was likely to be as poor as black, and the divide spelt out by the phrase ‘across the tracks’ was literal. Lazarus was cut in two—whites on one side, blacks on the other. I drove slowly through the white side of town, curious, blank faces staring at me from the sidewalks, past boarded up shops and patched up wooden houses, to the point where the road humped over the tracks, and I passed into another land, one unimaginably poorer than the one I had just left. Just when you think you’ve touched bottom, another layer gets peeled away and you realise you’ve been bobbing well above the line.
The change was instant. Most of the houses weren’t even houses. They were trailers with porches and steps tacked on. That ubiquitous symbol of poverty visible on the porch of almost every dwelling—a busted, rusting icebox next to the broken-down couch. I’d been careful not to meet the gaze of any man who’d looked out at me in this powder blue nightmare as I passed through whitetown. In darktown I was twice as cautious. I looked out for traffic—there was none, the only cars were up on blocks at the roadside—and I looked out for the street name Mouse had given me, Raintree Row. Home to Marcellus Gore.
I found it, directly opposite the church. A trailer well-looked after, freshly painted up, the garden planted with squash and corn, a young pecan tree, a white picket fence marking off a neat square. But the church was a showstopper. Four trailers welded together and topped off with a steel spire. I had never seen a trailer with a spire before. I could not help but stare. I parked the Chrysler in front and crossed the street. Considering I hadn’t passed a moving car since I crossed the tracks, there seemed to be an awful lot outside the Gore home—everything from pickups to shiny black sedans. Should have told me something. Didn’t.
I pushed open the gate and followed a brick path—yellow, was that appropriate?—to the door of the trailer, and knocked.
A tiny, old black woman opened the door. All in black, a dress that reached the floor, a bushy head of white curls.
‘Mrs Gore? My name’s . . .’
A voice from inside cut me off.
‘Hoozat, Gramma?’
And the old lady turned to look back. A lean-looking young black man in a tight, stylish black suit appeared at her shoulder, another man just behind him. The two stepped past her. The one with the pencil line moustache spoke.
‘Y’go back inside, Gramma. Momma needs you. We be takin’ care o’ this.’
All three of us observed a deferential silence as she shuffled back inside. I could hear the clink of china and cutlery, the sound of a woman weeping somewhere. And it finally came to me. The black clothes, all those cars, the out-of-state plates. I’d blundered into a funeral. The Gores gathered to bury one of their number.
I said, ‘I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have come’ and turned to leave, but the young guy had me by the shirt and was yelling, ‘What you want, man? What you want?’
‘I made a mistake. I’m sorry.’
‘Mistake! Mistake?’
Then the guy behind, black suit, lean and fit, no moustache, stopped him and pointed past us to where I’d left the car on the far side of the street.
‘Lucius. Look.’
Lucius let go of my shirt and looked. Then he hit me. A poorly aimed right to the side of my head. I rolled with it and made a dash for the gate. I made it to the car before they grabbed me again. The other one punched me in the mouth and I tasted blood. Then they got me to the ground and started kicking. How long does training have to last before you call it an instinct? I rolled into a fetal ball just like I’d been taught for the Freedom Rides all those years ago.
‘Motherfuckaah! Motherfuckaah! You got some nerve showin’ up here. You killt my brother!’
Lucius pulled me halfway upright, banged my head against the car. He wanted me to hear what he had to say. I found myself looking up into the eyes of a city sophisticate. These two might have started out as po’ country boys, for all I knew sharecropper’s kids, but some northern city had put a five- or ten-year veneer of sophistication and self-assertion on them. They weren’t scared of whitey anymore.
‘I didn’t kill anyone,’ I said through blood and spittle.
‘White man in a blue Chrysler chased my little brother on his motorsiccle and ran him into the ground. You killt him same as if you put a gun to his head and shot him. Antony!’
On cue Antony stuck an automatic in Lucius’s hand. He put the barrel under my chin and dug it into the flesh.
‘Say your prayers, motherfuckah.’
I couldn’t. I had said not a prayer since my mother died. There was not a word could have come to me. I could not even close my eyes to avoid looking at the man who was going to blow me away. And I saw a black hand grip Lucius’s shoulder. The pink of her fingernails level with my eyes. Saw a black head lean into his. Heard a woman’s voice say, ‘You gwine be stupid all your life, boy? Put the gun down or you’ll fry in the chair, and the rest of us likely as
not get burned out an’ lynched.’
‘It was him. I know it was him. Look at the goddam car for fuck’s sake. Look at the goddam car!’
‘Give me the gun.’
Lucius strung it out as long as he could. He banged my head against the roof of the car one last time, then he let me go and held out the gun to the woman. She took it in her left hand. He tried to avoid looking at her. A recalcitrant child caught in the peach orchard rather than a grown man restrained from murder.
She said, ‘Look at me.’
He looked and she slapped him hard across the face with her right.
‘Y’ever say “fuck” to me again I’ll hit you twice as bad. Now get home where your momma needs you and start acting like grown men not a couple of punks.’
She yanked me to my feet, thrust me through the open door of the church and slammed it shut behind me. I could still hear her yelling at them through the panels. I moved away, and found myself alone in a place almost unimaginable. It was a low, flat rectangle of a room, the point where the four trailers met making a cross, appropriately in the center of the aisle. The ramshackle exterior had done nothing to prepare me for what I now saw on the inside. Three of the four walls carried a wraparound mural. A version of Da Vinci’s Last Supper. That every disciple and the man himself should be black should not have been surprising. It was. But what was more surprising that they were black faces I knew. Christ was Sidney Poitier, and if I’d known the painting or the Bible well enough to tell one disciple from another, I would now be able to say who played James or who played John or Simon-called-Peter in this black triptych on formica and plywood, but all I can say is that Paul Robeson, Martin Luther King, Joe Louis, A. Philip Randolph, Cassius Clay (why do I assume it was painted before he took up Islam?), Louis Armstrong, Medgar Evers, a man I thought might be W.E.B. du Bois, and another I was damn sure was Malcolm X, all figured among the eleven that went to heaven. Judas had a look of Richard Nixon about him but I couldn’t be sure. I think all that mattered was that he was white. In fact my first reaction was white. I sat there thinking . . . Am I the first white man ever to see this? What would whitey say? Would he think this a violation? And I knew damn well he would. Because I knew that I, a non-believing, right-thinking white liberal, was wide-eyed about it. Why? For chrissake, why? Did my education tell me Jesus was white, even if it didn’t tell me he was Sidney Poitier in The Lilies of the Field? Billy didn’t. One day after school, when the Bible had been thumped with a vengeance we’d both found muscle-cramp boring he said to me, ‘What color do you think Jesus was?’ White, I thought, but I said, ‘I don’t know.’ And Billy had said, ‘I figure, being from the Middle East, he’d have to be kind of brown, I guess you could say he was tan-colored.’ What jump from tan to just colored? The woman who’d just saved my skin dragged me back from this reverie.
‘Y’OK?’
I looked up. She was sitting opposite me—row after row of stacking chairs—on the other side of the aisle, both of us a few rows down from the door. A small, beautiful woman, big eyes, wide mouth, I guessed to be about thirty-two or -three or so.
‘I’ll be fine, thank you. Till I have to go back out there.’
‘They gone now. They won’t be back.’
I sighed audibly, stared up at the ceiling. Stained, rusting tin sheet without a decorative splash of imaginative paint to it.
‘I’m truly sorry about your brother, Miss Gore. But I didn’t kill him.’
‘He weren’t my brother. Marcellus was my nephew. His momma, Messalina an’ me, we sisters. I’m Claudia Arquette. An’ nobody killt Gus. Gus killt hisself.’
Good God, was I going to arrive at every place too late? Not so much the harbinger of death as the guy with the long-handled broom come to push the mess around one more time.
‘How did he die?’
‘Gus been killin’ hisself slowly for a year or more. Dyin’ on the inside from somethin’ only he could tell. Last week he took the quick way out.’
‘How quick?’
‘How quick? How quick can drivin’ a motorcycle through a brick wall at a hundred miles an hour get? I’d say quick as lightnin’. Least I hope it was. Took off his head and both arms.’
I leant my head on my palms, elbows on my knees and hoped not to puke. God knows why, I found this a bloodier image than anything Mouse had told me.
‘And there weren’t no white man in no powder blue Chrysler chasin’ him neither. Somebody made that up or put two an’ two together an’ got five. Gus killt hisself. I know that. Even his Momma know that. Only Lucius and Antony needs a white man in a blue car—and if they seen more of their brother since he got home, ’stead of struttin’ their stuff up in Chicago all the time, they’d know Gus got reason aplenty to kill hisself.’
So. She knew. I was surprised. I thought it to be the kind of thing you never told your family. I unbent, stretched a little and rubbed at the swelling on the side of my mouth.
‘I’m very sorry to have troubled you on a day like this of all days. There’s nothing more to be said. I guess I’ll just go now.’
I stood up. She waved me back in my seat, still clutching the gun she’d taken from Gus’s brother.
‘You ain’t goin’ nowhere till you tell me what you wanted of Gus.’
‘You know. Please don’t make me go over it again.’
‘Know? What do I know? Boy, you start talkin’ or I’ll stand in that doorway and scream till Lucius and Antony get back here.’
‘I don’t get it. You said yourself. He had plenty of reason to kill himself.’
She cocked her head, one eye wide, like a reverse wink, and looked at me like she thought I was stupid.
‘I know he had his reasons, ’cause I seen the way he was eaten up inside. But I don’t know what they were. He wouldn’t talk to nobody. All I know is somethin’ happened. Somethin’ out there in Vietnam. What I don’t know is what.’
There it was, that phrase again—something happened. I didn’t want to do this. I didn’t want to have to tell this woman her nephew was a . . . what? . . . a murderer?
‘Please, Miss Arquette. Don’t make me do this.’
‘Was you in ’Nam with him?’
‘No. I never even met Gus.’
‘Then how come you know where to find him?’
‘He ever mention a sergeant called Mouse?’
She nodded. ‘Sure. He loved Mouse. Nearest thing to a father he ever got. Wrote about him in every letter.’
‘Mouse and me, we go back a long way.’
‘Great. So you and Mouse is buddies. Now quit stallin’ an’ tell me what you know.’
I told her. I began with that heartbeat flutter that you get when you tell someone things you know can rip their little world to shreds. It soon dawned on me that I wasn’t ripping her world to shreds. She was nodding, slowly, as if confirming what I was saying with her own assumptions. There were no tears, no wails. A calm I could not share seemed to surround her like river mist. And when I had finished, she sat, eyes down at the raggy carpet floor, legs crossed, one foot swinging almost carelessly, the gun held loosely in her hand. She had no questions. What I thought was a question turned out to be a statement.
‘So Marcellus trained as a soldier, went to ’Nam and shot niggers? Well, I guess I knew that. Might have denied it in my time, but I knew it. But now you sayin’ he killt niggers in a big way, a bigger way than we thought he would? New ways to kill niggers. Bigger ways. Ways we can’t imagine.’
I wasn’t about to use the N-word back to her. I just said no.
‘Well, what else would you call it. Uncle Sam calls him up, sticks a rifle in his hand, trains him to use it, sends him t’ th’ other side of the world and then tells him to kill. And Vietnam bein’ full o’ colored he kills colored. Kills all the colored he can. Sounds to me like the white man
got this down to a science. Gettin’ colored to kill colored. You heard o’ George Wallace? Don’t answer that. Course you have, everybody heard o’ George Wallace. Alabama’s own bantam rooster of a governor. A few years back he was sayin’ he didn’t give a cuss what was bein’ said about him by any leader of any new African country, ’cause “the average African don’t know where Africa is let alone where Alabam’ is.” Well I bought myself an atlas an’ a ’cyclopedia and I found out about Africa, an’ Asia and you know what? I found out that most of the world is colored. Most folks on earth ain’t white, they’s colored. Abyssinia, India, China, Vietnam—they’s all colored. An’ I’ll be damned if the sweetest trick whitey ever thought up in these United States of America ain’t to round up our niggers and send ’em all to other countries to kill their niggers. Hell, at this rate there soon be no niggers left! Now . . . don’t tell me that ain’t the way it is. Don’t tell me. Or I won’t send for Lucius and Antony. I’ll shoot you myself.’
She never raised her voice throughout that entire speech, but by the time she finished I had never felt so frightened of a woman in my life. She was head and shoulders shorter than me, but the power she packed into every syllable battered me harder than Lucius’ fists. I felt as though she’d picked me up and splattered me across the floor.
‘It wasn’t his fault.’
‘Don’t apologise for him. You don’t have that knowledge. Dammit, you don’t have that right.’
The woman was exhausting me. I felt like I was bleating more than talking.
‘What are you going to do now?’
‘Do? What I gots to do that’s what. I gotta tell Messalina soon as the boys go back north. Hell, woman’s son kills hisself, don’t you think she got a right to know why?’
I could think of half a dozen reasons not to tell a woman. I could think of a dozen lies to tell. I’d tell myself I was sparing her feelings. But Claudia Arquette didn’t seem to see it that way. At least she hadn’t insisted I be the one to tell Gus’s mother. She leaned in close to me, her face inches from mine. Her voice a mezzo whisper.