everyman

by M. Shelly Conner

  When Lee Roy exited the Greyhound bus with his single suitcase, he didn’t even know the way to campus. The town square was desolate, bereft of the major businesses usually located in such central districts. Lee Roy looked anxiously around the square, hoping that its emptiness was not an indication of what he could expect from campus life. Wandering the square, Lee Roy found himself before the stone soldier—a most unusual welcome committee. Yet the Confederate statue was not the only soldier in the square.

  “You look lost.”

  Lee Roy turned toward the voice to find a slender young man near his own light complexion approaching. “Yeah, a bit.” Lee Roy grimaced. “I guess I didn’t think things down to the small details.”

  “Looking for campus then?”

  Lee Roy nodded and took the proffered hand.

  “Sammy.” Sammy tipped his cap toward the statue and smirked at Lee Roy. “Well, come then. It’s only ’bout a mile.”

  Lee Roy grabbed his suitcase and followed Sammy as the soldier gazed on. Behind them, the Greyhound bus pulled away from the station, leaving a dust cloud that wouldn’t settle until the two new friends had arrived at their destination.

  Sammy had enrolled at Tuskegee about a month earlier. “But I’ve been around here most of my life,” he told Lee Roy. “Graduated from high school right around there. Then went into the navy, but . . .” He patted his side. “Kidney failed me. They took it and sent me packing. You serve?”

  Lee Roy shook his head and tapped his glasses. “Eyes good enough for everything but that. Detached retina.” He waved his hand beside his right ear. “Try not to stand over here.”

  Sammy smiled. “Well, can’t fight with guns . . . Guess we just have to make our minds into weapons. Plenty to fight for down here.”

  “Right on.” Lee Roy felt the beginnings of a belonging he hadn’t known since his days with the Rangers. “I should’ve been down here sooner.” He faltered. “Brother Malcolm . . .”

  Sammy stopped walking and slowly bobbed his head. “He was something. He was really, really something. And it needed to be heard. Here.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Sammy snorted. “Brother, if you think you found some sort of Negro paradise, you mistaken. There is lots of work to be done in Tuskegee. Don’t worry. You haven’t missed the rapture. I’m sure there’s plenty more death and struggle to go round.”

  And there would be. It was 1965 in a segregated Alabama town where statues of a white Confederate soldier and a former slave turned educator were planted on parcels like opposing chess pieces. They made pawns of the inhabitants of towns like Tuskegee, and the first college student casualty of the battle for civil rights was Sammy Younge Jr. It was nearly a year before his untimely fate that he befriended Lee Roy, leaving a legacy etched in the hearts of many, although void of the commemorative concrete and bronze avatars afforded to the soldier and Washington.

  Lee Roy’s commitment to the cause had been reignited. It made sense that his quest to aid the civil rights struggle would take him to the South. Although his childhood friends did not understand. Tiny had been the only one to brave the late February winter hawk and take him to the bus station.

  “Your backward ass belongs down there,” Tiny’s breath visibly puffed toward him in the car. Lee Roy reached for the door handle, and Tiny roughly planted his hand on Lee Roy’s chest. “Don’t get yourself killed down there.”

  It was a heavy remark in the wake of his grandmother’s funeral and Malcolm X’s assassination. People were dying. The movement that claimed the reformed Nation of Islam leader was not responsible for the death of Lee Roy’s grandmother. Yet her demise served as a reminder that passings brought about by injustice in no way lessen those from natural causes.

  “I’ll be a lot safer down there than in this piece-of-shit car of yours,” Lee Roy shot back. They shared a laugh about the four-year-old Corvair that decades later would be deemed one of Time magazine’s fifty worst cars of all time.

  With Sammy as a guide, Tuskegee offered Lee Roy innumerable opportunities to participate in the civil rights battles. Nineteen sixty-five was a hotbed year of local and regional activity that brought not only Malcolm X in February but also Martin Luther King Jr. in May to deliver the commencement speech. Although Lee Roy missed the activism fostered by the Blackstone Rangers in their earlier years, he had also latched onto them for more personal reasons—the brotherhood they offered. Attending Tuskegee brought fraternal bonding by way of four Panhellenic organizations thirsty for new pledges.

  The behavioral changes in Lee Roy—ones that seemed to accompany all fraternity pledges—were not lost on his new friend. “You know you’re starting to look like an undertaker,” Sammy remarked as they sat outside of the dining hall in early March. Lee Roy looked up from the sign he was painting.

  “What? You don’t like the suit?”

  “Well,” Sammy chortled, “I did the first couple of days, but now it’s just too much.”

  Lee Roy carefully placed the end of his tie over his right shoulder. “They say—”

  “They?” Sammy raised an eyebrow.

  Catching his near error, Lee Roy cleared his throat. “It’s good for colored men to be seen in business attire.”

  “So they say,” Sammy sneered.

  “Look, man,” Lee Roy slid back from the sign. “We are more than capable of being involved in all manner of business. If only folk just—”

  “White folk,” Sammy interjected.

  “Yeah. Yes. White folks. If they just got used to seeing us this way . . .”

  “Then what? They gonna bring us their business?”

  “Yes!”

  “Bullshit.” Sammy tossed his paintbrush into a bucket of water at his feet. “You know, most students are tired of unimportant ‘business as usual.’ Here you got your fancy fraternity telling y’all to just wear a suit and tie but ignoring the threat of nooses that are far more likely to be put around your neck. It’s a joke.”

  “I get you.” Lee Roy resumed painting. “But what’s wrong with working both ends of this thing? Why can’t I march and also pledge?”

  Sammy sighed. “Because colored folk never get a choice on which end of anything. You even thinking that you have one is just a distraction. If you aren’t full-time, then you part-time pledging to the movement. You can’t be part-time for life and death.” He stood and pointed to Lee Roy’s sign. “And this? Where you gonna be on Sunday?”

  “I’m there.” Lee Roy’s voice was strong with conviction. “Imma march.” Sammy snatched up his own sign and bucket and trudged away leaving Lee Roy to paint the final red a in Selma. But the institute had different plans, delivering notices reminding students about the mandatory Sunday chapel services and doubling down on the mandate with the threat of expulsion for absentees.

  The original Chapel, completed in 1898, required 1.2 million student-made bricks and years of trial and error learning the brickmaking trade, including three failed brick-burning kilns and thousands of useless bricks. By the time of its completion, the Chapel was the Pyramid of Djoser of its day. Perhaps Lee Roy and the other students compelled to attend Chapel every Sunday would have felt some deep reverence for its history had it not been destroyed by lightning in 1957. The replacement chapel, a wonder for its astonishing acoustics and lack of right angles, would not be constructed until 1969. Meaning that Lee Roy spent his weekly services in Logan Hall, the gymnasium.

  Lee Roy sat in the well-worn wooden seat with the indescribable sense of being out of place or placed out of being. The chaplain—unaware of the irony of his lecture “Pray Not Play”—droned on about student responsibility and morality from a makeshift pulpit in a building designed for play. Most faculty members sat toward the front of the room, and every time the chaplain spoke of play, a small but distinct cough sounded from one of the front seats. Straining to see past the rowed seat
s in front of him, Lee Roy could only make out the back of the culprit, identified by the occasional raising of the arm to cover his mouth in a perfectly synchronized dance with the throat-clearing noise. Lee Roy’s focus on the arm revealed a dark suit jacket, the one-inch bright tab of white shirt peeking from the jacket sleeve as the arm bent upward, and the exotic flash of a gold watch fastened around the wrist.

  With his eye on the culprit, the chaplain switched his focus to moral standards, eliciting a double cough from the offender. Lee Roy watched in rapt fascination, wondering if anyone else noticed the hidden war being waged. None knew of the very public war happening about eighty miles to the west on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. The chaplain spoke. The coughs repeated. Lee Roy watched, hypnotized by the rhythm of it all and transfixed by the gleaming timepiece.

  It came to be known as Bloody Sunday—the first leg of the Selma to Montgomery March. Fifty years later, the first Black president of the United States would participate in a re-creation of that final leg of the march in commemoration of both the struggle and progress, of which he was the most prominent legacy. In its entirety, the distance between the two cities was slightly more miles than years to this future event. It was far less commodified in its original incarnation. No one wanted to have to do it, and yet they marched by the thousands. Spectators gathered to lend support or hurl their opposition in racial epithets. On this leg of the march, six hundred souls linked arms and attempted to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge—named for the Confederate general and Ku Klux Klan grand dragon who died in the summer of 1907, a year after Tuskegee’s stone soldier emerged.

  The bridge—opposite of the sun’s ascension and decline—rises on its western end, the direction from which the protesters traveled. It reaches its peak at the center, one hundred feet above the Alabama River. The bridge’s uphill march revealed nothing beyond pavement until the activists reached the pinnacle and looked down toward policemen. Dogs. Batons. Violence. The future of their battered bodies to be immortalized by the unimaginably horrifying amounts of bloodshed on that Sunday.

  Bloody Sunday had awakened a hesitancy in Lee Roy that was matched only by the conflagration it ignited in his friend Sammy. They both attended the student protest against the violence of the event three days after its occurrence; however, where Lee Roy withdrew from the movement, Sammy was consumed by it. Lee Roy leaned hard toward the academic activism of the civil rights movement, while Sammy was entrenched in its physicality. There were no more debates between them—just silent acceptance of the other and the permeation of loss.

  That July, Sammy was brutally attacked while working to desegregate a church in Tuskegee. Lee Roy visited as he convalesced.

  “Can’t you see how dangerous this is becoming?” He argued to no effect. It seemed to Lee Roy, reflecting on his Blackstone Ranger years, that the most effective strategy against institutional racism was to work your way into those institutions and fight from within.

  Sammy’s voice was weak, but the conviction was as strong as ever. “No. Not becoming. Always been dangerous.”

  “Then why do this to yourself?” Lee Roy implored.

  Sammy attempted a chuckle but winced in pain. “You think I did this to myself?” He pointed emphatically at his bruised and swollen face.

  “Of course not.”

  Sammy sighed. “So, what would you have me do, brother?”

  Lee Roy touched the Greek letters on his sweater. True to his natural inclinations, he had retreated into the safety of a fraternal order. Alpha Phi Alpha, stitched in raised Greek letters, glared outward. “Live.” He gently placed a hand on his friend’s shoulder. “I’d have you live, brother.”

  “To what end?” Sammy whispered.

  “A natural one!”

  A smile managed its way across Sammy’s face. “What kind of natural order says that my life should be without the vote? inferior? separated from anything good in this world? What life is that to lead?”

  “There are other ways to, to, to fight.” Lee Roy stammered. “In writing and petitioning and . . .”

  Sammy blinked languorously. “Fighting . . . eventually involves . . . fighting.”

  Two months later, Sammy was arrested in the neighboring town of Opelika. Lee Roy heard the news from one of his fraternity brothers. There was often unvoiced reverence for the foot soldiers of the movement. Not everyone was built for marching, but they found ways to support it. The fraternity brother pressed a collection of crumpled bills into Lee Roy’s hand. “You know . . . for the brother’s defense or whatever.” Lee Roy nodded wordlessly. He was seeing less and less of Sammy but would make sure to get the money to him and to also relay the names of its donors.

  Autumn rolled into winter, and the New Year saw the birth of 1966 and the death of Sammy Younge Jr. one year after his enrollment at Tuskegee Institute. Lee Roy mourned heavily. He thought of his first meeting with Sammy at the Greyhound bus stop—the same place where Sammy met his unfortunate end.

  It was at a voter registration drive near the Standard Oil gas station where most everyone with a vehicle refilled their tanks at some point. After using the whites-only bathroom, an argument ensued between Sammy and the station attendant. The attendant—sixty-seven years old and well reared in the ways of the Old South—pulled a gun, and Sammy, still with fight in his footfalls, fled. The first shot rang out and missed him.

  Sammy made it to the Greyhound bus station just as an Atlanta-bound bus was boarding. He ran onto the bus, but safety was short-lived. The driver forced him off and back into running. It was the second shot that hit his temple, and Sammy fell bleeding against the back of the station.

  Lee Roy’s anger bubbled within him, and it could not be quelled by the constant coddling of his fraternity or quieted by the consolation of his classmates. The buildings, with their student-made bricks that he so admired, appeared weak and inadequate. They were an illusion of stability. They could not protect against what the movement moved against. Lee Roy no longer saw the lush greenery of the campus. He saw complacency, and as he maneuvered on the night of Sammy’s death, inebriated and carrying a pint of whiskey in one hand and a tire iron in the other, he found a scapegoat for his blame.

  In the pitch dark of the night, he raised his eyes to the bronze statue of Booker T. Washington and yelled, “Were you there?” Then followed it with a whispered, “Were you there?” He stood poised with the tire iron raised for the blow.

  The response came as a soprano melody from the night. It sang back to him, “Were you there when they crucified my Lord?” It gained intensity and asked again. “Were you there . . . when they . . . crucified . . . my Lord?”

  Lee Roy leaned with his back against the statue and slid to the ground as it moaned, “Oh, ooh, ooh-ooh . . . sometimes it causes me to tremble . . . tremble . . . tremble. Were you there when they crucified my Lord?” Lee Roy, shaking in response, sat on the cold ground.

  “Were you there when they nailed him to the tree?” Tears streamed down Lee Roy’s face during each crescendo of the refrain, “Were you there when they pierced him in his side?”

  A loud sob escaped him before he could quiet it with his hand. “Oh, God,” he cried. He saw Sammy running for his life and thought of their last conversation, where he’d pleaded with his friend to live safely. Mercifully, the voice stopped, and Lee Roy opened his eyes to investigate its source, the ending punctuated by the distinctive sound of flint to steel and a flame, at first small, then puffed large, reflected against a gold watch on the wrist that held it.

  Woodridge emerged into the moonlight reflected by the statue. He puffed a mahogany pipe and exhaled. “You’d do more harm with that tire iron to yourself than the founding father.” He took another long drag from his pipe. “The founder and I have always had differences of opinion on some things, but he’s always been one of impeccable taste.”

  Woodridge smiled. His suit played tricks in the moonli
ght by appearing royal blue at some angles and purple at others. It was tailored beyond its time, fitting a little more snugly than fashion then dictated. Middle-aged, a slight graying glazed his temples and sprinkled what seemed at first a low haircut but in more light was revealed to be a fiercely brushed Caesar cut. His mustache and goatee were equally manicured.

  Lee Roy stood attentive. He had heard of Professor Woodridge and the advice to avoid him and his apartment, for what the chaplain would call “morality issues.” He cleared his throat. “I wasn’t going to do . . . What I mean to say, sir, is that I’m cool.”

  Woodridge frowned into his inhale and exhaled. “Cool? I don’t know what that means. I think language and semantics are wasted on the young. I take it you mean that you are not hot? Not hot, not now. But you look very hot indeed. Hotheaded. That is to say, not cool at all.”

  “I’m fine, sir.”

  “Don’t call me sir.” Woodridge stepped closer. “I only wish to convey that the statue is of bronze. You don’t want to go clanging metal onto metal.”

  “Oh.” Lee Roy exhaled.

  Woodridge retreated into the darkness. “It’s not like cement or concrete.” His voice trailed off. “Now, I imagine a tire iron could do some damage to a statue like that.”

  Lee Roy stood fixed in place, catching the dwindling refrains of what had become a deep tenor humming, “Were you there . . .”

  The campus was awash with news that the Confederate soldier in town had been vandalized. Not all of the damage was caused by a tire iron. Graffiti and trash lingered. When students individually and in groups encountered the statue after its initial violation, their impulse was to add to the cause. It became a community vandalization project until Tuskegee’s white residents took note and began standing guard around the stone sentinel. Lee Roy, in particular, had lost what had become his nocturnal exercise in directed aggression.

  One night not long after his encounter with Woodridge, he stood frozen at the door to the professor’s apartment, fist raised, poised to rap on the forbidden slab of wood that was the subject of much discussion in student circles. Students were just as indoctrinated in the whereabouts of contraband and vice by older scholars as they were directed to systems of moral reinforcement by the administration. They knew that a juke joint could be found at the very end of Church Street. Ladies in trouble might find a solution at a small brick house right on the edge of town. There was a still ten miles into the woods toward Shorter that sold the worst moonshine since Prohibition. And if you felt a sense of unbelonging, you could knock on Professor Woodridge’s door around ten o’clock at night during his evening libations.