Downtown

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  “Was he a farmer before he went into the ministry?” I said to Luke. “Did he grow up on a farm?”

  Luke laughed. “Shit, no,” he said. “He grew up in a suburb of St. Louis. His father is an OB-GYN, and his mother was his nurse. Before he went into the ministry he wasn’t anything but a prep school kid and, from what I hear, an awesome stud.”

  “What happened to him?”

  Luke looked down at me.

  “I guess the movement did,” he said.

  I was suddenly weary of it all: the undercurrents that I alone could not feel, the innuendos I alone did not catch, the gulfs and continents of painful knowledge that I alone did not seem to possess.

  “So does he just like to dress up and play Farmer in the Dell, or is he trying to impress us with his body?” I snapped.

  “Any men he might run into down here are apt to be right off the farm,” Luke said mildly. “It’s a courtesy to them. You know, when in Rome. And then, the kids you’re going to see this morning don’t know any men but farmers, most of them. They don’t see any men, much, except their granddaddies once in a while, and they all wear overalls like that. A man in a suit would scare them to death. A man in a suit is The Man.”

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered. “I feel like a jerk. I should have thought. I should have worn jeans myself—”

  “No, you’re all right,” he said. “A white woman in jeans would probably confuse the hell out of them. They’ll just think you’re a social worker and ignore you. That’s what we want, today.”

  John Howard came up alongside the Morgan and slapped it on its squared-off rump.

  “We ready?” he said. “Hello, Smoky.”

  “Hello, John,” I said.

  “I came by last night to talk to Mrs. Roberts,” John Howard said. “Told her not to pretty things up, or try to get the kids to mind their manners. She said she wouldn’t. She understands what we’re trying to do: to get help for her kids, and the only way to do it is to show what she needs. It’s a good time for us. She’s down to grits this close to the end of the month, and those are cold. Her stove’s been out for two or three days. She’s been heating water to scrub the floors and bathe the children over the outdoor fireplace.”

  Lucas nodded and got out of the car and picked up his camera bags. I followed. We walked behind John Howard up to the porch of the little house and waited while he rapped on the screen door. It was torn, and had been patched with what looked like duct tape. The inside of the house was as dark as a cave.

  “Round to the back,” a low, beautiful voice called, and we went back down the steps and around the side of the house. It sat up on piled bricks off the bare earth, and the ubiquitous kudzu and wisteria vines gave it an almost exotic air, like a little jungle hut. We paused at a gate in a high wire fence, and I could smell flowers and damp-watered earth and something else, something rich and dark and wonderful, like coffee, and frying meat. The laughter and shrieks of children were louder here.

  A Negro woman came to the gate and unlocked it, and stepped back, and we went in. She was a mountain of a woman, very dark and shapeless in a clean, faded housedress. It was sleeveless, and her great upper arms looked like shining, smoked sides of meat. They shook when she moved. She wore men’s shoes with the toes cut out, and a bright turban wrapped around her small, shapely head. Perspiration ran down her wrinkled face, and a wide white smile split the ashy web of fine wrinkles on it. She had a gold tooth in the middle of her mouth; it caught the morning sun like a tiny flame.

  “Come in here, darlin’,” she said to John Howard, and hugged him hard as he stepped through the gate. “Mmm, mmm. Need to put some meat on those bones, you do. Who been feedin’ you?”

  “Nobody as good as you,” he said, and nodded toward us.

  “Mama Roberts, this is Lucas Geary and Smoky O’Donnell, that I told you about last night. They’re going to help me tell folks about what you do down here, get you some help. Like I said, today we’re not going to talk much. Smoky’s just going to look and listen, and Lucas is going to take a few pictures. That’s all. The kids should just go on doing what they always do. We won’t be long.”

  The old woman nodded at us, gravely and politely.

  “Glad to have you,” she said. “We ain’t got much, but it sure is more than I thought it was going to be, and you’re welcome to share it with us.”

  “Thank you,” I said, and smiled, and she patted me on the arm as if I had been a child, and turned and waddled into the fenced backyard. I followed John and Luke, not wanting to see what I knew I would.

  But it was not what I had thought, not what Luke had told me it would be, not what John Howard had indicated I would find. The little backyard was full of small tables with bright paper cloths on them, and folding chairs full of chattering children. They were just finishing what I could tell, even from a distance, was a breakfast of ham and eggs and biscuits, and there were paper cups of milk and orange juice beside the paper plates of food. In one corner of the yard, under a drooping mulberry tree, was a pile of rolled-up sleeping bags. They looked bright and new. At the rear of the yard, against the fence, a big camp stove had been set up, and a young woman was turning bacon and piling biscuits on a plate with deft-handed ease. She wore a long, bright dashiki and had an Afro, glinting coppery in the sun, and on her round little cat’s face were large black sunglasses. She did not stop what she was doing, did not turn when she heard our voices.

  It was John Howard who finally spoke.

  “Well, I see you got some other help in here, Mama Roberts,” he said. His voice was flat and uninflected.

  “Came this morning before light,” the old woman said happily. “Heard a little knock and went to the door and here was this child, all bent over under that there stove and with piles of food all around her, and several more of ’em like her, carryin’ blankets and sleeping bags and stuff. Looked like angels of the Lord, they did. Honey,” she called toward the young woman, “come on over here and meet this boy and his friends. They gon’ help Mama Roberts, too.”

  The young woman put down the plate of biscuits and turned and came across the bare earth, with its pale matted ghosts of dead grass, toward us. I could see that she was slender and small, and even behind the black glasses, very pretty. She had high cheekbones and smooth golden skin.

  “Hello, John,” she said. Her voice was light and soft, a Southern voice. But it was not warm.

  “Hello, Juanita,” John Howard said.

  “Y’all know each other?” Mrs. Roberts said. “I thought this baby girl here say she was from…Where did you say, honey? New York? Up North somewhere—”

  “We’re in Philadelphia now,” the young woman said. “I’m just visiting Atlanta.”

  “And just happened to be passing by with food and sleeping bags,” John Howard said pleasantly. “Yeah, Mama Roberts. We know each other. Juanita here may be a Yankee now, but she’s a Southern girl at heart. Born in…I believe it was Tupelo, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes,” the young woman said, looking at him steadily. Except for the glance and a nod at Lucas and me, she never did acknowledge our presence.

  “I heard you all were around,” John Howard said. He turned to the old woman.

  “Mama Roberts, this is not the way,” he said.

  The old woman looked around at the children, seemingly oblivious to us as they ate and drank and laughed, and back at John Howard, and then at the ground.

  “I’ll take it any way I can get it, John,” she said. “They came. They had blankets and food. They cooked it. They served it. They smiled. They didn’t charge me for it. They didn’t ask me all kinds of questions to see did I qualify for it. They didn’t say they gon’ do a study and get back to me. They said they glad to do it and they gon’ try to fix it so it happen every day, try to see about that before they go on back North. You do that for me, then you can come in here an’ tell me this ain’t the way.”

  “It’s not the way,” he said, softly, as if to no
one in particular. He looked at us, then, and motioned for us to follow him, and turned away to leave the backyard.

  Behind him, the young woman said, “John, have you forgotten Jonathan?”

  He stopped, and turned and looked at her. I could see that his face darkened; in it, the ridge of scar down his forehead into his eyebrow stood out lividly. But his expression did not change.

  “No,” he said. “I haven’t forgotten Jonathan. Have you forgotten the bridge?”

  “Yes,” she said, and there was something akin to defiance in her voice. “I didn’t have a bit of trouble forgotting that.”

  “Well, I never will,” he said, and walked around the house and out to the street. We followed behind him, not understanding, but not wanting to speak, either.

  We still had not spoken when Luke had stowed his camera bags into the Morgan’s trunk and I had gotten into the front seat beside him, and closed the door.

  “Want us to drop you off?” Luke said, finally, to John Howard.

  “No,” John said. “I’m going to walk a while. Sorry about this. It doesn’t really change anything. I’ll find us somebody else, and set it up. We’ll make your deadline.”

  “Just let me know,” Lucas said. John Howard nodded, and struck off up the road toward the top of the hill. Luke started the Morgan and eased it off back down the dirt road, the way we had come.

  “What was all that about?” I said finally.

  “I’m not sure,” Luke said. “I think I know, but I’m not really sure. I think Jonathan is Jonathan Daniels. He was a white guy who was shot and killed in the Lowndes County voter registration drive. I know he and John were good friends. I think the bridge is the Edmund Pettus; she must have been there when John was hurt. And I think she’s a Panther. I know they have free breakfast programs for the kids in the ghettos, and other free stuff. And I heard they were in town. I don’t know how they’d have found out about the Focus piece, but it doesn’t surprise me.”

  “She was something to him, wasn’t she?” I said.

  “Might have been,” he said noncommittally.

  “She was,” I said. I knew it was true. “Even if she’s not now, she was once.”

  “Does it matter?”

  “Well, of course it doesn’t matter. I just wish I knew more about him.”

  “And what would you like to know about him, Smoky?” Luke said, grinning, and I knew what the slow sound in his voice meant. I was angry with him once more.

  “I just wish I knew more about his women and a hell of a lot less about yours,” I said waspishly.

  “Well, then, want shall be your master, as the man said,” Lucas Geary said, still grinning, and gunned the Morgan off the dirt road. Just before we hit the paved street, I saw a car parked on the weedy side of the track leading back into Pumphouse Hill. It was a dark red Mustang, shining new, with tan leather seats, and on the backseat there was a small pile of clothing: neatly pressed khaki trousers and a folded blue oxford cloth shirt, and polished brown loafers. I knew that it was John Howard’s car, and began to laugh, and Luke began to laugh, too, and we were still laughing when we passed the capitol and drove back into the tall morning shadows of Five Points, downtown.

  8

  JOHN HOWARD WAS AS GOOD AS HIS WORD. HE FOUND US another day care project to shoot for Focus, and Luke and I went the very next day to cover it. It was in Summerhill, a better neighborhood than Pumphouse Hill, but only marginally. It was here, Luke told me, that Ben Cameron had stood atop a car, trying to talk the heat out of an impending race riot during a past incendiary summer, and had been toppled off. Summerhill had once been an affluent white neighborhood of large, two-story frame houses and sheltering old hardwoods, but now it housed tiny tenements and apartments into which some ten thousand poor Negroes were crammed. As in Pumphouse Hill, almost all of them were migrants from the rural South. Summerhill was a ghetto in every sense of the word, even if it ran to two-story tenements instead of one-room shotguns.

  Mrs. Carrie Holmes lived in a downstairs apartment off Love Street. She was a tall, thin, middle-aged woman, almost yellow of skin, cool and formal with us. She would not, John had said, make the impression that the earth-motherly Mama Roberts would have, but she was fully as devoted to her children, and in a way, did more with less, since she had virtually no backyard, and her children’s play yard was the sagging front and back porches of the old Victorian house, and the simmering streets around it.

  “She probably won’t talk to you much,” John said. “Her boy was shot in Mississippi during Freedom Summer, and he still walks with a cane. She was always remote, except with children, and that didn’t help the way she thinks about white folks. But she’ll be courteous, and her kids are great. There’s one little boy, Andre—look for Andre. I think he’s your focus for this piece.”

  “What about Andre?” I said.

  “If he’s there, Andre will show you,” John Howard said.

  He was not going with us this time. He had, he said, some people he needed to see, and they were leaving town that afternoon. He had cleared us with Mrs. Holmes. There shouldn’t be any problems.

  “Will it help that I’m a crippled civil rights hero, too?” Luke said, grinning. He had brought a cane with him that day, something I had never seen him do before, and I noticed the top of an Ace bandage showing over his work shoe. He limped heavily, too. The limp came and went, but I had never seen the cane or the bandage before. I raised my eyebrow at him.

  “Humidity gets to it sometimes,” he said. “And the walking yesterday. It gets a lot of sympathy, too.”

  “It won’t get you any from Mrs. Holmes,” John Howard said, but he smiled slightly. “But the kids will love it. Is it bothering you much?”

  “Only when I dance,” Luke said. “What about your eye? Do you ever feel that?”

  His tone was merely interested, as Luke’s tone of voice often was. Almost everything interested him.

  “Only when I laugh,” said John Howard, and I thought then that it was a bond they would have all their lives, the scars of that day at the Edmund Pettus Bridge. I wondered if, many years from now, on a day of rain and heavy air, Lucas Geary’s ankle would ache and he would think of John Howard, and vice versa. It gave me a strange, shy feeling, as if I were in an intimate situation with strangers. But then, that was where, I thought, I was.

  Mrs. Holmes was almost silent with us, but she directed us to the back porch of the apartment where the children were having their breakfast of biscuits and weak coffee.

  “Coffee?” I said, and then wished I had not. What did I know about feeding poor children?

  “Church donates it,” Mrs. Holmes said in a weary monotone. “It’s the last thing to run out. And most of them were born drinking it. Lots of little niggers don’t like milk, but they’ll drink coffee.”

  I jerked my head up and stared hard at her. Was she taunting me? Unexpectedly she smiled, a grudging small twitch. “It’s okay when we use it to each other,” she said. “Just don’t you do it.”

  “I never have,” I said. I did not think that I liked Mrs. Carrie Holmes, urban saint or no.

  Lucas raised the camera and squeezed off shot after shot of the children with their mugs of coffee. He could hardly have looked more conspicuous here, in this world of tiny, ragged black children, with his flaming hair and beard and his tall, boneless body, but somehow he melted into them, became a part of the furniture of the bleak porch, so that the children swirled and chattered around him as if he were one of them. Remembering his words the day before, I stood back, leaning against the side of the house, watching silently. I wore an old denim skirt and sleeveless blouse today, with scuffed loafers, so that, at least, I would not look, as he had said of my costume yesterday, like a Junior Leaguer fulfilling her service requirements.

  Presently Luke dropped to one knee and began to talk to the children. He talked softly, foolishness, nonsense, and the children responded by crowing with laughter, crawling over and around him, reachi
ng for the camera and the bright things in the camera bag, reaching out to touch his hair and beard, and the bright aluminum cane. Luke shot roll after roll of film. He did not raise his voice.

  Mrs. Holmes went into the house and came back pushing a very small boy ahead of her. He looked to be younger than the others, barely toddling, and he was plainly frightened. He had a large head, out of proportion to his tiny body, and his face was moonlike, the color of shiny caramel. There were silver snailtracks of tears on his cheeks, and he looked at Luke and me out of huge brown eyes that showed a rim of white all the way around.

  “Andre has been looking forward to this, but the young lady scares him,” Mrs. Holmes said. “It was a white lady took him away from his mama, a little lady like that one.”

  She did not look at me. My face flamed.

  “Why?” Luke said mildly.

  “Well, his mama was beating him,” Mrs. Holmes said. “He wouldn’t stop shittin’ in his pants. She beat him till we couldn’t stand the yellin’ anymore, and I called the social worker. She came and got him and put him in foster care. I went and got him, said I was his granny. He’s been scared of white ladies since. I didn’t know she was coming, or I’d have said no.”

  “She’s writing this piece,” Luke said. “She’s a good lady and a good writer, and she’s going to do these kids a lot of good. Where’s Andre’s mother now?”

  “She’s dead. She overdosed up in Pittsburgh this spring. He don’t know it. He thinks she’s coming back. She wasn’t but sixteen herself.”

  I closed my eyes in pain and rage. This baby, with a dead mother herself a child, terrified now and forever of a fourth of the population of the world.