Downtown

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  “Greenwood?” I said.

  “Mississippi,” Luke said. “When Stokely Carmichael got arrested for pitching his tent in Greenwood during the Meredith march, there was a big rally. He came straight from the jail. Everybody was mad; it was a chickenshit arrest. He made what everybody thinks is the first black power salute that night. And some folks think that night was the first time ‘Black Power!’ replaced ‘Freedom’ as a rallying cry. Not that it really matters.”

  “What a horrible thing to say anytime, but especially last night,” I said, thinking of the sense of joy and exaltation I had had last night at La Carrousel. “That’s his place. Dr. King’s. The nerve of that little—”

  “Yeah, I thought Rosser was going to kill him,” John Howard said. “He had him by the back of the collar and was fixing just to kick the shit out of him, but Juanita apologized and we pulled him out of there. She knows it was a bad thing for him to be there. She didn’t bring him. He just showed up. I think he’s trying to ride on her coattails. She’s got a lot of friends in the movement still, and I think he’d love to recruit them.”

  “Apparently she does have friends,” Luke said, and smiled mirthlessly at John.

  “I’m not apologizing, Luke,” John said. “She’s a hell of a woman, no matter what side she’s on. She was one of the best we ever had. You can’t just write that off. And besides, they’re not all like Sonny Pickens. Most of them were us once. I try not to forget that.”

  “They seem to have forgotten it,” Luke said. “You’re not going over are you, old buddy?”

  “You know I’m not. All I’m saying is that maybe it’s time to listen to what they’re really saying, the meat below the posturing and the slogans. It may not be so far from what we’ve been saying all along. The end is the same. The means are different, that’s all. And they get things done. They accomplish things you can see and touch and point to. It’s not outside the realm of possibility that if we got closer together we could learn from each other. Christ, Luke, our way isn’t working. I believe with all my heart in our way, but it’s like all of a sudden it’s just stopped working. It got a lot of legislation in place, but nobody’s enforcing it. It’s like we’re walking in molasses. Ever since the White House Conference last year people have been mad; a lot of the foot soldiers came home from that disillusioned and cynical. It’s pretty obvious Johnson is just using the movement. Before that, I think we were mad about different things, the North and the South. Up there, they were mad because the promises haven’t been upheld. Down here, there just weren’t any promises being made. Now we’re both mad about the same stuff. Now the promises have been made, and we’re seeing that nobody in the government is doing shit to get them enforced. Don’t you see? That makes all the…all the marching and beatings and jail and the shooting and the dying for nothing. Just for nothing, if they resulted in only promises that nobody means to keep. So yeah, I think we do need to look at what works. We could work it out about the means.”

  “You really think the SCLC is going to find something it can use in the Panthers’ camp?” Luke said. “You think Dr. King and the rest of them are going to get guns and black berets and leather jackets and scarves and march around?”

  “Don’t be a fool. Of course not. But you can’t deny that they’ve got an impressive organization. They’ve got this hot breakfast program going in virtually every major city they’re in, and day care, and black studies programs, and employment programs, and food banks, and they’re teaching inner-city blacks how to organize for better breaks in their jobs, and better treatment from the police—”

  “And they’re showing little kids how to shoot Magnums and they’re saying all the whites should butt out entirely, and they’re advocating armed insurrection—”

  “I never said they had all the answers,” John Howard said. “Not even many of them. A lot of what they say is bullshit. But I think even they know that. It’s saberrattling, to get attention. You can’t do anything without the attention. And they’ve flat got it, especially from the media. We don’t have that anymore. With an organizational structure like theirs, and with the press they’ve got, if we could just move closer together instead of separating into factions like we have—Jesus, SCLC never did have more than a few thousand folks, and never much money, and now that SNCC and CORE have pulled away, we’re like David going up against Goliath, only without the slingshot. All I’m saying is that their side has things we can use, and ours has stuff they need. We need to let them show us what they could do for us. We need to at least listen. We can say no to the guns; they don’t really use them, anyway. I don’t think they’d even push it; I think that’s just bait. I think we may be closer together than we think, them and us.”

  “Wow,” Luke said. “She’s better than I thought.”

  “She never left us that far behind,” John Howard said levelly. “One reason she was down here was to see if there wasn’t some middle ground we could meet on. To see if we could talk. She hasn’t forgotten the Delta, she hasn’t forgotten Lowndes County. They’re not all Sonny Pickens, like I said. Most of them aren’t.”

  “So what are y’all planning to do to bring everybody together?”

  “She’s not planning anything,” John said. “She left this morning to go back home. She’s got a little girl in one of their day care programs in Philadelphia, did you know that? Kimba. She’s three. Her father’s long gone. Juanita’s got more to think about than infiltrating us down here, no matter what some of the troops think.”

  “Well, then, what are you planning?”

  “Nothing. I don’t know. I’m going to talk to Martin about it, though. One thing’s for certain, he’ll listen. That’s more than I can say for Tony and Rosser.”

  Luke stretched. “It seems like such a long time ago. All of it. Like it happened to somebody else. Doesn’t it, to you? Christ, I don’t ever want to be shot at or hosed again, but the spirit in those days—it was something, wasn’t it?”

  “It was something,” John Howard said. The golden eyes were far away. “It was something, that’s for sure…”

  There was a soft tapping on the door, and Luke got up to answer. He opened it and a short, square young black woman came in carrying a crystal platter with a pound cake on it. It was still warm; fragrant steam wafted from it.

  “Miz Strauss sent this for y’all,” she said. “She says save some for your company, Luke.”

  Luke took the platter and put it in the kitchen. The young woman—hardly more than a girl, really, I saw on closer inspection—stood looking at us shyly. She was very black, and her head was wrapped in a bright cotton scarf with an African print, as Juanita’s had been last night. There were dark seed beads around her neck, and big wooden hoops in her ears. She wore bell-bottom blue jeans and a peasant blouse, and had sandals on her stubby, sturdy feet. She could not have been long past her teens.

  “This is Luella Hatfield,” Luke said. “She helps Mrs. Strauss out and does entirely more for me than I deserve. I think she gets extra hardship pay for keeping after my place. I’m teaching her photography and she’s teaching me to sing.”

  “A lost cause,” John Howard said, smiling. “He sings like a forty-dollar mule with the colic. It’s good to meet you, Luella. I’m John Howard.”

  “And this is Smoky O’Donnell,” Luke said.

  The girl gave John and me a sweet, shy smile.

  “You done the Andre piece,” she said. “Luke showed me. I know you from Selma, Mr. Howard.”

  “No kidding,” John Howard said. “Were you marching? You look too young.”

  “No. My daddy wouldn’t let me march till I was sixteen and I wasn’t but fifteen then. I was singin’.”

  “Luella was a Freedom Singer,” Luke said. “You remember Bernice Reagon’s bunch? Those great spirituals and movement songs? She had a bunch she took around the South just to sing, and God, sing they did—I never heard such music. They sang us all across that bridge in Selma. This gal can flat sing; A
retha Franklin hasn’t got anything on her. Folks think there’s an earth-quake when she lets go.”

  “I remember,” John Howard said, smiling. “It was the best singing I ever heard. So did you come up here to sing, or what?”

  “Well, I just came up here after Selma because it was where Dr. King and all y’all were,” she said, ducking her head. “My daddy wanted me to try to get a scholarship and go on to study somewhere, but I knew I had to be up here where y’all were. So I came on up here with my cousin.”

  “Where do you live? Are you studying?” John said. “You ought to be training somewhere—”

  “Not much call for singin’ now, don’t look like,” the girl said. Her smile was sunny and without regret. “And my cousin got married and moved to Columbus. I got a job with Miz Strauss right after that. I live in with her. She’s real good to work for. She gives me money and her daughter’s clothes and all the time off I want. She’s trying to see if somebody in the orchestra can get me some training. Her husband used to be the boss of it, you know.”

  I felt my heart squeeze. From the valiant verges of the Edmund Pettus Bridge, from the ranks of the best and bravest young voices in the country, to a spare room in a white woman’s house and the cast-off clothes of a white girl. It did not seem much of a trade-off.

  I felt my eyes fill. Luke must have seen them. He caught my attention and gave me a stern look and shook his head slightly. Aloud he said, “A person could do worse than work for Mrs. Strauss. She’s a fire-breathing liberal and a soft-hearted romantic at the same time. Luella and I both reap the benefits of that.”

  “Sho do,” Luella said.

  “I’ll ask around at AU. I think maybe we can work out some training for you,” John Howard said. He smiled at her with no suggestion of patronization, no sense of the difference between them. “What was your favorite song? Did you have one?”

  “I always liked ’Eyes on the Prize,’” she said. “You remember that one?”

  “Do I not,” John Howard said. He was silent for a moment, still smiling, as at some lost memory, and then suddenly he closed his eyes and threw his head back and began to sing:

  The only chain that a man can stand

  Is the chain of hand in hand.

  Keep your eyes on the prize,

  Hold on, hold on.

  He had a voice like a great bronze bell, dark and strong and full of the ancient resonances of Africa, the red clay of Southern fields, that gave the spirituals and the songs of the movement their poignance and power. It was a rich voice, timeless, compelling. I stood with my breath held.

  Luella Hatfield clapped her hands and took it up:

  We’re gonna board that old Greyhound,

  Carrying love from town to town.

  Keep your eyes on the prize,

  Hold on, hold on.

  I have never heard a voice like that since that afternoon. It swelled and soared until it filled the room and spilled out into the waning afternoon; it was honey, smoke, crystal, fire, wind, water, earth. My hair stood up at the base of my neck. My spine crawled.

  John moved close to her and put his arm around her and they sang together:

  The only thing we did wrong,

  Stayed in the wilderness a day too long.

  Keep your eyes on the prize,

  Hold on, hold on.

  But the one thing we did right

  Was the day we started to fight.

  Keep your eyes on the prize,

  Hold on, hold on.

  When they stopped, neither Luke nor I spoke. The two intertwined voices seemed to hover in the room like the breath of gods. The silence spun out. From outside, down on the street, came the sound of clapping.

  We clapped too, then, and John Howard and Luella Hatfield hugged and laughed, and she ducked her head and slipped out the screen door.

  “Pleased to meetch’all,” drifted back.

  “‘But the one thing we did right was the day we started to fight,’” John Howard said softly to Luke, and Luke lifted his palms and said, “Who am I to argue with destiny?”

  “’Scuse me,” I mumbled, and went into the bathroom and shut the door and ran the water so that they would not hear me cry.

  13

  I THINK THAT SOMETIMES THE GREAT CHANGES IN OUR LIVES, the ones that divide time, happen so deep down and silently that we don’t even know when they occur. I’ve never been good at sensing them. Only with hindsight can I see clearly that yes, this was such an event, that was such a time. It frequently happens that the seasons of the greatest change are the times that feel the most tranquil, the most suspended, the most…timeless, I guess. But if you could read them, as if on some interior seismograph, you could see the sharp peaks and valleys that marked the tiny, silent earthquakes. I suppose it would save everybody a lot of grief if those seismographs were actual, but of course that’s not the way life works. Not mine, anyway.

  That fall was one of those times. Earthquake season. Miniature earthquakes, of course; largely personal ones, but upheavals, certainly. Alterers of lives. But I did not feel them. I wonder if any of us did, really, in that glorious bronze autumn. Just as I will remember the fall of 1967 as the time that the change began, so will I remember it as the loveliest autumn I have ever seen.

  I think it was because it was my first real autumn. We do not have them in Savannah, not really. On the coast of Georgia and the sea islands of the Carolinas, we get a change of seasons, but it would be hard to think of it as conventional autumn. It is too subtle, too slow to ripen. It stays warm for one thing, though the great, suffocating wet heat of summer withdraws. The sea and sky go deep blue and seem to widen, and the sun turns from white to gold, and the light on the marshes becomes strange and luminous, as tawny as the marshes themselves when the green of summer fades. It is lovely and magical, but it is not, to me, autumn.

  Fall in the foothill country just below the Blue Ridge Mountains is another matter entirely. That year the heat left swiftly, overnight. A gust of cold air from some faraway Canadian peak swept in at the end of September, driving a great rainstorm ahead of it; a wind that first tickled and shivered, then lashed the pallid, dusty trees, summoning from them a booming shouting chorus they—and we—had almost forgotten. Rain then, in buckets, sheets, shrouds, waves, that drenched the matted ghost of grass in the park across the street from Luke’s apartment, and filled the little stream so that it poured over the waterfall in a flood of tea-brown water. Luke and I were caught in it, coming home from the Atlanta Falcons camp on Black Mountain, North Carolina, where he had been photographing the team at practice, and by the time we got the top of the Morgan up, we were soaked and shivering and laughing with the exhilaration of the promise of fall.

  And the next morning, there it was. Waking pressed together in the waterbed, chilly for the first time since I had been sleeping there, we heard the furnace come on in the carriage house, and smelled the familiar, evocative smell of dusty heat. You forget that smell from autumn to autumn, but it means fall to me as surely as the smell of sweet smoke from burning leaves, and the perfume of cold winesap apples bought at roadside stands in the mountains.

  In a few weeks the great sea of hardwoods from which Atlanta is carved was wildfire. Early frost bit the leaves to scarlet and yellow and bronze, and they skirled down like flaming snow all over the city. The air was clean and bronze-blue, and the sky was a color I had never seen before. We could not seem to get enough of the outdoors. On weekends we took the Morgan and packed lunches and drove into the flaming foothills, or simply took sandwiches and thermoses of coffee into the little park across the street and lay on our backs on an old blanket of the widow’s, the air chilly around us but the high sun lying like thick honey on our closed lids. We went to football games, we went to craft shows and folk fairs and flea markets. The Southeastern World’s Fair wheeled by in a Technicolor blur of sawdust and cotton candy; we went to the freak shows and the nude revues and rode everything, and Luke won me a truly dreadful Barbie d
oll look-alike dressed up like Scarlett O’Hara. It was the worst prize he could find in the entire hideous pantheon. When we made love that night, burrowed deep under the nest of blankets and quilts that covered the waterbed now, that smelled of smoke from the fires that we never quite made properly, the Scarlett doll simpered at us from the corner of Luke’s bureau until he got up and draped his shorts over her.

  “Lawdy, Miss Scarlett, you don’t know nothin’ ’bout no fuckin’,” he growled into my neck, and I laughed with joy and a kind of happiness that was deeper and quieter than joy. They say that spring is for lovers, but to me autumn will always be the very living country of love.

  Love? Dear Lord, but I was in love. Teddy had been right; I was impossible. I had thought I had loved people before, but I simply had not known what the word meant. I could not even remember what I had felt for Brad Hunt, and I had thought, for a time, that surely I loved him.

  He had called several times while he was in Huntsville, unable to believe that I would not forgive him that single lapse and I could not think what to say to him that would not hurt him. Finally I had said, badly and without preface, that I was in love with Luke Geary, and he had said that that was quick work even for a couple of micks, and hung up on me. I felt a kind of dim, generic regret, but mostly relief. Nothing, now, stood between me and Luke.

  Teddy said more than once that fall that many people went all their lives and never felt what I felt for Lucas Geary, and did very well, and maybe, in the long run, better with lesser passions. It was her fond but exasperated contention that I had turned as stupid as a sheep with my feelings for him, though I tried very hard, when I thought about it, not to allow this consuming new emotion to affect my work. I suppose it did, though; how could it not have? I was not at all the same person I had been before the night at La Carrousel, not even remotely. That person was untouched. This one was used, involved, consumed. It had to show.

  I did not see him nearly as much as I had before, certainly not every day. We soon found that there had to be, as Kahlil Gibran said in The Prophet, spaces in our togetherness. Otherwise I think the intensity might have burnt up something vital and healthy in both of us. It certainly would have annoyed the people around us badly; almost everyone in Downtown’s orbit knew about Luke and me, and almost no one seemed sanguine about it. No one wished us ill, I don’t think, except perhaps Matt, who openly disliked the relationship. But it seemed to unsettle everyone who was a part of that tight, shining entity known as Comfort’s People. Everybody in the inner circle grumped or teased or laughed about Luke and me. I remembered what Teddy had said, in one of the first talks we had ever had together: that Comfort’s People did not have interrelationships, but were faithful to the whole. I had not paid a great deal of attention at the time; it had not, then, occurred to me that I would ever want to be anything but one of Comfort’s People. Now, I wondered peevishly, when Teddy rolled her eyes or Hank jibed at me or Matt bellowed in frustration when he needed Luke and found him in my office or gone entirely, why it was not possible to be Luke Geary’s person as well as one of Matt Comfort’s. We had both begun as Matt’s people. But the part of me that was not drowned in Luke knew, wearily and well, that it was not. I realized many times that fall that we had broken the code, but it was beyond me to care.