Downtown

by Anne Rivers Siddons

  “Is it Alicia, do you think, and Tom? What?”

  He shrugged. “Don’t know. He’s got a darkness in him. Tom and Hank have told me about some times before, when he just sort of…went away. I don’t think he ever actually went out of the office though. If he’s not back tomorrow I’m going over there.”

  But he was. On the Friday before Christmas Matt was in his office when we all came in, drinking coffee and spitting orders into his dictating machine, rattling his change and watch, bellowing obscene verses to the cloying Christmas carols that seeped from the Muzak. He seemed to me thinner than ever, and there were purselike bags under his eyes, and an unhealthy flush on his sharp cheekbones. But he was freshly shaved and smelled of some piney new aftershave, and the chestnut hair was combed wetly in place, and the miserably wrinkled blue oxford cloth shirt still had a price sticker on the collar. The office bloomed again, like the Christmas rose the treacly tenor on the Muzak was singing about. Matt finally threw a cupholder at the speaker just outside his office. It was, I noticed, a yellow one, one of the chamber’s. Sueanne dodged it and grinned and got up and turned the Muzak down.

  We did indeed have lunch at the Top of Peachtree, the whole staff, boycotting the chamber’s Christmas party upstairs. When Sueanne questioned the wisdom of that, Matt said, “Which had you rather do, get drunk on champagne at the Top with the most fascinating people in town, or stand around up there drinking Kool-Aid and lime sherbet punch and eating those goddamned mouse turds the secretaries bring in, watching Culver in a Santy Claus hat handing out fruit baskets?”

  “Sorry I asked,” Sueanne said, grinning.

  “Will we get any flak from Mr. Carnes?” I asked Matt.

  “You won’t,” he said. “Only me, and I don’t give a happy rat’s ass. Anyway, I can guarantee that he’ll have forgotten it when we come back from Christmas.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I know.”

  And so we went to the Top of Peachtree, and drank a great deal of champagne, and ate until our sides ached, and laughed, and wished each other Merry Christmas, and kissed each other fondly, and at last started out into the elevator lobby, laden with the gifts we had chosen for each other, full of champagne and joy.

  Matt stayed behind at the table.

  “I’m meeting somebody,” he said. “Guy couldn’t make it any other time. Y’all go on. Merry Christmas. Bah, humbug.”

  When we went out of the room I looked back over my shoulder. Matt was lifting one finger for the waiter.

  Luke caught my look.

  “Don’t ask,” he said, and I did not. But some of the joy seeped out of the day. Downstairs, on the street, the sky was overcast, and the raw, wet smell was back in the air. The clouds had come in fast.

  “Oh, no,” I said. “Ice. And the concert’s tonight.”

  Sleet had begun to fall when we got to the Atlanta University campus, but it was not sticking to the pavement. It rimed the campus grass and shrubbery, though, looking pretty and festive with the lights from Sisters’ Chapel spilling out onto it. The weather had not thinned the crowd. Cars were everywhere, and when we reached the chapel, jogging to escape the needlelike sting of the sleet, it was clotted with people, streaming in from the cold or settling into their seats like brightly feathered birds. The beautiful chapel blazed with candles and smelled gloriously of the pine and cedar boughs that decorated the altar and choir loft and the edges of the pews. I noticed too, the smell of dusty hymnals and worn plush carpet that seemed indigenous to all the churches of my childhood, and the somehow exotic smell of wet wool and perfume. Only the bass note of the incense was missing. It seemed strange.

  It was a quiet crowd, hushed, as was proper for a church at this holiest of seasons, but a pleasant one, friendly. There were more black faces than white, but not so many. Whole sections of the auditorium were given over to white families. Most blacks and whites were dressed for church, in sober suits and bright holiday silks, but there were sprinklings of African dress, too: dashikis, djellabas, beads, batiks. And there was more of the plumage of the hip young than you would have expected to find in a church: miniskirts, smock dresses, turtlenecks, here and there a Nehru jacket. Here and there, also, you saw bell-bottom jeans and ragged vests, and furs—mink, persian lamb, raccoon, orange-dyed rabbit—were everywhere. It was a truly eclectic crowd, just the sort, I thought, that you would get on a college campus in any large city. I felt ecumenical and integrated and very pleased with myself and the night. But I noticed that the wedges of black and white faces, though they nodded and smiled pleasantly to each other, were not intermingled.

  We were a little late, and the auditorium was largely filled. Down at the very front, a small section of seats was vacant, as you would see at a wedding, waiting to be occupied by the bride’s and groom’s families. On the row behind it there were only a few people. John Howard was one of them. Luke moved down the aisle toward him, and I followed, and when we reached his row I saw that the empty block in front of him was corded off with red velvet ropes.

  I slid in beside Luke. On his other side, John nodded remotely to us, but did not speak. He wore the blue three-piece suit I had seen at Thanksgiving, and except for his nod to us, he looked steadily ahead at the empty choir loft. I thought that he could easily model for Esquire or Gentlemen’s Quarterly, the way he looked this evening, except there was something coiled and forbidding in the sharp-planed face, something unsettling and near dangerous. And the scar…. No. John Howard would not sell many suits.

  “How’d you manage that?” Luke whispered to him, gesturing at the roped-off seats.

  “Said I had some out-of-town VIPs,” John said briefly.

  “Christ, I bet they’re looking for the editorial board of the New York Times,” Luke whispered back, grinning, and John Howard gave him a reluctant grin in return.

  “Surprise, surprise,” he said.

  “You saving this row, too?” Luke said.

  “Just for some of the sisters, if they decide to come,” John Howard said. “There won’t be many of them, if any. They don’t march. A few are here, but I’m not looking for them. Don’t be surprised if they don’t embrace you with open arms, though, if any of them do show.”

  I wondered if Juanita was in Atlanta. I thought she probably was.

  “I have a feeling not much is going to surprise me tonight,” Luke said.

  “Probably not,” John Howard said. He looked at Luke’s coat, draped over the back of the seat.

  “You got a camera?”

  “Yeah, but it’s just a little one,” Luke said. “Don’t worry. I’ll look just like all the folks who’ve come to take pictures of their chirrun singing.”

  “Yeah, right,” John Howard said. He smiled again, briefly, and turned his eyes back to the choir loft. He did not look at us again. He might, I thought, have been a bronze statue; his skin shone in the flickering candlelight, and he was very still.

  I stood up once, to shed my coat, and Luke reached up and helped me out of it, and laid it over his. Before I sat back down, I looked around at the crowd behind me. In the sea of faces I saw, as if my eyes had been drawn to them by a magnet, Brad Hunt and his family, sitting about halfway down on the aisle. Beside Brad was a blonde girl with long, smooth hair drawn back into a blue satin bow. She was indistinguishable from many of the girls I had met in Atlanta who were Teddy’s schoolmates at Westminster, and I knew that I had not met her, but knew her anyway. She would be an executive secretary in a bank, live at home, do volunteer work for the Junior League, be good at tennis. She looked at me and dropped her eyes. So did Brad, a long, unreadable look, before he dropped his own.

  On his other side, Marylou Hunt, stark and shining in black, did not drop hers. Triumph fairly radiated from them, and she smiled, a small, V-shaped smile such as you see on archaic Greek and Roman statues. It must be a real occasion of triumph for her; vindication. Here I sat, her avowed enemy, in the company of a dangerous-looking black man and a wild-bearded h
ippie. I smiled back and sat down. My heart was pounding with simple shock. I did not care if Brad and his family attended the Spelman-Morehouse concert, but I had not expected to see them. It stood to reason, though, I thought, smoothing my sleet-mussed mop of curls off my face, that sooner or later, in this intimate city, I would run into Brad Hunt. I hoped, I think genuinely, that the girl beside him was a serious friendship. I still felt vaguely guilty about Brad, though it made little sense.

  The choir was late coming in, and the crowd rustled and whispered restlessly. Coughs peppered the silence. The house lights flickered once, then, and the crowd settled back in their pews like a flock of birds coming to earth. There were many smiles in anticipation of the choir’s marching in.

  And then there was the sound of the closed auditorium doors opening, and a great wind of sound started up in the back of the church and swept down toward the front: whispering, in-drawn breaths, more movement. And the Black Panthers came in.

  They came two by two, in military formation, grouped according to height, in perfect silence. They wore black leather jackets and turtlenecks and black pants and black boots, and the familiar, yet exotic, berets crowned sculptured Afros. Most wore wire-rimmed sunglasses and they all wore bandoliers, and though there were no guns in sight—Luke had said there would be none carried—the sense of them was as cold and steel-heavy as the reality of them would have been. They made no sound and looked neither to the right nor left, and they seemed to swallow sound as they came down the center aisle, so that, behind them, they left a trail of perfect silence. I thought that they looked somehow beautiful and terrifying at the same time, in the flickering candlelight and the trailing silence. They broke ranks to file into the two rows ahead of us, still in perfect formation, and remained standing until all of them were in place. Then, at a nod from the tallest, they all sat. They did not look around at John Howard, nor at the crowd, nor anywhere at all except toward the empty choir loft.

  There were no women with them or behind them.

  “Holy shit,” Luke breathed, and lifted the little Leica to his eyes and began to shoot.

  I did not reply. It was difficult for me to get my breath. Behind us, the church was as silent as if the audience had drawn in a single great breath and not released it.

  The conductor came in then. He stared for a long time at the two rows of blacks in front of the church, then at John Howard, and then nodded at the piano player and organist, seated at twin instruments below him.

  The great, golden strains of “Come, All Ye Faithful” crashed out, and the choir came marching in from the wings on either side of the risers set up for them, singing as they came: “Oh come, all ye faithful, joyful and triumphant, oh come ye, oh come ye, to Bethlehem…”

  The voices filled the auditorium and soared toward the icy skies outside, and my skin crawled, and tears came into my eyes. They were transcendent, the perfectly joined voices of these young black students in their festival robes, with a dusky richness, a resonance, a deep loneliness lacking in even the most cultivated white voices. Another collective breath was drawn in the chapel, and then I knew that it was going to be all right. The young voices owned the night; they had a power beyond any that might be generated from the crowd below them, even the double row of darkness at the front. In their seats, the Panthers did not move. They kept their eyes on the singers. I wondered what they felt. I did not think that they could possibly be unmoved.

  It was not a long concert. There was no intermission. We sat silent as they sang traditional hymns, spirituals, folk songs, African anthems, solos. I was entranced; I did not even notice as Luke shot and reloaded, shot and reloaded. There was the soft lightning of many flashbulbs behind me in the audience. The young singers had friends and family in abundance. I recognized the music critic from the Atlanta Constitution sitting across the center aisle from us, scribbling busily. Beside him, a press photographer shot unobtrusively, too. I was sure that the Panthers were getting by far the most film, but they gave no sign that they noticed. They were perfectly still, perfectly quiet, perfectly attentive. It was almost possible to forget they were there. Almost.

  The next to the last song listed in the program was simply “Solo,” and a spotlight followed a small, sturdy figure in a simple black evening dress out onto the stage. With a shock of joy I saw that it was Luella Hatfield. She stood alone in the spotlight, hands clasped loosely in front of her, head bowed. And then she lifted her head and sang, without accompaniment: “Go tell it on the mountain, over the fields and everywhere…. Go tell it on the mountain…that Jesus Christ is born….”

  The crowd gasped and broke into spontaneous applause. It went on and on. Her voice was as I had remembered it: a pure and stunning element of nature. She stood quietly smiling until the applause stopped and then went on. The piano and organ swelled behind her. When she finished, the audience was on its feet, clapping, whistling, shouting. It was a most unchurchlike reaction, and the only one possible for the voice of Luella Hatfield. In front of us the Panthers stood and clapped too, as hard as anyone. Flashbulbs bloomed.

  “Oh, John,” I whispered, tears trembling on my lower lashes. He did not turn to look at me, but I saw the corners of his mouth lift in a little smile.

  After that the chorus led the audience in “Silent Night,” and then, without a pause, segued into “We Shall Overcome.” I don’t know why it took me so by surprise. I imagine all concerts in black churches and halls ended with it in those days. I stood holding Luke’s hand, his other hand linked in John Howard’s, and swayed with the crowd, and felt my heart rise out of my body and my tears spill over as we sang: “Deep in my heart…I do believe…that we shall overcome some day.”

  What if I had never come up here from Savannah? I thought. What if I had never had a chance to do this? I will never forget this moment as long as I live.

  In front of me the Panthers stood at respectful attention, but they did not clasp hands, and they did not sing.

  Over it all the joyous voice of Luella Hatfield rode like a great golden flute.

  When the last note had faded, lying like smoke in the still air, no one moved in their seat. It was as if no one wanted to break the tender, perfect skin of the night. Everyone sat silently for another moment, and then the Panthers rose in a unit and filed out of their rows and back up the aisle, two by two, tall and black and royal in their silence. Not one of them, I thought, had made a sound the entire evening, except to clap.

  Only then did the crowd rise from their seats and reach for their coats and begin to laugh and chat with their neighbors. It was as if a cadre of great black birds of prey had hovered over a woodland for a time, done no harm, and moved on. Only then did life come back into the forest. By the time I had risen and turned to face the departing audience, the Panthers were nowhere in sight, gone out the great double doors onto the porch.

  “Well, it went off pretty smoothly, didn’t it?” I said to John Howard. “Where will they go now?”

  “Back to their bus,” he said. “They’ll be riding all night. They’ve got to be in Montgomery in the morning.”

  “What for?”

  “Going to do a Bar Mitzvah over there,” he said, and I stared at him before I realized he was teasing me. He smiled a little, but he did not take his eyes off the door and the crowd moving toward it.

  “Do you think you got anything?” I said to Luke, as he helped me into my coat.

  “Not a lot. Maybe some good stuff of faces—” he began. The first sound broke in then.

  It was a confused babel of sound, like a crowd scene in an old movie, spotty and inconsequential, but definitely not the sound of an ordinary crowd leaving a concert. Then shouts rang out, and the thumping and rustling of many feet, and a shrill female scream, and then others. I turned to ice; I could not move.

  The double doors burst open and the crowd, that had been streaming out into the night, stampeded back into the church. Men shouted hoarsely; women screamed; here and there the silvery shrie
k of a small child tore over the other sounds. The crowd eddied and swarmed like a living thing, surging back down the aisles toward us, away from the outside. I could see lights out there, brighter than anything I could imagine, seeming to bounce off the spinning wisps of fog and ice that fell steadily into the light, and a deep, monotonous chugging, like the beating of a great inhuman heart. Ringing, metallic shouts rose over the noise of the crowd. It was only long seconds later that I realized someone was using a bullhorn.

  Luke leaped onto the pew and strained to see over the milling crowd.

  “That motherfucking Boy has called out the troopers,” he said in a strangely calm voice. “They’ve got a goddamned riot going on out there. Holy Mother of God, somebody should shoot him.”

  He leaped down off the seat and took off up the aisle without looking back. I started after him, screaming “Luke, Luke, don’t! Wait, don’t go out there…”

  He could not have heard me. Without a backward look he was swallowed up into the crowd trying to press back into the safety of the auditorium. I stood numbly, hands pressed to my mouth, staring at the place he had vanished. As if in slow motion, as if in the clarity of a dream, or a drugged state, I thought, this is only the first time. All my life, if I spend it with him, I will stand in a crowd watching him rush away into danger, without ever looking back at me….

  Beside me John Howard stood stone still, and I turned to him.

  “John, go get him,” I said in a silly small voice. “You can get through. I’m afraid something’s going to happen to him….”

  He did not look at me. He did not move. He stood staring toward the door. His face was as gray as dead ashes. His mouth was open. His eyes looked as if he had been blinded.

  We heard the shots then, first one and then a stuttering stitchery of them, and more screams, and, far away, the first shrill keening of an incoming siren. John Howard’s body jerked as if he had been hit by the bullets, and he gave a great, guttural wordless cry and started forward, clumsily, as if he could not make his arms and legs work properly.