That night, they had had prime rib for dinner and key lime pie for dessert at The Club, courtesy of one of his farm friends, who was a member.
They had gotten to the auditorium in plenty of time to take their seats. She loved Nat King Cole, wanted especially to hear “Mona Lisa” and “Stardust.” The audience had been full of college-age kids—up from the university in Tuscaloosa for the evening. Some had driven over from the college in Auburn. It had made him and Mary feel like kids again. They were smiling and holding hands.
The lights had dimmed; Nat King Cole had walked onstage to tremendous applause—standing ovations and cheering. They all loved Nat King Cole. He was a native son. He had launched into his first song. Charles could never remember what that was. He was about to sing his second song, “Mona Lisa.” Charles remembered that because the orchestra had been playing the introduction, lulling them into the wonderful mood. And then suddenly, out of nowhere, three rednecks had come rushing up onstage. For a split second, no one knew what was happening. They grabbed Nat King Cole and started beating him. Charles remembered seeing one of them throw a punch to his stomach. The whole audience was momentarily dumbstruck and then screaming for somebody to do something. Police had rushed onstage and dragged the white boys off. Nat King Cole didn’t appear to be terribly hurt. He had left the stage. As they sat there with the rest of the audience, absorbing what had happened, Mary had become enraged. Charles’s stomach had tied itself in knots, feeling the blows. The whole evening, the joy of the entire trip—all was instantly washed away.
She had dropped his hand, had practically thrown it back at him. “I can’t believe you disgusting rednecks.” She had turned on him as if it were all his fault. “How can you put up with people like that? Aren’t you even civilized down here?” The more she talked, the more outraged she became. It turned into a tirade against everything she had had to put up with since she had left her home and come to live in his. People around them were staring.
“My Lord, Mary. Do you think I’m responsible for that? Do you think I would ever condone anything like that? If it were up to me, nothing like that would ever happen.”
She didn’t want to hear him. She kept on and on, venting frustrations she must have felt for years. This weekend had been meant to soften those frustrations. It had, but by using Charles as the battering ram.
Eventually, Nat King Cole had come back onstage. They had all clapped, standing on chairs and cheering—shouts of “The show must go on.” He had stood before them until the noise died down and then had said—not with malice, but in the most unassuming way—that he was an Alabama boy. He had just come to entertain them. Despite himself, tears had welled up in Charles’s eyes when Nat King Cole said that—that he was an Alabama boy. Charles, whose whole life was anchored in a strip of land along the river to the north. He had imagined the disgrace of not being welcomed in your own homeland. Then Nat King Cole canceled the concert and walked off the stage. Some few in the audience, Mary included, had immediately clapped at his canceling the show. Others were still speechless at what had gone on.
Although they had planned to stay the night, they canceled their reservation, packed, and drove home. Mary had regained her equilibrium somewhat on the ride back and had apologized to him, had said she knew it wasn’t his fault. She knew he had worked so hard to make it a perfect weekend.
Much later, they had even smiled when they remembered her outrage. It was so unlike her. But it had stayed with him, the Nat King Cole night. And lately it had been coming back more frequently: the punch in the stomach, the stringy, thin-faced rednecks thinking, in some grotesque world, that they were being heroes. Flashes of light illuminated the scenes one by one. He would wake breathing hard, sweat-soaked, and trying to sustain the thought that if it had been up to him, nothing like that would ever happen.
He knew the election was the thing that was making him revisit the Nat King Cole trip. Lately, he had been neglecting everything to work on the election.
CHAPTER 33
Izzy and Lou Ann
BY MIDSUMMER, four others had joined Maudie’s voting school. Two were men from the foundry. They had heard Jessie say that they could learn how to write a check. They would come, missing a class now and then, more interested in knowledge acquired to help them in everyday living than the once-a-year ritual of voting. Maudie liked them, felt at ease with them. They followed her instructions without question.
The other two—Maudie had been astounded when they appeared—were Izzy and Lou Ann, the girls from the drive-in. One night, halfway through class, the front door had suddenly been flung open and in they swished, the aromas of Evening in Paris and Juicy Fruit swirling about them. Everyone stared, which didn’t seem an unusual occurrence to them. They stared back.
“Miss Maudie done invited us to come, when we seen her at the drive-in with Carlie, so here we is.” They stood for an instant in the shadows just outside the circle of light, waiting to see if that reasoning would fly, and in the drop-jawed moment Maudie gaped at them, they must have decided it was her acceptance and so proceeded to step closer, spiked heels finding every crack in the sanctuary floor. The men—grinning—looked from woman to women and back again, thinking they might be the ones designated to throw them out. Izzy and Lou Ann recognized the looks. “We a woman, just like she a woman. We got a right.” And they settled themselves in front pews, stretching skirts down to decent levels.
Watching them, Maudie realized she needed every warm body she could muster for voting school, even if only lukewarm. She instructed them to take seats at one of the two tables that were now in the sanctuary. They jumped up, grinning, and proceeded to fuss over the chair next to Roy Boy. Izzy, being the stronger, won out. After she had jerked the chair away from Lou Ann, she went demure, crossing long, bony legs, adjusting a bra strap, smiling at Roy Boy. Lou Ann settled for a chair at the end of the table.
Maudie continued with the lesson, but for the remainder of class she had to talk over the constant smacking of Juicy Fruit. When class was finally over, she thought she must establish some ground rules, so she asked the girls to stay for a moment after the others had gone. There was a look of hesitation. “Can’t stay if we wanna get a ride. Roy Boy say he—” Roy Boy said he and Mr. Calvin would wait on them in the car.
“Now there’s one thing I don’t allow in my class,” she began, trying to say it with authority, in a way that wouldn’t elicit smart remarks—of the drive-in variety. “It’s about the Juicy Fruit.”
Their eyes immediately turned bright, and Lou Ann said, “Ain’t it something? Got it off a fellow we—” Izzy punched her. “Let’s us just say it was give to us by a gentleman we done a favor to . . . for.” The grins broadened into giggles, each poking the other.
“Never had none before,” Lou Ann said. “Smell just like perfume, don’t it?” Suddenly, Izzy slapped her knee, realizing why they had been kept after school. “She be wanting a piece,” she said to Lou Ann. “Look there in your purse, Lou Ann, see can we spare one.” Lou Ann pulled the strings to open the top of an evening bag that had seen better days, remnants of fake-pearl stitching hanging off its sides.
“Got three left. We give you one.”
Maudie stood holding the stick of Juicy Fruit as the girls waved bye and ran to catch their ride, sure now that they had bought their way into voting class—familiar as they were with bartering favors.
Later, Jessie held up his hands to ward off her suspicions. “Didn’t have nothing to do with them girls coming. Told me they heard refreshments was served at the voting school.”
“Well, who then? Carlie?”
“Now don’t go bad-mouthing Carlie. They just cotton girls. Izzy and Lou Ann don’t know nothing but the fields. Born and raised in the cotton fields. That’s all they know.”
“That’s not all they know.”
“Why, Miss Maudie, what’s you talking, and you a schoolteacher.”
“I think Carlie sent them.”
�
��If she did, it’d be to get shed of ’em. Probably stay awhile, get bored and leave.”
But they didn’t leave. Izzy and Lou Ann said they believed it was time for them to get some schooling. Their calloused hands with the split, dirt-imbedded nails would grip the pencil each held, both trying mightily to imitate the others and sometimes succeeding. The men were tolerant, smiling at one another when Izzy and Lou Ann walked in late, talking and smelling loud. Sometimes, the class could hear a car pull away after dropping them off. Other times, the girls would stand holding on to the front door of the church, slipping back into their high heels before coming forward. When they couldn’t get a ride, they walked to class barefooted. The cotton girls had found a new home.
Jessie had come early and put two plates of Miss Laura’s cookies in the middle of the tables in the sanctuary. The members of the class had come to know one another enough that conversation was not stilted. Sitting in and on the edges of the spread of light from the naked bulbs, they talked and waited for Calvin and Roy Boy. Izzy and Lou Ann sat at the far end of the table, an empty chair between them. They took special care to have a place reserved for Mr. Calvin. They liked looking at Roy Boy, but they had heard tales of Mr. Calvin’s bank money.
Roy Boy and Mr. Calvin arrived half an hour late. “We liable to commence without you.” Jessie had taken it upon himself to chastise anyone who was late or who might start to doze off during class, no matter how hard their day had been. “Miss Maudie”—he had started calling her that in front of the others—“don’t have no time to waste on people being late.”
Maudie had been standing there with a copy of the voter-registration papers. She was trying to bring up the subject of registering—for a third time. “I heard on the news the other night that there’s a man running for governor this time—against Wallace—a white man wants to treat everybody more equal, and if you registered to vote, then you might—”
There were immediate hoots and shaking of heads. “What rock you been hiding under, Miss Maudie?”
“Only white man I’d vote for done been crucified long time ago,” one of the foundry men said.
“And if I recall correct,” the other one added, “he wasn’t laid low by no colored, neither.”
She persisted. “They say he’s from down in the middle of the state, near Tuscaloosa. If you had the vote—”
More hoots and laughter, “Oh, now you talking. Tuscaloosa got the biggest Ku Klux in the whole state. He probably the chief Klux.”
And Izzy, “Thought this here was real school—didn’t know it was no fairy-tale school.”
And Lou Ann, “You ain’t nothing but right, girl.”
Maudie glared at them but decided to let it drop, for now.
Mr. Calvin sat down. “Sorry we late. We was delivering the float paper by the courthouse. Boss give it to us when we was headed out the door, had to drive all the way back in town to drop it off.”
One of the other foundry men leaned back in his chair—Ed, from up around Crossroads, who was married and had six children. “What kinda float we having this year? Old lady Peters gonna pretend she Miss America and fall off the thing again?” The other men began to snicker. “That white woman musta been drinking for two days ’fore she got up on that float.”
“A parade?” Maudie asked.
“Parade at the end of the summer,” Roy Boy said, “suppose to honor the working. Anybody can make up a float, and we all get off work to go watch. Got cotton candy, American flags all stuck up and down the lampposts, hot dogs for sale out on the street. Anybody can buy one and eat it.”
“What did you mean, ‘Anybody can make up a float’? Who enters?” She was looking down at the voter-registration papers. What if she sat here all summer and came away with one person having a bank account and the others only learning to read the signs at the drive-in?
“Oh Lord,” Mr. Calvin said, “she gonna get us in trouble now.” He reached over and took a cookie off the plate and pointed it at her. “I see that look in her eye. Done seen it the day we was at the bank and she start gathering up the money off the banking table.”
“We could have a float sponsored by the voter-registration school.”
“I told you she was gonna get us in trouble.”
“He say anybody can make up floats,” Jessie said. “Didn’t say no colored anybody.”
The cotton girls could immediately see the possibilities. “I could use me a ride on a float. Everybody get to ride?”
“How do you register to enter a float?”
“Got to go down and take one of them papers off the counter at the courthouse and fill it out and go back and drop it in the box,” Roy Boy said. “Me and Mr. Calvin done it the past five, six years. It don’t change. You get a parade number when you turn it in and pay five bucks. Then you bring in your float on the day of the parade, hand the number to the man, and he tell you where to line up.”
“How’ll they know what we’re gonna do?” Maudie asked. “We just get a number and the day of the parade we show up—that’s all?”
“If you pay the five dollars,” Mr. Calvin said. “You get the number and show up—nothing to it.”
All eyes turned to Mr. Calvin. He was not unhappy with his new reputation as a rich man, now that all his money was out of harm’s way. He patted the knees of the cotton girls. “Well, all right then, long as y’all let me be the Miss America.” The girls giggled, wiggled hips and hit on Mr. Calvin’s shoulder.
Even as she had said it, Maudie was standing it up next to sit-ins in North Carolina, or Freedom rides in south Alabama—some kind of shabby homemade thing they might build. “We need to enter, since we haven’t gotten around to registering anybody, and we don’t have long to go before Izzy and Lou Ann have to start back picking. This’ll be our voter-registration project.” When they didn’t say anything, she hurried on. “There’s just one thing. We can’t tell anybody we’re doing this. Everybody will be coming round here minding our business, messing with our float.
“What you ’spect, we ain’t gonna tell Reverend Earl, and the float sitting right here in the backyard?” Jessie said. “And peoples coming to church every Sunday?”
They all watched her, standing there staring at the obvious. She sat down in the nearest chair and picked up the registration papers, fingering them. “Okay, we’ll tell everybody we’re making something else. We’re making a place behind the church to show people how to register. That’s what the float really is anyway. People coming to register to vote, only we won’t tell them it’s going to end up being in the parade. We’ll tell them it’s just a model, a place to come see what it’s like to vote.”
The next week, Roy Boy brought the form to class. Mr. Calvin produced, with great flourish, the five-dollar bill needed to complete the entry.
“Wait till they see us riding down River Street. The colored band marches, but they ain’t never seen no colored float. Gonna be white floats all up and down and us in the middle. I’m gonna have a time waving to y’all up there,” Roy Boy said.
“What’s this ‘waving at y’all’ stuff? We’re all going to be on it,” Maudie said.
A silence fell across the room. The cotton girls looked sideways at Mr. Calvin. The reality of actually getting on the float was not as fun as imagining it. Jessie watched the pencil in his hand tapping the table.
Ed, from the foundry, spoke up. “This crazy. Where we gonna get a truck at? Where we gonna keep it while we get it ready?”
“Where we gonna get the money?”
“What money?” Maudie said. “We don’t need money. We can use what we got—old barn boards, things like that—maybe spend a little for crepe paper.”
They looked other places—out the window, down at the floor.
“Can’t write no signs,” Lou Ann mumbled.
“Ain’t got no big paper,” Izzy said.
“We can get poster paper. We can borrow a truck from somebody in the church. I can teach you how to do the signs.”
She hit the floor with her crutch. It only made them turn away more. She would evoke the one thing they would all have to heed. “I think the Lord gave us this chance,” she said. “Here it is right in our laps.”
“What if peoples start throwing things at us? Can’t take no more hits on the head,” Roy Boy said.
“What if peoples laugh at us?” Lou Ann said.
They were all looking at anything other than Maudie. She began to stack papers and pencils on the table. “All right, we’ll think about it. Either you want to do it or not.” She squared the pieces of paper until they were perfectly stacked, hoping for a response. “What I want to know is, what were you coming here for in the first place? Did you want to know how to read and count money and then be reading about where you can’t go—be wishing you had money to count? Don’t you wanna go to a bank and not be laughed at?” She slammed all the papers down and took her crutch from the back of the chair, surprised at how adamant she was about this. “Are y’all always going to be sitting behind the split-rail fence listening to—to somebody else’s music?”
The foundry men looked at Jessie. “What she talking—a split-rail fence?”
“Don’t pay her no mind. She talking crazy.”
Maudie pulled up out of her chair, weary with prodding.
“Now just hold on here,” Mr. Calvin said. “I think Sister Maudie got something here. The Lord done seen fit to visit this here on us. We be in a lot more trouble if we don’t listen to what He say.” Slowly, and for effect, he reached for his hat and rose up out of his chair. “Now here’s my thinking. We gonna think about it, like Miss Maudie say, but come next week, I’m gonna come on back in here with this five-dollar bill to put down on the float papers.” He winked at the cotton girls. “Might even pick y’all up some of that fancy colored paper while I’m at it.” He glanced at Jessie before he walked out the door. “Come on, Roy Boy. Done all we gonna do tonight.”
The Summer We Got Saved Page 23
