Roscoe got me home and forced me to stay. “You ain’t going nowhere,” he said. “Not to your office, not to Atlanta. Nowhere.”
“Roscoe, I have—“
“Tomorrow, Smokey,” he said. “See how you’re doing tomorrow.”
And then he left me with my television set, to watch the rest of the rioting. I wasn’t supposed to sleep for the next eight hours, and I don’t think I did, not while watching Memphis eat itself alive.
Thomas Withers had succeeded, the bastard. He had turned a non-violent event into something unrecognizable, something Memphis had never seen before.
Looters were all over the city. Fires started in most of the Loeb’s Laundries, the mayor’s family business. Students were held outside Booker T. Washington School, and the rumor that started it all, that a girl had been killed at Hamilton High, had a basis in fact. She had, indeed, been shot. She simply hadn’t died.
There was only one riot-related death, a seventeen-year-old boy whose name they weren’t releasing pending notification of next of kin. I knew he was black, because the reporters kept referring to him as a looter rather than a victim, the perpetrator of his own death at the hands of police.
I hoped like hell it wasn’t Joe. But I was afraid it was, so afraid that I called the police department to get some information.
They told me the boy’s name was Larry Payne. They asked me if I knew his next of kin.
I did not.
My phone rang twice that afternoon. The first time was Laura, relieved to hear my voice.
“I thought maybe you’d been hurt,” she said.
I didn’t tell her my head ached and they were worried I had a concussion. “I’m glad you missed this,” I said.
“I’m sorry to say I am too.”
She hung up shortly after that. We had a lot to say to each other, but we weren’t ready to say it. We had to wait until I went to Atlanta, until things calmed down.
The second time the phone rang, it was Jimmy, his high pitched voice even higher.
“I ain’t heard from Joe, nobody’s heard from Joe, and someone died,” he said, all in a rush.
“The dead boy,” I said slowly, “is Larry Payne.”
“Larry?” he whispered and I heard relief in that word. Relief and something else.
“You knew him?”
It took Jimmy a moment to answer. “Yeah,” he said. He took an audible breath. He wanted to honor Larry, but he was more concerned about his brother. “And Joe?”
“I saw him, but not enough to talk to.”
“How come?”
“It was a little crazy there.”
Jimmy didn’t respond to that. His breathing was loud and strained, as if he had been panicking all day.
He probably had been.
Finally, he said, “You sound funny.”
“I got conked on the head. Pain pills,” I said.
“Oh.” A pause, then, “You okay?”
“Yes,” I said.
He made a small sound, between a sob and a moan. Then he said, “I’m scared, Smokey.”
“Yeah,” I said softly. “There’d be something wrong with you if you weren’t. You stay inside, with that nice family, all right? Promise me.”
“But Joe—”
“Joe can take care of himself.”
“You sure?”
“I’m positive,” I said. “It’ll be all right, Jimmy.”
It wasn’t until I hung up that I realized I had finally uttered one of those platitudes to him, one of those I vowed I would never say.
Sirens wailed all over the city. As darkness fell, things seemed to get worse. I could go to my window and see the orange lick of flames against the dark skies. We wouldn’t know all the damage until the next day, but it was already becoming clear: Memphis would never be the same.
Even the interior of my house smelled of smoke. About 2:00 a.m., after the last television station displayed its test pattern as it played the “Star Spangled Banner,” I took another one of the pain pills the doctor had given me and wandered off to bed.
The sirens and flames filled my dreams. I kept hearing Martin’s voice, saying “I still stand by nonviolence” as he looked at me, blaming me. “I didn’t expect to see you here,” he would say, and I would say, “I’m here now,” although that felt wrong. Joe was standing behind Martin with a brick, and as Martin spoke, Joe threw the brick. Martin ducked and the brick hit me in the head, and Roscoe said, “Keep going. Keep going. If they catch us now, they gonna arrest us.” So we kept moving, and the sirens kept going all through the night.
I woke at dawn covered with sweat and sticky dark flakes of dried blood that I hadn’t cleaned off when I got home. My head throbbed as if I had a hangover. I staggered out of bed and went into the bathroom.
The face that stared at me wasn’t that much different from the one I had seen the previous morning. The resident’s neat stitches made it look as if someone had drawn a line in my curls with magic marker.
I splashed water on myself and then made myself shower. I got dressed slowly, set the pain pills aside, and took an aspirin since aspirin didn’t befuddle my brain. Then I made myself eat.
The sirens had ended. That must have been what woke me up. But smoke hung over the city like a pall. I couldn’t stay in the house. I had to get out, had to make sure everything was all right.
I got into my car and drove back to Beale Street. As I did, the radio kept me company, reciting the grim news: 155 stores had been damaged or destroyed, sixty people were injured—more, I assumed, if others had done as I did—and two hundred and eighty, all black, were in jail.
The National Guard had tanks on Hernando Street. They drove slowly, sweeping the area, the white boys in uniform holding their guns like they wanted to use them. There were a handful of cars out already, but only a handful, at a time of day when the streets should have been crowded. Police also guarded each corner, some of them holding nonstandard hunting rifles. Memphis looked like a town at war, which I guess it was.
The police weren’t letting anyone park on Beale. I parked between Third and Union, and walked slowly through the debris. Already some business owners were assessing the damage. Others were trying to pick up the pieces.
A fire still burned a few blocks up, and firefighters were driving past. The police officers stared at me, looking at my battered face as I passed, but they didn’t question me. When I finally reached Beale proper, I stopped.
The sight that greeted me was not what I expected. Bodies were strewn across the sidewalk, most torn in half. One still held a sign that read “I Am A Man.” More signs were scattered along the street.
There was no blood.
I stumbled forward, then realized that what I thought were bodies were mannequins from the store windows, tossed into the street like dirt. They looked so real and so dead that I had thought someone had left bodies for later cleanup.
The fire that the fire department was still battling was at Wilson Drug. Martha stood outside, her hands clasped together. I could just make her out in the morning haze.
A tank rumbled by, and some State Troopers jogged across Beale at South Main, stopping to set up some sort of barricade.
The devastation was more than I had expected, even after hearing the news. Beale was a poor district anyway, and it would be poorer now.
“Sad, isn’t it?” a voice asked behind me.
I turned. Withers was leaning against the side of the Gallina Building as if he had been waiting for me. He had a bruise on his left cheek.
My head throbbed. “Gloating?” I asked.
“At this kind of destruction, all the ruined lives? Of course not.” He stood and brushed off a sleeve. Then he smiled at me. “I gotta admit, though, Smokey. I thought you’d be a more formidable opponent.”
I lunged for him, but he stepped away. I caught myself on the edge of the building, feeling dizzy. Damn the injury. Damn the pain medication.
“Don’t worry, Smokey,” he sa
id, tilting his beret down over his forehead. “I’ve decided that I’ve had enough of Memphis. We don’t have to see each other again.”
Then he stepped over a mannequin in the street and walked away.
I let him go. There wasn’t much I could do, short of trying to kill him with my fists, something that wouldn’t go over, not with all the National Guard troops around.
He vanished down an alley and I hoped to hell he was gone for good.
I stared after him for a long time. Then, when my breathing was regular again, I went up to my office. No one had touched it. I took some cash from my safe, double-locked the door for safety, and went back to my car.
It was time to get out of Memphis.
After this, facing what awaited me in Atlanta would be easy.
Or so I thought.
TWENTY-ONE
I LEFT AT THREE THAT AFTERNOON, after I had gotten Martha off Beale, let Roscoe know I was leaving after all, and called Henry to tell him that my services—such as they had been—weren’t going to be available for the next few days.
My car was packed with blankets and a pillow in case I couldn’t get a room, some clothing, and some food in a cooler so that I wouldn’t have to stop in an unfamiliar town for a meal.
I drove past National Guard tanks to get out of Memphis, and it wasn’t until I was into Mississippi that my stomach unclenched. That had never happened to me before. Usually Mississippi was the place that made me nervous.
The weather was spring-wretched: overcast with a drippy cold rain that promised more winter and less summer. The roads were narrow and full of winter ruts, and the places I did stop—the familiar ones—were full of unfriendly faces, people who didn’t want to be working or didn’t seem to have time for a traveler of any color.
I had trouble finding radio stations I wanted to listen to. All of them rehashed the riots and I didn’t want to hear about it. Martin had given a press conference that afternoon from the Rosemont Hotel—I hadn’t even realized he had stayed in Memphis last night—denying that he had left the march in a hurry.
He had departed, he said, because he didn’t want to be part of a violent action. And he promised to be back around April third (no later than April fifth, he said) to lead a massive, nonviolent demonstration.
I shut off the radio after that. I wouldn’t be able to stay away any longer than that. After what happened at the march, I knew I’d never forgive myself if I wasn’t back in Memphis, trying to prevent a repeat of the actions of the day before.
For most of the drive, I found myself thinking of Laura. I no longer had any idea how to behave around her. She was a client, a lover, and had been becoming a friend. She was white and rich and from the North. Her parents knew who I was—had known me from Atlanta—and that made them even more suspect than they already were, having changed their names and moved on like they had. How much could I blame her for that? And how much was I using it as an excuse to put some distance between us?
As the highway took me through Birmingham, I felt a tightening of my shoulders. Birmingham had a dangerous feel to it. I didn’t even stop.
The tighening got worse as I drove into Georgia. I hated this place. I had hated it as a boy and hated it even more now. I had once told my foster parents that I would never go back.
They pretended to understand, but they didn’t. They were so proud of their move to Atlanta. The years in D.C. were years of struggle for them, not just because of my foster father’s job, but because me. Out of the goodness of their hearts, because they felt they had to do something for their community, they had adopted me. They had hoped for a good, well-behaved boy, the boy I had been before my parents died, probably the boy that the Grand had described to them.
Instead, they had gotten a sullen, withdrawn, frightened boy who read all he could, spoke to no one, and moved out of the house as soon as his age allowed. From that moment, I never looked back, although I stayed in touch. I felt I owed them that much.
They were good people. They took pride in my service record, even more pride in the education I gotten with their help, and when I refused to do anything obvious with that education, they only mentioned it once, and then in a wistful, don’t-you-think-it would-be-better-to-become-something? manner that spoke more to them than to me. I settled in Memphis and began my career, and they said nothing. When it became clear I wasn’t going to marry, at least not for a long long time, my foster mother pulled me aside and said she hoped that someday I would find what I was looking for.
The words made me cringe. I had found something last weekend, and I was turning my back on it already. I flicked on the radio, found an Atlanta rock station that was close to WDIA on the dial, and listened to it all the way in, suffering through the Beatles to get an occasional cut from the Supremes and Isaac Hayes.
The music didn’t keep my mind off everything, but it helped. I got into Atlanta around eleven, found a motel near Sweet Auburn, and checked in. The motel was a roadside that had been black-owned and operated since I was a boy. It was two stories and long, with boxy rooms and an office on the first floor that was the front room of the manager’s apartment. My room, on the second floor, had a double bed covered with a chenille spread, a TV chained to the wall, and a tiny bathroom with a showerhead that dripped silently, leaving a rust-colored stain from the faucet to the drain. It wasn’t much, but it would do.
I locked the door, sank onto the bed, and let the exhaustion of the last week take me away.
* * *
I woke midmorning and showered. A banana from the food I’d brought with me served as breakfast. When I was cleaned up, I grabbed dimes and used the pay phone near the pop machine on the first floor, not wanting to make any calls from my room.
At first, I thought it was guilt that made me call my foster parents first. Then as the phone rang, I realized I was going to initiate a conversation we had never had, a conversation that I had dreaded for most of my life.
It was time now.
My foster mother was home and surprised to hear from me. To her credit, she didn’t make much of my call or my explanation of it; she didn’t try to make me feel guilty for failing to visit them in the three years they had been in Atlanta. Like she had always done, she took me for who I was. I told her I was just passing through, doing some work on a case, and that I had some questions, but I could tell from her tone that she knew those questions were important.
The drive was only partially familiar. Atlanta itself had changed in the twenty-nine years I’d been gone.
Atlanta always changed—that was its only constant. I knew that much because Atlanta was the door to the commercial South, the place that was constantly in the news. I read about Atlanta; I did not visit it, except in my imagination. But as I drove from Sweet Auburn to my foster parents’ neighborhood, near Morehouse College, I was surprised at how much of Atlanta I remembered, how much of its history I knew, and how much it was nothing like the place that still haunted my dreams.
Because Atlanta rebuilt after Sherman burned it to the ground in 1864, it saw itself as the New South, a place that was above the hatreds and problems of the old. It wasn’t, as my life and my parents’ lives attested. But it did imagine itself that way and was willing to play the game, sometimes with blacks, as in the social changes of that started about ten years ago, and sometimes without, as in the Gone With the Wind premiere that I had one been a part of. Both exemplified Atlanta, at once patrician and commercial, Old South mingling seamlessly with the New South because it kept its seams hidden beneath a layer of civility not found anywhere else this side of the Mason-Dixon line.
That much of Atlanta hadn’t changed. But the skyline had. The city I had known had been short, squat, and tree-lined, in what had once been virgin forest land. Atlanta was not settled because it was at the site of any great river like Memphis, but because it had become the terminus for several railroads. In fact, the city’s first name had been Terminus. It was as different from Memphis as could be; a modern ci
ty with some of the South’s first skyscrapers.
There were no skyscrapers near my foster parents’ house. It was a two-story white house that dated from the 1920s, and it was in a beautiful old neighborhood. There were tall trees in in the front yard and a tilled area around the foundation that suggested spring flowers. I was willing to bet there was a vegetable garden out back.
My foster mother had always been proudest of her garden, since she couldn’t be proud of me.
I pulled up in front of the concrete sidewalk and got out of the car. My foster mother had been waiting on the porch. She was a stately woman in her early sixties, her hair still dyed black and ironed straight. She stood rigidly, and I still thought of her as taller than I was, even though I had her by several inches.
I walked up the sidewalk, noting the winter cracks, and stepped on the porch. She came into my arms as if she had been holding herself back and then squeezed me so tightly it hurt.
“We missed you, honey,” she said. “You’ll come back tonight so your daddy can see you?”
He had a Bible class that afternoon, or he would have been here with us, even on short notice. She had explained that in our brief phone call.
“Yes,” I said, even though I hadn’t planned on returning, and really didn’t want to. But I didn’t see how I could stay away. I had never visited them here before, and my foster father would want to see me in his Atlanta home, just once.
She leaned back in the hug and stared at my face. Then she ran a light finger near my stitches. “What happened?”
“I was with Martin on Friday.”
“Oh, Smokey,” she said softly. “Was it as horrible as they say?”
I blinked. Her gentle words touched a part of me I had deliberately shut off. I had stared at the destruction of my hometown, but I hadn’t let it reach me. It would have been too overwhelming.
“It was worse,” I said.
A Dangerous Road: A Smokey Dalton Novel Page 22
