by Lewis Shiner
By then nothing could have stopped him.
Afterwards, as he collapsed onto his pillow, she rolled over and kissed him on the forehead. “My goodness, darling, I would have thought working late would have tired you out. You’re like a man possessed.”
The possession had left him. Sleep bore down on him like a train, and he couldn’t manage to speak before it took him.
*
Robert took Maurice to lunch the day after the concert. They ate at Woolworth’s downtown, and though Maurice got some hostile looks, the counterman was willing to serve him.
“So I’m thinking maybe I underestimated you,” Maurice said. “Maybe.”
“I’m not trying to prove anything,” Robert said. “I’m not trying to impress anybody. I just love the music.”
“I can see that.” Maurice reluctantly unwrapped his hamburger and lifted the bun. A thick layer of chopped onions lay over the meat. “You heard me say ‘hold the onions,’ right?”
Robert nodded. “Mitch said something last night about Howard speaking. Does he give lectures or something?”
Maurice scraped the onions onto his plate and reached for the bottle of catsup on the counter. “He probably spit on it, too, when we weren’t looking. Lecture isn’t exactly the word. Rabble-rousing is more like it.”
“If he was doing this somewhere, how would somebody find out about it?”
Maurice reassembled the burger, took a bite, chewed and swallowed. He ate a few rippled potato chips that lay next to the onion pile and took a drink of his Coke. “You don’t have any more interest in hearing Barrett Howard speak than you have in living in Ethiopia.”
“Sure I do.”
“You’re hoping Mercy will be there, so you can wake up crawling out of some graveyard, mandrake roots all over you, and go work in some swamp until the gators drag your numb, brainless body away.”
“So does he do it in Durham much?”
“You want to know why Barrett got kicked out of the NAACP? He used to be the president of the Durham branch. Then he wrote a letter to Martin Luther King saying that he was in favor of pacifism as much as the next man, but if an armed white man came into his house without an invitation, he was prepared to, quote, meet violence with violence, end quote.”
“I don’t even own a gun.”
“People make mistakes. For instance, I think you’re about to make one. If you haven’t got sense enough to be afraid of the woman, maybe you could manage to be afraid of the man.”
“Mitch said he was a pussycat.”
“Mitch sees things the way he wants them to be. I think Barrett puts up with Mitch for the same reason I do. He’s what they call a holy fool. He thinks everybody in the world is like he is, and it makes him fearless. He thinks it’s okay to try to be a big shot because he doesn’t think anybody will get hurt by it, that it’s all some kind of game.”
“Isn’t that what we’re all doing? Trying to be successful? That’s what this country is all about.”
“I don’t think most black people would see it that way. No offense. From where I stand, somebody always gets hurt. Look at those people in Hayti whose houses we’re knocking down. Where are they going to go? A lot of them didn’t get paid anything like what their property was worth. Most of those houses were better than anything they’d ever had in their lives, and there’s no place left for them to move.”
“That’s temporary. You’ve seen the plans. There’s that development with close to 2000 rooms. We can’t build it until we clear the ground for it.”
“Yeah.” He looked down at the pile of onions on his plate. “That’s what I keep telling myself.”
*
April arrived, and Robert found that it added only five minutes to his drive home to detour down Pettigrew Street, through the heart of Hayti. Maybe ten. After the first time, he asked himself what he thought he was doing. Within two weeks it was part of his daily routine.
The dreams had been coming more often, three or four times a week. They lacked action and concrete images, consisting mainly of odors and textures and sensations that evoked female sexuality. Lurking in the background was an unseen presence, distinctly feminine without being identifiable as anyone he knew, not Mercy or anyone else. He could not say for certain that it was even human, only that its nearness brought him comfort and calm. Waking brought a drab, hollow feeling that lasted into the morning.
One afternoon he saw Barrett Howard outside the Donut Shop, two doors down from the Biltmore Hotel. He was arguing with another Negro on the street, a younger man in glasses and a dark brown suit. Howard looked violently angry, and Robert drove past without slowing down.
Mercy was nowhere in sight.
The next day, after work, he parked on Fayetteville Street, walked back to Pettigrew, and went in the office of The Carolina Times.
The paper came out once a week, on Saturday morning, and for the last three weeks he had driven to a corner grocery in the nearby Walltown neighborhood to pick up a copy. He told Ruth that Antree had asked him to do it, to gauge the reaction of the neighborhood to their work. In fact there was nothing in there about the renewal, nor was there any mention of Barrett Howard speaking anywhere. Most of the stories were about the difficult progress of the Civil Rights Act through Congress and the ongoing demonstrations in Mississippi and Alabama. The rest was local church news, or glowing reports of achievements by Negroes around the country.
A young colored woman sat at the desk in the front office. “Yes, sir, may I help you?”
His hands began to sweat and he had trouble finding his voice. “I was wondering if you knew a way to get hold of Barrett Howard. I understand he writes for the paper sometimes.”
“He hasn’t written for us in some time. He and Mr. Austin have some differences of opinion. May I ask what this is about?”
“No, I just…I had some personal business that I wanted to see him about.”
“Are you with the police?”
“Me? No, no, nothing like that.”
A man stuck his head through the door that led to the back of the building. He looked to be about 60, with short, thinning hair, glasses, and piercing eyes. His nose looked like it had been broken and badly set. He wore a tie and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up. “Is there a problem, Ellen?”
“No, sir. This gentleman is looking for Mr. Howard.”
“You won’t find him here, sir.” The man gave Robert a look that drained the last of his resolve.
“Uh, okay. Thank you. Thank you both.” He retreated to the sidewalk and made his way as purposefully as he could toward his car.
Then, without warning, he heard Antree’s voice. “Bobby? What are you doing here?”
Robert turned to see Antree standing next to his Cadillac. “Mitch. I. I was…”
“Bobby, are you okay?”
“Yeah, I’m fine.” He couldn’t think of a lie, couldn’t avoid the question. “I’m looking for Barrett Howard,” he said. With the admission came a sense of release. He hadn’t truly relaxed, he realized, in weeks.
“You looking for Barrett, or for his chick?”
Robert shrugged.
“Man, you are way out of your depth.” He looked Robert up and down. “I must be crazy to even bring this up. He’s meeting some people at Mercy’s house tonight. I can bring you with me, but you have to not fuck up. You understand what I’m saying?”
“I’ll be good. What’s the meeting?”
“Howard’s talking about trying to start a union. He hasn’t got a hope in hell, and I have to pretend to take him seriously. So don’t say anything.”
“All right. Thank you.”
“Don’t mention it. I mean really, do not mention it.” He looked at his watch. “Elvira’s? My treat.”
*
The residential streets of Hayti after dark were not designed to make Robert feel at home. Beamon Street described a short arc east of Roxboro Street and south of the tracks. The houses there, Antree told him, had
been built for tobacco workers in the downtown factories around the turn of the century. They were wood frame with a triple-A roofline, which was to say the transverse gable over the front door matched the gables on the sides. Most of the roofs sagged. Cars, tires, wooden crates, and tough scrub brush filled the yards. There were no streetlights.
Mercy’s house had lights blazing, and Robert heard voices from inside as they pulled up. “You still up for this?” Antree asked.
Robert nodded and got self-consciously out of the Cadillac, careful to lock the door. Unlike some of the other, identical houses on the block, 109 had an actual sidewalk leading up to the front porch. Robert waited there for Antree, then followed him up the steps, through the screen door, and into the crowded living room.
The room was 20 feet long and 12 feet wide, sparsely furnished. The walls were a light pinkish-purple and appeared recently painted. There was a fireplace on the interior wall, where Howard stood with one arm resting on the mantel.
Another dozen or so men, all black, fidgeted in twos and threes. Robert didn’t see Mercy. His emotions, running at high-school levels, began to sour.
He suddenly recognized Leon and Tommy Coleman, Tommy with his arms folded and his back and left boot to the wall. Robert joined them, offering his pack of Luckies around.
“Booker’s not here?” Robert asked.
“No, sir,” Leon said, waving the cigarettes away. Tommy took two, parking one behind his ear for later. “Booker be living large tonight,” Leon said. “Friday night, payday night. Booker’s eagle be flying tonight.” Robert realized that Leon was nervous too.
Howard’s voice was suddenly louder than anything else. “All right, let’s start this thing.” Conversations broke off and people shifted to face him.
“This is my show, so I guess I got to take the reins,” he said. “I wanted y’all to come here tonight so we could talk about what’s going on. I mean what’s happening to our neighborhood, and what we can do about it. I wanted to talk to y’all, because y’all are the ones doing the real work that is going to make this new road happen. So I want to talk a little about roads and cars what all that means to you and me.
“The East-West Expressway started with Henry Ford. Y’all know that, right?”
A few people went along with him and shook their heads or said, “What you talking about?”
“Henry Ford,” Howard said, “had the idea of ‘a motor car for the great multitude.’ He thought everybody should have one, because then everybody would be free. Well, and he would make a few dollars along the way.
“Thing is, there’s all different kinds of freedom. Cars used to be about freedom, about being able to drive anywhere you wanted to go. Now cars is another kind of slavery.
“You don’t have a car here in the South, you can’t work. You can’t get to the store to buy groceries. You’re sick, you got to get your own self to the doctor somehow, because he don’t make house calls no more.
“What are we building here but another superhighway, going to hook up with the Interstate system? I can tell you how that’s going to turn out. Going to turn out the same as when they put the railroad through, or the first paved highways, or the first turnpikes up in New York. Where the highway is, businesses are going to grow—unless they already knocked them all down, like they doing in Hayti now—and everywhere else, the businesses going to die. So the cities get more and more spread out along the highways, and then you need more cars, more cars need more highways, and on and on.”
Robert looked for Antree to see how he was taking it. Antree was by the front door, shoulder to shoulder with a man in a suit who looked like a preacher, and he was smiling.
“Henry Ford believed in the individual,” Howard said. “But there’s different kinds of individuals, too. When Ford cut his prices too much, his investors took him to court and won, because according to the law of this land, the purpose of a business is to make money for its stockholders.
“Because that is the individual that this is really all about, and in the end old Henry Ford, he saw it that way too. When the Depression hit, he cut wages below what everybody else was paying. And he fought longer and harder than anybody to keep unions out of his business.
“Thing is, it’s the same idea at the heart of all this, whether we talking about freedom of the roads or freedom of the rich to make more money. When you say every man for himself, you can bet it’s going to be the ruthless and the greedy come out on top every time. Every time.”
As Howard got his cadence going, some of the men were nodding along. The preacher was one of them, like a drummer tapping his foot to another drummer’s beat.
“I’m talking about your Rockefellers, your Carnegies, your Vanderbilts,” Howard said, and Robert felt a twinge of guilt, as if, for the sake of his father and grandfather, he should stand up to Howard and argue with him.
“These are the people America looks up to as heroes,” Howard said. “These are the men that created the oil companies and the steel mills and railroads that made America what it is today. They all got rich from it, too, not just a little rich, I’m talking about fifty-car rich, houses with rooms you’ve never been in rich. And all that money came from the labor of other people. Other people that they kept on the edge of starvation or shot down in the streets when they got uppity, shot them down with their own private police forces, like the Ford Service, which at one time was the largest private army in the world.
“These men never stood together without selling each other out. They were individuals, by God, and they had no friends and nobody they trusted, and nobody they could even talk to. And they were miserable, by all accounts, every one of them, and scared sick of losing their money. But they wrote the story of this country, and that is the story of the individual above all else.
“And that is why we are here tonight. On the one hand is the lie that America is built on, the lie that all men are equal, the individual is sacred, don’t tread on me. Behind that lie is the rich man, the powerful man, the greedy man.
“On the other hand is the truth that when the poor, the black, the disenfranchised stand together, there is no force on earth can stop us. We outnumber the rich and always will. This is still a democracy, more or less, and we have the ability to vote with our brains and not some kind of mixed up idealism that makes us go against our own interest. And we can organize, so that when the rich and privileged don’t keep their promises, we have a way to make them listen.”
It was a tough crowd, Robert saw, and when Howard said the word “organize” they began to slip away. Unions smacked of the North, of communism and disloyalty and troublemaking.
Howard saw it too and regrouped. “Because we are looking at a world of broken promises. Integration is a broken promise, broken since 1954. Look at Mississippi and Alabama and tell me the promise of voting rights is not broken. And we got serious broken promises here in Hayti.
“They told us we were going to have new buildings for our businesses, new homes for our families, and all they do is tear things down. This federal urban renewal program that’s paying for all this, it happened right after we won Brown v. Board of Education, and you can’t tell me that was a accident
“For every step forward there has been a step back. After slavery there was sharecropping and Jim Crow. Now that we’ve got Jim Crow on the run, there is something else happening, something even worse, some kind of all out economic warfare, war against the black and the poor, and if we don’t want that to turn into actual war in the streets, we have to do something.”
There it was, the threat behind the rhetoric. Robert realized he had been waiting for it, hardly breathing. Now that it was out there in the room he felt sad more than anything else. The mood around him was uneasy. People shifted their weight, talked in nervous whispers.
“We have to get together and stand together,” Howard said, and Robert heard the first hint of desperation in his voice. “We have to stand together and say, ‘If you want this road, give us o
ur houses and our businesses. Do that first, then we build you your road.’ ”
“We say that,” asked a voice Robert didn’t recognize, “who puts the food on our tables?”
“If we start a union, and if the union has a action, we don’t have to be fighting alone. That’s the whole point. The IWW been fighting actions like this for 50 years. I ain’t saying it’s going to be easy. I ain’t saying I got all the answers. What I am saying is, we have to start talking about it. We have to start now, because otherwise it’s going to be too late. There won’t be anything left of Hayti, no place for any of you to spend the money you make on this job, no place for the black man in America except prison or living on the street.”
Robert, strangely, found himself rooting for Howard. Don’t leave it there, he thought. Give us some hope, some good news, something to believe in.
Instead Howard seemed to have run out of gas. “That’s all I got to say, really. If y’all got questions, ask them. Talk to each other, talk to me. This is about all of us, and whatever you got to say, I want to hear. In the meantime, I think Mercy has got some coffee and cookies and things like that.”
Robert’s head jerked around at the sound of her name, and there she was, coming out of the swinging door that led to the kitchen, carrying a tray and a coffee pot. She wore a white cotton dress, the top tight and low cut, the short loose skirt buoyed up by petticoats, revealing long, bare legs. It took Robert a while to realize he’d stopped breathing.
She put the tray on the table with poor grace and set the pot next to it. When she went back in the kitchen her gaze swept over Robert without seeming to register him. A moment later she was out again with another tray, this one stacked with mismatched coffee mugs. She set those down too and then walked straight up to him.
