by Gwen Florio
‘Who are you kidding? You think they’d give us one?’
‘You prepared to get arrested?’
‘Been prepared from the minute we got here.’ Which didn’t jibe with a single thing he’d told their parents. Grace distinctly remembered a repeated exchange between her mother and Bobby:
‘You see cops coming at you, what do you do?’
‘Go the other way.’
Walter gave another whistle. ‘You think you’re ready for jail. After you’ve been in one, especially one of these little country jails, you give me a call. Collect. Tell me how ready you were.’
Walter had been to jail, swept up during a protest he was covering in Washington, and Grace remembered the tense hours at the Afro when the editors had huddled with a lawyer, trying to determine his whereabouts and then working for his release – an incident that, of course, only enhanced his standing.
He’d come through the experience with only minor injuries, if you counted a goose-egg the size of a fist over his right eye and the ruination of one of his beautiful suits. Once back in the newsroom, he’d shrugged off the whole business with a much-remarked-upon nonchalance.
But one day shortly after his return, she made the mistake of walking up silently behind him, not speaking until she was only about a foot away, and his coffee cup had gone flying, its contents besmirching yet another suit, and Grace got stuck with a dry-cleaning bill along with an appreciation of just what a single day in jail could do to a man.
She didn’t want to see Bobby become that same sort of jumpy, sideways-glancing man.
‘They’ll scoop up Marcus before he gets five words out of his mouth.’
Bobby puffed his chest out. ‘They’ll have to go through us first. There’s a whole new contingent from school, bunking with people over in Salisbury. They’ll come over just before the march. We’ll be five deep around Marcus.’
Walter scribbled some notes on his pad. ‘Impressive organizing.’
Grace couldn’t help herself. Pride washed through her, briefly sweeping away all her worries on behalf of her brother.
Someone who would muster a second group of students, squirrel them away in a neighboring town so as not to raise suspicions in Chateau, and command the presence of Marcus Simmons wouldn’t be so foolish as to risk undermining those accomplishments over something that had happened three years earlier, long enough that whole days went by when Grace didn’t think about it.
Nonetheless, when she bade her goodbyes that night, she lingered in the tall rhododendrons in Miss Lydia’s back yard until she saw the light in Bobby’s window blink off.
TWENTY-NINE
The woman who’d seemed so concerned about the march – ‘How many times can one town burn?’ – had evoked a restless mob surging through the center of town, shouting for revenge.
Instead, Nora saw a few dozen people, led by Grace, Kwame and a woman – tears drenching her face – who must have been his wife, walking slowly and silently down the middle of the street, the older people wielding cardboard fans against the heat. Several had printed out photos of Robert Evans and fastened them to their shirts or had blown them up and attached them to posters with predictable slogans.
Justice for Robert.
Demand Answers.
Who’s Next?
Accompanying the slogans, the image of a gun with a red slash across it.
An image of a police badge with a red slash across it.
An image of Alden’s face with a red slash across it.
Nora kept to the sidewalk, ambling a few steps behind the marchers, trying to look as though she just happened to be walking in the same direction on some errand, even though no one else was headed that way. Several people were out and about – it was lunchtime, when lawyers and courthouse clerks and store workers headed to the Wagon Wheel for the daily special. Patrons spilled from the diner’s doors to watch the passing parade. People coalesced in groups, black over here and white there, faces stony.
Nora braced herself for more comments of the sort she’d heard from the biddies, but the watchers were wordless as the marchers passed, the heavy silence broken only by the muted thuds of soles against blacktop. The onlookers stared at the marchers, and the marchers stared straight ahead, toward the courthouse that was their destination. Older people led the group, dressed for an occasion, the men like Kwame in suits, the women in flowered dresses and church meeting hats that shielded them from the punishing sun.
Behind them, and in double their numbers, was a contingent of younger people, from their twenties and thirties all the way down to what appeared to be high school and even middle school age, the youngster’s faces eager and animated in comparison to the hard stares of their elders, who’d done this before, after all.
Some of the women and a few of the men balanced babies on hips or pushed strollers. The Baltimore contingent was among the younger marchers, Nora guessed, but she couldn’t distinguish them from the locals. Years earlier, she’d have been able to tell by how people dressed – city people inevitably decked out in whatever was trendy at the moment – but the internet had made it possible for everybody to keep current.
As they neared it, Nora saw the sort of spectacle she’d initially feared but had begun to think was a product of an overactive imagination. Now, she realized her imagination had been right on target.
A line of people –white people – spread out across the courthouse lawn, blocking the walkway to the steps. They, too, held signs, although their own were nearly identical but for a single word’s different: Blue Lives Matter. Or All Lives Matter.
Parallel rows of police officers lined the final block to the courthouse, in a sort of gauntlet leading toward those waiting on the lawn. Nora scanned the variety of uniforms, picking out the local Chateau police, the county sheriff’s deputies and the state police. She tried in vain to make out the features in the shade thrown by peaked caps but realized Alden wouldn’t be there. He was on leave and, besides, any Fraternal Order of Police lawyer worth his salt would order him to stay far away from any such gathering.
Together, the cops and counter-protesters far outnumbered the marchers, a fact that registered with an obvious slackening of their already slow pace.
‘Aw, shit.’ The words floated toward Nora from the middle of the group in the street. Her own thoughts exactly.
Kwame held up his arm and everyone stopped.
‘Everybody gather ’round.’ His voice boomed over their heads.
Nora edged closer, keeping to the inky pools of shade cast by the maples overarching the sidewalk. As she came even with the group, fast coalescing from a straggling line into a cluster around Kwame, the people at the courthouse glanced at one another, sotto voce comments going up and down the line. The cops, merely alert before, stiffened to full attention.
Nora came nearly even with Kwame and pressed herself into a boxwood hedge, the tiny leaves waxy against her bare arms and legs, their resinous scent strong in her nostrils.
Kwame spoke loud enough so that those waiting on the courthouse lawn could hear.
‘They’re looking for a confrontation. But that’s not what we want. What do we want?’
The response came fast and clear as though they’d rehearsed it.
‘Justice for Robert!’
‘When do we want it?’
‘Now!’
The single syllable hung in the air, dying on a collective expelled breath.
‘No, we didn’t come here for a fight. And we didn’t come simply to honor Robert or to grieve him, although we do both. We honor him deeply, this son and nephew who will never get to be a husband, a father. We mourn the loss of promise, of what he might have become, might have contributed. That grief will never vanish, although we pray it will ease. But in addition to our sorrow, we honor Robert with our anger. Not the sort of raw, destructive anger, the kind that they’ – he turned and gestured toward the muttering crowd on the courthouse lawn, the increasingly attentive cops – ‘seem t
o expect, and maybe even want. But we’re not going to give it to them. They’ve already taken too much from us. The life of an innocent boy.’
Was he innocent?
‘I had to. He came at me,’ Alden had described the heart-stopping moment, lent credence by the account of Robert’s violent past.
As much as she leaned toward Alden’s version, especially given his consistently voiced regret, what would she prefer? Another black life erased, another layer of indictment for a system that gave tacit permission or even approval, given the despair-inducing repetitiveness of white cops who shot first when confronted by the menace they assigned to black men?
Kwame’s fist shot into the air.
‘We’re going to focus our anger. Use it to get results. Demand an investigation. We’ve already spoken with the Attorney General’s Office. They’re sending someone down here.’
A murmur ran through the marchers. Nora hunched farther into her inadequate shelter, lowering her head, turning her face into the shrubbery.
‘We’re not just going to settle for anyone’s word on what happened. We’re concentrating our anger, our righteous anger, on demanding the truth. Demanding transparency. We want the recording of the nine-one-one calls, anything that shows what happened that night. We need them to find Robert’s phone.’
Nora raised her head. None of the stories she’d read about the shooting had mentioned a phone. She thought of the men she’d seen searching the soybean field for a gun the day she and Alden had gone to the ocean. Maybe they’d find a phone, too.
‘And we want it made public, so that everybody knows the truth’ – another fist punch – ‘of what happened that night.’
The truth! Nora’s arm nearly jerked in a fist pump of its own. If those few fatal seconds had unfolded as Alden described and were verified by outside investigators, she would no longer have to suppress the twinges of a grownup version of a schoolgirl crush.
Kwame took a breath so deep it was audible even to Nora, half hidden in shrubbery.
‘I never thought one family could endure so much pain. First my older brother, the one I barely remember. I was just a little one when he was murdered in this very town, and that murder yet unsolved to this day. Now my one precious son.’
A sob rent the air. The man turned to his wife and held her until her heaves quieted to mere shudders. Grace stared off into the distance, something in her gaze nearly propelling Nora from her green shelter in search of the sun, to warm the blood gone cold in her veins.
‘But the abomination surrounding my brother’s death will not be repeated. This time, as before, we seek the truth. But this time we shall find it, and when we do, we will shout it to the world that what happened to Robert must never happen again.’
Inarticulate cries rose from the crowd.
An officer broke ranks from the line of the police and, joined by another man, jogged toward them.
Kwame turned to face them. Nora noticed how he held his hands out and down, palms open and empty, in a gesture both practiced and sadly practical. She herself had never thought to take any particular stance when facing a police officer and even had been markedly truculent when confronted with a sheriff’s blame-the-victim inclination in Wyoming.
The civilian’s white shirt clung damply in large dark patches across his stomach and under his arms. Nora recognized Todd Burris.
‘You don’t have a permit, Kwame. You need a permit for a parade or gathering.’
Kwame Evans tilted his chin to those at the courthouse. ‘They got a permit, Mr Mayor?’
The officer – Nora presumed he was the chief – chimed in.
‘They’re on public property.’
Kwame’s voice dropped a register. ‘As are we.’
‘But you’re in the street. Blocking traffic.’
Kwame stepped to the side of the crowd and made of show of scanning the street behind them, and then turning and looking toward the courthouse, heads turning in sync with his own, everyone seeing a street devoid of moving vehicles, the only cars in sight sitting decorously in parking spaces.
‘We’re not blocking anything.’
‘But it’s the law.’ Burris’s voice rose higher in exact proportion to Kwame’s deepening tone. ‘You can’t walk in the street. You’ve got to use the sidewalk.’
Kwame nodded, not to the mayor, but to the marchers. ‘You heard Mayor Burris,’ he said, pointedly using the honorific and last name to the man who’d only addressed him by his first. ‘Only allowed to walk on the sidewalk in Chateau.’
The mass of marchers milled together momentarily then split, some going to the sidewalk on one side of the street, others across the way, men helping young mothers lift strollers over the curb, people sighing as they reached the relief of the shade.
The chief spoke up. ‘No loitering.’
Some of the marchers stood so close to Nora she could have touched them; indeed, the two young men now hovering impatiently before her cast curious glances over their shoulders at the white woman who’d planted herself inexplicably within the greenery like some sort of ungainly, overgrown wood sprite.
A corner of Kwame Evans’s mouth twitched in a not-quite smile. ‘Ain’t nobody loitering.’ His broad casual tone stopped just short of sarcasm. ‘These are busy people. Things to do, places to go. Attorney General’s coming. Got to be ready for him. Right?’
The crowd murmured something that could have been assent. Mothers performed the ungainly maneuvers necessary to turn around strollers that came equipped with cupholders, baskets for purses and diaper bags, babies a seeming afterthought. Kwame Evans held out his arm and Grace took it. His wife moved to his other side and together, the trio made a retreat that somehow looked like a victory.
At least, it did to Nora.
‘This is some bullshit,’ one of the young men in front of her muttered.
The other elbowed him. ‘Look there. They think it’s some bullshit, too.’
The marchers were already vanishing down the side streets. Car doors slammed. Engines turned over. The people on the courthouse lawn milled about, signs drooping. The cops broke their parallel formation and clustered around the chief and the mayor.
‘Disappointed, for sure,’ one of the young men said. ‘Thought they’d get to crack some black heads today.’
They laughed together and then moved away, leaving Nora to extricate herself from the boxwood, brushing leaves from her hair and wondering how long it would take for the leaves’ distinctive scent to vanish from her clothing.
The sun hit her full in the face as she emerged. The last of the marchers stood in a small group before her as a few white people lingered across the street, watching them. Nora blinked, half blinded by the sun. A small woman leaning on a cane stood among them, her white head bare, looking for all the world like …
But, no. It couldn’t be. Penelope was still using her walker. And although she’d hinted she was capable of driving, she’d seemed content to comply with her doctor’s advice against it. Anyway, when Nora blinked again, the woman was gone.
THIRTY
1967
It was barely light when Grace slipped out of bed the morning of the march. June still snored lustily on her side of the bed.
Grace paused at the top of the stairs, listening for any sounds from the kitchen. Their host, Miss Theresa, liked to get up early so as to have a full breakfast waiting for them, coffee pale with cream, eggs scrambled with cheese, thick slabs of homemade bread toasted and dripping with butter and jam, and crispy scrapple she’d made herself with the leavings from a friend’s hogs. Grace swore her clothes had gotten tighter in just the two weeks she’d stayed with Miss Theresa.
‘She’s gonna turn you into one of those big-butt farm gals,’ Walter had teased, after which Grace had made sure to walk behind him to forestall any more observations about her butt.
She tiptoed in stockinged feet through the dark kitchen, slipping on her shoes only when she’d safely descended the porch steps.
She crept warily toward the street where Bobby was staying, keeping to the shadows, mindful as always of rural people’s tendency to wake with the dawn.
She’d gotten lucky in one regard. An aging willow anchored the backyard of the Driggs house where Bobby was staying, its branches drooping nearly to the ground, curtaining a shaded spot where old Mr Driggs liked to sit on afternoons in an old kitchen chair smoking his pipe. His chair, curtained from sight within the slender fronds, made the perfect spot for Grace’s morning observation, screening her from view, although it did nothing to filter out the scent of the Driggses’ breakfast, twin to the one she should have been eating in Miss Theresa’s kitchen.
Grace wished she’d thought to grab a piece of bread and butter on her way out the door. Her stomach rumbled so loud she feared it would give her away; indeed, a ragged-eared tomcat creeping across the yard in search of unseen prey stopped suddenly, his head swiveling in her direction.
‘Git,’ she hissed, and it obliged with a twitch of its moth-eaten tail.
Finally, she saw a shadow at the back door. She started to rise, pins and needles shooting up her leg as she put her weight on her left foot to wake it up. But when the door opened, only Walter emerged. A tiny orange dot glowed at his fingertips, the day’s first cigarette. He took a long grateful drag before setting out for the church where the activists met each morning to go over the day’s plans.
Grace waited for Bobby. Five minutes, ten. The mosquitoes came to life, whining around her ears, still sleepy enough to be easily brushed away. A garter snake wound through the grass and detoured around the unexpected barrier of her feet.
Finally, keeping to the edges of the yard, she crept toward the house, at the last minute darting toward it in a crouch, raising up by inches until she could peek over the windowsill into the kitchen, praying she wouldn’t come eye to eye with Miss Lydia going to fetch another cup of coffee for Bobby.
But the woman had her back to her, clearing the table in an otherwise empty room. She turned toward the window and Grace ducked, but not before she’d seen the single plate in the woman’s hand. Maybe Bobby had arisen even earlier, unable to sleep, full of anticipation about the pending events.
