Four Spirits

by Sena Jeter Naslund

  Agnes squeezed his arm, “Well, it’ll be all right then.”

  “What I said to him: ‘Well, reckon this is good-bye then. After ten years and never a minute late and never a day sick.’ And I walked out.”

  Agnes uncoiled like a jack-in-the-box. She threw herself on her husband and covered his face with kisses. “Oh, honey, oh, honey,” she said over and over. “I just so proud of you.” She commenced to sob. She put her head down on her knees and sobbed like the dam had broken. He rubbed her back, gently pressed into her muscles with his fingertips. Finally she looked up, her face running with tears, and said, “I married me a man. I didn’t marry no nigger.”

  In the Basement

  WHEN GLORIA FINALLY DESCENDED THE FEW STEPS INTO Christine’s dim apartment, Gloria saw a woman sitting at the wooden kitchen table, with four cans of beer in front of her. Her hair was combed up straight and held erect by a tortoiseshell barrette. A little girl was perched on a stool at the table, reading in the subdued golden light.

  Christine said, “Dee, I want you to meet my friend Gloria.”

  “Howdy do,” Gloria said quickly.

  But Dee did not acknowledge her. “Think I’ll just take me a little nap,” Dee said. She put an arm down on the table and plopped her head on her arm.

  “And this is my daughter, Diane,” Christine said to Gloria. Christine’s voice hurried from embarrassment for her sister’s rudeness into pride in her daughter. “Diane’s smart as a whip.”

  Diane turned her book facedown on the table and left her perch to approach them. She led with her forehead, wide and clear of hair. The light caught the curve of her forehead oddly and made it look like a single car light. Unconscious of her shining forehead, Diane held out her hand. “Howdy do, Miss Gloria,” she said, and smiled brightly.

  “I’ll just check on the boys,” Christine said.

  Little Diane’s lovely face made Gloria breathe carefully. Diane appeared as Christine might have been as a child. Here was intelligence unsullied by bitterness; goodwill undistorted by hardship.

  “What are you reading?” Gloria asked quietly, not to disturb Dee.

  “About a horse.”

  Suddenly Gloria knelt, as though her knees had given way, and held out her arms to Christine’s daughter. Diane walked straight into Gloria’s embrace.

  “Well, I see y’all done made friends,” Christine said as she walked back into the kitchen.

  Pressing Diane to her bosom, Gloria felt as though she’d entered the stable, as though she was beholding a sacred child, the future incarnate that must not be sullied. That must not suffer the degradation of segregation. She held Diane back at arm’s length to look again at her face.

  Diane accepted her gaze with perfect equanimity.

  Gloria had never seen such beautiful skin, such glowing eyes. Diane’s lips parted a little, as though she might speak, but she did not. The slightly scalloped tips of her new big-girl teeth showed.

  “I used to read dog and horse stories,” Gloria said. She got her feet under her and stood up. She spoke to Christine. “I learned more lessons from them than from the Bible.”

  “Girl!” Christine said and frowned slightly.

  “I did,” Gloria affirmed. “I learned to be loyal and brave. To suffer and endure. To have a steel will.”

  “Didn’t know you had a steel will,” Christine teased.

  “But I do.”

  Gloria wondered if Christine had forgotten her own meltdown when the church was bombed, how it was Gloria who stood strong. But it was fine with Gloria if Christine had forgotten. As though standing between the pews again, Gloria felt herself a witness to fact: the face of Christ had disappeared, had been blasted out of the window. His glass-thick body was veiled in dust; his radiance muted.

  Diane returned to the table, picked up her book again, and instantly lost herself in her story. Her eyes moved hungrily across the sentences on the page; Diane had absented herself from the conversation of the women. The ceiling light off, only a small lamp on the kitchen cook table illumined the pages of the open book.

  “If I could paint,” Gloria said quietly, indicating Diane, “I’d paint her picture. Negro Girl with Her Book. Or maybe, Reading at the Kitchen Table.”

  “Dee,” Christine said softly. “You asleep or playin’ possum?”

  Dee’s face was turned from them, and Gloria couldn’t tell.

  “It’s all right if she needs to sleep,” Gloria said. She looked at the four cans of beer and wondered if Passed Out ought also to be included in the picture. Passed Out Cold, with Niece Reading. Social realism, a bit of squalor. Probably it was Dee who wanted soft lamplight to assist her slide into oblivion.

  “I don’t ever drink at home,” Christine explained. “It’s not good for kids to see.”

  Gloria marveled that Christine would reveal the idea while her daughter was in the room, even if she did seem absorbed in reading.

  “Not what you say to kids,” Christine went on. “It’s what they see you doing.”

  For a moment, Gloria had no reply. She felt again that she was visiting a stable. There ought to be straw on the table or in a chair.

  “I feel like Christmas,” Gloria said. What should she call this place where she was? Apartment? Sounded belittling. House? It wasn’t the whole house. She found the word and tipped it into the waiting sentence, without emphasis: “Your home makes me marvel.”

  “Christmas in this hot weather?”

  Gloria smiled. “Now don’t be a doubter.”

  “You like a sandwich, or a cookie? Glass of lemonade?”

  “Lemonade, please. It’s lots cooler in here than outside.”

  Christine took a package of lemonade-flavor Kool-Aid from a drawer. She got down a pudgy glass pitcher, tore back the top of the envelope, and dumped in the powder. While she ran tap water into the pitcher, Christine asked, “What you think of Mr. Parrish?”

  It was on Gloria’s lips to say Oh, he’s fine, but she realized the question wasn’t entirely casual. “Well,” Gloria answered, “he said he wanted to talk, but then he didn’t have much to say.”

  “I think he trusts us.” Christine looked pleased and happy.

  “Does Diane like school?” It was strange to speak of someone present as though she were absent, but the lamplight enfolded Gloria in its own kingdom. In the basement, space seemed partitioned by an invisible curtain; within each fold might reside a world with its story.

  “She reads Dick and Jane at school. At home, she reads Black Beauty and Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch.”

  Diane looked up. “They both have horses in them,” she said.

  I could take her to visit the country, Gloria thought, but did she want Diane to see a bull dominate the bars of a stock rack? In her reading, Diane was claiming a world where animals were more honorable than people. “I used to want a horse so bad,” Gloria said.

  “Did you get one?” Diane asked. Her bright, calm face tilted up toward Gloria. Diane waited serenely to hear either yes or no, ready to build a world on either answer.

  “Eventually, I did,” Gloria said. “But it stays out in the country.”

  “How did you get it?” Diane asked. She closed her book.

  Christine cracked an ice tray into the pitcher and stirred the lemonade with a wooden spoon.

  “Aunt Dee,” Diane asked softly, “would you like some lemonade?”

  “I think she’s resting,” Gloria answered. “I got a horse by learning to play the cello.”

  “What is a cello?” Diane asked.

  “It’s like a big violin, but you hold it between your knees to play. My mother said it would be just like riding a horse to play a cello. Then she said if I learned to play the cello, they’d talk about getting me a horse.”

  “How old were you?”

  “I was nine or ten.”

  “Am I six or seven?” Diane asked her mother.

  “No, you’re just one or the other,” Christine answered. She smiled
at her daughter, as though they were playing a game of secret logic.

  “I mean,” Gloria said, “I can’t remember if I was nine or if I was ten.”

  “I was telling Diane about Schrödinger’s cat,” Christine said.

  Gloria felt the room tilt strangely. “What do you mean?”

  “You know. In physics.”

  “I know about angular momentum,” Diane said proudly. Angular momentum, perfectly pronounced. Diane explained, “If your arms are stuck out, and the fire hose hits one shoulder, and you start to spin, you can spin faster if you bring your arms in. And then you can use your arms, too, to protect your breasts. Or chest.”

  Gloria sipped her lemonade. “Maybe you ought to teach science instead of English,” she said to Christine. Breasts? Gloria had never heard a child of six or seven freely use the word breasts.

  “I teach Diane everything I know,” Christine said.

  Dee snorted from the table and then began to snore.

  “I’d like to learn how to ride a horse,” Diane said.

  “Who rode horseback across Europe during the Crusades?” Christine asked the child.

  “Eleanor of Aquitaine.”

  “Maybe animals are disguises for angels,” Gloria said. The room righted itself, and they stared silently at her.

  Diane suddenly went to open a freestanding metal cabinet, a dish cupboard, but the bottom three shelves were messy with toys. The highest of the three shelves was Diane’s, and she took out a white doll. “Her name is Eleanor,” Diane said. Then she got out a small horse from one of her brother’s shelves. Although the doll, dressed in a short, fur-trimmed ice-skating outfit and wearing boots with skates attached, was twelve inches high, and the horse no more than three, Diane placed the horse between the doll’s feet to make Eleanor ride the horse. “She’s riding across France,” Diane said.

  “Where is France?” Gloria asked skeptically.

  “In Europe. Between Spain and Germany.”

  Propelled by Diane’s hand, the big ice-skating doll rode the little horse across the kitchen table. Diane made clicking noises with her tongue and teeth to sound like hoofbeats. The horse trotted to the proximity of Dee’s sleeping head, then whinnied and drew to a halt.

  “Go on and lemme be,” Dee muttered in her sleep.

  “If something happened to me,” Christine said, “I don’t know what would become of my kids.”

  “Maybe—” Gloria said.

  “No. You got your own growing and learning to do.”

  Suddenly Dee sat straight up. Her eyes were half closed and she only half opened her mouth when she spoke, but she was looking at and speaking to Christine. “You don’t never teach me nothing, Queen o’ Sheba.”

  Night Riders

  “I MARRIED ME A MAN, AND I DIDN’T MARRY NO NIGGER,” Agnes said to TJ, and she felt joy, like a hearth fire in winter, springing to life in her bosom.

  Then she held out her hand and said for him to come on into the bedroom with her.

  “Let’s shuck out of these hot clothes,” she said, but really she didn’t mind the heat of the summer anymore.

  “I believe you want to tango?” he said. “I believe you ready to dance.”

  TJ was already in his bare feet. He unfastened his trousers and stepped out of them.

  “You wearing your young-man undershorts,” she said. Her husband was no taller than she, but she loved the well-molded brown legs against the white Jockey shorts. She started unbuttoning the front of her dress, when she heard a knock at the door. Her hand stopped. She looked at TJ. “Let’s just not answer,” she said.

  TJ picked his trousers up off the floor and stepped in one leg. “It won’t take but a minute,” he said.

  “I’m afraid,” she said. “Let’s not.”

  TJ said, “All right.” And he picked up the blond baseball bat standing in the corner. “I’ll take the Louisville Slugger with me.”

  While he walked out of the room, Agnes buttoned up her shirtwaist dress as fast as she could. She stepped back into her pumps. When TJ opened the door a crack, four white men burst in.

  Agnes charged into the room. “I done call the police,” she shouted. “I done call them.”

  TJ had retreated to the corner. He had the bat cocked like he was about to hit a home run. “Y’all leave us alone now,” he said.

  But one of the men reached for the living room light switch and turned it off. She saw the rush of their dark bodies, heard the thud of the bat. “Aim for they head!” she shouted, and she took off each of her shoes. She attacked the mass of men, and a big hand pushed hard into her stomach. She staggered back but ran at the blob of them again and hammered at them with the heels of her pumps, one in each hand, till she heard the thud of a body hit the floor, and somebody white say he’s down.

  They turned the lights back on, and Agnes saw her husband with blood on his head, lying on his side on the floor. Tom, she crooned. He was little, like a little brown baby dressed like a man. Tom! She watched TJ draw his knees up, and two men kicked him around the hips and pelvis. TJ covered his head with his arms. One of the men was holding the bat by the big end, and he began to strike around TJ’s head with the little end. Another man pushed his buddy aside and got out his own blackjack wrapped in leather.

  Agnes sank to her knees and lifted her empty hands. “I pray, gentlemen, don’t strike him no more. He’s a good man. He never done nothing. Not to nobody.”

  “Who’s with you,” the blackjack man wanted to know. “Name names.”

  TJ groaned.

  “You hear me!” And the blackjack cracked against his cheek, and blood spattered. TJ covered the place with his hand, and they beat the back of his hand, and the skin was gone.

  “Lord help us; Lord help us,” Agnes prayed, on her knees, pressing her hands together.

  “Shut up,” one of the men said and pushed her over.

  “Jesus, save my Tom,” Agnes prayed as she lay on the floor, but they continued to beat him.

  “Speak up, speak up. We ain’t got all night,” one said to TJ.

  “He can’t talk,” Agnes yelled. “He’s unconscious. Oh, Lord, let him live. Let him live.”

  One man lunged against the wall and turned off the light again.

  She heard the kicks and the blows, and she struggled to her knees. She heard a high keening, which was her own voice. She squeezed her eyes shut and entered the darkness where only God could dwell. Then her throat opened in hymn pitched heaven high, sung in her nightmare voice, “ ‘Father, I stretch my hand to thee,’ ” and she stretched out her hand into the blackness. “ ‘No other help I know,’ ” she sang through her sobs. “ ‘If thou withdraw thy help from me, where shall I go?’ ”

  And suddenly, they stopped. She could hear them stopping, one by one. Just their hoarse breath. God was among them, staying their hand.

  “Dead or alive?” one asked.

  “Who has the power?” one of them asked, and she knew the question was for her.

  “You do,” she said. “You and the Lord.”

  “You speak for your husband?”

  “I do.”

  Like the scream of the Holy Spirit, the sound of a siren tore the night. The four men ran for the back of the house. Police were running up the steps and flinging open the door. Beams from two big flashlights cut the darkness of the room as Agnes crawled toward TJ.

  A white male voice filled the room: “We got a report a black man was raping a white woman in here.” Their lights searched the floor, stopped on TJ’s broken body.

  “No, sir,” Agnes said. “Four white mens done beat my husband.” On hands and knees, she crawled toward him. She would shield him. They’d have to beat through her.

  Somebody turned on the overhead light. The two policemen were holding drawn guns in one hand and the big flashlights in the other.

  “Lord God,” one of the men swore. He had seen TJ.

  Suddenly Maggie from next door was pushing in. “Get some ice,” she told
Agnes. She felt TJ’s skull and touched the wounds on his face. “I brought my first-aid kit,” Maggie said, and she placed the little blue box in her lap and unsnapped the lid. Her gray hair was subdued into many horizontal sausage curls that covered her head.

  The younger of the officers respectfully asked Agnes, “You gonna press any charges, ma’am?”

  The other officer put his gun back in the holster. “Let’s go,” he said.

  Agnes said, “We don’t know who they were. They all looked alike.”

  “You who called?” the older officer impatiently asked Maggie.

  “No, sir,” she said. “I didn’t call, but I heard the screaming.”

  Lord God, even they had exclaimed. The young one.

  “You can be fined for a false alarm,” the other officer went on in a cruel voice.

  Agnes looked at them more closely. That one had straight gray hair; the other looked almost young as a boy, and he was little. Their badges flashed every time they moved their chests.

  “You want me to call an ambulance?” the young one asked.

  Maggie stood up. “We thank you kindly,” she said. “But I’m a practical nurse. I believe he’ll be all right.”

  Already Maggie was pressing a tea towel full of ice cubes against TJ’s head. Agnes knew doors were opening across the street and throughout the neighborhood. People were watching and waiting. Outside, the police car light pulsed luridly.

  “Jesus Christ, we don’t have time for this,” the older officer said, and they were gone.

  “Hold that ice against his head,” Maggie told Agnes.

  “God was here,” Agnes said. “I was at the bottom of the blackest pit and I called on the Lord.”

  “I called the police,” Maggie said. “Claimed a white woman was dragged in kicking and screaming by four bucks. Gave your address.”