Four Spirits

by Sena Jeter Naslund

  “ ‘Jim, he dead. He found hangin’ on a peach tree down round Alabaster. His parts gone and they cut out his tongue.’ ”

  “How change gonna happen,” Christine asked impatiently, “we don’t push a little? Who Jim anyway?”

  “I’m thinking of your kids, Christine,” Agnes softly continued. His parts gone and they cut out his tongue. “Who gonna take care of them—something happen to you?”

  “I don’t want to think about my kids right now.”

  “See what I mean?” But Agnes heard the resignation in her own voice. Wisdom was what you got from your own living; it couldn’t be shared. Learning—that could be shared. Maybe. Not wisdom.

  Christine put her hands on Agnes’s shoulders. Softly, she looked into her eyes. “I don’t want to think of my own kids, Agnes,’cause I’m thinking of four little girls. My cousin and three others blowed up in church.”

  Agnes shook her head. “They don’t want any violence done in their name. I know that. They gone to a better world.”

  Then Agnes recognized Charles Powers approaching them, from night school. He was smiling, looked so happy and pleasant.

  “I knew I could count on you,” Christine said to him.

  “I’ve graduated from marching to sitting,” Charles answered. “Howdy-do, Miss Arcola, Mrs. LaFayt.” Suddenly, he crouched down as though he were sitting. He scooted fast, even though he was almost sitting down and made them all laugh.

  “You don’t have to ‘Miss’ me,” Arcola said. “We not at school now.”

  “Your daddy know you down here?” Charles asked her. When he stood up straight, he towered over her. A big man. Agnes and TJ looked straight across into each other’s eyes when they stood together. With hooded eyes, Charles looked down at Arcola affectionately.

  Agnes was shocked that he reached out and touched Arcola’s shoulder, but then, lots of schoolteachers ended up marrying their students. As Arcola said, they weren’t at school now. And Charles was probably as old as Arcola. People need to reach beyond their station in life, Agnes told herself. I’m not against that. He’s a nice young man.

  “It’s the dogs I’m scared of,” Arcola answered. “I got bit once.”

  Fondly Charles said, “I ain’t letting any dog bite you.”

  “May ’63. I didn’t know you then.” She smiled a sweet smile.

  “You go limp,” Christine said aggressively. “We can’t fight back. You know that.”

  Charles spoke right up to her. “I’m not so sure women ought to be involved.”

  “Don’t give me that shit,” Christine said. “Pardon my French, Mrs. Agnes.”

  But Agnes was reeling with shock.

  Christine lowered her voice, but still Agnes marveled at the force in her voice.

  “Martin Luther King got his start from Rosa Parks,” Christine hissed. “She just one woman, and the South ain’t never been the same since. And you think of those dead children at Sixteenth Street. Didn’t nobody say, ‘Now you send four little Negro boys down to prepare for Youth Service ’cause we don’t want to blow up four little colored girls.’ ”

  Why was Christine mad at Charles? Agnes wondered.

  “You see some police dragging Arcola off by the hair of her head,” she harangued on, “and you don’t do nothing. When they grab you, Charles Powers, you go limp as a dead fish.”

  Her palms tingling, Agnes could feel how she’d grasped her pumps in both hands, how she had beat those men who were on TJ with the heels of her shoes as hard as she could. You got to defend your own, she thought, but she knew Martin Luther King would be ashamed of her. Still, he’d understand. Surely he would. Charles Powers was a fine young man, clean and straight, tall, hadn’t filled out all the way yet. And his clothes were pressed and respectable. She remembered how he’d come the first time to night school, wrinkled and worn out, codeine cough syrup in his pocket.

  “You and Arcola go walk around the block,” Christine said to Charles and Arcola.

  Christine just had to be bossy.

  “We got an hour or more. We need to spread out,” Christine went on. “Agnes, I need to talk to you.”

  Agnes thought that Christine wanted to apologize again:I ain’t taking none of that shit! She sure ought to apologize, her a teacher, whether she was on school grounds or not. Agnes watched Charles and Arcola stop to talk to the shoeshine boy. Then she noticed the family resemblance between them. “Why, I believe that’s Charles’s little brother,” Agnes said.

  Christine said nothing. She fidgeted as though she wanted to talk, but she said nothing.

  Agnes thought Cat got your tongue for once? but she said with dignity, “Mrs. Christine, can I do something for you?”

  Christine sighed. Agnes waited. She knew Christine, shifting her feet on the pavement, would finally decide to get on with it. When she did speak, Christine’s voice was tired and meek, as though it were coming from the lamppost nearby.

  “I always kind of got the feeling that you and your husband done done all right?”

  Now, Agnes was surprised, but she decided just to answer truthfully. She wouldn’t be offended. “Yes, that’s the truth,” she said. “We both always been regular first at Eighth Avenue A.M.E., and now at Sixteenth Street. We save our money. We tithe, least I did when I was working, and we save. We gonna have a good retirement, I believe.”

  Still Christine looked worried, as though she hadn’t gotten the answer she wanted.

  “I know you ain’t never gonna be no millionaire like A. G. Gaston, but you got some extra now, ain’t you?”

  “Yes, I do,” Agnes said directly. “You need some money, Christine?”

  “No.” Then Christine hesitated again. She walked over to the lamppost and knocked on it, knuckles on metal. Why she knocking on a lamppost like it some kind of door? “But I kind of got one eye on the future,” Christine said.

  “What would you like for me to do?”

  “I know you right about a lot, Agnes. And I do apologize for my language. I know life ain’t no multiple-choice, machine-graded test. Once I go in that door to White Palace Grill, I don’t know what might happen. You right. I might never come back out. Cat—she smart—she know that better than anybody. Cat called me up on the phone this morning at my house—”

  “I’m scared these phones is tapped.”

  “They don’t know me from any other nigger.” Now Christine was impatient with Agnes for interrupting. “They ain’t tapped my home phone. Cat didn’t call at school. Anyway, she say in her little slow way, swallowing now and then, ‘I been thinking about you, Christine. You and Agnes. You know Agnes is really a fine person, and she really brave—’ ”

  “Oh, go on. She didn’t say that.” Agnes’s heart was swelling with pleasure. Cat was the brave one, her holding her little white wax candle in both her hands, sitting waiting in the dark schoolroom for the bomb.

  “Yes, she did, and she say a lot more good about you, too. She say that it take a lot of courage for a late-middle-aged woman like you to come back to school, try to get her GED. She say it take a lot of determination for you to come night after night.” Christine went right on retelling, as though she were in a trance. “Every night sitting in that classroom with all the windows up and not a breath of air, and it just about a hundred degrees, and mosquitoes and moths and june bugs flying in, crawling on your clothes, in our hair—”

  “She there, too.” Agnes wished she’d taken care of Cat when Cat was a little girl. That was how much Agnes loved Cat, all of a sudden, with the cars going up and down Twentieth Street, and the police strolling along, king of the world. If she’d taken care of Cat, kept her clean and well fed, made her take naps, maybe she never would have gotten her disease.

  “Let me get to what I’m trying my best to tell,” Christine said. She shifted her weight from one foot to the other. “Cat say, ‘But you know, Christine, there’s a tragedy in Agnes’s life. She never had no kids—’ ”

  Agnes couldn’t keep herself fr
om gasping. She never had any kids—that was the way Cat would have said it.

  “ ‘—She never had no kids and she was made to take care of children. Made for it.’ ” Christine was speaking more and more rapidly. “ ‘And the sit-in coming on,’ this is what Cat told me on the phone, ‘it may be that there be a tragedy in your life, Christine. Or in my life.’ And she say, ‘You talk to Agnes, before time, you tell her anything happen to you, maybe she and her husband take care of your children.’ And that’s what I’m asking you, Agnes. Could you take ’em?”

  Agnes threw her arms around Christine and burst into sobs of fear and gratitude. “Oh, honey, you don’t have to ask me that. You know I’d take ’em. TJ and me, we ain’t gonna leave your babies without no parents. Oh, honey—” Agnes grabbed Christine to her, tried to keep her safe with her own body. “Anything happen to you, they come right to our house, we got a three-bedroom house—we prepared for children, boys and girls—and they be just like our own flesh and blood.”

  While Agnes held her close to her body, Christine spoke in a gush, into Agnes’s hair. “You know I could ask my sister. She used to ’em, but—”

  “No, don’t leave ’em with nobody but Tom and me. We done made our way. We ready.”

  “I got it writ on this piece of paper what I want. You take this, keep it safe. Dee wouldn’t fight you, but I want everybody to know. I choose you.”

  Agnes began to kiss Christine right there on the street. It didn’t matter who saw. But she listened to her thumping heart, how it wanted Christine to live and have her own life, even more than her whole being wanted the gift of children. Three children! She took Christine’s typed-out paper, folded it, and kissed it, and pressed it next to her heart. She unbuttoned her dress right there on Twentieth Street and slid the paper insider her brassiere next to her flesh. They could snatch her purse, but they’d have to rape and kill her to get that paper.

  “Now you go along,” Christine said. “I don’t want you anyplace ’round here ’cause that’s my babies’ future you got there.” She gently helped Agnes rebutton. “And that’s what this is all for.” She nodded at the White Palace, a place no more segregated than any other diner, restaurant, or lunch counter in Birmingham. Someday her children would go inside the White Palace, same as anybody, and eat a hamburger.

  Agnes kissed Christine again on her cheek. Half blind, Agnes made herself begin to move down the sidewalk, to the south. She could feel the hand grenade soldier and the police behind her, but with every step she put space between herself and them. TJ would never have to go as a soldier again. She tried to fix her eyes on the sky, to thank God for love.

  But Christine must live to have her children. Still, she, Agnes, was loved, and chosen, and trusted. Her eye fell on the big Fair and Square sign of Blach’s store, the square ruler and the lily, pretty as the cross of Jesus. Thank you, Lord Jesus, she tried to just mouth it, but the words came out, and she knew she mustn’t talk to herself out loud or people would think she was crazy.

  “Wait,” Christine called after her. Christine was standing where she was, but she called. Softly and tenderly, Jesus is calling. “You know their names, don’t you?”Calling for you and for me. “Where the names come from. Diane, she oldest, and then I studied history, and the boys are named for kings of England.” Christine in her Sunday suit stepped closer to Agnes, and the confidential words tumbled out. Come home, come home, come home, come home. “Eddie, Edward ’cause King Edward gave up all for the woman he loved, and I thought Eddie’s father might love me like that, but he left for Detroit and didn’t ever send for us.”All you children, come home, come home. “And Henry, I call Honey, named after Shakespeare Henry the Fifth, who grew up wild but made a good man.”

  “I know their names,” Agnes reassured. “Diane, Eddie, and Henry.”

  “I think Eddie might needs some glasses. I been intending to have him checked, but I never did do it.”

  “I get his glasses fit.”All you children, come home with me.

  Now they were holding hands, two women making one. Agnes stopped crying. She needed to listen and learn. She needed to know as much as she could. “Keep on,” she said.

  “That scar on Diane’s shoulder. That just a chicken pox scar. I told her that was where she got her smallpox vaccination, but she ain’t never been vaccinated really. I was scared of those vaccinations ’cause they say the germs ain’t all the way dead. But I reckon I ought to go ahead and let her be vaccinated. And last Christmas wasn’t so good, and I promised all of ’em, Santa Claus come double this year, if you can.”

  Agnes felt that a dagger had entered her heart. “Don’t say that. Don’t say that, Christine.”

  Christine shook her head. “You probably know better than me what younguns need. Don’t pay any attention to this babble. Go on now.”

  But Agnes had to sound the warning. “My voices told me to shop, yesterday and again this morning. I got toys in this shopping bag. I been to the presales, and me with no children that I buy for.”

  She saw horror pass over Christine’s features. Her body was trembling inside her navy blue suit.

  “You already got toys for my younguns’ Christmas?”

  “I been trying and trying to tell you. Don’t do this sit-in. My voice say, ‘Go look for Christine. Tell her go home this day.’ ”

  “Well, you’ve told me.” Christine was calming herself already. “I can’t let myself be superstitious, Agnes.” Her body ceased its trembling.

  “You still got the choice, girl.” Agnes’s thoughts scrambled to make everything straight and fitting together. “Whether you live or die,” she said, “these Christmas things going to your children. That’s all that means. You live and keep your children for yourself.”

  Saturday: Lee

  HER HOUSE WENT, NOT WITH A BOOM, BUT A LOW THUD and sudden collapse, as though a mallet from the sky had, with a single blow, pounded the structure earthward. The windows in the front bedroom blew out in a flash of light, and the entire corner of the house sank down. Immediately there were flames ready to consume the wreckage.

  I can kill my enemies, Lee thought. I know how. I know the long and short of it. Why did that phrase please her so much? From her vantage point across the street, she puzzled over it an instant. The long of it is deciding. The short of it is doing it.

  In the end, while he was snoring, she had snatched the beautiful crochet-lace-trimmed table drape, and she held it now, wadded up, pressed against her heart. Her treasure. She had taken her treasure away. In the end, she had cut away the clock and just lit the fuse. Suppose I trip, she had thought, but then she told herself the truth:I won’t.

  And then in her smugness, just after she positioned herself across the street, she remembered what she had seen. Just out of the side of her eye, running toward the lean-to back porch. She had seen Superman coming to save her worthless husband. Superman all shrunk little, and running like a little kid, not all-powerful and flying. Disappearing from her sight just at the moment of the boom, the exploding glass, the sinking down of the foundation, the refiner’s fire.

  That, she could not face. That, she would never ever face. She promised herself: she had not seen anything. That was impossible because Bobby had been sent to her mama’s, and Bobby was a good child who obeyed. Run! She was the one who must run!

  And she did. Nobody was looking. Not yet.

  She ran like a wild woman. She made herself smile as she ran. When her neighbor a block away called out “Where you going?” Lee tossed back, “I won a prize. I won a prize. I’m going after it!” And she knew glee was all over her face because she had done it, and that was not imagined.

  She was free. She had never been so terrified. Her bottom was healed now. She’d never been so scared and glad. She was strong as Wonder Woman, even panting like she was, and she held out one wrist to one side and the other to the other side to deflect whatever bullets or arrows might come. The sweat was pouring down her face, after she’d run half a mile
or so. Lee made herself slow to a fast walk.

  She saw a little colored boy pushing an ice cream cart, and she felt in her pocket. Yes, there was a dime. Just before she lit the fuse, she had picked up the loose change on the bedside table. She had done everything right. She’d sent the children, all the children, to her mother’s, and Bobby was a good child, who always did exactly what she told him. Hadn’t she said, Y’all stay till I come to get you?

  The colored boy was barefooted, and the pavement was hot, but she knew their feet was tough and he was used to it by now, and he had ringworm on his neck, but she didn’t care, the Popsicle would be wrapped up good. She folded the lace cloth into a triangle and draped it like a shawl over her shoulders. When she asked for orange, the boy lifted the thick square lid of his pushcart. Smoke from the dry ice came lofting out like he had the fires of hell in there. He reached down in it almost to the pit of his skinny brown arm, and out came her double-barrel Popsicle, with frost on its wrapper and its twin wooden handles sticking out.

  Then she thought of Vulcan and his Popsicle.

  “I’ve changed my mind,” she said, and the boy looked scared, so she went ahead and gave him the dime, but she added, “I’d like cherry flavor instead of orange.”

  He peered down in the cold hole, returned the orange and brought up the cherry. Then he went on down the street, ringing his bell with new confidence and hope.

  Red, old Vulcan, ’cause somebody died today.

  She started to pull off the thin paper, but some of it wanted to stick to the frozen Popsicle. She breathed her warm breath on the stuck place to make it loosen, and it did—a science trick most kids hadn’t known when she was growing up, but she’d taught all her kids.

  Taught ’em every little trick she knew. And they’d taught others. When she was little, she’d kept the secret for herself. She could keep a secret. She licked the sweet colored ice. Cherry was more sticky than orange, she’d always thought.

  She licked her Popsicle as she walked along. Not too fast, but fast enough. She was going someplace. Anyplace. Back when she was a child, she’d tested her theory about cherry and orange stickiness. Back when Popsicles were just a nickel each, she had bought two, and closed her eyes so she wouldn’t see the color. It was her science experiment. A “blind” experiment to see which kind was stickier. She’d chosen cherry, but the teacher had said, though she couldn’t see the colors, she could taste the difference in the flavors and knew in advance that way which was which, so it wasn’t really what you could call a blind experiment for stickiness. Lee had been mortified.