American Decameron

by Mark Dunn

  “No. I’ll be all right. I just have to rest. Tell Tessie that I’m sorry I can’t come to your barbecue. Maybe next time.”

  At just that moment Irma’s knees began to buckle. Rory caught her as she collapsed. He carried her into the house and laid her down on the sofa in the living room. The room was tidy, but everything within it seemed tattered and faded, as if it contained nothing that had been purchased in the last thirty years. At first glance it appeared to be the room of someone who was not only poor but had given up on trying to be anything else. Although they had Irma over to their house two or three times a year, it had been quite some time since either Rory or Tessie had visited her—years, even, since they had seen what had become of Tessie’s grandmother’s old house.

  “Do you have someone who can come and stay with you?” asked Rory. He had pulled up a chair and sat down next to her as she lay slightly jackknifed upon the threadbare sofa.

  “Oh, I don’t—” Irma shook her head.

  “Then you’re coming with me. We’ll put you in our guest room until we can figure all this out.”

  Irma shook her head again. “I don’t want to leave my home.”

  “You can’t stay here, Irma.” Rory started to get up. “I’m gonna go look in your refrigerator and cupboards.”

  “Don’t.”

  “Let’s get your things.”

  Tessie stared at her husband in horror. “She’s where?”

  “I put her in the guest room.”

  “But we have guests coming.”

  “It’s June. Nobody needs a coat bed. She’s not doing well, Tess. I’m going to have Dr. Vickery come give her a look on Monday. Or would you rather have your Dr. Crowley check her out when he gets here?”

  “You’re too funny. Besides, Dr. Crowley wouldn’t be right for her. He’s a pediatrician. With the new children’s hospital. I thought you knew that. What do you think is wrong with her?”

  “I think your aunt is starving to death.”

  “What?”

  “That’s my diagnosis.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “She has no money, Tessie. On Wednesday, I came upon her right as she was about to put a can of dog food into her cart. I wasn’t going to tell you.”

  “I wish you hadn’t.”

  Tessie sat down in one of the patio chairs. She and Regina had been putting decorative paper tablecloths over several borrowed card tables. Regina was in the kitchen at that moment cutting cucumber and tomato slices.

  “She’s our responsibility, Tessie. She’s family.”

  “I knew the day would come when I’d be saddled with her. I cannot believe this is happening to me. What if she comes out of that guest bedroom and has one of her episodes?”

  “You act like she’s Olivia de Havilland in Snake Pit. She has nervous spells, Tessie. She wrings her hands and bites her lips and then eventually she gets hold of herself and everything’s okay. If you can’t live with that…”

  “What do you mean, ‘live with that’? Are we taking her in?”

  “If she’s no longer able to take care of herself, we may have to.”

  “Over my dead body. I’m not going to have her here. People come here. People who shouldn’t have to see her; people who wouldn’t want to see her. You don’t put someone like Aunt Irma on display, for crying out loud! What are you trying to do to me?”

  Regina was standing in the doorway to the kitchen. She’d heard everything that her mother had just said.

  “Regina,” said Rory calmly, “make your Great-aunt Irma a sandwich. There should still be some of that chicken salad in the fridge. Put the sandwich back in the fridge for when she wakes up. She’ll probably be okay for a while. I got her some soup at the diner on the way home.”

  Tessie turned to her husband. She scowled. “Is that what took you so long? We have people coming over in less than half an hour and you’re stopping off at a diner with my batty aunt?”

  “Go on,” said Rory to his daughter. Regina was still standing in the kitchen doorway.

  “Hurry up, Regina,” said Tessie. “We’ve got a hundred things to do before our guests arrive.”

  Regina opened the door to the kitchen. She turned and said, “When I’m done, I want to go and sit with Aunt Irma. She always likes it when I sit and talk to her.”

  Rory smiled. “You do that, honey.”

  Tessie sprang to her feet. “The Crowleys haven’t even met you yet. What am I supposed to say if they ask where you are?”

  “I’m sure you can think of something, Mom.” Regina went into the kitchen.

  “She takes after you,” muttered Tessie, glaring at her husband, who had begun to busy himself at the grill.

  “And I thank God for that every day,” replied Rory, flipping over a large sirloin steak in the basting tray and splattering the grill with sweet vermouth basting sauce.

  1955

  AGITATED IN ALABAMA

  The bus was empty.

  The two middle-aged white women took their seats on the starboard side of the first row of forward-facing seats. Patty set her shopping bag down on the seat in front of her and nested her purse in her lap. Harriet put each of her two shopping bags down on the floor near her feet.

  Harriet had a car and often drove her friend Patty when the two went shopping together or had themselves a lunch out. Patty had never learned to drive. Patty had a colored man who took her where she needed to go when he wasn’t deadheading her flowers or raking leaves or doing any of the many repair jobs that Patty and her husband Roland’s antebellum mansion required. There was less for Lucius to do in the winter, but Roland Sprinkle kept him on at full salary. Patty’s husband Roland was a lawyer. But he was also half-owner of two launderettes, each in a colored neighborhood. Though Roland Sprinkle was a founding member of Montgomery’s White Citizens’ Council, it was important for him to show the Negroes of this very segregated southern city that he wasn’t a racist. He simply believed that black people and white people got along best when they kept their interaction to a minimum.

  It was Roland who suggested to his wife that perhaps she and Harriet should take the Cleveland Avenue bus to the Montgomery Fair department store downtown. Harriet had wanted to go to Loveman’s at the new Normandale Shopping City. Harriet had been there the week before and had set her eyes on an absolutely divine Lassie Maid wool and cashmere camel-colored balmacaan coat that she now wanted to buy; she was also looking forward to trying Francis Cafeteria’s new veal sauté. On the other hand, Patty’s husband Roland felt that it was important, given the fact that the Negro leaders of Montgomery had decided to prolong what was originally supposed to be only a one-day boycott, for the city’s white citizens to patronize the bus line as much as possible to keep its drivers—most of them good, hard-working family men (all of them white)—from losing their jobs.

  A full week had passed since a seamstress by the name of Rosa Parks (who coincidentally worked at Montgomery Fair) refused to give up her seat to a white man. Mrs. Parks had been sitting dutifully behind the “Colored Section” sign, but when the bus began to fill up with white passengers, the driver had gotten up and moved the sign to the row behind her and then asked that she give up her now white-designated seat. When Mrs. Parks defied him by staying put, the driver called the police and had Mrs. Parks arrested for failing to abide by a city ordinance that gave city bus drivers the authority to maintain segregation upon their vehicles through whatever means they saw fit. She was also charged with disorderly conduct.

  Up until now, Harriet Jacobs and her friend Patty Sprinkle had avoided discussing the boycott. It troubled Patty to think that law and order was breaking down in the city of her birth. That the peace and security of this quiet and stately southern capital was now being disturbed by Northerner-led foment and general unrest. Even the Negro preachers were setting their Bibles aside and preaching hatred of the white man. This is what her husband Roland told her, and it chilled her to the bone.

  In spite
of all this, Patty had vowed to keep her opinions to herself, even as she stared out the bus window at the hordes of colored folk crowding the downtown sidewalks, deliberately avoiding the buses and hoofing it to wherever it was they needed to be. Because it would be several more days until the newly formed “Montgomery Improvement Association” created carpools and independent taxi services to ferry their black brothers and sisters around town.

  Yet, try as she might, Patty couldn’t keep her thoughts and her fears to herself, and so in that next moment she unleashed a great rant that took her friend Harriet by surprise. “It’s just—I’m sorry, Harriet—it just isn’t right. Roland and I—we’ve gone out of our way to do right by Lucius and his family and our maid Wilma and all of her kids, but it just isn’t enough, is it? Not for them, not for any of these Negroes. You give them an inch and they take a mile. I’m sick to death of it. Just sick.”

  “How are Lucius and Wilma getting to and from your house?”

  “I don’t know and I don’t care. This city has a fine bus system for them to use, but they refuse to use it. They listen to that Reverend King and that Mr. Abernathy and all those other rabble-rousing ministers who only want to stir the pot, and I couldn’t care less if Lucius and Wilma have to walk twenty miles to get to my house. It serves them right. Of course, your situation is different because you’ve always taken your maid back and forth like she was the Queen of Sheba.”

  “Lollie lives too far from a practical bus route.”

  “Well then, I suppose she’s sitting pretty now.”

  Harriet moved her bags away from her legs to give herself more room. With no other passengers on the bus, she could put the shopping bags right in the middle of the aisle if she wanted. “I don’t think she’s sitting pretty. Her daughter is sick.”

  “That isn’t what I meant.”

  “I wouldn’t want to trade places with a single colored person in this city, Patty. Would you? What do you mean my maid is sitting pretty?”

  “It’s a figure of speech.”

  “Well, I’d really rather not talk about this.”

  Patty snorted. “I can’t help it.” A quiet moment passed. The bus squealed to a stop at a traffic light. Twenty-five to thirty black people appeared in the crosswalk, all of them staring at the nearly empty bus. A young Negro man in blue coveralls, denotative of his employment at the long-integrated Maxwell Air Force Base, fleered cockily at the driver. Patty saw it. She trembled with rage. “I have to say it. I wasn’t going to say anything about it, but now I have to. Beverly said that yesterday she saw you driving down her street with four or five colored women in your car.”

  “Yes, I saw her. I was wondering if she was going to mention it to you.”

  “Have you started your own taxi service for the help?”

  “Lollie was afraid that her friends would lose their jobs if they couldn’t get to the houses where they worked.”

  “They can take the bus.”

  “No, they can’t, Patty. They have a right to their principles. Even you have to grant them that.”

  Patty stared out the window. “What principles?”

  “The right to not always have to sit in the back of a bus.” Harriet swept her arm at all the empty seats behind her.

  Patty frowned. “Somebody has to. I suppose you think we ought to put all the black people in the front and the white people in the back. How much sense would that make?”

  “It’s segregation that doesn’t make any sense.” Harriet said this softly. A part of her hoped that Patty hadn’t heard it. The words were provocative.

  “I just know you weren’t always this way,” said Patty.

  “You mean before I married ‘the Jew’?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  The bus pulled up to a stop. The front doors opened and an old black woman drew herself up with difficulty onto the bottom step and then, gripping the horizontal bar to her right, hoisted her frail body up onto the raised floor of the bus. The process of boarding was labored and protracted. At no point did the bus driver offer a hand of assistance.

  “Good for her, taking the bus,” mumbled Patty. “At least there are a few sensible colored folk left in this town.”

  The old woman paid her fare. Then she turned away from the driver.

  “Don’t make her—” said Harriet almost inaudibly, the words intended for the bus driver but only in apostrophe.

  Dismounting the bus seemed to be equally difficult for the woman since there was a big drop-off between the floor and the bottom step and another drop-off from the step to the ground, and she would have to try very hard not to lose her delicate balance and fall. “Hurry up or I’ll leave you,” said the bus driver, poking at his teeth with a toothpick.

  Once upon the street—for the bus driver had left the woman too much room to step easily down upon the sidewalk—the woman scurried to the rear door, which the driver had opened for her. This was the rule for the black passengers of Montgomery’s city buses. They were expected first to enter the bus through the front door to pay their fare, then exit the bus and re-enter through the rear door to take their seats. It respected the long-observed custom of black servants only being permitted to enter the house where they worked through the rear or side kitchen door.

  The old woman now struggled to pull herself up the bus’s back steps. The driver revved his engine. Harriet rose from her seat and went to help the old woman. Once on board, the woman took a seat in the next-to-back row. Harriet returned to her seat next to Patty. There were now three passengers on the bus: Harriet and Patty in the first row of the forward-facing seats, and there in the back, an old black woman who, for whatever her personal reason, found it necessary to ignore the boycott and take the bus on this particular day.

  Harriet turned to make sure that the woman was comfortably settled into her seat. Although the old woman had thanked Harriet at the time of her assistance, she now thanked her again with a grateful smile.

  “I was afraid that he was going to leave her,” said Harriet to her friend Patty.

  “What?”

  “The bus driver. Sometimes they take a colored passenger’s money, and then while the person’s walking around to the back door, the driver pulls away.

  “I don’t believe they do that,” snapped Patty. “But if they do, it’s wrong, and they should be reprimanded.”

  “Considering the fact that very few Negroes are riding the bus this week, the drivers should let those who do sit in the front.”

  “That would be against the law.”

  “It isn’t against the law, Patty. Drivers can implement segregation on their buses any way they see fit. And I feel sufficiently segregated from any black person who might like to sit in that front seat.” Harriet pointed to the side seat just behind the driver.

  “You’re being ridiculous, Harriet. Is this what you and Abe talk about every night over dinner?”

  “Yes, Patty. We talk about injustice. And what do you and Roland talk about—I mean, when he isn’t watching Nat King Cole on television?”

  “Roland doesn’t like—well, aren’t you funny and clever? I can safely predict that tonight Roland and I will be talking about how you’ve started driving colored maids all over town like Montgomery’s very own Eleanor Roosevelt. He’ll get a kick out of that.”

  Harriet didn’t respond. It was almost Christmas and her attention was suddenly captured by a Salvation Army Santa Claus standing on a street corner shaking his bell. The very white Santa was using his other hand to pat the head of a little colored girl who, it appeared, had just dropped a coin into his pail. The scene defused Harriet’s anger. She was able to say to Patty in a very calm voice, “Patty, to be very honest, I don’t like you very much.”

  Patty looked as if she had just been slapped.

  “Or your husband. We wouldn’t even be friends if the men we’re married to didn’t happen to be partners in the same law firm. Or—for that matter—if I hadn’t always been so willing to drive y
ou around like a white female version of your man Lucius. I think it’s time that we stopped seeing each other. I hope this boycott lasts for months. I only hope that nobody gets hurt. People in this town—white people—have a tendency to play dirty when they don’t get their way.”

  Harriet stood. In a raised voice she said to the bus driver, who was giving her a stony look through his overhead mirror, “And I could not care less if you lose your job. You’re the one who had Mrs. Parks arrested, aren’t you? She didn’t have to get up. My husband has read me the ordinance. It clearly states that no person, and I emphasize the phrase ‘no person,’ has to relinquish her seat to another person should the bus be crowded and no other seats available. You have twisted the law for your own autocratic purposes just as the judge who sentenced her ignored the law. My friend Patty here sees things much differently than do I. Her husband sees things so differently that he’s joined the Montgomery White Citizens’ Council. I am now going to sit in the colored section of this bus. I have decided to make it my mission to see that the elderly woman with whom I will be sitting makes it safely off this bus and that you don’t try to run her over while she’s disembarking. Arrest me if you like. Goodbye, Patty.”

  With that, Harriet Jacobs picked up her Montgomery Fair shopping bags and moved to the back of the bus. She sat down next to the old black woman. The woman seemed confused.

  Patty Sprinkle had lots to talk to her husband about that night. He had lots to say as well. There was a faction of men who shared Mr. Sprinkle’s views who were exploring ways to punish the black leaders of the boycott for that they had done. There would be arrests and convictions for violation of state statutes that banned boycotts “without just cause.” Local automobile insurers would be coerced into canceling coverage for those who enlisted their vehicles in the carpooling efforts. Taxi drivers who lowered their fares to match the bus fare would be subjected to a re-animation of an ancient city ordinance that set a minimum on taxi fares—a minimum that most black folk in Montgomery couldn’t afford to pay. Later would come the retaliatory house and church bombings. These, though publicly disavowed by the ostensibly upstanding members of the white community, were always effective in drumming up the requisite amount of fear among the black citizenry.