by Richard Dry
“Yeah.” Love threw the top down and shut the locks. His brother kicked and yelled. Love looked at the chest for a moment as Li’l Pit screamed from inside. He backed away from it slowly, then ran downstairs into the living room.
“What’s all that racket?” Ruby asked. Love didn’t look at her. He paced to the front door and back, then sat on the couch, then stood up again.
“What’s going on?” Ruby went to the stairs.
“Nothing.”
“That ain’t nothing up there. You tell me right this minute.” She began to climb the stairs.
“I locked him in the trunk,” Love said.
“What’d you do that for?” She walked more quickly, but Love ran over and pulled on her arm.
“Don’t let him out.”
“What you mean? Let go of me.” She slapped his face, and he laughed nervously.
“Wait. No. Wait, really.”
“What you up to? You two boys play too rough with each other. Lida never made this kind of racket.”
“I’m not playing.”
“What you mean?”
“I didn’t know what to do. He’s gonna get in trouble.”
“Tell me what you mean.” She stayed on the bottom step.
“We’ve got to think of some plan. Something to keep him from slinging.”
“What you got him messed up in?”
“Nothing. I didn’t. That’s why I locked him in. I didn’t know what to do.”
“But he’ll suffocate in there.”
“I know. I know. I’m thinking.” He went back into the living room and paced.
“You can’t go and lock him in a trunk.”
“I know. But we’ve got to do something or he’s gonna get in deep.” The banging became louder as Li’l Pit made the trunk jump on the floor.
“Now, listen. You tell me what you mean. What might he get into?”
Love smiled again and then brought the smile under control. “See, he thinks he’s gonna go on a run,” he said.
Ruby shook her head. “What kind of evil you got that boy mixed up in? I’m fixin to lock you up in that trunk yourself once I get him out a there.” She turned and started up the stairs again.
“You got to wait,” Love yelled, but when he saw she wasn’t listening to him, he ran up the stairs past his grandmother to get to the trunk before she did.
“Get me out of here!” Li’l Pit yelled. “Get me out of here.”
“Hold still,” Love said. “It just fell. Hold still and I’ll open it.” The trunk stopped moving and Ruby came to the door.
“I had to go get the extra key from Nanna. Just hold still.” Love motioned Ruby to leave, but she stayed by the door. He opened the trunk and Li’l Pit burst out and ran to the open window, breathing heavily.
“I was just going to see how it closed, but then it locked,” Love said. “I couldn’t find the key.”
He and Ruby watched Li’l Pit from a distance. He breathed in the fresh air through his nose with his jaw set and tears in his eyes. His hands gripped the windowsill and he stared outside as if he were imagining climbing out and running away. Neither Ruby nor Love went near him, but the long silence seemed only to thicken his distrust, like something setting in concrete.
Ruby looked at the room, the clothes everywhere on the bed and floor.
“Now, what’s all this going on up here?” she asked.
Love looked at her and shook his head.
“What’s this Love’s been telling me…” Love opened his eyes and stared at her with a fear equal to anything she had ever seen in Lida or Love E. “This sure is a mess up here,” she said instead. “A fine mess.” She went to the bed and picked up the clothes, placing them neatly in the trunk. When she was finished, she turned to Li’l Pit, who was still at the window.
“Come on and get your coat and we’ll go to Sizzler tonight.” She’d taken him to Sizzler once before, and he had said it was the first time he’d eaten in a sit-down restaurant.
“No.” Li’l Pit shook his head. “I got some things to do.”
“That’s not until tomorrow,” Love said.
“Then why you want me to get all dressed up now?”
“’Cause we’re going out to dinner,” he said. He looked at Ruby. “Nanna told me this morning we were going out and you had to get dressed.”
Li’l Pit looked at Ruby. She nodded.
He wiped his cheeks, but his jaw was still clenched. He stared at the planks of the hardwood floor, and a whole minute of silence went by. Love and Ruby watched his face as he tried to figure out where to put all his anger. At times his nostrils flared and it seemed he wasn’t calming down at all. But then he lifted his long, wet eyelashes and looked at Ruby.
“Can we get the dessert bar?”
Ruby nodded. “Of course. You can get anything you want. We’re celebrating. This is our New Year’s celebration dinner.”
“I want the dessert bar.”
“Alright, then. Wash your face so we can go.” He walked out into the hallway and they heard him turn on the water. Ruby shook her head at Love and he smiled, and then looked away.
CHAPTER 14
FEBRUARY 1965 • EASTON 19
EASTON TAPPED HIS package of Kent cigarettes on the cash register at the gas station. He didn’t smoke more than one cigarette a day, and he’d already had one in the morning. That was all he would smoke unless he had a test after work, which he did. When he first started smoking, he’d worried that the gasoline on his fingers would catch fire, but all the mechanics smoked on their breaks and so did the attendants, just not around the customers.
On every break over the last year, he had watched Steve, the main mechanic, tear up cars and put them back together. Easton stood over him so it got to the point that Steve asked him to do small things. At first he just handed him oil and filters and parts, until he knew all their names and where they were kept. Then Steve showed him what he did with the parts, putting in the filter, draining the oil, and replacing the fluids. After three months on the job, Easton was doing all the tune-up work so Steve could do more complicated jobs, which he explained later on. After three months, Easton found a broken-down Ford to fix up for himself, and he worked on it in the evenings when he didn’t have art class.
This Tuesday morning he was thinking about the test he had that night. He rolled a cigarette between his fingers and then stuck it behind his ear. He’d smoke it right before the test. Five hundred years of Greek sculpture flashed through his mind, slides that the instructor showed one after the other: Poseidon, Hermes, Alexander; and the orders—Doric, Ionic, Corinthian. The hairs on his arms raised like those of an excited cat. It sometimes overcame him, this sense of being a part of academia and the serious study of art, but even more, it was a sense of having a history different from one he’d always been assigned—now he lived in the great tradition of artists. His classmates yawned during the slide shows, but he sat in the front row, captivated: the blank marble eyeballs of the sculptures haunted him, expressionless and chilling, people both dead and somehow alive; the illusion of softness in hardness, the white waves of hair carved into stone, the folds in the gowns, as smooth and flowing as if they were truly made of cloth; the chiseled white perfection of these warriors and gods. He often postured himself at work in one of the common poses of the statues, his jacket flung over his shoulder like a draped toga.
This was how he stood, his head slightly raised, staring through the garage window as if over the Mediterranean, when Sandra drove up. He hadn’t seen her since she left him in the bedroom almost a year before. After that, there were a few awkward discussions on the phone. The most he ever got out of her was that she didn’t want to hurt him, which, he protested, was exactly what she was doing.
He took the cigarette from behind his ear and lit it as he watched her park by the air hose. She drove a blue ’64 Olds, a gift from her father. Her bracelets caught the sun as she turned the steering wheel, the top of her dress open at the neck.
&nbs
p; As if he’d suddenly realized that this was not a dream, Easton threw down the cigarette and stepped on it. He turned around, looking for something to do, and, at a loss, got underneath the Chevy he was working on. He stared up at the lug nut he’d already tightened after changing the oil and listened as she walked into the garage, jingling the little bell around the door handle.
“Hi,” she said to Steve, who sat reading at the counter.
“Hello, beautiful,” he said. There was a moment of silence. “What can I do to make your day more pleasurable?”
“Does Easton still work here?”
“Easton? Right under there.”
Easton listened to her shoes swivel on the gritty floor. He could see her calves as she approached the car.
“Hello, Sandra,” he said first, just to throw her off.
“Oh. You still recognize my voice?”
“I’m a man of many talents.” All he could see was the bottom of the car and her legs.
“I wasn’t sure if I should come by,” she said. “Or if it would be too painful for you.” He didn’t reply. There was no proud way to answer that question.
“I hear you’re going to Merritt now.”
His chest tightened. He hated that she knew anything about him, particularly that he was in college. “Who told you that?”
“Charles.”
“Mmm-hmm. I thought he was in Mississippi.”
“He didn’t make it down there for some reason. I think he was scared.”
Easton stared at the metal plating under the car—he didn’t want to remember her face. He reached up and touched the cool bottom of the car and then pushed up against it as hard as he could, his chest and neck bursting. Then he let go and breathed out silently.
“I knew you could get into college,” she said. “Just two years and you can transfer to Cal.”
“What makes you think I want to do that?”
She shifted her weight.
“I don’t know. I just thought that’s what people did, I guess.” She paced at the side of the car. “How’s your drawing?”
“Listen, Sandra, what’d you come here for?” She walked away from the car and sat on the bench. Now he could see her legs and dress, all the way up to her stomach. He imagined throwing a wrench at her.
“Did you see that picture of Sheriff Clark beating Annie Cooper in Selma?” she asked.
“Mmm-hmm.”
“Did you hear what she did? As she was being wrestled to the ground, she yelled out, ‘Don’t you hit me, you filthy scum.’” Sandra clapped and laughed out loud.
“So what’s your point?”
“I’m going down to Alabama,” Sandra said.
He froze for a second, but then crossed his legs at the ankles, casually, where she could see. He was unhappy to find himself wishing she wouldn’t go. Even though almost a year had gone by without any contact, somehow her proximity gave him hope that they would get back together.
“They’re arresting hundreds of people, schoolkids too. I thought you might want to come be a part of the revolution down there.”
“You sound like Charles.” But even as he ridiculed her, he imagined sitting beside her in the blue front seat of her Olds, the windows rolled down and the desert around them. He could look at her face as she was driving, wind in her hair, freckles on her ear.
“I’ve got school,” he said.
“Oh, come on. I’m taking the semester off.” She got off the bench and knelt at the edge of the car. He could see her now, her hair pulled back in a ponytail, her eyes smiling at him. He was frightened by how beautiful she was to him. She could see him now also, see that he didn’t have any tools, that he wasn’t working on anything. But she didn’t mention it.
“Why do you want me to go?” he asked. He looked straight up at the car.
“I want you to be a part of it. Everyone is down there.”
“The Reverend Dr. Chicken Wing?” Easton muttered.
“What?”
“That’s what Malcolm X calls him. Didn’t Charles tell you?”
“Malcolm X was down there too, for a day.”
He pulled himself out from under the car and stood up. She stayed kneeling and he looked down at her, though it felt as if he were the one begging.
“Why do you care if I go? Why do you care?”
She frowned and considered his question. “Because.” She shook her head as if she’d never considered it. “I don’t know. Because I thought you’d want to. I thought you’d want to do something.”
“I see.” He turned around and then back to her again, with no place to go. “Is that why you want me around, so I can introduce you to some of my people? So you can be some cool chick showing up with a Black guy in your car? ‘Well golly, Shawn, she must really love us niggers; she drove all the way from California with one.’” He brushed himself off. Steve stayed quiet, his eyes still lowered on the paper. Sandra walked outside and Easton followed her. She turned and faced him.
“Why are you getting so upset?”
They were out by the pumps now and the customers stared at them.
“I don’t understand why you’re doing this,” he said.
“I thought you would want to go. Really. I thought I was doing something nice.”
“Well, I don’t have any reason to go to the South,” he said. “I don’t need to get hosed down for the cause. I don’t have to prove anything to anybody.”
He walked over to her car, motioning her to follow.
“Tell me something,” he said to her through his teeth when she reached him. He grabbed her wrist and held it tightly. “Do you really have no idea why I’m so upset? Are you that stupid? Because I’ll tell you straight out if you need me to.”
“I think I know.” She adjusted the side mirror of her car with her free hand as if nothing were happening.
“Why? You tell me why,” he said.
“Because I wouldn’t sleep with you.”
“Oh, man!” He threw his hands in the air and turned all the way around, then faced her again. “I’m angry at you because you never told me why. You never explained it. You just up and left, no questions allowed. How would you like someone to do that to you? And now you want me to go on this big trip with you, drop everything I have and be with you again like nothing ever happened. I’ll tell you why I’m angry at you. I’m angry at you for coming here and not knowing.”
“I left you because I thought it was best for both of us.”
“Well, thank you so very much for making my decisions for me.” He leaned on the car with a contemptuous smirk on his face. “You know, that’s the whole problem with you folks. You think you know what’s best for us without ever asking what we want.”
“I guess I was right.” She brushed her fingertips across her forehead. She let the words hang.
“What were you so right about this time?”
“We could never have gotten past it. I’m not saying it’s your fault. It just would have always been ‘us folks’ and ‘you folks.’ Never just you and me. That’s why I left. That’s why I didn’t want to go any further with you.”
“So you left me ’cause I’m Black.”
“No. But that’s how you’re going to say it was.”
“Whatever. I know what I know. Ruby warned me.”
“Let’s just forget it, Easton.” She opened the driver’s door and got in.
“Yeah. Let’s forget it.” He walked away and heard her start up the car. She didn’t shift into gear at first, but waited, for what he didn’t know, but he hoped that she was waiting for him to come back, because he wasn’t going to. He walked into the building and then into the garage. It wasn’t until he was behind the garage window that he turned around and watched her leave the gas station. He stared at her car as it pulled into the street, and he stared at the street long after she had gone.
SANTA RITA JAIL
TODAY I READ from Black Protest: History, Documents, and Analyses:
Early in
the Civil War, when the federal government still adhered to the notion that it was not a war over slavery, a debate was carried on among Negroes of the North over whether or not to offer their services. Many did attempt to enlist, but the sentiments of many others equalled that of one man who wrote:
I have observed with much indignation and shame, their willingness to take up arms in defence of this unholy, ill-begotten, would-be Republican government, that summons its skill, energy, and might, of money, men and false philosophy that a corrupt nation can bring to bear, to support, extend, and perpetuate that vilest of all vile systems, American slavery … (Wesley W. Tate)
Yet many Negroes had sought to enlist, and attempts were continued until Congress authorized the use of Negro troops in 1862. Even after rejections Negroes had formed companies or military clubs and drilled, keeping themselves in readiness for the day when the government would decide they were fit, and needed and wanted in the fight. By the end of the war 186,017 Negroes had fought with the Union Army—over 100,000 of them recruited in the South.
Negroes of the South took a stand on the war in other ways also. Some refused to work altogether; others demanded wages for their labor. Many guided Union soldiers and gave information to federal troops. Probably the best known Negro information-gatherer was Harriet Tubman who was a spy behind Confederate lines. In many cases slaves seized the property of their masters when Union troops arrived.
There are recorded cases of slave attack on white civilians in the South, but despite the greatly increased fears of the Southern whites and widespread rumors of uprisings, there was no general insurrection. This is not surprising in the view of the militarization of the South during the war which overlay the already established system of repression. In addition many observers agree that a general uprising was precluded by the accommodation of slaves to the slave system under the pressures of its elaborate techniques for preventing communication, and for breaking the will to resist by a combination of punishment and reward. But while there was no general insurrection during the war slaves did reveal their sentiments, for thousands fled to the Union lines.
Once Negroes were accepted in the Union Army other struggles began. The War Department order providing for Negro enlistment also provided that black regiments were to have only white officers. Despite many appeals and petitions by soldiers, resolutions of Negro organizations, and representations by Negro leaders, not more than 100 Negroes received officers’ commissions during the war. A second struggle of black soldiers was the fight for equal pay. Two Massachusetts regiments, the Fifty-fourth and Fifty-fifth, refused to accept any pay at all until pay was equalized. When the Massachusetts legislature appropriated funds to make up the difference between their pay and that of white soldiers the Negro regiments still refused, holding out for a federal equal-pay order. As Congress debated the issue there were threats of strikes and mutinies. One sergeant, William Walker of the Third South Carolina Volunteers, led his company to the captain’s tent and ordered them to stack their arms and resign from the army. He was court-martialed and shot for mutiny. The law providing for equal pay was passed six months after its introduction, but even then it had its faults. For those soldiers who had been free at the outbreak of the war, pay was made retroactive to the time of enlistment, for those who gained freedom through service in the war, pay was retroactive only to January 1, 1864. Thus, the Congress made a distinction between those who were free before the war and those who became free due to enlistment, providing full pay only for the former.…
