“You reckon right. How’d you know that?”
“If I had a education, I reckon I’d call it a educated guess.”
He was right; things had been particularly cold. I finally arrived at my homeroom, feeling rushed and late, but it turned out that most of the class was having the same difficulty, and I wasn’t the last to turn up.
It was noisy when I entered, but as soon as I passed through the door, the room fell silent. I was the first black to arrive. Glancing into a sea of peach-colored faces, I made my way through a maze of red, brown, black, and blond hair. I took a seat in the middle after a quick survey. There was something unsettling about the front. Maybe it was just that I’d be too close to the white teacher. There was something demeaning about sitting in the back, as if it was expected. After a few minutes of staring, the painful silence lifted. I guess they figured by then that I didn’t have a knife. A boy across from me leaned over the left shoulder of the boy in front of him.
“Think we ought to slide over some?” he asked. “If we stay this close, our hair might kink up.”
A group of them laughed. The teacher looked up, but she didn’t seem ready to engage. She was white, old and wrinkly. Her hair sat up on her head in a thimble shape that I imagined you couldn’t have bowled over with a rock. I figured her ideals must be equal to her age. I guessed that she probably hated blacks, and from that I deduced that I’d never be able to keep my grades up in her class.
I sat there stewing in my juices as the jokes continued. Something here or there about my lips, my nose, a few things about my mother who screwed dogs and pigs, some discussion of my body odor and how I probably couldn’t count to ten. Of course, I knew this kind of thing was coming. So I was extremely happy to see Rosetta Jones, Flak, T. Wall and a few other black kids enter. They glanced at me and sat on the other side of the room. We were allies in skin tone only. Couldn’t they, like Mark, overlook all that other stuff just this once? How long were they going to carry on with this nonsense?
“Good morning, class,” the teacher said. “I’m Mrs. Jones.”
She stood and walked in front of her desk. Mrs. Jones tried her best to calm the nervous class. She delivered a warm monologue, saying that everyone was aware of the new situation and that all should try to make the best of it; that this was how it was going to be from now on. A couple of the white kids groaned, and she ignored them.
She began to call roll for the seventeen whites and seven blacks. She had to go through it twice before she got everyone to answer, or to answer loud enough for her to hear. Mrs. Jones gave a short orientation for those of us not used to the school. Then she moved right into the first lesson, which was history.
She familiarized everyone with the particular item to be discussed and then posed a question. She looked at us waiting for answers, but none came. Black kids stared at the white kids, and the white kids stared back. Who would take a chance on being the first to be wrong? I thought the whole thing was silly, yet I couldn’t force myself to say anything. After a few moments of awkward silence, I willed my arm into the air. She pointed to me, and I answered the question.
“Yes, that’s right, ah—”
“Evan . . . Evan Walls.”
“Yes, that’s correct, Evan,” she said and seemed genuinely surprised. I was amazed at how dumb white people thought we must be.
She asked a few more questions, and I answered them all, determined to let her know that I was as smart as the smart-assed white kids next to me. She was simply astonished.
I felt like a god, but out of the corner of my eye, I saw the stares. Much colder even than when I had first walked into the room. Stares of uppity nigger and stares of Uncle Tom. I was in a crossfire of hate.
When class was over, I was met outside the door by T. Wall and Rosetta.
“You oughta be goddamned ashamed of yourself,” T. Wall said.
“For what?” I asked.
Rosetta spoke up. “You gone kiss that white lady’s ass, too, so you can be her pet, too, ain’t you? Get out my face, Uncle Tom!”
They both stormed off down the hall, and I stood by the door, trying to be tough, trying to show them that I wasn’t bothered in the least, but I was, and I am sure they knew it. As if things weren’t bad enough, I thought. In one direction I’d be the nigger, and in another, I’d be the pet, the traitor, the Tom. I guessed it wasn’t so safe in the middle, after all.
When I got home, a message had been left for me. All the spokes on my bike rims had been broken out, the frame had been bent by a sledgehammer, the fenders had been ripped off and the tires cut up. There it was. My beautiful bike, finally completely done in. I ran in to tell Mama, but she was ready for me. News did travel fast in Canaan.
For the next fifteen minutes, I heard about how I had disgraced the family by kissing up to the white lady and putting down the other black children. Did I enjoy making Daddy crazy? Did I enjoy turning this family upside down?
I couldn’t get a word in, so she never knew that I figured I had been doing just the opposite.
When she finished being angry and pleading with me at the same time, I walked outside to eyeball my bike. I felt heavy-hearted. To this day, I don’t know who destroyed it, but my money was on T. Wall. I stood there thinking, But we were the best of friends.
EIGHT
Summer turned to fall, the leaves changed, the nights chilled. My Friday nights were dominated by high school football, my Sunday afternoons by the NFL. Outside of class, my school days were spent searching for private places of refuge from my ever-resentful classmates. During classes, when I wasn’t answering a question, I kept my eyes on my desk or on Mrs. Jones. At home, I searched for a warm haven from the cold silence of my family. I found it in the woods across from our house. One day I happened upon a small area that reminded me of my circle in the cornfield. A haven of tall, skinny, pines. I liked to lie on the ground in the middle of them and stare upward. Especially, at night.
But not everyone was hiding out, concerned about making waves as they pursued their mission. Eliza Blizzard continued to boldly move forward.
Not long after school started, she began a crusade against the four grocery stores and the two meatpacking plants. She put leaflets in the mailboxes of as many black people as she could, asking them questions like, “How many black people work at the checkout counters in your favorite grocery store? For that matter, how many black people have a good job in your favorite grocery store? Of the thousands of black folk that come and go in the packing plants, how many have been supervisors? The answer to all of the above questions has to be a big ZERO. The next question is, black people of Canaan, what do we do about it?”
The resounding reply from black Canaan was “Nothing.” As usual, I eavesdropped on that week’s porch session.
“You can tell that fool won’t born and bred in Canaan,” Chauncey Mae said as she sucked on her toothpick.
“Yeah,” Ethel Brown said. “She won’t ’round when they was hanging our behinds from trees for all kinda trivial-assed thangs.”
“She don’t remember what happened to Nate and Cora,” Aunt Mary said.
I thought about Reverend and Mrs. Ellis hanging from the church steeple.
“She don’t know these crazy crackers like we do,” Jim Brown said.
“It ain’t enough,” Mama said, “that she done turned the whole town upside down with her craziness with the schools.”
“That’s a fact,” Daddy said.
Everyone became quiet, because they all knew that the school business was touchy with Mama and Daddy. One son was a traitor who spent time kissing up to white teachers and trying to embarrass other black children with how much of the white folk’s nonsense he knew. The other wasn’t a Tom, but he was still too smart for his own good. Mama and Daddy played the part of injured parents so the others would take pity on them.
Eliza Blizzard got little support from people. What help she did get came from the same few who had helped her with the int
egration of the school system. Even still, Eliza would not be deterred. She figured out how to get the people on her side. She set her sights on Ray Coon, who was the most hated white man in town. Ray owned Canaan’s largest gas station. It was called Ray Coon’s Gas & Oil, and it had six pumps, sold maps, cigarettes, sodas, chips, and other snacks, had two hydraulic lifts and three full-time mechanics.
He was vilified because when it came to disliking and generally offending black people, he took the cake. There were all kinds of theories for the roots of his extreme hatred. People speculated that a relative of his must have been killed by a black person, that he had been beaten up by some black buck during his youth, or that maybe he’d caught his wife sleeping with a black man. I asked Mama Jennie what she thought about all of it.
“I don’t know what the fool’s problem is. It’s a good bit of justice, though, that a white man as hateful as that be named Coon. Come to thank of it,” she said, laughing, “maybe that be the crux of his problem.”
Eliza Blizzard began to frequent Ray Coon’s gas station, which was something of a struggle for her. She usually went elsewhere because, as Bojack told me, “She can’t stand being called ‘nigger gal’ every time she go to get some gas. Folks who been born and raised up around that cracker are used to it.”
But Eliza Blizzard stuck it out. Every time she got some gas and he called her “nigger gal,” she called him “Ray” instead of “Mr. Coon.” Then her few supporters started doing the same thing. He was outraged that blacks presumed to call him by his first name—so incredibly outraged that he eventually changed the name of his station to Massa Coon’s Gas and Oil, his thinking being that blacks who dared to call him by his first name would have to call him Massa. People say he had quite a chuckle thinking about it. When Eliza Blizzard drove up on the day he put up his new sign, he strolled out of the building with a huge smile.
“What you want, nigger gal?” he asked. Then he tossed back his head and winked at a couple of his mechanics who had come out to witness the moment. They prepared to yuk it up when this uppity black woman called him “Massa.”
“Fill it up, Coon,” she said.
He was stunned. “You know what my new name is, nigger gal!” he shouted.
“Yes, but Coon is more official. Don’t you think?”
Massa Coon went into a wild rage and refused to sell her gas. Eliza Blizzard got out of her car and shoved him aside as she had done with Reverend Walker the day she announced the integration of schools. Then she cussed him up and down as she filled her own tank. This wouldn’t have been so bad except that the gas station was on one corner of the only intersection with a traffic light, which meant it was the most traveled intersection in town.
Black people who were passing on the street or sitting in their cars waited for Massa Coon or one of his boys to strike her down. Never before had they seen white people stand for anything like that. But nobody did anything to her. It was then that Canaan blacks came to believe that white people were afraid of Eliza Blizzard because she had almost single-handedly changed the school situation, which must have meant she had some powerful connections with the federal government. Massa Coon didn’t want to be the first to attack her in front of a crowd and then suffer humiliating—even criminal—
repercussions.
Later that night, Coon suffered a near-fatal heart attack. Within a few months he sold the station, and after that blacks came and went with relative ease.
The struggle continued. Newly energized blacks boycotted the local grocery stores and in the end forced the owners to hire black stock and checkout people. After that, they boycotted all food produced by the packing plants and forced them to hire black supervisors. Four were picked, and Daddy was one of them. He bought a new car and new clothes for Mama, who now wouldn’t be seen outside the house unless she was dressed “sharp as a tack.”
“Lord God, thank you so much,” Mama prayed at the dinner table every night. “Thank you for the many blessings you have bestowed upon us. Thangs is really turning around for black folk in this town. Once again you have kept the Walls family out in front.”
Things even got better for Bojack. In the midst of all the excitement, he and Aunt Mary stole away for a weekend and came back remarried.
“What did you go and do that for?” I asked him one day during our regular football practice.
“’Cause I love her.”
“Then why did you divorce her in the first place?”
“I didn’t divorce her. She did me, ’cause she needed some time to solve some problems, and the way I was acting was one of them problems.”
“Well, you haven’t changed much that I can see.”
“Nope. But now she understands why I had to play nigger, so to speak. You know, shuffle, give up them yes’ums, look at the ground, look weak and dumb. Just to get through the day with the white folks. Thangs was hard. I had to get by. And when she went off by herself, she found out she had to do the same thang. I thank that restored what little manhood I got in her eyes.”
“You think it will last?”
“I believe so. She done learned some thangs, and I done learned some. I reckon both of us be better off now.”
“I hope you’re right. If you’re happy, I’m happy for you.”
“Thanks, little man. Thanks a lot.”
It got on my nerves that everybody seemed to be doing well besides me. Only Mark was having similar problems, but he was working his way out. Black kids gave him grief for being such a bookworm, and he was afraid that this would lead to him being called an Uncle Tom, too. He began to spend more and more of his study time in front of the new color television that Daddy bought.
I resented Mama’s prayers of thanks every night at the dinner table. Every night before Mark came into our room, I knelt by my bed, my stomach on fire, and prayed for God to lift the burden that He must have known was too punishing for a boy my age. But nothing improved, and I began to think that maybe white people were right. That God wanted us to be a subservient race, and that he was punishing me for trying to overcome the odds. I figured he, as well as my old friends and new foes, had decided it was open season on Evan Walls. I became about as popular as a fish hook dropped in the Chesapeake Bay without bait.
•••
One Sunday afternoon, I was riding an old bike that Bojack had fixed up for me. I had my transistor radio in my shirt pocket, and I was listening to Joe Tex singing about a woman with skinny legs. I felt what I thought was a bee sting on my leg and then one on my back. I stopped the bike and looked around. Coming out of a clump of bushes were the barrels of BB rifles. The boys, T. Wall, Flak, Beno, and Muskrat, had opened fire on me. I was getting hit all over, and some spots started to bleed. I wanted to ride away, but I had placed my hands over my eyes to protect them, and I was afraid to take them away to put them on the handlebars. So I sat it out, although it was incredibly painful. BB rifles hold a lot of ammo. When a couple of them stopped to reload, I uncovered my eyes and rode away, covered with welts.
Another day, I was walking home from Bojack’s after discussing how my Dallas Cowboys beat the Washington Redskins, a team I hated because people said that they were one of the last pro teams to allow blacks to play. As I crossed Bojack and Aunt Mary’s long front yard, I heard a familiar bark. I turned and saw T. Wall and Beno at the edge of the woods bordering Bojack’s property. In front of them, lumbering toward me, was the big Great Dane, 5-10. Quickly, I thought of all the times I had stood out of range of this dog and not feared him at all because of the chain he was tied to. I thought of all the times he almost choked himself to death trying to get to me. Well, it had all come home to roost. His bark seemed twenty times more vicious, and he looked fifty times stronger. Before I could move, I began to cry, because I knew I’d had it. This dog would tear me apart.
I turned and ran toward Bojack’s, chants of “Sick ’em, dog” and “Get him, 5-10” coming from the edge of the woods. I got tired quickly. I felt like I was
running through water at the beach. I turned to look, and 5-10 was closing fast. I guess I decided that it was a lost cause, because I began to slow down and watch the dog come, like you would a car coming at you head-on, knowing there was no avoiding being hit. When I fell to the ground exhausted, I heard a loud growl that did not belong to 5-10. It belonged to Bojack, who had burst from his house at full speed. Beer sloshed out of a bottle he didn’t think to drop, and he was growling like Dick Butkus, his favorite linebacker. He got to 5-10 before the beast reached me.
Bojack threw his bottle at the dog and kicked 5-10 to the ground. When the dog got up to attack him, I saw something extraordinary. Bojack fought the dog like he would a man. He grabbed it by its collar with his left hand and began to punch the dog’s head with his right. It was furious and fast, and when it was over, Bojack stood watching 5-10, squealing, run flat out back toward T. Wall and Beno. The dog passed right by them on his way home.
“Yeah, that’s right!” Bojack yelled at them. “Carry your butts on home and tell yo’ daddies all ’bout it. And tell ’em if they wants to get ugly, I got something for they asses, too!”
Bojack picked up his bottle and turned to look at me. Once again, I wished I could see behind those reflectors. I wanted to see his eyes. He raised the bottle and threw it at a big rock in the ditch by the road. The bottle shattered with a pop. He took a deep breath. Breaking the bottle brought him relief from the quickly accumulated stress. I took note.
“You go on home now,” he said softly.
I watched Bojack walk away, and then I searched for unbroken bottles in the ditch. I found a ten-or-so-pound rock and took it and the bottles to my circle in the woods. I set the rock between two of the trees and took the first bottle in my hand. This is T. Wall, I thought. And I threw T. Wall into the rock and he shattered. Then I threw Beno and Flak. Then I threw Mama and Daddy, and I started to cry. It felt so good. The constant burning in my stomach that had become so much a part of me eased up a bit. There was a release, and I started to laugh while I cried, because I had found something to take off some of the edge, and that made me happy.
The Emancipation of Evan Walls Page 13
