***
As they drew nearer, Topper slowed almost to a stop, and David matched his step, his limp more pronounced as he involuntarily favored bruised muscles. They were joined by a small group of people he had seen crossing a vacant lot from the other side of the section. David shook hands all around, wishing he had not heard the note of pride in Topper's voice when he said "Lawyer Champlin." Topper, Abra'm, so many he had met in the past three years, were what he called in the inner places of his mind "Gramp-oriented Negroes"; men with black skins, denied their birthright yet possessing it none the less, staking indisputable claim to universal manhood by some divine authority, and proud—warmly, deeply proud— of those of their race who had "made it." The old feeling of guilt took over, the old feeling that nothing he had become really belonged to him, that it had all been luck, a feeling that he was in some way inferior to these quiet, patient people by very reason of what he was. And with the guilt, as always, came the shyness.
He heard one of the women saying, "You mighty young to have been doing all we hears about you, Lawyer Champlin."
"Yes'm," he said, and glanced at Brad and caught suppressed laughter in his eyes. "But I'm near thirty. I just look this way."
A man in the group said, "Where's Ruby Brown? Where'd that woman get to?"
"She's here," said Topper. "She's out there in the crowd. Seen her just a bit ago. We gets her to go over to Haskin's every now and again and lie down. Been here since daybreak. She's near crazy, worrying about that girl Effie of hers. Last she seen of Effie the girl was sitting on the ground, leaning up against the jailhouse wall, holding on to her stummick. Ruby's near crazy."
"Is the girl sick?" asked David.
The woman who had remarked on his youthfulness answered. "She been sick; she been sick more'n a week. Doc Anderson, he say she got appendix trouble. He was planning to drive her to the County Hospital yestiddy to get 'em X-rayed, get 'em out. Then all the trouble started. Her ma come home from work early, and Effie'd done got out of the bed and gone someplace. Next thing she knowed she seen the police pushing her down the street to the jailhouse. And talking filthy. Them po-lice sure talks filthy." She turned to the others. "Let's go see can we find Ruby."
"Wait a minute!" Brad stepped forward, lips thin and tight. "Wait a minute. Are you saying there's a girl in that jail with appendicitis—and she's had no medical attention?"
"That's what Doc Anderson say she's got," said the woman. "Haskin and Reverend Sweeton and Doc, they tried to get the law to turn loose of her, but the po-lice say she putting it on. She ain't, but they says that."
"Once upon a time," said David slowly, under his breath, though the words were audible, "there was a great big, wonderful country, with great big, wonderful laws. And the greatest of these was habeas corpus—"
Brad turned to him, his eyes green ice. "Washington?" he said. "Now? Without waiting?"
"I'll wire," said David bitterly. "Yessir, I'll wire. I can do it in my sleep by now. Saves time that way. What do you want me to say, boss? 'Send the Surgeon General down'? Or maybe those Army troops they've got stationed just over the state line—"
"You think they're still there?"
"They were yesterday, according to a guy I talked to in a restaurant. They're still expecting more trouble at the university."
Brad lowered his voice so no one nearby could overhear. "Suppose she dies? She could."
David did not answer, merely turned toward the silent people massed before the barriers and nodded his head in their direction.
"We've got to do something, David."
"Yes?" said David. The bitterness of his tone had sharpened. "Yes? Right now I'm inclined to leave it up to them."
"Pull yourself together, David. I'm talking about saving one girl's life; you're talking about something that could mean the deaths of a hell of a lot more. You out of your mind?"
"After this, maybe." He plunged his hands into his pocket, gave his head a quick shake. "All right, Chief, all right. I was only sounding off. Call Washington. It won't matter if that call's tapped. If they can't do anything else, they can send an extra supply of polish for the troops' buttons; give 'em something to do while they're waiting around up there outside Capitol City."
"Take it easy, son. When this one's over you're going to take a long rest. Let's go. These roadside sessions won't look right to the others."
***
As they worked their way through the edge of the crowd, David felt that the pressure of emotion was almost more than he could bear. It was like being deep in the sea with immeasurable tons of dark water above and below him, pressing on every inch of his body, constricting him so that he felt actual physical symptoms; his arteries and veins and lungs seemed to be bursting, and he felt as though his eyeballs were starting from his head.
He reached the threshold of Haskin's store just behind Topper, and the noise that came from within the store deafened him momentarily after the quiet outside. At first he saw no one in the packed room who was not talking, and he remembered Gramp saying once: "Trouble with colored is they talks too damn much."
As he followed Topper to a doorway in the rear, he saw that there were some in the room who were silent, men and women both, and he feared the ugliness in their eyes. Brad was beside him, and he put his lips close to the other's ear: "We need Sweeton here."
In the back room there were not so many people, and only a few of them were talking, but even as it was men and women filled it wall to wall. They were facing Haskin, who sat on a straight chair against the far wall, flanked by two of the other committee members. Haskin looked smaller than he had the night before; the skin of his face seemed more taut, the lines in it black and deep. Garnett was standing in front of him, bald head beaded with sweat, and his voice was a high whine as he answered something Haskin had just said.
"That's what I thought he meant!" he was saying. "I told you right!"
"You lying!" It was the shrill voice of a woman. "You ain't told him right! Get them chilren outa there! How long you think their folks gonna wait? You don' want vi'lence, vi'lence what you gonna get you don't get them kids outa there!"
"Amen!" It was a man's voice, and David's scalp prickled at the tone. The room seemed to be occupied now by a single rage-filled entity, and David knew that someone had to act, something had to be done to break that solid, massed anger, to scatter it, and then its fragments must be gathered together and welded into something other than what he had felt when he entered, a force that had seemed to push him bodily backward through the door.
He had not been conscious of any hostility toward himself in the outer room or outside the building; here it was as evident as though they had met him with fixed bayonets. Unsmiling, he limped directly toward the tableau at the far side of the room and stood behind Garnett for a moment, gathering his forces. He could not, no one of them could, admit to any mistake, not now, not during this period of intense emotionalism. To hold leadership, to keep the reins of control, to prevent a savage, tragic outbreak that might do their cause irreparable harm, he and the others could not appear in any light other than that of their own confidence, even though that confidence must be whistled up in the dark. And somewhere in the crowd, either inside or outside, was a woman who had gone thirty-six hours without sleep, a woman whose child was suffering and ill not more than a hundred yards away and to whom she could not go. He reached for the chair from which Haskin had risen, steadied it against the wall, and mounted it. The first person he saw as he looked out over the room from his stand on the chair was Brad, just inside the door on the far side of the room. There was no expression in the green eyes, but the gaze was so steady and strong he felt that he could almost lean on it physically, and it was like the cool, quick comfort of a drink at the end of a rough day. There had been no time to confer with Haskin; their telephone conversation was all that he knew of what had gone on that morning in the building across the road.
Although his throat felt choked with phlegm he did
not clear it because to do so might be evidence of uncertainty. He remembered Brad advising him about relaxing throat and jaw and lip muscles, and even in his own ears his voice sounded full and clear when he spoke.
"In just a little while—" he said, and as he said it he glanced at his wristwatch because he knew the gesture would give a sense of more immediate action—"In just a little while your committee will cross that street outside again, the street the whites believe separates the sheep from the goats; the street we know to be the dividing line between good and evil." Someone must be with him, he thought, because he heard a man say, "Tha's right." Now he dared clear his throat, and he felt someone steady the rickety chair beneath his feet and knew that it was Haskin, standing beside him. "Let's keep it that way!" he cried. "Let's keep the good and the decent on this side, and the evil on that side! Let's not let the evil spill over, crawl across that roadway like a snake, poison us with its venom! Let the rest of the country know what Main Street is today in Cainsville—the roadway that separates good from evil!"
More of them were with him now. From all directions in the room there were responses, and from the outer room too, its babel of talk quiet, its people crowding before the open doorway to the room where he stood. There had to be more with him, all of them had to be with him, or so many that those who held back would not count.
"When I came here yesterday I felt that many of you looked upon me as a stranger." There were scattered cries of "No! No!" and his eyes sought the ones who had said it, and he smiled. "But last night! Last night when they heaved me over those barricades out there I didn't hear anyone say 'Howdy, stranger!'"
There was, praise God, laughter now.
He lowered his voice. "No man, no woman of our people, is a stranger to us now. We have known what it is to have dogs set upon us, to be shocked with electric goads like cattle, our young people have been clubbed and beaten—and our children have been blown to bits by bombs while they studied about God in a Sunday-school class! Strangers? No man with dark skin is stranger to another man with dark skin in our country today! Even those who betray us, even those who withhold their own black hands from our cause are not strangers. Leave them to their loneliness. When we've won this fight—and we will—and they share in the victory knowing they had no part in it, they'll be lonely and ashamed." He timed his pause like a veteran, then went on, his voice easy and conversational. He might have been talking with each of them individually, over a cup of coffee at a lunchroom counter. "For every Negro in this country who's saying today 'Deal me out,' there are ten thousand, a hundred thousand, a million, who are saying 'Deal me in!' They know we're going to win this hand. And we're going to win because we hold all the aces. We hold the legal aces, that we know. But we hold more important aces. We hold the spiritual aces! We hold aces we were dealt by the law of this land, and we hold aces we were dealt by God. We have aces in our hands and up our sleeves and down our necks and behind our backs. And we're going to play those aces. But we've got to play them one at a time. One at a time. When we need them most!"
He waited again, sensing the spirit of the people before him, feeling it draw closer to him, and when he felt that it was close enough he went on, his voice rising: "Right now there's been too much talk! When your committee crosses that roadway again it will not be to talk! No! Let's stop this foolishness about talk and 'negotiating.' Let's get our children home first!"
Now the spirit of the people was more than close to him. It was engulfing him. He slid a sweating hand into his pocket, fingered his change, his key ring, the oddments a man collects, waiting for the cries to die down. "Stranger!" he said. "Let me tell you how much of a stranger I am! This morning I walked across a field near here. You call it Flaming Meadows. The whites call it something else, but what they call it does not matter, because it is your field, and it is mine. More than seventy years ago a good man met his death there, a flaming death. And his best friend went out of his mind at what he saw. How do I know that the man who died in that field was a good man? Because I've been hearing about him all my life. Because down in the part of New Orleans where I come from he is a legend. When I was a boy there were still old people alive who remembered that man, knew him well, and loved him. One of those people was his wife, my great-grandmother! Abra'm Towers's old mother, who lives in the house oh the edge of that field, has a picture of my great-grandmother and her husband, the first David Champlin, my great-grandfather. I guess most of you have seen it."
He had to wait longer now for the hubbub to die down. He held up his hand to silence it, and suddenly they were quiet, so quiet his own voice sounded louder than need be, and after the first words he lowered it:
"Yes, the man who died on Flaming Meadows was the first David Champlin, a good man, a kind and gentle man, whose firstborn was my grandfather—and he came into the world three weeks after his daddy was murdered. I don't believe it was an accident that sent me here! I don't believe in accidents of God! They tell me my great-grandaddy walks the field of Flaming Meadows at night when the moon is dark. I don't know about that. But I know who does walk that field at night and in the day. God walks that field, and in a few minutes God will walk Main Street in Cainsville! God is going to take the hands of your committee in His own and lead them across that street as he led the children of Israel across the Red Sea! And when they say, 'Give us back our children and then we will talk!' God will be talking on our side!"
The sound that swept through the room and the one beyond it was like a great hoarse sigh. David's voice broke into it, above the cries of "Yes! Yes, Lord!" and "Praise Jesus!" and "Amen!"
"Come on!" he cried, and one hand was high above his head. "Come on, let's send them over there with God!" His voice sang over their heads like a wind—" 'Oh, Mary, don't you weep, don't you moan—Pharaoh's army got drownded' "—and the sound of their voices ran before it like a gathering wave.
***
He stepped off the chair, weak from reaction, one hand on its back supporting him. The people were still singing, and he took Haskin's arm. "Some place we can talk a minute?" Haskin opened a door behind them and they entered a smaller storeroom, piled with unopened cartons of canned goods and cigarettes and beer. They closed the door, and when David looked at Haskin he saw that the other man was smiling, that, the taut look was gone. "That was fine," said Haskin. "That was sure fine."
"Thanks. First time in my life I ever led the meeting! Haskin, have any of those men on that committee—the white committee—tried to talk with you privately? Tried to trick you into talking with them alone?"
Haskin scratched his head. "I couldn't prove it," he said. "I mean I couldn't say as how this one or that one come up to me and invited me out for a friendly cup of coffee, like maybe over to the ho-tel. But now you speaks of it—" He paused, and David waited without prompting him. "Now you speaks of it, it seemed like ol' Hoot'n' Holler was a mite chummier than what he usually is. Kept a-looking at me every time he said anything, seemed like he was trying to say 'You and me understands one another.' But you gets used to that. You know how it is. All the whites thinks they understands us better'n anyone." He paused thoughtfully, then frowned at David. It was evident he was on the defensive. "We picked our men and women careful, Lawyer Champlin. Real careful. We got white men's niggers here just like they got everywhere. But they ain't over there in that room with me, I'm telling you straight. I'm a suspicious man, Lawyer Champlin, and I swear to God I don't know how that fella Garnett took me in. I guess I jest figured if he was with Reverend Sweeton he was all right."
"Never mind, Haskin. Never mind that now. And I didn't mean for a minute that I thought your men couldn't be trusted. My God, no!" He hesitated, looked at Haskin closely, and hoped that his judgment was right: that this was a close-mouthed man. "Keep what I'm going to tell you under your hat. Don't tell the others." He briefed him quickly on the Towers land deal, then said: "That's why I say if he tries to get you alone, let him—except it would be better if you at least made an e
ffort to have one of the others there, have a witness. But if he won't go for that, then talk with him alone. If he does this, stall. Stall, and get back to us with it. But leave him with the idea you'll see what you can do about getting cooperation from the Towerses. See?"
Haskin looked at David and smiled, and David was glad this man was on their side of the fence. "Sure I see," he said. "Sure I do."
"Now about Effie Brown. She's the first order of business."
"We been trying. They ain't about to budge."
"Try some more, Haskin. Try like hell. Mr. Willis may be able to get some pressure put on."
"We'll do our best. Effie's my sister's chile. You think I ain't trying?"
"I know you are."
"About this here other business. He makes a proposition and I comes back to you guys with it and meantime you got things fixed. Right?"
"I hope so."
"And then I go back and say as far as I know it's O.K., and they lets the kids out, mebbe a little bail money to save their faces, and then, after the kids is home—"
"That's it," said David. "That's it. And it won't be your fault. They can't blame you. If you keep your mouth shut."
Haskin's smile was one of genuine amusement now. "That's what I call a low punch, Lawyer Champlin. A real low punch. I'd a hell of a lot rather shoot 'em down, rush them stockades, but we got no choice. Man can't shoot without a gun; man can't fight odds like they got with his bare hands, not fair and square." He laughed. "They sure teaching us a lot, ain't they? About how to do business."
"We learn fast, once we start," said David.
***
After Haskin left, David walked to a side window and crossed his arms on the pile of cartons that half obscured it. Over the top of the pile he could see across Haskin's littered backyard to the roadway and across the roadway to City Hall and a corner of the stockade. The singing in the outer room had died down, and there was only a low murmur of voices. He suddenly gave way to the reaction he had been fighting off, laid his head on his forearms, not wanting to watch Haskin or the others cross the roadway, not wanting to see Al Williams look toward the stockade, perhaps wave or blow a kiss to his daughter who waited behind the heavy galvanized mesh with the barbed wire strung along its top. If I could just keep it a cause, he told himself. Just keep it a cause. But I can't. It's people, little people, big people, saints and sinners, good people and plain old-fashioned country sons of bitches; it's the white men's niggers and the men like Medgar Evers; it's the Effies and the no-count bastards like Garnett. And if I could just stop thinking about the people as individuals, lump 'em all into one, into the cause, it would be a hell of a lot easier.
Fairbairn, Ann Page 99
