“Well,” Stephen said, low. “Here we are.”
For a time, no one moved. They were apparently waiting for others to show up. But then Stephen got out, and the others followed.
Marshall had eaten at this restaurant several times as a child, and he remembered walking in the door, seeing the sign: WHITE ONLY. At nine and ten years of age, he had felt something unfriendly in the thing, to have it fixed that way on the entrance of a place, though none of the adults he had been with seemed to notice it. It was the world he had lived in. There had been colored men working on the boats from time to time, and in his child’s mind they had occupied the same place, oddly, as the boats themselves, a familiar part of the scenery.
Today, there was no sign on the door. But the outline of the place where it had been was visible in the wood.
“We’re gonna have to go on in,” Stephen said. “Somebody don’t get here soon. Those men have seen me and Minnie.”
“What men?” Albert wanted to know. He squinted in the direction of the pier. “Are those men? I can’t see that far.”
“Four of them,” said Alice.
“They watchin’ us, too,” said Minnie.
“Just wait, please,” said Stephen. “This has to be orderly.”
The four men in the T-shirts seemed to be talking about what they could see of the people next to the ’51 Ford—a black woman, a black man, a white woman and two white men, one of whom seemed to be making a face at them, standing there head and shoulders above the others with his hands clasped together at his hollow chest.
“Yep,” Albert said. “They seem to be coming this way.”
They moved a little in the direction of the doorway of the restaurant. The light had gone sunbright. The water of the river looked metallic and polished, now, and the wind rippled its surface.
“I guess nobody else is coming,” Stephen said. “Let’s go.”
“What do we do?” Alice said.
“Just as I said. We go in and ask for menus. We’re law-abiding citizens, within the law. Remember that. They will be the law-breakers now.”
Another car pulled slowly into the lot. It was crowded with Negroes. It stopped a few feet from Alice’s car, and all four doors opened. Alice’s aunt Diane got out, with five young colored men. They were all dressed in their Sunday best, suits and ties and white shirts. Diane hugged Alice, and shook Albert’s hand, then turned to Marshall and embraced him, too. “Isn’t this a nice day to eat out?”
The four T-shirted men had begun walking over. They were young, grizzled, with the glazed eyes of too much alcohol. One of them had a pack of cigarettes folded up in his left sleeve.
“Howdy,” the biggest of them said. He had fiery red hair and a red cap set back, showing a lot of forehead. “We was just wonderin’ if you folks was lost or somethin’.”
“No, sir,” said Stephen. “We’re not lost.”
“Well, then, we was wonderin’ what you thought there was for you around here.”
Minnie had struggled out of the Ford, and she took a step toward them. “What you got to know fuh,” she said. “You git on about your bidness. Git on with yuh, na.” She stepped toward them, making a shooing motion with her hands.
“Mammy, you ain’t here to cause trouble, are you?”
“I ain’t your mammy, and you best be glad a that, too.”
“Now, just hold on there,” another of the men said.
“Y’all git on about your bidness like I done tol’ yuh.”
“Minnie,” said Stephen, taking her lightly by the wrist.
The other men had come to stand side by side, their hands in their jeans pockets. The two groups were facing each other.
“Are you men connected with the restaurant?” Stephen asked.
The big one smiled. “You might say we are.”
“I see.”
Minnie started toward them. Stephen said her name quietly, but then simply watched as she pushed herself through them and headed toward the entrance. The men had moved reluctantly—it had taken her physically pushing past them, moving them, and now they closed ranks again, seeming momentarily confused.
“Look, you people ain’t wanted…” the big one began. But then he seemed to recognize the futility of saying anything, with Minnie forging on, reaching the small stoop and marching up to the door and in. The door slammed behind her.
“Goddammit,” the big, red-headed man said. “Go get her.”
The other three started toward the door, but then Stephen made his way there, too, followed by all the others.
“Shit,” the red-headed man said. “This is going to be some trouble.” He moved to stand in front of Stephen.
“Excuse me,” Stephen said, side-stepping him.
Marshall followed, with Alice and Albert close behind. All the others crowded in behind them. Inside, Minnie had already seated herself at a booth near the windows. Alice saw her and said, “She looks magnificent, doesn’t she? Come on.”
“Pardon me,” a waitress said, getting in their way.
Alice said, low, “Just politely walk around them.”
There were too many people for one waitress to stop, and soon they had all gathered in the three booths by the windows that overlooked the river. Albert, Alice, Diane, and a young man crowded into one; Marshall, Minnie, Stephen, and one other young man occupied the second; three more arranged themselves in the third booth. Alice turned to the young man next to her and introduced herself. He smiled and shook hands, and said his name was Reg. He introduced his friends—Ollie, Mike, and Cole, sitting in their booth, and Ty, sitting in Marshall’s booth. For the moment, they were all occupied with greeting each other. Minnie told them all to be quiet, finally, and to sit up straight. Marshall saw that several whites had gotten up to leave, and he marked the angry looks of some of them.
The waitress walked over, carrying her notebook. It looked momentarily as though she were actually going to take their orders. But then she seemed to parade before them, evidently trying to decide which of them to address. She finally chose Stephen. “Look, we’re awful busy here,” she said. Her accent was decidedly Northern. “We’re shorthanded in the kitchen.”
“Could we please have menus?” asked Marshall.
Stephen looked at him and smiled, and so did Minnie. He felt marvelous.
“Okay,” the waitress said. “You try to help some people.” She stormed past the staring crowd of customers and through the swinging doors into the kitchen. The room was very quiet, now. Everyone simply stared. It was as if they were all waiting for an explosion. Alice and Albert began talking about steamed shrimp with Reg, who commented that in his family there was nothing prized as highly as steamed shrimp for lunch on a Saturday afternoon. Reg was from southside Virginia, near the ocean. So were Ollie and Mike. They were students at the University of Maryland. They talked on, animated, all brightness, but there was something a little agitated about it, as though they were trying to keep from being scared. The silence had begun to seem freighted with bad possibilities. More people were getting up to leave, muttering words, glaring.
“You don’t expect to feel so exposed,” Stephen said, low, to Marshall, whose throat closed with elation at the confidence.
“Be strong in yourself,” said Minnie quietly. “It’s lonesome on the side of right.”
They waited. It was a long time.
Some of the people who had cleared their things and left the restaurant were milling around outside. Soon a crowd was gathering, beginning to look like a mob. They stared through the windows on that end of the building, perhaps forty feet away. A young man walked over to the jukebox in the corner and put a coin in, leaning on the machine with both hands, going over the list of songs. When he glanced at the booths with the Negroes in them, he seemed almost to be smirking, as if to say that he was in on the joke. The first song began to play—Peter, Paul and Mary singing “If I Had a Hammer.” The song played, and the young man stood there, reading down the list of songs.
But then a wiry, balding man came out of the kitchen and reached down and pulled the plug on the machine. The voices ground to a deep basso, and ceased. He turned and said something in a low voice to the man, who shrugged and held out one hand, apparently asking for his money back. The older man wore a cook’s apron with food stains on it, and he reached under this to bring out a coin, which he dropped into the other’s hand. Then he walked over to the three booths and stood with his arms folded, almost as if he had decided to stand a sort of guard over them.
“Aft’noon,” Minnie said. “We just need some menus, suh.”
“This establishment does not allow loud talk and disturbances,” he said. “One of your number said something offensive to my waitress. This is a private establishment, and we know our rights.” His jaw trembled. His voice shook with rage. But Marshall saw that there was fear in it, too. “We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone.”
“You own this place?” Minnie asked him.
“I’m the manager.”
“Yassuh. I see.”
“We’re short in the kitchen,” he said as though he were reciting it. “We can’t serve this many people in a group. One of your number was rude to my—”
Minnie began to hum, low, and quickly the others picked it up. The manager’s face whitened, and he marched across the room, saying something to those few patrons who had remained at their places. Marshall heard the word “niggers.” And then someone at the front windows shouted “Niggerlovers!”
Others took it up.
“Niggerlovers!”
“Niggers!”
“Go back where you came from!”
All this shouted across a space of empty tables, some with food still on them. “Good thing we sat here,” Ollie said. “Nice view on this side.” He looked out at the river.
“Go back where you came from!”
“Niggers!”
Minnie was singing now, and Marshall and the others joined in.
Ain’t gonna let nobody turn me round, turn me round, turn me round. Ain’t gonna let nobody turn me round, I’m gonna keep on a-walkin’, keep on a-talkin’, marchin’ down to freedom land….
Stephen had begun tapping the rhythm on the table with the flat of his hands, and Marshall joined in, feeling exhilarated, clear inside somehow, as if the complications of himself had been suddenly obliterated. The other voices rose around him, the shouts of the crowd growing louder, too.
Ain’t gonna let segregation turn me round, turn me round, turn me round…
Outside, two police cars pulled in, and men got out, wearing flat-brimmed hats and carrying nightsticks. It was a lot of police—six or seven men. The wiry, balding man in the cook’s apron rushed out to meet them. Marshall saw Stephen’s eyes widen slightly. Stephen smiled, a small, pained smile showing the gap in his teeth. Then he nodded. He seemed to have acceded to something with the look. He kept singing, holding Minnie’s hand now, as the policemen entered and crossed the room, approaching the three booths. The few remaining patrons were hurrying out of the place, looking like people executing a fire drill, and the waitress and two other women came from the kitchen, going out with the others.
Ain’t gonna let no police turn me round….
The oldest of the policemen, a tall, balding man with black tufts of hair over his ice-blue eyes approached the middle booth and seemed to know instinctively that Stephen and Minnie were the leaders. He only glanced at Marshall. “Okay, folks,” he said, then waited, and when the singing went on, he said it again, holding up one hand. “Okay, folks.”
Minnie stopped singing and held up her own hand. Everyone grew quiet.
The policeman looked at each of them, his hands on his hips now. The other policemen made an audience; they were ranged around the room in attitudes of calm vigilance. Two of them had gone outside to get the crowd under control. They were not doing a very good job. The shouted epithets kept coming.
“Get those niggers out of there!”
“Nigger-loving, Commie-Jew bastards!”
The policeman turned. “Now, hold on, out there. We have children present. Whoever that was, you watch your language.”
“It’s ‘bastards’ he objects to,” Stephen said sadly.
“Now—what did you say, there, boy?”
“Nothing, sir. We mean no harm and no trouble. We’re within our rights under the law. We only want something to eat.”
“I don’t know, singing in a restaurant. You’re disturbing the other customers, wouldn’t you say? I could run you all in for disturbing the peace.”
“Niggerlovers!” someone shouted at the window.
The policeman turned his attention to Minnie. “Mammy,” he said, “my name’s Wyatt Barnes. How do you do?” He offered his hand.
Minnie looked at it, then touched the ends of the fingers.
“I didn’t get your name?”
“Minnie.”
“I got the feeling maybe I can reason with you, Minnie.”
She looked at him. “I buried a friend today, suh. Moan a hundred yeahs old. And you know before she passed she done asked me why I ain’t been out marching and I didn’t have no answer when she did. You see?”
“But I can reason with you.”
“It depends on whut you got to reason wife, I guess.”
“Minnie, why d’you want to mess up my Saturday?”
“I got bettah things to do, too,” Minnie said, looking at the backs of her beautiful hands, “than mince words wif you.”
“I just wondered what you had in mind,” he said.
She almost smiled at him. “Just tryin’ to git lunch out the way.”
“Maybe you can’t read.”
Her gaze was fierce. “Maybe you can.”
“Yeah, I can,” he said. “I can. There’s a law against disturbing the peace.”
“I think singing is peaceful,” Albert said, and Alice laughed.
Wyatt Barnes moved to that booth. “Miss, why don’t you take your freak somewhere he belongs.”
“That’s me,” Albert said, smiling, looking straight ahead.
Wyatt Barnes turned to Minnie again. “I ain’t got a lot of patience left. You don’t want a world of hurt, you’ll leave peaceably. Otherwise, I won’t be responsible for what happens.”
“Sho you will, Mistuh Wyatt,” Minnie said. “Ain’t no need lying to me about it. I’m old, but I ain’t no fool. You don’t git old bein’ no fool.”
“I’m tellin’ you, I won’t be responsible.”
Minnie said nothing.
“I could arrest the whole bunch of you, but I know that’s just what you want.”
No one answered.
“Id’n it?”
“What we want,” Walter Marshall heard himself say, “is lunch.”
The big man looked at him. “What you’re gonna get is bloody.”
“We will not raise a hand against anyone,” Stephen said. “We’re within our rights under the law.”
“Naw. See, look over yonder. That sign above the cash register.” Barnes read it aloud: “‘We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone.’ Well, Mr. McConnell taken a dislike to you-all for pushing in here and saying offensive things to his waitress, and within the earshot of the peaceful, law-abidin’, God-fearing citizens of this town, and then singing that song and putting everybody in a bad mood. So he’s insisting on his right to ask you-all to leave.”
“We were singing,” Stephen said, “to drown out the obscenities your peaceful, law-abiding, God-fearing citizens are throwing at us, sir. Even now.”
“Look,” said Barnes, “I’m tryin’ to find a way out of this so nobody gets hurt.”
“All we want, sir, is a little something to eat. Then we’ll be on our way.”
Barnes walked over to the entrance, where the man in the cook’s apron stood, and muttered something to him. The aproned man muttered back. The crowd outside had gotten bigger, and the tumult of disapproval seemed to be growing with their nu
mber. Barnes came back to the table, and leaned down and looked at Minnie.
“Well, I’ll tell you, Mammy—”
“Minnie.”
“All right, dammit—Minnie. I’ll tell you what’s gonna happen. In about five minutes, we’re gonna pick up and go. You understand me? We’re gonna get back into those squad cars and head out to the highway and look for speeders, and whatever happens to you-all is just gonna happen.”
“You gonna let them tear up this man’s place a bidness? That just don’t seem right, do it?”
The crowd was getting louder, and Marshall had begun to feel afraid. He could see that Stephen was afraid, too, and Minnie. The knowledge gave him a small, electric surging inside. It was fear, but it was mixed with something else, too, now—a fellow feeling that went beyond the fear. They were actually going to be able to draw on each other for strength. He had the thought, and then he looked at the screaming face of a blond boy, perhaps thirteen years old, the ugly twisting of the little mouth to utter the word “niggerlover,” and he felt abruptly alone, and threatened, and extremely weakhearted. He wanted to slip out of sight of all these angry people and somehow make his way to safety. There were so many. Their anger had become personal, somehow. And a chanting had risen among them. “Niggers go home, niggers go home…” Grown people stood with their children, repeating this, the children chanting along with them. Grandmothers, women with babies. Little girls with braided hair and bobby sox and missing teeth.
Barnes said, “This is gonna be a riot and people are gonna get hurt.”
“You got your mind made up,” Minnie said. “Is you?”
“Now come on, you don’t want to get killed. You didn’t come here to get killed.”
“Don’t nobody do nothin,” Minnie said, loud, not looking at him.
Out in the parking lot, something was burning. They had brought an oil can around from the pier and lighted a fire in it. Some men were making torches from it, using sticks and pieces of planks from the pier.
Good Evening Mr. and Mrs. America, and All the Ships at Sea Page 23
