Perhaps she would find her way to the NAACP offices, and finally introduce herself to Mr. White. He had received her postcards over the years, unsigned most of them, all of them showing unsightly pictures of horrid things—lynchings, mostly, but some of men burning alive, and others of the crowd “enjoying” the moment.
Most had dates on the back, and she’d sent them to Mr. White so that he could investigate the case for the anti-lynching campaign ten years ago. It seemed like an eternity. Would he even remember her? She remembered him, the warmth of his voice on the handful of very expensive telephone calls, even as she gave him the list of names, the people who would tell her about the horrors.
She no longer had her notebooks. Before she had fled to West Texas with Frank, she had boxed them up and shipped them to 69 Fifth Avenue, Suite 518, NY NY, a place she had never been. She had never even known if they had arrived.
Maybe she should find out. After all that time on the trains, the walk would do her good.
After she bathed. After she rested.
After she had a while to figure out her plans.
She knew she had been atoning.
Long ago, Lurleen had figured out that her travels through her native South had nothing to do with Good Works, and everything to do with Noreen. Maybe if Noreen had told the truth, she would still be alive. She and that nice boy, whose name Lurleen could never remember, would both be living apart somewhere, their lives and deaths not touching. They’d have separate but equal families, and separate but equal houses, and separate but equal lives.
Although Lurleen had seen enough to learn that separate did not mean equal. Usually it meant separate and unequal.
All the things she’d seen. All the lies she’d told. In her search for the truth.
Sometimes, she was Lureen Taylor, with “people” in Atlanta. Sometimes she was Noreen Drayton, visiting cousins a few miles away. Sometimes, she was Mrs. Vasey, come to see if the schoolteacher job was still open. And sometimes, she stopped only for an afternoon, and had told just enough lies to determine that the people in that small town—whatever it was—had a nose for the truth.
She’d leave before she got run out of town, before she ever got started.
But other places, she burrowed into the community for a week, a month, a summer. She was a widow woman, or a spinster with no hope of ever marrying, or a married woman whose daddy had given her funds for the new house, the house she was surprising her husband with.
Amazing how many people believed the lies. Especially since she had an ear for accents and knew the difference between an Atlanta accent north of Piedmont and New Orleans accent from the Garden District. She spoke like a native of Huntsville and could manage enough Alabama to fool someone from the Carolinas. Arkansas was a bit too dense for her tongue, and she never did manage the variations between Memphis and Nashville, but she could cover it all with her Atlanta accent, because people from Atlanta always roamed.
She rarely got caught. There was that near miss in Arkansas in 1919. Some of the local women got her out. And then there was the afternoon she met Frank in Dallas. She’d been followed into that diner by some men because she asked too many questions. She’d slipped into Frank’s booth, where he sat alone with coffee and sweet apple pie, and asked him to indulge her for just a moment.
He thought the men were toughs, after a woman for what was under her skirts, and she never disabused him. They got to talking and that led to a correspondence, which led to a future months later, after she had given up by fleeing Waco.
Along the way, though, she’d found a lot of truth. Whispered stories over shared dinner in a boardinghouse. Pride, as someone showed her a postcard with a family member posing beside a corpse. Warnings that she best stay out of a particular side of town, lest she see something untoward, done by one of them boys with their shifty eyes.
Her mission always meant talking to the despicable ones, the murderers and their families, the townspeople who saw lynchings as entertainment. She’d always arrived too late, drawn by the postcard or a photograph or a rumor, and pulling out information for articles that would appear in the Amsterdam News or The Crisis, The Defender or The Atlanta Independent. Conversations with attorneys who needed just that one bit of evidence, that one piece of news that might help their client.
She’d even spoke to the great Darrow, nearly risking her identity for a case he would eventually abandon.
All excitement and fear and real true living, doing something she actually believed in. Elliot’s Good Works. Noreen’s atonement.
And for a while, Lurleen’s life.
It took half the night of dithering to figure out her money. She put twenty ones in her wallet, one hundred in four different envelopes stuffed in her purse, another hundred in another envelope at the bottom of her suitcase, and still another hidden in one of the bathroom tiles.
The rest stayed in the duffle, wrapped in layers of undergarments and nightgowns. A box with her wedding ring and pearl necklace sat on top of it all, the reason, she told the hotel manager when she asked to put the duffel in the safe, that she was entrusting it to his care. Still and all, she tied two strings around the duffle, using her father’s old double knots so she would know if anyone broke in.
She walked down the island from the hotel, heading—she knew—toward 69 Fifth Avenue, which, according to her map, crossed at West 14th. She had forgotten the particular pleasures and discomforts of walking through the city. Men in sharp suits, hurrying to work; women in nice dresses, window-shopping. Both stepping past the men in shabby suits or dirty work pants, the older men wearing signs around their necks—Will Work For Food—the women in threadbare dresses sitting behind them, listless children on their laps.
Lurleen averted her eyes just like everyone else did—too much misery, and none of it hers. She found three open banks along her route. She hadn’t investigated any of them, but she didn’t care. Everyone had believed that the Bank of the United States had been one of the most solid banks in the country. The best bank in New York, someone had proclaimed not six months before it shuttered, reminding everyone that banks had never been safe.
But they were safer than carrying her money in her purse or in that duffel all the time. She had enough money to lose a bit more.
She deposited $90 in each of the banks, keeping two fives from each envelope, and giving one each to the first two shabby women with families that she saw. Strange, she thought as she walked, she expected the men to drink the money away. But she thought the women would buy something for the children.
The gifts didn’t make her feel better. Because each block, each half-block really, she saw at least five more people who needed money, needed enough money to survive longer than a week or a month. They needed jobs and help and a roof over their heads.
By the time Lurleen reached West 14th, she walked with her eyes averted once again, her hand on her purse. If she hadn’t looked up after she crossed Sixth Avenue, she wouldn’t have seen the flag, rippling defiantly in the cool spring wind. Half a block away, the message was clearer than it probably was up close:
A Man Was Lynched Yesterday.
It blinked out, became something else for a half a moment—the man in Waco, screaming as they dragged him down the Main Street, yelling for help, his dark panicked eyes meeting hers. She’d followed, drawn to the first—the only—lynching that had ever happened on her watch.
She had recorded all of it, took what names she knew, even made haphazard sketches, not that she needed to since the local newspaper photographer took shot after shot, and probably made some of them into postcards.
The young man had screamed and screamed, and she had stumbled away, finally. There was no one to go to for help, no one to stop it, no one to speak sense. The authorities had all been present—the police, two judges, several lawyers, the mayor—all of them, and they had been cheering, or in one case, passing judgment, telling the young man he was guilty.
He done it!
S
he hadn’t saved him. Instead, she’d fled to Dallas on the afternoon train, writing her notes, locals asking what she was doing, and she’d—
She’d gone to Frank, and fallen in love, or so she told herself.
Because love was the only thing that could’ve made her give up the Good Works. Because good women like her, good moral women, they didn’t run away. They stepped in, talked sense to the men, made everything better.
And she never had.
Lurleen shook off the memory, made herself look away from the flag, and continued forward. She was walking toward that brown building. She needed to keep its lower levels in sight, not its flag. Not its pronouncement.
But she couldn’t help herself.
Another half block and she saw another sign spread across windows on the same floor:
The Crisis
Crisis. Indeed. There were several. And they all were intertwined into something she still didn’t entirely understand.
But she knew what the sign actually referred to. The Crisis was the NAACP’s magazine, and she’d read it faithfully for years. Not even Frank could get her to stop. He would shake it at her—why are you reading this filth? he’d ask, and she’d tell him, implore him, really, to look and see the literature inside, the poets, the stories, the voices.
But he hadn’t. And really, she hadn’t expected it of him. He was as open-minded as he could be, given how he was raised. He never harmed another soul, but he didn’t see issues with the separation of the races either.
They’d only argued about it once, and then she’d stopped. Because she would have had to reveal what was behind her travels all those years if she spoke any further. And she knew if she told Frank that she had been an investigator for the NAACP—an unpaid investigator, who helped with evidence for the lawyers—he would have . . . well, she never wanted to find out. But she guessed it would have been anything from giving her the occasional I don’t understand you look to tossing her out on her ear.
A shudder ran through her. Then she realized she was standing like a rube again, in the middle of the sidewalk, staring at the flag and the words in the window.
She pulled her purse closer and crossed Fifth Avenue, and forced herself to walk into the building itself. It was done with clean lines and lots of gold trim, just like the hotel. A bank of elevators waited on the other side of the marble floor, some of the doors open, revealing the operators standing inside.
She went into the nearest elevator and said primly, “Fifth floor please,” without looking at the operator. This was the day not to look at anyone.
The elevator smelled of tobacco and the hint of another woman’s perfume. The car shuddered slightly as it rose, but Lurleen didn’t mind. It still felt like magic to her.
The door opened, and the hallway appeared, some kind of scuffed tile or some cheaper flooring that resembled the marble below. Dozens of frosted-glass doors were closed, making it all look even more foreboding.
“Fifth floor, miss,” the operator said, clearly waiting for her to get out.
She swallowed, nodded, and stepped into the hallway. She waited until the elevator doors closed before she walked down the hall, searching for the door marked 518.
It wasn’t hard to find. It was slightly ajar, and from inside, she heard the click of typewriters, the hum of voices.
Her throat had gone completely dry. She peered through the crack in the door, saw men and women bent over desks, the women typing, the men on the phones. Papers and posters lined the wall, some warning blacks to be on guard, others proclaiming For A Full Democracy, Join The NAACP.
Everyone inside had dark skin. Everyone.
She didn’t belong.
She turned away, only to hear a female voice say, “May I help you?”
Lurleen took a deep breath. She could say, No, sorry, this is the wrong office, and no one would be the wiser.
But she had more courage than that—or she had, once upon a time.
She turned. “I . . . um . . . came to see Mr. White.”
The woman leaning against the door was young and pretty. Her hair was pulled away from her face, revealing compassionate eyes. “Come on in,” she said. “I know he’s here.”
Lurleen’s stomach tightened. She stepped through the frosted door, into a world of desks and ringing telephones, index cards in a wooden case pushed against the wall, and even more conversation than she had heard from the hallway.
Everyone in the room looked up at her, then looked away, most without meeting her gaze, and she realized she had done it again. She had given herself a destination with no real purpose. What would she say to Mr. White? That she’d been honored to investigate for him? Had she been honored? Had she really thought of him as anything at all, except a voice on the telephone, a name on an envelope?
“Mr. White is in a conference.” A young man had come up to her. He was taller than Frank and wore a suit with a stiff collar. His brown eyes reminded her of the eyes of the young man she had seen lynched in Waco. “May I help you?”
She shook her head. She needed to leave. She had no real reason for being here, and she was bothering these good people.
“They’re discussing that matter in Alabama,” the young man said as if she should know what that matter was. “They should be done soon if you’d just like to wait.”
She stood awkwardly, uncertain what to do. So many eager faces, so many busy hands, everyone around her working hard, believing in what they were doing, striving to change the world.
For all her “good works,” she hadn’t tried to change the world at all, not even when she worked for the NAACP. Instead, she had been studying the world’s sickness from a distance—her world’s sickness—and using her own privilege to “help,” when really, maybe, she had been nothing more than a voyeur, peering into the lives of others.
She hadn’t helped at all, and when she had the chance to help, the moment she needed to take a risk, step forward, maybe save a life, she had fled, disappearing into the privilege she’d been born into, the marriage to Frank—not really a love match at all or an uncontrollable passion, just an escape back into what she had been raised to do and be, and of course, she had failed at that too.
“No,” she said quietly. “I don’t want to wait. You’re doing much more important things.”
The muscles in her shoulders relaxed slightly as she spoke, and she loosened the hold on her purse. Then she realized what she had with her.
“I . . . um . . . I would like to make a donation,” she said. “Do I do that with you?”
“Sure,” the young man said, and slipped behind the nearest empty desk. He removed a receipt book from a drawer, and grabbed a pen.
She reached into her purse and removed the last envelope.
“Name?” he asked.
She licked her lips. She was on their rolls—had been, anyway, so that she could get The Crisis. She didn’t want to give them a name again.
“Can I be anonymous?” she asked.
“Certainly,” he said, as if he had expected it. Her cheeks grew warm. “How much?”
She opened the envelope and fanned the money so that everyone could see it. She didn’t want anyone to take it for themselves.
“One hundred dollars,” she said.
The nearby gasps were audible. He looked up at her, then at the money, and then back at the receipt book. His pen shook slightly as he wrote down the sum.
“Would you like to dedicate the donation?” he asked, as if he expected her to say no.
“Yes,” she said. “Please dedicate it to Noreen Quarles.”
He had her spell the last name, then he glanced at a nearby door. She could see shadowy figures behind the frosted glass. Probably that conference that Mr. White was attending.
The young man ripped off the receipt and folded it around the money, handing her the sheet behind the carbon paper that they apparently left in the receipt book for just this purpose.
“Thank you very much,” the young man sa
id.
She took the copy as if she had a real use for it. Then she nodded, and backed out of the room.
“At least take a newspaper or something,” the young man said. “Or a notice, to see what we’re working on.”
He swept his arm toward a table littered with newspapers, some daily, some weekly, and extra copies of The Crisis. She hadn’t seen that issue so she took it. She looked at the papers, but she didn’t pick them up. Instead, her gaze caught a folded page from the New Orleans paper, The Times Picayune, from two days before, paperclipped to a legal pad.
DEATH SENTENCES FOR ATTACK GIVEN TO EIGHT NEGROES
Mistrial for Ninth Ordered in Assault Trial in Alabama
She couldn’t help herself. She tapped the newspaper lightly.
“Is this the Alabama matter?” she asked.
“Yes,” the young man said. “Have you heard about those boys? They were pulled off a box car two weeks ago, and they’ve already received a death sentence.”
“Almost a lynching,” someone said softly.
Lurleen looked up. She couldn’t see who’d said it.
“We’re trying to figure out who we can send to represent them on appeal,” the young man said. He tapped the envelope she had given him. “This will help with travel expenses.”
She nodded, feeling like she had done something, at least, however small. Then she let herself out of the office. She was halfway down the hall before she realized she had not said any good-byes.
She was in the elevator before she realized that giving the money left her with the same emptiness that handing out the five dollars had. She was helping, slightly, but only for a moment—travel expenses for some attorney, some representatives. Expenses, one-time, paid for and gone.
The walk back to the hotel seemed longer than the walk to the offices. She went through the glass doors on the Eighth Avenue entrance and stopped in the lobby, realizing that all the gold leaf, the ornate ceiling, the decorations, could feed a family for months.
In Sunlight or In Shadow Page 22
