Last Bus to Coffeeville

by J. Paul Henderson

  Doc listened impassively, disbelieving that Nancy might consider he hadn’t turned these thoughts in his mind a thousand times already.

  ‘Doesn’t it ever strike you as odd,’ she continued, ‘that I’ve still managed to lead a meaningful life while knowing the worst is yet to happen, while you appear to have led a meaningless life after the worst has already happened?’

  Doc shifted uncomfortably. ‘I don’t feel sorry for myself, if that’s what you’re thinking. Besides, I think there’s a self-limiting gene in the Chaney DNA: I remember my father withering on the vine after my mother died.’

  ‘That’s nonsense, Gene, and you know it. The only self-limiting gene in your family is you, Gene!’ (Or had she said Eugene?) ‘I worry about you, do you know that? I worry what will become of you after I’m gone.’

  ‘I’ll be fine, Nancy. I’ll potter about for a while, and then go blind.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘I have macular degeneration. I’m losing my sight.’

  ‘Well, that explains your driving then, but I can’t see it being responsible for all this pessimism of yours. You’re wandering around in a world full of minor chords. Do you know this? Your glass is always half empty, never half full.’

  Doc pretended to give the matter serious thought. ‘I don’t know about you, Nancy,’ he said eventually, ‘but I’ve always found that a cliché is as good a place as any to leave a conversation. I’m going to smoke that cigarette now!’

  ‘Ugh, Gene, I give up, I really do!’

  Doc smoked his cigarette and returned to the room where Nancy was sitting with her arms folded. He kissed her on the cheek. ‘I’m sorry, Nancy. Thanks for what you said.’

  ‘I doubt my words have done a scrap of good!’

  ‘Probably not,’ he smiled. ‘But let’s look on the bright side – there’s always tomorrow!’

  Nancy punched his arm.

  Conversation returned to less controversial topics and Doc refilled their glasses.

  ‘Where’s that, er, square thing you took from my house? The thing with me in it?’

  ‘Your portrait?’

  ‘That’s the word! See what I mean? A simple word and I forget it!’

  Doc led her to the study and showed it to her. It was on the same wall as an autographed photograph of Martin Luther King.

  ‘Did he sign this for you personally?’ Nancy asked.

  ‘No, I bought it in a shop,’ Doc said.

  ‘When did you leave the civil rights movement, by the way? After they locked you up in Jackson?’

  ‘About that time. It wasn’t so much the arrest as the music, though. Michael Row the Boat Ashore was bad enough, but nothing compared with We Shall Overcome. I grew to hate that song with a passion and, if you want to know the truth, I got sick of the sanctimony of the people who sang it.’

  Nancy laughed. ‘What happened to Bob? Did he have musical differences with the movement too?’

  ‘He was killed in action in 1965,’ Doc said, secretly pleased to be able to wipe the smile from Nancy’s face. ‘Having said that,’ he continued slowly and deliberately, ‘he gave me The Barbed Wire Flag you were admiring, just five years ago.

  ‘We could pay him a visit if you like…’

  2

  Bob

  Mississippi

  The last occasion Doc had spent time with the man known as Bob Crenshaw was in the summer of 1964, in Hinds County, Mississippi, to be precise. It was the final days of their civil rights activism, and Doc was still called Gene.

  Two years had passed since the time of the Freedom Rides, and the civil rights movement had gathered momentum. The national spotlight now oscillated between the states of Mississippi and Alabama, the towns of Oxford and Birmingham, and Governors Ross Barnett and George Wallace. It illuminated their dark and shabby corners, and captured on film the brutality of methods used to stem the threatening tide: electric cattle prods, clubs, high-pressure water hoses and savage dogs. It recorded bombings and burnings, bullets fired and Molotov cocktails thrown, white-sheeted Klansmen and burning crosses. And then came the summer of 1964 and the fateful decision to drive the registration of black voters in the state with the lowest registered percentage – the state of Mississippi.

  ‘C’mon, man, one las’ trip; one mo’ try to get the black man on the ladder,’ Bob said to Gene.

  Gene didn’t need much persuading. His student days were coming to an end, and very soon he’d be stuck in full-time employment with his freedom effectively curtailed. There was also the possibility that he might bump into Nancy.

  ‘Okay, let’s do it. When do we go?’

  ‘Two weeks,’ Bob said. ‘I jus’ need time to sort some things out b’fore we go. We’ll take my car. One place it’ll fit right in is Miss’ippi; they all poor as dirt down there.’

  Gene and Bob arrived in Mississippi in the second week of July and reported to a small black church on the outskirts of Jackson. At the evening’s orientation meeting, they were told of three activists who’d gone missing in another part of the state while investigating the burning of a black church. ‘Be careful,’ they were warned. ‘Stick together, vary your movements and steer clear of the local police.’

  Over a drink that night, Bob said to Gene: ‘Let me ask you somethin’, Gene?’

  For some unknown reason, Bob had developed the habit of prefacing any question he had for Gene with a question to ask it, or to Gene’s hearing of the word, axe it.

  ‘Axe, Bob? Axe? It’s ask, there’s no X in the word! No wonder white folks are scared to death of you and your brothers when they hear you talking about axes all the time. They probably think you’re going to creep up in the night and chop them into little pieces. Have you ever stopped to think that maybe the black people’s worst enemy is their own diction?’

  ‘You too much, man, too much,’ Bob laughed.

  ‘So what’s your question?’

  ‘I ain’t aksin’ it now. I takin’ offence on behalf o’ my people.’

  ‘Suit yourself.’

  A few minutes later, Bob spoke again: ‘Let me aks you somethin’, Gene?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Same question I was gonna aks you b’fore.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘What you think o’ my hair?’

  Bob had spent the last two years of his life growing an Afro and it had become his pride and joy. He’d comb it over and again, taking out tangles and ensuring its symmetry with a wide-toothed comb he kept lodged in his hair.

  ‘I think it looks good,’ Gene said, somewhat nonplussed. ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘’Cos you ain’t never said, not once mentioned it.’

  ‘Well, I think it suits you. What does it feel like?’

  ‘Well it don’t feel like no Brillo pad, if that what you thinkin’! I get tired o’ that ol’ ches’nut. It soft and springy if you really wants to know.’

  ‘Can I touch it?’

  ‘You ain’t turnin’ fruity on me, are you, Gene? Cain’t says I see’d you with a girl since Nancy hightailed it.’ He laughed and then gave Gene permission: ‘Don’t go messin’ it!’

  ‘It’s like moss!’ Gene said surprised. ‘It feels good.’

  ‘Well remem’er it, ‘cos you ain’t touchin’ it again. Clumsy hands like yo’s’ll probably do it a mischief. If you likes it so much, you oughta grow one yo’self. You could become an honorary brother. You wan’ me to put a word in fo’ you?’

  ‘I’ll stick to being white, thanks. It’s an easier life.’

  Registering the black vote was slow and often frustrating. It helped if out-of-state volunteers were accompanied by black activists native to the state, but even then they were often viewed with suspicion. Worse was the reaction of white Mississippians, who resented outsiders coming to their state to change it: unsurprisingly, some volunteers were beaten and hundreds more arrested. The news that the three missing activists had been found murdered, however, came as a shock.

>   The three bodies were discovered buried under an earthen dam near the small town of Philadelphia. Two of the dead were white and from New York, and the third was a twenty-one-year-old local Negro from Mississippi called James Chaney. (Nancy would later tell Gene that she misheard the name when it was first read out on the news, and for two hours thought it was he who was dead.) Two bullets were found in each of the white bodies and three in Chaney’s, which had also been badly beaten; as always, Mississippi was more generous to its own – if also less forgiving. The nation was appalled by the outrage, and the government sent the FBI to investigate. It was their presence in Jackson that probably saved Bob and Gene from similar fates.

  It was late afternoon, and the two of them were driving to eat at a friend’s house in Jackson. There was little traffic on the road and Bob was driving within the speed limit. It was Gene who first noticed the flashing blue lights behind them.

  ‘Shit,’ Bob said. ‘What you suppose they want?’

  ‘God knows,’ Gene replied, ‘Probably just to mess with us.’

  When Bob failed to stop, the police car pulled alongside him. The cop on the passenger side rolled down his window and shouted: ‘Pull over! Pull over!’

  ‘I ain’t wearin’ no pullover, man,’ Bob shouted back at him. ‘It’s a jacket, seventeen dollars an’ change from Sears, Roebuck.’

  ‘Jesus Christ, Bob,’ Gene said, ‘Don’t fool with the man. Do as he says. There’s another police car behind us now!’

  Bob checked the mirror to confirm what Gene had told him, and then slammed his foot on the brake. The police car following was taken unawares and smashed into the back of them. There was no way, Gene thought, that Bob hadn’t intended for this to happen.

  Bob got out of the car and walked to its rear to survey the damage. He turned to the driver. ‘Yo’ gonna have to make restitution, sir. You went into the back of me. It’s the law o’ the land, I b’lieve.’

  ‘Fuck the law,’ the policeman said, ‘You’ve broken my damn nose, you fuckin’ nigger!’

  One of the cops from the first car drew his baton and clubbed Bob on the back of the head. In a knee-jerk reaction, Bob turned and punched the cop on the jaw, knocking him clean out. The third and fourth policemen drew guns, and only then was order on the roadside restored.

  As only one of the three vehicles was now capable of being driven, all six men crammed into the surviving police car and drove into downtown Jackson, with Gene and Bob in handcuffs. ‘Cain’t help thinkin’ six in a car’s illegal,’ Bob said to no one in particular.

  ‘You’re lucky we don’t stuff yo’ damn nigger ass in the trunk,’ the policeman with the broken nose said.

  Bob was charged with resisting arrest, assaulting a police officer (two), dangerous driving and reckless endangerment, while Gene was charged with being his accomplice. They were processed together, but then separated: Bob was taken to a holding cell reserved for blacks, and Gene to one reserved for whites; oddly, both cells were painted lime-green.

  Alone in his cell, Gene was unashamedly scared; a prisoner in a foreign land whose language, judicial system and customs were alien and unintelligible. He took deep breaths, waited for the feelings of panic to subside, and wiped the palms of his hands on his trousers. What the hell had got into Bob?

  He thought of his parents, of Nancy, and wondered when, or if, he’d ever see them again. He worried about being sent to the notorious state prison and his chances of survival there; if he was falling apart now, how on earth would he survive in Parchman Farm? He doubted that a civil rights activist would be given the friendliest of receptions there, either by guards or inmates.

  He paced the small cell for a time and then tried to distract himself by exercise: push-ups and sit-ups. Eventually, he lay down on the small cot and stared at the ceiling, listened to the sounds of the building and the occasional muffled voice. At last, he fell into a sporadic and disturbed sleep, resigned to the worst.

  When the cell door opened the following morning Gene was already awake, but, when told he was now free to leave, wondered if he was still asleep and dreaming. ‘I can go?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t know who your nigger friend is or who his friends are, but we been told we cain’t hold you. I don’t know how many lucky days you had in your life, young fellah, but I doubt you’ll have one lucky as this again. Now get your ass into gear and follow me.’

  Gene was led to the reception area and handed over to two FBI agents.

  ‘You know the deal?’ the Chief of Police said to the agents. ‘He’s on the next bus out of the state or we re-arrest him. You got that?’

  One of the agents nodded, and took Gene to a waiting car.

  ‘Where’s Bob?’ Gene asked. ‘Shouldn’t we wait for him?’

  ‘He’s already gone,’ the agent replied. ‘He told us to tell you that the deal cost him his Afro – if that means anything to you.’

  Under the Radar

  Bob Crenshaw was born into a loving family, but the love soon ran out.

  Moses and Clarissa Crenshaw did everything in their lives early: they married early, became parents early and died early. The dreams that would eventually separate them from each other and Bob, however, formed late in their young lives and were no more than opaque desires on the day they exchanged vows. They set up home in Atlanta. Mo went to work at the Coca-Cola bottling plant and Clarissa found work as a seamstress. Their lives were comfortable and, until the birth of Bob, uncomplicated. It was Bob’s unanticipated arrival, however, that catalysed their opaque desires into transparent dreams.

  Barely out of their own childhoods, and now with a child of their own to look after, Mo and Clarissa started to feel trapped. It was at this juncture that Mo realised he’d always wanted to travel the world and Clarissa, that she’d always wanted to be a jazz singer. The cruelty of these realisations became all the more unrelenting after Mo and Clarissa accepted that their dreams would never be fulfilled. But then the United States declared war on Germany and Mo, at least, got his chance to travel.

  Mo was taken by train to New York and then by ship to Liverpool, England. From there he was transported to a training camp on the Isle of Wight, where he and other recruits prepared for the planned invasion of Europe. He wrote letters home describing his journey, the English countryside, its climate and its people, and the new friends he’d made. He told Clarissa that he didn’t think it would be too long before he’d be returning home, and that he loved and missed her and Little Bob. What he didn’t tell her in these letters was that he was having the time of his life. What he also didn’t tell Clarissa in these letters was that his life was nearing its end – though this, he himself didn’t know at the time.

  D-Day arrived and Mo’s company set sail for an area on the coast of Normandy designated Omaha Beach. They were promised a display of precision bombing that would decimate the German defences and allow them a Sunday morning’s stroll along the beach and, in all probability, an early breakfast of coffee and croissants in one of the local cafes. As it transpired the precision bombing was anything but precise, and the bombs missed their targets completely.

  The troops were now faced with having to cover three hundred yards of open sand under heavy fire. Some of them thought it a challenge, others an opportunity, but whatever their thinking they ended up dying in droves, their bodies strewing the beach like clumps of red seaweed. Mo lasted no more than thirty-seven seconds before his travelling days came to an end, his soul departing the beach long before his body was dragged from it. Moses Crenshaw now lies buried in a cemetery overlooking the sea, popular with thousands of other American corpses.

  Clarissa took the news of Mo’s death badly. Having already found single parenthood difficult, his death not only robbed her of a husband she’d loved, but, in her increasingly fragile state of mind, seemingly fated her to an eternity of being alone with Bob. It wasn’t as though she didn’t love her son – she did – and it wasn’t as though Bob was a difficult child – he wasn�
�t – but he was always there, always. She never had time for herself, and eventually came to resent his constant and suffocating presence.

  She knew she had talent. On those rare occasions she managed to persuade family or friends to take Bob for the night, she’d visit jazz clubs in the city’s underbelly and guest with various bands. All who heard her voice, its cadence and velvet tones, were impressed, and at least two bands had offered to take her on tour with them. But she’d always had to say no, and explain that she had a young son waiting for her at home. ‘Then ditch the kid,’ one alto-saxophonist once said to her. At first she’d thought he was joking, but then realised he was deadly serious. The thought started to gnaw away at her, and thinking about it day after day and month after month eventually led her to act upon it. Her decision to abandon Bob and follow her dream fated him to a life spent in the company of his mother’s sister, Selena.

  On the second of July’s two Dismal Days, she and Bob rode the bus to Aunt Selena’s small house. It was a Sunday morning and Clarissa knew that Selena would be in church. She carried a suitcase packed with Bob’s clothes and a few toys, and a letter of explanation for her sister. Selena’s door was locked, and Clarissa told Bob to wait for his aunt on the porch and hand her the letter when she returned from morning service. She had an errand to run, she told him, but would return in an hour or so. She gave Little Bob a hug and then walked away. Bob stared after her, but she never looked back. It was the last time he saw his mother.

  Selena Priddy was a spinster, and no more than four feet two inches tall. She was four years older than Clarissa, and as a growing child had been considered the prettier of the two sisters. Then, at the age of ten, something went wrong with her growing. When the Priddys eventually took their daughter to see a doctor, they were told she had a severe form of scoliosis, or curvature of the spine. Both the family and available treatment at the time were poor, and Selena’s growth was effectively stunted. The upper part of her spine continued to curve to the right, while her ribs and shoulder blade started to stick out on the side of her back like a hump.