He knew I wouldn’t have any myself either, if this winter I had to stand in the yard and watch everything that was mine being thrown into the back of a pickup, as if this were the Dust Bowl and we were the Joads. My boyhood would end then. Even he’d had a longer run than that.
He rose off the couch. Momma, still culling pecans, throwing the rotten ones into the trash can near her knee, asked, “Where are you heading off to, James?” He didn’t answer, but she appeared not to notice. She was listening to the president conclude his speech by saying something about how we had to heal the wounds that were within us so we could turn to the greater crises without.
But the wounds within my father could not be healed. The other crises—well, they were a different matter.
Our phone, at that time, was on a party line. You could have a private line, if you were willing and able to pay for it, but we weren’t able to and, even if we had been, I doubt Dad would’ve been willing. He hated talking on the phone and usually wouldn’t even answer if it rang when no one else was home.
I imagine that when he lifted the receiver from its cradle that night, he was listening for heavy breathing. An old man who lived down the road liked to eavesdrop, and you could generally tell when he was doing it because he had emphysema. But I suspect he was otherwise occupied that night. He didn’t have a TV but was probably listening to the radio, to WJDX down in Jackson, which had been broadcasting the call to arms all day long, urging folks to grab their guns and head for Oxford. Even the operators were probably listening to the radio, but one finally came on the line. “Number, please,” she would have said.
“Seven eight four W one.”
“Calling Arlan, are you?”
My father couldn’t have been sure which operator answered—there were several who rotated in pairs, and all of them, as I recall, sounded generically nasal—so he probably would’ve just said, “Yes ma’am.”
She would consider neighborly small talk well within her duties. “Big mess they’re having up at Ole Miss.”
“Sure sounds like it.”
My father recorded her next remark in his green notebook. “You boys in the Council aim to do anything about it?” she asked him.
So far as he could tell, those boys didn’t intend to do shit. They liked to hold meetings, drink bourbon and talk big, and they were probably talking plenty big that evening as they sat in their living rooms with their doors securely fastened. But all the trouble, from what he knew, was being stirred up by folks who belonged to no organization. Some of them, he wrote, probably didn’t even belong to theirselves. They were owned by others just like I was and that accounted for a good measure of their meanness. “I don’t rightly know, ma’am,” he said, trying his best to sound polite, though it wouldn’t have been easy for him that night. “Could you go ahead and connect me?”
“Excuse me,” she said, and the line must have crackled when she jammed the plug into the jack.
The phone rang four times: both Dad and Maggie remembered it the same way. Four rings, and with each one his resolve grew a little bit fainter. If it rang five times, he told himself, he’d just hang up. And if he had, he would not have called back. On the evening of September 30, 1962, he was still close enough to the man he’d been a month before that he could say with certainty what he would or would not do. He’d say it to himself off and on for the rest of his life: If it had only rung five times, I would not have called back.
But a couple miles away, a little girl was moving through the house in her pajamas, her hand reaching out to grasp the receiver.
For a moment, my father wrote, he couldn’t remember her name. Then it came to him. “Maggie,” he said, “can I speak to your daddy?”
She knew who it was, she’d told me, but pretended not to. She couldn’t say why, except that it hadn’t been a good day. Her momma had started drinking around lunchtime, which was normal by then, but her daddy had been drinking, too, which wasn’t. They’d been talking in low voices all day long, wandering in and out of rooms, stepping outside once or twice to talk by the pool. He was angry, and seeing him like that had unsettled her. Her dad was the one she could count on. Twice since supper she’d had to run to the bathroom, her stomach in rebellion, and she was heading there again when she picked up the phone. “May I ask who’s calling?”
It annoyed my father beyond all reason that she said may rather than can. May wasn’t just a word to be spat out by a prissy little girl. It was also a name that happened to be his. “This is James May,” he told her. “Can I please speak to Arlan Calloway?”
“Just a moment,” she said. “I’ll see if he can take your call.”
The next thing my father knew, he heard a toilet being flushed. The phone at the Calloways’ house stood on a table in the hallway, right next to the bathroom door. He figured Maggie must have taken a leisurely pee before going to summon her father—but in fact she’d barely made it to the toilet before suffering another bout of diarrhea.
By the time Arlan answered, my father was almost out of his mind. He’d been standing there waiting for four or five minutes, just like he always had to outside of Herman Horton’s office, until the old man had nothing better to do than grant him a quarter of an hour. He’d been waiting, he thought, for the better part of his life, without even knowing what for. Up till now. “Listen,” he proposed, “how about you and me head up the road?”
“Up the road where?”
“You know where,” my father said.
“Did, I wouldn’t be asking.”
“Oxford.”
“Oxford?”
“Ole Miss.”
“Ole Miss?”
My father heard himself laugh. It surprised him, because nothing was funny this evening. Nothing had been for a month, and maybe never would be again. “What’s the matter, Arlan?” he said. “Some wizard turn you into a parrot?”
He’d never said anything like that to his old friend, or to anybody else, either, and his first impulse, after that snotty response left his mouth, was to say Sorry and beg forgiveness. But what did he have to be sorry for? He wouldn’t have tried to take Arlan’s house, because it wasn’t his. Nor would he have taken his truck, his car or his wife, not even if he held a lien against them.
“No, James,” Arlan said quietly, “I’m not a parrot.” Maggie recalled that after he said that, he made a fist of his right hand and whacked himself on the thigh. “You may not believe it, but I’m a person. Just like you.”
“That colored boy that wants to go to Ole Miss, he’s a person, too,” my father said. “But he’s not like me, and neither are you. You got a leadership role to play, Arlan. I’m just a loyal follower. Seems like I been following you since I was the size of a slop jar. And I’m ready to follow you tonight.” He could visualize him over there in that new ranch-style house, in those charcoal-gray slacks he liked to wear when he headed to a gathering at Mayor Finley’s or went into town to eat with his wife and family. Not too long ago he’d started calling supper “dinner,” like somebody that’d spent his whole life in a city.
Maggie got a very different view. From where she stood, she saw a thin film of sweat on her father’s upper lip. One corner of his mouth began to twitch, and the hand that wasn’t holding the receiver rose to his forehead as if he were racking his brain for a solution to an impossible situation.
Just then, though my father would never know it, Nadine walked into the hall. She placed her palm against Maggie’s shoulder and pushed her, none too gently, towards her bedroom.
My father couldn’t have heard her whisper, “What the fuck’s going on? Who’s that you’re talking to? Get off the goddamn phone.”
With his angry wife towering over him, Arlan Calloway’s voice assumed the tone of command he used when issuing instructions to hoe hands and tractor drivers. “All right, now,” he told my dad, “you walk out to the main road and wait. I’ll pick you up in ten minutes.”
At Ole Miss, one of my best friends was another h
istory major who’d grown up in East Tennessee, not far from the Virginia line. I went home with him once on spring break, and those hills they lived in were by no means heavily populated, and it got pretty dark there at night, especially once you turned off the interstate onto a winding mountain road. So it means something that when he came home with me to the Delta and we were sitting in the car one evening, drinking beer on the side of the road a few miles north of town, he claimed he’d never seen any place so dark. “Look,” he said, gesturing at the windshield, “there’s not a single light in sight. Man, I mean, this is like being in the grave.”
My father would’ve seen a light on that night while waiting for Arlan Calloway. Our house was no more than a couple hundred yards away, and my mother hadn’t gone to bed yet. But ours would have been the only light visible, because the only other house you could see from that spot was a tenant shack that didn’t have electricity.
The night had turned chilly, the temperature dipping into the fifties, according to weather reports I found in the Memphis paper. To the best of my knowledge, my father never owned a heavy coat, so if it got really cold he’d just put on extra layers. Furthermore, the Colt Python he’d jammed into his pants, under the elastic band of his boxer shorts, had to be cold against his skin. He’d left the house fast, telling my mother not to wait up, that he’d be back late. It seems to me that she might’ve said his name once or twice and asked where he was going, but I don’t believe he ever answered.
This wasn’t the first time he’d left the house armed. Whenever somebody ran off from the County Farm, he was one of the people they called up to walk the roads. I once heard him explain how he and Arlan helped corner two escapees in a barn on Beaverdam Creek. He told my grandfather that one of the other men on the patrol—Benny Earl Baggot, who also farmed sixteenth-section land—kept passing a bottle and calling out insults, begging the convicts to make a run for it, because it had always bothered him that he’d never shot anybody. “Over in Europe I shot several somebodies,” Dad said Mr. Calloway had told Baggot. “And if you ever do, you’ll probably need to start buying bigger bottles than that little one you got now.” Before long the runaways surrendered, spoiling Benny Earl’s evening.
Waiting there on the main road, my father wondered what Arlan had told his wife. I convinced myself he probably fed her a bunch of bunk about fighting for states rights knowing she wouldn’t be for it but would still give him credit for having guts. She could forgive a man for a lot of things I imagine but I don’t think she ever forgave any person male nor female for being gutless.
Finally he spotted headlights about a mile away. Later on, he recalled thinking that he wouldn’t have been shocked if his friend was about to suggest, “Why don’t we just ride around for a few hours, maybe drive down to Belzoni to that truck stop that’s always open, and get us some barbecue and coleslaw? I don’t have a stake in Ole Miss, and neither do you.”
The pickup didn’t seem to be in any hurry, but finally it pulled up beside him, and Arlan threw open the door on the passenger side. When the interior light came on, Dad saw the shotgun, its muzzle resting on the floorboard.
None of the five notebooks I found on Christmas Eve have dates in them. But given various bits of information, I can make pretty good guesses about how old each of them might be. The first spans a period from early summer of 1947 to sometime late in 1949: there’s a reference near the beginning to his forthcoming marriage, which took place on July 6, 1947, and near the end he alludes to the burning of a Canadian Great Lakes cruiser named Noronic, which according to Google happened on September 17, 1949, killing 118 people. The second notebook takes up almost immediately after the end of the first, as if he intended to record his thoughts regularly, but then he must have stopped for a good while, because there are no references at all to the Korean War—an odd oversight, considering his own experiences. Somewhere around the middle he notes his feelings upon learning my mother had gotten pregnant, which would place it near the end of 1955. My birth is duly recorded some pages later, along with the information, new to me, that she almost died in the delivery room. The last entry expresses his joy at his old friend Arlan’s homecoming, with his wife and children, and that happened late in the spring of 1959.
The third notebook is the one I’d seen as a kid, in which he ponders that girl in the Philippines. It starts with the death of my grandfather, in the summer of 1965, and ends with me in junior high, when I discarded his advice to concentrate on school instead of athletics. The fourth notebook starts with me about to go to Ole Miss and ends a few pages later, in the middle of a sentence about his new job at the Loring County school bus barn, the remaining sheets having been ripped out. The last of the five, the green one he’d started sometime in the fall, contains forty pages of ungrammatical but frequently eloquent prose, most of it directly related to the events of September and October of 1962—though in the middle, there’s a four-page section about driving my mother around in his van, stopping by where our house used to stand, then spotting my car in Maggie’s driveway and finding it there again on the same day the following week as well as the one after that. It’s the first time I’ve wished I was like her and didn’t know what I was seeing, he wrote. And she don’t. If she did she’d start that humming.
He might have thought he’d have enough warning at the end of his life to destroy the notebooks before anyone could find them, though there’s rarely much description and many comments are so cryptic that nobody else could make much sense of them. But in the green one, when he writes about the evening he and Arlan Calloway went to Oxford, there’s a remarkable amount of detail—as if, for once, he was writing with an audience in mind.
At one point, as they traveled north that night on Highway 49, a truck with Louisiana license plates swept by them, with a bunch of men in back wearing orange hunting vests. One of them stuck his shotgun in the air and fired off a blast, a cone of fire spewing from the muzzle. Mr. Calloway called him a dumb son of a bitch and predicted he’d be among the next to die.
One person was already dead—they’d heard that on the radio—and the people storming onto the campus could hardly breathe because of all the teargas. A retired army general named Edwin Walker was supposedly organizing an attack on the U.S. marshals, who’d already surrounded the administration building. When Arlan heard that, my father recalled, he shook his head and asked him if knew who Walker was.
“The fellow that commanded the troops at Little Rock Central?”
“Yeah, so I guess he’s down here trying to make up for past sins. Except that now, instead of a bunch of besotted rednecks, he’s facing some folks that know how to shoot back.”
“Whose side you on, Arlan?”
“I’m on my side, James. Aren’t you on yours? You’d better be. Because if you’re not, who do you think is?”
My father replied that he thought Arlan was. Weren’t they members of the same organization?
All that organization amounted to, Mr. Calloway told him, was a fucking civic club. Didn’t my father have enough gumption to know that?
Well, he had more than most folks knew. He understood perfectly well that the Council was a civic club. And like’s the case with most clubs not being in it could hit you in the pocketbook and mine was too thin to absorb much of a blow. I said to him hell Arlan I thought we was fighting for racial supremacy. And he says how in the hell is the white race so damn supreme when we live in a place that’s got three or four of them for every one of us? I’m just trying to conduct my business in the most efficient way possible he tells me, that the day doing business means saying yes sir to colored folks I’ll say it just as sweet as can be. That day’s not here yet. He says people have to adapt James and that’s what I’ve been trying to show you. I got half a mind to turn around and head back. We’re not going to accomplish nothing up there tonight except maybe getting ourselves killed.
Heading back was the last thing my father wanted. Or to put it another way, it was the last
thing he could afford. If they went back, he said, they’d just look like a couple of windbags.
Nobody would know, Mr. Calloway observed, unless he ran his mouth.
My father lied and said he’d already run it, that the operator had asked if they were going to Oxford and he’d said yes.
Well Arlan says to me like he’s being philosophical, that means it’s in the public domain.
Highway 6, at that time, didn’t bypass the town of Oxford as it does today. Back then it ran straight into the square, with the university off to the right. When they got there, the western edge of town seemed surprisingly quiet, given that a battle supposedly was raging just a couple miles away. My father noticed a rundown gas station on their left, a bunch of used tires stacked up on a spoke where anybody who wanted to could steal them, the door to the service bay wide open and somebody’s tool chest sitting on the floor. A hundred yards or so ahead on the right, there was what appeared to be a construction site, a broad expanse of newly poured concrete with absolutely nothing around it—in all likelihood, the foundation of the strip mall where the Jitney-Jungle stood when I was a student.
At first he wondered if maybe the news going out over the radio was an exaggeration. The highway ahead looked empty and dark. Then, over the drone of Arlan’s engine, he became aware of the noise: small-arms fire. He rolled the window down, and it got a lot louder. There was a weird odor in the air, too.
Safe from the Neighbors Page 22
