Four Spirits Read online

  I think the imagination can be a great moral and spiritual force—that it can expand people’s consciousnesses. I believe that if civic leaders can promote communication by having a common object to study and talk about, it would increase the sense of community, not only in combating prejudice, but in a sense of civic pride of place. Some places have everyone wear a button who has read the book, so if you see someone waiting for the bus, and you are both wearing buttons, you have something to talk about. It’s a kind of bridge. I hope that all of the arts can help to break down the prejudice, and inclination toward violence that is still very evident in this country.

  E-Book Extra

  The Facts behind the Fiction: Key Dates in

  the Civil Rights Movement

  17 May 1954: Supreme Court outlaws school segregation in Brown vs. Board of Education.

  07 May 1955: Reverend George Lee: killed for leading voter registration drive. Belzoni, MS.

  13 August 1955: Lamar Smith: murdered for organizing black voters. Brookhaven, MS.

  28 August 1955: Emmett Louis Till: youth murdered for speaking to white woman. Money, MS.

  22 October 1955: John Earle Reese: slain by nightriders opposed to black school improvements. Mayflower, TX.

  01 December 1955: Rosa Parks: arrested for refusing to give up her seat on bus to a white man. Montgomery, AL.

  05 December 1955: Montgomery bus boycott begins.

  13 November 1956: Supreme Court bans segregated seating on Montgomery buses.

  23 January 1957: Willie Edwards Jr.: killed by Ku Klux Klan. Montgomery, AL.

  29 August 1957: Congress passes first Civil Rights act since reconstruction.

  24 September 1957: President Eisenhower orders federal troops to enforce school desegregation. Little Rock, AR.

  25 August 1959: Mack Charles Parker: taken from jail and lynched. Polarville, MS.

  1 February 1960: Black students stage sit-in at ‘whites only’ lunch counter. Greensboro, NC.

  05 December 1960: Supreme Court outlaws segregation in bus terminals.

  14 May 1961: Freedom riders attacked in Alabama while testing compliance with bus desegregation laws.

  25 September 1961: Herbert Lee: voter registration worker killed by white legislator. Liberty, MS.

  1 April 1962: Civil Rights groups join forces to launch voter registration drive.

  09 April 1962: Cpl. Roman Ducksworth Jr.: taken from bus and killed by police. Taylorsville, MS.

  30 September 1962: Riots erupt when James Meredith, a black student, enrolls at Ole Miss.

  30 September 1962: Paul Guihard: European reporter killed during Ole Miss riot. Oxford, MS.

  23 April 1963: William Lewis Moore: slain during one-man march against segregation. Atlanta, AL.

  03 May 1963: Birmingham police attack marching children with dogs and firehoses.

  11 June 1963: Alabama Governor stands in schoolhouse door to stop university integration.

  12 June 1963: Medgar Evers: Civil Rights leader assassinated. Jackson, MS.

  28 August 1963: 250,000 Americans march on Washington for Civil Rights.

  15 September 1963: Addie Mae Collins, Denise McNair, Carole Robertson, Cynthia Wesley: schoolgirls killed in bombing of 16th Baptist Church. Birmingham, AL.

  15 September 1963: Virgil Lamar Ware: youth killed during wave of racist violence. Birmingham, AL.

  23 January 1964: Poll tax outlawed in federal elections.

  31 January 1964: Louis Allen: witness to murder of civil rights worker, assassinated. Liberty, MS.

  23 March 1964: Johnnie Mae Chapell: shot by 4 white men along a roadside. Jacksonville, Fla.

  07 April 1964: Rev. Bruce Klunder: killed protesting construction of segregated school. Columbus, OH.

  02 May 1964: Henry Hezekiah Dee, Charles Eddie Moore: killed by Klan. Meadville, MS.

  20 June 1964: Freedom summer brings 1,000 young civil rights volunteers to Mississippi.

  21 June 1964: James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner: Civil Rights workers abducted and slain by Ku Klux Klan. Philadelphia, MS.

  02 July 1964: President Johnson signs Civil Rights Act of 1964.

  11 July 1964: Lt. Col. Lemuel Penn: killed by Ku Klux Klan while driving north. Colbert, GA.

  26 February 1965: Jimmie Lee Jackson: Civil Rights marcher killed by state trooper. Marion, AL.

  07 March 1965: State troopers beat black marchers at Edmund Pettus Bridge. Selma, AL.

  11 March 1965: Rev. James Reeb: march volunteer beaten to death. Selma, AL.

  25 March 1965: Civil Rights march from Selma to Montgomery completed.

  25 March 1965: Viola Gregg Liuzzo: killed by Ku Klux Klan while transporting marchers. Selma Highway, AL.

  02 June 1965: Oneal Moore: black deputy killed by Nightriders. Varnado, LA.

  09 July 1965: Congress passes Voting Rights Act of 1965.

  18 July 1965: Willie Wallace Brewster: killed by Nightriders. Anniston, AL.

  20 August 1965: Jonathan Daniels: seminary student killed by deputy. Hayneville, AL.

  03 January 1966: Samuel Younge Jr.: student civil rights activist killed in dispute over whites-only restroom. Tuskegee, AL.

  10 January 1966: Vernon Dahmer: black community leader killed in Ku Klux Klan bombing. Hattiesburg, MS.

  10 June 1966: Ben Chester White: killed by Klu Klux Klan. Natchez, MS.

  30 July 1966: Clarence Triggs: slain by Nightriders. Bogalusa, LA.

  27 February 1967: Wharlest Jackson: Civil Rights leader killed after promotion to white job. Natchez, MS.

  12 May 1967: Benjamin Brown: Civil Rights worker killed when police fired on protesters. Jackson, MS.

  02 October 1967: Thurgood Marshall sworn in as first black Supreme Court Justice.

  08 February 1968: Samuel Hammond Jr. Delano Middleton, Henry Smith: students killed when highway patrolmen fired on protestors. Orangeburg, SC.

  04 April 1968: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Assassinated. Memphis, TN.

  E-Book Extra

  Reading Group Guide:

  Discussion Points for Four Spirits

  A Novel by Sena Jeter Naslund

  Transporting us to a time and place that tested the American dream in unprecedented ways, Four Spirits portrays a remarkable group of women and men living in Birmingham, Alabama, during the 1960s. This was the site of some of the nation’s most brutal attempts to quash the Civil Rights Movement, most horrifically in the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. Yet Birmingham was also where a triumphant swell of courage was born, one that award-winning novelist Sena Jeter Naslund witnessed first-hand while coming of age there.

  On the pages of Four Spirits, we meet an array of compelling characters—black and white, racist and integrationist, rich and poor, pacifist and terrorist. Through these fictional faces, this astonishing fight for freedom emerges in a storyline that pays beautiful tribute to unrecognized heroes. By turns exhilarating and poignant, Four Spirits is a novel that is meant to bring readers together, stirring emotions, recollections, and vibrant conversation.

  We hope that the following questions will enhance your discussion of this powerful and important book.

  Discussion Topics

  Two quotations, one from William Faulkner and one from Victoria Gray, an African-American Mississippi civil rights activitist, mark the beginning of Four Spirits. What is the contemporary relevance of these epigraphs? In what way is America’s past still present? Has the promise of a “rich harvest” been fulfilled?

  The novel’s prelude presents the only scenes in which Stella’s parents are with her in the present, rather than with her through memories. In what way do the events of that day both disable and sustain her throughout her life?

  Discuss the concept of destiny in terms of the book’s characters. T.J., for example, survived combat overseas and returned home to become a protector in his community. Yet he lost his job when he attempted to register to vote. Lee became embroiled in her husband’s violent plots and eventu
ally needed Aunt Pratt to help her find the way home (literally and symbolically). How does a combination of choice and chance create the fates of such characters as Catherine, Gloria, Lionel, Jonathan, and Stella?

  Compare the three men who win Stella’s affection. How does each one contribute to her growth throughout the novel?

  How does the book compare to your understanding or recollections of this time period? What did you discover about Birmingham and the Civil Rights Movement that you hadn’t known before? How would you have responded had you been in the various characters’ situations?

  The author gives us an unflinching glimpse of a Klansman’s perspective. What motivates Ryder to torture innocent strangers, as well as his wife? In your opinion, what are the roots of this behavior in general?

  The novel underscores the role of unjust laws and corrupt law enforcement officials in perpetuating Birmingham’s bloodshed. How did Civil Rights proponents overcome these tremendous disadvantages? Where did they find power?

  Sena Jeter Naslund vividly recreates the surreal aura that followed JohnF. Kennedy’s assassination. In what way are Stella’s experiences that day a reflection of the nation’s reaction to tragedy as a whole?

  Cultural icons and religion form a significant backdrop in Four Spirits. The intellectual canon features philosophers, scientists, composers, and literary lions. The spiritual references form a tapestry including Stella’s memories of her mother singing in Hebrew;existential skepticism;spiritual intuitions on the parts of Stella, Agnes, Lionel, and Charlotte;traditional Christian faith and the evangelical preaching of Lionel Parrish. How do the realms of thought and faith interact in Four Spirits?

  The act of mentoring is crucial to many of the novel’s characters. During his youth, Edmund strove to be one of the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth’s protégés; Catherine finds inspiration in her brother; Christine attempts to mentor Gloria. Who has been your mentor? What would you like to teach future generations about life?

  Christine, Arcola, Catherine, and Charles make a heavy sacrifice together at the White Palace. In her author’s note, Sena Jeter Naslund reminds us of the numerous real-life figures who lost their lives during this chapter in history. What can society do to ensure that they didn’t die in vain, and that such bloodshed will be not be repeated in the future?

  Discuss the literary devices Sena Jeter Naslund uses to enhance her storytelling: compact, intense chapters; widely varied points of view; the treatment of time;poetic chapter titles;carefully divided sections;a prelude and a postlude. What is the effect of these details?

  Four Spirits is filled with intriguing cameo characters, such as department store owner Mr. Fielding, many aunts, and the waiter who dances with Catherine. What makes even these minor roles significant in the context of this particular storyline?

  Though Four Spirits and Ahab’s Wife span extraordinarily different time periods, do any of the characters experience similar predicaments? How do these two novels complement Sena Jeter Naslund’s body of work?

  Two vivid scenes mark the novel’s conclusion: the burning of Jonathan’s car, and the ascension of Charlotte. What did these images evoke? What is the significance of giving Charlotte the last word?

  Prelude

  Old Times there, 1948

  Helicon, Alabama

  IN THE WOODS, A CHILD IS FIRING A PISTOL.

  “Aim at the trees,” her father tells her because she is five years old.

  She must shoot the trees, but it doesn’t make sense, because her father is the one who says he will die, and soon. Maybe death is hiding in the trees, the little girl thinks, and what if she kills death? Then it can’t get her father. Aim at the trees, yes, he surely said to do that, and she would do anything for him, and never be disobedient again.

  Since her parents and two brothers are standing behind, Stella sees nothing but trees, their slender pine bodies upright and endless as the soldiers marching down Twentieth Street in the Birmingham Armistice Day parade.

  In the piney forest, Stella holds the heavy, grown-up gun in her hand; she must lift the barrel to aim, and that tiny blade, like a fragment of razor blade on the end of the barrel, is called the sight. But will she become a soldier, if she fires a gun? And what if someone fires back at her? What if?

  During the parade, her mother pointed up to the balcony of the Tutwiler Hotel. “The reviewing stand”—Mama said—“General Omar Bradley.”

  “Now fire,” Stella’s father murmurs to his five-year-old daughter in his liquid-kind doctor voice. She knows the instruction is for her finger. Just her finger should ever so slightly pull the trigger toward her, toward them, but what if if if if if if if if the pistol has its own will and the barrel looks up above the green woods, up toward the sky that has turned pale, hardly blue at all anymore, and if the pistol continues to rear up like a stallion but instead of the must-be return of hoofs to the earth, what if the stallion rears past return, arcs backward till the horse is going to land on its own back, and then the stallion-gun fires, and it’s us all soft in our skin bags with hair on our heads and us limber jointed (with blood inside!), us in the gun’s sights and we are the target when the bullet races down the barrel?

  Because of death, Daddy reminds, “Aim at the trees!”

  Because Stella is hesitating in pulling the trigger, his voice comes booming now from the bedrock bottom beneath the sand beneath the sea: command: “Fire!”

  Her father’s voice roars like a cannon. Stella remembers the cannon roar and recoil not from the parade but from the movies of World War II, and she remembers Carlotta Shirley’s father and her mother’s explanation of shell-shocked Mr. Shirley:the toll of war.

  In the woods, her mother is wearing bright red lipstick, fresh, but Stella wears her faded overalls with the bib over her chest that always makes her feel safe. Perhaps (Stella imagines) the bullet she has fired dodges all the tree trunks in the woods before her; perhaps the bullet takes no toll but slips harmlessly like a snake between slender trunks, forever. Or, perhaps the bullet has hit a young pine, entering the bark lovingly like a ghost leaving not so much as a kiss-mark of lipstick on the flinty brown scales encircling a trunk just the size of your wrist. What happens to a bullet fired?

  And how could the repercussion of that shot be in the woods, when it rings in Stella’s own head? The sound of pistol fire big as apocalypse has entered Stella’s brain.

  (She has kept the barrel from rearing back.) “That’s right,” her father says. It’s his kind, lapping-waves doctor voice again. His face is pale and scrubbed so clean she can see the delicate red veins beside the flange of his nose.

  His blood is inside those vessels, and he is fully and completely alive. Is it possible that today while he was driving the car, he said, “I have lung cancer. That’s why I spit all the time,” and the car just kept going south? “You’ve seen me spitting. And I’ll die of it.” But his hair is still thick and gray, beautifully brushed. She loves his big nose and thinks him handsome as a hawk.

  ON THE DRIVE DOWN Highway 31, which links Birmingham to Montgomery and beyond to the even deeper rural South of virtually forgotten places like Helicon, Dr. Silver had spoken solemnly to his family. When he was a boy at Helicon, he loved Sunday school and squirrel hunting equally, he told his two sons and daughter as they drove south, back toward his old home—he’d never lost touch—where he had picked cotton alongside the colored folks. And then while he drove the car toward Helicon, he sang his children his favorite Methodist Sunday school song: “Jesus loves the little children, / all the children of the world; / red and yellow, black and white, / they are precious in his sight. / Jesus loves the little children of the world.” Because she is Jewish, Stella’s mother never sang a word about Jesus.

  Before he dies, Mama had explained to the children in the car, but the children are not to tell anybody at Helicon, he wants to visit. He wants to see again the woman he always called Old Aunt Charlotte, but Mama said only “Charlotte” and she explained that Daddy m
eant “honor” not “kin” when he said “Aunt” and that when he said “Old,” he meant respect for her years.

  When they first piled out of the car, they stopped at the little hut-house at Helicon, but Daddy had said, “Let her sleep. We’ll go fire the pistol.”

  But Stella and her brothers peeked and saw her sleeping—Old Aunt Charlotte, the one Who-Was-Born-into-Slavery. Not her son Christopher Columbus Jones, whose hair was cotton-boll white on his dark head, not her gaunt-cheeked daughter Queen Victoria Jones, whose head was crowned not by precious metal studded with gems but by a faded bandanna. Though ancient, Christopher Columbus Jones and Queen Victoria Jones are too young to have been slaves. It is their mother, Old Aunt Charlotte, who survived both before and after the time when the world convulsed in civil war to set her free. And Daddy wants his three children to know her. “It’s important to Daddy. He grew up at Helicon,” Mama, who grew up in Chicago, said in her special deep voice while they were in the car. Mama’s voice meant you have got to understand, or act as if you understand, and obey.

  Stella, of course, has always understood that Helicon was the place where the true South was. To her country-bred father, industrial Birmingham was an impostor place, not the real South at all, and so—is Stella herself real? Probably not. If her father denies the reality of Birmingham (or is it the importance of the place that he refuses to embrace?) and if, to Stella, no place is so real as the neighborhood of Norwood, or their red clay driveway, then are her feet real? And if not her feet, what of her legs? Bit by bit, when she tries to understand, she dissolves into unreality. She has come into a world that may never be real, and she and it are always going to be almost as nothing as ghosts or maybe, at best, spirits.