Four Spirits Read online

  Stella knew her breasts were terribly small. If they had been plumper, Darl’s fingertips might have found the beginnings of roundness. Sex, sex, sex, she thought. His hand slid down to her waist; her mind careened. Do I feel slender enough there? Inviting? With his other hand, Darl trained the binoculars on the city. With one finger, he adjusted the ridged wheel between the twin eyepieces. The black leather strap looped gracefully around the back of his neck.

  Darl was the complete darling: a lover of nature, a lover of music, a lover of God, considerate, a gentleman—if only he loved her. And best of all he was an organist, a master of the king of instruments. When Darl played Bach’s “O Sacred Head, Now Wounded,” creating his own improvisations, Stella felt understood. It was she who had been wounded, and the music was what she missed and needed. The way Darl played promised wholeness, profundity. Almost it seemed that the spirit of her father was hovering around Darl and her on this high place.

  She placed her hand just below Darl’s waist; she shivered as though to say “I only seek closeness for warmth, against the chill.” Her palm loved the unfamiliar grain of the cloth of his trousers, and underneath, the firm flesh of his buttock just beginning to flare. How tantalized her hand felt, the hand itself wishing it dare move down to know the curve of his butt. She glanced again at the side of his cheek, the binoculars trained on the city. His hair was a rich brown, and his freckles almost matched his hair.

  She wanted to brush the field glasses aside, to stand in front of him, for his eyes to look into hers and see in her more than a city’s worth of complex feeling, then she would tilt her face up a bare half inch and kiss his lips, her whole front against his whole front. They would lose their bodies, become a shared streak of warmth.

  Darl pointed to the rectangular finger of the Comer Building, twenty-one stories tall, Birmingham’s lonely skyscraper. Down in the valley, the sweep of buildings was scarved with a haze from the steel mills. After finding the Comer Building, they looked west and north, searching for the parks—Woodrow Wilson Park adjacent to the beautiful library (only for whites) and a few blocks away, Kelly Ingram Park, for Negroes (no library). The demonstrations were launched toward city hall from the Negro park. But trees, already in full leaf, blocked their view, even with binoculars, of the violent attack of Bull Connor’s police on the freedom demonstrators. Birmingham appeared as peaceful, from this distance, as when, long ago, Stella had stood here with her mother and brothers—one of their day trips.

  Suddenly Stella felt like a coward. If she wanted to see, she should have the nerve to go downtown. If she wanted to participate…but the idea frightened her too much.

  Darl said quietly, “May the Lord bless you and keep you…” He was saying it over the whole city, the Methodist benediction. “May the Lord lift up his countenance upon you…” Darl was trying, with words, to soothe the hidden unrest and violence of his city. It was one of the things she loved about Darl, his sincere belief. Her own belief was in chaos. Down below, the confrontation was hidden completely from their view, but Darl was addressing both sides someplace in the distance, under the greenery.

  “We should go down,” Darl said quietly. “You’re cold.”

  “Amen,” she answered, and she let herself smile. She imagined somebody with a tape measure, holding it, impossibly, from a flying robin down to the ground. She loved the idea—so unexpected, silly but fascinating, to juxtapose a flying robin and a floppy yellow tape measure.

  What was humor? one of their professors had posed, and he had answered, nondangerous, unexpectedly inappropriate juxtaposition.

  But as they began to descend the spiral stairs inside Vulcan’s tower, Stella grew sober. She thought of the force of the powerful fire hoses turned on the Negroes peacefully congregating and marching for equality. She thought of the police dogs, standing on their hind legs, mouths open, snarling and barking.

  In Birmingham, there was no romance between Vulcan and Lady Liberty.

  Christine

  IN EARLY MAY 1963, THE BLAST FROM THE FIRE HOSE caught Christine Taylor on the left shoulder, spun her counterclockwise, hit her on the back of her right shoulder. For the third day, the white firemen had been ordered to blast the demonstrators with their fire hoses. The force of water from the fire hose could rip the bark off a tree. As her front turned toward the fire hose, Christine brought up her forearms quickly to shield her breasts, was spun to face first the white mob, then the knot of firemen in red slickers. When the water blast crossed her upper chest, despite her shielding forearms and clenched fists, the force of the water knocked her breath away. Her body spun round the scream of her mind. Her legs tangled while she twirled. She fell to the pavement, and the pounding blast stomped hard on her back—one, two, three, four seconds, she counted through clenched teeth—then the high-pressure water moved on to punish another black person.

  After the attack passed over, Christine panted into the pavement, counted four breaths of air smelling of wet asphalt, and opened her eyes. The water blast was sweeping toward Charles Powers, one of her students in the night school. She exhorted Charles to fall, now, before the white men got him, and he did, but the water pounded him anyway. Stay on your belly! Don’t let it roll you over! she silently exhorted.

  The water struck Charles’s rump, lifting him, Sweet Jesus! abusing him through his trousers. Christine could see Charles screaming into the surface of the street, trying to get a fingerhold in the large cracks in the pavement. His lips inched over the asphalt while a policeman ran toward him, his nightstick raised. Releasing the pavement, Charles crossed his arms around the back of his head; the stick thudded his knuckles, but he protected his head, his hands crossed like pigeon wings over the skinny back of his neck.

  (“Got my trousers soaked with spray,” LeRoy Jones, the policeman, would later tell his buddies and his brother Ryder, “but I whacked that nigger till he yelled uncle.”)

  Christine watched the blast moving away from Charles, chasing the running feet of children dressed in Sunday school clothes.

  The fire-hose water hadn’t rolled him over;Charles was safe in front. Christine wondered, Would it have torn him up? Ripped his prick off? She wanted to press herself into the pavement she lay on.

  Charles, soaked, slowly rose to his feet. He was tall and lanky, had the broad shoulders and sinewy arms of a man. He moved slowly and cautiously.

  You’re not beat. You’re not beat, Christine thought as loudly as she could.

  With her cheek lying against the street, she watched him brush the street dirt off his lower lip. Christine knew she should get up, too, but she felt safer lying on the street, its grayness fanning away from her eye. She tugged down the skirt of her navy suit, her best suit, drenched now. Close to her cheek, a sparrow landed on the asphalt. When Christine glanced at Charles again, she noticed a little blood on his fingertips, which were next to his mouth (Must have scraped his lip on the asphalt). He was standing still, slumped, watching. She ought to speak to him. Encourage him.

  There was the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth reciting loudly, “I will fear no evil.” Water rocketed against his ribs, spun him once, twice, and he was down, his hands pressed against his side.

  Rising to her knees, Christine watched the running children and heard their high-pitched yelps. Like little dogs yelping. The torrential water splashed just at their heels, then traveled to their ankles and up the backs of their legs. The power of the fire hose pushed a little girl forward, drenched the back of her yellow organdy dress. The girl in sodden yellow lifted her hands and spread her fingers to push the children in front of her. All the children were soaked. The water cannon was moving the schoolchildren like kites in a wind against a brick wall; Christine fixed her gaze on a wet white shirt (Dressed up for nonviolence, poor boy) plastered against dark skin. When the blast moved on, the boy against the wall turned to face the firemen.

  He raised an elbow to protect his face, if need be, but he didn’t avert his attentive eyes. It was Edmund, Char
les’s little brother. Eyes wide with disbelief, Edmund wanted to see what was happening to them. Christine felt proud of him, glad that he wanted to see, to know. Edmund stepped forward from the wall and ran to kneel beside Reverend Shuttlesworth. The boy surely wasn’t more than seven.

  If not my generation, yours, she thought.

  Edmund

  “WHY DON’T THEY COME TO VISIT ME, HERE IN THE HOSPITAL?” Reverend Shuttlesworth asked the boy. “You come.”

  Nobody could smile like Edmund’s minister—all teeth, all sunshine. Smiling now, smiling up from his hospital bed. Same as the pulpit smile, but Reverend Shuttlesworth was lying in white sheets, not standing, not weaving left and right before his people, his narrow tie leaping like a dancing snake.

  “Who?” the boy asked.

  “King,” his minister answered. “King and Abernathy. You here. Where they?”

  The boy shrugged. He retreated back into the ignorance of youth; he was little, he could shrug and say “I don’t know,” but he smiled when he said it, like sunshine, he hoped. (He knew nobody was admitted here to the bedside of Reverend Shuttlesworth—doctor and wife orders—but he had slipped in. So if he slipped in, why couldn’t the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.?)

  “I just got to come see you ’cause you my hero,” Edmund soothed.

  “I thought Lone Ranger was your hero?” Minister was pleased, teasing him.

  “Not anymore. I gonna be you.”

  “Martin Luther King Jr. is a man of God, and I love him. But we ain’t the same. We ain’t no identical twins.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Pray with me!” He reached out his hand from under the white sheet to Edmund, and then Reverend Shuttlesworth closed his eyes. “Jesus, take this youngun. Be at Edmund’s side as you ever have by mine. When the house fall, lead him out. When the bomb burst, be his shield; put a helmet on his head and be his protection. Put love in his heart. Teach him. ‘Love your enemies; bless them that persecutes you.’ In the jail cell, tell Edmund—you with him, you with him even to the end of the world. In Christ’s holy name, Amen.”

  They opened their eyes, and Edmund said, “I didn’t let them put me in jail. I just ran off.”

  “Did you?” Minister wrinkled his forehead. He stared hard but loving. “Then I got to tell you. Don’t be afraid of the jail. They can’t jail a soul. Your spirit—it remain free, body behind bars.”

  “Yessir.”

  “Next time, you go on to jail like a good boy.”

  Darl

  AS THEY STARTED THEIR DESCENT DOWN THE NARROW SPIRAL steps inside Vulcan’s pedestal, Darl apologized to Stella. “I’m sorry we couldn’t see anything.”

  “The trees blocked the view,” she answered. She was descending the stairs behind him. This way Darl could catch her if she stumbled, break her fall. It was like walking on the street side; his mother had taught him manners: a gentleman should be killed first, if a car jumped the curb. Going up the stairs, he should walk behind, in case she (any she) should slip.

  From their high perch, Darl had admired the vast volume of air filling the space over the city in the valley. God’s love was suggested by a tension between immensity and insignificance—sparrows plying the ocean of air. From left to right, all the way to a vague horizon, the city had lain resolved into white, gray, and tan buildings, a monochromatic mosaic of little squares and rectangles. The tops of the bubbling green trees had resembled broccoli heads.

  At the head of Twentieth Street stood a green carpet, landscaped with fish-ponds; Darl knew the big trees of the park provided a canopy to the children’s entrance of the library, though the main library was too far away to serve children from his part of town, the West End. That other concentration of green he had seen from the balcony would have been Kelly Ingram Park, where the colored children gathered, the pawns of their leaders. If only people could be patient, God had his plan.

  The air over the city had not been invisible but perceptible as a gray haze hovering over the tiny buildings and trees. When Darl had looked up higher, he had seen some real blue, pale and tender. He felt that God had a tender attitude toward Birmingham, despite her shortcomings.

  Darl took his time descending the metal steps in the dim light. He needed to decide if he should arrange to see Stella again in the evening.

  “Did your folks take you to the library when you were little?” Stella asked, her voice floating down over his shoulder. Sometimes she seemed to follow his unarticulated thoughts.

  “We had a branch in West End. Not so grand.” He glanced out a narrow window set in the curve of the stone tower. He wished he had grown up nearer the center of things. Not that he didn’t love his own blue-collar people. He did, and fiercely.

  “When I was ten,” Stella said, “my aunt allowed me to take the bus alone to the library.”

  He could hear her steps slowing. She lived in Norwood, once the residence of the well-to-do, with its wide boulevard, but now an area that had headed steadily downhill for many decades. Still, he liked its quiet decay, the remnants of elegance.

  “It was my first visit to the library,” she went on, “after I lost my family. I turned ten. Aunt Krit said double digits meant I could take the 15 Norwood to town, on my own.”

  He paused and turned to look up at her.

  “They had been gone five years.” Her upturned face looked peaked and scared.

  “I’m sorry, Stella.”

  “The library had a revolving brass door.” She had stopped, stood as though suspended in the dim tower, one hand on the metal handrail. “You entered the door from the outside world, pushed, then emerged in another world. A quiet, interior world.” She seemed imprisoned in her sadness. Slowly she took another step down, closer to him; he continued their descent. “That’s how it was,” she said in a little voice. “They died and the world changed. Like passing through a revolving door from one world to another.” She paused again, as though she wanted this spiraling down to last and last. “Actually, it was like crossing a river from one state to another. The driveway passes between my original home with my brothers and parents and where I live now with my father’s sisters, Aunt Pratt and Aunt Krit. I crossed the driveway into another world.”

  At the bottom of the tower, they stepped out into the bright May sunshine. Though it had been chilly up on the pedestal, it was pleasantly warm at its base, with a slight breeze. How sad Stella had sounded. Darl took her hand, and they walked forward.

  “I need to go on to Fielding’s,” she said, referring to her evening work on the switchboard at one of Birmingham’s large department stores.

  He turned to face her. “I’ll pick you up after. On the Vespa.”

  “All right,” she said.

  Bobby Jones

  “LET’S GO FISHING, DAD. PLEASE, DAD,” LITTLE BOBBY Jones begged his father.

  “I promised your mom I’d stake up them tomatoes.”

  Bobby saw the twelve plants sprawled over the backyard. But this afternoon provided Bobby with a rare opportunity for fishing. His dad’s service station was close to town, and they’d shut down because of the demonstrations. His little brother and sister—Tommy and Shirley—were playing in the sandbox. It was just an old truck tire that held sand. Bobby had seen cats nasty in it, and he didn’t want to have anything to do with the sandbox. His mom was pinning a sheet on the clothesline. It was the kind of clothespin he liked, not the two sticks with a spring that could snap your fingers hard as a mousetrap.

  “Please, Mom?” he whined.

  “Oh, Ryder, y’all go on,” she said. “It won’t hurt the tomatoes none to wait.”

  “Where you want to go, son?”

  “Village Creek! Village Creek! And I’ll take my galoshes and wade.”

  “What’ll we use for a pole?”

  “Cut a pole!”

  “Son, if we was to catch anything we couldn’t eat it. That creek’s too dirty. Nobody but niggers eats out of Village Creek.”

  Bobby had no reply.
He’d only heard about Village Creek. He’d never seen it. He’d heard a white boy went over the Village Creek Falls in a barrel and it made him a half-wit. He asked his father about it.

  “Them falls ain’t but two feet high,” Ryder answered. “And the water ain’t more than a yard deep anyplace. It’s an open sewer.”

  Bobby tried to hold back his tears. He had imagined the water of the creek to be a bright blue with a fish hopping out of it, smiling, like in Shirley’s coloring book. Village Creek was the only body of water he’d ever heard of.

  “Tell you what,” his father said. “We’ll go explore.”

  Bobby watched his father take off his black cowboy hat and smooth back his hair. He watched his parents squint their eyes in the sunshine and smile at each other. Bobby put his hands on his hips, grinned, triumphant. He felt as though he were holding a Brownie camera and taking their picture.

  “We need a emergency plan,” his father said, “case the house catches fire.”

  Bobby glanced a nxiously at his house. Gray-white, it sat securely on the dirt.

  “You carry out the kids and the TV,” his father said to Bobby’s mother, “and I’ll get the guns and my recliner.”

  She just cracked her gum and smiled. “All right, hon.”

  The house was safe and square: four rooms not counting the bathroom. It was perfect.

  Bobby reached down to pick up his child-size football—a lumpy, waddy thing, stuffed with rags. His mother had made the football for his last Christmas, stitched it up on her machine out of brown oilcloth.