Downtown (27 page)

There’s one little boy, Andre—look for Andre. I think he’s your focus for this piece.”

“What about Andre?” I said.

“If he’s there, Andre will show you,” John Howard said.

He was not going with us this time. He had, he said, some people he needed to see, and they were leaving town that afternoon. He had cleared us with Mrs. Holmes. There shouldn’t be any problems.

“Will it help that I’m a crippled civil rights hero, too?”

Luke said, grinning. He had brought a cane with him that day, something I had never seen him do before, and I noticed the top of an Ace bandage showing over his work shoe. He limped heavily, too. The limp came and went, but I had never seen the cane or the bandage before. I raised my eyebrow at him.

“Humidity gets to it sometimes,” he said. “And the walking yesterday. It gets a lot of sympathy, too.”

“It won’t get you any from Mrs. Holmes,” John Howard said, but he smiled slightly. “But the kids will love it. Is it bothering you much?”

“Only when I dance,” Luke said. “What about your eye?

Do you ever feel that?”

213 / DOWNTOWN

His tone was merely interested, as Luke’s tone of voice often was. Almost everything interested him.

“Only when I laugh,” said John Howard, and I thought then that it was a bond they would have all their lives, the scars of that day at the Edmund Pettus Bridge. I wondered if, many years from now, on a day of rain and heavy air, Lucas Geary’s ankle would ache and he would think of John Howard, and vice versa. It gave me a strange, shy feeling, as if I were in an intimate situation with strangers. But then, that was where, I thought, I was.

Mrs. Holmes was almost silent with us, but she directed us to the back porch of the apartment where the children were having their breakfast of biscuits and weak coffee.

“Coffee?” I said, and then wished I had not. What did I know about feeding poor children?

“Church donates it,” Mrs. Holmes said in a weary mono-tone. “It’s the last thing to run out. And most of them were born drinking it. Lots of little niggers don’t like milk, but they’ll drink coffee.”

I jerked my head up and stared hard at her. Was she taunting me? Unexpectedly she smiled, a grudging small twitch. “It’s okay when we use it to each other,” she said.

“Just don’t you do it.”

“I never have,” I said. I did not think that I liked Mrs.

Carrie Holmes, urban saint or no.

Lucas raised the camera and squeezed off shot after shot of the children with their mugs of coffee. He could hardly have looked more conspicuous here, in this world of tiny, ragged black children, with his flaming hair and beard and his tall, boneless body, but somehow he melted into them, became a part of the furniture of the bleak porch, so that the children swirled and chattered around him as if he were one of them. Remembering his words the day before, I stood back, leaning against the side of the house, ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 214

watching silently. I wore an old denim skirt and sleeveless blouse today, with scuffed loafers, so that, at least, I would not look, as he had said of my costume yesterday, like a Junior Leaguer fulfilling her service requirements.

Presently Luke dropped to one knee and began to talk to the children. He talked softly, foolishness, nonsense, and the children responded by crowing with laughter, crawling over and around him, reaching for the camera and the bright things in the camera bag, reaching out to touch his hair and beard, and the bright aluminum cane. Luke shot roll after roll of film. He did not raise his voice.

Mrs. Holmes went into the house and came back pushing a very small boy ahead of her. He looked to be younger than the others, barely toddling, and he was plainly frightened.

He had a large head, out of proportion to his tiny body, and his face was moonlike, the color of shiny caramel. There were silver snailtracks of tears on his cheeks, and he looked at Luke and me out of huge brown eyes that showed a rim of white all the way around.

“Andre has been looking forward to this, but the young lady scares him,” Mrs. Holmes said. “It was a white lady took him away from his mama, a little lady like that one.”

She did not look at me. My face flamed.

“Why?” Luke said mildly.

“Well, his mama was beating him,” Mrs. Holmes said. “He wouldn’t stop shittin’ in his pants. She beat him till we couldn’t stand the yellin’ anymore, and I called the social worker. She came and got him and put him in foster care. I went and got him, said I was his granny. He’s been scared of white ladies since. I didn’t know she was coming, or I’d have said no.”

“She’s writing this piece,” Luke said. “She’s a good lady and a good writer, and she’s going to do these kids a lot of good. Where’s Andre’s mother now?”

215 / DOWNTOWN

“She’s dead. She overdosed up in Pittsburgh this spring.

He don’t know it. He thinks she’s coming back. She wasn’t but sixteen herself.”

I closed my eyes in pain and rage. This baby, with a dead mother herself a child, terrified now and forever of a fourth of the population of the world.

“Why in God’s name would she beat a baby for messing up his pants?” I whispered.

Mrs. Holmes looked at me with ill-concealed contempt.

“He ain’t a baby. He five,” she said. “He just ain’t never growed. Can’t control his bowels. Can’t speak, except to say his name. Lord knows, he says that enough, though.”

“What will happen to him?” Luke said.

“I reckon I’ll keep him for a while,” she said. “Then maybe somebody else will take him. I don’t want you to say his mother dead. I don’t want this child in foster.”

Luke nodded. He went and crouched down in front of the child, and touched his face gently.

“If you’ll tell me your name I’ll show you my car,” he said in a low voice.

The child stared, and then his great face split into an enchanting smile. His eyes danced with it; his whole body seemed caught in the force of the smile.

“Andre!” he shouted. “Andre! Andre, Andre!”

“Well, come on, Andre,” Luke said, swinging him up onto his shoulders. He limped heavily under the weight, but he did not stagger. He bore Andre through the dark, stifling apartment and out onto the street, where the little Morgan sat, surrounded by an honor guard of small Negro children.

Luke had hired them for a nickel apiece to watch the car when we arrived.

There was a long gasp from the little boy, and then Luke set him down and he toddled as fast as his stunted ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 216

legs would carry him over to the car, and hugged it. He literally hugged it, hugged the front fender and the bumper and the hood, hugged whatever part of it his short arms could encompass, and he kissed it. Luke shot swiftly as Andre hugged and kissed the Morgan, his face an epiphany of bliss.

“Andre,” he crooned. “Andre, Andre.”

Luke plopped him into the front seat of the Morgan and took him around the block, and as they drove away we heard his ecstatic anthem: “Andre, Andre!”

I looked at Mrs. Holmes.

“It’s what he says when he’s happy, when he wants to give you a present, or thank you,” she said. “I told him from the first day he come to me that Andre was the most beautiful word I ever heard, and he thinks it is. He’s a right happy little boy for what he’s been through.”

I turned away. I was determined not to cry in front of this tough, cold, loving woman.

Luke took the film straight back to his apartment and developed it, and that night we stayed late at
Downtown
and Tom and Luke and I put the first layout for Focus together.

The photos were wonderful, strong black and white with a great deal of stark contrast, the faces of the children the only soft, diffused spots. We used photos of almost all of them.

The lead one, a double-page spread, was a head shot of Andre kissing the Morgan, his eyes squeezed shut in rapture. I took the layout into my office and started my captions and text.

“His name is Andre,” I began. “He is five years old and he can’t say anything else, but he can say his name, and he shouts it aloud in joy and affirmation. Andre. His name is Andre. Remember it….”

I remembered our words, Luke’s and mine, the day before:

“And that’s what you’ll do, shoot the faces.”

217 / DOWNTOWN

“And that’s what you’ll do, write the names.”

I put my head down on my typewriter and cried for a long time.

Matt loved the Focus layout and copy. He blatted the taxi horn after he had studied it, and called the whole staff in and showed it to them. He crowed and capered and grinned.

He clapped Lucas and Tom Gordon on the back, and kissed me soundly on the mouth, and said that at the very least it was Peabody stuff, and maybe even Pulitzer. Then he steamed out of the office on his way upstairs to show Culver Carnes.

“This ought to buy me a fucking year of peace,” he yelled back, just before the elevator bell dinged.

I went back to my office in a white dazzle of happiness and tried to get to work on captions and cutlines for the entertainment guide, but had little luck. The drumbeat of real, solid work was too loud in my blood.

Culver Carnes was ecstatic. The next day he was in Matt’s office planning a press party for the venture.

“I was going to wait until we had published magazines, but that will be fall, and this is just too good to pass up,” he said. “The riots in Watts and Newark and the others have had me worried; Atlanta could go up, too. We’d be fools to think it couldn’t. And the Panthers have been in town, and that’s not good. I took the layout over to Ben Cameron, Matt, after you left, and he asked to keep it overnight, and he’s talked to Dr. King, and they both think we ought to do something with this right now. Press party, or something.

Show the world what Atlanta’s doing, the black and white communities together. King has agreed to let John Howard represent SCLC before the press, and said he’d see about sending a bunch of their people over—Bond, maybe, and Rosser Sellers, and some

ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 218

of the others who’ve been visible all along. He won’t come himself, says it would turn into a media field day if he did, and he doesn’t want to divert attention from the Focus project. I see his point. I thought the governor, and some of our civic leaders, and of course you and your staff, Smoky and this young photographer—”

Matt watched him neutrally, and I knew that he was seething that Culver Carnes had seized the piece as his own, and was hastening to make hay with it. But he was proud of it, too, and the press party would showcase
Downtown
as well as the chamber of commerce.

“Sounds like a good idea,” he said. “Where did you figure on having it?”

“Well, I thought the Commerce Club. Put on a real spread, have an open bar, the works—”

“You might want to rethink that, Culver,” Matt said. “It ain’t exactly a bastion of racial harmony.”

“Negroes have been able to eat there since 1965,” Culver Carnes said.

“Yeah, but they can’t join,” Matt drawled. “I haven’t noticed any membership drives down in the projects. I have a better idea. Let’s do it at the Top of Peachtree. They’ve been remodeling this summer, and they’re reopening next week.

Let it be a grand occasion; symbolic as hell—the whole city at our feet, et cetera, et cetera. All the press guys love the Top; they spend half their time in the bar there. And Doug was one of the first owners in town to integrate, even when he didn’t have to, so some of the Negro leadership go there occasionally. What do you think? They’d probably give you a real deal on the price.”

Culver liked that, and so it was that on a Thursday evening in July, after a thunderstorm had whirled up out of the west and washed the city clean of the oppressive wet heat that had stifled it for weeks, Luke and Tom 219 / DOWNTOWN

Gordon and I walked across the street and around the corner in the lucent summer twilight to go to the party for our Focus piece.

Matt had wanted us all at the Top of Peachtree early, and he and Teddy and Sister and the advertising staff were already there when we got off the elevator, sitting at our favorite long table against the corner window, the rain-shined city spread out around them. I had a quick, stabbing flash of sheer community and love when I saw them: my people, in our place, waiting for me. I had never felt anything quite like it before. I had always been an outsider, I thought, even when I did not know I was. But I was outsider no more, now. I belonged to
Downtown
. I was, unquestionably and forever, one of Comfort’s People.

“You all look absolutely fabulous,” I said, my voice thick with joy.

They did. We all did. Matt had on a new summer-weight gray suit that set off the shock of chestnut hair and turned his eyes the color of a winter sea. It looked slightly less slept-in than his others, and he was grinning with frank satisfaction and sipping a vodka and tonic. Hank was avuncular and bankerly in a dark blue suit, and Tom Gordon looked so coolly elegant and totally wonderful in gray-striped seersucker that I felt afresh the small shock that his hawklike looks sometimes wrought in me, and thought again how utterly stupid was the lover, male or female, who could leave him.

Teddy wore yellow linen and shone like the young sun, and Sister was resplendent in ruffled blue crepe up to midthigh, looking like the University of Georgia homecoming queen she had been not so long ago. Sueanne Hudspeth wore deep purple with a tiny waist and peplum and stiletto heels and looked, as Matt said, dangerous as all hell. I had a new red linen sheath and felt as vivid and ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 220

glamorous as Lady Brett Ashley, whom I had always admired inordinately. Only Hank knew about Lady Brett, and as he pointed out, I had zero chance of looking like her, given my height and stubborn breasts and hips. But I loved the feeling, anyway.

Only Charlie Stubbs and Alicia were missing. Charlie almost never joined us after work now, and Alicia was on vacation with Buzzy in Nassau. Buzzy liked to gamble there, Matt said, grinning. “Guess he wanted one sure thing along,”

he said. I disliked the comment, but I was just as glad Alicia was not present. She would have dimmed my Lady Brett splendor.