Downtown (41 page)

of darker chocolate from the dessert cart, and the white crème de menthe stinger I had coveted. By then the evening was beginning to slant oddly, canting in and out as with the tide, and the pain that lay like jumbled razor blades around my heart had dulled down. Laughter nibbled at my lips like tiny fish in warm water, though it frequently shivered on the edge of tears. When we walked out to wait for the Morgan, I was unsteady on my feet, and Luke put a casual arm about my waist that served somewhat to keep me erect. He put the Morgan’s top down, and by the time we had ridden in the warm, rushing air through downtown and into Southwest Atlanta, I was fairly clear again. I did not think I wanted to go home for a very long time.

Luke found a parking place on the street a block and a half down, toward the Atlanta University complex, and we walked the weedy, deserted no-man’s-land back to Paschal’s in silence. It was nearly ten-thirty, and there was no one else in the street in front of the unprepossessing two-story motel and restaurant that was the unofficial epicenter of the Civil Rights movement. I had walked without real fear in Pumphouse Hill and Summerhill, but somehow this shabby, lunar street left me uneasy. I was acutely conscious that my skin shone white in the pale light from the few unbroken streetlights. I looked around me as we walked.

“Relax,” Luke said. “Put away your blowgun. We’re not exactly going into the heart of darkness. Most nights this is the center of the civilized world. They’ve had Basie, Hamp-ton, Don Shirley, Red Norvo, Gillespie—you name it. We probably won’t be the only white faces, if that’s what worries you. Matt and I come here a lot. We’ve never been the only ones.”

“I’m not worried about that.”

“Then what?”

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“I don’t know. I guess it seems very real to me all of a sudden. The movement and all…”

And it did. I felt acutely conscious, on every inch of my skin, that I was walking into a place that often drew together the members of something whose passion and purpose paled, with its simple human significance, anything my small life had known. I might even be, for a short time, in the presence of one of the great and luminous legends of my time and any other. My residual drunkenness fled, and so did the scraps of the pain, as well as the tremulous laughter.

We went inside, threading our way through the close-crowded, small tables, pushing through nearly palpable planes of smoke lying motionless in the air. Luke looked around for John Howard, who had promised to hold a table for us. I followed him, head held high, a silly feeling, unmov-able smile on my mouth. I knew that a part of me was searching the room for hostility as a wolf would sniff the wind.

But I felt none, and felt little curiosity. It was a quiet crowd, with only the sinuous, seminal flow of the music winding through it like a joyous heartbeat. Luke slouched along, nodding here and there to people he knew, and I stumbled along behind him, rigid to my eyebrows with the simple desire not to appear as if I were slumming. I was consumed with a ridiculous desire to let everyone in the room see how delighted I was to be there. I caught myself smiling right and left, and felt myself redden in the darkness.

“Will you stop nodding like somebody in a bad play?”

Luke whispered over his shoulder. “You look like Queen Elizabeth reviewing the troops.”

I stopped.

We fetched up at a table against a far wall, and slid into chairs. John Howard sat on the far side, chair tipped back 331 / DOWNTOWN

against the wall. Beside him, on his left, Juanita Hollings sat.

John had a half-empty beer glass in front of him, but there was nothing on the table in front of her. She sat quietly, her shapely small head bound tonight in a bright African kerchief, gold hoops in her ears. She wore, instead of the djellaba, a simple white blouse and blue jeans. Nevertheless, she looked exotic, nearly feral, in the smoky gloom. Her bone structure was extraordinary; I thought she would be beautiful in whatever she chose to wear. The thought flashed into my mind that she would be even more beautiful in nothing. I looked from her to John Howard, and they both nodded to me. Only John smiled.

“Hi, Smoky,” he said.

Juanita said nothing.

John hit Luke’s shoulder lightly with a balled fist and held up his hand for a waitress. When one came, he ordered beers all around. He did not ask me if I preferred anything else, and I would not have said I did for anything on earth. I wanted only to sit very still and try to melt into the smoke and gloom. My whiteness seemed to wink rottenly beside all the rich shades of dark flesh around me. Not even Lucas Geary seemed so blindingly white. He looked, in fact, somehow as black as the blacks around him. It was amazing.

A young black man leaned forward out of the shadows beside Juanita, someone I had never seen before. He had been tipped back against the wall; I had not noticed him in the gloom.

“Introduce me to your friends, John,” he said, in a thick, slow voice, and at first I thought he might be drunk, but there were no empty glasses around him, and I realized that he was, with the exaggerated, gentle drawl, mocking us very slightly. I flushed again.

“Smoky O’Donnell and Luke Geary, this is Sonny Pickens,”

John said. “An old friend of Juanita’s, in town ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 332

from Berkeley. He’s never been to Atlanta, and we’re softening him up with some barbecue and Ramsey Lewis.”

Luke grinned and nodded affably, and I smiled, too. Sonny Pickens gave us both a wide white smile that looked, in the murk, more like a shark’s demeanor than a smile. His voice might be slow, but he himself was thin and quick, with nervous, jerky movements. I thought of something small and darting, quick to bite. A fox? A weasel? His face was pointed and his cheekbones high and sharp, and his Afro was larger even than Juanita’s. He was yellow rather than brown. I thought that he might well be someone you would want to soften up. I also thought he was years younger than John Howard, though not, perhaps, Juanita.

“How do you like Atlanta?” I said politely.

“I think I’m going to like it right well,” he said. His voice, though slow, was not Southern. “It’s got everything Juanita said it did. Good folks, good food, good music,” he nodded toward the band. “Really good…connections. Just looka here, this very room is full of heroes. Why, I’m sitting at the table with a real live hero…”

John Howard looked unreadably at him.

“Don’t be an ass, Sonny,” Juanita said. Her voice was light and sweet, but there was steel under it. Sonny grinned and leaned back against the wall. He folded his arms across his thin chest and closed his eyes, rocking slightly with the music.

Like Juanita, he wore a neat, unremarkable white shirt and blue jeans, but also like her, there was something powerfully electric about him, as though he were a young monarch masquerading as a commoner. A sense, I thought, of being something other than he appeared.

The music swarmed through the room like a loosened hive of bees: a playful piano weaving in and out around 333 / DOWNTOWN

bass and drums. The very walls throbbed with it, a teasing rhythm now bright as a school of minnows in sunny, shallow water, now as glistening dark as viscera, with a heavy blues beat and a skittering counterpoint. I swam into it instinctively, my feet tapping with it, my face turning to it of its own volition. The pianist, a crew-cut young man in horn-rimmed glasses who might have been an accountant, raised a cheerful hand to us, and John and Luke saluted back. I began to relax, very slightly.

Luke looked down at me.

“Like it?”

The trio slid into Duke Ellington’s “Come Sunday” and I smiled at him. “It’s wonderful. They’re terrific. I’d like to have some of their stuff.”

“I’ve got it all,” he said. “I’ll lend you some. I’ll introduce you, when the set’s over.”

He looked at John Howard, across the table.

“Dr. King here?” he said.

“Might be. He’s here a lot. We just got here ourselves. I see some of our folks over there at the table by the band-stand. I’ll ask.”

He beckoned toward a large table in the opposite corner of the room.

Two men rose and came across the room and stood behind John Howard, looking down at us. The short, pudgy one was Tony Willingham and the taller, blacker one Rosser Sellers. I knew their names from half a decade of news accounts, and their faces, vaguely, from the press conference for the day care story. I knew they were, like John Howard, SCLC—King’s men. I knew that both had demonstrated and marched with him; gone quietly to shabby county jails with him; been beaten, bitten, kicked, gassed, shot at. Rosser Sellers had, I knew, been hit, though I could not remember where, or how badly. Self-consciousness thickened my ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 334

tongue to silence, which was, I knew, just as well. I felt the Irish brogue hovering just behind my lips. It was not exactly just what we needed tonight.

When John introduced me, both of them smiled. They were small smiles, but I thought that they were genuine.

“Good work with the Focus business,” Tony Willingham said. “I hear there’s some money about to shake loose because of it.”

“Good work with the pool, too,” Rosser Sellers said, and they both laughed, and I felt pleasure light my face like a lamp. There was no shade of patronization here, no polite indulgence. Reserve, certainly, but nothing else.

“I don’t know what felt better, maybe doing a little good for kids like Andre or beating Boy Slattery at pool,” I said, and everyone laughed again, except Juanita and Sonny Pickens. Somehow I did not think I was going to win smiles there.

“And who knows which will pay off bigger in the long run,” Tony Willingham said.

Only then did they acknowledge the two out-of-towners at the table.

“Sonny,” Rosser Sellers said neutrally, nodding to him.

“Juanita. Long time.”

“It has been,” Juanita said, smiling slightly. Lord, but she was beautiful. In the dim, smoky room she looked like a priestess, like a carved deity.

“Seems like yesterday,” Sonny Pickens said. The sharklike smile widened. No one spoke for a moment.

“Sit with us,” Juanita said then, smiling, and they looked at her for another moment, and then dropped into vacant chairs. John raised a hand for the waitress, but they both shook their heads.

“Well,” Rosser Sellers said. “Y’all just catching up, or doing a little scouting?”

335 / DOWNTOWN

“Guess you might say some of both,” Sonny Pickens said, the strange parody of glee on his sharp face once more. I saw that there was no mirth behind it; he probably did it unconsciously. A smiling man whose smile promised nothing.

Juanita looked levelly at him, and then at the two newcomers.

“It’s a free country, brothers,” she said lazily. “But of course you know that.”

“Doin’ any good?”

Tony Willingham did not look at her when he spoke, but at John Howard. I saw John’s face tighten, though his expression did not change.

“I’m always willing to listen, brother,” he said, with an accent on the “brother.” “I remember when y’all were, too.”

“Oh,” Willingham said, rearing back against the wall and smiling a smile I did not like. “I think it depends entirely on what you’re being asked to listen to. Don’t you…brother?”

John Howard did not respond. Juanita laid a hand lightly on his arm and smiled at Tony Willingham.

“Be surprised what you can learn if you just listen…brother,” she said.

Beside her Sonny Pickens snorted, but he did not open his eyes. He seemed lost fathoms deep in the music.

What is going on here? I thought. Obviously they’re all old friends, or at least acquaintances. They know each other from earlier times; they’ve been through a lot together. But they’re beating each other over the head with this brother business. And all this cold, awful smiling. They’re like dogs, sniffing and circling. Who has betrayed who? If Sonny and Juanita are Panthers, what are they doing hanging out in the very backyard of everything they ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 336

say they despise? I wish I’d never laid eyes on Juanita. I wish she’d go back to wherever they go and leave…

I realized that I was thinking, leave John alone. In the darkness I blushed as if I had thought something indecent.

“How you doing, Luke?” Tony Willingham said to Lucas.

“I don’t think I’ve seen you to talk to you since the sit-in at Rich’s. Christ, you must have still been in school then; trying to grow a beard and mustache and not having much luck.

What’s it been, six years? Seven?”

“About,” Luke grinned. “It’s taken me that long to grow the beard. I remember one of the first shots I ever got printed was that one of you I took that day, with that little old lady whacking you with her umbrella. I never could figure out if she was one of the sags, or she just didn’t like your style.”

Tony Willingham laughed hugely. “Those were some kind of days, weren’t they?” he said. “There must have been fifteen hundred folks on that picket line at one time. It circled all downtown Atlanta. God, there were shuttle buses to take people down there and back, and we had two-way radios and special signs that rain and spit and worse wouldn’t wash off, and special coats for the girls so they wouldn’t get spit on…and worse again. Man, we thought we were hot shit.

And we were. We were.”

Everyone laughed but Juanita. Even Sonny Pickens cackled mirthlessly. Juanita sat carved and golden, still as an idol, her hand on John Howard’s arm.

“So, is the Lord here?” Sonny Pickens said. He still did not open his eyes.

“Sonny,” Juanita said softly, menacingly.

“The Lord?” I said.

“King. We heard he might be,” Sonny Pickens said.

337 / DOWNTOWN

“He’s in the dining room,” Rosser Sellers said, looking narrowly at Sonny Pickens.

“Good move,” Pickens said lazily. “Least he knows he can get served. That ain’t always true everywhere, you know, even in these enlightened days. It’s like John Lewis was telling—wasn’t it brother John? Talking about Nashville, I think. Somebody said, ‘Well, you know we don’t serve niggers here,’ and somebody else said, ‘That’s okay because we don’t eat ’em.’ Quick mind, brother John. Goin’ with the times, though maybe not far enough.”