Five Smooth Stones (100 page)

Luke had been arrested a day after his own arrest. He had been "loitering with intent." With intent to take pictures, the kind of pictures he'd been taking for the past three years. Obscene pictures, thought David; these were the genuinely obscene pictures. Naked bodies of lustful men and women, those were not the true obscenities; the true obscenities, the blasphemous obscenities, were women with pursed and cruel mouths turning away voters in a registrar's office, men with saps beating Negroes, a man clubbing a woman's head with the butt of a rifle. He'd give you obscenity, Luke would, the real thing. Pictures of young girls massed upright in a jail cell because there was no room to sit or lie, left there without blankets or toilet facilities; that had been a picture taken at the risk of his life. A picture of a nine-year-old boy being herded into a police wagon, looking up with wide dark eyes at the club held over him by his uniformed captor. What fun! What fun! Tour the South and bring your camera, get the pretty pictures of the lovely old plantations; never mind the slavery that made them so, it's all gone now. Don't miss the little children with the round dark eyes, forget—if you dare —the world those eyes will see. Get the pretty pictures of the smiling folk, white teeth gleaming; shoot your roll of film, you happy, happy tourist, shoot it all. Luke will give you more; Luke will give you all the pictures you can carry. Luke takes color pictures, Luke does, and red and brown are vivid, the one upon the other.

That first year with Luke after they left New Orleans together hadn't always been easy. David remembered sessions in hotel rooms, in dingy little restaurants and bars; sometimes Les Forsyte had been there, sometimes Brad, sometimes Chuck Martin. They worked the boy over with gentle, half-bullying affection, trying to make him understand that theirs was a work that would be weighed in the balances of the future, a future no longer unattainable but still definitely not a present, a "now." David had given him his head when it seemed wisest, let him blow off steam in demonstrations, sit-ins, freedom rides, bailed him out of jail a number of times. Sometimes Luke had his small camera tucked in an ingenious pocket in the belt band of his trousers, made for him by the clever hands of a woman in whose home they had stayed in northern Louisiana. "The kid has all the instincts of a pro," David told Chuck. "Last time he was jailed a deputy hit him in the belly with a club, trying to make him say 'I'm a nigger—' The third time he gave in. T kept thinking of that camera in my belt band, boss,' he said. You can't ask for more than that."

Several times David and the others had feared Luke's defection to one of the more militant groups. "I don't think he'd do it if the chips were down," was Brad's comment to David: "The boy thinks you're something close to the second coming. But, of course, he's young and hot-blooded. Actually, I think he's doing damned well."

He was doing more than well, thought David. He was making himself, without intent, close to indispensable. David did not like to think, even now, of what those long drives, hundreds of miles sometimes before they could find a place a Negro could sleep, would have been like without Luke's companionship. Without Luke, with only his own thoughts and the loneliness they bred, David wondered if his resolve would have held out.

Both he and Luke were never without the knowledge that behind them, beside them, and before them death waited for a wrong move. They joked about it because to do anything else would have been futile. The hatred that surrounded them was dependent on no act of theirs. It was a simple thing, like love, needing nothing more than the presence of its object to bring it to pulsating life.

That first year he had not even produced the one proud Mississippi voter he had mentioned to Joe Klein. One of his workers in rural Alabama reported—almost incredulously— that he had succeeded in getting one man registered. The man was a middle-aged farmer, with a better than average education, who had applied eleven times and been unable to pass the trumped-up tests. Yet he had never given up, spent every night with his books and his "readin'," determined to try again. Three days later, at the first opportunity he had, David drove to the town and was met by a grim-faced, sick-eyed youth of nineteen. The newly registered voter had disappeared.

"I shoulda known. God damn, I shoulda known. It was too easy. They done it on purpose—let him register so's they could make an example of him—"

"Any sign of a body, Jim?"

"No. And that's maybe good. His li'l piece of a car's gone. And his wife—she's gone. Their dog, he went over to the neighbors and they keeping care of him. Fine hound. He was crazy 'bout that dog. Neighbor's milking the cow, too. But they swear they don't know nothing. But nothing, man. Better not go out there, man; you likely to get run off."

"Any signs of trouble? Like a fight or struggle?"

"Nary one. I tell you, everything's like it would be if they'd took off right after supper straight up. Even the dishes wasn't washed, and that ain't like her."

"They got away, Jim."

"I hope to Christ they did. There was talk in the town about getting him. He musta heard it and got out. I hope he got out. I shoulda known."

"Don't blame yourself, Jim. Just find out what you can about where he might have gotten to, where he's got relatives and all that, and I'll start looking. We all will. He's got to be hurting for money."

"He been studying a long time. Been counting on it most of his life. Voting. He was mighty proud that day. So was we. He was the onlies' voter we had—"

Yet there was intangible progress that would eventually show up as tangible names on the registration rolls. More doors opened than would have opened a few years before; more Negroes listened, not turning away in fear. "You can see their faces now," David said to Luke. "Maybe you can't get what I mean, but you can see their faces because their heads are up. Maybe they aren't moving fast enough to suit you, but their heads are up, and a man sure as hell isn't going to move backward when he starts lifting his head."

He left field representatives in every area, and he knew that after he had done his own work and gone on, children would be sitting around tables in someone's home—learning; young people would be meeting in churches or social halls— learning; and older people would have hope living with their fear because these were their children who were learning.

Tents began to spring up here and there, the only shelter left to dispossessed Negroes who had revealed to the white man at last the faith and courage that had been lying dormant within them for a hundred years. Of the tent dwellers David said: "There's greatness in these people, Luke. Greatness. And don't forget it, just because they aren't marching."

Yet he still felt like a minnow trying to swim upstream against a torrential rush of water. Neither he nor Brad had won a case in court; most of the cases they had appeared in for the defendant were on appeal, a circumstance Les Forsyte and Fred Winters took for granted, but which Brad could not, just as he could not learn to take for granted the presence on southern benches of judges whose sole intent was circumvention of the law, to whom justice meant unthinkable surrender. "Relax, Chief," said David. "Save your energy to fight 'em all the way up."

He could afford to remember these things now, at the end of two and a half years, with his mind almost made up to return north, at least for a while, and work with Klein and Pennoyer, use the bitter knowledge he had gained to prepare legal defenses, administer fieldwork from there. The things he couldn't afford to remember, and which crept into his mind whenever he left the door ajar, were incidents like the one involving the little pharmacist in a small Alabama city. He was a small man, no bigger than Gramp, who had tried to register himself and his two sons, had been seen riding in a car with a CORE worker, a white woman, and was seen to tear the Confederate battle flags from the bumper of a car parked in front of his store. They had gotten him one night just as he was emptying trash into a barrel in the alley back of his store. Brad, Luke, and David were in the store, stocking up on toothpaste, shaving cream, and sundries for travel. Obadiah Brown had looked even smaller lying in the alley in the light from a streetlamp, his face a red-brown pulp, the bullet wounds only partially responsible for the blood in which he sprawled. Brad and David stood over the body, choking, and then Luke was with them, and Luke's camera recorded the battered face and almost every bullet hole. Not all, because some were in back.

The next day Luke found a Negro photographer and developed the films himself. That night they had their toughest time with him. By prearrangement Les Forsyte and Fred Winters arrived in town that morning, Les to confer with David and Brad, Fred down from New York to defend one of his field secretaries. And the three men did not return to the motel after dinner until late. Luke had preceded them, and they found him in the room he and David shared—packing. David saw Winter's face set in anger, but Forsyte took it in his stride. "Take it easy," he whispered to David. Brad eventually slowed Luke down, at least temporarily. Watching the scene, David thanked God that Luke was a guy who would listen once he had cooled down. Brad asked no questions, spoke quietly, suggested delay until he could line up transportation. The South, Brad said, had been a moral mess for two hundred years; it could go on being a mess for a couple of more days and Luke could wait those couple of days before saving it. "Come on, son. Shut that suitcase."

David watched Luke turn to the suitcase that lay open on a chair, bending to take out his shaving kit, and then he was across the room in two strides. He caught Luke from behind, one powerful arm around the youth's slender body, his free hand plunging into Luke's trouser pocket. He slackened his grip, and Luke whirled free, eyes blazing.

David stood looking at the gun he held in the palm of his hand. "What—the—hell—" he said slowly, then tossed the gun to the bed. "Perhaps I should have asked you for it," he said, still speaking slowly. "But I wasn't about to argue. You hadn't even learned how to protect it, you dope. A guy doesn't carry a gun so that any amateur can take it away from him. Or so a five-year-old could spot it from a block away." He was standing between Luke and the foot of the bed. "Leave it there, Luke. We'll wipe any prints off and throw it along the road after we leave tomorrow. You've got to have lifted it. Where?"

"Last week. In Chattanooga. In a hock shop where I was looking at cameras." He looked like a small boy, sullenly ashamed.

No one else had spoken since David made his move. Brad sat in a straight chair near the door, apparently relaxed and without concern. Fred Winters stood leaning against the doorjamb, looking cool and impeccably elegant in spite of a hard day, but there was fresh anger in his eyes. Les Forsyte stood at the side of the bed, looking at the gun. He spoke first, turning to Luke. "Where were you headed for? I mean, aside from the jailhouse?"

"Get off my back, all of you! What kind of a job is it when a guy sees people getting dead all around and all he's got to fight back with if they come after him is a lousy black box! God damn it, film ain't all we need. We need bullets! You see a guy lying dead in his own blood, in an alley, no nose, no teeth, full of holes. And what the hell do you do? You take a stinking picture of him! And then he's coming at you again in the dark room, coming up at you out of the developer, his face and his eyes, and them bullet holes, coming up at you slow-like, staring at you. And you knew the guy. You were talking to him five minutes before he got it. And you vomit, right there in the dark room, because you can't hold it in any longer, the way you felt when you run out that door and seen him lying there—"

David turned away, afraid that his face would show the same humanity that was in Luke, show that he wanted to give him back his gun, let him be a human being, make it possible for him to court destruction if need be in one final, instinctive act of self-preservation—and take his destroyer with him. Self-preservation. Self-defense. These meant self-destruction for the Lukes, the Brad Willises, the David Champlins— there was no plea of self-defense in the South when a Negro faced a white killer. Their lives were without value, defense of them indefensible. He felt sick and helpless, the high-pitched, ragged edge in Luke's voice scraping his nerves raw. Brad caught his eye and stood, and David saw the almost imperceptible movement of the head that meant "I'm taking over." He moved quietly away to stand in front of the window, near Fred Winters.

Brad walked over to Luke, stood leaning, then half sitting on the end of the bed. "Luke, no one's blaming you. I wish to God every Negro in the South had a gun. The picture would be different then. But they don't, and a lot of them wouldn't use them if they had them." He reached back and, with a skill that surprised David, unloaded the snub-nosed .38. "Learn all kinds of skills when you're a defense lawyer," he murmured, then tossed the gun back on the bed. "I'm not unloading this gun for your benefit, Luke. It's just that loaded guns scare the devil out of me. You can have the gun and the bullets any time you want them. You stole them fair and square from a white hock shop, and I don't hold that against you any more than I'd hold it against a man without a dime in his pocket if he stole penicillin because he thought he had a fatal infection penicillin would cure. But, Luke, suppose he steals the penicillin and finds out the infection won't respond to it? Some don't."

He threw the bullets on the bed, watched them roll over its lumpy surface and come to rest beside the gun. Brad repeated Les Forsyte's question. "Where were you headed for, Luke? You don't have to say if you don't want to."

"Atlanta." He muttered the word so low David could scarcely hear it.

"Atlanta! Martin Luther King?"

"God damn it, at least they're doing something—"

"Good God." Brad's exclamation was in the same low key. "You were going to present yourself to the King organization carrying a gun?"

"I'm not that stupid—"

"I didn't think so. Not even the Young People's Committee for Freedom would welcome you under those circumstances. You're a free agent, Luke. If it's going to make you feel happier and more fulfilled to line up with people nearer your age and get into this hassle on a more militant basis, none of us would try and stop you for any other reasons than that we need you, we're fond of you, and we'd hate to see you go. Only, for God's sake, if you're going to join one of these love-conquers-all groups don't do it with a gun in your pocket."