Five Smooth Stones (104 page)

Conversation at dinner was general. He had met no one with a more comprehensive or detailed knowledge of the activities of every civil rights group, South or North. He even learned things about his own organization he had not known. She could have been without sex as far as her general attitude was concerned. There were no meaningful glances or provocative gestures, no double entendres. She didn't need them, he thought, and she was one of those rare women with sense enough to know it.

She was objective—and abrasive—in her appraisal of civil rights activities in the South. But her criticisms, in David's opinion, were not valid because they were not based on any real understanding of the psychological factors involved. Isaiah had been' right. She had no patience with the fears and misgivings of an older generation, one that had borne the burden of a lifetime in the white South and who at last were being shown some hope of the lightening of that burden—yet who remained unable to march with banners because of a very real and ever-present fear of a terrorism from which they had never been free. He tried to have for her the understanding she denied others, led her to talk about herself and her own background. She had been born and grown up in California, gone to college in Berkeley, and never been closer to the South than Arizona until she was past twenty. By that time, David realized, her bitterness against the white rule in both North and South was all-pervading. That bitterness became a searing hatred when she talked of white men, and she spoke with the frankness of a man about their inadequacies, mental, moral, emotional—and physical.

"Ask any whore in San Francisco if a Negro will pay to get into bed with her," she said. "He'll buy her the best meal in town, take her to a show, pay her for the income she lost while she was with him—and that's that. Pay to make love he won't."

"Don't blast me out of my chair if I say you seem pretty well informed."

"My kid sister is one—"

"Can't you get her out of it?"

"No. She won't leave. Why should she? Even with what she has to pay the Goddamned white pimp she's supporting, she still sees more money in a month than she'd see in a year with me." She shrugged. "I'm not blaming her. Just because I was lucky doesn't make me virtuous."

"Lucky?"

She laughed, and her eyes mocked him. "Lucky. The first man I knew was white. I'd made it to college still pure. He was a senior. We used to have lunch together in the cafeteria, have our goodies in an abandoned lab in the basement. I thought he had to go home every day after classes and take care of his poor invalid mother. Then I found out he was dating the white girls, taking them to dinner and the movies, taking them where he wouldn't take me—out in public. Then getting from me what they wouldn't give him. My kid sister had a similar experience in high school. She reacted one way, I reacted another. She's going to get all she can out of them. I'm going to get back at them."

"Why in hell did you come south?"

She shrugged again. "Because I'm a direct actionist. I'm no politician. The only weapon we have in the North, as you damned well know, is political. I tried for a while and couldn't stomach it. The white liberal politicians who suddenly find out they've got more bigots in their district than they realized, and cut your throat. Even our own people playing footsie with them. And I got really fed to the teeth when I read about the namby-pamby efforts, the same kind of thing, going on in the South. I could tell you about my family before they moved north, about what happened to my mother's husband, the man who should have been my father—"

"Your father was a white man." He made it a statement.

"Yes. And if I knew who the son of a bitch was, I'd kill him."

"I believe you." He had never believed anything more firmly in his life. He changed the subject as tactfully as he could. The words "my mother's husband—the man who should have been my father—" weren't words to dwell on.

He said: "I wish I could soften up your attitude about some things down here. Grant me the knowledge gained from growing up here."

"The knowledge? Or the handicap to your conscience as a Negro?"

"You take chances, don't you? I hate to think I look like a guy who would let that one get by, but I'm going to because I want to make you see the picture here as a whole. A middle-aged Negro walking into a registrar's office in a Mississippi county courthouse may not be militant, but he's showing a kind of guts I sometimes wonder if I'd have in his circumstances. Can't you see that as a valid move toward freedom?"

"No. Because it's useless. He knows it's useless. He's still just a funny, quaint character to the white—an object of ridicule—someone to dominate and intimidate."

"You're wrong, one hundred percent. If that was all he was to the whites, they'd hardly bother to go to the lengths they go to in reprisal. He's risking that black neck of his. Literally. Your kids are risking dog bites, beatings, goads, jails —and for a youngster who's been treated like a cute little black primate all his life that can be heady stuff. That man standing in front of a registrar's desk—his scars go deep."

She was wearing yellow Capri pants that night, and she stretched one slim leg out beyond the table and pointed to a fairly fresh scar just above the ankle. "Dog," she said. "And I love them. I used to take my Scottie everywhere I went until I realized I could be jailed for days, perhaps weeks, and God knew what would become of her."

"You must miss her. Is that why you got a substitute?" This would at least open up another combat area.

Instead of reacting resentfully, she laughed. "You mean Garnett? Alonzo? He's our radar. Our eyes and ears. He's quite harmless."

The hell he's harmless, thought David. He said: "I don't see him that way. Anyhow, you ought to tell him to ditch that phony corn-pone accent. You've been pretty outspoken about the shortcomings of our groups, ALEC, then N-double-ACP, others. You've even had the guts to imply we aren't sufficiently color-conscious, that's why we aren't militant on behalf of our race. Want me to tell you what's wrong with your approach?"

One of Sue-Ellen's strong points was that she did not anger easily. He wouldn't have wanted to be around when she did give way to anger, but he saw that in normal conversational give-and-take she was in complete control of her emotions.

Now she said, "There's nothing wrong with my committee's approach—but go ahead, tell me what you think is wrong."

"You're underestimating the intelligence of your people down here, underestimating it by a hell of a lot. I don't mean the young people. I can see why you're so successful in handling and organizing kids." He was smiling again. "Children and adolescents are very susceptible to beauty. I can remember when I was a kid in about the third grade having a hell of a crush on a pretty teacher. There was a man—a professor—who helped me because I had to miss a lot of school, and I used to wish he was pretty, like she was, instead of having a red beard."

"Red beard?"

"He was a Dane."

"You had white indoctrination early—"

His eyes darkened with anger. "You know better than to make a crack like that. My Dane is dead now, but if he were alive he'd be roaring in the streets with happiness over what's happening here—"

"I suppose so." She sounded uninterested. "It doesn't matter. What matters is to raise enough hell to get action."

He laughed, trying to keep the conversation on an even keel. "I'll bet you aren't the Southern Christian Leadership's pinup girl."

"I'm not. And I don't want to be. I happen to think this 'love' routine is futile. For God's sake, do you think these people mean it—praying in the streets for red-neck bastards who are itching to lynch them—talking about 'loving' them? Are you that big a fool?"

"I suppose I am. At least, they've made progress. They've made people think instead of react."

"What do you mean, 'made people think?' The whites here don't even know what the word 'think' means."

He moved in warily. "Sue-Ellen, we disagree like hell on almost everything. But we both—or maybe I should say our organizations—have something to offer. I think perhaps we could work together, ALEC and the YPCF. Without losing autonomy, of course."

She smiled at him. "Between rounds?"

"Between rounds. Yes. If you can organize kids into drill teams, you can organize them into classes. You damned well have to recognize the need for those."

"I do." She frowned thoughtfully. "We'd fight—"

"Yea, verily—"

"I'll think about it," she said after a moment. "Keep an open mind?"

She laughed, and leaned back in her chair with a stretching movement that tightened her sweater over the small breasts, and her transformation from an argumentative and determined woman to just plain woman was so sudden it dazed him for a moment. She said: "I have a meeting at eight thirty. I'll give it some real thought when I get back. We can talk it over again before you leave—"

***

For a week he and Luke worked the community, David concentrating on the older people, Luke on the younger. Everywhere they went, even in remote rural areas, the evidences of a new spirit were as discernible as the first signs of spring in New England after a hard winter. Radio and television had brought the word to those whose reading was slight or non-existent. The knowledge that what had been "their gov'mint" might become "our gov'mint" in time, that their own children could conceivably face a future they would have a hand in shaping, was working a subtle alchemy, transmuting fear into hope, apathetic acceptance into courage.

"I'm surprised the whites haven't made it a crime for Negroes to own TV's or radios," said David. He and Luke had been in a crowded bar watching a TV news program showing scenes of an Alabama riot. The TV image was blurred by the thickness of the smoke that hung in the air, and the men and women in the room were quiet for the most part, but there was menace in the quiet. The volume was set high on the TV set, and the sounds of the riot were as clear as if the dogs and firehoses had been in the room. Now and then a man or woman, standing in the deep crowd in front of the bar, cursed, and the curse blended into the scene they were watching and became part of it, so that it seemed to come from someone in the mob. Once a woman who had been drunk when they came in, but who seemed sober now, cried out, "Ya ofay son of a bitch, git your hands off that boy! He ain't nothing' but a chile!" and a man's voice quieted her, and another woman's voice was raised: "She saying it right! They gonna roast in hell. Roast in hell, and I'm gonna be watching—"

The TV camera, concentrating now on the aftermath of the riot, swung to a Negro youth stretched along the heavy bough of a misshapen tree, high above the littered street. He must have eluded police, troopers, and volunteer white enforcers and escaped being caught in the mass arrests. But the reporters had seen him, and now, obviously unknown to him, he was squarely in the camera's focus. He was smiling. There was a cut on his forehead, and he had tied a handkerchief around his head to stop the blood from running into eyes that were looking from one end to the other of a block of buildings that had been transformed, in one flaming hour, to a shambles of broken glass, fire-damaged buildings, overturned cars. The smile never left his face. A man seated near David said softly, "I knows how he feels. Man, I knows how he feels." His companion laughed deep in his throat, softly. "Born again, man. That's how that boy feels. Born again."

He remembered that as he sat at the bar he thought again of the mass stupidity that passed as white thinking in the South, the ineptness that passed as white action in the North, and that he had felt as a warm and living thing his pride in his own dark skin, his pride in his people.

When he made his remark to Luke about whites forbidding Negroes access to TV or radio, Luke said: "They're not all that bright. I keep telling you, boss, these red-necks still—
still
—talking about their 'happy nigras.' "

"If they were any brighter we wouldn't be here. Educators, that's what we are, sonny boy, educators. And I'm not talking about citizenship classes for black people—"

***

During that week there had been only a few opportunities for another real talk with Sue-Ellen. They discussed methods of dovetailing the work of their organizations, arrived at a few tentative arrangements, argued, quarreled, and yet managed to establish an uncertain entente that David hoped would become stronger.

When he talked it over with Luke, whose opinion he was learning to respect more and more, Luke said: "She'd better get rid of the fat pussy-cat trails around after her. God knows, she's dedicated, but that guy's not dedicated to anything except himself."

"He's just the complete opportunist—"

"He ain't 'just' anything. You're taking chances, brushing him off like that. Right now he figures he's in the right spot. If he thought he'd be helping his own self, he'd cross that woman up quick as he would anyone else."

David grinned. "God help him if he ever does cross her up."

Luke shivered. "Wouldn't want to be around. No, man, wouldn't want to be around—"

"If we do get together it's not going to be easy." David ran his hand over his closely cropped head, digging his fingers into his scalp, frowning. "She's in the same groove, Luke, that a lot of northern Negroes are in. And a lot of the young militants down here. They're becoming almost a stereotype. They've got a damned 'thing' about the older Negro from—or in—the South, a sort of contempt, and the more you try and make 'em see it any differently, the harder their heads get. They never stop to think what they owe their ancestors. They want to be born now. They never see the ones who came before them as anything but millstones around the neck of the race. Try and make them think and you're judged immediately, no trial, no jury, and found guilty of being an Uncle Tom. Hell, some of them are screaming because it's the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, because 'colored' isn't right anymore. It ought to be the N double A
N
for 'Negro.' And a couple of generations ago 'Negro' was a word none of our people would use. Pretty soon 'Negro' won't be right. It'll have to be something else. And I'll be Goddamned if I want to be worried with it all."