Four Spirits (14 page)

THE NEXT MORNING, LEE PUT HER MAKEUP ON EXTRA HEAVY
so the bruise wouldn't show.

She had a new yellow spring dress to wear to church, and some panty hose, her first pair, which she lifted from the flat box with a simmer of anticipation. The hosiery seemed light as air in her hand. How could they survive the wearing?

Panty hose: two garments in one. Naked, she sat down on the dresser bench to pull on the hose. Up the fine mesh glided, past her ankles, calves, knees. Then she stood to stretch and tug the hose carefully to her waist. Now the panty hose covered her from toe to waist—she liked that. Compacting and constricting her flesh, their sheer power girdled her entire lower body. Across her thighs, the hose reflected the May morning sunlight with a fierce shine, in their effort to hold her.

Naked down to her waist, her breasts loose and soft, she bent her knees and took a few steps in her new panty hose. Almost like a pony, almost like prancing, first one, then the other, she lifted her knees, then placed her stockinged feet back on the floor. How clean and protected her feet felt against the uncarpeted boards. The panty hose covered her like another skin, protected her all the way up to the waistband.

Next came her brassiere. Cupping her breasts, the brassiere lifted her, held her breasts higher. Then her old slip, dingy, a disgrace. The box lid said they were
panty
hose, yet maybe she should take them off and put on some real panties
underneath? But all that was hidden—who'd know? She lifted the new dress from the bed and let it slide down her body.

In that yellow dress—she fastened the narrow, matching belt on a tight notch—she looked like a canary bird and felt good enough to sing. She loved to sing at church. “Love lifted me. Love lifted even me.” That phrase (“even me”), oh, she always put her singing soul into that. With more than her voice, she caressed the phrase, humbly and tenderly.

The sermon title would be “Be Ye Kind,” and Ryder was going with her. Her mama was bringing her kids, who had spent the night over there. Be ye kind. Her mama had always been kind to her, even if Pa was something else. Her three would look so nice, and she wouldn't have had to get them ready. Bobby almost ten, getting big, his hair combed with water.

While she combed her own hair (she wished she
had
put on underpants first but she'd go ahead to church without them this time), Lee recited the rest of the verse, her favorite: “Be ye kind, one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another.” That was her part, the forgiving—first Ryder, and way back, Pa. She could forgive just about anybody on a May morning with a new dress.

She did it wholeheartedly. She sat down at the dresser and put her little yellow hat on with the veil just coming over her forehead and eyes. At first she'd wished the veil was yellow, too, instead of black, but now her dark brown eyes appeared mysterious in the mirror as she looked out from the wide-spaced black netting of the veil.

The panty hose didn't like to bend for sitting. As she sat at the dresser she could feel the elastic at the waist dipping down in the back, slipping with the strain of encasing half her body. If they were going to do that at church, she might have to go in a bathroom stall and tug them up. The panty hose had come in the mail marked “Trial Sample” in a box so shallow it was hardly a box. And there had been a market survey sheet. They wanted her opinion!

She didn't like that little gaping at the small of her back—maybe she'd say that. But maybe then they would never send a sample again. She concentrated on positioning her yellow hat to just the right angle of tilt, toward the front.

Ryder stood behind her in the circle mirror and adjusted his tie. Like a big portrait picture: them in the mirror circle above the dresser. Could have been painted by Norman Rockwell on the cover of the
Saturday Evening Post
. Title:
“Almost Ready for Church.” If Norman Rockwell did paint them, he wouldn't notice the bruise under the makeup. With her best smile, she looked up at her husband. He put his hand on her shoulder.

Ryder had fair hair, rather skimpy really, but his once-broken nose was always interesting to look at. His face was scrubbed pink, and he reminded Lee of a cowboy, with his nice high cheekbones. His eyes were a little narrow and slitty, though. And his teeth, yellow with smoke, were going, but they didn't show in the mirror picture.

“See,” he said. “Done you good.” And he turned and swaggered into the living room.

While she watched his back in the mirror, bitter bile rose from her stomach to her throat. He shouldn't of reminded her. Forget and forgive. You got to forget to forgive. He put a blight on a new day.

She made the ugly bile stop before it came into her mouth. Swallowed it down. The stomach fluid surprised her. Although it had never happened to her before, she recognized that vile fluid invading her throat.

This was her true feeling for her husband, and she knew it. When the mirror no longer held his image, she mouthed words. Not a sound:

“I hate you.”

She liked to see her mouth working the words. How her lips and tongue shaped them. Her mouth started wide and got more narrow with each silent word: I hate you. She narrowed her eyes so they were slitty and mean.

She told herself more, just the shape of it, not even the quietest whisper: “I'll never hate
anybody
as much as I hate you.” What a long, secret sentence he couldn't hear except for little pops of her lips. The pops were like code.

She reached for her compact, swiped the pressed powder with the puff, and gently applied more powder on her cheekbone.

 

LATER, IN CHURCH,
when they were singing “Onward, Christian Soldiers,” when she glanced at Ryder, she hated him again and added contempt to her hatred—the way he belted out the song like he owned it: “marching as to war.”

Him? War? No. He just liked to ambush innocent niggers waiting for the bus and all his buddies with him. His rage at niggers controlled him. He didn't even run his own life.

Once he had said,
Only job a nigger's good for is wiping the street with his tongue, and then I wouldn't step on it.
And that was nothing but nasty talk. She knew it was nasty and there wasn't any need to be nasty that way.

Truth was, only person he dared to beat up by himself was his little wife—somebody
could
say that of him, and it would be true. Only person he dared to beat by himself was her.

“ ‘Rise up, O Men of God' ”—she sang the new hymn just as loudly as he did. Pity was, that's what he believed about himself, that he was the right hand of God. “ ‘Have done with lesser things.' ” He was just a lesser thing. She made her voice even louder than his, but still pretty, like she was singing to God himself.

What she wished for with all her might and knew could never never be: that she, Lee Jones, would have done with Ryder Jones. Someday.

Someday. Someday. Someday.
Those words chimed like the bell of truth.

But that could never be. They belonged together.

Right in the middle of the song, she stopped singing. Her mouth was open, but no sound. A sigh slid right down the inside of her nose and out into the air.

IN THEIR BOOTH AT THE ATHENS CAFE AND BAR, GLORIA
said quietly to Christine, “Well, I missed out then, didn't I?”

“You might of missed out this spring. There'll be more.”

Christine felt as though she would jump out of her skin if she didn't get some calming alcohol into her blood. Too much had happened. Too much done and too much not done. She wanted to storm into the streets, shout for people to turn out of their houses, march again. She'd even embrace the savage energy of the fire hose, let it spin her again.

Gloria sipped her 7UP. If she had anything with caffeine in it, then she couldn't get to sleep. She tilted her green eyes toward the ice in the glass and said in a low voice, “But Reverend King said it was a victory. Said it on national TV.”

“You see any big change?” Christine's nerves jittered as though they wanted to play the bones. She could almost hear the sounds of bones clacking together in some artful hands.

“He said there was a committee—white store owners, A. G. Gaston—” Even to herself Gloria sounded pious and naive.

“While Shuttlesworth in the hospital, King just took over.” Christine waved her hands over her drink, seemed to clear back the air. “King made a deal. Now he move on. Shuttlesworth try to tell him, ‘Brother, don't just scald the hog on one side, you got to scald him on both sides.' ”

Despite Christine's gestures and intense voice, Gloria was half listening to the jukebox playing Elvis: “Love me tender, love me true…” Gloria thought
Elvis was the
prettiest
white man she had ever seen a picture of. But why didn't anybody
say
he was pretty? The idea felt like her own secret observation, even though everybody had seen the same pictures.

“What I don't understand”—Gloria looked full in Christine's eyes. Yes, she could look somebody in the eyes if she started out about how
she didn't understand
. “Why King
want
to shut down?”

“He white-collar. Shuttlesworth blue-collar. That's the difference. Birmingham a stepping-stone for King. He fail in Georgia 'cause police play it smart and cool there. Wasn't nothing to put on national TV. Not no fire hoses and dogs. Not no Bull. King got to have his national coverage, and Bull Connor played right to him.”

To Christine, Gloria's green-eyed stare meant she knew nothing at all about how the world worked. Gloria's innocence and ignorance mesmerized Christine. Just books, poetry—that was all good little Gloria understood.

Christine explained, “And King got to stop now 'cause Birmingham out of control and fighting back. Those guys on the sidelines? They ain't studying no nonviolence. Gandhi just some foreign nigger far as they care.”

“King made everything work in Montgomery.”

After Gloria uttered this undeniable fact, she waited to see how far it would take her. She felt that she'd dropped a stone down a well and was waiting for the splash.

“Let me tell you something,” Christine began. “Montgomery ain't Birmingham. This steel town. Wasn't nothing here before the Civil War—Elyton Village, that's all. Birmingham grew up violent. Nothing plantation 'bout steel city. We more like Pittsburgh than Montgomery.” Christine fished out her green olive and ate it. “And we so poor here. Black folks so desperate.” But Christine knew that was inaccurate: very few were desperate for justice; most were afraid, worn down, cowed.

“Didn't we win something?” Gloria wondered how a martini would taste. “You want to come to Sixteenth Street with me some Sunday?”

“I might. Got to be at Bethel if Reverend Shuttlesworth preaching. You want to come with me?”

“Didn't we win something?” Gloria asked again.

“Yeah. Now educated, rich Negroes talking to rich white folks.”

Gloria knew it was half true: they at Sixteenth Street weren't much involved with Shuttlesworth's organizing till King came to town. Sixteenth Street was
the biggest and the richest of the black churches in Birmingham. Their class of colored wanted to negotiate. Here was the other half of what King had done: in the black community, he had smoothed over between those who wanted to wait and those who were already acting. Gloria's idea of victory contracted, became smaller, seemed more clear and hard-edged. Now well-off blacks were talking with working-class blacks.

In Gloria's wide-eyed silence, Christine heard the conclusion to her own thought. “Remember this,” Christine added, the idea calming her better than gin as she articulated words: “This be about class—it not just about color.”
And that class thing could scare Washington more than race,
she thought but did not say.
What if poor white was to realize they really in the same boat with poor black? They just fool themselves thinking they in the boat with rich white.

Boldly, Gloria asked Christine, “How come you talk black when we in here?”

“ 'Cause I'm home, and I mean what I say.” Christine sipped her martini. Sometimes Christine thought she didn't half know what she was thinking till she heard herself saying it to Gloria. Nonetheless, mockery rose in Christine's throat. “ ‘Didn't we win?' you asking me.” A mean energy surged in her arms and spine. “What you mean
we
? I didn't see any Gloria Miss Green Eyes marching, did I? I miss something?”

She wanted to hit Gloria, slap her hard, her and her cello, into reality.