Four Spirits (39 page)

AUGUST COMING, AGNES LAFAYT THOUGHT, AND I AM FINALLY
prepared.
Hurrying through the heat of early evening, she regretted that she was a little late to school—as though she wanted to make a grand entrance with her gift. Her shopping bag rustled noisily against her knee as she hurried. TJ had come, but he wanted to just stay with the car; he said he'd doze while he waited.

Agnes could see through the windows that the other students were already inside, and Mrs. Taylor, who was wearing her white jersey dress with the black and brown circles printed all over it, was standing up talking to the group. (Christine Taylor didn't need to wear such a middle-aged dress.) And there was the wheelchair and Miss Cat Cartwright, poor little soul so crippled up she could hardly write her own name. But they were just getting started.

“Now if you all would just pipe down,” Mrs. Taylor was saying.

Agnes slipped in the door, held her shopping bag up high and pointed to it.

“What is it, Mrs. LaFayt?” Mrs. Taylor asked her.

“First off, I apologize for being late. I am so sorry.”

“That's all right,” Mrs. Taylor said, “for just this once.”

“I thought everybody would be pleased, I brought us some hand fans.” She reached in her shopping bag and brought out the one with her favorite picture: Jesus, the Good Shepherd. He was sitting on a rock, wearing blue and red, with a shepherd's crook leaning against the rock. Jesus held a little white lamb up in his arms, and all around scattered on the green grass were other sheep. Agnes had everyone's attention. She added, “Courtesy of Brooks Furniture Company in downtown Birmingham. They asked me to say that—”

Mrs. Taylor spoke sarcastically, “In case you can't
read
the advertisements on the back.”

Agnes remembered how generously the fans had been piled into her shopping bag. The lady hadn't even stopped to count them;she'd just asked if that was enough, and Agnes had said,
Well, maybe just a few more, if you got 'em to spare, please.

“The store lady asked me to say please come in and look at their complete line of air conditioners, if you in the market for air conditioners.”

“You may hand them out,” Mrs. Taylor said, “while I explain about the practice tests.”

“I guess these will be our handheld air conditioners,” Cat Cartwright said, and she chuckled at her own joke.

Agnes thought,
Suppose she can't flap no fan,
and the thought pierced Agnes that she might have pointed out the nice girl's disability. Agnes quickly sat down.

“Everybody say ‘Thank you' to Mrs. LaFayt,” Mrs. Taylor instructed.

A group of the young men said in obedient unison, “Thank you, Mrs. LaFayt,” and smiled like good boys.

Mrs. Taylor began again. “How can I explain anything with y'all interrupting? ‘How'd I do?' ‘Answer my question?' Just please shut up and listen. If you can't answer a question and you can't eliminate one possibility as being wrong, then you
go on to the next question.
That's what I'm trying to get across. You don't just lay down and die. You keep going. Now there's not but one person in this room who did any good at all on that practice test. And you know why she did good? 'Cause she paid attention to what I been trying to teach you every week about
how to take a test.”

“Was it me, Mrs. Taylor?” a quiet little guy asked.

Agnes thought,
Most of these boys paid by Neighborhood Youth Corps to come to school, but they trying.

“No, it was not,” Mrs. Taylor said. “It was Mrs. Agnes LaFayt.”

Agnes felt faint with pride.

“Stand up, Agnes.”

She got to her feet. Agnes tried not to grin. She looked humbly down at the floor. But her heart had speeded up. She felt her arms dangling at her side, limp and amazed. Jesus the Good Shepherd hung from one hand. Maybe she would be able to pass the real test when the time comes.

“Now, Mrs. LaFayt,” Mrs. Taylor said, “you tell everybody how you went 'bout taking this test.”

Oh, how her heart was racing. Did she dare to tell? Agnes always told the truth. She kept her gaze on the floor, but she turned her head a little on one side. Sort of aimed the top of her head toward Mrs. Taylor. All the students and teachers looked at her standing up among the wooden desks. The walls with blackboards, the banks of big windows on each side, were waiting. Waiting for Mrs. Agnes LaFayt to tell them.

“Well, first I read the question. And then I read the answers. And then I close my eyes and I says, ‘Oh, Lord, is it A, B, C, or D?' and the Lord tells me, and I write it down.”

The room erupted in laughter. Agnes was mildly surprised, but she had spoken the truth. “Not for every question,” she tried to say, but they were laughing so loudly they didn't hear her. She wished Mrs. Taylor would tell her to be seated. “Just the hard ones when I don't know,” she said. Even Mrs. Taylor was smiling big, like the joke's on her. Everybody was grinning—

Then a cherry bomb exploded on the porch of the building.

Every smile disappeared. Everyone was frozen at the desks.

Then the bullhorn voice: “Niggers…niggers.”

Everyone became quiet.

“We see you all got some white women teachers in there with you. We think you better tell them teachers it's time to go back where they belong. We don't want to see no white teacher out here, come another night.”

Everyone sat in stunned silence. Miss Cartwright and Miss Silver stared straight ahead.

The lights went out. No one moved.
Jesus, help us,
Agnes silently prayed.

Then Mrs. Taylor spoke calmly into the dark. Just her voice. “Charles, you and Joe go to the circuit box in the entry hall and turn the lights back on. Mike, you go round and tell Mr. Parrish to call the police and then to come here.”

She's brave,
Agnes thought.
She's a brave woman.
Agnes heard the three biggest boys get up, saw them moving toward the door.
What if the bullhorn was to shoot, soon as somebody goes out.
But Mike and Sam and Charles walked out safely.

“Anybody got a match or a cigarette lighter?”

Agnes recognized Arcola's voice, knew Arcola was talking to add to the calm.

“Wait!” That's Miss Silver. “They might shoot at a light.”

But Christine—there she was, at the front, just where she was—flicked on her cigarette lighter. She tried once, twice, to turn the little wheel. Sparks fluttered
and then it was on, like a little candle. The flame lit up Christine's face and neck. She looked pretty, like Jesus in the dark, in the fan illustration “Behold, I am the Way, the Truth, and the Light.”

Christine smiled a sweet smile, her mother smile. Yes, Agnes had learned Christine had three little ones at home. Christine said, “They bluffing. You all just hold on now.” Christine lit a cigarette. Absolutely against the rules. Christine was calmly defiant. She drew on the cigarette like a man, not touching it, and it glowed bravely in the dark, a little spot of red. Yes, Christine had to be daddy and mommy to her kids. She knew how to act like a man.

“We gonna learn,” Mrs. Taylor said in her smooth strong voice, the red spot wagging. She took the cigarette from her lips, held it out in the narrow
V
of two rigid fingers. “And someday, sooner or later, everybody in this room gonna have his or her—that's right, you don't say ‘their,' not ‘everyone gonna have their diploma'—everybody in this room gonna have his or her high school diploma.” Just like a preacher, she put in a silence, so they'd all look at her, let the words sink deep in. Nobody butted in. Mrs. Taylor held the room like a bowl of silence. “Now, Stella,” she said, “let's conjugate one of your verbs.”

And Miss Stella said, “I am at school.”

And we all answered,
“I am at school.”

And she said, “You are at school.”

And we repeated it:
“You are at school.”

And she said, “He, she, or
it
is at school….”

There's always another verb to conjugate, and after “to be” Miss Stella start in on “to have” and we say it like we mean it: “I have friends, you have friends, he, she, or it has friends; we have friends, you have friends, they have friends.”

Agnes heard herself say softly, “Now we 'bout like a family ready to sit down for Thanksgiving.” She was glad to sit again in her desk.

Miraculously the lights came back on. Everyone looked at the faces around them as though they had just been born anew into life. Christine sat down in her chair.

 

JUST BEFORE THE
August heat hit, the bullhorn man turned a classroom of codeine-nipping boys, young white and black women, and one woman about old enough to be a grandmother into a group of friends.

ON HIS EVENING OFF, TJ SAT OUT IN THE CAR IN THE
dark parking lot and watched the small brick building that held his precious Agnes. If he could have done so, he would have watched it every night. To let some air in, he unbuttoned his shirt a couple of buttons.

On top of a slope the building sat low to the ground. One step led up to a small porch held up by round white columns at each end, with two more columns flanking the step in the middle. Both sides of the one-room building had five big windows in a row. Despite the distance, TJ could see right in the lighted classroom—the young folks, the teachers (one white in a wheelchair), and his beloved wife.

As he sat in the car waiting, another car pulled into the lot. Three white men got out, but they didn't notice TJ. He was wearing dark clothing; he supposed he just blended right in. One of the men was carrying something horn-shaped in his hand, attached to a box. They moved like men on patrol—stealthy and purposeful. There was a stand of willows between the parking lot and Agnes's building, and TJ lost sight of them when they slipped among the long fronds of the trees. They were dressed in dark clothing, too.

TJ got out of his car and stood beside it. He saw the men emerge from the woods, but they headed toward the bigger buildings that sat up high on their foundations, not the little isolated one. It was cooler outside the car than inside.

TJ listened to the cicadas and the tree frogs screaming for rain. Agnes had taken fans to the school. When she hurried away from him, he had thought,
Slow down, Aggie. It don't matter, you one minute late.

Suddenly the lights in the little low building went out. And the lights in the closest big building, too, just winked and were gone. TJ began to run. Before he got out of the lot, he determined he would kill them. If anything happened to Agnes, he would track them down and kill them. He stopped, went back. Read the license number on the back of the car. He had a hotel ballpoint in his pocket, and he wrote the tag number down in the palm of his hand. This way he could find them. He hated wasting time standing there, checking what he'd written against the Alabama tag, but he made himself do it.

Then he ran like a demon.

While he was in the grove of willows, his feet began to sink into the muck, up to his ankles. He heard a voice saying
Niggers…niggers,
and he began to think just how he would choke them one by one. His hands itched, and he remembered how, blind with dust, he had lifted the bricks and plaster in the bombed church. He saw the blood on brown arms and faces. He pictured again how people had moved like ghosts all covered in gray dust after the bombing. And that moment when he saw Agnes again, standing in the rubble, saw her knees buckle and her fall as though she were shot through the heart, and then he saw what she saw. The horror of it. Like John the Baptist, but a child, a young girl.

He charged the hill and was halfway up when the lights came back on. From this angle, he couldn't see as well, but the night class was all sitting down. He saw Agnes, from her neck up. Not even upset.

He'd been a fool. It was just the electricity had gone off. No, he had heard the voice:
Niggers…niggers.
But maybe he'd imagined that. Agnes was all right. He slowed down. His heart was beating hard, too hard. He ought not run uphill any more than Agnes should hurry. Her head looked so pretty, rising above the windowsill. She looked happy.

He saw three colored boys go in the door. Here came a man dressed up in a suit. Somebody in charge, probably. Mr. Parrish. TJ had seen this very man at the Gaslight with a beautiful high-style woman. Agnes had leaned over and said in TJ's ear:
I'm afraid it's not his wife.
Then Agnes had put her fingers to her lips—a secret—and he had nodded, agreeing. They didn't want to tear anybody down. That kind of carrying-on was too bad, but they had no intention of gossiping. Not about a fine-looking man like Mr. Lionel Parrish, director of the night school. And a preacher.

Mr. Parrish stepped up onto the little porch like he owned the place. Then he stopped in the doorway. He put one hand on the doorframe and stopped
there. Real casual. TJ heard him say to everybody simply “Good evening,” and TJ moved closer to listen.

“Sorry 'bout that, folks,” Mr. Parrish said pleasantly. “I have people out looking on the campus for those guys. Everything all right?”

TJ heard a car motor starting down in the parking lot.

A wiry woman in a white dress printed with circles said, “Yeah, we cool.” She had to be one of the teachers. Mrs. Taylor. Agnes had said Mrs. Taylor was the head teacher.

There were two white women, and the one with gleaming blond hair said, “Christine was magnificent.”
Magnificent
—a word from a different world than TJ's world.

Mrs. Taylor's quick reply: “Hey, I thought that was Stella teaching this class, didn't you all?”

And then the voice of his Agnes, though somebody blocked his view of her: “Miss Stella sure do make it plain.” Yes, that was Agnes. Never losing an opportunity to give a compliment, to raise somebody up:
she sure do make it plain
.

Then the blond white girl said, “Maybe it would be better if Cat and I didn't—”

Mrs. Taylor shot back, “Better for who? I thought I heard you conjugating verbs in the dark. I thought I hear you saying ‘Who has friends?' You have friends, we
friends
on a first-name basis.”

But the white girl was upset. Afraid. “Wait a minute,” she said. “You know what I mean. You heard what they said at the window. It's Cat and me they don't want out here.”

“Yes, and you know why?” Mrs. Taylor asked. She was getting mad. Yes, Agnes had talked about her. The Impatient One, Agnes had labeled her when she told TJ about school goings-on. “We already doing what they trying to stop,” Mrs. Taylor declared. “We
integrated.
Yes, we are. Say the word, class.”

And TJ heard his Agnes lead off, quietly, “Integrated.”

“And that's not the end of it,” Mrs. Taylor said, agitating herself. (TJ felt a chill. His feet were wet, his body soaked with sweat.) “They don't want anybody
learning
. In the slavery days, it was illegal for a colored person to learn to read and write. Learning is power.”

The blond girl answered, “Y'all better face the fact—all of you—if Cat and I come back here, we'll be putting you in danger.”

TJ moved so he could see better. See their faces. Who cared about integration? he wondered. This was about getting a diploma. Black teachers good as white ones for that.

But the crippled girl was talking again. Her hands were handicapped, as well as her legs, and she seemed to have something wrong with her throat. She said the bigots weren't worried about integration. Everybody sat still when she—Miss Cat—talked, gave her extra quiet and courtesy. She had trouble getting the words out, as though she had to squeeze them so they could fit through a constricted passage. “They're talking about keeping people as ignorant as they can,” she said.

“That's the truth, Cat,” Mrs. Taylor agreed.

“If I really thought that if Stella and I went away, your problems would be over, I'd go.” It was hard for Miss Cat to get out a long sentence. “But I don't think so. They want to intimidate you in every way.” She had to swallow and lick her lips, but she was determined to keep going. “They want to split us up.” She said it like she was proud. “I'll bet you within one week (swallow, swallow), even if Stella and I left (swallow) and never set foot on the Miles College campus again (swallow), there'd be some redneck out there with a bullhorn (swallow) telling you that school was out for the summer. Permanently out. (Pause) We take a stand now, or there's not going to be anyplace left to stand.”

“That's right,” Mrs. Taylor said. But her face looked strange. Like she was going to cry. “I say it with Cat.” Her voice was all quiet, like
she
could hardly get the words out. “Let's stand up for ourselves.”

TJ looked at the class. They looked stunned. Then his Agnes does it. She stands up. A sob catches in TJ's throat. She's misunderstood—they were just
talking
the word—but she's standing there beside her school desk. Then Miss Arcola stands up and beams a lightbulb smile at everybody else. And Miss Gloria pops like a little short cork right out of her seat. Mrs. Taylor is up with her. One by one all the black folks are standing. In the doorframe, Mr. Parrish straightens up like a soldier. Stretches himself up on tiptoe, bounces on the balls of his feet. Last of all, white girl called Miss Stella gets up. She looks around at them. She wants to be brave, too.

Only person left seated is Miss Cat in her wheelchair. She suddenly shoots up her hand—reckon they know she
can't
stand up—and the whole room whoops with triumph.