Four Spirits (5 page)

IN EARLY MAY 1963, THE BLAST FROM THE FIRE HOSE
caught Christine Taylor on the left shoulder, spun her counterclockwise, hit her on the back of her right shoulder. For the third day, the white firemen had been ordered to blast the demonstrators with their fire hoses. The force of water from the fire hose could rip the bark off a tree. As her front turned toward the fire hose, Christine brought up her forearms quickly to shield her breasts, was spun to face first the white mob, then the knot of firemen in red slickers. When the water blast crossed her upper chest, despite her shielding forearms and clenched fists, the force of the water knocked her breath away. Her body spun round the scream of her mind. Her legs tangled while she twirled. She fell to the pavement, and the pounding blast stomped hard on her back—one, two, three, four seconds, she counted through clenched teeth—then the high-pressure water moved on to punish another black person.

After the attack passed over, Christine panted into the pavement, counted four breaths of air smelling of wet asphalt, and opened her eyes. The water blast was sweeping toward Charles Powers, one of her students in the night school. She exhorted Charles to fall, now, before the white men got him, and he did, but the water pounded him anyway.
Stay on your belly! Don't let it roll you over!
she silently exhorted.

The water struck Charles's rump, lifting him,
Sweet Jesus!
abusing him through his trousers. Christine could see Charles screaming into the surface of the street, trying to get a fingerhold in the large cracks in the pavement. His
lips inched over the asphalt while a policeman ran toward him, his nightstick raised. Releasing the pavement, Charles crossed his arms around the back of his head; the stick thudded his knuckles, but he protected his head, his hands crossed like pigeon wings over the skinny back of his neck.

(“Got my trousers soaked with spray,” LeRoy Jones, the policeman, would later tell his buddies and his brother Ryder, “but I whacked that nigger till he yelled uncle.”)

Christine watched the blast moving away from Charles, chasing the running feet of children dressed in Sunday school clothes.

The fire-hose water hadn't rolled him over;Charles was safe in front. Christine wondered,
Would it have torn him up? Ripped his prick off?
She wanted to press herself into the pavement she lay on.

Charles, soaked, slowly rose to his feet. He was tall and lanky, had the broad shoulders and sinewy arms of a man. He moved slowly and cautiously.

You're not beat. You're not beat,
Christine thought as loudly as she could.

With her cheek lying against the street, she watched him brush the street dirt off his lower lip. Christine knew she should get up, too, but she felt safer lying on the street, its grayness fanning away from her eye. She tugged down the skirt of her navy suit, her best suit, drenched now. Close to her cheek, a sparrow landed on the asphalt. When Christine glanced at Charles again, she noticed a little blood on his fingertips, which were next to his mouth (
Must have scraped his lip on the asphalt
). He was standing still, slumped, watching. She ought to speak to him. Encourage him.

There was the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth reciting loudly, “I will fear no evil.” Water rocketed against his ribs, spun him once, twice, and he was down, his hands pressed against his side.

Rising to her knees, Christine watched the running children and heard their high-pitched yelps. Like little dogs yelping. The torrential water splashed just at their heels, then traveled to their ankles and up the backs of their legs. The power of the fire hose pushed a little girl forward, drenched the back of her yellow organdy dress. The girl in sodden yellow lifted her hands and spread her fingers to push the children in front of her. All the children were soaked. The water cannon was moving the schoolchildren like kites in a wind against a brick wall; Christine fixed her gaze on a wet white shirt (
Dressed up for nonviolence, poor boy
) plastered against dark skin. When the blast moved on, the boy against the wall turned to face the firemen.

He raised an elbow to protect his face, if need be, but he didn't avert his attentive eyes. It was Edmund, Charles's little brother. Eyes wide with disbelief, Edmund wanted to see what was happening to them. Christine felt proud of him, glad that he wanted to see, to know. Edmund stepped forward from the wall and ran to kneel beside Reverend Shuttlesworth. The boy surely wasn't more than seven.

If not my generation, yours,
she thought.

“WHY DON'T THEY COME TO VISIT ME, HERE IN THE HOSPITAL
?”
Reverend Shuttlesworth asked the boy. “You come.”

Nobody could smile like Edmund's minister—all teeth, all sunshine. Smiling now, smiling up from his hospital bed. Same as the pulpit smile, but Reverend Shuttlesworth was lying in white sheets, not standing, not weaving left and right before his people, his narrow tie leaping like a dancing snake.

“Who?” the boy asked.

“King,” his minister answered. “King and Abernathy. You here. Where they?”

The boy shrugged. He retreated back into the ignorance of youth; he was little, he could shrug and say “I don't know,” but he smiled when he said it, like sunshine, he hoped. (He knew nobody was admitted here to the bedside of Reverend Shuttlesworth—doctor and wife orders—but he had slipped in. So if he slipped in, why couldn't the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.?)

“I just got to come see you 'cause you my hero,” Edmund soothed.

“I thought Lone Ranger was your hero?” Minister was pleased, teasing him.

“Not anymore. I gonna be you.”

“Martin Luther King Jr. is a man of God, and I love him. But we ain't the same. We ain't no identical twins.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Pray with me!” He reached out his hand from under the white sheet to Edmund, and then Reverend Shuttlesworth closed his eyes. “Jesus, take this youngun. Be at Edmund's side as you ever have by mine. When the house fall,
lead him out. When the bomb burst, be his shield; put a helmet on his head and be his protection. Put love in his heart. Teach him. ‘Love your enemies; bless them that persecutes you.' In the jail cell, tell Edmund—you with him, you with him even to the end of the world. In Christ's holy name, Amen.”

They opened their eyes, and Edmund said, “I didn't let them put me in jail. I just ran off.”

“Did you?” Minister wrinkled his forehead. He stared hard but loving. “Then I got to tell you. Don't be afraid of the jail. They can't jail a soul. Your spirit—it remain free, body behind bars.”

“Yessir.”

“Next time, you go on to jail like a good boy.”

AS THEY STARTED THEIR DESCENT DOWN THE NARROW SPIRAL
steps inside Vulcan's pedestal, Darl apologized to Stella. “I'm sorry we couldn't see anything.”

“The trees blocked the view,” she answered. She was descending the stairs behind him. This way Darl could catch her if she stumbled, break her fall. It was like walking on the street side; his mother had taught him manners: a gentleman should be killed first, if a car jumped the curb. Going up the stairs, he should walk behind, in case she (any she) should slip.

From their high perch, Darl had admired the vast volume of air filling the space over the city in the valley. God's love was suggested by a tension between immensity and insignificance—sparrows plying the ocean of air. From left to right, all the way to a vague horizon, the city had lain resolved into white, gray, and tan buildings, a monochromatic mosaic of little squares and rectangles. The tops of the bubbling green trees had resembled broccoli heads.

At the head of Twentieth Street stood a green carpet, landscaped with fish-ponds; Darl knew the big trees of the park provided a canopy to the children's entrance of the library, though the main library was too far away to serve children from his part of town, the West End. That other concentration of green he had seen from the balcony would have been Kelly Ingram Park, where the colored children gathered, the pawns of their leaders. If only people could be patient, God had his plan.

The air over the city had not been invisible but perceptible as a gray haze hovering over the tiny buildings and trees. When Darl had looked up higher,
he had seen some real blue, pale and tender. He felt that God had a tender attitude toward Birmingham, despite her shortcomings.

Darl took his time descending the metal steps in the dim light. He needed to decide if he should arrange to see Stella again in the evening.

“Did your folks take you to the library when you were little?” Stella asked, her voice floating down over his shoulder. Sometimes she seemed to follow his unarticulated thoughts.

“We had a branch in West End. Not so grand.” He glanced out a narrow window set in the curve of the stone tower. He wished he had grown up nearer the center of things. Not that he didn't love his own blue-collar people. He did, and fiercely.

“When I was ten,” Stella said, “my aunt allowed me to take the bus alone to the library.”

He could hear her steps slowing. She lived in Norwood, once the residence of the well-to-do, with its wide boulevard, but now an area that had headed steadily downhill for many decades. Still, he liked its quiet decay, the remnants of elegance.

“It was my first visit to the library,” she went on, “after I lost my family. I turned ten. Aunt Krit said double digits meant I could take the 15 Norwood to town, on my own.”

He paused and turned to look up at her.

“They had been gone five years.” Her upturned face looked peaked and scared.

“I'm sorry, Stella.”

“The library had a revolving brass door.” She had stopped, stood as though suspended in the dim tower, one hand on the metal handrail. “You entered the door from the outside world, pushed, then emerged in another world. A quiet, interior world.” She seemed imprisoned in her sadness. Slowly she took another step down, closer to him; he continued their descent. “That's how it was,” she said in a little voice. “They died and the world changed. Like passing through a revolving door from one world to another.” She paused again, as though she wanted this spiraling down to last and last. “Actually, it was like crossing a river from one state to another. The driveway passes between my original home with my brothers and parents and where I live now with my father's sisters, Aunt Pratt and Aunt Krit. I crossed the driveway into another world.”

At the bottom of the tower, they stepped out into the bright May sunshine. Though it had been chilly up on the pedestal, it was pleasantly warm at its base, with a slight breeze. How sad Stella had sounded. Darl took her hand, and they walked forward.

“I need to go on to Fielding's,” she said, referring to her evening work on the switchboard at one of Birmingham's large department stores.

He turned to face her. “I'll pick you up after. On the Vespa.”

“All right,” she said.