Safe from the Neighbors (21 page)

She talked sometimes about her husband. From the outset she’d made it clear that she had no plans to leave him, and not just because they had kids. There were things about Arlan to admire, she said, even if he couldn’t see them.

“Well, I’m afraid I can’t. Not much point in trying to conceal that.” He knew he should change the subject, or at least fall silent, but that wasn’t in his nature. He asked if she knew what went on at those Citizens’ Council meetings.

“I can guess.”

He told her about the one at City Hall, how her husband and my father and the other men spoke openly about putting black people who’d registered to vote out of their houses and making sure they couldn’t find work.

“So far,” she said, “they’ve been pretty successful at it.”

“They won’t succeed forever. They’ll start failing soon, and I wouldn’t like to be them when that day comes.” He heard himself drone on: “That fellow your husband hangs around with, the one who looks like a beanpole?”

“James May?”

“He follows your husband around town like a pet. He’s got ‘loyal dog’ scrawled on his forehead.”

“He and Arlan knew each other growing up.”

“He always has such a hungry look in his eyes.”

“Maybe he’s never had enough to eat.”

Ellis told me that Nadine said my father wasn’t a bad man and neither was Arlan, that they both grew up poor, went off and fought in the war and, after they came back, had never known a day when they didn’t have to work hard. The thing was, she said, if you didn’t own at least a thousand acres, in the Delta you were a nobody. And if you wanted to be a somebody, according to Arlan, you had to join the Council. He talked all the time about securing their children’s future.

When she said things like that, what Ellis found himself thinking of was a future with her. For him, that meant stolen moments, and he failed to see why they couldn’t steal them forever, but she said when they started they were already in overtime. “You’re at the free throw line,” she liked to tease. “Better sink another one if you can before the buzzer.”

Her tone, when she made those kinds of statements, was far too breezy for his taste. She’d started it all, making the initial approach, stalking him at the grocery store when he had his kids in tow. She was the one who got emotional when they met to shoot baskets. He did tell me he conveniently managed to overlook the fact that he’d gone to the trouble of finding out what he could about her husband, then flipped through the phone book and called her when he knew Arlan wasn’t at home. But even so, if he saw her downtown with
her
kids, she wouldn’t even glance at him.

He in turn couldn’t stand the sight of her children, especially the girl. He saw them all one day on Front Street, right there in front of the Piggly Wiggly, a week or two before Christmas, a life-size Santa rotating above them in the window, Nadine talking to my mother, a sack of groceries tucked under her arm. He knew better than to speak. All he did was try to make eye contact as he passed, but the girl caught it and her dark eyes flashed.

“Do you ever wonder,” he asked, lying beside Nadine in bed in the motel down in Belzoni, “what it would be like to see each other at night?”

“Oh, hon, what difference would
that
make?” Once again: easy and breezy.

“What difference does
any
of this make, then?” he asked. “I go to the store to buy ketchup. I’m not thinking of you, I don’t even know you exist. I’m mentally composing the first paragraph of an editorial when you pop up out of nowhere and start that shit about me ringing one in from thirty feet. You’re lucky I don’t wring your neck.”

“You won’t wring my neck,” she said, “but Arlan would if he ever found out what we’re doing.”

He laughed. “That little man? He couldn’t get his hands
around
your neck. You’re too damn tall.”

“He could if I was lying down.”

He told me he hated to think of her lying down with Arlan Calloway. A journalist was supposed to be married to the truth, and for much of his life he had been, but after they got involved he lied to himself all the time. He told himself his main problem with her husband was political, when deep down he knew perfectly well that if Arlan would just walk out his front door, taking the kids with him and leaving his wife alone for the taking, he’d forgive him for every racist notion he ever subscribed to. The Meredith case was winding its way through the courts by that time, and Arlan could have stood on the corner of Front Street and Loring Avenue with a big sign saying
LYNCH JAMES MEREDITH
, and Ellis never would’ve mentioned it in the paper, so great would his gratitude have been.

He wanted to be with her every few days—in this motel room or another, it didn’t really matter much where. He wanted something permanent in a transient environment, something he could leave behind today and go back to on Thursday and find it just as strong because he’d left it alone for the last forty-eight hours. That, he told himself, was what he wanted.

“Don’t you ever get scared?” she asked him there in the motel.

“Scared of what?”

“Your wife finding out.”

He couldn’t imagine how she could. They had one car, and he drove it. She was busy taking care of their kids. She stayed home all day, and hardly anybody around Loring knew her. Anyway, nobody knew about Nadine and him. They’d been careful about that. “No,” he said, “I guess I don’t.”

“I do. I wouldn’t want to do that to another woman.”

Even when somebody’s lying motionless beside you, you can feel when she starts to pull away. He’d never known it until that day but could detect it then, some faint lessening of the pressure exerted by her hand on his chest. They’d been seeing each other for three months. Though the end was hardly imminent, he could feel it coming, and this made him want to do something rash. It never occurred to him, he told me, that what he was doing right then, at that moment,
was
.

“I’ve never seen the inside of your house,” he said.

“Well, I’ve never seen the inside of yours, either.”

“I don’t know what the floor looks like in your kitchen.”

“You don’t need to.”

“What we’re doing is not about need,” he said. “It’s all about want.”

“How do you turn the word
profound,”
she asked, “into a noun?”

“Profundity.”

“Then, hon, I think you’ve just uttered one. What we’re doing is all about want.”

It certainly was, and he wanted her, so he turned towards her and pulled her into his arms, thrilled by her size, though until now he’d always been drawn to smaller women. “I hate it when you talk so flippantly about this coming to an end,” he said. “Just plain hate it.”

“I want you to,” she whispered, her nose nestling against his neck. “Remember how you felt when you played your last game?
That’s how I want you to feel when this ends, only ten times worse. And I want you think about that every time you’re with me.”

“My last game ended in a loss.”

“So will this one,” she said.

They kept it up, Ellis told me, through the spring of ’62, meeting for lunch and sex whenever they could. Her daughter was in school, her son in kindergarten with me, Arlan in the field, so it was easy enough to slip away every few days. “Then when summer rolled around,” he said, “she fobbed the kids off on your mother a couple of times a week.”

“I remember that,” I said, and for a moment it was as if I were watching a movie, in which a little dark-haired girl with skinned knees begged her mother to take her along to wherever she was going.

While they conducted their affair, the rest of the people in the state—and a good many folks in other parts of the country, too—became intensely focused on the Meredith case. It was clear, Ellis said, that a showdown was coming. In late June, in New Orleans, the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ordered Ole Miss to admit Meredith for the fall semester. But one member of the court began issuing stays, the first three of which the full court of appeals invalidated. When the maverick judge issued a fourth stay, Meredith’s lawyers, joined by the Justice Department, appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

People were starting to go crazy, and Ellis registered their madness, which at another time in his life would have absorbed all his attention. But the editorials he wrote that summer, as the state became a powder keg, were tame. He weighed in on the issue a couple of times, duly noting there was no point in trying
to put off the inevitable, that the longer they drew things out, the worse the consequences would be, but his words lacked the passion that was being spent in cheap motels from one end of the Delta to the other.

In early September, Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black announced that after polling the other members of the court and finding all in agreement, he was voiding the stay and ordering Ole Miss to enroll Meredith immediately. “People couldn’t even focus on football,” Ellis said. “That tells you just how bad it was. All kinds of crazy things happened. Meredith would try to register and be turned away by the governor or the lieutenant governor, and the Justice Department would issue another threat, and that would lead Barnett to make another insane speech. At one point some group out in Orange County—I believe they called themselves something like the First California Volunteers—sent a telegram urging him to hold fast and pray because they were en route.”

One day, when he and Nadine were having lunch at an Italian restaurant over in Leland, she asked what he thought was going to happen.

All around them, farmers on their lunch break were discussing the same topic, making sweeping gestures with their knives and forks, their palms pounding the tables. They inveighed against the Catholic in the White House, though apparently it didn’t bother them that the owners of the restaurant were Catholics, too.

“Nothing much,” he said. “Barnett will rattle his saber some before falling on it in front of the Lyceum.”

“You don’t think folks’ll turn out in force?”

“Folks? What folks?” He waved his hand around the room. “The plantation aristocracy? Not a chance.”

She wound several strands of pasta around the tines of her fork. “There’s been some talk,” she said.

“There’s always talk. What kind are you referring to?”

“People in the Council. Some of them are saying maybe it’s time to take up arms, that what’s worked before may not work now.”

“You mean your husband intends to load his six-shooter, march off to Oxford and take potshots at, say, the National Guard or the federal marshals?” He shook his head. “If you want to make me laugh, you’ll need to tell a better joke.”

She laid down her fork still wrapped in spaghetti. “Look, I’m not telling jokes here. If something happened, it wouldn’t be funny. He doesn’t want to go to Oxford, but he doesn’t want to let his friends down, either. I think he’s scared of getting embarrassed.”

He knew and she did too that the organization had been embarrassing from the outset. But insulting her husband wouldn’t wash, and he could tell from the way she sat there—both elbows on the table, legs spread apart as if she was about to push herself up—that she was an inch from walking out. It was amazing, he thought, how the balance of power could shift. Ten months ago, James Meredith had been just another black man Ole Miss could dismiss, and now he had the federal government doing his bidding. Ten months ago, she was trying to attract his attention in a grocery store and he was stuffing a basketball in her face. “It won’t come to that,” he mumbled, picking up his own fork. “Nobody’s going to Oxford, except Mr. Meredith.”

That seemed to satisfy her. Her shoulders relaxed, and she went back to eating, and before long, Ellis said, it was all forgotten—up until late in the evening on Sunday, September 30, when the phone rang at his office and he picked up the receiver and she told him he was wrong.

Ellis had been there since the afternoon, listening to the radio and talking on the phone with a friend of his in Oxford, a retired
professor who’d taught him at Ole Miss. He’d been calling his ex-students around the Mid-South, people who ran little papers like the
Weekly Times
, pleading with them to do whatever they could to keep their readers calm. “Tell them,” he urged Ellis, “not to come. Please.” He said he’d seen pickups with license plates from all over the state, from Alabama, Tennessee and Georgia, too, even a few from Texas. The U.S. marshals had arrived by plane earlier in the day and when transported into town were pelted with bricks and bottles. Now a National Guard unit was heading onto campus. He’d just seen the trucks through the window, light from streetlamps reflecting off the Guardsmen’s bayonets. Nobody knew Meredith’s exact location, but rumor had it he was inside the Lyceum, hidden in the registrar’s office. Folks were forming up in the Grove, cars were set on fire, the air smelled odd.

Ellis told me that when Nadine called, he was considering a special edition that he’d print himself, a few hundred copies he could distribute around town under cover of darkness so people would see them first thing in the morning. If it kept even one person from jumping in his truck with a shotgun and heading for Oxford tomorrow, at least he would’ve made that small difference. So he was less than eager to pause and have a chat. He didn’t stop to wonder why she was free to call on a Sunday evening. “Listen,” he began, but she cut him off.

“Still want to see my kitchen floor?”

“What?” He could hear her breathing. Normally, she wasn’t a heavy breather. He’d talked to her on the phone countless times and taken naps beside her, but not once could he recall ever having been aware of her breathing. Which seemed odd, if you think about it.

“Arlan’s gone,” she said. “I begged him not to go, but he did it anyway, and now I’m here unguarded.”

He was having a hard time, he told me, processing both the
information and the invitation, if that’s what it was. It occurred to him that maybe she’d been drinking. This wasn’t a bad night to be drunk. “Whose idea was this?” he asked.

“Going to Oxford was James May’s idea. He called and said they ought to do it, and Arlan was so worried about losing stature in his buddy’s eyes that he agreed. So he loaded his shotgun and went to pick him up. Now they’ve ridden off to defend states’ rights. Probably both of them’ll get shot.”