The Street Sweeper (4 page)

He saw the images of Carole Robertson, Cynthia Wesley, Addie Mae Collins – three fourteen-year-old girls, and eleven-year-old Denise McNair, her braided hair tied tight with ribbons, smiling – four little black girls who, one Sunday in September 1963, had, as they had every Sunday, gone to Bible class at the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. But on the 15th of September these little girls attained national prominence when the church was bombed by segregationists. Fifteen people were injured. All four of the girls were killed. It was estimated that in Birmingham, Alabama, at the time of their murder one-third of all police officers were either Klansmen or had a Klan affiliation. Though the girls were killed before he was born, Adam Zignelik knew them and saw them in the minutes before waking in a sweat around 4.30 am that Monday morning. He saw his father briefly then too, a white man, in black and white.

He saw fifteen-year-old Elizabeth Eckford alone on 4 September 1957 at the centre of a crowd outside Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. Elizabeth was one of nine black students attempting to become the first students of their race to attend the school. All nine students were meant to be arriving together. They were to have met at 8.30 am on the corner of 12th Street and Park Avenue where two police cars were to take
them to school. That had been the plan. Elizabeth’s father, Oscar, worked as a dining car maintenance worker and her mother, Birdee, taught blind and deaf children how to wash and iron their own clothes at a segregated school. But in September 1957 the Eckfords didn’t yet own a telephone. No one had told Elizabeth the plan.

Elizabeth got up that morning to go to her new school. She put on a new black-and-white dress that she and her mother had made for the occasion. It was perfectly pressed. Adam Zignelik could see the pleats that flowed down from Elizabeth’s waist where the dress tapered in. The television news was on in the Eckford house. Before Birdee Eckford could switch it off, she and her husband, Oscar, who was walking the floorboards of the hallway to a rhythm in his chest, an unlit cigar in one hand and an unlit pipe in the other, both heard the newscaster speculate, between the weather report and a series of advertisements, about whether the nine coloured children would be going to school that day, the day after Governor Orval Eugene Faubus had warned that – if they did – ‘blood will run in the streets’. Elizabeth had heard it too. ‘Don’t let her go!’ Adam Zignelik called out but no articulate sound, nothing resembling language, came out of him. And, anyway, he was in an apartment in New York, asleep beside his girlfriend, Diana, some fifty years later. ‘Don’t let her go, for Christ’s sake. Don’t let her go!’

But neither Elizabeth nor her parents, Birdee and Oscar Eckford, heard Adam Zignelik nor, as they knelt down to pray together, did they feel the force of him thrashing in his bed, pleading with his father to intervene and stop Elizabeth from trying to go to Central High that day. Adam’s father, Jake Zignelik, ignored him too. She
had
to go. Far from stopping her, Jake Zignelik
wanted
her to go. That was the whole idea. Adam had to understand that.

Elizabeth put on her black sunglasses. She said goodbye to her parents, kissed them and walked to the public bus stop where she waited quietly for the bus that would take her to her new school. But when she got off at the bus stop closest to Central High she didn’t see any of the other eight black children who were meant to be starting at the school with her that day.

‘For Christ’s sake, please don’t let her go!’

She didn’t see any black people at all. She saw a sea of white people, thousands of them from all over the state and, judging from the out-of-state licence plates, from other states as well. She saw hundreds of soldiers in full battledress: boots, helmets. The soldiers were armed. She saw bayonets, too many to count.

‘She has to go, Adam. Don’t be a child.’

She looked at the guards lined up along the road leading to the school building and she looked at the white crowd. The day before, she had been told to go to the school’s main entrance. It was a block away from where she was standing. It occurred to her that when walking the block to the front of the school she might be safer if she walked it from behind the guards so that for the length of the block there would be a line of guards between her and the crowd. It was at the corner of the block that she chose to try to pass through the line of guards in order to stand on the other side of them. She was wearing sunglasses and the black-and-white pleated dress she had made with her mother. It was her first day at a new school. She was fifteen and she chose a soldier at random. The soldier didn’t speak but pointed across the street in the direction of the crowd. She tried not to look frightened and walked as the random soldier had directed her. What might another soldier have done? Elizabeth had always achieved high grades, always been an excellent student.

‘Dad, she’s fifteen!’

‘Don’t bother me, Adam.’

Elizabeth Eckford walked towards the crowd and, at least at first, that section of it closest to her moved back, away from her, almost as though afraid of her, as though afraid they might catch something from her. If you stood too near her perhaps you could
become
her. People would look at you. You would stand out simply by being in that part of the crowd nearest to her. You hadn’t gone there expecting to stand out. That wasn’t why you were there. But now you might stand out through no fault of your own. So you had better make sure that everybody around knows where you really stand. You hate her. You hate her as much as anyone else in the crowd hates her. You might even hate her more. By standing near you, she’s making you especially uncomfortable, more uncomfortable than she makes everybody else feel, and how
they
feel is only how you felt
moments ago before she chose you to make especially uncomfortable. Why did she have to choose you? She brings trouble with her wherever she goes. You can see it. You’ve been told this all your life, known it all your life, but now you can actually feel it. She’s making you sweat. She’s making your heart race. Everybody’s looking as she stands near you. Oh Christ, you hate her. Why did she have to make you feel like this? You hate her so much.

‘Dad!’

Then the crowd began to move in towards her. Mouths opened wide to let the anger and the hate pour out. All the toxic putrefaction that lived in the dark foetid recesses of the bowels of their minds was directed at a fifteen-year-old girl trying to go to school. Her legs began to shake and she wondered if it was discernible to the crowd. She had the whole block to negotiate before reaching the main entrance. She needn’t be afraid, she told herself. She needn’t be afraid no matter what the crowd was calling out because there were guards. There was a whole line of guards to protect her. The crowd was moving in.

‘Here she comes. Get ready!’ someone shouted.

Elizabeth moved away from the crowd and closer to the guards. She walked briskly but she didn’t run. The noise of the crowd was everywhere. All she had to do, she told herself, was make it to the main entrance at the end of the block.

‘Dad!’ Adam Zignelik tried to call out fifty years later.

Elizabeth managed to reach the front of the school. She approached another guard. This one wouldn’t meet her eyes. He stared out beyond her, over her head like she wasn’t there. The noise was all around her as though attached to the air. The guard wouldn’t let her pass. She saw that there was a path which led directly to the front entrance a little further on. She turned and took it. She hadn’t realised the school was so big. White students were walking up to the guards at the front door and were being let through. Still with the feeling that her legs could give way at any moment, she walked towards the guard who was letting the white students through. He didn’t move. Again it was like she wasn’t there. She tried to get in between him and the guard next to him. He raised his bayonet to block her. Then the other guards moved in. They raised
their bayonets too. As though sensing something, some change or new phase, a quiet descended on the crowd for a moment. Elizabeth didn’t know what to do. She turned away from the guards and just stood there, between them and the crowd. Now the crowd moved towards her, closer, and she heard, ‘Lynch her! Lynch her!’

Where was Jake Zignelik now? Was there anyone who would help her, anyone who was actually there? What happens to human kindness in the belly of a mob? Can it exist there at all or is it utterly extinguished? Elizabeth’s eyes fell on an older white woman with a face whose features had a cut not inconsistent with kindness. It was just a glance at first but from behind her sunglasses Elizabeth saw something she needed then more than anything else. She turned and walked towards this old white woman but when she got closer the woman spat in her face. The spit stayed there. She didn’t want to touch it. The crowd moved in closer and she heard someone shout, ‘No nigger bitch is going to get into our school. Get her out of here!’

She turned around to face the guards again but they remained impassive and impassable. The noise of those thousands of angry white people was like nothing she had ever heard before. She had always got good grades. She had always been very polite, always been a good girl, been no trouble to her teachers, always paid attention. These people didn’t know her. Where in her fifteen years of life was the thing she had done that was so bad they should hate her this much? There were so many of them and they all hated her. They appeared to feel this so strongly even though none of them knew her. It was hard to think but she found and clutched at the thought that somehow it might be better for her if she could make it back to the bus stop from where she’d arrived. It was a new plan, to make it back to the bench at the bus stop. She turned around and started the journey back, flanked by the crowd on each side. Still she didn’t run but her legs felt as though they might buckle at any time. She carried an old white woman’s spit on her. When she finally got to the bench at the bus stop her legs did buckle slightly but she propped herself up on the back of the bench.

Despite everything she saw and everything she heard and despite the fear she felt like shocks of electricity coming in surges through her
viscera to her sinews to the nerve endings in her skin, she reached within herself for a dignity that seemed to belong to a foreign code of conduct, foreign to the world she was then experiencing. It was a dignity that somehow her parents had planted in her. For fifteen years they had nurtured it. Elizabeth sat down on the bench at the bus stop and went digging for it deep inside herself. The crowd moved in closer to her and she heard someone shout, ‘Drag her over to this tree! Let’s take care of that nigger.’

‘Dad!’

Adam Zignelik hadn’t been born when this happened, when some young men in the crowd who had followed her back to the bus stop and were now behind Elizabeth Eckford started calling, ‘Lynch her! No nigger bitch is going to get into our school. We gotta lynch her! Lynch her! Lynch her!’ Jake Zignelik had been born but he wasn’t there. Who was there for Elizabeth Eckford at the bench at the bus stop near the tree in Little Rock, Arkansas, on the morning of 4 September 1957? Thousands of people were there. Was there anyone else there for her?

Television news cameras were there. Radio journalists were there. Daisy Bates was the president of the Arkansas state branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (the NAACP) and editor-in-chief of the black newspaper, the
Arkansas State Press
, and her husband, L. C. Bates, was the newspaper’s publisher. They hadn’t been able to sleep the night before because of the cars tearing up and down past their home with the horns honking and the passengers calling out, ‘Daisy, Daisy, did you hear the news? The Coons won’t be going to Central!’ Daisy and L. C. Bates were in the car that morning on their way, expecting to be meeting nine black children, when they heard the radio announcer on the car radio.

‘A Negro girl is being mobbed at Central High …’

Daisy Bates realised the girl had to be Elizabeth, the girl who lived with her parents and her little brother in a house without a telephone. Elizabeth hadn’t known the plan. No one had told her. They stopped the car suddenly and L. C. Bates jumped out and started running to find her. Daisy would drive there. But they were only two people, they were black and they were blocks away.

Thousands of people were already near the bench at the bus stop by the tree before L. C. Bates could get there. Jake Zignelik wasn’t there. Adam Zignelik, who saw it all shortly before 4.30 am that Monday morning, hadn’t been born yet. Was there anybody else there?

Benjamin Fine was an education writer for
The New York Times
and he was there. He manoeuvred himself behind Elizabeth, behind the bench at the bus stop. Then he pushed a little further forward. He managed to get beside Elizabeth and to sit next to her. He put his arm around her. He raised her chin just slightly and said, ‘Don’t let them see you cry.’ Grace Lorch was there, a white woman married to a white man who taught at a local black college. She made her way to Elizabeth and spoke kindly to her but in Elizabeth’s terror the kindness did not register. Grace Lorch took Elizabeth through the jeering crowd to a nearby drugstore in an attempt to call a cab. But the door of the drugstore was slammed shut in their faces. Grace Lorch took her to the bus and the two of them rode the bus to the segregated school where Birdee Eckford taught blind and deaf children how to wash and iron their own clothes.

After this, crowds were always mobs for Elizabeth Eckford and when she would see the mob in her room at night she would scream. When they heard this scream her brother would wake and her parents would come to her. But sometimes when she screamed no sound came out, just as it didn’t for Adam Zignelik shortly before 4.30 am one Monday morning some fifty years later in the Morningside Heights apartment rented from Columbia University, where he – the son of Jake Zignelik – taught history.

It all had to be seen in context, Jake Zignelik explained to his son. The ‘Little Rock Nine’, as the students became known, was the name given to the first black students to try to enrol in public schools in Arkansas but it was already three years after the Supreme Court had handed down its decision in
Brown versus Board of Education
. ‘Is three years a long time?’ Jake Zignelik had asked his eight-year-old son over chicken salad sandwiches and soda in Bryant Park. Adam thought for a moment before answering tentatively.