Makeda (6 page)
“I know
that,
Gray. They were in the dream.”
“They live in Africa.”
“I knew it. I knew it in my bones,” she said
sotto voce.
“West Africa.”
“Yes, yes,” announced in muted celebration.
“In Mali.”
“Where?”
“Mali, Grandma.”
“Is that so?”
“At the foot of a huge cliff.” My grandmother began to rock slowly. “Along a great winding river called the Niger.”
“I knew it. I knew it,” my grandmother said, almost whispering. “God be praised. God be praised.”
We sat together for a long while saying nothing. My grandmother, Makeda Gee Florida Harris March, head resting against the chair back, rocking in a slow swim, wearing on her smooth brown face the enigmatic smile of one who had gazed full upon the face of time.
It was I who spoke first, disturbing her back into the dark little room.
“Grandma.”
She drew in a punctuating breath.
I was reluctant to share with her the other piece of information I had come by that might appear to offset the good news I had brought.
After putting on my coat, I said, “My science teacher said that there was no small star that orbited the big star.”
This did not bother her as I had expected.
“Don’t worry, son. Your science teacher will learn soon enough about the heavy little star Po Tolo. My father, the priest, knew this in 1394. His people, the Dogon, have known this for 5,000 years. Of this I am certain.”
N
ineteen sixty was to be a fateful year for the March family, and for black people generally, to tell the truth. In June, Gordon would graduate from high school with top honors and head off in the fall to one of the four prestigious colleges from which he had won academic scholarships. The letter from Harvard College was the last of the acceptance letters from Gordon’s “big four” to arrive at the house on 39th Street. Gordon, well, Gordon and Mama and Daddy, really, would choose from the list of offers that also included Princeton, Stanford, and Columbia University.
Richmond, of course, and the whole of the South, remained riven by race. But the signs of change were all about us. Five years had gone by since thousands of blacks had assembled at the Holt Street Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, to launch a bus boycott after a black seamstress named Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing a white bus driver’s order to move to the back of a city bus. The leader of the boycott, a young pastor from the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church named Martin Luther King, Jr. had even come to Richmond to visit our school in 1958. He had become a national figure by then. I had not forgotten meeting him during the brief stop he made at Armstrong.
On February 1, 1960, David Richmond, Franklin Mc-Cain, Ezell Blair, Jr., and Joseph McNeil, freshmen at North Carolina A&T University, an all-black school in Greensboro, North Carolina, had gone downtown and demanded to be served at a segregated lunch counter.
The action the freshmen took had electrified and frightened me all in one stroke. It was three months before my sixteenth birthday. So I saw the brave young men in Greensboro as near peers.
They had thrown down the gauntlet, and not just to the Southern white establishment, but to Southern blacks as well. Looking back on it, I felt a great pressure to
do
something, to follow their lead. It was like they were watching me, and waiting for me to get off my duff.
The sit-in hadn’t felt at all like the aftermath of
Brown
vs. the Board of Education
six years before. My friends’ response to the Supreme Court’s decision had been decidedly mixed. The sit-in may have come as a surprise to the white students over at Douglas Freeman High who’d been given the erroneous impression, I think, that we wanted to
be
with them, which was, in my measure, a desire that did not exceed their desire to
be
with us. Surely, the whiteimposed
act
of segregation itself was humiliating to us— hate-inducing even—but with respect to the act’s sheer administrative result, it could not have been denied that blacks enjoyed the exclusive company of blacks every bit as much as whites enjoyed the exclusive company of whites. At least, this was my guess. The white students were probably operating at something of an information disadvantage here because we had more to go on than they did. The local media, which was largely controlled by whites, made plain the white students’ general dislike of blacks. I don’t think the white students could have known whether we really wanted to be with them or not. Nobody had asked us that question, not even the writer Ted Beaseley over at the
Richmond Afro-American.
By 1960, the Supreme Court’s edict seemed, at least in Richmond, to have been rendered for naught. The decision had had little effect on our lives. The public schools and the city in general had remained as segregated as ever.
But the action that the four college freshmen took was different—readily transferable, contagious. Every Southern city had lunch counters. In Richmond, there were twentyseven of them on Broad Street alone. Someone had counted them. Twenty-seven lunch counters with over 300 stainless steel pedestals under 300 round faux leather–covered seats that swiveled thousands—no, tens of thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands—around to Formicatop counters upon which zillions of burgers and fries and shakes and pies were served up lickety-split to any white person with a quarter or two. No references required. No questions asked.
For years, we blacks had looked with Pavlovian suspicion at the stools—saw them spinning languidly behind a ruddy diner’s retreat, saw them bracing up ravenous white patrons leaning into steaming plates, saw them standing straight and empty, waiting, watching, eyeing us passing near to them like hostile sentinels.
The four freshmen, scarcely six months in college, just upped and left campus, went to downtown Greensboro, found four empty stools, and sat down on them, just like that. I’m ashamed to admit that I could never have done that, been that brave. Amidst the lynchings still very much going on across the South. With storied old lawyers jousting still in the highest courts. No mass meetings. No Kings. No Shuttlesworths. No C.T. Vivians. Just four college freshmen who looked like me and had scarcely even begun to shave.
Four young men, boys really, walked to downtown Greensboro with only each other for comfort, for reassurance, and covered a wretched symbol of the old South with their bottoms. Turned the place on its head. Four boys. Hell, man, that was really something. Bad-ass something.
After that,
I
had to do something. I thought then that we all had to. And Gordon and I
did
. Lots of us did. We knew Mama and Daddy wanted us to be safe. They would be against us getting involved like this, but we did it anyway.
Though we were still mere boys, we wanted—needed—very much to be men, not grown-ups of course, but
men
in the spinal sense.
Ironically, the whole thing was Gordon’s idea. It happened only days after the news flashed around the country about what had happened in Greensboro. Gordon and I went downtown after school on Friday to buy a stylus for the Philco phonograph machine in the living room. The specialty shop that sold it was located on Broad Street between 5th and 6th next to the big new G.C. Murphy store with the running plate-glass window that gave onto Broad Street. I was walking ahead of Gordon when he stopped to look through the big window. I walked back to find him peering through the glass at the store’s long L-shaped confectionery counter and the fifteen gleaming pedestal stools standing empty around it, watching us, daring us.
“Let’s do it,” Gordon said.
“Let’s do what?” I asked.
“Let’s go in and sit down—and order something.”
“Mama and Daddy will kill us.”
“They don’t have to know about it.”
“But what if we get arrested?”
“We’ll deal with that when it happens.”
“Jesus, Gordon. Do you know what you’re doing? You of all people. What about your scholarships? You know what could happen to you?”
He did not seem himself, or at least not the deliberate mulling, measuring
himself
that I had always counted upon as a firebreak to my own natural heedlessness. Only then did I realize how opaque to me he had always been. How veneered was his self-discipline. Looking in the window, he gave every appearance of someone who’d tipped over and given in to some urgent irresistible exigency that required him to address smack-dab, with this one rashly considered act, a short shame-soaked lifetime of tacit accommodation and quiet cowardliness.
“I have to do this. I have to do it. If I don’t do it now, I never will.” If he had deliberated upon his decision, I did not know of it. He had always been serious about everything. In that respect, at least, he had remained consistent.
“Okay, man, I’m with you. Let’s go.”
With that, the March brothers walked into the G.C. Murphy store and took two center seats on the long side of the L-shaped confectionery counter.
The store was virtually empty. The waitress, a plump fair-skinned white girl whose face was framed by parentheses of blond Shirley Temple curls, refused to serve us or even acknowledge our presence. Without uttering so much as a word, she walked off, leaving us alone at the counter. No doubt surveilled by watching eyes somewhere, we sat there facing a wall-mounted menu for fifteen minutes. Having no thought-out idea of what to do next, Gordon and I eventually got up and went home.
S
unday week, Mama and Daddy invited the Reverend C.C. Boynton and Grandma to the house for dinner. Mama fussed over the table a good part of the day, sending Daddy just after breakfast to fetch the folding table pad from its box in the hot airless little storage attic that was reached with a pull-down retractable ladder in the upstairs ceiling.
Gordon and I had been assigned by Mama the task of “thoroughly cleaning” the house on Saturday.
Mama kept the kitchen door shut all Sunday so as to keep “the whole house from smelling like pot roast.”
Dinner was set for two o’clock. Grandma rode home from church in the backseat of the car between Gordon and me. She had changed in the church cloaking room out of her white deaconess dress and into an elaborately embroidered orange African gown that a taken-aback Reverend C.C. Boynton would affect to like, but would, in fact, distinctly detest. It was the first time Reverend Boynton had seen my grandmother outside of church.
Just as Daddy pulled to the curb in front of our house, a neighbor’s collie ran at the car and leapt about it barking playfully. This terrified my grandmother, who’d professed a fear of dogs for as long as anyone could remember.
She pressed her Braille leather-bound gold-embossed Bible fast to her chest, interposing it like a shield between her and the loud baying voice of the dog. My father got out of the car and shooed the animal in the direction of its owner’s house. My grandmother sat straight-backed between Gordon and me on the car’s rear seat until she was well enough composed and confident that the dog would not return. This would be the only time that I would ever see her appear frightened.
While Mama and Daddy and Gordon and I busied ourselves with last-minute preparations, Grandma sat quietly in the living room in a leather armchair awaiting dinner which would not begin until Reverend Boynton arrived. Sitting alone with her thoughts for periods of time never seemed to bother my grandmother. She appeared to live more from within than from without, as if she were of an unknowable place, to which no one of us could be made privy, even were such a view into her deepest cerebrations hers to grant.
At ten minutes after two o’clock, Mama, peering through the venetian slats at the dining room window, called out to Daddy, “David, Reverend Boynton is here,” speaking with the slightly elevated pace of one expecting the arrival of a special personage, a measure that squared entirely with the Reverend Boynton’s view of himself as he hoisted his considerable bulk from the driver’s-side seat of the big black four-door Lincoln sedan the church had given him on the silver anniversary of his pastorate.
My recollection is that Reverend Boynton never spoke in conversational English, but rather in a relentless
pulpitese
spoken loudly (even when mouth-to-ear) and with an overlaid relish for pontifical enunciation. Indeed, he must have been well-educated in the formal sense of it, at least. His doctorate, real, not honorary, had been conferred by the Yale Divinity School. Still, his booming sermons, for me, were tedious affairs, filling the hall but not the heart.
Daddy’s hand disappeared into the Reverend’s paw.
“So good of you to have me, David. So good of you to have me.” Pulling off his knee-length gray camel-hair chesterfield and turning toward my mother: “Aah, Alma, my dear, so good of you to have me, so good of you to have me.”
My mother steered Reverend Boynton from the vestibule into the living room where my grandmother sat composed with her fingers laced over the Bible which lay closed on her lap. Upon noticing her sitting quietly with her gown of brilliant orange spread over the arms of the chair, Reverend Boynton spoke more moderately, “Sister Mattie, what a nice surprise. And don’t you look pretty.” Reverend Boynton then seemed to sustain a temporary loss of confidence. Blind people had always affected him in this way. He likely sensed that they could
see
him better than sighted people could, and thus he lost with them the considerable advantage of his imposing physical presence.
Had my grandmother been sighted, she would have noticed on Reverend Boynton’s face features that confessed an enfeebled soul.
I can’t recall what my grandmother said in response.
I only remember that whatever it was amounted to little more than a word or two. I can still visualize the subtle tilt and nod of her elegant head which gave the impression of a royal receiving a subject.
Recovering with relief his bonhomous bearing, Reverend Boynton elevated his voice and said, “Gordon, Gordon. Aren’t you something, young man. Which is it going to be, Harvard or Stanford?” Not waiting for an answer, the reverend bore forward: “And why didn’t you apply to Yale, young man? Better than Harvard, really.”