One With Others: [A Little Book of Her Days] (7 page)

Now I wonder whatever happened to Cornbread.

V, deep down, she may have been as sad as a cover band. She might have felt drier than a clod of Arkansas dirt. Lonely lonely lonely, like the hunter green suitcase that hadn’t been used since her honeymoon.

Some honeymoon, she later told Gert, with that off-color smile, she almost had to rape him. She said this near death. As her executive organs were shutting down and she was finishing the
NYT
crossword, September 2, in ballpoint:

What is a suffix of book

ish

Who is a major exporter of coconut oil

Samoa

A colorless liquid

ouzo

A defeatist’s words

I [nospace] lose

The artist of the etching and aquatint,
el sueño de la razón produce monstruos.

[
Does it follow that the sleep of monsters produces reason?
]

It was the Thursday
Times.
They get harder. But the others got thrown out. This was on a shelf of dust under the silhouette where a boomerang had hung. The boomerang’s silhouette and the telephone’s and the outline of her iconoclastic altar, stayed white. Otherwise the walls were solid nicotine.

Had cancer after she had her last baby. Had a hysterectomy. Didn’t want anyone to know because she thought they’d say,
That poor woman with all those children and now she’s got cancer.
An invisible woman.

In Hell’s Kitchen, in her shaky hand, in soft pencil, next to the sill overlooking the scraggly barren pear in front of her building she wrote:

Cheops 2575
BC
–2150
BC

Moses 13th c.
BC
–Homer 9th c.
BC

Hesiod 8th c.
BC
–Herodotus 485–425
BC

Socrates 469–399
BC

V, if I may ask why did you write that on your wall.

It’s handy. It settles a lot of arguments, and with growing enthusiasm, That’s not the first thing I wrote on the wall though, the first thing I wrote is over here:

Unless a proposition is necessary it is meaningless with meaning approaching zero.
—Burroughs

I still haven’t figured it out, she adds with obvious pleasure. Then I wrote:

Be still, the hanging gardens were a dream.
—Trumbull Stickney

After she died the photographer and I visit the apartment. I find what she scribbled next to where her phone had hung:

WHAT

FRESH

HELL

IS

THIS

below which:

INTERPOSITION

AND

NULLIFICATION

And a sampling from her own hagiography, the names:

Elegua
[the trickster, guardian of the crossroads, messenger to god, lover of children; his numbers are 3 and 21; his day is Monday and his colors are black and red; his offerings are candy, cigars, and rum, and those too you would find on her shelves]

Saint Anthony
[to help her find things buried in the archaeology of her apartment]

Santa Barbara
[to protect her from lightning]

Obatala
[king of the white cloth—a benign deity by the measure and history of the world’s big-brand religions, minus some sacrificial chickens and an occasional goat—the essence of purity, justice, and clear thinking, but overly fond of palm wine; one with whom she might have identified]

Ben Turpin
[the cross-eyed silent film comedian]

+ + +

When I check into THE PEABODY the Jingle Bell Ball is about to begin. The lobby is jammed with tweens in designer dresses.

Lansky Brothers has moved its store into the Peabody from its old storefront on Beale Street. Tailor to Elvis, the Man in Black, and the johns of Beale.

And there he is Mr. Lansky, walking the floor, incarnate, draped in his measuring tape. Proverbial spring in his step. Inept at retiring, even at aging.

Mr. Lansky, did you know Henry Loeb, the late and former mayor.

I knew Henry very well. Big ox of a man, 6'4". He wore those white bucks, says the tailor to Elvis, the tailor to Johnny Cash, the tailor to the mayor of Memphis on whose watch the country lost its King.

Some leaders grow small and some grow tall in perpetuity.

Moved to Big Tree after all that went on.

Old King Cotton. He was never the real king. There was only the one King.

GRADUATE FROM ALL-WHITE HIGH SCHOOL, First Year of Choice: When MLK died kids were laughing and talking about how they should have killed that [N-word] a long time ago.

Did you hear the one about the [N-word] that...

Do you know why the colored want to send their children to the white school.

So they can learn to read and riot.

Do you know what they sang at King’s funeral.

Bye-bye, blackbird.

Memphis has one up on Dallas.

They got a president. We got a king.

So they slew the dreamer, and ever since they’ve been trying to slay the dream.

GRADUATE OF ALL-WHITE HIGH SCHOOL, First Year of Choice: Tried to time my trips to the restroom. Pick the right time I’d be alone with the sink and the mirror. Pick wrong, the smoking girls leaned against the sink in front of the mirror, Something stinks in here, smells like a [N-word].

Henry did not seek reelection. A fourth-generation Memphian. Wealthy. Jewish. Episcopalian. Big ox of a man. Liked to wear white bucks. Moved to Big Tree of all places. Big spread up on the Ridge. Sold farm implements. Had plenty of money. Made more money. Moved to be among those of his own get.

It’s almost closing time at the CIVIL RIGHTS MUSEUM, Lorraine Motel. I walk down to Mulberry, past big vacant blocks. I move quickly past the displays of dry-mounted text and props from the Movement and wend my way to room 306.

Looking through the Plexiglas that separates us from the carefully unkempt furnishing at the Lorraine—cigarette butts in the ashtray and the dinner plate shared with Abernathy.

The stuck clock of history.

An anachronistic-looking child stands next to me, with ringlets like Shirley Temple. Is this where they killed Elvis she asked her mother.

Wrong king child, wrong freaking king.

CRUISING DOWN UNION AVE: Why there’s Nathan Bedford Forrest, confident as ever on the one mount out of nearly thirty that didn’t get shot out from under him.

Those hoofbeats die not

TAPED TO A UTILITY BOX, corner of Highland and Poplar:

I’m tired of hearing what rich people have to say

STOPOVER AT BURKE’S BOOKS:

Graffiti in the bathroom:

What the American public does not know

is what makes the American public.
—Anonymous

I slept with Bill Faulkner.
—Anonymous

Along the wall lined with the author photos, I pick out Joan Williams. [
She slept with Bill.
]

+ + +

FAMILY OF V’S BABYSITTER: Another stifling day in Big Tree. There was a fight on the South Side, a family disturbance that got loud, got ugly. Cops came. There were arrests. Her father went to the jailhouse to find out about his sons. They wouldn’t tell him anything. They wouldn’t let him post bail. He got a call late that night. The sons were going to be released. He went down there. In the a.m. hours they let them go. First they cut the outside lights. A line of pickups were idling in the lot. The men in the trucks, the patriarch knew them all. They were from the farms. He was the flat-fixer for every one of those farms. They said they were going to take them to a fish fry. It was a [N-word] fry. That’s what it was. They beat her father. Beat the crap out of him. The youngest boys ran off. One jumped from the overpass. His knees jammed. Permanently. The brothers scrambled under a vehicle in a carport. The patriarch hid in the sticker bushes. He couldn’t see. He bled until he blacked out.

Maybe the reverend knew they were under his vehicle. Maybe he didn’t. He held his tongue. It was a choreographed release. Don’t you see. The police notified the men on the farms, the Night Riders, gave them time to get together. The flat-fixer knew every one of them. And they knew him.

+ + +

VIETNAM VETERAN, RETIRED NURSE: We were in the second wave of arrests. We met at the funeral home and broke into groups of fourteen. That way we were legal. A lot of us still got arrested and transported in horse trailers to the dressing room of the pool. Took three of us in the dogcatcher wagon.

I was eighteen. Graduated and went to Vietnam. Wounded. Purple Heart. Came home and town under curfew.

I picked my mother up from church. My car was surrounded. A woman held a brick. She saw I had a Service .45. I said, Lady, you hit my car...

Hardest part to come back and see signs that said [N-word].

All my kids were military. Oldest son killed by police officer in Memphis. Had a great job, went to church, great family. Now the cop is dead. He was black too.

Jesus saved me from the hatred. It’s the only way.

When life gets you down/keep looking up

+ + +

RETIRED WELDING TEACHER: Kept first watch on the porch with the lights off. Wore my fatigues. Holding a rifle. Since Nam, we were armed, too.

That’s when things began to calm down. When both sides were armed. Black people coming back from the Mekong Delta toting M16s, the way we used to walk off the fields with hoes.

There was a shooting at the Tastee-Freez. Things got too dangerous and kind of chilled off.

A teacher has been fired for a derogatory letter, for insubordination in which he told the superintendent the Negro had no voice.

It was a riot, a rampage. An outbreak. A disturbance. The students called it a boycott, a walkout. Gentle Reader, it was an uprising.

During the morning of this date, no one had been given any cause to believe that a riot was imminent. However the superintendent had notified the chief of the firing of a teacher at the all-Negro junior high and had stated that there might be trouble.

The first teacher to approach the study hall after the disturbance began was not on hall duty but went on the basis of a report that there was trouble.

When he arrived there was not another teacher in the study hall. The students were then in the process of overturning tables and throwing chairs.

The students, by this time numbering in the hundreds, went out upon the grounds; some or all of them continued their course of conduct throwing bottles, rocks, or other objects at the building resulting in breakage of glass.

A bottle or some other object struck an assistant superintendent on the forehead inflicting a moderately severe wound requiring medical attention.

WE [the grand jury] are aware that every effort is being made to bring about better facilities, yet we feel that this alone will not cure the ills that exist. Whether it be crowded conditions, lack of discipline, lack of respect, political and/or social ills, or imagined political or social ills, none of these excuse or justify damage and destruction of our education institutions.

Immediate Steps

Must Be Taken

Toward More Strict

Position Of Discipline,

Respect, Order

Quickly As Possible

Closer Observation

Take Whatever Steps

Necessary

Bring It

Immediately

Under Control

Protect Property

Rights Of Those

Desiring

Deserving

Opportunity

Education

Our County Judge

Doing Excellent Job

[later sent up for racketeering]

Under Circumstances

Best Crime Deterrent

Sure Detection

Swift Apprehension

Certain Punishment

Testimony Shows

An Excess Of $19,000