While the World Watched (3 page)

He'd stand us all in front of the kitchen counter and ask, “Whose week was it to do the dishes?” After he determined who was responsible, he'd point to the less-than-perfect kitchen and ask, “What's wrong with this picture? What didn't you do here?”

Before the guilty child could return to bed and go back to sleep, Daddy made him or her scrub down the kitchen—as he or she should have done earlier. Daddy insisted that the kitchen be clean and ready for his use in the morning. He had enough challenges each morning—waking us, feeding us, and making certain he arrived at work on time. After a long night of working at the club, he saw no reason why he should have to come home to a dirty kitchen.

Early in their marriage, Daddy and Mama created a special arrangement involving family responsibilities. Daddy cooked breakfast every morning for the family, and Mama cooked supper each evening after she got home from her school-teaching job. Mama proved just the opposite from efficient, organized Daddy. She had a laid-back, unassuming personality. Totally unorganized, she didn't care if we never washed the dishes in the kitchen sink. Nothing upset her. The house could burn down around her, and I don't think she'd pay much attention to it. I guess Daddy knew that if he didn't establish some order and organization in a house with six growing children, chaos would rule.

* * *

As Chester drove Wendell, Kirk, and me to church that fateful Sunday, I thought about my best friend, Cynthia Wesley. Her father had been my elementary school principal at Finley Avenue Elementary School, and Cynthia and I were in the same Sunday school class. We talked on the phone almost every day, and we were both members of a small all-girl community club called the Cavalettes. The group of about fifteen black Cavalettes got together mostly to socialize, eat cookies, drink punch, talk, and dance to records we played on the portable record player. We had just had a club meeting the week before, and we had another one scheduled for the afternoon of Sunday, September 15. The upcoming meeting would be particularly exciting for us because we had placed an article in the local newspaper about it. The announcement simply said, “Cavalette Club to meet Sept. 15 at 3 p.m.” I served as our president, and I had told everyone to bring three dollars that Sunday to pay for the matching gold caps and shirts we had ordered from Fred Singleton's, the downtown Birmingham sporting-goods store. Our first names would be printed in black letters on the front of the shirts, and the letter
C
for Cavalettes would be printed on the back. We could hardly wait to get them the following week.

The Wesleys had adopted their only child, Cynthia. They lived in a beautiful brick house in Smithfield, an area of Birmingham better known as “Dynamite Hill” because of the routine Klan bombings there. Back in 1948, the year I was born, several black families had crossed the “color line” that separated white homes from black homes in the Smithfield area of Birmingham. The Klan responded with random bombings for almost two decades. Several well-known Civil Rights activists lived in Dynamite Hill at the time, including Angela Davis, whose family had a house at the top of the hill on Center Street, and Arthur Shores, one of the first blacks to practice law in Alabama. The Klan bombed the Shoreses' brick ranch house on two different occasions. Fortunately, neither he nor his family was injured either time.

I wondered what Cynthia would wear on that Youth Sunday. Her mother sewed all her clothes because she could never find anything to fit Cynthia's petite size-two frame. Mrs. Wesley made beautiful clothes for her daughter—dresses just the right length and color and that perfectly fit Cynthia's tiny waist.

* * *

Chester pulled the car to the side of the street in front of the church. My little brothers and I stepped out of the car and walked into the church's lower-level door, which opened to the basement. The children's Sunday school classes met each Sunday in the lower auditorium. The adult Sunday school classes met upstairs—each one in a corner of the large main sanctuary or in the balcony between the two great stained-glass windows. In one window, Jesus tenderly held a lamb in his strong arms. I sometimes pictured myself as that little lamb, so safe and secure and loved in my Shepherd's hands. In the other window, my favorite one, was the kind-faced Jesus, poised with his hand in front of a large wooden door. I could almost hear him knocking softly, respectfully, on the door . . . again and again and again. His face showed a tender pleading for the person inside to open the door and let him in. I came to learn that the door represented a lost person's heart—a heart Jesus longed to enter and live within. I studied those windows closely every Sunday, and each one permanently etched itself in my mind. On both sides of the sanctuary, the stained-glassed images of Jesus comforted me and brought me great peace and joy.

The children's Sunday school classes were already in session when I sat both boys in their metal folding chairs. I walked upstairs to the church office and found middle-aged Mabel Shorter unusually flustered as she laid down the telephone receiver.

“What's wrong, Mrs. Shorter?”

“All these phone calls!” she said. “People have been ringing the phone all morning. But when I try to get more information, they just hang up.”

“Who are they? What do they want?” I asked.

“Oh, I don't know,” she said. “But they seem more like
threatening
calls than just
prankster
calls. The callers say they are going to bomb the church.”

Mrs. Shorter was the nervous type. I felt she might be overreacting, so I mentally dismissed her comments.

I didn't think any more about the threatening phone calls. I just felt so proud Reverend Cross had asked me to be the Sunday school secretary on Sunday mornings. I'd held this job since the seventh grade. I would man the office, listen for the phone, open the week's mail, greet guests when they came through, and compile the morning's Sunday school report. I would also record the attendance and the amount of money contributed to church that morning. I felt so grown up.

After the Sunday school lesson, the classes would all gather together in a large assembly before the morning service began. I would read the report summary out loud to everyone and make some necessary announcements before the superintendent dismissed everyone at 10:45. During those fifteen minutes before the next worship service, church folk would talk with one another, admire the babies, purposefully compliment and encourage the youth, and visit the restrooms.

My friends and I would slip out of the church between Sunday school and the 11:00 a.m. worship service to drink Cokes at Mr. Gaston's motel restaurant. This was a black-owned restaurant, the only place in the area that served blacks and allowed us to sit in a booth and have a waitress bring us a cold drink. We felt so grown up when we sat at a table; said, “Coca-Cola, please”; and waited for our drinks. We would each pay our thirty-five cents and then hurry back to the church.

Some nine years before, Mr. Arthur George Gaston, the grandson of slaves and a popular self-made millionaire, had built the A. G. Gaston Motel on the edge of Kelly Ingram Park—across the street from the church—on some land he had bought years earlier. The motel provided a place for black Civil Rights leaders to stay, as well as other visitors to the city. No other motel in Birmingham would allow black visitors to eat or sleep there. Before the A. G. Gaston Motel opened, they had to stay in the homes of church members. Mr. Gaston hung a large Z-shaped sign from the top of the two-story part of the brick building. It read simply,

A. G. Gaston MOTEL

Air-Conditioned

Before long, Daddy found out about our visits to the Gaston Motel restaurant, and he put an abrupt stop to them.

“When you go to church,” Daddy said, “you stay at church until you leave to go home.”

It was just another rule he added to the already long list of restrictions. So I didn't leave church anymore and order Coca-Colas at the Gaston Motel.

* * *

I left the flustered Mrs. Shorter in the church office, distributed record books to each of the Sunday school classes, and then quietly slipped into my own classroom. Around 10:20, after I had collected all the children's records, I headed toward the steps leading to the sanctuary to collect the adult Sunday school records. I paused and lingered a minute at the door to the girls' restroom.

“Hey! Good morning!” I called to four of my friends who were primping in front of the restroom's large lounge mirror. At that time, I didn't know that
five
girls were in the bathroom. I didn't see Sarah, Addie's sister, who was in a separate area near the washbowls and toilets.

The four girls—Denise, Addie, Carole, and Cynthia—combed their hair and chattered excitedly as they readied themselves for the 11:00 morning youth service.

Denise McNair smiled at me. She was always smiling, showing that little gap between her two front teeth. One of our teachers told us that in Africa “the gap” was considered a rare and enviable beauty mark. At eleven years old, Denise was a few years younger than I was, but I thought she was pretty and smart, and I always liked the way her mom fixed her hair.

An only child, Denise was doted on by her parents and grandparents. She always wore pretty, dainty clothes—dresses with fluffy matching pinafores. Denise's father, Mr. McNair, was my ninth grade teacher. He taught diversified education at Parker High School on Fourth Avenue North in Birmingham. An accomplished photographer, he also owned a black portrait studio. Mrs. McNair, Denise's mother, had a beautiful voice and sang in the church choir. Sometimes Denise sat beside her mother up in the loft during worship services.

Poised at the bathroom mirror next to Denise was Addie Collins, a sweet, quiet girl. I liked Addie, but we weren't particularly close buddies. Addie was just kind of
there
—serious and serene. She never fussed with anybody or said anything mean. I was closer to Addie's sister, Junie—I just seemed to gravitate toward her. A little mischievous, Junie laughed a lot and was always so much fun. Junie told me later that she and Addie had argued on the way to church that morning.

Carole Robertson glanced up and smiled at me too. Our mothers both taught school and were good friends. Carole, a member of Girl Scout troop #264, pinned the numerous badges she had earned to a long sash that draped across her chest and proudly wore her uniform to school. She was cute and always looked impressive in her uniform and badges. Carole played the clarinet in the school band. She was supposed to play that next night—Monday—at Parker High School's first football game of the year.

Carole loved God and church as much as I did. We'd grown up together in the church, attending the Easter egg hunts as children and later participating side by side in the youth programs. Carole carried a small Bible in her pocket whenever she went to church and was involved in most of the Sixteenth Street programs, usually with a speaking part. Though she lived in a segregated city with few opportunities for girls of our race, Carole found all kinds of things to do to keep busy. She seemed to hate just sitting still and was always on the move. Mature and ladylike at just fourteen years old, she was a person on a mission: she seemed to know exactly where she was going in life, with a sort of inward direction driving her. I imagined that Carole would become the president of something when she grew up or a leader such as Dorothy Height or Mary McLeod Bethune.

My best friend, Cynthia Wesley, also stood at the mirror in the basement restroom. I loved Cynthia and her family. She had a great sense of humor, made jokes, and laughed all the time. Her father, Claude Wesley, had been my principal at Finley Avenue Elementary School. That day the Reverend had asked Cynthia to be an usher. She stood at the mirror adjusting the handmade dress that perfectly hugged her tiny waist.

The Wesleys were professional people, prim and proper, but not in a stuck-up way. I think Mrs. Wesley had had throat cancer years before, although I'm not sure. No black person I knew would ever say the word
cancer
. When someone slipped and said “the word,” a dark, evil cloud seemed to settle over the room, and everyone started feeling uncomfortable. After Mrs. Wesley's surgery, she wore some sort of voice box with a small microphone attached. She wrapped pretty scarves around her neck to hide the box, and somehow these scarves always matched her beautiful outfits. But I could hear it when she spoke—the raspy breathing, the gathered mucus, the slightly mechanical tone.

I remember the way Mr. Wesley walked into my classroom at school—so proper and organized, but not intimidating. He wanted everything to be just right, much like my father did. He never commented on the racial slurs scribbled on the pages of the used textbooks the white schools gave us when they received new ones. Instead, he poured his energy into the positives. When I won the city, county, and state spelling competitions organized for black students, Mr. Wesley publicly expressed a special pride in me.

The Wesleys' home was neat, orderly, and beautiful. Mrs.Wesley made their drapes, and she made sure their hardwood floors sparkled. We had many of our Cavalettes meetings at the Wesleys' home on Dynamite Hill.

In later years, after the bombing, Mrs. Wesley often reflected on her last conversation with Cynthia on September 15. “That morning,” she told me, “Cynthia walked out the front door, and I called her back into the house. ‘Little lady,' I said, ‘is that your slip I see showing below your dress?' A bit of slip lace hung longer than her dress. I suggested she change it before she left for church.”

* * *

I left the girls in the restroom. “See you later!” I called and started up the stairs.

I hurried because the reports had to be summarized by 10:30, when the classes reconvened and the superintendent would stand up and announce, “Sister Maull will read today's Sunday school summary for us.”