Accordion Crimes (37 page)

“I know how I look. You been tellin me since I could stand up and walk.”

In the eighth grade Ida got her friend Tamonette to go downtown with her and pull white people’s hair. They walked the dusty road holding hands and singing “Jesus on the Phone Line.” They shared a dangerous humor, the sort where laughter must be stifled to avoid implication of guilt. Tamonette was thin and short, felt an obligation to be daring because of her grandmother’s sister, Maraline Brull, who had gone to Paris in the 1920s as a white family’s maid and there learned to fly an airplane, returned to the south as a crop
duster until a white farmer shot her out of the sky in 1931; even then she went fiercely, aiming the diving fiery plane at the man in the field with the rifle, and got him, too.

“What kind of jeans you wearin,” said Tamonette critically.

“Ask me no questions, I’ll tell you the answers. Whatever,” said Ida, twisting to look at the label.

“You fool, that’s the kind got the KKK behind it, making money off us. They behind that fried chicken you like, too. You better get rid them ugly old jeans.”

“Tamonette. How you know?”

“Everybody
know,
fool.”

It was four miles to Féroce and the town frightened them with its cars and sidewalks and traffic lights. Every white person seemed to be looking their way, reading their minds.

“Now listen,” she said. “Only one hair—you don’t be grabbin a whole bunch, just one hair—then if you get called on it you say ‘sorry, ma’am, musta got caught in my watch strap.’”

“You don’t got no watch and me neither.”

“That’s right, but you
say
it. Remember, just one hair. It hurt more.”

Crane’s Department Store with its crowds was the place, but not the main floor near the escalator. They needed to ease away and get lost as soon as they did it. Tamonette pointed with her eyes at the Returns & Check Approval counter, white people crowded five deep waiting to return defective junk they’d wasted money on, all of them jostled together talking and straining to see if the ones at the counter were almost done or not.

Ida picked out two fat women, Number One, with white hair and a man’s face, in a big pink dress, talking to Number Two, potbellied, with violet clustered curls. She edged close enough, heard their talk.

“Doesn’t Elsie belong to the Daughters?”

“Sugar, she did but gave it up.”

“Her family lived in Mississippi for the longest old time.”

“Will you look at the short skirt on that one?”

“Those skirts, I think they’d be cold.”

“Oh, the styles are just awful.”

“I’d like a new dress, but I can’t … well …”

“You know Elsie’s car? I always bump my head when I get in her car.”

“I always do that! I’m glad to hear somebody else besides—
OW!
” Both hands flew up to the back of her head, she looked right and left, up at the ceiling, wondering about a canary loose from the pet department.

“Well, honey, a hairpin must of hit a nerve—”

“Somebody pulled my hair.”

“Well, don’t look at
me,
” said Violet-Curl, affronted, and Tamonette and Ida were two aisles away examining notebooks with mottled black and white covers, not even smiling. (Ida bought one of the twenty-nine-cent notebooks: she had already started scribbling down certain things she heard.) Later they got a girl with long red hair parted in the middle, then changed to another store and Tamonette got a youth with long straggles, and still neither one of them even smiled, not even on the long walk back, though it was pent up in them until they were safe in Ida’s house when they roared and screamed and reenacted sidling up to this one and that one, selecting a single hair, the sharp yank, the drift away with poker faces.

Lamb was home, sewing some old rag of Mrs. Astraddle’s into something Ida or Marie-Pearl would end up wearing and hating. The radio was blasting Reverend Ike, pouring out words like handfuls of BBs: “
I am the greatest, I am stupendous,
I am beyond all little kinds of measuring sticks and ordinary classifications, I am somebody, I am something coming to you like a BULLDOZER and I am looking good and smelling twice as good and I am telling you, get out of the ghet-to and get into the get-mo. Get some money, honey. You and me, we not interested in a harp tomorrow, we interested in a dollar today. We want it NOW. We want it in a big sack or a box or a railroad car but we WANT it. Stick with me. Nothing for free. Want to shake that money tree. There is something missing from that old proverb, you all know it, money is the root of all evil. I say LACK OF money is the root of all evil. The best thing you can do for poor folks is not be one of them. No way, don’t stay. Don’t stay poor, it’s pure manure, and that’s for sure. I want you to know—
”

Lamb believed in Reverend Ike, sucked up the stories of the blind beggar woman who bought one of his prayer cloths and minutes later the phone rang and she had won a Cadillac in a sweepstakes, and a man rewarded with a South Seas cruise or the one who found, on a bus seat, a wallet of crisp bills with no identification. She ordered her own prayer cloth, kept it hidden in the toe of her patent-leather Sunday shoe and waited for it to start working, said every morning “I feel and pray that God will make me rich sometime.”

In 1960 Ida was eighteen and Tamonette, who had dropped out of school in the ninth grade, was as big as a house with her second baby.

Ida graduated and came up against the dead end she had always known was there. There were no jobs for black women except housework and field work. What was the point of social studies and algebra if the best thing out there was scrubbing
some white woman’s rancid toilet? Lamb said something to Mrs. Astraddle, maybe Ida could help in the kitchen, maybe part time, but Mrs. Astraddle glanced at Ida, standing there scowling and swinging her big arms, said, I don’t think so, Lamb.

Her notebooks and papers were all over the house, pages curled, loose papers gliding to the floor when anyone came in off the porch.

“Can’t you get rid of this shit?” said Lamb.

“Shit? You don’t know what I got here, do you?”

“No, and don’t give a care. All I see is one great big papery mess. All I see is you gettin bunches a writin paper from some old woman. What you doin with those old woman papers? Scratchin away instead of lookin for work.”

“It’s stuff they tells me.”

“Better get a job,” her mother said bitterly.

Joe McNeil, Franklin McCain, David Richmond and Ezell Blair, Jr., sat at the Woolworth’s lunch counter up in North Carolina on the first day in February and in a few months sitins were happening everywhere. Ida dumped all the notebooks and papers in a box, pushed it under the bed.

“I
got
to get in it,
got
to get in it. I’m going up to North Car’lina,” said Ida.

“You fool,” said her mother. “You be killed. Those white men kill you. You are not
going.
It’s
college
kids, college students doin these things, black ones and
white
ones, they got it all organized, you just don’t go runnin up and say ‘here I am, little Miss Ida from Bayou Féroce.’ These people got charm bracelets, wearing pink shirts. You don’t know nobody. You don’t be part of no organization. I’m tellin you, it is dangerous, girl, like you don’t even understand—I’m talkin mortal unto death dangerous. You be picked off like a drumstick on a platter.”

“I can march. Can sit in.”

“March? You can’t even walk to the store without complainin. Look at you, solid blubber, you melt before you walk a mile. You haven’t got the sense of a potato bug. I swear, I rather see you scribble on them old woman papers. Go all the way to North Car’lina to get killed.”

“I won’t get killed.”

“Happen every day to quicker, smarter, better-lookin ones than you. I bet that’s what poor Mr. Willie Edwards thought over there in Alabama the first day on his truck route when the Ku Kluxes made him fall off a high bridge and die, hammered his fingers with guns to make him let go. For nothin. I could tell you things all day and into the night but I might as well save my breath.”

(A few years later Redneck Bub, on his way to record his only hit, “Kajun King of the Ku Klux Klan,” “for segregationists only,” broke down in front of Lamb’s house. He came up to the door. “You got a phone?” he said. “Lemme use it.” She knew who he was, let him use it. He drove home the same way two days later, and as he passed Lamb’s house again the worst headache of his life came down and stayed for a week, caused him to throw up in his car.)

Tamonette snorted, choked on smoke. “You don’t need to go to no Montgomery Alabama or no North Car’lina for a sit-in. They having a bad sit-in over in Stifle Mississip’ Saturday afternoon. At the Woolworth’s lunch counter.”

“How you know that?”

“Because me and my mother and the Baptist Young People gonna be in it. Reverend Veazie takin us down there in the church bus and we gonna sit in.”

“You? Girl, since when you interested in sit-ins?” That mealy-mouthed old chicken-eater Reverend Veazie at a sit-in, driving a bus full of people to it, was too much to imagine, and Tamonette’s mother was not the sit-in type. Tamonette herself, a watermelon balanced on a pair of toothpicks, had never said a thing about civil rights in her life.

“I’m coming, then.”

“Don’t say nothin to nobody about it.”

She didn’t dress up; they didn’t make dress-up clothes big enough to fit her. It was the same old men’s blue jeans and men’s work boots unless Lamb sewed up a tent-sized skirt for her, roughly ironed with cat’s-face wrinkles all over. Tamonette couldn’t fit into anything but her old orange maternity dress, but the boys wore their go-to-church jackets and pressed pants, the other girls and women were henned-up in good rayon prints, belted and nyloned, and some wearing hats and even gloves in spite of the heat. Up front she saw Tamonette’s ex-boyfriend, Relton, the father of the unborn baby, sitting beside Moira Root, his long narrow feet in tan boots.

“That why you so interested in the sit-in,” she hissed to Tamonette.

“You hush your mouth. It is NOT.” But it was. Ida’s hard eye saw Tamonette’s coming life, letting men walk all over her, and she’d have one baby after another, wearing the old orange maternity dress until it fell off her, things never working out.

On the church bus Tamonette’s mother and Reverend Veazie, sad-looking and bumpy-cheeked, a white handkerchief sticking up from his pocket like the peak of Everest, sat in front, and Tamonette’s mother started singing as soon as
the bus rolled, a woman who could not resist harmonizing with engine hum.

“Now, they don’t know we coming,” called Reverend Veazie. “Remember, just take a seat and sit quiet and if the waitress ask what you want, order a Co’-Cola. Everybody got fifteen cents to pay for it if she serve it? But she won’t. No matter what they do to you, remember, you can keep ordering your Co’-Cola in a quiet, cool voice. Stay cool. Do not destroy or touch anybody or anything except your Co’-Cola—if she serve it. But she won’t. When the police come and try to force you away, hang on to that counter. Don’t say nothing, just hang on, Jesus Christ with you, make them drag you away, don’t offer no resistance beyond hanging on to the counter. Passive resistance, coolness, think of Reverend King and remember you are doing an important and brave thing for all the brothers and sisters, for your people, for everybody, for the legions of justice, so stay cool.”

It was an ordinary little town, hot, a few big trees, half the main street stores with
FOR RENT
signs in the windows. They went right through, and on the far side of town, past a tire dump, pulled into the Dixie Belle Mall. They were nervous, went in through the Woolworth’s doors in a bunch, the girls gripping their purse handles, the boys stretching their necks in the starched collars and ties, stomach muscles clenched stiff. They walked to the lunch counter in single file. A middle-aged white farmer, dirt-stiff hair and crusty overalls, was swallowing the last of a milk shake, tuna sandwich crusts and blobs of grey fish on his plate. They sat on the empty stools. The man looked up, startled, put some money on the counter and went. The only visible waitress, cleaning the stainless-steel spigots and machine parts, took her time in glancing up in the mirror to see who needed a menu. She froze, did not turn to confront the row of dark faces but scuttled into the kitchen. They could hear her shrill voice asking, where’s Mr.
Seaplane, we got a problem out front, and the cook, old and white-haired, coming to the porthole in the swinging door and looking out, one arm up in the air so the wet grey in his armpit showed, then his face disappeared, replaced by that of the dishwasher and the other waitress.

She could feel the round little seat under her behind, wanted to try its spin capability, but could also feel the crowd gathering in back of them and looked up in the mirror to see them, mostly mean-looking white men, saying, what the hell’s goin on here, what is this, what are them niggers doin, looks like we got us a problem here, hey nig, what you tryin to pull off here. A tall white man in a brown suit came out from the kitchen—the manager or the boss, nobody was sure.

“All right, you niggers, you clear out of here right now or I’ll call the sheriff. I’m gon’ count to three and if you ain’t hightailin it for the door by the count of three I can
guarantee
you some trouble.
One! Two! Three!
” When no one moved except Tamonette’s boyfriend who raised his hand as if he were in school and said, I’ll have a Co’-Cola, please, Brown Suit paid no attention and counted again, said, that does it, I’m calling the sheriff and the cops, and went back into the kitchen. The police were there before the door stopped swinging so they knew he’d called before counting. A voice from the crowd said, you want a Co’-Cola? to Tamonette’s faithless boyfriend. A sandy-headed short man, pack of cigarettes rolled up in his t-shirt sleeve, got behind him, held a bottle of Coca-Cola high, poured it, spattering, on his head.