Finding Bluefield (5 page)

“What you looking up, Nicky?” Lucinda called from the register where she was adding up receipts, just as she had done after every lunch for eight years since her husband died, leaving her in charge.

Nicky didn’t look up. “The Squire. I wanted to see what’s playing.”

“I got the paper right here,” Lucinda said, swinging at a fly.

Nicky put down the phone book and went over to look through Lucinda’s newspaper.

“You going tonight?” Lucinda asked as Nicky checked the listings.

“Nothing good.” Nicky put down the paper and turned to leave.

“
Mr. Ed’s
on tonight,” Stella called. “I love that horse.”

“See y’all tomorrow,” Nicky said and stepped outside. The air was so still it made things quiet. She sat in her car making up her mind. At a gas station, Nicky checked the phone book and wrote down the address of the First Baptist Church. Twenty-six years in Bluefield and Nicky didn’t know her way around the North End. She’d been by it and through it, but not in it. Never had a reason to stop. The North End was a neighborhood of small, single-story houses, originally built for GIs, white GIs, on their return from WW II. Gradually, post-war prosperity and progeny sent most of those families in search of newer and larger homes on the south side of town and the North End became home to the many black families who had come to town to work in the new factories and services of Bluefield’s expanding economy. Nicky found Jefferson Street and spotted the church. She turned into the parking lot and turned off the Bel Air. The sanctuary doors were wide-open, and the sounds of the choir practicing spilled out of the building. When Nicky’s father died a year earlier, Nicky and Carol-Ann had sung together at the funeral. Nicky hadn’t been to church since. She took a deep breath, climbed out of her car, and up the steps into the chapel. When they saw her enter, the choir stopped singing. The reverend looked over his shoulder and then turned back to his choir. He started them on a hymn and walked toward Nicky. He ushered her outside and shut the doors behind him.

“They sound beautiful, Reverend,” Nicky said. “I used to sing in the choir.”

“Is there something I can help you with, ma’am?” the reverend said.

“I hope so.” Nicky pulled the flyer out of her pocket and showed it to the reverend as if it were proof of some sort. “I’m looking for bus tickets for the march on Washington. But if this is a bad time…”

“This is fine,” he said, “I have tickets.”

“Are these the only buses leaving from Bluefield?” Nicky asked.

“These buses are integrated, if that’s what you’re asking. You won’t be the only white folk on the bus.”

Nicky bought four tickets, took two, and asked the reverend to give the other two away.

*

Back home, over dinner, Nicky showed Barbara the tickets while she told her about driving through the North End and about the details of packing food and clothes for the trip. Barbara listened quietly and said nice things about Dr. King and the other organizers, but she wasn’t going to join Nicky for this one.

“It’s about civil rights,” Nicky said. “How do you not support civil rights?”

“Who said I didn’t?”

“I know you do. So why won’t you come with me?”

“Look, I’m glad Dr. King is shaking things up and taking his message to Washington, but he’s a reverend, and at the end of the day, preachers just don’t march for dykes or with dykes. black, white, Christian, Jewish, rich, or poor.”

“But this is not a queer thing,” Nicky said, lighting a cigarette.

“No. Not now. But the moment someone finds out you’re queer, then it quickly becomes a queer thing.”

“No one has to know. I don’t have to tell everyone I meet who I sleep with.”

“Because you can’t,” Barbara said.

“Because I don’t have to. Blacks can’t hide that they’re black. Does the hospital have a black doctor?”

“They wouldn’t have hired me as a queer doctor.”

“But you know how many black doctors you work with. You don’t know how many queer doctors.”

Barbara put down her fork and started to clear the table. “Anyway, I’m not saying don’t go. I’m not even saying I’m right. I’m just saying I can’t go with you.”

“And I’m just saying that I would like us to go together.” Nicky stood and put her arms around Barbara’s neck. “I think it will be fun.”

*

A few days later, early on a Wednesday morning, Nicky slipped out of bed without waking Barbara. She grabbed her clothes and made her way downstairs to shower. Dried and dressed, she pushed open the screen door and stepped outside under cover of a moonlit sky. Three in the morning and the heat had barely let up. Nicky tossed her bag onto the backseat of her Bel Air, slipped behind the wheel, and headed to meet her bus to DC.

The parking lot at the First Baptist Church was filling up like Easter as Nicky guided her yellow Chevy into a parking spot and shut the engine. The Bel Air’s top was down, and Nicky lifted herself up and sat on the driver’s seat headrest. Her cigarette glowed in the darkness like one of the many stars lighting the sky that night. Someone who didn’t know better, Nicky thought, someone who didn’t know that the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. was going to be speaking in Washington, DC, later that day, would have been surprised by all the activity in the parking lot of the First Baptist Church of Bluefield, Virginia’s, first free Negro congregation. If they didn’t know about the march, then they might have supposed that people were gathering for some moonlight revival. Except, they would have had to wonder what so many white folks were doing peacefully in the North End. At night. But, Nicky thought, you’d have to be real young, real old, or real sorry, not to know about the march. All of which might explain why Bluefield’s three police cars were parked directly across the street from the unlit lot. No one, it seemed to Nicky, paid them any mind. At least not now, not at this moment.

Nicky got out of her car. People were dressed, she thought. Sunday best dressed. Going to make history, how you want people remembering you, dressed. Her own choice of clothes was certainly not church-attending attire. But it would do. Nicky lit a cigarette and leaned on the hood, her left heel resting on the front fender as the swelling sound of large engines quieted the crowd. Three buses, each marked with the words
Charter: Washington DC
, turned onto Jefferson Street. They maneuvered into the lot, coming to a rest alongside each other, relaxed and ready, their diesel engines purring in the moonlight, their golden parking lights glowing in the still of the night. The drivers quickly began the process of boarding passengers. As families of several generations made their way into the bus, cordialities were traded, inquiries into one’s health and relatives, comments on the weather, a hat, were all exchanged on the way down the aisle. With each passenger, the process took just that much longer.

And my family, Nicky thought. Daddy’s gone. I don’t remember my mother. My only sister lives way across the country, and I haven’t seen her since Daddy died. Even with all the birthday and Christmas presents I send, Carol-Ann’s kids don’t really know who I am. Barbara and I are family, but we’re the only ones who think so.

Nicky stepped on her cigarette, lifted her bag, and joined the line. She handed the driver her ticket and climbed the steps into the bus. The smells instantly covered her, and she was reminded of all those revivals Carol-Ann forced her to attend. She made her way down the aisle to the rear of the bus and took one of the remaining seats next to a young boy who was trying to rub sleep from his eyes. It didn’t work, and as soon as the buses started rolling across Virginia, he fell asleep using the window as a pillow. Nicky ate a peach.

As the sun came out, Nicky followed a hawk circling outside her window. Up and down the aisles, passengers began to stir. The bus pulled onto Highway 11 and joined an unplanned caravan of buses from all over the Southland, from Virginia and Georgia and Alabama and Tennessee and Mississippi and Louisiana.

Softly at first, a woman sitting in the front of the bus, began to hum a familiar melody that spread gently over the riders. It didn’t take long before several other women took up the song.

Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound

Two women took to the aisles. Nicky sang along softly and thought about her father’s funeral service when she and Caron-Ann sang together. Nicky and Carol-Ann had been part of their church choir from when they were little girls. They were both sopranos, but only Nicky got the solos. Their father drove them to and from church for practice, for services, but never came in. He was always there, waiting across the street in his truck, but he never came in. Their mother would have wanted them to keep singing, he told them. Weeknights, after dinner, while they washed dishes, her father would light a cigarette and sit at the kitchen table reading the newspaper while he listened to them sing.

That saved a wretch like me

After he fell and broke some ribs, they found the cancer. By then, it was too late and he faded fast. She and Carol-Ann buried him in the family plot at the edge of the farm.

I once was lost, but now am found

When Carol-Ann went away to college, Nicky stopped going to church. After Carol-Ann got married and moved to California, they hardly ever had a chance to sing together. Until the funeral.

Was blind, but now I see

When Carol-Ann’s third child came, it got harder for Carol-Ann to make the trip east, and they hadn’t seen each other since their father’s funeral. Nicky was going to have to go west if she wanted to see Carol-Ann.

“Orphans,” Carol-Ann had whispered to Nicky during the funeral service.

“What?” Nicky giggled.

“We’re orphans now.”

“We’re too old to be orphans,” Nicky had said.

“You’re never too old for some things.”

*

In DC, Nicky left her fellow travelers and made her own way toward the Capitol where a large crowd had already gathered. She drifted toward a row of tables full of pamphlets, buttons, T-shirts. One table made her stop.

“My father had a table like this,” she said, rubbing the surface.

“What happened?” a man with a thick Brooklyn accent responded.

Nicky looked up. “He died last year.”

“I’m sorry. But what happened to the table?”

“Nothing. My father and his friends used it to play cards. Mostly, they’d eat and drink too much and talk too loud.”

“Sure. That’s the point of playing cards with friends.”

“They always played at our house. Probably because my father didn’t have a wife. When Jay Johnson died, they got Sonny to take his place, but when my father died, the game stopped.”

“Why didn’t it move?”

“I don’t know. It’s been over a year since my dad died, and those men still check up on me. I should ask the guys if they want the table.”

“Maybe they want you to take his place,” he said.

“Play cards with a woman? No. You don’t know those guys.” Nicky laughed. “Maybe they want to keep the game going at my house.”

“My Shirley played cards on this table. She died eight years ago.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Since then, this table has been leaned on by thousands of people. Seen all of New York. Well, not Staten Island. Been in all fourteen cars I’ve had in the last eight years. The thing is…” he spoke more softly at this point, making Nicky lean toward him, “this table has had enough pamphlets, flyers, petitions, buttons, letters, bumper stickers, and collection cans on it to have solved just about every problem this world faces. But who’s going to listen to a table? Right? Still, you do what you can.”

“Yes,” Nicky repeated. “You do what you can.”

A thickly bearded man stepped up and began to inquire about the merits of a certain petition, and Nicky took the opportunity to slip away. She found a place to sit and rest and wait. Things were happening. The country was changing. No way to deny it. Be part of the change or be in its way. Kennedy in the White House. King in Washington. People in the streets.

During the short march from the Capitol to the reflecting pool, no one seemed to be in any hurry. By the time Nicky arrived, the speakers had started, and all the grass on both sides of the reflecting pool, and every shaded spot along the street, was covered with people. Nicky was tired, hungry, and thirsty, and she needed a bathroom. She looked at the lines for the portable latrines and started walking away from the Lincoln Memorial. She took out a biscuit and kept walking as she passed the Washington Monument. At the Smithsonian, she found an empty ladies’ room without a line. Refreshed, she strolled through the floor looking for the Wright brothers’ plane. As a girl, Nicky would beg and beg to go up in the crop duster, but her father never allowed it. Someday, she thought, looking at the Wright Flyer’s wings, I’m going to learn to fly.

“You like planes?” a man said, startling Nicky.

“I like that plane,” Nicky said.

“I’m here for the march,” he said. “Came all the way from California. Are you here for the march?”

“For the bathroom,” she said.

Nicky started to walk away.

“You from DC?” he asked.

“No,” she said and moved away. It sure has been a long time since someone tried to pick me up, Nicky thought.