Waiting for Augusta (19 page)

Just as we passed a bank with a clock declaring the time to be 7:32 a.m., Noni barked with delight and pointed ahead. Up the street a block, gathering around a thick tree near a building's parking lot, was a group of people. Behind them, sitting there like Augusta had decided to throw us a bone, was a long table filled with food.

Half a block farther and I could see it was doughnuts,
fruit, jugs of juice and steaming coffee. A big, clear jar marked
DONATIONS
sat there as well. My step lightened as we approached the crowd, which we now saw was focused on a tall man in an ugly white suit, a blue shirt, and a black tie. He held a clipboard and had slicked-back hair, two things that reminded me of the physical education teacher at Hilltop Primary—the one who'd laughed when the boys called me things that I'd never repeat to my mother, let alone my father.

“Real casual,” Noni whispered, patting the backpack that I'd taken over carrying. “Grab and go.”

“ ‘Grab and go'?” I whispered back. “Who
are
you, anyway? Some kind of professional thief? Didn't anyone ever give you a sense of right and wrong?”

“Says the boy who stole a money egg from a chicken. And yes, I was given a sense of right and wrong. That alone would be fine if I was just a soul floating around, but I was given a body, too, and that body was given a stomach, and that stomach wants one or three of those doughnuts. Wanderers have to eat, you know.”

“I'm hungry too.” It was fortunate that wandering guidelines worked in favor of empty stomachs. I wanted badly to catch my first glimpse of Augusta National, but the chances of us sneaking in during the day weren't good, considering the fact that ticket holders would already be lined up and we still hadn't seen the course and we'd need time for planning
our approach once we saw what we were dealing with.

The second day of the Masters would have to be played without Daddy there.

He hadn't spoken since our talk the night before, and I was worried that he'd disappeared again. I'd figured on asking him the best way of getting on the course. I'd pictured us talking strategy together, like a captain and soldier, huddled together close. But it looked like Noni and I might be on our own.

“Okay, let's get some food. Be careful.” It wouldn't do to draw the attention of some runaway-grabbing adult, so we'd need to be cautious or we'd never see the outside of the golf course, let alone the inside.

Just as we arrived at the table, the crowd broke up and people began mingling among one another with a low hum like a beehive, waiting for the queen to tell them to get to work.

Slick Hair came over right as Noni was lifting a doughnut, lightly tapping her hand with a chuckle. “Now, darlin', I know fighting for justice can strike hunger into a person's belly, but this food's for after.” He patted her on the head, not noticing the stink face Noni set on him.

“After what?” she said.

A woman came around the table, dipping beneath the plastic sheet and coming up with a stack of signs—thin, pale wood lengths attached to white cardboard rectangles. She
handed one to each of us. “Here you go, children. I don't believe you went to school with my Catherine and Lucille. What are your names?”

“Byron Nelson,” I told her.

Noni raised a hand. “Bridget Nelson.”

“Your mama let you out of school for this?” she asked us both. She passed the stack of signs to another woman, who distributed them among the crowd of men and women, all around Mama's age.

“I'm taking a break,” I said. Following her eyes to Daddy's backpack with the bucket hanging off, I added, “We're going camping this weekend.”

“I don't go to school,” Noni said.

The lady nodded in a knowing way and straightened Slick Hair's tie. “We've taken our girls out, too. But where are your parents? Did you come alone to help the cause, bless your hearts? This'll be perfect—you see those news cameras over there?” A shadow passed her face, and she jerked around and grabbed Slick Hair's hand. “Honey, they're interviewing the Negroes over there! You better start.”

He straightened his tie and marched across the parking lot.

“Now,” the woman said to us, “you get right up in front and wave those signs, okay? They'll see how our children's education is being taken away.” She looked up, distracted. “Listen, you tell your folks about the new school that's opening. Freedom Academy, we're calling it.” She turned and her face lit
up with excitement. “Here come the buses! Places, everyone!”

Noni shrugged and moved aside a stack of newspapers to reach for a plate of doughnuts while everyone was facing the other way, surging like a soft wave toward the building. She shoved a chocolate one in her mouth, passed me one, and put a string of grapes in the backpack.

“I guess we'll get more after whatever we're doing. I'm not above working for my food.” She shouldered a sign and joined the group, which was approaching the steps of what I now recognized as a school. Slick Hair had gotten himself a bullhorn and was giving a speech about fighting against tyranny and injustice.

A dull aching started in my throat, the lump growing thicker as six school buses turned the corner and approached the parking lot. I stared down at the sign in my hand, turning it over to see the words and having a flashback to the first time I'd seen the insides of an animal, bloody and wrong and nothing like the way it looked from the outside.

I scanned the pile of newspapers, and two headlines caught my eye:
FORCED BUSING LEADS MORE PARENTS TO WITHDRAW STUDENTS
and
EMPTY CLASSROOMS: DESEGREGATION ORDER PROVES LARGELY INEFFECTIVE
. A photograph showed a classroom, empty of students except for a colored boy and a colored girl, seated next to each other in the second row from the front. A lone white boy sat in the front row, at the opposite end of the classroom. The children
looked to be about my age. Another photograph showed people standing together, holding signs. It was just like Hilltop, when the bus that picked up high schoolers started picking up the older kids from our colored neighborhood. And when May and the other students came to my school.

The Augusta buses came to a halt, and I saw immediately how they were only half full. The newspaperman had turned away from a colored woman and was gesturing to an opening bus door. Children started exiting.

In Hilltop, there had been a big rally of white parents and a man with a bullhorn just like Slick Hair's. I could hear the sound of speeches all the way down the road, but by the time I got to Hilltop Primary, those parents were already marching down the street, taking their boys and girls to the newly formed Hilltop Christian Academy, set up in the old church building. I remember the look on the faces of two of my friends as their mamas hauled them off. When I'd waved, it was like I'd already gone invisible to them. Like I'd never been there at all. And some of them had left their signs behind on the ground. Signs like these.

I pictured May walking past these signs, the way she must have done in Hilltop.

“Noni!” Dropping the sign, I ran over to her, but she'd already dropped hers, her eyes panning over the other posters' words, a confusion, then a sickness coming to her face that let me know she felt exactly like me.

GO HOME, NEGROES!

CUT THE COLOREDS—WHITES HAVE RIGHTS

And the worst one of all, the one that had the most hate screaming from it, was a photograph of Martin Luther King and the words,
NEGROES WON'T RULE THIS SCHOOL: YOUR KING IS DEAD
.

I knew about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and how he got killed for trying to change things. I was in first grade, and Miss Stone told us the day after that it was an awful thing and it was okay to feel sad or angry or scared. I wondered if May had felt that way. I'd never asked.

“Here, honey,” said Slick Hair's wife, putting the sign back in Noni's hand with a smile as the first bus drove away and the second one began unloading. “Can you believe all these Negro children? And to think, they were gonna bus my girls across Augusta to some horrible colored school, in the name of desegregation. It just sickens me to pieces.”

Noni stared at Slick Hair's wife, stared at the signs, stared at a colored woman being interviewed. There were four or five other colored parents standing with her, and I found myself thinking of Mrs. Talbot and wondering whether she had stood like this outside Hilltop Primary on the day May started school. The crowd was quiet enough to hear the interviewer ask the woman why she wanted her child to go to school there and for us to hear the answer.

“As I understand it, this school has books that my son's school doesn't,” she said. “They've got other things, too. Better things. I just want my son to have the same opportunities. Equal opportunities.”

Equal.

A few years back, Mr. James Walter, one of our Pork Heaven customers, started talking about some business that had happened in Birmingham when I was just a baby. He said he didn't see why things had to change and that keeping things separate but equal was working just fine. Mama told him that it was easy to say that from where he sat and then said she was sorry, but we'd run out of lemon cake, which we hadn't. We kept being out of food that he wanted most, and eventually he took his appetite elsewhere.

I'd wondered about Mr. Walter's chair for months, staring at the spot in the café where he'd sat—a magic chair where it was easy to say things. I thought maybe Daddy and I could sit down and eat one day, and I'd sit in that chair. When I'd finally sucked down enough nerve to ask Mama about it, she'd said there was no magic chair. The thing that man was sitting in was his skin color. She said being white had made things easier for me, too.

The interviewer turned away from the mother and began talking once again to the camera. Noni had dropped her sign again, and Slick Hair's wife picked it up, confused. She reached it out again.

“I'm not your toilet seat,” Noni told her, knocking the sign to the ground.

The woman blinked. “I beg your pardon?”

“Don't try to plop your ugly inside of me.” She glared and then tore a few signs out of shocked adults' hands, throwing them to the ground before grabbing my hand. “Let's go.” She was in a fury, her body coiled up, fists tight. She pulled me through the crowd, across the parking lot, and over the street from where the white parents had been having their meeting a moment before. She dropped under a tree, and I sat beside her.

Noni breathed slowly, her eyes staring at the crowd. “I'm not sorry for what I said to that lady,” Noni said. “They're nothing but bullies. All of them. I'm glad I never went to school. Their kids are probably just like them. They probably helped make those signs.”

The buses were almost empty and the television cameras would leave soon. The show would be over and those people would be coming over for refreshments, like they were at some kind of garden party.

“Bullies,” I agreed, thinking about how Willy Walter had beaten me up on multiple occasions, for no good reason. How he'd stood over me after the big blows and shoved me down every time I'd tried to stand, until I'd been too exhausted to do anything but lie there on the ground and pray he'd go away.

There'd been one day in the cafeteria when his sister, Ann, had offered May Talbot a birthday cupcake during school lunch and then waited until she'd gotten close to smear it on her dress. The smear made me so angry, but I hadn't done a thing. I'd been afraid of what might happen if I got angry, so I just stared, feeling shaky, which was maybe as bad as laughing like some boys and girls had done.

I'd been a coward that day. Anger needs bravery to go with it. But bravery, the part where you try to put your anger and fear and frustration into doing something, into changing something, that was the hard part. Looking at the face of a girl stepping off that bus, her brown eyes as deep and her back as straight as May Talbot's, I was ashamed of myself. May was brave every single day. She had to be.

I wanted to be brave, too.

Maybe May needed a friend as much as I did. Maybe she was sad about Miss Stone leaving, too. Maybe I was less mean than the kids who whispered taunts at school, but I wasn't showing it. Maybe there was a part of me that still saw her skin color instead of just seeing May.

Daddy always said that golf was the game that most tested a man's character, because you had to call penalties on yourself. There were moments when no fellow golfer or official would be there to make sure you followed the rules. You had to admit mistakes and violations your own self, then try your best to play better.

“Noni?”

“Yeah?”

“How do you change a person's mind about something?”

She chewed at a piece of her dress. “I don't know.”

I didn't know either. And maybe trying to change people's minds wasn't enough. You had to change their eyes and their heart, too.

The sky above issued a grumble like a hungry man's belly, and a thought struck me; maybe I couldn't make the world a fairer place that day, but I could think of one way to make a small change in the life of one man. And maybe that was a good start. I unstrung the bucket from my backpack and handed it to my fellow runaway.

“Noni,” I said quietly. “On the count of three, I'm gonna get up and grab that big bowl of fruit. I want you to take this bucket and fill it with as many doughnuts as you can. Then run.”

Noni's grimace turned into a curious grin. “Where are we running, Benjamin Putter?”

“We're going back to the river.”

I
t was several minutes before the river man looked up from the fruit bowl. Half the grapes and apple slices had been eaten, the oranges handed back with the explanation that they didn't suit him much. He hadn't touched the doughnuts yet, but had them tucked between his legs. Noni and I sat beside him under the big oak, watching the fishing lines dangle in the water. “Thanks,” he finally managed. “My name's Tom Barry.”