Authors: Sena Jeter Naslund
Four Spirits (4 page)
“I'm Stella. Did we wake you up with the shooting?”
From the small carved wooden woman comes a cackle that is almost strangling; a bit of drool wets the lower lip, which is not wood after all but moving flesh. “Lord, honey, can't no shooting wake up your old great-great-great (How great Thou art!) grannie.” Old Aunt Charlotte raises her eyes to their father. “Would I got any rest these years if shooting wake me up?”
“Are you dead then?” Ruben asks.
The eyes of Old Auntâor is it Grannie?âwiden. “I don't think so. Lord, are we all dead, Doctor?”
“I don't believe you'll ever die,” Queen Victoria speaks up. Everybody grown-up snickers, even Christopher Columbus over in the corner, looking down. Even Daddy, who will die (so he said privately), and soon (it's a secret), but his laugh sounds wounded.
While she laughs, Charlotte scans the ceiling to check for large dusty wings, but she sees nothing waiting for her that resembles the Angel of Death. Because she won't ever die, Charlotte's glee is greatest of all, and the joke is on all of them.
“I been tried,” Charlotte says.
She sees a moth up there above her bed, but its wings are caught in a cobweb.
“Tried many a time.”
Then her father reaches out his hand to the woman on the bed whose body doesn't even reach halfway to the footboard. When the two-toned hand and the white hand meet, she snatches his to her mouth, quick as a dog taking a bone. She kisses the back of Daddy's hand and murmurs, “Best baby in the world. Best baby, white or black.”
Chris's neck ratchets his chin another notch closer to his chest and Victoria's straight-ahead stare hardens into a stone beam.
The old eyelids slide down like a window shade, then raise up. “Let me touch themâthe next gen-er-a-ti-on.” The doctor's children are nudged closer by both their parents into the reality of family-but-not-family that Dr. Silver not only thinks to be right but holds as being sacred.
The hands of Who-Was-Born-into-Slavery rest on Stella's head.
“Blessed girl!” Old Aunt Charlotte squeaks in high-pitched surprise. Both her hands spring away from Stella's head as though the child's head has burned her old fingers.
Those words shock Stella, zing from her ears down the neck bones, through her body to her smallest toe bone.
Blessed, blessed.
Stella knows that she has been waiting to hear those words. What did it matter that they were spoken in the voice of a mouse? She feels like Samuel in the Bible, as though she should say, “Here am I; send me.” But she steps back and gives her bedside place to her brothers.
No words at all are uttered over the boys, when the brown fingers slowly muss their hair. The boys have been neglected, and she, the girl, has been selected.
Blessed girl!
and the world is illumined as never before, as though sheet lightning has shimmered the dead air. In exchange for her special blessing, her scalp still tingling, though she is ignored in the little sepia room crowded with family and nonfamily, Stella intones aloud in her deepest voice: “Live forever, live forever!”
Though the whole room vibrates with laughter, Charlotte's laughter the highest of all, a descant, Stella knows that she and the woman sitting up in bed have exchanged gifts better than birthday presents. And she knows Charlotte knows, too.
Finally Charlotte asks feebly, “Did you fire the pistol, Mrs. Doctor?”
Stella watches her mother shaking her head from side to side.
“I didn't think so,” Charlotte says.
Mrs. Doctor would never shoot the pistol, and the world was the same as always. Charlotte closes her eyes, exhausted by her foray back into the realm of the living who could never be real. Except for Doctor. Oh, he was real from the moment he came out of the woman place, covered with white cheese.
Charlotte asks politely, “How Miss Krit and Miss Pratt?” While Doctor tells her his sisters in Birmingham are fine, Charlotte wonders,
And where did Mrs. Doctor come from?
She looks like a gypsy. Dark, but not colored-folks dark.
Swarthy
âthat is the word Charlotte wants. It comes drifting up through the decades in her mind, comes to her from fifty, no sixty, maybe seventy years ago.
Swarthy-complected
. But all these children, fair as Doctor.
“Fairest Lord Jeeee-sus.”
Once Charlotte had stood outside the Methodist church whose Sunday school and service were faithfully attended by the Silver family, and Charlotte
heard the church organ swell up like the blooming of a gigantic flower, and that was what the white folks sang.
“Fair are the mead-ows, Fair-er still the woodlandsâ¦. Je-susis fair-er, Je-sus is pur-er.”
Fair-er? young Charlotte had wondered, fair-er than the li-ly? And Charlotte had pictured not a lily, or Jesus, but a giant magnolia blossom, purest of whites with its overpowering fragrance, growing up from the boards of the country church, swelling bigger and bigger like organ music in their midst, suffocating their hearts.
Nostrils flare, lips clamp shut, the old woman sucks in a tremendous breath as though she would take in all the air of the room for herself. Stella hears a hound, out on the breezeway, thump its tail against the boards as though now it is satisfied. Magnolia perfumes the air.
In the distance the crack of a gun splits through the trees, the sound reverberating from the low hills again and again till Stella almost wishes it would not die but last forever in its loneliness.
“Rifle,” her father says.
Dreaming now, Charlotte sees a whole battalion of ghost soldiers step out of the trunks of trees. The boys in gray have been hiding there, and now, transparent, they march forever through the woods; facing them, other soldiers emerge from trees on other hillsides, march to close, to aim, and finally, always, to fire at one another.
Mama is humming a lullaby for Charlotte, as though they were all at home in Birmingham. All throat, she is singing a song that breaks Stella's heart, that always breaks Stella's heart in the same place. Just Mama's voice in a language that sounds like Stella's celloâYiddish, which only Mama knows.
Aye, yi, yi, yi, yihâ¦Ah, yi, yi, yi, yih
â¦Mama's song becomes a violin whispering sorrow, without a syllable from any language.
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ON THE WAY HOME,
the blue car with the Silver family insideâa car not so much like an egg as like a nest equipped with seatsâruns into bad weather. Wind and rain lash the car, and Stella's mother sings “La Cucaracha” and “Frère Jacques” to keep their spirits up, but Stella wishes they were home sitting on the worn red rug singing while Mama played the pianoâor even just played her own musicâChopin and Mozart. Instead, lightning jitters before their wide eyes, and the terrifying wind bends the trees beside the road. Like a long finger, the cyclone reaches down to tip the car and make it roll over and over, down the bank, till all those inside are broken and blood is everywhere before the car comes to rest.
After the storm passes and the highway patrolman frantically circling the crushed car calls out, “Anybody alive?” only Stella shrieks, “I am! I am!”
In the hospital, all of Stella's desire is to go back to her own time of shooting trees.
Daddy's arm is around her. One, two, three, fourâshe hears the shots they fired, all except Mama, in the woods at Helicon. And the past is real again.
FROM MANY PLACES IN THE VALLEY THAT CRADLED BIRMINGHAM,
you could lift up your eyes, in 1963, to see the gigantic cast-iron statue of Vulcan, the Roman god of the forge, atop his stone pedestal. Silhouetted against the pale blue skyline, atop Red Mountain, Vulcan held up a torch in one outstretched, soaring arm. In other mountain ridges surrounding the city, the ore lay hidden, but the city had honored this outcropping of iron ore named Red Mountain, as a reminder of the source of its prosperity (such as it wasâmost of the wealth of the steel industry was exported to magnates living in the great cities of the Northeast), by raising Vulcan high above the populace, south of the city.
Fanciful and well-educated children liked to pretend that Vulcan, who looked north, had a romance with the Statue of Liberty, also made of metal. But
she
was the largest such statue in the world, and he was second to her, and that violated the children's sense of romance, for they understood hierarchy in romance to be as natural as hierarchy among whites and blacks.
Looking down from Vulcanâhis pedestal housed stairs, and around the top of the tower ran an observation platformâyou could see the entire city of Birmingham filling the valley between the last ridges of the Appalachian mountain chain as it stretched from high in the northeast to southwest.
In early May 1963, Stella's freckle-faced boyfriend, a scant half inch taller (but therefore presentable as a boyfriend, if she wore flats), had persuaded her to drive from their college, across the city, avoiding the areas where Negroes were congregating for demonstrations, to Red Mountain. From the
observation balcony just below Vulcan's feet, Stella and Darl hoped for a safe overview.
I believe if outsiders would just stay out
â¦Darl had told her.
Let Birmingham solveâ¦Don't you?
But Stella hadn't answered. Instead, she'd said,
I'd like to see. I'm afraid to go close.
We can go up on Vulcan,
Darl had offered, for he was a man who wanted to accommodate women; a man who loved his mother. Stella had met her.
He'd brought along his bird-watching binoculars. Darl could recognize birds by their songs alone; he could imitate each sound;he kept a life list of all the birds he had ever seen. His actual name was Darling, his mother's maiden name, and though Stella dared not call him
Darling,
she longed to do so.
“Do you know the average altitude for the flight of robins?” he asked.
A spurt of laughter flew from between Stella's lips. She imagined the giggle as though it had heft and was falling rapidly down from the pedestal, down the mountain, into the valley.
“I don't have the foggiest idea,” she said.
“About thirty inches.”
“What a waste!” she said. “To have the gift of flight and to fly so low.”
She thought Darl might laugh at her sentenceâhalf serious, half comicâbut he didn't.
Stella glanced up the massive, shining body of Vulcan, past his classical and bare heinie, up his lifted arm to his unilluminated torch. At a distance, she had often observed that the nighttime neon “flame” made the torch resemble a Popsicle. Cherry red, if someone had died in an auto accident; lime green, otherwise. Even this close and looking up his skirt, Vulcan's frontal parts were completely covered by his short blacksmith's apron.
Though it was May and the police were already into short sleeves, on the open observation balcony, Darl and Stella were lifted above the heat into a layer of air with cool breezes. Stella wished she'd worn a sweater. Darl put his arm around herâ
just for warmth,
she told herself with determined naïveté, but she thrilled at his encircling arm diagonally crossing her back. His fingers fitted the spaces between her curving ribs. They were alone up in the air; they weren't some trashy couple smooching in public.
Yes, this was what she had been wanting. Perhaps for years. Someone's arm around her, making her safe.
Stella knew her breasts were terribly small. If they had been plumper, Darl's
fingertips might have found the beginnings of roundness.
Sex, sex, sex,
she thought. His hand slid down to her waist; her mind careened.
Do I feel slender enough there? Inviting?
With his other hand, Darl trained the binoculars on the city. With one finger, he adjusted the ridged wheel between the twin eyepieces. The black leather strap looped gracefully around the back of his neck.
Darl was the complete darling: a lover of nature, a lover of music, a lover of God, considerate, a gentlemanâif only he loved her. And best of all he was an organist, a master of the king of instruments. When Darl played Bach's “O Sacred Head, Now Wounded,” creating his own improvisations, Stella felt understood. It was she who had been wounded, and the music was what she missed and needed. The way Darl played promised wholeness, profundity. Almost it seemed that the spirit of her father was hovering around Darl and her on this high place.
She placed her hand just below Darl's waist; she shivered as though to say “I only seek closeness for warmth, against the chill.” Her palm loved the unfamiliar grain of the cloth of his trousers, and underneath, the firm flesh of his buttock just beginning to flare. How tantalized her hand felt, the hand itself wishing it dare move down to know the curve of his butt. She glanced again at the side of his cheek, the binoculars trained on the city. His hair was a rich brown, and his freckles almost matched his hair.
She wanted to brush the field glasses aside, to stand in front of him, for his eyes to look into hers and see in her more than a city's worth of complex feeling, then she would tilt her face up a bare half inch and kiss his lips, her whole front against his whole front. They would lose their bodies, become a shared streak of warmth.
Darl pointed to the rectangular finger of the Comer Building, twenty-one stories tall, Birmingham's lonely skyscraper. Down in the valley, the sweep of buildings was scarved with a haze from the steel mills. After finding the Comer Building, they looked west and north, searching for the parksâWoodrow Wilson Park adjacent to the beautiful library (only for whites) and a few blocks away, Kelly Ingram Park, for Negroes (no library). The demonstrations were launched toward city hall from the Negro park. But trees, already in full leaf, blocked their view, even with binoculars, of the violent attack of Bull Connor's police on the freedom demonstrators. Birmingham appeared as peaceful, from this distance, as when, long ago, Stella had stood here with her mother and brothersâone of their day trips.
Suddenly Stella felt like a coward. If she wanted to see, she should have the nerve to go downtown.
If she wanted to participate
â¦but the idea frightened her too much.
Darl said quietly, “May the Lord bless you and keep you⦔ He was saying it over the whole city, the Methodist benediction. “May the Lord lift up his countenance upon you⦔ Darl was trying, with words, to soothe the hidden unrest and violence of his city. It was one of the things she loved about Darl, his sincere belief. Her own belief was in chaos. Down below, the confrontation was hidden completely from their view, but Darl was addressing both sides someplace in the distance, under the greenery.
“We should go down,” Darl said quietly. “You're cold.”
“Amen,” she answered, and she let herself smile. She imagined somebody with a tape measure, holding it, impossibly, from a flying robin down to the ground. She loved the ideaâso unexpected, silly but fascinating, to juxtapose a flying robin and a floppy yellow tape measure.
What was humor?
one of their professors had posed, and he had answered,
nondangerous, unexpectedly inappropriate juxtaposition.
But as they began to descend the spiral stairs inside Vulcan's tower, Stella grew sober. She thought of the force of the powerful fire hoses turned on the Negroes peacefully congregating and marching for equality. She thought of the police dogs, standing on their hind legs, mouths open, snarling and barking.
In Birmingham, there was no romance between Vulcan and Lady Liberty.