Chapter 5
Dandelion Wine
“Oh,” Theresa said. “It wasn’t that much. I just sat down and wouldn’t get up, and I still don’t know what got into me, what made me do it that day. I guess it must have been a lot of things that added up.
“One thing was the legality, the search the NAACP was making for a viable case to take to court. Other colored people that year had been arrested for not getting out of their seats to make room for colorless people, but there was always something wrong in the case that might have made it hard to defend.
“One case was Claudette Colvin. She and an elderly woman beside her both refused to get up. But, when the driver went to get the police, the elderly woman got off the bus, leaving Claudette sitting alone. The elderly woman might have been a good case, but Claudette was pregnant, and she wasn’t married. So our legal beagles left that case alone, so people wouldn’t say Negroes were promiscuous. That was, any more than they did already, to rationalize their raping Negro daughters.
“But I think it was more the driver that made me do it then. I’d had a run-in with him before, about that business about having to get on through the front door to pay one’s dime and then get off and get back on through the back door to sit down, if you were lucky enough to find an empty back-seat. It was raining, and I had no inclination to get back out in the rain just to get back on. So, in that earlier episode, I just went on back and sat down. I mean, I just did, as in justice, not injustice.
“I thought the driver might have overlooked the craziness because of the rain. I’m always trying to give everybody the benefit of the doubt, but I’m often wrong and was that time. He got out of his seat and came back and ordered me out the front door to get back on at the back. That time I said nothing, but I did a little something that probably made him mad. I got up, but I dropped my purse near the front door.
“And I sat down in a front seat to pick it up, and I didn’t hurry about it, either. The driver’s face was nearly as dark as mine by the time I got out the door, but the color was closer to purple. So I wasn’t at all surprised that he drove away before I could get to the back door. I kind of enjoyed my walk home in the rain, since I dearly love rain, as you know. But Mama and Raymond were pretty upset.
“Anyway, it was that same driver this time. I’d tried to avoid him since that earlier incident, waiting for the next bus whenever I saw him driving one. But this night it was kind of late, and I’d been walking shopping for Christmas presents, and so my feet and I were tired. So I was paying more attention to my feet than to the driver when I got on the bus. I just dropped my dime in the box and went back and sat down.
“I sat in a front seat of the colored section, beside a man sitting by the window. A few seats in the white section were empty then, but they all filled up after a few more stops. At the Empire Theater, a man got on and walked back to me and stood there looking down at me and the man beside me. The man beside me moved to get out of the seat, and I moved my knees aside to let him out.
“But, after he was out, I moved my knees and the rest of me over by the window and just sat there, looking out at the front of the theatre. The white man stopped staring at me and turned to look at the driver, who was already watching through his inside rear-view mirror. He popped out of his seat without waiting for any words from that other passenger, and he walked back to us.
“He had a gun. He had a pistol in a holster. I hardly moved, still facing out the window, but I’d moved my eyes enough to see him staring into the rear-view mirror and storming back with his gun. He didn’t point his pistol at me or even pull it out of the holster, but I had to wonder why a bus-driver thought he needed to pack a pistol, and why the police let anyone do that on a public bus.
“’Are you going to get up?’ he asked me, standing shoulder to shoulder with the white passenger.
“’No,’ I said, and I still didn’t take my face from the window, but just sat there, waiting.
“’I’ll have you arrested,’ he said.
“’You may do that,’ I answered.
“Neither did he waste any words. He took his pistol to the payphone in front of the theatre and spent a nickel to call his boss. I could hear him talking, getting the go-ahead to quell my disturbance by any means necessary. A few minutes later, a patrol car arrived with two policemen in it.
“They got on the bus, and one of them asked me why I hadn’t stood up and given my seat to the white-man. I know it’s rude to try to answer a question with a question, but I felt like being a whole lot ruder than that. So I gave him the same answer I had given the mother of that white kid I knocked from his bike in Pine Level.
“’Why do you all push us around?’ I answered.
“And I remember exactly how he answered, with the frightening authority of any French corporal doing his job. Your friend Lev was right in suggesting that every single soldier of the Reichkrieg was responsible for the Holocaust.
“’I don’t know,’ said the policeman. ‘But the law is the law.’”
Had the policeman looked into Theresa’s eyes, he might have seen the little shining onyx that was about to beat the great white whale. But he didn’t, as I did now, as I listened to the rest of her telling of this dawning of her light here this time.
“So he and his partner arrested me,” she said. “They didn’t beat me or even handcuff me, but they arrested me and gave me nothing not required by their law, not even the drink of water I requested several times, not even that much justice.
“But there was one kind person working in the jail, and I found that also frightening. The nice person was the woman who took me to my cell, locking me alone in one but changing her mind just as she turned away to leave me. She told me another cell had two women in it, and she asked me whether I’d rather not be alone. I told her it didn’t matter much to me, but she moved me anyway, wordlessly.
“I was grateful for that kindness in that dark place, not because I wished not to be alone, but just because it was kindness. I was so grateful that I didn’t ask her for water, because that bright warm act of kindness in contrast to the dark cold of the confinement made me feel I owed her not to trouble her more. It made me feel as though I owed something, to that French corporal jailing me. And that frightened me.
“I learned a little also from the women in the second cell. One of them neither looked at me nor spoke all the time I was there, but the other asked me if there was anything she could do for me. Considering the circumstances, the only thing I could think of to help her feel less helpless than we did was to ask her if she might get me a drink of water. A metal cup hung on a hook above a sink above the toilet.
“She rose from her steel shelf they used as beds there and dripped some water from the tap into the cup. After I thanked her and drank the water, she expressed her understanding of the meanness of many Montgomery bus-drivers, and she asked me whether I was married. When I told her I was, she told me some of why she was there, and I could not understand her story. It made hardly any sense to me.
“She said that her husband was dead, and that she was keeping company with another man. She said that that man had attacked her, and that she had tried to retaliate with a hatchet, and that he’d had her arrested. She said that he’d healed somewhat during her two months here and that now he wished to get her out of jail. But she said she now preferred to have nothing to do with him. Good, I thought.
“But bad was that no one else who knew her knew she was there. She had a stub of a pencil and a scrap of paper, and she wrote down telephone numbers of her brothers, and I told her I’d call them. I did, the next day, and I saw her on a street a few months later, but I wondered how anyone’s life could get to such a state, and she was kind and smart! Could being black degrade as much as that?
“I almost didn’t get the numbers. At first, she couldn’t find any paper. But, while the lady jailer was letting me make a telephone call, the lady prisoner found the scrap. I still almost didn’t get it, because she didn’t hand it to me before my friends arrived to get me out. But the lady jailer left the cell-door open while she let me through the door to the stairs, and the lady prisoner ran out and threw the paper down the stairs.
“My telephone call from jail was brief but poignant. Mama wanted to know whether they had beaten me, and Raymond said he’d be down there in a few minutes. I knew he’d not, because he didn’t have a car and because he didn’t have bail money, and so I loved his faith, which worked out. My boss at the NAACP and one of their lawyers and his wife, white friends of ours, got there first. Raymond arrived a little later with the bail money. He is always a true prince, a shining knight.
“But surely I’d have spent at least the night, had we not a white lawyer.
“Poor Raymond. He loves me so much, and he had to call a friend to get a ride to come and get me, because he’d sold that Studebaker for the Scottsboro boys. One thing we’ll have to do in Detroit is buy him a car. That we’ll have to do.”
“Do you think we’ll ever see him again?” I asked.
“Beatrice will guide him back by suppertime, I guess,” she answered.
“So tell me more! What happened next?” I asked.
“Well, everybody jumped into confab mode. Telephones were ringing all over black Montgomery. Nixon, my NAACP boss, saw this straight off as the perfect case, the one we’d been looking for. No one could fault my decency, since the nastiest thing I’ve done this trip is knocking that white-boy off his bike and bragging about it. Raymond was sick from worrying about me being in jail, and the thought of my doing more sickened him more. But he came around, because he knew we must. He agreed because he knew we had to. He’s a very brave man. Such heart.”
She paused a moment, and looked at the horizon, before going on.
“My fiery friend with whom I went to school in New Orleans stepped out of line as soon as she heard. Without asking anyone, before the night was over, she gathered some friends, and went to work. One of her friends had access to a mimeograph machine, and they ran off a few thousand copies of a flyer. By dawn, they had distributed them all over black Montgomery. The note she wrote asked that no one ride a bus Monday. That school-chum of mine actually started the boycott. The rest of us just fell in step from there. Such spirit here on Earth sometimes.
“And a white friend, who worked for the main Montgomery newspaper, published the text of the flyer on the Sunday paper’s front page, as though it were news. And, with the help of that posting, and the spirit and speech of thousands of other colorful friends in Montgomery, by Monday morning it was big news. I couldn’t see a bus-stop from our apartment, but Oliver could see one from his and Rachel’s kitchen window. So he saw that the first bus at that stop that Monday morning carried no person, except the driver.
“Later that morning was my trial. I pleaded not guilty to a standing-room-only crowd in the courtroom, and was found guilty. It was what we’d wished for, so we could appeal to higher courts, but a wonderfully higher court was held that evening in the biggest black church in Montgomery. That weekend, my school-chum’s organization, the Women’s Political Council, had published another flyer, more officially. This one requested attendance at a mass meeting at the church.
That court was standing-room-only inside the church, and outside the church and into the street. People were hollering and singing and saying things like that I was sweet and that they’d messed with the wrong one now. At another meeting, during the weekend at Oliver’s church, Oliver had been asked to lead whatever came of this. He led this meeting at this larger church, and now it was all official. African American Montgomery stood united. There was no stopping us now.
“That’s about it. The boycott was on. The city council and the bus company fought it with everything they had, and some of those cowards who call themselves white bombed some of our houses and ran away in the night like roaches afraid of a midnight snacker, and Oliver’s house was one bombed. But Rachel kept the light on, and the rest of us shined as well, and a year later the buses were integrated.
“Oh, and you should have heard Oliver,” she said. “You know, when he was Moses, he made himself a speech impediment and made his brother Aaron do most of the talking to the Pharaoh. Not so this trip, not from the beginning, not at all. That first mass-meeting was an inspiration. From him to everyone. Even to me.
“He said our movement wouldn’t end until justice rolls down like water, and his words rolled down like water. I could hear all that studying he’d done in Boston, but it wasn’t what he said as much as how he said it, with passion flowing like that water. I was so, so very proud of him. I thought I’d likely burst.”
But now she sat quietly, looking down like into water. I shifted a little and looked out at the wide Texas landscape. Two clouds of dust were rising in the distance, converging from two different directions on the road, one with a big yellow dot in the middle, the other with a little red one. It was Raymond and Beatrice in the Studebaker, and Ben and Quincy in their school bus.
“Many things are bursting well,” I answered.
“Yes, they are! How’s Arafat?” she asked.
“Not so well. He’s keeping his promise to me, but he’s right that there’s little he can do. Palestinian factions are sprouting up all over the land, and Israelis keep building settlements wherever they wish. The Arab nations are becoming more hostile, and pushing Yasser out of the picture. There’s no focus of control for the Palestinians.”
“Well,” said Theresa, “He’s just going to have to sit tight and keep doing the best he can. No one else there is willing to stabilize or to take the whole heat with a grin. If he stays steadfast, it’ll get better. It shall.”
“But it’ll get worse first,” I said.
“How about Mikhail?” she asked, demurring.
“I haven’t heard from him lately.”
Ben ran from the school bus into his mother’s arms. Quincy followed his little brother off the bus and took a pat on the back from Raymond. Raymond replaced me beside Theresa on the swing as I moved to sit on the steps and accept my youngest son from his mother. Quincy took his schoolbooks into the house, and his mother followed him through the door, presumably to start supper, saying nothing, but smiling.
Beatrice was always the best, seeing further than I.
Slavey had just returned to Michigan. In Boston, he had made friends with others who had found reason to give up on the American dream. Like them, he had made himself into a caricature of the pompous business-people of the whiter race, wearing outrageously fancy suits and straightening his hair. Then, with them, he had tried to steal monetary wealth. He’d become a crook, a petty hustler.
Caught in a burglary with some friends, he had made his way into the Massachusetts prison where Sacco and Vanzetti had spent their last days for legally requesting their share of the American dream. Since their sentence was death, while his was but eight years of his life here, their nation had made some progress, but not enough.
One of Slavey’s partners in crime, who was less colorful than he but had been a partner of his in bed, received no jail time, only probation. But Slavey spent those years more productively than she would have in prison or did outside and free. He read, book after book, mostly idealistic philosophy, mostly saying that what had happened to him should happen to no one. Slavey already knew that better than did Theresa’s cellmates, of course. But he read the books to learn more. And to speak in others’ terms.
He also wrote in prison, but mostly letters to his sister in Roxbury, telling her how he felt about what he was reading and making for her the case he had made as Muhammad, that religion had provided the pride powering what had been done to her race, and so her race should find its own religion, to empower pride in return.
“Jesus didn’t have blue eyes,” Slavey wrote to his sister. “He was Semitic.”
His sister talked to friends of hers about what Slavey was writing to her, and her friends talked to other friends of theirs. By the time Slavey returned to liberty in the cradle of liberty, he had many friends he hadn’t met. They were waiting in Roxbury for him to lead them to their liberty. They had even organized somewhat.
On Grove Hill, in the nearest thing to a middle-class neighborhood his sister’s race had in that land of the pure-white Puritans, they’d made a mosque. They’d made it of an empty storefront-building while Slavey was in prison, and they called themselves the nation of Islam. But some people called their mosque freedom house.
They were spreading the relative prosperity of Grove Hill into other neighborhoods of Roxbury. They were leading others to work together to turn abandoned storefront buildings into clean and productive neighborhood businesses, serving fairly and well. Later, some people would call them communists.
Oliver and Slavey would talk about that later, in a hotel in Harlem.
“Communists,” said Oliver. “We both know better than that.”
“Yeah,” answered Slavey. “But I went to a different college.”
“I was in jail, too,” replied Oliver. “19 times, if I counted right.”
“Not as long as I,” said Slavey. “But harder time for less reason.”
Lots of convicts called sharing prison-time going to school together.
But, communist or not, many African Americans in Roxbury or anywhere else would not leave their Christian churches for the Nation of Islam, and yet many of them picked up the communist capitalist essence of the movement anyway. A couple in Roxbury, Otto and Muriel Snowden, founded in one of those storefront-buildings another organization they called Freedom House and did not call a mosque, and there they carried the spirit more broadly for Roxbury, long after Slavey moved more widely in the world.
The last I looked, Freedom House was still in Roxbury but had moved into a big brick school-building near the mosque, which was still a mosque. And Freedom House was still doing all it could for the community and was offering the classrooms for classes in real-estate purchasing and electronic data-processing and for church-group meetings and Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and for anything else for which anyone would use the space to try to keep Roxbury from self-destructing.
So Slavey had done well in prison. But, although a branch of the Boston Public Library was within a block of the mosque the last time I looked, Grove Hill had self-destructed much somehow like the New Orleans projects despite whatever hopes Huey Long had for them, like Bedford-Stuyvesant in New York City, like many places. But we can’t blame Slavey or the Snowdens for that, unless we can blame Slavey for not living eternally on Earth, with all the problems everywhere.
“It needs to be a game of pickup,” said Slavey in his storefront mosque. “And what needs to be picked up is the revolutionary spirit and the courage to follow it, to follow it for the better, by any means necessary.”
So, following his spirit, he took the spirit from Roxbury to Harlem by way of the south side of Chicago and a brief time in Motown to get a little spiritual guidance from Theresa. We all had to check with the shining onyx from time to time.
Slavey might have sought pointers from the Pointer Sisters, but they hadn’t yet made it past Texas from California. Motown was then less sounded than Slavey, hardly sounded at all outside the black community, like Slavey. Slavey’s sound would rise to the world suddenly near the end of this visit of his, as would the music.
Oliver, on the other hand, increased his volume steadily, his politics approaching presidential level before I joined the Republican Party. He met Dicky before I did, when Dicky was Eisenhower’s vice president, and I was somewhat secretly a gallivanting globetrotter. After I met Dicky, after Fits Jr. beat him out of the presidency, Oliver and I compared notes, quickly in that hotel in Harlem. I had to sneak in.
“What’s up with that Fits Jr. character?” asked Slavey.
“Yes,” answered Oliver. “He speaks so well and behaves so badly.”
“Maybe it’s all those drugs he’s taking for his back,” Theresa suggested.
“How about that Tricky Dicky character?” I asked, seeing no approaching answer.
“He seems wonderfully sincere,” said Oliver. “Or, if not, maybe he’s the most dangerous man in the world.”
“My hunch is more like the most dangerous man in the world,” I suggested. “But that Fits Jr. character might be worse.”
But Fits Jr. helped us cross the line that the governor of Alabama said he’d drawn in the dust in Montgomery, the cradle of the Confederacy: “Bigotry now! Bigotry tomorrow! Bigotry forever!”
“Bigotry” wasn’t his word, but it’s his words' meaning.
Oliver called that governor Pharaoh and said he’d let God’s people go sooner or later, but we all felt we had lost a little ground. Montgomery, the city of Theresa’s bus boycott, was the capital of that state there. So, how could the Governor talk like a bigoted bus-driver there? Didn’t those people ever learn?
Fits Jr. talked to us, which is more than Eisenhower did. Eisenhower left us to deal with his vice president at best. But Fits Jr. didn’t talk to us either, until the United States government let the Alabama government let the Birmingham government officially and openly do more damage than the Ku Klux Klan had ever done clandestinely, at least in so short a time! Why do people have to learn such things?
That lesson came to be called the Children’s March. Oliver never wished a child to be on the front line of any of the Gandhian battles he was leading. The government was responding to the non-violent people’s requesting freedom by violently beating them into the ground, drawing their blood and then quartering them in jails. Oliver hardly hated, but he easily hated the harm done to those peaceful people, and he doubted he could bear seeing children treated so. He found that doubt self-evident.
But the movement had mandated a life of its own. Like Arafat in Palestine, Oliver had come to feel himself less a leader of a movement than a plug against improper movement. His rolling words inspired the spirit in huge audiences now, as Slavey’s were in smaller audiences. But now mainly his job was to keep people from taking Slavey’s advocations too much to heart, too much in deed. He had to hold off that flow until Slavey taught his final lesson. He found that flow self-evident.
Now, the spirit lived its own life, with the people taking it in their hearts to their homes, to their households for table-talk in Oliver’s terms and often Slavey’s, dinner-table talk. And the households were full of children, black children who talked with other black children, in their backyards and streets and in their black schools. And those children told each other that they wished to do more than stand in lines to be refused library cards. They wanted God to help them, and they wished to help themselves. And they would do it by any means necessary.
They wished to stand not only behind each other in the library lines, but also shoulder to shoulder on the front line. And Oliver had to let them, because he could not stop them, because he could not stop the spirit he’d worked so hard to unleash. So he bowed to the children and prayed with them, thousands of them in downtown Birmingham, as the government unleashed the dogs.
It was a nice day for a stroll. Dust-motes, like those one sees as light streams through a window, were sitting quietly in the sunlight on the concrete of the buildings of downtown Birmingham, but not beaming strongly enough into the eyes of the police and firemen of that city, who were arrayed like the British at Lexington, with their dogs and fire hoses, awaiting black parents, and their children.
The children and parents ambled into the center of the city. They sang that they should overcome the oppression of their unalienable rights. Beneath the blue sky with its white clouds, they knelt to pray before the police that they might no longer need to show the third color of the star-spangled banner, the red of their blood the same as the blood of the police, and of the firemen who should have been putting out fires, not feeding this conflagration. But, answering no prayers today, the city stood ready to oppress.
The children rose beside their parents, and the police let loose the dogs, and the firemen the water. The dogs tore, and the water smashed, and the children fell in the street, and the parents crashed against the buildings, and the blood flowed. And the dust lay low, wet and soggy in the street and on the buildings, not mighty now or shining. Before it was over, three thousand children and their parents were bled away to jail. But also at last a few found truth to be self-evident. Before it was over, some firemen wept.
And that’s how it ended, that week in Birmingham, Alabama. Day after day, the children marched, and the dogs tore and the water smashed, until the first American fireman quelled the conflagration, by simply refraining from turning on his nozzle. Hell, he couldn’t see anyway, through the water rolling down from his eyes, in a mighty righteous stream of justice.
Other firemen followed him, and the dogs skittered away as dogs would always like to do. Next, from that year, in the United States of America, was the Civil Rights Act of 1964. A century underdone.