Just Above My Head Read online

  “To scare us,” said one of the women. “To drive us crazy.”

  “And so that cracker could harass you,” said Mr. Elkins, “and maybe kill you, and, now that he’s got our address, too, bomb this house!”

  That’s hard to believe, I wanted to say, but I said nothing: was it hard to believe? I remembered my swift, uncertain impression that the men had been interrupted at something—interrupted at what?—that they had not expected, or desired, to see us. They had not planned the confrontation. Only, when they saw us, they had not been able to control their reflexes. They could not have foreseen, any more than we, that the woman would step out on her porch and scream, that the street would fill up so fast. They could not have guessed, any more than we could have, that Mr. Elkins, one of the pillars of the church, and an apostle of nonviolence, also, nevertheless, kept a gun handy.

  Mr. Elkins walked to the window, and stood there, with his back to us, looking out.

  “If they come back at all,” said Mrs. Elkins, “they won’t be coming back till after nightfall.” She had forced herself to recover; she was very calm.

  “That’s just what I’m worried about,” said Mr. Elkins. But he turned away from the window.

  “Well, now,” he said, “what about this rally?”

  “Well, now,” Mrs. Elkins mimicked suddenly, “what about our guests?” She turned to Peanut and me. “In all this excitement, I don’t believe I’ve had the presence of mind to introduce you to anybody—”

  “Oh, we’ve made our own introductions, more or less,” said one of the women, the youngest. She was copper-colored, Indian-looking, with dark, slanted eyes and silky hair twisted into an elegant bun at the top of her head. She emphasized her Oriental characteristics with long, jade earrings, and a heavy, barbaric-looking bronze bracelet, and she wore several rings on her long, very beautiful fingers. She wore a loose, green dress with a wide brown belt with a savage, gleaming buckle at her narrow waist. “I’m Luana King,” she said, “Miss Luana King” and she laughed. “I always tell that to the visiting firemen, keep hoping that one of them will carry me out of here.”

  “You wouldn’t know what to do with yourself, away from here,” said Mrs. Elkins.

  “Oh,” said Miss King, and sipped her old-fashioned, “I bet you I’d think of something.”

  The other two women were Mrs. Rice and Mrs. Graves. Mrs. Rice was quite dark, and, as we say, heavy-set, with a pleasant, kind of pushed-in face, and very bright, intelligent, dark eyes. She was dressed in dark blue, wore a wedding band and a silver brooch, and waved one friendly hand at Peanut and me. Mrs. Graves was thin, and dark, seemed, somehow, disappointed, and “came,” as she put it, as though they were parcels, “with Mr. Graves,” who was the gray-haired man with the pipe. “I’m sorry about what happened to your brother,” she said. “Will he be able to sing tonight?”

  “He says yes,” I said, “but I say no.”

  She smiled. “Well. Some of us can be stubborn.”

  “Yes,” said Mr. Elkins. “Now, what about this rally?”

  “Herb,” said Mrs. Elkins, “one of us has to be there.”

  “Yeah. What about this house?”

  “Herb, I see no sense at all in your sitting up in this dark house all night long, by yourself, with a gun. And it ain’t but one gun, you got to remember that, and they never come by ones.”

  “Well, what we going to do then?”

  “I think we should just go on like we intended. Sister Beulah, across the street—that’s the one who screamed so loud,” she explained to Peanut and me—“she can keep an eye on the house, and call the police if she sees anything—funny.”

  Mr. Elkins sucked his teeth. “Call the police!”

  “Well. And we ought to call the police, just the same, and report what happened this afternoon, just so it’ll be in the record.”

  “Yeah. I’ll do that right away. You know,” he said to Mr. Graves, “we going to have to do what we been talking about doing, and arrange to guard each other’s houses. Ain’t nobody else going to do it for us, now, you can hurry up and believe that.” He started out of the room. “I’ll be ready in a minute,” he called back, and we heard him climb the stairs.

  Silence fell in the room, an exhausted silence. It was also the silence of people who have more on their minds than they can utter, or than they care, or dare, to utter.

  Peanut had not moved from the mantelpiece. I finally, at long last, walked over to the bottles, and poured myself a drink. Then I walked over to Peanut.

  “What are we going to do?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. I really don’t see how Arthur can sing.”

  “Well, if he can’t sing—we don’t have any reason to stay here.”

  “You want to leave tonight?”

  We looked at each other.

  “Yeah—hell, I don’t know. I think I’m going crazy.” He sipped his drink, and we watched each other. “I wanted to commit murder this afternoon. I mean, I really wanted to kill. That’s not me.”

  “Well,” said Peanut, finally, catching his breath, “maybe we should go and check out Arthur. Then we can decide what we doing.”

  “I’m not sure,” I said, “that anyone is going to allow us to drive at night, out of here, through Georgia. And they might be right.”

  “I thought of that, too,” said Peanut. “Come on. Let’s check on Arthur.”

  “Excuse us,” I said to the others—they were seated around Mrs. Elkins, speaking in low tones—“we’re going to check on my brother.”

  We walked the long hall to the bedroom. Arthur lay on his back, his eyes closed, the ice pack held firmly to his mouth. We looked down at him, not knowing whether he was asleep or not. Just as I leaned down, intending to lift the ice pack so that I could see his lip, he opened his eyes.

  “Hi. Is it time?”

  “I don’t know. How do you feel?”

  He had handed me the ice pack. Now he touched his upper lip, gingerly, with his tongue.

  “How does it look?”

  “It’s maybe gone down a little. But it’s still swollen.”

  “Turn on the light.”

  Peanut switched on the light, and Arthur staggered to the mirror above the chifforobe. He peered at himself. The swelling had considerably diminished, but it was still visible, making Arthur look rather like a precociously decadent juvenile delinquent. He smiled, winced, forced himself to smile again.

  “I don’t think you ought to force it, man,” Peanut said.

  “Well, maybe I can sort of hum my way through,” Arthur said. “Actually, if one of you was to bring me a drink, I might be as good as new.”

  “Okay,” I said. I put down my drink on the night table, and went back to the living room.

  “How’s he feeling?” Mrs. Elkins asked.

  I grinned. “He says he needs a drink.”

  “Let me go and see about that child.” She rose. “You all excuse me a minute,” she said to the others. I poured Arthur a healthy vodka on the rocks, and Mrs. Elkins and I walked back to the bedroom together.

  Arthur was laughing, though with some difficulty, at something Peanut had said, and Mrs. Elkins walked over to him, firmly took his chin in her hand, and studied his upper lip.

  “It’s a little better,” she said. “But try to sing with your lip like that, it’s liable to pop wide open.”

  “No, it won’t. I’ll sing quiet songs.”

  “You got a ways to go yet,” she said, “before you start singing quiet songs—open your mouth. Wider—does that hurt?”

  “A little. But I think I’ll be all right.”

  “It’s likely to be worse tomorrow, that’s what I’m afraid of. But—all right. I’ll explain to the people that you can only sing one or two quiet songs. And then you come back here, and put some more ice on that thing, and you go straight to bed, you hear?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” said Arthur. “Can I have my drink now?”

  Mrs. Elkins took the drink fr
om me, and handed it to Arthur. “There. And then you better make yourself presentable and come on out and meet the people, and we’ll go on on.”

  “Okay,” Arthur said. “Thanks, Mrs. Elkins.”

  “Ain’t nothing. Start getting ready now,” and she hurried off down the hall.

  We had been more or less expecting the police to come to the house, but they hadn’t by the time we were ready to leave. We did not know whether to take this as a good sign, or a bad sign: a good sign, if it meant that they were wholly ignorant of the matter; a bad sign, if it meant that they already knew all about it, and were hatching other plots. We were running late—there had been two worried telephone calls from the church already—and so it was decided that Mr. Elkins, Peanut, and Arthur, and I would go to the police station in the morning to put the remarkable visit of the three white men on record. Nothing would come of it, that we knew, but still, it would be best to bring this visit to the official attention of the guardians of the public peace.

  We got to the church. This church has so haunted my dreams, so often and for so long, that I have not known, for years now, when I attempt to describe it, whether I am describing the reality, or the dream. I did not know Atlanta then, and do not really know it now, and have never desired or attempted to return to the place we were that night. It seems to me that the church must have been on the outskirts of Atlanta, for I remember the setting as being entirely rural, innocent of sidewalks, asphalt, traffic lights, the sounds and the rush of the city. But this may be, merely, the optical delusion of a native New Yorker, a creature for whom all other cities are bound to seem somewhat rustic. It seems to me that there was a bridge nearby, perhaps a railroad bridge, I am not certain. The church was violent with light: the lights bathed the wide front steps of the church and spilled over the lawn, covering the parked cars and the people walking up the steps, or standing on the church veranda, and whitened the faces of the white policemen, on their motorcycles, or standing beside their cars, and lent a dull sheen to their holsters and the handles of their guns. We approached the church carefully, slowly, idling past the motorcycles and the patrol cars, careful of the people walking on the road. Lights flared in our faces: the lights from another car, a flashlight, the lights from the church. We crawled up the road: there was no possibility of parking anywhere near the church. We crawled past the cemetery across the road from the church, and parked, along with many other cars, in an open field.

  We were in two cars. Mr. Elkins and his wife, Peanut, Arthur, and I, were in the first car, and Mr. and Mrs. Graves and Mrs. Rice and Miss King followed close behind us.

  Mr. Elkins stopped the car, switched off the lights and the motor, and wiped his face with an enormous red handkerchief. Mr. Graves parked beside us, and we all stepped out, into the surprisingly mild southern air. The sky was an electrical blue-black, and the stars hung low. The trees were great, massed silhouettes on the edge of the field, by the side of the road, seeming to contain the darkness, and to act as a bulwark against it.

  We started walking down the road, toward the church, two by two by two. Peanut was just ahead of me, with Miss King, Mr. and Mrs. Elkins walked together, just behind me, and I could faintly hear Arthur, who was walking with the heavy-set Mrs. Rice. I couldn’t see him, for he was behind me, but, indeed, I could scarcely see Peanut, who was only a few paces ahead of me—the southern darkness is surprisingly swift and powerful.

  I kept my eyes straight ahead, but I was aware of the white faces watching us, the faint, murmuring sounds our passage caused, an occasional rebel laugh. The air became, as we moved closer to the church, almost too thick to breathe. My chest hurt a little; my armpits, the palms of my hands, my forehead and between my legs, were damp. The faces of the afternoon returned to me, and Arthur on the ground, and Rodent Eyes and me, and my hands around his neck. I thought of Peanut’s face when he said, I wanted to kill. That’s not me. I thought, That’s not me, either, but, deep within, I began to tremble. Music, wave upon wave, rolled from the church and I tried to baptize myself in it. I didn’t know the song they were singing, couldn’t make out the words, but the violence of the beat began to calm the violence in my heart.

  We crossed the lawn and mounted the church steps. The people on the steps greeted us with smiles, with mocking admonitions concerning our tardiness; listened gravely, with a watchful wonder, to Mr. Elkins’s laconic account of the reasons for our tardiness; agreed that they would meet, and discuss the matter in depth on the morrow. We entered the church, Mr. and Mrs. Elkins in the lead. And, like Mr. Reed, in Richmond, Mr. Elkins joined other men on the wall. Mrs. Elkins found a seat for me in the front row, and took Arthur and Peanut with her, placing them in camp chairs beside the pulpit. She then entered the pulpit, and vanished from my sight.

  My memory of that night is chaotic, kaleidoscopic, at once blurred and vivid. I remember watching Peanut and Arthur, who were sitting one behind the other, facing me, directly in my line of vision. Peanut was sitting behind Arthur, leaned forward from time to time to whisper this or that, or Arthur, would lean back—they were perpetually smiling, but very circumspect. Arthur’s slightly swollen lip emphasized the mischievous, impish quality of his face—from time to time, I made faces at them, tried to embarrass them by making them crack up, but they remained impervious and dignified.

  There were several speakers, brief, low-keyed, intense, addressing themselves to various aspects of the black community’s problems, and possibilities: it was not their fault that precision favored the former. Yet they made the latter real, too, if only by their insistence that the present and future of black people had to be taken in black hands. If, beneath this, thundered the relentless question, How? they were not wrong to make us remember that the longest journey begins with a single step. And every black person there could prove this, could prove it in himself, by taking a long look back. Courage is a curious, a many-sided force, and real courage is always allied with the unshakable faith which forces one to go beyond the appearance of things to the essence, the driving force, the key, the wheel in the middle of the wheel.

  Mrs. Elkins, true to her word, announced that “our guest singer” had met with a small accident, and had been forbidden—by her—to sing more than one or two “quiet” songs. “But we will get him back down here,” she promised, “just as soon as his scars are healed!” She elicited from the church a noisy corroboration, and then introduced “Mr. Arthur Montana. Accompanied by Mr. Alexander T. Brown,” and Arthur and Peanut took their positions.

  Arthur stepped forward, moving a little away from the piano, and said, “I really am sorry about this accident. If you knew me better, you’d know I don’t always look exactly like this. Something happened to my upper lip, and it’s a little swollen.” He smiled, and grimaced, and there was a murmur of sympathy from the church. “So, when I get to the chorus, I wish you good people would help me out and join me, help me sing the song.” He paused, and smiled. “I know all of you know it—it’s a real old quiet song.” He stepped back, Peanut hit the keys, and Arthur sang:

  Go spread the tidings round,

  and a pleased, muffled roar came from the church, and some people began to hum. It was a song I had not heard for years.

  Wherever man is found,

  Wherever human hearts

  And human woes abound

  Let every mortal tongue

  Proclaim the joyful sound,

  The Comforter has come!

  He paused, and raised his hands, a welcoming gesture, and the voices of the church rose,

  The Comforter has come,

  The Comforter has come!

  The Holy Ghost from heaven,

  The Father’s promise given.

  Go spread the tidings round,

  Wherever

  man is found

  The Comforter

  has come!

  He stepped back and bowed, and age-old blessings, older than the song, poured over him. I watched him, and I listened to the people, esp
ecially the old people, and I watched the faces of the old people, and I watched the faces of the young. Who would dare to say there was no Comforter, even in Georgia, tonight? Even in spite of whatever might happen in the next five minutes.

  In the next five minutes, we lost Peanut.

  There was a great crowd, friendly confusion, as we moved toward the doors of the church. I was being introduced to people, shaking hands, I felt Arthur’s presence nearby. Then we were on the church steps, people were leaving, heading swiftly toward their cars. The motorists and the cyclists watched us, silent and wicked—they were all still there when we came out, not one had left: as far, anyway, as we could tell. We were standing on the church steps—we: we, at this moment, were Mr. and Mrs. Elkins, Arthur, Mrs. Graves, who was saying a last good-bye to Mrs. Elkins and arranging to meet later in the week, and I was saying good night, somewhat elaborately, to Miss King, and thinking about tomorrow and the visit to the police station and then hitting the road out of here. Miss King and Mrs. Graves turned and went down the steps, into the darkness, and then, Mrs. Elkins said, “Why, where is Mr. Brown?”

  There were still many people in the -church, and we assumed he was behind us. Arthur said, “He left me to go to the bathroom, just a few minutes ago.” We didn’t think anything, yet. I walked back into the church, anyway, and looked around, but there was no Peanut in sight. I came back out, and I asked, “Where’s the bathroom, I’d like to go myself.”

  “It’s a country toilet,” said Mr. Elkins. “It’s right around there,” and he pointed toward the darkness at the left of the church. Then, for the first time, with no warning, a sickness of terror rose up in me, for I could only very dimly make out the shape of a building in the darkness. And, then, in a flash, as though I had communicated it, Mr. Elkins stared toward the outhouse in the darkness, as though he had never seen it before, and, without a word, he and Arthur and I began running toward it. I prayed it would be locked from the inside.

  But it wasn’t. Arthur got there first, and yanked the door open, yelling, Peanut! Hey, Peanut!