“Go on, Sam!” Hubert said. “That’s what you brought it over here for — to show people!”
“No!” Sam said. “Come on, now — I said No! Didn’t you hear me?” His voice was too loud, his hand was actually shaking, and the silence after it was much too long.
Corey rescued him: “Now Sam is still learning these things. And you’ve got to practice them before you do them for other people. He just needs to practice and will show us all his trick in his own time, now.”
Hubert dragged his forearm from the table, sucked his teeth — his turn to sulk.
But nothing dented Mr. Carter’s simple, irrepressible good will. “Can I ask you something seriously, though?” His dark fingers moved on the handle of his unused knife.
“I don’t know.” Corey smiled. “Can you?”
“Would you please tell me — because I have heard this story about you two ladies so many times before, but just in snatches and fragments, so that you never know what you’re really supposed to believe and what you’re not — just so I can tell other people when I get back to Philadelphia — what really happened at that movie, there — was it six or seven years ago?”
“What movie?” Elsie asked.
“That movie,” Mr. Carter said, “where you two got into all that trouble?”
“Six years ago?” Elsie said. “What movie does he — ”
“Oh, I know what he means,” Dr. Corey said. “Arnold — ” which was Mr. Carter’s name to Corey and Elsie, but not to Hubert, Clarice, and Sam — “that wasn’t six years ago. That was seven, eight — ” she frowned. “That was nine years ago now!”
“But… what happened?”
“Might as well go ahead,” Hubert said. “After all this time, everybody ought to know.”
“What movie?” Sam said. Though he knew the outlines of the tale, the fragmentariness was as much there for him as for Arnold Carter — since, nine years ago, when Corey and Elsie had first gone up to the city, where they’d stayed for two years before coming home, Sam had been… well, nine.
“That great big movie they made, about the south — and the Ku Klux Klan and all,” Hubert said. “About the wonderful white south and the black devils who were raping all those white women — ”
“Oh!” Elsie said. “That awful movie — that made everybody go out and start lynching all those people!”
“It didn’t start them lynching,” Corey said. “But it certainly made them go out and lynch more.”
“What did you have to do with it?” Sam asked.
“We were picketing — a peaceful picket line. With a lot of other Negroes.”
“With a lot of other angry Negroes, I bet,” Hubert said. “That’s what I heard.”
“We were angry,” Dr. Corey said. “Who wouldn’t be angry, at a movie like that?”
“How did a movie make people lynch people?” Sam wanted to know.
“It was a movie about those damned Ku Klux Klansmen — ” Corey didn’t use language like that and it startled Sam to hear her cuss like Louis — “and told how wonderful they were and how they were protecting southern white womanhood.”
What came back to Sam was a memory of his cousin, or a woman whom his mother had called their cousin: yes, he’d been nine, eight, maybe younger, when her and her husband’s mutilated bodies, under gray canvas, had been brought, in the creaking wagon, back through the evening trees, to the campus —
“We were picketing,” Corey said. “That’s all. With the others, across the street from the theater.”
“Well, that wasn’t quite all,” Elsie said.
“Then what else did we do?” Dr. Corey asked, indignantly.
But Elsie had some devilment in her eye.
And there was a grin back of Dr. Corey’s indignation. “We certainly didn’t do very much else — that anyone with a grain of sense wouldn’t have done. There’s no forgiving a movie like that — stirring people up to violence against their fellow man!”
“What did she do, Miss Elsie?” Mr. Carter asked.
“Well, we were picketing, there across the street. The policemen were keeping us back. And you could see that it wasn’t doing anything to keep people from going into the movie — ”
“The thing we wanted to do,” Corey said, “was to stop them from going to see it, you see. That’s what we were trying to do.”
“So finally,” Elsie said, “Corey says to me, ‘Come on.’ Well, I didn’t know where she was going.”
“You did too!” Corey said. “I told you — ”
“After we got in line,” Elsie said, “you told me. We left the pickets, went down to the end of the block, crossed over, came back, and got on the ticket line to the movie. That’s when I asked you, what we were going to do. And you told me, ‘We’re going to go inside and see that movie!’ Well, I was afraid to leave her, because I knew she was probably going to do something foolish — and I didn’t want her to get in trouble.”
“You went into the movie?” Clarice asked. From her tone, Sam realized this was new to her as well.
Corey nodded.
“We went into the movie,” Elsie said, “took our seats, and waited for the lights to go down and the man at the organ to start his playing — and I asked: ‘Corey, what are we going to do now?’ And she whispered, ‘Hush!’ and just to sit there and to do what she did. Well, I thought, dear Lord, give me strength! What has this crazy girl, my own little sister, got it into her head to do?”
“Then what happened?” Sam asked.
“The lights went off, the man started to play the organ, and the movie began — and Corey jumps up, scoots out into the aisle, with those long dresses we used to wear back then, catching on everybody’s knees, saying real loud, ‘Excuse me — excuse me, please!’ and I’m coming right after her. I think people thought she was sick — and had to use the facilities. So they were making room.
“But then, when she got into the aisle, she ran right down toward the front of the theater — and I’m running to keep up. And she climbed onto the stage — ”
“I jumped onto the stage,” Corey said. “I got hold of the edge, and I went up like a boy over a fence — though I don’t know whether I could do it today — ”
“And she grabbed hold of the edge of the screen, with the light from the projector all over us, and people starting to stand up and call out to ask if something was wrong, and she ripped it — ”
Corey laughed. “I certainly did. I remember, you stood there, on the stage, in front of all those people, and you said, ‘Oh, Corey — !’ ”
“Then I grabbed hold,” Elsie said, “and started ripping too!”
“Once we began, she ripped more than I did,” Corey said. “I really think Elsie was having fun.”
“I was scared to death,” Elsie said. “But, by then, I figured it didn’t make much difference. I knew we were going to end up in jail, no matter — so I decided it’d be better at least to do what we’d come for. Yes, I got hold of it — and I ripped it too. In about a New York minute, the two of us tore the whole screen down!”
Clarice hooted, hands over her mouth.
“But then what happened?” Sam said, between his own guffaws.
“I mean,” Clarice said, “how did you two get out of there?”
“Very quickly,” Corey said. “We were lucky. Someone in the audience by that time had started fighting. There were other people on the stage now — you remember that man who asked us, so politely, while we were ripping, if something was wrong? But the fist fight in the audience, that was taking up all the ushers’ attention. So even while they were putting the lights on, we rushed backstage and down some steps and around through a door that opened right into the alley — and got out!”