I stepped from the Chevelle into a hot shower of sunlight and moved, stiff-rumped and sore, through blistering air toward the door. My heart drew tight. I slowed my step, and stopped Smith at the door.
“Chaym … I think we should go somewhere else.”
He arched his back, stretching. “What’s the matter? You afraid they won’t serve us? You go somewhere else. I’m starvin’, and I know my rights.”
He stepped inside, his head rammed forward, and I followed, my eyes taking only a moment to adjust to the dark, low-ceilinged interior. I began a prayer but the words did not come. The air inside the diner was soured by the smell of grease. Over the stove the ceiling was smoke-grimed, and beneath our feet the once-brown linoleum was scuffed and faded. Five small booths, darkened by use, ran the length of the diner on my right. Slut’s wool had been swept into the corners. A portable fan blew hot air across a long, curving counter. There, an old man, thin and balding and wearing round black-rimmed bifocals clamped over the bulb of his waxy nose, sat on a leather stool, reading an edition of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that headlined the riot in Chicago. His fingernails were dark with dirt, his chin seemed to drop straight into his neck, the back of which was hacked and leathery, and his overalls hung loose in the crotch. On the other side of the counter a middle-aged woman shaped like the Venus of Willendorf, with hazel eyes in a flat, pale face enveloped by red-blond hair, was topping off his cup with black coffee. The name stitched over the pocket of her stained uniform read ARLENE. When Smith entered they both stopped suddenly and stared. Just stared, as if he and I were spacemen who’d fallen from the stars.
“You bet’ be open for business now,’ said Smith. “We come a long way …”
Arlene’s head made an infinitesimal bob, but she was still pouring steaming hot coffee — beyond the rim of the old man’s cup and along the porcelain counter, where it spilled onto his narrow lap and squeezed a whoop out of him that so startled her the pot fell clattering from her fingers to the floor. She scrambled to clean up the mess. Smith made a nasty chuckle, relishing every moment of confusion our appearance had caused.
“You hear what I said?” he asked. “Can we get served?”
Arlene was still staring. “I guess I can wait on you.” She had one of those roosterish, unmusical American voices, coarsened by years of smoking Camel straights, full of cracks and cackle. “The owner, he’s not here. Are you …”
“Am I what?”
She pointed toward the newspaper in front of the old man, who was swabbing his wet crotch with a fistful of napkins, to a front-page, above-the-crease photograph of King in a Chicago poolroom surrounded by admiring teenagers as he leaned over the green felt of a pool table, lining up the cue for his shot. Arlene said, “Him. Is that you?”
“No.” Abruptly, he was very quiet.
“Really? You look just like him.”
“I’m not him,” Smith said angrily, and the saying of it seemed to knock the wind out of him, as if he’d been asked that a thousand times, and each time whoever asked was disappointed, making him feel like an impostor, less than the real McCoy. He lifted one of the leather-bound menus stacked on the counter next to displays of candy and fresh pies, and studied it as the old man, dripping, scurried out. Arlene continued to gawk at us.
“I want four specials for me’n my friends, to go. You got a bathroom here?”
“Outside, around the back. You know, I almost asked for your autograph—”
“You still want it?”
“Well, if you were him, I might, but—”
Smith walked out before she finished.
Arlene blinked, pushing a limp, lawless lock of hair, dampened by the heat, off her forehead with the back of her hand. “Did I say something wrong?”
“No,” I said, “he’s just sensitive about his looks.”
“Well, the way he left, you’d think I called him a name. He does look like that colored preacher, the one causin’ all the big to-do up in Chicago. I wanted his autograph ’cause he’s in the paper all the time, but that don’t mean I like how he’s stirrin’ things up. I get along with colored just fine, but that Dr. Coon—”
“King,” My stomach heaved. “His name is King.”
“Whatever, I just think he’s pushin’ things too fast.” She took a deep breath. “You go ’head and sit down. I can serve you since you’re gonna take it out. I’ll have your order in a minute.”
She stepped to the freezer, took out four hamburger patties that looked as if they’d just thrown off a lingering illness, and dropped them into a skillet on the grill. My belly was still knotted. I’d wanted to slap her, but I remembered how my mother told me to behave in public, and how polite and civilized and patient the minister was himself — always a credit to the race — when confronting white people with an I.Q. the size of their shoes. I tried not to hate her. At the spot where she’d been leaning on the counter when we entered there was a copy of a movie star magazine beside a pack of cigarettes and an ashtray packed with butts bearing the imprint of incisors I’d noticed were stained brown by nicotine when she opened her mouth. In fact, she’d tried to keep her hand over her mouth when speaking to conceal an overbite and the tartar and decay on her front teeth. With her back to the counter, I could see a blemish on her neck from cheap, dimestore jewelry.
I closed my eyes, both hands resting on my lap. Smith’s words in the car ran through my head, then the memory of trips my mother and I made to visit relatives in South Carolina when I was young fell through my heart like rain. I remembered roadside cafés like this diner, where we stopped hungry and tired after seven hours of driving and were told we could be served only if we went to the back entrance. Another image rose up: badly lit department stores near my relatives’ homes in Abbeville where they enjoyed the privilege of purchasing clothes like other citizens from the pale, blond salesgirls but could not try them on their bodies before the sale was made, as if their skin was unclean, corrupt in some way, and might contaminate or blemish with the ancient stain of blackness these cheap garments off the rack. All this my mother accepted, and she never corrected the teenage employees when they called her “girl,” which even then made my thoughts turn murderous with hate and humiliation, as an incident King experienced in 1944 brought him “perilous close” to despising white people when during his college days he was seated behind a curtain on a dining car, a shade pulled down to obliterate entirely the offensiveness of his presence. And so he rode behind a screen, trapped within their ideas of his identity, his blood pressure soaring, which meant even his health and the risk of myocardial infarction was at the mercy of people he despised, and he could do no more to change this than my mother who, dragging me in tow, tramped through mud around the café to the kitchen door, where we waited for what seemed hours, listening to the laughter and voices of customers and the clatter of dishes and silverware inside. I remembered that my mother’s expression was sad but stoic as she looked into the distance with her chin lifted, both hands folded in front of her, and I saw that for me she would suffer a thousand indignities and denials of her personhood so that I would not go hungry, dying this way every day, one little piece at a time, in order to wrest from the world not great victories but the most pathetically simple items for survival — hand-me-down clothes from the women whose houses she cleaned and the plate of food wrapped in foil the café’s waitress at last brought to us, handing it to my mother with a self-satisfied smile as if she’d done something good and noble that day, a compassionate deed her pastor would praise come Sunday, because she had not turned us away but instead fed the coloreds, the grendels, through the back door, not cast us out as some would, which was unchristian, but consigned us to a more benign phantom realm east of Eden where we were, if not fully human, half-men and half-women: poor, damned creatures scratching at her kitchen door like cats for a bowl of milk. (Wasn’t that how JFK had once described blacks, as “poor bastards”?) And for this meal, this phantom nourishment, my mother gave her money, said God bless you—I remember her blessing them — then back inside her car as we continued south she made me eat every morsel for which she had so dearly paid.