“School’s closed. National Guard using it as a base.”
“I’m the building supervisor. I want to see what damage there’s been.”
“Mr. Rawlins,” a woman’s voice called.
I looked to my right and saw Mrs. Masters, the school principal, waving at me from her office window, about a hundred feet down the salmon-colored plaster wall.
“I’m so glad you’re here,” she shouted. “Things are terrible.”
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“I’m fine but our poor school . . . Come to my office.”
“I’d like to,” I said. “But the general here has orders to keep me out.”
“It’s all right to let him in, sir,” the small woman said.
“No ma’am.” He kept his eye on me. “I have orders that only the military and police can get in here.”
“What rank is she?” I asked the sentinel.
He didn’t dignify the joke with a reply.
“At ease, soldier,” a white man in a colonel’s uniform said from just inside the wide double doors. “This man works here.”
“But sir —,” the guard began.
He really didn’t like me. He was willing to argue with his superior officer over orders that would allow a smart-mouthed Negro like myself into the compound.
“That’s enough, soldier. This man is allowed in.”
I smiled at my brother. He scowled at me before standing aside.
And there I was again, caught in the contradictions brought to the surface by the riots.
The sentry took his job seriously. Who was the enemy? Black people. Even though he was colored himself it was his job to bar our entry and he intended to keep us out. Even though I didn’t know it at the time, that was the beginning of the breakup of our community. It was the first time you could see that there was another side to be on. If you identified with white people, you had a place where you were welcomed in.
I walked past him and nodded to the officer.
The white man merely watched my passage. As soon as he saw that I was headed in the right direction he turned on his heel and marched off, leaving the sentry and me at the opposite ends of a struggle that neither one of us had asked for.
“OH, MR. RAWLINS,” Ada Masters cried.
We were on the third floor of the main building. Almost every door had been broken open and furniture was strewn in the halls. Here and there you could see where someone attempted to start a fire. But school buildings don’t burn easily. The wood was thick and the walls were as much stone and brick and plaster as they were anything else.
The damage looked bad but it wouldn’t take long to put everything back in order. I’d need painters and glazers, probably a carpenter or two, but I figured that the whole plant would be back to full capacity in two weeks’ time.
I told the principal this.
“It’s not just that, Mr. Rawlins,” she said. “It’s what they tried to do. Why would people want to burn and destroy their own community?”
She began to tremble and cry.
I folded the small white woman in my arms.
“It’s okay,” I crooned as if talking to a child.
“How can you say that? This is as much your neighborhood as the one you live in.”
“That’s just why I can say it,” I said.
“I don’t get what you mean.”
I let her go and sat two chairs upright for us. When she was comfortable and a little more relaxed, I said those things that I wished Paris had said to the hardware store owner.
“This is a tough place, Ada. You got working men and women all fenced in together, brooding about what they see and what they can’t have. Almost every one of them works for a white man. Every child is brought up thinking that only white people make things, rule countries, have history. They all come from the South. They all come from racism so bad that they don’t even know what it’s like to walk around with your head held high. They get nervous when the police drive by. They get angry when their children are dragged off in chains.
“Almost every black man, woman, and child you meet feels that anger. But they never let on, so you’ve never known. This riot was sayin’ it out loud for the first time. That’s all. Now it’s said and nothing will ever be the same. That’s good for us, no matter what we lost. And it could be good for white people too. But they have to understand just what happened here.”
Ada Masters had a look of both awe and terror on her face. It was as if she were seeing me for the first time.
At the far end of the hall I saw a soldier come up the stairs. When he saw us he waited around to watch.
“I’m going to have to be off the next few days, Mrs. Masters,” I said. “The police asked me to help them look into something.”
“The police?”
“Yeah. I’ll be here Monday. But if you need anything before then, call my house.”
I stood up but she remained in her chair.
“You coming?” I asked.
“Not right now,” she said. “I have to think, think about what’s happened and, and about what you said.”
13
Cox Bar was in a back alley off of Hooper. It was no more than a ramshackle hut but that was the place you would most likely find Raymond Alexander. Big Ginny Wright, the proprietor, was standing behind a high table used for a bar. She stood under a murky lamp that seemed to spread darkness instead of light. There was a pool table in the corner and a few chairs set around the room.
There were electric fans blowing from every side but it was still hot in there.
A small woman sat on a high stool at the far end of the tablebar, nursing a beer and staring off into space.
“Easy,” Ginny said. “How you, baby?”
“I’ve been better.”
Ginny laughed. “Me too. With these fools runnin’ the streets I been thinkin’ of movin’ back down to Texas. At least there you know what to expect.”
“Mr. Rawlins?” The young woman who had been drinking the beer had come up to me. She was slight and medium brown, the same color as Ginny.
“Yeah?”
“You remember me?” she asked. “I’m Benita, Benita Flag.”
I realized that I had met her before—with Mouse. She was beautiful then, wearing a little pink dress and red heels. Her hair, I remembered, was done up like a complex sculpture made of seashells. Now the hair was coarse and unkempt. She wore jeans and a stained white blouse that had been buttoned wrong.
“You seen Raymond?” she asked me.
“No.”
“’Cause he ain’t called me in two weeks and I’m worried he got hurt in all that’s happened. You know Ray wouldn’t just sit inside. I’m worried that maybe he got shot again.”
Mouse had been shot a few times in his life but the last wound was because he was helping me. For a long while I thought that he’d died and that I was the cause of his death.
“Can you help me find him?” Benita asked.
Ginny’s impatient sigh told me that Benita was just one more girlfriend that Mouse had let slide.
“I haven’t seen ’im in weeks, Benita. Really.”
She stared in my face, looking for a map to her boyfriend.
“I told her that even his wife don’t know where he is,” Ginny said. “But she just sit there drinkin’ beer and hopin’ he gonna walk in.”
Benita ignored Ginny’s barbs.
“Tell him to call me if you see him, Easy. I got to see him.”
“Excuse me, Benita,” Ginny said, “but Easy come in here to see me. I know that ’cause he don’t drink, so he must have somethin’ on his mind.”
Benita didn’t like being dismissed. She gave Ginny a hard look but then moved back to her lonely stool and flat beer.
“Raymond be lucky if that one don’t shoot ’im,” Ginny said in a low voice.
The comment unsettled me. It reminded me that the life we lived had always been perched at the edge of violence. That violence was Newell and Mouse and whoever killed Nola Payne. It was a constant threat eating away at happiness and any feeling of well-being.