The sign was forbidding, it said: EAT.
Alma turned her head slowly as Kin decelerated. “Here? You think they’ll serve us?”
He rubbed his jaw, then quickly dropped the hand back to the wheel. He had a day’s growth of beard, and none of them looked too well-starched after on the road. “I don’t know; I guess they’ll just have to feed us; you can’t turn people away on a night like this.”
She chuckled softly. He was still a big-town colored, in many ways.
They turned onto the snow-hidden gravel, and Kin pulled carefully around two gigantic semitrailers near the entrance. Then as they drew around the bulk of the vehicles, the sign that had been blocked-off winked at them. MOTEL FREE TV SHOWERS and underneath, in a dainty green worm of neon: VACANCY.
The semitrailers bulked huge, like sleeping leviathans, under their wraps of snow. It was getting worse. The wind keened around the little building like a night train to nowhere.
He stopped, and they sat there for a moment, letting the windows fog up around them.
Alma was worried, her brow drawn down, her hands in their knitted gloves interlocked on her lap. “Should we stay here while you go in?”
He shook his head. “It might have some effect if all of us went in together. Stir their hearts.”
They woke Raymond and Patty. The little girl sat up and yawned, then picked her nose with the lack of self-consciousness known only to a child upon awakening. She mumbled something, and Alma soothed her with a few words that they were going to stop and eat.
Patty said, very distinctly, “I have to go pee-pee, Mommy.”
It loosened their tenseness for a jagged second, then the implications dawned. This was another problem.Well, let’s tough it out , Kin thought wryly, a prayer rising silently from somewhere below.
When they opened the doors, the sharp edge of the wind slashed at them, instantly dispelling the body warmth they had maintained in the sealed car. The children began to shiver, and an involuntary little gasp came from Alma, barely discernible over the raging of the wind and the constant downdropping of the snow.
“Let’s go!” Kin shrieked, lifting Patty and charging at the Motel-Restaurant’s front door.
He hit the door at a skidding run, turned the knob, and flung the door wide. Alma crowded in behind him, and slammed the door as Raymond moved in on her heels.
They stood frozen for a split second, till the shock of the bitter cold left them, and then, abruptly, their senses returned.
They stood there, the four of them, in the middle of the restaurant, and slowly, everyone had turned to stare at them.
Kin felt a worm of terror leave its home and seek warmth elsewhere. It crawled toward his brain as he saw the eyes of the men in the restaurant fasten on them. He knew what they saw: a nigger, a nigger’s woman, and two little pickaninnies.
He shuddered. It was not entirely from the cold.
Alma, behind him, drew in a deep breath.
Then, the thick-armed counterman, leaning across the Formica counter-top, furrowed his brow and said, very carefully, so there was no chance for misinterpretation, “Sorry, fella, we can’t serve you.”
Then all the suppressed hopes that this time, just this one time of such importance, it would be different, that someone would let it slide, disappeared. It was going to be another battleground, in a war that had never really been fought.
“It’s pretty bad out there,” Kin said, “we thought we might get something hot to warm us up. We’ve been driving all day, all the way from — ”
The counterman cut him off with a harsh Midwest accent, not a trace of drawl in it. “I said: I’m sorry but we don’t serve Negroes here.” The way he said it was a cross between Negro and nigger. His voice was harder.
Kin stared at the man: what sort of man was it?
A thick neck supporting a crew-cut head. It looked like some off-color, fleshy burr on the end of a toadstool stem. Huge shoulders, bulging against the lumberjack shirt, and a pair of arms that said quietly musclebound and muscled. Kin was sure he could take the counterman.
But there were others. Four men, obviously truckers, with their caps slanted back on their heads, their eyes coolly inquisitive, their union buttons on the caps catching the glow of the overheads.
And a man and woman at the end of the counter. The woman’s pudgy face was screwed up in distate. She was a southerner, no question. They were able to look at you in a way like no other way. They were smelling hog maws and chitterlings and pomade. Even if it wasn’t there.
Even as they talked, a waitress came out from the kitchen, carrying a plate with steak and home fried potatoes on it. She stopped in an awkward midstride and stared at the newcomers. Her head jerked oddly and she turned to the counterman. “We don’t serve ’em, Eddie,” she said, as though he had never known this fact.
“That’s what I been telling ’em, Una. See, fella, we — uh — we don’t serve your people here. Gas, we got it, but that’s it.”
“It’s winter out there,” Kin said. “My wife and kids — ”
The counterman reached down and took something from under the bar that he kept concealed. “You don’t seem to hear too good, fella. What I said was: we ain’t in business for you.”
“We need a room for the night, too,” Alma inserted, a quavering bravado in her voice. She knew they would get nothing, and it was her way of having them turned down for everything, not just a lousy meal. Kin winced at her petty game-playing.
“Say, now, get outta here!” the waitress yelled. Her face was a grimace of outrage. Who were these darkies, anyhow?
“Take it easy, Una, just take it easy. They’re goin’. Ain’tcha, fella?” He came out from behind the bar, holding the sawed-off baseball bat loosely in his left hand.
Kin backed away.
It was going to be fight this big ofay, and maybe get his brains knocked out, and even then not getting food and sleep, unless it was at the county jail … or going back to the car, and the cold.
There could be little decision in the matter.
“Let’s go, Alma,” he said. He reached behind him and opened the door. The cold struck him suddenly, sharply, like a cobra; he felt his teeth clench in frustration and pain.
Eddie, the counterman, advanced on them with the ball bat and his arms like curlicued sausages of great size. “G’wan now, and don’t be makin’ me use this on yer.”
“Is there a colored place near here?” Kin asked, as Alma grabbed Raymond and slipped past into the darkness.
“No … and there ain’t gonna be, if we c’n help it. We got a business to run here, not for you people. G’wan to Illinois, where they treat a nigger better’n a white man.”
He came on again, and Kin backed out, closing the door tightly, staring at the 7-Up decal on the door. Then the wind raced down the neck of his coat, and he hurried to the car.
The three of them were huddled together in the front seat.
“Daddy, I gotta go pee-pee,” Patty said.
“Soon, honey. Soon,” he murmured at her, sliding in. He turned the key in the ignition and for a moment he did not think the overheated, then chilled motor would start. But it kicked over and they pulled ahead, past the forms of the trucks, like great white whales sleeping in shoals snow.
The road was worse now.
Cars were strewn on either side of the dual lane like flotsam left after the tide. Kin Hooker bent across the wheel, slipping automatically into the rib-straining position he had known all day.
His thoughts were clear, now.
For almost two years now, since they had started the idea, he had been undecided. Certainly it would be decisive, and a new world, and worth fighting for. But so many would be killed, so many, many, many who were innocent, and who had nothing to do with this war that had never been fought.