Leaving: A Novel Read online

  We once held a position in our village: we were the scientist, the reader of the sky, who knew if there would be rain or drought this season by the smell of the wind and the cloud formations; or the zoologist, a Pygmy animal tracker, who knew the difference between a deer and an antelope dropping, between the paw print of a jaguar and the paw print of a lion. Or we were the slaves of another tribe; yes we might have been slaves of Black people, but we had respect, we had dignity, and we kept our culture to pass down to our children. In America, all will be wiped out, our children are given a new set of rules. Everything wise and powerful will seem to have been created by the White man.

  CHAPTER 4

  FEBRUARY 1963 • EASTON 17

  EASTON SAT ON the brick steps of the university’s West Lawn. He and the other protesters had gathered there, a few blocks away from Woolcrest’s. It was seven-thirty in the morning and the store had already opened. High up to the left, the white fog drifted through the top branches of the eucalyptus grove with a silence that made him shiver. He rubbed his hands together, stood up, then sat down again.

  “Shit. Let’s go already.”

  Ken Weaver yawned and sat down next to him. Ken was one of the Black leaders of the march. He wore sunglasses and a white cardigan sweater, V-necked with blue stripes, his hair cut short and neat.

  “You nigga motherfucker shit coon pussy,” he said to Easton. “Go back home to Africa.”

  “Morning, Ken.”

  “Black ape.”

  “You’re not a completely convincing bigot.” Easton smiled cordially.

  Ken took a sip of his coffee and let out a loud, satisfied sigh. A police car drove by on Oxford Street, the single top-hat siren unlit.

  “Just remember,” Ken said. “No matter how hard it is, we’re trying to make friends out of our enemies.”

  “I’ve done this before,” Easton said. He’d joined the Congress for Racial Equality six months earlier, after Charles told him about it. Since then he’d participated in a protest every month. “The store is open already. We should go.”

  “Patience. Not everyone’s here yet, and we have to finish the signs. Why don’t you go help.”

  Easton stood up and walked over to the circular brick bench from which he could watch Sandra kneeling down in her gray skirt, drawing large letters on a picket sign. The blond hair on her calves stood up in the cold, but she was concentrating on making the large, round “u” in prejudice.

  They’d talked once before, at another rally, when he’d placed himself next to her in the song chain so they could hold hands. She’d raised their clenched fists in the air together, and he stared at their interlocking fingers.

  “I hope my father’s watching the news,” she had said to him. “He’ll probably think we’re having sex.” She was a freshman at the university and a year older than he, originally from Oregon. In Norma, he might have been shot just for standing so close to her.

  “This is what I say we do.” Charles’s voice shook Easton out of his memory. They were both watching Sandra.

  “There is no we here,” Easton said. “There’s me and there’s her.”

  “Her? I’m not after no white meat.”

  “Sure.”

  “Listen,” said Charles. “I’m serious now. I’m talking about the cops. See, the cops expect all of us niggers to be scared and just let the White kids in our group scream and shout, ’cause the White kids don’t have anything to lose. But the funny thing is, it’s really us that don’t have anything to lose, right? But they don’t get it. We have to scare them until they realize we’re really angry, that they’re hurting us and we’re going to hurt them back if they don’t stop it.”

  “Why do you think someone like her is doing this?” Easton asked.

  “Listen to me, man, I’m serious. None of this ‘keep your mouth shut, be they friend’ shit.”

  Sandra started another card and flipped her short ponytail over her shoulder so that her neck showed above the white collar.

  Charles continued, “Malcolm said it’s fine to be nonviolent, and if everybody’d lay down their guns, then he’d lay down his gun. But if people are still shooting at you, you got to defend yourself.”

  “That’s true. That’s true,” Ken said as he came over, nodding his head. Easton watched Sandra as the other two got into it again. “But we’re doing our damage economically. Nobody ever got anywhere but dead fighting with their fists against the oppressor.”

  “I guess you never heard of the Civil War.”

  “I guess you never heard of Martin Luther King, Jr., or Gandhi, or Thoreau.”

  Easton stood and left the two to their endless debate. He walked over to Sandra, around to the front of the cards, his hands in his pockets.

  Easton cleared his throat. “Need some help?”

  “Oh. No. You don’t have to do anything. I’ve got it.” Her fingernails were perfect half-moons, polished clear and smooth. She pressed on the brown Magic Marker and filled in the circle of an exclamation point.

  “I just want to get started,” he said. “Please, give me something to do.”

  “Here, take these signs and nail them to those crosses.”

  Easton sat and collected the signs. “Did your father see us holding hands?” he asked as he hammered.

  She smiled and her ears turned red, almost translucent at the curl. “No. No, he didn’t see it.”

  “Well, maybe today.”

  “Yeah.” She put the marker away and sat up, considering her work. “How’s that look?”

  He moved around next to her and his heart quickened. “Good. But you spell abolish with an “o,” don’t you?”

  “Do you?” She scribbled out the tail of the second “a.”

  “I’m not carrying that one,” he said.

  “No. I’ll carry it. I never was so good in spelling. I’m hoping you don’t have to spell to be an anthropologist.” They were so close that the skin of their arms almost touched. She turned and looked at his face, around his forehead and cheeks, at his lips and hair. He smelled her perfume, a clean alcohol smell, not sweet like his sister’s vanilla oil.

  “Any other corrections?” she asked. He sifted through the signs intently, as if he were looking for a winning ticket to the lottery. He could feel her eyes on him but was afraid to turn and see.

  “Do you have to do anything with your hair?” she asked. “I mean, how do you comb it?”

  He touched his head as if he had to remind himself. “I’ve got good hair. I don’t have to do much. I just put in some pomade once in a while and pick it. But someone like my niece, she’s going to have to grease it every day or it will get all kinky.”

  She nodded.

  He looked back at the cards. “Nothing else is spelled incorrectly.”

  “Are you going to go to college? Because I think you should.”

  “I was thinking about it before. But now I’m more interested in being an artist.”

  “Painter?”

  “Charcoal drawing, mostly.”

  “Charcoal. That’s very…” She sat up straight and waved her hands around in the air as if she were trying to conduct her feelings into words. She wore small pearl earrings like he’d seen in the White fashion magazines he sometimes bought, and a silver bracelet around her thin wrist. “It’s very sensual,” she finally said.

  “Well.” He laughed. “I just want a job so I can have some cash, you know?”

  “So you can take me out, right?”

  Easton felt his chest tighten. If he simply said yes, she might be shocked at him for thinking she was serious. He tried to think of something clever but nothing came to him. She stood up and brushed off her hands.

  “Okay, signs are ready.” Ken walked over with Charles at his side, who was still yelling a point at him.

  “No, man, that’s because you’ve internalized the oppressor’s propaganda to pacify you. Violence isn’t evil in itself, only violence with an evil intent.”

  “Very nic
e signs, Sandra,” Ken said.

  “Yes,” Charles said, without even looking at them. “I hope they’re not too heavy a burden for y’all to carry.”

  Ken put his hand on Sandra’s shoulder, but she looked straight at Charles and smiled. “I’m willing to do whatever’s necessary.”

  Olaf, the other group leader, ran up the stairs breathing hard. “Sorry. Sorry. Alarm clock.” He picked up a sign and held it in the air. “All right. Let’s roll.”

  Charles let out a breath and shook his head. “How come the White folks are always telling us when we can go and when we gotta stay?”

  “Sorry.” Olaf looked at the ground. “Sorry. I wasn’t trying to tell you what to do. I was just saying now that I’m here, we can go. I mean, not now that I’m here, now that we’re all here, you don’t have to wait up for me anymore. I’m just trying to say you don’t have to wait up for me anymore.”

  Ken patted Olaf on the back. “Thank you. We’re glad you made it. Don’t let Charles intimidate you. It’s good to have your leadership skills to help us build ties with the community.” Olaf smiled and nodded.

  There were twenty protesters and half got to carry signs. Ken took the lead and they marched down Center Street to Shattuck and over to Woolcrest’s. Charles was in the back, talking it up with some newer Black members. Easton walked near Sandra, with one young man between them, a blond student in a blue suit who kept smiling and nodding at him as if they were long-lost brothers. Just before they reached Woolcrest’s, the man gave him a thumbs-up—for what, Easton wasn’t sure.

  They made a circle in front of the store. The police were already waiting at the curb, but they stayed in their cars. Usually they let them protest for an hour and then cleared them off. Charles didn’t join the circle; he stood at the corner of the building, watching both the picketing and the police.

  “Please don’t shop here.” Sandra handed a flyer to a woman coming out of the store pushing a cart. “They have unfair hiring practices, here and in the South.” The woman walked off, holding the flyer away from her body like it might explode.

  Shoppers came and went and neither Easton nor Sandra had any luck giving more flyers away. Half an hour later, they still had full stacks of paper in their hands. Most customers looked straight ahead and pretended the protesters were invisible.

  Finally Sandra put a flyer in front of one woman and said, “Keep America free.” The lady took it. She turned to Easton and shrugged.

  To the next man coming out of the store Easton said, “Equal rights for all races.” The man put his hands in the air like he was being held up. Then Sandra said to the next man, “Be a good American; support democracy,” and he took it. He even smiled at her. Sandra stuck her tongue out at Easton.

  “Fight the Commies,” Easton said, and a woman stopped and waited for him to give her a flyer. They alternated with new ones:

  “Support Kennedy.”

  “Buy American.”

  “Feed the children.”

  “Love the U.S. of A.”

  “Free America.”

  Sandra held out a flyer to one man and said, “Free, live American girls,” and even then the man had his fingers on the paper before withdrawing his hand and backing away from her.

  Charles whistled and pointed to a man and his son skirting around the edge of the circle to get into the store.

  “You missed one,” he yelled to Easton, who ran after them, but they slipped inside. Easton was about to turn when he noticed a familiar face behind the glass. Mrs. Usher was moving a sign farther from the window, a sign that announced a 50 percent sale every weekend. She looked older, and her arms shook as she gripped the metal base of the stand.

  She had long since stopped selling Ruby’s line of dresses, not because of his involvement in the protests, but because the store bought exclusively from a national distributor now. Mrs. Usher placed the stand in the aisle and looked up at the doors. She noticed Easton, and as if he’d forgotten why he was there, he smiled and raised his hand in a half-wave. She walked directly toward him, her shoulders forward, her old legs slightly off balance in her high heels. He wanted to run away, as he had that day when he’d begged her for a job. But her intensity kept him frozen there, like she was commanding him to wait. She couldn’t have recognized him. It had been three years, and he’d met her only four or five times. And yet he hoped that she might remember, just as much as he hoped she didn’t. She pushed the door open a few inches and spoke to him through the opening.

  “You’re going to have to move, young man. You may be allowed to boycott, but you can’t block the entrance. I know that for a fact.”

  “Mrs. Usher,” he said.

  She stared at him with narrowed eyes, as if he were a ghost come to haunt her. “Yes?”

  “I’m Ruby’s little brother, Easton. Love E.”

  “Oh.” Her face changed, first to recognition and relief and then to confusion. “Oh yes. I see now.”

  “How are you? How’s your husband?”

  “Why are you doing this? Why are you doing this to me?”

  “Oh, no. It’s not like that—”

  She pulled the door shut before he could explain. He thought he might say that it wasn’t personal, that he wasn’t trying to get back at her for what she had done, that he hoped she’d forgive him.

  “You have to clear the sidewalk,” a voice blared from a police megaphone. “You are blocking pedestrian traffic.”

  “You’re blocking the street!” Charles yelled at the cops. “How come you can do anything you want? If we were picketing for an increase of police wages, you would let us march all day!”

  Ken walked over to the police car and talked into the open window. The police officers glanced at Charles and nodded. Charles waved to them and yelled at Ken, “Sell me out, brother. That’s what they want. You sell me out and then you can smile because the real enemy has been locked up and you can keep your job, holding a sign for the White oppressor that reads, ‘Don’t worry about me, I’m just going to sing a song if you spit in my face.’”

  Ken walked back into the circle and Easton came up to him.

  “What did you tell him?”

  “I told him we are a nonviolent group, but we won’t leave until the store changes its policy.”

  “What about Charles?”

  “I said we couldn’t be responsible for what he might do, that he wasn’t part of our group anymore.”

  Easton looked at Charles leaning against the brick building, a pick in his natural and his arms folded across his black turtleneck. Easton walked over to him with his sign down.

  “You know they’re probably going to single you out,” he said to Charles.

  “How come you’re over here? Did Uncle Ken tell you to come over here? Because you can save your breath.”

  “I don’t think you should let yourself get beat up. I know you, you’re just asking for a beating, but this isn’t like high school.”

  “Man, I don’t want to be beat up. What I want is to be able to stand here and exercise my First Amendment right to say this place stinks and to close it down because it violates the law and watch them blue boys over there shut the place down. But they aren’t going to do it, man. Don’t you get it? We’ve been picketing outside this store almost every weekend for six months, and all they’ve done is hire one colored elevator man for two dollars an hour, right in the middle of the store where everyone can see him and say, ‘Oh deary, what are these radicals complaining about, colored people do work here.’ I’m not the one out here starting a fight. I’m defending my right to earn a living. It’s self-defense. They’re the ones telling you to clear out. I’m just not going to let them clear me out when I have a right to be here.”

  Two policemen got out of the lead car and slammed their doors. They walked toward Charles and Easton with their clubs out.

  “You’re going to start a riot if you touch me,” Charles said to them. The policemen looked over at Ken, who shrugged. Easton brushe
d his cheek and then put his hands in his pockets. He smiled at the officers.

  “He won’t do anything if you leave him alone,” Easton said.

  “What’s your name?” the first officer asked him.

  “Who, me?” Easton asked.

  “See how it works?” Charles said. “You’re going to be in the system now.”

  “What’s your name?” the officer asked again. Easton looked at Ken. Ken shook his head.

  “I take my Fifth Amendment right not to say anything.” This was part of the training they’d gone through, including the mock beatings and arrests. The rest of the protesters stopped to listen to the confrontation, and the policemen felt them getting closer.

  “You don’t need a Fifth Amendment right until after I arrest you,” the officer said.

  “So you don’t intend to arrest me?”

  “I intend on keeping this sidewalk cleared for the customers.” He looked back at his partner, who nodded.

  “You mean you’re just doing your job,” Easton said.

  “That’s right.”

  “You’re an honest man who believes in what’s right.”

  “Look, I’m asking you nicely”

  “I’m just saying that you’re a decent human being, that you care about the law, about justice, and morality.”

  “That’s got nothing to do with you blocking the sidewalk.”

  “That’s right. It doesn’t. It’s got nothing to do with justice. I’m asking you as a person to a person, not as some sort of criminal: Why’d you become a policeman?”