Lucinderella, p.15
Lucinderella, page 15
In short, the Northern papers got hold of it, sent in an airborne task force of newsmen, “featuriters,” and photographers and with the help of radio and television commentators attempted to alert the nation to its danger. They interviewed Leon, paid him a fee (which he was glad enough to accept under the circumstances), and photographed him at the closed door of The Homestead, the “Hotel Unfair” by now; they photographed Rufus kneeling in his tomato bed at an angle that made him appear to be begging for his life at a lynching, the iron rods of the fence looked like a cage. They tried to make him let them in the back door: “Aren’t you the janitor?” as ingratiating to a yardman as calling a Park Avenue doctor a veterinary. “Janitor!” “Well, porter? Superintendent?” (Their images were urban.) “I’m the yardman.” “What’s a yardman? What does he do? What do they pay you?” “I’m the yardman, what can I do for you?”—obviously there was nothing they could get together on after such a beginning.
SPEW-National sent in a busload of students who had apparently passed all their exams and been just standing round; they seemed glad to get off from more confining academic duties and they knelt in prayer round Papa Charles’ old mounting block for the various sound trucks and cameras that by then were grinding away, sang “We Shall Overcome” and “We Will Not Be Moved” and a few hymns and spirituals (censored somewhat for the modern ear—no “Longin for de ol plantation” or “Hear dose darkies singin” or such obscenities), lay down in the gate and on the porch, and when the sun happened to go in on part of it, handicapping the lensmen, obligingly backed up and ran through it all again even to the “Cossacks! Dirty Cossacks!” for Patrolman Gepfert and some of his colleagues, who weren’t quite sure how to take it.
The Judge said it looked like a sit-in and Uncle Brownell said, “But if this is the Peace Corps, Guy, I understood they were expressly cautioned when sent to strange places against provoking disturbances, cautioned, I mean, to fit in. Of course ‘fit’ does sound like ‘sit,’ but even so——”
“This isn’t the Peace Corps, Bubber. These are students, some of them, I should say, from what we used to call the College of Hard Knocks.”
They demanded “Jail!” but we didn’t want to take on their board and lodging with no prospect of any bursar refunding us a nickel out of what was for him pure gravy; however, there seemed to be no choice, and anyway I think Gepfert was annoyed at “Cossacks.” He had faced down all sorts of names in his day but that was a new one and he seemed to think it carried implications a man shouldn’t put up with; in any case he called The Wagon, the hymns and prayers rising to a greater intensity as it rolled in, as well as “Cossacks! Dirty Cossacks!”
“‘Cossacks’?” said Uncle Brownell inside the closed shutters.
“When we were boys,” the Judge sighed, “we said, ‘Cheese it, the cops!’ but the steppes are closer today.”
Which was also true of Massachusetts. Miss Barbara Storer, blue-haired and seventy-eight, arrived in a matter of hours, as soon as she came out from under the dryer and could arrange passage on the suddenly choked airways—a descendant, it seemed, of old Captain Ezra Increase Bigelow Prescott Storer of Salem, master of the brigantine Hepzibah S. (for a daughter), who had plied the Africa-Carolina trade for years until a meddling Federal Government outlawed his cargo; Miss Barbara, suffering from the isolation imposed by the increase which the Captain had accumulated while things were going well, and propelled by who can say what other complication of non sequiturs, arrived and, from a wicker chair which Big Ma had Dahlonega carry out to her, participated in the songs and ceremonies with dry enthusiastic little claps of her gentle palms and a gay post-debutante smile of expensive Boston dental work. She hadn’t had such fun since Endicott’s boy stroked the Harvard crew to victory in the race conflict with Yale in Naught Six, crying “Jail!” with the others and “Cossacks!” and “Freedom now!” (apparently an interpolation of her own and confusing on the heels of “Jail!”); she would have been the first one in The Wagon except for the gallantry of Chief Whisnant, who insisted on sending her in his own car—unfortunately, in overcoming her resistance, getting himself photographed in positions the Northern press could only read as manhandling and police brutality. (“Go limp, Barbara!” they shouted at her, forgetting how hard it was for a New Englander to do that.)
They didn’t take Leon. He hadn’t been able to participate much in the goings on, not knowing the songs and unable to join in the prayers (he was a Church of England man, he told Lucinda, and used to having the score there in front of him), and also being I suspect rather aghast at the un-British attitude to the constabulary—reticence the students were glad to encourage, seeing no need to share credit with a foreigner and interpreting his general politeness as a sign of weakness anyway, what else? They had shunted him off into the background and forgotten him, hardly even knew whom Lucinda meant when she asked for him, though she spotted him soon enough by his hat.
Perhaps the police didn’t take him because he was talking to a lady, polite too in their provincial way; at any rate they didn’t take him, and he and Lucy talked—largely I believe about his four children and their wide Mendelian range of beautiful colors, one white, two brown, one black, thanks to his lovely Portuguese-Jewish wife. He asked if Lucy didn’t find it very monotonous living in a household of only one color. “But you do have Dahlonega, don’t you? Is she your sister?” He was homesick and obviously getting sicker every minute and when Stanley came out with the Judge’s message about the plane he could hardly believe his ears.
By the time he had got his suitcase and said his thanks to “Bubberdarlin” and “Nunkie,” the students were gathering again (Captain Ezra in a kind of grand peripheral justice had put up bail for everybody) and Leon moved among them saying good-by to those who thought they had seen him before somewhere and those sure they hadn’t. He stood up on the old carriage block in a breather between the hymns and thanked them for the interest they had shown in his affairs. He got as far as “Everything’s been taken care of, mates, you can stand down now” before he was silenced by jeers and “Stool pigeon!” and “Uncle Tom!” and “Who’s this son of a Birch?” everybody as indignant as if he had turned a hose on them. He shook his head with a wide uncomprehending West Indian smile, turned up his pink palms and yielded. Stanley and Lucy took him to the airport in the Judge’s car.
Leon’s leaving didn’t bother the students any more than any other drop-out. He didn’t belong in the course, hadn’t had the credits, was hardly getting by; if he had stayed on he would have been a kick-out. If there was a momentary weakening in morale Savannah’s taxicab took care of it, squawking to clear a way to the house and full enough of assorted luggage and Florida souvenirs and Savannah in traveling clothes to prove the place was a hotel. They closed ranks and linked arms and sat and lay and kneeled and in the end forced her speechless back upon Uncle Otis and the Jonathan Copp, where she would have had to go anyhow, no room at The Homestead even if Uncle Brownell had accepted her handling of the Doubling-up Clause—she was alone in the cab at the time, having let Cleveland off at the bank what with all its recent troubles.
This rout of a would-be guest, as I say, more than offset the loss of Leon and they raised their voices in “Let My People Go” and “Hold the Light” (formerly “Hol de Light, Hol de Light, de Angels Lookin at Me”). One spidery boy shouted a plea for “Better basketball courts!” and everybody seemed to agree it was a right he shouldn’t be denied.
Uncle Brownell had somehow persuaded himself that the question of Jewell Street wouldn’t come up at all; there was no visible connection between the two establishments, none of these people out there knew anything about it or would ever know. They had other things on their mind. He took it for granted that the Mutual Deterrents I have mentioned would apply to them as well as to our friends, overlooking the fact that the deterrents were designed for use against individuals with standards which had a stable and accepted value and that out-of-town students and newspapermen were actually as invulnerable as a truck-load of data processing machines.
The reporters on this assignment, though you might not have guessed it from the breathlessness of their dispatches, were really finding the whole thing rather deadly. After all, students at work are not very interesting—upright, prone, or sitting; aside from which (except for the brief interlude of Leon) the boys had been through it all before, knew it backwards, could have written it in the home office. Trying to find something new, some new approach, a fresh angle for the editors at home and for their own sanity as well, they scratched into all sorts of cracks and crannies and unlikely places and one afternoon a boy named Kloufax on one of the wire services took a long gamble on picking up a tie-in between the “Telfair” carved into the carriage block and perhaps a “Telfair” carved into the records at the Clerk’s Office and without much digging struck Papa Charles’ will and the strange little lapidarian glitter of “Jewell Street,” which he thereupon hired a Jax Taxi and proceeded without much hope to visit.
He told John Wheat he was looking for 908 and John phoned upstairs, listened a second or two and sent him up. Madam Ace received him in the parlor where she was saying good-by to a one-armed man whom she called Professor; she pointed Kloufax to the television set and he watched the Bay Street Show with a sort of morbid lack of curiosity while the Professor said there seemed to be so many cops in Bay Street he would never find one to tell him how the hell to get to the South ramp and if she would kindly direct him he would just be pushing off.
When she came back from seeing him to the head of the stairs she studied Kloufax with an inquiring “Yes sir?” and asked if he had anybody special in mind. He told her the truth about how he happened to be there, showed her some identification of himself as a newspaperman, which she glanced at without putting her skepticism in words, or needing to. “If you’re from the Syndicate,” she said, “you must know Jason Colquitt.” Kloufax said he didn’t know Jason, but she went right on; she was a private-enterprise woman and she didn’t intend to have any syndicate telling her how to run her business, or any Justice Department either, if that was who he worked for, or was he a T-man nosing into her internal revenue? “I’m a newspaperman, Mrs. Ace——”
“Mooneyham. Mrs. Mooneyham. Because I’m thinking of retiring to the County anyway,” leading on into a conversation that eventually covered a rather wide field, from the threatened rise in her rental to any number of curious details about The Homestead (and the homesteaders), the sum of it forcing him to conclude that, applicable to the Hotel Unfair or not, there couldn’t be much question that Title II was applicable to what he christened The Annex. In fact when he brought up the question of discrimination at The Annex Mrs. Mooneyham as much as said that discrimination was her middle name; she was discriminating and her clientele was and her girls were. The basis of all quality was discrimination, the freedom to choose, to separate the better from the good; she had never had anyone complaining of her high quality for the simple reason (this with some edge, getting closer to home) that those with a taste for less could easily find it among the amateurs—“the ‘bush league,’” should she say. “And as for ‘equality,’ there are no two bosoms in my house that are equal, Mr. I-didn’t-catch-the-name——”
“Kloufax.”
“And even in a single pair the left one’s different from the right. And among my clients no two have equal—characteristics, though I am certainly not going to discuss personal matters of that nature with a stranger.”
“In other words, Mrs. Mooneyham——”
“Beyond saying it is inequalities that are the spice of life.”
“In other words, Mrs. Mooneyham, you operate both establishments but they’re not equal?”
“Let me ask you a question, Mr. Kleenex, if I may.”
“Kloufax.”
“Yes. Are you with us here this afternoon on, in a word, business or pleasure?” feeling round for the bell button that would bring up John Wheat from the bowling lanes in case the answer was what she had begun to suspect. And it more or less was, Kloufax explaining, or starting to, that he was a Young-Man-on-the-Way-Up and his business was his pleasure, at which Mrs. Mooneyham pressed and, in a minute or two, produced John whom she requested in a quote-unquote tone to show the gentleman to his car.
He had hardly left Jewell Street before even more far-reaching revelations began to take place in Bay, for Lucinda, violating the picket lines on her way home from the courthouse, stepping over and around prostrate bodies as if she lived on an alligator farm, heard somebody behind her say, “Miss Fannin?” then, “Lucy?” then, “Lucy!” and turned into the flash of a camera.
She couldn’t remember for a minute which one of the metropolitan dailies the boy worked for or what his name was but she knew him; and knew three or four of the others now that they crowded round her and she took a good look—and they took a good look at her, never expecting to find her in such a place. In such a situation indeed, halfway through a picket line I mean. The encounter appeared friendly enough from the window where I was waiting for her, even exuberant on their part (in their worn-down seeking for something new to put on the wires) though not on Lucy’s; I went out over the knees and thighs to be with her.
She was quite upset, I could tell, though she was trying to hide it, trying to be pleasant through her annoyance—and under the strain of it introducing me as “Cliff, boys.” One of them said, “Hello, Cliff,” in a casual way but another one added it up: “Cliff? Cliff Maloof! I’d have known him anywhere, Lucinda,” Lucy grabbing her mouth and wailing, “No, I don’t mean ‘Cliff,’ I mean—I mean Johnny Clint,” and throwing her arms round me, “Who do I mean, honey? Introduce yourself,” and I said my name was Spignor, her solid little thorax sending warm electric pulses into my chest on one side and my arms on the other. And the flashbulbs popping. Kloufax said, “I want to talk to you, Lucy,” and she said, “If you want to talk about the race question I don’t give a damn about the race question, one person at a time is all I can take, and sometimes more,” which they all scribbled down with stubby pencils. He said no it was something else and she said, “Later, Fax, I have to go to the john” (if you please!), and he said all right.
But the connection had been made between the sets at the Martin Beck and the house in front of their eyes; they got it all now and they went to work like the firemen charging in to rescue Big Ma in the bathroom, photographing right and left, plowing through the pickets and over the bodies to get closer and begging Lucy to take them inside (“backstage,” they said; said they wanted “to meet the cast”), which she wouldn’t do, and making a long shot of Uncle Brownell and the Judge who had noticed a change in the tumult and come out on the upstairs porch, the whole siege having completely altered in character with the reporters being the ones trying to get an entrance and the students out there gaping, and nobody caring if they did. In addition to which, picketing The Homestead had suddenly got to be too much like picketing the Martin Beck Theater, suddenly got into Mutual Deterrents of their own—cross-union complications and no one could say what reprisals from the Actors Guild and the Brotherhood of Stagehands, or whatever they call it, not to mention all the amalgamations of musicians and electricians and carpenters, anyway people who spoke the language. The first thing I knew, Lucy was giving autographs to the students and shaking hands with everybody and the monitor was down at an end of the fence arguing about a pull-out, not whether but where to; some students wanted to go on to Fort Knox and picket “that de facto segregation of gold bars out there.” “We’ll have a ‘Cash-in,’ man,” one of them said; “They’ve got no Constitutional right to stockpile all that money.” The monitor wouldn’t consent, said it was “a ‘Graduates Only’ job” and cut it all short by setting out for the office, where he got in touch with SPEW-National and reported the bad turn things had taken by long-distance collect.
Which ended it as abruptly as it had begun. The class was evidently given a new problem; in half an hour they had deactivated Bay Street, and the next morning they boarded buses and pulled out, students, newsmen, lensmen, all of them, and we heaved a deep sigh of relief—sewer-smelling from our Miracle Mile but beautiful.…
It left things pretty quiet at the Jonathan Copp (most of the press had been staying with us, Uncle Otis shaking his head over the whole to-do—another branch of the family, thank God); we had plenty of time to read the Northern papers when they began to come in. And look at the pictures. Lucy and I were on the front page of two of them as “Playwright and Friend” (a smirk in the “Friend,” which would have seemed to have some justification, Lucy with her arms tight round my neck and me pulling her up on tiptoe and giving her a heartier kiss than the occasion accounted for). The news stories were not very clear. One had it that I was the actor who took the part of Maloof in the play and suggested that the entire cast may have flown down in support of the Freedom Sitters (“Operation Fair”)—corrected in a later edition at the quick protest of the theater manager against the implication the evening performance was being left to understudies. Another paper made an attempt to unravel the situation as it was, quoting Miss Fannin’s New York agent as declaring she had, as a test, purposely precipitated the crisis by calling in Mr. Tolliver; which got her safely over on the side of the angels instead of leaving her there with us red-necked crackers. Nothing anywhere on Madam Ace, not news any more that sex was at the bottom of everything.
2
I borrowed Uncle Otis’ car and asked Lucy to drive out and have a steak with me. “‘Playwright and Friend,’” I said (I had showed her the page that morning, yesterday’s paper). She said, “Why, Clamp, I’d love to,” getting my name right at last which was almost like kissing me on the mouth; a nice spring evening when I went to pick her up, the sun hardly down, Bay Street as still and quiet after all its troubles as if being treated for shock.
