The Moon Above: Part 20

Chapters 39 and 40

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THIRTY-NINE

Our Secret Weapon

VIRGINIA HAD STARTED COMPLAINING to me that I was gone too much and was not seeing enough of James. We had tried and tried to have another child, to give James a brother or a sister, but it didn’t happen, and Virginia turned her full attention to our only child. She fussed over him and burrowed into his life as much as she could, even well after the point when it embarrassed him.

Toussaint and I needed to do something to this policeman’s wife to keep our plan of revenge afloat. I needed to spend more time with James. To my everlasting regret, I solved both problems at once.

Toussaint and I thought and thought and decided the worst thing we could do to this nice, upstanding white lady would be to inspire fear. Fear not only of Race men, but of Race men being able to penetrate into her house at will. We decided we would leave a note on her kitchen table. It would say only, “We are watching you and your brother. For George.” We would include a picture of George that had been taken after his beating and circulated in the Race press. The Defender never picked up the story, but the Chattanooga Call did, so we cut that one out. It was an elegant solution, one that could be equally deadly for us as blowing up a car, if we got caught, but also one that carried a little less immediate risk to life and limb.

The problem was getting into the house. Her two boys were tearing around the house at all hours, and when they weren’t wandering in and out, the neighbors were. This is where the lack of adequate sneaking around cover was critical. And this is where it occurred to me: use James. I wish I could say that Toussaint put me up to it and I just went along out of weakness, but the truth is that it was my idea. I could never tell Virginia, of course. I approached James directly.

He was sitting on his bed reading one evening while Virginia was at the store buying groceries. He was reading a comic book, The Flash, about the fastest man alive. It was his favorite, as its tattered cover would attest. I came in and wandered up so casually that he instantly knew that I wanted something. Without going into a lot of detail, I explained what I wanted him to do. I even explained a little bit of the why, so he would understand why it had to be done. He smiled when I finished talking. James looked at The Flash as if he would be joining the ranks of superheroes soon, once he had done this thing.

“It will be great!” he said.

He was too big and cool to hug me anymore, but he gave me a light punch on the shoulder. Not a hug, but almost as good. I can still feel a tingling in that shoulder when I think of that moment now.

“When do we start?”

It took a while for all the pieces to come together. The policeman’s sister and her family had company for a few days, company that came with more kids, so that made it impossible. Then it rained hard for several days and I didn’t want to have James mucking around in that. But still we watched and waited. James got more and more eager, drawing little lines of attack in pencil on the back of his notebook. When Virginia saw them one day and asked him what they were, he said they were football plays. Sometimes he drew the Flash running through the lady’s backyard.

Finally, all the elements came together. The family packed some suitcases in their car, which meant it was their turn to go visit someone and inflict their children on them. They weren’t big bags, which meant they weren’t going to stay long, but that would give us a couple of free days, at least. They also took the dog, which was a very good thing. He wasn’t much to look at, but he was noisy.

James had plotted his route as best he could without going into the yard. There was a gap in the back fence that appeared to be just big enough for him to climb through, and assuming there were no unforeseen pitfalls in the yard, he should be able to get to the house without being spotted. Getting into the house was another thing. Most people didn’t lock their doors. We had to hope that this family didn’t, even when they were away on vacation. If that wouldn’t work, I trained James on how to pick locks. Or, rather, we figured it out together, as I didn’t know how to do it, either. We practiced on our back door so the neighbors wouldn’t see us and wonder what we were up to. I never quite got the hang of it, but James was fast and good. I was proud of him for that. I still don’t understand why.

The evening after the couple left, Toussaint and I parked the car a few blocks away from the house, where the neighborhood petered out and the woods began. Nobody would see us here or look for us here. There was a small creek running through the woods, so if anyone did happen to spot us, we could get out of the car and say we were going fishing. Fishing at night in that little creek was a fishy excuse, but the white folks would probably expect Race men to be doing something like that.

The position was good for us but of little use to James because he would be on his own. He had the picture and the note in a sack, but he would have to make his way to the house in the dark without being seen. We had driven him around a few times to visualize where everything was, and he had plotted out several options, but now it was up to him. I got out of the car, bent down and gave him a hug.

“Be my little superhero,” I whispered, and he chuckled and then he was gone.

“He’s a good boy,” Toussaint said. “Smart, too.”

“Yes, he is. Just like his daddy.”

He laughed. “Which one? Good or smart?”

“Both. Of course.”

James took longer than I hoped, but finally I saw his small form darting from behind a tree across the road. Then he was in the back seat, telling us his story so fast I could hardly make out a word. He had nearly gotten to the fence when he heard the sniffing of a neighbor’s dog from behind a fence, then he had to sit quietly for several minutes until it went away. He made it to the back of the house all right, but the door was locked. James poked around and found an unlocked window and entered the house by crawling down the back of a couch. He made his way to the table and left the note and the photograph.

“They had a cookie jar,” he said at the end. “I brought us each back a cookie.”

We laughed and we ate the cookies. They were chocolate chip and a little stale, but the moment was good. That was my little activist, coming back from a mission with cookies.

“THIS IS RIDICULOUS,” THE REV. SCOTT SAID.

He was reading the Chattanooga Call, which he had subscribed to and which he had sent to our house. It wasn’t as good as the Defender, but it was easier to get. Rev. Scott slid the paper across the table to me. “School Integration Causes Riot in Mississippi,” the headline screamed.

“National Guard Called in to Keep Order.”

“They are rioting to keep little Black children out of their schools,” he huffed. “It’s just absurd. I don’t understand these people. What do they think will happen? That our black will rub off? What are they so afraid of?”

“Losing power,” Virginia said. “We were going to have a nice quiet dinner and now you bring that up. I told you not to bring the newspaper to the table.”

“Well, I shouldn’t have, I’m sorry. I don’t mean to get my dander up. It just seems that we climb and climb and then fall back, fall back. We can’t get ahead. Like that Greek fellow who was always pushing that rock uphill. Sen — sen — ”

“Sisyphus,” I said. I had a good education and liked to show it off now and then.

“Right. Sisyphus. I need to write that down. That would make a good sermon.”

He scribbled in the margins of the newspaper.

“Maybe Toussaint and some of those Nation of Islam people are right,” Virginia said. “Maybe nonviolence isn’t the way to go.”

We all stared at her, the Rev. Scott, James, and me. She had never said anything like that before.

“I know they’re not, I know they’re not,” she said quickly. “I’m just tired of hearing news like that. It’s so frustrating.”

“I know it’s frustrating,” her father said. “But Toussaint and his kind are not right. You don’t get ahead by being worse than the people who are keeping you down.”

“Maybe that’s the only way to do it,” James chimed in.

His grandfather and mother looked at him now, but I kept my eyes on my plate. I would have kicked him under the table if I could have reached him.

“What are you saying, son?” Rev. Scott asked.

“Maybe violence is the only thing they understand. That’s what they use on us, and it has worked for a long time. Maybe there’s no other way for them to see.”

Rev. Scott looked at James with sadness in his eyes, and it hurt me to see it. I was the one who had brought James into Toussaint’s orbit, but I wanted to keep that part of his life away from his mother and his grandfather. The less anyone knew about what we were doing, the better.

“Son. That isn’t what the Bible tells us to do. We should turn the other cheek.”

“But the Israelites were always fighting people and wiping them out!” James protested. “They would move in some place and kill everybody there!”

Rev. Scott shook his head.

“They did, too!” James said, his voice louder than it needed to be.

“Yes, they did,” his grandfather said. “But that was the Old Testament, James. Those days are gone. Now we are to turn the other cheek.”

James put his napkin on the table and stood up, his chair squealing against the floor.

“We’ve been doing that for a very long time. We don’t have any cheeks left to turn.”

He stomped out of the room and up the stairs. Virginia, so furious that her face was a deep maroon, began to stand to go after him. I grabbed her hand and pulled her back into her chair. “Let him go,” I said. “He’s a teenager.” “Barely,” she said.

“Still, he is. Let him cool down.”

“He’s right, dear,” Rev. Scott said. “He’s a good boy. This news would turn anyone’s head.”

“He probably won’t even remember it tomorrow,” I said, with a forced laugh. “He’ll be thinking of some girl at school.”

“Oh, I hope not, not yet,” Virginia said, calming down, giving me a smile.

I knew what I said wasn’t true. Toussaint had lit a fire within James, and I had spent a lot of time fanning the flames. That fire wouldn’t go out easily.

FORTY

Burning Down the House

“WHY DON’T you and Eileen come by the house?” I asked Willie one day when I ran into him at the hardware store. “Been a while.”

“Yeah, we’ll do that,” he said, his eyes resting on me for a second and then glancing off.

I hadn’t seen Willie in a while. Since I wasn’t working with him directly, we had to make an effort to get together, and we hadn’t made that effort in a long time. He paid for his bag of nails and gave me another nod and headed out. He was almost to his car when I caught up with him.

“Willie, seriously. Come by the house. Maybe tomorrow night? I feel like I haven’t seen you in forever.”

Willie had a big white Lincoln with dark green leather seats. He was doing well for himself, had moved up to chief of his section at Redstone. I was sure there were things he was working on that he couldn’t tell me about.

“I’ll have to see,” he said as he sank onto the Lincoln’s bench seat. Willie had picked up some weight to go with his gravitas. “But tomorrow night’s probably not good. I’m putting in a lot of hours.”

I don’t know why I pushed it so. In that moment, I felt Willie slipping away, and he was a bond to my past that I suddenly realized I didn’t want to break.

“Willie. Please.”

Willie pulled himself back up off the seat by leveraging the door frame, which made the whole car creak. He leveled his eyes on me, his fat lids at half-staff, which I knew meant that he was serious.

“Johnny, to be honest, I don’t like the company you’re keeping.”

“What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean. The last couple of times we were at your house you spent most of the night complaining about the white man and what he’s doing to us. I see that every day, I don’t need to hear about it when I’m visiting my friends.”

“But — ” I didn’t know what to say. “I’m just talking about the news, what’s going on around us every day.”

“I know what’s going on around us every day, Johnny. You’re not the only Black man to be affected. And it’s not anything new. What’s new is that you’re angry about it. You and that Toussaint Guthrie.”

“So, you don’t think I should be friends with Toussaint?”

Willie descended back onto the seat. I felt a trickle of cold sweat run down my spine. I was losing him.

“You can be friends with whoever you want, Johnny. But what has Toussaint done up against what you’ve done? What does he know up against what you know? Nothing. He’s all mouth, Johnny. And you’re all ears, for some reason. But just because you’re listening to him doesn’t mean I have to.”

“Willie — ”

He shut the door and rolled down the window a little.

“Call me when you wise up, Johnny, and we’ll be glad to come over again.”

He started the Lincoln’s massive engine and drove away.

“I’m not going to call you!” I shouted at the vehicle’s departing backside. “You just stay in your place, Willie! You seem to know where it is!”

I didn’t really feel that way about Willie, and I don’t know why I shouted that. There are a lot of things that I did in that time, and in the years to come, that I don’t understand. It was almost like I had actually died in the war but wasn’t buried, and someone else took over my body and lived the rest of my life. When I think about those times and feel bad, that’s what I like to think. It wasn’t me. I was dead and gone and peaceful in the ground, and someone else made my mistakes.

Virginia was losing patience with me, too. As time went on, James’ enthusiasm for the struggle — and for making the struggle an actual struggle — became impossible to ignore. She was no dummy, she knew where it was coming from, too, as surely as Willie did.

“Look at what’s going on all around us,” she said when the Freedom Riders started moving into the South and signing up Race men and women to vote. “This is the way to do it, not with violence. I don’t want you filling our son’s head with this, Johnny.”

“It’s what they’re afraid of, Virginia. It’s what they’ve always been afraid of. White people understand violence. They can dish it out, believe me. But they can’t take it. Especially from us.”

“Getting down to their level doesn’t make us better. It doesn’t even make us equal. It makes us worse. I am telling you, do not fill James’s head with this.”

“Or what, Virginia?”

It was a question I should never have asked. She gave me a long, hard, level look. I had seen fire in her eyes before, but it had never been aimed at me as a weapon.

“I will do whatever I can to protect him from that, Johnny. Whatever I think I need to do.”

That could cover a lot of ground. I backed down. I didn’t really want to know how far she was willing to go.

So, I began lying to her. The truth was I was proud of what James was becoming. He was becoming a warrior. I was done with that life, was exhausted by it, but he was just beginning, and he would be a much better warrior than I ever could be. I protected our country from outside forces. But I came home and despite my sacrifice, I was just a Race man in white America. Nothing had changed. James was going to be part of a new generation of warriors, one that would extend freedom to our own people. How could you not be proud of that?

I thought that fighting back was the hard way. Working through nonviolence, like Dr. King advocated, like Gandhi had advocated before him, was the easy way. Was it not easy to do nothing in the face of continuous and eternal oppression? Was it not harder to risk jail or even death to help others? That is what I thought then, as I talked with Toussaint and watched James begin to swim in the waters we warmed for him. That is what I thought for a long time.

I could not convince Virginia otherwise, or her father. I became an underground supporter to my little warrior, underground even in my own house, in my own life.

“Son,” I told him one night while we were sitting in our car, looking at the house of someone who had attacked Freedom Riders, wondering what we could do to them — “son, there are people who don’t understand what we’re doing, and some who do understand it but don’t approve of it. Do you follow me?” “I follow you, Father,” he said.

I had taught him to call me Father and to call Virginia Mother, instead of Mom and Dad. It was how I was raised, and it seemed right to me.

“So, we need to be quiet about it. You know we’ve talked about not saying anything at school. You haven’t said anything at school, have you?”

“No, sir.”

I thought he answered a little too quickly, but he looked sincere, so I didn’t press it.

“That’s good. I’m just saying we also need to be quiet when we’re around anyone else. Anyone but you and me.”

“What you mean, Father, is don’t tell Mother. And Grandfather.”

“Yes, James. I know that sounds difficult, but that is what I’m asking.”

“Would they count as people who don’t understand what we’re doing? Or people who understand but don’t approve?”

“That last one, I think. But I’m not so sure that anyone who really understood it would oppose it. You’ve read your history, right?”

“I have. Are you going to ask me again if I know where Toussaint got his name?”

I looked over at him and he was looking away, but grinning.

“Oh, I’ve asked you that before, have I?” “Yes, sir.” Still with the grin.

I reached over and gave him a playful box on the back of the head.

“I knew that. Just seeing if you were paying attention, is all.”

“Uh huh. Sir.”

I matched his grin with my own. And so, I continued training and molding my weapon in secret.

THINGS REALLY WENT SOUTH WHEN HE GOT BUSTED. THIS WAS WHEN I learned several things about my son. One was that he had started going out on his own with his friends, doing what he called “operations.” Toussaint and I were too old and slow for him, and too soft. He and his friends had developed a taste for the harder stuff. Blowing up a car, breaking into a house to deliver a cryptic note, hanging pro-Race signs off the front doors of known racists, that was all nothing. It would not right the wrongs, not the way a beating could.

James and his friends, as they got older and stronger, liked to deliver their message wrapped in pain. They never attacked a white man openly — that would be suicide, even they could see that — but they were as watchful as sharks and became skilled at following a white man on a narrow road as he tried to make his way home after having too much to drink. A sudden acceleration from behind, a flash of the headlights, maybe even a gentle tap with the front bumper, and that man was very likely to careen off into the trees to break an arm or leg, or worse. If the man was very, very drunk, and they knew no one waited for him at home, he might get a beating from a group of masked toughs as he stepped out of his car and fumbled with his keys at the door. He would never be able to say who hit him.

James and his gang scattered their attacks all over North Alabama. Decatur one week, as far as Scottsboro the next, maybe a quick hit in Florence. They delivered no actual message with their message, just quick and blinding pain. They never touched women, or course, or even tried to be noticed by women, especially white women. That was the real kiss of death, of literal death, far more dangerous than even taking on a white man in the daytimes. James and his friends were angry and increasingly violent, but they were not stupid, and they were not suicidal.

But they did make mistakes. They got too active too close to home. One day a policeman showed up at our door, looking for James. A white policeman. I was at work. Virginia let him in and asked what it was all about. He showed her a baseball cap that had been left at the house of a man who had been beaten by several people. No one had seen anything, but the hat was there and, written neatly inside, was the name James Nicholas. It was a little smeared with sweat but it was still legible. Virginia had written it there, had inscribed his name on most of his clothing, for some reason. James probably forgot all about it.

Virginia called him at the church, and he came home. He was working there, doing the same sort of odd jobs that I used to do at the Rev. Scott’s church in Tuskegee. The policeman asked James if he had been at the house where the beating occurred, and he said no. He had been at his friend Jeff’s house, several miles away. Jeff could vouch for him and so could Jeff’s mother. The policeman showed James the hat and asked him if it was his, which of course it was. James said he had lost the hat and didn’t know what had happened to it. He thanked the policeman for bringing it back. The policeman asked him if he was sure he hadn’t lost it at the scene of a beating, and James said he was sure.

And that was it. The policeman, in talking to Virginia, had already given up that he had no witnesses. He was either expecting James to fold up and confess, or he didn’t really care about solving the case and threw away his only lead. Maybe he didn’t much like the guy who had been beaten up and didn’t care who did it. Whatever the reason, he left, but he took the cap with him.

I heard about all of this an hour or so later when I came home, tired and dirty from a long day and expecting dinner. Instead, I stepped into a battle. Virginia was hot, and James wasn’t much cooler.

“You,” my wife said, pointing her finger at the center of my head like

she was holding a gun. “You filled his head with this nonsense. You and that Toussaint. And now he’s a criminal.”

“I am not a criminal,” James said, shouting at her loud enough to make her flinch. “I didn’t do anything.”

“You know you did,” Virginia said. “You know you did.” “Don’t you raise your voice to your mother,” I said.

We were all talking at once, giving each other orders instead of listening. It set the tone for how things were going to be from then on. I had thought I was coming home to just a normal evening after a normal day at work, but instead I walked into the beginning of the end. These things sneak up on you sometimes.

That particular evening, James ended up sulking in his room and I ended up sleeping on the couch after making myself dinner out of whatever I could find in the fridge. Virginia stayed in our bedroom and I could hear her crying on the phone to her father. I couldn’t sleep. I watched TV until all the stations signed off and then I lay there, rigid and angry, my body finding new lumps in the couch that made me squirm. Looking back, I think that was probably the worst night of my life. Worse even than all the horrible nights in the camp. There, I had lost hope but felt it was not my fault, it was the fault of forces much bigger than me. Here, I knew it was my fault.

I went back to work the next day. Virginia was in the bathroom, so I snuck into the bedroom, got my clothes and left. James went to school, I guess. Things went on as if things were normal, for a while. Virginia was distinctly frosty to me for a long time, and James was becoming an inscrutable teenager, so I threw myself into work. The vehicles in the motor pool had never run so smoothly. After a while, I got promoted, and became the assistant to the commander for the entire motor pool: trucks, airplane engines, generator, whatever there was that had pistons. I could have run the whole thing myself, but that still wasn’t a fitting job for a Race man in Alabama.

“You should build the engines for our rockets,” one of the German engineers joked when he climbed down from a plane flight one day. “We could get to the moon faster.”

I gave him a little chuckle but no actual smile. He was right, though.

Redstone Arsenal’s motor pool had the least downtime of any Army base, or any NASA facility.

But anyway, I’m a little ahead of myself. I worked hard, and James got good grades despite his growing hooliganism, and Virginia actually began to remember that I was her husband and that she loved me. And then James got arrested for real.

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