Look Away

I want to Know: Is there anywhere a land of goodness and beauty? Once I thought there was. The streets were lined with oaks. The houses were cool and shuttered. Men and women sat on porches telling stories. I picked blackberries on red ditchbanks and sold them to a Negro who made wine. I fished and hunted, in still waters, in still forests. The summers were long, the winters short. With a girl named Flora I swung in a swing with a long rope, and a quarter arc of an automobile tire for a seat. The rope ascended up and up to the oaken limb, and I giggled when her dress billowed and I saw her thighs. The flesh was sweet and warm, in warm sunlight. We stood outside the Negro church and listened to the singing. We thought we knew them. They were loving, primitive and joyful, and they cooked for our mothers, cleaned our houses and dug our ditches, and at night went away. In the moonlight their skin shone like the leaves of magnolia. They sat on their porches at night, in a dark city, dark and silent. We sat on our porches, listening to grandfathers. We heard the crickets singing, and far away in the mist at the pond the croaking of frogs. We slept, we ate, we sang, we played, we loved, and went away.

Sometimes we come back, and want to know.

Flora and I went away, to the university. She was one of those beauties with olive skin, black hair and blue eyes, and a long, square-shouldered body. When we made love she gasped and sobbed and closed her eyes and they filled with tears, and her face was raw and naked, drawn, wild, troubled and profoundly sad, and then faintly lighted with tenderness and sleep. I would never forget. But (as I learned later) there was another man, Ian Macdonald, whose father was a banker and a planter. They didn't marry just then. We all went away again.

Ian went to Harvard. I went to New York, and worked for a magazine. Flora went to New York, too. New York is a small town. You can't hide there, any more than you could in our village. Flora and I came upon each other again in the lobby at the Algonquin, after the theater, drinking highballs. She told me she was a model. She was a long-necked New York Modigliani in a fashion ad, with her hip out of joint. They made her gaunt and sunken-eyed. For six months we slept together, in my place on 11th Avenue. We argued only about the Negroes who came to my parties. Flora would leave as soon as a Negro arrived. It wasn't important. So I thought. She vanished, without farewell, on a summer day, and in the fall she married Ian Macdonald.

Two years later I returned to the university for a few days. My Southern accent gentled the way for me, until I took out press card, pencil and note pad. Then the eye chilled and narrowed, and the mouth closed to a stony bloodless line. The mob attacked cars, photographers, the marshals and the Army of the United States of America. The state and local cops grinned, and withdrew. They would help no nigger get in that door. I went away saddened and sickened, but not persuaded: This was crisis, conflict; most unusual. My home was gentle, my people tender. The violent ones were strangers agitated, for the moment, by strange doctrines. They and the crisis would go away.

Last summer I went back again, wondering and fearful, yet excited, in a nostalgic sort of way, and hoping. I wanted assurance; I wanted to listen again to the voices of grandfathers on the evening porches. I still was very young.

At the motel, on the first evening, I ran into a reporter I had first met during the unpleasantness at the university, nearly two years before. We had dinner together. He had been in Mississippi for a week. "Obey all the laws," he told me. "These cops down here will arrest you for anything—for nothing. Don't drive a car with an out-of-siate license plate. Don't even approach the speed limit. Stop at all stop signs. Don't cross the yellow line. Don't shack up with a woman. She may be part of a frame. Don't dress conspicuously. These kids coming down here are just begging for trouble. Sandals, sneakers, beards—my God! Some of 'em are going to get hurt, or killed. Don't say anything in public or on the telephone. All the telephones you'll use are tapped. Don't travel alone. Don't travel at night. Don't trust anybody. There're some splendid people down here, but they can't do a damn tiling to help you. You're absolutely alone, in one sense, in the most fundamental sense, but remember: Always have a friend with you."

I thanked him, and went for a ride, alone, in my rented Oldsmobile. I never had liked being one of the pack, picking each other's brains; I would be no headquarters reporter; surely, day and night, alone or not, I would be safe. This was my home. I drove the dark streets. I had never remembered them as dark. I moved slowly, looking for the porches. They were dark. Lonesome lighted signs welcomed me to the Baptist church, the Kiwanis Club and the hotels. In the Negro section the darkness closed down and the silence was the silence of deep space. On the porches before the dark shacks I saw a white shirt, the flare of a match, and a dark, still presence. The streets were rutted and gritty. At a corner I slowed and stopped, and looked about me. I just hadn't remembered the place as so dark. I remembered it as light, and red, blue and green. A car stopped behind me. I drove on. It followed. I saw a sign, Quiet—Sick Zone, and laughed, but not much. The following car was patient—50 feet back, slowing and turning and speeding as I did. At the motel, when I parked, it stopped its patient, respectful 50 feet away, and two white faces gazed at me, slack-lipped and flat-eyed but without expression except, perhaps, for slow-witted speculation and assessment. If they were my shadows, they were harmless. I forgot them. In my room I turned on the television set in time to see an announcer read the news. The news was that nearly 200 college students—Negro and white—were arriving this weekend. They would make a revolution, if they could.

I was here to write a story about them. The next morning my reporter friend told me that one of them had been arrested, possibly for driving 30 miles an hour in a 40-mile zone. I went to the courthouse. It was a Georgian brick building, with the customary Greek facade—fluted columns and Doric capitals—and on the roof a Romanesque cupola, and its tiny replica perched upon it. The grass of the lawn was sparse, brittle and faded, and the red earth baked and cracked. At the edge of the square stood a sign, in the form of a coat of arms, proclaiming the American Legion's Back to God Movement. It listed a dozen or so churches, from Southern Baptist to Roman Catholic, and admonished, Go to The Church of Your Choice, But Go! Our Southern people are very religious. I was right at home.

In the dim, cool corridor of the courthouse I found the deputy who had arrested the alien student. He was a short, hard, deeply browned young man wearing a revolver on his hip, and on his head a straw hat, after the fashion of the place, with its wide brim curved sharply up over his ears, like the wings of a plunging hawk. His name was ton Crane. I identified myself.

He looked me over, up and down, with black eyes in a mahogany face. "A writer? By God, you'd better be."

"You want to see my press card?"

Crane took it with slow, sullen fingers, brought out a small black notebook and with labor and squinting, copied my name in it. His slow, sullen fingers straightened, barely holding out the card, forcing me to reach arm's length for it. He waited, his eyes slanted at me. I asked him about the arrest.

"How come you know about it so quick?"

"Another reporter told me about it."

"And how'd he know so quick?"

"They told him at Freedom House."

"You livin with um, ain't you?"

"For God's sake," I took a deep breath and wrestled with my anger. "I wouldn't be here if I were living with um."

"I can't tell you a thing," Crane said, wheeling and striding away like a cowboy in an old movie.

"Who can?"

"Nobody can," he shouted, without turning. "Nobody in God's world."

I heard another voice, and turned. I was being addressed by a planter type, a man as well fed and pudgy and ruddy as a boar ready for butchering. He was tall and neat, and he wore a straw hat like the deputy's. Behind him I saw a small group of overalled men slouched in the dimness of the corridor. They seemed hazed, as if they stood in fog. I listened to the planter type, hearing but not understanding, for the moment.

"Do you live here? Did we send for you? Well, we do live here, and we didn't send for you, and we'd appreciate it if you'd get out of town."

There was a sort of Biblical rhythm in his address; it was nicely turned and balanced. And perhaps I should have appreciated also the fine irony of his phrasing: the Southern grace of "we'd appreciate it" and the primitive brutishness of "get out of town." But in that time and place—high noon in a Southern courthouse—I saw only the naked loathing of a loathsome man. Behind him his audience stirred, like fish in the stained waters of a swamp. He spread his legs and put his hands on his hips. I was incapable of speech. I walked out into the sunlight.

Go to The Church of Your Choice, But Go!

Numbed, delaying the time of accounting as long as I could, I found myself paraphrasing an old Bill Broonzy lament: Go to the church of your choice, if you're white you're all right, if you're brown stick around, if you're black get back, get back, get back ... I hummed the old half-remembered cry, remembering the old half-remembered voice, and walked to my car. The steering wheel was so hot it burned my fingertips, and my bare arm smarted from a touch of the door. I turned on the engine and waited for the air conditioning to cool the air about me. I trembled and sickened, in fear and rage. But I'm a Southerner, too, I whispered; this is my home, too. The men had moved from the corridor to the porch of the courthouse. They stood between two fluted columns, slack and still, squinting in my direction—a Southern frieze. The planter type stood at their center, a tall man in a white, short-sleeved shirt and khaki pants, his straw hat the peak of the pediment. His lips stirred in speech. I cursed him, and turned away. Men and women—white and black—moved slowly, with a certain tropical dignity, through the scorched air. Rexall. Piggly Wiggly. Penney's. Dixie Café. Marlon Brando in Mutiny on the Bounty. Confederate flags. Window stickers: Support Your Citizens' Council, in red, white and blue.

I could make no assessment, not yet.

And yet, unmistakably, as I drove around the square, I felt followed. The skin of my back crawled upon its frame, and the hairs at my neck stiffened and itched. I was exposed, naked, alone, open not only to a bullet but to the obscenity of surveillance. In my mirror I saw an old Chevrolet sedan approach close to my rear bumper. I cursed. But it turned into an alley. The street behind me was empty, for a moment; then an old black Ford sedan buzzed up like a fly landing on a mirror. I drove slowly, watching its reflection. A driver and another man. In the movies the passenger was always said to be riding shotgun. Oaks, maples and magnolias flowed forward and away in the glass, but the Ford stuck, steadfast, patient and roaring. The two faces behind me were shadowed beneath the brims of straw hats like Deputy Crane's. They were darkened and vulpine. But just as the skin and hair crawled and itched again, they turned out of my mirror and vanished.

And now came, creeping up on me, a Buick station wagon, long, elegant and new. A white woman was driving; in the seat behind her there was a Negro woman, after the local fashion: In Mississippi black and white do not integrate the seat of a car. The Buick passed me, and the driver stared, and waved. I did not recognize her, but in her face I found a sharp and arresting familiarity—an acute stirring of the past, now alien and out of context. Her mouth opened in some unheard greeting, or exhortation, or excoriation, and I cursed again. Even their women taunted and threatened the stranger. The Buick hurried on and, after a hundred yards, slowed suddenly, pulled to the side of the street and stopped with a swinging and a swaying. The driver's door was flung open and (continued on page 130)Look Away(continued from page 60) the woman—in a blue shift and sandals, bare of head, arms and legs—jumped out and waved both arms. I thought she might jump up and down. I slowed, just a little, and then floorboarded the accelerator and lunged past her. The Negro woman gaped in astonishment. The white woman waved and shouted. At the last instant I thought: It was Flora. Flora. Then, instantly, no, it could not be.

In my mirror I saw her stand waving for a moment, then her arms slowly fell, and she, too, vanished. I slowed my car, remembering the warning: Don't even approach the speed limit. In a moment I turned into a single-lane dirt road, and looked back. The Buick station wagon blurred by on the highway. Unwittingly, I supposed, I had shaken my tail. I stopped in the silence and solitude of scrub pine and empty sky, and began laughing. If ever I saw Flora again I'd have to tell her: Her twin sister like a jumping jack beside a car, waving at a stranger. I'd grow a beard and don sandals, and tell her someday. My laughter died and I whispered her name. The old remembered joys gentled and finally misted the bleak unhappy land about me. I had not forgotten. But I would not see Flora, even if she called. I wanted no involvement down here, with relatives, or strangers, or old girls. But that wasn't Flora. It couldn't have been. She would never expose herself so grotesquely. Best forget, and do what I had to do.

I drove on, slowly, in the red rutted road. The church was out this way somewhere; or its ashes were. My tinted windshield clouded the sky. It was 100 degrees out there, in that hungry, angry land; inside the air-conditioned car, perhaps 80, and blowing. I drove on, past empty cotton fields and cornfields; heat waves shimmering on tin rooftops; pastures, and cows in the shade of the oaks; a dog dead in the ditch (buzzards circling above); a crow and a redbird; shacks tumbling down (Gone to Chicago); a swamp, cypress growing in dark stained water; tiger lilies and yellow daisies, and stunted pine and oak in hot bottomless forests as empty and hushed as the day before creation.

Such was my land, and the land of Flora, Ian Macdonald, Deputy Sheriff Fon Crane, the planter type, and the grandfathers—the land of my childhood. I always forgot, until I came back, and even then the memory was hard and slow in coming, like a doomed birth. I always remembered the swing and the sweet warm thighs, and the blackberries on red ditchbanks and the evening porches—these I remembered with the warmth and the longing of a man for his childhood. But the hard-borning memories were the others: They were impossible—impossible the heat, fear and hate. But in memory lay the omens of what I would find here. Without wanting or willing it, I heard the memory cry: A hot August day, and a Negro hanging from the limb of an oak. Yes. I had seen it. It would not be denied. I sought other scenes, and listened for other voices: the porches, and the slow tender voices of hospitality and hope. And saw the Negro's festering, bloating body pendulant, swinging, a clock running down. I drove on, in my sad, beloved, despised land, but still hoping that memory had erred.

The ashes of the church stained the center of a grove of singed trees. The tin panels of the roof were blackened and twisted; fused glass glistened in the sunlight; the bell lay tongueless and mute in the ruins. I was utterly alone, in the hush of deep country. I walked slowly about, resurrecting the temple from its ashes. Here to old Zion they'd come in their wagons and their buggies, and later in their old cars and trucks, little black girls in white dresses, and men and women more somberly clad. There at the pine boards of their picnic table they'd eaten their Sunday-meeting dinners. I had heard their singing: Beulah land, Lord, and the blood of the lamb. Here at the edge of the grove Just Sleaping lay the dust of Rebecca Alcorn, a slave at birth, at death a handful of dust beneath artificial poinsettias. And there Mother At Jesus Feet, here Lance Burl beneath a pattern of oystershells, born a slave, too, but now At Rest; here an infant's unmarked grave, beneath a pebbled mound a child might have erected at the seashore, forgotten, fading and dimming into the forest other unmarked graves, sunken, weeded and lost.

Such was what they burned, when they burned old Zion.

But still I could not yet assess and reject. I wanted to know.

Down the road a mile or so I found the home of Jerry Burl, the grandson of Lance Burl who lay now beneath the oystershells. Jerry Burl sat on the porch of a neat, small frame house painted white. Tremendous blue hydrangeas bloomed in the yard, beneath a tremendous oak. Behind us stood Burl's wife, just beyond the front screen, hazed and dimmed, a shadow on shadow. She listened, but never spoke. A fresh scar reddened the black skin at Burl's hairline; he held a jaw in a cupped hand.

"So you found the church, and Grandpa Burl's grave. Lance Burl had him two wives sold away from him in the slave times, and after the War got him another wife, my grandma. He founded old Zion, and he caught his death of pneumonia one day in February, Nineteen-hundred, aged seventy, sittin on the peak of the roof, repairin the shingles. They put on a tin roof in Nineteen-twenty. We keep his grave real neat. I think the shells are right pretty. I can just barely remember him, like a faded picture in an unlighted room, at twilight. The face just won't quite come up out of the gloom, out of the past."

Jerry Burl's eyes were marbled blue with age. He wouldn't quite look at me. I sat there and remembered James Baldwin. James Baldwin said that they hated all whites; that no white man ever in all his life could really know a Negro. Perhaps, I thought, James Baldwin was wrong. I kept trying to know Jerry Burl. I listened to his voice and searched in his face. He wouldn't quite look at me.

"It was a mistake, a terrible mistake," he said. He held his hand at his jaw, his blued eyes on the glaring middle distance where the piny woods grew. "We hadn't used that church buildin for no Freedom School. Never used it so. And I never been in trouble, in all my life, with white or black. Always got along, got along. Maybe I would like to vote, yes, but you know how things are around here. They just don't want us to vote. They just won't let us vote. And I got land. I got sons and daughters.

"But they come anyway, Wednesday night a week ago, after our leaders' and deacons' meetin. We broke up about ten o'clock, and went out, and there was two cars parked there in the driveway. The men got out and one of um pulled me outen my car and said Where your guards? And I said What for we need guards? we got no guards. And he said You a goddamn liar and he hit me up here on the head with the barrel of his pistol, and I went down on my knees, not prayin, fallin, and heard my wife scream. He hit me again, here on the side of my face, with his fist, and I heard a pistol shot, a signal, and saw men comin up outen the woods with guns. They looked to be white, twenty or thirty of um. And they dragged my wife outen the car and I cried out Spare her, but one of um said to her We goin to whup you, too, we teach you to hold Freedom Schools, and they hit me again and kicked me, and held a club over my wife, and she said Let me pray. And the man said It's too late for prayin, and she said It's never too late for prayin, and she prayed. And the man said Leave her be, and let him live. The good Lord answered her prayers. But my jaw is all out of whack. The teeth don't meet. I got to see a doctor, or a dentist, or somethin."

"Did you recognize any of them?"

I heard a movement, a slight breath of speech. Looking about, I saw that his wife had left the doorway. The rectangle of shadow was empty. I turned back to him. "Did you, Mr. Burl? Did you recognize any of them?"

The ancient blued eyes flickered across mine, and away. He sat silent, holding his jaw. The lines of his face were black chiseled in black. I repeated my question again.

"Can I trust you?" he asked. "Can I trust you, white man?"

"You can trust me."

"Can I, white man? Really?" His eyes gazed straight into mine, and in my turn I wavered and looked away, remembering James Baldwin. "I don't mean nothin personal, white man. You know what I mean. You know why I ask."

"I know."

"Yes. Maybe you do know. So I say this. I don't say it myself. I say what other folks say. And they say: There was a policeman part of that crowd."

"I just met a Deputy Fon Crane at the courthouse, Mr. Burl."

"You don't say."

"Yes. Was he the officer there?"

He sat still through a long pause. "It ain't what I say," he whispered at last. "It's what they say. I say nothin." He sighed. "Except up in New York I got a boy and a girl livin. You from New York. Maybe you can call um." Once more his eyes flickered and crossed mine, and turned away. He gave me his children's names, addresses and telephone numbers, from memory, precisely, watching my pencil record them. "If you call um, tell um their father's had a little trouble, but he's mendin now."

And on my way to the motel that afternoon, outraged, enraged and sickened, I got lost. A tall, slow white man walked to my car and stood in the hot Southern sun and patiently and meticulously told me the way. "You're welcome, suh, any time." He'd have carried me there on his back, if I'd asked him. And that night in the dining room a waitress gave lessons in the graces of hospitality, and at the end said Thank you and come back, and when I paid my bill the cashier said Thank you and come back, and I knew that they meant every slow honeyed syllable that they spoke.

And I knew that if I'd met Deputy Sheriff Fon Crane at another time, under a different sky, we might have bought each other drinks and swapped lies about cards and women and guns, and the planter type would have served me bourbon neat and fed me barbecue, and Jerry Burl would have bowed and said Yes suh and held my coat for me.

"Goddamn such people," I said, in my room.

I had forgotten Flora, and the woman beside the car.

It was early twilight. Through the picture window of my room, outside in the hot misted air, I could see white kids playing in the swimming pool, and in another quarter of the landscape, Negro kids playing in the street. Above the hum of the air conditioner I could hear their voices, without knowing which came from white lips, which from colored lips. The voices at least were desegregated. The telephone rang. I went to it, remembering, All the telephones you'll use are tapped.

"All right, you bastard, what you doin down here? You down here writin about the niggers?"

I sat down on my bed. She laughed. "I just wanted you to know right off, Fred, where you and I stand on a certain matter. Now we can forget it. Come on out. We'll eat and drink and be very merry."

"Flora," I said. "Flora."

"Not necessarily in that order. Perhaps simultaneously. Fred, don't hang up. I'm sorry if I offended you. Won't you come out, please?"

She pleaded. In numbness and anger, I refused. Tomorrow night? No. Any night? Perhaps—if I had time. I heard a faint click and scratch on the line. Tapped, I whispered, tapped. Flora shouted: What was I saying? Nothing, I said. Where was her husband? I asked. He was out somewhere. He was always out somewhere, these days. He had a career, and a cause. Didn't I know? I didn't know. I should have. Please, Fred—I couldn't be so close, and not come to see her. It wasn't right—it wasn't decent. She had to see me. She got so lonesome sometimes, so longing for the old days. Wouldn't I come? I said, "Call again," and hung up, with trembling fingers.

I thought I could see her face: blue-eyed and glowing, and faintly mocking, with just enough acid in the eyes and at the mouth to flavor the honey in her voice. Real Southern. Sultry Southern, and knowing and sardonic. So I imagined her, and slept poorly...

Flora in pigtails and a short white skirt swung in a long swing made of a rope and a quarter arc of old automobile tire. She was wearing no pants, but I couldn't quite reach far enough to touch. She was swinging naked by the feet of a festering bloating black body, laughing, flowing in honey and acid, far away and very close, caressing the black festering flanks and gazing out at me, daring and mocking.

• • •

Finally, again, the day glared. In the swimming pool the white kids swam and splashed, and shouted and laughed, and in the street, before their shacks, the Negro kids pushed an old grocery cart about, and shouted and laughed. The High Official, a man all bald head and hospitality, assured me that the state and local police could and would maintain law and order, that Mississippi wanted only the restoration of constitutional government, that the outside Reds were agitating and roiling up the nigras who had been happy and content all these years, that he knew of no more loyal and devoted body of men than the state and local police, that there was one county, the County of X——————, not far from where we sat, where there was no law, only bootleggers and white farmers and tenant nigras where they even headlighted deers and no stranger should venture because there was a swamp in that godforsaken place and you could sink a body in it forever and many a body would rise there among the cypress and the rattlers and moccasins on the final day of judgment when the last trump sounded, and that the state's own law-enforcement officials would maintain law and order, and that the reporters never told the truth about the South, only lies, and that he was delighted to talk to me and come back any time.

The Executive Director: Shriner's diamond pin in his lapel, on his wall a certificate of membership in the chamber of commerce, a portrait of General Lee, and a photograph of his son in boy-scout uniform, the Southern air conditioned by machine and honeyed by hospitality. "We've been invaded every summer for ten years, and we'll win this invasion, just as we've won all of um, with another triumph for constitutional government and law and order. Our local and state police are a splendid band of men. They are fully trained and capable of handling any emergency... Glad to talk to you, suh. Come back, any time."

Flora: We would sit in the shade of the evening and talk New York and magnolias, moonlight, starlight and catfish, Ian's cotton and her bridge. Would I come, please?

At the rally for The Candidate: The band played Dixie and Darktown Strutters' Ball but not the national anthem. Full-voiced, full-bodied, they sang Wish I was in the land o cotton, and jelly roll blues, though the tractor was now in the cotton, and jelly roll down in New Orleans meant men and women togethering, man—roaring the contradiction and the obscenity in the restless cool conditioned air, whooping and hollering among the Confederate flags couchant upon their staffs, while the Hi-Steppers from The College all legs and breasts stepped high, silencing and stilling for prayer (Give us peace, O Lord, and freedom from agitators), and hollering and whooping again for The Candidate: Return to constitutional government; they'd listen to the South again someday, they'd know someday we were the country's last hope, Lord God of hosts be with us yet, God bless Mississippi and her fine law-enforcement officers.

On the telephone: Flora's iterated invitation, and the faint scratch and click of the tapped line. I said "No," and goodbye. Flora hung up. I waited, and laughed. A man's voice, small and remote, said, "You son of a bitch, get out of town."

• • •

It was 92 degrees at 9 o'clock in the morning, the air heavy and wet. Something had to happen, to surrender, somewhere. At 11 the clouds were swelling and blackening over the city, and at 11:30 lightning and thunder came down upon us, and in a few minutes a blinding, gray, lush rain. The temperature dropped 24 degrees in five minutes, but it would be hot again before night. A sorrowful man said: "I wish I could talk to you. I wish I could be your friend. There are some of us—perhaps many of us. We don't like what's goin on. But it'd ruin me—destroy me. They own the legislature, the governor, the Senators and the Congressmen, and every law officer in the state. I even had to go to that rally last night, and bellow along with the rest of um. I'm sorry, suh. I just can't take the chance." The man seemed close to tears. Really a rather lugubrious performance, altogether. Perhaps he exaggerated. Perhaps he didn't. In another land, beneath a different sky, we might have gone fishing together.

The day was already heating up again.

"Would you," the man asked, impaling me with a pair of Negro eyes, "would you trust your life to these splendid local officers?"

Here was another man I wanted to know. I knew his name: Floyd Anderson. Would James Baldwin permit me to know him as more than a name and an organism? The Negro eyes awaited my answer, amused, mocking and patient. They were the new Negro eyes. I'd never seen them in the South of my childhood. That South was now suddenly the Old South. In that Old South the questions were never asked. Everybody knew, and was silent. The Negro swung festering and pustulant at the end of his rope, and nobody cared.

I told Floyd Anderson that I didn't think I would trust my life to these splendid local officers. No. I did not feel entirely safe. Not even in a house called Freedom House. Least of all in that house. In the lintel of the front door there was a quite neat pattern of six bullet holes. At a front corner there was a black, lacerated bomb scar. It was a small dingy white frame house in the colored section, beside a gritty, rutted street. Parked before it were three old cars, bloated and small-windowed in the fashion of a few years ago. They had brought 18 volunteers, to a revolution.

Floyd Anderson left me to answer a telephone. An old amusing befuddled question asked itself: What am I doing here? This wasn't my fight. It was theirs. It wasn't my cause. It was theirs. I didn't even trust causes; I didn't trust people with causes. The falcon eye, the hard purpose in the face, the hard evangelistic voice, the single obdurate adamant cure for all ills—die total preposterous paraphernalia of Cause repelled me, provoked my hard and resisting hostility and mistrust, and sent me fleeing to the reasonable, the sane, the uncommitted. But here I stood, and remembered the labor union I had covered once in the South, years ago: the dingy rooms furnished with broken furniture, lighted by a single naked bulb hanging from a wire to a flyspecked ceiling; the clutter of pamphlets and booklets; the total devotion and disarray of the people and their methods and their utterances; and finally, the sullen defeat. Just so here: a card table holding stacks of pamphlets; a sofa gutted and spilling itself upon the dingy floor; the frenetic stir and rush of bodies and voices; the same indignant telling of tales: police brutality and commercial conspiracy against the Cause, the People. But defeat? here? Perhaps not. Yet why did they try, in a hot hostile land?

They wore sandals, sneakers, Levis, shifts, shorts, sweat shirts and jerseys bearing the names and crests of distant colleges, and long straight female hair hanging doorlike about tired melancholy unpainted faces, and shaggy uncut male hair above horn-rimmed glasses. And they were young—younger by far than the CIO organizers—and dedicated and so far unscarred. And they were black and white all together. No wonder Mississippi hated them.

I turned back to Floyd Anderson, who was speaking softly into the telephone, his fingertips lightly holding the black cord. His father was a dentist in Jacksonville, Florida. He was a slight, tan Negro whom I could imagine singing We Shall Overcome, and swaying and lamenting, and dancing with a snapping of his fingers—a wound-up spring of a man, with a beard. A beard, and a Negro, and a Cause, in the South. He was studying for his doctor's degree at Harvard. He would write his thesis on Keats. In my Old South a Negro as anything more than a servant or a laborer had been unthinkable. You just couldn't have integrated Keats and Floyd Anderson.

"So you're afraid," he said, returning to me, amused and sardonic. "But you have a right to be here, don't you?"

"Of course I do."

"So do we. We carry no club, no gun, no bomb. They are the lashers, the bombers, the murderers. Yet many of you whites say we ought to stay at home. We ought to be prudent, to wait. What in hell are we doing here? I'll tell you what we're doing here, white man. We're teaching the Negroes child care, nutrition, sanitation, Negro history—God knows they'll never get that down here—and we're helping them get the vote. What's so bad about that?"

I was making dutiful notes.

"So a cat named Joe gets himself arrested for assaulting Sam, and Joe cries out Sam hit me on my fist with his chin. You see? We are shot, bombed and murdered. We are arrested just for being here, and thrown into jail, and if we're white the jailer delivers us into the hands of the white drunks in a cell and says Boys here's a nigger-lover, you know what to do with him. And so the drunken citizens in that cell beat the blood and the brains out of us. And the Negro ones of us are beaten by the cops themselves. And the cops and every mother other one of 'em cries Foul, and Invasion, and Subversion ... So you've talked to Jerry Burl."

I looked up at him, startled.

"Well, Jerry Burl lied to you," he said, smiling and nodding, mocking, watching. "Don't be so shocked, white man. Everybody lies, down here in this country. The history of the South is one long uninterrupted lie. White to black. Black to white. The Negro tells the white man what he thinks he wants to hear, and the white man tells the Negro what he thinks he ought to hear. But some of us have stopped lying, white man, and the whites don't like what they're hearing, and the Negroes don't like what they're hearing. They'd been using old Zion for months. I spoke there once myself. Old Burl was right there in the Amen corner, patting his foot and nodding and saying Amen."

"But I was going to write it the way he told me. He told me a lie, and would have let me believe it and write it."

"Yes. Who can you trust, now, down here? Any time, anywhere? Just yourself, white man, and sometimes not even yourself. I don't trust you."

"But why'd he lie to me?"

Anderson shrugged. "He thought you wanted to hear it that way, perhaps. Or perhaps he lost his nerve."

"Can you blame him?"

"I've been beaten, too."

He looked at me square and hard, unforgiving and scornful.

"I'll be beaten again."

"No," I began, but he went on.

"I'm on my way back out to old Zion now. I've got to talk to him about his case. We're going to file suit. You want to go along, call him a liar to his face? Say, white man, you want to drive me out? give me a lift?"

"I couldn't do that. I'd compromise my position."

Floyd Anderson smiled and nodded. I protested: I couldn't afford to get involved. I couldn't let myself become identified with either side.

"Don't sweat it," he said. "Don't sweat it, white man."

He was laughing at me, bent and taut, his lips tight and bloodless against the white beauty of his teeth. "You know somethin, white man?" he said, speaking Southern Negro now. "You know somethin? This here's Hospitality Month down here in this great state. Hospitality Month. And I'm going out and look at a burned church and talk to a old man that they beat the hell outen. And they gonna follow me out there, maybe, and someday they gonna arrest me again, and beat the hell outen me again, and maybe slit my throat and drop me in a swamp. Yes, suh, boss, yes, suh, cap'n, hallelujah, praise de Lawd..."

• • •

"I'll come," I said to Flora, at last, when she called that evening. "I'll come, if you won't mention The Question, The Cause, and if you won't call people Red agitators and black niggers."

"Grant me just one teensy-weensy little laugh," she said. "What's black and white and red all over? Give up? The Methodist church, these days. Get it?"

"You've just lost me."

"Oh, Fred, for God's sake, don't be solemn and tiresome."

I went. Faintly in the moist evening air hung the scent of honeysuckle. A nightingale would sing, and the darkies would chant and dance in the quarters. But at the Macdonalds' the ladies would weep no more, the darkies would sing no more. Theirs was no white Southern mansion. They lived in one of those houses that look $20,000 and cost $100,000—a ranch house, large, long, low, straight and flat, that rambled about in a grove of oaks, maples and magnolias. The Buick station wagon stood in the driveway, and behind it a black Continental. I had seen this place in a hundred magazines and in a thousand places. Because it was everywhere, it was nowhere. At the moment it filled a need: I wanted to be nowhere.

Beyond the screen of the front door waited the figure of a woman, like the figure of Mrs. Jerry Burl beyond her screen. She was leaning against the door frame, one leg crossed behind the other, arms crossed and clasped beneath her bosom—dimmed, hazed and softened against darkness. She was a Rubens figure now—no more the Modigliani of the fashion ads—and perhaps, I thought, pausing, a New Orleans whore waiting in her crib.

Watching and waiting, smiling in faint mockery, she let me walk the breadth of the flagstone terrace. Then, with a grand slow movement, she swung the screen open. She embraced me, kissed me, wetly and largely, upon my lips, and with an arm hooked through mine led me into the house.

"You never did approve of me, did you, Fred? I'm not sure I approved of you. But the question never came up, did it? I promised I wouldn't mention you-know-what..." She talked under some compulsion or other, gushing and breathless. She was dressed in sandals and a white shift and, I thought, nothing else at all."... but I just couldn't take it any longer. I was living in constant fear. Not of being hurt. Oh, no. I could always take care of myself. But fear of being touched by one of them. You see? You understand, Fred?"

She had led me into a long, wide living room that was pure Scandinavian—all low, long lines, dark blond wood, and brass and stainless steel. On each side the room was walled by a vast sliding door of glass, one looking toward the road, one toward a terrace that sloped away into the gloom of the grove. The fireflies were out; they flickered and dimmed like tiny distant Christmas lights. Beyond them a forest grew, bending away and down into running water. A bar stood next to a tremendous fireplace that had never been used. The room itself seemed unused, an abandoned way station of some sort. Flora was pouring drinks. Her shift was straight, plain and full, but it might as well have been transparent. In faint curves, in the suggested movements of flesh against fabric, I could see what lay beneath, and I whispered an oath to myself, for an old lost delight. She turned, paused, her lips parted, and nodded and laughed. "But Fred," she whispered, "be careful how you look at me. Remember, I'm a married lady now. A married Southern lady."

Black hair and blue eyes, olive skin, ripe, sweet and sour as a lemon drop—Flora. We drank together. Bourbon and branch water. I had forgotten its authority. I welcomed it, just now.

"I want you to understand, Fred," she said. "I want you to understand because I'm still fond of you." She sipped her drink and looked away. "We're raised to fear the touch. You know how we're raised. Momma tells her daughter horror stories about colored men and what they do, because her momma told her, and we're to tell our daughters, and the men believe them, too. You can't blame us, Fred. Please don't blame us."

"I don't care, Flora. Goddamn it, I don't care anymore. Coming South has made me not care."

"Do you care if you don't care?"

"I feel guilty."

"You damn liberals. You're all just a big old sweet bag of guilts, you are, honey."

She walked about the room, swinging her hips, swinging her drink. She was talking Southern girl now, with that sometimes amusing, sometimes cloying and frustrating, rise of inflection at the ends of sentences, where other voices dropped. The odd chantlike rhythm of it left you eternally suspended above a height, waiting for an end that never came. Perhaps it was all part of a game they played. She sipped and pouted, and drank. We refilled our glasses, and listening to her Southern girl talk, watching the beautiful suggestion of movement beneath her shift, I remembered my dream of her. She could; metaphorically, she could swing by the feet of a lynched Negro. Metaphorically, she and all her kind had swung by those dead black feet all their lives. Christ, I whispered to myself, and the husband entered.

Ian Macdonald was ordinary, I discovered: handsome, precise, just right. Right height, right coloring, right weight, right voice. Ordinary. In tan slacks, white shirt, blue crested blazer. He could have appeared with Flora in one of her ads. Harper's Bazaar, perhaps, with a gin and tonic in his hand, in the background a Continental and a white house. Everywhere, and nowhere.

"Well, Mr. Ives," he said, at the bar, "you don't seem to have lost your Southern accent. I can't say the same for Flora. She came back ending every sentence with Already yet, and speaking of Yurp and Itly."

"Oh, Ian, for God's sake..."

"The longer I stay around here," I said, "the deeper my good old Southern accent gets. A sort of oral protective coloration."

"I'm sure you need no protection here, Mr. Ives."

Flora laughed, but she stood in the wings now, for suddenly my talk was with the man. He was so solemn I was certain he had been offended. I was rather surprised, and pleased. Ruffle his feathers a little, I said to myself. Pull that slick blond hair down over those pale blue eyes. Perhaps I spoke with the authority of the bourbon. Perhaps because he now had Flora and I didn't. I had loved her. I loved her again.

"It's dangerous to talk Yankee around here," I said. "It'd be like talking English at the Kremlin. Do you know a deputy sheriff named Fon Crane, Mr. Macdonald? He wears a gun and a screaming-eagle hat________"

"He's a fine, dedicated officer of the law."

"Who beats up old men and burns churches."

"Oh, I see," he whispered, flushing and drinking, and then gazing into his glass. "I see. You have been getting about, haven't you?" The coat of arms on his blazer was Harvard's. Veritas. I remembered, with the authority and the glee of the bourbon, the Harvard man I had met two hours before. The near Ph.D. The Keats man. I had forgotten Flora.

"Ah, fair Harvard," I said. "Do you happen to know a fellow alumnus of yours named Floyd Anderson?"

"Don't believe I know an Anderson."

"Oh, Fred, cut it out. Ian's only Harvard Business."

"Flora! Come to think of it, Mr. Ives, I believe I do know a Floyd Anderson. Could it be the same man?"

"You boys are sure hitting it off, aren't you?"

"Could be," I said.

"Where'd you meet him, Mr. Ives?"

"At Freedom House. He's a Negro."

"Oh, God," Flora said, from the depths of disgust. "You promised."

"You promised," I said. "Floyd Anderson was going out into the country this afternoon to investigate the burning of the church, and the beating of the old man, Mr. Macdonald."

He was mixing himself another drink. He ignored my empty glass. I went to his side and mixed my own.

"You know the cases?" I asked.

"They were never reported to the police."

"Perhaps with good reason."

"Our police are very efficient."

"So I've heard, in certain endeavors."

"Oh, goddamn it, Fred," Flora cried. "Can't we be friends?"

"How can they investigate a crime if it isn't reported to them?"

"He's going to file suit. And he'll lick you, Mr. Macdonald, he and his army. Not just in the battle, in the war."

"Fred, Ian," Flora shouted, bounding between us, "cut it out, right now. Ian, let me tell you about Fred. Fred's going to write a great novel about the South. About a white boy and a colored boy growing up together, playing together, hunting and fishing together. And then separating, and the white boy coming back and finding out that he and the colored boy are now strangers, enemies, even, and fighting over the same high-yaller wench and fighting over civil rights and all that..."

"It's been done," I said. "It's been done a thousand times."

"And Fred, let me tell you about Ian. Ian's going to be the next governor, and then a Senator. It's all worked out. He has two passions, mathematics and politics. He's written a book, did you know? called The Nature of Numbers, and it was published by the Harvard University Press. And he publishes a magazine, the Southern Citizen."

"He publishes that?"

"He does indeed. Isn't that grand?"

Her husband stood as cold and still as a corpse against the bar. I was beginning to see how angry he was. His face was white, his lips bloodless and thin. "Yes," he said, coldly, with cold control, "my book sold five thousand copies. Quite a sale, they tell me, for a university press book. And my magazine has a circulation of two hundred and three thousand, and it's growing every day, all over the country. And did you know that two even numbers multiplied always produce an even number, an odd number and an even number multiplied always produce an even number, but two odd numbers, even the same odd numbers, multiplied, always produce an odd number, that there's a genetics to it, of a sort, as there is in human multiplication, and did you know that integration has never in history succeeded in strengthening a community or a nation, that even in Africa the white-controlled Republic of South Africa is more productive and prosperous than the entire remaining continent, that miscegenation has been a factor in the decline of past civilizations such as Egypt, Greece, Rome, India and Portugal, that Brazil and Cuba have long been centers of miscegenation, that integration would result in miscegenation and a mongrelized population without pride of race, nation or religion, and would thus weaken the United States, and that when the Communists take over our country they'll turn the South over to the niggers. Please excuse me. I must make a telephone call."

He put down his glass and marched out. I whispered to myself, The man really believes, he really believes... Flora stood before me dimmed and hazed, her arms crossed again beneath her breasts. She nodded, slowly, with a profound sadness, touched by a trace of defiance in the tilt of her face. "Now you know," she whispered.

"He's going to be governor? Senator? and you his lady?"

"Me his lady. I can put up with some things in exchange for other things."

"Are they worth it?"

"You know they are. And perhaps I won't be putting up with anything at all. Let us drink, Fred. Let us drink."

"Are you afraid?"

"Of him? Oh, no. He's a gentleman. A gentle man."

"And you love him."

"Let us drink."

"Are you afraid to disagree with him? with the others down here?"

"I might be. Everybody else is. But I might also agree with him. Let us drink, Fred." We drank.

Ian Macdonald called from another room. She went out—with unseemly haste, it seemed to me—and above the hum of air conditioning I heard the slow low sounds of their voices. I wanted very much to hear their words. They returned to the room. He bowed in my direction, his blue eyes as sightless as glass and off in their aim by about ten degrees. "Mr. Ives, I must tender my apologies. A matter of pressing business... My wife must now be both host and hostess. Please come back to see us."

I wish to do the man no injustice. He is no doubt a gentleman, and a gentle man, after his fashion. But I swear (remembering the stiffened body and the tight bloodless lips) that he would not have surprised me if he had clicked his heels, shot his hand out in the Nazi salute, and yelped "Heil Hitler!" Perhaps I had seen too many late movies, but just so he left, without the ceremony but with the spirit.

Flora and I drank, in silence, stained by a stale, warped presence; we waited for the return of something lost. The spirit between us was dead; it revived hard. Dinner was candlelit, upon a long blond board, served by black shadows. We drank wine the red of cherries, and ate beef red and bloody as a wound and Flora's lips. A haze, a glitter and a glimmer, settled upon the night, in the room. All surfaces were heated hard and bright. Somewhere, somehow, we crossed a frontier; we gazed at each other, eating and waiting. We ate a great deal.

But in the living room she stood apart, at the broad back window, looking out upon the terrace and the forest. We were still waiting, I thought; listening and waiting. Faintly I could hear the talk and the clatter of the servants, and the air conditioning like bees in clover.

"He won't be back for a long time," she said at last. "He has a cause, and he has a girlfriend. I have neither. Southern white ladies have no causes, and no lovers."

A maudlin, boozy pity swelled up strong enough to choke me. I went to her and put my hands on her shoulders. She swept them off, trembling and retreating. No, she shouted, no, no.

She turned to the window again. "The mosquitoes out there would eat you alive right now," she said. In a moment three figures moved across the dimmed landscape, at the far edge of the terrace, like the children of Israel in Green Pastures, two women and a man, black. Her eyes followed them until they vanished, as if off stage. "They tote enough stuff home with them in those umbrellas to feed the whole block," she said, with a tough, short laugh.

"Perhaps they need to."

She almost lost me again, with her laugh. I declined to be lost. She waited for another moment, and turned.

"Now, Fred, now, now, and now."

• • •

Again I slept poorly. I dreamed dreams clamorous with chaos, with cries and crimson flamings and flashings. Red serpents and red mouths, raw wounds and a black noose, and a black body swinging, a scarlet woman coiled about it like a serpent, nude, brazen and unspeakable. I awoke with a cry. The taste of stale oil was in my mouth; my stomach and head were in flames. Tomato juice, red and cold, was all I could swallow. "You wa'n't hungry, were you?" said the waitress. "Well, thank you, and come back." I would go home now, and not come back. I would leave unfinished business behind me. I packed, and in weakness and nausea longed for Flora again. I would call her; go to her. Rescue her? It was an old and melodramatic and preposterous notion, in the light of day, but it held me, pensive, with growing determination. I closed my bag and my typewriter and set them beside the door, and sat upon my bed, the telephone at my right hand. It would be now, and forever, or never. I heard the children's integrated voices again, white and black. Yes. Flora. How did she feel? what did she believe? what did she believe in? I would find out. I reached for the telephone, just as it rang.

I hoped, of course, with a flaming of joy and anticipation. Instead I heard myself addressed by a harsh, alien voice that, omitting the amenities, rushed to its message: "I'm calling the reporters and writers to tell them that Floyd Anderson and one of the volunteers, Lewis Niles, have disappeared, are missing, and their car has been found sunk in a swamp ten miles southeast of here. They went to the church late yesterday afternoon and interviewed some people out there, and just vanished, sometime early in the night. We're asking the FBI..."

My arm straightened; my fingers opened, and the telephone dropped into its cradle. I walked slowly to my door, past my bag and typewriter, and out to my car, and sat sweating in it for a long time. "Flora," I whispered, finally, as if rehearsing a speech I would make, someday, "Flora, I did a terrible deed. I betrayed them. He made me angry and I betrayed them. We betrayed them. Now somehow we've got to make amends." I drove out through the town and the country. I spoke an absurd line, alone in the car: "Come away with me. Fly away with me. Look away." I parked before the house and crossed the lawn. On the front terrace I stopped, looking through the vast window into that vast living room. I saw a table cluttered with the scraps and the tools of breakfast. Two half-filled glasses of tomato juice, red and cold, stood beside the plates. Flora and her husband sat on a long sofa. He still wore his blue blazer. Their heads were close together. Once they looked about, as they talked, their eyes flashing and seeking. Then they were together again, whispering. Not in affection, but close and inseparable. There was something practical and businesslike about their clinging images—the twain, bound, king and queen of nothing, nowhere.

"Oh, Christ," I said. "Oh, Christ," and left them forever.

In my room I called once more. A servant answered. I asked for Flora. Faintly on the line I heard again a whisper, a tiny scrape and scratch. In a moment Flora answered, cool and slow, with perhaps a faint caution in her voice.

"Flora," I said, "I had to call you. I had to speak to you again."

"Perhaps you shouldn't, Fred."

"Flora, my darling, I'll never forget."

"Fred, please."

"Will you forget? Will you ever forget?"

"Oh, Fred, of course I won't forget. But please, Fred, you mustn't."

"I finally agreed to go last night for one reason only, Flora. Because we used to sleep together."

"Fred, please, but yes, we did, didn't we, yes, yes."

"And then again last night, Flora. Will you ever forget?"

"No, Fred, I won't forget."

"Will you see me again?"

"Perhaps. Someday."

"Flora, my phone is tapped."

I hung up, and sat staring at it. In a moment it began ringing. I rested my hand upon it, feeling it vibrate to the sound of bells. My fingers closed about it, but my hand did not lift. I bowed my head. Perhaps I was one of them now. Perhaps they had made me from birth one of them. "It was a joke," I whispered, "a joke, Flora." A dirty joke, and nobody was laughing. I clutched the phone. Let it keep ringing. I was safe, so long as it rang. At any time I could pick it up and say to Flora, "I'm sorry, my dear." But I was lost among them, with him, in their filth. It rang, and it stopped ringing. I walked out the door.

"Thank you, and come back," said the cashier.

On the way to the airport I turned on the radio for the news. Instead I got a morning prayer meeting. Our Southern people are very religious. A Presbyterian preacher was saying, "Oh isn't it great to be alive on this beautiful morning?" I turned it off. I arrived at the airport just in time for the next plane out. The stained water of the swamps receded beneath the wings. The creeks coiled like rampant dragons on an Oriental screen. The forests spread, darkened, and closed upon the land. Perhaps I will never know what I want to know. Perhaps I will know only that I will never be young again, and that I will never be clean again.