He nods to Kip on his way to the door, stealing a final glance at the first woman mayor of Houston: the fruity suit, the stiff black shoes, the helmet hair; the American flag and Reagan watching over her shoulder. He looks at Cynthia and thinks of the girl he once knew . . . and tries to guess which one is the lie.
Chapter 10
He doesn’t remember when he stopped loving her. It would be neat and tidy to say his arrest. Those frantic and confused days after he turned himself in, long hours spent in lockup, trying to explain to his court-appointed lawyer what exactly had hap pened, trying to understand it himself . . . all the while wait ing for her to call, to prove his worst fears wrong. He doesn’t remember when he stopped loving her, or when exactly he started. They never called it anything or gave it a name. In the beginning she was just a scruffy kid who started coming around to meetings. He was the one who had been appointed to tell her, as forcefully as need be, to stop. They didn’t want her help. Her political awakening was on her own time, not theirs. Besides, in those days, the sisters were still frying chicken and going on beer runs for the meetings, walking ten feet behind the men at campus marches. If the brothers hadn’t run her off, the sisters surely would have. No way a white girl was gon’ get in line first.
He went to tell her in person, even though he didn’t have to. He could have waited until she showed up at the next meeting at the duplex on Scott Street, where they spent most of their days—organizing marches, skipping classes, eating whatever somebody’s little paycheck could scrounge up, drinking beer and fooling around with women, whoever was in the building at the time. He could have waited and made a show of the whole thing, putting down the white girl in front of everybody. But he had no desire to be cruel. This movement wasn’t about keeping score or getting even, at least not for him. He really believed they could change things. And he didn’t see any reason why whites shouldn’t be a part of that too. Hell, they had made this mess of racial inequality in the first place; why shouldn’t they have a hand in cleaning it up?
His comrades though, his brothers-in-arms, were, for the most part, leery of white folks. They didn’t fool with hippies— white kids who didn’t wear shoes and were always telling people to relax—and they were even more suspicious of the whites who showed up in pressed khakis and Top-Siders, who joined SNCC and Students for a Democratic Society, who talked the talk. Their anger was some days focused as much on pissing off their parents as it was on the president or voting rights or racist cops across the South. But, hey, Jay thought, at least they showed up. They went to campus marches and organized their own. Cynthia Maddox was all right in Jay’s book; she got credit for just showing up.
So Jay went out of his way to tell her to please
After calling him a racist and a chauvinist, a word he had to
look up when he got home, she told him she thought he was the only one in his group who had any sense. She asked him if he wanted to join her for dinner, her treat.
Jay, who had holes in his coat and was working on a few in the soles of his shoes, was quite grateful for the offer.
They went to a barbecue stand on Telephone Road, her choice. She ordered chicken and mustard greens and pushed him toward the hot links and potato salad since she had never tried those before. Halfway through the meal, she was reaching across the table every few minutes to pick at his plate.
All through dinner, she ran through a laundry list of things she’d been saving up, stuff she would have said at the meetings if they’d ever let her talk. How they should work the system from the inside, plant one of their own on the school’s admin board, or even better, the city council. “Infiltration,” she said, chomp ing on an ice cube soaked in Big Red soda. “The FBI ain’t all crazy.”
She thought they could pull it off too.
But they would need somebody unassuming, somebody the establishment would never suspect. She licked the corners of her mouth and smiled, an indication that she knew such a person, maybe someone sitting across the table from him right now. “You may need me more than you think you do.”
And she had more to say too.
She claimed their meetings were disorganized, too much eat ing and smoking and not enough focus. She also thought the Panthers were on to something with their uniform look. “Have y’all ever thought about getting matching outfits? Something jazzy, like with rainbows on the back.”
By then, Jay had heard enough. He mumbled something about a paper he had to write. He thanked her for the meal and hitched a ride back on his own.
He, frankly, didn’t think he’d ever see her again.
But Cynthia Maddox was insatiable and full of ideas. She was on a full scholarship and making straight As; she had a lot of time on her hands. She stopped coming by the house on Scott Street and starting calling him up at his dorm, on the hallway phone, all time of the night, wanting to run her ideas by him. She was a member of SNCC by then, a group she’d finally talked her way into, and was starting up one of the few SDS chapters in the state. She wanted to know what he thought about this or that. Would he look at a draft of a press release she was writing, urging a boycott of the student union cafeteria (because they bought canned peas and tomatoes from a plant that didn’t hire blacks or Mexicans)? Could she get him to agree to give her a heads-up about any marches he had planned so she could coor dinate something with her groups and present a unified front to the school, the city, and the local press? And what did he really think of nonviolence? “I mean, really, don’t you think we’re past all that?”
Finally one day, just to shut her up, he asked her where she was from, where she’d gone to high school. She grew up in Katy, she said, out west, off the I-10 freeway. She’d come to college late, already in her twenties, and before that, she’d spent her entire life within a fifteen-mile radius. To Jay, it explained a lot. She was like a spring chicken that’d been running around in a too tight cage and had finally been let loose. It was an energy he recognized in himself. They were both kids who’d grown up in the dirt in rural East Texas, itching to get past the social confines of all that open, lawless space. They kind of got to be friends that way, talking about home. Turns out Cynthia (Cindy to everybody but him; he didn’t like the name, didn’t think it suited her much) didn’t know her daddy either. She had a bastard stepfather too, a guy not even ten years older than she was, who used to look at her funny when she was coming out of the bathroom.
It was weeks before Jay would tell her his story.
The soft footsteps he used to hear in the dark, his stepfather padding past, on the way to Jay’s sister’s room. He’d always hear his mother next, shuffling on the same worn carpet in the hall way, walking into her daughter’s room to stop whatever had hap pened or was about to. Jay, who was just a boy then and scared to death of his stepfather—the beatings that sprang up like hur ricanes on the Gulf, with no advance warning and no time for retreat—never did a thing to stop him. The next morning they’d all sit around the breakfast table like nothing had happened, like there wasn’t a snake sitting right there at the table, sipping Sanka and sopping up his eggs with a biscuit. His mother was still mar ried to the guy, wondering why Jay never came home for Christ mas.
He’d tried to tell his buddies once. He and Bumpy Williams and Lloyd Mackalvy were sharing a bottle of Jack on the front porch of Bumpy’s mother’s house in Third Ward one night, long after a card game had broken up. Jay tried to talk to them about his family, what tore it up. He tried to talk about what it is to be a man, to feel such a need, a call really, to protect the ones you love, and the hollow, gnawing pain of being unable to do so. But his friends weren’t interested in personal tragedy; they were out to save a race of people. There was a war going on; this was no time for baby sisters and family squabbles. Plus, they were slow to condemn Jay’s stepfather. In their
