gloves were indestructible, basically, made of the same kind of materials used in countertops and TV tubes, in the electrical insulation in the basement and the vulcanized tires on the car. The gloves were important to her despite the way they felt, clammy but also dry, a feeling that defied innate contradiction.
All the things around her were important. Things and words. Words to believe in and live by.
Breezeway Car pools
Crisper Bridge parties
Sectional Broadloom
When she finished up in the kitchen she decided to vacuum the living room rug but then realized this would make her bad mood worse. She'd recently bought a new satellite-shaped vacuum cleaner that she loved to push across the room because it hummed softly and seemed futuristic and hopeful but she was forced to regard it ruefully now, after Sputnik, a clunky object filled with self-remorse.
Stacking chairs Room divider
Scatter cushions Fruit juicer
Storage walls Cookie sheet
She thought she'd lift her spirits by doing something for the church social on Saturday to pep up the event a little.
Do not use in enclosed space.
She would prepare half a dozen serving bowls of her Jell-O antipasto salad. Six packages Jell-O lemon gelatin. Six teaspoons salt. Six cups boiling water. Six tablespoons vinegar. Twelve cups ice cubes. Three cups finely cut salami. Two cups finely cut Swiss cheese. One and a half cups chopped celery. One and a half cups chopped onion. Twelve tablespoons sliced ripe olives.
She remembered coming home one day about six months ago and finding Eric with his head in a bowl of her antipasto salad. He said he was trying to eat it from the inside out to test a scientific theory of his. The explanation was SO crazy and unconvincing that it was weirdly believable. But she didn't believe it. She didn't know what to believe.
Was this a form of sexual curiosity? Was he pretending the Jell-O was a sort of lickable female body part? And was he engaged in an act of unnatural oral stimulation? He had jellified gunk all over his mouth and tongue. She looked at him. She had people skills. Erica was a person who related to people. But she had to put on gloves just to talk to him.
She set to work in the kitchen now, listening all the while for the reassuring sound of her men coming home, car doors closing in the breezeway, the solid clunk of well-made parts swinging firmly shut.
The charismatic black stood outside the church talking to the crowd.
Downtown the young whites leaned on brick walls and parked cars, crew-cut young men in chinos or jeans, or squatted on the curbstone, some older men among them, most showing a small hard salty grin, eyes tight, watching the marchers move out of the bus terminal.
Past the brick dorms and athletic fields of the campus, a group of black men lounged against a car parked in front of a rickety frame house in an alley off Lynch Street. A man with a cane. A man with blue suspenders. A man in a necktie and white shirt and straw fedora. A couple of younger men sitting on the fenders and talking to a woman eating a peach on the porch steps.
The charismatic speaker said, 'They made us run, so we got good at it.'
The marchers came into town carrying knapsacks and signs. Some of them walked toward the campus as the sun began to set. A number of white-shirted police stood along the route, smoking, some of them, and seeming to disregard the marchers, who walked in two loose columns toward the sound of the speaker's voice.
The young speaker said, 'They made us run until we got so good at it we didn't need their inspiration anymore.'
In the Greyhound terminal a number of marchers separated from the others and began to sit on the floor of the whites-only waiting room.
But the porch didn't really have steps. It had a couple of loose cinder blocks set against the brick underpinning and that's where the woman sat.
Students joined the crowd in front of the church, listening to the speaker, and some of the cornerboys came out of Cooper's, where they'd been shooting pool, and stood around to watch the crowd.
Men and women kept marching through the downtown streets and the whites sat on the curbstone and watched them, seemingly unable to stop grinning.
Four highway patrolmen stood outside the bus terminal leaning on a cruiser and talking casually, the butt ends of their shotguns leveraged on their hips, muzzles pointing up.
The young speaker said, 'But just about the time we became Olympic-class runners, some of us decided we were gonna sit down.'
The woman finished eating the peach and held the pit in her hand and when one of the men leaning on a car fender said something racy or tricky or sly, she threw the pit at his feet with a kind of dismissive motion.
Somebody adjusted the speaker's microphone and his voice began to carry now, reaching the guardsmen who were coming down out of trucks at the end of a blocked-off street.
A black woman stood watching in the bus terminal. She'd come from up north, riding buses all the way, and now she was in the terminal, fittingly, about to sit on the floor. She watched local police move among the demonstrators and lift a young man by an arm and leg, taking him in two directions, briefly, at once, until they got straightened out, a pair of short-sleeved cops, not looking at the youngster, who sat unstruggling in their grip as they carried him out to the street.
The charismatic black said, 'There's a certain feeling circulating in the culture that black people ought to develop a willingness to die.'
The guardsmen formed up and began to fix bayonets and their commander stood nearby in summer tans and a campaign hat, looking around for the armored van.
The miked voice floated over the heads of the assembled marchers and students and townspeople.
On the floor of the bus terminal the woman waited for the police to reach her and carry her out to the truck and take her to the jail, one
Rose Meriweather Martin, known as Rosie, an insurance adjustor from New York City.
'The interesting thing is that this here's not what the white man is saying. It's what the Negro is saying. If they want to kill us, in other words, let's develop a willingness to die. Or was saying. Because we damn well ain't saying it anymore.'
There was an armored van moving through the streets, with bulletproof windows and gunports, and the men inside had submachine guns and tear-gas launchers.
The young whites began moving away from the walls and the parked cars. They got up from the curbstone and dusted off their pants and they went to stand at the far end of the street, uninterested in the marchers now or interested in a different way
The woman on the porch saw some young men running in the dark, cornerboys or students, looking back as they ran, and the men lounging against the parked car also saw them but did not stiffen or speak or move away It was their car, their street, and they needed to measure the situation.
The young black man said, 'I ain't saying don't resist. I ain't saying assume the fetal position and let them put their cocked revolvers upside your head. Tell you what I'm saying.'
The whites didn't look at the marchers as people coming into town to agitate and make trouble. Not anymore. They stopped reading the signs about voter rights and freedom rides. They stopped grinning at white nuns marching with black ministers. It was the armored van they were interested in now, twenty-three feet long, searchlights blazing.
'And I ain't saying you're obliged to love those truncheons they're beating you with.'
