in, the two women exchanged a long look before Lanette sat by another teacher.
I saw Cedric, my mechanic, and Raphael Roundtree, who was sitting with his wife. Cedric gave me a surprised smile and wave, but Raphael’s greeting was subdued. His wife just stared.
The meeting went like many community meetings with an ill-defined goal. It opened with a prayer so fervent that I half expected God to touch everyone’s heart with love and understanding on the spot. If He did, the results were not immediate. Everyone had something to say, and wanted to say it simultaneously. They were all angry about the blue pieces of paper, and wanted to know what the chief of police and the sheriff were doing about them. At tedious length, the lawmen explained that they couldn’t do anything about them; the handouts were not obscene, did not contain a clear and overt incitement to violence. Of course, this was not a satisfactory response to most of the people in the church.
At least three people were trying to speak when Lanette Glass stood up. There was silence, gradually; a deep silence.
“My son is dead,” Lanette said. Her glasses caught the harsh fluorescent light and winked. Darnell’s mother was probably still in her forties, with a pleasant round figure and a pretty round face. She was wearing a brown, cream, and black pantsuit. She looked very sad, very angry.
“You may talk about ‘we don’t know this’ and ’we can’t guess that,‘ but we all know good and well that Darnell was murdered by the same men that are passing around this paper.”
“We can’t know that, Mrs. Glass,” Marty Schuster said helplessly. “I sympathize with your grief, and your son’s is one of the three homicides the city and county police are working on-believe me, we’re working on it, we want to find out what happened to your son-but we can’t go haring off and accuse people who don’t even have an identity.”
“I can,” she said unanswerably. “I can also say what everyone here is thinking, blacks and probably whites, too: that if Darnell hadn’t been killed, Len Elgin would not have died, and maybe Del Packard, too. And I want to know what we, the black community, are supposed to do about these rumors of armed militia in our town, armed white men who hate us.”
I awaited a reply with interest. An armed militia? The problem was, just about every white man-and black-in town was already armed. Guns were not exactly scarce in this area, where lots of citizens felt you were wise to carry a weapon if you traveled to Little Rock. You could buy arms at Winthrop Sporting Goods, if you wanted a top- of-the-line piece. You could buy a gun at WalMart, or at the pawnshop, or just about anywhere in Shakespeare. So the “armed” part wasn’t exactly a shocker, but the “militia” part was.
I wasn’t too surprised when Claude and Marty Schuster protested ignorance of any knowledge of an armed militia in our fair city.
The meeting was effectively over, but no one wanted to admit it. Everyone had had his or her say, and no solution had been reached, because a solution to this problem was simply unreachable. A few die-hards were still trying to get the lawmen to make some kind of statement committing the law to eradicating the group apparently inciting white Shakespeareans to some kind of action against dark Shakespeareans, but Marty and Claude refused to be pinned.
People rose and began to shuffle toward the two exits. I saw Marty Schuster, Claude, and the minister go toward the aisle on my left. I stood admiring the carved pulpit, at the end of the aisle to the right, before I stepped into the aisle. I had zipped up my coat and was pulling on my black leather gloves when I felt a hand on my arm. I turned to meet the magnified eyes of Lanette Glass.
“Thank you for helping my son,” she said. She looked at me unwaveringly, but her eyes suddenly swam in tears.
“I wasn’t able to help when it counted,” I said.
“You can’t blame yourself,” she said gently. “You can’t count the times I’ve cried since he died, thinking I could somehow have warned him, somehow rescued him. I could have gone out for milk myself, instead of asking him to run to the store. That was when they got him, you know, in the parking lot… at least that was where his car was found.”
His new car, still with its crumpled fender.
“But you, you fought for him,” Lanette said quietly. “You bled for him.”
“Don’t make me better than I am,” I said flatly. “You’re a brave woman, Mrs. Glass.”
“Don’t you make me any better than I am,” Lanette Glass said quietly. “I thanked the black Marine the day after the fight. I never thanked you until tonight.”
I looked down at the floor, at my hands, at anything but Lanette Glass’s large brown eyes; and when I looked up, she had gone.
The crowd continued to exit slowly. People were talking, shaking their heads, pulling on their own coats and scarves and gloves. I moved along with them, thinking my own thoughts. I pushed up my sleeve to check my watch: It was 8:15. Through the open doors ahead of me, I could see that the crowd was thick in the church’s foyer. People were hesitating before stepping out into the cold. There were about three people between me and the sanctuary doors, and there were at least six people behind me.
The stout woman on my left turned to me to say something. I never found out what it was. The bomb went off.
I can’t remember if I knew what had happened right away or not. When I try, my head hurts. But I must have turned. Somehow I had a sense of the pulpit disintegrating.
I was pushed from behind by a powerful wind and I saw the head of the woman beside me separate from her body as a collection plate clove through her neck. I was sprayed with her blood as her body crumpled and her head and I went flying forward. My thick coat and scarf helped absorb some pressure. So did the bodies of the people behind me. The wooden pews also blocked some of the blast, but they splintered, of course, and those splinters were deadly… some of them were as big as spears, just as lethal.
The roar deafened me and in silence I flew through the air. All this happened at the same time, too much to catalog… the woman’s head flew with me, we flew together into kingdom come.
I was lying halfway on my right side, on something lumpy. Something else was lying on me. I was soaking wet. There were cold winds blowing in the church, and flames were flickering here and there. I was in hell. I watched the flames and wondered why I was so cold. Then I realized if I turned my head a little, I could see the stars, though I was in a building. This was remarkable; I should tell someone. The lights were out, but I could see a little. I could smell smoke, too, and the sharp smell of blood, and even worse things. And there was a heavy chemical smell overlaying everything, an odor that was completely new to me.
My situation isn’t good, I thought. I need to move. I want to go home. Take a shower.
I tried to sit up. I couldn’t hear a thing. That made my state even more surrealistic. With some senses so drenched with input and others totally deprived, it was easy to convince myself I was in a nightmare. I lost my place for a few minutes, I think. Then I reoriented, after a fashion. Someone was near me, I could tell, I could feel movement but not hear it. I turned painfully onto my back, put my hands on whatever was lying on my chest, and shoved. It moved. I tried to sit up, fell back. That hurt. A face appeared through the gloom in front of me. It was the face of Lanette Glass. She was talking, I could tell, because her mouth was moving.
At last she seemed to realize that she wasn’t getting through. She moved her lips slowly. I decided she was saying, “Where-is-Mookie?”
I remembered who Mookie was, and I remembered seeing her earlier. She had been on the other side of the church-that was where I was, in the Golgotha A.M.E. Church-and I’d glanced across at Mookie as she’d passed from the sanctuary into the foyer.
“Can you hear me?” I asked Lanette. I couldn’t hear myself. It was overwhelmingly strange. I thought of going to the dentist, not being able to feel your own lips after he filled a tooth. I went off course for a minute. Lanette shook me. She was nodding frantically. It took me another moment to realize she was letting me know she could hear me. That was great! I smiled. “Mookie is on the other side of the church,” I said. “In the foyer.”
Lanette vanished.
I wondered if I could stand up and go to a warm place and shower. I tried to roll onto my knees; I pushed against the thing underneath me, to flip from my back to my stomach. When I’d gotten that done, I saw the lump underneath me was the body of a girl, about ten or twelve years old. Her hair was elaborately decorated with beads. There was a sharp splinter protruding from her neck. Her eyes were blank. I closed my mind to that. I pulled
