Mark Dunn - American Decameron

“Go on,” said Rory to his daughter. Regina was still standing in the kitchen doorway.

“Hurry up, Regina,” said Tessie. “We’ve got a hundred things to do before our guests arrive.”

Regina opened the door to the kitchen. She turned and said, “When I’m done, I want to go and sit with Aunt Irma. She always likes it when I sit and talk to her.”

Rory smiled. “You do that, honey.”

Tessie sprang to her feet. “The Crowleys haven’t even met you yet. What am I supposed to say if they ask where you are?”

“I’m sure you can think of something, Mom.” Regina went into the kitchen.

“She takes after you,” muttered Tessie, glaring at her husband, who had begun to busy himself at the grill.

“And I thank God for that every day,” replied Rory, flipping over a large sirloin steak in the basting tray and splattering the grill with sweet vermouth basting sauce.

The bus was empty.

The two middle-aged white women took their seats on the starboard side of the first row of forward-facing seats. Patty set her shopping bag down on the seat in front of her and nested her purse in her lap. Harriet put each of her two shopping bags down on the floor near her feet.

Harriet had a car and often drove her friend Patty when the two went shopping together or had themselves a lunch out. Patty had never learned to drive. Patty had a colored man who took her where she needed to go when he wasn’t deadheading her flowers or raking leaves or doing any of the many repair jobs that Patty and her husband Roland’s antebellum mansion required. There was less for Lucius to do in the winter, but Roland Sprinkle kept him on at full salary. Patty’s husband Roland was a lawyer. But he was also half-owner of two launderettes, each in a colored neighborhood. Though Roland Sprinkle was a founding member of Montgomery’s White Citizens’ Council, it was important for him to show the Negroes of this very segregated southern city that he wasn’t a racist. He simply believed that black people and white people got along best when they kept their interaction to a minimum.

It was Roland who suggested to his wife that perhaps she and Harriet should take the Cleveland Avenue bus to the Montgomery Fair department store downtown. Harriet had wanted to go to Loveman’s at the new Normandale Shopping City. Harriet had been there the week before and had set her eyes on an absolutely divine Lassie Maid wool and cashmere camel-colored balmacaan coat that she now wanted to buy; she was also looking forward to trying Francis Cafeteria’s new veal sauté. On the other hand, Patty’s husband Roland felt that it was important, given the fact that the Negro leaders of Montgomery had decided to prolong what was originally supposed to be only a one-day boycott, for the city’s white citizens to patronize the bus line as much as possible to keep its drivers — most of them good, hard-working family men (all of them white) — from losing their jobs.

A full week had passed since a seamstress by the name of Rosa Parks (who coincidentally worked at Montgomery Fair) refused to give up her seat to a white man. Mrs. Parks had been sitting dutifully behind the “Colored Section” sign, but when the bus began to fill up with white passengers, the driver had gotten up and moved the sign to the row behind her and then asked that she give up her now white-designated seat. When Mrs. Parks defied him by staying put, the driver called the police and had Mrs. Parks arrested for failing to abide by a city ordinance that gave city bus drivers the authority to maintain segregation upon their vehicles through whatever means they saw fit. She was also charged with disorderly conduct.

Up until now, Harriet Jacobs and her friend Patty Sprinkle had avoided discussing the boycott. It troubled Patty to think that law and order was breaking down in the city of her birth. That the peace and security of this quiet and stately southern capital was now being disturbed by Northerner-led foment and general unrest. Even the Negro preachers were setting their Bibles aside and preaching hatred of the white man. This is what her husband Roland told her, and it chilled her to the bone.

In spite of all this, Patty had vowed to keep her opinions to herself, even as she stared out the bus window at the hordes of colored folk crowding the downtown sidewalks, deliberately avoiding the buses and hoofing it to wherever it was they needed to be. Because it would be several more days until the newly formed “Montgomery Improvement Association” created carpools and independent taxi services to ferry their black brothers and sisters around town.

Yet, try as she might, Patty couldn’t keep her thoughts and her fears to herself, and so in that next moment she unleashed a great rant that took her friend Harriet by surprise. “It’s just — I’m sorry, Harriet — it just isn’t right. Roland and I — we’ve gone out of our way to do right by Lucius and his family and our maid Wilma and all of her kids, but it just isn’t enough, is it? Not for them, not for any of these Negroes. You give them an inch and they take a mile. I’m sick to death of it. Just sick.”

“How are Lucius and Wilma getting to and from your house?”

“I don’t know and I don’t care. This city has a fine bus system for them to use, but they refuse to use it. They listen to that Reverend King and that Mr. Abernathy and all those other rabble-rousing ministers who only want to stir the pot, and I couldn’t care less if Lucius and Wilma have to walk twenty miles to get to my house. It serves them right. Of course, your situation is different because you’ve always taken your maid back and forth like she was the Queen of Sheba.”

“Lollie lives too far from a practical bus route.”

“Well then, I suppose she’s sitting pretty now.”

Harriet moved her bags away from her legs to give herself more room. With no other passengers on the bus, she could put the shopping bags right in the middle of the aisle if she wanted. “I don’t think she’s sitting pretty. Her daughter is sick.”

“That isn’t what I meant.”

“I wouldn’t want to trade places with a single colored person in this city, Patty. Would you? What do you mean my maid is sitting pretty?”

“It’s a figure of speech.”

“Well, I’d really rather not talk about this.”

Patty snorted. “I can’t help it.” A quiet moment passed. The bus squealed to a stop at a traffic light. Twenty-five to thirty black people appeared in the crosswalk, all of them staring at the nearly empty bus. A young Negro man in blue coveralls, denotative of his employment at the long-integrated Maxwell Air Force Base, fleered cockily at the driver. Patty saw it. She trembled with rage. “I have to say it. I wasn’t going to say anything about it, but now I have to. Beverly said that yesterday she saw you driving down her street with four or five colored women in your car.”

“Yes, I saw her. I was wondering if she was going to mention it to you.”

“Have you started your own taxi service for the help?”

“Lollie was afraid that her friends would lose their jobs if they couldn’t get to the houses where they worked.”

“They can take the bus.”

“No, they can’t, Patty. They have a right to their principles. Even you have to grant them that.”

Patty stared out the window. “What principles?”

“The right to not always have to sit in the back of a bus.” Harriet swept her arm at all the empty seats behind her.

Patty frowned. “Somebody has to. I suppose you think we ought to put all the black people in the front and the white people in the back. How much sense would that make?”