Washaway Etowah

Most cities you can’t see the sky but you can in Montgomery. Now that I’m here, I’m thinking, why did I ask to see Montgomery in the dropdead heat of July? At least I can breathe. The sky is so blue and close, the clouds traveling in little groups, the dome of the capitol building blinding white, topped by three flags, the American, the Alabama, and the Confederate. I was reading the plaque for Dexter Avenue Baptist Church when those three flags caught my eye. Standing here, it’s hard to believe that yesterday I was stuck under a skyscraper on 95 just past the George Washington Bridge, morning rush hour, a wreck ahead, feeling about to pass out, steak and eggs riding my throat in waves, and all around me the radios going “Don’t worry, be happy” and “Fight the Power.” Loud. And I was getting more and more claustrophobic and thinking more and more how my doctor told me to relax for the next six months so I won’t have another heart attack, but how are you going to relax after that kind of deadline?

I’m a trucker but I don’t drive at night anymore because those white road markers shine like so many cigarettes, which I had to give up. But I couldn’t sit still for six months wondering, is this it? So I found myself stuck behind the wheel under a skyscraper, angry that my life was slipping away in the exhaust of New York City.

Then I did what everybody does in those kinds of situations. I asked God to please not let me die in New York City, and so he let me make Jersey, and then I said please, not north of the Mason-Dixon, and then not in Virginia where those snotty fox hunting planters live and then not in North Carolina because of Jesse Helms who is a cancer pack in the tobacco industry’s pocket and the reason I’m dying, cigarettes, and not in South Carolina because they can’t run an honest football program and not in Georgia because I hate Lewis Grizzard getting rich off stuff my Grandma told me. Let me see Alabama again. Make me an angel that flies from Montgomery.

I’ve never been to my home capitol before. The building is being renovated behind a big chain link fence. And it’s pretty, pure white, like all the government buildings. I don’t know how they keep the buildings so white but the glorious look of them almost makes me have faith in the state government. But not quite. I’m from Winston County and I’m glad there’s a fence around the state house. We declared ourselves the Free State of Winston and didn’t secede. For that, our delegate spent the war years as a so-called political prisoner in a Confederate dungeon.

Up the next rise is the Civil Rights Memorial, brand-new. It’s simple, two fountains made of black granite. One is a wall that water runs down and the other is like a flying saucer cut in half, but nice-looking, water coming out of an off-center spring. There’s a white concrete walk around it and a white concrete ledge to sit on. I sit a long time and watch people come and go and take pictures of the moving water. The beauty of the monument is that it doesn’t stand still. It can’t stand still; it makes you want to move, to keep moving with that water, to make justice roll down like a stream, like rain, like thunder, like sweat on my chest, God it’s so hot in July.

I walk around the edge of the dais, my hand trailing in that running water, warm, like blood. I begin to feel the names carved in stone, not reading them, not reading them, and I walk around and around and then my hand stops on one name, traces his letters, and I burst out blubbering crying, me a weeping white man in a swarm of solemn blacks. I know before I look.

 

William Moore. Shot dead in Etowah County, 1963. I was there. I saw him lying in the roadway, his sandwichboard crumpled under him. My headlights on the shape in the road, my uncle saying, “Stop. Stop right now, boy. Pull over and get out.”

I was fourteen years old that April, driving my mother’s 1951 Chevrolet DeLuxe. It was black and ornery on turns. This evening Uncle Ax was taking me to buy whiskey for the first time. I’d spent a week with him and he’d decided which job he could arrange for me but was holding off the announcement until we had the proper beverage for the celebration. Uncle Ax gave directions to Etowah County rather than to Bim Lee’s in Marshall, where he lived. I was excited. I’d never tasted moonshine but I’d smelled it and knew it was powerful enough to kill. I had an uncle who’d died of bad hooch, so they say. Uncle Ax liked his drink, too. I was to make sure he got home since he had a hearing in the morning. He was an elected judge, kind of a tough thing to be. He wasn’t good at farming so he needed something, and being popular and fair without offending anybody was a tough chore and the reason he drank, or so he told me on our little journey.

We found the man’s house, up a tiny road we had to negotiate without the headlights, then flash them three times as we sat in a running creek and waited on an arcing light, three times around. We got out in the creek, cold water sweeping over our ankles, and stalked through the yard like panthers. Uncle Ax made me stay outside and watch our car to see if we’d been followed. I couldn’t see much of the house, except it was small and there was only a very dim light near one window, probably a candle. There were no dogs which was real odd. Everybody had hunting dogs. Even if you didn’t want one, at least one would find you and take up residence. So I sat there wishing for a dog to come up and ask for a pat on the head but none came. A cat rubbed on my leg and I almost bit my tongue through, but the cat purred so loud that I rubbed its neck, then it began to lick my fingers.

Uncle Ax huffed behind me. I carried the crate to the truck and was disappointed to feel regular cold beer bottles. This was no moonshiner, just a bootlegger. It made no sense to drive all the way over here for some beer. We put the crate where the spare tire’s supposed to be, and put the tool box on top of that, and drove on, again with no headlights, but the moon was bright enough. It just took a long slow time, and Uncle Ax said nothing at all until we were heading down a steep hill.

“Pull over, boy,” he said. He always called me boy. He had so many nephews and grandsons and cousins and what not and he was supposed to know everybody who voted for him, so all males under forty were “boy.”

I saw two big trees and a stump on my side, a gully on his.

“Never mind. Just stop in the middle of the road. Nobody else’ll be out this way this evening.”

So I did, all the while thinking this is Mama’s car he’s left in the middle of the road heading down a steep hill, not his, and it’s got beer in it. Then I started to realize why I had been asked to chauffeur, not to bring me into the world of men but to take care of Uncle Ax’s tail.

“Get the shovel and the buckets from the back seat.”

I did, thinking maybe now we were going to the still. We’d carry raw hooch in the buckets, but first we’d have to dig until we found the mouth of the moonshine well.

We walked through mushy ground covered with last year’s brown leaves. Ahead was a dogtrot, sunk in the middle, all the steps gone. It looked haunted and mysterious. We walked around to the front. It had been fancied up a little by shutters, which I saw were not shutters at all but the side panel of steps, put up beside the steps in a zigzag design. Kind of neat and unusual.

“Here we go,” said Uncle Ax. “Right here. Now be careful not to break any roots.” He pinched off a plump creamy rosebud and ran it under his nose like it was one of his Cuban cigars.

“You want me to dig up these rosebushes?”

“That’s what I said.” He shone his flashlight on the shrubs and then selected which ones I should take.

I remembered the glorious roses that grew in front of his grand house. A double rose hedge ran a quarter of a mile from the road and ended in an enormous arch over the white sand walk.

So I dug. We got about five and put them in the buckets. I did break off a root or two, a loud pop! which Uncle Ax had to hear, but he didn’t bother me about it. By now the moonlight had slicked everything with a silvery coat and I had scratches all over my arms. I was hoping when we got to the car that Uncle Ax would give me a beer or at least a sip off the little bottle he took from under his jacket. But no. I was there to drive. So I did, knowing now why we had come all this way for maybe six bottles of beer. Stealing flowers from a homesite was a serious crime. We all believed the plants belonged to the heirs since their Mama or Grandmama or Granddaddy had cared for them. It wasn’t like taking flowers off a grave because those were going to die soon anyway. But uprooting plants from a homesite was like stealing from the dead.

 

I couldn’t really relax even when we got to the straight highway because the car pulled to the left and the road took a lot of turns. I’d always had strong arms, though, and I was starting to get seduced by the rhythm of the road and Uncle Ax’s cheery singing.

By the time we got to Attalla, he was into his sixth round of “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.” The lights had just come on at a store called the Hilltop so I put mine on and I’m always glad I did. A car roared toward us in our lane, his lights in my eyes, and I flashed him and fought the car to the right. We bounced down in a ditch, then bounced back up onto the road. I flashed him again, since I had just got through a lecture from Uncle Ax about returning favors.

My lights hit on a shape in our lane, a big shape, a shape too thick and round to be a box. A deer, maybe.

Uncle Ax said calm and slow and sad, very sad, “Stop right now, son. Pull off the road. Then we’ll get out.”

I pulled hard against the car, the pull stronger as we slowed, me not wanting to let it die before we got all the way off the road, sweat coming down off my head. I got us off the road to a gravel spot beyond a picnic area.

It was a man wearing a crumpled sandwichboard. It said “Eat at Joe’s Both black and white.” I couldn’t see the man’s face, just his dark hair.

“Help me, Joab. We got to get him off the road before he’s run over.”

He was a big man. Uncle Ax took his shoulders and me I got his legs right under his knees and I knew from the way his leg joints gave that he wasn’t alive, but he was warm and I could smell his sweat and his leathery shoes. His shoes were unlaced, knots at the top to hold the tongue in, stretched at its widest. The shoes were swollen up, like he was wearing watermelons.

We put him on the ground. Uncle Ax straightened up his head and told me not to look but I did. He’d been shot in the face at close range; there was little to recognize, except his jaw, which was hanging open in a twisted scream. I swallowed and straightened the billboard. This side read Equal Rights for All Mississippi or Bust. His grocery cart was still beside the road. We pushed it over next to him. There was a black notebook and some food and bandages. I didn’t know who he was. Uncle Ax did but he didn’t say anything to me then. “They must have been scared or they would have dragged him off the highway.”

I remembered the long car, its headlights, its pale color as it rushed by, the silver fins, white roof. All so clear. And how I pulled us off the road because, because it was in our lane, taking off from this spot, trying to blind us as it barrelled into its own lane — trying perhaps to let us run this man down.

A car drove up and stopped, its single headlight turning us into statues. What if it was the killers? My heart was going fast as I stood there, still, my hand on a dead man’s shoe, the lanolin filling my nose. A whiff of Uncle Ax’s whiskey, wet April air, the exhaust of the dead-eye car. We waited.

A man got out, clip pad in hand. “What’s going on here?”

Uncle Ax said we’d found this man in the road. I expected him to introduce himself as a judge from Marshall County and have us on our way, but no. Uncle Ax gave the name of a recently deceased friend who’d lived in Birmingham. Uncle Ax said we were driving home from Collinsville. I knew then that Uncle Ax had to appear on the up and up. If the man ordered a search of our car, a search for a rifle, and instead found our booze or the roses which were wilting on the floorboards, probably wagging their branches out the window—but I didn’t look. If he found any of that, Uncle Ax would have trouble at home.

Then a sheriff roared up and I thought we’d really done it. Uncle Ax would be voted out of office for sure, and me, well, I was only fourteen and only Uncle Ax would know that I was driving without a license. But the weird thing was, the sheriff and the man with the clipboard, who turned out to be a radio announcer, seemed to know the dead man, and they weren’t surprised to find him shot.

I knew there was trouble between whites and blacks but hardly any black people lived in Winston County so I didn’t really know what all the fuss was. But as the sheriff and the radio man talked, I began to get that funny warning taste in my mouth. This dead man, this dead white man, was born in Mississippi and he’d gotten so ashamed of his home state, they said, he wrote the governor. The radio man claimed he had a good head for quotes and just spouted the dead man’s letter, “I dislike the reputation this state has acquired as being the most backward and most bigoted in the land. Those who truly love Mississippi must work to change this image.”

“Thank God he wasn’t born in Alabama,” the sheriff said.

“No, but he died here,” said Uncle Ax, trying to be friendly. But being a little drunk, he didn’t have control of all his wits.

“What’s your name again?” the sheriff said and Uncle Ax lied again.

The radio man said, “Funny thing, I just had Mr. Moore talking on the radio telling us all about his march. It was on the TV out of Chattanooga and I figured lots of people would be curious to know him. Just one hour ago me and him were sharing coffee at the station and talking about his sore feet.”

Uncle Ax and I stood still. I wanted to leave and I figured Uncle Ax did too before they took down Mama’s license plate, but neither one of us wanted to make the suggestion.

The two men talked on and occasionally reached down to feel if there might still be a heartbeat. “No, he’s dead,” they’d say and keep talking.

“I do admire his courage,” said the radio man.

“If you call it that,” the sheriff spat out a chaw so close to my foot I could smell it. “You wouldn’t catch me spending my two week vacation walking across the South with a sandwichboard on my back. No sir, especially not if I was a postman. If I was a postman, last thing I’d want to do is walk my vacation away.”

“What would you do on your vacation, sheriff?” asked the radio man, then added, “off the record.” “Damned if I’d tell you.” He looked up to the store. “Where is the ambulance? If it don’t show in a minute, I’m going to have to carry him over there myself.”

The ambulance soon arrived and everyone soon forgot about us. The ambulance must have alerted the whole county because cars kept driving up, taking a look at the grocery cart, at the dark spot in the road, at the sandwich board that had been removed from his body by the medics. Soon the whole place changed. Tire marks erased, the gravel kicked up here and there, the story changed a million times, suddenly a dozen witnesses.

Uncle Ax decided it was time for us to leave. He leaned his head into the circle surrounding the sheriff and yelled, “Hey, see y’all later. Got to get home to Margaret and let her know what’s going on before she gets it all ass backwards and thinks a nigger got killed.”

The men laughed and said to go on home and we walked real casual to our car and I saw where Uncle Ax had blacked out one of the numbers on the tag, how and when I don’t know, but he is a judge after all and knows how to loop the law. He told me to drive. A bit shaky, I didn’t want to maneuver around all the cars but I did and I was sweating again. I had only a little ways to go when that pale car with the silver fins pulled up on the other side of the road. Two men got out, one a skinny guy with gray in his hair and the other a preacher, I could tell by his big round hat. Their clothes had been pressed to creases. Uncle Ax growled “Get on with it,” and we roared off. He’d got a bottle from the trunk and nipped all the way home. Soon he was snoring.

As I was driving away, fighting that car, concentrating on the road, on the raggedy bridges we crossed, on the long stretches of plowed fields that come fall would be white with cotton, on the beautiful Tennessee River, and finally near Scant City going up and down the hills making sure not to speed blind through the foggy bottoms, I was losing the evening, the sheriff s chatter, the exploded face, the swirl of lanolin, sweat, and leather, the dead weight from knees gone lax. That night in North Alabama I learned the comfort of tunneling through blur.

Uncle Ax got me hooked up with a trucker in May. By the time I was sixteen I was driving a rig. Then I got sent to Viet Nam. I’ve done so much running since 1963, that night in Etowah County faded almost out of m y head. But I can’t run now. My finger is locked onto William Moore’s name; it’s wearing a dent in my finger, a dent already there, the water warm in July, warm going cold as his ankles had in my hands.

 

At Uncle Ax’s house, I got him woke. He said we had to plant the roses, then and there. I dug and he shone the flashlight that kept winking on and off. And it got so I didn’t need the light and told him so. He leaned up against the house and went to sleep on his feet. There were five holes already where he’d ripped out some dead bushes, so it was pretty easy work. One or two roots had been broken. They’d lose some branches and some buds but I didn’t cut them that night. Figured I’d let the plant choose what to save and what to let die. The soil was moist and I got stuck plenty since I couldn’t see that good. And I thought that if me and Uncle Ax hadn’t shown up then maybe the postman would be getting buried right now, just disappeared. The moist dirt falling on his face, into his shrieking dead mouth. The soil so moist I could taste it.

I cleaned the shovel under the pump and put it back in the toolshed, all the while feeling like I had killed and buried a man and needed to hide what I’d done. I went back to the compost heap and filled the wheelbarrow, then raked the dead leaves around the roots of the roses, as if the bushes had been there all winter. These would bloom white, I knew, little white clusters. I unloaded the beer. Took the crate into the barn and hid it among bales of hay all stacked up and neat. I pried the cap off a brown bottle and drank the burning yeasty beer. I remembered with awe that me and my cousins had played hide and seek among the bales. I remembered the day we found Whitey-Cat’s kittens. She’d taken one or two newborns and dropped them between the bales. She had kittens every spring and fall, and always some disappeared. The beer stung but I made myself drink the whole bottle.

Five years later Uncle Ax lost it. The folks had been noticing he’d gotten weird at the courthouse, carrying garden snips under his robe and clipping off any pretty flower he took a liking to. He’d have his driver stop so he could hop out and get a blossom from somebody’s garden, put it in his lapel or tie it to his shoe. In his judge’s chambers, they’d find him, a camellia behind his ear if it was winter, a magnolia in the summer. This got to be too much for some people and they voted in a young guy. Uncle Ax didn’t seem to mind except at night, when he was haunted by the dead he had robbed. I figured out it wasn’tj ust me who knew about the stolen roses. It was all his grandsons and nephews and young cousins. He’d given us all something on him, but it was reverse blackmail. How could you turn in old Uncle Ax? We all thought it was a secret between him and each of us, one little secret. But my secret was the darkest.

One night he hacked the roses down all the way out to the road. They found him, one bush to go, lying face down in the dew, his heart ticked out. It was an awful slaughter in the early summer. Tufts of color strewn along the road like so many dead bodies. The briars had given a good fight. Uncle Ax was bloody from it.

I went to his house and got the last bush, dug out the root, soaked it in my cooler and drove to the Hilltop store in Etowah County. My rig handled the road easily; I was there in no time at all, and that made me sad. I planted the root near the picnic area, a memorial to William Moore and Uncle Ax and my innocence. I haven’t been back because I don’t know if that rose can survive the traffic, or if someone else has stopped for lunch and fancied a pretty rosebush under the kitchen window, sweetening up the washing of the dishes. I like to think it’s still there.

 

A bus full of black Baptists unloads across the street. They walk against the light, then spill up the steps and fan out around the fountain. Kids splash in the water on the other side; they don’t splash me. I’ve still got William Moore’s name under my hand. They want me to move out of the way so they can get a picture of them and the waterfall over Martin Luther King’s words. They don’t ask but I understand. I try to take a step but my legs won’t budge. My hand is held to William Moore as if by electricity. I am buzzed to it. I want to let go. I’m shaking now, sweating. I want to get out of the way so these black ladies in their fine church clothes can get their picture taken on a Friday afternoon, a freedom so recent it feels like a commercial for Disneyland.

I almost cry out when those fat armed ladies in their bright flower dresses stand together in front of that weeping wall. All bunched up in purple hats and red lipstick and none of them crying; the men in white shirts standing around, reading the names of the murdered people on the dais, the offering plate. Kids splashing in the water; those little throwaway cameras going click, pop, click. Tears coming out of my eyes and me pretending it’s sweat off my forehead, it’s so hot, summer hot in Montgomery, Alabama. And these people sweating, too, and no one saying anything but I am thinking, these people, not any older than me, had to drink at a different fountain; no wonder they lower their eyes; no wonder they believe in God; no wonder you can see the sky in Montgomery, because you can look straight ahead and you can’t look down. The sky is so blue in Montgomery.

And then I fall over on the memorial, water in my throat now, washing down my face, down my shirt and in my crotch, wet and thick and warm . . . washaway Etowah, washaway Winston, washaway Alabama.

They’re looking at me, a rim of black faces above the black bowl. They’re telling the children, “Don’t splash him.”

I hear the whisper, “Klan,” going around like the game Telephone.

I try to say, No. I am not the Klan. I try to say. I saw this man dead in the road. I saw his dead face. He died for you, I want to say.

They are looking down under that blue Montgomery sky.

I hear a kid, “White man gonna contaminate the monument,” and then “Shhh.”

There’s a rumbling, a rumbling in the stone, a rumbling in the people, like the growl of a dog. I hang on to the granite but it’s wet, it’s slippery, there’s no hand hold. I’m losing it. I’m losing my hold, my grip, I am in the water. I am drowning in the water. My head will not raise. My eyes see swim.

“Baptize this man!”

The shout makes me jump, raise up a bit, cause a tiny splash. I don’t get splash on anybody.

“A sinner. He needs to be cleansed. The Lord has called him to the water and he is ready to drink at the mighty well.”

Who is this voice? My eyes see black and glitter. My eyes hurt.

“Baptize this man in the name of Jesus.”

No amens. I roll my head. The crowd is still there, looking. None wants to Amen for me. Their eyes glint pity.

A heavy hand on my head pushing me down in the water. I fight but my neck is so weak. Water in my nose.

“The Father.”

My cheeks brush the granite below the surface.

“The Son.”

I give up. My body goes limp. I’m in it again, water all over, legs lifted off the ground.

“The Holy Ghost.”

The heavy hand is pushed away. Rough arms thrust under my shoulders. I’m brought up into the air and I can breathe. I suck up a lungful of hot summer Montgomery air, bus exhaust so thick I can chew it. I chew it and then I chew the asphalt and the construction dust from a few blocks over and the man’s sweat behind me and a dozen different perfumes from the ladies. I am hungry for air.

The Baptists get back on the bus and I wonder, did they take a picture of a white man prostrating himself on the Civil Rights Memorial? But the thought is fleeting. I’m so happy to breathe.

“Can you stand up by yourself?” says the deep voice that owns the arms.

“Yes, sir.” I’m fine. The grip is loosened and I turn to shake the man’s hand.

He’s an Alabama state trooper, my mortal enemy on the road. I squeeze his large brown hand, his shoulders stamped Crimson Tide. “You’re all wet,” he says.

“Yes sir, I reckon I am. I’m baptized, too.”

“I was afraid you had a heart attack.”

“No sir.”

“This place gets some people very angry. Wouldn’t surprise me if someday there was a killing here.”

“I hope not.”

The man laughs and sits his broad butt right down on the memorial.

What can I say? I am outraged. “Their lives meant something,” I shout. “Don’t be so disrespectful.”

His uniform is soaking up that water, dark blue going black. I want to slug him, slug his smug face as he sits there, his big fanny on William Moore’s name. Then my heart starts going like an M-16 and I feel weak again. I lean on the monument, cup my hands, drink. I go clammy cold, and drink some more. I hear the trooper spit but I do not look to see where. I must drink.

He is beside me again, holding me up. “You okay?”

“I need my pill. Digitalis.”

“Where?” I tap my breast pocket, my hand making a flapping noise against the blister-pak inside.

He puts the pill in my mouth and helps me over to a grassy spot in a small triangle of shade. “You ought to go home.”

“I am home.”

“No, I mean to your house.”

“This is my home.” Washaway Etowah, washaway Winston.

“I have real work to do,” he says. And that’s all.

I don’t thank him for my life and I don’t care that I don’t. As my heart returns to its normal pace, a nice comforting thurrump, thurrump, I begin to have normal thoughts, it’s time to find lunch. I pace down the hill to the state house. A monument is action turned to stone. A roadblock maybe. A dead-end sign. My strides are long now, giant, I am barreling past sawhorses, flashing yellows, bulldozers, men in orange hats.

My heart is big and strong, a bellows, wings. I’m soaring. I’m going to rip that Confederate flag out of the blue Montgomery sky.