I last saw them. But now they looked as if they were chiseled from marble. Strange as it sounds, I would have liked it better if they had been holding a basketball.
I looked as long as I could bear, and then I took another breath and fixed my eyes on a pink gladiola just beyond the top of the coffin. Finally Mama turned us away and we faced Mrs. Herndon.
Mama dried her eyes. “He is so beautiful.”
Mrs. Herndon smiled disconsolately. “Thank you for bringing Jackie back to me.” She looked away for a moment. When she returned her gaze to us, her big eyes were wet again. “Today’s May thirtieth. Jackie’s birthday. He was eighteen today.”
Her words sucked all the air out of my lungs and yanked me back to a memory of Jackie telling me how he got his name.
The Duke freshman team, of which Jackie was instantly the star despite being the youngest member, had played in South Carolina but he had been thrown out of the game—a shock to me given his even temper. He took a swing at a guy who had been pulling the hair on his legs and calling him nigger. He told me later how his coach had taken him aside, reminded him about Jackie Robinson, how whites screamed racist abuse when he started with the Dodgers but how Robinson held his temper and beat the other teams with his bat and his base running, not his fists. Jackie and I were shooting baskets outside my dorm, when he told me this.
“My full name is Jackie Robinson Herndon. Mama was real pregnant with me when he went into the majors in 1947. So, when I was born, she named me for him.” Jackie’s eyes had twinkled. “She always told me if Branch Rickey hadn’t started Jackie with the Dodgers that year, I would have been named for her next favorite Negro, Cab Calloway.” He gave me a half-smile. “Cab don’t sound much like a ballplayer, does it?”
Jackie Robinson Herndon. Breathe, I told myself. Breathe.
On the day of Jackie’s funeral, charcoal-colored clouds dumped rain on the little Baptist church with the fury of a hundred firehoses. But the bad weather didn’t keep away mourners. The church was almost of full of elderly women, who studied me intently as Mama, William, and I entered the church and sat two pews behind the family. “Tha’s him.” The loud whisper of an old woman. “White boy drove him down there.”
The small choir sang plaintive spirituals—“Go Down, Moses” and “Baby Gone Home”—that were punctuated by claps of thunder and Mrs. Herndon’s wails. She kept crying out Jackie’s name and a single word she seemed to be addressing to God: Why? Her shouts and the cracking thunder made me start trembling.
The preacher’s words put me in hell. “They killed Emmett Till and tied him to a fan and threw him in the river . . .”
“They did!”
“They shot Medgar Evers and he died at the feet of his crying babies . . .”
“They evil!”
“They bombed to death those four little girls in the Birmingham Sunday school . . .”
“Help me, Lord.”
“They shot and buried Chaney, Schwerner, and Goodman under a mountain of dirt.”
“Oh, God.”
“They shot our Jackie . . .”
The mourners’ responses grew louder with the mention of each martyr and turned into a angry shout with Jackie’s name. My arms and legs shook, my stomach churned, and my ears roared from some inner racket. The lights in the little church glared through my eyelids even when I clenched them shut.
In the awful moments when Jackie was shot, there were things I had to do, actions I had to take that were directed from some deep survival instinct. But now I was trapped in that little church, unable to move. Mama’s firm hand took mine. She leaned in to me. “Breathe, precious. Breathe slow.”
5
From the airport William drove to Bebe’s home, where we found her chatting with a light-skinned colored man. A little over six feet tall, he wore a black suit, a tight black knit shirt that revealed a muscular torso, and black boots. He had a goatee like some kind of a black beatnik and large gray eyes, partly hooded by drooping eyelids that made him look both suspicious and sleepy. What was this guy doing with my grandmother?
William cleared his throat. “Tom, Betty June, I want you to meet Marvin Whitfield.”
“Tommy,” Bebe said, “Marvin is here to provide you protection.”
The bodyguard. He seemed too cool to have earned the reputation for meanness. He looked more like a musician. I guessed about twenty-five but found out later he was just past thirty. Blacks always look younger to me than they are. There had to be meaner-looking Negroes in Illinois. Now, confronting him, I doubted I needed someone to protect me. I should just lie low for a while. But, of course, no one had asked me if I wanted a bodyguard. Whitfield looked me over as if assessing whether I was worth saving.
Bebe offered us beer. “I’d like a smoke,” Marvin said in a slow, matter-of-fact voice.
He and I moved to Bebe’s front porch where we drank Budweiser, he smoked Kools, and we eyed each other. He took a switchblade from his pants pocket, pared his fingernails, and cut back his cuticles. His slim fingers flicked the parings away. The nails shone with clear polish. I had never seen that on a man. He took a pistol from the back of his waist and placed it on the glass-topped garden table next to the glider where we sat. When he crossed his legs, he exposed another, smaller pistol strapped to his ankle. The porch light was attracting mosquitoes, so I turned it off, and we sat in the darkness. His cigarette competed with a nearby gardenia’s rich, sweet perfume to scent the muggy air. Cicadas were making a racket interrupted only by the periodic call of a whippoorwill.
“Tell me how all this shit got started,” Marvin said, exhaling smoke, not looking at me.
I briefly recounted what had happened at the store and the harassment since then.
“This nigger who got killed . . .”
A reflexive anger flashed. “Don’t refer to him as a nigger. I’m sick of that shit. Jackie Herndon. His name was Jackie Herndon. He was my college friend.”
He regarded me out of the corner of his eye. Finally he broke the tense pause. “This . . . boy, he do anything to piss off the old cracker?”
“Nothing. Just tried to get this girl out of there.”
“Did this bitch start the trouble?”
“Well, yeah. I mean, she sure aggravated it.”
“Were you trying to kill this old man?”
“I was just trying to make him quit shooting at us.”
“Well, you did that, didn’t you?”
“Yeah. I would have killed him if I was any better shot.”
“We can work on that.”
I asked how people in Eden Rise knew about him. In that
