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mother’s jacket, vanished with them and bounced back behind the ear-nose-and-throat man and the pediatrician.
    Even the judge who had won a grand slam and gone into cardiac arrest at the last bridge tournament rose from his sickbed to fall in step. They came, though this was before the chance of getting on television had begun to be “factored in.” It was strange to see people who would have died rather than be accused of having flowers that “showed off” call undue attention to themselves smack in the middle of town, in front of so many others who were keeping quiet, arms folded, not about to join in.
    Up one side of the plaza and down the other grownups were loud in public. How long? Not long. They made noise and the songs were almost like church, only faster. In church the hymns were dragged out. On the street people sneaked through verses, and then bore down hard on the end, as if they were stomping out a fire. I saw something nervous and steely in the excitement, expressions like that on my sister’s face when she made up her mind to go without training wheels even if it meant hitting the telephone pole.
    We didn’t know what to do with our hands. One section wanted to lock arms, another wanted to clap. There were no stars at the head of our procession to show us what to do. My parents said the city fathers and the quislings among us had
scared them off by saying outsiders would get what was coming to them. My parents and their friends agreed that they hadn’t needed speeches after all. It didn’t matter how long an audience had been sweating, nobody ever willingly cut short a speech. Leaders, especially, were driven by the code that said, “I’ve written this out and you’re going to hear every word.”
    The march had started well enough, but without speeches and banners there was no point to come to. The protest broke up, people left abruptly, rolled away like beads of mercury. My new shoes were covered with dust as fine as powdered ginger and I wanted to hurry home, to sink back into that state where good news for modern Negroes couldn’t find me.
     
    Grandfather said he’d never met a rich white lady he didn’t like, which was more than he could say about the Negro movers and doers he’d dealt with in his time. Old Eleanor was worth more than the whole WPA. What the country needed was another aristocrat in the White House, a Puritan to scorch confusion, a man with a name as solid as Thorndike or Augustus.
    He thought back to the Depression, when the Rockefellers on holiday in the Sand Hills were moved to donate copies of Collier’s to the churches. My father said we didn’t want charity anymore. Grandfather had his theories about good whites and bad whites. My father said some of us needed whites more than others. Grandfather said we would not catch the whites he needed by trying to stretch “Congo” lines from our front porch all the way to Money, Mississippi.
    We could never tell what would set Grandfather off. He said my father knew precious little about discrimination in the army, since he’d spent most of the last war trying to dodge the draft. My father said Grandfather hadn’t exactly crossed the Rhine either. Grandfather said He would have mercy on whom He
would have mercy. The beige stepgrandmother switched channels to National Velvet . She was annoyed that our old set didn’t pick up ABC.
    Grandfather said that if my father had wanted to keep studying and not die peeling potatoes for white second lieutenants he should have gone to a good school like his. My father said that Dr. Mays had been more of a father to him than Grandfather had. Grandfather said my father would not have been at second-rate Morehouse in the first place had he not been expelled from second-rate Fisk for calling the French teacher queer. We were sent to bed.
    “See you in the funny papers,” my mother said. I turned away. I had come down with something that couldn’t be cured by three cheap words and a