“Coloured folks to the back!” ordered the driver of Louisiana State bus line number 33. Larry and Jimmy entered by the back like they were supposed to. They walked to the front; the bus hadn’t started. Larry took out a few coins, which he held out to the driver who eyed them suspiciously. The driver looked the pair up and down for a moment. They seemed clean enough. Larry did not look away, but Jimmy dropped his gaze to the floor. “To the back, please,” the driver repeated with a sigh. He’d let them ride, even though it would probably cause him some headaches. But he was like that; he didn’t want to turn the boys away. They didn’t look dirty or anything. What were they doing here anyway? They should be hanging out somewhere where they wouldn’t bother anyone. Shouldn’t go looking for trouble. Here in the South, they lived by the law: “Separate but Equal.” Blacks didn’t use the same fountains as whites, or the same schools, or the same toilets.
Jimmy and Larry made their way to the back. A fat white woman, all frills and jewellery, eyed them with disgust. Larry wished he could give her a good slap and teach her some manners. He hated those types of women who thought they could do as they liked because they wore new shoes and lived in a big house. Probably on her way home to eat lunch that her black housemaid had made for her. Probably, that same housemaid had watched her grow up, looked after her, cuddled her, fed her and cleaned up her messes; now the white woman wouldn’t look her in the eyes anymore and acted like she didn’t exist if they passed each other in the hallways of that big house. Probably that kind of woman. And this was their democracy. Abraham Lincoln once said: “As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy.” Larry sat down peacefully and laughed. The woman took fright and turned around. She wasn’t too courageous, just stuck-up. Jimmy said nothing; he hadn’t even noticed his friend’s little game. The bus stopped; a man got on. He was a big man wearing a farmer’s hat. He spied the two young blacks. “This is going to get ugly,” the driver said to himself. The man in the hat scowled the dirty scowl of a racist, a southerner etching a frustrated smile full of simmering rage, a disgusting smile that Larry knew all too well.
“These people want equality! But we’re different. If we must coexist, there needs to be a position of superiority and inferiority. And I, like any well-raised white man, am for the fact that the most well-educated and intelligent race should be superior,” the man in the hat thought aloud.
“The most well-educated?” Larry repeated.
“You talking to me, boy?” the man in the hat demanded.
“Who else?”
“I can’t understand what you’re sayin’.”
“I said you’re not in a strong position to talk about people’s education, that’s what I said,” Larry replied, losing his temper.
“I don’t understand slave talk.”
Larry didn’t answer. Why would he? He didn’t want to get into a fight, even if he’d have loved nothing better than to throw that fool off the bus. Fighting racists meant fighting against all of society, against the law, against their morality, against things that had been going on for centuries. He got off the bus with Jimmy. The pair walked to their grandmother’s house. It was a blue pastel shotgun house inherited from her parents, who were freed slaves. Legend said that they called those wooden houses “shotgun” because if you opened up the front door and fired into the house, the shot would go all the way through to the back. They’d finally come to the end of the path in the middle of the fields. Their grandma was waiting on the porch in her rocking-chair. She was reading her paper and smoking a cigarette. She looked a thousand years old, Larry said to himself. She was wizened with white hair rustling on her shoulders, her little legs dangling from the chair like a child’s. “Hey mama!” Jimmy called to her. The old woman looked up from her paper and smiled at them.
They sipped lemonade on the porch and talked for hours. Grandma always told the same stories, but the two young men didn’t protest. They respected her; the woman had lived through so much history. She told them how the saying used to go in New Orleans: “When massa sings, Negro dance; when work whistle blows, Negro jumps”. It didn’t make much sense today. Her parents liked to tell her about the history of slavery in Louisiana. They told her how Negroes were sold in Congo Square, sorted like cattle. They told her about running from the whip in the tobacco fields. They told her what the young folk never saw, but that was passed along like an ancestral wound, an imperishable memory that had to survive, whatever came after.
“What about Abraham Lincoln?” Jimmy interrupted.
“Lincoln wanted to free the southern slaves, and what did he have to care what happened to those men and women? He fought till his last breath in the Civil War against the Confederates. But they shot ol’ Abe down!”
Alan Alfredo Geday