“She will be fine, Miss Townsend.”
She had such a gentle manner. I wanted to speak honestly with her about everything; I just didn’t know how to begin. My experience with Catholics was limited to this hospital, so I didn’t even know if I was addressing her correctly.
“Tell me. How’s the case going?” she asked softly.
So she did know. Still, it was an awkward question to answer. “To be honest, I don’t understand all the technicalities of it. I just know their lawyer, Lou Feldman, is committed. I can tell you that.”
“A lot of folks in this town are outraged over this,” she said.
“Outraged over the lawsuit or the surgery?”
“Good question.”
“A lot of folks wish it would go away, I think.”
“Civil, may I offer one piece of advice?”
“Course you can.”
“Be careful.”
“Careful?”
“Sometimes love can kill you, just like hate. You love too hard and you can lose yourself in other folks’ sorrow. You hate too hard and you know the rest of that story. Take care of yourself. You can’t help others if you’re down and out. I have to remind myself of that all the time.”
“I never thought a nun would tell me I could love too hard.”
“Only Jesus’s love is infinite, Miss Townsend.” She suddenly looked older than she had when I’d first walked into the school.
India yelled out in triumph. We turned. She had built a pyramid, which teetered for a few seconds, then tumbled over.
* * *
? ? ?
LOU’S OFFICE SAT above a restaurant and the scent of grease wafted up from below, weighing down the air. Foam takeout containers overflowed from his trash can. I’m fairly certain that restaurant kept him from starving to death. The office was a one-room operation with just a front reception area sectioned off by a folding screen. Behind the screen, two desks overflowed with papers. I plopped down in the chair across from him.
“She fired me.”
“Who did?”
“Mrs. Seager. And she didn’t even have the nerve to do it to my face. She had a letter delivered to my house Monday morning.”
“I’m sorry, Civil. I suppose that was inevitable.”
“You got somebody to help you on this case?”
“Sure. I’ve got a dozen lawyers working for me.”
“You do?”
He grunted, and I realized that was the sound of his laughter. He was just messing with me. I watched as he riffled through a stack of papers.
“What are you looking for?” I asked him.
“Some notes I took.”
“Can I help? It’s not like I have a job to go to anymore.”
He looked up. “I’m sorry you got fired, Civil. We should have prepared for that.”
“It’s not your fault. Will you hire me?”
“I appreciate the offer, but you’re a nurse, Civil. You should be over there applying to work at the hospital.”
“I used to help my daddy organize his office when I was in high school. I’m good at filing.”
“You want to be my paralegal now?”
The rat-tat-tat of a typewriter started up. His secretary was a fast typist. The regularity of the keys clicking was punctuated ever so often by the return bell. I had never learned to type at all.
“Here it is.” He pulled a piece of yellow legal paper out of a stack and seemed to momentarily forget I was there. His eyebrows lowered as he wrote something down. After a while, he looked up at me again. I was embarrassed to still be sitting there, but I couldn’t bring myself to leave. Not yet.
“Do you want to read the complaint? Here. Read it.” He handed me a slim, stapled stack.
The statement described how Mrs. Seager and another nurse went to the girls’ house after determining they were candidates for sterilization. Mace had signed an X on the permission document. So had Mrs. Williams. Val signed as the witness. It crossed my mind to ask Alicia if she knew about Val’s betrayal. I had not seen Alicia in a few days. She had not put her finger in the telephone to call me since I’d been fired. Not one word. Not hello, how you doing. Not nothing. Mrs. Seager had somehow discovered that I’d moved the family to Dixie Court and taken the girls off birth control. Alicia had to have been the one who told her.
Val had played a role, too. I knew Mace’s mother had trusted Mrs. Seager because Val was there. Mrs. Seager was wily to bring one of her nurses, understanding that a Black face would help her accomplish the mission. The nurse had worn the same uniform I wore.
“What do you think?”
“It hurts to read.”
He lit a cigarette. “I’m sorry, Civil. I didn’t mean to—”
“Lou, you never really told me why you’re doing this, why you took this case?’
“Not all white people in Montgomery hate Black people, Civil.”
“I never said that.”
“I know tensions in this city have always been high. Hell, tensions in this state.”
“Tensions,” I repeated.
“How would you put it?”
I paused. And then I told him a story. I asked him if he remembered what Montgomery was like in 1963. I was thirteen years old, I said. It was the year George Wallace was elected governor and declared segregation would define the South forever. The year students were hosed down in a Birmingham park. The year hundreds of thousands of people marched on Washington demanding their civil rights. The year President Kennedy promised a civil rights bill but was later gunned down in front of his wife. But it was also the year somebody knocked on our front door. Hard. The kind of knock that made Daddy wake the family. Three of Daddy’s friends carried the white woman into our living room and lay her on the couch. She was bleeding, and her face was swollen. The men argued in panicked tones. Who was she? Are you trying to get us killed? They’ll blame one of us. Okay, I’ll look at her, but she cannot stay here. And then Daddy had brought out his medical bag and stitched up the woman’s scalp, put ice to her face, squeezed ointment in her eye. An arm was likely broken, but it would require a hospital visit and an X-ray, he told the men. He had done all he could do.
Lou was staring at me intently. One thing was for sure: He was a good listener. No wonder he’d been able to rattle off those facts about the Williams family the first day I met him.
“They had found that woman on the side of the street, likely beat up by a husband or boyfriend. And they had tried to help her, though they’d known they were putting their own lives in danger. It’s not that I think you hate us. It’s that this risk you’re taking is real. It has consequences, Lou. Montgomery has come a long way, but race relations in this city still ain’t no county fair.”
His chair was black vinyl with silver metal armrests, the kind of chair that spun around and had wheels for feet. The way he leaned, I thought it might tip over and deposit him on the floor.
“You’re not even getting paid,” I added.
“Now you’re sounding like my mama.”
“Lou, how far are you willing to take this thing? I mean, what if it starts to blow up in your face? Will you stick by those girls?”
He sat up. “If you’re wondering whether you can trust me, I’m telling you now, Civil, that you can.”