other two laughed. They walked past the White House without a glance.
The other students made so much noise when they saw what the kitchen had cooked up for lunch—hamburgers and mashed potatoes and ice cream that would never see the inside of Fisher’s Drugs—that Blakeley told them to keep it down. “You want them to think this is some kind of circus we running here?” Elwood’s stomach refused the food. He’d fucked it up. Try again in Cleveland, he decided. The rec room, a quick “excuse me sir” in the hallway. Instead of out in the open, in the middle of the green. He’d have cover. Give it to JFK. But what if the inspector opened it right there? Or read it on the walk down the hill, as Hardee and Spencer caught up with them to escort them off the property?
They had whipped Elwood. But he took the whipping and he was still here. There was nothing they could do that white people hadn’t done to black people before, were not doing at this moment somewhere in Montgomery and Baton Rouge, in broad daylight on a city street outside Woolworths. Or some anonymous country road with no one to tell the tale. They would whip him, whip him bad, but they couldn’t kill him, not if the government knew what was going on here. His mind strayed—and he saw the National Guard drive through the Nickel gate in a convoy of dark green vans, and soldiers jumping out into formation. Maybe the soldiers didn’t agree with what they were sent to do, their sympathies lay with the old order instead of what was right, but they had to abide by the laws of the land. Same way they lined up in Little Rock to let the nine Negro children into Central High School, a human wall between the angry whites and the children, between the past and the future. Governor Faubus couldn’t do anything about it because it was bigger than Arkansas and its backward wickedness, it was America. A mechanism of justice set in movement by a woman sitting down on a bus where she was told not to sit, a man ordering ham on rye at a forbidden counter. Or a letter of proof.
We must believe in our souls that we are somebody, that we are significant, that we are worthful, and we must walk the streets of life every day with this sense of dignity and this sense of somebody-ness. If he didn’t have that, what did he have? Next time, he would not falter.
The bleacher team headed back after lunch. Harper caught his arm. “Hold on a minute, Elwood.”
The other boys cut down the slope. “What is it, Mr. Harper?”
“I need you to head up to the farms and find Mr. Gladwell,” he said. Mr. Gladwell and his two assistants oversaw all the planting and harvesting at Nickel. Elwood had never talked to him, but everyone knew him from his straw hat and his farmer’s tan, which made him look like he swam across the Rio Grande to get here. “Those men from the state aren’t going to head up there today,” Harper said, “they’re going to send some other experts to check out the farms, special. You find him and tell him he can relax.”
Elwood turned to where Harper pointed, down the main road where the three inspectors mounted the steps to Cleveland. They went inside. Mr. Gladwell was God knows where up north, with the lime or potato fields, it was acres and acres. The inspectors would be gone by the time he got back.
“I’m liking the painting, Harper—can one of the little kids go?”
“Mr. Harper, sir.” On campus they had to go by the rules.
“Sir, I’d rather work on the bleachers.”
Harper frowned. “Acting crazy today, all of you. You do what I asked you and on Friday it’s back to the usual.” Harper left Elwood on the dining-hall steps. Last Christmas, he’d stood in the same spot when Desmond told him and Turner about Earl’s stomach trouble.
“I’ll do it.”
It was Turner.
“What’s that?”
“That letter you got in your pocket,” Turner said. “I’ll get it to them, fuck it. Look at you—you look sick.”
Elwood searched for a tell. But Turner stood with the con men of the world and the con men never betray the game.
“I said I’ll do it, I’ll do it. You got someone else?”
Elwood gave it to him and ran north without a word.
It took Elwood an hour