was young enough not to want to be seenas one even if she really was one. Not young
enough (or stupidenough!) to believe that a few pairs of faded jeans and thekhaki shirts she
habitually wore in any real way changed her essential status, or riding the bus or the
subway when shecould have used the car (but she had been self-involved enough not to see
Andrew’s hurt and deep puzzlement; he liked her andthought it must be some sort of
personal rejection), but youngenough to still believe that gesture could sometimes
overcome(or at least overset) truth.
On the night of August 19th, 1959, she paid for the gesturewith half her legs … and half her
mind.
6
Odetta had been first tugged, then pulled, and finally caught up in the swell which would
eventually turn into a tidal wave. In 1957, when she became involved, the thing which
eventually became known as the Movement had no name. She knew some of the
background, knew the struggle for equality had gone on not since the Emancipation
Procla- mation but almost since thefirst boatload of slaves had been brought to America (to
Georgia, in fact, the colony the British founded to get rid of their criminals and debtors),
but for Odetta it always seemed to begin in the same place, with the same three words: I’m
not movin.
The place had been a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama, and the words had been spoken
by a black woman named Rosa Lee Parks, and the place from which Rosa Lee Parks was
not movin was from the front of the city bus to the back of the city bus, which was, of
course, the Jim Crow part of the city bus. Much later, Odetta would sing “We Shall Not Be
Moved” with the rest of them, and it always made her think of Rosa Lee Parks, and she
never sang it without a sense of shame. It was so easy to sing we with your arms linked to the arms of a whole crowd; that was easy even for a woman with no legs. So easy to sing
we, so easy to be we. There had been no we on that bus, that bus that must have stank of ancient leather and years of cigar and cigarette smoke, that bus with the curved ad cards
saying things like LUCKY STRIKE L.S.M.F.T. and ATTEND THE CHURCH OF YOUR
CHOICE FOR HEAVEN’S SAKE and DRINK OVALTINE! YOU’LL SEE WHAT WE
MEAN! and CHESTERFIELD, TWENTY-ONE GREAT TOBACCOS MAKE
TWENTY WONDER- FUL SMOKES, no we under the disbelieving gazes of the
motorman, the white passengers among whom she sat, the equally disbelieving stares of
the blacks at the back.
No we.
No marching thousands.
Only Rosa Lee Parks starting a tidal wave with three words: I’m not movin.
Odetta would think If I could do something like that—if I could be t hat brave—I think I
could be happy for the rest of my life. But that sort of courage is not in me.
She had read of the Parks incident, but with little interest at first. That came little by little.
It was hard to say exactly when or how her imagination had been caught and fired by that at
first almost soundless racequake which had begun to shake the south.
A year or so later a young man she was dating more or less regularly began taking her
down to the Village, where some of the young (and mostly white) folk-singers who
performed there had added some new and startling songs to their repetoire—suddenly, in
addition to all those old wheezes about how John Henry had taken his hammer and
outraced the new steam-hammer (killing himself in the process, lawd, lawd) and how
Bar’bry Alien had cruelly rejected her lovesick young suitor (and ended up dying of shame,
lawd, lawd), there were songs about how it felt to be down and out and ignored in the city,
how it felt to be turned away from a job you could do because your skin was the wrong
color, how it felt to be taken into a jail cell and whipped by Mr. Charlie because your skin
was dark and you had dared, lawd, lawd, to sit in the white folks’ section of the
lunch-counter at an F.W. Woolworths’ in Montgomery, Alabama.
Absurdly or not, it was only then that she had become curious about her own parents,
and their parents, and their parents before them. She would never read Roots— she was in another world and time long before that book was written, perhaps even thought of, by
Alex Haley, but it was at this absurdly late time in her life when it first dawned upon her
that not so many generations back her progenitors had been taken in chains by white men.
Surely the fact had occurred to her before, but only as a piece of information with no real temperature gradient, like an equation, never as something which bore intimately upon her
own life.
Odetta totted up what she knew, and was appalled by the smallness of the sum. She knew
her mother had been born in Odetta, Arkansas, the town for which she (the only child) had
been named. She knew her father had been a small-town dentist who had invented and
patented a capping process which had lain dormant and unremarked for ten years and
which had then, suddenly, made him a moderately wealthy man. She knew that he had
developed a number of other dental processes during the ten years before and the four years
after the influx of wealth, most of them either orthodontic or cosmetic in nature, and that,
shortly after moving to New York with his wife and daughter (who had been born four
years after the original patent had been secured), he had founded a com- pany called
Holmes Dental Industries, which was now to teeth what Squibb was to antibiotics.
But when she asked him what life had been like during all the years between—the years when she hadn’t been there-, and the years when she had, her father wouldn’t tell her. He
would say all sorts of things, but he wouldn’t tell her anything. He closed that part of
himself off to her. Once her ma, Alice—he called her ma or sometimes Allie if he’d had a
few or was feeling good—said, “Tell her about the time those men shot at you when you
drove the Ford through the covered bridge, Dan,” and he gave Odetta’s ma such a gray and
forbidding look that her ma, always something of a sparrow, had shrunk back in her seat
and said no more.
Odetta had tried her mother once or twice alone after that night, but to no avail. If she had
tried before, she might have gotten something, but because he wouldn’t speak, she
would- n’t speak either—and to him, she realized, the past—those relatives, those red dirt
roads, those stores, those dirt floor cabins with glassless windows ungraced by a single
simple curtsey of a curtain, those incidents of hurt and harassment, those neighbor children
who went dressed in smocks which had begun life as flour sacks—all of that was for him
buried away like dead teeth beneath perfect blinding white caps. He would not speak,
perhaps could not, had perhaps willingly afflicted himself with a selective amnesia; the
capped teeth was their life in the Greymarl Apartments on Central Park South. All else was
hidden beneath that impervious outer cover. His past was so well-protected that there had
been no gap to slide through, no way past that perfect capped barrier and into the throat of
revelation.
Deltaknew things, but Delta didn’t know Odetta and Odetta didn’t know Delta, and so the
teeth lay as smooth and closed as a redan gate there, also.
She had some of her mother’s shyness in her as well as her father’s unblinking (if unspoken)
toughness, and the only time she had dared pursue him further on the subject, to suggest
that what he was denying her was a deserved trust fund never promised and apparenily
never to mature, had been one night in his library. He had shaken his Wall Street Journal
carefully, closed it, folded it, and laid it aside on the deal table beside the standing lamp. He had removed his rimless steel spectacles and had laid them on top of the paper. Then he had
looked at her, a thin black man, thin almost to the point of emaciation, tightly kinked gray
hair now drawing rapidly away from the deepening hollows of his temples where tender
clocksprings of veins pulsed steadily, and he had said only, Idon’t talk about that part of my life, Odetta, or think about it. It would be pointless. The world had moved on since then.
Roland would have understood.
7
When Roland opened the door with the words THE LADY OF THE SHADOWS written
upon it, he saw things he did not understand at all—but he understood they didn’t matter.