The Assignment
By
Jimmie von Tungeln
Truth be known, I didn’t want to do
the piece in the first place. Hell, I wasn’t even a journalist. I was a consultant,
a pretty good one, and should have stuck to it. But I had been doing these modest
little columns for a
It was a good fit. People associated living in
historic neighborhoods with eccentricity back in those days. People welcomed things
that supported that paradigm. So, folks liked my little “human interest” pieces.
As for me, I was happy to stick to them. There was no chance of running out of
characters, and I didn’t have to travel.
Then the
editor called me one day and asked me to stop by. When I got there, she up and
gave me an assignment. Just like that, like I was some cub reporter or
something. This posed a noticeable departure from the usual process whereby I
just picked out some local oddball and wrote about how they had adjusted to
living in an old house.
This time she picked the subject.
Why? Beats me. Maybe I was getting stale, or she was trying to sell more copies
or something. Rather than speculate, I went along with her for the moment.
Well guess
what? You never know what dish life is going to serve up and what decisions are
going to throw themselves in front of you, threatening your hemostasis like a group
of western bandits with their pistols drawn and ready.
Here’s how it started.
A local bigwig,
known to us all as a neighbor and a nice guy, had bought one of the most
historic homes in the city. It boasted such long-term provenance that the house
and grounds came with a caretaker who had worked there since the Great Depression.
Mr. Pitts cared for the grounds and lived in a small apartment attached to the carriage
house, a.k.a. the garage. He was a quiet little man of advanced age who lived
alone and remained out of sight when not working. All the neighbors knew him to
nod at, but none of us had ever talked witj him.
The editor
explained the human-interest angle. Supposedly, a friendship had grown up
between Mr. Pitts and the banker’s young son Alfie—Alfred Chidester LaRue was
his full name—a little blond-haired kid from the high-rent side of life. Get
it? Old black gardener and white heir apparent, the image of an odd couple as
corny as it was appealing to our liberal audience. All I had to do was
interview the old man, mine a few historic nuggets and take a picture of him
and the kid together. It would produce enough “ain’t that cutes?” to make a
tough man buy a round of drinks. There was no Pulitzer looming, but it would
get me through until another deadline appeared like a hungry tiger emerging
from the mist. No problem.
Anyway, I didn’t have to. These
columns represented a public service for me. In other words, I didn’t get paid.
Seeing my words in print provided my only emolument. So, I had a degree of
leverage unavailable to a poor inky wretch actually writing for a living.
I could have refused the assignment
and interviewed, instead, a friend who was restoring a cottage near ours and
who looked more like Charles Manson than Manson did himself. He played cello in
the city’s symphony orchestra and would have been great material for a photo
essay, the research being carried out over a couple of beers. Why should I
spend a dry afternoon interviewing the town’s oldest gardener? It didn’t make a
bit of sense. “To hell with the editor and her aspirations,” I kept telling
myself. Was I my own man or what?
Naturally, I
took the assignment. I had to go through the banker himself and he pretty much
outlined what he wanted the piece to say. Alfie was an only-child and, having
few young friends in the neighborhood, he had taken up with Mr. Pitts. Followed
him everywhere. Shared secrets with him. Even helped with the yardwork. Well,
maybe a little. The important thing was the friendship that had developed
between man and boy. That was the angle.
Sure. One
of the greatest and most persistent dreams of American Caucasians is that,
someday, an African American will love them. But I could pretend with the best,
so I pressed on to complete the assignment.
I set up an
appointment for the next Saturday afternoon. It was a nice autumn day that
welcomed a person outdoors. I grabbed an ancient Rolliflex camera that I used
for such work, made sure I had pen and paper, and walked the two blocks to the
house.
The house sat on a half-block
facing one of the two main streets leading directly to downtown. When it was
built, wealth had followed the topography. The larger houses were on the
highest ground, and homes fell off in size and value as the topography dropped
into the flood plain. It was never more than a short walk from the mansions to
the homes from which domestic help could be hired, for practically nothing, in
the good old days. In other words, urban form followed economic function. Households
weren’t separated by income as they are now. That’s how, thanks to the historic
preservation craze, I could afford to live near a bunch of mansions.
I arrived.
Mr. Pitts had dressed up a bit. He always wore neat clothes with a narrow-brimmed
dress hat. Today he added a tie. He stood at attention with his hands to his
side and presented a smile like a boot-camper at inspection. Alfie was bouncing
a ball against a tree and the parents stood by with pride. All was set for this
to be a painless adventure. Wham, bam, thank you m’aam and I meet my deadline.
I called
little Alfie over and made him sit for a picture with Mr. Pitts. As I lined it
up, I pulled a few grunts out of the kid to the effect that he liked Mr. Pitts
and enjoyed helping him with the yard work. Mr. Pitts sat smiling through thick
eyeglass lenses that distorted his face to where it looked like one of those
cartoon characters that has just seen something either real juicy or real
dangerous.
So far, so
good.
Figuring I
had about all out of Alfie I was going to get, I excused him with “Now Alfie,
why don’t you let Mr. Pitts and me visit while you get back to your yard work?”
In other words, “Scram, kid!”
Alfie was
more than happy to be rid of adults, so he walked to beyond the garage. There,
someone had dug a shallow pit from which smoke was rising. Within the pit, I
assumed from the smell, were dead leaves, trash, and some sort of organic
waste. Alfie amused himself by kicking more leaves into the fire.
His mother saw the opportunity and
appeared from nowhere with a tray of cookies and iced tea. She sat them on the
bench between us and asked, sweetly, and devoid of sincerity, the way only a
southern woman can ask, if we were comfortable. After receiving affirmatives,
she then swished away amid a crackling of petticoats and an almost audible
smile. I pushed the tray toward Mr. Pitts. He smiled and pushed it back toward
me.
“No,
please, go ahead,” I stammered, fumbling for my writing pen.
“Thank you,
suh,” he said. He exaggerated the “suh” so I—so we both—would know he didn’t
attach any meaning to it. Then he took a cookie in one hand and a glass of tea
in another. He neither drank nor ate right away, though. He rested the arm with
the cookie on his leg and wrapped a hand around the glass of tea as if to keep
it from flying away. He smiled at me. His eyes looked even larger than before.
A breeze
filled the yard and blew smoke from Alfie’s fire toward us. As it did, Mr. Pits
finally raised the cookie in a soft arc to his mouth and took a small bite. He
lowered it and raised his glass with the same grand gesture and sipped his tea.
Hoping to
get started, I asked him how long he had lived around there.
“Oh, I was
born around here,” he said. “I been here for as long as I can remember. We
lived on Tenth Street but it went for the freeway. House ain’t there no more.”
He chewed
his cookie with what I thought was a grim expression. As he did, the smoke
circled us and I caught the pleasant smell of burning leaves punctuated by the
sharp odor of the other trash smoldering in the pit. Mr. Pitts stiffened and
his eyes retreated behind his thick glasses.
“I been
here since when things were different than they are now,” he said. “Way
different.”
Then, that far into the interview,
he stopped talking. His voice didn’t exactly trail away as much as it fluttered
beyond us like a feather caught in a whirlwind.
I was
losing him. I hurried back to work.
“Different
in what way?” I asked.
He just
looked at me. He seemed to struggle to respond and when he did, it wasn’t
really to me but, it seemed, to the trees and the garden and maybe to the city
itself with all its history and smoky secrets.
“Way yonder
different. Folks weren’t as good to you then.” He took another bite of cookie
and drank from his glass. That energized him.
“My folks had it hard back then.”
I tasted
panic. Alfie had disappeared behind the garage and I felt as if I were on an
asteroid hurtling through space with an alien. This affair wasn’t going
according to plan. I nodded as if I understood and scratched on my pad without
looking up. He continued.
“The worse
was what they done to Mr. Carter.”
“Mr. Carter?”
That was all I could manage.
“Ain’t
nobody should have had that done to them. Nobody. I don’t care if he was
colored.”
I gave up
and stared at my pad. What was he saying, and where was he taking me? I stared
right through my pad and into the ground. From therein oozed a memory. I met it
halfway and solved the mystery.
Back in the 1920s, there had been a
lynching in Little Rock, less than a half-mile from where we sat. It happened right
in the middle of what was then the center of the “colored” commercial area,
along Ninth Street.
“Oh my god,” I thought. “This is
where he is going.” I tried to raise my head but it took three attempts to
overcome the gravity created by that realization. When I did manage to look up,
Mr. Pitts was somewhere far away, and scared. I mean really scared. His hand
was shaking so much the tea was spilling.
“I remember
that day like it was yesterday,” he continued. They made us all go inside, for
they knew there was to be trouble. I was just a child, but the oldest. My Momma
put the youngest under the bed and made me watch after them. She said the white
folks had done killed Mr. Carter and was draggin’ him down Ninth Street behind
a car. She was scared and she made us all cry.
“We could hear people yellin’. They
was honkin’ their horns and yellin’ so loud we could hear them in the bedroom. Wasn’t
no colored folks on the street, except Mr. Carter and he was dead. They hung
him and beat him and drug him up and down Ninth Street. We was all hidin’ and cryin.’
My Momma was tellin’ us to be quiet.” He stopped, looked away and back,
directly at me.
“They shouldn’t have done that.”
Here I was.
It was a nice brisk autumn day and I should have been somewhere else, but I was
sitting in someone else’s yard listening to an old man reciting his version of
our city’s most awful moment and I couldn’t escape.
“They drug
him and drug him. All back and forth on Ninth Street. We could hear the cars
and them horns honkin’, the honkin,’ oh my lord, the honkin’. Ain’t nobody
ought to have that done to them. We was still cryin’ when they built a fire at
Ninth and Broadway and burned him up. We could smell the smoke and that made us
cry harder. My momma had some cookies in her apron pocket and she gave one to the
younger kids to hush them up. She broke one in half and gave me a piece. She
took the other half and then she started cryin’ too.”
He looked
at the cookie in his hand, then returned to that awful day.
“Somebody
said they broke one of his arms off and waved it at the cars going down
Broadway,” he said. “I don’t know. Nobody looked out the window the whole time,
for we was too scared.”
I pretended
to write something.
“Too bad,”
he said so low I barely heard him. “Them was bad days. Bad for us all.”
The smoke circled
us and I sat as still as I could. Mr. Pitts stopped talking and sat with his
hand with the cookie resting on his leg. As the fog of remembrance cleared, he
began to smile. He didn’t say anything. He was done talking to white strangers for
the day.
He sat there
proud and triumphant, a black-skinned Cicero having had his say, needing
neither accolades nor approval. I thanked him, not sure at all whether he even
heard me, and then eased away and headed home. I was all confusion, trying to
sort out what had just happened. I still had an assignment but what the hell
was I going to write? The truth about what happened? That would be the honest
thing. It might even be a good piece. Shake the readers up a bit. Let them know
that history wasn’t all about cute Victorian houses. Hell yes!
Back home, I
sat in the kitchen and stared through the window. When I tried, I could hear
the shouts on the street, feel the throb of the car engines running, and smell
the acrid smoke of man and wood burning.
Damn that old man!
Outside the afternoon was
dissolving into evening. The shadows got longer and darker the way our thoughts
will as we doze. Beyond the kitchen window, the air was still crisp and clear.
Inside, it was dark and gloomy. The evening sky changed purposefully that time
of year like a lover moving from caresses to kisses, and then to the dark
undertones of passion. My thoughts moved that way, too, as I reflected on the
day and what it was trying to tell me. Maybe it was trying to tell me to be
brave, or truthful …, or honest. Maybe it was suggesting that I approach what I
was doing with something a little deeper than just seeing my name in print.
Maybe it was just trying to tell me to say something else entirely, before
darkness came. Maybe. Maybe.
After a time, I stood up and
retrieved a beat-up Remington typewriter and package of paper from a closet and
carried them, with as much gentleness as I could muster, into the kitchen. I placed
the typewriter on the kitchen table so I could see beyond it into the deepening
gloom. Then I slid a page of paper into it and turned the cylinder so the paper
positioned itself precisely across the top, aligned there neat and worthy of
higher-level thought. I drew and released a long breath of sad air—air that had
once moved through the city and down the streets and around the large oak trees
past the moving cars and quaint old houses and had once even flowed around the
twitching, smoking body of John Carter.
I didn’t want to, but I smelled
that smoke.
Click, click, I advanced the paper.
I was ready. My mind was as clear
as the way of a traveler making the last turn on the last curve before home. I
rubbed my hands. I thought how funny it would be to make the Sign of the Cross.
Instead, I started to type: “Mr.
Otis Pitts, age 70 and a lifelong resident of Little Rock, has a new best
friend who is only five years old.”
July 2009
Revised 2017
Revised 2024
