Shot in the Heart - Mikal Gilmore [46]
Things didn’t improve when they hit Alabama. By then it was summertime, and the sticky, palpable heat felt unlike anything Bessie had ever known. Plus, there was something about the place itself that scared the hell out of her. Maybe it was all the talk she had heard over the years about the South’s insularity and violence, but she felt the locals were giving her a hard, assessing stare every time she opened her Yankee mouth. One time, ordering in a roadside diner, she was given a nasty look by the waitress, who said: “Where the hell are y’all from?”
Also, Frank didn’t help her calmness. They had rented a small motel cabin in a little roadside town south of Selma, in the central part of the state. There wasn’t much to do there. A couple of picture shows, a drugstore with a soda fountain, where Bessie could get lunch. Except Frank wanted her to stay inside their room most of the time by herself, and not get too close to any of the neighbors. She especially wasn’t supposed to share much information about them or their lives, or to answer the inquiries of any strangers. “These are curious people,” Frank had said. “They may seem genteel on the surface, but deep down they hate you because you’re different. You’re a Yankee, and Yankees are unwelcome intruders. Leave these people alone, Bessie. They may seem all right by the daylight, but by night they’ll cut your throat and nobody will ever find what’s left of you.”
One night, Frank got drunk and told Bessie a bit about his earlier stay in Alabama, a decade before, when he had been married to Barbara Solomon, a Jewish woman. They moved into a town called Greenville, and Frank got work as a newspaper ad salesman. One day some local members of the Ku Klux Klan came around and invited him to a rally. Frank declined and when they wanted to know why, he told them that he was a Catholic and his wife was Jewish and he’d got along fine with black people all his life, so he couldn’t really see himself joining the Klan in its various campaigns. A couple of nights later he came home from work and found his wife and baby sitting in the dark. Barbara told Frank that some men had come by, banging on the door and making terrible threats. They fold her that Jews and Catholics weren’t welcome in these parts, and if they were here come the next sunset, they would cut her husband’s balls off in front of her. Frank believed they weren’t bluffing. That night, he and his wife left Greenville before dawn and headed to Montgomery. The marriage only lasted another year or two.
Whatever Frank was doing in Alabama this time, it went on too long for Bessie’s liking. She kept pressing him to leave—she wanted to have the new baby back home in California, in Los Angeles, or at Fay’s, in Sacramento. Frank said: “Soon. We’ll leave soon. I have to finish what I came here to do, get paid, and then we’ll go.”
Thanksgiving Day that year Frank got up before dawn, got dressed and left, and didn’t come back until after midnight. Bessie was sitting in the small cabin with her baby in the dark, like Barbara Solomon ten years before. She was wondering what to do if she never saw Frank again, how she would get out of this frightful place. Or maybe they would come for her too, in the night. About 2 A.M., Frank came in and said: “I’m done here. I think we should leave right now. You can sleep in the car while I drive.” She was dead tired, but something about the way he said it made her exhaustion beside the point. It was another one of those towns they left without packing their