The Dark-Thirty (7 page)

Grady’s face flushed with surprise and anger. He shouted out the door, “Don’t get uppity with me! Y’all know
Auntie
is what we call all you old colored women.” Furious, he slammed the door against the bitter cold. He shook his head in disgust. “It’s a waste of time trying to be nice,” he told himself.

But one look out the window made Grady refocus his attention to a more immediate problem. The weather had worsened. He checked his watch. It was a little past nine. Remarkably, he was still on schedule, but that didn’t matter. He had decided to close down the route and take the bus in.

That’s when his headlights picked up the figure of a woman running in the snow, without a hat, gloves, or boots. Although she’d pulled a shawl over the lightweight jacket and flimsy dress she was wearing, her clothing offered very little protection against the elements. As she
pressed forward against the driving snow and wind, Grady saw that the woman was very young, no more than twenty. And she was clutching something close to her body. What was it? Then Grady saw the baby, a small bundle wrapped in a faded pink blanket.

“These people,” Grady sighed, opening the door. The woman stumbled up the steps, escaping the wind that mercilessly ripped at her petite frame.

“Look here. I’ve closed down the route. I’m taking the bus in.”

In big gulping sobs the woman laid her story before him. “I need help, please. My husband’s gone to Memphis looking for work. Our baby’s sick, real sick. She needs to get to the hospital. I know she’ll die if I don’t get help.”

“Well, I got to go by the hospital on the way back to the garage. You can ride that far.” Grady nodded for her to pay. The woman looked at the floor. “Well? Pay up and get on to the back of the bus so I can get out of here.”

“I—I don’t have the fare,” she said, quickly adding, “but if you let me ride, I promise to bring it to you in the morning.”

“Give an inch, y’all want a mile. You know the rules. No money, no ride!”

“Oh, please!” the young woman cried. “Feel her little head. It’s so hot.” She held out the baby to him. Grady recoiled.

Desperately the woman looked for something to bargain with. “Here,” she said, taking off her wedding ring. “Take this. It’s gold. But please don’t make me get off this bus.”

He opened the door. The winds howled savagely. “Please,” the woman begged.

“Go on home, now. You young gals get hysterical over a little fever. Nothing. It’ll be fine in the morning.” As he shut the door the last sounds he heard were the mother’s sobs, the baby’s wail, and the moaning wind.

Grady dismissed the incident until the next morning, when he read that it had been a record snowfall. His eyes were drawn to a small article about a colored woman and child found frozen to death on Hall Street. No one seemed to know where the woman was going or why. No one but Grady.

“That gal should have done like I told her and gone on home,” he said, turning to the comics.

It was exactly one year later, on the anniversary of the record snowstorm, that Grady was assigned the Hall Street Express again. Just as
before, a storm heaped several inches of snow onto the city in a matter of hours, making driving extremely hazardous.

By nightfall Grady decided to close the route. But just as he was making the turnaround at the east side loop, his headlight picked up a woman running in the snow—the same woman he’d seen the previous year. Death hadn’t altered her desperation. Still holding on to the blanketed baby, the small-framed woman pathetically struggled to reach the bus.

Grady closed his eyes but couldn’t keep them shut. She was still coming, but from where? The answer was too horrible to consider, so he chose to let his mind find a more reasonable explanation. From some dark corner of his childhood he heard his father’s voice, slurred by alcohol, mocking him.
It ain’t the same woman, dummy. You know how they all look alike!

Grady remembered his father with bitterness and swore at the thought of him. This
was
the same woman, Grady argued with his father’s memory, taking no comfort in being right. Grady watched the woman’s movements breathlessly as she stepped out of the headlight beam and approached the door. She stood outside the door waiting … waiting.

The gray coldness of Fear slipped into the driver’s seat. Grady sucked air into his lungs in big gulps, feeling out of control. Fear moved his foot to the gas pedal, careening the bus out into oncoming traffic. Headlights. A truck. Fear made Grady hit the brakes. The back of the bus went into a sliding spin, slamming into a tree. Grady’s stomach crushed against the steering wheel, rupturing his liver and spleen.
You’ve really done it now, lunkhead
. As he drifted into the final darkness he heard a woman’s sobs, a baby wailing—or was it just the wind?

Twenty-five years later, Ray Hammond, a war hero with two years of college, became the first black driver Metro hired. A lot of things had happened during those two and a half decades to pave the way for Ray’s new job. The military had integrated its forces during the Korean War. In 1954 the Supreme Court had ruled that segregated schools were unequal. And one by one, unfair laws were being challenged by civil rights groups all over the South. Ray had watched the Montgomery bus boycott with interest, especially the boycott’s leader, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Ray soon found out that progress on the day-to-day
level can be painfully slow. Ray was given the Hall Street Express.

“The white drivers call my route the Blackbird Express,” Ray told his wife. “I’m the first driver to be given that route as a permanent assignment. The others wouldn’t take it.”

“What more did you expect?” his wife answered, tying his bow tie. “Just do your best so it’ll be easier for the ones who come behind you.”

In November, Ray worked the three-to-eleven shift. “Snow’s predicted,” the route manager barked one afternoon. “Close it down if it gets bad out there, Ray.”

The last shift on the Hall Street Express
.

Since he was a boy, Ray had heard the story of the haunting of that bus route. Every first snowfall passengers and drivers testified that they’d seen the ghost of Eula Mae Daniels clutching her baby as she ran through the snow.

“Good luck with Eula Mae tonight,” one of the drivers said, snickering.

“I didn’t know white folk believed in haints,” Ray shot back.

But parked at the east side loop, staring into the swirling snow mixed with ice, Ray felt tingly, as if he were dangerously close to an electrical charge. He’d just made up his mind to
close down the route and head back to the garage when he saw her. Every hair on his head stood on end.

He wished her away, but she kept coming. He tried to think, but his thoughts were jumbled and confused. He wanted to look away, but curiosity fixed his gaze on the advancing horror.

Just as the old porch stories had described her, Eula Mae Daniels was a small-framed woman frozen forever in youth. “So young,” Ray whispered. “Could be my cousin Carolyn in a few more years.” He watched as the ghost came around to the doors. She was out there, waiting in the cold. Ray heard the baby crying. “There but for the grace of God goes one of mine,” he said, compassion overruling his fear. “Nobody deserves to be left out in this weather. Ghost or not, she deserves better.” And he swung open the doors.

The woman had form but no substance. Ray could see the snow falling
through
her. He pushed fear aside. “Come on, honey, get out of the cold,” Ray said, waving her on board.

Eula Mae stood stony still, looking at Ray with dark, questioning eyes. The driver understood. He’d seen that look before, not from a dead woman but from plenty of his passengers.
“It’s okay. I’m for real. Ray Hammond, the first Negro to drive for Metro. Come on, now, get on,” he coaxed her gently.

Eula Mae moved soundlessly up the steps. She held the infant to her body. Ray couldn’t remember ever feeling so cold, not even the Christmas he’d spent in a Korean foxhole. He’d seen so much death, but never anything like this.

The ghost mother consoled her crying baby. Then with her head bowed she told her story in quick bursts of sorrow, just as she had twenty-five years earlier. “My husband is in Memphis looking for work. Our baby is sick. She’ll die if I don’t get help.”

“First off,” said Ray. “Hold your head up. You got no cause for shame.”

“I don’t have any money,” she said. “But if you let me ride, I promise to bring it to you tomorrow. I promise.”

Ray sighed deeply. “The rule book says no money, no ride. But the book doesn’t say a word about a personal loan.” He took a handful of change out of his pocket, fished around for a dime, and dropped it into the pay box. “You’re all paid up. Now, go sit yourself down while I try to get this bus back to town.”

Eula Mae started to the back of the bus.

“No you don’t,” Ray stopped her. “You don’t have to sit in the back anymore. You can sit right up front.”

The ghost woman moved to a seat closer, but still not too close up front. The baby fretted. The young mother comforted her as best she could.

They rode in silence for a while. Ray checked in the rearview mirror every now and then. She gave no reflection, but when he looked over his shoulder, she was there, all right. “Nobody will ever believe this,” he mumbled. “
I
don’t believe it.

“Things have gotten much better since you’ve been … away,” he said, wishing immediately that he hadn’t opened his mouth. Still he couldn’t—or wouldn’t—stop talking.

“I owe this job to a little woman just about your size named Mrs. Rosa Parks. Down in Montgomery, Alabama, one day, Mrs. Parks refused to give up a seat she’d paid for just because she was a colored woman.”

Eula Mae sat motionless. There was no way of telling if she had heard or not. Ray kept talking. “Well, they arrested her. So the colored people decided to boycott the buses. Nobody rode for over a year. Walked everywhere, formed carpools, or just didn’t go, rather than ride a bus. The man who led the boycott was named Reverend King.
Smart man. We’re sure to hear more about him in the future.… You still with me?” Ray looked around. Yes, she was there. The baby had quieted. It was much warmer on the bus now.

Slowly Ray inched along the icy road, holding the bus steady, trying to keep the back wheels from racing out of control. “Where was I?” he continued. “Oh yeah, things changed after that Montgomery bus boycott. This job opened up. More changes are on the way. Get this: They got an Irish Catholic running for President. Now, what to do you think about that?”

About that time Ray pulled the bus over at Seventeenth Street. The lights at Gale Hospital sent a welcome message to those in need on such a frosty night. “This is it.”

Eula Mae raised her head. “You’re a kind man,” she said. “Thank you.”

Ray opened the door. The night air gusted up the steps and nipped at his ankles. Soundlessly, Eula Mae stepped off the bus with her baby.

“Excuse me,” Ray called politely. “About the bus fare. No need for you to make a special trip … back. Consider it a gift.”

He thought he saw Eula Mae Daniels smile as she vanished into the swirling snow, never to be seen again.

J
osie was tired of being the only child in the Hudson family. Her friends JoBeth and Arthur Lee had lots of brothers and sisters between them. Josie wanted a brother.

“I’m the girl in the family,” she reasoned. “Wouldn’t it be nice to have a boy? Then I could be the sister and he could be the brother. What do you think?” Josie asked her mother.

Mama always had a ready answer. “I forgot to let the stork know we moved from Kennerly Street to Harrison Avenue last year,” she said,
taking plates down from the cabinet. Josie set the table. Mama smiled, then winked playfully. “So you see, he doesn’t know where to bring a baby.”

Josie knew better. Arthur Lee had told her and JoBeth how babies came into the world. “When your mother and father want a new baby, first your mama has to get fat,” he’d said confidently. “She eats and eats until it looks like she’s going to pop. But she doesn’t. She goes to the hospital to lose the weight. Then they get to choose a baby. That’s how it works.”

Weeks passed and Mama stayed skinny. “She chews on celery,” Josie told Arthur Lee and Jo-Beth at the sandbox. “I’ll never get a brother.”

“Well, my mama is big as a refrigerator,” said Arthur Lee. “They say she’ll be going to the hospital soon. If she brings home another baby boy, you can have him. I got four brothers, and that’s enough!”

JoBeth added, “I saw in a magazine that you can adopt a baby in a faraway country for pennies a day.”

No, Josie decided. “I want a brother that’s the same as me.”