The Gold Cadillac (3 page)

The policemen told my father to get in the back of the police car. My father did. One policeman got back into the police car. The other policeman slid behind the wheel of our Cadillac. The police car started off. The Cadillac followed. Wilma and I looked at each other and at our mother. We didn’t know what to think. We were scared.

The Cadillac followed the police car into a small town and stopped in front of the police station. The policeman stepped out of our Cadillac and took the keys. The other policeman took my father into the police station.

“Mother-Dear!” Wilma and I cried. “What’re they going to do to our daddy? They going to hurt him?”

“He’ll be all right,” said my mother. “He’ll be all right.” But she didn’t sound so sure of that. She seemed worried.

We waited. More than three hours we waited. Finally my father came out of the police station. We had lots of questions to ask him. He said the police had given him a ticket for speeding and locked him up. But then the judge had come. My father had paid the ticket and they had let him go.

He started the Cadillac and drove slowly out of the town, below the speed limit. The police car followed us. People standing on steps and sitting on porches and in front of stores stared at us as we passed. Finally we were out of the town. The police car still followed. Dusk was falling. The night grew black and finally the police car turned around and left us.

We drove and drove. But my father was tired now and my grandparents’ farm was still far away. My father said he had to get some sleep and since my mother didn’t drive, he pulled into a grove of trees at the side of the road and stopped.

“I’ll keep watch,” said my mother.

“Wake me if you see anybody,” said my father.

“Just rest,” said my mother.

So my father slept. But that bothered me. I needed him awake. I was afraid of the dark and of the woods and of whatever lurked there. My father was the one who kept us safe, he and my uncles. But already the police had taken my father away from us once today and my uncles were lost.

“Go to sleep, baby,” said my mother. “Go to sleep.”

But I was afraid to sleep until my father woke. I had to help my mother keep watch. I figured I had to help protect us too, in case the police came back and tried to take my father away again. There was a long, sharp knife in the picnic basket and I took hold of it, clutching it tightly in my hand. Ready to strike, I sat there in the back of the car, eyes wide, searching the blackness outside the Cadillac. Wilma, for a while, searched the night too, then she fell asleep. I didn’t want to sleep, but soon I found I couldn’t help myself as an unwelcome drowsiness came over me. I had an uneasy sleep and when I woke it was dawn and my father was gently shaking me. I woke with a start and my hand went up, but the knife wasn’t there. My mother had it.

My father took my hand. “Why were you holding the knife, ’lois?” he asked.

I looked at him and at my mother. “I—I was scared,” I said.

My father was thoughtful. “No need to be scared now, sugar,” he said. “Daddy’s here and so is Mother-Dear.”
Then after a glance at my mother, he got out of the car, walked to the road, looked down it one way, then the other. When he came back and started the motor, he turned the Cadillac north, not south.

“What’re you doing?” asked my mother.

“Heading back to Memphis,” said my father. “Cousin Halton’s there. We’ll leave the Cadillac and get his car. Driving this car any farther south with you and the girls in the car, it’s just not worth the risk.”

And so that’s what we did. Instead of driving through Mississippi in golden splendor, we traveled its streets and roads and highways in Cousin Halton’s solid, yet not so splendid, four-year-old Chevy. When we reached my grandparents’ farm, my uncles and aunts were already there. Everybody was glad to see us. They had been worried. They asked about the Cadillac. My father told them what had happened, and they nodded and said he had done the best thing.

We stayed one week in Mississippi. During that week I often saw my father, looking deep in thought, walk off alone across the family land. I saw my mother watching him. One day I ran after my father, took his hand, and
walked the land with him. I asked him all the questions that were on my mind. I asked him why the policemen had treated him the way they had and why people didn’t want us to eat in the restaurants or drink from the water fountains or sleep in the hotels. I told him I just didn’t understand all that.

My father looked at me and said that it all was a difficult thing to understand and he didn’t really understand it himself. He said it all had to do with the fact that black people had once been forced to be slaves. He said it had to do with our skins being colored. He said it had to do with stupidity and ignorance. He said it had to do with the law, the law that said we could be treated like this here in the South. And for that matter, he added, any other place in these United States where folks thought the same as so many folks did here in the South. But he also said, “I’m hoping one day though we can drive that long road down here and there won’t be any signs. I’m hoping one day the police won’t stop us just because of the color of our skins and we’re riding in a gold Cadillac with northern plates.”

When the week ended, we said a sad good-bye to my grandparents and all the Mississippi family and headed in a caravan back toward Memphis. In Memphis we returned Cousin Halton’s car and got our Cadillac. Once we were home my father put the Cadillac in the garage and didn’t drive it. I didn’t hear my mother say any more about the Cadillac. I didn’t hear my father speak of it either.

Some days passed and then on a bright Saturday afternoon while Wilma and I were playing in the backyard, I saw my father go into the garage. He opened the garage doors wide so the sunshine streamed in, and began to shine the Cadillac. I saw my mother at the kitchen window staring out across the yard at my father. For a long time, she stood there watching my father shine his car. Then she came out and crossed the yard to the garage and I heard her say, “Wilbert, you keep the car.”

He looked at her as if he had not heard.

“You keep it,” she repeated and turned and walked back to the house.

My father watched her until the back door had shut behind her. Then he went on shining the car and soon began
to sing. About an hour later he got into the car and drove away. That evening when he came back he was walking. The Cadillac was nowhere in sight.

“Daddy, where’s our new Cadillac?” I demanded to know. So did Wilma.

He smiled and put his hand on my head. “Sold it,” he said as my mother came into the room.

“But how come?” I asked. “We poor now?”

“No, sugar. We’ve got more money towards our new house now and we’re all together. I figure that makes us about the richest folks in the world.” He smiled at my mother and she smiled too and came into his arms.

After that we drove around in an old 1930s Model A Ford my father had. He said he’d factory-ordered us another Mercury, this time with my mother’s approval. Despite that, most folks on the block figured we had fallen on hard times after such a splashy showing of good times and some folks even laughed at us as the Ford rattled around the city. I must admit that at first I was pretty much embarrassed to be riding around in that old Ford after the splendor of the Cadillac. But my father said to hold my head high. We and the family knew the truth. As fine as the Cadillac had been, he said, it had pulled us apart for a while. Now, as ragged and noisy as that old Ford was, we all rode in it together and we were a family again. So I held my head high.

Still though, I thought often of that Cadillac. We had had the Cadillac only a little more than a month, but I wouldn’t soon forget its splendor or how I’d felt riding around inside it. I wouldn’t soon forget either the ride we had taken south in it. I wouldn’t soon forget the signs, the policemen, or my fear. I would remember that ride and the gold Cadillac all my life.

Author’s Note

For a few years when I was a child, I lived in a big house on a busy street with my mother, my father, my sister, and many aunts and uncles and cousins. We were originally a Mississippi family who had migrated to the industrial North during and after World War II. My father was the first of the family to go to the North and that was when I was only three weeks old. When I was three months old, my mother, my older sister, and I followed. A year after our arrival, my parents bought the big house on the busy street. During the next nine years, aunts and uncles and cousins from both sides of the family arrived yearly from Mississippi and stayed in that big house with us until they had earned enough to rent another place or buy houses of their own.

I loved those years.

There were always cousins to play with. There was always an aunt or an uncle to talk to when my parents were busy, and there seemed always to be fun things to do and plenty of people to do them with. On the weekends the whole houseful of family often did things together. Because my father, my uncles, and my older male cousins all loved cars, we often rode in a caravan out to the park where the men would park their cars in a long, impressive row and shine them in the shade of the trees while the women spread a
picnic and chatted, and my sister, younger cousins, and I ran and played. Sometimes we traveled to nearby cities to see other family members or to watch a baseball game. And sometimes we took even longer trips, down country highways into that land called the South.

I have many good memories of those years, including the year my father brought home a brand-new Cadillac. I also have memories of those years that long troubled me. I have woven some of those memories into this story of fiction called
The Gold Cadillac.

’Lois and Wilma’s father has a brand-new gold Cadillac, and ’lois is looking forward to riding in it all the way from Ohio to Mississippi. But in the rural South there are no admiring glances for the shiny new car—only suspicion and anger for the black man behind the wheel. For the first time in their lives, ’lois and her sister know what it’s like to feel scared because of the color of their skin.

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BOOKS BY MILDRED D. TAYLOR

The Friendship

The Gold Cadillac

Let the Circle Be Unbroken

Mississippi Bridge

The Road to Memphis

Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry

Song of the Trees

The Well