“How are Lucius and Wilma getting to and from your house?”
“I don’t know and I don’t care. This city has a fine bus system for them to use, but they refuse to use it. They listen to that Reverend King and that Mr. Abernathy and all those other rabble-rousing ministers who only want to stir the pot, and I couldn’t care less if Lucius and Wilma have to walk twenty miles to get to my house. It serves them right. Of course, your situation is different because you’ve always taken your maid back and forth like she was the Queen of Sheba.”
“Lollie lives too far from a practical bus route.”
“Well then, I suppose she’s sitting pretty now.”
Harriet moved her bags away from her legs to give herself more room. With no other passengers on the bus, she could put the shopping bags right in the middle of the aisle if she wanted. “I don’t think she’s sitting pretty. Her daughter is sick.”
“That isn’t what I meant.”
“I wouldn’t want to trade places with a single colored person in this city, Patty. Would you? What do you mean my maid is sitting pretty?”
“It’s a figure of speech.”
“Well, I’d really rather not talk about this.”
Patty snorted. “I can’t help it.” A quiet moment passed. The bus squealed to a stop at a traffic light. Twenty-five to thirty black people appeared in the crosswalk, all of them staring at the nearly empty bus. A young Negro man in blue coveralls, denotative of his employment at the long-integrated Maxwell Air Force Base, fleered cockily at the driver. Patty saw it. She trembled with rage. “I have to say it. I wasn’t going to say anything about it, but now I have to. Beverly said that yesterday she saw you driving down her street with four or five colored women in your car.”
“Yes, I saw her. I was wondering if she was going to mention it to you.”
“Have you started your own taxi service for the help?”
“Lollie was afraid that her friends would lose their jobs if they couldn’t get to the houses where they worked.”
“They can take the bus.”
“No, they can’t, Patty. They have a right to their principles. Even you have to grant them that.”
Patty stared out the window. “What principles?”
“The right to not always have to sit in the back of a bus.” Harriet swept her arm at all the empty seats behind her.
Patty frowned. “Somebody has to. I suppose you think we ought to put all the black people in the front and the white people in the back. How much sense would that make?”
“It’s segregation that doesn’t make any sense.” Harriet said this softly. A part of her hoped that Patty hadn’t heard it. The words were provocative.
“I just know you weren’t always this way,” said Patty.
“You mean before I married ‘the Jew’?”
“I didn’t say that.”
The bus pulled up to a stop. The front doors opened and an old black woman drew herself up with difficulty onto the bottom step and then, gripping the horizontal bar to her right, hoisted her frail body up onto the raised floor of the bus. The process of boarding was labored and protracted. At no point did the bus driver offer a hand of assistance.
“Good for her, taking the bus,” mumbled Patty. “At least there are a few sensible colored folk left in this town.”
The old woman paid her fare. Then she turned away from the driver.
“Don’t make her—” said Harriet almost inaudibly, the words intended for the bus driver but only in apostrophe.
Dismounting the bus seemed to be equally difficult for the woman since there was a big drop-off between the floor and the bottom step and another drop-off from the step to the ground, and she would have to try very hard not to lose her delicate balance and fall. “Hurry up or I’ll leave you,” said the bus driver, poking at his teeth with a toothpick.
Once upon the street — for the bus driver had left the woman too much room to step easily down upon the sidewalk — the woman scurried to the rear door, which the driver had opened for her. This was the rule for the black passengers of Montgomery’s city buses. They were expected first to enter the bus through the front door to pay their fare, then exit the bus and re-enter through the rear door to take their seats. It respected the long-observed custom of black servants only being permitted to enter the house where they worked through the rear or side kitchen door.
The old woman now struggled to pull herself up the bus’s back steps. The driver revved his engine. Harriet rose from her seat and went to help the old woman. Once on board, the woman took a seat in the next-to-back row. Harriet returned to her seat next to Patty. There were now three passengers on the bus: Harriet and Patty in the first row of the forward-facing seats, and there in the back, an old black woman who, for whatever her personal reason, found it necessary to ignore the boycott and take the bus on this particular day.
Harriet turned to make sure that the woman was comfortably settled into her seat. Although the old woman had thanked Harriet at the time of her assistance, she now thanked her again with a grateful smile.
“I was afraid that he was going to leave her,” said Harriet to her friend Patty.
“What?”
“The bus driver. Sometimes they take a colored passenger’s money, and then while the person’s walking around to the back door, the driver pulls away.
“I don’t believe they do that,” snapped Patty. “But if they do, it’s wrong, and they should be reprimanded.”
“Considering the fact that very few Negroes are riding the bus this week, the drivers should let those who do sit in the front.”
“That would be against the law.”
“It isn’t against the law, Patty. Drivers can implement segregation on their buses any way they see fit. And I feel sufficiently segregated from any black person who might like to sit in that front seat.” Harriet pointed to the side seat just behind the driver.
“You’re being ridiculous, Harriet. Is this what you and Abe talk about every night over dinner?”
“Yes, Patty. We talk about injustice. And what do you and Roland talk about — I mean, when he isn’t watching Nat King Cole on television?”
“Roland doesn’t like — well, aren’t you funny and clever? I can safely predict that tonight Roland and I will be talking about how you’ve started driving colored maids all over town like Montgomery’s very own Eleanor Roosevelt. He’ll get a kick out of that.”
Harriet didn’t respond. It was almost Christmas and her attention was suddenly captured by a Salvation Army Santa Claus standing on a street corner shaking his bell. The very white Santa was using his other hand to pat the head of a little colored girl who, it appeared, had just dropped a coin into his pail. The scene defused Harriet’s anger. She was able to say to Patty in a very calm voice, “Patty, to be very honest, I don’t like you very much.”
Patty looked as if she had just been slapped.
“Or your husband. We wouldn’t even be friends if the men we’re married to didn’t happen to be partners in the same law firm. Or — for that matter — if I hadn’t always been so willing to drive you around like a white female version of your man Lucius. I think it’s time that we stopped seeing each other. I hope this boycott lasts for months. I only hope that nobody gets hurt. People in this town — white people — have a tendency to play dirty when they don’t get their way.”
Harriet stood. In a raised voice she said to the bus driver, who was giving her a stony look through his overhead mirror, “And I could not care less if you lose your job. You’re the one who had Mrs. Parks arrested, aren’t you? She didn’t have to get up. My husband has read me the ordinance. It clearly states that no person, and I emphasize the phrase ‘no person,’ has to relinquish her seat to another person should the bus be crowded and no other seats available. You have twisted the law for your own autocratic purposes just as the judge who sentenced her ignored the law. My friend Patty here sees things much differently than do I. Her husband sees things so differently that he’s joined the Montgomery White Citizens’ Council. I am now going to sit in the colored section of this bus. I have decided to make it my mission to see that the elderly woman with whom I will be sitting makes it safely off this bus and that you don’t try to run her over while she’s disembarking. Arrest me if you like. Goodbye, Patty.”