Some men had cut an oil drum in half and covered the halves in cattle wire and started barbecuing and folks had brought tables and chairs and the tables were covered with plates of fried catfish and creamy potato salad and deep brown drumsticks and fat purple grapes and heaps and heaps of greens. Children ran and folks danced and some men played baseball in the wilting grass. Two men had brought their guitars and were cutting heads against each other like they were standing on a street corner in Helena, and the sounds of those guitars was as sharp as the sky.
Lila sat with her girlfriends, housemaids all — ’Ginia and CC and Darla Blue — and they drank sweet tea and watched the men and the children play and it wasn’t no trick at all to figure out which men were single because they acted more childish than the children, prancing and bowing up and getting loud. They reminded Lila of ponies before a race, pawing the dirt, rearing their heads.
Darla Blue, who had all the sense of a barn door, said, “I like that one there.”
They all looked. They all shrieked.
“The snaggle-toothed one with the big ol’ bush for a head?”
“He cute.”
“For a dog.”
“No, he—”
“Look at that big spilly belly on him,” ’Ginia said. “Go all the way to his knees. And that butt look like a hundred pounds of warm taffy.”
“I like a little roundness in a man.”
“Well, that be your true love, then, ’cause he all round all the time. Round as a harvest moon. Ain’t nothing hard in that man. Ain’t nothing going to get hard neither.”
They shrieked some more and clapped their thighs and CC said, “What about you, Miss Lila Waters? You see your Mr. Right?”
Lila shook her head, but the girls were having none of it.
Yet no matter how much shrieking and jawing they did to get it out of her, she kept her lips sealed and her eyes from wandering because she’d seen him, she’d seen him just fine, could see him now out of the corner of her eye as he moved across the grass like the breeze itself and snatched a ball from the air with a flick of his glove so effortless it was almost cruel. A slim man. Looked like he had cat in his blood the way he moved, as if where other men had joints, he had springs. And they were oiled to a shine. Even when he threw the ball, you didn’t notice his arm, the piece of him that had done it, so much as you saw every square inch of him moving as a whole.
Music, Lila decided. The man’s body was nothing less than music.
She’d heard the other men call his name — Luther. When he came running in to take his turn at bat, a small boy ran alongside him in the grass and tripped as they reached the dirt. The child landed on his chin and opened his mouth to wail, but Luther scooped him up without breaking stride and said, “Hear now, boy, ain’t no crying on Saturday.”
The child’s mouth hung open and Luther smiled wide at him. The child let loose a yelp and then laughed like he might never stop.
Luther swung the boy in the air and then looked straight at Lila, taking her breath on a ride down to her knees with how fast his eyes locked on hers. “Yours, ma’am?”
Lila tuned her eyes in to his and didn’t blink. “I don’t have no children.”
“Yet,” CC said and laughed loud.
That stopped whatever was about to come out of his mouth. He placed the child’s feet on the ground. He dropped his eyes from hers and gave a smile to the air, his jaw slanted to the right. Then he turned back and looked right at her again, cool as you please.
“Well, that’s some pretty news,” he said. “Yes, sir. That’s pretty as this here day itself, ma’am.”
And he tipped his hat to her and walked over to pick up the bat.
By the end of the day, she was praying. Lying against Luther’s chest under an oak tree a hundred yards upriver from the party with the Big Walnut dark and sparkling in front of them, she told the Lord that she feared she could love this man too much one day. Even if she were struck blind in her sleep, she would know him in a crowd by his voice, by his smell, by the way air parted around him. She knew his heart was wild and thumping, but his soul was gentle. As he ran his thumb along the inside of her arm, she asked the Lord to forgive her for all she was about to do. Because for this wild, gentle man, she was fit to do whatever would keep him burning inside of her.
So the Lord, in His provenance, forgave her or condemned her, she could never be sure, because He gave her Luther Laurence. He gave him to her, in the first year of their knowing each other, about twice a month. And the rest of the time, she worked at the Buchanan house and Luther worked at the munitions factory and ran through life as if he were being clocked at it.
Oh, he was wild. Yet, unlike so many men, wildness wasn’t a choice for Luther, and he meant no harm by it. He’d have corrected it if you could have explained to him what it was. But that was like explaining stone to water, sand to air. Luther worked at the factory and when he wasn’t working he was playing ball and when he wasn’t playing ball he was fixing something and when he wasn’t fixing something he was running with his boys through the Columbus night and when he wasn’t doing that he was with Lila, and she had the full force of his attention because whatever Luther focused on, he focused on it to the exclusion of all else, so that when it was Lila he was charming, he was making laugh, he was pouring his full self at, she felt that nothing, not even the warmth of the Lord, projected such light.
Then Jefferson Reese gave him the beating that put him in the hospital for a week and took something from him. You couldn’t right say exactly what that something was, but you noticed the lack of it. Lila hated to picture what her man must have looked like curled in the dirt trying to protect himself while Reese pounded him and kicked him and unloosed all his long-bottled savagery. She’d tried to warn Luther off Reese, but Luther hadn’t listened because some part of him needed to buck against things. What he’d found out, lying in the dirt while those fists and feet rained down on him, was that if you bucked certain things — the mean things — they didn’t just buck back. No, no, that wasn’t enough. They crushed you and kept crushing and the only way you escaped alive was through pure luck, nothing else. The mean things of this world had only one lesson — we are meaner than you’d ever imagine.
She loved Luther because that kind of mean was not in him. She loved Luther because what made him wild was the same thing that made him kind — he loved the world. Loved it the way you loved an apple so sweet you had to keep taking bites from it. Loved it whether it loved him back or not.
But in Greenwood, that love and that light of Luther’s had started to dim. She couldn’t understand it at first. Yes, there were better ways to get married than the way they did, and the house on Archer was small, and then the plague had come to town, and all of this in a short eight weeks — but still, still they were in paradise. They were in one of the few places in the whole world where a black man and a black woman walked tall. The whites not only left them alone, they respected them, and Lila agreed with Brother Garrity when he declared that Greenwood would be a model for the rest of the country and that ten to twenty years from now there’d be Greenwoods in Mobile and Columbus and Chicago and New Orleans and Detroit. Because the blacks and whites had figured out how to leave one another be in Tulsa, and the peace and prosperity that came with that was too good for the rest of the country not to sit up and take notice.