The Gone Dead

by Chanelle Benz

  Billie raises the empty plastic bottle. “I toast you.”

  “You ridiculous. Let’s go up. You still want takeout?”

  “I guess. I’m not that hungry.” Billie watches a truck pulling in, waiting until a couple gets out with their little dog. “I don’t want you to stay here for too long.” She turns back to Lola. “You think I’m doing the right thing, right?”

  “Our folks are survivors of the terror of segregation. This is part of your inheritance, it’s up to you what you want to do with it.”

  Billie smiles. “But is God with me?”

  “That depends on what you do.”

  Lola follows Billie up the motel steps. Let this not be the last time she sees her. Not again.

  Dr. Melvin Hurley

  THIS IS THE QUINTESSENTIAL MOMENT IN WHICH TO HAVE THIS CRUCIAL discovery. His theory about Cliff’s lost work is now not merely conjecture. Not only that, but he himself has become much more of a character in the narrative than he could have ever imagined. His firsthand observations are now a vital part of the biography. Of course, he cares what happens to Billie, but to see the story turn this corner is truly something to behold.

  He pulls into the parking lot and cuts the engine. Of course he vaguely assumed that the apartment complex would be run-down, but he didn’t picture this battered vestige of a motel. A man, who must be Dee, is on the second floor balcony smoking. Melvin steps from the car and Dee nods down at him.

  They meet on the balcony. The cigarette smoke is heavenly. “I appreciate you meeting me, Mr. James.”

  As they shake hands he remembers that they are not actually that far apart in age. He is a little older than Dee, but Dee looks like the older man.

  “Don’t have long.” Dee takes a drag on his cigarette.

  “I understand so I will cut to the chase and say first that thus far Billie is resistant to returning to Philadelphia.”

  “She ain’t still staying up at the house, is she?”

  “Not at the moment, no.” Melvin tries not to stand downwind. Two weeks, almost three now. “I doubt very much that she will leave until she sees the elusive Curtis Roberts.” He would be back down to zero if he had a cigarette now. All his suffering in vain.

  “We had a deal. And you ain’t lived up to your end.” Dee turns to go.

  “Wait, please.” Melvin touches Dee’s shoulder and Dee turns back, his expression weary. “In a sense, in a sense, Mr. James, Mississippi is a metaphor for all of America. And the wounds here pervade the rest of the country, they’re only more visible in the Delta. But then there’s also the tremendous bravery. People have risked their lives here for equality, died for the vote.”

  “People have died here for walking down the damn road. For driving home from the grocery store. What did Cliff die for? His death didn’t change nothing. It don’t matter if Curtis Roberts is dead or alive, she ain’t ever gonna get near the man.”

  “Let’s say that I believe that you don’t want Billie to meet Curtis Roberts because you think he is dangerous. But why would Jim McGee not want her to see him?”

  “I ain’t him.”

  “Why go to such lengths? I’ll tell you what I’ve come to believe. I think that somehow these men have been involved with what happened to Cliff. But what I haven’t puzzled out is why after all this time, you, his brother, would be so resistant. It almost makes it seem as if you might have been involved with what happened to him.”

  “Man.” Dee steps closer. “You better watch what the hell you saying.”

  Melvin’s palms go damp. “Forgive me, but it’s one of the few possible explanations I can come up with.”

  “Shit. Is that what she think? I killed her daddy?”

  Melvin wipes his hands on his pants. “I don’t know what Billie thinks anymore.”

  Dee is silent for a moment. “How many stitches?”

  “Three on her temple and I believe a few at the back of her head.”

  “Can’t you get her to leave it be? Just let us old men die.”

  The desperation in Dee’s face is hard to look at. “She can’t remember what happened, but of course there is a way in which she knows, it’s embedded in her muscles, in the way she moves through the world.” What a good opening for his chapter on Billie.

  “She be fine. Just get her to go back and I’ll give you what you want.”

  “Whatever happened, it’s time to let it out.”

  Dee stubs his cigarette out and flicks it over the railing, walking back into his apartment. The heavy door smacks shut. Melvin turns off the recorder. This isn’t quite how he imagined their tête-à-tête would go. He goes to the door and knocks.

  “Mr. James? Dee?”

  A man sitting down on a chair at the other end of the balcony is staring at him. The door opens. Dee is standing there holding a box.

  “I’ll give you this on one condition—you don’t tell her where you got it.”

  Melvin nods. “Of course.”

  Dee closes his eyes for a moment, rubbing his forehead. “You know folks up in Greendale said all kinda things about Cliff when he died. Like he was some Communist brother swaggering round here with an M16 and shit.”

  “That he was militant?”

  Dee looks at him. “Yeah. There was rumors he was part of the Invaders up in Memphis. But he didn’t own no black leather jacket.”

  “Well, he was too old for Vietnam.”

  “Some folks said he was on drugs. How you gonna claim that when there were none found in his system? Nobody wanted to listen. They said Dee you just a kid. And my mother, my momma said there ain’t no justice in this world, baby. We have to wait till the next.”

  “Billie won’t go back until she finds him.”

  “And what then? Curtis Roberts ain’t gonna talk to her and even if he did it’d be nothing but lies. Then all them white trash people are gonna be running her off the road, shooting at her car, and they ain’t gonna be too careful. It’s too late for any kind of justice. Shit, we should both leave Mississippi, me and her.” He nods at the box. “Maybe you can use this to get her to go back east. I can’t be involved no more. I’m too goddamned tired.” Dee goes back in and shuts the door.

  Melvin places the box on the ground and opens it. On top are old issues of the Chicago Defender. Cliff’s birth and death certificates, his old driver’s license. At the bottom are newspaper clippings, a collection of letters of condolence, and finally, the pages.

  CHAPTER 1—WHY O WHY

  When I moved away from Mississippi, I told myself that I would never return. It was what my mother, Ruby James (née Grant), had wanted, and though she expected that I would visit, she could have never imagined the reasons why I would come back. In 1850, her grandmother, my great-grandmother, Eula, had been born into slavery, and though Eula died long before I was born, my mother never forgot the stories of terror that woman carried, especially the one of being sold off as a young girl in New Orleans. Eula was the root of my mother’s family because we had no idea of who our people were before her, before she was forcibly orphaned. But over the years I have come to understand that something more than fear must’ve been passed down to me from my elders, because not only did Eula experience cruelty and countless other traumas, but she also experienced a radical change: she was freed. Something her mother and her mother’s mother, wherever they were, must have been begging God for, but though Eula searched she never found them, and never knew if they lived to see their prayers come true.

  My mother and her mother, Mabel, never wanted to talk about slavery days. They were ashamed, I suppose. I was the opposite. I wanted to know all about it, and even as a little boy, I was angry that such an unjust institution had ever been in place. But unlike me, they had seen the mobs, the picnics of hate, felt the daily humiliations that simmer with death. Lynchings were whispered about at night when I was supposed to be asleep.

  I had been raised, like most people in my town, to believe that the way things were was the way they
were always going to be. White folks had their schools and hospitals and barbershops, and we had ours, or sometimes we didn’t. But even if white folks were supposed to be better in every way, I spent most of my time wondering why exactly they had everything and we didn’t. Why they could do what they wanted with impunity. Perhaps I would have gone along like a little sheep if I hadn’t become such a big reader. Books fired up my imagination and I began dreaming that I was one of the good guys, maybe even the lead hero, who would one day find a way to prosper over the villains that kept us down.

  The other part of what was swirling around in me came from my father. William “Willie” James had come home angry from World War II after serving in Japan and China. He hated the way that white soldiers treated him when he was out there fighting for his country, but he spoke in glowing terms of the people he had met in other countries. To them, he was a soldier and a man. When my father first came back from the war, he figured things would be different because he was different. He had risked his life, and though he hadn’t gone past the seventh grade, he had seen some of the world. The revolution in his spirit did a number on mine. I hung around the porch at night to listen to his cussing about the white “home guards” being formed in the county now that black veterans were coming back. These young black men weren’t as militarized as black soldiers would be by the Vietnam War, the army during World War II was still segregated and blacks were mostly assigned to service branches and rarely in combat, but still they had gotten a taste of what it felt like to be out from under Jim Crow.

  But when the White Knights rode again and again, dragging mutilated black bodies over the very ground that black families had broken their backs farming, eventually my father could not stand it. He left the South and went to Chicago, leaving my mother and me to fend for ourselves.

  As I grew older, the whispers started to take the shape of people I knew. The wild thing is that at the time my best friend was my white neighbor, Jimmy. Well, Jimmy could hardly believe the stories I’d tell him, or he preferred to believe that those black bodies must’ve done something bad to earn it. But the world didn’t seem to apply to me and Jim, not yet. He never cared that I was colored and I didn’t think much about his being white. But when my father was around he didn’t like me associating with a white boy. He forbade me to step a foot in Jim’s house unless I was helping my mother. I listened to my daddy, fearing the switch, but when he went off to Chicago and took up with another woman, I did as I pleased. Jimmy’s mother was a decent, gentle white woman in my estimation who never fussed at us as long as we took off our shoes before coming in the house and didn’t terrify the cat.

  Of course, now I am positive she knew what was coming because the mother was always the one to do it. Our friendship, the bond between two young boys, had a focus and purity. I wonder if my life since has been a struggle to return to when that life of play and family and God was as natural and entire as the air I breathed.

  I can remember the panic I felt as my mother sat me down and told me that I couldn’t play with Jimmy no more. That it was the way it was between white and colored folk and I was about to turn thirteen. It broke my heart. But there had been warnings. He could go wherever he wanted in town and I wasn’t supposed to go past the railroad tracks. While he was fishing and reading mystery magazines, my mother had me doing yard work for the white families she cleaned for. She didn’t want me picking or chopping cotton, she was adamant about that. But she had done it for Jimmy’s family. All of my family had once worked for his family. Not only that, but we lived on their property and they were our landlord. And while I was used to the white kids who took the bus to their school taunting us while we black kids walked, I had begun to notice white men treating me with suspicion. I knew the hushed stories of black folks shot by a passing car of white men, while dancing in a café, while riding on the handlebars of a friend’s bike, or being forced to jump off a bridge for no conceivable reason other than the color of their skin, were a reality. But none of this would compare to the awakening that was to come my way.

  When I was about fifteen and in high school, the U.S. Supreme Court announced their decision on Brown v. Board of Education that all public schools should be integrated. All hell broke loose. It was like White Redemption all over again. My uncle Floyd, who was living then in Vicksburg, signed one of the NAACP’s petitions to desegregate the schools and a mob started to gather. The local white paper published all the names, numbers, and home addresses of these black signers. He and his wife both lost their jobs, got a number of death threats, and rocks through their windows. For a while they moved up here to Greendale and I heard about it from my cousins.

  A year later, the year after Emmett Till was murdered, I was sweet on a girl I had grown up with named Sheila. She was very beautiful and I have always thought that there was something mystical about her. One Saturday after I had finished working, I walked over to Sheila’s house, where she lived with her mother, grandmother, and Uncle Louis.

  But as I got closer I saw her kneeling on the side of the road by a car. There was a police car parked behind it. I knew my mother would not want me to take one step closer, but I could not leave Sheila out there crying. Her uncle Louis was lying on the ground, having been shot in the head by Deputy Curtis Roberts. Sheila’s hands and arms and dress were soaked with blood. The deputy claimed that Louis was resisting arrest for speeding and had pulled a gun on him. We stood there listening until I told Sheila to get my mother who could drive him to the hospital that took black folk. The deputy watched as we lifted Louis into his own car. He died before we got there. Sheila told me what happened. There was no speeding, no gun, no dispute. I had been fully initiated into an ugly truth: a black man in this country knows there is a chance that he could die violently for no earthly reason and that a good portion of people will say well he must have done something to deserve it.

  Curtis Roberts was a vicious white man who wanted to be important. As far as I was concerned, he thought that being in the Klan or being an officer, which in those days in Mississippi could be the same thing, would make people take notice. There never was a trial, no witnesses came forward. Neither of our mothers would let us make statements. My mother sent me to stay with my father for the summer, and while I was gone she met Dee’s father and when I came home he was living with us.

  A few years ago, I came back to Mississippi. It was 1969 and Charles Evers had just been elected as the first African American mayor in Mississippi since Reconstruction down in Fayette. I thought that I was coming back as an intellectual, as an artist, to write about Greendale and help care for my mother as she struggled with her health.

  But 1969 was also the year after Dr. King had been assassinated and I was lost on the battlefield. I wanted a break from the poetry scene, from the frenzy of sanctimony about how a black poet should be, and I needed to get back to my roots. That first summer back, my daughter came to visit.

  Before she was born, I did not know how I would love my child. I never even thought I would have a daughter. I had always imagined myself a father of sons. I did not know, could not know that my love for my child would remove the distance, the skin between me and the world, that I could feel as if all the children in the world were my child, and I would grieve for all unjust sufferings, vicious deaths, ugly indifference. And to call on invisible forces to protect my child was not enough. I needed to understand how the world had created Curtis Roberts and how this had killed Louis Jackson. This book is about me, and this book is about him.

  BIG MUDDY

  I came back because I had to.

  I came back because blood called

  and it was my blood already in the ground.

  The land called to say: I am your ancestors.

  The land called and said: Youngblood, I am the lady of the house.

  I came back because we did not know

  your name your names all the names

  in the river in the ground

  those who never got
to know that

  somebody, heirs of their body, would come back for them.

  Melvin picks up the box and rushes down to his car. Heaven forbid Dee should change his mind. He slips it carefully onto the passenger seat, climbs into the driver’s seat, and speeds into the gas station across the street. Parked by the air tank, he dials his partner, leaning on the steering wheel, shaking. The other line picks up.

  “This is a very tremendous day in my life.”

  Hopsen

  ALWAYS HAD THE FEELING SHEILA WAS TOO GOOD FOR HIM. NOT THAT she ever acted that way. When he was young it felt good. He was proud to have won her, to have a queen like that on his arm. But then he started worrying about how she knew the men she did, if they had known her body and that didn’t feel so good. He knew she wasn’t no virgin when they started dating, but he didn’t want any man knowing a part of her he didn’t. He wanted to be number one with nobody standing in spots two through ten.

  For that reason he didn’t like it when Cliff moved back and started coming over all the time like him and Sheila were best friends. He claimed he was writing a book, a history of the adversity that had happened in their town or some bullshit like that. Jerry didn’t think much about it at first. Not like he gave a shit about poetry. He was into music. Sheila was the one who had loved English class in high school so he let it go. But then one night he heard her talking to Cliff about her uncle Louis, which had been a real tragedy, talking bout getting some justice against Curtis Roberts. Jerry knew she’d catch hell if any of it went in a book.

  She would never have forgiven him. He can’t remember another time he wasn’t honest with her. He hadn’t hardly decided what he was going to do when Curtis Roberts pulled him over one day, made him get out of the car and spread on the side of his car, saying: “Your wife is mixed up with that uppity nigger Cliff James. Spreading lies about me.” Curtis hit him in the back of the head with something and Jerry had slid like a sack of potatoes to the mud. Curtis stood over him, saying, “I know you ain’t a troublemaker like him, Jerry. I know you know better than that.” Then the death threats came, a brick through the front window where his daughter Sandy was watching TV—Marcus wasn’t born yet. All over a damn book. He couldn’t stand for that. He made certain that he always answered the phone, that Sandy played in the backyard not out front, that they never drove nowhere after dark, and kept his rifle right by his bed. So when they offered him a way out he was bound to take it. To protect his wife and kid. What man would have done different?