Some Go Home

by Odie Lindsey

  (More than once, Mr. Wallis had hired a couple of boys to capture and hamstring a scrawny buck, then let it loose up by the big house, in hopes she’d determine it wasting. One year, this tactic actually worked, opening a rare, relentless season of killing for Wallis and his colleagues.)

  Though it was in fact perverse, Miss Beverly’s saving was perhaps benevolent in an adjacent, unintended way. For one thing, versus a labor displacement care of combine or thresher, Gabe remained in charge of the mules, the third generation of eldest males in his family to do so. In turn, her ethic also sustained a relationship to the land, the crop, and the bodies required to operate all.

  For Gabe, Miss Beverly’s stubborn, bastard strain of concern served to fortify his ownership of homeplace: thirty acres and a cabin, bought outright from Miss Beverly’s grandfather by his own.

  (Truth be told, everyone who’d been on Wallis Farm long enough knew that Gabe’s parcel was the result of a negotiation, a payoff intended to put down lingering interfamily questions. They knew that Grandfather George’s offer of landownership had been a condolence, a dividend. A consolation prize to his shadow kin.) (Folks did not, however, know that when the deal was first brokered to Gabe’s grandfather, the ex-slave had initially vowed to turn the bribe down, and to instead pursue his true birthright at the courthouse in Pitchlynn. Indeed, the eldest Gabe had understood that his body pumped just as much George family blood as did any of the man’s other children—his half-siblings, to be clear—so he knew that he was owed far more of the paltry land than he’d been given.

  (In the end, however, Gabe’s grandfather was also a pragmatist. He came to realize that legal protest would only cost his family everything, at best running them off the farm and out of town . . . whereas, conversely, even a stamp of landownership would radicalize them toward independence. Someday. So instead of challenging his birthright at the courthouse, the old man had gone to a bank. He’d hired out a safe-deposit box, and he took the folded paperwork—a little quitclaim deed put together by his former master, and upon which the eldest Gabriel had scrawled his mark in ink—and he placed it in the box, right and proper, right there in town. He had not been treated well by the banking staff, and he held serious mistrust of the institution itself. Yet this was during the time after the War Between the States but before Plessy v.; the time that had even been marked by a Black United States senator from Mississippi. When Black lawyers and policemen might even be seen on some streets, when the eldest Gabriel was not alone in his pursuit of stability, and resource, and formal immersion. This was deep into Reconstruction. And like these other men, Gabe’s grandfather had chosen to engage the process, to perhaps even believe—regardless of whether some squat Pitchlynn bank clerk wished to reciprocate the engagement or not. As such, the entire operation with the bank had felt . . . dignified? No. Not dignified. Not even safe. But possible. Yes, that was it: leaving the bank, a participant in trust, Gabriel felt robust in that he felt slightly possible. His investment in the contract, and the bank, and the land, was by default and legal compact their co-investment in him. Though he and his own could still be throttled by terror, deprived of all franchise, he believed that the money and land would make him valuable soon enough.)

  The parcel had been sold to Gabriel’s namesake for the laughable price of $175. The debt had been cleared within two seasons.

  Gabe’s father had rebuilt the shotgun cabin years before: re-chinking the walls and adding a floor of pine boards, and a second bedroom off of the back, kicking the shape of the shotgun cabin out into a half-T, and then a full-T design as the family expanded. The children had been enlisted early and often to maintain the home, and they were taught every aspect of construction, repair, and sustainability. They had lived off of small truck farms, earning both their own veg and a few dollars at town market, or on the farm store, alongside a share of knowledge passed down care of turned soil and yanked weeds, care of pinching worms from tomato plants, of waiting for the second hard frost before pulling greens. Three generations of Gabe’s household understood that peanut vines were the perfect supplement for the paltry head of milk cows kept in a pen out back. The roughage was economical and healthy, and the cows loved it, though you had to plan ahead, had to first throw the plants on the roof flashing to dry them out, to get them good and brittle. These things the children knew. Small things, perhaps. Little bitty things that might matter to no one else. Yet these processes, these strategies . . . this precision was the difference between survival and being starved off.

  Though technically the thirty acres belonged to his entire family, Gabriel, the oldest of seven, four of whom were still living, was inheritor and caretaker. His siblings were settled with this, knowing the land was theirs to build on if they chose. By mid-century, the bulk of them had moved on anyway, northward for work, mostly, toward both true and imagined liberation.

  Gabe’s relationship to the White neighbors who owned nothing—croppers and migrants who, among the Black field hands who still worked the farm, cycled on and off, depending on their ambition or endurance—was a conflux of resentment and situational respect. Never equality with the Whites, but situational respect, it seemed.

  His own work was the life chore of teaming and driving and tending the Wallis Farm mules, lock to dock, first light to last. Gabe’s family had been on that farm longer than most—including Mr. Wallis—so his legacy, like that of the mules, was hard-wired to the bare function of things.

  The main room of his cabin was patched by the faded floral wallpaper his wife had picked out years before. The bedroom walls, too, were a mash of these patterns, on account of either the store holdings, or their money, running erratic. (Mina would buy what remnants she could, when she could, then paste them up like a quilt.) The windows featured sun-faded, sage-colored curtains. He had an old wood-housed radio, though he no longer listened every day. The kitchen now had a small icebox and a rudimentary electric stove. The bathroom, fitted with exposed pipe, was dominated by an honest-to-goodness bathtub, a jubilatory improvement on the outdoor corrugated trough he’d grown up with. On the floor in the front room was a patchwork rug his wife had woven out of linen and rag scraps. Folded and draped over Gabe’s iron bed frame was a quilt the elder ladies had given him after she was gone.

  Mina’s pregnancy had been weak. One afternoon, Gabe came in from the mule barn and found her on the floor, her sack dress soaked below the waist. He had mobilized then as he had not since the war, tending to his wife while spreading word to the neighbors, conscripting everyone in her service. Within an hour the farm’s veterinarian had ordered Mina to stay in bed, explaining that she had a thin something-or-other. (The vet’s counsel was not owing to an abolishment of Black physicians, but rather to a lack of time to get to the colored hospital way over in Clarksdale.) Per these orders, Mina did nothing for nearly three months: no work, no cooking, no helping anyone out. No money made from laundry or stitching, from engaging the egg trade with the Lebanese peddlers who still came around, their delivery trucks like satellites from their brick-and-mortar stores, loaded with sundry, and who nurtured any available market, with any available race. (Folks suspected that Wallis Farm was the last stop for this type of circuit trade.) No, nothing but rest. Though Mina had begged Gabe to let her up, he was relentless, and shrewd in his ability to forfeit his own needs: nourishment or habit, or touch.

  Because of this discipline, she had made it through childbirth. Death would not put the family at distance. Instead, it was the fierce protectionism of motherhood that pulled them part.

  The newborn was small but loud—deafeningly loud—from the first hour. At the baptism, that baby had bawled like nothing anyone had ever heard. The women on hand had soon bawled right along with her, though their spirited moans proved mere wake to her vessel.

  Jessamine, named after her mother.

  Life was defined by the child’s screaming. Gabe and Mina had soon tried any remedy offered, rubbing dirt on her gums, rubbing sugar and whiskey
and starch. Still, the baby would not cease. Jessamine’s cries had dwarfed their cabin hour after hour, robbing the family’s sleep and their meals, and shattering all tranquility.

  It was as if the infant’s howls were a facilitator, a relentless, verbal conduit that forced Gabe and Mina to confront an ongoing rift. Over the years, as their neighbors and family had dissipated, leaving Wallis Farm for places north, for those apparent, abundant sites of redemption and autonomy, a lake of murky ambition had formed at the heart of the couple’s relationship—with each partner standing on opposite shores. Mina wanted to move on, to thrive among the part of the family who’d left this place a near-generation before, and who would still welcome her in Bronzeville, or Paradise Valley, or Cedar-Central. Gabe, however, was convinced that stewardship of the land, and the reward that this entailed, was close at hand. Like his grandfather and father, he believed that their children would inherit the mantle of ownership, the land-legacy that had defined Mississippi for so many.

  Pushing their divide, baby Jessamine wailed like a siren, exacerbating all, forcing emotion, and action, to the surface. The mobile health nurse even found that the child’s throat had scabbed over.

  At times, the new parents could only leave the infant on the old iron frame bed, writhing on her back, pillows surrounding her like a padded sort of fort, at which point Mina would leave the bedroom and plod to the front room and weep, at which point Gabe would sit in his chair and rock, and drift for a moment into a sort of dulled, dampened space, an emotional landscape first discovered during the war; his feelings were held in a place somehow beyond, someplace invulnerable, recognized but removed. Like loving someone through a window.

  When Gabe’s sister Jeanes finally left the farm, no lingering regard for her homeplace, or her inheritance-in-land, Mina had begged Gabe that they follow suit. When he wouldn’t relent, his wife had cursed him, and then asked him, and then promised her partner that movement toward the unknown would deliver a new opportunity. New life. Mina swore to Gabe that Chicago would bring about an armistice between them. Would rehabilitate, would remortise them. That it wasn’t too late to change. So many, many others had done so before.

  Assaulted by his love for her, and by the screams of his child, and by the past, and the promise of everything he had known and been raised to know, to do, Gabe couldn’t help but bifurcate. He broke himself in two, and told Mina to go on ahead. He put up a grin, and asked her to please stake some new ground on the family’s behalf, and he promised to follow her, follow them, as soon as he had secured the next yield, and a little bit of money. (Or better yet, he thought, by the time of the harvest she would return to him, the child a bit older, and they could retain the family course.) He had hated to propose this split, and he hated himself for wanting it, and he swore it was only temporary.

  “I just cain’t, Lord,” Gabe had prayed for forgiveness. “I am so sorry, but I cannot handle this now.”

  Mina had accepted the plan, though in the buildup to departure she had offered time and again to back out. She knew Gabe wanted her to stay, and she would’ve done so if he had asked, if he had only confessed that he couldn’t go forward without her.

  It was true: He wanted Mina to back out. Was desperate for her to stay. Yet with the agreement, Gabe had witnessed the new flare of life in her, a brocade of expectation. He could see that she needed the move more than she needed even him. Asking her to stay would only scar things up further. So he didn’t. He couldn’t.

  After the decision was made, the child fell silent. Over their final nights together, Gabe had sat for hours on the floor, watching Jessamine fidget and stretch. He was tickled to discover that her facial features, though chubby and mostly obscure, had also bunched into familial traits: Jessamine’s teacup chin, and his own mother’s squinchy smile eyes. He flat-out bellowed when the baby put her entire foot in her mouth. And when the child drowsed, he cooed to her, and sang, and whispered to her of her forebears. With her every yawn, he took in the pleasant sweet-sourness of her breath. Gabe would fall asleep next to the baby, Mina stepping around him in the small room, putting the child into the crib, and readying herself for rest. After, she would rouse Gabe from his spot, and the two of them would tiptoe over the wide, creaking floor planks and into bed.

  Jessamine was now ten years old. She and Mina still lived on the same block as Jeanes’s family in Chicago, as had been arranged before the move. Gabe’s daughter had proper schooling, a cobble of proper parentage, and four cousins close as siblings, alongside two generations of kinfolk and extended community. Mina wrote him often, begging him to release himself from the farm, to open up to the world. There was Vietnam and James Bond and the Regal, and half of Mississippi in Dixmoor. Marvin Gaye and Willie Mays and Malcolm and . . .

  A black-and-white photo Mina had sent was tacked to one wall in his cabin. It showcased his daughter in a long, dark coat, her body cocked against the wind as she waved a mittened hand, the snow and brick apartment houses behind her, and the scaffoldlike Bronzeville rooftops in the distance. Mina never pressed Gabe to send any more money than he could spare, but she always, repeatedly, pressed him to move, or to even just visit them, to see what it was like. She was waiting.

  Gabe sensed that an upheaval would soon come to Wallis Farm. He couldn’t not know that a resolution, a dividend, would soon show itself, rewarding him for having held firm to the land. His best guess was that someone would soon offer to buy him out, though he prepared himself also for the opportunity to buy.

  Whatever the case, he needed to see this era through. He had to, for all of them. He would go to his family when it was done.

  THE MULES. Gabe thought nothing about shoving the heel of his fist into a sweated latch and cheekbone, or about flaying a haunch with the strap—though he rarely had to. The animals knew him too well for violence. He issued orders and praise into their cathedral-arch ears, driving them as he’d been shown by his father. He shoed and fed and teamed up and cared for them, brushed them down, and cut out their fly bites and festers. Each mule seemed resigned to his authority, in large part because Gabe never, ever forgot to maintain the hierarchy. One lapse in posture or placement would beckon a death-kick to the head.

  The Wallises had always allowed their workforce to harness and clop a borrowed surrey into Pitchlynn on Saturday afternoon, though unlike his forebears, Gabe took his damned pickup truck (if he even bothered to go at all). Outside of fairs or special events, or perhaps a revival, walking the town square was for upstarts, for young people. Nearly forty, Gabe had grown tired of looking for whiskey, or companionship, and he was tired of dressing in anything but overalls. Mostly he was tired of the expectation that he change into town mode, aloof and disengaged, so as to avoid judgment or threat. (If he did go to Pitchlynn, he sure as hell wasn’t going to fashion himself as some prewar, darky pilgrim, some barefoot pageant to Wallis nostalgia by riding in on a creaky wagon, a haystick in his mouth as he reined a span of mules. He had driven an Army deuce-and-a-half transport truck across half of Europe, for chrissakes.) Wed to his solitude, Gabe did what he pleased, mostly, while on his own land. He passed the nights with the far-off broadcasts of the radio, or by talking to himself, remembering.

  3

  Gabe wasn’t sure whether he would salt and hang the rabbit meat in the smoke-shack. Though it was late in the day, his appetite hadn’t yet shown itself, on account of his preoccupation with whomever had spied on him from behind the thicket in the glade.

  Beneath the olfactory rush of sweat and meadow, of forest, dog, and musk, he was convinced he’d caught the scent of ladies’ soap. The thought of it made his insides feel like petals peeling into a whorl.

  He stood outside the log-wood shack that housed his salt box and cast-iron kettles, and the rafters where he hung meat to cure. The hare lay across the waist-high carving stump. The feist, June, panted heavily as she lay in the dirt near his feet. Gabe issued the dog a quick syllable of praise, then picked up his long knife and began dr
essing the kill.

  Someone shouted his name. He looked up to see three young men approach. One of them, Junior Bates, was a farmhand he’d known since the boy was bug-sized. The other two, also young Black men, were strangers. Gabe ignored them, looking back to the stump as he severed the rabbit’s back feet. No good would come of the men wanting anything from him.

  “Gabe, hey, Gabe?” Junior called again. “Need to talk with you, man.”

  The strangers walked up, keeping a respectful distance, eyeballing the knife and the growling dog. “This is Robert and Don,” Junior announced. “They’s here on account of—”

  “I know why,” Gabe interrupted, swatting away a congregation of flies. “I know. And I don’t hold any strike against you men. Y’all are doin’ important work. But I’ve done fine for a long time on my own, and I have my own mission in process. So y’all need to keep on walkin’, and work your campaign out somewhere else.”

  Gabe threw the rabbit’s feet down to the feist, then severed the head and did the same. The dog’s eyes stayed locked on the strangers as she gnawed into tendon and bone.

  “Mister Gabe,” Junior continued. “You’re the only one on this farm who owns his house. You a war hero, man. Ain’t nobody can tell you what to do. Even if they try, they can’t—”

  Gabe took his knife to the back of the rabbit, slicing the length of the fur. “Snicks, Kings, and Riders,” he mumbled. “COFOs and all? Y’all got some names, boy!” He chuckled to himself, then laid the blade on the stump, then started tearing the hide away. Once more he stared at the young civil rights workers. “Like I said. Y’all need to point it in another direction. But good luck to you. God bless.”