by Odie Lindsey
4
Hare Hobbs knocked on the tall wooden door, and was beckoned into the sporting hall. The shadowy, open room was massive enough to swallow his own cabin several times over.
Someone asked if he wanted a drink. He did, so they made one for him, with a handful of ice shards dug from a fogged pewter pitcher. He had never been invited here, though he knew the men gathered at the converted barn on a regular basis. He’d often heard their laughter frill the night.
Now it was him here, inside, with them. No women came into this space, save, he supposed, the servants. This was strictly Mr. Wallis’s domain: a large, gutted, A-type barn-turned-sporting-lounge. When not in Jackson, Wallis was here, holding court with his peers. Despite the fact that Miss Beverly wouldn’t let him hunt the property, or perhaps as antidote for his desire to do so, the room was outfitted as a sort of refined game camp. Buck and black bear heads were mounted on rough pine paneling, and bunk beds were installed in the spare rooms. Rifles stood upright behind a glass-front antique rack. The central wall of the hunt lodge featured a large stone-mantel fireplace.
And there was whiskey. Good whiskey.
The crew of men on hand were mostly residents of the big houses in Pitchlynn proper, though some were from Holly Springs and Oxford and elsewhere nearby. (Hare guessed that like Mr. Wallis, these were landowner-donors-turned-Jackson-politicians, their last names adorning library and street sign and legislation.) They sat comfortably on the large leather-and-tack couches, or leaned against the rough-hewn wooden bar, packing the ends of their unfiltered cigarettes before lighting, then exhaling plumes as thick as cream. They were warm toward each other, and, somehow, toward Hare.
He had no idea why he was here, why Mr. Wallis had come down to his cabin to ask if Hare could meet some of the boys who were gathering to talk “farm affairs.” Even Hare’s wife and son had known something was off. As if to ward away her husband’s anxious, unspoken thoughts (of debt unpaid, or chore unfinished? Of termination on the farm?), his wife, Syl, had offered a terse smile just after Mr. Wallis left their porch.
“Next thing you know you’ll be a boss,” Syl had assured Hare. “Someday soon we’ll wake up in our own little house. Own our own little plot.”
They both knew she was lying.
Mr. Wallis asked Hare to sit in an emerald-colored armchair of rough cotton and brass tacking. He did. Over long minutes, the other men then bantered about Ole Miss football, about the ’63 SEC title—the school’s sixth—and the prospect of another national championship, only this time undisputed. They vowed that no federal court or socialist President could, or would, continue to force the school’s hand or policy. The cohort then carved out space for Hare to join the conversation, but he didn’t. Instead, he sat there grinning, terrified that the sweat from his neck and shoulders would stain the deep green chair upholstery. He hunched forward to avoid contact, making him appear touched by disfigurement.
Mr. Wallis had finally cut the clatter by asking if Hare always went by his nickname, or if he ever went by Harold—noting that Harold was a potent Viking name.
“Mr. Wallis,” Hare replied, “you can call me Harold, sure, though nobody’s called me anythin’ but Hare since I’s a boy.”
“Fine,” Mr. Wallis said. “So, Harold, do you have any idea why you’re with us?”
“Nope,” Hare answered.
The men chortled lovingly at this bluntness, and smiled as if he were a friend far removed, someone welcomed back into their fold. Hare grinned back, then sipped his whiskey and sucked a fleeting ice shard.
Mr. Wallis continued, “You are here, Harold, because I have noticed you. The way you carry yourself. The way you raise your boy—what’s his name?”
“Edward. But we call him Sonny.”
“Edward,” Mr. Wallis repeated. “The way you wrestle your tasks, as if throwing them off, as if fighting for the next prize to be taken. You are not a man easily satisfied, are you?”
Hare was uncertain as to how to respond, so he didn’t. If asked the same question forever he would never think of himself as fighting through anything, save hour to hour, shanked cotton row by row. Still, in answer to the silent pause of the group, Hare nodded in the affirmative.
“Exactly,” Wallis said. “You are that man. And you’re humble about it. A fine trait.”
The men grunted their agreement.
Hobbs smelled himself amid the scent of dampened fire and pine and coffee. He wanted to dive his nose close to his armpit, as his ripeness was so out of place. This ain’t real, he thought, looking around for any authentication. They think I’m slow, like some heifer or sow. They need somethin’ offa me.
“Now, look, Harold. We ain’t here to play poker.”
You won’t have it, he thought. I ain’t no sow.
Wallis lumbered the floor in his tan quarter-brogues, then set his drink on the jagged stone mantel. “Tell me, friend. What do you know about what the coloreds have going on around the farm? What jungle drums have you heard?”
“Wellsir,” Hare muttered, adjusting in the green armchair. “I don’t really know. I haven’t, really.”
“Don’t worry, Harold. We’re not a lynch mob. Not out to wreak hell. Our business is simply to know what’s goin’ on.” He then pointed at Hobbs. “It’s your business, too, Harold. Because god love ’em, no matter how good I am to those people, no matter how much food, tack, seed, clothes, what have you—and I promise you I have never, ever touched my scales when weighing yield—they don’t trust me.”
“I reckon that’s because—”
“I know why it is, Harold. Thank you. And I have to live with it, same as I live with my teenage daughter. But just as I must watch over a child who don’t know how to care for herself, I need to know what’s goin’ on with my coloreds. I need you to tell me what’s out there, for ever’body’s good.”
“Mr. Wallis, I really don’t.”
“Harold?”
“Yessir.”
“How long you been on this farm?”
“I guess we’re right up against six years now.”
“Is your boy in school?”
“Yup, much’s they offer, anyway.”
“County schoolhouse?”
“Yessir.”
“And your wife? What’s her name?”
The volley of questions made Hobbs wriggle in the chair. “Well . . . My wife, Mr. Wallis?”
“Your wife.”
“Syl. It’s Sylvia.”
“Sylvia. Mother of Romulus and Remus.”
“Pardon?”
“Nothin’. Sylvia and . . . the boy’s name again?”
“Edward Isaac.”
“Isaac?” Wallis grinned. “That’s a Semite name, Harold!” The men sniggered at this. “A Semite name if there ever was.”
“I don’t— We got it out of the—”
“I’m kidding, Harold. I know, I know. You picked it from the Bible, as well you should. Isaac is a fine name. A strong name.”
“From the Bible,” Hare echoed. “Anyways, we call him Sonny.”
“Yes. Edward Isaac and Sylvia. And your boy, Edward, he’s at the county schoolhouse? And your Sylvia.” Wallis paused. “Say, does your wife still wear feed clothes, Harold?”
“Sorry?” Hobbs shifted again.
“She still trade eggs? Wear sack print dresses?”
“Well.” Hobbs looked to the dark corner of the room. “Not always. ’Pends on how we’re doing. What part of the season it is and all.”
“How’s that feel, Harold? Your dear wife, Syl, is still dressed in feed sack, like her mama would’ve worn? Your boy at the county school, instead of bein’ up to the new Christian academy with his own kind? My Susan George is in class there.” He glanced around the room. “She’ll do just fine.”
“Well, Mr. Wallis—”
“No more ‘Mr.,’ Harold. I’m askin’ you, how does it feel? Your wife in auntie clothes, your boy in a coon-trash school? All of you working until your
back breaks while people like us, like me and the boys here, sit up in this lodge and drink whiskey?”
“Mr. Wallis, I guess—”
“I said no more goddamn ‘Mr.’ Harold! Just answer me.”
“Well . . . it feels like that’s our lot right now. My daddy raised us to believe that hard work and—”
“Don’t patronize me, man.” Wallis stepped forward to lean over Hare, speaking at the short edge of shout. “Your home a slapdash of splintered pine and bricked newspaper? Your meals of cornbread and hog fat? How, Harold? You’re a veteran, right?”
“Battle of the Bulge, yessir, I—”
“So how do you stand it, man? My whiskey? My warmth?” Wallis paused. “My simply bein’ born rich as the only reason why I am here—and why you are down in the shacks?”
“Well, it don’t feel so goddamn—” Hare caught himself, and stared at his shoes.
Wallis smiled, stepped back, and looked around to his chorus. “Yes,” he said. “It’s not fair, is it?”
Hare finished his whiskey, calming himself. “I guess sometimes it’s not. But the work ’round here ain’t bad or—”
“Right, right. Calm down, we’re just talkin’. Nobody’s throwing you off the farm for speaking your mind, friend.”
“I just wouldn’t want you to think that—”
“Quite the opposite, Harold. Like I said, I’ve noticed you. We’ve noticed you. A soldier. And when we notice leaders, we bring them together. Help each other out, see? Now, first off, your boy should be in a proper school. A private, Christian school. And your wife? Sylvia? She should have a dress befitting a woman of her race.”
“All due respect,” Hare said, “we’s just fine here. We want to work hard and—”
“Don’t get me wrong, Harold. Your work is your value. Your honesty and toil, your virtue. I’m not proposing pageantry, man. I’m suggesting you be awarded a bit more stake, for a bit more work. For instance, the ability to obtain some of your own land?”
“Sir?” Hare said.
“Over time, of course. Ownership takes time, Harold. But a little bit of something yours, maybe?”
They will not have me, Hare thought, though he could not restrain his swallow. Battle of the Bulge.
He felt as if they could see inside his history, as if they could see him at sixteen, mending boots and binding blisters. A runt. A platoon runt filling canteens like some mascot, some toy held back from combat.
He’d been pinched by the other soldiers, had been goosed and kicked. Tickled, even touched. Hare had fetched their coffee and bullets, and soap, always soap; he became a washerwoman of sorts. The platoon had repeatedly hidden his gun and bayonet, the only two things a troop was never, ever permitted to lose. Army even let those black bastards fight at the Bulge, Hare thought. While I got treated like some Christy poster pinup.
“You are a leader among us, Harold. A sergeant, taking charge.” Wallis raised his glass. “And we need your leadership. Your eyes, your ears. Your fists.”
Hare felt stripped naked as Wallis and the men bunched around him, smiling, enacting his manhood. Fact was, he had come home from the war still a runt. Had redeployed to no inheritance, save the ready-made narrative of a war hero, a title that defined him despite what he really was: less than nobody; a mascot; a washerwoman, likened to the Black maids who marched along the roadsides at early morning, toward the proper White homes and White kids they tended in Pitchlynn. These men now stood too close to that truth. They could see inside Hare. Could take his story away.
Wallis continued, “And in exchange, there could be a little bit of land, of something yours, Harold. Because stake is what makes us, what binds our presence as men in this social fabric. As guideposts and providers, versus some likeness of chattel, of skins who grow and die without resonance. I tell you what, Harold. Protestantism and yeomanry can be damned. There are only two things on this planet that matter. That you either have, or you take: earth, and birth.”
5
Sylvia sat on the edge of the cotton-tick mattress, in the lamplight. She’d sponged out the scrapes and blackberry spines on both her and the boy’s skin, and dabbed them with a tincture of iodine. Sonny now slept in the front room, in the breeze through the porch door. Syl wished to sleep, was as exhausted as the boy, but she couldn’t stop worrying over her husband, and what would become of his meeting with Mr. Wallis. Her fingernails drifted the topography of her skin, her shoulders, her forearms, her thighs.
From the Hills to the Delta, to the Piney Woods and back again, she and Hare had traveled, had scrapped, had fallen further and further behind. Their marriage was an odyssey of erosive, gentle collapse, a dissolution from the self-sufficiency that each had been taught and raised by. Their forebears, all from the hill country, north Mississippi, had been owners of small plots of corn, mostly, alongside just enough cotton for clothes, drapes . . . necessity. The lifestyle that Syl and Hare had been raised by was an ethos, an earnestness as was wrought from maybe seventy-five acres and a couple of dogtrot cabins. Their people were never croppers, nor tenants, but landowners. And though she and Hare’s families had been large—especially during their grandparents’ and great-grandparents’ eras—the clans were a world removed from any nabob plantation dynasty. They had owned no slaves, nor wanted to. Rather, their modest size was their sustainability; it was their community, their love, and their labor force at once. Everyone pitched in, their collective efforts in both the field and at home resulting in a shared family yield. The commune’s only real ties to consumerism were the tools they had bought, since they could not always forge. The rest, whether spokeshaved chair or chest of drawers, and from clothing to cookware to coffin, had been produced by hand and sweat of brow, as God intended.
The love of Christ, Syl thought. The many children, the work. The crop. The lives of our grandfathers and their small parcels. The land, my god. The owning of land. Oh, and the stories of old Carolina, passed on. The richness of legacy and . . .
But this? Now? Hare and I have become such sorry people. Strangled in a home we can’t never own, on a farm whose yield knows neither border nor ambition. Our foundation is gone, she thought. Our fathers, our families. The land. My husband, twisted up by the spiral of it all. Gone.
She knew Hare wouldn’t be able to resist whatever Mr. Wallis wanted. Her husband was desperate with guilt over his non-providing, and he’d do as he was instructed. Beyond even economics or ownership, Hare needed to matter, to feel valuable again. She knew the Wallis cohort would take advantage of this desire. They would lead her husband to ruin. To violence.
She thought of Gabe.
I can go away. I could.
Syl envisioned him in the meadow, sculpted and godlike, his poise so intrinsic to her own father, her grandfather. She sat on the striped tick, her sweat trickling, her print dress risen just above the knees. The heat passed through her but she shivered as if frozen. She took the washrag from the chipped enamel basin, squeezed off the warm excess and watched it streak down her wrist, and she caressed herself at the neck and shoulders and arms.
He’s the only one ’round here like they was. My daddy. My grandy. Moving through time, in command. Gabe’s the only one on this farm can’t be broken.
She had watched Gabe for years, since they had moved onto Wallis Farm. Watched him more than she should, she knows. (Syl had once suffered a single, hard slap from Hare for this brazenness, having asked too many questions about Gabe at one sitting: How had a Black man come to own his land on a cropper farm? How was it that one season Gabe had refused to accept the price per pound that Mr. Wallis had offered? That he’d even threatened to take his yield to a neighboring outfit if he wasn’t paid right? And where was the man’s wife at, anyway?) Gabe’s family had gone on and his land was secure—two factors that exempted him from the relentless pressure to produce. He was the only one around them who didn’t kowtow or submit to the underlying current of instability. Everyone had to make ends, of course. Yet Gabe�
�s ownership transmitted a security like none other.
Most of all, Gabe could leave. Though he had chosen not to, he could.
This liberty was all that mattered to her. Not even Syl’s prayers could constrict the idea of flight. She raised onto the balls of her bare feet, her knees cocking higher, her buttocks bearing down into the mattress. She held it all inside, this fear, this fondness. Owns his land, she thought. Damn him. She whispered the scripture but couldn’t tamp the idea of what she wanted. Owns himself. The scrapes on her skin and the heaving rush of blood; she was molten with life as the washrag caressed.
I will go, she thought, though she did not know when. He’s the only one.
She heard the dead thunk of Hare’s boots on the porch boards, then jumped up and smoothed herself. The cabin door opened just as she entered the front room. In the darkened corner, the boy lay asleep on his cot.
“What’s wrong with you?” Hare asked.
“Nothin’,” Syl replied, kneading her neck. “Just a little scraped up from berry-pickin’ with Sonny. So hot out there.”
“Yeah.” Hare walked to the kitchen and began to rummage, palming a tin of tobacco while taking a seat at the small table. “Cornbread?”
“Just here.” She moved in behind him, and took a skillet off the small iron stove. She could tell he was drunk. She cut him a thick slab of cornbread, then took the buttermilk from the icebox and poured him a glass.
Hare nodded when she set the meal before him. He crumbled the bread into the buttermilk, then used a fork to stab and stir the clotty mixture. He downed most of it in one gulp, gasped, and exhaled loudly, his breath of whiskey and sour dairy.
“They want me to be their man,” he said. “Say they’s trouble fixin’ to spread on the farm.”
“Oh?”
“Coloreds.”
Syl had known this was coming. She could not have lived on Wallis Farm and not known. She’d heard rumors of visitors to the Negroes’ cabins at night, and snips of clandestine sermons from the mouths of those who knew no church.
