by Odie Lindsey
She didn’t care. Nor, she thought, does my husband.
“What trouble?” she asked.
“Organizing. Subversion. Mr. Wallis and his band is scared.” He scoffed. “All that money, this land, and they’re scared of a few colored niggers. I swear.”
“They ain’t no trouble, is there?” Syl asked. “I mean, no real trouble, right?”
“I don’t guess so. Not here, anyway.”
“Well then, what are they—”
“But they may be trouble. Especially if Wallis and them say they is.”
“Well, what on earth does that mean?”
Hare’s eyes flashed intolerance. Syl looked away.
“What it means,” he said, “Is that they need someone in charge on the property. What it means is, well. It means that if Mr. Wallis and them say they’s trouble, then they’s trouble. Period.”
He drank the last slick of buttermilk, and nodded for her to get more. She did.
“But what is it they want with you?” she asked.
“They want me to be what they can’t. To be their eyes, ears. Fists.”
“But they’s not any real concern, Hare. You know this.”
“Not much of anything, really. Just a little bit of talk. Couple of those young agitators.”
“So why—”
“I’m ’bout done with these questions.” He stood up and stepped toward her, backing her into the small cabinet. “Here’s how it works,” he stated. “They say, and I do. And then I say, and you do. Ain’t no way around it. No way, lest you want to get up and move on again. Get to god knows where. Is that what you want? ’Cause they ain’t but a handful of farms still left to work on shares. Nobody needs a man anymore. Nobody needs anything but money and machines.”
“But—”
“May be there’s more farms like this, left for us to rot on. Maybe over in Alabama. So I ask you, are you wantin’ to move?”
“No. But—”
“No’s all you need to say.”
“But the boy?” she whispered.
“What do you think’s gonna happen to him if we start draggin’ him all over creation, lookin’ for some new version of this same shit life? Huh?”
With this, she snapped. “What do you think is gonna happen if we don’t? How you think Sonny’s gonna turn out? You think he’ll grow into some big shot? Some kinda Wallis if we—”
Hare smacked the cabinet beside her head. Syl shrieked, so he covered her mouth with his hand, pinning her against the cupboard. He leaned in close to her ear, his whispers adrift on a violence that, no matter how many times she’d encountered it, still thrived with new terror.
“Now, I don’t know where it gone wrong for us,” he said. “But it did. And so you need to listen . . . and then stop goddamned talkin’. You hear me?”
“Mmm-hmm.” She nodded.
“Okay,” he said, and took his hand from her mouth. “Mr. Wallis says we can either be with them, or move on. Says that if we stay around, if I can prove myself to them, then maybe we—that is you and me and Sonny—can finally get aholt of some land of our own, some . . . I have got to get us ahead. Get us back to the way it was supposed to turn out. And I will do this. I am going to do this.”
He stepped away from her, shook his head a little. “Besides. The thing is, Mr. Wallis says they’re gonna change all this land up. They gonna close the whole damned farm down, turn it into somethin’ else. So we gotta act now, before it all disappears.”
Sylvia quivered. “Turn it into what?”
“Somethin’ else entirely. Not even a farm.”
“But you know the coloreds won’t be put back again. That old life is too far gone. It has been, don’t you think?”
He picked up the dishware and handed it to her, turned and walked into the center of the main room, and sat down in his rocker. Opened his tin, rolled a cigarette, and stared into the black, empty fireplace.
“You’re not gettin’ it,” Hare said, uncaring whether she heard him or not. “I said, this ain’t even gonna be a farm no more. There’s not even gonna be a Wallis Farm to be ‘put back’ on. The coloreds are gonna be put off this land, whether they want to go or not. This life? This prison of the past? This life is over.”
Sylvia stepped over to the sink basin, poured some water onto a rag, then cleaned and wiped the glass and fork. She closed her eyes as she did so.
The crop, she thought. The love of Christ, gone. And now Hare. Gelded by men he cain’t equal, but who he’ll never stop measurin’ against. The storm of his insufficiency will destroy us.
The mules were all but gone. The Negroes would no longer submit. Syl wiped her hands on a dish towel, and considered what she now knew: her husband would fashion himself into a suicide of sorts, a Wallis expendable. She understood now that if she stayed on this farm, she and the boy would go down with him.
Hare kicked off his boots, dragged his cigarette, and moments later threw the butt into the fireplace. He dragged the ladder-back chair out on to the porch, to catch the breeze. Dug in his pockets for his pint.
She knew he would be asleep, fast, precisely where he sat. It was a strange thing, his ability to sleep upright, all night, in that rocking chair on the porch. He was a corpse of toil and sweat and whiskey, and the only thing that might rouse him now was the need to piss, or to curse the world God provided.
I’ll go to Gabe, she thought. We will leave this place forever.
6
Gabe lay awake on his stitched canvas mattress, and stared at the photo of his daughter. He smiled at her smile. Waved at her mitten-handed wave. Took in a vision of Chicago, its rising scaffold of flat rooftops in the distance, and the low ceiling of clouds. He wondered how Jessamine’s feet stayed warm in all that snow.
He would go to them, sometime. Or perhaps they would just come home, if he asked. If he ended up buying more land instead of selling off.
His bare feet caught the drift of breeze through the house, and his nose took in the scent of leftover rabbit and pepper stew in the kettle. He’d been unable to take ample care of his wife, and, worse, to tolerate his own infant. Now his only family left were either the aged uncles and aunts, people who shared some long-ago shuffle of kinship, or the tight-knit families, Junior Bates’s and the like. None of these relations brought him comfort at night. Over these hours, it was only himself and his small farm—his father’s land, his grandfather’s stake—as surrounded by the virtual continent of Wallis.
It troubled Gabe that over the past season, Miss Beverly had become just a bit too withdrawn, a bit too patient with her husband’s antics. Gabe believed she was too worn down. Partnered to this, Mr. Wallis had abandoned any firm interest in whether or not this year’s crop was even being farmed to full yield. He hadn’t brought on anyone new, save a few hands too old or too young or too stupid to claim work elsewhere. Not once had Wallis even come by to check on folks, to inquire about their health and children. The bossman hadn’t even given his yearly visit to waste breath on the terms of anybody’s arrangement, or the details of their effort versus his expectation.
Gabe had known off years, and he understood the way a farm’s collective temperament could waver, or quibble, or howl. Yet this was different. From the ill-stocked farm store to ill-tended rows, the very ethos of production seemed to have soured in the Wallises. (Had it also in himself? Was some epidemic infecting them all?)
And now this: young activists in from elsewhere, up North, their ideals meshing with those of work and Providence.
I could, Gabe thought. Could just go on, at last. Take right back up with Mina, and with my Jessamine. Find work there, in the snow. Brick and rooftops. Be a daddy to her, like mine was to me. Hell, the patches of my own rooftop ain’t no more than scrap flashing anyway. I could leave and be done with this place forever. Nobody would ever even know I’d been here.
He wondered what would become of the land if he left. He did not plan on dying anytime soon. In fact, he planned to live as long as
his grandfather, the first Gabriel, who spat vinegar and wormed shine, and worked the animals well into his nineties, a pack of spotted feists in his wake. Because this was what was done. It was their communion with posterity.
Yet for whom was Gabe keeping the little plot? Unlike his grandfather, or his father, there was nobody to pass down to, nor interest from siblings strewn elsewhere. Who was going to learn of the mules? Who could he teach about the peanut vines? Who would learn to slaughter, scrape, and boil the hogs? To prepare the salt box? To cure?
Maybe she would, he thought. Little Jessamine.
Maybe if he held out, maybe if it turned out Wallis was gonna sell off his own acreage, Gabe’s daughter would come back to Mississippi when grown. To live and inherit and carry on this land. Build a new, fancy house, and care about TV and movies, magazines, and the like. Maybe her mother would tire of the ice, and grow weary of calling on Gabe to abandon post. All the renting, the winter, the exhaustion of city uncertainty. Hell, he thought, all this time and they still needed assistance—who could sustain that?
His family had fought so hard to keep the farm. If Jessamine were a boy she would be here, he thought. Maybe. Maybe if he just asked Mina to come home . . .
The only thing Gabe knew for certain was that right now the mission was to hold the land: for his family before, and, mostly, for Jessamine. This space had shaped the fact that they could not be removed—whether by work or weather, sickness or violence. Nobody had taken it from them, and nobody could. How on earth could he let it go now?
Jessamine won’t never come back, he thought. Mina won’t come back. Not even for a season. People’s only being tugged away from this place.
Gabe then considered leaving his lot to the church. Or, hell, maybe even to those boys who’d come down to change things, the Snicks and Kings and COFOs and Riders. He could provide them a place to gather, a base camp of sorts, like cover fire for their fight. Bless ’em.
I could hand it all over, he thought. Leave this spoilt Mississippi, so lonely.
Yet they were too close to something. To something on the farm that he just had to figure out. The Wallises’ neglect was a marker of a process: either Gabe would sell out because they coveted his land, or he would buy in, in full, because they were done with this backslidden stewardship. In either case, it would soon be clear.
In the photo, in the snowdrift, Jessamine’s cheekbones were high and shiny, like those of her mother and grandmother, a legacy of the family’s Chickasaw bondage. The child’s overcoat, her smile. Her toboggan. The rooftops in the distance, the pointed spires of a church like those he’d seen only while shoving through Europe during the war. Through Chartres with the Red Ball Express. Hammer Down, the experience having only strengthened his resolve on the farm.
Hammer Down, in theater, Europe, where a still teenage Gabe had throttled his deuce-and-a-half transport truck through hail and snow and mortar fire, through exhaustive hallucination and corporeal agony. Back and forth over supply lines, again, again, his palms rubbed as raw as a strawberry on the gearshift, and, later, as rough as a cracked heel, a hoof. Trucking back and forth, slapping himself awake, cigarette after cigarette, anything to keep the Red Ball operational.
If D-Day was the heart of the invasion, the Red Ball Express was the blood. Oil, water, food, meds, the Red Ball trucked in every mandatory supply for an Army to move, to live, and to win. Without them, without this back-and-forth transport, D-Day was spectacle, and Europe was lost.
Gabe and the rest—the majority of them Black men—sucked it up and drove on, the nights smearing into daybreak, to Chartres and back, again, again. Got so tired they flicked lighters on their skin to stay awake. So tired that at times even a Luftwaffe assault became mere aggravation, a rousing annoyance.
The roadsides were a slick mix of snow and mud, a splatter of stacked fieldstone wall and scorched farmhouse. The gored-out carcasses of livestock and soldier were almost Permian, near-reptilian in the wake of the artillery.
Still, the trucks drove on, drove past, drove through, again.
(Though once, they’d been forced to make an extended roadside stop—at which point they watched a Frenchman kick a dead horse. The lot of Gabe’s convoy, five deuce-and-a-half trucks, two jeeps, had been made to halt while the lead vehicle crew repaired a crankshaft. The boys were freezing and starved, vibrating from both the frigid temp and amphetamine jimjams . . . and they were skillet-shot kills for the Germans. Yet they exited the trucks anyway, their eyes scouring the gray sky, their ears cued for the rev and sputter of aircraft. They had huddled up to smoke, to share a belt from a bottle, and then cracked up as the old Frenchman implored the dead horse: to move from the roadside, to hide from the soldiers, as if Gabe and the boys were there to steal it, or, more pressingly, to eat it. As if Gabe’s company cared about anything save fixing the fucking crankshaft before being strafed by Messerschmitt. Anyhow, when the old man first kicked the horse, its eyes half open and its spine sticking up through its croup like a daisy, they had tried to stop him. Arret, monsieur! Ça va! Hey, man! Yet he had kicked the horse again, while his swollen, pawlike hands yanked the bridle rope, and his eyes darted from the carcass to gathering squad. The man was frenzied. Starving. Beyond all laws of humanity.
The soldiers had muttered to themselves, and they lit second smokes, standing close to their engine blocks to catch the flush of radiant warmth. My lord, the flush of that warmth. Gabe had shaken his head at the Frenchie, had then giggled. The old fermier had laid into the horse relentlessly, his boot into its neck, his tugs on the bridle, until the bit raked the animal’s teeth out and the man had slipped in the mud. It was pure slapstick.)
Deployment had ripped Gabe, them, from the structured fabric of existence; it had revealed the truth of the anemic White South. Upon his return to Mississippi, having lived mission critical, Gabe would no longer tolerate the way things had been. There was victory in Europe. There would be victory at home. Hammer Down.
So he had worked the land, and held firm the land. And he knew that the land would outlast any code, and he swore that he would never, ever cede it—lest he got a proper price, or acquired a larger plot. Gabe drove on, he drove forward, mule to milestone, his resolve like a diesel engine, slow and grinding, his objective clear and getable. For himself and his forefathers, and most of all for his child, he would steward this place at all costs, until his enemies had exhausted themselves, had ground themselves to bone dust.
We built this place, Gabe thought. All of it for the others—save these here little farm plots of our own, speckled like pepper ’round the hills. My father, my grandfather. My own. This little spot is ours. We built this whole goddamned South, and I will keep what’s mine.
He rubbed the photo with his thumb, then lay it facedown on his chest. The breeze slinked over his skin, and the amber late summer sunset smudged into the cabin’s waxy windows.
Gabe had just drifted into a nap when a small battery of knocks hit his door.
7
She don’t know nothin’, Hare thought. Never will. Her jitters ruling her body. Her backhanded suggestions. That woman moves ’round me like a specter, like some haint, dodging this way and that, bent from my gaze. Thinkin’ she knows better than me—as if. Her cowardice. I sit in this chair and make like I’m asleep. Sit here silent, arms on rests, my breath a slow brook of water, while she muddles about in the kitchen, in the bedroom. Her knees creaking. Her thoughts racin’ like she knows anythin’ at all.
Sit in this chair and feel my feet on the porch boards, and the whiskey warm inside me. This chair, what my grandfather built. It has sat both him and my father. I have carried it from farm to farm. It is my final piece of their stake; it is the hand that clasps my father’s hand, and my grandy’s—though I got no memory of chair-buildin’. No memory of workin’ the spokeshave, or the lathe.
Goddamn it, I love her. But her insolence? She thinks me a failure, a lesser man. But what would she have me do? What else is left?
This chair under me, so smooth and reliable. Ain’t even a drop of glue in these joints. Drug farm to farm, field to field; it is the only thing I have left. It has sat my father and grandy. Has even rocked a Bird Clan Chickasaw woman.
Syl thinks she knows, thinks to influence my actions. Thinks she knows best, her body and thoughts ruled by tremors, her existence some living testament of Jeremiah. Goddamn her, I love her. I hear her in the trickle of water from the basin. I hear her thoughts of judgment, or perhaps of some damned fantasy. She thinks I’m asleep; thinks she knows the future.
I love her. She don’t know nothin’.
“An example,” they said to me. Mr. Wallis and the rest. Their whiskey. Smiles. Promises of what’s to come on this farm. Christian ethic and community, my ass. These groups they count on ain’t nothin’ more than alphabet letters: Klan to SCV, Citizens’ Council to LMA—or whatever all that other terror business is. The heads on the wall of their lodge, black bear and buck . . . ain’t nothin’ but heads. Symbols, like me.
They want me to be the eyes, the ears, the fists. “Find an example,” they ordered. “Make an example of someone.” A symbol, to send the rest of the blacks packing.
There ain’t no time left for Delta and Providence Farm. Ain’t no time left for mules, or men. So cast down that markin’ knife and chisel. Cast down your lathe, and your steam-bent wood. At last, this land will move into the future. And I will be a part of it. I have to.
Syl don’t understand this. Her thoughts are too distracted by sorrow and sin. She don’t get that Mr. Wallis and them’s finished with this old-timey soil business.
“You make an example,” Wallis said. Our example. “And the rest of them coloreds’ll run off for Chicago.” They say if I do what they ask, they’d surely be a small piece of homeplace for me. Some dirt I can own. With decent schooling for Sonny, if I just do what they ask.
Maybe more important was what they ain’t said. What they didn’t have to lay out was what happens to me if I don’t participate: I’ll be thrown off with the rest of the croppers. Forced to confront an even greater ruin. A greater span of distance from security. Stability. Respect.
