Copyright © 2005 by Patricia Cunningham Devoto
All rights reserved.
Warner Books
Hachette Book Group, USA
237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Visit our Web site at www.HachetteBookGroupUSA.com.
First eBook Edition: June 2005
ISBN: 978-0-446-51994-6
Contents
Also By Pat Cunningham Devoto
Dedication
Epigraphy
Prologue
Chapter 1: Their Father
Chapter 2: The Seduction
Chapter 3: The Girls
Chapter 4: Maudie
Chapter 5: Eugenia
Chapter 6: Shiloh
Chapter 7: Tuskegee
Chapter 8: The Rutland Place
Chapter 9: The Surprise
Chapter 10: On the Road
Chapter 11: The Word of Truth Missionary Baptist Church
Chapter 12: The Water Boy
Chapter 13: Mon Amie
Chapter 14: Divorce
Chapter 15: Miss Laura
Chapter 16: The Card Game
Chapter 17: Highlander
Chapter 18: Scrimmage
Chapter 19: Reuben
Chapter 20: Reuben: The Early Years
Chapter 21: The Candidate
Chapter 22: The Rally
Chapter 23: The Drive-in
Chapter 24: Jessie
Chapter 25: Mr. Calvin K. Jerome
Chapter 26: Banking Business
Chapter 27: The Con
Chapter 28: The Sit-in
Chapter 29: The Gift
Chapter 30: Yolanda
Chapter 31: The Cross Thing
Chapter 32: The Rising Tide
Chapter 33: Izzy and Lou Ann
Chapter 34: The Float
Chapter 35: The Telling
Chapter 36: Dominique
Chapter 37: The Raid
Chapter 38: The Leaving
Chapter 39: The Campaign
Chapter 40: The Reckoning
Chapter 41: The Road Home
Chapter 42: The Blue Dodge
Chapter 43: The Last Night
Chapter 44: Home
Chapter 45: Trowbridge’s
The Parade
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
ALSO BY PAT CUNNINGHAM DEVOTO
Out of the Night That Covers Me
My Last Days as Roy Rogers
For my parents
Sara Thackston Cunningham and
Wells Rutland Cunningham
I have no way and therefore want no eyes. I stumbled when I saw.
—King Lear
There is a road: It runs east west out of Chattanooga, bound for Memphis, following the path of the Tennessee River as it dips down into the northern edge of Alabama. Turn off Highway 72 just out of Chattanooga and the road leads to Highlander Folk School, campground for the revolutionary leaders of the civil rights movement. Stay on 72, turning north some miles later, and that road winds into Pulaski, Tennessee, birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan.
PROLOGUE
IT WAS YEARS LATER, after their father died, that they came across it. Both of them were sitting on the front porch, taking a breather, halfway through cleaning out the old house on Walnut Street, the one their parents had moved to when the grandparents passed. The leavings of a lifetime were stacked in boxes on the porch and in the front hall. Tab had plugged in one of Miss Hattie’s old GE floor fans and it was blowing around memories. Tina finished her Chick-Fil-A, pitched the sack and half the fries in the trash, and flipped the top off an old shoe box, beginning again to sort.
It fell out on the floor between them, and Tab put down her Coke to pick it up. “How in the world did this survive?”
“How do you think? Mother saved everything, and then some.”
“Kids stopped using pencil boxes like this years ago.” Inside was the stub of a pencil, bits of eraser, and a crinkled piece of paper. When Tab tried to unfold it, blue remnants fell in her lap. “I am holding, or trying to hold, here in my hand, the thing dreams were made of—back then.”
“Well, I don’t remember that we had reefer paper back then, so what is it?”
“It’s a Blue Horse loose-leaf-paper filler band,” Tab said, reading from the faded label. “Says you can get a free camera or a bicycle headlight by saving a mere two hundred bands. Maudie and I were saving for a camera. She gave me this pencil box for safekeeping when she got polio and had to leave to go down to Tuskegee.”
“That black girl you were friends with when you were a kid. I remember.” Tina took a sip of Coke. “Of course, you realize that back then, in order to save two hundred bands, you and Maudie would have had to use up maybe ten tons of paper.”
“Back then”—Tab smiled at the long ago—“that kind of reasoning seemed perfectly logical.” She folded what was left of the paper, placed it carefully back in the pencil box, and pitched it in the trash.
CHAPTER 1
Their Father
SO INEVITABLE were its comings and goings that the Ford Ranchero seemed to steer itself off Highway 72 and onto the red clay roads of the Rutland place. As soon as it stopped, Charles Junior jumped out to play on the split-rail fencing that edged the pasture. Charles propped the morning paper against the steering wheel and read the article on the upcoming governor’s race, not because he was interested, but because he was loath to go inside to what his foreman had said he would find. The paper predicted Wallace the winner. He glanced up at Charles Junior, then lazed over to an article about Ike playing golf at Augusta. He had a notion that right here and now he might be able to take himself out of time—let the sun, beating down against the top of the cab, pressure-cook his little cubicle and ease him into a gentle, lasting sleep. Instead, he skimmed the movie section, folded the paper and placed it on the seat beside him, got out of the truck, and went inside.
Clyde, his foreman, stood off in a corner, watching. Charles raised the lid on the stainless-steel vat that was the receptacle for milk taken from the dairy cows. The heavy aroma of wild onions wafted up out of the vat. He let the metal top bang back down into place. “Four damn days’ worth of milking gone to waste—the second time this month.” A few of the dairy cows had broken through a fence and grazed on a field with wild onions.
“Ain’t nothing to do but pitch it,” Clyde said. “This rate, you ain’t never gonna get Will that new house.” Rather than sympathy, Charles thought he detected a note of satisfaction in Clyde’s voice.
He left the barn and walked down the road to Will’s. Mary had said something about new clothes for the girls. The boys didn’t matter—blue jeans and a T-shirt—but the older girls, Tab and Tina, were coming to an age when that sort of thing did matter. Will’s new house would have to wait.
Out on the sagging front porch, which was a good part of his living space, the old man was sitting in a straight-back cane-bottomed chair. Charles could hear the sounds of a hymn drifting through the old screen door, which had long ago lost its usefulness—poked with holes and bowed out at its bottom from the banging of grandchildren, the scratching of dogs. Will’s daughter, inside fixing the noon meal, was stuck on the same verse: “Oooh—sometimes it causes me to wonder . . . to wonderrrr.” It began to blend with the other sounds of the day: a tractor motor in the distance, chickens out in the yard fighting over the last bits of corn, the house dog chased by the yard rooster. Charles took a seat on the wooden swing that hung at the end of the porch. He got out a cigarette and struck a match on the back of the oak ribs.
“You got plenty of firewood? I’ll have Tot come up here and cut you some if you need it.”
“Nawsir
, got plenty of wood.”
They had known each other since Charles was a boy. Will had worked for his father, had gone to fetch the doctor the day Charles was born. “Did he get by here with your check yesterday?”
“Yessir, sho did.”
Charles looked out to the rectangle of concrete, way past curing, that was to be the foundation for the new house.
Will whittled. His knife disappeared into a calloused hand, churning away at a piece of white oak that would eventually reappear as a whistle for the grandchildren.
“Some bad news with the milk just now. The cows . . .” His voice trailed off because it didn’t matter why. “We’ll have to hold up on starting the walls.” He threw what was left of his cigarette out in the yard, watching the chickens come up to inspect the smoldering butt before they backed off in search of real sustenance.
He left and went back to the farm store to check on Charles Junior and to tell Clyde, “Be back. I’m going to check the springhouse,” and he was—in a way.
The natural spring sat in a draw, down in deep woods near the river. Tall birch trees and oaks towered over the old springhouse. Nurtured for over a hundred years by the spring, the trees were giants now. They must have already been big when his great-grandfather first came here and carved his name—Jonathan McDavid Rutland, 1820.
“The Cherokees weren’t good and gone before he was here, claiming the land for us,” his father had told him. There were all manner of things cut into the trees: initials of young lovers, Indian symbols, or what he thought were Indian symbols. Maybe the slaves had carved messages in the trees when they had come down to fetch water up to the main house, which was over a mile away. The main house had always had its own water, but this spring was supposed to have the best-tasting water in the county.
Carved into the tree nearest the spring was what appeared to be a Confederate battle flag and, carved beside it, “Franklin Blues.” Perhaps young boys had come for a drink in the sweltering midsummer heat, shedding their wool uniforms, squatting down, ducking their heads into the cool water, filling canteens for the long march. He liked to think of them sitting there, momentarily refreshed before they took to the hot, dusty roads again—great numbers of them to be killed.
When he was a boy, he had carved “Charles Lane Westmoreland Rutland.” He had been named in the English fashion—bestowing multiple middle names—partly because his father wanted to show ties to his British heritage, and as a practical matter because there were so many relatives to be placated and there would be only one firstborn son.
There had been a sister, Eugenia, born before him and received pleasantly enough. She was healthy, would be a wonderful companion to her mother and perhaps marry well, but she had not been afforded extra names. It would have been pretentious. When she was young, she had been immediately precocious, talking early, reading by the time she was five. Her father had been very proud, but she was not a boy, would not be there to ensure his step off into eternity.
Charles stooped down by the springhouse and listened for the hum of the motor that pumped water back over the hill to the south field’s watering troughs. He splashed his face and took a drink. It might be the best-drinking water in the county, but nobody seemed to care about that anymore. Too many other choices now—tea and Coca-Cola and Kool-Aid. People didn’t appreciate good water anymore.
From here, he always walked up the hill to the family graveyard, sat down on one of the raised markers, and pulled out a cigarette. It was pleasant, always a breeze and a good view of the river. This routine—going to the spring, looking at the river from the graves—always made him feel better; or if not better, then more secure in what he was doing—in what he was meant to do.
CHAPTER 2
The Seduction
CHARLES HAD BEGUN WORK on the farm as a young boy, on weekends and during the summers. By the time he was ten, he had been made responsible for one of the most important, if menial, jobs on the Rutland place—weighing the cotton during picking season. His sister, Eugenia, would watch from under the shade of the big oaks in the front yard of the main house, begging to be allowed to go to the fields and work, too. Mr. Ben would pat her on the head. “Too much sun isn’t good for a lady’s skin, Eugenia.”
Charles would stand by the cotton wagons situated in the middle of the field in the heat of the late summer, responsible for weighing the cotton sacks that were brought back to the wagon by the pickers. It was a job of huge importance. Some farms were known to adjust the scales to give the owner advantage. Some pickers were known to add rocks to their sacks. He had been proud that he checked the adjusting screw periodically, that he felt each sack and watched as it was dumped in the wagon, to make sure no rocks rolled out in among the bolls. He never gave a short weight to anyone who had been hours in the sun. The pickers, black and white, had timed their picking to end at Charles’s wagon so he could do the weighing. From the time he was a child, he had felt his place—and liked it. Eugenia had never felt her place and never liked it.
Later, there would be another sister, Helen, and a younger brother, Arland. They had never questioned the way of things. Eugenia had always questioned everything.
Charles had been given his own horse, with a roll-top saddle like his father’s, and would ride behind him out into the fields to inspect the crops. One afternoon, he was sitting on the steps of the log cabin that served as the farm office. His father had been called away to another part of the property. Charles was eating his sack lunch and waiting for Mr. Ben’s return when he noticed one of the tenants running up the road toward him. She had been quite a distance away and had come close before Charles had seen the distress in her eyes. Sue Ann was breathless by the time she reached him.
“Waylon done turned the wagon over on hisself, Little Boss. You gotta come.” He was up and running with her back along the dirt road, wondering why she thought that he, at twelve years old, could do anything about it. As it happened, he saw that he could do something. He immediately began unloading the sacks of corn off the heavy wagon, Waylon moaning underneath.
“Go ring the bell, Sue Ann. Go, run,” he had shouted. He could hear the big plantation bell echoing all over the fields as he dragged sack after sack off the fallen wagon. By the time he had lightened the load enough, other workers had come in response to the bell and could help right the wagon. The man under, suffering a broken leg, had stopped the men who were carrying him off long enough to call him “Mr. Charles” when he thanked him. His father, upon hearing the story, had reached in his pocket and given him his penknife. He couldn’t imagine ever being any happier. He had gone to the springhouse that very afternoon and carved his name.
Later that same summer, on one of their rides, his father had looked out over the fields and said to Charles that someday he would be responsible for all of this, and Charles, at that moment, had felt there could be no better job, that there could be no finer place to live than in a world in which he was the hero.
He had not noticed the large gullies that had formed as a result of years of planting the same thing over and over, had not known that the end result of fields of healthy green bushes sprouting white puffs was brought about by large loans that had to be paid off at the end of each growing season, or—if not paid off—they would sink the farm into deeper and deeper debt. By then, he was twelve and king of the hill. He had not observed that the hill seemed to be shrinking as small parts of what had once been a huge tract of land were sold off each season to satisfy unpaid debt. It had not entered his mind, at that young age, that even then his debt to the system which was breeding him had become insurmountable.
Early on, the family had moved to town so that Charles and his siblings could attend public school. After graduation, his best friend, Reuben, had gone up east to college. Charles had gone to a state university, nearby and inexpensive, the University of Tennessee. He worked part-time to make room and board, and he met Mary, the daughter of the president of the university.
It was
not until he came home to settle in with his new bride that the enormity of what he had committed to began to sink in. It was not until his father let him take a look at the farm ledgers, let him take them home and study them, that he began to comprehend.
Thoughts of the Great Depression still lingered somewhere out there, pushed back out of sight by each turn of the sixteen-disk harrow in red clay, by backbreaking summers on the hay baler, hot, sweaty bodies coated like flypaper with the swirling chaff. From a distance, the word plantation sounded dim, diffused, even romantic; up close, it was hot, grueling, worn-out.
He and Mary had spent the first five years of their marriage scrimping and saving, living in the run-down old plantation house out in the country. At the end of those five years, when they were four—two girls, Tina and Tab, had arrived—Mary had insisted they be allowed to attend a town school. They moved into Bainbridge and Charles began driving out to the farm every day.
Now he had been farming for over nineteen years and, in that time, three more children had arrived. His first two, Tab and Tina, were on the verge of becoming young women. He was beginning to notice specks of gray. It was a life he had settled into, much like chocolate poured into a mold fills up every nook and cranny to gain the perfect likeness.
This was the way of men of his generation. The job of nurturing had been left up to the women. For men, the assigned measure of love took the form of provider and protector. A man’s love was not weighed in any outward expression, but in a lifetime of being there, and that was not fully indemnified until the whole lifetime had played out. Though a man might feel the pressure of such responsibility and take to the bottle, and though he might squander what money he was able to earn on gambling or enjoy extra time with worldly women, all was forgiven, or overlooked, if he could be counted on to be there. If he did not stay the course, he became like so many tinkling ice cubes melting away in an afternoon’s glass of tea.
The Summer We Got Saved Page 1
