by Susan Vaught
“Surely,” Dr. Harper said. His smile got a little fixed. “But the pages, girls. The rest of what Ruth wrote?”
I might have been imagining it, but he seemed a little too . . . eager. Or something. On impulse, I picked up the few papers I had let him see, then remembered the key I had zipped into the front pocket of my pack. I put the papers back on his table and fished it out, showing it to him on the palm of my hand. “Any idea what this might unlock?”
Dr. Harper stared at the key, his eyes wide and his brows drawn tight together. His face went slowly pale, until he looked like the blank white typing paper on his table.
Indri gave me a look, then glanced back at the professor, who was nervously rubbing his neck. He seemed to realize we were staring at him, and he mumbled, “It’s, uh, a bit too small for a door.”
His voice sounded thin, and his smile was definitely forced. He reached for the key, but I closed my fingers over it, and quickly put it away.
For a split second his face darkened, like he was angry. My thoughts banged together too fast. My backpack seemed to fight with me as I tried to cram Grandma’s papers inside, so I gave up, shouldered the pack, and gathered the papers into my arms. I didn’t like having all the lynchings and mysteries and murders hugged tight to my chest, and I didn’t like how Dr. Harper had just acted about Grandma’s key.
Neither did Indri. She inched away, toward the door. “Thanks,” she said to Dr. Harper. “We’ll, um, call you.”
Or not.
Dr. Harper cleared his throat again and blinked a few times. A little color came back to his cheeks, and he managed another fakey-type smile. “I’ll look forward to seeing you at Square Books.”
We hurried out of his office.
It was all I could do not to run past the big stained glass window, covering my eyes as I went.
11
NOT WHAT I EXPECTED
* * *
Excerpt from Night on Fire (1969), by Avadelle Richardson, page 304
Both sides of the ice cream line went motionless and quiet. Leslie kept her back turned to the crowd. My heart beat so hard I couldn’t swallow. I couldn’t even breathe.
The White woman didn’t say anything else. She didn’t even look at Leslie, just sniffed and humphed, then waited her own turn. Leslie had enough sense to take her banana split and walk off, rather than go into either side of the restaurant.
Half an hour later, finishing our own ice cream cones, Aunt Jessie and I walked back to the out-of-the-way road where we had left the car. We found Leslie standing next to my faded red Mercury Marquis. Her arms were folded.
“I’m not even speaking to you,” I said. “You’re completely crazy, and you’re gonna get me killed.” I threw my ice cream on the grass beside the car, then looked around, suddenly nervous some White person would show up and see us, see me, see everything. “You’re gonna get my boy killed, and then I’ll just kill you, too. I’ll do it myself, with my own two hands.”
Eyes wide and pleading, Leslie looked at Aunt Jessie for help.
“Child, what that woman was saying, it wasn’t even directed at you.” Aunt Jessie held out one big, black arm and pressed it against Leslie’s pale, freckled skin. She forced a laugh, trying to make us all feel better, but Leslie refused to laugh along with her.
Finally, Aunt Jessie shook her head. “Now that things are starting to happen in Oxford, you got to be more careful.”
“That man James Meredith,” I said, “the one who got turned down by Ole Miss because he was Black, well, he filed a lawsuit last month. He means for to be heard all the way up to the Supreme Court. He means to go to school at Ole Miss this fall. Folks like that woman in line, they’re scared, and it’s only gonna get worse from here.”
“Scared people do stupid things,” Aunt Jessie said. “So here’s the first, best rule for survival in Mississippi. Don’t never trust a scared person, not ever. You understand me?”
INDRI AND I RUSHED TO the entryway and she held the outer door open for me. Together, we spilled through it, jogged down the concrete steps, and made it to the sidewalk. Then we stood there with our backs to the Grove, staring at the building and blinking and breathing, letting the light and the warmth cover us.
After a few moments, Indri said, “That . . . was . . . NOT . . . what I expected. Any of it.”
“Me either,” I admitted. Talking seemed hard, like the muscles in my mouth didn’t want to cooperate. “What was that about, his reaction to the key?”
“It was kind of awful.” She gave me a sideways look. “He knew something he didn’t tell us.”
“Yeah. But what?”
“No idea.” Indri shook her head. “All of that creeped me out.”
“What are you two doing here?” somebody growled from behind us and I spun to find Avadelle Richardson right in front of me, fedora and all. She was wearing a T-shirt with gold fringes that sort of looked like a lampshade, but it matched the gold threads in her slacks. The slogan on the shirt read, I hate everybody!
The snarly look on her face made the slogan all too real. Bits of silvery hair poked out from beneath the fedora, sticking to her sweaty face as she gazed at the papers in my arms. Her cheeks turned sunburn-red. She raised her cane to eye level and shook it at me. “I thought I told you not to muck in Ruth’s work!”
I stepped back from her, cradling the papers, and that’s when I saw Mac beside her. He had his hands jammed in his jeans pockets, and he looked tired. His gaze shifted from my face to the papers, and his frown made me feel like a salted slug. I moved backward again, wondering how many more steps it would take for me to be safe from a swing of that cane. Mac would probably stop Avadelle if she tried to smack me with the eagle’s head, but he looked so mad I didn’t trust him to move fast enough.
“Ms. Richardson,” I said, stealing words from Dad and trying to sound as much like him as I could, “this is really none of your business.”
“Yeah,” Indri agreed, but she backed up with me, squinting at the sunlight glaring off the cane’s bird-shaped handle.
I looked at Mac for a long second, then looked away. People moved on the sidewalk in both directions, but nobody seemed inclined to get close enough to Avadelle to help us.
She finally lowered the cane but raised her voice. “What were you two good-for-nothings doing in Ventress? Did you talk to Fred Harper? What did he tell you?”
No way was I answering that. Even if I’d wanted to, I wouldn’t have a clue how to explain what just happened in Dr. Harper’s office. All I could do was stand my ground, wondering if Indri and I should turn and make a run for the Grove and Creative Arts and Ms. Yarbrough.
“I know you hate me now, Dani,” Mac said, “but are you trying to make my life harder?”
“Everything’s not about you, Worm Dung.” Indri’s comeback was almost as loud as Avadelle’s raggedy breathing.
“So what if we saw Dr. Harper?” I asked Avadelle. “Why does that matter to you?”
“Worm dung?” Mac asked nobody in particular. “As in worm . . . poop?”
“Worm, caterpillar, snake, maggot.” Indri shrugged. “Take your pick.”
Avadelle ignored Mac and Indri as she glared at me. She smacked the cane down on the pavement and leaned on it. “I don’t have to tell you a thing, girl.”
“And I don’t have to tell you anything either.” My arms were getting sweaty against the manuscript pages, but I didn’t dare try to get them into my pack now. “Except this. My grandmother gave these papers to me, not you. Whatever I find out about your feud, she wanted me to know.”
“Dani—” Indri started, but she didn’t try to finish. It was probably the look on Avadelle’s face, three parts fury and one part stunned sadness, that made her hush. I know it shut me up cold.
“What happened between me and Ruth,” Avadelle said in a deadly quiet voice, “that’s old history. She’s half dead and I’ve got one foot in the grave.”
She had a point, and even though she was a
mean old witch, I felt even more like a slug for upsetting her again. “I’m sorry if it bothers you, Ms. Richardson. I really don’t have anything against you. I’m just trying to figure out what’s making my grandmother so unhappy, so she can stop crying and be at peace.”
Mac had stepped up beside Avadelle, his hands hovering near her cane in case she raised it again. His eyes widened as I spoke, and so did hers.
“Ruth is upset?” she asked, leaning away from me like she was the one thinking about running now.
Something tugged at my pack, and I realized it was Indri, trying to get the strap off my shoulder. I stretched out one arm and let her take it, but I kept my gaze on Avadelle. The breeze blew again, bumping the brim of Avadelle’s hat. I heard the zipper of my pack whizzing along its track as Indri got the bag open, but I felt like a bubble had formed around us, freezing the day into so much green and gold stained glass, because Avadelle turned whiter than any of the ghostly soldiers in the Ventress Hall window. Her eyes seemed to hollow out, and her cheeks flattened, and she got one hundred years older in between one breath and the next. Her hand lifted off the eagle-head cane. Her knobby fingers fluttered just above her chest, and right that second, I was pretty sure she had a heart, and that it was hurting her, in more ways than one.
“GG, you all right?” Mac reached to steady her, but she turned around and marched away from us, smacking her cane with each step.
Indri pulled Grandma’s papers out of my arms, and I let go of them without fighting her. As she stuffed the manuscript into my pack, Mac watched his grandmother head up the steps into Ventress.
“We have an appointment with Dr. Harper,” he said, sounding confused and surprised.
“Why?” Indri asked as she closed up the pack, protecting the papers from the breeze and my sweaty skin and Avadelle, too, if she changed her mind and came charging back with that cane leading the way.
“No clue,” Mac said, turning to face us. “GG gives the orders. I just try to keep her out of trouble.” He rubbed both eyes with his fingertips.
Sympathy must have showed in my expression, because Indri nearly yanked my arm out of the socket as she slid the pack strap back into place. I ignored her and asked, “Are you having to take care of her all the time now?”
Mac put his hands back in his pockets. “All last week, and the first part of this one, because Mom has to be out of town.”
The world around us seemed more solid now, and I could tell it was getting way past lunchtime since the crowd on the sidewalk was so thin. “Looking after her has to be hard,” I told him.
One side of his mouth quirked into a smile, but sort of a sad one. “I guess you do understand how that is.”
Leaves rustled in the bushes and trees, and Indri snorted like a ticked-off bull as I came back with, “I’m sorry about her seeing the papers. Dr. Harper got—well. We left Ventress in a hurry, and the papers wouldn’t go back in the pack right, and I didn’t—just, I’m sorry.”
I expected Indri to step on my foot, but she didn’t. At least not yet. She just stood beside me, arms folded, the picture of suspicion and no-way-am-I-being-friendly-to-WORM-DUNG.
Mac’s gaze flicked to the pack. “What’s it all about, anyway? The feud, for real?”
“The first part’s just on civil rights,” I said. “Sort of. It’s bigger than that, really. More like a time line of Mississippi history, but with a lot of stuff we never read about in school.” Thinking about my rainbow name shining out from dark crayon, I added, “Grandma wrote about her wars and ghosts, for context. You know, to help me understand whatever happened between her and Avadelle.”
Mac nodded as Indri’s foot started to tap. “Dani, we’re late,” she said. “We better get back before Ms. Yarbrough calls our parents.”
“I’m sorry GG won’t tell you what she knows, if it would stop your grandmother from being upset,” Mac said, making me pretend Indri hadn’t just told me we needed to leave.
“Do you know what they fought about?” I asked him.
Mac shook his head. “She won’t talk about Ms. Beans at all.” He pointed to the manuscript. “Except to say that digging up bones doesn’t do anything but make angry ghosts.”
Digging up bones doesn’t do anything but make angry ghosts. That phrase shot into my head and stuck like a dart. All of a sudden, I wanted to know why Avadelle was meeting with Dr. Harper. Had he told her we were coming to see him? Would he tell her what he’d seen in the papers so far, and about the key? What did he know, anyway—about what Grandma was writing, and the key, too?
My eyes shifted to Ventress Hall, and I thought about storming up the steps again, banging on his door, and demanding answers, whether Avadelle was there or not.
“No,” Indri said. “Just, no. Going after her won’t help anything, and I don’t want to be around Dr. Harper again right now.”
Mac’s face tensed, and his fists clenched. “Please don’t follow GG in there. That’ll just set her off a thousand times worse.”
White-hot noise roared in my mind. Neither one of them had watched my grandmother weep and cry and whisper about the secrets trying to claw their way out of her broken mind. They didn’t know. They might not even think it was that big of a deal.
Stop, my better self reminded me. These are your friends. Well, one of them is, anyway.
My anger started to ebb as fast as it had crested. Because that was the truth. I wasn’t angry with Indri. I didn’t know what I felt about Mac, not really, except I didn’t want to miss a chance to get more information, just in case Grandma didn’t manage to get all of her thoughts on paper. And it wasn’t so bad, actually, talking to Mac when he wasn’t being an idiot.
“Dr. Harper told us my grandmother got injured during that riot back in the 1960s,” I said.
“The Meredith riot? Yeah, I remember GG talking about that.” Mac pulled his hands out of his pockets and shoved his hair out of his eyes. “She said she met your grandmother a few years before all that stuff, that she got hurt and had to go to a hospital in Chicago—but I don’t know how Ms. Beans got hurt.”
He absently picked at the ends of his fingers, scratching the callouses he got from pressing his skin into metal guitar strings. “So,” I said, “you still playing your guitar a lot?”
“Every day.” He stopped messing with his fingers, like he got suddenly self-conscious about it.
Indri huffed out another few sighs, so fast it sounded like she was blowing gnats out of her face.
Mac looked me in the eye, his gaze steady, his body more relaxed now. “I still have the band, too.”
I thought about Indri and me sitting for hours, eating cheese and crackers and drinking Coke while Mac strummed and Ben beat the drums and DeMario played the keyboard. They hammered at the same loud song over and over and over—but really, they didn’t suck too bad.
“My parents finally soundproofed the garage so we can practice whenever we want now,” Mac added. He took a breath like he wanted to ask me if I wanted to come to their practice again, but he didn’t.
“Dani.” Indri caught hold of my arm at the elbow and started to tug. “We really, really have to get back to camp now.”
I looked back over my shoulder. “We need to go to Square Books and talk to Ms. Manchester, and get some details about the night of the riot.”
“Aunt Naomi?” Mac nodded. “She knows a lot about that night. Call me when you go, and I’ll meet you there.” Mac watched Indri tow me down the sidewalk toward the Grove entrance, and then he grinned and called out, “See you then. Um, later.”
He waved, and Indri made me turn around. She kept pulling me along, muttering, “I cannot believe you,” and, “Good thing I’m here to be the one with actual common sense,” and, “Did we just have a decent conversation with Worm Dung?”
“Yeah, I think so.” I caught up with her, and she finally trusted me to keep going and let go of my arm.
“Ew, we did. We spoke to that lowlife.” She brushed off her sh
irt like she had bugs. “I need to go home and take a shower.”
“Come on. It wasn’t that bad.”
“He blew you off, Dani, like you had no meaning at all to him.”
“Yeah, yeah. I know. You’re right.” Somehow, I didn’t look back toward Ventress Hall to see if Mac had already gone inside. Indri was probably right.
But I had to admit, for a minute or two there, Mac was the nice guy I remembered him being.
12
SOMEBODY HAS TO DO THE RIGHT THING
* * *
Excerpt from Night on Fire (1969), by Avadelle Richardson, page 315
A week later, I was still mad, but I couldn’t explain myself. I felt too weary to try. Just when I thought Leslie truly understood the world I lived in, that my son, Abram, and my mother and my aunt lived in, she pulled some stunt that let me know she didn’t grasp reality. Maybe she never would.
Could any White person understand living Black in Mississippi?
We were getting ready for our Tuesday-night class, and I dusted shelves too hard, too fast, and I didn’t talk. Leslie had the books ready on the desks, but she kept fiddling with them, trying to get me going. “ ‘All of us failed to match our dreams of perfection. So I rate us on the basis of our splendid failure to do the impossible.’ ”
She waited.
I heard myself grunt just like Aunt Jessie, and then I sighed. “That’s from William Faulkner’s Paris Review interview you gave me. The 1958 one. Too easy.”
“How do you rate me, CiCi?” She turned toward me, and the single bulb in the room underscored the shadows ringing her eyes. She wasn’t wearing lipstick, and her hair lay flat against her head. In her drab brown dress, she looked more a prisoner than a woman of privilege.
I quit dusting and leaned against my desk, rag still in my hand. “Say what?”
“How do you rate me? What do you think of me? Really?”
