by Ron Hall
Then I felt like the Lord had given me a word for the people that was gathered there. And when the Lord say “speak,” ain’t much you can do but get up, open your mouth, and see what comes out.
Here’s what come out that day: “Miss Debbie was a close enough friend a’ mine that I prayed and prayed for her, day and night—even to the point of offerin God life for life. ‘Let me go in,’ I said to Him. ‘Let her stay here, ’cause she more worthy than me to stay here on this earth, and I would be better off to go on up to heaven ’cause I ain’t had no kinda luck down here.’”
But everbody there that day knowed it didn’t turn out that way. So I looked at Mr. Ron and Carson and Regan sittin over on the bench that Miss Pame put in, ’cause I knowed what I was fixin to say was gon’ be hard for them to hear.
“I know when somebody you love is gone, that’s the last time you feel like thanking God. But sometimes we has to be thankful for the things that hurt us,” I said, “’cause sometimes God does things that hurts us but they help somebody else.”
I could see folks noddin their heads. Mr. Ron and them just sat still and quiet.
“If you want to know the truth about it, nothin ever really ends but something new don’t begin,” I said. “When somethin ends in our sight, it begins somewhere else where we can’t hear it or see it or feel it. We live in two worlds—a physical world and a spiritual world. When Miss Debbie’s physical body laid down, her spirit rose up. When we come through this world, we just change form ’fore we go on to the next.”
I looked over at her grave at where Mr. Ron’s ranch hands had tucked some wild roses in an old bucket and set em up by Miss Debbie’s head. Then I looked at Mr. Ron again, and I could see him noddin then. He smiled a little, and I thought maybe he was rememberin that I had seen Miss Debbie’s spiritual body with my own eyes.
61
Summer burned through and September breezed in, its usual hot winds unseasonably cool. Denver and I spent a lot of time together. We talked about what we’d been through and tossed around the idea of writing our story down.
But to tell the story, I needed to know more about Denver’s roots. Had the place he’d come from been as bad as all that? I had been to the plantation in Red River Parish many times in my mind. But the images I conjured had a back-lot quality, as though a stagehand were constructing them using props left over from Gone with the Wind. Denver’s vocabulary, meanwhile, was short on adjectives, leaving us just one choice. I knew I had to go with him back to Red River Parish to see and touch the place that had produced this man who had changed my life. Denver had another reason for wanting to go back: to close the door on the past.
Maybe that’s why he clammed up when in early September 2001, we hopped on Interstate 20 and began our pilgrimage. As we motored east in my new Suburban—the old one had logged too many miles by then—Denver was unusually quiet, and I asked him why.
“I ain’t slept much lately,” he said. “Been nervous ’bout this trip.”
He’d been back before, to visit his sister, Hershalee, and his aunt Pearlie May. But in 2000, Hershalee had died, just a few months before Deborah, leaving Denver feeling permanently untethered from the close family bloodlines that bind us to earth and give us place.
We hadn’t been driving long before Denver’s head hit his chest like a rock falling off a cliff. A minute later, he started snoring. For the next three hours, the trip sounded like the scenic route through a sawmill. But once we crossed into bayou country, something in the air seemed to quicken his spirit: He didn’t rouse slowly from sleep but suddenly sat straight up.
“We nearly there,” he said.
The Louisiana air was warm and moist, heavy with the residue of recent rain. Soon, we were whipping by cotton fields, and Denver’s eyes brightened like those of a young boy passing an amusement park. Outside the windows, acres unrolled, and vast blankets of milky-white bolls stretched away to meet rows of hardwood trees that formed a distant horizon.
“Looky-there now, ain’t that purty! Just right for pickin!” Denver shook his head slowly, remembering. “Used to be hun’erds a’ colored folks spread out all the way across them fields as far as your eyes would let you look. And the Man’d be standin by his wagon with his scales, writin down how much ever one of em picked. These days, all that cotton just sittin there waitin for some big ole monster-lookin machine to run through there and strip it off. Them machines cost a lotta folks their jobs. It just don’t seem right.”
Again, Denver’s love-hate relationship with his plantation struck me. It was as though he wouldn’t have minded so much being stuck in an agrarian time warp if he hadn’t seen so much injustice in it.
We drove about another half-mile, Denver’s nose practically pressed against the window. “Here, Mr. Ron. Pull over right here.”
I eased the Suburban onto the gravel shoulder, and the tires crackled to a stop at the edge of the cotton, white rows fanning out like bicycle spokes. Denver stepped down into a muddy aisle and we walked between the rows, Denver running his hand lightly over the fluffy bolls.
“I plowed and chopped and picked the cotton in this field right here for a lotta years, Mr. Ron . . . a lotta years.” He sounded wistful and tired, then brightened as he let me in on a trade secret. “This is a good day for pickin ’cause there’s a little bit a’ dampness in the air,” he said with a wink. “Makes the cotton weigh more.”
“Don’t you think the Man figured that out and factored it in?” I asked.
Denver paused for a moment then laughed. “I ’spect so.”
I pulled a tiny digital camera from my pocket, and Denver slipped into sepia-portraiture mode as if I’d thrown a switch. He dropped one knee into the dirt and peered seriously into the lens through designer sunglasses, looking about as much like a former cotton-picker as Sidney Poitier. I snapped off several shots, and he was still frozen in his touristy pose when the soulful call of a train whistle floated over the fields.
“Was that your ride you caught out of here?” I asked.
Denver nodded solemnly. I wondered how many times he listened to that whistle before he heard it calling his name.
62
I was mighty anxious ’bout goin back to Red River Parish. I felt better when we crossed the Louisiana line, though. There was somethin in the air . . . memories, spirits, I don’t know. Ain’t every spirit good, but they ain’t all bad neither.
Mr. Ron took some pictures of me in one a’ the fields I used to work. We didn’t stay but just a minute ’fore we got back on Highway 1, which shot straight ahead, cuttin that cotton in half just like a long black knife.
We drove on for a purty good li’l piece till I told him, “Turn in right here.” He yanked the wheel hard right onto a old dirt road. Set back on the left was the Man’s house, and on the right was a new house I hadn’t never seen before.
We bumped down the road purty slow, kickin up a little mud, cotton spreadin all about. Wadn’t too long ’fore we saw a old, abandoned shack, gray and falling down, all the paint wore off it. “That was the Boss Nigger’s house,” I said.
Mr. Ron looked at me kind of funny. I guess he was surprised I said “nigger,” but that’s just what we said back then. Case you’re wonderin what the Boss Nigger did, it was just what it sound like: He was the colored man that bossed all the other colored folks around.
Mr. Ron kept drivin till I said, “Stop right here.”
Right there next to the road on the other side of a wire fence was a two-room shack looked like it was fixin to fall down any minute. There was weeds crawlin up over it. Wadn’t no front door, just a yella jackets’ nest as big as a hubcap. “That’s where I stayed,” I said, kinda quiet.
Wadn’t no place to pull off, so Mr. Ron just stopped the Suburban in the middle of the road. We got out, climbed over the fence, and poked around a bit, pushin through the high weeds, peekin in the windows. Wadn’t no glass in em. Never had been. Wadn’t nothin inside but cobwebs and yellow jackets and heap
s a’ trash. I wondered if any of it was mine. But after so much time had gone by, I reckoned not.
Mr. Ron just kept shakin his head. “I can hardly believe you lived here all those years,” he said. “It’s awful. Worse than I thought.”
Lookin at that shack, I could see myself as a young man, so proud to have my own place I didn’t even realize it wadn’t no bigger than a toolshed. I could see myself on the Man’s tractor in that field yonder. I could see myself tendin a hog out back a’ the shack and scrapin to make the meat last. I could see myself rollin out the bed ever mornin before sunrise, tendin the Man’s cotton year after year, and for nothin.
When Mr. Ron asked could he take some pictures of me in front of that shack, I let him. But I only smiled on the outside.
63
When Denver showed me where he used to live, I could hardly process it. Made of gray plank lumber, it was half the size of the shotgun shacks I’d grown up seeing in Corsicana, nearly small enough to fit in the back of a long-bed pickup truck. I stared up the road the way we’d come and remembered passing the Man’s house—a big white country house, clapboard, with a gracious porch complete with swing. The contrast disgusted me.
Denver didn’t say much as we poked around the place. Then he suggested we move on down to the house where Hershalee had lived. We climbed back into the Suburban, and as we rolled over the red dirt road, he told me how the Man had let her live in the house until she died even though she didn’t work the fields anymore and couldn’t pay rent. Denver seemed to think that was mighty decent of him.
For a moment, my mind drifted down a road it had traveled before: What kind of man was the Man? For decades, one Man kept sharecroppers barefoot and poor, but let a little colored boy earn a brand-new red Schwinn. Another Man let an old black woman live on his place rent-free long after she’d stopped working in the fields. A third Man kept Denver ignorant and dependent, but provided for him well beyond the time he probably could have done without his labor.
It seemed a throwback to the slavery-era doctrine called “paternalism,” the idea that black people were childlike and incapable of living free, and therefore better off as slaves. That it had happened to Denver in the mid-twentieth century shocked me.
About a quarter-mile down the road, we stopped at Hershalee’s. It was a real house—what you could see of it. Tarpaper shingles and grayed, peeling eaves stuck up from a ten-foot tangle of johnsongrass like the last dry deck on a sinking ship. Behind the house, thirty yards off, a pea-green bayou slunk from left to right. I shut down the Suburban, and Denver and I got out to survey the place.
At one time, Hershalee’s house had worn a coat of white paint trimmed in baby blue. But today it looked like a bomb had exploded nearby. All the windows were broken out. Trash and glass—mostly wine bottles—lay scattered in the few patches of bare ground that weeds had not yet overrun. The house sagged askew from sawed-off bois d’arc tree stumps, and the porch was rotten and falling away. From what we could tell, johnsongrass shrouded the house on all four sides. The parts of the windows we could see spilled forth only darkness.
Denver looked at me with a sly grin. “You scared to go in?”
“No, I’m not scared. How about you?”
“Me? I ain’t scared a’ nothin.”
With that, we breaststroked through the towering weeds like men on safari and jumped up on the porch—having to, since the steps had fallen off. Using the few remaining boards like stepping-stones, we picked our way to the front door, which hung open, reminding me of a hungry mouth.
Denver went in first, and I heard rodents skitter for cover as I followed him into a small parlor that had been ransacked then used as a dump. A divan was piled high with trash, broken chairs, and an old record player. A table and a dresser stood against the wall at odd, unlivable angles. Clothes littered the floor. A thick layer of dust lay over it all.
I took a step, kicking paper, and looked down to find an old pile of mail. On the top, a letter from the City of Fort Worth addressed to Denver Moore in Red River Parish, Louisiana. The date: March 25, 1995. I started to hand it to him, but he waved me off.
“You open it. You know I can’t read.”
I slipped a thumb under the yellowed envelope flap and the glue gave way like dust. Shaking out a single sheet inside, I unfolded what turned out to be a warrant for driving without a license. Squinting in the dim light, I read aloud: “Dear Mr. Moore, we have a warrant for your arrest for the amount of $153.00.”
We broke out laughing, the sound falling strangely in the dark, ramshackle house. I tucked the letter in my pocket, a keepsake. Reaching down, I scooped up another letter, this one addressed to Hershalee from Publishers Clearing House, informing her that she may have won $10 million. Looked like she’d died on the eve of her lucky break.
Hershalee’s bedroom was eerie, like walking through a life suddenly abandoned. Family photos still sat on the bureau. Her clothes still hung in the closet, and the bed was made.
Denver looked at the bed and smiled. “I remember one time Hershalee was watchin some other folks’ kids, and she wanted to make em mind. So we come in here’n closed the door, and she told me to jump up and down on the bed and holler like she was beatin the tar outta me. She wanted to make them other children do what she say.”
The memory turned him melancholy, but the moment passed quickly.
“Come on,” he said. “I want to show you Hershalee’s bathtub.”
Denver had told me about the tub when he’d bought it for Hershalee, using the money I’d insisted he keep from his Colorado adventure. Hershalee bathed in it but had never had it hooked up to running water, and she kept it on her screened-in back porch. Denver and I picked our way out there, straining to see in the house’s dark center. Boards groaned and creaked under our feet and the hair on my neck twitched a little. When we reached the porch, a little more light streamed in through the johnsongrass that crawled up the surrounding screens. And sure enough, there sat Hershalee’s bathtub, crawling with spiders.
Only the tub-half of the porch was screened in and open to the air. On the other end, some kind of extra room, dark and boarded up, jutted out toward the bayou.
“Hershalee was mighty proud she had this new tub,” Denver said. “Come on. I want to show you the potbellied stove where she heated up water to take a bath.”
He started toward the kitchen, but froze and looked back at me: “Did you hear that?”
I stopped and listened in the weird silence. Then I heard footsteps, like heavy boots. Worse, I heard heavy breathing. Someone was stalking toward us from inside the boarded-up room fifteen feet away. But it didn’t sound to me like someone—it sounded like something.
The hair on my neck stirred again and I looked at Denver. Thump, thump came the steps, then the creaking of a door handle. Denver’s eyes widened until they seemed the size of pie plates. “Let’s get outta here!” he whispered.
We bolted off the porch, back through the inky house, hurdling piles of trash and upended furniture. I barely beat Denver to the front door. We burst out, one-two. I leaped over the rotting porch planks and flew off the front porch, Denver airborne behind me. We hit the ground running, but a few feet from the house, pulled up and stopped.
I stared at Denver and he stared back, both of us panting with relief. Then we broke into nervous laughter.
“Do you think that was a possum or a coon?” I said lightly, as though neither of us had really been all that scared.
“Mr. Ron, ain’t no such thing as a two-hundred-pound possum or coon that wears boots and walks like a man.”
I picked up a big stick and looked back at the front porch, ready to do battle with whatever emerged. Then, instead of calling it a day, Denver and I did just what they do in the horror movies: We edged around the side of the house toward the bayou. I was fully prepared to see some kind of boot-wearing swamp monster lumbering back to his gooey lair. Less than a minute had passed when suddenly every hair on my body stood
at attention. Denver and I locked eyes, transmitting shared terror.
“Let’s get outta here!”
This time we both said it and raced back to the Suburban in a dead sprint. We jumped in, slammed the doors, and punched the lock buttons. I turned the ignition key and . . . nothing.
My brand-new car wouldn’t start. Over and over, I cranked the key forward. Denver’s head swiveled between the key and the house, the key, the house. His eyes grew wider. He punched the imaginary gas pedal on the passenger side, willing the thing to start.
The engine coughed and sputtered as though out of gas. But the tank was nearly full.
“Do you believe this?” I said, my voice up an octave.
“Sure do,” he said and swallowed.
A full minute passed as I tried the ignition again and again. The hair on the back of my neck was now so rigid the follicles hurt. The engine coughed and spit and finally caught. But when I pushed on the gas . . . nothing.
Terrified, I wouldn’t have been surprised if the swamp monster we hadn’t seen out back roared out from under the truck, crashed through the windshield, and ripped our throats out. I had never before felt such fear. It was visceral, palpable. With the engine barely turning, I jerked hard on the gearshift and we rolled forward, my $40,000 SUV limping like an antique buggy. About a quarter-mile down, the road dead-ended. I bumped off into a muddy pasture to turn around, but the engine stalled. As I cranked the ignition again and again, Denver kept glancing up the road, looking for the Something.
Finally, the Suburban sputtered to life again and I pulled back onto the road, the engine popping and sputtering like an old tractor with a tank of bad gas. We crept along like that until we passed Hershalee’s house. A hundred yards later, the engine roared to life then settled into a kittenish purr, gauges perfect, as if nothing had happened.
At that, Denver erupted into a belly laugh so all-consuming that if he’d been on an airplane, the oxygen mask would’ve dropped to help him breathe. He gasped and howled, tears squirting, until he finally blurted, “Now, Mr. Ron, you got a story to tell—a good one! You sure do!”
