“You know my father,” I said. “It seemed like Maybelle’s was the smart place to be. My father and I just don’t get along.”
“All right, then. But there is one question I been dying to ask: What in hell are you doing back in Eudora?”
“Nothing much,” I said. “I’ve got a little business to tend to.”
“Lawyer business?”
“Just a simple job for the Justice Department. I have to interview a few lawyers in the county, that’s all it is. In the meantime – it’s catfish!” I said.
Pretty soon Miss Fanny came from behind the counter bearing plates of crispy fried fish, sizzling-hot hush puppies, and ice-cold sweet-pickle coleslaw. The first bite was delicious, and every bite after. I asked Miss Fanny what time the place opened for breakfast, and made up my mind never to suffer through another of Maybelle’s breakfasts.
“Hell, I look old, but you still look like a high-school boy, Ben,” said Jacob. “Like you could run ten miles and never even break a sweat.”
“Oh, I did plenty of sweating just riding that bike a dozen blocks,” I said. “It’ll take me a while to get used to this heat again. How you been keeping yourself, Jacob?”
“Well, let me see… you probably heard I turned down the offer to be ambassador to England… and that was right after I passed on the chance to be president of the university up in Tuscaloosa. Well, sir, it was shortly after that I made up my mind that the profession I was most suited for was as a carpenter’s assistant.”
“That’s good,” I said. “Honest work.”
“Yeah, me and Wylie Davis are the men you want to see if you need a new frame for your window screens, you know, or a new roof for your johnny house.”
Then there was silence, a good and acceptable kind of silence – nothing nervous or uncomfortable about it. The kind of quiet that is tolerable only between old friends.
It was Jacob who finally broke it.
“They were good days, Ben. Weren’t they?”
“They were great days.”
“We were friends! Right through it all.”
“The best,” I said. “We were like brothers.”
We clinked our iced-tea glasses. Then Jacob spoke.
“But there is one thing I need to make very clear to you, Ben.”
“What’s that?” I tried to keep the note of concern out of my voice.
“You said we were like brothers?”
“Yeah? That’s what I said.”
“I just need to remind you of something.”
“Well, go ahead, Jacob,” I said.
“I was always the pretty one.”
Chapter 31
ENOUGH!
Enough idle thoughts about my long-ago romance with Elizabeth Begley.
Enough turning over in my mind the painful lack of affection between my father and me, the disgust in his face when he saw me for the first time in six years.
Enough reliving an old friendship like Jacob’s and mine.
Theodore Roosevelt hadn’t sent me to Eudora to take a rickety bicycle ride down memory lane. I had a job to do, and it might even help change history.
I paid the bill for our lunch, and Jacob left two bits for Miss Fanny. Then he headed off up Commerce Street to help Wylie frame a new roof for the front porch of the town hall.
An old black man stepped off the sidewalk as Jacob passed, not to avoid a collision, but simply making the customary show of respect. Black men of all ages had been stepping down off sidewalks to get out of my way since I was five years old.
I rode the bicycle back to Maybelle’s, changed my shirt, and set off on foot for the Eudora Quarters. On my way out, I made sure to tell Maybelle I had some interviews to attend to.
I considered trying to hire a horse and buggy, and couldn’t think of anywhere in town to do such a thing. My father had three perfectly good horses in his barn, of course, but I was determined to do what I came to do without him.
ABRAHAM CROSS, EUDORA QUARTERS said the slip of paper the president had given me.
It was time for me to meet this Mr. Cross.
Chapter 32
I KNEW THE STREETS of the Quarters almost as well as I knew the rest of Eudora. I knew the history of how it came to be. After the war, the slaves from all the plantations and farms in the vicinity of Eudora had been freed. Most of them had either left their previous lodgings or been turned out by masters who no longer wanted to provide housing for people they didn’t own.
So the freed slaves built their homes where no one else wanted to live, in a swampy, muddy, mosquito-ridden low place half a mile north of the center of Eudora.
They gathered fallen logs from the woods and lumber from derelict barns to build their little houses. They laid boards across the swampy, pestilential ground to keep their children’s feet out of the mud. They stuffed rags and old newspapers in the chinks in the walls to keep out the wind in winter.
They ate squirrel and possum, poke sallet and dandelion greens. They ate weeds from the field, horse corn, the leftover parts of a pig, and whatever else they could get their hands on.
Walking along there now, as the neighborhood changed from poor white to poorer black, I saw a colored man sitting on the porch of a shack painted a gay shade of blue. He nodded at me.
I returned his nod. “Pardon me, do you know a man by the name of Cross? Abraham Cross?”
He never blinked. His eyes didn’t move from mine, but I had the feeling he was deciding whether or not I was worthy of the information I sought.
“Yes, suh,” he finally said. “If you just keep walkin’, you will come on a house with a strong smell of onions. That will be Abraham’s house.”
The sight of a white man walking on this street was not a welcome one for most of the people I came across. They kept their eyes down as they passed, which seemed to be customary now in Eudora but had not been the case when I was a boy.
Within minutes I caught the sharp tang of onions on the air. I saw thick patches of the familiar blue-green stalks in the yard of a small red house.
Suddenly, from the space between two houses, one little boy came running, followed by two more, and two more in pursuit.
“He gonna snatch you and eat you,” the lead boy shouted.
Then I saw what was chasing them – a wild pig, huge and hairy and grunting, bearing down on the boys with a pair of very bad-looking tusks.
“That ain’t the most beautiful animal in the world,” said a colored man standing on the porch of the red house.
I answered, “That is a face not even a mother could love.”
I looked closer. The man was taller than me, by at least three inches, and older, by at least fifty years.
“But she sure is beautiful when she’s angry,” he said.
We both laughed.
Then he said, “Begging your pardon, sir, but I get the idea you might be looking for someone.”
“Well, as a matter of fact, I am looking for a man. His name is Abraham Cross.”
“Yes, sir. You lookin’ at him.”
I must have appeared surprised.
“You was expectin’ some young fella, weren’t you, Mr. Corbett?”
“No, I– I really had no idea who to expect…”
“Well, sir, I confess I was expectin’ a young fella myself. So I guess at least one of us was right.”
Chapter 33
MAYBE IT WAS because he looked like a picture of silver-haired wisdom. I just don’t know. But the truth is, I liked Abraham Cross from the moment I met him.
When he shook my hand, he grasped my shoulder with his other hand, so that I felt well and truly gripped.
“From this moment, Mr. Corbett–”
“Call me Ben,” I said.
“From this moment, Mr. Corbett,” he said pointedly, “I am happy to be of service to you as a guide and advisor. With luck, we may also become friends.”
I told him that I felt luck would be on our side.
He offered me a se
at on his porch, which had a view of everyone passing along the boards from one end of the Quarters to the other. Abraham greeted everyone – man, woman, child – with a friendly wave and a personal word of greeting. I think if that hairy old boar had come back, Abraham would have waved and said howdy.
Abraham Cross had the way of a man at ease with himself. He wore dark woolen trousers, a neatly ironed white shirt, and a navy blue bowtie. I don’t know if he’d dressed up because he was expecting me or if he dressed this way every day.
On his head was a faded blue baseball cap with the initial P faded to near invisibility. I asked him what the P stood for.
“Pythians,” he said. “Does that mean anything to you?”
“Weren’t they athletes in ancient Delphi?” I said.
“Well, sir, I may be old but I ain’t as old as the Greeks in old Delphi,” he said, laughing.
Then he explained.
His greatest love in his young life, he told me, was baseball. After the War between the States he headed north, where a few Negro teams played.
“Notice I said they ‘played.’ I didn’t say they ‘flourished.’ Anyways, I made the team in Philadelphia. We was porters and butlers, iron men, lawn mower men during the week. On the weekends we played baseball.”
At Abraham’s nod, I followed him off his porch and toward the little “downtown” of the Quarters.
We were passing the colored general store, Hemple’s, where you could see the canned goods inside through gaps between the boards. By the front door stood a neat pyramid of beautiful peaches.
Abraham reached into his pocket for a couple of pennies, which he took inside to the old man at the cash box. He came back out and selected a nice fat peach from the side of the stack.
“Were you any good?” I asked the old man.
He smiled. He looked past me to a broom standing just inside the door. He asked me to hand it to him.
“You want to know if I was any good?”
He held the broom short, like a baseball bat. Then he tossed that beautiful peach into the air.
He swung.
He connected. Tasting a fine spatter of peach juice on my face, I watched it sail up and up, into the hot afternoon sky.
“Don’t bother to go lookin’ for that peach,” he said.
“I believe it is gone,” I agreed.
“In a minute or two it’s gonna be in Loosiana,” he said with a grin. “They always said tall, skinny boys like you and me can’t play baseball. They say we too far from the ground. I’ll tell you something, I proved they don’t know everything.”
He wiped the broom handle on his shirt and put the broom back inside.
We walked a few minutes in silence. Then Abraham stopped, his face suddenly serious.
“I could talk baseball and swing at soft peaches all day,” he said. “But you and I have some other business.”
“Yes, we do,” I said.
“This is serious business, Mr. Corbett. Sad business. My people are worse off now than they were the day Mr. Lincoln signed the Emancipation.”
Chapter 34
“WE DON’T HAVE TO GO far to find a lynching tree,” Abraham said. “But I know how tired you young fellas get from walking in the heat of the day. I reckon we’d best take the hosses.”
The two “hosses” Abraham led out from a rickety blacksmith shop were mules – in fact, they were mules that had hauled one too many plows down one too many cotton rows. But those skinny animals proved their worth by depositing us, less than twenty minutes later, at a secluded swampy area that was unmistakably the site of a lynching.
Unmistakably.
A cool grotto tucked back in the woods away from the road. Big branches interlaced overhead to form a ceiling. The dirt was packed hard as a stone floor from the feet of all the people who had stood there watching the terrible spectacle.
Abraham pointed to an oak at the center of the clearing. “And there’s your main attraction.”
Even without his guidance, I would have recognized it as a lynching tree. There was a thick, strong branch barely a dozen feet from the ground. The low dip in the middle of the branch was rubbed free of its bark by the friction of ropes.
I walked under the tree. The hard ground was stained with dark blotches. My stomach churned at the thought of what had happened in this unholy place.
“Somebody left us a greeting,” Abraham said. “That would be the Klan.”
He was pointing behind me, to the trunk of a sycamore tree. About five feet up, someone had used an odd-looking white nail to attach a plank with crude lettering on it:
BEWARE ALL COONS!
BEWARE ALL COON LOVERS!
“I’ve never seen a nail that color,” I said.
“You never seen a nail made out of human bone?” said Abraham.
I shuddered, reaching up to haul the plank down.
“Don’t waste your strength, Mr. Corbett,” he said. “You pull that one down today, there’ll be a new sign up there next week.”
His face changed. “We got company,” he said.
Chapter 35
THE DOUBLE-BARRELED SHOTGUN pointed our way was almost as big as the girl holding it. It was so long and heavy I was more afraid she would drop it and discharge it accidentally than that she might shoot us on purpose.
Abraham said, “What you fixin’ to do with that gun? That ain’t no possum you aimin’ at.”
I was distracted by the fact that she was very serious and very pretty. She wore a simple cotton jumper, stark white against the smooth brown of her skin. A perfect face, with delicate features that betrayed the fierceness of her attitude. Deep brown eyes flashed a steady warning: keep away from me.
“What y’all doing messin’ around the lynching tree?” she said.
“You know this girl, Abraham?”
“I surely do. This is Moody. Say hello to Mr. Corbett.”
Moody didn’t say a word to me. She kept her barrel trained on my heart. If she was going to stare at me this way, I couldn’t help looking back at her.
“Well, if you know her,” I said, “maybe you should tell her not to go around pointing firearms at people.”
“Moody, you heard the man,” said Abraham. “Put it down. Now, granddaughter.”
“Oh, Papaw,” she said, “what you bring this white man out here for?”
Abraham reached out and pushed the gun barrel away. Moody pulled back from him as if he were trying to take away her doll.
“She’s your granddaughter?”
“That’s right.”
It struck me that the girl had seemed as willing to shoot her grandfather as to shoot me. She walked boldly up to me, around me, looking me over as if I represented some species of animal she had never observed before and already didn’t like.
“Mr. Corbett is here from Washington,” said Abraham.
“You working for him?” said Moody. “Why would you?”
“We working together,” said Abraham.
“Well, if you ain’t working for him, how come he calls you Abraham, and you call him Mr. Corbett?”
“Because he prefers it that way.” Abraham knew that wasn’t so, but he fixed me in place with a look that stifled the protest in my throat. “Mr. Corbett is here by the instructions of the president of the–”
“Abraham,” I said. “We’re not supposed to talk about any of this.”
He nodded, dipped his head. “You are right, Mr. Corbett,” he said.
Moody gave me a disgusted look and said, “You should have let me shoot him while I had the chance.”
Chapter 36
WHEN I WAS GROWING UP, gumbo was not something most white people would eat, unless they were Catholic and lived down on the coast. Gumbo was food for black people, or Creole people. Like chitlins and hog ears, it was the kind of thing mostly eaten out of necessity. Or so most people thought. My mother’s cook, Aurelia, used to whip up a big pot of sausage-and-crawfish gumbo and leave it to feed us through Friday, her day
off.
So when Abraham suggested we stop in at a little gray shanty of a saloon with a crooked sign on the door, GUMBO JOE’S, I was a happy man. Also along for the meal was Moody and her brother Hiram, a handsome boy of nineteen with aspirations to be a lawyer.
I was surprised at the idea of a Negro restaurant in Eudora, but when I stepped inside the place, I saw it was 95 percent saloon, with a little cooker perched beside the open window in back. On the flame sat a bubbling pot.
An old black man came out from behind the rickety bar. I couldn’t help flinching at the sight of him: he had no chin, and his right arm was severed just below the elbow.
Without our asking, he brought three small glasses and a bottle of beer. “Y’all want gumbo?”
“We do,” said Abraham.
So much for a menu.
Abraham poured beer into all three glasses, and I took one. It wasn’t cold, but it tasted real good.
“What happened to that man?” I said softly.
“The war,” said Abraham. He explained that the old man had been a cook for Pemberton’s army at Vicksburg. The Yankee mortar shell that crashed through the mess tent was no respecter of color or rank.
“He lost half his face fighting for the side that was trying to keep him a slave,” I said.
“Wasn’t fighting, he was cooking,” said Abraham. “A lot of us did. The pay was good. Better than we got staying home. Those was good times, if you didn’t get killed.”
The War between the States had been officially over for forty-three years but had never actually ended in the South. The Confederate battle flag still flew higher than Old Glory, at least at our courthouse. There were Rebel flags hanging on the fronts of stores and from the flagpoles of churches. Ever since I was a boy I had recognized the old faded butternut cap as the sign of a Confederate veteran.
There had always been men with wooden legs or wooden crutches. I knew that an empty sleeve pinned up inside a suit jacket meant an arm had been left on a battlefield in Georgia or Tennessee. Maybelle’s handyman, otherwise a handsome old gent, had a left eye sewn shut with orange twine. The skin around that eye burned to a god-awful dry red that would have scared me if I’d been a child.
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