A Sky Full of Stars

by Linda Williams Jackson

  Hallelujah rolled his eyes and said, “We’ll only get the truth when we write our own history books.”

  “Mrs. Jamison, at least, said she was happy that schools are integrating. She thinks Stillwater should integrate too.”

  Hallelujah nodded. “The Jamisons are good people.”

  I raised a brow. “‘Good white peoples,’ as Ma Pearl would say?”

  Hallelujah frowned. “No. Just good people.”

  We fell into silence for a moment and let Hallelujah’s words just sit there. It was kind of refreshing to refer to people as just good people, and not colored or white. Ma Pearl often referred to the Robinsons as good white people because they gave us things that were no longer of use to them and because they treated us better than some other white landowners treated the colored folk living on their land. The Robinsons, in turn, referred to Ma Pearl and Papa as good colored people because they didn’t cause trouble and because Papa tended to his cotton with care even though he was not the one who benefited from it and Ma Pearl tended to Mrs. Robinson’s every need without complaint. They claimed them good colored people because they didn’t aspire to be more than Negroes should aspire to be.

  Hallelujah began speaking again about Hoxie, Arkansas. “Hoxie integrated in the summer,” he said. “We had our own worries at the time. Bigger worries—​like Levi getting killed, for one.”

  Levi Jackson. I leaned my back against the porch post and let the name soak in. Levi Jackson. Just turned twenty-one. Registered to vote. Run off the road and shot. Dead. His parents’ dream of him being the first person in their family to graduate college dead, too. Whole family packed up and moved to Detroit shortly after his funeral.

  “Lamar Smith,” Hallelujah said. “Dead. And nobody’s in jail to pay for the crime.”

  “And Emmett Till,” I added, cringing.

  Hallelujah nodded. “Murderers brought to trial. Acquitted. All in one summer.”

  Chills crept over me.

  “And before all them, Reverend Lee was killed in May, and nobody was ever arrested,” said Hallelujah. “Now watch your cousin Mule end up going to jail and sitting there until the sun turns as white as the moon, just for hitting a white man.”

  “If they even bother with a trial,” I muttered.

  “They’ll have a trial. It’s the law.”

  Hallelujah’s words hung in the chilly evening air as heavy as the scent of honeysuckle on a hot day. It’s the law. Since when did any laws, except the Jim Crow laws, apply to the treatment of Negroes? If it hadn’t been for the NAACP, Mule could’ve been dead at that very moment—​his body floating somewhere in an Arkansas river.

  I didn’t realize I was frowning until Hallelujah said, “Don’t let your face freeze like that.”

  I tried to relax my face, but I couldn’t. It had begun to match my heart.

  Chapter Four

  Thursday, November 10

  THE DAY AFTER A GRAND JURY REFUSED TO HOLD Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam accountable for kidnapping Emmett Till, it seemed the world was about to explode, especially in our little colored school.

  Despite how many times our teacher, Miss Hill, asked them to, the students would not calm down. And it was Hallelujah who had incited them. Earlier that morning he had gotten permission from the ninth-grade teacher Miss Wilson to come over and speak to the eighth-grade students regarding a history project on Abraham Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation. I knew from the devious look on his face when he entered the room that he had something else in mind. Instead, he educated us on how it was time for colored folks to demand their civil rights. I doubt any of us would have known a thing about what the grand jury had said if it hadn’t been for him. I doubt any of us would have known what a grand jury was, for that matter, had it not been for Hallelujah.

  A grand jury, he told us, is like a regular jury—​twelve average people randomly selected to determine whether there is enough evidence for a case to go to trial. And with Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam, it didn’t matter that, the Monday morning after Reverend Mose Wright told the sheriff his great-nephew had been taken, the sheriff arrested the two and locked them away in jail. Nor did it matter that they both had admitted they “took the boy.” But I guess since they claimed they only “gave him a good talking to and released him,” their twelve peers didn’t see anything criminal about what they had done.

  “How can they not try them for kidnapping?” Hallelujah demanded, banging his fist on an already beat-up desk—​a castoff from the white school on the other side of Stillwater. “They admitted it during the first trial. Those murderers should be tried, found guilty, and sent to prison for what they did. Instead, they get to go right back to living their lives, making money off colored folks—​the very folks they just made a mockery of.”

  Miss Hill, a tall, wide-hipped, narrow-waisted woman with a wispy voice that didn’t match her size, stood before the students and asked us not to discuss anything further about the Emmett Till murder inside her classroom.

  She asked Hallelujah to leave.

  But regardless of how much she fidgeted and twirled the gold-toned bracelet she always wore around her left wrist, Hallelujah would not leave and the students would not stop whispering. They whispered about Emmett Till, the trial, and all the marching going on, even in places like New York City. All of this was information Hallelujah had fed them. And if it hadn’t been for the fact that his father, Reverend Clyde B. Jenkins the Second, was the English teacher at the high school, Miss Hill might have asked some of the other boys to throw him right out of her class.

  But I don’t think even that would have worked. Hallelujah had created his own little uprising in our class that morning, and everyone seemed eager to hear what he had to say.

  “Reverend Mose Wright risked his life coming down here again to testify,” he said. “He could have been lynched just like his nephew. And a Leflore County grand jury still found those murderers not guilty. How? Please tell me how.”

  We all knew how. But nobody said a word. Once again, Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam, like schoolchildren on a playground, had been brought before a group of their peers, this time to determine whether or not they should be brought to trial for kidnapping Emmett Till. To me, it was kind of like what Papa called closing the barn door after the cow had already gotten out. If their peers wouldn’t send them to prison for murder, why would they send them there for kidnapping? Again, the justice system in Mississippi simply wanted to appease (or maybe even tease) northern Negroes and the NAACP.

  Miss Hill wrung her hands. “Jenkins,” she said nervously. (Jenkins is what the teachers called Hallelujah, since his real name was Clyde Bernard Jenkins the Third.) “Please respect my authority as the teacher in this classroom and leave. You said you wanted to speak about a history project, and that’s why I allowed you to take time away from my prepared lesson. I did not give you permission to speak about a trial, and I’m sure Miss Wilson didn’t either.”

  Without a word, Hallelujah dropped his hands to his sides and marched to the door. When he opened it, Miss Hill sighed and relaxed her shoulders. But I noticed that her hands shook when she picked up the worn history text from her desk. As soon as she balanced the open book in one hand and began flipping through it with the other, Hallelujah turned back and stared at the class. “I think we should take a vote,” he said.

  Miss Hill tilted her head to one side. “A vote?”

  Hallelujah nodded. “Yes, a vote.” He shut the door and faced the class. “All in favor of discussing this mockery of a trial, raise your hands.”

  At first, no hands went up. Then slowly, one after another, fourteen hands, including mine, came up no higher than our faces.

  With a grin, Hallelujah turned to Miss Hill. “The people have voted. We would like to openly discuss this matter further.”

  Miss Hill took a deep breath and let it out. “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” she said. She glanced at the door. Her eyes, disproportionately large comp
ared with the rest of her facial features, revealed her fear.

  But her nervousness didn’t stop the whispers. The students began talking, not only about Emmett Till but about Levi Jackson’s murder only a month before, in July. As the whispers grew louder and into full-out talking, Hallelujah called the class to order.

  Miss Hill dropped the history book onto the desk and, eyes brimming with tears, rushed from the room. Hallelujah did not seem bothered as he stood before the class and addressed us. “As I was saying before, a grand jury has decided there will be no trial. There will be no more wasting of their time and money for this kind of nonsense—​the nonsense of bringing to trial white men for the killing or kidnapping of a Negro. And you know why?”

  Hallelujah paused for a response, but there was none.

  “Because white men have been kidnapping men of color for ages, beginning with our ancestors from Africa. So of course they don’t consider it a crime. They see us as less than human. Not even as good as a hog. As a matter of fact, they probably would try a white man for stealing a hog. But never for taking a Negro from his home in the middle of the night.

  “And I bet a white man would spend time in jail for shooting someone’s dog. But never a Negro—​someone’s family member. Even wild animals get protection and can’t be shot outside of hunting season. But in Mississippi, it’s always open season on the Negro.”

  Murmurs filled the room.

  “And just what is we s’pose to do ’bout this?” came a voice from the back of the room.

  I turned to find that the person speaking was a boy who was supposedly a cousin of mine, from my daddy’s side of my family—​the Banks family. Except his last name was Cooper. And like Fred Lee and me, he carried his grandparents’ last name rather than his father’s. Also, like Fred Lee and me, his mama no longer walked the soil of the Mississippi Delta. Instead, she had migrated to California, leaving the boy, James “Shorty” Cooper, behind to be raised by his grandparents, Raymond and Velma Dean Cooper.

  Shorty, who at sixteen was the oldest student in the eighth grade, cocked his head and raised a brow at Hallelujah. “What we go’n do ’bout it, Preacha’ Boy?”

  Hallelujah, with his hands crossed over his chest and his feet firmly planted and shoulder-width apart, mimicked his father’s preaching stance. “I say we do what the people in Chicago and New York are doing. I say we march.”

  “March?” several voices echoed. Then the whispers started up again, slowly at first, before they escalated into discernible words. Crazy. Fool. Done. Lost. His. Mind.

  “What good is marching?” asked Shorty. “White folks is shootin’. I say we shoot back.”

  Suddenly, voices exploded. Angry words jumbled together, but names came out loud and clear. Reverend Lee. Levi Jackson. Lamar Smith. Emmett Till.

  “Kill them ’fo they kill us!” Shorty shouted over the commotion. “Them dirty dogs done shot down a sixty-three-year-old man and a fourteen-year-old boy. Who go’n be next? Somebody’s granmama?”

  The room grew quiet, so quiet that all we heard were birds chirping through the open window.

  “You can march all you want,” Shorty said, “but I’m pickin’ up my grandaddy’s shotgun. I ain’t lettin’ no white man come up in my house like that preacha’ did. I ain’t go’n wait ’round to git shot. And I sho’ ain’t go’n march on the street and git gunned out.”

  Shorty, who once rightfully earned his nickname in his elementary years, was now a head taller than any other boy in the class. His age, too, made him intimidating. But that he couldn’t help. He was one of the students who worked the fields and only attended school part of the year, hence he had repeated multiple grades.

  I thought about my cousin Mule in Arkansas and how the sheriff came to arrest him. My own heart ached when I envisioned the toll it took on poor Uncle Charlie—​his eyes widening, his heart giving out, his shoulders slumping, his head dropping forward. Dead. No bullets required.

  What if Mule had used that pistol of his and shot the man who owed him money, instead of just punching him in the face? He’d probably be dead right now himself. They wouldn’t have bothered with an arrest, jail, and beating him up. A lynch mob would have hunted him down to string him up instead.

  I jumped when the classroom door burst open. Wild-eyed, Miss Hill rushed in. I expected to see one of the male teachers, specifically Reverend Jenkins, following her. Instead, it was the pudgy little white man from the county office. The scowl on his face said he was not happy with the colored children on the other side of town.

  Chapter Five

  Thursday, November 10

  “WHAT’S THE TROUBLE IN HE’AH?” THE VERY ROUND Mr. Cartwright asked.

  Though the room grew quieter than a graveyard, Hallelujah maintained his defiant stance. Please sit down and pretend you belong in here, I begged him. I was so scared that my heart felt as if it would thump out of my chest and land bleeding on the floor. It wasn’t Mr. Cartwright, the man in charge of making sure everything was okay with the colored schools, who frightened me. It was Hallelujah, and the way he stared him down.

  I still had that copy of Jet magazine he had shared with me back in September, right before the murder trial. It was securely hidden at the bottom of the cardboard box that held my folded clothes—​safe from Ma Pearl’s eyes. But I removed it often, studying the photo of Emmett Till almost as much as I did my textbooks. Hallelujah, with his eyes narrowed at Mr. Cartwright, resembled him even more than I thought he had the first time I glanced at the picture.

  Though he stared straight at Hallelujah, Mr. Cartwright asked Miss Hill, “This the boy causing the trouble?”

  Miss Hill, too chicken to speak, nodded.

  Mr. Cartwright fixed his eyes on Hallelujah’s face, then let them roll down toward to his feet. They came back up again, slowly, to meet his eyes. Nearly spitting, he asked, “Ain’t you Preacher Jenkins’s boy?”

  Hallelujah returned Mr. Cartwright’s steely-eyed stare. “My father is Reverend Clyde B. Jenkins the Second,” he said.

  When Hallelujah sealed his lips, indicating he had nothing further to say, everyone in the room seemed to suck in air at once. We all knew it was practically a crime for a colored person to address a white person and not end their statement with “sir” or “ma’am.”

  I jumped when a flock of black birds suddenly took flight from the tree directly outside the window. The noise they made momentarily took attention away from the standoff between Hallelujah and Mr. Cartwright.

  Bodies shuffled in their seats.

  “Hallelujah is Reverend Jenkins’s son, sir,” Miss Hill said loudly, emphasizing “sir.”

  Mr. Cartwright took his eyes off Hallelujah long enough to say to Miss Hill, “I know who he is.” Then to Hallelujah he said, “Boy, you tell that pappy of yours that if he wants to keep his job ovah he’ah, he best keep you outta trouble. The school board don’t tolerate teachers who cain’t control their own offspring.”

  Hallelujah neither uttered a response nor took his eyes off Mr. Cartwright.

  Mr. Cartwright grunted and motioned toward the class. “If he cain’t control his own spawn, how can we expect him to control the rest o’ these niggers?”

  Miss Hill looked as if she might faint.

  “You people have developed a false sense of security because of them northern agitators,” Mr. Cartwright continued. “That troublemaking N-A-A-C-P.”

  He stopped, turned his face toward the window, then frowned.

  He stood there, for what felt like something close to eternity and stared at the last of the yellow leaves waving in the breeze, clinging to the giant tree.

  He finally turned his attention back to the class and said, “You people should appreciate all we do for you.” Then, gazing steely-eyed at Hallelujah, he said, “Now git on back to your classroom, boy.”

  Without lowering his head even one bit, Hallelujah marched toward the door. Even there in the classroom, knowing Mr. Cartwright wouldn’t tou
ch him without a lynch mob at his side, I feared for Hallelujah’s life. His behavior was what Ma Pearl would have called downright uppity.

  “And tell that pappy o’ yours that he ain’t foolin’ nobody,” Mr. Cartwright said, grinning slyly. “We know ’bout the meetin’s. Let him know we’re havin’ our meetin’s, too.”

  When they had both left the room, Shorty Cooper confronted Miss Hill. “Why you run ’n fetch Chubby Cartwright?”

  Miss Hill fiddled with her bracelet. “I didn’t fetch him,” she said. “He caught me talking to Mr. Bryson in the office and asked me why I was out of my classroom.”

  “And you couldn’t lie?” asked Shorty.

  Miss Hill stormed toward the open window. When she reached it, she stared out for a second, then slammed it shut. Abruptly, she turned and fixed her eyes on Shorty. With newfound confidence, she said, “I don’t owe you any explanations, James Cooper.”

  Shorty only snorted, but a girl named Barbara spoke up. “You should’ve stood up for Hallelujah,” she said. She gestured around the room. “We all should have been standing up for him instead of letting Chubby Cartwright wear him down like that. He was only trying to help us be more aware of what’s going on around here.”

  With her forehead creased, Miss Hill narrowed her eyes at Barbara. “I will not tolerate that disrespect in my classroom.” She glanced toward the door, then cut her eyes at Shorty. “It’s Mr. Cartwright.” Then to Barbara, “You know better.”

  “I know we need to do better,” said Barbara.

  Miss Hill snatched up her history text and said, “None of you will tell me how to run my classroom. I won’t lose my job over this nonsense.”

  Barbara’s cousin Dorothy spoke up. “It ain’t nonsense,” she said. “It’s truth. And we need to know about it. Colored folks in the South been asleep long enough. We need to wake up down here.”

  “Open your books,” Miss Hill ordered us, ignoring Dorothy.

  “Why?” Shorty challenged.