The Emancipation of Evan Walls

by Jeffrey Blount

  PRAISE FOR

  THE EMANCIPATION OF EVAN WALLS

  “Blount’s intimate, unhurried writing style masterfully creates scenes bursting with true-to-life dialogue and unforgettable characters. This is an important book that holds truths for all Americans, whatever their ethnicity. It will make you cry, it will make you angry, and it will make you cheer Evan Walls’ emancipation as heroic. If you aren’t already ‘woke,’ you will be after reading this book.”

  —Mary Batten, author of Aliens from Earth

  “Jeffrey Blount has written a timely novel of enormous power. Evan Walls shows the kind of courage we wish weren’t needed, but still is today--the courage to defy convention, step beyond boundaries and risk everything to live the life you desire. The Emancipation of Evan Walls is a page turner and more, an important addition to today’s crucial conversations about race and privilege.”

  —Masha Hamilton, author of 31 Hours

  “I found this story shocking and thought-provoking. There is so much inherent drama to Evan’s story. His world is well-drawn from the get-go. There is a great feel for the place and time and the dialogue is superb.”

  —Christina Kovac, author of The Cutaway

  “Jeffrey Blount has crafted an engrossing novel that pries open an often-overlooked dimension of racism in America today. To achieve his dreams, an eleven-year old Evan Walls discovers he must not only do battle with white prejudice in his rural Southern community, he must also struggle against the diminished expectations of his own people. Blount conveys powerfully the loneliness of an intellectually gifted child caught between these two worlds and the real costs of freedom. The Emancipation of Evan Walls is one of the most sensitively told, yet brutally honest reflections on race and identity in recent history.”

  —Jonathan Odell, author of Miss Hazel and the Rosa Parks League

  THE EMANCIPATION OF

  EVAN WALLS

  JEFFREY BLOUNT

  The Emancipation of Evan Walls

  by Jeffrey Blount

  © Copyright 2019 Jeffrey Blount

  ISBN 978-1-63393-810-6

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior written permission of the author.

  This is a work of fiction. The characters are both actual and fictitious. With the exception of verified historical events and persons, all incidents, descriptions, dialogue and opinions expressed are the products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.

  REVIEW COPY: This is an advanced printing subject to corrections and revisions.

  Published by

  210 60th Street

  Virginia Beach, VA 23451

  800-435-4811

  www.koehlerbooks.com

  For my wife, Jeanne Meserve

  In the morning, as always, her eyes will meet mine and she will smile. She’ll say, “Jeffrey, I love you.” And I will close the front door behind me, knowing that I can move mountains.

  “Don’t take it to heart,

  don’t let ’em break you baby child,

  and pity the mouths

  as they try to unmake you . . .”

  “Hometown Hero,”

  Megan Jean and the KFB

  CONTENTS

  1993 HOBOKEN, NEW JERSEY

  PROLOGUE

  1968 CANAAN, VIRGINIA

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  1969 CANAAN, VIRGINIA

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  1973 CANAAN, VIRGINIA

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  1993 LURAY, VIRGINIA

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  1993

  HOBOKEN, NEW JERSEY

  PROLOGUE

  Through the rivers of my youth swam many moccasins. In the fields of golden corn and swaying wheat, copperheads lay in wait.

  Although I spent much of my time watching my step, I was often bitten. I wandered blindly in circles, in a daze, unsure of who I was, of where I’d come from, and to where I was going. To say that I did not like my childhood would be a monstrous understatement. For that portion of my life, I was a cornered and wounded animal fighting for survival. And even though I endured, I cannot look back on those days without feeling a deep-seated ache throughout my bones.

  From the late 1960s through the ’70s, my war raged on in a small industrial and farming town in southeastern Virginia. A town, like most Southern towns, split by a plague of overt and clandestine hatred.

  The veiled hatred belonged to the “Negroes,” as we called ourselves then, although it wasn’t really concealed. Whites in the town knew they were hated, but they also knew blacks would shut up before they stood up. And so, as far as the whites were concerned, emotion not shown was emotion that didn’t exist.

  Blacks spoke of their hatred only in the company of other blacks. We could be a fiery bunch in the safe haven of our collective misery, but we all knew how impotent we were in the face of our adversary. If we tried to forget, all it took to remind us was the sight of other blacks walking down Main Street, their eyes directed toward the sidewalk so there would be no chance of meeting the eyes of an oncoming white person. It seems to me that most blacks never looked up and faced life head on. They had been beaten into an overbearing and worrisome fit of submission. Who among them had the strength to look up? Who among them had the desire?

  Life was always the two or three feet in front, whether it was the two or three feet of weeds being chopped out of somebody’s field, the two or three feet of hog being gutted on a line in the meatpacking plant, or the two or three feet of parquet floors being waxed in a white family’s home.

  Life fatigue and fear smothered ambition, even after Martin Luther King Jr. marched and the civil rights bill passed. Maybe the assassination of Dr. King reaffirmed the certainty of who was in charge and the reason to not get uppity. In a way, King was fortunate, wasn’t he? He just got shot. Others—neighbors of my parents and other friends they had known—suffered much grislier deaths.

  But in the thick of all of this, I got lucky. Or did I? I suppose it’s a matter of perception.

  At the budding of my youth, my eyes were opened like those of Saul on the road to Damascus. I was preemptively frightened, warned off from the trap lying in ambush for young black men—a quicksand called “the status quo.”

  While I did escape, traveling the long road through and beyond my hometown was not a pleasant journey. I was in one crash after another, and the trip, which isn’t even done yet, has left me emotionally damaged.

  •••

  Two days ago, my daughter Jennie was born. My eyes grew wide with fear when they first asked me to leave her side. Sensing my discomfort, the nurses allowed me to return and sit by Jennie, watching protectively as they checked her temperature and changed her diapers.

  My wife, Izzy, had been more than patient with my hovering, as I constantly held on to one of Jennie’s feet during their initial breast-feeding sessions. And when our best friends came by the hospital to peek at Jennie through the glass, I merely waved at them and held my daughter’s hand. They didn’t understand why I didn’t come out and talk. They beckoned, but I couldn’t leave her. Izzy met them in the corrido
r and told them that I was overwhelmed. Our friends thought that was cute, and it satisfied them, but not Izzy. There had been a dead spot in our relationship.

  When we approached the subject of my past, whether it was just us or with friends, I would grow silent. It was particularly painful when we were with friends. Izzy was always on edge, afraid I would someday burst out and tell them something that she’d never heard. Maybe she was afraid that she wouldn’t be able to handle it and would lose her composure in front of them.

  When we were alone, she tried not to ask too much. I’m sure she hoped that whatever I found too painful to tell her wasn’t something that would reflect badly on me. I’m sure she hoped it wouldn’t have changed her mind about marrying me.

  How could I explain to Izzy that I was not worried for Jennie because of the threat of nuclear war, cancer, or AIDS? How could I explain the depth of my fear for the breaking of the fragile hope of a child? How could I explain to her that I didn’t want Jennie to have to come home from school bullied, dejected and friendless. And what about the most important point, the most painful for me? The near paralyzing fear that Jennie would suffer not because of anything she did or said, but because she has my genes, which means she would never be hip enough, or in tune enough, to recognize the warning signs.

  •••

  I was sitting in the hospital room, holding one of Jennie’s toes as Izzy playfully cooed at her.

  “I’m afraid,” I said, “that, like me, she will always want the right things at the wrong time and not understand why people react to her as they will. That she’ll be like me as a child—a misfit, a snowball. Confused and ungrateful.”

  I looked up at Izzy, who was smiling. I could tell she wanted to help me, but I had given her no clues.

  “Evan,” she said. “End this craziness. Why don’t you get the monkey off your back? Just blurt it all out. Just tell me the whole story. It’ll be cathartic.”

  “I’m afraid you won’t see the significance,” I told her. “It might be impossible for you to understand.”

  “Why? Because I’m white?”

  “Yes.”

  Izzy put her hand on my cheek, and she smiled tenderly.

  “I can’t promise you it will have the same significance for me. After all, I didn’t live through whatever you did. But if it hurt you so much, it will be important to me. Try to explain it to me for our sake, and Jennie’s. I can’t help her avoid something if I don’t know what it is.”

  “You’re right,” I said. “Maybe it’s time.”

  Izzy’s expression changed to a mix of happiness and fear. Happy that the suspense might almost be over, but afraid that, with her new baby in her arms, she might find out something about her husband that she couldn’t live with.

  I held onto my daughter’s toe, looking into my wife’s beautiful brown eyes. For too long I had forced her to display her superhuman patience. For too long I hadn’t been true to myself. I took a deep breath. I let go of Jennie and took Izzy’s hand.

  “I am a refugee,” I said. “On the run and still looking for some kind of asylum. I escaped from a very different kind of race war. And you know, it blew me away. Because before I got caught up in it, I thought all the cruelty inflicted on blacks was done by whites, but I was young and had a lot to learn.”

  1968

  CANAAN, VIRGINIA

  ONE

  I was on the back porch, preparing to pull the wings off a fly. It struggled vigorously as I held it between my left index finger and thumb. I yanked the wings off quickly and placed the fly on the screen near Mantis. Then, under the fading light of the setting June sun, I sat back to watch the kill. It was like having Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom on my own porch.

  Mantis was the nickname my older brother, Mark, gave our pet praying mantis. In early May, he’d opened the screen door on his way inside, and this scrawny, green bug flew in behind him. Daddy told us that if we left him on the porch, we wouldn’t have much trouble with mosquitoes all summer. His prophecy had been correct. In fact, we’d started feeding flies to Mantis because the mosquitoes had become so scarce.

  It didn’t take Mantis long to catch the fly and begin his dinner. Satisfied with having taken care of his hunger, I lay back on the wicker lounge and stared out over the backyard. A slow drizzle had just ended, the last remnant of a thunderstorm that passed an hour before. I sat there thinking about how much I liked thunderstorms. Most people I knew hated them. There were folks who hid in closets and others who ran around unplugging every electrical device. One of my cousins even slept with her sneakers on during thunderstorms, feeling that as long as she had rubber on her feet, lightning couldn’t harm her.

  Storms created no such anxieties in me. They relaxed me. I would stand at the big window in the living room and listen to the rhythm of cracking thunder breaking against the clouds like ocean waves against a shore. I would watch the rain come down in sheets, my head jerking from side to side, trying to catch the bolts of lightning. I’d hope that the lightning would hit the electric lines and short out the transformer high on its pole, leaving our house in darkness. When Mark was younger, he and I would run to our parents’ bedroom, where they usually spent their nights reading the papers and talking. Daddy would reach into the drawer of his nightstand and pull out a flashlight.

  “Grab ahold, boys,” he would say.

  Mark and I would each grab a pant leg and hold on for dear life as Daddy turned on the flashlight and led us ever so slowly through the house. Of course, we could find our way with our eyes closed and not bump into a thing, but there was something different about the darkness brought on by thunderstorms. Something mysterious. Daddy knew that, and he helped us enjoy it.

  All of a sudden, we’d be on safari, trudging carefully through a hazardous jungle. I swear I heard the roar of big Bengal tigers, the squawks of parrots, and the heavy steps of elephants bearing down upon us. Daddy pretended he heard them, too. He would stop suddenly at times and shout, “Hide!” Mark and I would quickly fall to the floor or pin ourselves to a wall while Daddy inched around a corner or poked a flashlight into a room and then declared it safe for passage. We’d attach ourselves to him again, and the adventure would continue.

  Mark became too old for this after a few years. I kept it up for a while until Daddy lost interest in it—and everything else. I understood because I knew he was in pain. For a long time now, thunderstorms had gone unnoticed in the Walls’ home.

  “Evan! Where are you, son?”

  “I’m out here, Mama.”

  Mama came out onto the porch, stood behind me, and put her hands on my shoulders. She inhaled deeply.

  “I always did like the fresh way the country smells after a nice rain,” she said.

  “Me too,” I replied, smiling because she seemed happy.

  Mama had always been a lover of nature, but for a long time she hadn’t noticed a good storm any more than Daddy had. The way she stood behind me taking in the fragrant odors and staring at the twilight startled me and made me happy. The situation reminded me of one of my favorite memories. Across the road in front of our house, a row of dogwood trees had grown close together. Years when they bloomed thickly, they looked like a puffy white blanket. Mama would be so moved by the sight that she would sit and look at them for hours.

  One day, I joined her, and she held me close. As she rocked us, she whispered over and over, “Sweet springtime snow.” She had never been more beautiful to me.

  Mama was long and lean at just under six feet tall. Her imposing height and brash personality made her at times seem harsh and unsympathetic. She easily frightened us into good behavior. But those characteristics were generally softened by the single braid of hair ending midway down her back. Her beautiful smile and, at that moment, an aura of peacefulness made me want to stay in her arms forever.

  But those days were long gone. Mama and Daddy shared the pain that had ruined so many of our family traditions. Mark and I felt it, and a lot of other people in
Canaan felt it too. That was why everyone gathered on our porch once a week. In a way, it was a support group—a collection of people who came together with the common goal of helping each other endure the next week.

  Mama took her hands off my shoulders. “Come on inside, and help your dear old mother make the Kool-Aid.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I said and followed. While I stirred the big pitcher of orange-flavored drink, I thought about the meetings, which ran from May to October of each year. They had been going on for as long as I had been alive and always took place at our house. I could remember back as far as 1964, when I was six years old.

  At that age not much held my attention. But on this particular night, they were talking about John F. Kennedy. At the mention of his name, I sat up and listened. Here was a white man my parents had never spoken of, at least not to me. Then all of a sudden, that past November, he was killed, and my mother was crying like she had lost a son. I wanted to know why. When I asked her after his funeral on television, she just shook her head.

  “Every time Moses come along, he gotta die before the job gets done. We ain’t never gone catch a break.”

  I wanted to ask her what that meant, but she looked so broken, I let the moment pass.

  The following May, as I served Kool-Aid to the folks on our porch, I perked up when I heard somebody mention JFK.

  “Was the shot heard ’round the world,” Nate Applegate said proudly, as if he’d coined the phrase.

  “It was more than just one shot,” Ethel Brown noted.

  “I know that,” Nate replied. “Who don’t? But it was the first one that got him.”

  “So you say! Next you gonna be telling us you was there,” Mama said to him.

  “Now come on, Treeny,” Cora Applegate said. “Cut my old man some slack.”

  They all laughed and then continued to discuss their various trials and tribulations which, according to them, were the direct result of Kennedy’s death.