Now, four years later, Mama caught me daydreaming while stirring and slapped me gently on the bottom with a wooden spoon.
“Wake up, mister.”
“I’m sorry, Mama.”
“That’s all right. Just put the Kool-Aid in the refrigerator. Then go down into the basement and chop up that block of ice that’s in the freezer.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
I got an ice pick and a large water bucket and went down to the basement. I lifted the block of ice out of the freezer, put it in the pail, and began chopping. I thought about the years that had passed since that night in 1964. The ritual had continued. The same people, save for the Applegates, were still coming around. Two years ago, the Applegates had proclaimed to the whole town that they were off to join the civil rights movement. There was a March Against Fear from Memphis, Tennessee, to Jackson, Mississippi. But they never made it.
“They talked too much and let the wrong folks hear,” Mama had said after Nate and Cora were found dead in a cornfield.
Even still, when eight o’clock rolled around, when the red-hot sun had retired and it was cooler out, the rest came around to our back porch. And they came because our family was one of the most prominent black families in Canaan. For many years, we were one of only three black families to run their own farm. This fact and the large four-bedroom, nineteenth-century farmhouse we lived in gave us an aura of wealth that we didn’t deserve. Our 100 acres of land and our home had been a gift to my great-great-grandfather from his master after the Civil War. His master had respected him as much as a slave could be respected.
Information about the “gift” had not been passed along to the other black families of Canaan. My parents, Augustus and Treeny Walls, were not about to tell anyone. They wanted to perpetuate the idea that their benefactor was an ancestral black man with the strength of a giant who had wrestled away what he needed to survive from the white man. The land was taken—not given—the myth went.
My maternal great-grandmother, Mama Jennie, was the oldest Negro in town—loved and respected by all. She once explained to me why my parents shied away from telling how they came to own the farm.
“Negroes,” she said, “has got to feel like they got something in this life. Augustus and Treeny the closest thang around to colored folk who got something. They got they own farm and they be they own bosses, or as much they own bosses as Negroes can be. If they has to tell folks the truth that they ain’t earned it, then they got to admit they ain’t much more than anybody else. That they just lucky. Colored folk get tired of going through life feeling like anythang they got is cause they lucky. That’s why all them folks come to your house every week. They want to be near someone what got something because they worked hard and conned Mr. Charlie.”
Mama used to love to show off what the Walls family had supposedly earned. If we had guests for dinner and Mama put out a loaf of bread, she would always take the heel. That proved she was a big enough person to let the less fortunate have the good stuff for a change. That was why the porch sessions were held at our house; we were letting the less fortunate get close to the good stuff.
But somewhere between 1964 and 1968, the good stuff went dreadfully sour. Daddy lost the ability to work our farm. The civil rights movement had upset the status quo.
The whites of Canaan became afraid and felt they needed to put Negroes back in their place. Daddy was put in his place through economic sanctions.
Dusty and tired from a hard summer’s work in the field and damn proud of it, Daddy drove into town. He backed our big grain-hauling truck up to the Farmer’s Market silo and went in as usual to sell his corn. But this time, he was told that his “colored, nigra-type crops” were worth only a fourth of “white” crops. He had no choice but to sell it to them at a vastly reduced price. The next year, Daddy couldn’t afford to plant and was forced to rent the land to a white farmer, who hired my father and paid him slave wages to work on his own property.
This nearly shattered our life in Canaan. From that point on, we kept up our daily routines, but we never really enjoyed living. Daddy never again noticed thunderstorms, and Mama never mentioned dogwood trees again. However, Mama insisted that the back-porch sessions continue at our house and that we continue to supply the food and drink, even if it made us late in paying a bill or two. Conscious of our newfound predicament, the others offered to take turns hosting the get-together. But Mama, sensitive about our image as Negro aristocracy, would hear nothing of it. The others quickly dropped the issue, and they were happy to do so, I think. Mama Jennie said they knew that sharing the load would make plain the fact that the Walls had lost control of their lives. If that was true, then the rest of them had no hope at all.
•••
I filled the bucket with chopped ice and hauled it up to the kitchen. I put some ice in the glasses and then went back out onto the porch. Mantis was resting in a corner after his meal. Daddy drove up in the pickup with Mark and Bullet, our cocker spaniel, who ran off into the cornfield. I sat, preparing for my weekly fix of adult conversation, which was sometimes so boisterous that it used up all the space and air on our porch. And that was saying something because it was pretty big. Mark was fond of saying that it was as wide as the house and as deep as half a living room. Full of eclectic furniture, from wicker chairs and lounges to metal slides and wooden rocking chairs, it was our church away from church.
I thought of the people who would be coming. Most nights, Ethel and Jim Brown were first to arrive. They were first wherever they went. Townsfolk believed it was because they couldn’t stand to be alone with each other. Jim was a drunk and Ethel a nag.
“Nagging and drinking mix about as well as a Negro and the Klan,” Chauncey Mae Jones would say.
Chauncey Mae was a widow. She was tall, and so thin she seemed unhealthy. She had high cheekbones, big lips, and eyes that looked like they would pop out if she leaned over too far. Daddy liked to say she had “uglied” her husband to death. I never really cared what she looked like. I would just remember her as the mother of Rosetta and as a nosy woman who Mama said would pretend to be sweeping her front porch at three in the morning in order to see what was happening at parties across the street. Parties she claimed she was too much of a Christian to attend.
Then there was my aunt Mary, my father’s sister, and her ex-husband, Bojack. She was short, light-complexioned, and “painfully buxom,” my mother used to say. And like my mother, she had a fiery personality. Bojack was her opposite. He was a tall, lean, dark-complexioned man who seemed incredibly sad. He always wore reflector sunglasses and sat quietly behind them.
Back in 1964, they came as a couple. In fact, they had been newly wed that year, even though my grandmother tried to stop the marriage by throwing a knife at Bojack during the wedding ceremony. She claimed he lacked responsibility and was the black sheep of his family. She swore that the marriage wouldn’t last more than a few years. Time proved her correct. But Aunt Mary and Bojack still came to the sessions, albeit separately.
Finally, there was Cozy Pitts and her daughter, Eugenia. Cozy was a very sad woman who, like Bojack, said very little. I always figured she came just to feel like she was a part of something that wasn’t painful. At her home, she was always in pain, agony dealt by her huge and usually drunken husband, Arthur. One winter night, my brother, Mark, and I were leaving Days Neck, which was the section of Canaan where the other members of the session lived. We passed behind the Pittses’ home, trudging through three inches of snow. We stopped in our tracks when we saw Arthur Pitts drag Cozy out into the snow. She was in her nightgown and crying hysterically. Eugenia, who was my age, stood on the back steps crying just as wildly.
Arthur Pitts ripped off his wife’s nightgown and threw her heavyset, naked body into the snow. He stood over her, yelling about some chore she hadn’t done, but I knew that the reason for this exhibition went way beyond any housework left undone. I could not see Cozy’s face, but I imagined it wracked with fear and pa
in and confusion. I had always heard Daddy say to Mama, “The world is hard enough to beat with both us fighting it as one. If we too busy fighting each other, we can’t never win.”
Cozy lay on the ground, motionless. Arthur took off his belt and began to beat her mercilessly. She started jerking around, throwing her arms any which way, trying to fight off the belt. As she started to get up, her wig fell off. It looked like a lost shrub in the snow. She tried to run, but all she could do was hop a step at a time as Arthur whipped her. Then Eugenia’s older brother, Taliferro, who was big for a boy of twelve, ran out of the house and grabbed his naked mother. He shielded her, taking the sting of his father’s belt. Arthur just continued to whip them both until he was exhausted and collapsed into the snow.
The next week, out of the blue, Mark asked Taliferro about the incident. The three of us had been walking and shooting the breeze. We wandered over the Morgart’s Lake bridge, and then up the hill through the tall pines and maples until we found a good place to sit. We could watch the cars cross the bridge to our left and to our right we looked down over the lake. Below us, a little ways down the hill, was my aunt’s ex-husband, Bojack. He was reducing a block of wood to splinters with his .22 rifle.
At first, Taliferro seemed embarrassed. I guess I would have been, too, if he’d seen my mama naked being whipped by my daddy. Next, he seemed mad at Mark for having the nerve to bring it up. I was too, but Mark was like that—nosey and direct. He had to know about everything.
Taliferro was quiet for a while, and tears welled. I knew that men and boys weren’t supposed to cry. In Canaan, they either were tough enough to put aside all feelings, or else they got drunk. Watching Taliferro on the verge of breaking down made me nervous. I looked down at Bojack, who was reloading his rifle. Then he shot again. The piece of wood jumped, and so did Taliferro. The shot brought him out of his trance.
“I hate anythang white,” Taliferro said.
Mark and I simply stared at him, not knowing what he meant.
“White people,” he continued. “That why my daddy beat my mama. White people done made him thank he ain’t shit. He don’t like feeling like shit. It makes him mad. But he can’t hit the peoples that make him mad, ’cause they got more power than he do. They white. So he need to feel like he a man about something. Like he can control something. So he beat us and Mama.”
Taliferro displayed an understanding beyond his years. Mama Jennie had already talked to me about racism’s effect on black children: “Little colored chillen know who they is earlier. They grows up faster. Oh, they plays and all, but the minute they finds out about racism, they suddenly takes on a burden that makes ’em grow up fast. It’s a heavy one, too. Heavier than most folks of different persuasions carry all they lives.”
Taliferro looked out over the lake so we couldn’t see his tears. “You know why my mama be wearing that five-dollar wig?” he asked.
“Nope,” Mark said. “Why?”
“’Cause Daddy set her hair afire, and it done scorched her head so bad, her hair don’t grow back.”
I looked at Mark, and he looked at me. We both felt helpless.
“I really hate white people,” Taliferro said. “I truly do.”
•••
Before long, everyone was present and accounted for except Chauncey Mae and Rosetta. We all sat, saying as little as possible, not willing to spill any gossip until every ear was present. Mama wouldn’t even serve the Kool-Aid.
“When are they coming? I’m thirsty,” Mark said.
“Me too,” I said.
“Be quiet! The both of you,” Mama said. “You’ll get it soon enough.”
No sooner had she spoken than Chauncey Mae, sucking on a toothpick as usual, and Rosetta came across the yard.
“Chauncey Mae. Come on this porch, girl!” Mary called out.
“We coming! Fast as our legs let us go.”
“Windy out there, ain’t it?” Ethel Brown asked her.
“Sho’ nuff. Even if I’da just woke up, I’d know we done had us one whale of a storm.”
Rosetta ran up on the porch and said her polite hellos to the adults. She waved at Mark and then spoke to me.
“Hey.”
“Hey,” I said back.
“I just seen T. Wall. He say to say hello to you.”
“Thanks, Rosetta.”
Rosetta went off to play with Eugenia, who was trying to feed Mantis another fly.
“Sit down and rest yourself, child,” Mama said to Chauncey Mae.
Chauncey Mae eased into her seat. “What’s rest? Something you eat?”
“You ought to be glad it ain’t, cause if it was, all us be dead and gone,” Jim Brown said.
“He ain’t told no lie yet,” Aunt Mary added.
Everybody laughed.
“Well,” Chauncey Mae continued. “If John Fitzgerald Kennedy was still alive, we’d be resting better and prob’bly eating better, too.”
“Tell the truth, child. Tell the truth!” Cozy Pitts shouted. Everyone became quiet for a second—no doubt, like me, thinking of the cruelty Cozy had escaped at home that would make her speak out so.
Mama got up, went inside, and came back with a tray of glasses filled with Kool-Aid. She told Mark to go in and get the potato chips off the kitchen table. When he got back, Ethel Brown had just seconded Chauncey Mae’s speech about how we’d all be better off if Kennedy were still alive. A rash of “amens” and nodding heads followed.
Bullet came out of the cornfield, barking at us. I let him on the porch. I started brushing his golden hair, talking quietly to him, and drifting in and out of the conversation. That is, until I caught sight of Bojack behind his sunglasses, squeezing the glass in his hand so hard I thought he’d break it. His whole body was tense. I stopped rubbing Bullet and paid closer attention to the conversation. They were talking about their problems, which never really changed from week to week. As always, they blamed them on the death of Kennedy.
Above Bojack’s sunglasses, I saw a crease running up the middle of his tight forehead. His eyebrows were pushed together. I tried to figure him out, but I didn’t know enough about the man to know what could upset him so. Since his and Aunt Mary’s divorce, he had become a loner. I, along with most of the others, never spoke to him much. He usually stuck to himself.
On Saturdays, he went down to Morgart’s Lake or to his backyard to shoot his .22. From the back steps of his house, he would shoot cherries off a cherry tree, forty feet away. Or he’d sit on the hill over the lake, shooting at a piece of wood he’d tossed in. On Sundays in the fall, after all the football games on television, we would see him out in the fields. He would punt to imaginary people, throwing passes and tackling them, refining the art of football.
I continued to stare at him. He just sat there behind his glasses, thinking. Mama said that he hadn’t always been quiet at the sessions. He acted that way lately, she said, because he couldn’t stand to be near Aunt Mary, but he didn’t want to miss the gossip, either. So, he came, he listened, and he thought. But on this night, I knew there was more.
Bojack had been looking down into his Kool-Aid. I watched him look up. He glanced at each person as the conversation continued. When he could stand it no more, he shot up out of his chair. His quickness jolted me, as it did the rest of the group. Mark, who had been sitting next to me, rubbing Bullet’s stomach, sat back quickly in his seat. Rosetta and Eugenia turned so abruptly that they scared Mantis, who flew over our heads to the other side of the porch. Cozy Pitts put her hand to her heart as Bojack began to shout.
“It’s been five damn years since that man was shot. Since then, they done killed his brother and Reverend King, and y’all still talking about what he coulda done for us if he was alive. Hell, he was in the big house for three years, and we still couldn’t vote! I don’t see how y’all still clinging to John Fitzgerald Kennedy.”
Everybody was suddenly quiet and still in their chairs. I could see the questions in my mind written all over
their faces. What does he mean, knocking John F. Kennedy? Don’t he know what the man did for us? Don’t he realize the way things have been going since Kennedy died?
Lyndon Johnson wasn’t doing anything with any oomph to it. He wasn’t sending federal troops to help the situation in the South like Kennedy had done. He was just in the White House signing pieces of paper that the white Southerners couldn’t care less about. They needed to be forced into things, and Kennedy had been the man for the job. What kind of nonsense was Bojack talking?
Bojack didn’t understand what Mama Jennie would explain to me later. “Folks,” she would say, “have got to have something to keep them from looking at life the way it really is. We Negroes is in a bad situation. If you takes away our faith in thangs like supposing how life would be if John Fitzgerald Kennedy was alive, then peoples would be forced to look at they real situation. Most folk hurts a lot if they really, really has to look at theyselves. When some folk finally see the light, it hurt so much it kills ’em.”
Bojack continued with his assault. “I don’t see what y’all thank one white man can or would do for us poor black folk in this redneck town anyway.”
Everybody simply stared. Bojack took his seat and the session fell silent. I figured that they had come to the painful conclusion that Bojack might be right. But he was trying to kick their only significant crutch out from under them, and they were not about to take that lying down.
Their silence didn’t last long.
“Where you coming from with that nonsense, man?” Daddy asked Bojack.
“It ain’t no nonsense in it, Augustus,” Bojack replied.
“You just don’t know what you talking about,” Ethel Brown said. “I don’t know what’s done got under your skin, but you ain’t got to try and ruin our night with it.”
“Boy, ever since that divorce, you been one fool nigger,” Chauncey Mae added.
“He ain’t getting none,” Aunt Mary said. “That’s his problem.”
The Emancipation of Evan Walls Page 2
