The Emancipation of Evan Walls

by Jeffrey Blount

  “Really,” I said. “I gotta go see Mama Jennie. Miss Antebellum Taylor say she won’t feeling too good this morning. I’ll come by after that and tell y’all everythang. The truth! Not what Eugenia probably said.”

  “Come by the tree house on your way back, E,” Muskrat said. “We gone be there. Beno stole some of his daddy’s Playboys.”

  “I’ll be back there before long.” I was still unnerved by T. Wall’s skepticism. “For real. Square up, man,” I said, although I was starting not to believe myself. “It won’t nothing.”

  T. Wall just stared as I pedaled off.

  In five minutes, the air became heavy with the smell of industry, of blood and flesh. I was passing the meatpacking plants. Two huge concrete-and-brick buildings were surrounded by twelve-foot wire fences. They were owned by two different companies, but according to the people who worked in them, only the names were different. Both companies had a reputation for abusing their black employees. Several particularly cruel tales had become legend. I heard many of them at the weekly porch sessions, stories of people working ten to fifteen hours in unsanitary conditions for wages that left them dirt poor. Stories of people who were not trained properly for their jobs. I can’t tell you all of the grief-laden yarns I heard about Joe This or Mary That who were ordered by their white supervisors to operate dangerous machinery. If Joe and Mary said, “I still don’t quite understand it,” the supervisor said, “I ain’t got time to waste on you, nigger. Just do it, or I’ll just go get one of the other niggers out there waiting for a job to come in here. Ain’t no problem. You don’t wanna work, there’s the door and let the doorknob hit you where the good Lord split you.”

  Needing a job, they learned how to operate a machine, but only after losing a finger, a hand, a toe or a foot. I heard of a woman who lost an entire arm to a ham-skinning machine. Like the others, she was offered no compensation and could do nothing about the situation. They paid money to a union out of their tiny wages, but the union—also run by whites—never helped them. Beyond the union, there was nowhere to go.

  All over Canaan, many evil injustices were inflicted because blacks were ignorant about how to use the system to fight back. It was one more reason why I needed an education. Getting mad about being mistreated was not enough. I wanted to be able to do something about it. Furthermore, I thought an education would offer me a choice. The Joes and Marys of Canaan had none. Their avenues were restricted by their illiteracy, making field, factory or domestic work their only options.

  I wanted to be able to one day say, “I can work in the plants if I want, but I think I’ll be a vice president. Or maybe I’ll go to work for an oil company or a newspaper, and wear a suit and tie to work.” I wanted to be able to pick the job out of calm deliberation, not out of desperation. I saw the lines of black people waiting for work and I felt sorry for them and for Daddy.

  “The damn place is a prison,” Daddy would say when he came home from work smelling like a smoke-cured ham. He spent an hour a night trying to get the odor off himself, and Mama would wash his clothes. They were never satisfied with the results because they were really trying to remove the smell from their souls. No detergent could do that.

  I peddled across the Pagan Creek Bridge and pulled over on the side of the road. To my left was the Colonial Store, Canaan’s largest grocery store. To my right was marsh, and down the hill from me, a boardwalk ran over the marsh to where Mama Jennie’s house sat up on a hill. The small A-frame peeked out at me from behind tall, stately trees of pine, black oak, and elm. The hillside was covered in dogwood, lilac, crepe myrtle, and magnolia. A rainbow of flower beds graced the hill and surrounded her house. In them were azaleas, violets, blue lobelias, jack-in-the-pulpits, bloodroots, petunias, irises, tulips, and more. The beautiful sight gave me a warm feeling as I marveled at how she managed to keep her flower and vegetable gardens going at her age.

  “It’s hard work that keeps a woman young,” she said to me once. “And I done seen a whole lot of that.”

  Mama Jennie had worked the fields when she was young and later as a widow. She raised eleven children by taking in laundry. “And believe me, chile. That was a lot of laundry,” she once told me.

  Not only was she serious about keeping her gardens every summer, she went to church every Sunday, and every other week Mama took her shopping. She cooked her own meals and took a short walk with her cane every day. She loved to tell the story of how her mother had lived to 112 without ever seeing a doctor.

  “And look at me,” she’d say to Mama. “Old as I is, I ain’t taking no pills. You my grandchile. Half my age. Got to take a pill to get up, go to sleep, to feel happy, and to go to the bathroom. I ain’t on nobody’s pills.”

  Although her physical endurance was impressive, it was her wisdom that captured me. She seemed to have witnessed more than the sky above. Daddy used to say that the Bible held an answer to every moral problem. I believed the same of Mama Jennie.

  “You can ask her most anythang,” I once said to Mama and Mark. “She always got an answer, and they all make good sense, too.”

  “You right about that,” Mark said.

  “Jennie Lowe is a wise old woman,” Mama said, smiling.

  “What did Nana used to call what Mama Jennie said?” I asked.

  “Your grandmother used to call Mama Jennie’s words ‘little kernels of truth.’”

  I always found hope in Mama Jennie’s ancient eyes, strength in her ever-weakening voice and truth in her smile. In me, she found someone interested in the workings of the world. She liked that. She used to say about me, “Chile, you ask more questions than a Philadelphia lawyer. And that be good. More colored chillen ought to wanta know what’s going on around ’em.”

  Every Sunday evening, as regular as the porch sessions at my house, all of Mama Jennie’s children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren living in Canaan came by to see her. No one ever told me so for sure, but it seemed like family law that you did not let Sunday pass without stopping by, or you’d have to answer to Jennie Lowe.

  Most of the great-grandchildren played games on the hillside or at the edge of the marsh. The adults sat on the front porch laughing at the kids and gossiping about local happenings. I played a lot of the games, but I spent more time at Mama Jennie’s feet listening to her talk about religion, history, and basic people problems. And I was still at her feet when everybody came inside to watch the CBS Evening News, then later the Ed Sullivan Show. After the Sullivan Show, we all went home, not to be seen until the next Sunday, except for me.

  I called Mama Jennie twice every week and went to see her at least once. I couldn’t get enough of her company. Looking at her face was like looking at a beautiful mountain range. It had rugged peaks and smooth valleys, enveloped by clouds of white hair. But in the end, mountains also crumble, suffering the slow pain of erosion. And so it was with Mama Jennie. She had rolled with the punches of life, but their cumulative effect was finally taking its toll.

  I got on my bicycle and rode down the hill and across the boardwalk. I carried the bike up the steps Daddy had built into the side of the hill for her. I found her on her knees, digging weeds out of her vegetable garden. She was humming “Pass me not, oh Gentle Savior.”

  “Hey, Mama Jennie,” I said.

  She looked up. “Well,” she said, smiling. “Ain’t you something coming around to brighten up a old woman’s day.”

  “Miss Antebellum Taylor called this morning. She told Mama you didn’t sound too good.”

  “Well, I was a mite tired this morning. Help your old great-granny up from here. I ain’t even really sure how I got down here in the first place,” she said, laughing.

  I dropped my bike and helped her.

  “Oh, I guess I’m better now, though. When you get to be my age, you get tired off and on all the time. It ain’t no big thang. I just been checking on my chillens. I keeps them alive, they keeps me alive.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” I gave her the cane lying o
n the ground beside her.

  “Now that you seen to it that the old lady ain’t ’bout dead yet, what you got on your mind?”

  “Nothing but you.”

  “Ain’t what I hear.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  We started walking toward the house.

  “I hear thangs was pretty hot ’n heavy out y’all’s way last night.”

  “Man a’mighty. News sure do travel fast in this town.”

  “Well, it ain’t like it got far to go ’fore it hits the right ear and mouth just waiting to spread it all ’round. I thank both the ear and the mouth was prob’bly on your porch last night, and on the same person to boot.”

  We laughed at her reference to Chauncey Mae. I helped her up the steps and into the house. She poured iced tea, cut us some pound cake, and we sat at the kitchen table.

  “So,” she said. “You gonna be somebody, huh?”

  Once again, a perfectly amicable conversation turned humorless. I looked into her eyes and thought of T. Wall. I hung my head because I couldn’t take what I felt to be the criticism in her expression. I trusted her so much, and because I did, I wanted to leave. I began to fidget. For the first time, I didn’t want to hear what she had to say, knowing full well that if she told me I was wrong, I would probably drop it. But as always, Mama Jennie came through for me.

  “Ain’t no need to hang your head, son. Jennie is behind you. It’s ’bout time somebody wanted to stand by theyselves, apart from this crop of shortsighted fools ’round here. I’m just looking like this cause I want to hear the truth. You know me. I’m serious ’bout the truth.”

  “I didn’t mean nothing bad last night. I didn’t know I was gone stir everythang up.”

  “Chile, it’s prob’bly blowed over by now. You know how your folks is.”

  “Yes, ma’am. I hope so . . . blowed over, that is.”

  She took a big bite of her cake and drank some tea.

  “Well, even if it don’t blow over, don’t let none a that stop you. It’s good you wants to get a education, with or without white folks. Education is the only real way outta our trap. Look at mosta us. We can’t deal with nobody important. We go to the bank, to the doctor’s office, to pay the phone bill, to the insurance company, and we hanging our heads and be stuttering. Why we do that? I tells you why. Cause we don’t know nothing ’bout nothing. That’s why. And them folks be walking off with all our little bit of money, and we don’t know nothing from nobody.

  “Look at Eliza Blizzard. That woman got her a education. It did more than teach her ABCs and what not. Taught that gal how to thank, get her ducks all in a row. That’s why she can go up to them school-board meetings and give them folks what-for. She can thank circles around all us.”

  She frowned and shook her head.

  “You know, prob’bly the biggest thang that kept us down all these years ain’t been the KKK and shackles on our feet. It’s been the shackles on our brains. They didn’t keep us down just by divide and conquer. They kept us down by not letting us read. So you be sure to read, read and read some more, chile. That’s the key. Get something in that good head a yourns. Can’t nobody take that away from you. And if white folks in America can’t deal with it, then get on a boat and take yo’ educated behind someplace else. You know ’bout Paul Robeson, don’t you?”

  “No ma’am.”

  “See there. We ain’t even educated ’bout ourselves. He a black man that got black-balled over here. Went cross the sea, yonder somewhere, and lived for a long time. He was a smart, smart man. You be one, too. Look up in the cabinet over there.”

  I got up and looked in the cabinet. Inside were two tattered books. They were Old Yeller and Savage Sam.

  “I called up Philly and told your aunt Frances ’bout you and them Reader’s Digest magazines. She sent these books that the white folks she work for had thowed out with the trash. She say they for boys your age.”

  I was elated to find Mama Jennie so much in my corner. I went over and gave her a hug. Then I told her what Bojack said the night before, that it upset me to hear a thirty-five-year-old man say that essentially he had lived for nothing. Mama Jennie paused.

  “You know,” she said, “I don’t know too many colored folk from that age on up who don’t feel the same. How sad is that?”

  Many times I’d heard Mama Jennie tell us how even after slavery was legally over, Negro children weren’t allowed to read and write. When the Negroes finally found a Negro teacher brave enough to come into Canaan, white people burned down the church they used as a school and lynched the teacher.

  Mama Jennie went silent again; I thought she might cry.

  “I’ll never know what I coulda been or done.”

  We ate our pound cake and drank our tea in silence. After a few minutes, she spoke again.

  “That’s why we owe it to our chillen to see that they don’t be following in our footsteps. That’s why I’m proud of you for standing up for yourself,” she added.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “You know Lost Boy, don’t you?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “What you thank ’bout him?”

  “He’s crazy. Most us just laugh at him.”

  She looked mad. “Well, what’s so funny? He ain’t nobody’s damn joke.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You oughta be. Cause that man was just like you when he was your age. Smart as the sun is bright. Had manners to boot. Always say ‘yes, ma’am, no ma’am.’ Take your bags for you. Always had a smile on his face. The chile was gone go someplace. Then wham! Now he around here talking to the trees.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “Billy Ellis. Folks been calling him Lost Boy for so long they done forgot what his real name is. Well, Billy is the only child of the only religious coloreds to be lynched in Canaan. They found his mama and daddy, I reckon some twenty years ago. Found ’em hanging from the steeple of the Grace Street Baptist Church. They own church!

  “The thang is, Reverend and Miz Ellis was the Eliza Blizzards of they time. They was in civil rights before anybody even thought of a civil right for colored folk. They was smart folk from up north, and say they gone send Billy to college up yonder. They went out they way to help colored folk ’round here.

  “White folks ain’t bother them too much, even though they stirred up trouble. For a while, the fact that the reverend was a man of the cloth and she was his wife kept them in a safe zone. But you can push the Klan too far.

  “Anyways, when they had enough of the Ellises, they lynched ’em and left they only child, Billy, without a home. And the folk of Canaan, who his parents tried to protect, turned Billy away. Folk said nobody knew the straw what broke the camel’s back where the Ellises was concerned and, cause of that, everybody, including me, didn’t take him in. We thought the Klan might be coming back after the boy and kill whoever took him in, too. I guess I hoped he would get on a bus and go on up north to his relatives, but then I found out he didn’t have none. The boy was so shattered, he didn’t know what to do. He wandered the roads for a while. Then he pitched a tent in the cemetery next to his parents’ graves. Stayed right there till the church come and made him move. Say they couldn’t have no beautiful funerals and thangs if they had to be lookin’ at his nasty brown tent. When he wouldn’t move, they burned down his tent. Sounds much like the KKK, don’t it?

  “Before anybody knew it, he done got in the liquor and been stumbling ’round, sitting on street corners crying, lecturing trees and such. Folk say he walked around in a fog, lost. That’s how he come about being called Lost Boy.”

  “That’s a terrible story, Mama Jennie.”

  “You right. And I ain’t proud of my part in it neither, but it’s so. That’s why I want you to keep your head on straight. You done made the right decision, so don’t turn back.”

  “I won’t, and I’ll make you proud.”

  “Well,” she said. “You just be sure ’n do that.”
>
  From that moment on, I considered Mama Jennie my partner in crime. I decided that if things went wrong, if I became depressed because the struggle became too hard, then I would go to her. It would take only one good word from her to set me straight again.

  We changed the subject, although it never really left my mind, and finished our tea and cake. Then we played checkers for an hour until Mama showed up, and Mama Jennie decided she wanted to be taken to the supermarket. I told Mama where I’d be, and she smiled and kissed me.

  “Go on ’bout your bidness, then. And no more of that talk from last night, you hear?”

  I got on my bike and flew across the Pagan Creek Bridge heading for Days Neck and the tree house. I wanted to know what Eugenia had told the guys and what they thought of it all, provided she’d told them the truth.

  As I rode, I couldn’t imagine T. Wall and the boys not agreeing with me. After all, we were like family. We all liked each other more than our real siblings.

  Of course, it hadn’t always been that way. We were once just boys passing on the roads, laughing in church and playing hide ’n seek in Days Neck or marbles at school. But two summers ago, we came together as a unit—T. Wall, Beno, Muskrat, Flak and me.

  •••

  The five of us made up the Tenderfoot rank in our Boy Scout troop, run by the Grace Street Baptist Church. Every summer, we went camping. Usually it was just in the woods that we already knew, the novelty coming from the fact that we were spending the night outside. But that year, our troop leader, Mr. Chimes, decided we should be a part of the greater society of Boy Scouts. He had been in the Korean War and met a white man whose life he eventually saved. They kept in touch, and the man had also become a Boy Scouts leader. Mr. Chimes accepted an invitation from him to bring us to an official scout camp.

  At first, our parents balked at the idea of our troop joining white scouts in the remote Virginia countryside. But Mr. Chimes said his friend was trustworthy, and soon our parents gave in. We boys were happy. We were going to spend a week at a real scout camp where we could swim, shoot, tie knots, identify plants, and do crafts for merit badges.