The Emancipation of Evan Walls

by Jeffrey Blount

  The Tenderfoots decided to study together and stick together once we got to camp. We knew the older scouts didn’t want to be bothered with us. We spent months learning our knots and plants and other things in preparation. By June we were ready.

  Mr. Chimes piled us into three station wagons. He and his two assistants, Mr. Day and Mr. White, drove us to Camp Smith.

  When we got there, all the troops were told to line up on a huge playing field. When that was done, it became painfully obvious to us that we were the only black troop present. And the only poor one, too.

  Not all of us had uniforms. I had two, one of which I had loaned to T. Wall. But there were lots of blue jeans and T-shirts and imitation Keds to be seen throughout our troop. We heard the snickers and saw the pointing fingers, but no one among us said anything. We just gave each other a look that said we’d have to stick together.

  Everything went fine until the second day, when, out of the clear Virginia sky, a troop from the central part of the state decided to march down to the lake where we were taking swimming lessons. They marched to cadence like a well-trained army regiment. Each of them carried a Confederate battle flag.

  Those of us who were swimming stopped. Those who were not turned to meet the angry onslaught. The vision of my father being beaten came back to me. In all of our minds was a slow and torturous fading of dignity, of pride, of any enjoyment at Camp Smith.

  The boys in that troop laughed as they passed us by, their flags waving above their heads. The sky seemed to be full of them. An Eagle Scout stood before them and flipped us the bird as a salute, and then the other boys from other troops joined in, flipping and laughing at us. Even camp counselors marched alongside them. We looked to Mr. Chimes, Mr. Day, and Mr. White. They were helpless too, and like most other black adults put in a situation like that in front of black children, their shame was immense. They dropped their heads.

  So we just stood and waited for the parade to end. Afterward, we slow-footed it back to our campsite and found it torn apart, a Confederate battle flag flying from a tree in the middle of camp. We were so mentally beaten that no one took it down.

  They had also placed trapped skunks under the wooden floors of our tents. We let them out, but already our clothes and equipment reeked. They’d urinated and defecated on our bunks and stole our money. Much of our clothing, of which there was precious little, had been shredded with knives.

  Some of us picked a stump here and there to sit on. Others just sat on the ground and stared. For some time, no one moved. We were afraid to investigate further for fear of finding more destruction.

  Finally, after some time had passed, one of the older boys took down the flag and set it afire. Muskrat started crying. “I wanna go home now.”

  “Tomorrow morning,” Mr. Chimes said. “Tomorrow morning.”

  By the time night fell, T. Wall, Muskrat, Beno and I had crowded into one tent that didn’t smell too bad. We had taken the two reeking cots outside to let them air out. We huddled on the floor, afraid, telling tales of Negro-versus-KKK lore. Before long, we became more afraid because outside our tent, in the middle of camp, we could hear the birth of revenge.

  Jap Jones, one of the older Boy Scouts, was holding court.

  “I ain’t taking this shit lying down. No more, baby. Running ain’t my gig.”

  “What you gone do then?” Herman Mason asked.

  “We can return the favor,” Jap said.

  “Yeah,” Claude Jackson said. “Come up on ’em like a thief in the night.”

  They made plans centered around the Eagle Scout who had flipped us the bird. They would use him to send a message to the rest of the white Boy Scouts. A message that said the days of sitting back and taking it was over.

  “They must thank we still slaves or something,” Elroy Meeks said.

  “I believe you right,” Jap replied. “But we gone put a stop to that thanking in Camp Smith tonight.”

  “Damn straight,” Herman shouted. “It’s a new day, baby. A new day!”

  I thought of a favorite line of Mama Jennie’s from a poem she often quoted.

  Sherman’s buzzin’ along de sea,

  Jubili, Jubilo!

  Sherman’s buzzin’ along to de sea,

  Like Moses ridin’ on a bumble bee,

  Settin’ de prisoned and de humble free!

  I peeked out of our tent and scanned the faces around the fire.

  I had seen anger in the eyes of black men before, but never had I seen such immeasurable hatred. That night I looked into the eyes of fifteen would-be killers. Scared, I looked to the tent where Mr. Chimes, Mr. Day, and Mr. White were staying. I knew they could hear what was going on. They didn’t care; they weren’t trying to stop it. Maybe they were happy to hear it. And they weren’t the only ones in total support of the plan. The eyes of my friends were red-hot coals in the pitch-black darkness, burning with the excitement of retribution.

  Jap Jones dispatched Tom Goode to find out what tent the Eagle Scout was in while we sat in our tent and talked the situation over.

  “Ooh,” Beno said. “They gone get all up in that white boy’s shit tonight.”

  “Going upside that nasty yella head,” Muskrat said.

  “I ain’t missing it,” T. Wall said. “Y’all?”

  “Not me,” I said.

  I wasn’t excited about hurting anyone, but if someone else was going to do the hurting, then I was a willing witness.

  Hours later, around midnight, every boy in our group left the campsite. We followed Tom Goode through the woods and crept up on the white scout’s camp.

  In all of the sites, the tents were placed in a circle backing up to the woods, with a big open area in the middle. We went to the back of the Eagle Scout’s tent. A boy named Hopewell Long took out his knife and cut open the back of the tent so quietly that he didn’t even wake up the two boys inside.

  When Jap Jones walked onto the floorboards of the tent, the Eagle Scout’s buddy woke up first. He opened his mouth to yell, but Jap Jones had come across a tree branch on our walk through the woods, and there was no hesitation in his swing and no remorse on his face after the branch slammed into the boy’s head and laid him flat on the floor.

  The Eagle Scout shot up in his bed. Jap, Herman, Hopewell, and some others stuck a skunk-stinking sock in his mouth and dragged him out of the tent. They pulled him into the woods, tied a bandana over his mouth, and tied his arms and legs. Then they sat him down and tied him to a tree.

  Jap and the other older boys began to march around him, flipping him the bird as they passed his line of vision. The boy closed his eyes, and Jap smacked him around until he opened them again. Jap said if he didn’t keep them open, they might get ripped out.

  “Yeah,” Claude Jackson said. “You don’t wanna miss nothing now, do you?”

  The boy shook his head, and from the sidelines, the Tenderfoots laughed.

  Then they took turns slapping the boy’s face until it was beet red. Next, they took off the bandana and removed the sock. They all lined up in front of him, Jap first in line. “You piss on my bed,” he said. “I’mma piss on you.”

  He stood over the boy, pulled out his penis, and pissed right into the boy’s face. Next, Herman Mason did the same thing. Then Claude Jackson, Hopewell Long, Tom Goode, and all the rest of the older scouts.

  “Open your lily-assed white mouth,” some of them said, and proceeded to piss down his throat.

  Jap worked up the ability to do it again and stood over the boy, who had urine dripping down his face and pouring out of his mouth. He was crying, but you couldn’t tell the tears from the piss.

  Jap pissed on him again and said, “White folks can call me nigger from here till kingdom come, but I’m satisfied. Every time somebody call me that and thank they got me cold, I’m gone thank about the day I made a white boy drink my piss. And I’m gonna smile. Y’all want a turn?” he said, turning to us.

  We looked at each other. Only T. Wall moved. As he wal
ked to the boy, I thought of Taliferro Pitts and knew that he would have loved to be in T. Wall’s shoes. T. Wall did it, right down the boy’s throat. After he was finished, he turned and looked at the rest of us. We shook our heads. Though it was the ultimate chance to avenge my father’s beating and the stealing of his life as a farmer, and as much as I hated that boy for what he and his friends had done, I couldn’t urinate on him.

  “Let’s go,” Jap said. He kicked the boy hard in the stomach as we started to leave. Then, in his big steel-toe boots, Jap kicked the boy hard in the head, and the boy started to throw up. He vomited violently until he had nothing left to throw up and there was only the sound of empty, horrible retching.

  Someone must have heard this, or maybe his buddy had finally woken up from the blow Jap had leveled. Anyway, flashlights came on in the campsite, and we all took to the woods like frightened rabbits.

  An hour later, when we were all in our tents, two white men came into our camp. One of them was Mr. Chimes’ friend. The men got Mr. Chimes and explained to him that two boys had to be taken to the hospital because they had been assaulted. They wanted to know where we had been from the time we left the lake until they walked into our camp.

  Mr. Chimes told them that we hadn’t left the campsite. That we had been too afraid because of what happened earlier. He showed the men some of our stained bunks, our shredded clothes, and empty wallets. He explained that the afternoon’s events had led to us not showing up for dinner and that we planned on leaving in the morning.

  The men insisted on having a look inside each tent, and so they did. They flashed their lights in on all of us. We just stared back, having stripped down to our shorts by then. Finally, Mr. Chimes got up the nerve to do what we thought he should have done earlier.

  “Where was all yo’ concern when we got hit this afternoon? I didn’t see nobody coming ’round then,” he said.

  “I didn’t know it had happened,” the man said.

  “Don’t lie to me,” Mr. Chimes said, angrily. “I saved your life. You owe me one better than that.”

  His friend just turned and walked away. The other man followed. Mr. Chimes would never hear from that guy again.

  After twenty minutes or so, we all came out of our tents and danced a silent dance of celebration. T. Wall, Beno, Flak, Muskrat and I danced in a circle with each other. Though only T. Wall had taken part, we all felt like we had been to battle together and had survived.

  •••

  I turned off Highway 10 onto the dirt road leading to the community of Days Neck. T. Wall’s house was midway down the main road, which we called “the Track.” Behind it was the tree house that the five of us had built with plywood left from a burned-out shack.

  As I pedaled into his yard, 5-10, the huge Great Dane that belonged to T. Wall and was named after a local five and ten cents store, came tearing after me, growling like he wanted to eat me alive. But I wasn’t fazed. By then, I was used to him charging me. He always choked on the chain that restrained him just before he got to me.

  I dropped my kickstand at the base of the big walnut tree in the backyard. Beyond the tree, in a vacant lot, there was a group of men from the neighborhood hanging out around Lost Boy’s truck. I ignored them and climbed the ladder. I knocked the secret knock on the trap door, and they opened it for me. “Hey, T. Wall,” I said. “You’d thank after all this time, 5-10 would stop barking at me.”

  “Shit, E. You know he don’t like nobody but me. Not even my mama.”

  “What y’all doing?” I asked.

  “Looking at the naked ladies,” Flak said, winking at me. “Boocoo tits in here, bro. Come see.”

  This was typical of Canaan boys. At least, black boys; I didn’t know any white boys at the time. There was little for us to do. We didn’t have a recreation facility like the white kids. There was no pool, no little league, and very few church functions. We were too young for the pool halls, so we just hung out and talked about the day when we could get laid. Sex seemed to be the only way black men and boys could truly feel like men. So that was pretty much all they thought about.

  Older men didn’t discourage us young guys, either. In fact, most of the men wore the conquests of their sons around their necks like a Congressional Medal of Honor. Muskrat said that Beno had stolen his father’s Playboys, but truthfully Beno’s father made the robbery an easy one, as he always had. He wanted Beno to be a stud in the worst way. That’s just the way it was. Boys became men by getting laid, and girls became women by getting pregnant.

  “Look at this one,” Beno said. “This the kind they used to hang niggers for.”

  Flak leaned over and took a look. “Well, hang me, baby. Umph, umph, umph!”

  “Yeah,” Muskrat said. “You go ’head and fix up the rope. Give me fifteen minutes with that gal, and I hang myself for you. After getting some of that, everythang else in life gone be a letdown anyway.”

  We roared with laughter, slapping hands all around. T. Wall, who had been cleaning his BB gun, leaned over. “Let me see that.”

  He handed me the gun, and I looked at it, rolling it over in my hands. I liked the feel of it better than mine. We all had them; that was how you were trained to use the real thing so that you could put food on your family’s table. Mostly we shot crows, and we were very proud of our accuracy.

  “I don’t know about all that,” T. Wall said, looking at the Playboy. “Yeah, she got a good body, but ain’t no pussy in the world worth dying for.”

  “Well, tell me this,” Beno said. “Could you live without it?”

  “I guess so, stupid. I ain’t had none yet, and I guess I’m what you call living. But if it’s like what my daddy say it like, then I reckon you got yourself a point.”

  “She ain’t got enough butt for me,” Muskrat said. “Now you take Eugenia. She got a butt that sits up so high and mighty, you could near ’bout fry yo’ whole breakfast on it.”

  “Been in the bushes with one girl, one time, and he the king of good butt,” Beno said.

  “Hey, I can’t help it that I likes me some good butt.”

  “Speaking of Eugenia,” I said, really afraid to ask but feeling that I might as well get it over with, “what she say about me last night?”

  “Oooo, boy. She talked some trash ’bout you,” Muskrat said.

  “Yeah,” T. Wall said. “She told us you wanted to go to school with whitey and stuff like that. I told her she was full of shit and to take her big-butted, crazy-headed self on home.”

  “Then she said you said you was gone be better than all us,” Beno said. “You say that crap?”

  “No, I didn’t,” I said. “Miss Chauncey Mae been spreading the same mess, Mama Jennie said. I ain’t said nothing like that.”

  “See,” T. Wall said. “I told that bitch you ain’t said that shit. I told her, man, I know E like the back of my hand. He’s a brother to the bone and don’t want nothing to do with no whitey. Give me five, bro.”

  He held out his hands, and I slapped them with my hands, palm to palm. “On the black side,” he said. He turned his hands over, and I slapped them again.

  “What I did say was I wanted an education,” I told them, my friendship feeling somewhat renewed after our reaffirmation ritual. “I said I wanted to get out of Canaan. I didn’t say I wanted to be better. Just in a better life situation.”

  T. Wall, who had taken the BB gun back, dropped its stock to the floor. Beno rolled up the Playboy in his hands and, along with the rest of them, he stared back at me.

  “Ain’t that the same thang?” Flak asked. “Better situation mean better’n us.”

  “Eugenia was right, won’t she? You did say you was gone be better than us,” Muskrat said.

  “No, I didn’t. All I said was I wanted to get something in my head so I wouldn’t have to worry about the white man taking what’s mine, like he done my daddy’s right to be a farmer. I want to be like Eliza Blizzard. She says what she wants to say, and they don’t mess with her bec
ause she smart. She got the NAACP and the federal government behind her with the school stuff, and the hick white people can’t stop her ’cause she know how to use they system.”

  “Yeah, we know ’bout old lady Blizzard and her big-assed mouth,” T. Wall said. “If you thank like she thank, maybe Eugenia was right. That woman want us to integrate with them . . . them thangs.”

  “We can use ’em to study the books, T. Wall. That’s all I want,” I said.

  “E,” he replied, looking angry. “I’m disappointed in you, brother man. You oughta be thanking ’bout what you said.”

  “I have been.”

  “E, you ain’t gone turn Tom on us, is you?” Muskrat asked.

  “What you thank? You know me!”

  “All I know is you better not. Folks be real pissed off. Eugenia say Taliferro said if he heard you talking that crap, he was gone shut you up by busting up your mouth.”

  “Taliferro ain’t my damn daddy,” I said. “Just ’cause he blame everythang wrong in the whole world on white folks don’t mean I got to thank like he do.”

  I was nearly as agitated as the night before.

  “You ain’t sounding like us,” T. Wall said.

  “And you ain’t listening to what you sounding like,” I fought back.

  “What you mean by that shit?” Muskrat asked.

  “Ain’t nothing wrong with people wanting to get ahead. That don’t mean I thank less of nobody. Y’all ought to look around. Things is bad.”

  “It ain’t that bad,” Beno said. “I thank people doing alright. Look at Earnest Hudd. He ain’t been out of school that long. He got a job. Dude got that bad-assed red GTO.”

  “Yeah,” Flak said. “That car is real bad. I seen him race it some. It be standing still and he put that baby in first and hit it. Man, you can see the back of that thang sit down and boom! Burn that dawg!”

  “All right!” Beno said. They slapped fives on the black sides all around.

  “But,” I said, “you look at that shack he live in. He ashamed to take anybody home. If he need heat in the winter, he gotta go sit in the car. Can’t afford no clothes. Look at the mess he be wearing. They barely pay him enough money to pay the car note. He thank he cool riding around in a bad car, but that’s all he got. A bad car ain’t no life. And a job at them plants can’t be the best we can do.”