The Emancipation of Evan Walls

by Jeffrey Blount

  “When you get so damn smart? Talking all old, like you somebody’s old man,” T. Wall asked.

  It was a good question. I remember thinking to myself that I was only ten, but I also remember thinking that was just how much Bojack had shaken me up. He’d opened my eyes to the grief around me. Ten years old wasn’t too young to realize that it wasn’t where I wanted to be.

  “I ain’t so smart. But I can see. You can, too, if you want to look. I hear Mama Jennie and Bojack talk ’bout Eliza Blizzard and how much respect she get from black and white folks. It don’t take no grown person to know that it be better to be like her than to have a bad car like Earnest Hudd.”

  “I ain’t got no respect for her,” Flak said.

  “You know any black people ’round here smarter than her?”

  No one answered.

  “See,” I said. “And she ain’t stuck here neither. If it don’t work out in Canaan, I heard Mama Jennie say, Miz Blizzard can just go and leave and work someplace else. Ain’t nobody else got enough education or enough money to do that.”

  “She still ain’t getting me to no school with no white folks,” T. Wall said. “I’m with Taliferro. Let’s kill ’em all.”

  “That ain’t the point, T. Wall.”

  “The point is,” T. Wall said, “is all of a sudden you must thank your ass is white. You ain’t nothing special. Your daddy lost his precious farm, and y’all struggling just like everybody else. You coming around here with some pie-in-the-sky dream shit. You better look at who your friends is. One day you be walking ’round here with your dreams and nobody gone be talking to you.”

  I was shocked by my friends’ reaction, suddenly feeling like an outcast, a pariah. No matter what our different desires were, I always thought our friendship would accommodate them. I mean, Muskrat loved baseball, but I hated it. So what? T. Wall loved to fish, but I thought that was as boring as baseball. So what? I wanted an education at all costs, and they didn’t. I figured, So what?

  Just then, we heard laughter outside. It was like a gift from God. We went over to the window, a big hole in the wall.

  “What’s going on, T. Wall?” Muskrat asked.

  “You know how everybody be tired of Lost Boy coming around sleeping on they porch steps and stuff.”

  “Yeah.”

  “He been sleeping in this truck for a good while now.”

  “We know that,” Beno said.

  “Well, they don’t want him sleeping in it no more.”

  “He ain’t hurting nobody,” I said.

  “That ain’t the point,” T. Wall said. “Daddy say we can’t have no trash like Lost Boy hanging ’round.”

  “That’s the same kinda stuff white folks say about us,” I said. “We ought not to say that about our own.”

  “Why you got white folks on the brain for?” Flak asked. “Like you love ’em or something.”

  “People like Lost Boy gives black folks a bad name,” T. Wall said. “Daddy says he gives white folks a example reason to call all us lazy and shiftless.”

  Outside the tree house, Lost Boy, his hair in knots, his beard dirty, and his shirt torn, stumbled toward the broken-down pickup truck he called home. The men were laughing.

  “What they know that we don’t?” Flak asked T. Wall.

  “Daddy say they was gone put a black snake in the truck. They was gone hide it somewhere. Lost Boy come on in there and lay down, and next thang he know a snake be crawling on his behind. He’ll be too drunk to know it ain’t something poisonous. They set a fire under his ass so he won’t come back to this neighborhood.”

  Lost Boy got into the truck and closed the door. There was quiet for some time. Then the ruckus started, and the men below began to bellow. The old pickup rocked side to side. I saw Lost Boy swinging his arms and yelling. Finally, it stopped. So did the laughter of the men. Lost Boy opened the door and tossed out the snake’s head. He came out and sat on the ground by the truck and began to gut the snake.

  “Damn,” Beno said. “He gone cook it and eat it.”

  Lost Boy was talking up a storm to no one as he continued to clean the snake. The men walked away, shaking their heads and probably planning something else. But for the time being, Lost Boy had won, and I was happy about that.

  THREE

  When the corn around my house reached a point where it was taller than me, I journeyed into its depths. Even though the crop belonged to the white farmer who semi-rented Daddy’s land, I treated it just like I did when it grew for Daddy. In the center of the field, I cut down stalks, creating a circular haven in which I meditated. I spent most of my daylight hours there, spinning wonderful webs composed of fascinating dreams about who and what I would become.

  It was in that place of refuge that my love of reading blossomed. The first novel I ever read was Old Yeller. The second was its sequel, Savage Sam. Mama Jennie spoke to Aunt Frances again, and she sent more books that had been thrown away by her employers’ children. I carried a dictionary into the field with me to help me through them. I devoured those books and any other fiction I could get my hands on. My vocabulary grew faster than the corn in the field harboring me, and little by little my speech began to change. Through an unwavering practice schedule, “thangs” slowly became “things,” and “ain’t” practically disappeared. At first, I just pretended I was one of the characters I read about and spoke as I thought they would. Pretty soon, I was speaking as myself, and although I slipped a lot, I did well.

  “Why you talking all proper and stuff for?” Mark once asked.

  “Because it’s the way you’re supposed to speak, I think,” I said.

  “If you white,” he said.

  Dictionary in hand, I read the front page and the sports section of the paper every day. By the end of the summer, the world had opened up and changed me. I sometimes listened in on the weekly porch sessions, auditing them from a distance. The adults would discuss current events. I found I knew more than they did, which fed my appetite for knowledge. I was already moving beyond them.

  In early August, Mark and I talked Mama into buying the books we needed for our school year early so we could get a head start. I read most of them before Labor Day.

  T. Wall and the gang stayed clear of me for the better part of the summer. The first time I saw them after the argument in the tree house, they asked me if I was still thinking that same crazy stuff. I said yes. They shook their heads and walked away.

  It’s funny, though. I didn’t miss them and hadn’t really thought about them much. I was totally preoccupied learning and enjoying it like nothing before. On the Saturday before I started fifth grade, I sought out the man who was responsible to finally thank him.

  Bojack was exactly where I expected to find him, sitting at the edge of Morgart’s Lake, wearing his reflector sunglasses, and shooting his rifle. An empty bottle of Boone’s Farm Apple Wine lay beside him.

  I approached him from the rear, down the embankment, through the pine and maple trees. I snatched a honeysuckle blossom from a bush and sucked on the back end of it as I sat down beside him. He nodded and unloaded his chamber on a piece of wood bobbing in the water.

  “Ain’t seen you at the sessions lately,” he said without looking at me. Another shot rang out.

  “Mama and Daddy won’t let me come no more. Anymore.”

  “I reckon I shoulda kept my fat mouth closed and you wouldn’t be in that ole doghouse.”

  He ran out of bullets and stopped to reload.

  “I wish I weren’t in the doghouse either, but I’m glad you didn’t keep your mouth shut.”

  “Weren’t!” he said, turning toward me, playfully mocking. “You say . . . weren’t?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Where you learn to talk like that?”

  “I’ve been doing what you suggested. I’ve been reading the paper and books and most everything I can get my hands on. I’ve been studying.”

  “Well,” he smiled, “ain’t you something? Maybe I
ain’t so sad no more that I talked up.”

  He began to shoot again.

  “Can you tell me something?” I asked.

  “What?”

  “Can you tell me why you got mad all of a sudden? Why you’ve been coming for years and then all of a sudden you got real angry? I guess I’ve seen you stewing in your juices, but—?”

  “Well, ain’t you a little lawyer. Coming up with a question like that. Right personal, too.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to get too big for my britches.”

  “Oh, hell, I know that. I’m just kidding with you. Lighten up some.”

  He laid the gun across his lap and gazed out over the lake.

  “Let’s see here now. I guess it was Eliza Blizzard what done it. Yeah, that’s right. I had just seen her that evening before I come over to your place. I reckon she got me riled up and such.”

  “Aunt Mary said you were shacking up with her. Is that right? The school principal?”

  Bojack laughed. “Naw, that ain’t true. Why would that lady want to shack up with me? A man like me ain’t got nothing she want. The truth of the matter is that Negroes ’round here don’t like the woman. She been going ’round to house after house trying to get a petition. She trying to change thangs ’round here for the better. Trying to help get our people ahead in this world. But you know the Negroes ain’t having it. These fools so damn full of hate, they can’t see clear past they noses. It goddamn burns me up to see somebody hate something or somebody so much that they can’t put they feelings aside. They end up cutting off they noses to spite they faces.”

  “What’s the petition for?”

  “Ain’t you heard?”

  “No. A lot of people ain’t talking to me so much these days. And I can’t remember Miss Blizzard coming around to our house.”

  “Oh, she been there. She told me. Your folks run her off just like all the other peoples.”

  “I guess I can see why. After listening to folks on the porch that night, I guess Miss Blizzard won’t have much luck anywhere.”

  “Well, she got plenty luck with me. That’s why folks be seeing her car at my house. I’m probably one of the few Negroes in this damn town can see she right. I help her any way I can. I can draw a little bit. I got some posters in the shack behind the house.”

  “How come some people can see, and some people can’t?”

  “I be damned if I can figure that one out,” he said.

  He took aim and began shooting. The piece of wood split again and bobbed in the water.

  People said shooting made Bojack happy, but he didn’t look happy then as he ripped through a few .22 longs. It didn’t seem that he was concentrating on the shooting. It was like it had just become a part of him. A natural rhythm like walking. Something a person can do without concentrating, which allows the mind to be free. Bojack’s mind might not have been on his marksmanship, but it didn’t seem free, either. Just like the night he exploded in anger on our porch, he seemed burdened.

  “You shoot good,” I said when he finished that round and began reloading.

  “I do, don’t I?” He turned and smiled. “Good technique and good equipment. Got the technique in the Army and the equipment right here in Canaan.”

  “Can I hold it?”

  “Yeah. You can shoot it, too, if you wants.”

  “Oh, I never shot a real gun before. Just my BB rifle.”

  “Well, if you gone start, you might as well start shooting with the best. This here’s a Springfield semi-automatic .22 rifle. Feel that weight. Ain’t it nice?”

  I nodded as I took the gun. It had a strap, and Bojack showed me how to wrap it around my arm to help stabilize the rifle.

  I was surprised at how little it kicked, and I hit the wood on my first try. Bojack seemed impressed.

  “I’m pretty good with my BB,” I said.

  “I bet you is.” He smiled.

  “Where’d you get a rifle like this in Canaan?”

  Bojack paused. He took the gun from me and began shooting. In hindsight, I think he took the gun because it was his security blanket, which he needed in order to talk about the ghosts in his past. He let it rest across his lap after he’d finally disintegrated the block of wood. His face—what I could see of it—reminded me of pastures in the middle of winter. Pastures covered with dead, brown grass, bereft of livestock or any other kind of life.

  He caressed the barrel, and his voice quavered when he spoke.

  “I got it from a man I really looked up to. More a daddy to me than my old man ever was. Reverend Ellis was his name.”

  “You mean,” I replied, “Lost Boy’s . . . I mean Billy Ellis’ daddy?”

  “That be the one. How did you know Billy’s real name?”

  “Mama Jennie told me.”

  “Oh. I see.”

  “How come he gave you the rifle and not Billy?”

  “He gave us both one. We used to hunt squirrels and rabbits with ’em. Man, could Reverend shoot!”

  “Could he shoot cherries off a tree from as far away as you can?”

  “Way farther,” Bojack said. “Billy could too.” He paused. “He was my best friend, Billy was. I used to pretend he was my brother, and Reverend and Miz Ellis was my folks.”

  “What about your parents?”

  “They won’t hitting on much by the time I met Billy. My daddy was a beaten man long before I came along. He ain’t care ’bout much a nothing. Back when WWII came along, he thought he found a way out of Canaan and being looked at as a nigger by white folks. See, he figured if he went off and fought his little colored heart out on the battlefield, then they would respect him. Well, he went alright, and he fought. He came back with medals, but when they gave a vict’ry parade for the vets coming home to Canaan, they wouldn’t let no colored march. Then he realized he coulda died over there and nobody white woulda give a good goddamn. Probably woulda been happy he was dead more than ole Hitler. And he thought he was fighting for some freedom. Sheeeeeit!

  “Only thang much I remember ’bout him now was watching him sitting in the backyard one day, building a fire. And drunker than a skunk too, boy I tell ya. He sat down and watched the flames for a while and then he went in the house and come out with the American flag he come home with from the war. Next thang I knew, he thowed it on the fire and watched it burn.

  “He ain’t never had no love for me or nobody else after the war. Folks say ‘nobody else’ included my mama, too. These days, I don’t remember much about her. I just remember her being there. Nothin’ special, just there. Anyway, them days I was goin’ nowhere fast. Billy kinda adopted me, and we become fast friends. Then Reverend and the Mrs. adopted me, too, and it was like family . . . till they got lynched.”

  My head dropped. I couldn’t believe he was telling me all of this. Since Aunt Mary left him, he’d been a recluse. He probably found a kid easier to talk to and less judgmental.

  “If you know Billy’s name, Mama Jennie musta told you how he ended up like he did.”

  I nodded.

  “Well, I turned my back on him, too,” Bojack said.

  I looked up at him. He was staring out over the lake, the water reflecting on his sunglasses, making me think of that river you often hear about people crying.

  “I know,” I said.

  “I was afraid,” he said.

  “I understand that.”

  “Oh you do, do you?”

  “Yeah. I mean, I reckon I probably woulda done the same thang—thing, the same thing. It’s the way things were.”

  “That don’t make it right.”

  “Nope. I reckon not.”

  “It’s a bad thang to live with. I tried to talk to Billy three days ago. I seen him sitting on the street corner by the bank on Main Street.”

  “What happened?”

  “He ain’t even know who I was.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Me too,” he said quietly. “Me too.”

  There was a moment of
silence, and then he patted me on the head and smiled again, as if to thank me for listening.

  “But,” he continued, “I bet you ain’t come here to hear no old dude cry the blues.”

  “Nope. I came to thank him for turning me on to being something. Maybe you let Billy down, but you started something with me. Maybe I’m your turnaround. Like I said, I’ve been reading a lot. The newspapers, books. I practice speaking a lot. That’s why I’m talking like I’m talking.”

  “Music to this old fool’s ears. You got a big smile all on your face. Must be liking it all.”

  “I do. I love to read.”

  “Well, ain’t that some shit? What your mama and daddy thank of that one?”

  “Not much.”

  “What you mean?”

  “They don’t talk to me about it, and I don’t talk to them about it. Daddy got so mad at me the last time I was at the session, and Mama won’t go near the subject. She’s afraid of upsetting him. So I’m afraid to talk to them. Everybody but you and Mama Jennie seem to be that way. None of the grown folks will talk to me much. I guess everybody’s still upset. Even T. Wall, my best friend.”

  “Ummmm.”

  “Mama Jennie says they’ll probably get over it soon. Just like with everything else. I can’t figure out why they’re not mad at you, though. You can still go to the sessions.”

  “Well, I ain’t no threat, that’s why. Dig this. See, I done already had my life pass me by, just like them. We sinking in the same old rickety-assed boat. But you ain’t. You can still be more than most all the colored folks in Canaan ever had a chance to be. That makes ’em jealous for the chances they never had. They mad at you ’cause when you become something, you toss all them lost chances right back up into they faces. It hurts.”

  “But they didn’t fail at life. They didn’t have the same chances I do. There won’t no civil rights movement before they were born.”