The Emancipation of Evan Walls

by Jeffrey Blount

  “There’s just something special about the Lord’s day,” Mama would say before turning on the television set to a station airing her favorite religious show. The gospel music and the minister’s hellfire and brimstone became a backdrop to our breakfast and a prelude to Reverend Walker’s rote sermons. We would chatter about last week’s goings-on and about what the week would hold. It had all been very nice and very family-like—until everything changed.

  I didn’t wake up to the normal Sunday morning delights the week after my beating from Daddy and Aunt Mary’s revelation. Mama wasn’t singing the gospels along with the television. In fact, the TV wasn’t even on. There was just a deadly silence broken every now and then by the clinking of silverware. I heard Daddy shuffling around his bedroom and Mark turning on the shower. I took a deep breath and shook my head, still feeling some pain, wondering at the whole mess I’d brought on.

  Aunt Mary had left after our discussion and told everybody about my going over to Eddie Gleason’s and the beating I got. She added other things that never happened but were, in her mind, the appropriate embellishments to make steeper my fall from grace.

  The black kids at school became even more vicious. It was a daily bloodletting. I dreamed of Christmas vacation, thinking I would be rid of the steely knives in the other black kids’ eyes. Every time I passed one of them or a group of them, my wounds opened deeper. There was never enough time between stabbings for the wounds to heal. They passed me in the halls singing their arrangement of the guards’ chant from The Wizard of Oz. “Oh-reee-oh. Ohhhhh-re-oh!”

  The teachers, especially the black teachers, were no help. Like the adults at my church who allowed me to be stoned on my way to summer Bible school, the teachers turned away from my pleas for help until I no longer pled. Some white teachers tried, but they made only a small effort. I think they thought I deserved it, too, but they didn’t matter much to me. I never expected anything from them anyway.

  Dee and Eddie expressed their friendship even more vigorously. They knew my penchant for going off alone to sulk my way back into shape, so they allowed me to come in and out of their lives as I pleased. They put no pressure on me and remained good friends.

  Those friendships helped some, but I still felt that my life had no center. I just wasn’t whole. I spent most of my time alone at home and at school groping in the dark for something that would make me feel at home with myself. Mama Jennie and Bojack urged me to struggle forward. Mama Jennie sang “Onward Christian Soldiers” to me, but I was tired. I was wilting.

  I tried to appear aloof when others were looking me over, hoping for a sign that they were getting to me. At night, I found my spot in the woods and shed my emotions, which ping-ponged from tears to anger.

  I stood out there in my circle of trees, freezing on cold nights, not wanting to go home. I broke a lot of bottles on rocks during that time, thinking, each time one crashed, I don’t need ’em. They don’t mean nothing to me. Then why are you crying?

  I had to find a way not to need them or anyone. Feeling their hate and being alone was killing me.

  •••

  By the time everyone got to the breakfast table that Sunday after my beating, I was reminded of why I spent more time in the woods than in the house. Everywhere I went, there was incredible tension. I began to hope as hard as I could that Mama Jennie would relent and let me live with her. I had to settle for the fact that she had threatened to turn Daddy in to the police if he beat me again. He knew they’d jump at any opportunity to lock up another black man, especially one who saw himself as special among local blacks. I tried to ease things by forcing a conversation.

  “How come everybody is so quiet?” I asked.

  No one answered.

  “Don’t you want the TV set on, Mama?” I asked.

  She stared at me for a while with so much anger in her eyes that I had to drop my head. I saw that she had burned the rolls, which she’d never done.

  “I ain’t in the mood,” she finally said.

  I guess that was the first time I realized what I had done to them. The incredible squeeze play I had put them in. I hadn’t thought much about how Daddy wanted to become the head deacon, which was something I knew he wanted badly. But that was becoming less of a possibility; Reverend Walker had told Daddy, “If your own children can’t look to you as a model and then do the right thang, how you expect my sheep to follow you as my lead shepherd?”

  Mama suffered, too. Chauncey Mae had been infested with Rosetta’s hatred. She called Mama to tell her that she wasn’t sure she could come to the porch sessions in the upcoming summer. “Child, I gots me a reputation to be concerned about. I can’t be coming ’round to no house with no Uncle Tom in it,” she told Mama.

  Ethel Brown threatened the same thing and only said hello whenever the two met. Cozy Pitts didn’t even bother to call. I’m sure it was scary for Mama to be losing her friends.

  And Mark’s situation was pathetic. He was trying desperately to become a true brother, and I was standing in the way. No one would take him seriously as long as I was his little brother.

  We got dressed and went to church. Mama and Daddy still sat with the deacons and their wives but otherwise didn’t mingle much. Mark’s friends seemed to barely tolerate him, so he unhappily sat beside me. We were all depressed and isolated. We stood with our hymnals open at the appropriate moments, but we did not sing.

  Reverend Walker took to the pulpit and absolutely stunned me with a sermon titled “The Little Boy Who Thought He Was Better Than All His Little Friends.” He read the title twice before he went into his sermon, which tore me and my dream apart. He never mentioned my name, but the entire congregation knew where the message was aimed.

  I tried to tough it out, but I couldn’t. I looked at all those Jesuses in the stained-glass windows and remembered the comfort they had given me in those days of revivals, but they were of no help. So I decided to run out, no matter how embarrassing. I stumbled standing up and stepping over Mark, but I quickly gathered myself and ran as fast as I could out of Grace Street Baptist Church, trying my best not to notice any more of the laughing faces than I had to. Bojack met me outside, and I fainted in his arms.

  I guess it must have been about a half hour later that I woke up at home, with Bojack sitting on my bed beside me. I woke up looking at my reflection in his mirrored sunglasses.

  “I ain’t never going back!” I yelled before I burst into tears.

  He put his hand on my shoulder and squeezed. “Can’t say that I blames you . . . that I can’t.”

  And in fact that morning was the last time I saw the interior of Grace Street Baptist.

  I lay there staring into space, feeling the tears dry on my face and tasting the salt residue. Bojack massaged my shoulder while looking out the window.

  “I guess,” I said, breaking the silence, “I never thought nothing like this would happen. I didn’t think I would be pushing folks’ noses way out of joint. All I wanted was to be somebody.”

  Bojack turned back to me, his face sagging around the sunglasses. He looked as if he wanted to say something, but couldn’t, having come up empty.

  “They think I’m trying to be white,” I continued.

  “Yeah,” he said with a big, depressed sigh. “I reckon they do.”

  “Isn’t it possible to be somebody and still be black? How come they figure you have to give up your blackness if you want to get As? Do they want us all to dig ditches forever?”

  “Yeah,” Bojack said. “I reckon some do.”

  •••

  The next morning, I felt uplifted, even though I had gotten on the bus with embarrassingly ashy, gray skin, which was a sign of real backwoods, low-income black folk. As we left the house, Mama took the time to rub some lard on Mark’s face and hands. When I came behind Mark, ready for the same treatment, she just looked at me and said, “I ain’t studying ’bout you, boy.”

  But it was the last day before Christmas vacation. All I had to
do, I told myself, was to make it through one more day. Then there would be two weeks of rest from school, and I could spend most of the time at Mama Jennie’s.

  I was in homeroom when I realized that making it through that one day was not going to be easy. I noticed the other black kids were extremely restless, shifting in their seats, stealing quick glances at each other, nodding and staring at their watches. Mrs. Jones didn’t notice, but she didn’t pay much attention to most of the black kids.

  I kept my ears open all morning while passing kids in the hall, hoping for some kind of clue. I got caught staring, too; as I remember, a couple of them yelled at me, “What you staring at, Snowball?”

  I got nothing out of my heightened awareness, so I was taken by surprise when, at two minutes to twelve, right before the lunch bell, all the black kids in the school except me left their classrooms. Later, I found out that this was happening at the high school and even the elementary school.

  They lined the hallways and took everyone else in the school hostage. They banged on lockers and chanted, “Death to whitey!” and “Say it loud. I’m black and I’m proud.” They threw books and folding chairs at every white person who dared peek out of a classroom. Some of them brazenly faced off with white male teachers who tried to stem the tide.

  Much of this was happening right outside my classroom door. I sat in my chair, shocked and entranced. Outside were T. Wall and Flak. I saw Rosetta run by, enraged. She shouted loudly, “Death to whitey!”

  All of a sudden, I woke up, quickly looked around and realized that I was the only black kid still in the room and probably the only black kid in the entire Canaan school system who didn’t know that a protest had been scheduled. I was crushed. This was the ultimate slap in my face.

  White kids looked at me as if to say, “Well, nigger, what are you sitting here for?” And I wondered why I was there. Slowly, I got up out of my seat. I walked tentatively toward the door, knowing that once I went into the hall, I would be treated just as if I were white. But I didn’t feel comfortable sitting in the class, either, because I could tell the white kids didn’t want me there. My stomach was on fire.

  I made it to the door and stuck out my head. Sure enough, a book just missed my face as it slammed against the door frame. It came from Taliferro Pitts, who shouted, “Get back in that room, Uncle Tom.”

  I turned around and looked at Dee, who was looking back at me, completely confused. We just stared across the room at each other for a second, thinking, Can we still be friends at this moment? Who draws the line, and where? It was clear where the other white kids had drawn the line. Up until that point, many of them, by virtue of my friendship with Dee and Eddie, had begun to accept me. I was invited to a couple of other houses of non-Canaan natives, but I didn’t go because I was afraid of Daddy. At that moment, though, they thought of me as the enemy. I felt them all thinking the word “nigger.” I couldn’t stand it, so I turned away. I was in the middle again. My stomach pain inflamed.

  Eddie emerged from the door at the far end of the hallway, which was open. I had forgotten that Mrs. Jones sent him on an errand. Now, he was running back to the class, afraid, ducking books and chairs.

  I turned to Mrs. Jones. “It’s Eddie,” I shouted. “He’s out there!”

  She ran to the door along with Dee.

  “Over here,” she shouted.

  “Run, Eddie, run!” Dee yelled.

  Angry black students rained books upon us. We ducked but looked back out to find that they had grabbed Eddie. Two boys held him as another started shouting in Eddie’s face. Then, the one shouting punched Eddie in the stomach. I just couldn’t stand it. I thought, Maybe their gripe is legit, but this isn’t right. This makes us blacks no better than the men who beat Daddy.

  Bojack had taught me to body-block the way the pro football players did it. So, I sprinted and threw my body into the two boys holding Eddie. He was released in the collision and was able to make it safely into the classroom. I was slammed to the floor and tasted blood in my mouth. That was all I remembered until I woke up in the hospital to find Mama Jennie sitting by my side.

  •••

  Coming out of that long, drug-aided sleep was quite difficult. Though I was still on the edge of sleep, I twisted my head back and forth, fighting the urge to drop off again. Little by little, I won the battle. Where there was darkness, there was soon fuzzy light. Where there was numbness, there was excruciating pain. Where there was nothing, there was a smell I couldn’t put my finger on.

  When my eyes were finally able to focus, I saw Mama Jennie snatching an arm back from around my face, covering up something and then shoving whatever it was in her purse.

  There was a lot of pain. I was forced to take a deep breath in order to deal with it. Mama Jennie assumed I had taken the breath to hold back on an avalanche of tears. I guess she expected me to wake up, see where I was, and then let the rivers flow.

  She leaned over to me and whispered. “You go ahead and cry, baby. Ain’t nobody here but me.”

  I thought about it for a while and actually searched myself for some tears, but I came up empty.

  “Right now, I don’t think I can cry anymore.”

  “Well, I guess I ain’t surprised at that,” she said. “I reckon you done cried enough already for one childhood.”

  “I guess.”

  She gave a sad smile, kissed the palm of her hand and put it on my forehead. I closed my eyes as she held it there. I enjoyed the warmth as much as I could through the pain.

  “How you feel, baby?”

  “I hurt pretty bad.”

  “Let me get the nurse, then.”

  She went to the door and called the nurse, who checked my chart and brought in a cup of water and some pills. It took everything I had just to sit up enough to swallow them.

  Mama Jennie sat there, smiling and rubbing my forehead. I began to wonder about what was causing my pain, so I asked her.

  “The question,” she replied, “ain’t what you hurt, but what you ain’t hurt. Let me see where to start. How ’bout right here.” She rubbed the bandage on my lower abdomen. “You got stabbed, but it’s a small wound. Little Boy Scout knife or some thang like it.” She knocked on something that sounded like she was hitting a rock. “They broke a arm bone.”

  “Wow, I didn’t even notice it,” I said, looking down at the cast on my left arm.

  “And you got two broken ribs,” she continued. “And finally, you got yo’self a full-blown ulcer. Bleeding and everythang.”

  “An ulcer!” I shouted, and then winced from a sudden blast of pain. I knew what caused ulcers; I knew people who had them. Overworked men and women, desolate and full of anguish, trying to keep themselves and their families above water in a world they knew was stacked against them. I didn’t want to be included in that inconsolable group. I mean, Cozy Pitts had an ulcer. I had nothing in common with her. But then, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I sort of fit the description. And then I felt the melancholies coming on, as Bojack used to say. I felt like I had finally gone over the deep end.

  I just lay there thinking about the ulcer. I simply couldn’t believe it. In the middle of these thoughts, I realized that something else was wrong. Where’s everyone else? I wondered. I knew the answer, but I asked Mama Jennie anyway.

  “Are you the only one here?”

  “Brother out in the waiting room . . .”

  “I mean Mama and Daddy.”

  “No, son. They ain’t come with us.” Mama Jennie looked heartbroken.

  “Why not?” I asked.

  She took her hand off my forehead and sat back in her chair. Her fingers played nervously around her purse.

  “I reckon,” she said, “your daddy figure this is good for you. It won’t bad enough that you was out there making friends with white folks, now you out there protecting ’em against colored folks. Your Mama and Daddy so embarrassed they can’t leave the house.”

  “You mean I could’ve
died, and all they would’ve cared about was their reputation.”

  “I reckon. But it ain’t quite that simple. All of the somebody stuff. Your daddy’s troubles, your mama’s troubles, and her being afraid of what you and everything else is doing to your daddy. She’s trying to hang on to both of you, but it ain’t easy. I’m feeling like she thank she gotta make a choice in her heart. You know, between you and him. Between the life she had and you.”

  I nodded. I didn’t know what to feel except guilt.

  “How did you hear about it?” I asked.

  “Chile, you talking ’bout Canaan. I knew about the whole thang before you hit the school floor.”

  “So everybody knows?”

  She nodded.

  “You know,” I continued, “I think they wanted to kill me.”

  “Sounds that way.”

  “What stopped them?”

  “White po-lice who took the opportunity to break some of them boys’ heads. You know the po-lice loved that.”

  “And I bet black folk are blaming me for the police.”

  “You right.”

  “I knew it.”

  “Well, you did give ’em that chance to enjoy they favorite pastime. But none of that change the fact that them boys what done this to you deserved some of they own medicine.”

  “What else are they saying about me?”

  “Oh, baby, don’t beat yourself up over this now. You know what they be saying. The same ole, same ole.”

  I took a deep breath and stared at the ceiling.

  “It’s hard being a Negro, ain’t it?” she softly asked.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Sort of like having arthritis. It flares up now and then, but you learn to live with it.”

  “But I haven’t learned yet.”

  “Well, I hate to say it, but it seem like you got a larger dose than most.”

  “You know what I don’t understand?”

  She shook her head. “What might that be?”

  “Is how a little eleven-year-old boy can stir up so much trouble. Most of the time what a kid thinks don’t matter much at all.”