The fire department came. The police. Daddy was out of his mind with pain and kept cursing the name of L’il Bokay Cooper. The next morning, when he was interviewed at the hospital, Daddy had no memory of anything at all, which caused the police to decide the first words he’d uttered after the event amounted to evidence. They drew up papers charging Bokay with arson and attempted murder. His supposed motive was revenge for the firing of Katherine Marie from Daddy’s household and medical practice the previous year. Jackson’s mama was in complete turmoil over Daddy’s condition and did not contradict their theory.
That afternoon, the police arrested Bokay for setting fire to the doctor’s office, convinced they had reason and not thinking any further no matter what Jackson or Katherine Marie told them. They roared into the village in four police cars, lights and sirens blazing at two in the afternoon. They ripped Bokay from the bed where he lay moaning while Katherine Marie applied ice packs to his burns. She tried to stop them, grabbing on to the backs of their belts with two hands. They pushed her into the dirt. Bokay howled like an animal but he was all trussed up by then and he couldn’t help her.
That left Jackson to set things right. He tried to tell them no one had fired Katherine Marie, she’d quit. Nobody listened to him. He was that yankified jewboy niggerlover to them all. Not only that, he was concussed. His testimony was considered untrustworthy. The day after that, the Hicks and Turner boys had the nerve to step up and give witness. They said they saw Bokay drunk and driving his truck off the road earlier in the evening, which bolstered the police claim. With no precedent, no rationale other than meanness, the police sent Bokay to Parchman to await completion of their investigation and probable trial.
Parchman Farm, a hell hole if there ever was one, as the Freedom Riders who spent some memorable time there earlier that same summer found out. Those lucky boys got out for the most part in one piece. Bokay broke out, sure enough, not two weeks later, in the company of some militants he’d chanced to share his prison dormitory with. By the time he was reapprehended, he was living in a safe house in Natchez run by the Nation of Islam. The ACLU took up his defense and after many a high-profile battle, succeeded in freeing him on the grounds of false imprisonment that was further cruel and unusual. Only by the end of all that, he wasn’t Bokay anymore. He was Mombasa, founder of the Black Warriors of the African Jesus, the party he created to give black Christians a militant home. He had respect for the Nation, it wasn’t that, he felt gratitude for all their help in setting him free. And certainly he was done with going along, with yessum and nossir. He’d learned to stand up. He saw that his people needed leaders like those in the Nation. But he was a Jesus man through and through, no getting around it. After he was cleared, he came back to Guilford to collect Katherine Marie. He came with a busload of his Black Warriors of the African Jesus to cow the Hicks and Turner types into leaving his people alone. These were some of the biggest, meanest black men the town of Guilford had ever seen, and there were a lot of them. The kluckers left the village alone, alright. As long as the Warriors stayed in town.
When Jackson finished telling Stella the story of his Freedom Summer, he slumped in his chair, as finished with his story as he intended to be. He was exhausted. He’d taken his time and told her what he had to say leisurely because, betrayal or not, it felt good to tell and he’d savored the telling like a fine meal. Stella came around the table and stood in front of him to nestle his head between her breasts. Oh yes, she said. The devil’s in the details, isn’t it? Don’t you worry. I’ll be more circumspect with Bubba Ray if it helps. Now, we don’t have to talk about him ever again. I understand better how you feel, I truly do. I’ll never tell a soul, too. You can depend on that.
They separated and went to sleep. In the early morning, Jackson’s dream, a particularly pleasant one featuring Stella and an airy swing made of feathers, was interrupted by a terrible racket followed by a host of ornate curses. Startled, he opened his eyes to the sight of Daddy dressed in a seersucker suit with a white shirt and open collar, no tie. A straw hat with a snap brim sat high atop his head. The very second Jackson awoke, his father let out a new curse, leaving his son to wonder who on earth the man was so angry with.
By the Lord God of Jacob, may you slide sideways down a rocky slope to hell in a flat-tired wheelbarrow!
Daddy dry spit twice in the air as punctuation, then rifled through the side drawers of his rolltop desk with his damaged hand, the gloved fingers strumming like spider legs over the tips of color-coded files.
And after that, he continued, may the spiteful wife of Samael crawl under the fiery gates like the cockroach she is to torment you with tiny bites of her sharpened teeth on your nekkid backside just before you set on a splintery bench to await recitation of your sins!
He chuckled in a particularly nasty way, tickled by his own wit, then fell to muttering while he slammed and opened drawers one after the other. At last, he found what he sought.
Aha! Here it is. Alright. Alright. You can suck a little ice on your way into the pit, then.
Daddy. Daddy. What are you doing? asked Jackson. Unaccustomed to his father’s rants, the display before him alarmed. His father looked up, squinting his good eye. He noted his son’s presence with an expression that was likely a kind of surprise from which all shame or self-consciousness was absent. He smacked his lips the way men twenty years older than him did before speaking and spoke.
Son. Jackson. I have an important meeting today. I am settin’ down with the board of the White Citizens’ Council to see about address of my grievances. I intend to pressure the chairman with this if I have to.
He waved a manila file with a bright blue tab around. A handful of lab reports escaped and fluttered to the ground, but Daddy ignored them.
As you are a lawyer in larvae, perhaps you’d like to accompany me.
Yes, Daddy. I would. Just let me get dressed and all.
Daddy studied his pocket watch. He sat at his desk, opened the file, and held X-rays up to the light. Without looking away from them, he said: You got half of an hour, son. Then I’m going with or without you.
His nerves charged, Jackson duly washed up and put on the best clothes he’d brought with him: the blazer, chino pants, and an oxford shirt. It seemed to him his daddy was setting out on a rash and temperamental adventure. Mama’d told him that Daddy’d been expunged from the Council rolls in the spring of ‘62, an event that amounted to a bitter pill for the old man. It did not matter, she’d said, that they’d dropped all Jewish members at the time in reaction to that gaggle of Yankee Jews who, the previous summer, bussed their commie hides into quiet, peaceful neighborhoods and stirred up trouble unprecedented since the War of Northern Aggression. Daddy took it personal. He figured he’d been dropped because of his infirmity and him a martyr to the violent notions of Mobissimus Cooper or whatever it was L’il Bokay called himself these days.
Knowing all this, Jackson was distressed. No doubt Daddy needed protection from both the Council and his own distemper. Accordingly, the good son wrote Stella a note on his whereabouts in case she wasn’t yet up and about. Daddy seems quite upset today, it said, and I think it not wise to let him go out alone. I will be back as soon as possible. He was tempted to tell Stella more concerning the whys and wherefores but decided against it, thinking if she knew what was going on, she might insist on tagging along, thus ensuring disaster in a situation loaded with enough intimations of catastrophe without her participation. He stuck the note in an envelope, sealed it against prying eyes, and ran upstairs to stick it under Stella’s door. It was not until he’d gone into the kitchen for coffee and a piece of bread that Eula, who’d arrived to put up breakfast for them all, told him, no, it was Saturday, it was nine fifteen in the morning, the doctor had no appointments. He just liked to get dressed up and take a stroll with his paperwork most times in the morning of a Saturday.
He sure do talk up a storm while he’s at it, too, she said. Don’t mean nothin’. Nobody p
ays mind to his Saturday morning conversations, Mr. Jackson. If you don’t mind my sayin’ so, I believe he goes on like that because he misses being busy. It’s hard on a man like him to have so little to do.
You best be ready, son! Time to go. Time to go.
Daddy had arrived at the kitchen door. He now clutched two files, the blue-tabbed one and another tabbed in red, clutched them tightly under his arm between the sling and his jacket. He followed Jackson’s eyes to the folders, tapped them one after another with his free hand.
The chairman, he said. His wife.
He cackled.
I’ve got ’em good, son. Eula! Tell Miss Missy we’ll be back before lunch. I have not forgotten the party over to Mickey Moe’s this afternoon. Not at all.
Father and son walked half the morning away, strolling through every part of Guilford familiar to them with the exception of the village and the street that housed the offices of the White Citizens’ Council above Uncle Izzy Joe’s hardware store. Until the last moment, Jackson held out the curious hope that Eula was mistaken, that Daddy was scheduled for a confrontation with those in whose service he had been fiercely faithful but who had rejected him. While the fulfillment of his hope would represent a perilous enterprise, it was preferable to its alternative. After their third circumvention of the White Citizens’ Council offices, he accepted the truth. They were not walking anywhere but in circles. Daddy was engaged, not in a battle royal, but in a futile fantasy, the product of a broken mind.
Yet they marched on. Several times, bits of paper from Daddy’s files fell out. Jackson chased them down, Daddy stuffed them back into place, but no further mention or use was made of them. Everyone they passed, black and white alike, greeted Daddy with the utmost respect. Good Morning, Doctor, the men said, tipping their hats, and Good to see you looking so hearty, Doctor, the women said with gracious smiles. Although they bid Jackson a fine day as well, no one, not a single soul, asked him how he’d been since last he’d visited home.
It was strange because it felt so unnatural, so anti-home. This was not the way Mississippi treated even its most prodigal sons. On the other hand, he realized he should have expected the cold shoulder from all and sundry because, of course, no one, especially the black people, wanted to be linked publicly with his recent history, with his defense of L’il Bokay, now the infamous Mombasa, or his insistence that the true authors of his daddy’s adversity were the drivers of a certain green Ford Maverick, two young men who yet walked the streets of Guilford while their accuser slept sound and certain in New Haven. It wasn’t right, but it was the way humans behaved, he knew that. Still, it was one thing to understand such treatment, it was quite another to experience it.
TEN
Spring, 1964
IT TOOK SOME FANCY FOOTWORK, but Jackson maneuvered the family into taking two cars over to Mickey Moe’s, the venue of Stella Godwin’s introduction to the extended Sassaport clan. The idea that either of them might be squished against Bubba Ray in the backseat of Mama’s Eldorado was more than he could bear. It did not escape him that his resolution to show Stella the South he loved, the one he’d missed every day of his long exile up north, had devolved into keeping her as far away from Bubba Ray as possible. He didn’t like the way his brother sidled up to her during breakfast or hovered over her when she took a little swing on the back porch. Every moment she spent in proximity to him fueled Jackson’s animus. He began to wonder if they would get through their trip without an ugly episode.
He chose a route to Mickey Moe’s that took them through the village, as Jackson wanted to point out to Stella the places where he and Mombasa Cooper scampered about as children, the house in which Katherine Marie grew up, and also the site of the Little Children of Jesus Baptist Church. Things had changed. Many of the old tar-paper shacks he remembered, ones that served him as signposts in the deep wood, no longer existed. In their place were charred or otherwise broken-up mounds of rubble, left all in a heap like war memorials, and next to them a variety of replacement mobile homes—used ones, dented, rusted, with sheets of tin peaked over the roofs to run off the rain, the occasional expando porch at the rear, and in front vegetable gardens, green with spring growth under a cover of chicken wire as protection against night critters. Before he left home, Jackson thought life in the village the meanest possible. Once he went up north and saw the ghettos there, experience bathed his memories of the village in a sentimental wash of bucolic charm. Countless times he’d remarked in a bout of the exile’s bombastic pride that at least the poor back home had something beautiful to look at from their windows every morning: flowers and trees and birds and the river, the kind of beauty that gives a man hope and faith in God’s mercy. Now, confronted with a glaring vista of battered metal under the noonday sun, he was hard pressed to see a distinction between urban blight and its country cousin. Poverty’s poverty, he thought with a young man’s startled sense of enlightenment, whether countenanced in cement or magnolia.
It’s not the way you described it, Stella said.
No, it’s not. A tornado must’ve come through here.
It’s like a ghost town, Jackson. Where are all the people? A bright warm day like this and not a single child playing outside. There’s no one working in the yard, no one strolling the babies, not a soul looking out a window. Look. Everyone’s got their curtains drawn, if they got ’em at all. And where are the dogs? Every other place we’ve driven through down here is loaded with dogs. What do you think that means?
Jackson thought about it. I do not know, darlin’. Maybe somebody died.
At least the Little Children of Jesus Baptist Church looked almost as he recalled, although the yard out front was wildly overgrown with weeds and tall grass. One of the windows was boarded over. There could have been any number of ways the glass had broken, but the possibility of tornado damage seemed to Jackson the more probable, the most reasonable. Some of the headstones in the graveyard must be hidden by all this vagrant vegetation, he determined, as it didn’t look to him as if there were half the graves there used to be, and those that remained were curiously spare in floral tribute, a neglect unheard of in Mississippi. Whoever died, Stella observed as they passed, the funeral isn’t taking place here, is it?
Jackson’s daddy always said that Negroes switched houses of worship like a woman changes her dress on a hot afternoon. Maybe, he told Stella, the pastor of the Little Children of Jesus Baptist Church went out of favor.
Mickey Moe was now a married man. He’d done well working as a salesman for Uncle Tom-Tom’s insurance agency, well enough to buy Great-Aunt Lucille’s farm when she passed. He moved his wife and Aunt Beadie into the big house, kept a horse and two goats in the barn, leased out most of the fields, and scaled back his hours at the agency because, as Mama told Stella, he’s just a good old boy at heart who likes nothing more than tinkering with tractor engines and strolling up and down rows of cotton.
When they drove up the long road to the big house, Jackson saw with pleasure that Mickey Moe had arranged a feast fit for the celebration of kings. Near the riverbank under a row of shade trees were picnic tables draped in red checkered tablecloths on which Sassaport women laid out huge platters of greens, biscuits, coleslaw, and deviled eggs while Sassaport men elbowed one another around the barbecue pit preparing the meat. The scent of spice-rubbed chicken, brisket, and ribs wafted through the air along with clouds of hickory smoke. Small children stood on benches and folding chairs at strategic positions around the tables wielding fans to keep flies off the food. Larger ones gathered sassafras leaves to use as napkins for greasy fingers later on. The eldest Sassaports sat in a long row of wicker chairs on the verandah of the big house. And next to, under the grandest shade tree of them all, Mickey Moe himself manned a bar with sweating pitchers of ice tea and lemonade for the women and children, plus bottles of beer set in tubs of ice and quarts of hard liquor lined up for the men.
The two cousins greeted each other like Esau and Jacob. Stern, solemn, the
y stood apart and extended hands, gripped hard, then burst into smiles wide as the river at its widest and hugged, Mickey Moe lifting Jackson off his feet. The men watching them hooted and hollered, made rude jokes about their manhood, and then each hugged Jackson in his turn.
At the same time, the women descended upon Stella like a cloud of birds, wings outspread, gathering an errant chick. She disappeared into the vortex of their number and was swept away to be initiated into the feminine mysteries of the Sassaport clan, which consisted of a series of rules such as (a) let the men see to themselves, (b) let them feel guilty about that, and (c) wield the power of said guilt on truly important occasions only, no squandering of such precious currency allowed. There were other rules of blood regarding issues of loyalty and the raising of children of which the affianced had no need yet, so the Sassaport women were silent on those matters even though they were more intrinsic to the survival of family and thus far more serious. Stella was overwhelmed as it was. She did not notice nor consider that more in the name of family allegiance might be required of her in the future. As she reported to Jackson afterward, half of what she absorbed that afternoon had to do with recipes and home décor, two areas of domestic life she rarely pondered. It’s likely she missed the point of much wisdom dispensed to her by metaphor that afternoon, a fact that might explain a lot about how her clan relations went later on.
While she was busy misapprehending a large portion of what was so generously revealed to her, Jackson was busy catching up with Mickey Moe. He apologized for not attending the latter’s wedding, feigning an obligation to take an oral examination before his provosts in order to complete a course in constitutional law that winter. Mickey Moe looked at him askance. I thought it was the influenza you’d come down with, that’s what your mama told me, he said. While a flustered Jackson flapped his jaws, trying to come up with an explanation, his cousin stared stonily at him then broke into another wide, disarming smile. Son, he said, clapping him on the shoulder and putting a beer in his hand, you still can’t set on a mountaintop and see a bald joke comin’ from half a mile on a clear day. It don’t matter to me you didn’t come to the weddin’. I know you had your reasons. Jackson don’t come home no more, I told my gal. Why do you think we’re havin’ this party? All of us down here notice you ain’t been home a very long time, a very long time. Makes your visit quite an occasion. We know you have your reasons. Jackson wasn’t quite sure what Mickey Moe meant, what he might know, even less how he knew it. He thought it best to dissemble. You all noticed? he said, veiling his fears in a quizzical demeanor. Mickey Moe had moved on. Never knew two brothers so dis-alike, he said, gesturing with a mason jar half-full of bourbon poured over shaved ice in the direction of Bubba Ray, who stood underneath a bald cypress with his hands clasped behind his back and his head tilted upward as if he were a tree inspector studying the cypress for rot or infestation.
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