Beyond This Time: A Time-Travel Suspense Novel

by Charlotte Banchi

  “Why you want to know?” Dreama asked, her tone sharp.

  “Because I’m worried, Miss Simms. I’ve heard talk and I want to sort the truth from the fiction.”

  Lettie Ruth studied his face, after a few seconds she appeared to have reached a decision. “She was beat and raped, Mr. Mitch,” she said quietly.

  “White men treated her no better than an animal, then tossed her aside,” Dreama said. Undisguised anger radiated from her words.

  Mitch’s chin dropped to his chest and he closed his eyes. Everything Floyd and his pals had bragged about was the gospel truth. Once again guilt reared up and pawed the air. If he’d only reacted to her pronouncement about returning to Park Street, rather than passively sitting on his butt she wouldn’t have ended up in this time. He may have failed her once, but not a second time. He’d do everything in his power to right this wrong.

  “Will she be all right?” he asked without looking up.

  “In time she will get better,” Lettie Ruth answered. “But she won’t ever be all right again, Mr. Mitch. A woman can’t endure this much violence and not come out changed.”

  He raised his head and looked at the three people at the table. “Is there some way to make it easier for her? I’ll do whatever you tell me.”

  “I don’t think she wants your help, Mr. Mitch,” Lettie Ruth said.

  “Because I’m a man?”

  “Because you’re a white man,” Dreama Simms declared.

  “That’s a load of bull shit,” he said heatedly. He took a deep breath and slowly released it. He couldn’t let her get under his skin. His number one priority was to find Kat and take her home before it was too late. He didn’t know how Pop Rayson was doing, but in the worst scenario he couldn’t hold on much longer.

  “It’s the way things is around here,” Dreama said. “Your kind ain’t all that welcome. And you wait and see, Kat will be tellin’ the same once you two hook up.”

  He chewed the angry words filling his mouth into bits and pieces before they ricocheted all over the kitchen. Focus, he told himself. When it didn’t work, Mitch pushed away from the table and left the kitchen.

  As he stared out the waiting room window Dreama’s comments replayed in his head. Because you’re a white man. Would her cruel words prove prophetic? Would Kat refuse his help based on his color?

  “Mitch?” Taxi stood in the doorway. “I’m sorry Dreama answered you so mean, but it’s probably the truth. Your friend don’t want nothing to do with white folks right now.”

  “I’m not white folks,” Mitch snapped. “We’ve spent twelve hours a day, five days a week together for the past five years. That ought to count for something. But now I’m beginning to wonder if I should even try.”

  “Of course you should. Just gotta give her some space for a little while. Your Kat’s trapped with one foot half in and one foot half out of hell right now. Soon enough she’ll be wanting a good friend to help show the way out.”

  “It will take a better man than I am to show her the way.”

  “Women got lots of peculiarities, Mitch, and one is being able to see the good and see bad in a man. It’s like they can x-ray right through your skin, into your heart. I reckon Kat seen the good in you. And between us men,” Taxi glanced at the kitchen door then lowered his voice. “I bet it don’t matter to her if you be colored or white.”

  More than anything Mitch wanted to believe color didn’t matter. But could she emerge from this unscathed? Taxi could talk from sun up to sun down about how Mitch differed from Floyd, but at the end of the day he still had ginger-red hair, blue eyes, and freckles. He couldn’t get much whiter than that.

  If their situations were reversed, and he’d been the one attacked, his perceptions and attitudes toward blacks would probably be forever altered. Right or wrong, that’s how it worked. Humans hauled around cart loads of prejudicial bull shit for lesser reasons.

  Segregation was a prime example. It provided a method for uneducated white Southerners like his father to cope with the emerging Black-Awareness. Those from the east Hollow had worked hard to improve themselves and their community and welcomed the changes. In the opposite corner, men like Billy Lee swaggered and threw threats around in a desperate attempt to hold on to their self perceived superiority.

  But they were scared and maybe a little jealous of any changes in their narrow strip of the world. Scared because they’d never dared to dream of a better life. Those boys didn’t want anything except what they already had—a six pack of beer on Saturday night, welfare checks each month, and a woman to bed or beat when the mood struck.

  The crux of the matter was respect. The bigots didn’t respect themselves, and the only way they could feel worth anything was to shove their frustration down a black throat. Forcing strong men like Taxi to bow and scrape proved to all the Billy Lees and Floyds that they were still better than the dumb ass nigger with a high school education and a full-time job.

  White Only. Colored Only. How much longer before it dawned on people that white was a color too? Mitch brushed the hair off his forehead, embarrassed by his mental speech making. Judas Priest, he’d been preaching to an audience of one. He thought he kept his mouth shut, but from the strange look on Taxi’s face, he wondered how much he’d spoken out loud.

  =SEVENTEEN=

  “If you ask me, this relationship between her and that gentleman shines a whole new light on everything,” Dreama said, as she vigorously wiped down the kitchen counter.

  “What are you hinting around, Dreama Simms?” Lettie Ruth asked.

  “Maybe Kat didn’t get dragged out to no field. Could be she wanted to be with those boys.”

  Lettie Ruth shook her head. “You ought to be shamed. You and Taxi found her, and you know she didn’t look like she’d gone out there to have fun.”

  “It’s true I found her, but I also got ears. That white man seems mighty fond of a Negro woman. Nothing good ever comes from that.”

  “Why do you act this way, Dreama?”

  Dreama pulled down the high collar on her green dress. The scars across her throat looked shiny in the morning light. “You know how I got these … and why. So don’t be lecturing me on good white folks.” She turned away and looked out the window, her eyes glistening with angry tears. Last year a group of good white folks had tied a rope around her neck, then hauled her up a tree because her manager was their color. Not hers…

  … She’d warned Harvey that coming down South would be a mistake and they ought to stay in Detroit. Record the new album in a studio. But he pushed so hard for the concert tour she finally gave in.

  Their long bus was filled from front to back with musicians and equipment. The boys partied all the way from Detroit, while Dreama sat in the back and chewed her fingernails. None of them understood the rules, but once they crossed the Tennessee state line they had learned. Slashed tires, rocks thrown through the windows. The Klan disrupted almost every concert.

  When Harvey asked her why this happened, she pointed to her band. Her white band. “This sort of thing don’t work down here,” she said. “Negro and white live in different worlds.”

  Harvey dismissed her explanation, pooh-poohing her concerns as total nonsense.

  And the bus rolled into the Heart of Dixie.

  Dreama Simms ended her concert tour just outside Birmingham, hanging from a tree. Her larynx crushed. Her singing career over.

  “What they did to you was wrong,” Lettie Ruth said. “But’s that’s only a tiny handful of folks out of the whole big world. You can’t mistrust all whites on account of them.”

  Dreama wiped her eyes with the dish towel. “Name three of those pale ghost people you trust.”

  “I trust Timothy.”

  “And?”

  Lettie Ruth shook her head. “And you got me so worked up I can’t think straight.”

  “You ain’t worked up girl. You got no names ‘cause there ain’t no good ones.”

  “Did you lose every ounce of
ability to see the good side of white folks the minute you started in with that NAACP bunch?” Lettie Ruth asked. “They teaching you how to hate at those meetings?”

  “They teach me to think twice before believing every word out of a white mouth. I’m learning how to stand up for my rights.”

  “What about Kat’s rights? Seems she has a right to be friends with Mr. Mitch if she’s a mind to.”

  “Yeah, lot of those type friendships down at Miz Rita’s parlor.”

  “I’m not talking about no whore house friendships, and you know it. Just because a woman got a white man friend, don’t mean something dirty’s going on.” Lettie Ruth glared at Dreama and propped her hands on her hips. “Timothy Biggers is white, you think because I live in his house he’s jumpin’ me?”

  Dreama fought to keep the smile off her face. The very idea was plain old silly. The doctor didn’t have time for women, much less a colored one. “He’s only forty-three, honey, not an old man with a cane,” she said. “And he’s good looking for a white man, reminds me of that movie star, Gregory Peck.” The comments were only meant to tease her friend, but from the fire in Lettie’s eyes, maybe she’d touched on something.

  Their relationship had always intrigued Dreama. They worked closely together and put in long hours, which was to her understanding, the reasoning behind Lettie Ruth movin’ in with him. Of course they lived in separate parts of the house—Lettie upstairs and Timothy down—but it was still under the same roof. And the arrangement had raised more than one eyebrow at the Freedom Methodist church.

  When it came to Timothy Biggers, the gossips didn’t have far to look for a juicy bit of trash. He’d been the talk of Maceyville for going on ten years. Tongues started wagging the very day he opened his clinic in the east Hollow and dared the west side of town to do something about it. He showed no preference, doctoring everybody equal, long as they came through his door. And another thing, his waiting room wasn’t split up into colored and white sections. Biggers ignored the segregation laws because he simply didn’t give a good goddamn.

  As for the Ku Klux Klan, hard as they tried, those boys couldn’t scare him off. One run-in between the doctor and the Kluxers ended with three white knights stretched out on the tables in his exam rooms.

  As a World War II veteran and medical doctor, Biggers had known where to shoot them, without killing anyone. He’d sewn them up afterwards. Rumors held that he’d sent every one of those boys a bill, and added a little extra on account of all the aggravation they’d caused him. Nowadays they pretty much ignored his goings on. Occasionally they tore up the flower beds or painted his sign out front to read: DR. NIGGERS CLINIC, instead of Dr. Biggers Clinic.

  “Well?” Lettie Ruth was asking, her tone sharp and demanding. “You think I got some sort of arrangement with Timothy?”

  “Of course not,” Dreama answered. “What a foolish notion.”

  Lettie Ruth looked ready to tear the head off a live chicken and Dreama thought better of airing her suspicions. If the nurse wanted to play doctor with the doctor, they’d best keep the window shades down and the lights off. If word of a love relationship started circulating around Maceyville, there would be hell to pay from both the east and the west sides of town.

  “And it’s equally foolish to assume something beside friendship is going on between Kat and Mr. Mitch,” Lettie Ruth lectured. “If you’re so curious, why don’t you go find her? Then ask her all those questions burning so bright inside your head.”

  “Maybe I’ll do that.”

  * * *

  After their heart to heart in the waiting room, Mitch and Taxi returned to kitchen. Lettie Ruth greeted him politely and didn’t seem to bear any ill will. Dreama was a whole different set of circumstances. The second he entered, she gave Mitch a look hot enough to dry up the entire Gulf of Mexico. Mitch decided it would be in his best interest to make one more try at peace negotiations.

  “I want all of you to drop the mister, just call me Mitch,” he announced, pulling out a chair and sitting down.

  Dreama snorted and tossed her head. “We may live in the east Hollow, Mister Mitch, but we ain’t too dumb to wonder the reason why you would ask us to do that.”

  “Dreama’s right,” Lettie Ruth said quietly and without anger. “Do you know what happens to coloreds in Maceyville who don’t show white folks proper respect?”

  “I’ve got a pretty good idea, Lettie Ruth. But I don’t see it as disrespect,” Mitch explained. “Kat sure as hell doesn’t call me Mister Mitch. Never has and never will.”

  “And that’s another thing,” Dreama snapped. “Why is you all tangled up with her?”

  “She’s just as tangled up with me,” Mitch countered, as he worked to come up with a plausible explanation for their relationship. He couldn’t tell them he and Kat were police officers from another time zone almost forty years in the future. And he couldn’t bring up Kat’s relationship to Lettie Ruth or Alvin Rayson. Luckily, Dreama pushed on with her argument and he didn’t have to respond.

  “Ain’t no reason for a Negro woman to get all tangled up with a freckled white man,” she declared. “That girl struck me as having better sense.”

  “Well, she doesn’t,” he snapped. It was a childish comeback and Mitch knew it, but whatever he’d said would have been wrong. Dreama already hated him. In fact, she carried such a large chip on her shoulder it would take a bulldozer to knock it off.

  Lettie Ruth clapped her hands sharply, effectively ending the bickering between Mitch and Dreama. “Y’all take it out in the yard, or hush it up,” she ordered. “I’m fixing to go look for that girl, any of y’all coming along?”

  “I’m comin’,” Taxi said.

  “Count me in,” Mitch said, as he rose to his feet.

  “Me too,” said Dreama. “I ain’t letting him out of my sight.”

  Lettie Ruth sighed, reminding Mitch of a weary mother. “Fine, then you two can travel together in the car and keep an eye on each other. Me and Taxi will go on foot.”

  “Lettie Ruth!” Dreama shouted.

  “Hey! No way,” Mitch shouted.

  Lettie Ruth and Taxi looked at each other, shrugged and walked out of the room, leaving the bickering duo alone.

  “Well?” Mitch asked.

  “I’ll be doing all the drivin’,” Dreama declared.

  “Fine by me.”

  * * *

  WEBSTER AVENUE FREEDOM METHODIST CHURCH

  Alvin Rayson stood before the Ladies Prayer Breakfast participants. This was the first time he’d preached to a full church since the Army, and his knees trembled. He’d sweated through his undershirt during the choir number, his Sunday white shirt during the scripture reading, and now was working wetting down his suit coat.

  Pastor Gordon cleared his throat, a gentle nudge for Alvin to get on with his sermon.

  “In Paul’s letter to the Romans 12:19 it says: ‘Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath: for it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord’.”

  Rayson soon found his rhythm and began to relax. Somewhere in the middle of verse 20, he saw Lamar and Virgil sneak in and take their seats in the back row. A pretty young woman, wearing a yellow dress, sat sandwiched between them in the pew.

  Throughout his fiery sermon his eyes were repeatedly drawn to the woman. Her attention never wavered, even when he wandered off the subject. When she smiled at one of his pulpit jokes, his heart soared. He got the feeling his message fell on fertile ground and all the hours he’d devoted polishing today’s lesson weren’t wasted. God had known this very woman would be in church this morning.

  Before long Alvin was preaching, beseeching, cajoling, and scolding the church in the time-honored style of a revival tent preacher. He got so worked up at one point he slammed his hand down on the pulpit so hard the wooden cross nailed on the front panel crashed to the floor. Always the showman, Reverend Alvin Rayson knew when to shut up. And he did.

  A
fter the invitation to accept the Lord and the benediction, he slowly worked his way through the congregation keeping his eye on the woman in the yellow dress. He took the time to speak to each person, graciously accepting handshakes and praises, even though he would have preferred passing through the crowd unhindered. But he knew better than to try and rush the Prayer Breakfast sisters.

  When he finally reached Lamar and Virgil’s guest, he saw the woman’s severely swollen and blackened eye. Bruises covered her face and arms and he wondered if she’d been in a car accident or if someone had inflicted the damage. If the latter turned out to be the cause, although he’d just spent over an hour preaching against seeking vengeance, he wouldn’t mind getting his hands on the person handing out such beatings.

  “Lamar, I don’t believe I’ve met your guest,” he said.

  “Pastor Rayson, this is my friend Miss Kat,” Lamar said.

  “Glad to have you at Freedom Methodist, Miss Kat,” Rayson said as he extended his hand. His welcome hung empty in the air. The woman wouldn’t meet his eye, much less shake hands. In the few minutes it had taken him to move from the pulpit to the back row, she’d erected a full size wall between herself and the world.

  “She don’t feel so good today,” Virgil explained.

  “A person don’t have to feel good every single day, Virgil,” Rayson said. “Why don’t you boys escort our guest into the fellowship hall for cake and coffee?”

  Not knowing exactly what to do, Alvin simply watched as Lamar took Miss Kat’s arm and guided her down the length of the pew. He thought about her behavior, avoiding eye contact and flinching when he’d offered his hand. She was afraid and he didn’t have any idea what she feared. His years in the seminary hadn’t prepared him for this type of situation.

  * * *

  Kat immediately felt at home in the chaotic fellowship hall. The aroma of fresh coffee and cinnamon spice cake, the hum of competing voices and outbursts of laughter reminded her of Sundays at Hope and Glory. Momentarily forgetting where she was, Kat turned in a circle, eyes sweeping the crowd for her Pop’s robust figure. He must be nearby, she could hear his deep rolling laugh.