If Sons, Then Heirs: A Novel

by Lorene Cary

  CHAPTER 5

  Into Virginia, once they left behind the Washington, D.C., corridor, I-95 started to feel more like going home. And with Khalil sleeping, Rayne’s mind roamed from pounding the highway this time to the many times he’d pounded it before. For years now, Rayne would come down at Easter. In fact, he came the week before to do the chores she’d saved up for him, which he always protested were two-week work orders for three men. Then he’d take her to Holy Week services. If it was warm enough, they’d go fishing at least once, and eat the catch all week until the Easter ham. They’d walk the land, with her telling him his great-grandfather’s maxims, so that by the end of the week, as Rayne told Lillie, he was so close to the man he’d never met that he almost expected him to walk in the door, or felt him to be waiting in the smokehouse, where Rayne had sometimes heard a sigh or a door closing, and where Bobo swore it was colder than other outbuildings.

  It was.

  Even Jones said so. He’d said it one Christmas after Rayne had finished Cheyney State. Jones told Rayne to come out and collect wood with him, and instead, took him to the smokehouse.

  “You think this place is haunted? Well, it is. It’s colder than shit in here, because King’s still here, waitin for I don’t know what, but I’m letting him know that I’m givin you this.”

  “Come on, Uncle Jones, man. Nana Selma already keeps everybody spooked.”

  “Stop talkin. Listen, I’ma give you a hundred dollars for Christmas just for yourself.”

  “Whoa. Jones!”

  “Stop talkin, I tell you. Now, I’m only givin it to you to keep you from spending this other hundred-dollar bill I’m about to hand to you, but this here is not to spend. It’s to keep. That’s what I call the last gift I ever received from your great-granddaddy King. I’m just as superstitious as my sister deep down. You could say that, but listen up: you keep it, and it will bring other money to you.”

  Rayne had folded it into the copy of the business plans he wrote, rewrote, and revised each year as he went from demolition to demo and rough contracting to full-service construction. He’d clip it to the back of each budget that he made, line by line, before putting in a bid. Usually it stayed in an inner fold of his wallet. He never really forgot that it was there.

  Rayne did not tell Bobo about the bill, because Bobo and Jones had never gotten along, and it would have pained Bobo to hear how close his grandson had gotten to the older man since Bobo’s imprisonment. Still, it was Jones who’d taken care of the old truck’s loan note, so that the police would not come and repossess it in South Carolina and jail Rayne for theft. Jones had sent money to Rayne in college, and he helped Selma with the taxes every now and then. He called and badgered her to tell him how things stood rather than suffer in silence.

  Jones’s work life, so far as Rayne knew, involved raising and breeding horses with a rich white man somewhere in upstate New York, and traveling with them when they were being raced or sold. That’s why he could stay with Selma at Christmas, but seldom in spring.

  Jones had told Rayne that he and Selma were orphaned children of King’s sharecroppers, and that their parents and siblings, along with King’s first wife and a third of the county, had died in an influenza epidemic. King earned their loyalty when he buried their family, and gave them the option of staying on, even though they were too young to command their own house and vittles. Jones worked with the animals (“the original horse whisperer,” Selma called him). King sent Selma, who had expected to be put out into the field, to grade school.

  “It’s hard to imagine what it meant to be a black orphan in the Depression and to have a little shack to live in. Don’t look like nothing, do it?” Jones once asked him as they stood looking at the stark two-bedroom wood structure, their first home on the farm.

  No, Rayne had thought, it looked like a hog house, only bigger; it looked like the worst photos he’d seen in National Geographic.

  “You gotta remember, we had no skills. I was sixteen and Selma was nine. Our relatives had already told us they couldn’t feed not nary ’nother mouth. It was like slavery sort of, because where would you go, but live somewhere and do anything they said just for a roof over your head and a bushel of cornmeal? We was glad for it; glad for the meal, glad it don’t have no mold, glad for no bugs.”

  Jones’s murmuring baritone had a slow, low-country intonation, despite the years he’d traveled the world with his horses and their owner, Jared, a man Selma referred to simply as “White Folks.” But Rayne never underestimated the sophistication of his analysis. “They said the difference between the Depression and slavery was that in the Depression if they killed a nigger, they hadn’t lost an investment. It was a dangerous time.”

  “Is that why you left?”

  “Sort of,” he said, measuring his words carefully. “Mostly I left because, after King died, I couldn’t stay still. I couldn’t put in the crop and take it out year after year. I couldn’t stand it anymore. My sister promised him that if anything happened she would keep his family’s land. I loved your great-grandfather. I probably loved him more’n I loved my own kin. But I didn’t promise I’d stay, she did, and, besides,” he said, his baritone edged in a rare bitterness, “I knew who I was back then. How could I have lived here?”

  ———

  Once Rayne finished the 395 loop around Richmond, I-95 stretched out ahead of him through North Carolina and South. He thought of stopping at a rest area, but decided instead to drive as long as he could while Khalil slept.

  It felt like he’d been driving in a truck forever.

  He took gulps of the coffee and ate two sandwiches, which Lillie had made with precise attention to his taste. She’d baked a turkey breast the night before, then sliced it very thin onto some small French rolls he loved, which she bought from a bakery downtown. She’d added different vegetable matter on each. He couldn’t identify all the elements, but each sandwich had a distinct favorite flavoring: one with cream cheese and cranberry sauce she made fresh, the other with some sort of olive-y paste that oozed over the sides and dripped onto the big red-and-white napkin she’d packed for him to lay on his lap.

  “The stuff you like is messy, baby.” She always said the same thing when she showed him the bulge of napkins she rolled and wedged into the front seat next to him. Then, referring to their joke about his eating and driving, she’d say, “If you use this, then you won’t have to jump around in the seat and curse when a piece of avocado slips out and stains your you-know-what.”

  Rayne ate and drove for as long as his bladder and the shuffle play lasted. Al Green’s “Let’s Stay Together” came swinging out with its romantic horns, big and round, seductive and earnest, after the driving intelligence of Nas, and the cool certainty of Miles. Rayne’s memories fogged up from the landscape. The defrost system sucked them in to collect on the dashboard of his mind, as if he needed to drive the same territory again and again in order to discover how to escape from it.

  ———

  It was the first lynching story Rayne remembered hearing. And it was the first, in fact the only, fight he remembered between Jones and Selma—over whether to tell it to him. It was the year he drove down Bobo’s Ford, and Jones figured that since he’d been living with Bobo and boxing in Philadelphia, smelling himself, as they said, he needed to know how things had been. Selma came in to protest.

  “Why the boy need to hear that old poison?” Selma asked. “How’s that gonna help ’im?”

  “He needs to know what he’s up against.”

  “He know what he’s up against. Isn’t his grandfather in prison? Didn’t his mother send ’im away like a sack o’ mail? What else you want to lay on his shoulders?”

  “He got good strong shoulders, like King. How he gonna get anywhere, he don’t know where he come from?”

  “He come from us,” Selma shouted, her voice as low and harsh for a woman as her brother’s was for a man. “He come from us, and he come from here. He come from King Needham, the o
nly black man I ever met who said: Don’t cripple children. Don’t weigh ’em down.”

  “And all that means I can’t tell ’im how it was that they lynched that boy? Come on, sis, they did it, and he needs to know that that’s where it was—right out there where the golf course is now, runnin next to your east borderline, where whatshisname got that dev’lish patch of hybrid corn.

  “The boy got computers up in Philadelphia, Selma. He can find all this out if he’s of a mind. You can’t hide nothing! Ain’t no secret.”

  Selma had withdrawn to her bedroom, and Jones, muted, went at the story he had begun to tell, but differently.

  Rayne saw it for the first time. For years, he’d been caught in the memory of their fight, and then, in the terrible truth of the story itself. But something about being in the truck with the boy who had adopted him as Dad, and censoring his own story of Bobo’s imprisonment, made him see that Jones had jogged onto a path that branched off from where he had started, although Rayne could not remember where that had been.

  ———

  It had happened, Jones said, just around the time King married Selma, who by then was a lithe young woman, seventeen or eighteen, who worshipped the older man who’d saved her and her brother. As Jones told it, the lynching happened the night before they were to be married, which made King decide not to take his new bride away for a honeymoon trip, but rather to stay on the farm and watch his land and stock and outbuildings. Once the bloodletting started, it could sometimes make people crazy.

  Jones said that he didn’t tell Rayne this story to cripple him, but only to let him know not to believe how things look on the surface; people lie. The crickets and bullfrogs and cicadas make a racket all night, and folks never know what they’re talking about. Likewise, the land tells its own stories. Bobo let it make him bitter. Jones suspected, he said, that Rayne’s character didn’t tend that way. But even if it did, secretly, then seeing Bobo’s suffering should show him where bitterness leads.

  ———

  This happened. It was during the Depression, and who the hell knew why, but they lynched a boy the old-fashioned way. He was about fifteen and close to feebleminded. They said he killed a little white girl. Likely a lie, but everybody agreed that the girl was indeed dead. She was dead, and somebody killed her, and just because we didn’t want it to be a colored kid doesn’t mean it might not have been. That’s how people talked about it to keep from going crazy.

  In this case, the white men dragged the boy from his house. He lived down by the swampiest bottomland there was. If his folks had had two nickels to rub together, it would’ve been their first dime.

  They took him to a field with a tree. They got up a crowd. Seemed like every so often they needed a lynching party. Jones said that he had told this to Jared once, who thought about it for a while and came back with the theory that Christians had an appetite for human sacrifice to cleanse themselves. Jones said that after a while, that made sense to him. It helped him keep from hating, which was as bad as going crazy.

  But the people Jones grew up with, they told the story along fault lines of the teller’s character, class, or experience. Compassion for the dead child or not. Possibility of boy’s guilt, or the irrelevance of it. The logic of revenge or of repair. Jones told the story, and he tried to capture the collective sense of this tragedy, but it was hard to do so. The people said so many things:

  —And no matter what they do the poor child is still dead, the little girl.

  —Fuck ’em.

  —Don’t say that. Dear Jesus.

  —The boy’s dead, too, ain’t he? Fuck ’em.

  —I don’t think it was the child.

  —Had nothing to do with the girl. They wouldn’t get offa the land. The brother come from Arkansas told ’em they didn’t have to. Said the AAA would protect ’em.

  —Any fool knows better than that.

  —Well, the boy they killed always had been feebleminded.

  —I believe that’s why they couldn’t move.

  —They gone now, ain’t they?

  —Jesus.

  —Jesus.

  This may not be why those particular men did the thing they did, or why those people came out to the field like it was a damn barbecue, and brought their kids, or why they got a photographer right out there on the field to take pictures of the crime and then to sell ’em right there, but Jones wanted Rayne to know that behind all of this was the land. Same as the land his great-grandfather owned that probably some white men thought he shouldn’t. The land was the hard, eternal truth underneath every law and every lie.

  Jones remembered that not too long before this, the Agricultural Adjustment Administration in Washington had passed a law that prohibited landowners from turning sharecroppers off fallow land. The idea was that when farmers took crops out of circulation, the poor people would not be turned out to starve. In Arkansas, where sharecroppers were turned out by the thousands, they organized. The Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union swept through the county, calling meetings. They distributed leaflets that people who could read were supposed to read to the others, quoting poems written by Negroes, but so beautiful you never could tell in a thousand years. In Harlem, Claude McKay tried to stuff the spirit of the times into sonnets: “If we must die, let it not be like hogs / Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot…” People printed these things, and so, eventually, poor people like Jones got hold of ’em. King helped him read them at first, then Jones would memorize them:

  If we must die, O let us nobly die,

  So that our precious blood may not be shed

  In vain; then even the monsters we defy

  Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!

  The man from the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union insisted that thousands of black and white tenant farmers were banding together, taking to the highways, squatting there. Mrs. Roosevelt took up their cause, and word spread among them that the president would not let them die out in the sun like turtles on their backs. They wouldn’t chop the cotton, period, they said. Weeds choked it; the rest went to seed.

  Sharecroppers all the way in Mississippi heard about it: that at the meetings, when they said these things, slumbering men and women awakened to rebellion. And Mississippi talked to Georgia and Georgia talked to South Carolina. The hell with ’em! A family can only starve once.

  But after the Agricultural Adjustment Administration man left, the black people talked sense back into themselves. Hey. Arkansas was not Mississippi.

  But who went out and read this crazy, shining manifesto to the family of the lynched boy? Couldn’t have been anything else emboldened them to turn up in the spring like lilies after the man told ’em to go? There they were, the father sick unto death, as they said, with TB, a grandmother crippled, one son run off, mother plowing like a mule to put in a crop of sweet corn and greens and potatoes, they say: something to eat, at least, since the land wasn’t going to be used.

  —Wasn’t going to be used? Was she crazy?

  —Boy was just feebleminded; mother was insane.

  —Well, what the hell she gonna do?

  —I told you: you can only starve once.

  —Maybe they figured something would turn up.

  However people could, they took it in. But they did take it in; you had to; everybody did. That’s what the adults used to say when Jones was a boy, before the flu took his daddy, lying in his own sweat, eyes wide open to the flies. The children listened, afraid, Jones said.

  “Mostly we were always afraid. That’s why King was like nothing we’d ever seen. A big, giant colored man who did not seem to be afraid.”

  ———

  Selma’s point was that she did not want the lynching from another era to insinuate its way into Rayne’s mind and fill him with its terror. And Jones figured it was probably King who told her: if anything happens, do not tell the kids. King tried to stay buried in hope that his heirs would not have to mortgage their lives to the past.

  Jones
felt regret when Rayne told him that he could see it in his mind, almost, and that it made him want to blow up the golf course, whose green stretched out with innocent-seeming luxury over the crime scene.

  It was true, in fact, that the lynched body, a lonely corpse in the wind, kept turning burning turning in Rayne’s mind.

  Sometimes for no reason he could figure, he saw it. Sometimes the smell of old joists in a metal trash can outside a demo job would light the fire in his mind, and he’d see it all over again, or close the door of his mind even as he knew that behind it, the body still burned. Lynching demands moving pictures—so we can be afraid forever.

  See? See it? You can see it in your head, can’t you?

  See it? I can’t hardly stop it. That’s the thing; how you stop it?

  ———

  When Rayne told Lillie, she did not think of the body, but the mob. Acting on the impulse of one ancient brain, they commenced the thing out in the open. As if that boy were theirs to do with as they pleased. As if God had given them dominion over this dull-eyed creature whose lips never closed, but hung akimbo like he’d forgotten what he wanted to say. That’s how Lillie saw it; they acted like gods who’d been given the power to drive out demons, and he was the swine.

  ———

  It was a picnic without grace. Every devilment you could do to a man’s body, Jones hinted, they did to his.

  ———

  Women brought food, and children watched. That’s what Lillie couldn’t understand. Children watched, and they had to remember. Even those who forgot, they remembered, too. On Sundays, they had to murmur, with his image turning burning turning in their minds, murmur together, shhhh, softly, whisper it together: Grant us therefore, gracious Lord, so to eat the flesh of thy dear son Jesus Christ and to drink his blood, that we may evermore dwell in him and he in us.

  Like Jared said: People need a sacrifice.

  And those who missed the picnic itself could see it later. The photographer used a lightweight camera on a tripod: fast new shutter and clip-on flash. He pulled black drapes around him to makeshift a darkroom and developed photos right in the field. Men who got just five dollars a head from the hog-reduction program paid fifty cents for a print still wet.