Chapter Thirty-Eight
SET UP FOR A FALL
Vida had the fidgets so bad she had already chipped two of Hazel’s dishes, and it wasn’t even noon.
Levi had stunned her the evening before with the news about his day at the courthouse. His eyes had shone bright, the way they had the night he came home raving about the lightning bugs and his church that couldn’t be burned. That had been over a month ago. She thought he had got it out of his system.
“I wish you could have seen it, Vida,” he told her. “You would have been proud. It’s what God been leading me to do. I’m walking with the Lord again. Stepping out in faith.”
Vida had been so stunned she collapsed on the bed in disbelief, hiding her face in her hands.
“You should have seen how they looked at me, Vida,” he said. “Like I was dangerous or something. Like I was a man to be dealt with. It was like Moses calling on the Pharaoh.”
Vida looked up at him and shouted, “Don’t you never say nothing about no Moses again! You hear? We ain’t people in no book. You can’t go plopping us down in some make-believe story ’cause it suits you. We is real!” She jumped to her feet, furious, and held her arms out to her father. “See? Flesh and blood. We got feelings. We can hurt. We can die. You got no right.”
Levi seemed bewildered by his daughter’s reaction. “Vida, you don’t know what you’re saying. It was God’s will. I had to do it.”
“No you didn’t!” Vida said, furious. “You didn’t have no right getting up one day and out of the clear blue deciding you was going to be Moses. ’Cause tomorrow when you wake up, you got to go back to being Levi the nigger yardboy. You’ll still be living in Mississippi. The white man still be on top. And then what you do? You think God going to get you out of this mess? Well, he ain’t. Case you ain’t noticed, he ain’t parted no seas for us lately.”
Levi had been undeterred. “It is the path, Vida. I got to go where the Lord leads me. Don’t you see it? It was God sent the sheriff to burn my church down. Made him spread the lie about me working for the vote. But the sheriff’s lie was God’s truth. God wants me to stand up for my people. Like that King preacher in Alabama. Like that Rosie Parks girl you told me about. She stood her ground and got dragged off to jail for it. The Lord done set out a story for her, and she ain’t backing down from it. I ain’t neither.”
“Don’t lay it on Rosie,” Vida said sharply. “That ain’t our story neither. No more than Moses is.” Yet when she saw his look of incomprehension, she gave up. All she could do was shake her head sadly, bite her tongue, and walk away.
They had hardly spoken the rest of the evening. Levi sat out on the porch praying, and Vida stayed inside, terrified the sheriff might show up any minute to firebomb their house. After an hour passed with the cabin still standing, Vida had almost convinced herself that her father had imagined the whole thing. Then Creola came crashing up the steps. After nodding uncertainly to Levi, she rushed to Vida’s side. She breathlessly confirmed Levi’s story, saying that it was all Hayes Alcorn had talked about during supper.
The next morning at breakfast, things were strained between her and her father. Clearing away the dishes, Vida suggested the only workable idea she had been able to come up with. “Maybe we ought to go on up to Memphis,” she said. “Borry some money from Willie and leave Delphi. I ain’t got no reason to be here no more. Crazy, just waiting around to get killed.”
“No. I ain’t running,” Levi said firmly. “I got to wait right here. This is where my church will be. The Lord promised it to me.” His face softened, and he smiled patiently at Vida, as if she were a little girl who didn’t understand her Sunday school lesson. “Don’t be afraid, Snowflake Baby. He ain’t deserted us. He been watching and directing our feet all the time.”
He reached over and cupped her face in his giant hand. She knew then that there was no way she could talk him out of this. Her father had finally set his world right again. He had found a story he could weave himself into. He was a self-proclaimed prophet of God, a leader of his people, the kind they wrote up in newspapers and put on TV. It didn’t matter that not a soul was following him. He was the Reach Out Man once more.
Now Vida was looking out the Grahams’ back door for the umpteenth time that morning, hoping to get a glimpse of her father working in the neighborhood, when Hazel came up behind her and said, “What’s got you on edge?” Vida nearly jumped out of her skin.
“You expecting company?” Hazel asked. “Your friends coming over later?”
Vida yanked the screen door shut. “Ain’t nothin’ the matter with me. Didn’t sleep much, is all.” She walked over to the oven to check on the corn bread.
“Well, if it’s about what your daddy did, I don’t want you to worry one bit,” Hazel said, sounding proud as could be. “I done fixed it.”
Vida slammed the oven door shut. “Fixed it?” She spun around to face the white woman. Hazel had a satisfied grin on her face. That’s all I need, Vida thought, a woman the whole town knows to be a crazy drunk coming down hard on my side. She’ll get us all killed. “What you mean, you fixed it?”
“Floyd’s little boys’ club told him he had to fire you,” Hazel said. “But I put my foot down. ‘No way in hell,’ I said. I said, ‘Nobody’s gonna fire my Vida.’” Hazel’s eyes seemed to mist up. “Oh, I wish you could have heard me, Vida. I really stood up for you.”
Hazel looked as if she expected a “Praise the lord” and a “Thank you, Jesus” to come bubbling out of Vida’s mouth. Instead, Vida’s face went to stone, and she angrily wrenched herself around to the sink. She began scrubbing a pan so hard, it looked like she was trying to take off the enamel.
Hazel didn’t move. She kept standing there in the middle of the kitchen, waiting for her due.
Rinsing off the pan, Vida said curtly, “Why don’t you go on and do your driving now? Your hooch is in my sack behind the door.”
Hazel was unfazed. “How about I carry you on home later? We can chat for a spell at your house.” Hazel stood there, as dense as molasses, waiting for her answer.
Vida began scrubbing the same pan again, cursing to herself. White women! God, she hated white women! She slung the pan into the sink with a splash and whipped herself around toward Hazel. “Tell me something, Miss Hazel,” she snapped. “What you want from me, exactly?”
“What do you mean?” Hazel asked, caught short.
“Why you bother saving my job for me? It can’t be the hooch. You can get that for your own self now.”
“But Vida—”
“And I been meaning to ask, why you all the time coming down to Tarbottom and letting peoples see you sitting in my yard talking to a colored woman?”
Hazel opened her mouth to speak and then closed it again. Vida could tell she had hurt the woman, which only made her want to strike again. “Why you want to talk with me at all? Why don’t you talk to Mr. Floyd? Or some white womens?”
“You don’t enjoy our little chats, Vida?” asked Hazel, sounding small.
“You the onliest one chatting. I the one jerking my fool head up and down like a chicken in a yard full of corn. It ain’t natural.” Vida dropped her eyes to the floor. “Anyways, my peoples is starting to talk. And I reckon so is yours.”
“Well, let them talk. What they gonna say, anyway?”
“I can’t speak for the white folks, but my peoples is asking if you trying to be colored. And some want to know if I trying to be white.”
“That’s the silliest thing I ever heard!” Hazel said. “I talk to you because you understand me. I can tell you things I can’t tell nobody else.”
Vida shot Hazel a look sharp as a pick. “Why is that, Miss Hazel?”
“Because—”
“’Cause why?” fired Vida. “’Cause I won’t tell nobody?”
Hazel gripped the back of a kitchen chair, like her legs were going wobbly.
“How do you know I don’t tell nobody?” Vida pressed. “How you know
I don’t tell my friends everything you say? And all about you dranking and driving?”
Hazel looked as if she could cry. “I don’t care what you tell your friends.”
“No, I reckon you don’t. All my friends is colored. Don’t matter what colored folks think.”
“Vida, you’re putting words in my mouth. I care about what you think.”
“Then tell me,” Vida demanded, “what do I think? What I thinking right now? Tell me what it is I fret over every day? Tell me what keeps me up at night worrying. Tell me what you know about my suffering. What it is I done lost.”
Hazel’s eyes were tearing up. “I thought we was friends.”
“I clean your house,” Vida said sullenly. “That makes me your maid, not your friend. That’s the difference between colored folks and white. You get to pick me as a friend and I ain’t got no say about it.”
Vida turned back to her dishwater so she wouldn’t see the hurt on Hazel’s face any longer. But her insides felt as if they were crumbling, caving in like a house afire, one floor at a time.
The sheriff was tilted back against the wall in his chair, boots up on the desk, waiting for his deputy to return with the evidence—evidence the grand old man would insist on before he would let Billy Dean act. It just might work, he told himself again. At least it would buy a little breathing room. Give him some time to figure his way out of this fix Delia had put him in.
If he worked it right, he could put a stall into things for a couple of months. Get the good citizens off his back. Give the newspapers somebody else to crucify besides him. And most of all, keep the Senator from replacing Billy Dean with Lampkin Butts as sheriff. The old man had threatened it often enough. Said he didn’t even need an election to do it. Billy Dean was his personal sheriff. Like all them personal niggers he looked out for. Billy Dean reached into the drawer and pulled out Delia’s note to read it one more time.
I’m holding you to your promise, Billy Dean. Leave her or I’ll tell Daddy. It’s me or nothing, sugar. And you know you could never stand nothing.
He studied the handwriting. All those pretty swoops and curves and curlicues masked the cold hand of steel that had written it. He brought the letter up to his face and sniffed it. “Oh, Delia. You sweet, conniving thing,” he whispered. “Why didn’t I do it your way from the start? It wouldn’t have had to come to this.”
It wasn’t the first time he’d wished he’d just gone ahead and given her what she wanted. Done it before the threats began. Gone ahead and told Hertha the truth. Hell, it would have been worth it to see the look on that godawful face of hers. Anyway, it wasn’t as if he was ever going to get his hands on the Senator’s money. He used to be under the impression that when the old man died, the plantation and the gins and the bank shares would pass on to him. He would be fixed for life. Could do things his own way. Then Hertha told him there was no way he was getting his hands on it. She said she might keep him on as sheriff, but the Columns was a separate thing. A family thing. Her family, not his. And the family lawyers would make sure of it.
To hell with her family. And their land and their money and their personal niggers nobody could lay a hand on. You touch one, you touch them all. That was the problem with the Senator and them. They couldn’t tell where one thing ended and another began. They were all wrapped up in one ball, and it was theirs. Billy Dean couldn’t imagine such a thing. With him, the fewer strings the better. He’d cut them all loose if he could.
To hell with them all, he thought again. The only one of the whole bunch he ever gave a good goddamn about was Delia. And now. . .
In the middle of his thought, the door was flung open and in rushed his deputy, panting like an overworked mule. The sheriff quickly shifted himself about and got his boots on the floor. He shoved the letter into the drawer and slammed it.
“I told you about knocking, Lampkin.”
The deputy struggled to catch his breath. “Looka here what I found at the murder site,” he said, puffing. He handed Billy Dean the watch chain. “You was right. Funny how we missed it all them other times.”
“How about that? I had a feeling.”
It has to work, the sheriff told himself again. What was the worst that could happen? The old preacher might spend a few weeks in jail until this thing was settled. He sure seemed willing enough. Of course the best solution would be for him to get lynched before things unknotted themselves. That wouldn’t be Billy Dean’s fault. Not if he played his cards right with the Senator. The sheriff pocketed the chain. For the first time in months, he walked out of the redbrick jailhouse with a spring in his step. He got in his cruiser and headed straight out to the Columns.
That night Vida sat up alone, waiting in the pitch-blackness of her shanty for her father to return, trying not to think the worst. The truth was, she didn’t know what to think anymore. The last twenty-four hours was proof that her father was liable to do anything. Already several of the other maids had come by to tell Vida the pieces they knew of the last day’s events. Even Missouri. She said that everybody laughed at Levi when he tried to register. That Vida had nothing to worry herself about except having a fool for a father. Vida had been so happy to hear that, she had wanted to kiss the spiteful woman. Next it was Sweet Pea, who said she had overheard a call between her white lady and Nellie Grinder. Nellie was all upset because the sheriff had refused to arrest Levi. Said he laughed it off.
So for a few moments, Vida felt some welcome relief. Then Creola came chugging up Vida’s steps, sweat drops as big as bullets glistening among her freckles. Vida could tell Creola had something to say and was fighting hard against it. Finally she blurted, “Mr. Hayes is telephoning all over the state about Levi. Calling him an agitator. A civil righter. An NAACP nigger. Going on about how dangerous he is. Say something got to be done. And the sooner the better.”
Creola reached out for Vida’s hand. The woman was trembling. “Vida, I sure would feel a lot better if you come and stay with me and Rufus tonight.”
“I can’t go, Creola. Things going to work theyselves out. I be all right.”
Creola bit her lip and then said what she had come to say all along. “Vida, when a colored person starts up with that voting business, his whole family liable to get hit. Night riders drive by shooting off they guns. Even fling dynamite sticks through your window.” Creola’s whole body shook. “Vida, I’m afeared for you.”
Vida reached out and took the big woman in her arms and thanked her. But Vida still wouldn’t go, determined to wait up for her father. “I owe him to be here. It’s ’cause of me we come to Delphi in the first place. I ought to got him away from here a long time ago.”
Reluctantly, Creola left the cabin. Vida closed the door behind her and dropped the crossbar. She would wait for her father in the darkness. As she sat in a corner of the room, Vida heard coonhounds down by the river, their barks high-pitched and sharp, like they were on the scent of game.
“Please, God,” she whispered. “I ain’t spoke to you in too long a time. I been holding a lot of madness against you. And you got to admit, you ain’t been the easiest thing to love. Still, I promise, if you let my daddy live through this, I see what I can do about softening up some on you and him both.”
Vida heard the hounds again. Their barking was different. Harsher now and lower, like their heads were slung back. The dogs had something treed. And then came another sound.
Vida’s heart nearly stopped. It wasn’t dogs this time, but the low whine of a car engine. Easing cautiously across the floor, as if a careless creak would give her away, she peeked out her window. Sure enough she saw the approach of a pair of headlights, painting the row of shacks in a gleam of white.
There was nowhere to run. All the houses around her were darkened now. Word had spread fast about the trouble the Snows were in, and nobody wanted to be lit up when trouble came calling.
Vida went back to her chair and waited, listening as the sound of the engine came closer, and closer and closer
still, until she imagined she could hear the tires whispering against the dirt track. She said a last prayer for Nate and another for her father.
The shack exploded in light. The car’s headlights were aimed right through her window. In that instant, Vida was hurled back in time, to the awful night the sheriff had come for Nate, when her room had lit up, distorted images thrown against the walls, the horrible glare in her eyes.
The engine cut off but the headlights stayed on. Her heart pounded like a wild animal trying to bang its way out of its cage. Still she did not move. She sat there listening, waiting for it to happen: An explosion. Gunshots. A voice summoning her out into the night.
So far there was only silence behind the lights. Finally the lights themselves cut out. Still she waited.
Able to stand it no longer, Vida rose up on wobbly legs and peeked through the board shutters. She couldn’t believe her eyes! There was the Lincoln sitting in her front yard. “Miss Hazel,” Vida whispered. Then louder, “Miss Hazel!” Her voice raw with fear. “Is that you out there, Miss Hazel?”
“I got to talk to you, Vida.”
Vida was never gladder to see anybody in her entire life. Nobody would dare hurt Vida with a white woman in her yard. “Sure thing, Miss Hazel,” she called out the window. “I’ll cut on the porch light. You can talk as long as you want this evening. I even got coffee.”
Vida quickly lifted the crossbar, and by the time she had opened the door, Hazel had both feet on the porch. “Miss Hazel. . .?”
“Let’s go inside, Vida,” Hazel said, pleading. “Can we, please?”
“I reckon we can,” Vida answered, but she was thinking, what has this white woman gone and done now that would make her ask to go inside a colored person’s house? Once inside, Vida turned on the light and offered Hazel a chair. She’s looped up and can’t go home, Vida guessed. “You want that coffee, Miss Hazel? Won’t take but a minute or two.”
Hazel shook her head. “Vida, sit down beside me, will you?”
Miss Hazel and the Rosa Parks League Page 30
