by Kia Corthron
“You’re just being nice. You want the radio?”
“No, I wanna hear what happened with the judge who fell asleep in court.” What Beau doesn’t realize is his windbagging has become a comfort to Eliot. A sense of normalcy, of life before.
“Oh you were listening!” Beau chuckles self-deprecatingly. He finishes the tale, the trial outcome dismally predictable, then switches on the dial. “Let’s see where we are.” Mostly static, two stations playing country music. Then, “Hey!”
“What!”
“What did that sign say?”
“Nathan, Alabama, Population something. We’re still fifteen miles away.”
Beau sits back. “Huh.”
“What?”
“That’s where my sister lives. I had no idea it was so close.”
“You wanna stop in and say hi?”
Beau shakes his head. “Haven’t seen her in twenty years. She and I get to talking we’ll be there hours, and you and I will not be driving ole Dixie after dark.” He stares out at the high weeds lining the road. “But maybe I’ll call her tomorrow.” Beau falls into a pleasant world of far-off memories, for the first time in the entire drive saying nothing for so long that when an announcer begins a mellow monologue Eliot turns up the volume, to get a feel for the local landscape and to fill the silence.
They pull onto the grounds twenty-five minutes later, half an hour before dusk. A tiny poverty-stricken Negro village at the edge of town, the houses resembling little more than shacks, but this particular shack happens to have a telephone and thus was the one the locals felt would be most useful for the Northern visitors. The hosts come out to greet their guests. Martha Coats is brown, about five feet tall and stout, her darker husband Jeremiah a sturdy six-five.
“An this is our granbaby Leona,” Martha says. Whether Leona, who looks about ten, is the offspring of their daughter or son, and where that daughter or son is now, neither Eliot nor Beau inquire. The one-story home contains two bedrooms of equal small size, and the lawyers are loaned what is apparently the child’s room, a single bed and several blankets on the floor.
“You can roll it up in the day if you need walkin room,” she suggests to Eliot. “I’m assumin Beau bein the elder will have the bed.”
But Beau looks at Eliot nervously. “You want the bed, Eliot?” This sensitive generous thing is all new to him, and he seems flustered every time he speaks a kindness as if he may have done it wrong.
Eliot sets his suitcase next to the unfurled bedroll. “My brother and I used to camp in the backyard. Least now I won’t get eaten by the mosquitoes.”
“You still might,” says Martha.
There are pigs’ feet and greens for dinner, and they sit and get acquainted for a couple of hours. Before retiring Beau asks the Coatses if he might use their phone to call his sister in Nathan tomorrow morning before she leaves for church. The couple is delighted to hear he has people so close.
“You wanna call her now?” asks Jeremiah.
“I imagine she still goes to bed with the chickens. Last time I phoned after nine she laid me out so bad by the time she finally got around to ‘How are you?’ my whole long-distance allotment had been exhausted. I had to tell her, ‘I’ll let you know that next call.’”
The crickets are loud, and Beau’s snoring louder. With a small flashlight, Eliot reads a while, then stares at the ceiling. In a variation of a recurring dream, it is Eliot’s twenty-seventh birthday, a year from now, and he is home in Humble with cake and ice cream and Dad and Dwight. “We have a surprise for you,” Lon says, and in walks Claris. Eliot is in an ecstatic awe, and everyone laughs. “We knew we could fool you!” his mother says.
Early the next morning Beau phones his sister. By his tone, it’s clear she’s thrilled to hear from him. After a few minutes he says, “Rosie. Guess where I am?” The whole house hears her screaming response.
“Come on, make yourself useful,” Martha says to Eliot, and he follows her outside to the chicken coop to help collect eggs. “You won’t be seein me an Jeremiah in the voter registration line tomarra. We’re already registered.”
“Really?”
“Bout five of us they let on the rolls. Make it look like they ain’t prejudiced. Don’t ask me how we made it to the fortunate few, probly jus drew our names from a hat.” She counts eggs to herself. “Where your people from?”
“Maryland.”
“Whereabouts?”
“Humble.”
She frowns. “I don’t know that one.” She blows on an egg. “Well I bet your mama must be proud a you. Lawyer.”
Eliot doesn’t pause in his egg collecting. “She was.”
“Aw, she not with us no more?” Eliot shakes his head. “When she pass?”
“Two weeks ago.”
Martha nearly drops her basket. “She jus passed?” Eliot nods. “Aw. Bless your heart.” Martha collects more eggs. “Bless your heart,” she says again softly to herself.
When they get back in the house, Beau announces that Rosie will visit later that morning. She wants to prepare a meal for Beau, and since he can’t get out there, she told him to ask Martha not to cook. She would be bringing enough for everyone, dinner and supper.
“Would you rather take the car and drive to her?” Eliot asks.
“Nope. Never know what might come up, we need the car.”
At 8 a.m., the three representatives from the local NAACP arrive. They are dressed casually, as if they are farmer neighbors, and perhaps they are. Warren, who gives the impression of the leader as he does most of the talking, appears to be in his mid- or late forties. Joe Archie seems mid-thirties, and Les around Eliot’s age. They thank Beau and Eliot again for being here as there are no local Negro lawyers. Then they all discuss the strategy for Monday, tomorrow, over breakfast. Warren mentions a recent hysteria sparked by the integration of the high school, so they should be prepared for troublemakers.
“I hate to say it,” says Martha, “but we ain’t lettin Leona go to the white school, not till things calm down anyway.”
“Wait for that, she might be graduated,” Warren says.
“Then that’s the way it’s gonna be. Sure, I’d like her to have the nice new books. But mostly I like havin her in one piece.”
Beau remarks, “Indianapolis schools been legally integrated since ’49, but don’t they do every kind of gerrymandering, trying to keep the old separate ways.”
Joe Archie grins. “Yaw Up-South, huh?”
“Sure,” Beau says. “And make no mistake: Up-South go all the way to Boston, at least.”
Rosie’s car pulls in around 10:30, a half-hour after the NAACP men have left. She is light-skinned with brown freckles. Like Martha, she is short and rotund and in her fifties, as if these were traits of all local women. Beau walks out to greet her, and she has barely stopped the car before she runs to him. Her eyes dance, and Eliot sees that she adores her brother.
And Beau seems a completely different person around Rosie: soft, affectionate. Leaving the talking to her, which she does a lot of. Amusing the table with anecdotes of Beau as a boy, of their family and childhood neighbors, of the crazy colored and white folks out in Nathan. The Coatses reluctantly leave for their 11 a.m. church service around 11:45. (“Never starts earlier n noon,” Martha had remarked.) Rosie feels a little guilty for skipping church herself, but “I know the Lord’ll forgive me missin this once. My brother’s in town!”
Eliot decides it would be nice to leave the siblings alone to catch up, so he tells them he brought some work with him and should go into the bedroom now to look at it.
“Just a minute first,” says Rosie. She puts her hand on Eliot’s. “My brother told me about you losin your mama recently, an I jus wanna say I sure am sorry.”
“Thank you.” At moments Rosie reminds him of his mother. But these days a lot of things rem
ind him of his mother.
“We all gotta go through it. Beau was only ten when he lost his.”
“Yes, Lord,” Beau says softly, far away.
Rosie registers the confusion on Eliot’s face. “Oh, you didn’t know. I’m Beau’s foster sister. We grew up together in Arkansas, an my husband Roy too. Beau was the only one his family, Miss Nancy an Mr. Melvin tried an tried but another baby never come. Beau’s mama, dark as she was, still the prettiest woman in town. One day walkin down the street, these four white men start to touchin her. Broad daylight! His daddy, big man, find em standin outside the white saloon that night, he say real quiet, ‘Don’t you never touch my wife again.’ An them four men jus stare at him, shakin in their shoes, terrified to say a word. This we know for true cuz a neighbor a ours happen to be walkin by then. People was sayin, ‘Melvin, get outa town! Them white men gonna come after you!’ Well he don’t budge, an three days go by, four, five, he figure they done forgot all about it. Then the seventh night, everybody asleep, they come outa nowhere, hootin an a-hollerin.” She turns to Beau. “Took her, didn’t they, Beau-Beau. Takin turns with her till she died.”
Beau nods, his sad eyes staring at something on the table no one else sees.
“Right in front a her ten-year-old son.”
“What happened to his father?” Eliot has fallen into Rosie’s pattern of referring to Beau in the third person. Beau too seems to be reliving the tale from a distance, an outside observer, albeit not a neutral one.
“They held him to watch everything they did to his wife fore they ready for him. I don’t even wanna get into what kinda mutilations before they burned him alive, an conscious, make sure he still got life in him before they tie him to the railroad track. His screams wakin everybody within a mile, wake me an my family. An not jus the terror. The grief, shock: what they done to poor Miss Nancy. A full hour till the locomotive come cut him in two, his wailin fill the air, seem like it burstin with all the horrors a the world. Never forget the sound till the day I die.”
Eliot stares at Beau. How could he have gone through all that and never spoken of it? How could Eliot have never sensed something of it in him? “You saw it?”
“I saw it,” Beau says quietly. “They meant me to see it. It was a show for me.”
“So my mama an daddy took him in. An we been brother an sister ever since.”
Another quiet. Then Beau says, “Now tell me how that rascal Roy’s makin out.”
When Eliot feels he can leave without being rude, he excuses himself. In the bedroom he pulls out his work and stares at it for the next two hours, never comprehending a word.
At supper Beau is quiet. Martha asks why Rosie’s husband didn’t come.
“He’s a veteran.” Beau buttering a biscuit. “Army, had his legs blown off. He moves around on a little cart in the house, but hurts him to ride in the car.”
Jesus Christ! thinks Eliot, what next? Well Rosie, Roy and I were just having ourselves a little vacation in Hiroshima back in August of ’45, when all the sudden
Beau sighs. “Sure wish I could’ve shook hands with ole Roy though. Rosie and I figured it out. Lass time we seen each other was our mama’s funeral, ’38. Twenty-four years.”
Martha marvels on the wild coincidence of their proximity. “Yeah, they moved here soon after they got married, can’t remember why now.” Beau gazes out the window. “Until yesterday Nathan, Alabama, wasn’t anything to me but an address on the envelope.”
At bedtime Beau goes to the outhouse as his roommate unrolls his bed. Eliot looks up, sensing another presence. Leona, looking sad.
“Hello.”
“My granmama said I gotta be nice to you cuz you jus lost your mama.”
Eliot smiles. “You have a very nice granmama.”
“Wamme tell you a joke to make you feel better?”
“Yes.”
“What’s the biggest pencil in the world?” and without giving Eliot a second: “PENNSYLVANIA!” She doubles over in laughter, running out of the room, overcome by her own cleverness.
In the morning Beau and Eliot are at the courthouse at 7:30 as are the three NAACP men, and about forty Negroes are already lined up though the building won’t open until nine. The government employees start rolling in around 8:45, conspicuously ignoring the two hundred colored men and women in single file. An assemblage of casually dressed white men stands near the queue, clearly not here in solidarity with the Negroes. Beyond them a squad of police officers with a van at the ready.
The temperature is already nearing eighty, and Eliot has noticed that the line, as monitored by a white official, is directly in the sun, and needn’t be, given that a clump of trees is nearby. Most of the hopeful registrants seem to be in their best attire, including coats if outerwear spruces up their appearance. Eliot remembers the shoes. At Didi’s suggestion he would bring items for the poor on his trips South—used clothing, toiletries, school supplies—and the gesture was always deeply appreciated. It had occurred to him, since he now had the new wingtips she had bought for him, to give away his old, still in good condition. (He’d considered donating the new pair but worried it would be ungracious to dispense with a gift.) The moment he met giant Jeremiah he saw there was no point in offering his size 8s to him. As he looks at the queue now, he notices a few who appear to be in need, but it may be insulting to pick someone out of the crowd because his shoes look shoddy, or for that matter to approach one man and not his neighbor in line who may be of equal want.
The white protestors are in the shade. Eliot recalls Warren’s caution about the school integration madness. By contrast the whites here seem bored, as if this is a special chore they are required to finish before getting back to their real work.
By eleven, only three people have been let into the building, and none of these allowed to register. Eliot had been warned about this and tries to keep his temper in check, standing in the oppressive sun. Periodically he or Beau gently inform the people of their rights, and are sometimes asked questions. Eliot becomes concerned about the frail elderly, some beginning to breathe unevenly, and he expresses this to Beau. Beau whispers to Warren, who nods, and Eliot isn’t sure if he is considering some sort of action or if he assumed Eliot, through Beau, was simply commenting on the state of affairs.
The fourth rejectee, a tall thin old man, exits the courthouse furious. A couple of police officers walk over. The senior citizen is waving his arms wildly. One of the officers grabs at his arm, and the elder swings. The cops handcuff him, take him to the police van, lock him in and pull away. An old woman, apparently the man’s wife, runs as best she can after them, yelling and crying. Eliot, urgently wanting to intervene, looks at Beau, who is looking at Warren, who says, “One a you come with me?”
Eliot now notices that Beau in his middle age seems to be waning in the heat himself. And while Warren had asked for either of them, his eyes were on Beau, presuming him to have the greater experience.
“You wanna go, Beau?” Eliot asks.
“Okay.” Beau is relieved, and he follows Warren to the jailhouse, apparently walking distance despite the cops’ fanfare with the van.
There is absolutely no movement in the queue now, and at precisely one o’clock many employees pour out carrying lunch bags. Some NAACP volunteers, mostly women, arrive with sandwiches and water for those in line, but the police won’t let them near, claiming they are obstructing the people’s right to register to vote. Les has had about enough and goes to talk to the cops, who laugh in his face. At two o’clock, the employees return from lunch. At 2:05, a buzzer is heard, and the entire building empties, “Fire! Fire!” some say, laughing. At 2:10, the fire department shows up and runs straight through the queue, pushing people out of the way, causing tension among some of the standers who begin to argue about who was in front of whom. The firemen are in the building for some time, doing nothing that anyone can see, many o
f the Negroes surmising they are drinking Coca-Colas to kill time. At 3:10, precisely one hour after their grand entrance, they emerge, the captain announcing that the problem is electrical wiring and that the building will have to be closed the rest of the day, Come back tomorrow. This should legitimately have brought about a collective moan if not a riot, but the people, having by now anticipated this, sigh and quietly disperse. Eliot feels himself hyperventilating from a heat inside him having nothing to do with the sun, but he takes a breath and follows Les and Joe Archie to the jail.
When they walk in, the deputy briefly glances up from his newspaper with distaste. Beau and Warren sit nearby, both looking frustrated and Beau in particular worn out. The wife of the arrested man sits a few feet away, lost in her own thoughts.
“That’s Delaware,” Warren says, out of the officer’s earshot. “Said the sheriff has other business to attend to, which I reckon is a leisurely supper, and that he’ll be back at six. The earliest we can see Mr. Yancey.”
Eliot looks at Beau. Beau, exhausted, stares at the floor. Eliot walks over to speak quietly to his colleague. “Why don’t I drive you to Rosie’s? I can get there and back by 4:30, 4:45, plenty of leeway.”
Beau stares. “What?”
“I can counsel Mr. Yancey, Beau. Only one arrest, we got lucky. I’ll leave you off at your sister’s. You can see Roy, then I’ll come pick you up in the morning on my way out of town.”
“What are you talking about? Go off and socialize when I came here to do a job?”
