by Anne Moody
As Emma and I were leaving, Poppa came walking around the house with an armful of logs. I wasn’t surprised when I saw that he was as white as any white man I had ever seen. I stood in the yard a few feet from him and Emma as they talked, trying to decide whether he was actually white. He even talked like a white man. I wanted to ask Emma if he was white but I was too embarrassed. So I just assumed that he was.
When we left her parents, Emma carried me to meet her younger brother Clift and his wife Ruby who lived in the next house. Clift had five children. When they saw Emma coming up the little hill to their house, the two older ones ran and swung around her neck. They looked like they were so glad to see her. It was then that I began to really like Emma. She seemed to be the big influence in that family. The children and adults alike all admired her. She had a way of making people turn on to each other.
Walking back to Miss Ola’s house, I saw people going in and out of the big, empty-looking building that sat just across the road. As we got closer, I could hear lots of noise like a party was going on. It was the family café.
When we walked inside, I felt the closeness of Emma’s family. The children were dancing to a tune on the jukebox. Daddy and all of the adults sat around in one corner talking and telling dirty jokes. I felt a little out of place in the beginning so I stood alone watching the teen-agers. Emma had gone over where Daddy and the rest of them were. She told one of those dirty jokes of hers which sent Daddy them into a roar of laughter. Now she started dancing with the teen-agers, her big belly shaking more than any other part of her. All the teen-agers stopped and gave her the floor. She did some reels and rocks that I had never seen before, while all the children chanted, encouraging her to put on nastier cuts. When the record stopped, she called to Mildred, “Hey, Mildred, bring me that deck of cards behind that bar.” Right away Mildred rushed them to her. “Come on, Essie Mae, I’ll beat you twenty straight!” Emma shouted to me.
We walked over to one of the little broken-down tables and pulled up a couple of crates and started a game of Coon King as all the teen-agers stood around looking. I beat her three games in a row and she gave up. Then all the teen-agers in the café wanted to play me. All that evening I sat playing Coon King and thinking, “If only Raymond had been as strong as Emma, Mama wouldn’t have all that trouble with his people.”
Chapter
SEVENTEEN
The following Sunday, as usual, Emma, Daddy, and I went out to Ola’s café and spent the entire day there. It was about ten o’clock when we returned home. We had had a bite to eat and were getting ready for bed when we heard screaming. It was Emma’s sister Janie, next door.
“Lord Jesus somebody help me! Help me! This man done gone crazy.”
Emma jumped up and ran onto the porch. Daddy and I ran after her. By the time we got to our front door, Emma had crossed the yard and was entering Janie’s kitchen. Suddenly Daddy stopped short.
“Wilbert! What’s wrong wit’ you?” he shouted. He made an attempt to move but stopped abruptly again. Looking over his shoulder as he spoke, I saw Wilbert, Janie’s husband, standing outside their house pointing a shotgun in their kitchen window. “Man, don’t shoot in that window, you’ll kill all them children.”
“That bitch better open this door! Um gonna kill her goddamm ass tonight,” Wilbert exclaimed, running around to the porch. He leaped up on it like a wild man and almost jerked the screen door off its hinges.
“Y’all help me wit’ this door!” Janie screamed to her children as Wilbert kicked the wooden door with enough force to shake the entire house.
“Emma! Don’t just stand there, help wit’ this door. I tell you this man done lost his mind!”
Wilbert had broken the latch and upper hinge and the door was now tilted open at the top. The weight of bodies propped against it inside kept the bottom hinge from crumbling. Wilbert pushed until almost the entire door tilted. Then all of a sudden he stopped pushing, stood back, pointed the gun at the bottom of the door, and fired a shot. The door now hung loosely as if the weight on the opposite side had disappeared, and Wilbert stood there calmly looking at it. Gradually the calmness left his face and he started trembling like a frightened child. For a while everyone inside the house was quiet. Then we heard Emma moaning incoherently.
Daddy leaped off the porch and ran into Janie’s kitchen. I started to follow him but stopped. I was sure I would find Emma near death on the floor.
Just as I finally made my mind up to go in and see what had happened, Daddy appeared in the door with Emma in his arms. He held her nearly two hundred pounds as if she were weightless. As he came into the light, I could see that Emma was covered with blood from her waist to the tip of her toes. I looked into her drawn face and walled-in eyes. I was sure she was dead. Daddy’s face was hard and cold. He looked as if he was dead himself. He walked past Wilbert on the porch and didn’t even look at him as Wilbert said:
“Oh, Emma, what have I done to you? Oh God, what have I done? Diddly, I didn’t mean it, I didn’t mean it.…”
Daddy walked carefully down the steps. As he walked toward the truck that belonged to Cousin Hattie’s husband, Albert, I got a feeling that it wasn’t his strength that supported Emma but some supernatural force that carried them both. I couldn’t move as I watched Daddy carefully place Emma in the back of Albert’s pickup truck. He got up in the truck with her, placed her head in his lap, and then sat there as though he expected the truck to know what to do. I had just thought of going to get Albert to drive the truck for them when Albert and Cousin Hattie came running out of their house. Albert didn’t even look at Daddy sitting in the back of the truck. Without a word he and Hattie got up in the front and drove away. Then Janie came running out of the house with her blouse half on looking like a ghost. She didn’t even look at Wilbert as she ran to their car. Wilbert ran after her and jumped into the driver’s seat.
I stood on the porch for a while looking out into the darkness. I felt as if I had just witnessed the end to some weird movie and my life was all wrapped up in it. I looked over at the broken door to Janie’s kitchen. I knew that Janie’s five kids were inside and that they were awake. It frightened me that I didn’t hear any stirring around. Somehow I got up enough nerve to go and see what they were doing.
I walked up on Janie’s porch as if I was treading on an earthquake. The door hanging on its bottom hinge made the house look like it was collapsing and I got the feeling I was collapsing with it. Inside the kitchen, all five of Janie’s children stood with their eyes fixed on the pool of coagulating blood. I had never seen so much blood before; I noticed fragments of flesh and shattered bone mixed with it. Leon, the oldest boy, was crying. The younger ones appeared to be in a trance. “Let’s put them to bed, Leon,” I said. After I helped him do that, we cleaned up the blood together.
“Her whole foot, Essie Mae—her whole foot is gone, shot to pieces,” Leon said, still crying. When he told me that, I was glad—glad that it was only her foot. From the way she looked when Daddy brought her out, I had thought it was her stomach. “Auntie ain’t never did nothin’ to us. She even gives Mama money to buy us food when we run out. Now look what Wilbert done done to her. I could kill him, I could just shoot that man’s brains out.”
As dawn approached that morning, Leon and I were still up, nodding over a cup of black coffee. I sat up all night while he talked to me about Wilbert and Janie and voiced his concern about what would happen to the children if they separated. As I had listened, I relived all the fears I had had when Mama and Daddy separated. Leon knew that he would have to stop school and work to help Janie take care of the children if Wilbert left them, because he knew Janie was pregnant. I shed a few tears with him as he said, “What kin I do, Essie Mae? These white people here don’t pay nothin’ to grown men. You know they ain’t gonna pay a twelve-year-old boy nothin’. I use to work for that old white lady who live up the road and she paid me four dollars a week to work like a slave.” I thought of the old white woman I
had worked for who paid me seventy-five cents and two gallons of clabber milk a week and all the others I had worked for for practically nothing.
At seven that morning, I left Leon sitting before a cup of black coffee. I still remember his trembling hands as he motioned to thank me, his red swollen eyes, the tight lines across his forehead, and his nervously shaking feet. He looked like an old worried man with a twelve-year-old frame.
I was just beginning to enter a restless sleep when Daddy came home. He told me that Emma’s brother Clift was going to pick me up at ten o’clock before he went to work and drive me to Centreville to spend the day with Emma in the hospital. Then Daddy was off to work himself like nothing at all had happened. I didn’t even have time to ask him about her.
At the thought that I would have to go to Centreville, I got sick enough to be in the hospital myself. I hadn’t planned to go back at all. As Clift drove down the main street later, I rested my head on the back of the seat and pretended I was asleep. I didn’t want to see the town or recognize anyone I knew. Once I was in the hospital, I didn’t leave Emma’s room except for occasional use of the rest room.
I spent a week with Emma in the hospital. During that time, I learned to admire her strength even more. She was livelier than anyone who visited her and refused to let anyone feel sorry for her. Each day when the doctor came in, she cracked jokes with him and carefully observed what he was doing. When I saw her foot for the first time, I turned away unable to look at it. It was all swollen and bloody and one side of her ankle and heel had been blown off.
What I admired most about her was the fact that she didn’t blame Wilbert for shooting her. She placed the blame where it rightfully belonged, that is, upon the whites in Woodville and how they had set things up making it almost impossible for the Negro men to earn a living. “It ain’t Wilbert’s fault,” she told a group of her relatives. “Him and Janie wouldn’t be fightin’ if Wilbert could get a good job and make enough money to take care of them children. If these damn white folks ain’t shootin’ niggers’ brains out they are starvin’ them to death. A nigger can’t make it no way he try in this fuckin’ place. Don’t y’all go blamin’ Wilbert for this. It wouldn’t bring my foot back or make it well. Neither would it help him feed his children.”
“If there were more Emmas in this world, Negroes would be a whole lot better off,” I thought every time I looked at her in the hospital.
After a little over two weeks in the hospital, she was discharged. Once she was home, we all got back on regular schedules. Her only visitors now were members of the family who came and spent a few hours with her on Sundays. After about a week of sitting up in the house all day alone, she began to feel sorry for herself. The old spirited Emma I admired gradually disappeared. Every evening when I got home from school, she would have thought up a million little things for me to do. Then she would complain about everything. I couldn’t sweep the floor clean enough to please her. I began counting the weeks until graduation when I could leave there for good.
Meantime, I was going to Johnson High School every day. But the students were so boring there that I longed for my old classmates at Willis High. The Johnson boys and girls didn’t seem to care about anything but each other. They sat up in class all day passing notes back and forth. And most of the teachers didn’t give a damn whether they learned anything or not.
The one thing I didn’t miss was my old basketball team. The team at Johnson High was much better and more exciting. While I was at Willis, I had heard a lot of talk about the big tall Johnson players. I went out and watched them practice a few times to discover everything I had heard about them was true. They shot jump shots and passed the ball like boys. I tried to talk myself into a practice game but every time I went out and watched them I got scared and chickened out.
One afternoon I was sitting up in class bored stiff when one of the players came in and told me Coach Dunbar wanted to see me. When I got outside, Dunbar was sitting on the ground in the middle of the court surrounded by the players. The girls stared curiously at me as I walked toward them. Some whispered and hunched each other.
“Miss Moody, we have been waiting long enough for you to make up your mind to play with us,” Dunbar said without even looking at me. I didn’t know what to say so I just stood there. “Hicks called me up a few weeks ago and accused me of stealing his best player,” he continued. “I thought the man was out of his mind. And today I discovered the fine new chick who I’ve had my eyes on for weeks turns out to be Hicks’s best player.” All the girls laughed when he said that and one asked:
“What Mrs. Dunbar gotta say about that?”
“Shhh! Shhh,” Dunbar said, holding a finger up to his mouth. “Pull up a chair and sit down,” he said to me.
I sat down on the ground among the girls. Dunbar then told me that his best player was sick. He said they had some tough games coming up and that he wanted me to replace her. I told him that I wasn’t interested in basketball anymore and hadn’t planned to play with their team. But somehow he talked me into getting into the practice game that evening.
During that game, he put three big guards on me who looked like female football players, then stood back and watched them slaughter me. He stood watching every move I made without saying a word. I knew he was sizing me up as a player and I tried to impress him, but those big girls were smothering me and I couldn’t even move. When the game was over, I walked away hurting all over and vowing that I would never touch a basketball again.
But one evening, when I passed the basketball court and the girls were out practicing, Dunbar spotted me and called me over. He told me that they had their toughest game coming up the following day and asked me to play. I was going to refuse, but then I remembered how basketball had helped me forget my troubles and pass the time at Willis High, and I changed my mind.
The next morning around nine o’clock we boarded one of the school buses. Our destination was Liberty, Mississippi, where we were to meet one of the toughest teams in the state. On the way, I was extremely nervous. I began to wonder if I were as good as Dunbar and Hicks thought.
When we got to Liberty, we were greeted by a woman who was the exact picture of Emma. She reminded me of the fight we had had the night before. The strategy I had thought up on the bus vanished and throughout the entire game I thought of Emma and played as if I was playing against her. When the game was over, all my teammates ran to me and began swinging around my neck. We had won by two points. The score was 43 to 41. I had shot 27 points and had broken a tie of 41–41 the last ten seconds of the game.
During that spring I hardly saw Emma or Daddy at all. Johnson High had become one of the most challenged teams in the state and I was one of its most valuable players. In addition, I organized Johnson High’s first gymnastic and tumbling team, ran track, did substitute teaching, and spent all day Sunday in church. Before I realized it, I was practicing for graduation.
Wilkinson County was a recipient of one of the new “Separate but Equal” schools built throughout the South as a result of the 1954 Supreme Court Decision. It had been under construction on a fifty-two-acre plot in Woodville for almost a year when I graduated in 1959. The following September all the Negro high schools in Wilkinson County would consolidate into the new school, giving it nearly three thousand students and eighty to ninety teachers. It was supposed to be the largest new school in the state and it caused much bickering among the Uncle Tom principals and teachers in the county. Many of the teachers sought positions as heads of various classes or departments and the principals challenged each other for the position of head principal. Since Willis was the biggest Tom among the principals of the merging schools, he was the one chosen by the state board for this job.
My class was scheduled to be the first to graduate in the new school building. Most of my classmates were all excited about this but not me. As most of them, students, teachers, and principals alike, were bragging about how good the white folks were to give us such a big
beautiful school, I was thinking of how dumb we were to accept it. I knew that the only reason the white folks were being so nice was that they were protecting their own schools. Our shiny new school would never be equal to any school of theirs. All we had was a shiny new empty building, where they always had the best teachers, more state money, and better equipment. The only exciting thought I had about graduation was the fact that I was finishing high school and that would enable me to leave Woodville.
During the graduation ceremony each merging school was to be represented by the student with the highest average. I had a straight A average—the highest of all the seniors. But because I was a product of two schools, I had been ruled ineligible to represent either. My homeroom teacher thought it was very unfair for me not to be the main speaker. She wanted to make an issue out of it but I wouldn’t let her. She didn’t understand and thought it was stupid of me not to want the speech after earning it. I told her I felt that the only thing I had truly earned was my diploma and if she could arrange for me to get it without marching and becoming a part of all that confusion, I would be grateful. Then she called me crazy and forgot the whole thing.
The night before graduation, I packed all of my clothes and prepared to leave for New Orleans the following morning. I said good-bye to Daddy before going to bed because I wouldn’t see him again before I left. I had expected him to object to my leaving so soon after graduation but he didn’t. He just told me that I should try and get into college in New Orleans and that he would help me as much as he could. That night I felt closer to him than ever. I realized that he had known all along that I was not happy there, that Emma mistreated me when he wasn’t home, and that he also understood Emma too and loved her enough to be patient with her until she was up and out of the house again. As Emma listened, I could tell she was touched by the feeling Daddy had shown toward me. The next morning, she got up and was nicer to me than she had been in a long time. She acted as though she was sorry that I was leaving. She even told me she would come to my graduation if she could wear shoes. I responded politely to her newly shown interest in me but by this time I didn’t care whether she came to my graduation or not, and I knew Daddy wouldn’t come because he had never been to a public event in his life. So the next morning I walked out of the house alone, my cap and gown swinging on my arm.
