Chapter 32
At 10:33, we hear the purr of A the DeSoto coming down the driveway. Mother and I hurry out to help Doto with the boys, who are both asleep in the deep leather seats. I carry Mitchell, Mother half carries, half walks Ren up the stairs to their beds.
The kitchen clock shows nine ’til eleven when we hear Luther’s truck, followed by his careful tap at the back door. Mother gets up quickly, stiffly, to open it.
“Should be right behind me, MizLizbeth,” Luther tells her quietly. He’s loosened his tie, left his jacket in the car. Walking in, he pauses beside Armetta to place a hand on her shoulder. She covers it with one of her own.
“Be here any minute now,” he says and the five of us—Mother, Doto, Luther, Armetta and me—sit silent, listening for the truck. I watch the second hand hop around the clock, nudging the minutes from 10:57 to 11:03 to a full ten after.
Luther checks his watch and shakes his head. “I saw ’em,” he says, “walkin’ outta the lake and into the grove. Shouldn’t’ve taken but another five to reach the truck.”
Mother stands and leaves the room. I hear her walking back and forth on the porch. Luther and Armetta follow her. As I get up to join them, Doto stops me, tells me to “sit down and stay put.” What’s wrong? Where are they? I want to scream.
Doto remains confident. “Calm down. Your daddy’s smarter than any ten of those men put together. He’ll be here.”
Like a wave, fear rises up to choke me. What if you’re wrong? I wonder. As if she’s read my mind, Doto glares at me to keep the faith.
At 11:30, worry, like a magnet, pulls Doto and me out of the kitchen and onto the porch. Nobody’s talking. Out in the yard, the crickets rub their wings and my nerves together, a pair of bullfrogs croak our concern, and a lone night bird cries for its mate.
I stand beside Doto, willing Daddy home. It’s a ten-minute drive; you should be here NOW! My heart bangs inside my chest. For another lifetime, we stand and wait, watching the dark, not wanting to acknowledge the possibilities that swirl like demons around us.
And then, we hear it . . . the roar of the truck entering the driveway, its headlights arcing into view. Mother flies down the steps. Daddy brakes, leaps out and grabs her tightly. I wait my turn to hug him.
“Tire!” he says. “Goddamn flat. Picked up a nail on the way in . . . flat as a pancake when we got back.”
“They’re fine,” Doto announces, queen to her court.
“Right as rain,” Luther says, shaking off dark thoughts.
“And just about as wet,” Daddy says, tossing Robert a towel and swinging his waterproof ditty bag onto the table. “Sorry for scaring you all. Everything was fine until that tire. Never changed a flat so fast in my life.”
“We made it through the grove in no time, saw Luther’s light and headed down the beach,” Robert tells us.
“Didn’t see a soul,” Luther tells him. “Ev’ry one of them Klanners musta been at that big rally downtown.”
“The lake wasn’t any more than three and half feet deep,” Daddy says. “We waded right across it, holding the bag and the shotgun over our heads. Only thing was, in the middle, Robert looks at me and, quiet as can be, asks, ‘Did Ren ever say whether or not there’s ’gators in this lake?’ ”
As Mother gasps, Daddy smirks, “Let’s just say it’s a good thing my pants were already wet. We picked up the pace after that. Made it to the fishing camp fine, but as we walked up onto the beach, Robert nearly stepped on a water moccasin.”
A shiver snakes up my spine. Unlike a rattler, a deadly water moccasin will strike without warning, just as soon kill you as look at you.
“Scared me half to death,” Robert says. “Didn’t dare shoot it, though. Mr. Mac’s next to me whispering, ‘Stand still , stand real still.’ Now how am I s’posed to stand still when I’m shakin’ like a leaf?”
“Snake was as scared as we were,” Daddy says. “After a while—”
“He means forever,” Robert interrupts.
“—it slithered off. After that, we expected just about anything. Crept up to the door of the building and started searching for a padlock. Robert tries the handle and the door opens—we walked right in!”
“Tell ’em about that,” Robert says, nodding Daddy on.
“Damnedest thing I’ve ever seen. On the outside, that building’s just plain pine clapboard, badly in need of paint. Inside, we switched on our flashlights and it’s varnished tongue-and-groove cypress, paneled like a high church or a courtroom. There’s a small anteroom, like a vestibule, in front and a big paneled door; beyond that, a fairly large meeting hall.”
“You wouldn’t believe it,” Robert tells us.
“Black, red and gold everywhere,” Daddy says. “Like a House of Horrors, with a big square painted on the floor. In the middle of that, some kind of altar.”
“Gave me the creeps.” Robert mock-shivers.
Daddy nods. “On three sides of the square there are chairs, some kind of ceremonial seats. And on the far side, opposite from where we came in, there’s a throne on a raised dais, big as a church pulpit but painted blood-red and black.”
“With a huge Florida longhorn cow’s skull above it.” Robert holds his hands wide apart to show us the size of the skull and horns. “I told Mr. Mac, ‘Wouldn’t surprise me to see the Devil himself sittin’ up there.’ ”
“Made my skin crawl,” Daddy agrees. “I went one way, Robert went the other, tapping the paneling with our ballpeen hammers, looking for a hollow spot. Took us about ten minutes, but just behind a small table on a side wall, we found it—hollow panel, about waist high, with a sliding door concealed in the woodwork. We got that open, and inside, there was a shelf and a good-sized tin tackle box. We opened that and found three books and a zippered bank pouch. The top book was a Bible.”
“Presented to Mr. Reed Garnet, on the occasion of his confirmation into Opalakee Presbyterian Church,” Robert tells us.
“Age twelve, by his loving mother.” Daddy grins.
“Oh, Lord,” Mother moans, “wouldn’t Hannah Garnet just die if she knew where that Bible ended up?”
“Maybe, maybe not.” Armetta purses her lips.
“We left it there, along with the pouch, which had a little bit of cash in it, and took the other two books with us,” Daddy says.
“What were they?” I ask, hardly able to breathe.
“Not much.” Daddy shrugs. “Just the Membership and Attendance Records. And the Treasurer’s Log.”
“Ohhh, if that don’t beat all!” Luther is grinning, slapping his thigh.
“Then what happened?” Doto demands.
“We put the hammers and the books in our bag, slid that tin box back inside the secret panel, closed the door, waded back across the lake, crossing our fingers that if there were any gators they weren’t hungry, ran through the grove, changed the flat and hightailed it home!”
“Were you scared?”
Daddy turns to face me. “Terrified,” he tells me softly.
“Can we see what y’ got?” Luther asks.
“You bet!” Daddy empties his bag in front of us.
Maybe because I was expecting big leather-bound volumes, like Doto’s ledger books, the black-and-white cardboard composition books, like Ren and I use in school, surprise me.
Daddy opens the Membership Book first. There, in someone’s tidy handwriting, is the list of names far longer than the F.B.I.’s list I saw last month. This one has columns with years of dates across the top and checkmarks showing who attended which monthly meeting. Apparently, the last meeting was just five nights ago, with all but a few members present and
accounted for. After that, there’s a section listing Klan Officers. Emmett Casselton’s at the very top, as Exalted Cyklops, above a list of strange-sounding titles like Klaliff, Kludd, Klokard, and others with the letters KL.
The second book, the Treasurer’s Log, has neat, numbered entries for dues paid and fines collected. Armetta is the firs
t to notice that in the back of the Treasurer’s Log, there are a few odd enclosures. All of a sudden, she freezes, eyes wide, nostrils flaring, hand flying to her throat.
“What is it, Armetta?” Mother asks her.
Slowly, carefully, without removing it from its place, Armetta points out the newspaper clipping. “I have a copy of this at home. It’s the story about the Moores registering voters in The Quarters. My name’s in it, too.” Turning the page like it will tear if she touches it, she uncovers another sheet taped into the book. A rough pencil drawing. “Good God Almighty! You realize what this is?”
Daddy leans forward, studying the bunch of squares and rectangles with letters inside. I see “P,” “K,” “LR,” and, in one, a “BR” with a circle around it.
“Luther! Don’t you recognize it?”
“Recognize what?” Luther says, his eyes darting from the drawing to Armetta’s face and back again.
“It’s the Moores’ house!” Armetta says, pointing. “See here, ‘P’ is for porch, ‘K’ for kitchen. This ‘LR’ right here is the livin’ room. You and I sat right there last October visitin’. This ‘BR’ over here, the one with the circle, is the bedroom where the dynamite went off.”
“Are you sure about this?” Daddy asks, his blue eyes boring into her brown ones.
“Dead sure,” she says, returning his gaze steadily.
Daddy sits back in his chair. I find myself staring at the open window over the sink, wishing it was closed.
After a few long seconds, Daddy leans back in. “Anything else?”
“These last two sheets aren’t taped . . . let’s look.” Armetta unfolds the two sheets and places them in the middle of the table. The first one is a duplicate of the flyer inviting Klansmen to tonight’s Kounty-wide Klonverse in Orlando. The second one is titled Why the Klan liKes IKe! It calls on “Good Democrats and Real Southerners” to support Eisenhower for President. The flyer cites Ike’s record as “an enforcer of racial segregation in the U.S. armed forces,” his “opposition to civil rights legislation,” and his “support of immigration laws which bar Colored Races from entering the country.”
“Jim Jameson was right, this stuff is dynamite,” Daddy says. “Lizbeth, where’s the pouch?”
As Mother retrieves the mailing pouch Mr. Jameson gave Daddy, Armetta folds and replaces the flyers in the book. Daddy brings Armetta a plain sheet of paper and asks her to write a note to Jim Jameson stating that the drawing in the Treasurer’s Log appears to be the floor plan of the Moores’ home which she visited last fall. After she writes the note and signs it, Mother and Daddy sign it, too, as witnesses. Daddy puts the note on top of the two composition books, slips them inside the mailing pouch. He seals it and hands it, along with Mr. Jameson’s twenty-dollar bill, to Luther, who’s agreed to mail it from the Wellwood post office first thing tomorrow morning.
“Once you put that pouch in the mail, we’ve done our part. Now, we just have to hope that the Good Lord and the Grand Jury do theirs,” Daddy tells him.
“Amen to that,” Luther echoes.
“I still wish we could’ve blown that place up tonight,” Robert says on his way out the door.
“Back to hell where it came from?” Daddy asks. “Me, too.”
Robert grins and waves goodnight.
“We’ll see y’all later,” Luther and Armetta call quietly as they disappear into the night.
In the kitchen light, my parents’ faces seem drained of the excitement that filled the room just minutes ago. I’m dead-tired myself, not wanting to think.
“And now we wait,” Doto says, so softly I almost don’t hear her. I’ve never seen her look so old.
“Now,” Daddy says, helping her up, herding me out of the room, “we try to get some sleep.”
The Saturday morning after Daddy and Robert went into the Klan fishing camp, Ren (who knew nothing about their efforts) did the second most foolhardy thing of his life.
Privately, he and I had decided that the man who shot at him was most probably J. D. Bowman, the same trigger-happy Klansman who murdered Marvin. “But, of course, we’ll never know for sure,” I told him, trying to let that particular sleeping dog lie.
Well, Ren, applying the kind of cockeyed logic that only a boy is capable of, got up and took himself off to Carney’s Coffee Shop, the flat-topped fried-food restaurant across from Voight’s Grocery Store. Everybody knows Carney’s is where Mr. Emmett Casselton, King of the Klan, regularly holds court with two or three other men in the big corner booth facing the street.
Ren walked in, sat himself at the counter, ordered a hot apple fritter and a glass of milk, and settled in to eavesdrop on Emmett Casselton’s conversation!
“I was hoping they’d talk about the shooting and who did it and all,” he brags to me later, cocky as can be.
“Are you crazy?” I yell, dumbstruck by his brashness. “The Klan almost blows your head off and, first chance you get, you’re off to Carney’s pestering Emmett Casselton?”
“I wasn’t pestering him, I was just listening. But all he talked about was money, price of fruit, price of juice, price of land. Hardly worth the trip.”
“And that’s all that happened?”
“Well, yeah, until they got up to pay and Mr. Casselton noticed my Dodger cap. I had it pulled way down so he couldn’t see my head.” Ren’s scrapes have healed into beet-red welts.
“And?” I’m ready to strangle him.
“And he asks me, ‘You a Brooklyn fan, boy?’ ”
“And you said . . .”
“Well, nothing at first. He’s kinda scary-looking. Got these pale alligator eyes with no lashes, big old nose with gray hairs sticking out the holes, and skin like leather with sun spots all over him.”
“So, you didn’t answer him?”
“Yes, I did, too. I said ‘yes, sir.’ And, he said, ‘The Brooklyns are bums. Goddamn nigger lovers never won a Series, never will.’ ”
“Oh, God! And you said . . .”
Ren grins. “I gave him Marvin’s V-sign and said, ‘Maybe this year, sir.’ ”
I groan.
“And he didn’t say nothing, just looked at me like I was an idiot.”
“You are an idiot!” I rail, shaking him. “If you don’t swear this minute, Ren McMahon, on the Holy Bible, that you will never go near Carney’s again, I’m going to tell Daddy and Doto, and you know they’ll make mincemeat out of you!”
“Leave me alone. Lemme go!”
Because our family seems so different from other people’s in Mayflower, Daddy’s always joked that we are strangers in a strange land. Somehow, Ren twisted that into believing he was anonymous or, worse yet, invisible. I have no idea whether Emmett Casselton recognized him as “the McMahon boy” or not. But I’m worried that Ren’s visit to the coffee shop draws attention to our family at a time when, Daddy says, “we need to be laying low.”
Chapter 33
Monday, April first, Fool’s Day, the Federal Grand Jury con-venes its investigations into Ku Klux Klan activities in the state of Florida.
By Tuesday morning, the news from Miami crackles through the school hallways like an electric current. Fourteen Klansmen have been subpoenaed statewide, twelve of them from Orange County, nine of them from Opalakee.
Before the first bell rings, Joan Ellen Marks broadcasts the morning report to a group of us lined up outside our classroom.
“Miz Lucy came over last night, mad as hell and wailin’ like a banshee,” Joan Ellen says. “I guess Mr. Reed thought there’d be a bunch more people from a bunch more Klans. But there aren’t but a few who aren’t from Opalakee. Miz Lucy’s ’bout gone ’round the bend ravin’ that Mr. Reed’s gonna wind up in jail! If that happens, Miz Lucy swears, she’ll never be able to hold her head up in this town again; she and May Carol’ll wind up in the poorhouse, or else livin’ with Mr. Reed’s mother, which Miz Lucy says would be a fate worse than death. It took Mamma most of the night to calm her down.”
“What
about May Carol?” I ask, remembering her mother’s stinging slap at the Garnets’ pool party.
“She spent the night with me but went home to Miz Lucy this mornin’. Don’t think she’ll be in school today.”
In class, everybody wants to talk about the same thing, peppering our teacher with questions about Grand Juries and U.S. Prosecutors. Mrs. Finney, smelling an opportunity for some real-life Social Studies, puts aside Americanism versus Communism and begins a comparison of States’ versus Federal Rights.
“At the heart of this week’s events in Miami is the question of jurisdiction,” Mrs. Finney says, writing the word on the board. “Who can tell me what that means?”
My classmates, several of them related to the Klansmen now in Miami, appear well versed in the differences between state crimes (robbery, assault and battery, murder) and federal ones (the infringement of someone’s Constitutional rights).
“The jurisdiction of a Federal Grand Jury applies only to areas governed by federal law,” Mrs. Finney tells us. “Unless the Federal Prosecutor can prove that a federal crime has been committed, the people subpoenaed to Miami will have a nice vacation and come home in a few weeks, okay? May we move on to mathematics now?”
The news passed on from the maids to Armetta to us is pretty much the same. The nine members of the Opalakee Klan as well as the five others from the Orlando, Ocoee and Miami Klans were expecting many more Klansmen to be subpoenaed. Safety, so to speak, in numbers. They remain confident, however, and have been advised by no less than the state’s Grand Dragon himself that no federal jurisdiction applies.
Apparently, the Klansmen are free to discuss their testimony outside the courtroom and, according to the maids, call their nervous wives at home almost every day. “Loose lips sink ships,” the saying goes. They certainly destroyed Miz Lucy Garnet.
We hear the story from Armetta, who got it from Selma, who was there. “It’s pure pitiful,” Armetta tells us, “hurt my heart to hear it.” Mine, too.
After ten days of cooling his heels in a Miami motel room, Mr. Reed Garnet finally got his turn to testify.
Lay that Trumpet in Our Hands Page 18
