I tilted my head to the side. “Ma Pearl—”
She scowled.
I sealed my lips.
With her forehead creased, Ma Pearl went back to work on the biscuits.
She shook extra tablespoons of flour into the sticky mixture as she began half singing, half moaning, “Stay outta grown folks’ bizness,” as if it were a real song. “All these dirn chi’rens jest oughta stay outta grown folks’ bizness.”
While her fingers shaped the sticky batter into dough, her made-up lyrics morphed into the humming of a real song. “‘Why should I feel discouraged,’” she sang quietly, “‘and why should the shadows come? Why should my heart be lonely, and long for heav’n and home?’”
Something was wrong. Mr. Albert Jackson and Levi and Fish never missed a full day of work. And Ma Pearl never bothered with Gospel music unless it was Wednesday or Sunday, church days. Otherwise, she swayed and snapped her fingers to the blues.
I pulled back the curtain and stared into the early morning darkness again. As the sun peeked over the horizon, promising another blazing hot day, Slick Charlie finally got his lazy self up and crowed. I dropped the curtain and stared down at a crack in the floorboards as I listened to Ma Pearl’s chanting, “‘Jesus is my portion. A constant friend is he. His eye is on the sparrow, and I know he watches me.’”
Her singing annoyed me. I was thirteen, not three. If something had happened to Mr. Albert and his sons, I was old enough to know about it. I studied Ma Pearl’s face for answers as she worked the big ball of dough. She rolled and patted, stretched and pulled, concentrating, as if that beige lump were the most important thing in her life at the moment.
I tried one more time. Taking a deep breath and letting it out, I quickly asked, “How come Mr. Albert ain’t coming?”
Ma Pearl’s hand paused midpat. She glanced at me but didn’t say a word. She sighed and began patting the dough again. “Colored folks just oughta stay in their place. It’d keep us all outta a whole lotta trouble. One Negro do something, white folks get mad at everybody.”
I rubbed goose bumps from my arms even though it was probably a hundred and ten degrees in the kitchen with that stove burning. Mr. Albert didn’t seem to be the kind of Negro who would get in trouble with the whites. To my knowledge, he had always stayed in his place, just like Papa. Just like white folks like Ricky Turner warned us to do when he chased us off the road with his pickup. Then I had the nerve to challenge him by tossing a rock his way and by poking my tongue out at him. I couldn’t help but wonder what Ma Pearl would have thought of that.
Cautiously I asked, “Did Mr. Albert do something? Is he in trouble?”
Ma Pearl ignored my question. “Fetch me that rolling pin from the safe.”
As I got up to get the rolling pin, she spoke under her breath. “These young folks don’t know noth’n. Go’n get us all kil’t. Running round here talking ’bout the right to vote.”
Young folks? Levi or Fish. But right to vote? That would be Mr. Albert. He was the only one old enough to vote. Now I was even more confused. Could Mr. Albert even read? And surely he wouldn’t do anything to stir up trouble with whites in Stillwater.
My heart pounded as I opened the door of the gleaming white cabinet where we kept things we didn’t want the rats to feast on during the night. Just two months before, back in May, a preacher named Reverend George Lee had been killed for helping colored folks register to vote. I prayed that nothing like that had happened to Mr. Albert.
“A Negro ain’t got the right to do nothing ’cept live free and die,” Ma Pearl said.
Live free? When we couldn’t even walk up the road without being chased down by a peckerwood in a pickup? I didn’t realize my hand was shaking until I reached up to the middle shelf for the rolling pin and knocked over a Mason jar full of last winter’s pear preserves. Like dominoes, that jar knocked over another jar, and that one, another. All three of them rolled out of the cabinet and crashed to the floor.
“Gal, watch what you doing!”
“Ma Pearl—” I started, but didn’t finish. It wouldn’t do any good. I could tell from those lines in her forehead that she didn’t want any apology I had to offer. Plus, I knew it wasn’t just those fallen preserves and the sticky mess they made that had her in a huff.
I handed her the rolling pin and sighed. “I’ll clean it up.”
Ma Pearl groaned. “I’ll clean it up myself. You just go’n in there and git yo’self ready to work. I didn’t git you up early jest to sit round here and run yo’ mouth. You got a long day ahead. Now git. You know how slow you is.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said.
“And wake Fret’Lee, too.” She sighed and pursed her lips. “Try not to wake up Queen. She didn’t sleep good last night.”
When I was halfway out the door, she stopped me. “Go’n empt’ that slop jar too,” she said, turning up her nose. “That thing stank worse then skunk spray. You and Queen piss through the night more’n anybody I know.”
You mean Queen pisses through the night more than anybody you know, I wanted to say. I sleep through the night because you work me like a donkey all day.
But I was smart enough not to talk back to Ma Pearl. Like I said, there was no sense in arriving in 1956 before the rest of the world got there. So I kept my mouth shut as I went on to the back room to fetch the slop jar and take it out to the toilet to pour out the queen’s pee.
Chapter Four
MONDAY, JULY 25
HERE’S HOW I FIGURE THINGS HAPPENED EARLIER that Monday morning before the sun ever rose over Stillwater, Mississippi:
God called his faithful angel Gabriel to his big shiny throne and said, “Gabe, I have a special job for you today.”
Gabriel honored his boss with a bow and said, “Master, whatever you wish is my command.”
Then God said, “Take a great big bucket and fly over to the sun. Fill that bucket with as much heat as it will hold; then go down to Stillwater, Mississippi, and pour it over a girl named Rose Lee Carter. Then bake her. Bake her real good, until she learns not to complain so much.”
And I know old Gabe did just what God ordered, because by midmorning I was so hot I could hardly breathe. That sun beat down on me like I owed it money from six years back. Sweat dripped in my eyes so bad that I couldn’t tell cotton from weeds, and I know I was chopping down both.
But even with my impending heat stroke, I felt I had a right to complain just a little bit after what Ma Pearl did that morning. Before I could get my clothes on good, she was calling me to get to the barn to milk Ellie while Queen slept. And it didn’t help one bit that that cantankerous cow (Ellie, not Queen) wouldn’t cooperate. Milk squirted everywhere except the darned bucket.
Queen claimed she’d been cramping all night and hadn’t slept a wink. It’s a wonder she didn’t bleed to death as much as she had the cramps. Queen was two years older than me. Well, almost three, seeing she would turn sixteen that October. And like me and Fred Lee, she lived with Ma Pearl and Papa instead of with her mama, my aunt Clara Jean, and her family. That’s because Uncle Ollie, Aunt Clara Jean’s husband, wasn’t Queen’s daddy, like Mr. Pete wasn’t mine. Matter of fact, Queen didn’t even know who her daddy was. Nobody did, except Aunt Clara Jean, of course. And Aunt Clara Jean never would tell a soul who Queen’s daddy was.
Folks said he was white. And that wasn’t too hard to believe, seeing that Queen was light enough to pass for white herself if she’d wanted to, and seeing that her long hair never needed the heat of a straightening comb. Plenty of folks in our family were yellow, but Queen was different. And with the way she never lifted a finger to even wash a plate, she acted like she was white too.
Folks said that when Queen was born, Ma Pearl took to her like ants to a picnic. They said she snatched that newborn baby from Aunt Clara Jean’s bosom and claimed her like a hard-earned prize. That’s because Ma Pearl favored pretty. And to Ma Pearl, light equaled pretty, even if the person was as ugly as a moose.
Of course Ma Pearl was right. Before my first birthday rolled around, on February 4, 1943, I was as black as a cup of Maxwell House without a hint of milk. And according to Aunt Clara Jean, I was the ugliest little something Stillwater, Mississippi, had ever seen.
Of course, my dark skin is what sentenced me to the field. “Queen too light to be out there in that heat,” Ma Pearl always claimed. But like Goldilocks’s claim about Baby Bear’s porridge, my dark complexion was just right.
As I gripped the hoe between my callused palms and stared down at what seemed like a mile-long row of cotton, I wanted to cry. Thanks to Mr. Albert and sons, I now had to suffer at least four full days in the field instead of three.
I usually didn’t go to the field on Monday and Thursday mornings, the days Ma Pearl worked for Mrs. Robinson. While she kept their house, I kept ours. And Queen, even though she was almost sixteen and pretty much grown, did nothing—except sit around and read magazines that Mrs. Robinson had tossed out.
But I guess I should’ve considered myself lucky. Most colored folks didn’t have it nearly as good as we did. Since Papa was one of the best farmers in the Delta, Mr. Robinson put him in charge of his cotton. Other colored folks who lived on plantations had to deal with straw bosses like Ricky Turner’s evil daddy. And some of them were, as Ma Pearl put it, “the most low-downed white mens you ever did see.”
I looked up and saw that Papa and Fred Lee had left me way behind. They always did. I was a slow chopper. Ma Pearl said I had my head in the clouds, daydreaming. And she was right. I was always dreaming about the day I could have a house like Mrs. Robinson’s, with a maid to clean up after me, a cook to prepare all my meals, and a substitute mama to change my baby’s diapers simply because I couldn’t take the smell.
Actually, I decided I would have a house better than Mrs. Robinson’s, and it certainly wouldn’t be in Mississippi. It would be in Chicago. Because no matter what it took, I was going there one day, just like Mama and all the rest of them.
In Chicago I’d go to the finest school they had—a school where coloreds and whites went together. No white school with good stuff and a colored school with a bunch of old stuff. And we’d all use the same bathrooms and drink from the same water fountains, too.
Then I’d graduate from that school and go to a fine college, a college where only the smartest people could go. I’d study to be a doctor, like my friend Hallelujah wanted to be; then we could both be rich like that colored doctor he told me about who lived in Mound Bayou. After I became a doctor and made a lot of money, I’d come back down to Mississippi and buy Papa a brand-new car, one better than Mr. Pete’s. And I’d teach him how to drive it. Next, I’d buy him a big white house just like Mr. Robinson’s, and I might let Ma Pearl live there with him. Then again, I might not.
Those were my plans. Chicago. College. And caring for my family.
Daydreaming—it’s how I survived that dusty cotton field.
“Rosa Lee!” a second-soprano voice called.
Before I even turned, I knew I would find Hallelujah Jenkins standing at the edge of the field, waving at me.
Nobody called me Rosa but him. “A pretty name for a pretty girl,” he’d said.
“A preacher’s son ought not to tell lies,” I’d said back.
Besides, who else would’ve been calling my name from the edge of a cotton field midmorning instead of working in one? I glanced up at the sky. The sun was between nine and ten o’clock. Every Negro I knew, other than Queen, was somewhere working, either in a white man’s field or in a white woman’s house.
Hallelujah Jenkins was the most privileged colored boy in Leflore County, Mississippi. Slightly chubby and not so athletic, he always wore starched shirts, creased slacks, funny-looking suspenders, and brown penny loafers, even in hundred-degree weather, just like his daddy, Reverend Clyde B. Jenkins the Second. And he was constantly pushing his thick black glasses up the bridge of his pudgy nose.
Hallelujah was actually Clyde B. Jenkins the Third. But everybody called him Hallelujah. When he was eighteen months old, that was the first word out of his mouth, at a funeral, no less.
Hallelujah even dressed nice when he helped us out in the field on occasion. And trust me, those occasions were few and far between, as the old folks used to say. Ma Pearl said he was too delicate for farm work. But Papa said it was a sign that Hallelujah would be a man of books and not of brawn. “A learned man like his daddy,” Papa said.
“Erudite” is the word my seventh-grade teacher, Miss Johnson, would use to describe him.
Hallelujah was a strange kind of fellow, but he was also my best friend. And when I saw him that morning, I remembered it was his birthday. He was finally fourteen. “Fourteen going on forty,” as Papa would say. But to Hallelujah, fourteen seemed to be the magic age when he thought Queen—the girl he claimed he would one day marry—would finally pay attention to him. Guess he forgot that she would keep having birthdays too.
Like me, Hallelujah didn’t have a mama. Well, I had one. She just didn’t act like one. But Hallelujah already had three mamas in his brief lifetime. Hallelujah’s first mama, his real mama, died when he was four, his second mama when he was eight, and his third mama when he was twelve.
It’s true. They all died four years apart. Folks said Reverend Jenkins killed them. They said he bored them to death when he forced them to listen to his sermons all week before he put his congregants to sleep with them on Sundays. Rumor had it he was on the lookout for wife number four. Too bad every woman in Leflore County did her best to avoid even shaking the poor man’s hand on Sunday morning, in case there was any truth about his sermons boring his deceased wives to death.
Hallelujah trudged on up the row toward me, his penny loafers collecting dust along the way. It was so hot that even he wore a wide-brimmed straw hat to hide his face from the sun, when a fedora usually graced his head.
“How come you didn’t grab a hoe?” I asked him. “Can’t you see I need some help?”
Hallelujah shook his head. “Can’t. Preacher let me stop by for only a minute.”
“What? Long enough to eat some of Ma Pearl’s cooking?”
Normally, Hallelujah would’ve laughed. But that day he didn’t. He didn’t even smile.
“Happy birthday,” I called, hoping to at least conjure a lip curl.
But Hallelujah’s expression remained stoic. With a wave of his hand, he gave me a dry “Thanks.”
I leaned on the heavy hoe and wiped sweat from my face with my sleeve. When Hallelujah got closer, I could see that his eyes were red, as if he’d been crying.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
Hallelujah tilted his head sideways. “Didn’t you hear?”
“Hear what?”
“About Levi.”
My legs went weak.
I knew something bad had happened.
With Ma Pearl acting jittery that morning and Papa being quieter than usual, I knew something had happened that they didn’t want me to know about it. Mr. Albert, Levi, and Fish had been working with us in Mr. Robinson’s fields for as long as I could remember, and they had never missed a day of work.
My top lip felt numb when I spoke. “S-something happened to Levi?”
Hallelujah removed his glasses and wiped them with a handkerchief from his shirt pocket. Before he put his glasses back on, anxiety shone in his eyes. “Rosa Lee,” he said, his voice shaking, his eyes tearing up, “Levi’s dead.”
My knees buckled. If it hadn’t been for the hoe, I would’ve crumbled to the ground.
Black, pulsatin
g dots flashed around me as Hallelujah’s next words floated to my ears: “pickup … shotgun … head …” Dead.
The black dots multiplied as the earth spun beneath my feet. Nausea rose in my stomach, and every drop of biscuits and eggs I’d eaten that morning threatened to come back up.
Dropping the hoe, I grabbed my stomach and bolted from the field.
As I stumbled clumsily between the dusty rows of green cotton leaves, I couldn’t help but resent them. Levi Jackson, a fine young man, had spent most of his life tending to that field, bringing that cotton to life every summer. Now he no longer had his.
I wanted to scream. I wanted to scream until my anguish was heard all over Stillwater—all over Mississippi—all the way to Chicago, straight to my mama’s ears. I don’t know why, but I hated her at that moment. I hated her more than the nameless face that had shot Levi Jackson for no good reason.
But I couldn’t scream. I couldn’t open my mouth and take a chance on throwing up and killing any of Mr. Robinson’s precious cotton.
By the time I reached the edge of the field, my stomach lurched. Racing past the chickens scratching in the yard, I dashed toward the toilet, heaving the whole time.
I’m not sure why I ran to the toilet, knowing its stench would only make me gag more. When I reached it, I ran behind it, my body lurching forward, spewing the last of my breakfast toward the ground.
Hallelujah banged on the door of the toilet. “Rosa Lee, you okay?”
“I’m back here,” I called weakly, all my strength now a yellow puddle on the ground.
Rubbing goose bumps from my arms, I came from behind the toilet and headed up the path to the backyard. Hallelujah trailed behind me. When I reached the yard, I hugged my arms around my stomach and doubled over. A sick moan followed.
Midnight Without a Moon Page 3
