Midnight Without a Moon

by Linda Williams Jackson

  Hallelujah put his arms around my shoulders and ushered me to the back porch. When my body dropped on it like a sack of overgrown potatoes, I pressed my face in my palms and screamed. I screamed until my stomach hurt.

  I shouted into my palms. “Why, Hallelujah? Why?”

  “He registered to vote,” Hallelujah said, his voice hoarse. “And they killed him.”

  I raised my face from my palms and wiped away tears with my sleeve. “Levi wasn’t old enough to vote,” I said angrily.

  Hallelujah removed his glasses and wiped tears from his own face. “He turned twenty-one last Thursday,” he said. “Went to the courthouse and registered the next day.”

  “Levi left the field early on Friday,” I said, my voice choking. “Said he had something important to do.”

  Hallelujah stood right beside me, but his words seemed distant as he detailed the little he knew of Levi’s murder. My mind was on Levi and what a fine young man everybody said he was. So all I heard from Hallelujah’s rant was “forced off the road” and “shot in the head.”

  I could see Levi’s dark brown face as if he were standing right in front of me. It hadn’t been a week ago that I heard him brag to his younger brother Fish that this would be his last summer “chopping some white man’s cotton.” He was the first person in his family of eight boys to graduate from high school and attend college. After his first-grade teacher declared him brilliant, his parents scratched and scrimped for nearly twelve years in order to send him. In the summer, he came home and chopped cotton to help out, with the promise that when he graduated, he would get a good job and move his parents off Mr. Robinson’s place. That September would have been the beginning of his last year at the colored college Alcorn. And it was all for nothing. Levi was dead. Gunned down like a hunted animal.

  “Something needs to be done about folks being killed for registering to vote,” I said, my teeth clenched. “First Reverend Lee in Belzoni, and only two months later Levi?”

  Hallelujah wiped his face with his handkerchief, then put his glasses back on. He laughed, but it wasn’t a happy laugh. “White folks won’t do a thing to another white for killing a Negro,” he said, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose as he stared out toward the cotton field, where Papa and Fred Lee were mere dots on the horizon. “They won’t even do anything if a Negro kills a Negro. A Negro ain’t worth a wooden nickel to them. Kill one, another one’ll be born the next day to take his place.” He took his glasses off again and wiped his eyes.

  Hallelujah plopped down on the porch beside me. We both stared out at the chickens clucking aimlessly around the yard. Slick Charlie, our only rooster, stood guard at the door of the henhouse, as if to say You hens better stay out there in the yard where you belong. Stay out there till your work is done.

  When the screen door burst open, I jumped so hard I almost fell off the porch.

  Queen stormed out the door. It was well past nine o’clock, and she still wore rollers in her hair. Her pointy nose stuck up in the air, as if she smelled something foul. She pinned her hazel eyes on me and Hallelujah and said, “Y’all cut out all that racket. I’m trying to sleep.” A copy of Redbook magazine hung from her hand.

  Hallelujah tipped his hat. “Morn’n, Queen,” he said. “Didn’t mean to wake you.”

  Queen ignored Hallelujah as if he were a leaf on a tree. Instead, she glowered at me. “Can y’all hold down the noise?”

  “Queen, Levi Jackson got shot last night,” I said.

  Queen shrugged. “Niggas get shot round here all the time.”

  Hallelujah stared at Queen, his eyes narrowed. “Levi’s dead, Queen,” he said sternly. “They say some white men in a pickup forced him off the road and shot him in the head.”

  For a brief moment, shame crossed Queen’s face. Then, as quickly as that moment came, it vanished. Queen turned up her nose and said, “I knew that uppity nigga would get hisself killed one day.” She stormed back into the house, allowing the screen door to slam shut behind her.

  Hallelujah and I stared at the door in silence.

  A few seconds later, I sighed and shoved myself off the porch. “I’ve gotta get back to the field,” I said. “Ma Pearl will beat the black off me this evening if she finds out I’ve been sitting around talking to you instead of working like I’m supposed to.”

  “Preacher’ll be back shortly to pick me up,” Hallelujah said. “I’ll just head on up the road and meet him.”

  “No!” I said, grabbing his arm.

  Hallelujah flinched with surprise.

  I quickly moved my hand and said, “Don’t walk down the road by yourself.”

  Hallelujah stared at me, confused. “I meet Preacher along the road all the time.”

  I told him about my encounter with Ricky Turner.

  He slumped back down on the porch. “I’ll wait for Preacher,” he said.

  Chapter Five

  TUESDAY, JULY 26

  THAT MORNING, MR. ALBERT WAS RIGHT BACK IN Mr. Robinson’s cotton field with sixteen-year-old Fish and one of his younger sons, Adam, barely ten. Adam would replace Levi.

  Mr. Albert’s three older sons had left, one by one, for Detroit six years prior. Like Mr. Pete, they had packed up their young families and fled the dirt clods of the Delta as soon as they saved up enough money to start a new life someplace else.

  Nobody talked about Levi, at least not in my hearing, anyway. Ma Pearl and Papa acted as if their words might get picked up by the wind and carried over to Mr. Robinson’s ears if they said anything about the shooting. Hallelujah had said that folks acted the same way when Reverend George Lee was shot in Belzoni back in May. Some, he said, even claimed it was the preacher’s own fault that he was killed. “If he’da just took his name off them voting records like the white folks told him,” he’d heard a woman at church whisper, “he wouldn’ta got hisself kil’t.”

  I was glad when I saw Reverend Jenkins’s brown Buick stirring up dust along the edge of the field, as I was sure Hallelujah would have some news about Levi.

  When Hallelujah jumped out, Reverend Jenkins—​his thick glasses glaring in the sunlight—​said something to him, probably instructing him to mind his manners. Then he waved and drove off. He honked and waved at Papa at the far end of the field as the tires of his Buick crunched rocks on the road.

  I paused (not that I was doing much work anyway) and leaned against the hoe. “Hey,” I said, waving at Hallelujah before he even reached me.

  Hallelujah smiled and waved back. It was good to see him smile again. But as hot as it was out there—​and I mean heat that wrapped its arms around me like a long-lost relative giving a hug—​that boy was wearing his dark brown fedora instead of a straw hat.

  “What you trying to do,” I said as he got closer, “get black like me? You gonna burn up in this heat.”

  Hallelujah touched the tip of his hat and grinned. “The blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice.”

  “Who told you that lie?”

  “Read it in a book,” he said.

  I chuckled and started chopping again. “Even the devil got sense ’nuff to wear a straw hat in this heat.”

  Hallelujah followed me as I crept along the row. Again, he didn’t bother to stop by the barn and pick up a hoe to help out. But there really wasn’t much to chop, seeing that Papa knew how to take good care of cotton. We didn’t have many weeds, like I’d heard about in some fields. But I was still slow. Even little Adam could outchop me.

  I was dressed in Fred Lee’s too-big overalls and his long-sleeved shirt, and it took a lot of effort for me to walk up and down quarter-of-a-mile-long rows of cotton in the suffocating heat for five hours straight. I stopped for a water break at the end of every row. It’s a good thing I worked under Papa’s supervision instead of a white supervisor like Ricky Turner’s evil pappy.

  “What’s your business today?” I asked Hallelujah.

  Hallelujah shrugged. “Preacher let me take a break from the store. ‘A couple
hours only,’ he said.”

  “You helping Miss Bertha today?”

  Hallelujah nodded. “Yep.”

  “And you need a break already,” I teased him.

  Hallelujah grinned and pretended to wipe sweat from his brow. His aunt, Bertha Jenkins, owned a small grocery store—​the only Negro-owned business in Stillwater. Even though she sold mostly staples, like flour, cornmeal, and sugar, white folks still weren’t too happy about her store, seeing that it took business away from theirs. It had been broken into more times than anybody cared to count. She could barely keep her shelves stocked. The police dismissed the vandalism as “coloreds destroying their own property to try to make God-fearing white folks look bad.” But we all knew who was really trying to sabotage Miss Bertha’s business.

  “So, what’s Miss Sweet cooking today?”

  No matter how many times I heard it, I just couldn’t get used to people calling Ma Pearl “Miss Sweet.” She was about as sweet as a slice of lemon soaked in vinegar. Her real name, of course, was Pearl, but I couldn’t see how that one fit her either, seeing that a pearl is usually a thing of beauty.

  I squinted at Hallelujah. “It’s Tuesday. Not Sunday. What else she go’n cook besides beans?”

  “What kind?”

  I shrugged. “Pinto, I reckon.”

  “That’s good enough for me,” Hallelujah said. “Beats the air soup I would’ve eaten.”

  I teased him. “So you really stopped by to get fed, huh?”

  He patted his thick middle and said, “Yep.”

  I glanced down the row to make sure I was still far away from Papa, as he and Fred Lee were coming back down the row toward me. “Heard anything about Levi?” I asked under my breath.

  Hallelujah stuffed his hands into his pockets. “Preacher’s getting the NAACP involved.”

  Spit caught in my throat, and I almost choked. I stopped chopping and placed a finger to my lips to shush Hallelujah. “Not so loud,” I said, my eyes darting toward Papa.

  NAACP—​Ma Pearl said if I ever uttered those letters in her house, it would take a year to wash the taste of lye soap from my mouth. The letters stood for National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. And according to Hallelujah, the group was trying to do just that: help colored people advance. “To help our people find their way out of these cotton fields,” I once heard Reverend Jenkins say.

  Reverend Jenkins was involved in the group. Secretly, of course. So Hallelujah knew all about it, had even been to some meetings. I knew nothing, except what I got from him or from the discarded pages of the Clarion-Ledger newspaper, which I sneaked and read while out in the toilet. The Clarion-Ledger was the largest white-owned newspaper in Mississippi, and it was the Robinsons’ favorite. What it reported about the NAACP was that it was nothing more than a bunch of northern Negro agitators coming to the South to incite good colored people to stir up trouble with whites.

  And Ma Pearl agreed.

  “The Robinsons is good white peoples,” she said. “So we ought not ’sociate with Negroes who stir up trouble.”

  She said we were lucky. Mr. Robinson let us keep hogs, chickens, and a cow on his place when other landowners wouldn’t. Most coloreds had to buy overpriced meat, eggs, and milk from the white stores because Miss Bertha didn’t have the means to keep such things at her store. Or they had to just do without. So we should’ve been grateful for Mr. Robinson’s generosity, especially with the way he kept our house furnished, always allowing Mrs. Robinson to buy items she’d soon tire of and then pass them on to Ma Pearl.

  Even Mr. Robinson himself had said he’d run any Negroes off his place if they caused trouble. “Any nigra bold enough to drink that poison the NAACP is pouring out is bold enough to find another place to stay,” he’d said. “Including you, Paul,” he told Papa. And Ma Pearl was taking no chances on getting “thowed off” Mr. Robinson’s land.

  The only thing I was grateful for was having a friend like Hallelujah, whose papa wasn’t afraid of white folks—​or at least knew how to sneak around them. If Ma Pearl and my own grandpa wouldn’t tell me anything, Hallelujah sure would. My thirsty ears drank up that “poison” as quickly as he could pour it out.

  “Preacher said they’d try to get Medgar Evers to come this way and see if he can get the sheriff to do something,” he said.

  “Medgar Evers?” My heart pounded. Medgar Evers was a big name in the NAACP, from what I’d heard. Field secretary. I wasn’t sure what that meant, but I knew Ma Pearl would’ve scourged me if she’d known I was learning such things from Hallelujah.

  I started chopping again, in case Ma Pearl decided to spy on me from the kitchen window. Sweat poured down the sides of my face, and I wiped it with my sleeve. “Didn’t Medgar Evers go down to Belzoni when Reverend Lee got killed?” I asked. “Nothing happened then. Nobody got arrested. Didn’t even make the papers,” I said.

  Hallelujah corrected me. “It didn’t make the white papers. Plenty of colored papers like the Defender reported it. And Jet, of course.”

  “That contraband?” I said, teasing.

  Hallelujah laughed. The first time he brought over a copy of Jet magazine, Ma Pearl caught a glimpse of it while we sat in the kitchen flipping through it. Unfortunately, all she saw was the shapely, bathing-suit-clad model in the centerfold. She yanked the magazine out of Hallelujah’s hand, flipped through it herself, and immediately judged it preachy and pompous. “A bunch a high-class northern Negroes trying to make everybody else feel bad ’bout how they lives,” she said. She tossed the magazine back to Hallelujah with, “Preacher oughta be ’shamed of hisself letting you read that trash full o’ half-nekked womens.”

  She never said that the fashion magazines Queen got from Mrs. Robinson were trash. Yet they too held plenty of pictures of bathing-suit-clad beauties, except they were white.

  I shivered, even though sweat poured down my sides under my two layers of clothing. It scared me that the only newspapers and magazines I read were the ones the Robinsons read—​the safe papers—​the papers that didn’t report the story about a preacher being gunned down for registering himself and others to vote.

  I learned from Hallelujah that Reverend George Lee had been shot in the head while driving his car. He ran off the road and crashed, dying before he made it to the hospital. Nobody was arrested. Just like probably nobody would be arrested for Levi’s murder, either.

  “What are they so afraid of, Hallelujah?”

  “Nobody wants to die, Rosa Lee,” Hallelujah said quietly.

  “I don’t mean colored folks. I mean white folks. Why are they so afraid? Why are they killing people just because they want to vote?”

  Hallelujah furrowed his brow. “Rosa Lee,” he said, “with the privilege to vote—​to choose—​we can change things, even put our own people in power.”

  “You know how crazy you sound? Colored folks can’t even own a store round here without white folks sabotaging it. Can you imagine a Negro running for office?” I removed my hat from my head and fanned myself. “He’d have a bullet in his head before his name got on the ballot good.”

  Shielding his face from the sun with his hand, Hallelujah pondered what I had just said. He was always thinking, always digging deep into that reservoir of information he had gleaned from the magazines and newspapers he frequently read. I knew he’d come up with an answer to any challenge I might present. Sure enough, after a moment he pointed at me and said one word: “Kansas.”

  I questioned him with my tilted head and raised brows.

  “Brown versus the Board of Education,” he said. “Topeka, Kansas.”

  I shrugged.

  “The Supreme Court declared segregation unconstitutional,” Hallelujah said, smiling. “No more separate‑but‑equal. White folks have to let colored children go to school with white children in that state now.”

  I still didn’t understand.

  Hallelujah squinted. “Don’t you see, Rosa? Now that we have the power to vote,
we can make that happen in Mississippi, too.”

  Hallelujah’s words took a moment to soak through my heat-damaged head. But when they did, I dropped the hoe and doubled over. I thought I would die laughing. This time I knew Hallelujah had gone too far with his crazy thinking. Whites and coloreds at the same schools in Mississippi? Never in a million years.

  Chapter Six

  TUESDAY, JULY 26

  WHEN THE SUN BEGAN INCHING ITS WAY TOWARD NOON, Hallelujah folded his arms and said, “Ain’t it about quitting time?”

  “C’mon,” I told him. “I’m ’bout to die out here even if it ain’t. I’m so thirsty my mouth feels like it’s stuffed with cotton.” I dragged my hoe back along the row, too tired to pick it up. “If we walk real slow,” I said, “it’ll be close enough to twelve by the time we reach the house. And maybe Ma Pearl won’t be cross with me for leaving the field a few minutes early.”

  When we reached our grassless backyard, the first thing we saw was Slick Charlie chasing three hens toward the henhouse. Hallelujah laughed. “Ain’t them hens got sense enough to run in opposite directions?”

  “I think they like being chased by Slick Charlie,” I said, nudging him in the side. “Kinda like how Queen likes being chased by you.”

  Hallelujah took off his hat and fanned himself. With his light brown complexion, I could see a hint of pink spread across his cheeks. “Humph,” he said. “I ain’t stud’n Queen. If Queen had any sense, she’d be chasing me.” He snapped his suspenders and said, “I’m a man who’s going places.”

  “One, you ain’t a man,” I told him. “And two, the only place you’re going is to Ma Pearl’s kitchen to eat up her food.”

  Hallelujah tucked his hat under his arm and broke into a strut. “I’m going up north like everybody else,” he said. “Except I’m going to Ohio. Columbus. Because it was named after the fellow who discovered this country.”

  I spat a dry spit and said, “You ain’t going nowhere.” But I didn’t mean it. I’d never heard of any Negro going to Ohio. But if Hallelujah said he was going, then he probably was. The Jenkinses always did things differently from other colored folks. And Hallelujah was forever plotting to be the first Negro to do this or the first Negro to be that. I just hoped he didn’t leave before I figured out a way to get to Chicago. There was no way I could survive the dusty Delta without him.