When I went out to sweep the back porch, I found Fred Lee sitting on the steps. He was tossing corn at Slick Charlie and his female admirers—the twenty or so hens that supplied us with eggs and the occasional chicken dinner.
“Got a letter from Mama today,” I told him.
Fred Lee shrugged, kept tossing corn to the chickens, and didn’t utter a word.
I took the letter from my pocket and extended it toward him. “Wanna read it?”
He spat on the ground, then shook his head. Even with his near-charcoal complexion, he still looked like Mama, in my opinion, despite what Ma Pearl said. He had her sleepy eyes and her thin nose and thin lips, unlike me, with my wide nose and full lips.
I placed the letter back in my pocket and began sweeping the porch. But I wasn’t nearly as concerned about the dirt as I was about my brother. At only twelve, his thin shoulders were already hunched over, almost as bad as Papa’s at fifty-nine.
My aunt Ruthie Mae, the knee baby of the family, was married to a mean man everybody called Slow John. Slow John drank all the time and was always getting into fights. He even stabbed an old man six times in the chest for cheating him at dice. Papa said Slow John was hard like that because he grew up without his mama. Folks said she was shot to death by Slow John’s daddy in a juke joint up in Clarksdale.
As I swept the porch and stared at my brother, I wondered if he would become hard like Slow John. When Fred Lee was little, Ma Pearl was always calling him stupid because he wouldn’t talk. Until around age four, the most he would do was mumble. Even though I was only five, I tried my hardest to teach him how to talk. By the time he was four and a half, he still knew only a few words. He didn’t speak in sentences until he was almost six.
Then Mama left us. Fred Lee shut down again. After that, it took him two years to say more than “umm.” Standing there on the back porch that hot August afternoon, nearly a month after Mama had left for Chicago, I couldn’t recall two words having come out of Fred Lee’s mouth since.
I took a chance on getting caught by Ma Pearl and leaned the broom against the house. I went to the edge of the porch and sat with my brother. Fred Lee had never cared much for touching, so there would be no pat on the knee or arm draped around his shoulders. I folded my hands in my lap instead.
“Wanna talk?” I asked.
Fred Lee shook his head.
“You should,” I said.
Fred Lee shrugged.
“Baby Sister’s coming Sunday.”
Nothing.
“She’ll probably bring us something.”
Silence.
I should have expected that response from Fred Lee. He didn’t give a hoot or holler about stuff like that. Like Papa, he seemed to be content in whatever state he was in, even if that state was the State of Poverty.
Ma Pearl said that Fred Lee was slow in the head like our daddy. She said, “All them Banks is a tad bit touched.” Interestingly, according to Ma Pearl, all of mine and Fred Lee’s bad traits came from the Banks blood. None of them came from hers.
Seeing that my brother wasn’t going to talk, I got up and began sweeping the porch again. Then he decided to talk.
“How come she don’t want us?” he asked, his voice coming out choked.
I didn’t stop sweeping. But the broom stopped moving, as if it had a mind of its own. I took that as a sign from above and placed the broom against the wall. I sat and had a long-overdue talk with my brother.
At first neither of us said a word. We simply sat there in the sun, listening to the sounds of the chickens clucking in the yard. Occasionally a grunt came from the hog pen as our sow and her three plump pigs cooled themselves in the mud. The pigs would soon become our meat. Then Papa would mate our sow with Uncle Ollie’s boar to produce new pigs. They, too, would be fattened up with slop, and the circle of life would continue.
I took a handful of corn and tossed it into the yard. The chickens left the corn they were already pecking at and raced toward the fresh drop. “Sugar and Li’ Man are still babies,” I told Fred Lee. “They need Mama more than we do.”
I cringed at my own lie.
“Ain’t Sugar seven?” Fred Lee asked.
I didn’t answer. He already knew Sugar was seven—the age I was when Mama left us, saying we were big enough to take care of ourselves.
“I’m leaving as soon as I can get my hands on some money,” Fred Lee said.
I jumped. That was the most I’d ever heard my brother say in his entire life.
“How you suppose you gonna do that?” I asked him. “Every dime we manage to get goes in Ma Pearl’s hatbox.”
Fred Lee shrugged. “I’ll figure out a way. Pick pecans, maybe.”
“Gotta have somebody to pick for,” I said. “Mr. Robinson already got his pickers. Little children. Nine and under. So he only has to pay them three cents a pound. Then he can go to Greenwood and sell them for twenty cents a pound.”
Fred Lee said nothing.
“Picking pecans won’t get you enough money to buy a bus ticket nohow,” I said.
Fred Lee shrugged, grabbed a handful of corn, and tossed it into the windless space above the yard. He gazed out at the fields, which were bursting forth with bolls, just begging to be picked, weighed, and sold. “We too black for her,” he said.
“The blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice,” I said, mimicking Hallelujah.
“That’s stupid,” Fred Lee muttered.
Of course it was. Hallelujah could comfortably make fun like that. His complexion was an acceptable caramel color. He knew he could stand in the sun all day long and never get as black as me and Fred Lee. Besides, only a fool would want to.
The blacker the berry, the quicker it gets thrown out is what he should’ve said, because that’s exactly what I felt like, something thrown out, like the corn Fred Lee and I tossed to those chickens.
Chapter Eleven
SUNDAY, AUGUST 21
AFTER MAMA LEFT US AND MARRIED MR. PETE, Aunt Belle would sit with me nearly every day on the old broken-spring sofa in the front room and fill my heart with dreams. We’d sit there with a Sears and Roebuck catalog spread in our laps and dream over dresses. Pretty, frilly dresses. The prettiest, frilliest dresses a little girl could ever wish for.
I remember pointing at a blue one with a stitched white bodice and a big bow tied in the back. I smiled and asked, “Will you buy me this one?”
“Um-hmm,” Aunt Belle said with a nod.
I beamed and pointed at another. “And this one?” It was red with white polka dots. The white collar was round and wide.
“Sho’ will,” Aunt Belle promised.
I vividly remember a black velvet one with a white lace collar. Aunt Belle promised me that one day it, too, would be mine.
Other than in those catalogs, I never laid eyes on any of those pretty dresses. At only seven years old, I was too young to realize my aunt didn’t have the means to purchase them. Less than a year after Mama left, Aunt Belle, at nineteen, left too. She moved to Saint Louis with Papa’s youngest sister, Isabelle, after whom she was named. There she attended beauty school. And although she had only finished eighth grade, like Aunt Clara Jean, three years after moving to Saint Louis, she opened her own beauty shop.
Papa said she had grit. As a little child, I thought he meant grits, like what we ate for breakfast. So whenever Ma Pearl cooked them, I ate a big helping because I wanted grit too, like Aunt Belle.
In my eyes, Aunt Belle was rich. Not as rich as Mr. Pete, but richer than most folks I knew. She never bought me those promised dresses, but she brought both Queen and me clothes every August before school started back in September. We weren’t allowed to keep these clothes folded in boxes in the corner in our room like the homemade croker-sack dresses. Ma Pearl kept our good clothes in her room, hanging in that old scratched-up chifforobe Mrs. Robinson gave her. And sometimes Queen would be the only one allowed to wear hers. Ma Pearl would find a reason to deny me mine, such as claiming t
hey didn’t fit me right. So they remained a collection, untouched, in the chifforobe.
When Sunday finally came, I thought I would burst from excitement. Plus, we didn’t have to go to church, as Ma Pearl wanted to have the house ready and the food cooked by the time Aunt Belle arrived.
I sat on the front porch, my legs dangling over the edge. I didn’t worry about sweat, splinters, or even snakes as my legs swung anxiously back and forth under the raised porch. I simply enjoyed the scent of collard greens and candied yams floating from the kitchen. I could even smell the buttermilk in the cornbread. Ma Pearl usually cooked on Saturday night, with Papa believing that Sunday was the Sabbath. But this time he made an exception and let her cook on Sunday. So, long before the sun ever left China that morning, she was up fixing chicken and dressing and whipping up cakes—coconut and caramel.
It was straight-up noon, and the sun nearly burned a hole in the top of my head. But as soon as I got up to grab my straw hat to avoid heat stroke, I saw a black car coming down the road with a cloud of dust surrounding it. I knew it was Aunt Belle. It was one of the most beautiful sights I’d ever seen.
I burst through the screen door and yelled, “She’s here! Baby Sister’s here!”
Queen dropped her magazine and bolted from the chair by the window. If I had been a monkey, she would have crushed my tail, as Papa liked to say. She was out of the screen door before I could even turn around good. She raced across that porch and bounded down the steps faster than Li’ Man and Sugar had that day they told me they were going to Chicago.
It’s a good thing she didn’t collide with the car, as fast as she was running.
Aunt Belle’s car (or rather, Great-Aunt Isabelle’s car) pulled slowly into the yard and stopped under the ancient oak tree. Except this time Aunt Belle wasn’t driving. A man was. And he was the blackest man I had ever seen in my life. So black that it looked like only a bright yellow shirt and a set of grinning teeth were positioned behind the steering wheel. And just as Ma Pearl predicted, the car held three other northern just-gotta-see-Mississippi spectators as well.
By the time I reached the car, everybody—Ma Pearl, Papa, and Fred Lee—had come out of the house. While Ma Pearl and Queen and I swarmed Aunt Belle’s car like bees on a hive, Papa and Fred Lee remained on the porch. I could tell they were studying the stranger in the driver’s seat as his wide grin revealed teeth that were whiter than Ma Pearl’s bleached bloomers.
Aaron. That was the stranger’s name. Aaron. Like Moses’s brother in the Bible. Except his name was much longer: Aaron Montgomery Ward Harris. “I was named after the famous Aaron Montgomery Ward who created a mail-order catalog,” he said. “Like those you have stacked there in the corner.” He smiled proudly as he nodded toward our collection of Sears and Roebuck catalogs. “But feel free to call me Monty.”
Like me, Mr. Aaron Montgomery Ward Harris was as dark as midnight without a moon. With his black hand interlocked with Aunt Belle’s creamed-coffee one as they sat together on the settee in the parlor, I couldn’t help but think of a piano and how the keys worked together to make music. Aunt Belle and Aaron, or Monty, as I had decided to call him, looked happy, like two people making music.
The three northern spectators were a man and a woman—newlyweds, James and Shirley Devine—who looked to be around Aunt Belle’s age, and a girl, Ophelia, who looked to be about Queen’s age. Ophelia was the sister of the sophisticated Shirley. And she was a Goliath of a girl, big boned and as ugly as an ogre. But sitting crossed-legged on the sofa, wearing a cream-colored pantsuit and as much makeup and the same hairstyle as her full-grown older sister, she made even Queen appear homely.
And she made me feel five years old. Papa allowed me to wear pants only when I went to the field, and even then, they belonged to Fred Lee. And makeup? Never.
The country people—Queen, Fred Lee, and me—sat on raggedy chairs brought to the parlor from the porch. Ma Pearl and Papa sat in the matching blue chairs, one near the window, the other near the door, while the sophisticated Saint Louis folks sat on the settee and sofa.
“Where y’all staying?” Ma Pearl asked. That was always her first question to Aunt Belle. Never “How was the trip?” Or “How’s everybody up there doing?” But always “Where y’all staying?”
“Monty has folks in Greenwood,” Aunt Belle answered. “We’ll be staying with them.”
Aunt Belle had said she could never go back to sleeping under a tin roof or peeing in a pot after having enjoyed the luxuries of living up north. Yet with hope, and without fail, Ma Pearl had me scrub everything from top to bottom and from left to right, anticipating a different answer from her youngest child.
Ma Pearl addressed Monty. “You from here?”
“My mother grew up around Money,” he answered. He grinned and added, “Mississippi, that is,” then chuckled at his own joke.
“You ain’t no kin to Mose Wright ’n’em, is you?” Ma Pearl asked.
Monty thought for a moment before he said, “The name doesn’t sound familiar.”
“Mose a farmer over there in Money,” said Ma Pearl. “A good man. A preacher.”
“My mother never mentioned any Wrights,” said Monty. “She moved to Saint Louis at age twenty. I was born and raised there, as a matter of fact. But I believe Mother’s family might have moved to Greenwood when she was around seven or eight, so she doesn’t remember much about Money. Just that it was small. Nothing more than a one-horse town.”
“Mose wouldn’ta been livin’ in Money then, Pearl,” said Papa. “He just moved out there on Mr. Frederick’s place ’bout eight, maybe nine years ago.”
Ma Pearl squinted at Monty. “You kinda put me in the mind of Preacher Mose. You favor him a lil’ bit.”
“There’s no telling who I’m related to down here,” said Monty. “My mother still has family scattered throughout the Delta. Some in Greenwood still. But more in Mound Bayou, the city founded by Negroes. Some of Mother’s family moved there in 1898, shortly after the city was founded. But she’s never mentioned any Wrights from Money.”
Ma Pearl’s forehead creased. “How old is you?” she asked Monty.
“Thirty,” he answered.
“Belle ain’t but twenty-fo’.”
“That’s only six years’ difference, ma’am.”
With her expression stoic, Ma Pearl answered, “I can count.”
Monty grinned. “I’m sure you can, ma’am.”
Ma Pearl, of course, couldn’t let him have the last word. She glared at him and said, “Y’all sharing a bed?”
Aunt Belle fidgeted, shifting her weight upon the settee. “We’re engaged, Mama,” she said. She showed Ma Pearl her ring finger. It held a thin gold band. Atop it sat a dainty diamond.
Ma Pearl snorted. “That ring don’t mean y’all can share a bed.”
Papa sat straighter in his chair. He removed his pipe from his shirt pocket and placed it between his lips. He didn’t bother filling it with Prince Albert.
But before he could say a word, Aunt Belle blurted out, “It’s a shame what they did to Mr. Albert’s boy, ain’t it?”
Ma Pearl’s jaw dropped so hard it could’ve hit the floor. “What you know ’bout that?” she asked.
“Anna Mae and Pete told me.”
“How they know and they way up in Chicago?”
“Pete said he read about it in the Defender,” Aunt Belle answered. “Said it wasn’t much, just something about another Negro killing going unpunished in Mississippi. Didn’t even have his name. But Pete knew it was one of the Jackson boys. The one that was at Alcorn College.”
Papa rubbed his chin. “Hmm, the Defender,” he said. “That’s a colored paper, ain’t it?”
Monty nodded and said, “Indeed, it is. The Defender is a paper created and run by Negroes, Mr. Carter. It was founded in 1905 by Robert Abbott.”
Ma Pearl raised an eyebrow. “Abbott? That don’t sound like no colored name to me.”
“Nei
ther does Carter,” said Monty. “But I assure you, ma’am”— he held up his hand and turned it backwards—“Mr. Abbott was a Negro, with a complexion as dark as mine.”
Queen sneered. I could imagine what she was thinking—the same thing she’d said to me too many times: Wouldn’t wanna run into a spook like you after dark.
“How they know ’bout what’s going on in Mississippi?” Ma Pearl asked.
Aunt Belle spoke up. “Just because Mr. Albert wouldn’t allow the NAACP to get involved directly doesn’t mean they didn’t in other ways,” she said. “People still talk.”
“Um-hmm,” Ma Pearl said, pursing her lips. “It’s all that talk that caused Albert ’n’em to run off in the night, sked half to death. They know’d them NAACP peoples wadn’t go’n keep they mouths shut. And as soon as they’da started lurking round here, white folks get mad and take it out on the rest o’ the family.”
“Mr. Albert and his family are probably better off in Detroit anyway,” said Aunt Belle as she rolled her eyes toward the window, where Mr. Robinson’s rows of white cotton stretched till they met the horizon. “At least they don’t have to pick that man’s cotton.”
“Humph!” Ma Pearl said. “He coulda at least stayed one mo’ week to help Paul finish choppin’ that last stretch o’ cotton.”
“You’re blaming the wrong people,” Aunt Belle said. “The NAACP didn’t run Albert Jackson from Mississippi. White folks did.”
Ma Pearl’s forehead creased as she squinted at Aunt Belle. “You ain’t messing with them NAACP peoples, is you?”
Without hesitation Aunt Belle snapped open her black patent leather purse and whipped out a small brownish card. She handed it to Ma Pearl.
Ma Pearl grabbed her chest as if her heart had suddenly failed. “Lawd, I knowed we shouldn’ta let you go up there with Isabelle.”
Ma Pearl might not have known how to read, but she certainly knew her letters. With a grunt, she read them one by one. “N-A-A-C-P,” then the name, “Lucy Isabelle Carter.” With a flip of her wrist she flung the card back at Aunt Belle. It landed on the floor. “Didn’t know I was raising no dirn fool,” she said.
Midnight Without a Moon Page 7
