Midnight Without a Moon

by Linda Williams Jackson

  After giving my bladder some relief, I crept back through Fred Lee’s room using the moonlight as my guide. I felt my way along the wall until I reached the sheet that hung in the doorway of the room I shared with Queen. When I pulled it back to enter, my heart nearly stopped. I thought I was seeing a ghost. Instead it was Queen, fully dressed and climbing out the window.

  My gasp startled her. She stopped, one leg on the floor of our bedroom, the other hanging out the window.

  “Queen!” I said, my voice between a shout and a whisper. “What you doing?”

  Queen just stood there with her eyes bucked and her mouth gaping. She was wearing one of the new outfits Aunt Belle had brought her—​a light pink pantsuit that fit her curvy body like a second skin. Ma Pearl would kill her if she found out she’d sneaked clothes out of the chifforobe. Well, maybe not, since it was Queen.

  Letting the sheet drop to shield our room from Fred Lee’s, I tiptoed in. “Where you going?” I whispered as I got closer to Queen.

  She placed a finger to her mouth and shushed me. She brought her whole body inside the room, then peeped out the window.

  “You running away?” I asked, assuming that any bags she had packed must have been tossed outside, seeing that her hands were empty.

  With a wave of her hand, Queen shushed me again. “Naw, fool. I ain’t running away.”

  “Then why you sneaking out the window?”

  She sucked her teeth and said, “None a yo’ ol’ ugly business.”

  The shock of her angry reply made me jump. Then I heard a horn. It sounded as if the tooter just barely touched it, so as to alert only someone who knew to be listening for it.

  Queen glanced out the window. “Go back to bed,” she hissed at me like an angry snake.

  I stalked toward the window. “Who’s out there?”

  Queen blocked me with her arm. Her nostrils flared. “Like I said, that ain’t none a yo’ business, ol’ ugly spook,” she said, her teeth clenched.

  When I tried to push past her, she shoved me to the floor. Before I could get back up, she was out the window faster than a gush of wind. I stumbled to the window just in time to see her race to the edge of the field, where a rusted-out white pickup waited.

  My stomach twisted. The pickup belonged to Ricky Turner.

  Chapter Fourteen

  SATURDAY, AUGUST 27

  HALLELUJAH STARTED DRIVING WHEN HE WAS ONLY eight years old. After the second Mrs. Clyde B. Jenkins the Second died, Reverend Jenkins was so torn up that he couldn’t even remember how to start his own car. So eight-year-old Hallelujah jumped right on into the front seat, started it for him, and drove straight down the road without missing a beat. And at fourteen he was a master behind the wheel.

  When he pulled up in front of the house that morning, I beamed. And if I had been the squealing type, I would have done that, too. Hallelujah might have been his daddy’s chauffeur at eight years old, but Reverend Jenkins rarely allowed him access to the keys once he was actually almost old enough to drive.

  I hopped into the passenger seat of the brown Buick, my grin stretching from my right ear to my left, and commanded, “ To Miss Addie’s, my good man.” I held on tight to my crate of eggs, as I knew what would happen next.

  Gravel flew behind the car as Hallelujah sped off. Good thing Ma Pearl had gone fishing that morning, else she would’ve barged out of the house like a giant mama bear, yelling, Gal, git outta that car with that foolish boy!

  Gravel beat on the sides of Reverend Jenkins’s Buick like popcorn popping in a skillet of hot grease. Hallelujah and I both hooted, as if we were a couple of city gangsters who had just pulled off the heist of the century. I knew to cherish the moment, as there was no telling when I’d see another one like it.

  After catching Queen sneaking off into the night with Ricky Turner, I finally told Ma Pearl and Papa about him chasing me off the road nearly a month before. I told them right in front of Queen, hoping she’d take a hint. She didn’t do a thing but roll her eyes at me.

  Ma Pearl threw a fiery fit when she realized that Miss Addie never got her eggs and had to make do a whole month without them. “Eggs is needed for everything,” Ma Pearl had yelled at me. “You should’ve told somebody. I oughta slap the black off you right now.”

  Papa interrupted her rant and said he’d get Preacher to take me the next time. The preacher sent his son instead. So there we were, Hallelujah and I, rumbling down the road to Miss Addie’s, when Hallelujah decided to spoil my adventure by telling me that another Negro had been killed in Mississippi for helping colored people register to vote.

  “His name is Lamar Smith,” Hallelujah said. His voice was quiet, and his eyes were fixed intently on the noisy rock road ahead of us. “He was sixty-three years old. A farmer and a war veteran. He had voted only a few weeks ago. When he was shot down, he was at the courthouse, trying to help other Negroes register to vote.”

  I, too, stared at the rocky road ahead, saying nothing as Hallelujah gave me the horrible details of this man’s murder. By the time we pulled into Miss Addie’s yard, which was only big enough to accommodate the Buick, I was trembling and had broken into a cold sweat.

  “You better stop all that shaking before you break them eggs,” Hallelujah said, nodding toward the crate in my lap.

  I tried to smile at his attempt to calm my nerves. But how could I smile when a sixty-three-year-old man had been gunned down in broad daylight just for voting and taking other Negroes to the courthouse to vote?

  Ten o’clock in the morning?

  Right on the front lawn of the courthouse?

  The sheriff saw the killer leaving the scene covered in blood, and he did nothing?

  Mississippi had to be the most evil place in the world.

  I thought about the ages of the people who had been killed in just a few short months. Reverend George Lee was fifty-one. This man, Lamar Smith, was sixty-three. And Levi Jackson had just turned twenty-one. They all risked their lives to try to make a change.

  Reverend George Lee, from what I was told, was a man of means, like Mr. Pete. But rather than running up north, he chose to stay down south and fight for his rights. I didn’t know much about Lamar Smith, except his age and that he had fought in the war, but he was older than Papa. Yet he decided to go to the courthouse and help other colored people register to vote. Then there was Levi, who was almost finished with college. He could have waited one more year, then left Mississippi and started a new—​better—​life somewhere else. Instead, he risked his life, even though he knew that Reverend George Lee had been killed only a few months before.

  I could now understand why people like Mr. Pete chose to leave. He had his own land, on which he grew plenty of cotton. He had a nice house in Greenwood. He was better off than a lot of white folks in Leflore County, or even in Mississippi. Yet if he did something as simple as register to vote, like one of them, he could be killed.

  At first, after seeing Mama and everyone else leaving Mississippi for a better life up north, I wanted to go only because I wanted that kind of life too. But after hearing that white folks in Mississippi would kill anybody, regardless of age, for simply wanting to exercise their right to vote, I wanted to leave before I was old enough to face the life-and-death decision of whether to stand up for my rights or just sit back and leave things the way they were.

  Hallelujah turned off the motor, got out, and then ran around to the passenger side and opened the door for me. Either Reverend Jenkins had taught him well, or he didn’t want to take a chance on my dropping Miss Addie’s eggs.

  Miss Addie’s yard was so small that we were practically at the rickety front steps when we got out of the car. I was almost afraid to climb the steps and walk across the tattered porch, even though I had done it too many times to count. Each time, I wondered whether it would be the last.

  At nearly 102, Miss Addie had been born a slave. And since she lived on Mr. Robinson’s place and her last name happened to be Robinson as w
ell, we all assumed that her family had been owned by Mr. Robinson’s family. And from the looks of her house, it appeared she was still living in a slave shack.

  But slave or not, Miss Addie, like the abolitionist Frederick Douglass—​whom my old teacher Miss Johnson frequently quoted—​could read and write. And from what I had heard, she was a person with rather strange insight, and she had delivered not only nearly every colored baby in Stillwater but a few white ones as well.

  Before I could tap on the door, she called out in her crackly voice, “Y’all come on in.”

  Miss Addie’s house had three rooms—​a front room, a middle room, and a back room, which held a table, no chairs, a woodstove, and a tiny icebox. The house was what folks called a shotgun house. If you shot a gun at the front door, the bullet would zoom straight through the house and go right out the back door, assuming nobody (or nothing) was in its path.

  Miss Addie’s front room served as her bedroom as well as her living room. In it she had no other furniture besides her bed, a rocking chair, a spit cup for her snuff, and a large tree stump that sat right in the middle of the floor, as if someone had chopped down a giant tree and built the shack right around it, which I think they did.

  The middle room was where Miss Addie’s granddaughter, Jinx, slept. Jinx, who was also Miss Addie’s caregiver, was a forty-something-year-old spinster who sat around giggling all the time when there was nothing actually funny. I’m not sure whether Jinx was her real name or not, but I imagine that when it came time for choosing which relative would live with and care for Miss Addie, someone probably pointed at her and said, Jinx! You’re it!

  I was hoping that Jinx wouldn’t be there when we arrived. But as soon as Hallelujah and I stepped through the door, she emerged from the middle room, giggling for no apparent reason and asking for the eggs. “How come you didn’t bring ’em last time?” she asked me.

  Miss Addie, rocking back and forth in her rocker, said with some exasperation, “I told you dat boy run her off da road, Jinx.”

  Jinx giggled, hugging the egg crate to her chest, as if I might take it back. “How you know a boy run her off the road, Mama?” she said. “You ain’t left this house in ten years.”

  Miss Addie picked up her spit cup—​a tin can that once held store-bought peaches. She spat in the can, then wiped dripping snuff from her chin with a dingy handkerchief. “These old eyes sees what others cain’t,” she said.

  With eyes nearly as silver as dimes, Miss Addie, some folks claimed, was born with a caul, or sixth sense, and therefore could “sense” things that other people couldn’t. But most folks, like Jinx and Ma Pearl, just thought she was plain ol’ senile.

  “Set a spell, chi’ren,” she said, motioning toward the stump.

  Jinx giggled and said, “I’ll put the eggs in the icebox.”

  Before she left the room, Miss Addie said, “Brang these chi’ren some dem teacakes you made the other day.”

  “No, thank you,” I said quickly. “We ate before we left.” Besides being a giggler, Jinx was also a nose picker. And from what I had heard, she couldn’t cook worth a lick anyway.

  “They taste funny, Mama,” Jinx said, giggling. “I didn’t have no eggs, remember?” For some reason, she found that extremely funny and broke into a giggling fit as she headed to the back of the house.

  “How’s yo’ papa ’n’em?” Miss Addie asked me, although she stared straight at Hallelujah.

  “Everybody’s fine,” I answered. She was still staring hard at Hallelujah.

  Hallelujah fidgeted.

  Miss Addie pointed a bony black finger at him and narrowed her silvery eyes. “You ain’t the boy, is you?”

  “Me?” Hallelujah asked, pointing his thumb at his chest. He chuckled. “No, ma’am. Rosa and I are friends. I would never run her off the road. I gave her a ride here.”

  Miss Addie moaned as if she were in pain. “Um-umph, not that,” she said, shaking her head. “It’s somp’n else. But I cain’t quite git a holt of it.”

  Hallelujah glanced at me and grimaced. We had both heard stories of Miss Addie’s so-called visions, which even Reverend Jenkins said were no more than her recounting stories from her hundred-year-old past.

  Jinx reappeared in the doorway. With her head tilted to one side and her hand over her heart, she was serious for once and not giggling. “Mama, what you talking ’bout?” she asked.

  Miss Addie kept her eyes fixed on Hallelujah. “Dat boy,” she said, pointing. “Somp’n ’bout dat boy.”

  Jinx shook her head and said, “Mama, don’t start that crazy hoodoo talk with these chi’rens here.”

  “Dis ain’t no hoodoo!” Miss Addie snapped. “Dis da truth. Somp’n ’bout to happen. Somp’n ’bout to shake up Miss’sippi jest like dat flood of twenty-seven shaked us up. It came heah to wash ’way da sins o’ dis place.”

  Jinx stormed into the room. “Stop it, Mama,” she said. “Stop scaring these chi’ren. Every day, you sit round here ack’n like some kinda witch cooking up spells. You too old and too close to death for this kinda stuff. You go’n end up going straight to hell.”

  But Miss Addie didn’t stop. She wrapped her thin arms around her frail body and rocked vigorously in her chair. “Yes, Lawdy, baby, somp’n ’bout to happen. Somp’n ’bout to happen. Somp’n ’bout to shake dis place.”

  Jinx giggled nervously and said, “Don’t y’all pay Mama no mind. Ain’t nothin’ ’bout to happen, ’cause she don’t see nothin’ ’cept the angel Gabra, who ’bout to come take her home soon.”

  Miss Addie stopped rocking and stared at Jinx. “Ain’t no anja ’bout ta come git me. My time ain’t close as you thank it is. But dis place,” she said, motioning around the room. “Dis place. Her time done come. Somp’n ’bout to happen. Lawdy, somp’n ’bout to happen.”

  Even though there wasn’t a whiff of cool air in that tiny room, chills covered my arms. I was ready to leave.

  “Well, we have to go now,” I told Miss Addie. I nudged Hallelujah.

  Rather than hearing me, it seemed that Miss Addie had fallen into a trance. She pointed toward the ceiling and said, “Look! Do you see it?”

  Hallelujah and I looked up at the same time. I don’t know what he saw, but all I saw was sunlight streaming in through the cracks in the ceiling.

  “Yes, Lawdy, baby,” Miss Addie said as she threw her head back. “The time is com’n dat all mens should repent!” She dropped her head to her chest, then began to sway and moan. The sunlight that was streaming in through the cracks in the ceiling suddenly disappeared. The sky had clouded. The room grew darker, as if a giant hand had covered the whole house and was blocking out any sunshine that had previously managed to seep in.

  Miss Addie’s moaning grew louder as the room grew darker. It seemed as if she would moan forever. When she finally stopped, the room was as quiet as a graveyard.

  “Jinx!” she yelled.

  We all jumped.

  Jinx stepped forward. “I’m right here, Mama,” she said quietly, like a child chastised and found guilty.

  Miss Addie grinned, as if nothing unusual had happened, and said, “Git these chi’ren some dem teacakes ’fo they leave.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  SATURDAY, AUGUST 27

  I HADN’T BEEN ABLE TO GET A FULL NIGHT’S SLEEP since the night I got up to use the pot and caught Queen sneaking out the window. And that Saturday night was no different. She lay over on her bed, breathing softly, but I couldn’t tell whether she was really asleep or just faking. I decided she was faking. So I did the same, with my face turned toward her bed in case she tried to sneak out.

  Sure enough, after what felt like an hour of lying there playing possum, I heard a truck in the distance. It cut off suddenly, but I could still hear some clanking, as if the truck were coasting along without its engine running.

  Queen’s bed creaked.

  When she eased off the bed, I saw that she was fully dressed. Again, in one of her new outfits. A powder b
lue pantsuit.

  I sprang up to a sitting position.

  Queen nearly jumped to the ceiling. “You scared me!” she said, half yelling, but mostly whispering.

  I crossed my arms over my chest and asked, “You going somewhere?”

  Her face, illuminated by moonlight, quickly went from surprised to hateful. “Mind your own business, spook!” she hissed at me as she headed toward the window.

  I got up from my bed and followed her. “You’re gonna get in trouble.”

  “Not if you keep yo’ dumb mouth shut.”

  “I don’t mean that kind of trouble.”

  Queen waved me off. “You don’t know nothing, ol’ ugly girl. You just a baby.”

  “I know sneaking out at night with a boy can get you a baby.”

  Queen’s face hardened. She grabbed my wrist and twisted my arm so hard it popped.

  I winced and tried to wriggle free. But for someone who never did any work, Queen was surprisingly strong.

  Twisting my arm harder, she leaned her face nearly nose to nose with mine and snarled, “If you say one word about this, I will break this arm and twist that ugly head right off yo’ skinny … black … neck.”

  She breathed heavily in my face. Her breath smelled like mints. Those, too, she obviously stole from Ma Pearl’s chifforobe when she’d swiped the powder blue outfit she was wearing.

  Before I could wrestle free from her grip, the faint tap of a horn had Queen dropping my arm and dashing out the window faster than Flash Gordon.

  “I hope you get eaten up by mosquitoes!” I yelled after her.

  I fell onto my bed feeling just what she’d called me: stupid. Why should I care what happened to her? She was meaner than a bear caught in a beehive, as Ma Pearl would say. So she deserved whatever she had coming. I couldn’t believe Ma Pearl was making me leave school and letting her stay in. She wasn’t doing anything with her life but throwing it away. I, at least, had dreams.

  I lay flat on my back and rubbed my wrist. My skin burned where Queen had dug her long fingernails into it. I didn’t know what time it was, but I knew it was late and I should’ve been sleeping. Before I knew it, Slick Charlie would be crowing, the scent of coffee, biscuits, and salt pork would be stuck in the stuffy air, and Ma Pearl would be storming through the house with her war cry: “Rise ’n shine, Saints! It’s time for church!”