I switched to the other hip. “She left Mississippi at age thirteen. Attended the best schools in Chicago. Graduated at the top of her class. She is now a college student studying to be a teacher. Or a lawyer. Or a doctor. Or maybe even a movie star.”
I quickly recognized the next song. A thousand times I had watched Queen dance around the parlor, snapping her fingers and shaking her hips as she listened to it. With the beat so catchy, I couldn’t help swinging my hips from side to side too, wondering what it would be like to be one of those northern socialites.
The song was something about a sandman bringing dreams. Snapping my fingers, I danced until I worked up a sweat. I knew I probably looked like a fool standing before the mirror, dancing in my undergarments, but at the moment, I didn’t feel like one. I felt free. Happy. Rejuvenated. Ready to move up north and conquer the world.
“Mr. Sandman,” the song said, “bring me a dream.”
Hallelujah. He was kind of cute. Probably the cutest boy I’d ever seen. But he liked Queen, not me. Everybody liked Queen. Everybody liked beautiful, light-skinned Queen.
But at that moment, I didn’t care. I hugged my body and pretended I was dancing in one of those juke joints where Ma Pearl claimed that Slow John caroused on Saturday nights. I hummed to myself.
“Mr. Sandman, hmm, hmm, h—”
“Gal, what is you doing?” Ma Pearl cried from the doorway.
Shock flashed through my body like lightning. “Ma Pearl!” I gasped as I scrambled to get my dress off the floor and over my head.
Ma Pearl, her arms folded, her eyes cold, stared at me from the doorway. “What the devil is you doing in my room, Rose Lee?”
I feared my heart would beat out of my chest. “I—I—” I didn’t know what to say. There I was, undressed, dancing in front of a mirror, in a room where I wasn’t even allowed, on a day I’d pretended to be sick so I wouldn’t have to work in the field, and I couldn’t think of a lie that was less humiliating than the truth.
“I ast you a question, Rose Lee,” Ma Pearl said.
My mind scrambled for an answer. When it didn’t find one quickly enough, Ma Pearl stormed toward the wall where the black strap of terror proudly hung. She yanked it from the nail and said, “Guess I have to speak to the backside, since the mouth on vacation.”
Recognizing the familiar threat as an invitation for a beating, my brain quickly conjured up an answer. “It was too hot in my room,” I said, my words rushing together. “My fever felt like it was getting worse. That’s why I came in here. Your room ain’t as hot.” I pointed toward the blackout curtains, my hand shaking.
Ma Pearl narrowed her eyes. “And why was you half nekked?”
“I took off my dress to cool off faster.”
“Um-hmm,” Ma Pearl said, staring at me from head to toe.
She made me feel ashamed even with my dress on.
“You better be glad that boy in the front room waitin’ for you,” she said, frowning. “Otherwise I’d beat the devil outta you for lying to me. Talkin’ ’bout a fever. You got a fever all right.”
“Ma Pearl, it wasn’t like that,” I said, wishing I could melt into the floor and disappear.
She jerked her head toward the door. “Git on in there and see what that boy want. He running round here frantic. Like he go’n die if he don’t talk to you.”
Butterflies fluttered in my stomach. “What boy?” I asked.
“Preacher’s boy.” Ma Pearl frowned. “Who else be looking for yo’ lil’ black self?”
“Hallelujah,” I whispered. Guilt overcame me. Just knowing I had been standing before the mirror, undressed, swaying to music and thinking about Hallelujah, made me feel dirty and ashamed. I wanted to cry, but I knew I couldn’t. Ma Pearl didn’t tolerate tears unless she had administered a beating strong enough to warrant them.
Seeing that she had deflated me, she sniffed haughtily and said, “Git on outta my room and quit ack’n like a dirn fool. You see that boy all the time.”
Slapping me hard on my backside as I passed her, she added, “That’s for running down my dirn radio batt’ries.”
I felt as low as a smashed spider as I stumbled into the front room, where Hallelujah, fedora in hand, sat on the three-legged sofa near the front door. “Rosa Lee,” he said, his voice sounding relieved. “I thought something had happened to you.”
Swallowing the tears before they formed, I motioned him to follow me outside to the front porch.
“I went to the field looking for you, and Mr. Carter said you were sick in bed,” Hallelujah said, his voice rushing out. He slumped into one of the close-to-broken chairs on the porch. I leaned against a post instead.
“I’m okay,” I mumbled, staring at the floorboards.
Hallelujah placed his fedora back on his head and leaned forward in the chair. “I knocked and knocked and nobody answered. I was worried.”
When I didn’t say anything, Hallelujah began to nervously tap his foot. “Mr. Carter told me to go get Miss Sweet. I ran to the Robinsons’ and found Miss Sweet starching shirts in the backyard.” Still nervously tapping his foot, he wrapped his arms around his stomach, as if to calm himself. “I didn’t know what to think when you didn’t answer the door,” he said, his tone somber.
“I’m okay” was all I could muster. Tears threatened to gush. I felt like a fool letting Ma Pearl catch me like that. I felt even more like a fool standing outside on the porch with Hallelujah after I’d just been inside dancing undressed in front of the mirror. I didn’t think the day could get any worse until Hallelujah uttered his next words.
“They found him, Rosa Lee,” he said quietly.
I shook my head. “What?”
Hallelujah’s voice choked when he spoke. “They found the boy from Chicago.”
Found. I grabbed my chest. From the look on Hallelujah’s face, I knew it was worse than when Obadiah Malone was found, passed out, near Stillwater Lake.
“They found him yesterday,” Hallelujah said. “Preacher just got word this morning.”
My throat went dry. “Wh-wh-where?” I managed to ask. “Where did they find him?”
“The Tallahatchie River.”
The landscape swirled. I grabbed the porch post to keep from falling.
Hallelujah took a handkerchief from his shirt pocket and wiped sweat from his forehead. “A fisherman found him caught up in a bunch of tree roots. They tied a cotton-gin fan around his neck with barbed wire,” he said, his voice strained. “Tried to keep him down with the weight.”
Hallelujah stared toward the ancient oak in the front yard. His eyes seemed to be fixed on that tree for an eternity before he finally said, “He floated to the surface anyway. No matter how hard they tried,” he said, swallowing, fighting back tears, “they couldn’t hide it. They couldn’t hide their crime.”
Chapter Twenty
SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 3
WHEN I WAS LITTLE, AUNT BELLE READ ME A BOOK she had found in the trash at the Robinsons’. I remember the book’s cover. It was red, yellow, black, and tattered. And I remember the title: Remarkable Story of Chicken Little. I asked Aunt Belle what “remarkable” meant. She said it meant that the story was unbelievable. After she read it, I understood why. Chicken Little thought the sky was falling—that the world, as she knew it, was coming to an end.
She was wrong. And because of her foolish mistake, she and all her neighbors were coaxed straight into a fox’s den and eaten by the fox. And like Chicken Little, because of one foolish mistake, a boy was dead.
That Saturday morning, as I sat on the front porch with Papa and waited for Uncle Ollie to arrive, I, too, felt as if the sky were falling. The blanketlike cloud draped over us with such blackness it seemed as if God had asked his faithful angel Gabriel to paint it that way. It seemed that any minute the sky would open up and wash us all away.
Maybe Hallelujah was right. Maybe Mississippi itself was hell. No. Mississippi was worse than hell. At least in hell you know who the ene
my is. And at least, if you believe the Bible, you know how to keep yourself from going there. But in Mississippi you never knew what little thing could spark a flame and get you killed. Registering to vote. Voting. Or even something as little as whistling at a white woman.
But it wasn’t just the storm clouds that darkened my morning. It was Aunt Belle; she had left without bothering to say goodbye. The minute she found out about the Chicago boy’s funeral, she sent word by Reverend Jenkins that she and her northern comrades were leaving—heading to Chicago. I figured that’s probably where she was at that very moment—in Chicago—preparing to attend a funeral for someone she’d never met while the folks who loved her sat under the heavy weight of a thunderous Mississippi sky.
As Papa and I waited for Uncle Ollie, we didn’t dare sit in the house. Ma Pearl was in a huff—slinging pots and pans around as if they had scorned her. She had planned to go fishing that morning, but both the thunder and the news that a dead body had been floating in the river for three days kept her at home.
Papa and I sat in silence as we watched the black clouds roll across the sky, looking as if there was no end to them. Thunder rumbled in the distance, yet it was still so hot that it felt as if the heat could burn a person’s skin off. No one thought the weather would turn so suddenly, as the day before had been sunny. Now it felt as if those thick clouds had trapped the heat over Stillwater the way heat got trapped inside the belly of our black woodstove.
At a quarter of ten, Uncle Ollie’s old Ford came rumbling up the road. The car was black with lots of dents, but it got Uncle Ollie, along with all the family members he often chauffeured, where they needed to go. And that Saturday, Papa and I were going to visit his little black bird in the woods—my aunt Ruthie.
Aunt Ruthie and her husband, Slow John, didn’t live on anybody’s place. They simply lived in a shack hidden so deep in the woods that even a bear couldn’t find it. And since they didn’t live on anybody’s place, Slow John, an uneducated, rowdy drunk, had no one to work for—no sharecropping or tenant farming. And because of his bad spirits (and the many other spirits he consumed on a daily basis), he rarely held a job more than a week at a time.
Slow John and Aunt Ruthie were so poor they didn’t even have a problem with rats. Those rats took one look at that empty kitchen, shook their heads, and walked away.
Uncle Ollie’s car shook and rattled as he drove over tree roots that snaked throughout Aunt Ruthie’s grassless front yard. As soon as the car stopped, just short of the splintered front steps, three of Aunt Ruthie’s children—Li’ John, Virgil, and Mary Lee—rushed off the sagging porch and raced to the car.
“Papa!” they cried. They had just seen him the month before, but they acted as if they hadn’t seen him in a year.
The screen door creaked open, and Aunt Ruthie stepped out on the porch. She might have had a complexion like cocoa, but she was one of the most beautiful women I knew. She kept her long hair pressed and curled. And when she smiled, her face lit up so bright it could soften even the hardest heart, except that evil Slow John’s.
Her slender body was draped in the same dress she seemed to wear every time I saw her, a lime green one with faded red flowers. With one hand on her hip and the other over her heart, she called out to the car, “Y’all come on in, Papa.”
Aunt Ruthie’s house always smelled like lemons. Every door and window in the house was kept open during the summer. And with so many trees surrounding it, it was always cool, even if the air everywhere else in Stillwater sat stiff at a hundred degrees. But wintertime was a different story. Aunt Ruthie’s house had so many cracks in the walls and floors that it was as cold as the outdoors.
Visiting Aunt Ruthie made me appreciate why Ma Pearl didn’t want to get thrown off Mr. Robinson’s place. There was a time when Aunt Ruthie and Slow John, like the rest of the family, had resided there as well. From what I heard, Slow John stole money from Mr. Robinson and blamed another worker. But the truth came out when Slow John was foolish enough to go in to town the next week and buy a bunch of new clothes from Mr. Jamison’s store. Mr. Jamison immediately notified Mr. Robinson that one of his “nigras” had come into the store flashing a heap of money. After that, Slow John was never again able to secure a spot on a white man’s place, except for that shack, which was owned by an out-of-town landlord who couldn’t care less about his property.
“Papa, you didn’t have to do that,” Aunt Ruthie said when she saw us hauling sacks of food from the car. She said that every time. And every time, Papa replied, “Ah, this ain’t nothing, Ruthie. We got plenty at the house. No sense in us having all this extra.”
“Li’ John, y’all take them sacks to the kitchen,” Aunt Ruthie said.
Uncle Ollie handed his sack to Li’ John, but Papa and I held on to ours like we always did. “Me and Rose got this, Ruthie,” he said.
We followed Li’ John through the bedroom to the right of the front room, then on to the kitchen from there. Aunt Ruthie had only one bedroom in her house: it was for her and Slow John. The children slept on pallets in the front room and the kitchen. Girls in the front room, boys in the kitchen.
Every time I entered Aunt Ruthie’s kitchen, I thought about the nursery rhyme “Old Mother Hubbard,” whose cupboard, too, was bare.
As we helped seven-year-old Li’ John and six-year-old Virgil place food in the safe, Papa clucked his tongue. “Bible say a man who won’t take care o’ his own is worse than a infidel. Lord Jesus, help that man do better by his family.”
I also thought of how the Bible says that if a man didn’t work, he ought not to eat. Yet there was Papa, once again supplying that lazy man’s kitchen with food. But I quickly dismissed the thought when I looked into the eyes of Aunt Ruthie’s daughters, four-year-old Mary Lee and two-year-old Alice, staring hungrily at the bags of beans, as if they couldn’t wait to smell them simmering in a pot.
“Y’all set a spell,” Aunt Ruthie said when we went back to the front room. She shooed all the children, even the baby, who had just begun to crawl, outside to play on the front porch. I prayed that they didn’t get struck by lightning, seeing how the house was surrounded by all those trees.
While Ma Pearl’s house was furnished with Mrs. Robinson’s halfway decent castoffs, Aunt Ruthie’s house was furnished with whatever anybody else in the family could’ve easily burned as rubbish in their backyards. That day, I made a promise to myself that when I found my way out of Mississippi and got an education and a job, I would buy Aunt Ruthie a house, just like I planned to buy one for Papa. I would fill her house with beautiful brand-new furniture and fill her kitchen with so much food that she would feel like she lived in a store.
Aunt Ruthie settled her skinny self down on a brown chair that had been thrown out by Aunt Clara Jean and turned to me, saying, “I bet you miss your mama.”
I swallowed the truth. “Yes, ma’am,” I said.
“Anna Mae sho’ is lucky,” Aunt Ruthie said. “Always has been,” she added, sighing.
“How the chi’ren?” Papa asked.
“They fine, Papa,” said Aunt Ruthie. “You hear how they out there runnin’ round that porch makin’ all that racket.”
“Um-hmm,” Papa said, nodding, staring toward the wide window that overlooked the porch.
Even with hungry bellies, Aunt Ruthie’s children could smile. Their daddy might have been a trifling drunk, but their mama was always there. Always caring. Always loving them with everything she had.
“Ready for school?” Aunt Ruthie asked me.
I looked at Papa, then I replied tersely, “I won’t be going to school next week.”
“You won’t?” Aunt Ruthie asked, her brow furrowed.
Just thinking about school made a lump rise in my throat. I shook my head because I couldn’t answer.
“How come?” she asked.
This time Papa spoke for me. “Rose is needed at the house. I’m shawt on help for the pickin’, and Pearl gittin’ to the
point where she need mo’ help too.”
“This jest till the harvest in, like we used to do, right?” Aunt Ruthie asked. “She goin’ back in November, ain’t she?”
When Papa shook his head and said no, I felt like fainting.
Aunt Ruthie grimaced and said, “You go’n take Rose outta school, as smart as she is?”
Papa sighed, but he didn’t answer Aunt Ruthie, just like he wouldn’t answer me. Instead, just like he had done when he questioned Mr. Pete on the day they left for Chicago, he crossed his right leg over his left knee, removed his pipe and Prince Albert tobacco from his shirt pocket, filled the pipe, and placed it between his lips. He puffed, even though there was no smoke, while Aunt Ruthie and I regarded him with the same curiosity with which he had regarded Mr. Pete when Mr. Pete had made a decision others could not seem to comprehend.
Chapter Twenty-One
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 4
I DOUBTED THERE WAS A NEGRO IN STILLWATER, other than Slow John, who wasn’t in church that morning. Even Uncle Ollie came. And Aunt Ruthie, which was rare. She and her children huddled in the last row of the church, near the window. Aunt Ruthie once told me that she didn’t like church, because when they came, folks stared at them as if they didn’t belong. I stopped staring when I realized I was acting like one of those folks.
I snapped to attention and stopped glancing around being nosy when Miss Doll belted out, “‘Je-e-e-sus, keep—me neeear thy cross. There a pre—cious foun-n-n-tain. Free to all a he-e-ealin’ stream—flows from Cav—re-e-e’s moun-n-n-tain.’”
The congregation joined in. “‘In the cross … in the cross … be my glo-o-o-ree-e-e evu-u-uh. Till my rap-tured soul shall find … rest … beyond … the ri-i-i-ver.’”
It didn’t take long for me to tune them out, and my eyes—and mind—began to wander again. River. The Tallahatchie. A body weighted down with a seventy-pound cotton-gin fan. I had never been inside a cotton gin, but they always looked scary to me. A huge barnlike building where cotton was processed. Very spooky.
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