As much as I wanted to run to my bed and hide my head under a pillow (actually I wanted to hide my whole body under the bed), my feet wouldn’t allow me. As if drawn by a force unknown, they turned and headed toward the front of the house.
Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom.
“Who there?” Papa asked. I’m sure he knew as well as we all did that it was Slow John.
“I came to git my wife,” Slow John bellowed from the other side of the door.
Papa didn’t open the door. He picked up his shotgun instead. “Go home and git some rest, John,” he called through the door. “Sleep off them spirits.”
“I ain’t drunk, old man,” Slow John answered. “I ain’t goin’ nowhere b’dout my wife.”
“Ruthie and the chi’ren stayin’ here tonight,” said Papa.
Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. “Open this do’, old man.”
“Git off my porch, John,” Papa said. “ ’Fore I blast you off.”
From the other side of the door, Slow John let out a drunken laugh. “You won’t shoot me, you old fool.”
Papa cocked his shotgun. “I’ll shoot you and take your body to the sheriff myself. Even dig your grave if they ast me.”
For a moment, there was silence on the other side of the door, then the shuffling of feet. By the heaviness of his steps, I could tell that Slow John was wearing the steel-toe boots he’d used to whack Aunt Ruthie in the head.
Wump! Slow John kicked the door. “Come outta there, Ruthie, ’fo I come in there and git you,” he yelled.
Aunt Ruthie jumped. She had been leaning against the doorframe to Grandma Mandy’s bedroom, but now she stood, stiff-backed and trembling.
“My daughter ain’t leaving this house, so you might as well go home,” Papa said.
“She ain’t yo’ daughter no mo’, old man,” said Slow John. “She my wife.”
“Ruthie!” he called loudly. “I sorry. I sorry for what I done to you. I swear I ain’t go’n do it no mo’.” He paused for a moment, then said, “Got a new job, too, baby. Mr. Callahan said he give me work d’morrow. I told him, ‘Suh, I be there first thang in the moan’n. I couldn’t wait to git home and tell you ’bout it.” Another pause, then: “It broke my heart to find you gone.”
After a long silence, there was loud weeping on the other side of the door, then, “Ruthie, baby. Please. I loves you. I go’n kill myself if you don’t come back.”
The look on Aunt Ruthie’s face was hard to read. Her empty stare. Was it fear? Or pity?
“Ruthie,” Papa said, “you a grown woman. You make your own choices. You chose to marry that man. It’s your choice to go or stay. I can’t decide for you.”
Aunt Ruthie took a step toward the door.
“Dirn fool,” Ma Pearl hissed.
With a tremble in her voice, Aunt Ruthie called through the door. “I can’t wake up the chi’ren right now, John. I’ll be home in the morning.”
“I needs you home d’night.”
“In the morning,” Aunt Ruthie repeated. Her voice shook so badly that she could hardly speak. “You go on to the house and git some sleep,” she said to Slow John, staring sheepishly at Papa.
After a long silence, Slow John answered, “I gots to go d’work in the moan’n. I need to take y’all home d’night.”
Aunt Ruthie wrapped her arms around her waist, dropped her head, and muttered, “A’right.”
“Lawd, have mercy!” Ma Pearl cried. She threw her giant hands in the air and stormed toward her bedroom.
Papa gave out one more warning. “Ruthie,” he said, almost as a sigh.
“Let’r go, Paul,” Ma Pearl called over her shoulder. “She’ll learn ’ventually. That school o’ hard knocks is a dirn good teacher.”
With tears rolling down my cheeks, I, too, turned and went to my room, knowing my heart couldn’t take the sight of Aunt Ruthie walking through that door, especially with fresh blood seeping through the clean rag Papa had just wrapped around her busted head.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 21
“BEER!” MONTY YELLED. “BEER. IN A COURTHOUSE. During a murder trial. Stupid and senseless,” he hissed.
I sat on the floor in Grandma Mandy’s old mothball-scented room next to the kitchen, my ear pressed against the wall, straining to pick up every word of the conversation from the adults huddled around the kitchen table. There was so much excitement over the third day of the trial of Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam that I was sure the week of September 19, 1955, would go down as one of the best weeks in Negro history in Mississippi. Our little unpainted house on Mr. Robinson’s place buzzed with commotion that Wednesday night, and with so much hope. After Reverend Mose Wright had stood before a courtroom full of white people and pointed out J. W. Milam for the jury, Reverend Jenkins and Monty couldn’t stop bragging of his bravery.
But obviously Monty was livid over someone drinking beer during the trial. Having never been in a courtroom myself, I had no idea whether this was normal behavior.
“Mississippi is making a mockery of the justice system,” he said. “No one should be allowed to drink beer during a trial. It’s just plain stupid.”
“When you have the judge setting the example,” Reverend Jenkins chimed in, “what can you expect? He sat there and sipped on a Coca-Cola.”
“This kind of tomfoolery would never be tolerated in a northern courtroom,” said Monty.
“Baby, calm down,” Aunt Belle said with a slight laugh. “We can’t worry about what these people do or do not allow to go on in their courtroom, as long as they let the Negro press in to report the story. God knows we can’t depend on the white press to tell the truth.”
“Amen to that, Baby Sister,” said Reverend Jenkins. “Thank God for the Negro press—”
“But did you see that press table?” interjected Monty. “All our people cramped around a card table against the wall? And they made Congressman Diggs sit there too? And what’s with that fat sheriff strolling in there, greeting them with ‘Hello, niggers’ every morning?”
“Baby, we’re not gonna let the negatives overshadow the positives, okay?” said Aunt Belle. “Reverend Mose did a fine job. Stood right there in the midst of all that white, pointed, and said, ‘There he is.’”
I was exhausted from a long day of picking cotton, frustrated at all the learning I was missing at school, but somehow I stayed there on the floor, my legs stretched before me, my head resting against the wall, the nutty scent of Maxwell House coffee lingering in the air. The conversation of colored people discussing the trial of two white men accused of lynching a Negro made me feel good. But then there was Ma Pearl, and she simply had to toss in her two coins.
“I don’t like all this crazy talk up in my house,” she said. “Coloreds and whites was gittin’ ’long jest fine ’fo all these NAACP peoples showed up.”
“God, Mama,” Aunt Belle said. “How can you call this master-slave existence getting along?”
“I ain’t nobody’s slave,” Ma Pearl said. “I gits paid for my work.”
Even from the other side of the wall, it seemed I could hear Aunt Belle’s eyebrows shoot up when she asked, “What? Three dollars a week?” She sighed and said, “It’s a shame how that woman got you thinking she loves you.”
“Y’all young folks thank you know everything,” Ma Pearl said. “Don’t know nothing. Thank them northern Negroes go’n be round when the Klan show up at ol’ Mose’s do’step tonight? Nah, they ain’t. They go’n be somewhere hidin’ behind they own locked do’s.”
The kitchen was silent for so long it was as if they all had suddenly fallen asleep.
Finally Ma Pearl spoke again. “Not all white peoples is bad,” she said.
“Yes, Mama, we understand,” said Aunt Belle. “Negroes have their good white people just like white folks have their good nigras. And it was them good nigras that helped Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam kidnap Emmett Till. Any word yet from Miss Doll about where her nephew and Milam’s other
good nigras have run off to since this trial started?”
“I don’t know noth’n ’bout that,” Ma Pearl answered brusquely. “If them NAACP peoples wanna know where Doll’s nephew at, they can ast her, ’cause it ain’t my bizness.”
“Well, we know that he and the others know something,” offered Monty. “The word among our people is that the sheriff is holding Milam’s workers in a jail somewhere in a town called Charleston until this trial is over. Now, just why do you suppose the sheriff would go through so much trouble?”
“Like I said, ain’t none o’ my bizness what Milam’s niggers do,” Ma Pearl answered.
Monty puffed out his chest. “Well, our people will find them. And when we do, we will get some answers.”
“And jest who is yo’ peoples?” Ma Pearl inquired.
“The NAACP, of course,” answered Monty.
“I wish I could get my hands on Milam’s Judas niggers,” Aunt Belle hissed. “I’d beat ’em worse than Bryant and Milam beat poor Emmett. And if I had a pistol, I’d use it on Bryant and Milam!”
“Gal, Saint Louis done really ruint you!” Ma Pearl snapped. “I didn’t raise you like this. That boy dead ’cause his mama didn’t teach him to respect white folks. Now you talkin’ foolish jest like I bet he was. Talkin’ ’bout shootin’ white mens. Gal, I taught you better’n that.”
“Miss Sweet!” Reverend Jenkins yelled. His voice was so loud I jumped.
When he spoke again, his voice had calmed to his preaching level. “I understand there’s a certain bond between the older Negroes and the whites, but we’re living in a new time, and Mississippi needs to change with the times. Respect is something I agree with, but the constant bowing down to whites because of Jim Crow scare tactics has got to stop. True, the young man had no business whistling at Mrs. Bryant, but not because she’s white and he was a Negro, but because he was a fourteen-year-old boy and she is a grown, married woman. That’s the kind of respect we need to teach our children. Respect for their elders, respect for authority, respect for their fellow human beings. Not respect based on some antiquated Southern way of life.”
When the silence came again, I should have known that Ma Pearl was getting her ammunition together to fight back.
“Preeeeacher,” she addressed Reverend Jenkins sarcastically, “you sit here in my kitchen telling me how things got to change. But the man who own this house says I best leave things the way they is. Tells me I gots to leave if I let these northern Negroes tell me how I oughta live in Mississippi. Now you tell me this: Where we go’n go if we git thowed off this place? You got a house for me? You go’n let me and Paul and all these chi’ren of mines live in town with you and yo’ boy? I ’spect y’all got ’nuff room for all us with all that money you makin’ taintin’ the chi’ren through the week and fleecin’ the flock on Sunday.”
Reverend Jenkins chuckled. “First of all, Miss Sweet, I teach our children, not taint them. And second, last I checked, my flock didn’t have enough wool for me to fleece.”
“Humph” was all Ma Pearl could counter with.
“You could always come to Saint Louis, Mama,” Aunt Belle said softly.
Saint Louis? My heart felt like it momentarily stopped.
I would gladly go to Saint Louis with you! I wanted to cry out to Aunt Belle. If only you’d ask! Saint Louis—Chicago—even Detroit. It didn’t matter, as long as it wasn’t Mississippi. Why was she extending an invitation to Ma Pearl and not me? I know she said she wasn’t prepared to take me with her. But how much preparation could she possibly need? Her two weeks were almost over, and I still hadn’t had an opportunity to speak to her in private. If only I had the chance, I could perhaps convince her that I, too, was worthy of the North.
Ma Pearl snubbed her offer anyway, saying, “And live with you and that tramp Isabelle?”
“Pearl!” said Papa. “That kinda talk ain’t called for.”
“Y’all NAACP lovers tell me this,” Ma Pearl said. “Where Mose at now? Jest answer me that. Y’all sittin’ up in here braggin’ ’bout what he did in that courtroom, now tell me: Where he at?”
No answer. So Ma Pearl answered herself. “He holed up somewhere, hidin’. Sked outta his mind. That’s where he at. ’Cause there ain’t nothin’ none y’all can do to protect him.”
I heard a sigh, as if someone was about to answer, but Ma Pearl spoke again. “If I said it once, I said it a thousand times. Them NAACP peoples ain’t go’n do nothin’ but git more folks round here kil’t.”
In my heart, I wanted to be brave like Preacher Mose and stand up to white people—stand in a crowded courtroom and point a finger at someone like Ricky Turner and say, There he is! He’s the one that tried to run me off the road, then spat tobacco juice at me! He’s the one that chased nine-year-old Obadiah Malone into the woods and all the way to Stillwater Lake! He’s the kind of evil person who would kill a Negro for no reason!
But as Papa always said, the spirit might be willing, but the flesh is sometimes weak.
After hearing what Ma Pearl said about Preacher Mose, I suspected that in the courtroom his spirit was willing, but in the dark of the night, his flesh became weak. And when it came to standing up to white folks in Mississippi, my flesh, like Preacher Mose’s, weakened when I thought of the horrors they could do to me.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 22
DURING CHURCH ON THE PREVIOUS TWO WEDNESDAY NIGHTS, I had been so tired after picking cotton all day that I barely kept my eyes open while Reverend Jenkins droned on with his lesson. As a matter of fact, I welcomed any prayers the congregation decided to offer, because it gave me a chance to rest my eyes. And I especially welcomed Deacon Edwards. That man could call upon the Lord for a good fifteen minutes without even stopping to catch his breath. But that Thursday night, when Reverend Jenkins decided to hold a prayer meeting before the last day of the trial, sleep was the furthest thing from my mind.
Church was packed. It was more of a victory celebration than a prayer meeting. Even Aunt Belle and Monty were there, as well as a few other folks from around Leflore County who didn’t regularly attend Greater Mount Zion Church.
“Today was a great day for the Negro in Mississippi,” Reverend Jenkins had said at the beginning of the service. “A historic victory.”
Not only had Preacher Mose stood before a courtroom packed with white people and pointed out a white murderer the day before, but on that Thursday, Mamie Till, the Chicago boy’s mother, had bravely testified before the court that she was one hundred percent sure the body found in the river was that of her son, Emmett Louis Till.
Sheriff Strider and the lawyers defending the “accused” murderers were adamant in trying to convince the jury that the body pulled from the river had been there too long to be that of Emmett Till, even making a mockery of the colored undertaker during the trial. They were still holding on to the claim that the NAACP had gone through all that trouble to secure a dead Negro’s body, tie a seventy-pound gin fan around his neck with barbed wire, and throw it into the Tallahatchie River just so they could pick a fight with whites in Mississippi. Aunt Belle said she had even overheard one white person laugh and say, “Ain’t that just like a nigger to try to swim across the Tallahatchie with a gin fan tied around his neck.”
Whether they tried to make a mockery of the trial or not, Aunt Belle and Monty were convinced that with the testimony of two surprise witnesses, Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam had to be found guilty. An eighteen-year-old colored man named Willie Reed had been brave enough to testify before that menacing crowd that he had seen the two accused men take a Negro boy into a barn, and after that he heard screams and beatings. Willie Reed’s aunt, Amanda Bradley, had also been brave enough to go to a Mississippi courthouse and point Milam out among his own folks. She, too, had heard the screams coming from the barn that morning and had seen Milam leaving it.
With all that was going on in our little part of Mississippi, I felt invigorated. I felt
hopeful. Colored folks were being brave and openly pointing a finger at whites who had committed crimes, and it was all because of a city boy who forgot he was supposed to act a certain way around whites in Mississippi.
After enough folks in the church exhausted themselves with shouting, Deacon Edwards dropped to his knees before the prayer bench at the altar and let out a moan. “Ummm, I just wanna say thank ya!” he shouted. “Thank ya for giving courage to the Negro t’day, Lawd. Thank ya that yo’ angels of mercy surrounded Miz Till as she entered that hostile coatroom. Thank ya for watchin’ over Brother Willie Reed as he told ’em what he see’d that moan’n when the mens beat that po’ boy. Look and have mercy, Lawd. Keep yo’ eye on the young lady that told the coat what she heard that moan’n. Let them be safe, Lawd. Don’t let there be no ’taliation ’gainst them.” When he paused and began to moan, the women of the church began to shout, as they always did. It was then that I felt a tap on my shoulder. When I turned, the girl behind me, Lula Brown, motioned toward the back of the church, where Hallelujah stood near the door. He motioned for me to join him. The moment I had the opportunity, I sneaked out under the pretense of going to the toilet, which wasn’t a lie, entirely. After sitting through all that singing and shouting, my bladder was stretched to its limit.
After leaving the toilet, I met Hallelujah at Reverend Jenkins’s car, where he sat on the hood. I climbed up on the hood of the Buick and stretched out my legs. The shouting inside the church had quieted, and Reverend Jenkins stood in the pulpit. Outside, several other teenagers loitered around the church, sitting on cars, chatting, smoking, or doing whatever else they felt like doing while the old people inside praised the Lord.
“I don’t have a good feeling about this,” Hallelujah said.
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