by Bill Harris
They waited. They wanted Mama to hurry up so they could get to church and sing their song about how Jesus loved them and for the preacher to preach, getting in after the devil (like old Skeeter used to snap after fireflies before he got so old, and Daddy said old Skeeter just went off in the woods and wouldn’t be back), and Preacher Rhodes get them others to clapping and dancing and caterwauling and drown out the business of that from-up-the-hill crying and moaning and carrying on.
They waited and sang their Jesus loved them song a little louder, so maybe Mama would hear them, and hurry up please Mama please, hurry up.
7
Ezekiel 28:2
A few, all women, stood applauding as the Mae’s, faces flushed and split by their grins, holding hands, bowed, a third and then a fourth time.
“A-men!”
Answered by scattered amens as the Mae’s joined Jenny, and the women resettled, found their fans, and watched preacher Roy Rhodes, proprietor of Rhodes Crossroads general store and postmaster, wipe his brow with his blue handkerchief and begin:
“Pride,” he said, and wiped again at his forehead. “‘. . . Let them be caught,’ it says in Psalms 10 and 2 . . .” He paused, letting that soak in, or for them to try to remember the rest of it.
“Amen.”
“Amen,” he repeated. “But I begin to-day with the word from Ezekiel. 28. 2.”
He began to read from the bible opened before him. “Son of man, say to the leader of Tyre, ‘This says the Lord GOD, because your heart is lifted up . . .’”
“Amen.”
“Amen . . . ‘And you have said, I am a god, I sit in the seat of gods—’”
“Amen.”
“Amen—‘in the heart of seas . . .’”
A chill went through Jenny. She threw up her hand and shouted, “Yes,” making the Mae on either side of her jump and look at their mother, who never said Amen.
Jenny was thinking of Mister P. W. Anderson, thinking he was in the seat of a god where he could lord it over Cotty, as the preacher continued, “‘yet you are a man and not God’—”
“Amen,” she shouted again, her mind racing to when she got home and told Cotty what he had missed about one person trying to put his self above another person.
“Yet you are a man and not God—” which is exactly what Cotty should have, would have said to that Mister P. W. Anderson, if it wasn’t for . . . You mister, are a man and not God—not a prince, not a chosen, just some—boss from headquarters, up north or where ever it was, but all the same . . .
He was a—she couldn’t even think what—Lucifer, fancying himself over and above Cotty and the worth of the job he was doing.
Preacher, like he was talking directly to her to help her remember it, was repeating the phrase just as she was repeating it in her own mind, “Yet you are a man—and not God! For you have said in your heart, ‘I am, and there is no one besides me.’”
That was exactly what she was trying to think to say to Cotty when he had said what he had about how Mister P. W. Anderson had the prideful nerve to disrespect Cotty in front of them niggers. Cotty was a proud man and justified in it. The way he had pulled himself up. Quit drinking, found the Lord, good daddy—and that Mister High and Mighty High Class, in his pride thinking there was no-body besides him that mattered in the conversation, or the way of things here in Mardalwil County, Alabama. He did not have a clue about her Cotty.
And preacher went on and he went on working himself into a lather, from one side of the church to the other and front to back, clapping and shouting and wiping his face, going on about the foolishness and fatality of pride, and she, fanning with her hat, sweat running down her neck and armpits, repeated, “Yet you are a man—and not God! For you have said in your heart, ‘I am, and there is no one besides me.’”
She, a Mae on either side of her, their hands covering their smiles, knew this was their favorite part.
Jenny rocked slightly back and forth and gave witness to the holiness of the Word, and she couldn’t wait to get home and tell him what she’d heard. She wasn’t even going to stay for the visiting after church. The Mae’s would be disappointed, not getting to bathe in the praise for their song, but she had to get home as quick as possible to tell him the heartening words she’d heard.
“A—” said Lollie Mae.
“—Men!” said Sallie Mae.
8
Witness
Fall 1928
There so long that he, whose name was not remembered, was of the land. Saw everything. Quiet as moon’s shadow cast through a shroud of cloud was present with no presence, but with predetermined purpose, always there, always there, seeing but seldom seen.
Said nothing but made himself known to those had the need to know.
Her wagon had clopped and rattled past, with her looking, as many of them did, more a widow than a wife, her face dry as husk, the reins in her lye-wrinkled fingers held as tight as her jaw was clenched. Of course she had not even seen him on the road shoulder. Why would she? Her twin gals, though, each the dead spit of the other, had, or thought they saw their own version of him without knowing what they were seeing, but hadn’t acknowledged it to him, or to the other, from whom they kept no secrets, but still their hands held the other’s hand, tight.
The wagon is out of sight when he leaves the road and cuts, without the crunch of footsteps, off across the parched hill bottom acreage of nettles and brambles, of what, in their time, had been the wooded approach to the hilltop main house of the Kimbrough Plantation. The land is now on the books somewhere as Kimbrough Properties, a subsidiary of Kimbrough Company Works. On it, an acre or so away, is the cabin the Wilcox woman left from a short while before. It, once looked down on from the house now char, is typical of its breed. It had been the overseer’s place six or seven decades of seasons ago, and it is from which the overseer left one rainy night with the young girl beside him in the buggy seat. It has been rebuilt over time from the original one room to now house the Wilcox’s, a family of four.
He stops short and leans on his skint maple branch walking stick. A colored boy he cannot identify by name but knows is a recent release from what whites call the convict lease camp is, his attention on the Wilcox cabin, alert as a bird dog in a bog, and doing a pretty fair job of moving and not being seen through the overgrowth of black bent grass and bottlebrush buckeye wide and high as the wall of a one-story building, going golden now as it does this time of year.
It is certain this is not his first visit around here under cover of the foliage, and it is certain also that neither is he here for chicken stealing or other some minor mischief. No. No, look at him yonder, he has other business on his mind as he, low-crouched, moves to squat out of sight within sight of the outhouse. Surveying it like a spider eyeing the weaving of its glowing silver and gold web. This young negro, still getting reused to walking without the leg irons, is here for business of a cold and keen-edged kind. Reckoning or redemption is his aim.
But by nightfall the boy who will soon leave without seeing if his prey has been entangled in the strands of his plot, will sit, resting, his back against the scaly gray trunk of a water hickory, halfway through the swamp, his wits about him, reading the assurance of the stars before dreaming a dream-filled sleep.
The boy could have set the shack and the sorry excuse of a useless barn afire; he could have snuck up to wait by the door and with a baseball-sized rock brained Blue Britches when he exited and tipped him down over into the well, but that would have been too much like a baptism, and therefore contrary to his intention; could have waited behind the outhouse and stepped around with the same rock and watched him, in his surprise, step back the way negroes had to do when a white passed, then hit him and watched with satisfaction as he dropped to his knees, face forward in the dirt—all of these, contemplated during the long hot days and short hot nights, the boy had harbored for all his time under the guard’s dominion, but the boy’s knowledge of what would have followed: the commencement of
bedlam of a white man murdered and a negro, out of shackles, running, so that the remaining negroes would not, on his account, have to hunker down as the crackers rose up like devil dogs with bloodshot eyes and slobbering mouths, their tails ablaze, so no, the boy did none of these; instead, carrying a small sackcloth bundle, he leaves his hiding place, heading off back through the brush toward the river, and trots upstream.
So, the negroes at worship or on their porches or still in bed or cooking or just dragging in could continue without new threats to their oppressed existence on his account.
With his stick across his knees, he sat on a stump. He was like a shadow of the Groundsel bush at his side. He had a bemused expression as he waited with the patience of his age and nature. He listened and saw and felt the flurry of every living thing brought out and breeding abundantly in the business of the morning: the music of tweets, twitters, chirps, warbles of the titmouse’s, chickadees, and blue jays that perched year-around; and the transient grosbeaks, bobolinks, thrushes, and towhees that soon after this coming Tuesday’s rain, full of seeds, grains, beetles, wasps, and caterpillars, would, like the colored boy, leave there.
Directly Wilcox, dour, shirtless, exits his cabin, yawning and scratching, and carrying the overnight slops can, walking barefoot from his porch across his yard down the slight slope to the privy to open the off-kilter door and move inside.
He whose name was no longer remembered heard the sound and curses from inside the outhouse. He smiled and hummed a tuneless air like a warbler’s trill. He moved off, purposeful as a bee, to pollinate through mind to ear to mouth to ear to mouth to ear, so by Monday, end of dinnertime, all coloreds in Mardalwil County, Alabama and further would know, beyond whites’ authorization to stop it, detail by detail of the occurrence at the old overseer’s place that yester-Sunday morning; so that, from that time forward, Mister Cotton Wilcox, Cotty to his woman, would go from being that rusty-toothed, blue britches-wearing, peckerwood camp guard who rode shotgun over the Kimbrough Works convicts on a company horse; daddy of them scrawny, devilish, coot-crazy twin gals with the angelic voices, and gaunt wife who thought her husband was the very picture of the hardest working, most family-dedicated man she knew; the one who had called that colored boy Mule nigger to his face for the last time, and who wasn’t as smart as either one of them took him to be, or he wouldn’t have squatted to take his Sunday morning dump on the one-holed plank of knotted pine that the colored boy, who had by this time crossed the river at the place described and recommended by one of the older men who had walked the woods and fished the river through there for years before being swept up by the authorities in a local raid and sentenced to a planting season of work on a squad with the constantly grinning boy called Mule, who that morning, had nigger-rigged the outhouse seat, cleverly enough so it didn’t look meddled with, so Mister Wilcox sat and tumbled ass-first in full body flop down into the depth of his convict labor-dug privy.
9
Confidential
Acorn, Alabama, Fall 1928
Offenders were plentiful what with the shambles in the land even sixty years after the Rebellion. It was against the law for whites and coloreds to pursue their felonious endeavors as the Confederacy struggled to recover the civilization of its past. Or so politicians and merchants throughout Alabama had explained it to P. W. Anderson. So there was a ready supply, a surplus even, of those who could be arrested and convicted and imprisoned by the state of Alabama. The ones that the Cotton State did not use as cheap labor on its public works projects were leased out to private contractors. From the late 1800s until the present, the system fortunes had to be reclaimed or made in the private sector, and had been very beneficial in the rebuilding of the great state of Alabama.
Kimbrough Company Works was one such contractor. The accounting and the legal departments had expressed concerns that cotton, the golden goose, was laying its last batch of eggs. Suspicions were also expressed that the company representatives on the scene in Acorn, given their self-interests, might not be as forthcoming as they might be. P. W. Anderson, Management Consultant, from the home headquarters in Hartford, Connecticut, was on a fact-finding visit. There were indications that the system was ending its cycle of sustained profitability. P. W. Anderson was Kimbrough Company Works man in the field.
Anderson looked at the angel of the south in the bright yellow dress with the stenographer’s pad on her knee and wondered—well, wondered how forthcoming she would be to direct questions about her job security, and the lengths she would go to ensure it.
He explained he realized it was Sunday morning and she had been asked at the last minute to come in to take his dictation. It needed to go out in tomorrow’s mail. He also was to leave on the morning train, but he was not going directly back home. He had a side trip of a personal nature.
Miss Holden, he had been told, was her name.
“Eveline,” she said, “or Evy.”
“Evy then,” he said.
“Ready when you are,” she said.
He smiled. He began.
“All that I am about to dictate to you is strictly for the eyes of our corporate president in Hartford and officers of the board there.” He paused, looking at her.
She, with her pencil poised, understood.
“People’s positions, their jobs are on the line. Nothing I say must be repeated.”
She nodded.
He smiled and nodded.
“CONFIDENTIAL.”
She began writing, her eyes on him but her pencil making curlicue marks on the pad on her crossed knee.
“FROM: P. W. Anderson to the home office, Hartford Connecticut, etc.,” he said.
She waited, ready to continue.
He complimented her on her perfume.
She thanked him.
He wondered how she stood this heat, and asked her.
She was used to it she guessed.
Yes, he could see how fresh and cool she looked.
He lit a cigarette with his gold lighter.
Did she like her job?
Yes, she did.
Did her husband mind her working?
She wasn’t married.
Oh?
No.
He was sure she would have been.
She showed him her bare ring finger. Front and back.
He made a joke about the common sense of the young men in Acorn.
She laughed and shrugged. She waited, her pencil poised.
He imagined the heat was much more bearable in the evening with a cool drink.
It was, she concurred.
He stood and turned to look out of the window in order to refocus his concentration.
From the second-floor window, he looked across to three old men on a shaded park bench in the town square. They wore no jackets and the collars of their white shirts were unbuttoned, they wore dark trousers and laced shoes, there were two canes between them. They were city men, maybe retired city fathers. Not farmers. They sat as if chewing their cuds, but otherwise were as inanimate as the Confederate flag that hung limp in the breezeless heat adjacent to the nearly two stories-high bronze confederate soldier in broadbrim hat, canteen at one hip, bayonet at the other, bed roll over his shoulder and across his body, his rifle held angled up from his waist, stationary in a forward stride atop the Greek-styled plinth facing north up Nobel street. It was a memorial to the vanquished Grand Army of the Republic, glorifying a futile pursuit. He had seen its like in nearly every sleepy hamlet or busting burg he had visited or passed through from his beginning six days ago at the capitol on his journey’s end in Acorn.
Others of Acorn’s residents made their way about the slow motion business of going to church.
He asked Evy if she minded if he took off his suit coat. They didn’t have this sort of heat or humidity in Hartford.
She pleasantly did not object. He was the boss. She watched him as he did and hung it over the back of what normally was her boss’s, Mister Pittsford’s chair. He turned bac
k to the window.
He prided himself on his observational skills and fact-gathering techniques and being able to order and put them in logical sequence without the use of written notes. His dictation to her briefly and concisely recalled his observations and conclusions from his arrival in the Heart of Dixie, detailing the politicians and farm and factory owners he had met and their council and concerns.
He had recapped his journey to the point of his reaching the convict camp in Acorn yesterday.
When he looked back her pad now rested on her left knee. It had been on her right.
Was he going too fast for her?
No. No. She was fine.
He smiled. They were almost done, he reassured her.
She waited.
He hoped that it didn’t embarrass her but he was pleasantly surprised at how well they were—getting along—and how thoroughly professional she was. First rate. As good as any of the girls from the secretarial pool in the home office, many of whom had gone to the finest clerical schools in the north and east.
(Had that been a blush?)
Did she get a chance to travel much?
She didn’t.
She should. He found traveling really uplifting. The places you saw, the things you learned—people you met.
He smiled.
She returned it.
Where were they? Oh, yes. He apologized for the unpleasant nature of the details and opinions he was about to express.
He summarized that the conditions in the work camp were deplorable. They were below even the minimal standards that passed muster in this forsaken region.
He gestured to Evy to indicate, “Present company is excepted.” Her head was down and she did not respond.
“There is a camp supervisory guard in particular who encapsulates the vices and what virtues there might exist here. His name does not matter. As to his manner, he typifies in mentality and civility an individual as lowbred as any under my command during my time in the service with the 1st Division in France in the Great War.
