by John Ridley
“You all hear what I'm tellin' you?” The white boy wasn't chuckling anymore, wasn't laughing. Neither were his new gang of pals. They were popping their knuckles, twisting their fingers, squeezing their fists… . Their hands, impatient with all the taunting, anxious to get in on some of the fun.
“What? Y'all too stupid to move a bunk? Lemme show you how to move a bunk.” The tall white boy grabbed up the bunk closest to me, slung it for a corner of the cabin, slung it hard so that it crashed to its side, the mattress and linens flying off. “That” —the white boy huffed, breathless from the physical explosion—“is how you dumb-ass niggers move a bunk.”
“Maybe we're dumb, but you're the one doing the moving for us.” I was trying to be funny. I was thinking a laugh might just lighten things up. If I had been thinking at all, I would've kept my mouth shut. As it was, I just sounded like I was trying to be wise.
For a long couple of ticks nobody said anything, everybody stunned silent by my unintentional uppitiness. It would take the white boys only a moment to recover. It would take them only a moment to decide they needed to hammer some obedience into me. My body, working one step ahead of my thoughts, started to go for a bunk and move it over to where the other was strewn in the corner—the nigger section of the cabin. I refused to feel embarrassed or humiliated by my actions. My thinking? I could get beat at home. I didn't need to travel cross-country for more of the same. So if moving a bunk kept me bruise-free …
I heard more fingers cracking. Not the whites'. Now it was Mo's fists that were getting impatient. He wasn't about to do any bunk moving. He was fixing to have a go at these boys like he was Char-lie Bad-Brother, all set to mess them up, solo if he had to, one-hundred-percent-style.
The tall white boy saw what Mo was doing, saw the fire stoking in him, and got with a peckerwood grin. Nigger wanted trouble? Fine. He'd give the nigger trouble.
Violence was coming. It was crowding up the joint, shoving aside logic and reason.
“Hey!”
All of us, black same as white, turned and looked. In the door was another man. White. Tough-looking. Not tough as in big and beefy but like he'd spent a lot of years doing the kind of hard labor that gives the whole body durability. He had on a shirt, the camp's logo sewn on the breast.
“What ya doin'?” the man in the door asked, his voice a mixture of annoyance and Southern drawl. The drawl made me think the annoyance came from him almost being deprived of the chance to lay in a few I-hate-coons-too licks.
For whatever reason, because no one else did, I started to answer the man. “We was told t—”
“What ya doin'?” the camp man asked again, ignoring me and talking directly to the tall white boy directing the confrontation.
“Just having some play with the niggers,” he said all happy with himself. He might as well have been recounting fishing stories with drinking buddies. “Niggers don't know where niggerville is. I told them to put their bunks—”
“Ah'll tell yew where their bunks go.” The camp man came down hard with that, using his voice as a cleaver to cut the boy off.
The boy started up again. “But he was—”
And again he got shot down. “Their bunks go jus' where they were.” Tone underlined the camp man's words.
The white boy sucked at his lip, grumbled: “Shit.”
The camp man took a step for the boy. One strong step that the boy backed from. Maybe propped up by his cackling gallery he thought he was big enough to stir up trouble with a few far-from-home blacks, but under his pomp of rage the boy was just a boy, and knew better than to try the same with this man.
The man: “Yew say somethin'?”
“No, sir.” The white boy's eyes flitted around the cabin as if trying to keep track of a buzzing fly.
All the other white boys did some looking around. They looked around, looked down. Generally they looked pretty stupid. Their leader getting corrected took the fight out of them.
“All right then,” the man said just strong enough not to invite any challenge. “Le's git this heyah place cleaned up, and ah don't wanna heyah about no mo' trouble outta this cabin.”
The man, whose name, or at least the name he went by, I would later come to know was Dax, started back to whatever he'd been doing before taking the time to referee a race riot.
Kevin, the other one of the three of “us” said as Dax passed: “Thank you, sir.”
“Don't yew niggrahs think nothin' 'bout it,” he said without even looking at us. Then he was out the door.
Not more than a couple of hours in Washington and my work trip was turning into a living classroom. I'd thought Dax had done what he'd done, stopped the fight, because he was a decent person. He wasn't. To him me, Mo, and Kevin were nothing more than a few niggers. Not people to be treated equally, just animals that shouldn't be treated badly for no good reason.
THE WAR WAS OVER. The boom was on. Families left cities. Suburbs were born. Houses weeded up across the country, giving birth to entire towns overnight. Cedar Hill. Cockrell Hill. Levit-town. Lakewood. One hundred houses a day were started at each. One hundred houses a day, and still not enough for all the people who rat-raced after their piece of the American dream: hi-fied dens and pink-flamingoed lawns. The camp ran full throttle six days a week to fill the demand for lumber. Dawn to dark the forest rang with the sound of chopped trees screaming as they twisted and snapped against their trunks before thudding dead to the earth. There were a dozen different tasks to be done, each tagged with their own slang: donkeys, donkey punchers, skidders, whistle punks, high climbers. They all sounded unique and exciting. They all amounted to the same thing—moving trees. Chopping trees and moving trees. Milling trees and moving trees. Clearing the land of every tree that stood. Nothing fancy about it. The sweat was ordinary. The muscle ache was the same that came with any other grind. The only thing special about logging was that you learned to respect the boss. The boss was the trees. Douglas firs, Sitka spruces, western red cedars, Port Orford cedars. Some three hundred feet tall and over a thousand pounds. When the boss got felled, when it was being skidded, you learned to get out of its way. Get out or get hurt. Hurt if you were lucky. Otherwise all you got was dead for your twenty-five dollars a week.
Twenty-five dollars that we didn't really get anyway. Every worker had a passbook, and at the end of each week a company man would write in it what we earned to be settled up at summer's end. We never got cash. The company men figured if you didn't have cash you couldn't get into any trouble. You couldn't go into town and get drunk. You also couldn't take what you earned and run off in the middle of the night. All you could do was keep working. Keep up your respect for the boss six days out of seven.
On the seventh day we rested. We spent the mornings gathered in various worship groups praying or singing or whatever. Once religion was out of the way we sat around playing cards, smoking, paging through mail-order skin magazines. For lack of booze, a few guys shook up a cocktail of Aqua Velva and Kool-Aid. Some got high off the mix. Some got a free ride to the hospital.
Almost always we stayed segregated. You might see the occasional white with blacks, or the rarer black with a bunch of whites. Mostly the races kept to themselves and the whites—generally the southern whites—made it plain they wanted things that way. You could hear them talking together about something or other—the weather, a story about back home, how somebody earlier in the day, not paying attention, almost got taken out by the boss. They'd be talking about nothing in particular; then you'd hear it from them, the word: nigger. Nigger or coon or jig or darkie. You'd hear the word in a sentence, not spoken in anger, but used as if it were just another part of the language. Apple. Sky. Boat. Nigger. That was the frightening thing, how easy it came to them. How commonplace their hate was. How rooted racism was in them. They were good whites, and we were black dogs and that's all there was to it.
Race mixing was not encouraged. Race mixing was not tolerated.
There was one young fello
w from Michigan, white boy, who didn't much seem to care if someone was white or black or otherwise. He'd sit and talk and spend time with one person as equally as he would another. One night he got taken—got dragged—out into the woods by some other whites. He was found the next morning naked, freezing, and spilling blood from where he'd had a fat, coarse tree branch repeatedly, violently shoved into his butt-hole. All the management had to say about things was: “Should've known better than stir up race trouble,” then sent the fellow back to Michigan.
Race mixing was not encouraged. Race mixing was not tolerated.
After spending most the day resting up from the week that'd passed, getting ready for the week to come, we'd all go to the main hall for dinner, eat segregated, then go back to our same color-correct groups and spend the evening entertaining ourselves with songs and music from guitars and harmonicas and Jew's harps. I couldn't play any of those. I couldn't sing. I could tell jokes, though. That I could do. I would bust up the boys with some bits I'd heard from comics on Toast of the Town and observations about working at the camp. It was enough to give everyone a fair laugh. I guess I was funny. Anyway, I was funny enough to get some notice. One Sunday after joking around, Dax pulled me aside. He told me he was putting together an amateur show for the following Sunday, a chance for the guys with talent to entertain the ones without. He'd heard me telling jokes and asked if I wanted to do a few bits. I didn't even have to think about it. Just the idea of being in front of a crowd, having people hoot and clap for me same as they did for the TV comics, gave me a jazz.
“Real glad to hear that,” Dax said. “Figure we ought have one of you for the rest of the colored boys.”
The next couple of days got spent trying to work up a routine. Excitement kept me from thinking of much else. Not thinking of much else almost got my head taken off when I got into “the bite of a line,” the snap of a tow cable that sent it flailing like a steel whip. To this day I believe ducking my father's blows gave me the speed to dodge the line. Most of it. While I was getting stitches where the cable had torn my shoulder, I made the obvious decision to save my joke-arranging for nights as I lay in bed. I'd mumble bits to myself while my worn-out body begged me for sleep.
Sunday night came around. The main hall was packed with people—workers, management. Everyone wanted to see the show, sup port their friends. That, and in the middle of a forest in Washington State with no money to spend and nowhere to spend it, an amateur night was the best and only bet. Some of the boys in the camp were not untalented, and the ones Dax had picked for the show were very good. Good singers. Good instrument players. The excitement I'd been feeling through the week got dialed over to nervousness, only then the gap between being funny for a few people and being horribly unfunny for several hundred becoming obvious to me. I felt something tapping against my leg. I looked down. It was my shaking hand.
Then all of a sudden it came time for me to take the floor. I got introduced, went out to the center of the room. Whatever applause there was died off. Maybe nerves were making me supersensitive, but I became aware of an odd split second of quiet between the clapping and my telling a joke. It was an emptiness that, in my mind, just hung in space, waiting to be filled. I filled it with some bits from the television comics, jokes old and hackneyed but funny enough to coax out a few laughs from the audience. Then I went into some bits about life at camp, the hard work and long hours and how we were rewarded for it all with some writing in a passbook and bad food. Basically I made fun of the whole operation.
The laughs started coming in waves.
And when I did impressions of some of the workers and managers—the way someone talked, or exaggerated one of their mannerisms, mugged their facial expressions reminiscent of how Pop used to mock the neighbors on one of his weed jags—the joint went nuts with screams and hollers.
From the corner of my eye I caught a glance of that tall white boy, the one from our koogie that wanted to beat in my head for not knowing the route to “niggerville.” The tears in his eyes said he couldn't laugh any harder. Everyone was busting up.
Everyone except for Li'l Mo. Mo wasn't laughing. He didn't seem to find it too amusing, me clowning around in front of a bunch of whites. But as I finished up, all that was in my mind was that a room full of people—some who didn't know me, some who out-and-out hated me—were applauding me.
Dax had arranged for a special dinner after the show for the performers, a thank-you meal of steak and potatoes and a hunk of pie. I went back to the kitchen and got my plate same as the rest of the acts. The steak still sizzled when the cook plunked it down. Juice percolated from the skin of the potatoes. I started outside so I could get to eating while it was all still hot.
“Jackie,” Dax called to me from a table. “Where yew goin'?”
“Outside,” I said.
Dax sort of laughed a little. “What in tha hell for?”
Because I was hungry and I wanted to eat. I was going outside because I was black and everyone else was white. Blacks didn't eat with whites, and it never occurred to me that things should be any other way.
Apparendy it should have. Dax waved me over to a spot next to him. “C'mon over heyah, Jackie. Eat outside, tha flies'll git in yer food.”
As I sat down, as I cut into my steak and chewed on the first hearty mouthful, I remember Dax's hand coming down firm on my back.
“Funny as hell, boy. Where'd you learn to get so funny?”
THE AMATEUR SHOW was four or five days in the past. I was working a skid trail trying to keep my mind on the boss and off the applause that was still ringing in my ears and the taste of the steak that was resurrected with my every swallow. As I worked at that chore, a Jeep came around driven by one of the camp managers. He stopped below my station, called me down from the line. I went to him, smiling, thinking he had something good to say about my act. Five days later and I'd still been getting the warm hand from people who'd seen me. Not this time. When I got close enough to read the manager's face, it told me and told me plain that whatever he had for me wasn't pleasant.
“Get in.” Two words. To the point. And when the second I spent trying to figure out why was too long in passing: “Well, c'mon, boy. Get in. Let's go,” the camp manager prompted again whip-cracking-style.
I started climbing into the Jeep. The manager barely waited for me to finish before pulling away.
I got ridden back to the administration building. I got walked to an office. Inside was another camp manager, looking less happy than the one who'd driven me. With him were a couple of frowning policemen.
“These here men are from the police,” the manager told me in case their blues, badges, and guns weren't hint enough. “Your father's looking for you. Says you run off from home.”
Most of the time Pop was too lit up and strung out to find his way from the couch to the floor. But somehow across the length of the country that smoker was able to stretch out and point a finger at me.
The manager said: “These officers are going to take you back to Seattle, put you on the first train for—”
“I don't want to go home.” I tried to sound firm about it, but the only thing greater than the begging in my voice was the pleading. “If I go back home my pop's going to—”
“You're not eighteen.” The manager didn't care a thing for my plight. He demonstrated his non-caring by not so much as looking my way. “You're not eighteen, you can't work. We'll get you on the train, we'll get you home.” To further elaborate on his non-caring, the manager picked up some papers from his desk, stared at them. His furrowed brow indicating that the papers, and not me, now had his full attention.
I started to go with the policemen.
I stopped.
I asked the manager: “Where do I go to get my money?”
“You're not eighteen, you can't work. You can't work, you can't get paid.”
Jammed between the two cops like a public enemy, I got walked to their prowl car and put in back. It was a long drive to Sea
ttle, and on the whole of it there was no conversation among me and the officers. Once there, at the train station, I was left with a ticket for New York. Probably the lumber company paid for it. Taken out of what they owed me, they got off cheap.
Nearly three days back to the city. Outside the Vista-Dome, mountains melted into desert, which blended into … I had no money. A porter took pity on me, snuck me some leftovers from the dining car.
At the changeover in Chicago I gave consideration to getting off the train and running off to somewhere to do … something. Then I thought about how well I'd get along in an alien city, pockets empty, no one to feel sorry for me and slip me food. I got on my train and finished my ride to New York.
When I got to Penn Station there was no one there to meet me. I had no change for the subway and was too scared to try fare-jumping.
I walked home.
When I got to our apartment my father was high or drunk or some other form of passed out. On the couch. Right where I'd left him months ago. I went to bed.
In the middle of the night, on a jag, Pop busted into my room and welcomed me home belt in hand. His rant was something to the tune of: “I'll teach you to run off! I'll teach you to think you're somebody! ”
For the next twenty minutes he taught me well.
part II
There was something floating in the Tallahatchie River. Bloated by water, gnawed by fish, it was hard to tell what it was.
What it was was a body.
The body was Emmett Till.
Emmett Till was fourteen.
Was.
In August of 1955, Emmett had gone from his home in Chicago to Money, Mississippi, to spend the end of the summer with relatives. Money was rural, a township of barely fifty-five. Other than that, there was only fresh air and open fields. It should've been a good place for a kid to spend a summer. Would have been. Except that one day, at a tiny grocery store, young Emmett said something lewd to a white woman. Maybe he did. Maybe he only whistled at her. Maybe all he did was look in her general direction. Whatever the fact, as far as the upstanding white citizens of Money, Mississippi, cared, Emmett might as well have slapped her down and raped her. So that night two men—Roy Bryant and his brother, F. H. “Big” Milam, Milam being particularly nasty by even the rest of the town's reckoning—went 'round to Emmett's uncle's looking for “that Chicago boy.” The two men strong-armed Till into their pickup and took him off into the dark.
