Jam on the Vine (9780802191571)

by Barnett, Lashonda

  Ivoe put aside the third draft of her first article of the school year, certain that it also missed the mark. There wasn’t time enough before her meeting with Berdis to begin again. Frustrated, she collected the pages, shoved them into the drawer, and pushed back from her desk, going over the events of yesterday with Miss Durden.

  For nearly an hour they had haggled over the title and debated when Ivoe could not explain from whom she had procured her quotes.

  “I don’t recall if it was at the church or during the silent march. And I don’t appreciate being accused of fabricating material,” Ivoe said. “I’d just as soon not write for the paper.”

  Miss Durden’s eyes never left the page.

  “You’ve got what my mother used to call natural smarts—the ability to look at something and form the right question. You’ve got love for the written word, everybody else’s more than your own. If you combined those two and cared a little more—”

  “I care.”

  Miss Durden read a passage aloud that Ivoe was especially proud of and pointed out two misspellings.

  “I’m lazy then.”

  “Not lazy.” Miss Durden sensed Ivoe, anxious and seething. “Miss Williams, you are careless. And defensive. Neither will serve you as a journalist.” She continued to read. “Refrain from paraphrasing. You are the voice of a community, use people’s exact words . . . Otherwise, these bad habits will leave you open to factual errors, misrepresentation. Neither belong in the Willetson Herald. Or any other newspaper for that matter.”

  Ivoe hesitated for a moment of painful embarrassment, and in a sudden crude motion she reached over the teacher and snatched the paper from her hands. She brushed against Miss Durden so hard she mussed up her hair but withheld apology and turned to leave. A touch on her shoulder from behind made her tremble. She felt foolish, vulnerable, found out. She was no writer; she was a reader who ingested too many words, some of which spilled out, leaving a mess.

  “Miss Williams, kindly return the paper. I am not finished with my comments,” Miss Durden said softly.

  Without turning around, Ivoe handed her the paper. The woman was determined to drive her in this unpleasant manner.

  Miss Durden’s fealty to the best story curbed any desire for Ivoe’s favor. Empty praise and flattery were a writer’s enemy. She read on, circling an idea worth keeping, a well-crafted sentence, but by the end suggested starting from scratch.

  At the sight of Berdis’s swaggering air, Ivoe jumped up from the bench and flew to her. They laughed and rocked each other wildly in their embrace.

  Berdis plied her with questions about the summer: “Tell me everything you did . . . and with whom.”

  Summer in Little Tunis had dragged on without incident, Ivoe explained. She had worked in the Al-Halif family store from eight until one and spent the long, idle afternoons and evenings reading. She was home two weeks before it got around Little Tunis that she could come and go from the Stark house whenever she pleased. She had been seen on the road headed home with books bound in leather. “Girl, how you go up in they house like it’s a Negro library?” people from Old Elam Church asked. “Turn the doorknob and walk right in.” Interaction with Miss Susan—a quiet pass in the hallway, or a silent dance around each other in the library—was far less exciting than the townsfolk made it out to be unless their literary tastes collided. Occasionally, Miss Susan paused her at the door to check a book’s spine—not for accounting purposes but to see if she had read it. Ivoe enjoyed the way they spurred each other to their best articulation on plot, character, style. They exchanged reviews on global literature, formed alliances over certain titles, disputed others. On Ivoe’s recommendation the singular book by a Negro writer in the Stark collection—Paul Laurence Dunbar’s Oak and Ivy—was read by Miss Susan (twice) and now traveled among her friends. “You must read the Negro Shakespeare,” Ivoe once heard her say.

  Visits to Susan Stark’s library, sometimes as often as four times a week, were a passport to the world. Europa opened her arms wide and enclosed Ivoe in British romances, Norse mythology, and the translated tracts of German philosophers. She rejected southern white men’s narratives of beguiling warmth and Negro characters possessed of sunny dispositions but read everything by northern white men: Mr. Hawthorne and Mr. Melville never bent a fictional truth, a fact she laid to the abolition movement. But the greatest flutter of heart she found in Irish drama. One evening, Miss Susan had requested she read aloud with her Lady Gregory’s Spreading the News. Language and laughter powerful and extravagant rendered an Ireland so real that Ivoe scarcely remembered she was sitting in a parlor in Central East Texas. A singular passage had heightened her spirit and wed her to every character on the page. For the rest of the summer Miss Susan’s parlor became the Abbey Theatre, where they delved into Yeats and Synge.

  Her summer of lavish reading nearly ended without consequence until that dangerously hot day Miss Susan insisted she not embark for home before the sun went down.

  The glow of the mottled amber lamp was cozier than the glaring sun, shut out as Ivoe drew the curtains. She plumped up the scarlet pillow, admired the brocade ticking and silk braid trim, and settled upon the divan with Moby-Dick. Minnie delivered a tray of cucumber sandwiches and iced tea and whispered an odd question about the jailhouse, quickly waving her hand to dismiss it. Ivoe had eased off her shoes and was about to enter the Spouter-Inn with Ishmael when she heard the front door slam shut. Earl Stark called out for his mother and began pacing the floor. Despite every effort to ignore them—closing the doors of her mind then the library door—she caught Miss Susan’s voice, taut like the skin of a drum: “You did what without my consent?” Then, disgusted, “What about all those families in Little Tunis?” Earl remarked plainly, “Well, Mother, they will have to move on.”

  That evening Ivoe found Miss Susan lying back on her favorite chaise with the Saturday Evening Post. Her face showed a mind taken up by worry as Ivoe stepped onto the verandah with hesitation. “Miss Susan, it may be indelicate to ask but I heard you and Earl talking about Little Tunis. It concerns me.”

  “Earl’s quitting cotton.”

  Sharecroppers in Little Tunis had complained about the steady decline of cotton for the last few years, but Ivoe asked, “Why now?”

  “I don’t understand it . . . with the cattle ranch and the mill we’ll be fine, but if we don’t crawl from under this crop-lien system it’ll bankrupt us. Earl says the convict leasing program will ensure our wealth and Starkville’s.”

  “We don’t have a prison.”

  “About to—the Burleson Prison Farm.”

  Ivoe felt her stomach drop. Her family, Miss Stokes, and the Al-Halif family were the only people she knew not dependent on sharecropping. During their exchange, Susan had patted the cushion and motioned for Ivoe to sit beside her but she was unmoved.

  “Now, the plain fact is some of your people are unwilling to work. They’ll never save enough to buy their own land.” Miss Susan’s eyes fluttered, her face registered disappointment and embarrassment. “The way Earl sees it, he’s the victim because he stands to lose the most. He never once turned his back on them. They’ve turned on him . . . defaulted contracts, unpaid loans. When he gets after them about it, well, some of their responses are downright incendiary.”

  Ivoe bristled. Colored people were supposed to be maltreated and cheated without so much as a word of protest.

  “If the prisoners pick all the cotton, how will the people who’ve been picking it for years, for generations, make a living? Or doesn’t your benevolent son think obliterating a community’s only means of survival counts as victimization?”

  “I will excuse your tone because of your usual tactful manner. Nothing can be done about it. He’s signed the papers and everything.”

  “When—”

  “Now, Ivoe.”

  Ivoe returned an incredulous stare and sa
id with sudden force, “When are they building the prison? When does Earl plan to tell the sharecroppers?”

  “I don’t know any more about it,” Miss Susan said, shaking her head like a disgruntled child. “The Enterprise knows more about my son’s affairs than I do. Nothing for you to worry about.” Susan’s disarming smile enraged her. “Lemon owns that plot—unless she’s planning to sell it and you and I both know better than that. But, I’ll tell you, those families behind in rent, they’ll be the first to get evicted.”

  That summer’s great mistake was telling her parents about the conversation with Miss Susan. Her last weeks at home, prison farms were the only subject to ignite her father. Day after day, not a word reported on it in the Enterprise, but Papa’s questions persisted and made him cross. He asked customers about prison farms in other counties and drew Momma into serious talks. “They put a jail here, you mark my words, Little Tunis won’t be fit for no kind of living at all. We ought to think about leaving here.” He harped on Kansas or anyplace west, as he had done when Ivoe was a child. For the first time in her life, she had seen her parents argue in close vicinity. Papa towered over Momma with hurtful eyes and said in a quiet voice seething with regret, “Land what don’t come with peace ain’t worth having.” Still, Momma had the final word: “They can build a prison all around me. They not gonna build it on Booker and Iraj’s land ’cause I ain’t selling it.”

  Despite the surprising letter from home, climbing the dormitory stairs Ivoe felt rankled by her conversation with Berdis. For hours they had argued about the boycott. Berdis complained about the streetcars; dividing lines painted on the floor were no longer good enough. They had added screens about a foot tall on top of the back of the seat—so cumbersome that when the trolley lurched heads banged; hats tumbled to the ground. “I feel like a damn caged animal . . . Gentlemen and hoodlums heckle the entire way while the conductor does nothing. I count it as luck if I can ride without an insult.” All the more reason she stay off the streetcars, Ivoe had shouted. Impossible, Berdis claimed. Without the direct route of the streetcar, dray service added an hour to her Willetson commute. She could not walk nor would she use the colored conveyances, which were “inconvenient and tiresome.” While Ivoe appreciated a different perspective, she questioned Berdis’s allegiance. Did she have any? For anybody? Last year she had admired her friend’s tenacious drive for music but recent conversations showed how selfish she could be. “I don’t recall leaving it up to the church to decide for me,” she’d said as Ivoe passed along information about the boycott from Miss Durden. “As long as I can afford it, I will Jim-Crow to school—if that’s what you want to call it—and when I arrive to the music room I won’t smell like a horse and will have strength enough to play.” Ivoe said the difference between them was that she understood that any society accepting of a colored woman concert pianist must also allow for colored patrons to travel to the hall in first-class accommodations. There would never be the one without the other. The steeliness in her tone silenced Berdis for only a moment. “Colored people choose the wrong things to be proud about. We’re barred from the best music shops, pay the same entrance fee at theaters . . . to sit in the buzzard’s roost, muss ourselves entering and exiting establishments through back alleys . . . Why is a damn trolley seat so important? At least they haven’t doubled the fare. Must every step for colored progress wear our heels down?”

  While they were fresh on her mind, Ivoe jotted down the reasons Berdis withheld support from the boycott. She would use them to frame her next article, calling attention to the heroes of the movement, the colored hackmen, who for the past two months had lowered their quarter fare to a dime. Some drays and delivery wagons hauled workers into town free of charge. She would turn a critical eye to the Austin police, exposing their latest tactic—employment of crooked county humane officers to pursue colored hackmen on false charges of half feeding and working to death worn-out horses—and conclude the article with a clarion call to Willetson women: “Do not trample on our pride by being ‘Jim-Crowed.’ Walk!”

  Little Tunis, September 30, 1906

  Dear Ivoe,

  I hope you are studying.

  You are an auntie. Your brother and Roena are parents of twin boys. They named the firstborn James, but at half the size of his brother and with beady eyes, Junebug seemed a better fit. The second baby, pudgy with big eyes that make him look wise, made Papa think of the King of England until Edward stuck his little finger in his mouth, then I called him Pinky and that’s the name that took.

  You would think fatherhood would make Timbo want to act right but that boy won’t stand straightening. I wonder what make Timbo think he can cheat life. Seems like I raised you children better than that. He ought to know sooner or later you got to pay with something—your mind, your heart, your sweat. Something. He’s in for a rude awakening. I just hope the cock crow before it’s too late. Roena fusses about his gambling but your brother got some hard bark on him. Can’t tell him nothing. We got lucky with you. At least you will listen to somebody.

  There have been a few other changes around here. It was a year ago when you first went off to Willetson that your sister commenced with the clarinet. She reminded Papa of the promise he made to her if she stayed with it. He sure had a hard time finding somebody to give her lessons but he kept at it. Finally Meyer’s daughter—a music teacher in Bryan—said she’d do it so long as Irabelle comes in the evenings so folks don’t see that she is taking up Negro students.

  If Irabelle is not practicing she don’t go far lessen Papa’s with her. Always up under him. You sure was different at nine. To help with the lessons I raised the price on my preserves to fifteen cents. Folks don’t seem to mind.

  May-Belle is doing fine. Papa’s worrying himself sick over this jail business. He told me to send you this from the paper.

  Keep my nose up. I pray for you.

  Your Mother

  Inside the envelope was a clipping: Earl Stark on the front page of the Starkville Enterprise with the president of the Texas Board of Prison Commissioners. The headline: “Seeds of Change Planted at Prison Farm!” Stark had not renewed any sharecropping contracts. His cotton would be picked by convict labor leased from the prison in Bryan. The Burleson Prison Farm covered four thousand acres and housed 280 inmates. The plan called for the clearing of two hundred acres—from cow pasture to every cabin on the north side of Little Tunis’s Main Street. To expedite his plans, sharecroppers were paid to leave the Bottoms immediately and encouraged to integrate Starkville’s “more established” communities. Many had taken the deal, “or were themselves twice taken,” Ivoe blurted out to the empty room. From what the article left out she surmised a harrowing revelation. Her neighbors had been enticed by paltry sums and signed contracts they didn’t understand. The rents, let alone mortgages, for homes in the German and Moravian enclaves would break them in less than a year. Her parents knew better than most that no colored person ever made out well in a business deal; nevertheless, should Papa be tempted, she expressed her concerns in a note.

  .

  On a quiet Sunday morning made for sleeping in, Ivoe rose early and looked out the window at the heavy spring rain. For a handle on anything affecting colored Austin, she knew where to go. She dressed in a hurry, forgoing the usual breakfast of hominy and toast since even on a good day the passenger carriages closest to campus kept infrequent schedules. The fetor of wet horses and hay directed her to the nearest hack line. A ride to New Hope Baptist Church in Wheatville, where Miss Durden and many colored Austinites lived, cost five cents aboard a double horse wagonette that seated about twenty.

  The preacher admonished his congregants for any show of violence: “Those who did not know any better than to stand in solidarity with the race must be left alone to ride the trolleys.” Streetcar conductors, now sworn in as deputies by the sheriff, arrested any Negro who heckled riders as they attempted to board or disembark. The pre
acher had used church funds for the release of four members jailed after pulling two boys from a streetcar. Murmurs and sighs of displeasure rippled through the congregation. Someone shouted, “What about them?,” in response to the tragedy of last week when reportedly a drayman had driven too slowly in front of a streetcar, prompting the conductor to leave his car and club the colored man’s head repeatedly. Within an hour, Wheatville blacks stormed downtown Austin, many with hunting rifles and makeshift weapons. The Texas Rangers joined the police force to contain the posse, resulting in fifty-seven arrests for weapons possession. Those who witnessed the attack of the drayman said little more than a bag of pulp was left between the man’s shoulders.

  .

  Ivoe laid her watch on the desk. She was behind in homework for most subjects but wanted to give more time to the Herald, to bring the requisite clarity and truth that led to equal rights for black Austinites. Her articles included detailed accounts of white backlash. Stories like the successful colored businessmen issued fines by the city for fabricated infractions. Craft came easier now but the subject matter troubled her mind and sometimes broke her heart. The last six months of covering the boycott had brought a revelation. Journalism was more than a talent to cultivate, more than her life’s calling; it was social justice.