Freshwater Road

by Denise Nicholas

  "Now, see, that's what I mean. You can't control these kids nowadays. That girl's had the best of everything from the day she was born, and look at her." Iris sucked on her cigarette, now the authority on raising children, satisfied, as if she and Shuck had something in common because her seventeen-year-old son had already been arrested for stealing a car.

  Shuck sipped his whiskey and thought of a thousand places Celeste might've gone starting with right there in Detroit. But he knew that in some way he had something to do with this, that by being a race man himself, he allowed for the possibility of his children seeing things just like him. Only he hadn't counted on it going so far. Could be the white boy had nothing to do with it.

  And what about Wilamena? Celeste had a way of not telling her mother the big things. Wilamena would call him looking for Celeste. He needed a double shot of Crown Royal. Now Celeste had run off, just like her mother. No. This wasn't like that at all. Celeste was doing something big, not just running off. He caught himself feeling a moment of pride. Men went to war to find themselves, came back different people, some better, some not so good at all. He knew he wouldn't have gone down there for all the tea in China. Not to Mississippi. And what would it do to her?

  Maybe he should've remarried, made a traditional home, instead of living his life exactly the way he wanted and pushing the mothering off on other people. Never saw any cracks in his way of raising his children until now. Billy rarely came home. Now Celeste had run to Mississippi and didn't even tell him until she was already there. That's not how things were supposed to be.

  "Why we got to be the ones always fighting for something? Paying double, triple, quadruple?" In the thin light, Chink's yellow-tinged skin shone dingy white.

  Shuck felt prophetic. "That's what the whole damned thing's about. Paying dues until they wear you down. What you need is a gun. You got the right gun, you'll get your rights. Now, you take those peckawoods in Mississippi. I bet you give those Negroes some guns, they won't have any problems registering to vote. White folks understand two things. Guns and money." He might take his own gun and go down there. That would be the end of it. Bring Celeste home. "Damn."

  "You got a gun, Shuck, you better pack it up and send it down there to your daughter." Iris sounded delighted, gripping the rounded edge of the oak bar as if the room was spinning. "The government needs to take care of that stuff anyway."

  Shuck put a toothpick in the corner of his mouth, twirled it a couple of times. "Whole lot of things they're supposed to do." He dropped the toothpick in the ashtray next to his empty glass, his hands trembling.

  "It's those slow-assed niggers in Georgia, Mississippi, and Alabama letting crackers walk all over them. They the ones needing some rights. Not us," Rodney said.

  "You need to leave it alone, Rodney." Chink's warning floated like a buoy at low tide. "When's the last time you stood up to one, huh?"

  Millicent talked to her drink. "Nothing between them and us but a few miles."

  "Not even that." Chink moaned.

  Iris shot a look to Shuck. "Where in Mississippi is she, Shuck?"

  What difference did it make where in Mississippi Celeste was? It was the same damned thing. Mississippi didn't have any good neighborhoods for Negroes. It wasn't like Detroit. Dearborn might be a bad zone for Negroes, but Detroit was a good one. None of that in Mississippi. No place to run. No place to hide.

  "Down south, they have sit-ins, nonviolent stuff. Up here, we have riots." Millicent's cigarette created a small white crossbar to her brown fingers and deep pink nails, jabbing the air in Shuck's direction. "Nobody's thinking about nonviolence up here."

  "I'm still happy to be up here." Rodney said.

  "You one of them `I'se-so-happy-to-be-here' Negroes, always saying thank you, massa' for something that was yours to begin with." Posey stared at Rodney without a hint of fellowship in his eyes. But no matter what anyone ever said to him, Rodney shrugged it off, burly and untouchable.

  Rodney sneaked a look at the floor. "Well, I saw them dogs and fire hoses on the news. Where would you rather be?"

  "Shut up, Rodney." Posey glared at him.

  Shuck heard them and didn't hear them, jumping over their references, scanning his own life and past, seeing Celeste and Billy as children, each holding one of his hands, walking on the island park, Belle Isle, going to the movies, buying ice cream, sitting in Momma Bessie's rose-scented backyard.

  "I remember the race riot, man. 1943. Now that was awful. June then, just like now and already hotter than hell." Posey sounded like he wanted to say it and didn't want to, like he was pushing a conversation about something else, anything in the past, to help Shuck.

  Rodney yelled out above Posey, above the suction vents, air conditioners, icemakers, humming ceiling fans, jukebox. "Shit always happens when it's hot." He folded back in his chair.

  Shuck let the memory of those old days float into his head. Back in the forties, waves of Negroes and whites from the south overwhelmed Detroit. Instead of Packards and Cadillacs, they built tanks, jeeps, army trucks, airplanes, and PT boats. People lived jammed too many to a room, slept in closets, on porches, wherever a mattress would fit, or just a folded blanket would do. Lines for food, for streetcars, for housing, for everything. Momma Bessie even rented rooms in the old house on Whitewood, bringing down the wrath of the few whites who hadn't run when they'd moved in. Rocks hurled into windows. It never ended.

  Chink wagged his head from side to side like a sad-faced dog. "It was bad on Belle Isle. Never forget it."

  Millicent and Iris faced the bar mirrors, thin hazy smoke threads winding from the ends of their cigarettes, heads delicately ticktocking back and forth.

  "People used to cart their picnic things out there on the streetcar." Millicent's chin dipped.

  "The day that riot started was no time to be fooling around on streetcars." Posey dried glasses with a vengeance, clanking them down on the bar sink. "Peckawoods pulled people off, beat them in the street."

  "Whole lot of Negroes got killed," Rodney said.

  "Few white boys, too," Chink added.

  "Right." Rodney's knee started twitching. "A few."

  Shuck went to the jukebox and punched in "Take the A' Train" and "Broadway," escaping to his New York dream. He sat again, looking at the night-life Negroes with pearl white teeth and processed hair, Joe Louis in the ring, Thurgood Marshall on the steps of the Supreme Court, Lena Horne draped on a Hollywood post, Nat "King" Cole at the piano.

  Evening trucks from the post office jarred the big window across the front of the Royal Gardens. That big plate glass window irked Shuck, though he liked seeing his Cadillac parked at the curb, the patterns of traffic, the twist and turn of the seasons-women in their sundresses, hair up off their necks, then later the first bustling skips of autumn, the snow when it came lashing with the wind off the lakes, barreling back and forth across the city. And spring-hard as it was to see spring on Lafayette Street, all black tar and concrete. Smaller panes of leaded glass would be more elegant, more mysterious, make the place look less like a dressed-up storefront.

  The talk about the riot of 1943 went on around him, the voices heavier, garbled, swimming in and out of the music, in and out of his thoughts. He reminded himself that children were born to leave, the universe ordered it, that Billy would stay in New York, that Celeste would run off to Mississippi. And always there was the thought of Wilamena with her new husband in New Mexico. He kept thinking of the man as her new husband. It had been nearly ten years. Longer than that since she'd pulled the plug on Detroit.

  3

  A hard something landed in Celeste's lap, waking her from a doze. Behind the continuous murmur of voices in the office, typewriter carriages banged, bells sounded, and a radio played. "Sign that. I'll take you to the apartment in a minute. I'm Margo." Celeste grasped the clipboard, frowning up at the short, pretty, blue-eyed white girl with edge-straight blonde hair cut just above her shoulders. By the time she got "hi" to her lips, Margo h
ad pivoted into a small army of coverall-wearing Negro and white young people moving around the airless office /storefront picking up papers, diagramming patterns on a blackboard, sticking pins in a map of Mississippi. Celeste wondered if the pins marked the locations of dead bodies, burned buildings, or some other horrendous occurrence. On the walls, pictures of Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, Medgar Evers. Through the front windows, she saw that the police cars hadn't moved.

  Margo huddled over a mimeograph machine near the back wall with a young dark-skinned guy, she cranking the handle of the old inky cylinder while he caught the copies. Celeste eyed them through slits. The last thing she'd expected in this office was a white girl telling her what to do, even if it was only signing some form. Mississippi and the civil rights movement meant pushing two years of Ann Arbor's surrounds of white people to the rear.

  Here, both Negro and white student-types were working and talking together in easy familiarity. Hard to tell who was in charge. Serious faces, cigarette smoke spiraling up to the white-tiled ceiling, and music coming from a small radio in the corner, Wolfman Jack's gravel-choked voice punctuating the melodies. It had the feeling of a campus gathering, without the food and alcohol.

  Celeste walked to the bulletin board to see the photos of rural-looking Negro people grinning with their arms around overall-wearing studenttypes. Everyone seemed to be old and young at the same time. And, photo after photo of burned down buildings. She went back to her folding chair.

  A ballpoint pen dangled at the end of a thin string attached to the clipboard. A typed page and a carbon under it, the word "release" in caps across the top.

  In the event ofyour injury or death, neither you nor your family or heirs to your family have a legal right to sue or to otherwise seek compensation from One Man, One Vote.

  This whole trip was going to break Shuck's heart. Beneath the fine suits, the stingy-brimmed hats, the sleek cars, and the smooth demeanor, Shuck was a race man. But Mississippi was a different story. He'd want to come down here and snatch her back to sanity. She'd better call him soon. He'd need to hear her voice to know that she was OK. Wilamena would more than likely hiss and fume and blame it all on Shuck being a race man, constantly talking about Negro this and Negro that, filling Billy and Celeste's heads with all that Negro-ness. She'd have preferred to have them less anchored in things Negro. More classical music, less jazz, more London and Paris, less Harlem and Chicago. And for sure, less Detroit.

  A line of typed dashes stretched across the bottom of the page. Celeste's full name was typed under the line and the dates of her stay in Mississippi. A note at the bottom: Be sure to send one copy home to a parent or guardian before leaving for yourproject city.

  Celeste's departure date, the end of Freedom Summer, August 21, was two months away. She might be dead by then-or a hero, a northern agitator hero who'd managed to register an entire town of disenfranchised Negroes. She saw herself as a cross between Joan of Arc and Harriet Tubman, the fires of righteousness flaming in her heart stoked by the news reports that had been coming out of the south for the last three years. Her departure date floated on the paper as if the ink had run out, as if there'd be no leaving Mississippi. She signed on the line and pulled the copy from under the carbon, then slipped it into her book bag. Shuck said your decisions were your own when you crossed from teen to adulthood. Age eighteen marked the beginning of adulthood, but the years between eighteen and twentyone were a kind of nebulous grace period you were given if you appeared not to have good sense. She'd be twenty in November.

  The clatter in the office scaled down as the volunteers filtered out in groups of two and three. When Margo led her out to a 196o Ford and told her to get into the back seat, the police started their engines, too. Had police cars, lurking around midnight corners, followed the other volunteers when they left? She'd seen enough squad cars on the way from the train station to handle it. Was this the routine or was special attention given to new arrivals? Her suitcase gave her away.

  Margo's car stank of decomposing cigarettes and sweaty armpits. Celeste added her own train-funk to the haze of odors. From the dark of the car's backseat she watched the back of Margo's head as they rode through the deserted streets of downtown Jackson. The two police cars followed half a block behind them. More than likely, the police knew when she'd arrived at the train station, knew the volunteers' every move. Already Mississippi felt like a moldy hole, a long dark tunnel without enough fresh air, too much moisture, and no light at the end. This interminable night ranked as one of the longest of Celeste's life. When she checked behind them again, the police cars had disappeared. She wanted to relax, but something told her the effort would be a foolish waste of time.

  "If you're with a white person and you get stopped by the police, let the white person do the talking." Margo's pure New York City accent leaned against the slow southern night as she drove well under the speed limit, checking to the right and the left and eyeing the rearview mirror at every intersection. Perspiration slicked her face to a moony shine. A dark bandana covered her blonde hair. "Act like you're the maid getting a ride home from work."

  "Are you serious?" Celeste rolled her eyes at the back of Margo's head. "Nobody's that dumb, even in the movies." Then, she remembered the porter at the train station. Was he acting servile to survive? To get paid, for sure. Now she wished she hadn't looked at him so harshly. She might find herself bobbing and weaving, shuffling to save her own life before this summer was over. Could she do that? What would it do to her? She tried to follow the thought to its conclusion. And what in God's name would Shuck think about her riding around in the backseat pretending to be somebody's maid? He'd want her to survive, pure and simple. Pride could get her a one-way ticket to a tongue lashing, or a beating-or worse, get her tossed into a fast-moving river.

  "You'd be amazed." Margo double-checked her rearview mirror, then accelerated. "Another car fell in behind us when the police cars turned around. He's gone."

  Maybe it was still the police but in an unmarked car, Celeste thought.

  At the next intersection, Margo slowed. "When it comes to the movement, every white person in the south is the police. They all follow us. There's no real distinction between regular white people and the police down here."

  Celeste sank deeper into the backseat, her heart skipping through its beats like a drummer on smack. Margo knew what she was thinking before she'd opened her mouth. She dug her fingers into the crack where the seat meets the seat back and brought her hands out with dirt and lint pieces sticking to her fingers. "So what do I do if I get stopped with all Negro people in the car? Jump out and start tap dancing?"

  "You might have to." Margo turned into a residential section of woodframed houses set back beyond night-black lawns. "It's already happened. Some volunteers were stopped and the cops made them dance in the middle of the highway. Guns drawn."

  Celeste's neck tensed as though her vertebrae were fusing. What to say now? Nothing. Just listen. Pay attention. She caught Margo's eyes in the rearview mirror.

  "Be respectful and pray. Sing freedom songs in your head. By the end of orientation, you'll know the words to a lot of 'em." Margo let her eyes go back to scanning as they moved quietly through the streets.

  No lamps lit the windows, no porch lights were on, and the shrubs and hedges were just dark shapes in the night. Not even the trees moved, just the car gliding in slow motion over the black tar. Celeste ducked her head well below the back window, gasping for air, legs sprawled across the bump, peering out like a child. She tasted again the train coffee and that mayonnaisy ham sandwich from the stop in Memphis.

  Margo turned into what looked like a housing project of low, dark-brick buildings. "Try to get the name of the officer stopping you. The patrol car number, details that can be reported to the FBI. Try to stay calm. Try to stay alive."

  Celeste bucked herself up a bit, and pushed aside her bristling selfconsciousness at being a trainee with a white-girl boss who obviously knew more a
bout staying alive in Mississippi than she did.

  "Remember names and squad car numbers. Sing the words to freedom songs," Margo repeated. "As soon as I get you ready for Pineyville and the other straggler ready for the Delta, I'm going to Aberdeen." Margo put her arm on the car window ledge, the warm air fluttering her bandana. She looked so in control, she made it sound like they were going off to be camp counselors.

  Celeste strained to sense Margo's fear. Maybe she was so afraid herself, no one else's fear had a chance. She glared beyond the car's front lights. "Pineyville? Where's that?" She checked the map of Mississippi in her mind. Greenwood, Vicksburg, Natchez, Yazoo City. Names like dreams that pillowed nightmares.

  "Down below Hattiesburg, a few miles from the Louisiana border." Margo stopped the car in front of an apartment building with windows across the front, then turned off the engine and the lights. The engine ticked down to nothing. "Used to be the Piney Woods before the loggers cut down all the trees." She sat low in her seat but alert, head turning like a radar scanner. "The Gulf coast is nice, but it's still Mississippi, and when it's not, it's Louisiana or Alabama or Florida. Same goddamned thing."

  How much farther down below could they go? Where did Mississippi end? Celeste stopped a moan that formed in her throat, and said, "Aren't you afraid?" She didn't want to be the only one afraid.

  "Yeah." Margo turned a little in the car seat and looked directly at her, and Celeste saw a wide-eyed girl very much like herself. They were about the same age. They had come to Mississippi for the same reasons. "Only a nut wouldn't be afraid in this place."

  Celeste sighed, thanked God she wasn't alone. "That helps."

  The shrieking of cicadas and mole crickets swelled, aroused by the sound of the car, the low-talking voices. Nothing romantic about it. No harking back to benign nighttime stories of the sounds of the south, no animated crickets and puffy-haired Negroes with smiles and songs on their lips. This was a tunnel of death. Her mouth tasted like sandpaper. Then, suddenly, the quiet mushroomed around them. Celeste heard her own heart beating. All she could see were dark trees, hedges near windowpanes lit only by the reflected moon. She sat up a bit to see the surrounding area.