Freshwater Road

by Denise Nicholas

  "Stay low." Margo's voice was sharp. "There's a car under the trees across the street. It's always there." Margo turned to Celeste and smiled a creepy smile in the soupy darkness. "The Klan shot out the street lights when they found out we were housing volunteers here. We think that's one of their cars."

  Celeste glared at the car, caught between wanting to thump Margo on the back of the head for scolding her like she was a child and being thankful that Margo had warned her about the lurking danger. Nothing moved inside the dark car. Just black windows and no heads.

  "How long've you been here?" Celeste's voice crackled between her true voice and the hoarse whisper of fear.

  Margo pulled a single key out of her bag and held it up in the streak of moonlight coming through the front windshield. "Six months." She sounded proud. Celeste didn't want to look up to a white girl, but she had sense enough to know that Margo had already passed tests that she hadn't even studied for. She had to give Margo her due, relax inside for a moment, and listen to her as she would her teacher.

  "For the next few days, you go through nonviolence training with the stragglers. Y'all are the last group. We need to get you going to your projects so you'll have time to do what we're here to do." Firm-voiced, Margo laid it out, though the "ya'll " was a tight fit with her New York accent. "You'll be running your freedom school and your voting project at the same time. The voter education classes take priority. That's pretty much it. Oh, and try not to get killed." Straight faced and no nonsense. She handed the single key to Celeste and indicated with a nod that it was time for Celeste to get out of the car.

  Fear approaching terror hurtled through Celeste. She opened the door and hunched over to climb out of the backseat. The civil rights demonstrations on campus seemed so harmless. That was another world. This was the real deal. Run a freedom school and try not to get killed. She'd read it in her packet of materials, knew the school was a part of the summer project, couldn't remember precisely what she was supposed to do. She needed to sleep, to bathe, to eat a meal that had a green vegetable on the plate. Negro people were her people. She didn't want a white girl from New York to be more courageous on their behalf than she was. She had to submit, though, because it might be the difference between life and death. Mississippi wasn't Ann Arbor or Detroit, and she needed to keep that foremost in her mind.

  "Your contact's Reverend Singleton." Margo never stopped scoping the darkness, even as she leaned across the front seat and talked to Celeste out of the car window. A real soldier. "He's the point man in Pineyville. I'll fill you in over the next few days."

  Celeste tried to gather up some mettle for her cracking, slipping voice. She leaned down, head in the window, wanting to crawl through the window back into the car. "When do I go?"

  "As soon as I see you're ready. Stay low to the floor at night. That apartment's been shot into. Grab the empty mattress. There's another volunteer in there."

  Celeste hefted her suitcase and book bag out of the back seat, wondering how long it would take her to get ready. Ready for what? Nonviolence training, of course. Practice being oppressed, practice not getting killed. Taking low to keep the peace, removing chips from shoulders, anger from lips, history from heart. She lingered by the side of the car, afraid to walk through open space. Afraid she'd end up like Medgar Evers, shot dead a few feet from his front door. Across the street, the dark car waited. "What about the police?" Celeste heard her own dumb question too late to pull it back. They'd just been followed by the police. The police were all over Jackson waiting.

  "Forget the police." Margo sighed on the verge of impatience. "I'll pick y'all up in the morning. White volunteers have to sleep in another unit. No integrating. Not yet anyway." She started the car, staying low, her parchmentwhite face surrounded by her dark bandana and the night. "I'll wait 'til you're in the door. Go on."

  Celeste hunched over and scurried for the door as Margo started the engine. Her suitcase and book bag scraped along the walkway. She might've crawled on her hands and knees, anything to not be a walking target. She found the door knob and felt around for the keyhole, then finally got the door open. When she turned around, Margo gave her a quick wave and headed, it seemed, almost directly for the dark car across the street, going so slowly it seemed to be a taunt.

  A miniature lamp sat on the floor next to the mattress but barely lit the dark corner of the living room. Two folded sheets and a flat pillow with no case lay on top. In Ann Arbor, Celeste's mattress was on the floor, too, but not because it had to be, not because someone might shoot at her through the windows. She positioned her suitcase and book bag at the end of the mattress to form a footboard, or at least a blockade, then undressed down to her underwear before pulling a light cotton nightgown over her dirty body, keeping low the whole time. The jumper and the blouse were going in the bottom of her suitcase, never to be seen again until she got home. No, better to air out the sweaty clothes before putting them into her suitcase. She laid them on the wood floor. To take a bath or even to just wash up in the face bowl meant turning on lights, which would locate her for the mystery men across the street in the dark car.

  She sat on the mattress and leaned against the wall staring at the small, bare living room. Always she had a sense of waiting. It went way back. Waiting for Wilamena to shower her with the hugs and kisses she saw other children receive from their mothers, waiting for Shuck to pick her and her brother up from some relative's house, waiting for Shuck's numbers to fall. Waiting for her life to begin. Now she'd begin her own journey with no clue as to how it would end.

  "Your name better be Celeste." The voice wavered, followed by the padding of bare feet on wood. "Otherwise, I'm going out the bedroom window."

  "It is," Celeste called in a whisper. She had hoped the other volunteer would be sleeping, giving her time to just sit there and mull over the possibilities of what lay ahead.

  "Good." A door closed and in seconds there was the sound of a flushing toilet. A young woman crept into the living room, walking squatted down. "Ramona Clark."

  Ramona sat down on the floor and leaned back against the door frame. Her hair was a mass of wooly kinks, round like an upside down bowl. Celeste could make out a small brown face, big oval eyes. "Haven't slept since I got here."

  "Celeste Tyree." She felt her dirty, frizzled, humidity-inflated curls and waves, every strand symbolic of a contorted family tree. "That car across the street might keep anybody from sleeping."

  "Amen to that." Ramona said. "Where're you from?"

  "Michigan. Detroit. Actually, I'm in school in Ann Arbor." She tried to see more of Ramona's face in the dim light.

  Ramona's head moved back and forth, her big bowl of kinky hair swaying. "Ooo wee. Not many black folks up there."

  "Not many." Celeste heard the "black." Speakers from the movement who came to campus said it too. She hoped Ramona wasn't excluding her, tossing her in the "other" pile-the "good hair" pile, the light-eyed Negro pile. Negroes used to be "colored." Kids used to fight over being called black. It was the new title, the new calling. Black folks. She wanted to be in it. Shuck would be. Wilamena wouldn't. Celeste herself hadn't gotten comfortable saying "black."

  "I'm at Howard with the black intelligentsia, the so called `high-yellow first line of defense,' no offense intended." Ramona's voice eased out, consonants hit then released very quickly, sliding softly off the edges of her words.

  Celeste bristled and lied. "None taken." Shuck was in her head telling her there was no high yellow, no low yellow, or anything else. There were just Negroes. Now, just black folks. Period. Celeste gave herself a point. Shuck was always ahead of the pack, in the vanguard. And she always trying to catch up.

  "Where're they sending you?" Ramona stretched her legs out on the wood floor.

  "Someplace called Pineyville." All she could see was the bowl of hair and flashes of the whites of Ramona's eyes. "I never even heard of it."

  "Boy, you hit the jackpot." Ramona's eyes flared wide. "That's where th
ey lynched Leroy Boyd James."

  "Jesus." Celeste's train-weary mouth dried like dusty bones. She'd never heard of Leroy Boyd James, either.

  "It was in the fifties. I did a paper on lynching in three deep-south states since World War II. I'm a sociology major." Ramona leaned her head back against the door jamb.

  Every Negro in America was a sociology major, like it or not, college or not. You had to be. "What happened to him?" Celeste knew before Ramona said a word.

  "They say he raped a white woman. Never got to court. Got kidnapped from the jail down there, beaten, shot, and dumped into the Pearl River. The sheriff said it never happened. A fisherman pulled him out. Body got caught on some tree roots or something. Otherwise, he'd have been swept down to the Gulf by the currents. Disappeared. A prisoner told the FBI that the sheriff there opened the door to some men. Nobody was charged with his murder."

  All the air sighed out of Celeste's body. This wanting to know could definitely give you nightmares. Maybe Ramona exaggerated. Maybe there was more to the story, but she couldn't fathom what that might be. She'd seen the photos of Emmett Till. She'd seen the range of horror when it came to white women and Negro men. She tried to stir up enough saliva in her mouth to swallow. "Where're they sending you?"

  "Indianola. In the Delta." Ramona sighed. "Plantation country."

  Wasn't Mississippi all plantation country? And what was Pineyville? A lot more than the Piney Woods, evidently. Leroy Boyd James. A new wrench of fear cranked her stomach, sent the acids churning and the ghost of that ham sandwich flying.

  "You running your project by yourself?"

  "Unless some more volunteers show up. They've got a pretty active bunch of black folks in the town." Ramona got into her squat-walk position. "Oh, the lady across the way brings biscuits and jelly in the morning. We've got coffee. The phone in the hall is for emergencies. They said we can call collect anywhere. The FBI numbers are right next to the phone there." Ramona disappeared around the corner. "I hope you can sleep. I sure can't. Don't forget to stay low."

  "Goodnight." Celeste shriveled down the wall, legs spread out on the mattress. She felt like she'd been awake for days. Too many thoughts swirled in her head.

  Sporadic dog barks, crickets, the creaking of trees. No low music in the background. No laughing voices with conversation riffs in between. It had to be three in the morning by now. A thickness in the air that made you think you were hearing things, but when you really pressed your ears to it, there was nothing there.

  Celeste squat-walked to the open front windows, sat down on the hardwood floor, and pushed on the screens. They were locked in place. Lightcolored curtains waited for a breeze, any slight shuffle of air. The car across the street glimmered in a sliver of moonlight. Ghosts with guns. Sweat bubbled out on her forehead, under her arms, between her legs. She smelled her own body, the dampness curdling into a pungent aroma.

  She crawled back to the mattress. The heavy air weighted her down on the thin bed, the hardness of the floor rising into her spine. What had Leroy Boyd James really done? Was it like Emmett Till? A whistle, a nothing whistle? She knew there were white girls in Ann Arbor who loved the easy grace of long dark arms and lips that felt like pillows in heaven. But this wasn't Ann Arbor. Margo standing at the mimeo machine with that guy? What was that about? Maybe nothing. Margo was from New York. No big deal. But where was he from? He's the one who'd pay the price. Down here, death came hunting when you reached across the lines of demarcation. In Ann Arbor, maybe just a hateful look, a bad name slung across some busy street. She and J.D. turned heads. Here, crossed love got dropped in the cracks of old storm shelters, locked away with warning signs marked Danger. People died for flirting. She'd read enough to know this was the real deal. Mary Evans's voice in her head, You be careful, girl, you hear? Miss sippi ain't nothing to play with.

  4

  Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and their blue Ford station wagon disappeared near Philadelphia, Mississippi, on the night of June 21, gone like a moonlight rainbow after a summer evening storm. The news flew through the trees, over the creeks, and down the mud-brown rivers on the rhythm of a talking drum. By afternoon of the first day, the news was on the dinner table in Jackson. By evening, it was in the fingers of the lady pressing hair in Canton and on the lips of the waitress in Greenwood. On Tuesday, the second day, their station wagon was pulled from the swampy waters of Bogue Chitto Creek near Philadelphia. The car had been burned to a crisp.

  Wilamena's admonition about Negro people-they'll never return the favor-darted through Celeste's mind as she stood on the baking midmorning pavement in front of a local shoe store in downtown Jackson. She'd brought no wristwatch to Mississippi, had no idea of how fast time passed or if it passed at all. Judging by the displays in the shop windows, the out-of-date dresses and rigid hairstyles on the women walking by, Celeste had a feeling that time was going backwards. Confederate flags adorned the fronts of every store for as far as she could see. Not a flag of the United States of America anywhere.

  She'd been directed by Margo to hand out flyers for a voter registration meeting. She was to do this in the shadow of the Mississippi state capitol. She thought Margo was joking. But there wasn't the slightest smile on Margo's face. She thought of declining, of begging off, but knew how that would be perceived and talked about in the One Man, One Vote office. Besides, Ramona had been standing there when the assignments were given to the last group of volunteers, and she wasn't going to cop out in front of her, or them.

  A police car with two officers pulled in across the street. She caught her peach short-sleeved cotton dress, her pony-tailed hair, even her tight-lipped fear reflected in the plate glass window of the shoe store. Celeste frosted a smile on her face as her fear petrified.

  She'd been told to hand the flyers to Negroes and whites with no distinction. When a flyer was begrudgingly accepted or snatched, it got a quick glance and a quicker toss into the city trash can, as if the flyer and the message were contaminated. Negro people stepped wide of her, offering furtive takes to passing whites that said, "I ain't in it." Margo wouldn't be back to pick her up until noon so there was nothing to do but keep trying. She shook off thoughts of Wilamena's simmering disdain, her assumed superiority, as if every kind or giving gesture toward another human being qualified as a favor that had to be reciprocated. Wilamena never got what the gesture did for the person offering-not as something to lord over others, but as an expression of one's own humanity. Just like the graduation.

  Wilamena couldn't put herself out to attend her own children's graduations from high school, and yet thought it just fine to continue asking them to come to New Mexico. Some people got it and some didn't. There was no blessed community in required reciprocity, but there certainly was in just flat-out giving. So many people had made the commitment, had put their lives on the line. Wilamena had to be wrong.

  Already, Celeste had adapted to her Freedom Summer orientation schedule. Classes in nonviolent philosophy and action every day. Drop to the ground, protect your head, go into a ball. If the fire hoses come out, forget it. There's no protection. Voter registration booster meetings were held every night at local churches with speakers from the clergy and from the leadership of One Man, One Vote. The Mississippi State Constitution of i89o and its strictures on Negro voting were featured at the meetings. The sermons, the boosting part, were designed to keep the brethren riled up and raring to go on the march toward enfranchisement. The brethren included the volunteers. At the end of each meeting, the church body stood to sing freedom song after freedom song, just like Margo said. Celeste garbled the words, reading sometimes from a mimeographed sheet, trying to catch the passion of the more experienced summer volunteers, the dedication of the locals.

  To calm herself on the pavement, she quietly hummed "We Shall Overcome," feeling more and more like a fanatic whose beliefs separated her from the rest of the world. She spotted a suit-wearing white man coming toward her and opened her face t
o respond to his queasy smile, thinking this brave soul was about to break the barrier, to step up, take a flyer, and maybe even have a conversation about what was going on in Mississippi. She plastered some terrified version of love on her face to accompany her limp smile. He zoomed by, grabbed the flyer, and hissed "Jiggaboo" in her ear all in one seamless motion. She dropped a handful of flyers to the pavement as she spun around to see him scrunch his flyer into a ball and lob it gracefully into a trash can. He disappeared into the bustling morning flow of pedestrians.

  Jiggaboo?A stinging rippled around the coils of her brain, igniting tenuous but deceptively wiry ganglia of self-hatred. From a long-ago joke, a lampoon, the ever-vibrant denigration of Negro people, that word, jiggaboo, sneaky thing, still lived in a backyard shed. You can't hate Negro people and not hate yourself, Wilamena. Celeste heard Shuck say that on a long-distance phone call years ago. Now, she was the alone-on-a-strange-street-jiggaboo girl a.k.a. Celeste Tyree. She'd been caught and stripped naked, revealed, branded out there on the street. Call a spade a spade. Did anyone else hear him? And why did she think about that at all? J.D. had pulled the cover off of her, showed her she was passing-not like Wilamena, but in a more subtle way, a more dangerous way, because she didn't think she was. She came down here to right her rudders, to get straight with herself. Jiggaboo Girl. She smiled.

  The flyers scattered on the pavement, got caught up in the shoes of passersby. No one offered to help gather them. They stepped on them, kicked them away from their shoes. Lines drawn in the red earth. She'd come here to shore up her own Negro-ness, to plunge herself into the real deal after lounging on Shuck's racial cushions for her entire life. For too long, she'd thought she was above it. Wilamena stood in the wings. Shuck was right. They were all Negro people. Black folks. But why did no Negro person stop to help her? Wilamena had walked away, married a man who looked suspiciously white, though he wasn't, and escaped to a more pliable place. Wilamena wasn't going to be a Jiggaboo Girl for anybody or anything. A sleight of hand, a face without stereotypical earmarks. Wilamena could slide by. Shuck couldn't. Wilamena wanted to be out of it more than she wanted to be with her own children. That was the rub. Escaping the jiggaboo meant more to her than anything. Celeste couldn't escape even if she wanted to. When the sun hit her, she went dark.