Sissy stared over the papers on the table. "You a real teacher?"
"I'm a student. College." Celeste imagined Sissy seeing Ann Arbor, the green of it, the richness, too, with a library bigger than any building in Pineyville and students everywhere with their easy familiarity.
"Cause you too young." The girl nodded. "I sure liked you talking in the church that time." She wagged her head like an old woman for emphasis, as if thinking, I want to do that, too.
A car crunched by on Freshwater Road, grating over the gravel and sand, and Sissy's eyes grew wide as she jumped towards the door.
Celeste looked out the window again, this time to see a rusty chrome back fender, not the big Hudson's, disappearing down the road. "I was scared to death. Never done anything like that before." This house, closest to the turn-in from the blacktop and only half a block from the Tucker house, wasn't a good choice for this clandestine meeting. "Let's go for a walk. You got time?"
Sissy had her hands on the doorknob. "Yes, ma'am."
"Yeah, let's go." If Mrs. Owens woke, she'd see the spread of papers on the table, the unlatched back door, and figure she'd gone to the outhouse.
Celeste followed Sissy across the sandy earth towards the pines, both of them checking back in case the Hudson turned onto Freshwater Road before they made it to the trees. When they entered the deep forest, there was no real path, just breaks among the trees. Sissy wound around, heading away from Freshwater Road so that nothing could be seen of them, Celeste knew, because she could no longer see the houses or even the electrical poles. They slowed and walked side by side, the heat infiltrating the trees, thick but less intense than in the open spaces. The scent of pine laced the air without the overlay of must and funk.
"What's your college?" Sissy led them through the piney woods like a scout, stepping slowly, cautiously, eyeing the needle-laden ground. Celeste wondered if snakes slithered through those woods and what other wildness lived in this place, so close to the house and yet foreign and strange. She'd never been a girl for the countryside, not on foot anyway. "It's a big school. Up north. It's called the University of Michigan, after the state." Mrs. Owens never spoke of the woods, never set foot into them though they were practically a part of her backyard. Celeste heard the slightest moan of the trees, the subtle movement of branches high up in the air, responding to a breeze that never made it to the ground. She didn't want to go too far from the house, but she didn't want to show her fear of the woods to Sissy.
"My teacher says she went to school in Jackson. At Tougaloo College. You ever seen it?" Sissy talked easy, slow-gliding between the trees, surefooted and carefree.
"When I was doing my training to come here." Celeste nodded, stepping gingerly over piles of browning pine needles, seeing things that were not there. "It's a lot smaller than where I go, but it's nice." Margo had taken her and Ramona on a sightseeing trip to see Tougaloo College and the state capital. She and Ramona had sat in the front seat with Margo driving, a visual anomaly for sure. It had to be a challenge to local whites to see them riding around chatting like it was the most normal thing in the world. Even as they did, Margo stayed vigilant and so did she and Ramona, checking behind them and to the side in traffic as heads whipped around watching the three northern interlopers. It was nerve-wracking even while it was funny. Margo had a streak of the wild. Sissy had it, too, apparently.
"You got a boyfriend?" Sissy's voice lifted up, nearly sang it.
"I had one. He went away for the summer." She had been thinking of J.D. less and less frequently.
"You went away, too." Sissy laughed, then stopped short and stood quietly listening.
"You're right." Celeste whispered, not about to tell Sissy that her boyfriend was white or that one of the reasons she'd come south was to get J.D.'s white world out of her system. Sissy didn't say a word for a moment, just stood there looking up into the pines at the streaks of blue sky showing through.
"Is he cute?" Sissy took off walking again. "Where'd he go?"
"He's good-looking. But he's not my boyfriend anymore." Celeste figured after this summer, if she survived it, they'd at least talk again. "He went to Paris, France."
"How come?" Sissy pressed her with little girl questions. "Where's that?"
"Well, he comes from a different kind of background. He paints pictures." Celeste struggled to cast J.D. in alight that revealed and secreted him at the same time. "Paris is a city in another country. Across the ocean."
"You have a lot of places in you." Sissy's voice dreamed again as it did in the car when she tried to grasp the concept of movie stars on big screens in the dark. "I never knew someone who painted pictures." Said as if a child her age should've known someone who painted pictures.
Celeste smiled at the thought of the woman Sissy might become. "I never did either 'til I met him at school." She remembered the day she'd first seen J.D. all set up with an easel on the campus green. She'd stopped to see what was on the canvas. Trees, but not representational. Greens in all shades and bricks it seemed of black and brown. He'd asked her to have coffee with him.
"What about your daddy and your momma?" Sissy kept walking.
Celeste didn't answer her right away, listened to the whistle-singing of birds like she hadn't heard since Ann Arbor. She thought of the idea of a daddy and a momma as a grouping, a framework. She'd barely known it before Wilamena took off, had lived all the intervening years with that slight hollow in the idea of parents. "My mother lives in a place called New Mexico. My father lives in Detroit. Before I left for school, I lived with him. Me and my brother." She felt a pang, a prick every time she thought of how her life had played out so far with a distant mother who always seemed to be looking in her own mirror. Father. She held onto Shuck. She'd missed something, she knew, but it was hard to fathom exactly what it all meant.
"By yourself?" Sissy eyes got bigger and cloudy. "Just you and your daddy and your brother?"
"Well, my brother left for college first. So, yeah, for a while it was just me and my father. He's a lotta fun." Celeste saw Shuck in her mind, all crisply dressed, pinkie ring shining, Cadillac gleaming like a white-iced cake in the sunshine. Whatever oddness there was in Shuck being a single parent faded. "My parents divorced when I was younger than you are now." A slippery feeling of unease went right down her spine. She tried to grab it, make it speak to her, but it was gone. She didn't know if Sissy understood the concept of divorce. Not sure she understood it herself.
"You got a daddy who's fun?" Sissy stopped in her tracks. "My daddy ain't no fun."
Celeste heard the child's vehemence, saw the anger in her eyes. "I can see that. He's protective of you, that's all." Celeste didn't want to get off on a tangent about Mr. Tucker the dream killer. People were possessive of their children, though Wilamena had never been particularly possessive of hers. If that was what it was. She'd seen it in her cousins and in friends, always felt a draft of loneliness in those moments. Wilamena would drop her and Billy off at a cousin's house and never seemed to miss them, never seemed to care if they came back or not. Shuck had never been so dismissive; he'd made himself a presence no matter how late he stayed out at his bar or with his pals. That only drew her tighter to him, and to Billy, too. When Wilamena left for good, that same lonely draft blew even harder, but Shuck took up the space with his warmth.
Celeste had been walking behind Sissy again. She had no idea of how far they had gone. "Maybe we better get back."
"Yes, ma'am." Sissy turned and led them unerringly back to the place where they'd entered the piney woods. Inside the house, the child sat for a moment at the table with Celeste. Sissy must know the forgotten paths, Celeste thought, all through the remains of the piney woods. When they said goodbye, Sissy re-entered the forest, taking the long way around toward her house by walking parallel to Freshwater Road through the pines. Celeste stood at the back door and followed the yellow of Sissy's dress until it disappeared in the trees. She didn't have much hope that Reverend Singleton would
be able to convince Mr. Tucker to allow his children to come to the freedom school. Not now.
15
The five children who now came to freedom school every day were ages six to eleven. They were Labyrinth and Georgie, her first students, and Tony Mobley and his two little sisters, Hattie and Marge. Other children attended on different days, dictated by the ability of their parents to get them to the church. On some days, Celeste had as many as fifteen. Sissy occasionally appeared at the church door, but never came inside. Mr. Tucker had expressly forbidden it. If there'd been any hope that he'd soften, the gunshots that blasted out his back windshield put that to rest. But Sissy had shown up again at Mrs. Owens's back door and taken a furtive lesson from Celeste in the kitchen. And then another.
Celeste stood near the wood railing separating the pulpit from the rest of the church, her portable chalkboard leaning on a chair, the children squirming on the hard pew. Though Reverend Singleton's two big fans created a meager cross breeze and the splotchy window shades were rolled down against the sun's assault, the late morning swelter made her feel that she would surely faint if the temperature rose one more degree. She and the children grew lethargic near noon, the end of the freedom school day. She longed for a thin current of crisp air, a Canadian breeze with chills at the outer reaches.
In Jackson Celeste had been taught how racial oppression made children think less and speak little, bending many of them into the hunched old people they would eventually become. Celeste added parental oppression to that list, thinking of Sissy and her clamp-down father. When Sissy appeared outside the church, she would spend the morning opening and closing the church door, spiraling in and out of the parching sun, her bright-colored dresses blinking light into the shady church cavity as she kept an eye out for her father and his big maroon Hudson.
"The first time Frederick Douglass escaped from slavery, he was captured and sent to jail." Celeste's voice bounced limply off the wood walls and beams, barely breaking through the retributive heat. "He didn't give up just because he went to jail." She raised her voice so Sissy could hear the lesson back at the door, hoping the children would connect Frederick Douglass's journey to what was going on in Mississippi that summer. Sissy had read Frederick Douglass in the kitchen, but that was their secret.
"Pass it down." She handed the picture of Frederick Douglass to the boy sitting on the end of the row. "Stand and say your name." She asked them to stand and say their names before speaking when it became very clear that they seemed to feel more comfortable staring at the ground when they spoke. It was a way of encouraging them to inhabit the space they lived in, a way of for them to plant themselves in the earth and say, "I'm here and I matter."
The boy jumped to his feet, grinning. "My name be Tony." Tiny white beads of sleep nestled in the corners of his child eyes and bed lint speckled his tight kinky hair. Ashy from head to toe. No shoes or socks, toenails dirty, ankles marked with insect bite scars. Celeste fought an urge to take Tony straight to Reverend Singleton's lavatory, wash him, rub lotion on him, comb his hair, then take him shopping for new clothes. "Your last name, Tony?"
"Mobley, ma'am." He took the picture, gave it a good look then passed it down.
Sister Mobley, his mother, had committed to the voter registration class after Celeste spoke from the pulpit. She'd sent Tony and his two sisters to the freedom school the next day. Sister Mobley and her children lived farther down Freshwater Road in a raw wood house with a sinking porch that had spaces wide enough to slip a foot through. Sister Mobley had no husband. She worked in service part-time and, in her mind, had not much to lose. Registering to vote and freeing her children from the thinking they'd been born into had become a small obsession for the thin woman.
Labyrinth and Georgie stared at the picture of Frederick Douglass. Labyrinth stole a peek back to Sissy at the door. "May I take it to Sissy?"
"Stand and say your name." Labyrinth knew the ritual.
The blonde-haired child stood, looking like a creature from another planet. Celeste felt an odd kinship and a small revulsion at the same time. The similarity between them had to do with their overall difference. In truth, they looked nothing alike. Not many blond Negroes in Mississippi. Not many green-eyed Negroes either. One thing was for sure, though: Labyrinth was nobody's fool.
"I'm Labyrinth Johnson." She pursed her lips, not in the least cowed by the fact that she used the last name of her mother and all the other children used a father's surname whether or not that father had disappeared from their lives. "Now, may I take this picture back to Sissy, ma'am?" Clearly, she felt she didn't need to stand up and say her name every time she spoke. She knew her name and knew how to be in the world, whether her daddy was white Mr. Dale who owned the grocery store but didn't own up to her or not.
"Sissy, do you want to see Frederick Douglass?" Celeste called to her, coaxing. Sissy stepped just inside the church door, her eyes like the wings of hummingbirds fluttering back to the ominous road. Her thick hair was braided tightly, Vaseline glistened on her scalp in the parts. Her face was scrubbed, elbows and knees oiled every day.
"I do want to, Miss Celeste." Sissy's voice trembled. Her almond eyes grew so large Celeste could read the fear in them all the way to the front of the church. Then Sissy smiled, acknowledging their secret lesson in Mrs. Owens's kitchen. Celeste nodded to her. If Sissy saw her father's Hudson turn into the church road, her cotton dress metamorphosed into wings as she took off flying through the long-needled pines and wax myrtles, plaited hair coming undone as she navigated the back way to Freshwater Road. From the church, running through the woods she arrived at her house more than five minutes before her father. She'd already told Celeste that she'd rather be punished by her mother for coming in with her socks and shoes coated in orange dust, or even mud, than have her father find her at the freedom school.
One time Sissy hadn't run. Mr. Tucker left the car idling in front of the church, while he got out to grab Sissy's thin brown arm. He pushed her roughly into the front seat of his big car, yelling the whole time in his seething Mississippi drawl that women belonged at home. Celeste, helpless to do anything about it, stood in the church door watching the maroon car disappear back down the church road, Sissy's little body bouncing in the front seat next to him.
Later that day Mr. Tucker paid a visit to Mrs. Owens, who met him at the front screened door and invited him in, but he stayed on the dirt path at the foot of the leaning stairs looking up at her. He told her that no daughter of his was going to be learning anything from a loose young woman like that Celeste Tyree. He said that when Sissy left his house, she'd be leaving with a man she was married to. Not like Celeste Tyree, unmarried and not living in her parents' home. He called her that unbound woman, comingand going, talking from pulpits like a man, taking long train rides alone, living like she was a young widow woman ready for anything.
Celeste heard it all from inside the house. She marveled at his perception, having never had more than a one-minute conversation with him. She walked to the front and stood behind Mrs. Owens like a child. Mrs. Owens shushed her before she opened her mouth, waving her back with her hand. Mr. Tucker said that he'd already warned his daughter to stay away from that freedom school and Celeste Tyree. He must never find out that Sissy was coming to the house having Freedom School lessons in Mrs. Owens's kitchen.
When the Hudson took off down Freshwater Road, Mrs. Owens told Celeste to be careful. Mr. Tucker made her think of the devil, and she added in a low voice that she'd seen little pitchforks in the lights of his eyes. Celeste said she needed to find a way to liberate that child from her own father before her spirit shriveled. Mrs. Owens told her to stay out of it-that Celeste would be gone at the end of the summer, but Sissy and Mrs. Tucker would still be there, dealing with that hateful man. Mrs. Owens didn't say a word about the kitchen lessons, but Celeste figured the old woman had been feigning sleep on the afternoons when Sissy came to the back door. That way, she was free to say she'd known nothing about it.<
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"Go, ahead, Labyrinth. Take the picture to Sissy, and thank you." Celeste thought of scenarios for Mr. Tucker's next trip to the church. She wasn't sure that if he came again and caught his daughter at the church door that she'd stay back like a helpless bystander. She saw herself standing between Mr. Tucker and his daughter, having a full-out argument with him about the value of the freedom school for Sissy's future, the value of freedom, period. She'd put her heart and soul into trying to convince him of the good of it all for Sissy.
Labyrinth marched down the center aisle of the church, her sun-dress straps sliding off both shoulders, her blonde curls bobbing like a headful of big yellow daisies. She stayed with Sissy while they both handled the picture of Frederick Douglass. Sissy checked for any sign of Mr. Tucker on the church road, then Labyrinth dragged a chair to hold the door open, looking back to Celeste as if to say, "Why didn't you think of this?"
"Frederick Douglass eventually escaped in 1838 and went to live in New York, starting a newspaper called the North Star." She'd already talked to them about what newspapers were; she used the New Orleans TimesPicayune for reading exercises. She spoke loudly enough so that Labyrinth and Sissy could hear her back at the door.
The children were respectful of her whether they were getting the point or not. Just like the adults here, they treated her not quite like she was a white person, but certainly not like one of them, gazing at her as if she were on the other side of a plate glass window. In the first days of freedom school, they didn't look at her at all. Except Labyrinth. Everything on her face was a challenge. Dolly Johnson was training her child for what was coming. She was rearing a half-white no-father child with a strong name like Labyrinth, endowing her with an attitude strong enough to back people off of her. It was working, because the child was strong, unbent but in a different way than Sissy, who was a delicate dreamer. Labyrinth dug in her heels and wouldn't take no for an answer for her life.
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