"You play that?" Otis screwed up his face at her. "You know that Negro killed himself playing Russian roulette? What a Negro doing sitting around playing Russian roulette? No telling what really happened."
The deeper-than-blues dirge quieted them. Celeste's eyes burned and she lowered her head. `Forever, my darling, our love will be true..." His voice was the haunt, not the words. It was the loneliest sounding voice she'd ever heard. She didn't know why she'd played it. It was some old collective memory song, a haunting thing whose strains never left you once you heard it. She couldn't even remember where she first heard it. Probably somewhere with Shuck. Maybe it had been on the old jukebox at the Royal Gardens, but it wasn't Shuck's kind of song.
"Kansas City" brought them back, cleared the air, pounded the red walls with rhythm.
"Things are changing," she said. Even Shuck talked about how things had changed in Detroit from the time of the big riot back in the forties, always talking about how she could do anything she wanted to do in this life.
"Changing? Drinking from the same water fountain? What's that do?" Ed pointed to his head while his eyes gazed into the interminable craggy cave of historical misfortune. "It's too late, we're already gone."
Celeste wondered if that was the gin talking, or did he have the gift of prophecy? Could he really believe that-and if he did, what was he doing in the movement? She couldn't spar, damage for damage, with anyone from the south. Maybe the gin got inside him and balled up all his bad experiences. But he wasn't talking about the dreadful confrontations. He meant a memory of death, the whole experience of slavery and its residuals. Neglect. Living in too small spaces. Curvature of the soul. Did he mean there was no repair? No hope?
"You don't believe that." She said it praying he didn't and wishing they'd stop this conversation.
Ed turned away from her. "If corn liquor doesn't make you crazy, all the stuff you can't do down here sure will. I'm not even talking about white against Negro." She tried to ease away from the challenge Ed had just flung onto the bar.
"You right." Otis dropped ice cubes with his bare hands into their drinks. "When it comes to some things, everybody in the same boat. Whole lot of Bible going on."
She wished he'd pour more gin into her glass, she felt dryness coming into her mouth. "White people bother you?"
"They always botherin' somebody." Otis sounded like Shuck. No rancor. That's just the way things were. A night man. Night men were father confessors, Buddhas in the temple, men who listened a lot and saw it all. Exemptions. They would kill, Negro or white, whoever crossed the line. The gun said it all.
"Keep on Pushing" came on loud and jumping.
"We supposed to just wake up one morning like it didn't happen?" Ed slid off his stool as if running from the thoughts drumming in his head. Something chasing him. She thought he was going to ask her to dance this time. He didn't even look back. But, he said something she heard loud and clear: like it didn't happen.
She watched Ed moving in the mirror. With his arm out as if he was carrying a staff or an umbrella, he did a high-stepping dance, moving around the perimeter of the dance floor, between the tables, all over the room. She swiveled to watch him, aching to join him, to release her own demons in a dance.
"You can't take that out of him. Don't even try." Otis read her thoughts, spoke to her like he knew her.
What was it that couldn't be taken out of him? The dance was beautiful.
Why take it out of him? Then she knew Otis didn't mean the dance but what was under it.
"He's one of them Creole muthafuckers." Matt whispered in a huffy voice.
Ed seemed to lead a line of invisible people who he turned and bowed to without missing a step. Leaning to one side and then the other, prancing a strut, swaggering, bending the music to his rhythm, he moved with a furious dignity, his head thrown back, his eyes nearly closed.
Celeste watched. Creole was a mixture. He didn't look in the least bit mixed, not mixed with white anyway. Maybe Indian. Maybe somewhere back there, something else. She glanced at her own darkened face in the mirror.
"From New Orleans." Matt leaned in to her. "That's a second line. They do that behind street funerals. A band plays and people dance. After the body's buried."
If that was a second line, what was the first? The trip to the cemetery? The band? He looked so free, she wanted to join him out there, second lining, but felt glued to the barstool. Something intimate and private about the way Ed moved through the air.
Otis read her. "Go ahead. Ain't nobody in here but us."
"In the Still of the Night" came on the jukebox before she moved off the stool. Ed walked over and took her hand. She stopped breathing as they slid onto the big black and white linoleum squares, fluid, like rollerskating, a breeze on her cheeks. But they were dancing tight, clinging body to body, feet barely moving, thighs clamped together, his arm down at his side clutching her hand. His heart still pumped the second line. He smelled of crisscrossing rivers. The room fell away, went black behind her closed eyes. He whispered, "Sugar," in her ear and she pushed her pelvis into him, felt him respond.
Spinning slowly on her own away from him, the red cinder blocks melted into wide brush strokes, slashes of red-orange paint on a giant canvas. Her dress flared, and she knew that the shape of her legs and buttocks showed. She moved her hips to the music and saw Ed watching her. She dreamed she was Marpessa Dawn dancing in the streets of Rio. Or it was a basement party in Detroit with dim lights, old furniture, and spiked punch. Hard boys and chiffon girls, afraid to go all the way, kissing until their lips cracked and peeled to rawness, rubbing each other to the corner of madness through their high school dress-up clothes. Ifyou do it to yourself, it'll drive you crazy.
"You sure from Detroit." He brought her back to him just as she was feeling too far away.
The hard pocket of lonesomeness she'd been carrying around softened. The ever-present nagging fear released her. So many thoughts of death, jaws clenched at night for fear shots would be fired through the house again. The terror of Mississippi had tunneled into her. She felt worn down and lifted up at the same time.
"I think you got to come to New Orleans, chere." He made it sound like an inevitable direction, like this moment created a door that they stood in with New Orleans on the other side. She had blue sky and white clouds in her ears, the music thumping and her breath sinking into his.
17
But for the presence of the northern rabble-rouser, Celeste Tyree, a Pineyville local eavesdropping on the proceedings inside the church on these summer evenings would have heard Reverend Singleton teaching freedom directly from the pages of the bible with a rawboned intensity. When he closed his book, Celeste opened hers-the Mississippi state constitution and the One Man, One Vote study materials. Her lessons centered on the clauses in the constitution's 1890 text that had brought voting rights for Negroes to an end. She taught her small group about poll taxes, grandfather clauses, and literacy tests, the legal obstacles they sought to remove once and for all.
Celeste, Matt, and Ed made it to the church from their outing in Hattiesburg just as Reverend Singleton began the bible-study portion of the voter registration class. Celeste ran for the outhouse. The greasy food from Miss Grace's Cafe on Short Sixth Street where they'd stopped to eat after drinking far too many gin and tonics at Otis's red cinderblock joint-it all kicked high. She threw up, lurching over the black hole, avoiding a look into the well of corrosion and quicklime as the last soft light of evening shafted through the wood slats and the small window. She lit a kerosene lamp, replacing the protector glass carefully, turned the flame down low. Her stomach felt queasy but no new wave of vomit came. She stopped at the spigot on the side of the church, already dreading a late night trip to Mrs. Owens's outhouse, but so thirsty she thought she'd never make it through the class without the water. She splashed it on her neck and face, head thundering as she leaned over. Shuck said don't let me see you drunk. That meant don't get drunk. He never said,
`Don't drink. "Alcohol flowed like water on campus, but she'd never been drunk before. She dug around in her book-bag for a piece of stale Juicy Fruit, which she chewed and sucked nearly dry before coming in the side door of the church to take her place up front with Reverend Singleton.
Matt and Ed, cool and composed, had taken seats in the back as representatives of One Man, One Vote to size up Celeste's voter education class. In the car coming from Hattiesburg, they'd decided to ask Mrs. Owens if they could sleep in their sleeping bags on her parlor floor rather than risk traveling to McComb, their next stop, in the dead of night. Celeste imagined inviting Ed to sleep in her bed, but nothing would've been more out of the question in Mrs. Owens's house. She'd never do anything of the kind in Shuck's house, either. Something unmanageable had been let loose in Hattiesburg, her pent-up loneliness, her rebuke of the clamped-down world she was living in, so starkly opposite to the freewheeling life of Ann Arbor. Now she had to tuck that freedom taste away again.
Celeste slowly got into the rhythm of the class and only had the slightest feeling of being off-balance. She taught Williams V. Mississippi, the 1898 case that sealed the fate of Negro voters in the south when the United States Supreme Court decided in favor of the State of Mississippi. The rest of the southern states followed Mississippi's lead. A county clerk had the power to select a passage from the state constitution for a potential registrant to interpret. A black man was given a difficult technical passage. A white man, a simple sentence. It was the end of Negroes voting in the south. By Freedom Summer, very little had changed.
In the course of each class, Celeste laid out the sections of the constitution that would more than likely appear on a voter registration test. The sample tests from One Man, One Vote had questions ranging from extremely difficult interpretations of constitutional clauses to ridiculously obvious ruses meant to stump people. A question might ask how many grains were in a cup of sand, or how many bubbles in a bar of soap. These inconsistencies in testing procedures made some Negro folks the more determined to pass whatever test was put in front of them, and made others apply themselves only in a half-hearted, oh-what's-the-use manner. For many, it meant they'd rather not try at all.
Dolly Johnson attended the voter education class regularly by now. To Celeste's eye, she'd undertaken a broader personal transformation, going from a woman who wore low-cut dresses and tight-fitting slacks to more conservative styles. Dolly was evolving. Still, if Labyrinth was the apple, Dolly was surely the tree. At close to thirty years old (as Celeste found out from Etta Singleton), she didn't look a day older than Celeste, and she had the same feisty spirit as her daughter. Mississippi hammered women into a tight-lipped passivity, but not Dolly. Even Geneva Owens camouflaged her spunk and guarded her speech and demeanor most of the time. She'd survived a rugged life on her own after the death of her husband. She'd earned the right to be on the earth with a voice. But Mrs. Owens stayed quiet, until she decided to let her voice be heard in her will to vote. After making that decision, Mrs. Owens proceeded cautiously. Dolly spoke her mind at the slightest provocation. About the voter registration test, Dolly intimated that her good relationship with Mr. Percival Dale might offer her a leg up. Of course, this was exactly the wrong thing to suggest in front of the class, but it didn't stop her.
Mr. Landau brought the message of the Deacons for Defense and Justice to the meetings. He lived near Pineyville, but worked in Louisiana at Crown Zellerbach. He regularly went across the state line to attend the meetings of the Deacons, and he carried a rifle in his truck. The Deacons promised to defend themselves against any marauding whites, to protect their lives, their family's lives, their property, and the lives of civil rights workers who came to their towns. It didn't matter to them if the whites had on uniforms or sheets. Freshwater Road had been used as target practice in the middle of the night, the very kind of thing the Deacons for Defense and Justice defended against. Mr. Landau never would've allowed that, he eagerly reminded everyone in the church. He created a stir whenever he spoke. There were those who mumbled their agreement with the Deacons (still short of joining them or of starting a group in Pineyville) and those who stayed in lock-step with Reverend Singleton's strict adherence to nonviolence. The only self-defense was in spiritual and actual nonviolence. In Celeste's mind, the spiritual part required the greater work. A person might live a long time with a heart full of violent hatred, sing God's praises in church with vengeance and retribution just on the tip of the tongue. Reverend Singleton admired Mr. Landau and feared him, too. He thought of the Deacons as Louisiana Negroes walking a thin line that bordered on crazy. Wild Negroes, he called them. Celeste believed in her heart of hearts that "Wild Negroes" were just what they needed, but she couldn't say that to Reverend Singleton.
Celeste couldn't imagine Shuck doing any violence to anyone first but she knew darned well he'd never walk away if he was attacked or, worse, roll into a ball on the ground. If he did walk, it would only be to get his gun. There was a code on the streets and without teaching it in words, he lived it. Celeste wobbled on nonviolence, worked hard to keep the principle focused in her heart. But she knew, too, that if she was alone, walking on a Pineyville street, and an individual assaulted her, that person might get a response and she didn't really know what that response would be. She felt very clearly a hardening of her anger over the situation in Mississippi. She also knew real fear for the first time in her life. She continually pushed it down, sat on it, buried it, but still, it was there.
Along with Dolly Johnson and Mr. Landau, Sister Mobley, Geneva Owens, and Etta Singleton rounded out the class. Mrs. Owens and Mrs. Singleton were the best readers in the group. Others came and went, taking it all in, nodding and rustling around in nervousness. This was a big step to take for people who had been denied the vote since the end of Reconstruction, for people who lost their jobs if they even whispered about voting, whose homes were bombed if they walked in the front door of the courthouse. They had no memory of the meager, long-ago days when they could vote. The people remembered being told by the registrar of voters that voting wasn't for them, that they should stay out of whites folks' business no matter how many times they tried to register. They had clear memories, too, of the men who'd been shot, whose homes had been burned to the ground when they pushed the issue of voting farther than white folks allowed.
The Mississippi constitution gave everyone a headache but they read and reread it. They studied it and they studied the United States Constitution, too. Celeste grilled them and Reverend Singleton quoted bible passages that helped them stay with it. He knew his people well-he knew that he could slide a whole lot of new food onto a plate that had been greased by the bible. It was a long class that night, interminable to Celeste, who fought the residues of the alcohol's effect and who never stopped feeling Ed Jolivette's body close to hers on Otis Gilliam's linoleum-squared dance floor. Behind her talk of voting rights and grandfather clauses, she conjured ways for the night to never end, for Ed to decline going on to McComb in the morning, to stay there in Pineyville with her. She knew it wouldn't happen but she allowed herself the dream anyway.
Matt unloaded both sleeping bags out of the trunk and helped Mrs. Owens from the car on Freshwater Road. He'd been quiet on the trip back from Hattiesburg and nearly sullen after the class on the ride to the house. He'd seen with his own eyes how Celeste had danced with Ed. Celeste hoped it wouldn't influence his report on her project. Mrs. Owens chatted away in the car, grateful to have both men staying the night in her manless house. When she closed the front door behind her and Matt, Ed and Celeste took off for the pay phone to check in with the Jackson office.
Celeste scrunched down in the front seat watching Ed on the phone. She checked the main street for headlights, movements. The Pearl River County Administration building and Sheriff Trotter's office were three short blocks away. She hoped Sheriff Trotter and his deputies had turned in for the night.
Her eyes came back to Ed, tall and leaning, skin nearly as da
rk as the night. He couldn't have looked more different from J.D., but something about him reminded her of J.D. regardless. Danger? J.D. loved to roar his motorcycle over those country roads even when they were wet and slick, hanging on to the edge, pushing it as far as he could, snuggling up real close to death. Then there was his pursuit of her; she hadn't thought about that kind of risk until Shuck had nailed her on the subject of Negro women with white men. J.D. never spoke of how it might've thrilled him to swim hard against the tide. She too felt that rush walking the campus with him, seeing the heads turn now and then, seeing even a scowl or two and sometimes a tight-lipped smile.
Ed stood there with one elbow on the metal platform holding the pay phone, open to her. He was no back-facing man. Another daredevil, but with a calm voice denting the quiet night. Mississippi made the motorcycle rides and dating a white boy feel senseless. What was it for? Personal excitement, a high like a ride on a roller coaster? This high was defying guns and beatings to stand up in the face of history. But was there still an adrenaline rush? Maybe that, too.
"Ed Jolivette checkin' in." Accent falling on theJol. "Pineyville. All right, then." She loved the music in his way of speaking, thinking her own voice must sound very flat with its midwestern clip and drag.
"We going into McComb tomorrow." No fear, not in his voice anyway. Death defying. Ed sounded generous, unruffled but wary at the same time. He stood perfectly still in his bibbed denim overalls and a light shirt. Any white man with a gun could shoot him dead right before her eyes. At least she could duck down to the floor of the car. She scanned the darkness beyond the circle of the convenience light.
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