Celeste didn't move near Mrs. Owens. Guilt curled through her. She wanted to call out that Sissy had been coming to the kitchen to get her freedom school lessons against her father's orders, that Sissy came to the church and hung out by the door. Mrs. Owens knew that already, but no one dared say it to Mr. Tucker. It was their secret. Even Reverend Singleton didn't know. If Mr. Tucker saw Sissy running from the back of the house or running from the church door, he'd punish her. He'd made that clear enough.
"Mr. Tucker and Reverend Singleton out trying to find her. Y'all might as well come on in here cause they know everywhere to look and y'all don't." Mrs. Owens let the screen door thud behind her. It should have been a cracking slam, a sound to break the doomful anxiety into which they treaded.
"She just ran away from home is all." Firecrackers went off in Celeste's head. "Mr. Tucker keeps her on a short rope." She stopped herself from feeding her own frenzy. Thoughts thick as bulrushes at the edge of the Nile. Child gone. Need some luck here, Shuck. Need a good dream and a better number. Will you still bet on me, Shuck? "She always stays back by the door looking out for Mr. Tucker the whole time. She loves stories about slaves escaping. Frederick Douglass is her absolute favorite." She waited for a judgment from Ed Jolivette.
Mosquitoes plunged into their skins, making them slap their arms and legs, leaving little spots of blood and black stems. Had Sissy signaled that she was about to flee?
"There you go." Ed didn't say anything else. Did he mean the story of Frederick Douglass inspired a child to flee?
"What're you saying?" Celeste fed the child's wanderlust at every opportunity and now she thought it was too much.
"You came to Mississippi because of stories you heard," Ed said. "A child could dream of leaving for the same reason."
"Dreaming and doing it are two different things." Celeste stared down the road toward the Tucker house. "Shouldn't we check on Mrs. Tucker?" She scratched the new mosquito bites, rubbing the flaking suntanned skin on her arms and ankles.
"Best to wait here like Mrs. Owens said. If Mr. Tucker and Reverend Singleton don't find her, they'll go to the police." Ed slumped across the shoulders as he spoke. "I'm going to sit with y'all for a while, but I got to get back on the road." The chirping wail of crickets started in, like soldiers singing in time to their steps.
"Why don't we go to the police now? If Sissy ran away because of the story, she'll be waiting for night somewhere, then searching for the North Star and trying to follow it."
"They're not our police." Ed sounded like Shuck, one foot in the mainstream and the other running. God bless the child, Shuck always said. Who would bless Sissy? Not ourpolice? "Don't we have any police?" She mumbled it. Negroes barely had police in Detroit. The old people used to talk about it. If they stumbled onto a suspect or a solution, fine. If someone ratted, informed, they'd proceed. If Negroes didn't have police up there, they sure as hell didn't have any in Mississippi.
"She's a kid. Klan wouldn't want her." But as far as Sissy was concerned, the Klan wasn't the only danger. "If Mr. Tucker saw Sissy anywhere near the freedom school, he might be as bad as the Klan or worse." She put it out there hoping he'd pick it up.
Ed sat down on the porch steps with his legs apart, his elbows resting on his knees. "They don't care how old she is." His tight dark skin creased as if cut by a knife when he spoke. She saw the muscles in his jaws working.
"Doesn't have to be anything like that." Would he even entertain the thought that wherever Sissy was, it might not have anything to do with white people?
"What else would it be?" He took her in with the slightest break in his way of speaking. Something behind the words. He can't let it in. The possibility that Negro people destroyed each other too, even in the face of all the good that was going on. Not now, not during Freedom Summer.
"Negro people are no different from anybody else." She knew it wasn't true, sensed he could launch into epics that revealed how different Negroes were, starting with skin and hair, starting with slavery. Stand-outs, the differences shouted across the sunny landscape, dark skin stealing the light, always in high relief. Shadow people. Melody in the movements. Sorrows in the songs. Slavery changed everything forever. "Mr. Tucker's a dangerous man. Mrs. Owens said she saw the devil in his eyes one time. Like I said, he was real mean about Sissy coming to the freedom school." Celeste walked a few paces on the dry dirt path.
"Somebody's always disappearing in Mississippi." Ed seemed to be disappearing, too. He sounded like he didn't have anything left for this child.
He stood up and she leaned into him. Wasn't it enough that three young men had died? What else needed to happen for this to stop? She felt herself slipping down his body.
"You can't break now." There was still a sliver of light far off toward the west, pulling darkness across the world. She backed away from him for fear someone would see them showing affection in the open air. It was against movement rules to show affection, to fraternize romantically in the open.
"I hope it wasn't that Frederick Douglass story that sent Sissy running." But that's what she felt it was, that and her overbearing father. One way or another, it was the story that sang to Sissy, lulling her to believe that she too could be free by following a star. The freedom sirens opened their arms then pointed their fingers in the direction of her dreams. Messages coming from unseen places.
What felt like the last breath of life sighed out of her. "She must've come looking for me, and I was off in New Orleans having a good time."
"Don't do that." Ed reached for her but didn't pull her in close again.
"She's afraid of her father. Every time she stood in that church door, she knew she was challenging him. I should have been here." Celeste pleaded with him, with herself, with life.
"What were you going to do? Stop her father from being her father?" Ed shook his head.
She inhaled those words. Shuck pushed his fistgently into her lower spine. Stand up straight before Iput a board in your back. It was always God bless the child, even when it came to something as unknowable as this, even when it came to having the strength to go one more step when you felt the bones in your knees turning to chips. Sissy might've run the long way around and ended up in the trees behind Mrs. Owens's house, waiting for a sign. If the Hudson had turned onto Freshwater Road, she would've taken off through the pines.
Celeste walked into the house, Ed behind her. Mrs. Owens sat in a pyramid of light in the stifling kitchen, stricken and worn-out, with the bible on the table. Take it to the Lord. The back door was open as if some reprieve from the heat would walk up the weather-gray slat board steps, come inside, and sit awhile. Or Sissy, breaking into a run from the line of pines like a dart across the night, a shooting star, calling out, I don't want to go home. Celeste knew why she didn't want to go home. She knew why Sissy stayed by the church door, then disappeared, running around the neighborhood hurling herself at people, talking, lingering, laughing, letting everyone know she was any place but at the freedom school. Her alibi. Neighbors told Mrs. Tucker that Sissy stopped by. Mr. Tucker heard it. As long as she was nowhere near that freedom school.
They sat there, the house creaking and settling like it might fall if one more storm hit it. The bony dogs of Freshwater Road suddenly started howling and barking, kicking up dirt, sniffing for food, sending false alarms down the spine as they chased some skinny rat or gopher under the crawl space of another house just like this one.
But weren't they sitting in the kitchen too soon? Mourning begins here. When Grandma Pauline died, they'd gathered in the kitchen to whisper ancient stories, harvest tears, and stare into death's blank face. Even Wilamena had come to town for one day to bury her own mother. Long spaces of quiet as words failed. Sissy was only hiding from her father. We don't need to be in this kitchen yet.
Waxed paper covered a plate on the stove. Celeste put the plate into the buzzing refrigerator. Mrs. Owens poured iced tea for her and Ed, then started slowly turning the pages of her bible. Da
rkness but for the single lightbulb overhead. They were three poker players in a backroom joint betting on Sissy's return. Ed planted his hands on the table and leaned back away from them in his chair. Steel in his eyes saying I'm notgetting on board theJesus train. The service in Meridian had taken its toll.
"I love Thee, 0 Lord, my strength." Mrs. Owens read from Psalm i8. "The Lord is my rock and my fortress and my deliverer."
Celeste found her lips moving along for a line or two, remembering she'd heard it a million times from Momma Bessie, Grandma Pauline, and every other Negro woman of a certain age she'd ever known. It was when their men died or went wild murdering themselves, or fell into the angry traps set for them every step of the way. They were there on Sunday mornings, fanning and fainting, when life and men became more than they could bear, when they needed the Lord as substitute man, as balm for life's never-ending abrasions.
Geneva Owens closed her eyes. "Lord, Jesus, please spare this child." She slid the bible to Celeste. "Now, Celeste, you read. Try the 29. That's one we read together." Proud that here she was the teacher.
Celeste turned the thin, crinkling pages. Corners folded here and there. Rainy tear spots, circles of salt eating at the black-ink words and the oily secretions of desperate hands marking use, agreement, supplication. "Ascribe to the Lord, 0 sons of the mighty, ascribe to the Lord glory and strength." The words moved around in her mouth like sand crabs walking sideways, seeking a tide pool. Shuck didn't give much credence to the bible. Said it had a way of hamstringing life. Momma Bessie and Grandma Pauline tussled with it, succumbed to it. She didn't have a clue as to where Wilamena was with it. "The voice of the Lord is powerful, the voice of the Lord is majestic." If not this bible, then what?
Celeste moved the bible towards Ed. Leaning back in his chair, respectful and disdainful at the same time. Arms folded across his chest. No.
Ed had lost faith. Was life in the south mean enough to wrench a person's faith right from their soul? Celeste thought that it might be, and turned her mind away from the bible on the table.
Thin streaks of night coolness laced the heavy air. Mrs. Owens turned to the Book of Lamentations and read, "Remember my affliction and my wandering, the wormwood and bitterness. Surely my soul remembers, and is bowed down within me." She closed the book and rose from her chair, breaking the spell of lethargy. In the dim cave of light, Celeste looked into the darkness beyond the window.
Ed drove off into the night, heading for the Hattiesburg project where he'd meet up with Matt. Celeste held her breath as he pulled away, had kept quiet about asking him to stay and sleep again on Mrs. Owens's parlor floor. He and Matt would monitor the Hattiesburg project then continue on to Crystal Springs. She gnashed her teeth when she finally slept, a grinding that she heard in her dreams. Behind her eyes, John Coltrane played a celestial solo on a dark stage in a single circle of light. A white man stood in the middle of the concert hall, raised a gun, and shot him dead. Ed leaped from his seat beside her, his long legs climbing over seat backs, shoulders, people screaming. He tackled the man, took the gun, and shot him. Ed said "goodbye" with his eyes, ran toward an exit, and jumped into an ink-black river. He was gone.
22
The new morning sunlight hammered through the curtains. Thank God her room faced west. Celeste lay on her mattress on the floor, trying to remember what day it was. Just before dawn, she awakened, turned out the light, and napped some more, dreamed. Sissy hadn't knocked on her bedroom window. No hushed child's voice called, "Miss Celeste, I'm out here." the house barely breathed.
Celeste arranged the flat pillows and wrapped her legs around them. She dozed, dreaming of searching for Sissy on the wintry shores of Lake St. Clair wrapped in a blanket of hard-grained sand. The wind flew off the lake in frozen sheets, building the swirling snow into cotton-white dunes. She called to Sissy, her mouth full of snow, then crawled on frozen knees to the last place Sissy could've gone. To the water's edge.
She woke, the heat of the day rising and the sound of a car coming to a graveled finish in front of the house. Good, she thought. A visitor. She smelled baking biscuits and crept to the window. Reverend Singleton, hat in hand, no jacket, white shirt unbuttoned at the neck, tieless, closed his car door. Across the road, bluebirds flitted in deep pink crepe myrtle, and black crows marched in single file along the power lines. Reverend Singleton's hard-bottomed shoes struck the rickety front steps at a slow pace. He knocked on the outside screen door.
Mrs. Owens came from the back of the house. Celeste heard the small flat clank of the hook and eye being released and of Reverend Singleton stepping onto the porch out of the sun. Their voices were submerged in the splash of water as she quickly washed her face in the basin and brushed her teeth. Reverend Singleton and Mrs. Owens sounded as they did on the morning when she'd first heard them speaking together in the kitchen, but more somber.
"Celeste, Reverend Singleton here, want to talk to us." Mrs. Owens voice lifted onto a tight rope, high and breathless, just outside her bedroom curtain.
Celeste repeated her mantra, deep sigh words: We need some luck here, Shuck. "Yes, ma'am. I'm up." She did her daily ritual of throwing the mattress back up on the bed.
Reverend Singleton's eye whites were streaked with red lines. Orange and brown dirt smudges pocked his shirtfront. His sleeves were rolled to the elbows. It was crowded with three people, the rocking chair, and the straight-backed chair on the tiny porch, and Celeste wondered if it sank any under the weight. She felt fidgety, her hands searching for anchors, neck locked.
"Sister Owens, might I have a glass of water?" Reverend Singleton's eyes, usually forward-looking, direct, and strong, went sorrowful, sluggish. He seemed too tired to insist on anything.
"I'll get it." Celeste followed the aroma of frying bacon to the kitchen. Mrs. Owens called to her to turn the fire off under the skillet. A tin of fresh baked biscuits sat on the other side of the stove. She got the pitcher of cold water from the refrigerator and poured a glass for Reverend Singleton and drank off a glass herself, looking out the back door. No Sissy in the trees. Her dream flowed into a memory. She stood there holding the pitcher, staring out the kitchen door, not wanting to return to the front of the house.
On the porch, she handed Reverend Singleton the glass and thought of leaving again for something else, anything, to not hear what she knew he was about to say.
"I saw something I thought was orange in the light." Reverend Singleton drank. The water calmed him. "Couldn't tell from a distance. Could've been anything." He stopped to breathe, his eyes picking up life again. "Flowers. Could've been a late-blooming flower from a yellow-poplar tree in there or something. A lilly. Up close, it was pink."
She'd seen them, water lilies, floating on the bayou by the side of the road going down to Sophie Lewis's house.
Their lips went dry. Mrs. Owens backed up a step, stood now in the main doorway-her house behind her, drawing her away from this news. Celeste focused with all her might on Reverend Singleton.
"Don't you want a cup of coffee or something?" Mrs. Owens' hands fluttered as if blocking invisible messages. Her face sank into her head, the creases and furrows in her brow hanging in cliffs and ridges. "I'm makin' some breakfast. You welcome." Mrs. Owens stalled, not ready to hear the rest, trying to pull up the past, the pleasant breakfasts shared with Reverend Singleton when all seemed well. This ruined it all. Breakfast, a last meal before death taps on the door.
"No, ma'am. I been out all night with Mr. Tucker. We been in the woods, been... I got to get home. Thank you, though." Reverend Singleton didn't want to say it anymore than they wanted to hear it.
"What happened?" Celeste knew by now that country people didn't ask a lot of questions, just accepted everything. Like it was fate.
"Sissy was floating in Cataboula Creek southeast of here, her dress caught on some tree roots." His eyes teared. "That's all I know." He finished the water.
Celeste took his glass but couldn't move. Reverend Singleton st
ood just inside the screen door, while Mrs. Owens blocked the entry to the house. She felt stuck nearly in the middle of the leaning porch.
Shuck, what's the number when death is real? There's no good luck in it. Do we bet on death? Is it the only sure bet going? No phones to pick up, to hear the news from unseen faces. Everything from lips to ears with eyes to see and arms to hold. Sissy floating in the creek. But not the faking, playful deadman's float that kids did in summer lakes and pools back home. What was this? A little brown girl in pink with ribbons in her hair, her dress a water-filled balloon, her lungs new caves for tadpoles and swirling dense water. Not splashing and playing with other children to cool their molting skins in the deepest part of summer.
Celeste's face hardened into a mask so steely the backside of it had to be tears. "What you think?" Now she was talking like a local, even heard Wilamena in her mind telling her not to talk low. Said in her mind, What do you think?
Reverend Singleton released his own tears from the corners of his eyes and wiped them away with his hands. "They have to tell us something from over at Morris's. You know." He'd seen her floating. His tears would not be dammed behind any sort of mask. To see is to believe even among the faithful.
"But that's a funeral home. They don't know about investigating a death." Celeste pushed forward with her big-city knowledge even though that was exactly what she wasn't supposed to do. Let the locals lead. She cornered herself near her bedroom window, wished she could crawl inside, go back to bed.
"Mr. Tucker's in a shock." Reverend Singleton's eyes said something else to her.
"What's he think?" Celeste couldn't stop herself. It galled her that he was in shock now after trying to quash Sissy by degrees, the girl's child eyes going from great question marks to empty almond shells every time he came near. He had no right to be in shock. "He blames me?" The words had crept together into a thought without her even knowing they were on the move.
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