Zenia, for the first time, sounded like she had some sense. Celeste felt nothing but confusion.
Silence. Celeste was trapped, couldn't move back into her room or run out the front door into Freshwater Road screaming. She never had gone to see Mrs. Tucker about Sissy. It might have given the woman an opportunity to tell something. It might have given Celeste a chance to say something, too.
"Let me get these greens in the box." Celeste heard Mrs. Owens's chair move away from the table, heard her forking greens into bowls and refrigerating them. "He wouldn't know what to do without you."
The only words flying through Celeste's mind, ready to leap from her mouth were, "Lord, have mercy." She felt as if Mrs. Owens had betrayed Zenia Tucker and her, too. But Mrs. Owens wasn't a betraying kind of person. What did this mean?
"I don't know what to do with him no more." Mrs. Tucker sounded distant.
"You got to think about them boys. They your children, too." Geneva Owens brought her practical reality to the table.
Celeste heard it but somehow it wasn't enough to justify the rest. Mrs. Tucker had to make it through this crisis because of her two other children. Understood. But was staying there with "the devil" the only way to do it? Clarity came so slowly. What else was a poor woman with two other children supposed to do? Run away from home? And do what? Celeste's head pounded.
"I better get on." A chair scuffed the floor. Bare feet softly padding over the linoleum. The back door opened.
"Watch yourself now." Mrs. Owens relatched the screen door, alarms laying quietly in her voice.
"Don't feel I have much to lose one way or the other." She must've been walking away because her voice disappeared.
"It'll be better in a while." Mrs. Owens called it out.
The old pump on the back porch sucked, gurgled, and spewed, the gears grinding in their connection.
Celeste crawled back into her room, sat on the floor leaning against the bed, staring into the lightless room. Sissy had escaped to the only freedom she would ever know. A crank turned in Celeste's stomach. She tried to wrap her racing mind around the possibility that Mr. Tucker molested his daughter, that he killed her. Mrs. Tucker seemed to be saying that and not saying it at the same time. As mean as he was, Celeste wouldn't allow it to take shape in her head. How, in these tiny wood houses where every creak and groan echoed through the rooms? Had Mrs. Tucker covered her head with pillows, put orange dirt in her ears and gone to the outhouse in the middle of the night instead of using her night jar, sat on her screened porch rocking and singing to herself, blotting out the sounds? What about those sons? They wouldn't even know the difference. Zenia Tucker reached for reason in an unreasonable world, but still, Mr. Tucker had a hand in killing Sissy, Celeste believed. If he didn't hold her head under the water, he chased her to the water's edge and damned her to save herself.
The day after Sissy's funeral, Celeste woke to the smells of chicory-laced coffee and frying bacon. A scattered dog bark, a blackbird's cawing. She lay there staring at the ceiling. Late summer felt like a sojourn through hell's basement with no vents and no stairway out. Birds flew short trips from shady tree perches to any nearby water. Dogs slept during the day under houses, cars, rocks. Mississippi's already slow-moving life rhythm became a piteous crawl, the blood flow thickened like molasses.
In Detroit, a thousand cool lakes and pools relieved. When things got too oppressive, the city opened water hydrants to cool the roaming summer children. In Mississippi, you sat and rocked and fanned. You drank iced tea and lemonade until it ran out of your ears, until the sweetness made your teeth ache and your stomach turn.
At the funeral, the Tuckers had sat in the front row near the stained and polished wood casket, which was balanced on two sawhorses with a white drape, the lid half open. The freedom school children placed their strings of flowers across the lid. Other homemade flower arrangements surrounded the casket. Reverend Singleton taught the lesson of II Samuel, Chapter 12, on the death of a child, saying that during the time Sissy could not be found, eyes feasted on tears and hearts cracked, feet trod the forests in the night searching. Now Sissy lived in her new home and it was time to celebrate her placement in God's Kingdom. He spoke of her death without saying what had happened to her, as if she was a sacrifice for the greater good, as if she'd died to pull them together and move them forward. Celeste sat in the church staring at the back of Mr. Tucker's head as she'd done in the car the first day she met Sissy, suppressing the urge to stand and testify against him, to tell all she'd heard Zenia Tucker say in Mrs. Owens's kitchen. The Negro community had closed ranks against the truth.
When it came time to file past the casket, Etta Singleton played "Amazing Grace." Mr. Tucker stood and put his hand out for his wife. She didn't move. It seemed he stood there for the longest time waiting for her to get up. He leaned in trying to pry her from the seat, but she brushed his hands off and lowered her head, her shoulders caving in, sobs coming from her that were so wrenching that soon the entire church body wept openly. Crying and fanning with the desolate music squeezing out the last heartfelt memory of Sissy, and anyone else who'd died in recent memory.
Finally, Mr. Tucker walked alone to Sissy's casket, stood briefly, then took his seat, his head down. Then Mrs. Tucker got up and leaped towards the casket, flinging herself over it, rocking the sawhorses, sobbing. Reverend Singleton, in a white robe that flew out behind him, rushed over to comfort her and to pry her fingers from the edges of the casket. He walked her back to her seat. She stayed well away from Mr. Tucker, on the other side of her two boys, and never once looked at her husband.
When Geneva Owens and Celeste walked past the casket, Celeste set her eyes on the cloth cradling Sissy. She didn't want to see the lifeless brown body that used to be a living, breathing child whose face was all questions. Finally, she looked at the dead child. What marks had been hidden by the mortician's "good" work? Those almond eyes pressed close, set above high cheekbones in a delicate oval face. Dark hair plaited and adorned with white ribbons. Celeste wanted to raise her up out of the coffin and shake the life back into her. Pineyville needed a second line, a better way to release this pain.
When she and Mrs. Owens turned from the casket to resume their seats, Celeste felt the eyes of Mr. Tucker on her like firebrands. He glared with open hostility, seemed ready to come after her right there in the church. The mourners wept and squirmed in their seats, but no one stood to testify, to call out a thought as to what had really happened to Sissy. Someone filled with anger and impatience, some man or woman of the town who'd grown weary of having no police except ones who terrified them, might have stood up for Sissy's life and her death. But they didn't. They mourned her as if by rote, as if mourning children compared to feeding chickens. The Negro community of Pineyville crying, sobbing really, but no one said a word.
They buried Sissy just beyond the sacred ground in the regular cemetery.
On the way back to Freshwater Road, Celeste stopped at the pay phone and dialed the Jackson office, not sure if the words to come would be a begging plea to be relieved of her responsibility or not. She asked to speak to Ed Jolivette and when he came on the line, she didn't know what to say. After a long pause, she got out, "We just buried Sissy." The sun knuckled her under. "I don't think I'm going to make it." Her lips moved, desert winds of heat crossing her mouth, her head leaning against the metal frame that held the phone, knees locked so she wouldn't fall. Reverend Singleton and his wife and Mrs. Owens waited in the car.
24
Celeste dreamed of death like an old person reaching back for life. Sissy, a low-flying angel, swept through her nights. Celeste thought before she awoke that soon she'd be with Sissy, flying free; they'd wave to Mickey Schwerner, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, Medgar Evers and all the others, and life would be so peaceful and clean, so beautiful, you had to turn your eyes away. Unbearable beauty. That turning away woke her thinking in real time that her days were numbered. She'd been spared when the troopers be
at Matt on the highway, untouched when the cops in Jackson picked her up for littering the sidewalk with her fliers. It was about averages. Much like walking on balance beams. You had to fall sometime, and you knew it would hurt. Going to see Mr. Heywood, the registrar of voters, she figured, would be her time for falling.
Reverend Singleton set up a mock registrar's office in the space between the front row and the pulpit steps. He'd seen the registrar's office on more than one occasion and described it for them. A polished dark oak counter divided the large space into a waiting area with hard chairs near the entry door and a typist/secretary area with desks, where three white women sat talking on the telephone and typing. A large Confederate flag was tacked up on one wall of the typist area. The windows on the their side overlooked the main street and the entrance to the building. On the countertop, large ledger books were stacked like squat posts. A small shiny chrome press-bell illuminated the counter. The inner door with "Mr. Heywood" in block gold letters led to the registrar's office. Reverend Singleton said he'd never gotten that far.
Those who had chosen not to go on the first try play-acted the roles of the whites, berating the would-be registrants, even pretending to hit them. The first-round volunteers had to fervently embrace nonviolence. The fury unleashed when a Negro person fought back could not be anticipated or measured. Beprepared to drop to the floor, pray, singfreedom songs, do whatever you can to protect yourself, but do not retaliate. The moral responsibility for what happened lay then at the feet of the aggressor. Some whites didn't care. Some Negroes wanted to fight, didn't have any more cheeks to turn. Mr. Landau was that kind of man.
Mr. Landau was the only man besides Reverend Singleton to attend all the voter education classes over the summer. But he was still a member in good standing of the Deacons for Defense and Justice in Bogalusa. No way for him to go with the first group to see Mr. Heywood unless he disavowed all violence, self-defensive or not. He'd as soon pull out a shotgun and start blasting if the going got rough-especially against the women. The Deacons would provoke no violence, but they'd let no attack go unanswered. The various church members who'd listed in and out of the class all summer volunteered for the second, third, and fourth groups.
At Sunday church services, Reverend Singleton continued to make reference to the memorial service in Meridian, preached more than one sermon about why the three had been killed, about how that put the torch in the hands of each of them to carry on. He never talked about Sissy. Their children, he said, must know what those young men stood for, that they laid down their lives for freedom. He vigorously underlined the fact that two of the dead boys were white. This freedom was beyond and above race. There was no turning back now. They'd spent the summer in preparation for the days to come and everyone had to be on board the train. If you couldn't ride in the first car, that was fine, ride in the second or the third. It didn't matter if you ended up in the caboose as long as you were on the train. He preached more calmly, laying it out for everyone. Celeste heard Ed Jolivette's quiet, zen-like approach in the reverend's new way of preaching. He fired up the congregation for only the briefest moment. She wondered if the churchgoers were disappointed, if he'd intentionally left them smoldering rather than allowing them to release their pent-up and sometimes furious spiritual passion, a religious passion that had, it seems, as much to do with oppression as with anything else. They were going to need all of that and more to get through what lay ahead.
On a Monday morning, Celeste and Mrs. Owens climbed into the back seat of Reverend Singleton's car dressed in their churchgoing clothes. Mrs. Owens wore her hat, her hair braided and snuggled at the nape of her neck. She brought along her bible, as if the experience of going to see the registrar of voters had some religious significance. Celeste had washed and ironed her peach cotton dress, but decided not to wear her pumps in case things got out of hand. She wore her tennis shoes-she wanted to be able to dodge any blows without slipping in those pumps, or getting her toes squashed in her sandals. Her hair was pulled back in her usual summer ponytail.
Way down the road, Reverend Singleton stopped for the thread-thin Sister Mobley who stood outside her house in a much-washed summer dress, holding her bible and a small cotton purse. She climbed in next to Reverend Singleton in the front seat. Celeste wondered if the bibles were meant to protect them from blows to the head. Or maybe they give solace, a spiritual buttress against the realization that the white people of Pineyville despised them beyond their wildest and worst anticipations, possessing a simmering hatred, an unqualified disdain that could be provoked by a laugh or even a smile, and ratcheted up quickly and irrationally to physical abuse. The local Negroes knew this, but had learned to live in fear of it, had bowed down in the unyielding face of it for too many years to count. The hope was that nonviolence would tamp down the hatred a bit, keep it from erupting like Vesuvius when these awakened Negro people stood up and said, I'm here, I matter. Celeste knew already that this hatred would not be conquered by the summer, or by a winter or any other quantification of time.
"Where you at, Miss Tyree?" Tony stood on the sagging front porch waving, the little man of the broke-down house, left at home to babysit his two shoeless younger sisters while his mother went to register to vote. She'd never heard "where you at?" until Ed Jolivette said it. Now, Tony used it with a smile as if he knew something. It made her blush.
She waved. "All right now, Tony. You take care." She turned her eyes away, pretended to do something on the car seat. At this distance, Tony couldn't read the embarrassment she felt for the poverty the Mobleys lived in. She faced the boy through the open car window again. "See you in school tomorrow morning, Tony." She wanted to tell him what to do in case she wasn't there, in case she was sitting in the Pearl River County jail, but that might scare him.
"I be there." He helped the younger ones wave goodbye.
Sister Mobley leaned in front of Reverend Singleton and called out to him. "Mind the girls, Tony."
"Yes, ma'am." Tony looked like a miniature man, arms around the shoulders of his younger sisters.
The car pulled away. If they got arrested, who in God's name would care for Tony and those little girls? Celeste stared at her hands in her lap, helpless. What if they weren't allowed a phone call? Wilamena waved from the wings, whispering I told you it was too much to bear. Shuck stood on the other side, his best-of-Negro-life wallpaper lit up behind him.
"Etta's coming if we get arrested." Reverend Singleton must have seen the forlorn look on Celeste's face in his rearview mirror, spoke as if he'd been inside her head.
She nodded, relieved. "Will she meet the children for freedom school?"
The DeSoto crunched the gravel and sand road. "She'll be there for a bit. Long enough to make sure they're all right."
"Good." Fear cartwheeled inside Celeste-for them, for the children, for every Negro person in Mississippi. She watched the cypress wood shackhouses of Freshwater Road, one in slightly better repair than another, all too small for families, too airy, too rundown to be anything but firewood. It felt like they were going to a funeral.
The Tucker boys sat on their front porch staring with blank faces at the passing car. No sign of Zenia Tucker. Celeste saw them turning into copies of Mr. Tucker already, hoped they'd catch themselves before then. Zenia wasn't much good to them now.
Mrs. Owens fidgeted with her bible. "What about our bail?" She glanced out at her little house as they rolled by. Everything quiet.
Celeste disconnected her feelings from the house when they passed; she needed to separate herself from everything. Just float. No memories of Ed in the front seat of Matt's car, no day in New Orleans riding on the St. Charles Avenue streetcar and kissing in the shady sunlight of Audubon Park, no need to call Shuck, not even any anger at Wilamena. Just free float. Nothing in her pocket but identification and payphone money. Kleenex. Maybe she should've put in Band-Aids and disinfectant for any wounds. Hard to carry a bottle of mercurochrome, though. They needed a good first-aid kit
for Reverend Singleton's car. She'd forgotten.
"What if someone gets hit or something? We might need a doctor." She realized instantly she shouldn't have asked that question in front of Mrs. Owens and Sister Mobley.
"We just have to pray that doesn't happen, and if it does anyway, we'll just have to run over to Hattiesburg. There's a doctor over there who'll treat Negroes." Reverend Singleton put the prayer in it. Mrs. Owens and Sister Mobley kept their eyes hard on the road ahead. Celeste, as embedded as she was in this town and in this moment, shook her head, sinking inside at the neglectful thing Reverend Singleton said. There's a doctor over there who'll treat Negroes. How had this insanity lasted for so long? She'd believed her entire life that doctors had a spiritual significance, right up there next to ministers, that they would not traffic in prejudice and bigotry. Healers. They were healers.
"Etta'll come and bail us out, if it comes to that. She's got the money to get started. The Jackson office will send down more with a lawyer," he reminded them. The church body had planned for this day by putting nickels and dimes in a special basket all summer long. Sophie Lewis had also contributed more, just for this. The One Man, One Vote office pitched in money, too. Northern volunteers put in their own bail money. She knew Shuck had followed her instructions. If they were arrested, they'd be in jail for at least a few hours.
"I was sure hoping Mr. Landau would change his mind and come on." Sister Mobley stared out the window.
They neared the town center. Reverend Singleton gripped the steering wheel with both hands. "Well, he's with us in spirit, you know that."
Celeste wished he'd been ready, too, but in truth, she wished he'd come and brought along one of his guns. Be nice to have a man with a gun protecting them when they walked in that building. Maybe someone stationed in the thick foliage of the trees. Maybe he'd bring his whole group of Deacons for Defense and Justice to stand guard. That would change things. All-out war. Celeste chastised herself for dwelling on self-defense with guns. It was a flight of fancy, a protective urge, but it went against everything the movement was about that summer. She'd already heard Matt and Ed speak of the Deacons as if they were black angels, protector spirits. It wasn't just her own terrified thinking. Everyone thought it. And it was natural to do so, to think of protecting oneself, one's community from people who would destroy it. The philosophy of nonviolence wouldn't help against the blows. It might help in rebuilding the character of the south. Later.
Freshwater Road Page 29
