Sister Mobley stood up. "I saw it with my own two eyes. It was awful. That Mr. Heywood grabbed aholt of Sister Owens and me, and that sheriff put his gun right to her temple, held it there, then he pushed this child and the reverend out the door. Oh, Lord a mercy." She swooned back into her seat.
Mr. Landau stood and everyone quieted. "I know you don't believe in self-defense. I know. But, if the brothers in the Deacons only drove their cars over there, stayed in their cars with their guns, all this would go a whole lot better."
With no instruction from her brain, Celeste felt her head nod in the affirmative. It sounded reasonable until she remembered that in truth, that kind of confrontation would lead to a bloodbath, and even the Deacons for Defense and Justice didn't have enough guns to win. The whites had all the old laws on their side, too. It just sounded so good when Mr. Landau said it. She had seen the hatred in Sheriff Trotter's eyes, in Mr. Heywood's, too.
Reverend Singleton thanked Mr. Landau and asked him to stay around, to have a word with him at the end of the meeting. Mr. Landau sat down. Celeste would get to hear what Reverend Singleton had to say to Mr. Landau as he and Mrs. Singleton always drove her, Mrs. Owens, and Sister Mobley back to Freshwater Road after the meetings.
Reverend Singleton called for the second group of volunteers to be ready to go with the first group to swell their numbers. They would meet at the church again in the morning and go to the County Administration building again and again and again until someone in this town was registered to vote. He asked them to stand and led them in the singing of freedom songs. The singing felt good to Celeste, released the residual anxiety from the day, from the gun to her temple, but she knew it was only the beginning and only God knew where it would end.
After the singing and the greeting, Dolly Johnson and Mr. Landau stayed behind and volunteered to join the group on the next visit to the county building. Reverend Singleton took Mr. Landau to the side, leaving all the women. Celeste felt she should've been included in that conversation, which she was sure was about nonviolence, and tried to hear what was being said. A few minutes later, Mr. Landau walked from the church without saying another word to anyone. Reverend Singleton gave her a quick nod.
Celeste had hoped against hope that Sissy's death would provoke Mrs. Tucker to stand up and away from her husband as she'd done at the funeral. She had it in her mind that Zenia Tucker would appear at the church door, just as her daughter had done. Celeste prayed that the woman would find the courage to join them as a way of healing her own heart. Her prayer had not been answered and her hands were tied because she could not go to that house and try to convince Mrs. Tucker that this thing they were doing was Sissy's dream, too.
When Reverend Singleton brought the rest of them back to Freshwater Road, Celeste walked to the big mailbox, praying for something, anything that had life outside Pineyville written on it. She reached inside and felt the soft pad of mail. Letters. This place of no phones made letters so much more important, scripted voices from places far away. A storm began to whisper, the clouds gaining girth. She brought the mail out and read her name on an envelope. The return address was the One Man, One Vote office in Jackson, and "E.J" was written above it. The others were for Mrs. Owens. One had a Chicago return address-probably from her sons. She put the letter in her book-bag, grinning right into the dark clouds. She held her face up to catch the fine drizzle that began to fall, seeing Ed Jolivette with the moonlight on his dark skin, catching the whiteness of his teeth. In her mind, he was always dancing.
She placed Mrs. Owens's mail on the kitchen table. In the quiet of her room, the rain pelting the small house, Celeste opened the thick letter and pulled out a small stack of color photos. Cloth on bolts and ribbons in exuberant colors, strings of garlic and red peppers hanging on nails above bins of peaches, grapes, piles of bananas, okra, and tomatoes. Loaves of bread wrapped in paper. And long windowed houses with green shutters and balconies, wrought-iron railings in fleur-de-lis patterns, iron fencing and gates with corn on the cob posts, each kernel in detail. A photo of the St. Charles Avenue streetcar going up the middle of the shady street. For the first time she blessed the fact that she didn't have a telephone in this house. She flattened the letter on her lap like a document, smoothing the fold creases, read "Sugar" at the top of the page. Good. If he was saying something as bitter as goodbye, he wouldn't start with something so sweet. She flopped back on her soft bed. Her eyes stayed on the "Sugar," refused to float on down the page. She heard him saying the word in her ear.
I been thinking about you, the way your face made the stars and the moon run for cover, afraid ofyourglow. You stole my heart and now I'm walking around Mississippi completely heartless. You are too cruel. A woman in the office in Jackson asked me why Ilooked so sad. I told her I lost my heart and didn't know ifI'd ever find it again. Didn't want you to forget the French Quarter, the St. Charles Avenue street car, Audubon Park, and me.
Ed
She closed her eyes, feeling the after-rain stagnation gathering intensity, the ponds festering, rivers slowing, her heart all muddy desolation. This was the kind of viscous humidity that stopped you where you stood, had you staring into space vacantly, not bothering to bathe or change clothes, not able to pass through the weight of the air. She stretched out on the bed, too weary to pull her mattress down to the floor. She held the letter flat on her breasts, clutching the sides of the paper. The letter was her shield, her lifesaver, her hope for a better tomorrow away from this place, a dream of colors and dancing, of sunlight on rooftops. But she knew, too, that this man had a beautiful but dangerous heart. Untouchable in a sense, because she knew that this thing in Mississippi owned him, though they'd never spoken of it. That commitment she trusted, but it was the thing that would preclude all else. She felt drugged, sinking into the mattress, its fine hairy fibers creeping into her nose and stopping the flow of air into her lungs.
25
With one index finger crooked in the steering wheel and his mind on Celeste, Shuck eased the Cadillac to the curb, the sunlight reflecting off the long hood of the glossy car like the stage lights at the Fox Theatre off of Cab Calloway's big white suit. The top was down. Momma Bessie's house sat there like an old memory. It hadn't changed in the slightest since Momma Bessie and his father, Ben, first bought it. They'd gotten in early on the opening of the West Side to Negro people ready to buy the small, well-built, two-story houses. The area grew into a haven for the up and coming, a coveted world, the strivers row of Detroit.
Shuck grew up surrounded by an odd mix of families like his own and resentful whites who were slow to see what was coming and got stuck. Even progressive-minded whites who intended to stay put regardless eventually moved or died out. Now this was old. Other neighborhoods opened. The houses on LaSalle, Boston, and Chicago Boulevards made this one look like a miniature. Even Shuck's house on Outer Drive was no big deal in Detroit anymore. One or two well-off Negroes had bought into Indian Village, even Palmer Woods. Shuck sat in the car thinking that somebody might've already made it into Grosse Pointe-whether the white folks out there knew the buyers were Negroes was another story.
Momma Bessie's deep emerald green lawn, summer-cut high, was wellwatered and weed-free. He paid a gardener to do the yards on Outer Drive and here once a week in the summer and to shovel the snow in the winter. Shuck heard his own footsteps on the wood stairs, surveyed the seasoned porch furniture. Momma Bessie took care of things so that they lasted until Shuck had to unhinge her grip from them. She'd used her manual wringer washing machine until Shuck sent her off to Bermuda on a vacation then had the old washer removed and a new electric one installed in the basement. She accepted it, but he knew she would've been just fine with the old one until its L-shaped handle fell off and clanked to the basement floor. It was the same all through the house. Old but shining like new.
Before he crossed the few feet of porch, Momma Bessie had arrived at the front door and swung it open. She rarely gave him time to use his key. Sh
e was tall, a subtle mixture of brown and yellow skin, gray hair bunned in at the neck. Shuck had noticed she was beginning that slight tilt forward, heavier now that she didn't work every day, that she was up in age. No one had a clue as to why close people started calling her Momma Bessie, but they did. Mrs. Annie Rose Tyree had been quite a looker in her day. Still wore her housedresses starched and ironed, never went out without a hat on Sundays.
Shuck kissed her on the cheek, saw the delight in her eyes every time he came in the door. He walked through the vestibule to the neat living room with the television angled in the corner, the curtains closed against the sun, the carpet vacuumed with not a footprint in it, the sofa and two upholstered chairs set for conversation or television watching. The coffee table glittered with crystal pieces and mementos of Momma Bessie and Ben's travels in years past. Ashtrays from Bermuda, California, and Las Vegas. In this living room, children had been encouraged to sit on the floor. Celeste and Billy didn't earn chair rights until they entered high school.
He went out the back door to check the yard, the fence and gate, the garage with his father's old Mercury still sitting in there. Momma Bessie never would learn to drive. He should get rid of that car. He walked along the narrow yard pavement, the sun high and hot, marveling at her gardening, the small yard worthy of photographing with its roses and peonies, morning glories and lilac bushes. The ancient apple tree still bore the fruit that she used to make the best apple pies on the West Side of Detroit.
Back inside, Shuck climbed the stairs, hand on the smooth oak railing, checked windows, screens, faucets, drains, the toilet in the one bathroom. Stood in the room that had been his own as a teenager, the room he slept in when he met Wilamena in high school, the room they slept in just before they got married, the room he came back to when she left him. Momma Bessie hadn't changed one thing. He kept clothes in the closet. Could stay the night here and never bring a thing with him. The past lived in this house, pressed into overcrowded closets, in shoeboxes and hat boxes in the attic. He glanced at the framed photograph on the chest of drawers of Billy, Celeste, and himself standing in front of the Royal Gardens the day it opened. The ghost in the picture was Wilamena. Celeste looked just like her when she was a child. Still did.
Downstairs, he sat at the dining room table where in years past he'd written his policy numbers every day of the week. Shuck could see his reflection in the tabletop. Used to come in with a head full of numbers and bets, a doubled brown paper bag full of cash. Would sit at this table with his small book and rectangles of inky copy paper that he slid in under the top sheet as he wrote down the numbers and the code names for the people who'd made the bets. At each stop on his route, he wrote the numbers and bets for his customers on little papers so each customer had a copy. He never drove through the streets with the numbers slips, knew the police watched for men like him who lived well and never punched a time card. He called in his numbers, put the books in a shoebox in the basement, and took the money to the "bank." Late in the afternoon he'd come back as the numbers fell, coming off the racetrack. In the evenings he'd go pay off his winners.
Shuck played fair and square and people trusted him, and some stood right in front of him and cried when he said he was finished running numbers. He became the bank, let the runners come to him. He'd felt the heat of the police, knew it was time to make some changes. After a good hit, he bought the Royal Gardens and pulled back from the numbers game altogether; luck, he knew, was like the weather, and it was hard to live the good life in jail. Shuck, with his bar and his house on Outer Drive, became a respectable Detroit businessman. His only contact with that other world came through the vendors he needed for the bar. The Mafia controlled the jukebox business and the liquor business, and had a hand in cigarettes. It was all about distribution, and no Negro man had been able to crack that. More than a few, he knew, had died trying.
Momma Bessie poured him iced tea with lemon and a sprig of mint from the backyard and gave him a coaster for his glass. He heard her rummaging in the front hall closet, covering the dress shirts she ironed for him with dry cleaner's plastic, thinking that was why he was there. How many shirts he brought, that's how many she washed and ironed. When he didn't bring them, she acted as if he'd broken her heart. So once a week, he came with a bag of dirty dress shirts and picked up the washed and ironed ones, the starch in the collar and cuffs done exactly the way he liked. She said she turned to her stories on the television, set up the ironing board, and by the time the stories went off, she was finished. Said the ironing was good for her arms, just like working in that yard.
Shuck drank the perfect blend of tea, sugar, mint, and lemon, not a bit sure what he wanted to talk about or if he wanted to talk at all. This house was his touchstone. If he just came in, walked through the rooms, sat for a moment, it convinced him that things held, that everything wasn't just flying off in directions. Sometimes, he knew, he wanted things to fly off, to be forgotten.
Momma Bessie didn't know Celeste was in Mississippi and he wasn't going to tell her. He'd told her, instead, that Celeste had stayed in Ann Arbor for summer school.
"Where's your shirts?" She gently laid the ironed ones across the other end of the dining room table, the clear thin plastic ballooning out then relaxing.
"I'll bring 'em tomorrow." He had the bag ready in his bedroom on Outer Drive, had just walked right by it.
"You hungry?" Momma Bessie headed for the kitchen before he answered. "I got some pound cake in here." She'd cut him a piece and bring it with a fork and a napkin no matter what he said.
"No, no. I'll pick up something tomorrow when I bring the shirts." Shuck knew she felt his distraction.
Momma Bessie put the small plate with a slice of pound cake on a place mat in front of him, then stood in the doorway between the kitchen and the dining room, worry knitting her brow, tautening her sagging jawline. "I saw Alma Weaver down at Hudson's the other day. Said she was teaching summer school. I wondered why I hadn't seen her all summer long."
"Summer's just getting started good." He wanted to push summer along as fast as possible, get it over with, bring Celeste out of that hellhole down south. It was August. He'd lost all track of time. Summer had been whizzing by, but to him it felt as if it was all in slow motion.
"It'll be gone by the time we look up." Momma Bessie's clock ticked on another sphere. Day counting, life counting, needing to group around her those she loved as often as possible. Shuck knew these things.
"Maybe we should start planning something for Labor Day?" He hoped that would calm her down about this summer business. Celeste would be home from Mississippi by then. Something to celebrate, he was thinking, a cookout at the house on Outer Drive.
"Well, we can have a ending to the summer, though we never had a proper beginning, I guess." She turned away into her kitchen.
He ate the cake, the butter and sugar spreading out on his tongue. He washed it down with iced tea, taking in the room where he'd eaten Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners for more years than he could count. Adults at this table, children at the card table set up in the corner. When he bought the house on Outer Drive, the alternations began. Christmas dinner here, Thanksgiving there. But it was never the same. "You ever think about leaving this house?"
"To go where, at my age?" She came back to the doorway.
"To my house." He pushed his placemat away gently.
"What would I do with all my furniture, my things?" Momma Bessie considered his words right there in front of him. He wondered if she'd ever had the same thought.
"We could work it out. Think about it." With Momma Bessie in the new house and Alma, too, with her plants, maybe Celeste would come home, just pack the Outer Drive house with people, make things the way they used to be. Maybe then the new house would feel like this old house used to.
Momma Bessie stared out the back dining room windows to her yard, then turned into the kitchen and rattled around in the sink. "Bring me that saucer and glass when you're done.
"
Shuck heard the water running, the small clanks of glasses and silverware.
"All right then." He picked up his shirts, took his dirty dishes to her, and went on out the front door calling back, `Be sure to lock up, now."
He saw Momma Bessie standing in the kitchen doorway with her hands on her hips and a stern look on her face. He was leaving too soon, but sitting still had never been easy for him unless he was sitting in a nightspot. She'd think about what he'd said, but he didn't know if she'd ever make the move. Maybe.
He arranged the shirts in the trunk, got in the car, put the top up against the sun, and headed toward Outer Drive. Manfred's After Hours Joint, where Gravy spread his whiskey-soaked rumors, was a mere four blocks away. Too close for comfort. The old neighborhood had run its course. Decay had long since raced past the possibility of rejuvenation. Too late. The scales tipped in the direction of desertion, departure, letting it go. Time to put the past behind him once and for all. But life rarely granted a once and for all, overlapping instead, under-towing, circling back, linking the inevitable and the unpredictable. If he moved Momma Bessie to Outer Drive, and Alma, too, he'd be as close as he could get to having the home life he wanted. Get this Freedom Summer thing done, Celeste out of Mississippi in one piece and Wilamena out of his head. Once and for all.
26
The echoes of shoe heels on hardwood, the rustling of suit pants, the thistledown of summer dresses swishing on bare legs in the cool lobby as the white citizens of Pineyville went about doing their morning business. Reverend Singleton, as always dressed in a tailored suit like he still lived in Chicago, walked in favoring his bruised back. Stiff-lipped Sister Mobley, the bodice of her print day dress trimmed in white lace, followed clutching her bible, holding it out from her body like a shield. Geneva Owens, looking ready for church, carried herself as if she'd been coming in the front door of the Pearl River County Administration Building for her entire life. This time they were joined by Mr. Landau in dark summer slacks and a long-sleeved shirt and Dolly Johnson, her cotton skirt and blouse ensemble giving her the look of a clerk typist, The two newcomers stayed close behind the veterans, eyes glued to Reverend Singleton's aching back.
Freshwater Road Page 31
