"Scared me to death." Celeste said. "I slept on the floor for a few nights, still do most of the time. I tried to get under that bed." No need to mention how she'd wet the bed out of fear.
Celeste stared over at Dolly and wondered what she might have been thinking back when she brought Labyrinth and Georgie to the freedom school the first time. Two children she wanted to free from this dungeon of oppression, a married white man as one father and a long-gone black one as the other. She must be terrified. If Percival Dale stopped helping her, he'd be right in a line that descended from slave masters who refused to sign freedom papers for their own flesh and blood. Some things had changed and some others had barely budged. Dolly was surely on that tightrope that Shuck so feared for Celeste.
"They did that back when my husband, Horation, was alive." Mrs. Owens spoke from a reverie.
Celeste heard the quiet in her voice, remembered the old photo of Mrs. Owens and her husband in his World War I uniform hanging above her bed, that oval of fading life, the old woman's memory of him caught and alive in her voice as if he'd only died yesterday.
"White folks something, all right." Dolly's eyes grazed her soiled mattress.
Celeste fully expected Geneva Owens to say, "And you oughta know." But she didn't.
"My Tony wants a gun." Sister Mobley's voice was filled with awe. "He ain't nothing but a child."
Celeste hoped Sister Mobley didn't think she'd filled her son's head with thoughts of guns in freedom school. But she would send Tony to "study" with Mr. Landau in a wink. All summer long, she'd wanted to tip over to Bogalusa to one of those Deacons for Defense and Justice meetings. People needed to be able to protect their homes. No more cheeks to turn.
"Mr. Tucker come down and checked on us that night. They sho tore up that car a his," Sister Mobley said. "He had to take it all the way to Jackson to get that glass replaced."
In spite of it all, Mr. Tucker hadn't gotten the point-that it didn't matter that he had not backed the movement. All bets were off. He might as well get on board the train, because he was just as black as everyone sitting in that jail cell, just as vulnerable, just as disenfranchised and disinherited as any other Negro in Pineyville or anywhere else for that matter. He got his car window shot out for nothing. He hadn't helped to build this movement but he paid the price anyway. Sissy had to be tapping him on his shoulder morning, noon, and night. But did he feel an ounce of guilt?
In the small window built high up into the cinderblock wall, Celeste saw nothing but crystal blue southern sky and white cloud clusters floating. Dark clouds hugged the edges. Where was Ed Jolivette right now? He felt like those dark clouds always at the rim of her consciousness, never disappearing, as if he walked with her, touched her arm, or prodded her in some vague way toward the sureness she strove to have. He and Matt must be organizing for the end of the summer project. Voter registration rolls tallied, political work leading to the big changes sure to come in Mississippi. She had to drag Pineyville to the finish line, no matter what, both for herself and because she knew that Ed expected her to do it. And Shuck did too. Not enough that she'd come to Mississippi. She had to move the place along.
Trotter's deputy came through the lock-up door and stood at their cell, his key ring clanking on the bars as he opened it. "You, up top there, you come on with me." He had more Mississippi drawl than Trotter. He beckoned to Celeste with his long muscular arm. His other hand was on his hip, near his gun. "You Celeste Tyree?"
Celeste climbed down from her bunk thinking he knew very well who she was. "Yes." The word "sir" was on a slow passage from her brain, but a fearful quick catch of breath and a missed heartbeat caught it, laid it down. Good. She didn't want her cellmates to see her fear. She stood up straight, had no purse to grab; there was Kleenex in one pocket of her skirt, her tiny change purse with payphone money in the other along with her Social Security card and student ID. Her number was up. Her luck, Shuck's luck, had run out.
Mrs. Owens stood out of her bed, dread filling the gullies on her face.
Sister Mobley prayed out loud. "Behold, the Lord's hand is not shortened, that it cannot save; neither his ear heavy, that it cannot hear; but your iniquities have separated between you and your God, and your sins have hid his face from you, that he will not hear."
The deputy looked at Sister Mobley with a full face of contempt.
Dolly Johnson scooted to the edge of her bunk, dangling her legs over the side like a child.
Celeste felt like she was being led to the firing squad. The deputy reached for her arm and pulled her through the cell door, his hand like a cold brace on her. He relocked the door.
"Follow me."
He walked, checking her behind him, down the short hall and through a metal door, then down a flight of stairs that she'd forgotten coming up little more than an hour ago. The tan walls were broken by closed dark doors, her tennis-shoed footsteps quietly padding behind his police shoes clomping on the concrete floor. Celeste counted doors, then began humming, "Ain't gon' let nobody turn me 'round, turn me 'round." She didn't remember these doors from their walk into the jail. Maybe it had been the pull of the handcuffs taking her attention. Fear shutting down the mind as it had done in the car with Matt. Her hands were free now. She watched the deputy's holstered gun bouncing gently with the rhythm of his legs.
She couldn't hold the freedom song in her head. When the deputy passed a clean, white porcelain drinking fountain, Celeste saw no Whites Only sign. She stopped to drink, delighted to have the cold water in her mouth. It tasted like first snow. As the cold stream flowed down her throat, the deputy shoved her head hard into the fountain. She vomited the water as her mouth slammed into the shining chrome spigot. A quiet crack, then she saw her blood going down the drain as pain shot from her mouth up into her head. Stunned, she moved over to the side, her brown hand slipping from the white porcelain bowl. As she turned to face the deputy, her feet tangled into a knot and she stumbled to the floor, her head and back bumping into the wall. The black of his police shoes was the last thing she saw.
In a tunnel of cottony fog, she heard the words, "That water's not for niggers," then floated off dreaming of following Mary Evans into the Whites Only ladies' restroom in the train station on her first night in Jackson. Signs up, signs down. `Miss sippi ain't nothing to play with, girl." Coming back to, her head and mouth throbbing, blood still leaking. Lips were blood-packed things. Her hands were limp, her neck crooked, one leg folded under her at the knee, one straight out. Gym shoes with pocks of orange earth like dried blood from walks to the outhouse, from helping Mrs. Owens in her tiny patch of yard. Thank God, she thought. I wore my gym shoes. She knew that it was her lip that bled and now felt like an inflated balloon, ran her tongue over her teeth with tears gathering in her eyes.
Celeste heard a second voice and looked up to see Sheriff Trotter standing with his deputy. They grabbed her under her armpits, hoisting her to her feet, her shoes barely toeing along the concrete floor until they reached a door and went into a small room. They sat her in a hard chair, her lip a few paces behind every move she made. The deputy left the room and was back in seconds, it seemed, with a glass of water that he slid toward her on the dark tabletop. She wondered where the water had come from.
"Go ahead. You so thirsty." Trotter stood by a barred window, his arms folded across his chest, his eyes deepened into his head and looking dark. She remembered them as blue, but not today.
Celeste stared at the water, needed to drink, but dared not reach for it. She'd been bullied into self-denial so quickly. Her lip had stopped bleeding, had left blood on the front of her blouse. The lip had disassociated itself from the rest of her mouth. She glanced up at Trotter, whose outline fuzzed in the sunny backlight then cleared.
"Go on." He gazed out the window.
She shook her head "no," words stuck in her chest somewhere. She needed ice more and none was offered. If it had been, she wasn't sure she'd have had the courage to reach for it. Fear of physica
l pain was too fresh in her mind.
Trotter turned to her. His eyes went yellow in the sunlight. "That lip'11 heal."
Celeste's hands lay flopped in her lap, her feet wound around the legs of the chair, her blouse buttoned and blood-splattered and untucked. She felt her change purse in her skirt pocket, hoped her student ID and Social Security card were still in there, too. Throbs like hammer blows along her back, her head, and in her mouth. Didn't know if she'd been hit in the head, too, had been completely out, or just floated in shock on the corridor floor. She was still alive, and she hadn't been raped. Maybe her luck ran still, but thin. She needed to see a real doctor, a dentist, finally took her finger and smoothed it across her front teeth. One tooth was cracked.
"You want a mirror?" Trotter had an overly dramatic look on his face, dismissive of her injury as if it was a fake theatrical moment.
She shook her head again. She'd better wait until she got back to Mrs. Owens's house, then realized that maybe she wouldn't get back there, that they didn't have to let her go. They might do what they did to the three boys, release her in the middle of the night and call the Klan to ambush her. Home never seemed so far away, like a mirage in an ever-receding distance.
"You might well be ruining your future down here meddling in things that have nothing to do with you." Trotter sat on the window ledge, the sun haloing behind him.
Celeste shoved thought to his words, fighting to hold her chin up and level, wanting to hide her swollen lip. "I'm not sure I understand." Then it hit her. This wasn't about being a coed on some plain of trees in a four-seasoned place, or sitting in Shuck's bar pretending to be Dorothy Dandridge playing Carmen Jones with a cigarette hanging from ruby red lips. This was the real deal. She thrust her head up and looked squarely at him, then parted her lips and showed him the crack in her tooth that she hadn't seen herself.
Trotter turned away, eyes drifting around the room, then out the window again. "You're being charged with a felony." Trotter's voice broke into staccato phrases with little beats between. "Endangering the lives of others." He glanced at her. "I can't protect you, and I can't protect those you're dragging into this." He paced in front of the window. "Anything could happen."
She kept her head up, staring at him, her lip flopping around like a too-fat pancake. No looking down at the dirt. No eyes drifting off to Africa. Just keep looking him in the eye. Protecting us was not what he'd sworn to do. And nothing that happened here would matter in Michigan, and if it did, she'd fight it. True, there were students in southern schools arrested in the movement who lost their places in those schools. She knew better for students coming down from northern schools. His fabricated tactic wasn't going to work.
`Anything has already happened. For years." Her voice felt craggy, clogged.
"What if I came to your neighborhood and set about inflaming your neighbors against you?" He glanced out the window again like he was really talking to someone out there instead of right in this room.
Celeste tried to figure which side of the building they were on. The sun wasn't really behind him, but the harshness of the light let her know they were up above the tree line. The jail faced east. It was past noon.
"And when you go back to your life in your big fancy school, what do you suppose is going to happen to these people you've riled up?" He looked directly at her.
She wanted to say she hoped they'd vote people like him out of office. "They'll become full citizens in this state as well as in this country." Her lip moved in slow motion. How did he know that she went to a big university? Ah, the files. There were files on all the volunteers all over the state, files that passed from the White Citizens Councils to the Klan to the local authorities and back again.
"You people seem to think you're the only ones who have rights." He went back to looking out the window.
"I don't think that." She spoke carefully, not wanting her lip to bounce because it hurt, keeping her teeth from touching top to bottom for fear the crack would become a break. "The right to vote, the will to be represented by people who have your interests somewhere in their agenda is all I'm interested in here." She needed to be quiet, rest her panging mouth.
"Have you looked at your people?" He had genuine surprise in his voice. "They better off here with us than back in Africa. Wouldn't you say?"
Her anger swelled like tidewater in a storm. "We've been here as long as you. We helped to build this country, too. The only difference is we never got paid for the labor and we can't vote in Mississippi." She needed to calm herself. Be wise. He held all the cards. Let him have his way of thinking. She'd never convert him anyway. Just like she'd never change Wilamena. This cost of being Negro is the very thing Wilamena had warned against. But she wasn't Wilamena and wouldn't be even if she could. "Maybe there'll come a time when all of this seems like a bad dream."
He breathed as if hit, something deep catching him. He turned slightly to the side. She saw his profile, the strength in his body and his forehead. He was a handsome man. When he turned fully back to her, there was something deep in his eyes, as if he wanted to run from everything in his head. Like Ed Jolivette doing a second line at Otis's bar in Hattiesburg. Too much to bear. Ed danced it out. What did Trotter do? The grief stayed in his eyes for a second before the chill returned. The wall slid down like a steel drape.
"We gon let y'all go today. But I'm telling you, you keep this up and nobody will be able to stop the people who'll rise against you. Do you understand?" He walked so close she could smell his sweating body. He turned his face away.
"Yes, I do understand." She followed him with her protruding lip, her eyes so violent, she imagined, Martin Luther King would have expelled her from the movement had he seen her.
The Pineyville Six met again at Reverend Singleton's car, a parking ticket sticking up on the windshield. They climbed in, everyone trying not to stare at Celeste's lip. She sat in the back by the door, behind Reverend Singleton, with Mrs. Owens piled in next to her and Dolly on the other side of Mrs. Owens. The others sat in the front. Celeste leaned the side of her head against the car window, tried to see a reflection of herself in the glass. How bad was it? At this rate, she thought, they'd all be crippled by the time anyone got to register. The back of her head felt as if a wedge of brain had been carved out. Empty. They were being picked off one by one. Reverend Singleton yesterday, her today. It was a plan. Did he understand? They could easily have attacked the whole group physically. They needed to rethink who went to see the registrar. Older people needed to go to the back of the line. Mrs. Owens and Sister Mobley shouldn't go-too old, too frail. But she knew they'd never stand back now. No matter what, they'd keep coming. Dolly and Mr. Landau could take it. She didn't know if Dolly could be trusted. But she needed her to stand with them. Mr. Landau didn't say a word in the car. Celeste figured he was cleaning his gun in his mind.
They drove through town hushed and worn out. Mrs. Owens patted Celeste's arm then sighed into her own exhaustion. Dolly sank into her seat, crossing and uncrossing her legs, impatient to get to her own antique of a car that she'd left at the church early that morning. Reverend Singleton dropped Dolly and Mr. Landau near their vehicles at the church, then proceeded to Freshwater Road.
"Never mind you coming to the meeting this evening. Y'all stay here and rest." Reverend Singleton paused the car long enough to unload Celeste and Mrs. Owens, then took off towards Sister Mobley's house, orange sandy dust swirling behind him.
Mrs. Owens went straight to the kitchen and in seconds Celeste heard the banging sound of ice cubes being crushed, probably by a cast iron skillet. She'd never seen a hammer in this house. She walked to the cracked mirror and stared at her new face, her swollen lip and cracked tooth making her look like she'd been in a car wreck. She didn't know whether to laugh or cry as she sat down on her mattress on the floor. Mrs. Owens brought crushed ice cubes wrapped in a towel for her mouth and two aspirins. Told her to lie down and keep the ice on her lip. Celeste slept and dreamed and swea
ted. Mrs. Owens tipped in from time to time and changed the ice pack, brought her iced tea and more aspirins.
The house quieted into evening. Celeste felt hunger rumbling around, but didn't want to risk breaking her tooth off completely. She'd have to learn how to take food in on the sides and be careful of biting down with the damaged tooth. How would she not gnash her teeth at night? There were nights in Mississippi when her fear drove her teeth into a gnashing fit, the grinding so loud that it woke her. No dentist in Pineyville would put his hands in her mouth. In truth, she didn't want any Mississippi dentist repairing her tooth.
Sometime in the night, when her ice pack had become a soggy towel and her lip felt closer to its normal size, a reddish-orange flash of light soared into the sky. Celeste stood to see out of her window. The light flamed orange and back to red and then settled into a white light that danced high. There'd been no storm, no trees with burning branches like angry witches running, no wallops of thunder. The flaming light opened a pearly hole in the black sky.
In time, the smell of smoke drifted to Freshwater Road. It had to be the burning of the St. James A.M.E. Church. Nothing else over there. The meeting had broken up hours ago. People were sleeping by now. She remained in the dark by the opened window, her eyes needing to close, to rest, to stop the burning tears coming down her face seeping into her cut lip. The church would burn to the ground taking Mrs. Singleton's organ, the chalkboard, the door that Sissy opened and closed in fear of her father's arrival, the aisle that Ed Jolivette had walked down when he first came toward her, the railing, the wood pews and the folding chairs and Reverend Singleton's precious lavatory with the flush toilet. And the pulpit she'd spoken from on her first Sunday in town. The bell. The platform where Reverend Singleton harangued his congregation to get on board the freedom train. It had all begun in the church. How many songs had Sophie Lewis sung to help Reverend Singleton build his church?
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