"Take turns with those pens. That's all there are. Take your time." She had a curly smile on her lips. "When you done with that, Mr. Heywood might want to ask you some questions."
Celeste wondered if she'd called Sheriff Trotter. Surely he knew they were in the building. Something must be going on, and she needed to figure it out fast. They'd fill out those applications, answer all those questions, and then they'd have to wait and wait to find out the results. No law about that, just history. No games left short of the endgame.
The third white woman, younger, stared openly at them. Celeste caught her eye and saw there was no hatred in her look, only surprise and confusion. Was it surprise that they'd even shown up after the burning of the church, or just surprise that she was a witness to history? She didn't come to the counter, but her eyes went back and forth from Celeste and the group to her desktop, then to the tall windows and the broad blue August sky beyond them.
Time pushed the sun to the afternoon side of the building as they stood at the counter filling out those registration tests. Clouds gathered in surplus then thinned out, and the sun beamed clear and hot again. For all of them to complete their forms took more than three hours. Celeste knew they wouldn't be registered today. Reverend Singleton gathered the tests in a pile, pushing the extra one to the side. "We're done. May I ask how long the wait will be before they're processed?"
"I can't answer that." It was the hostile dark-haired woman who spoke. "Like I said, Mr. Heywood might ask y'all some questions, too."
"Fine. We'll wait here." Reverend Singleton turned to the group. He showed Mrs. Owens and Sister Mobley to the waiting chairs and physically sat them down. They'd finished their applications and gone to hovering around the door, looking anxious to leave. Mr. Landau, Dolly, and Celeste stood with Reverend Singleton.
"Ain't you wanting to register?" The younger woman spoke directly to Celeste.
The world went silent. The two older white women's heads whipped around to her.
Celeste was stunned that she'd even asked her such a sensible and polite question. She fumbled for words.
"No, I'll have to vote at home." Celeste spoke curling her upper lip to cover that cracked tooth, sounding like a crone. In truth, she hadn't yet registered, and wouldn't be able to for another year.
"You sure?" The young woman bit her lip, tried to suck moisture out of her frightened mouth. The dark-haired woman glared at her.
"Thank you. I'm sure. Thank you." Celeste wanted to smile but knew that would only get the girl in more trouble than she was in already.
The other women encircled the younger woman's desk, kept their voices down, but there was no mistaking the anger and hissing in the air.
The Negro people waited.
"I read in the newsletter from Jackson there're some white builders from California going around helping rebuild some of these burned down churches." Reverend Singleton spoke calmly to the group as if they sat in a coffee shop mulling over the morning papers. "They're up in Mileston right now. The community center there got torched."
Celeste had read it. She knew that same little article had also said that the structures being rebuilt were being guarded by Negro men with shotguns night and day. "They're guarding that place now. Twenty-four hours a day. Men with guns sitting out there guarding the workers and the building while it's being built." When Celeste said "men with guns" she lifted her chin and made sure the women behind the counter heard every word.
Dolly looked at her, then at the secretaries. "Well, I heard that. It's about damn time." She snapped her head back around to the women behind the counter, looked down her freckly nose at them, then walked closer to Sister Mobley and stood by her like an attendant. Celeste wondered what was going on in that mind: Dolly Johnson coming into herself like a wild person. Trouble ahead.
Mr. Landau grunted. Sister Mobley let out a deep sigh and opened her Bible. Any talk of guns sent her to scripture. Mrs. Owens didn't flinch.
The suntanned woman stood. "We gon have to close now. Y'all have to come back tomorrow. Or whatever."
The three secretaries, the younger one lagging, gathered their purses from desk drawers, freshened their lipsticks, and stood waiting for the group to vacate the office. They walked out not knowing when, or if, their applications would be processed.
Reverend Singleton ferried Dolly and Mr. Landau to their cars at the church clearing, then dropped Sister Mobley and Mrs. Owens on Freshwater Road before taking Celeste to the place where Sissy's body had been found. He drove a mile or so on the two-lane, then turned southeast onto another blacktop bordered by a high ridge of rust-orange dirt with thickets of saplings surrounded by tall stands of long-needled pine. If you didn't know the turn-off, you'd drive right by. Then he turned again onto a sandy dirt and gravel road. Celeste raised her window nearly all the way against the clouds of dust. Reverend Singleton aimed his car into pressed tire tracks that smoothed their passage until they hit a few deep ruts.
"How long do you think they'll make us wait?" Celeste's mind rattled over all the waiting that Negro people had been doing since the end of the Civil War.
"No telling." Reverend Singleton wagged his head in short swipes as if to say only God knew.
They rumbled along, the landscape morphing from pine forest to near desert and back again. A faint pine scent floated on the air. This was indeed a very long way for Sissy to have run, even with her strong young legs.
"You never talk about home." Celeste licked her tongue across her cracked tooth, panting from dust and heat.
He loosened his tie again and unbuttoned the top button of his shirt, keeping his eyes on the sand and gravel road. "I was born right across the Pearl River just outside Bogalusa. My people left the south years ago."
"Why'd you come back?" The car felt like the anteroom to a furnace with the windows closed. Celeste cranked her window down again and let the dust float in. A hand-painted sign nailed to a tree announced Cataboula Creek. Reverend Singleton turned into a car path that had lost most of its gravel and in a few yards pulled up to a mound of dirt and sand the color of old oranges.
"Well, you can't run forever. What goes on here, goes on everywhere. It's a matter of degree. You came down here." He grinned, but his eyes had a spark of nostalgia, a longing.
"For a summer, Reverend." She smiled back, her cut lip still tight. "Just for a summer."
"Praise the Lord." He took the key out of the ignition, nodded her out of the car.
Celeste liked him praising the Lord for her sojourn.
The heat lay across southern Mississippi like the grease in a cast-iron skillet over a high flame. A rush of chattering birds lifted up from the thinboned trees. The place smelled of rotting earth, of dead leaves and worms. It was as if a primeval forest and a sandy plain had overlapped unintentionally and now fought each other for dominance. Rough country.
"Even bamboo grows in here." He walked along, rolling up his shirt sleeves. "There's poplars, black willow, wax myrtle, swamp oak."
Celeste walked at his side until the thickness of the growth narrowed the path, and then she fell in behind him. In a quiet marred only by their padding, crunching footsteps, she heard the gurgling of water. Then Reverend Singleton stopped. It was groundwater swelling out of a rocky pile like a faucet someone forgot to turn off. They stood on the slipping edge of a wide streambed where tree roots grabbed out, naked.
"Where you'd learn so much about trees?" She remembered how he'd also named the trees on the ride to Sophie Lewis's house. She spoke low as if someone else might be there watching them, marking them. She stepped closer to him.
"Always wanted to work with plants. You know. When you get to college, you think you'll have time to study everything. But, of course, you don't. You get about the business of designing a life for yourself. The ministry was always number one. The trees came in second and third." He loped along the creek bank like a guide following a trail. "This is where the creek begins. It runs south to Lake Borgne." Sweat drenche
d his shirt collar and spotted the cloth across his back. The stream strengthened by degrees, other tiny rivulets joining the original one until a robust flow got going.
"There's no oxygen in here." Celeste stopped to catch her breath, the sweat running down her body as fast as the water in the creek. The density of trees held the sun at a distance, but whatever was gained in coolness got lost in humidity.
"Not much." He walked a few steps from the edge of the creek, which swelled and developed a wavy current, crystal clear with an orange sand bottom. After a while, he stopped. "This is where we found her. I marked the place by this yellow poplar." He pointed to a dark-barked tree with leaves that looked like squares. Celeste followed the straight-arrow trunk up to a break that showed a piece of blue sky. The tree had small cone-like growths on the branches.
"You oughta see the flowers. Like big tulips." He leaned back against the tree and wiped his sweaty face with his handkerchief. "The flowers come in the spring. The leaves will turn yellow in the fall."
"I remember from that ride down to see Sophie Lewis. You pointed it out, but it had started raining." She kneeled down in the soft dirt, eyes searching the area, wondering what message had been rained away, slipped down the current all the way to the Gulf. She sat back on her heels looking at the moving water, the perpetual scale of dried salt on her body feeling like a horror of insects creeping over her skin. She scratched and slapped at bugs that weren't even there.
"When it rains, you know, this stream gets going." Reverend Singleton joined her by the bank. "There's run-off from higher ground."
"I can see that." She pondered it. "But Sissy would've run north. She wouldn't have come this way. We turned south from the two-lane." Celeste stood, brushed the sand and dirt from her knees, stared at the roots and vines gnarling around the mud and sand. "We studied how the slaves figured ways to get to the north, as far as Canada. We never talked about running south."
"She's a child. What'd she know about directions?" He spoke simply.
"We studied it. We talked about the north star, how to find it in the night sky." She held onto her belief like it had come to her in a clairvoyant dream.
"At night." He stood. "She disappeared during daylight. Maybe she got confused." Reverend Singleton stared up at the yellow poplar tree with its napkin-shaped leaves as if he might embrace it.
The water grew more powerful, as if someone turned the spigot up to full. She tried to remember if there'd been a big rain that day. Of course, it rained nearly every day for at least a few minutes. Had it been enough through here to swell this creek? But the creek was swelling by itself. Maybe, in the center, the current was strong enough to grab a child's leg if she was very tired from running, or if she stepped into the water to cool her feet or to drink. She looked up into the trees and couldn't tell where the sun was. She turned in a circle trying to find it until she felt dizzy. Maybe it had been an accident. But with no autopsy, no one would ever know for sure. She shook her head in a renewal of her disbelief at the way the thing had been handled.
"I know what you think. You never liked Mr. Tucker, and he never warmed to what we're doing. I agree with you that he's a hard case. But you can't think he'd kill his own child for standing in the freedom school door." Reverend Singleton tried to quiet her agitation, sounding ministerial. She needed to prick his pat estimation of what had happened to Sissy. Reverend Singleton was a smart, insightful man. He had to believe what she did. How could they be so far apart on this?
"It was more than that. I saw it in his eyes. He wasn't just a man who distrusted the movement, or me because I come from the north. His eyes burned when he looked at me-as if I had done something personal to him. I didn't." The words spilled out of her in a rush.
"It's over now." Reverend Singleton started towards the car. "Let's go."
"Zenia Tucker knows. She's lost her mind. I heard her talking to Mrs. Owens." Celeste followed close, afraid to be more than a few paces from him, eyes going from his back down to where she was stepping, her gym shoes so dirty now they'd forgotten they'd ever been white.
"What are you saying?" Reverend Singleton stopped and turned to her. Anger flashed across his face.
"I don't know. Something's not right. Something wasn't right, the way she was at the funeral." Celeste had lost all sense of protocol; she talked to him like he was a friend, a confidant, not the leader-man, not the minister of the Negro church of Pineyville. Her lip pulled against itself. "She wouldn't let Mr. Tucker anywhere near her. Why? Maybe he was touching his daughter. Maybe she knew it all along and did nothing." Celeste heard her words and was stricken by the power of what she'd said in front of a minister. She began praying in her mind for forgiveness even as the words hung in the thick primordial air.
"You can't say that. It's the most horrendous thing you can say about a parent."
"Sissy was coming to Mrs. Owens's house for lessons. Sneaking in the back door. Maybe he saw her." She finally admitted her own complicity and felt not a whit of relief for doing so.
"Maybe he did. Still, it's no reason to kill a child. Maybe a reason to kill you, for interfering with his parenting. You shouldn't have done that, Celeste. We set the rules for freedom school and you broke them by doing something on the side." Reverend Singleton's disappointment in her was profound enough to quiet the birds in the forest trees.
"Sissy needed to come to that kitchen." Celeste's eyes burned. "She had nothing else to hold onto." Another real truth clarified in her mind at that moment-how she'd used Sissy as a pawn in her little power struggle with Mr. Tucker.
Reverend Singleton grabbed her arms and shook her. "What you did was wrong. And if you believed he was capable of hurting her, then why would you jeopardize her by teaching her in the kitchen when he forbade it? Why would you do that?" At the moment when she needed Reverend Singleton to pull her into his chest, to give her a forgiving hug, he let her go as if his disappointment had wiped away his duty as a minister to help her handle her own pain. She felt selfish and guilty.
"I heard Zenia Tucker say something. Maybe she didn't mean it, but at least she should've been asked what was going on in that house. And nobody asked her." Celeste shifted the burden back to Mr. Tucker, where she believed it belonged. "She knows something. She can't say much because Mr. Tucker's her bread and butter. Even Mrs. Owens said that to her. I heard it." Her anger began to fade. It was all useless.
"A woman who's lost a child will likely think a thousand different things. It's over now, Celeste. The child's in the ground." He turned his back and walked.
"Negro people hurt each other, too, Reverend. No one will even discuss it." She didn't fight now, just said it quietly as she walked behind him.
"It's over." He walked faster, his footsteps sounding like muffled tomtoms. "Let it go." There was hardness in his voice; a wall of stones had come down between them. "You're a smart girl, Celeste, but you've got plenty yet to learn about life." He resumed his role as chief keeper of the spiritual codes. He offered to lead her out of her confusion and anger, but he knew something about her now that he'd never known before.
His words stung her. Shuck had said the same thing, but it had been playful, not a judgment. What did he mean? That a girl child's death didn't mean as much as the other things pressing on this small town? That this summer was about voting rights and not about Sissy? Bad enough to face the Pearl River County power structure, go to jail, be knocked around. But where was her common sense if not in her suspicion about what had happened? What was the lesson he meant about life? Sissy wouldn't have run south. Sissy wouldn't have run at all if she, Celeste Tyree, had not come to Mississippi. She got into the car feeling deranged, her head pounding from crying, from grabbing at something that kept slipping away. What was it, she thought, that kept so many people from countenancing the possibility that Mr. Tucker might have killed his own daughter?
That night, in the bedroom mirror, her cut frightening as a harelip, the fragile front tooth hanging on by a prayer, Cele
ste thought again that the people who stayed in Mississippi had a courage she'd never find in herself. Slave ghosts held them tight to this ground, whispering, don't let that chained horrorgo unrequited. They'd been waiting, too. They sang it in the trees in a patois of lost tribes, their dark eyes and lashed backs living in the closets of every house in the south. She wanted to be out of Mississippi, to cross any river that had to be crossed to leave this place. She paced in the small room, stood by the window pining for freedom. She basin-washed the salt and film of dust from her body before changing into her sleep shirt. All the while, Wilamena's letter was glowing like a hot rock in the pocket of her suitcase under the bed.
28
The locals said the quick rains of summer would soon transform into deep storms with masses of dark and thunderous clouds. They spoke of hurricanes that swirled up from the Gulf, rolling across Lakes Pontchartrain and Borgne, pummeling southern Mississippi. Pineyville only tasted what New Orleans, which sat below the level of the sea, ate from a platter.
Celeste had packed and unpacked her suitcase a hundred times in her mind. She first started doing it the night the shots were fired through the houses on Freshwater Road and blasted out the back window of Mr. Tucker's maroon Hudson. Whoever had done it surely believed this would scare the Negro people out of their drive for voting rights and scare her back to where she came from. She fled back to Detroit a hundred times, in her dreams, in her walks to the outhouse, in her daily struggle with the lack of running water, in her loneliness.
The Pineyville Six, as Reverend Singleton continued to refer to them, went back to Mr. Heywood's office every morning. Each time they were told he hadn't yet gotten to their applications. Celeste was walking on a wire, waiting to see if it would hold or sizzle to threads. Registration was closing for the coming elections, but appeals were being filed all over the state because of the extraordinary delays in processing the applications. There was no leaving Pineyville until someone passed that test.
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