"Now, I know you want to go to that phone and call your boys up in Chicago. Tell them you're a registered voter." Celeste diced celery, working to pick up the older woman's air of celebration.
Geneva Owens released the lid on her greens, then pulled a pot of cooked potatoes out of the refrigerator. "Well, I do. I will tell them. Do so wish my Horation had lived to see this day."
Horation Owens had fought in the Great War and been injured, came home and never could vote. "He knows." Celeste nearly diced off the tip of one of her fingers thinking about it. The knowing. Who had snuggled Wilamena's lie to their bosom? And, what exactly was the lie? She heard Momma Bessie and Grandpa Ben talking in the kitchen a long time ago.
When Grandpa Ben said they walked the horses from Lexington to Louisville, Celeste asked why. Momma Bessie gave her the question look. `Girl, they didn't have trucks in them days. "
"Oh. "
Grandpa Ben said he remembered when jimmy Lee won the Derby. "He won all six races on the card. That was before they stopped letting us ride. "
"We used to ride?"
"Girl, the first Derby they ever had was won by a Negro jockey. Oliver Lewis, and his horse was Aristides. Wasplenty Negroes riding back then. Riding and winning. "
"Where'd the name Tyree come from, Grandpa Ben?"
His mouth tightened and a brick-hard look came into his eyes. "You don't know nothin'about no Tyree."
Momma Bessie's eyes flashed him a warning as Shuck came into the kitchen grinning with Billy right behind him.
"Tyree's a name tapped out rhythms in speakeasys and buckets of blood from Harrodsburg to Detroit. From the bluegrass to the black tar. " Grandpa Ben looked right at Celeste. "You got people in the country and people in the town and never been no slaves, either. "Shuck came over and kissed her on her forehead and she and Billy ran out the back door to the yard.
When they'd piled fried chicken in a roaster pan, refrigerated the potato salad, rested the greens, and covered the shrimp and okra side dish, Celeste went in to wash herself and dress for the celebration. Mrs. Owens whipped up a batch of cornbread so fast Celeste thought someone had left it on the front steps. They poured tall glasses of iced tea loaded with sugar and sat on the screened porch, Mrs. Owens rocking in her chair, work-sweat pooling at her hair line, puffs of kinky hair poking through her hair net. Celeste, dressed now in clean slacks and a fresh sleeveless blouse, sat on a straightbacked chair and prayed as usual for a cool breeze.
"I didn't want Sister Mobley to feel bad about not having anything to bring." Mrs. Owens stared at the rutty road through the screen. "That's why I went ahead and did the rest. Etta Singleton's bringing a sweet something. Nobody else bringing nothing." She said proudly. "I'm glad to do the cooking, glad you been here to help me."
"I like being a sous-chef." She heard the past tense in Mrs. Owens's words. The thought came to her clearly: why not just stay? Continue the work, rebuild her freedom school. Hide, pretend she never got Wilamena's letter, throw it down the outhouse hole.
"Now, what's that?" Mrs. Owens stopped rocking.
"Cook's helper. I read it in a book."
"Well, cookin' comes from Join', not from readin'." Mrs. Owens rocked her chair, coughed a grunty sound.
"I know." She didn't know, but she understood that she needed to. It had been a summer of doing, of stepping into the fray, not being on any sideline of life. Celeste leaned her chair against the plank wall of the porch, rested her head back, dreaming of her golden day in New Orleans with Ed. The downshifting light softened and banks of clouds ballooned up from the south. She visualized Wilamena, voluptuous dark wavy hair resting on her shoulders and framing her beautiful face, standing in the rust-orange beach-like soil of Freshwater Road. The image slipped through her mind like a river eel. What was it like for her in New Mexico? No big cities, no black people. She'd spirited herself to a hiding place to be something else, someone else. She'd unhistoried Detroit. And who was Cyril Atwood, anyway? Maybe a border man whose history branched out into a jumbled lineage like Wilamena's. Wilamena might well have been searching for a truer home. Celeste realized she didn't even know where Wilamena'd met him.
"First thing I'm going to do is get this tooth fixed." Running her tongue over the crack in her tooth had already become a quirky habit. She followed it with a lick of her lip to feel the thin scar.
"Yes, indeedy. They got a dentist up there in Jackson who'll do it." Mrs. Owens rested her head on the chair back. "His name is Dr. Fields."
"Negro?" Celeste would be damned if some Southern white dentist would see the inside of her mouth. She sipped the iced tea, feeling the shot of pain as the cold hit that damaged tooth, held the glass in her lap and felt the cool of it at the base of her stomach.
"Yes, he is. Folks travel a good distance to see him." Pride in her voice. "I don't know if there's another one in the state. Must be. I just never heard of him."
They sat there like two codgers, Mrs. Owens slow-rocking her antiquated chair and Celeste balancing hers on its hind legs and leaning into the wall, the late afternoon heat shushing the birds on the power lines, paralyzing the flies, clamping down everything that moved. The calmness of it slowed her heartbeat. Every day at this time, the place settled its dusty veil. The sky rested. A hot tiny town to live in while the clattering world rushed off. Celeste thought on it. She could run a year-round freedom school for the children, give them what they'd never get in that public school. Have runaway weekends with Ed Jolivette in New Orleans, take drives to see Sophie Lewis. She'd help Reverend Singleton get the rest of the Negro population registered to vote, organize them to fight for a paved road, indoor plumbing. Plenty to do here.
"Can't hardly wait till November, to walk in there and know my name is in that big book." Geneva Owens stared off across the road. "Sure is cause for a celebration."
"It is." Celeste wanted to be there to see Mrs. Owens walk in there and vote, too.
She followed the woman's gaze to the landscape, wondered what she saw beyond the low mounds of sand where wild grasses and weedy flowers stammered to life.
"Used to be a house across there. Hurricane come through and flattened it." Mrs. Owens sat still looking at the few cinderblocks and washed-out cypress planks disarrayed on the ground. Had it been more than a hurricane? By the end of summer, the locals pined for the big cooling storms to cleanse the land and shake Mr. Heywood's magnolias senseless. But they also prayed the Pearl River wouldn't override its banks and that their clapboard houses would stand through another hurricane season and another cold rainy winter.
The older woman put her hands on her knees, then to the chair arms and rose from her chair. "I'ma get myself cleaned up before the others get here."
While Celeste balanced on her tilting chair staring at the rubble pile across the road, Dolly drove up in a swirl of pastel dust with Labyrinth and Georgie and their pink vinyl record player, toting a shopping bag of 45s. They set up the music on the porch and ran a line into the house, Celeste thinking all the while that Dolly wasn't going to register to vote in this town even if she never laid eyes on Percival Dale again. Dolly had taken herself to the place that Shuck warned Celeste against. A Negro woman with a white man will always be lonely. Celeste hugged Labyrinth and Georgie, something she'd never done before, and they hugged her back. Freedom Summer was over and in their own small way, they'd won.
"What kinda music you listen to up there in Detroit?" Dolly's skeptical expression made Celeste laugh.
"Same kind you listen to down here in Mississippi." Celeste put her hands on her hips. "Why?"
"Just wanted to know is all." Dolly rummaged through the 45s, arranged a stack on the little record player, and turned it on. Little Richard blasted out, "The Girl Can't Help It," and the crows jumped off the wires, flapping their wings, cawing, and flying around and away. Dolly went in to help Mrs. Owens with the food. Labyrinth danced by herself in the small space, and Georgie sat watching his big sister shake her hips. They'd be lucky if
the porch survived. The music rode on the thick air, all the more vibrant because there wasn't anything to interfere with it. The Tucker boys, Darby and Henry, came out of their newly painted house half a city block away.
Celeste walked out in the middle of Freshwater Road in the late afternoon sunlight, beckoning to them to come on over. The now dusty Hudson, parked in a lean towards the gully, stood like a grand maroon and chrome sculpture. Mr. Tucker was in there being his evil self, probably seething because somebody might be having a good time. But Zenia Tucker, who'd barely shown her face since Sissy's funeral, stood half in and half out of their front door.
With Martha and the Vandellas launching into "Quicksand" behind her, Celeste shoved aside all the warnings to stay clear of Mr. Tucker and walked toward the Tucker house under a cornflower blue sky. She kept to the middle of the road, dipping a little in time to the music. The next house down Freshwater Road was Sister Mobley's and well after that other small houses were scattered, built as temporary places for the workers in the lumber mills that used to line the banks of the Pearl River. Pineyville's thin soil didn't support plantations; it had always drawn craggy loners, black and white, who couldn't make it anywhere else. They hid out in the piney woods, floated lumber down the Pearl River until its pristine waters turned black from wasted cargoes and wood oils. A deliriously worn-out river. It was a miracle that a drop of that water ever got to Lake Borgne. Pine forests covered everything right down to the last plain before the Gulf of Mexico, the scent of pine woven into the air. Celeste imagined herself hiding away her life in the piney woods.
"Your house looks pretty." Celeste started talking before she arrived. The white shiny finish arced out against the tangerine soil.
Zenia Tucker seemed caught in the front door just like Sissy had at the church, living in a shadow, hugging a secret that she couldn't even speak herself. "Thank you, Miss Celeste."
"Don't you want to come over to celebrate with us?" She spoke to the boys who stood on the bottom step of their porch eyeing her, pebbles of reticence in their eyes. "We got three people registered to vote."
"That's real nice, Miss Celeste. Wait a minute." Zenia Tucker disappeared, the screen door closing right behind her.
Celeste eased closer, praying Mr. Tucker stayed in his house. Beads of sweat bubbled into streams down her face and body, more from fear than heat. "What you been doing all summer? Haven't seen you around." They'd receded like their parents. She smiled, hoping to break through Mr. Tucker's hateful barricade. "Now, which one's Darby and who's Henry?"
"Nothing. I'm Henry." The Tucker boys had sad eyes, too, but not like Sissy's almond ones, full as they were of questions and reveries of flight. The bigger one, Henry, spoke again. "What happened to your tooth?"
"I ran into a drinking fountain." She gave them a big silly grin.
They didn't believe her, she knew, by the way they glanced at the ground as if embarrassed to be in the presence of a lie. Their father probably told them about the goings on at the county building, fashioning the story to suit his own ends.
"My daddy told me you went to jail." Henry had accusations in his face. "Bad people go to jail."
"I did go to jail. So did Reverend Singleton, Sister Mobley, Dolly Johnson, Mrs. Owens, and Mr. Landau. We all went to jail."
"I Like It Like That" blasted out from Mrs. Owens's porch, sounding so funky her body shimmied a little step to the music right in front of the Tucker house. She hadn't heard a note of music except church music and freedom songs since she was in New Orleans with Ed. Dolly must've cranked the volume up even more. Mrs. Owens wasn't going to have that for very long.
"Oh. Why all y'all go to jail?" Darby spoke up.
"I hope your mother will tell you."
Celeste figured she'd better back off as Zenia Tucker came all the way out into the light, frail, her whole body sinking in on itself, clothes lopsided, hair half-combed, the hot-iron scar on her face healed but ugly. She gave Celeste a large piece of paper. "She'd a wanted you to have this, I'm sure."
Celeste stepped onto their path to reach for the paper, took it, and backed away again just as Mr. Tucker appeared behind Zenia. Zenia Tucker's face stayed as blank as a sheet on a clothesline. Mr. Tucker stepped out onto the porch but said not a word, just stared at Celeste with enough hatred in his eyes to stall an army. Celeste froze where she stood. She turned the paper over slowly, trying to encourage her legs to move away, to go. Sissy had drawn Frederick Douglass with wings in the night sky and the north star up in the corner. The drawing vibrated with color. Douglass's dark skin and beard and huge crinkled hair flowed back in a draft of flight. It was the same picture that had illustrated the front of the Frederick Douglass book. His big brown eyes were bright and full of intent. Sissy must've drawn it at home because she'd never taken a seat in freedom school. Celeste stepped back to the road. "Thank you, Mrs. Tucker." She didn't look again at Mr. Tucker, kept her eyes down. "Well, you welcome to come on over. Mrs. Owens cooked a whole lot of food." No one moved. "Bye, then. Bye Henry, bye Darby. Mrs. Tucker." They said "goodbye" in whispers. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Mr. Tucker disappear inside his house.
The sun geared west as Celeste walked back toward Mrs. Owens's house, staring at the drawing, tears welling in her eyes, falling down her face. Sissy's self-portrait as Frederick Douglass reminded her that if she hadn't come to Pineyville talking about freedom, north stars, and better places, Sissy would still be alive. She stepped over Labyrinth and Georgie on the front stairs and kept her face away from Dolly, who sat in Mrs. Owens's rocker. She took the drawing into her room, propped it up on her dresser, and stood there crying in silence. In a while, she collected herself and joined Dolly and the children.
When the Chantels whorled "Maybe" through the late-August air, Mr. Landau turned in off the two-lane, parked on the side of the road, and swung his long legs out of that truck dressed in slacks, a brightly colored short-sleeved shirt showing off his muscular arms. He went straight to the kitchen, shaking the little house with his heavy-footed stride. Dolly and Celeste followed him in like big-city pigeons. Sure enough, he had a bottle of gin in one pocket and six bottles of tonic water distributed among all his other pockets, along with two weevily lemons. All from Louisiana. Celeste blessed Louisiana under her breath, then made gin and tonics for Mr. Landau, Dolly, and herself. Reverend and Etta Singleton arrived with more food and all the Mobleys and soon, there was enough to feed the town.
After eating the celebration meal, the never-used parlor became the grown-ups' sit-down place. Dolly and the children stayed on the front porch or bopped to the music on the dirt path. Celeste was glad they danced on the dirt path, because if they kept jumping and bopping around on that porch, it might just fall to the ground. Dolly put on "Duke of Earl" and did her imitation of Gene Chandler with his cape pretending to leave the stage and coming back over and over. With her cracked tooth making her feel like a bucket-of-blood patron, Celeste dropped her jaw at Dolly's smooth antics. The children hollered and clapped for Dolly as the sun dropped to the level of the horizon, the sky slashed with pale orange streaks that matched the color of the earth. The voices of Reverend Singleton, Sister Mobley, Mr. Landau, and Mrs. Owens carried out on the evening air, pulled her inside.
Etta Singleton was down the short hall in the lonely light of the kitchen scraping and stacking dirty dishes. A feast for the bony dogs of Freshwater Road. Across the tiny parlor room, Geneva Owens beckoned to Celeste to come take her seat, then went to the kitchen, too.
Mr. Landau sipped his gin and tonic, large hands engulfing the kitchen glass, as he leaned against the wall near the entrance. "This time, I don't care what y'all say, I'm bringing the Deacons for Defense and Justice over to guard the rebuilding. Ain't no sense in going through this again." Mr. Landau sounded like a man unaccustomed to taking charge with his words; he had his head down so that some of it went into his chest, but the meaning was clear.
"Well, now, Landau, you know we can't put ourselv
es in a position for a gunfight. We wouldn't win it anyway." Reverend Singleton stood straddle-legged near the front window. Celeste felt his eyes follow her to the parlor chair.
"Won't be no gunfight. All's has to happen is seeing those Negroes with shotguns. Ain't nobody gon do nothin'." Landau swigged his drink. "You don't need to do a thing 'sides raise the money to rebuild."
"Lord, have Mercy." Sister Mobley dabbed at her heart with rapid little pats, sitting near Celeste in the only other chair.
"I sure want to be here to see that." Celeste heard her voice, scanned their faces in the dimming light, uneasy that she'd intruded in something that the locals were deciding amongst themselves. She reached under the yellowy shade of the one lamp and turned it on, feeling as disenfranchised as they'd been all their lives. Outside.
"We have a small insurance policy. Won't cover much, but every bit helps."
He paused and Celeste wondered if he'd mention going to Sophie Lewis for help in rebuilding the church. He didn't mention her, but caught Celeste's eyes, which surely had questions about why he didn't. Now she was afraid to say the woman's name. Celeste thought over the day they'd visited Sophie and remembered a closeness between them but more importantly, a kind of big pride they had in each other. They were like-minded, only she was free and he wasn't. Clear now. She was the reason he could stay there. He had an exquisite place to run off to, to hide in, to revive himself in, to touch some part of a life he'd left in Chicago, a life of theatre, opera, books, and conversations with people from all walks of life.
Freshwater Road Page 37
