The Jackson office of One Man, One Vote would kick in money, too, since they were fund-raising all over the country for the movement. And, the dirt-poor Negro people of Pearl River County would ante up again, constantly repairing and rebuilding; they'd put money up for the church when they needed that money for other things, had already put money up for the church. There ought to be a way to sue the people who burned down that church, make them pay to rebuild it and then some.
Reverend Singleton nodded to her. "We need that freedom school, too. These children getting nothing from that public school. That's what they should've burned down."
Celeste cleared her throat. "I'm thinking I might stay on for a while." She sought agreement, going from one to the other. She wondered if Mrs. Owens and Etta Singleton could hear this conversation out in the kitchen. Mr. Landau nodded, eyes going off somewhere else. Hard to read him. He'd been like that all summer except when it came to self-defense. "If I stay, I'm thinking about maybe setting up a freedom school library in the new church. Even have it so the children can check out books. They can't touch the books in the other library." She curled her lips in, praying they'd condone her staying.
Sister Mobley stared at the white lace curtain then looked up to Reverend Singleton, face placid. "That's true. I don't let my Tony go nowheres near it." She looked sideways at Celeste, rail-thin body nearly swallowed up by the one upholstered chair.
Reverend Singleton's eyes shone in his brown face like the idea of a library was the finest thing he'd ever heard. "I like that." He seemed to see the new church with the freedom school and the library. "I'll need to think some more on that, but right off, it's a fine idea."
Landau grunted. "That would put the salt in the white folks' wound. Not only are we voting, we got our own liberty."
Sister Mobley fidgeted. "Don't want to rile them up too much now."
"Sure you're right." Celeste tried to sound like a local and contain her fledgling joy. Mr. Landau didn't give a damn about riling up the white folks, and with the Deacons for Defense and Justice on board, things would go more smoothly. She saw herself hammering nails into the church beams, the liquid blue sky smiling through slats of newly milled cypress, trucks of Negro men with shotguns parked on the church road night and day. Boxes of books arriving from cities around the country for the children. She had her own business to take care of, too, but just hadn't come up with a way to do it. On the screened porch, Dolly and the children had grown quiet, the music turned off now. In the pale light, the grown-ups huddled in the parlor.
"We better be getting on home. Don't want to be on these roads too late at night." Reverend Singleton gathered himself to leave. "Some folks probably mad enough at us for getting a few registered."
Celeste rose to be the hostess, to walk him to the front porch. The children spoke their goodbyes, their high soft voices subdued by the night. Celeste stared into the dark, the voices still coming from inside the house like an alto chorus.
"I want you to know that how I feel about Mr. Tucker is pretty much the way you do." He spoke quietly and glanced toward the kitchen. They were at the screen door. "But if I'd operated from that belief, the church would've split right down the middle. They don't want to believe Mr. Tucker did anything wrong, so they don't believe he did. You understand?" Reverend Singleton's brow furrowed intently.
"I'm trying to accept it, Reverend Singleton." She felt relieved at learning what he believed, relieved that he confided in her. "It helps that you told me this. I didn't want to feel like I was crazy."
"You're a long way from crazy, young lady." Reverend Singleton took her hands and held them both in his. He called to his wife, and after her goodbyes they drove away.
Mr. Landau finished his drink, took his glass to the kitchen, and came back to the front door, where he lingered as Mrs. Owens said her goodnights, Celeste standing beside her feeling for a feather of a moment like her dutiful daughter. She helped Dolly gather the 45s and unplug the little record player, walked them all to Dolly's old car. Dolly gave Sister Mobley, Tony, and the two girls a ride to their house down Freshwater Road.
Inside, Celeste's mind raced with prospects and excitement. Already, she made lists of things she'd get for the new freedom school and library. She couldn't wait to discuss the possibility of staying on for a while with Mrs. Owens. After finishing the kitchen cleaning, they fell into the hard chairs at the small table, exhausted, enjoying the teasing breezes that trailed in then died too quickly. The country night sank heavily around them, vanquishing any memory traces of music, of talking, laughing people who an hour ago filled the house to its seams.
Mrs. Owens sat with her hands folded on the tabletop. "Horation was in this house tonight. He so enjoyed a gathering." She paused a moment, the night sounds swelling. Cicadas interrupted by the barks of roaming dogs and the creak and groan of trees. A car or truck moving steadily along the two-lane. Pine, rust, thin streaks of sourness and mold scuffled on the air. The shrimp shells would have to be buried.
Deep fatigue and an airy exhilaration mixed inside Celeste. "Want to show you something." She stepped to her room, grabbed Sissy's picture, and laid it before Mrs. Owens.
"Oh, my Lord." Geneva Owens picked it up and held it closer to the light above. "It's beautiful." She rested it on the tabletop.
"Sissy drew it." Celeste said, pride spilling through her words. "Isn't that something? Mrs. Tucker gave it to me. It's Frederick Douglass. Sissy never even sat down in freedom school. She understood everything." She paused, undecided as to whether she should go on, then took the plunge. "I think I need to stay here and keep working with the children. That's what I'd like to do." She stopped, let the words spread out in the kitchen, thought of all that needed to be faced at home, then revved up again. "Reverend Singleton invited me to stay on, wants me to continue the freedom school. My daddy has a friend who teaches in Detroit. I'm sure she'd help me collect books and ship them down here. I can set up a library along with the new freedom school and the children would have their own place, wouldn't have to worry about going to that other library where nobody wants them touching anything. I can just see it." Her words tumbled out, eyes pressed forward, heart beating fast, fingers splayed on the table. "Wouldn't take more than a year to set it up, then I'd go back to school." She lied, feeling like she'd more likely wander the earth like a gypsy. "Lot of people do it. Take a year off like that."
Mrs. Owens watched Celeste, seemed to be reading her like the crinkly pages of her bible. "Well, you were my child, I'd have you finish your school ing. When you go to Jackson, you'll see what the other summer people are deciding to do. But, whatever they do, you need to go on and finish your schooling. No delaying." Mrs. Owens tapped her fingers on the table, a background drumming nearly indiscernible, shoulders sinking a bit, submitting to the tiredness they must surely feel after the day of cooking and cleaning.
"But the freedom school. That public school is set up to keep them back." Celeste pressed her case, desperation flecking the words. "Reverend Singleton said that's what they should've burned down. I can't leave now." Her dream of staying singing through her words, she might have been in the pulpit of Reverend Singleton's St. James A.M.E. Church. She was in a life and death struggle for a place called home, didn't know what else there was in the world that she could count on. Shuck slipping away.
Mrs. Owens said nothing for a while, seemed to be considering her words, mulling them over and over. She adjusted herself in the chair, wiped her temples with the corner of her apron. Celeste's head pounded with excitement, the anticipation of working out the details of staying, of rebuilding and teaching Tony and his two little sisters, Labyrinth and Georgie, and maybe even getting the Tucker boys to come. In memory of Sissy, she wanted to stay on, but in the back of her mind she knew that would be a perpetual thorn in Mr. Tucker's side, to wake up in September and find her still there watching him, spreading her freedom songs over the land into the hearts of other young people and old people, too. He'd never
be able to tolerate that-he'd punish Mrs. Owens and Sister Mobley, too, by not providing them with the least manly gestures. He wouldn't care then if they all died.
"What about your daddy? I know he would not want you to stay here. You can't let him down like that." Mrs. Owens's forehead creased deeply as if she couldn't imagine Celeste coming up with this idea of staying while a well-providing father sat at home waiting for her to get on with her education, her own life.
Celeste's breathing grew shallow. She knew very well if she stayed here it would break Shuck's heart. She licked her scar-lip, her cracked tooth, nodded her head up and down gently. "He wouldn't like it, but he'd never tell me not to do it if I really wanted to." She lied like a pro. She'd lied all summer long, saying she'd write her mother, which she hadn't done and had no intention of doing. Didn't even know what Shuck would feel after he heard what was in Wilamena's letter. Didn't even know if she'd ever tell him.
Mrs. Owens looked askance at her, seemed on the verge of disputing her words, but said nothing for a while. The two of them sat there like boxers in a circle of light, the kitchen table their ring, waiting for the bell.
"It's time for these Negroes to get up and demand better for their own children. They live here, they work here, they need to be doing for themselves. You can't spoon-feed people forever, child." Mrs. Owens folded her arms across her chest, blocking any further incursions. "We do the rest on our own."
Celeste sighed so deeply her exhaling breath brought her heart to a near stop. She grabbed at Mrs. Owens's words, moved them around in her head trying to figure a way through. Spoon feed. "But if someone like me is here, some things will go a lot faster." She didn't want to admit the downside-that whites resented the Northerners meddling in the town.
In the quiet that followed, she realized she'd revealed something about herself that even she didn't want to be there.
"There may be truth in that, but they need to do it on their own so they know they done it on their own." Mrs. Owens raised her voice but calmed by the end of the sentence. "You did all you can do to show us to the next point. And it's time for you to prepare for your own self's life. You done plenty for ours. You can't hide here. Reverend Singleton means well, but you got to go home and ready your own life." She slid Sissy's drawing across the table toward Celeste. "This is the time for us that live here. Sissy didn't die so you could stay here. We didn't do all we done so you could stay here. That's not what it was about."
The weight of it, and the rejection in it, sent shivers over Celeste's body. Nowhere to hide. The words brought heat to her face and ears. She felt her stomach falling. Mrs. Owens knew precisely what Shuck would say. Celeste looked away, bit her lip, then looked back at Mrs. Owens in fear that she might mumble out the truth. So this was the end of her sojourn in Mississippi, the beginning of letting this woman, this house, and this backwater town go. Now she had to leave-she would never insult Mrs. Owens by staying in town with some other family.
They were quiet. Celeste's head tilted down. She must not cry, she thought. She glanced out the back door, around the little kitchen, the refrigerator humming. Mrs. Owens still as a statue.
"You understand what I'm saying?" Mrs. Owens held her face with her knowing dark eyes.
"Yes, ma'am." Celeste nodded, not understanding all of it, sensed somewhere in what Mrs. Owens said that the Negro people of Pineyville needed the best: no more half-educated teachers, no more zealous "would-be-if- onlys." She'd faked herself out by thinking they needed her as much as she needed them. But everything had changed. This was the end of the first race. The next race would be different.
The house was sleeved in darkness, the one bare light bulb shining on their sweaty tired faces. Celeste looked down at Sissy's drawing, saw the girl in the church door with fear in her eyes, remembered her sitting in the back seat of Mr. Tucker's Hudson with her big sunglasses on staring up at the sky. She'd promised to take her to see a movie on a big screen in the dark. But there'd been no time. Out the back door, the tops of the long-needled pines sketched dark silhouettes against a moonlit sky. Sissy'd found some peace and she needed to find some, too.
"All right then." Mrs. Owens got up from her chair. "Good night, child. Be sure to lock the doors." She passed by her, patted her shoulder, then went into her room and closed the curtain behind her.
Celeste heard the old springs disturb as Mrs. Owens sat on the side of her bed, heard the crisp pages of the bible. She turned out the kitchen light, locked the rickety back screen and door and the front doors, then went to her bedroom. She propped Sissy's drawing up on the dresser trying to figure a way to pack it. It struck her that Horation and Geneva Owens in the old photo looked as calm and contained in that oval frame as if they'd lived a life of peace, fulfillment, and bounty. How, she wondered, did they subdue so much? With her gone, Mrs. Owens would have her old room again, sleep in the place where she'd loved and cried all of her life. The fatigue of the day overcame her. She went to sleep with the mattress on the bed for the first time since bullets flew through the house; she didn't have the strength to pull it down to the floor.
30
From her window seat on the plane, the opulent green of Detroit's western suburbs reminded Celeste of New Orleans. The highway shot through like a concrete arrow. One frost-cool night in late September or October would usher in autumn and she'd awaken to a celebration of color that was equal parts enchantment and regret. She smelled the burning leaves at curbside on Outer Drive, the feel of air thinning to cold. Ann Arbor was twenty or so miles west, Detroit the same distance east, two worlds that might have been on different planets. She'd come home, though she no longer counted on the meaning of the word, would've stayed in Pineyville for a while longer if Mrs. Owens had agreed to her plan, her maneuver to avoid confrontation with the import of Wilamena's letter. Shuck had always admonished her that she was transparent, too apt to carry her heart on her sleeve. Hard as he'd tried to teach her otherwise, he'd not been successful. Mrs. Owens had read her like a book she'd read before.
That morning in Jackson, Celeste labored to make herself appear like a well-off young woman coming home from a Caribbean cruise. Shuck wouldn't want to see the sweat-drenched, dirty-toed girl she'd become in Mississippi. Her cracked tooth had been replaced with a temporary one by the only Negro dentist in town. The nurse in Dr. Fields's office told her that in the past, Negro people traveled to Memphis to get their teeth fixed, if they got them fixed at all. White dentists in Jackson wouldn't take them as patients. She'd reconnected with Margo and Ramona, all of them staying again in the segregated volunteer apartments for their debriefings. That morning she'd ironed the best of her cotton dresses, a sleeveless peach sheath with a cropped jacket, for the trip home. She hadn't put on a fully ironed dress in weeks. At Mrs. Owens's house, she'd taken to running the iron over the bodice of a dress and perhaps down the skirt front. It was a thankless and useless task. In minutes, the humidity re-pressed every wrinkle into soft folds of limp fabric. Clothes stayed rough-dried no matter how hard you ironed them, helpless against the humidity.
The smooth look she got from setting her hair on Margo's electric curlers lasted about as long as it took her to walk outside to get into Ed Jolivette's funky movement car for the ride to the airport. She wore her white pumps and carried her bulging green canvas book-bag, its frayed corners and dirt splotches belying all of her primping. A crusty layer of dark suntanned skin obscured the mosquito bite scars up and down her ankles and arms.
Shuck stood back from the gate at the edge of the waiting crowd, dressed in a late-summer brown suit with a creamy shirt open at the collar. His stingy-brimmed hat sat a little back on his head, his forehead the color of dark stained oak with deep red hues. Celeste walked toward him searching his living face for what she'd not found in the small snapshot on her dresser on Freshwater Road. She wasn't there, she feared, not in the shapes or colors. How had she missed it for all those years? Still, she saw herself deep in his eyes, a reflection of him, an ext
ension of the man, a hope lodged in her and her future, her sight and her way of being in the world. Mississippi, she figured, had deepened that. He was begrudgingly proud.
Shuck grinned and frowned at the same time, eyes saying words he'd never speak. "Damn, girl, you black as me." He hugged her and kissed her forehead as he always did.
"It'll fade." She sidestepped that weighty issue and dove into an adolescent litany of how much work it had taken her, Ramona, and Margo to turn her back into someone he'd recognize after living raw in the wilds of Mississippi for two months. She showed him her temporary tooth and told him about the incident at the drinking fountain with Sheriff Trotter's deputy. Anger flashed in the dark brown of Shuck's eyes, and Celeste thought for a moment he might hit the nearest white person. She chastised herself for not waiting until she got into his car to start telling him her Mississippi stories.
He slung her book-bag over his shoulder then slid his arm into hers as he always did when they walked side by side, the way they walked the streets in New York City on a vacation a long time ago. "What you got in here, rocks?" They strolled toward the baggage claim area. "Mississippi dirt. Rocks. Notebooks and stuff." She'd carried that book-bag all summer, back and forth to the St. James A.M.E. Church until it burned to the ground. At the beginning, it held odds and ends, notebooks, maps, chewing gum, a real purse. She really had added dirt and rocks-a small brown bag, now torn, full of tangerine-colored soil from Freshwater Road, and a few white stones from the church clearing, all of which more than likely had tinted and creased Wilamena's letter, which she'd moved to her book-bag, too.
Shuck looked ahead as if searching for an exit to something. "You supposed to be registering people to vote down there, not collecting dirt and rocks."
"Thought I'd have time to study, too. For next semester." She hoped to convince herself that she'd be ready to return to school after Labor Day, suggesting her resolve to him, shaky as it was. Just days ago she was begging to stay in Mississippi, to not come home at all. She might, at that moment, have grabbed the book-bag from Shuck, dug out the letter, and pled for answers right there in the airport. She didn't, and she congratulated herself that maybe this patience meant she'd crossed over into adulthood, left the nebulous field that separated late adolescence from the rest of her life. No demanding answers in inopportune places. Wilamena had hurled her out of childhood, thrown her into deep water.
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