Letters to Missy Violet

by Barbara Hathaway

  She said one day her neighbor’s cow was eating some apples and she was gobbling them up so fast without chewing them and an apple got stuck in her throat. A sharecropper farmer was passing by in his wagon and saw the cow choking. The farmer took a piece of rubber hose, put a stick through it, and pushed it down the cow’s throat but it didn’t move the apple. So the farmer pushed his hand down the cow’s throat and got hold of the apple and pulled it out. The cow didn’t like it at all and stepped on the farmer’s foot. But if the farmer had not done that the cow would have died.

  “Sharecroppers and farmers are very special people, and I don’t want you children to forget it,” Miss Battle said. It sure was a surprise to hear Miss Battle put in a good word for Mister Waters and the sharecroppers. Miss Battle is beginning to sound a bit like Miss Glover . . .

  Always Go Straight Home from School

  I don’t know why, but I keep getting into trouble lately. Right after I got into hot water with Mama about writing that letter to Missy Violet about Miss Olette’s daughter, I got into trouble again following behind Charles. This time I really did get a whupping—the worst I ever had. The trouble started one day while some of us kids were passing by the church on our way home from school. Charles said he knew a big secret about something that was inside the church. But before anybody could ask what it was, Charles blurted out, “It’s a dead body!”

  “Why don’t you quit fibbin’,” Arma Jean said, because she knows how Charles likes to make up stories. Nobody ever believes him except maybe Jeff Brown. He thinks Charles is the greatest thing since sliced bread.

  “Why don’t you tell the truth sometimes and shame the devil,” I said to Charles, and his face started getting all red.

  “If you don’t believe me, why don’t you go inside and see for yourself!” he told me.

  “Y’all wanna go inside and see?” Cleveland asked, and silly us went inside. Arma Jean, Cleveland, Jeff Brown, Charles, and me. Ruby Dean was the smart one that day and went on home.

  The church door was locked so we had to climb in through a window. “The Lord gonna punish us for this,” Arma Jean said when our feet hit the floor.

  “Aw, we ain’t gonna touch nothin’—we jus’ gonna look,” said Charles.

  “Yeah, yeah, we jus’ gonna look,” squawked Jeff Brown.

  The lights inside the church were off, but we could still see the long, shiny black casket with the silver handles standing before the pulpit. We all stayed close together and walked up to the casket.

  “Wow!” Cleveland whispered.

  “Didn’t I tell ya! Didn’t I tell ya!” Charles hollered.

  “Shhhhhh! We in church!” I reminded Charles.

  “Dontcha wanna go up and see who it is?” he whispered, but his voice made an echo in the church.

  “Noooo!” Arma Jean and I both said at the same time.

  “I wanna see!” squawked Jeff Brown.

  “Hush! You not suppose to disturb the dead,” Arma Jean said.

  “Yeah. They might come back and haunt you,” Cleveland said.

  “No they won’t,” said Charles, like he knew all about dead people.

  “How you know?” asked Cleveland.

  “’Cause the Good Book say, ‘The dead know not anything.’ So how is he gonna know who lookin’ at him?” Charles answered.

  “Where it say that?” Cleveland wanted to know.

  “Missy Violet read it to me from the Bible so I wouldn’t be afraid of the dead,” Charles answered.

  “We still got no business in here disturbin’ this dead man,” Arma Jean said.

  “Y’all a buncha scaredy-cats!” Charles said, and laid his hand on top of the casket. Then he slid his hand back and forth, back and forth. “Man, this feel smooth and slick like a brand-new Cadillac,” he said, showing off. Then Cleveland went over and touched the casket, then Jeff Brown, then Arma Jean, then me. I don’t know why I touched it. I guess I did it because Arma Jean did.

  “I bet you a quarter you won’t lift up the lid,” Cleveland dared Charles.

  “It’s a bet!”

  “I hate boys,” Arma Jean said. “Always darin’ each other and showin’ off.”

  Just then, Charles, Mister Biggity Showoff, lifted up the lid. It made a loud CLICK, and a smell like old flowers and turpentine floated up from the casket. And even with the lights off we got a good look at the dead man inside. He was very big and long, and his skin was the color of Brazil nut shells. He had on the nicest suit I’d ever seen on a colored man, and a ring with a large red stone was on his pinkie finger. Charles touched his face. “He feels cold and hard,” he said. Then he laid his hand on the dead man’s chest and frowned. “Feels like tissue paper,” he said. Then all of us were touching the dead man’s chest and face and hands. Arma Jean and I jerked our hands away when we touched his chest because it did feel all crinkly like tissue paper.

  Charles said that he’d heard that sometimes the undertaker scoops out all of the dead person’s insides and stuffs them with tissue paper so they wouldn’t be so heavy. Ugh!

  All at once, Mister Charles Elister Paxton Nehemiah Windbush Biggity Showoff reached in the casket and pulled the dead man’s eyelids up. He must have accidentally twisted the dead man’s head too, because all at once his head wasn’t facing up toward the ceiling anymore but was facing us! Big, mean, scary gray eyes were staring right at us! Somebody slammed the casket lid down, and we scattered all over the church. Arma Jean and I finally got through the window. I got a splinter in my knee going over the sill.

  It turned out the dead man was kin to a lady named Miss Willa Sumter, who lived on the outskirts of town, and he was a gangster who lived up north in Chicago. The undertaker’s helper said he had been shot.

  That Saturday at the funeral when the casket was opened for the family to have “the last look” there was the dead man, lying there facing the congregation. Starin’ at them with those scary gray eyes just the way he had stared at us. They say Miss Willa fainted and some of the people ran out of the church.

  Soon word got around, thanks to Miss Nula Irish, that the body had been “tampered with,” especially since Miss Nula claimed she saw “a redheaded scamp and a gang of rascals” running from the church on Friday afternoon. The news got back to Mama, and Mama remembered that I’d gotten a splinter in my knee that I couldn’t explain. She put two and two together and came after me with Papa’s shavin’ strap. Oh Lordy!

  Charles Gets His Comeuppance

  I know Charles is my first cousin and all, but I wish his ma would get well so he could go on back up to Mount Gilead. Papa says he doesn’t think Aunt Charlotte will ever get well. He thinks there’s something wrong with her heart. He says she’s been sick ever since she was a little girl. He said if she ran and played too much she’d get tired and faint and their mama would have to hold smelling salts under her nose. Papa said most of the time she just sat on the porch in the rocker and tattled on the other children.

  One time I dreamed Charles found some redheaded, freckle-faced people just like himself and moved far, far away. When I told Mama I wished that dream would come true, she said I got to be nice to Charles and show Christian charity because he’s a guest in our home and he’s our kin. Sometimes I wonder if Aunt Charlotte and Uncle Nehemiah just send him down here to get rid of him. I wouldn’t blame them if they did. Mama says they sent him down here so he can be with his cousins because there are no children up there for him to be with. I think the children up there just don’t like him.

  Sometimes we’ll be getting along just fine, but then he’ll go and do something mean and spoil everything. Like the other day when nobody was looking, he cuffed me upside the head because he’s still mad about what I said in the letter to Missy Violet about the cow patty. He’s becoming a real bully. Mostly he picks on girls or boys like Jasper Kelly and Arthur Jones. Jasper’s got a funny leg and Arthur’s got a birthmark over one eye.

  Charles is always making fun of them. “Where you get
that ol’ crooked leg from?” he says to Jasper, and Jasper’s eyes fill up with water. Or he’ll smack poor Arthur across the eye and say, “Oops, I thought that was a doodlebug settin’ on your eye!” Sometimes he pushes them into each other to make the other kids laugh.

  But somebody fixed Charles’s business real good in school the other day, and it was Ruby Dean Baker! She had an apple on her desk and Charles kept foolin’ with it—acting like he was going to snatch it off Ruby Dean’s desk and eat it. Ruby Dean kept telling him to stop, but nobody hardly pays Ruby Dean any mind, she’s so easygoing. But that day Ruby Dean meant it. So when Charles grabbed the apple and took a great big bite out of it, Ruby Dean clobbered him. She wrestled him to the floor, bopped him in the eye, and pounded him good. She was all over him like a net.

  Miss Battle didn’t say one word, just sat at her desk marking papers. And I shouldn’t say this because Mama says it’s a sin to laugh when your enemy gets his comeuppins, but I was glad, glad, glad! That big ol’ Ruby Dean might not be so bright when it comes to learning, but she sure can wallop a bully! Now everybody wants to be her friend.

  The only friend Charles has left is Jeff Brown, and Jeff’s own mama says Jeff’s head is not crowded with brains. But Jeff thinks Charles is the “bee’s knees” because he’s got freckles and red hair. He tells Charles, “I ain’t never seen no colored boy like you before. You must be some kinda lucky!” And Charles just swells up. He’s got Jeff thinking he can do anything.

  Besides Jeff Brown and Missy Violet, the only other person who likes Charles is Cleo, my baby sister—and that’s because she’s only a few months old. But she sure cottons to Charles. Whenever he chucks her under the chin, she coos and grins. And her little baby eyes say, “I love you, Cousin Charles.”

  What We Saw in the Woods

  Not long after Ruby Dean Baker whupped Charles good in class, he tried to make up with me.

  “Hey, cuz, wanna play jacks?” he asked.

  “Nope. Don’t wanna play no jacks,” I answered.

  “Wanna play cards?”

  “Nope.”

  “Well, how ’bout we go fishin’, then.”

  Now, he had me when he said “go fishing.” I loved fishing. Besides, I could fish circles around Charles. So that Saturday after we finished our chores we started out for our favorite fishing spot on the Pee Dee River. “Let’s take the shortcut through the woods,” Charles said. But I didn’t want to go through the woods with Charles, because every time I go through the woods with him he gets all crazy and tries to scare me. We’ll be walking along and he’ll just disappear. Or he’ll make scary noises or jump out from somewhere shouting, “LOOK OUT! THE RAUSY BOYS!” or “HERE COMES HAIRY ESAU!” And I almost run over myself trying to get away. One time I fell down and busted my lip and skinned both knees, he scared me so bad.

  “No,” I said. “You gonna try and scare me.”

  “No I ain’t,” Charles promised. I don’t know why I was stupid enough to believe him. I guess I really, really wanted to go fishing. Or maybe it was because I always hear Mama say, “Forgive those who trespass against us.” But something happened in the woods that day that was a lot scarier than Charles.

  The sun was nice and warm when we left, and the fish were jumping high. I caught seven catfish and two bass. Charles only caught four sunfish. My mouth was watering as I thought about those fish fryin’ in Mama’s big black skillet. But on the way back home, we walked up on something real, real scary: the Ku Klux Klan.

  The Ku Klux Klan are a bunch of bad white men who go around beating up colored people, or anybody who is not white. They even kill people. Mama and Papa said they were the ones who killed Uncle Bud, Papa’s great-uncle, because he tried to vote for the Republican Party.

  All the men had on white robes with hoods covering their heads, and they were standing around in a circle. At first we thought they were stringing somebody up, but then we saw that they were just talking and having some kind of meeting. Some children were with them, too—three boys. One of them looked like he was only five or six years old. Charles left me and jumped in the bushes, but I was too scared to move, and one of the men saw me. “Hey, gal, what you up to!” he hollered. I couldn’t see his face, but I knew that voice. “I’m not doin’ nothing, Mista Lordnorth,” I answered. Mister Lordnorth’s the man who owns the biggest furniture store in town.

  “STUPID!” I heard Charles squawk in the bushes. “Now they gonna string us up for sure, ’cause you done pegged one of ’em.” When Charles said that my knees began to knock and I could just see me and Charles swinging from a tall oak tree.

  “Who in them bushes?” one of the men shouted as he went over and pulled Charles out of the mulberry bush. I could tell that Charles was scared because his eyes were as big as wagon wheels. “Well, well, well, what have we here,” said a great big Ku Klux man. I think he must have been the leader, because he wore a special hood and his robe had a big red circle with a white cross in the middle. He made us give him our fish and told us to “skedaddle.” But the man with Mister Lordnorth’s voice told him they couldn’t let us go.

  “Well, what we gonna do with ’em?” the man asked. And the man with Mister Lordnorth’s voice said something to the leader man, and they tied us up and went back to what they were doing. Charles and I started to cry. “Viney, they gonna kill us!” Charles kept saying, and every time he said it my stomach hurt. I started wondering what it would feel like when they killed us and what it would feel like to be dead and never to see Mama and Papa again. I was crying so hard, my nose started to run, but I couldn’t wipe it because my hands were tied and that made me cry even more.

  I could hear Charles praying and I tried to pray, too, but the words kept getting all mixed up. I wondered if God could hear us way down there in the woods. I closed my eyes real tight, trying to pray, but all I could see was Charles and me laid out in two white caskets, like the one they had for Miss Daisy Mack’s little girl when she died of the diphtheria. Two small-size white caskets standing in front of the pulpit at the church, and Mama and Papa and Aunt Charlotte and Uncle Nehemiah just crying their hearts out.

  I wanted Papa to come and get me. I wanted him to ride up on his horse and snatch me and Charles up on his saddle and ride away. “Oh, Papa, Papa, Papa!” I kept crying, and when I opened my eyes one of the little boys who was with the Ku Klux was standing there looking at us. He had big blue eyes that looked like two blue marbles, and he just stared and stared at us. Then he did a curious thing—he untied our hands.

  “Hey,” he said when we were untied.

  “Hey,” we said back.

  “My name is Jody and y’all better run,” he said. And we did. We ran as fast as we could. It was just like a miracle in the Bible how that little boy helped us get away. But I wondered what made him do it. I wondered how his little fingers untied that heavy rope. Jody . . . Jody . . . Jody. I kept saying his name in my head all the way home so I wouldn’t forget it. And I kept hoping that those bad men would never find out what he did.

  When we got home we told Mama and Papa what had happened to us, and Mama started crying and thanking the Lord for saving us from the Klan. When we told them the part about Mister Lordnorth, Mama had to sit down. “Those the same men who give us a ride home after we done worked in their wives’ kitchens and fed their children,” she said. “The same men be underneath those white sheets! The same men who wait on us in the stores be hidin’ under those hoods, ’cause they don’t want folks to know who they are. Some of their own family members don’t even know they belong to the Klan!”

  Mama said we’d never set foot in Mister Lordnorth’s store again even though he was good about letting colored people have credit. But the last thing she said on the matter was “Lord, bless that little white boy’s sweet baby heart.”

  For a long time after that happened I had bad dreams about Mister Lordnorth and I was afraid to go into town with Mama and Papa on Saturdays. I was afraid Mister Lordnorth would see
me and send the Klan to get me out of my bed one night or burn a cross in front of our house.

  Papa said not to worry so much about it, that all colored children looked the same to Mister Lordnorth. He said if he was going to remember anyone it would be Charles because of his red hair. That made me feel a little better, but not much. I didn’t want them to get Charles either. I hope God will save us from the Ku Klux again the way He did when we were tied up down in the woods.

  Telling All About Our Troubles

  September 22, 1929

  Dear Missy Violet,

  I just had to write you again and tell you about the terrible thing that happened to Charles and me when we went fishing this past Saturday. We took a shortcut to the Pee Dee river. But we walked up on the Ku Klux having a secret meeting. They saw us and made us turn over our fish. They tied us up because I recognized Mister Lordnorth when he spoke even though his face was covered up with a hood. We were so scared. I thought they would kill us for sure. I thought I would never see you or Mama and Papa again. Charles left me and jumped in the bushes, though he’s been telling folks that he fought the Klan off.

  But the truth is, he cried and prayed so hard and pitiful, I couldn’t even get mad at him. I was crying and praying, too. Then, Missy Violet, a good thing happened. There were some boys in the woods with those men. One was only about five or six years old. A little boy with blue eyes. He came over and untied us. His name was Jody. He said, “Y’all better run.” I pray for little Jody every night, because he saved us.