“She’s your granddaughter?”
“That’s right.”
It struck me that the girl had seemed as willing to shoot her grandfather as to shoot me. She walked boldly up to me, around me, looking me over as if I represented some species of animal she had never observed before and already didn’t like.
“Mr. Corbett is here from Washington,” said Abraham.
“You working for him?” said Moody. “Why would you?”
“We working together,” said Abraham.
“Well, if you ain’t working for him, how come he calls you Abraham, and you call him Mr. Corbett?”
“Because he prefers it that way.” Abraham knew that wasn’t so, but he fixed me in place with a look that stifled the protest in my throat. “Mr. Corbett is here by the instructions of the president of the—”
“Abraham,” I said. “We’re not supposed to talk about any of this.”
He nodded, dipped his head. “You are right, Mr. Corbett,” he said.
Moody gave me a disgusted look and said, “You should have let me shoot him while I had the chance.”
Chapter 36
WHEN I WAS GROWING UP, gumbo was not something most white people would eat, unless they were Catholic and lived down on the coast. Gumbo was food for black people, or Creole people. Like chitlins and hog ears, it was the kind of thing mostly eaten out of necessity. Or so most people thought. My mother’s cook, Aurelia, used to whip up a big pot of sausage-and-crawfish gumbo and leave it to feed us through Friday, her day off.
So when Abraham suggested we stop in at a little gray shanty of a saloon with a crooked sign on the door, GUMBO JOE’S, I was a happy man. Also along for the meal was Moody and her brother Hiram, a handsome boy of nineteen with aspirations to be a lawyer.
I was surprised at the idea of a Negro restaurant in Eudora, but when I stepped inside the place, I saw it was 95 percent saloon, with a little cooker perched beside the open window in back. On the flame sat a bubbling pot.
An old black man came out from behind the rickety bar. I couldn’t help flinching at the sight of him: he had no chin, and his right arm was severed just below the elbow.
Without our asking, he brought three small glasses and a bottle of beer. “Y’all want gumbo?”
“We do,” said Abraham.
So much for a menu.
Abraham poured beer into all three glasses, and I took one. It wasn’t cold, but it tasted real good.
“What happened to that man?” I said softly.
“The war,” said Abraham. He explained that the old man had been a cook for Pemberton’s army at Vicksburg. The Yankee mortar shell that crashed through the mess tent was no respecter of color or rank.
“He lost half his face fighting for the side that was trying to keep him a slave,” I said.
“Wasn’t fighting, he was cooking,” said Abraham. “A lot of us did. The pay was good. Better than we got staying home. Those was good times, if you didn’t get killed.”
The War between the States had been officially over for forty-three years but had never actually ended in the South. The Confederate battle flag still flew higher than Old Glory, at least at our courthouse. There were Rebel flags hanging on the fronts of stores and from the flagpoles of churches. Ever since I was a boy I had recognized the old faded butternut cap as the sign of a Confederate veteran.
There had always been men with wooden legs or wooden crutches. I knew that an empty sleeve pinned up inside a suit jacket meant an arm had been left on a battlefield in Georgia or Tennessee. Maybelle’s handyman, otherwise a handsome old gent, had a left eye sewn shut with orange twine. The skin around that eye burned to a god-awful dry red that would have scared me if I’d been a child.
“That old man behind the bar?” said Abraham. “Before the war, he was trying to become a professional fiddler.”
I shook my head. “And now he has no chin to lean his fiddle on,” I said.
Abraham’s face broke open in a big smile. So did Moody’s and her brother’s. “Aw now, Mr. Corbett, I was fooling on you. Old Jeffrey wasn’t no fiddler. He was slingin’ beer back before the war, and he been slingin’ beer ever since.”
Moody saw the look on my face and busted out with a guffaw. “Papaw, Mr. Corbett ain’t too swift, is he?”
Chapter 37
THE CHINLESS OLD MAN RETURNED, bearing in his good hand a tray with three steaming bowls of dark gumbo.
“Look like we maybe gonna have some music too,” Hiram said, and his face lit up in a smile.
Two or three men had drifted in, still shiny-sweaty from the field. They ordered beers and shot nervous looks in our direction. The more I thought about it, the more I realized how out of place I was in here. It was the Negroes’ place; who was I to come in and sit down as if I belonged?
At least they had the courtesy to let me sit there, which would certainly not be the case if one of them tried to order a beer in a white barroom.
I was delighted to see a grizzled middle-aged fellow taking out a banjo, tuning it up while his buddy drummed his hands on an overturned gutbucket. The thin, listless woman between them waited for the banjo player to plink a little chord, and then without any introduction or ritual, she set in to wailing.
Lawd, I been blue
Since my man done left this town…
The little hairs on my neck prickled.
“You heard the blues before, Mr. Corbett?” asked Hiram.
“I have—one time,” I said. “On Beale Street in Memphis.”
Sho done been blue
Since my man done left this town…
“You like the way she sings?” Moody said.
“I do,” I said. “I like it a lot.”
Moody shrugged, like she didn’t much care which way I answered her question.
“I’m a devotee of ragtime music,” I told her.
“You a what?” said Moody. “A deevo—what did you say?”
“Admirer,” I said. “I’m an admirer of ragtime.”
“No, that word you used—what was it again?”
Moody had a bold way of speaking. I must admit I wasn’t accustomed to being addressed by a colored girl without the customary “yes, sir” and “no, sir.”
“Devotee,” I said. “One who is devoted to something. I think it’s from the French.”
“That’s a pretty word,” she said, “wherever it come from.”
He beat me, then he leave me
And now he ain’t been coming round.
When that lament ended, the banjo man put down his instrument and brought out a battered guitar.
Once again I was swept up in the mournful repetition, the slangy bent notes from the singer echoed by the guitar, the way it all fell together into a slow, rhythmic chant of pure feeling. This music was made from leftover parts of old field songs and hymns and slave music, but to me it sounded like something entirely new, and something quite wonderful.
Chapter 38
MY BELLY WAS STUFFED full of gumbo and rice. My tongue still burned from the red pepper. I remarked to Abraham on the staying power of the cayenne.
“Here, take a chaw on this,” said Abraham. From his satchel he brought forth a length of brown sugarcane. I smiled. That’s what our cook Aurelia used to prescribe for a sore throat or any other minor childhood complaint: a suck on a piece of sweet cane.
“You got enough for family?” said Moody.
“I got plenty, but it don’t look right for a gal to chew cane,” Abraham said.
She put on such a pout that Abraham laughed and brought out a piece for her and another for Hiram.
“My granddaughter is incorrigible,” said Abraham. “I hope you can forgive her.”
“I don’t need him forgiving me,” she said.
Her grandfather’s face darkened. “Moody? Watch your mouth.”
She dropped her eyes. “Yes, sir.”
“See now, Mr. Corbett, she got so comfortable settin’ here next to you that she’s done for
got how she s’posed to act. If you was any other kind of white man, she could be in big trouble right now, sassing you that way. Same thing goes for Hiram. Even more so.” I had the feeling he said this more for Moody’s and Hiram’s benefit than for mine. Moody kept her eyes riveted fiercely on the floor beside our table.
“See, when you’re colored, you always about this close—” he held up his fingers, indicating a tiny space—“to sayin’ the wrong word. Or lookin’ the wrong way. And that means you this far from gettin’ beat up, or kicked, or punched, or cursed. Or gettin’ strung up and killed by the KKK.”
I took a long sip from my beer.
“Everything a colored man does can be a crime these days,” he said.
“I don’t quite understand,” I said.
Moody’s eyes came up. “Let me tell him, Papaw.”
He hesitated, but then he said, “All right.”
“They’s a young fellow called Whitney,” she said, gazing intently at me. “He spent a day hoeing out the flowerbeds around ol’ Miz Howard’s house, then when she was done he told her how much it was. She didn’t want to pay. Said he hadn’t worked that many hours. Then she calls up the sheriff and says Whitney done said something dirty to her. Well, she got him arrested, but that wasn’t enough for ’em. They come drug him out of the jail and hung him up. Killed him. All because he asked for his pay.” Her eyes blazed.
“That’s the truth,” said Hiram.
“Sammy Dawkins brung his empty Co-Cola bottle back to Sanders’ store to get his penny back. Ol’ Mr. Sanders tells him niggers don’t get the penny back, just white folks. Sammy argues with him and next thing you know he’s in jail. For wanting his penny!”
“Keep your voice down,” Abraham said.
“There was a couple boys sitting on the sidewalk downtown. They was talkin’ to each other quiet like, telling about this strike of colored men up in Illinois. Well, sir, somebody overheard what they said, and next thing you know a bunch of men jump on these boys. One of ’em, they knocked out all his teeth.”
“We get punished for ‘boasting,’ and for ‘strutting,’ and for talking too loud, and for casting the evil eye. We get arrested for ‘walking too fast,’ or ‘walking too slow,’ or taking too long to say yassuh.”
Moody was furious now. Her voice carried to tables nearby. Some of the people stopped their own conversations to listen.
“Colored man looks at a white woman, they kill him just for thinkin’ the thoughts he ain’t even thought,” she said. “If he even looks at a white woman, it must mean he wants to rape her or kill her. When they’re the ones doing most of the raping and killing around here!”
“Now, calm down,” Abraham said.
“Don’t tell me to calm down! I know what it’s like. It happens to me too, Papaw.”
“I know, child.”
“You don’t know what happened yesterday. I was bringin’ the basket of ironing back to Miz Cooper, you know she got that boy Dillard, he’s not right in the head. Well, he out there pulling weeds in the kitchen garden. He looked at me. All I said was, “Howdy, Dillard,” and he says somethin’ real rude, like, ‘Maybe you want to go with me, Moody’ or somethin’ like that. I just ignored him, Papaw. I just kept walking. But he come up behind me and grab me, like, you know, touching my titties.”
“Hush,” said Abraham sternly.
“It’s what happened, Papaw,” she said. “Then he says ‘Aw come on, Moody, you a nigger girl, and ever’body knows that is all a nigger girl wants.’ ”
And with that, she couldn’t keep the tears in. She folded her arms on the table and buried her head. Hiram stroked her neck.
I spoke softly: “We’re going to do something, Moody. That’s why I’m here with your grandfather.”
There was silence. Then Moody looked up at me and she was angry.
“Go home, Mr. Corbett. That’s what you could do. Just pack up your bag, and go home.”
Chapter 39
“I GUESS YOU PRAYED for mail, Mr. Corbett,” Maybelle said as I walked past the kitchen of the rooming house the next morning. “And the Lord answered.”
She held out a plate with a pair of blackened biscuits and another plate with three envelopes. My heart lifted. But my happiness faded when I glanced through the letters and found that none of them had come from Washington.
I smiled down at the biscuits, thanked Maybelle, and put them aside for disposal later.
On my way over to the Slide Inn, I thumbed through the mail. First I opened a flyer inviting me to a “social and covered dish supper” at the Unitarian church in Walker’s Bridge, one town west of Eudora. In the right-hand margin was a handwritten addition: “Ben—Hope to see you at the supper. Elizabeth.”
The next envelope also held an invitation. This one was a good deal fancier than the first, engraved on heavy paper, wrapped in a piece of protective tissue.
Mr. and Mrs. L. J. Stringer
request the pleasure of your company at supper
on Saturday, July fourteenth,
nineteen hundred and six
at eight o’clock in the evening
Number One Summit Square
Eudora, Mississippi
R.S.V.P.
What was this world coming to? A fancy-dress invite from
L. J. Stringer, of all people!
It was hard to believe that the sweet, kindly boy with whom I’d spent a good portion of my childhood was now in such a lofty position that he could send out invitations engraved on thick vellum. And that on his way to manhood, L.J. had invented a machine that shot twine around cotton bales in one-eighth the time it took four men to do the job.
The Stringer Automatic Baler. Without it, Cotton would no longer be King.
I eased into a rear table at the Slide Inn Café. I ordered coffee and a big breakfast of grits and eggs, patty sausage and biscuits. I thought about L. J. Stringer for a moment or two, but my heart was heavy at the absence of a single letter from home.
Why hadn’t Meg written? I didn’t really need to ask myself that. I knew the answer. But even if she was too angry—why hadn’t she allowed the girls to write?
I decided to detour by the post office just to make sure no letters had been accidentally sent to Judge Everett Corbett’s home.
Meantime I took a slurp of the Slide Inn’s good chicory coffee and tore open the last of my three letters, the one without a return address.
At first I thought the envelope was empty. I had to feel around inside it before I found the card.
It was a postcard, like any other postcard. In place of a picture of the Grand Canyon or Weeki Wachee Springs, the card bore a photograph of a young black man dangling from a rope. His face had been horribly disfigured. The whip marks on his bare chest were so vivid I felt like I could touch them.
On the other side of the card was a handwritten message:
THIS IS THE WAY WE COOK COONS DOWN HERE.
THIS IS THE WAY WE WILL COOK YOU.
WE KNOW WHY YOU ARE HERE.
GO HOME, NIGGER-LOVER.
Chapter 40
I DIDN’T GO HOME, of course; I couldn’t—my mission was only just getting started. So I actually talked to some candidates for federal judgeships. And I continued my secretive investigation for Roosevelt. I even squeezed in a few hours at L. J. Stringer’s party and remembered what a good friend he was.
A few weeks later, I felt I needed a haircut, and I knew where to go: Ezra Newcomb’s.
During my visit, I congratulated Ezra, Eudora’s only barber, on the sharpness of his blade. This resulted in my receiving a nine-point instructional course on the most important techniques involved in properly sharpening a straight razor. (The truth was, I had brought my own dull razor along, hoping to have Ezra sharpen it.)
“You got to start her off real slow, then you swipe down the strop real fast,” he was saying.
This was exactly the lesson I had gotten from Ezra the last time he cut my hair, when I was a boy of eighteen.
“Just don’t understand it,” Ezra said. “A boy goes all the way up to Harvard and they don’t teach him how to sharpen a razor.”
“I must have been out sick the day they gave that class.”
Ezra laughed and swept the bib off me with a dramatic flourish. He returned my sharpened razor to me. I handed him a quarter and told him to keep the change. He whistled at my generous big-city tipping habits.
Then I stood outside the barbershop in the bright September sun, admiring the dangerous gleam on the edge of the blade.
“Why, Ben, you’re looking at that razor the way most men look at a pretty girl!”
I turned around to see Elizabeth Begley standing right there beside me. We were practically elbow to elbow.
“I was admiring Ezra’s handiwork. In all my years of trying, I have never been able to put half as good an edge on a razor.”
“Oh, Ben, I don’t believe there’s anything you can’t do,” she said, “if you decide to go after it.”
Now what was this craziness? Was my old girlfriend flirting with me? Was I flirting right back?
I flicked the razor shut and slipped it into my pocket.
“Come walk me to Jenkins’s store,” she said. “I bought new boots for Emma and she’s already been through the laces. That’s not right.”
We walked the sidewalk of Commerce Street, which was fairly deserted at this hour.
“A little bird told me you were the guest of honor at the Stringers’ dress party the other night,” she said.
“I wouldn’t say guest of honor,” I said. “But I guess some people are a little curious what I’m doing back here.”
“You must tell them all you’ve come to visit me,” Elizabeth said with a smile. “That will get their tongues wagging.”
She laughed, and so did I.
“Speaking of people who love to talk behind other people’s backs…” She nodded in the direction of Lenora Godwin, who was walking toward us on the sidewalk across the street, apparently lost in thought.
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