Freshwater Road (2 page)

The woman moved fast, shoving her things under a washbowl and then
ducking into a stall. Celeste did the same. Squatted over the dirty toilet,
panties down, she imagined being grabbed by the ankles from under the
door. Her mind snapped to the television news film she'd seen of young
people, Negro and white, yanked off buses and beaten until blood flowed
down their faces. Whites Only signs flashed like backdrops to a bloodletting.
Two minutes off the train and here she was already breaking the law. Her
imagination ran on full. But this was real. Her father, Shuck, used to say she
had good book sense and not too much of the other. She heard the woman
flush and exit the stall. She took deep breaths, pulled the flush chain and
came out into the glass-hard light of the bathroom.

Celeste eyed the ladies' room door, anxious to wash her hands and be
on her way. "Is it okay to be in here?" She and the hair-rolled woman were co-conspirators. There was comfort in the assumed comradeship. At least
she wasn't alone. They were in the Whites Only bathroom, had already used
it. She had a story to tell, and she hadn't even gotten to the One Man, One
Vote office.

The woman glanced at her sideways, digging in one of her bags, standing in front of the scum-pocked mirror. "Okay by who?" Her round eyes
protruded slightly just above full cinnamon-brown cheeks. "Where you
from?" Her head lurched back then settled as she worked on herself, her
bag heaving up a comb and brush, toothpaste, a box of powder, a frayed
puff, lipstick, rouge.

"Detroit." Negro people from the south favored the city of Detroit,
that mystical blue-collar heaven of jobs. Shuck and Momma Bessie both
did a lot of fussing about Negroes still coming up from the deep south
searching for jobs that no longer existed, running the city services down
the drain simply by the press of their numbers and needs. Celeste plunged
soap containers along the line of washbowls. They were all empty. Still, she
rejoiced at rolling up her long sleeves to the elbows and getting that fabric
off her damp skin.

"Detroit, uh?" The woman smiled a knowing smile, as if honoring
Celeste with a good check mark. "Chile, nobody pays that sign no mind
no more. Course now, white ladies stopped coming in here." She indicated
the overflowing trash receptacle, the dirty mirror and basins. "The law says
we can come in here, it don't say they have to come in here." She squinted
in the mirror.

Celeste took it in, trying to grasp the logic. "Where do they go?" She
saw long corridors of bathrooms with color-coded signs, some white, some
Negro, some integrated, and some unmarked. Wrong door, bad news.
Maybe they gave their old ladies' rooms to Negroes and built spanking
brand-new ones for themselves, left the signs up to confuse everyone. How
long could they do that?

"I don't give a damn where they go." The woman applied her makeup as
she talked, manicured nails glowing fuchsia. Then her deft hands quickly
removed hair rollers. She brushed her hair, then applied rouge and powder
to her face. "Those signs were down 'til the white folks got word about this
Freedom Summer thing." She glanced at Celeste with a suspicious narrowing of her eyes, then coughed. She took a plug of toothpaste on her finger, rubbed it on her teeth, bent to get a swig of water from the faucet, gargled,
then spat the residue in the bowl.

Celeste, remembering the instruction from One Man, One Vote about
announcing to strangers her reasons for being in the south, rinsed her hands
under the warm water, splashed some on her face, and volunteered nothing.
No way to know who might run straight to the local police, the Klan, or
some other enemy. Too late she discovered the paper towel dispenser was
empty, too. "You from Jackson?"

"Mound Bayou." The woman paused. "Ever hear of it?"

"No." Celeste stood there dripping.

"It's a all-colored town, north of here. Bolivar County. Ain't nothin' up
there but a post office and a lot of mud. But it's ours."

Wouldn't be long before Detroit was an all-colored town, too, if you
listened to Shuck and Momma Bessie. Shuck always had a story about some
white business or another moving to the suburbs. Still, she thought, she
might like to go to Mound Bayou, see it for herself. She'd never realized
how Negro Detroit was until she arrived in nearly all-white Ann Arbor.
She'd missed Detroit in her bones that first semester and ran home every
weekend-until she met J.D. That ended the trips home; Shuck didn't take
to her dating a white guy, and he let her know it in no uncertain terms.

"You can't stay in Mound Bayou too long. Sure to lose your mind." The
woman laughed. "Somebody like you, from way up there in Detroit and
all, you sure to God would forfeit your mind."

The woman made Detroit sound like it was all the way to Hudson Bay,
Canada.

Celeste chuckled and got a good look at her own tired face in the mirror.

"They got other ones. Different places in the south." The woman packed
her things, took off her flats and slipped on pink pumps, shoved the flats into
one of her bags. "Don't want to miss my train. Going to New Orleans for a
few days. Get out of Miss'sippi for a minute. Catch my breath." She headed
for the door, high heels clicking on the dirty tile floor. "Always wanted to go
to Detroit. Get me one of them jobs at Ford's Motor Car Company."

Celeste might have told her that those jobs were now as rare as gold
nuggets in a well-panned stream. She took one last glance at her sallow,
travel-weary face in the mirror. Her shoulder length hair had risen to its
peak of fullness and become a frizzled helmet of curls, waves, and flyaway strands. Her gray-green eyes had receded under heavy dark brows, sunk in
pits of fatigue. Her lips needed color. She needed color. Whatever makeup she'd had on when she began her journey lived now on the small train
pillow she'd left on her seat. She grabbed her suitcase and book-bag and
followed the woman to the door. Didn't want to be in that Whites Only
ladies' room alone, whether anybody paid the sign any attention or not. It
was still up there.

The woman bumped half way out then turned back, her face primed
and ready. "What's your name, girl?"

"Celeste Tyree."

"I'm Mary Evans. Pleased to meet you. You ever been in Miss'sippi before?" She had a dubious look on her face as she appraised Celeste.

"No. First time. First time in the south." Even in her fatigue, Celeste's
face pressed forward with expectation and fear.

"Well, let me tell you something. You be careful, girl, you hear. Miss'sippi
ain't nothin' to play with." She lowered her voice for the last of it, eyes doing
a fast flit around the lobby. "You have a nice stay, now, you hear?"

"Thank you." Celeste angled out the door checking for any hard-eyed
men in uniform with billy clubs, cattle prods, snarling dogs. "Have a good
time in New Orleans."

"Sure to do that. It's a good-time place." The woman sang the words
as she fast-walked away, her pink pumps gleaming in the dingy, yellow-lit
station.

Celeste figured the woman had guessed why she was there by the way
she'd looked at her, sizing her up. But she'd said nothing. Knew better than
to venture into that conversation. She checked again for enemies in uniform
then bounded across the emptying lobby, through the double glass doors
into the dank air of a June Mississippi night.

A sparse parade of cars moved slowly up and down the street. In her
rising confusion, she considered trying to hitch a ride. How far could it be?
Not here. Across the way were closed stores, a darkened coffee shop. She
waited under the hooded overhang of the station, the dim yellow lights
throwing shadows on the pavement, the late night air heavy as a stack of
Momma Bessie's Kentucky-made patchwork quilts. She pulled the paper
out of her book bag with the phone number and the address of the One
Man, One Vote office, but she didn't want to call before she'd exhausted
her options.

Anxious to be on her way, she stepped to the curb and reached for the
door handle of the only empty cab. The cab jerked forward, then stopped
a few yards beyond her reach. An embarrassment flushed her warm body,
followed by a flash of chills. She took a sneaky look around and locked
eyes with the grinning porter, who had just clanked his metal-wheeled cart
onto the pavement trailed by a small pack of white people who seemed to
snicker at her obvious ineptitude at things southern. The porter gave her a
tit-for-tat glance as he loaded his passengers into the waiting cab. Her cab.
He rolled his cart back into the station, eyes glued to the air in front of
him. Celeste stood alone on the pavement, Mississippi like a stain spreading
through her body.

"Wharsomevers y'all goin', ah can fetchu."

The voice sounded like liquid, the words humbled and broken. She
turned to see a dark, bent-over man standing in the yellow hue of the station
lights. He had the blues all over him and not a note of music played. He
doffed his black cabby hat when he spoke.

"Ah say, wharsomevers y'all goin', ah can fetchu. I's a caib."

A reminder this time, as if her confusion and fear had mounted on her
face and he'd seen it. Relieved, Celeste showed him the mimeographed
paper with the address, not saying a word. The cabby nodded with a hint
of a smile and directed her toward his cab. Only now did she see the other
taxi stand, the Negro one, down the block, a good hike from the station
entrance. She followed him, the front of her head tightening into a mask
of fake nonchalance as she stepped into the back seat holding her book-bag
in her lap like it was a child. The cab was black with light writing on the
side. She needed to remember that. Easy. It was black. The cabby hefted
her suitcase into the trunk then hunched himself into the driver's seat. They
inched away from the station, Celeste having no idea where she was going
or if she'd ever get there. She wanted to mark the place she was leaving but
her neck wouldn't turn.

The slow-moving car and the heavy heat made her head loll back, though
she didn't quite close her eyes; instead, she stared into the cab's dark ceiling,
wondering what Shuck would think when he got her letter. He more than
likely would blame her white boyfriend-now ex-boyfriend-for this decision to go south. Shuck's gaze charred the air in front of the student union
when he first laid eyes on J.D. He'd ordered her into his sleek Cadillac and
drove around in circles, telling her that a Negro woman with a white man would always be lonely. She'd never seen Shuck like that. "It has to do with
history," he said. "And no one woman is strong enough to buck it."

Shuck's words never left her head-even though she and J.D. kept
doing what they'd always done, like going to Blues Night at Glinty's Bar
and taking long rides on his motorcycle over two-lane country roads. But
she and J.D. started arguing, about the blues of all things. J.D. claimed
immense knowledge; he could produce long lists of blues singers he'd seen
and heard, and swore he understood the blues as well as anyone. Celeste
roared back, hands flying to her hips like someone she'd seen on a Detroit
street, that unless he'd been shackled nude before the world, sold like a head
of cattle, and hated like the plague, he didn't know a damned thing about
the blues. When J.D. argued that Celeste didn't even look particularly
Negro, that she'd grown up in circumstances as comfortable as he had
(proving that she had no more claim on the blues than he), her fury erupted,
spewed, and blistered until he'd walked out the door. She tried to flick off
the implications of the deeper truth he'd touched upon-the truth of her
own privilege-but in the end, it was Shuck's belief that she clung to, that
race in America lived outside the purview of class or privilege, out there in
a world all its own, not tethered to anything except hatred. That belief of
Shuck's went deeper than any other, and J.D. helped her know it.

A floral sweetness floated on the midnight air. Shadows behind trees
and hedges, white faces staring at the Negro cab prowling the lonely streets.
In Ann Arbor right now, small groups of students roamed the campus,
lingered in the clubs, made out in each available hallway, alcove, doorway,
grove of trees. At Shuck's Royal Gardens Bar in Detroit, music and jolly
repartee mingled with clinking ice cubes in every sort of glass. Laughter
rang in the dim blue light. Bluesy jazz swore in the pauses. But here in
Jackson, Mississippi, nothing moved that you could see except the police
cars that patrolled the streets in droves, parked at intersections as if expecting an army of gun-toting gangsters or armed revolutionaries.

Away from Shuck, she began to lose ground, his sheltered world losing
dimension, unable to project out to the galaxy beyond the West Side of
Detroit, where things hadn't changed much in two generations. In Ann
Arbor, she'd tested herself on the wrong seas. By the time the Movement
speakers appeared on campus looking for recruits and money, she volunteered, gladly. There was always Shuck's voice in her head talking his race talk, pulling her back to home base and pushing her out into the world-to
the south-at the same time.

J.D. the painter had gone to Paris for the summer. Here she was in
Mississippi, in a cab going she knew not where, embarking on an adventure
that had death written in the small print. According to Shuck, even as a kid
she'd always had a deep sense of justice and fair play. He was pushing her
to go to law school. She couldn't see it. Wilamena, her mother, thought it
silly of her when she wanted to share her dolls and candy with other kids,
Negro kids, who didn't have the abundance that she had. Told her she was a
fool to think they'd ever return the favor. Surely there was enough injustice
in Mississippi to validate her coming, and she didn't consider it a favor. Or
did she? She tied her reasons for making this sojourn to all of that, and to
Shuck, her father-her so wanting to be like him and so wanting to be
unlike her mother who'd spent her life running away from Negro people.
From herself.