Freshwater Road (23 page)

"That child, and that white man, are nothing new here." Reverend
Singleton's face tightened the slightest bit and he spoke low. Celeste wondered if he was hiding his true feelings or maybe hinting at something from
his own life in Chicago.

"I don't understand, then." Celeste pushed him for more. She knew so
little for sure about these people, knew only that white Pineyville hated her
being there and the reason she was there. All else was up for interpretation.

"Well, she gets favors. You know. Money from him. Or so people think.
Plus she's got that job over in Hattiesburg and those white folks are good
to her." Reverend Singleton shook his head.

"Oh. You're saying there might be some jealousy in it?" She grabbed the
thought as if it was a life raft in rough water.

"I am. That's not native to Mississippi, I'm sure." He said all he was
going to say about that.

"No, sir, it's not. My daddy says you have to be strong as acid to deal with Negroes, and there's no words to describe how strong you have to be to
deal with white people." Celeste felt grown-up and full of wisdom quoting
Shuck.

"He's so right." Reverend Singleton softened.

Celeste wondered if she should befriend the outcast woman. But if she
befriended Dolly Johnson, the other women would read into it. She had to
be careful, needed to bring them all in without dragging the quibbles and
tensions that divided them. Like Reverend Singleton did from the pulpit,
preaching to everyone, bringing everyone along equally.

"Don't you worry. Be some more children in there tomorrow morning.
And some grown-ups in that voting class, too. See there, Mr. Landau,
and Sister Mobley's gonna come. Truth be told, that Dolly Johnson's a
good candidate for voting, too. It'll be a start." Celeste followed where he
gestured and saw Mr. Landau walk away from the group heading for the
parking area in front of the church. He was an African-Indian looking
man, tall, carved, and dark. "Have to keep an eye on Landau, though, he's
partial to those Deacons for Defense over in Bogalusa. They don't believe
in taking a lot of crap off of white folks."

Celeste wanted to stand up and yell for Mr. Landau to come back, to sit
down and talk a while. Matt talked about the Deacons in the car and had
even gone over to one of their meetings when he dropped her on Freshwater
Road. Reverend Singleton left her to float from group to group, nodding,
shaking hands, being the good minister.

Still, Sissy wouldn't be there, and that bothered her. She sat sideways
on her wobbly chair, wishing she'd brought the fan from inside the church
but too lazy to walk back in there to get it. She watched the crowd in their
dresses and suits, jackets off now, tie knots loosened. Her dress was damp,
her hair a mad mix of humidity-induced curls and straight sticks. She'd
wanted it to be contained for church, had released the rubber for a few
seconds to sort the mess out, and in that instant of time, it rose and puffed
up all over her head until she had to work to wrestle the rubber band back
on it and finally gave up and put the rubber band in her pocket.

Mrs. Owens chatted with a group of women, glancing over from time
to time. Celeste hoped she was convincing them all to come to the voter
registration class. Peaceful on the surface at least. A country painting, The
picnic at the church. J.D. could paint it, but it would never show the nightmare living just beneath the skin. The people holding their picnic plates and sipping sweet drinks had been terrorized into stepping off the sidewalk
when a white person came down the street. They entered the county courthouse through the back door. They drank water from the colored fountain
and sent their children to the broken-down colored school-as Labyrinth
had called it, the school with no books. They assumed the face of serenity
while they seethed inside, until they succumbed to a childish inferiority or
stepped out of line. God only knew what that might mean. Some became
what white people called them. Others never bent. She needed the unbent
ones to help her through. In church, their response had been spirited, with
the music lifting them like a soundtrack. She had no idea if that was enough
to bring them in to do the real work of breaking down the old ways. She
didn't know if someone was going to die.

Celeste turned her chair to stare into the woods. Piles of cool stones
nestled in low ferns, shaded by the modest live oaks and tall pines. The oak
branches reached out from the trunks for yards, strong arms offering shade
and solace. She could see the tops of long-needled pines way back. She
walked to the edge of the clearing to get a better view, hoping to sit out of
the withering sunshine. As she eased into the wooded area, a high-pitched
scream rang out, stopping her in her tracks. She backed out into the clearing and turned to see the entire congregation gawking at her, some with
mouths open, some so stunned they appeared to be marvelously life-like
statues. Mrs. Owens hustled over, grabbed her arm, and snatched her from
the grove.

"Chile, you can't go in there." She pulled Celeste back to a table and sat
her down forcefully enough to let her know the old woman still had muscle.
Mrs. Owens tore to the food table and came back with a cup of punch, then
retrieved her own plate.

The punch was so sweet Celeste smacked her lips. "Was it a snake or
something?"

"Drink it down, settle your stomach."

She had the exact opposite thought. The sugar might make her sick.

"You didn't eat nothing all day."

"Too hot to eat, Mrs. Owens. Was there a snake or something?" The
screech still lobbed around in her head though all was quiet except the
murmur of voices in the background. She wondered if the churchgoers were
talking about her and she didn't even know what she'd done.

"There's a coupla graves back in there. Can't go there. Have to go around
the other way. A few yards in it's sacred ground."

"Nobody told me." She felt weak, the syrupy liquid oozing into her stomach, shivering her, making her nausea rise, hold there on the ledge waiting
for the next surprise. "Who screamed?"

"Sissy." Geneva Owens talked softly. "She got a big voice for a little girl."

Celeste sipped the grapey sugar water thinking she probably needed salt
more than sugar to offset what she was losing in perspiration. The older
woman ate as if she'd just been sitting there sunning herself on a quiet summer afternoon, flowering beads of perspiration forming thin, slow-moving
streams that traced her gray hairline, seeped down her forehead.

Celeste drummed the paper cup on the table. "Who's in there?"

"Don't make no difference who's in there. It ain't for sittin'." Mrs. Owens
finished her food without another word.

It was hard to tell if Mrs. Owens meant to ever reveal the truth or just
didn't want to talk about it right at that moment. Reverend Singleton might
tell her, she thought, but that wouldn't be until tomorrow morning when he
opened the church for freedom school. She prayed she hadn't lost the favor
she'd gained by standing with Reverend Singleton in the pulpit. Again, she
felt the sharp yearning to go home, to ride with Shuck in his convertible
Cadillac all over the West Side, visit his friends and cronies, stop at Momma
Bessie's to rest in the shade of the apple tree with a tall thin glass of minted
ice tea and a long slim handled spoon.

The picnic carried on and people ignored her as long as Mrs. Owens,
her guardian and supporter, was there with her. She saw Sissy across the
way trying not to look over at Mrs. Owens and her. Mr. Tucker sat with
his back to them. Reverend Singleton mingled with his congregation as if
nothing had happened.

Later, the Tucker boys, Darby and Henry, barely opened their eyes
when the Hudson stopped short in front of the house. A quick hand squeeze
for Sissy, who didn't have a smile anywhere on her face, a grunt from Mr.
Tucker, and a nodding rustle of fake flowers from Mrs. Tucker passed for
goodbye as Celeste and Mrs. Owens got out of the car, the empty bread
pudding pan and the giant collard greens pot smelling sour now. Just
as Geneva Owens's hand reached the screened door handle, Mr. Tucker
lurched off leaving a train of orange dust and gravel bits. Celeste had a flash of that flowered hat falling down on Mrs. Tucker's face as she stepped
into the house behind Mrs. Owens. They headed to the back porch, Mrs.
Owens to scrub the pots and Celeste to dry them. "That man from New
Orleans give the church the bell, he's buried in that sacred ground. Can't
talk about it cause it's against the law to bury white in a colored cemetery.
But it's what he wanted."

Later that night, Celeste climbed onto her bed thinking how it was that
every Negro in town knew a white man was buried in the Negro cemetery,
knew that if the whites learned it, they'd dig him up and throw him away,
his white bones floating down the Pearl River. How long had he been there,
who put him there, how had they pulled this off without anybody telling?
Was his the only white grave back there? Was it the secret that made the
ground sacred? A curl of a smile at the corners of those lips, those sunravaged faces, saying that white people didn't know it all, hadn't made every
decision for every life in Pineyville. They must have other secrets, too.

Shuck had written "Pineyville" on a slip of paper and pocketed the note.
Mississippi was as bad as a good number was good, but Pineyville had
locked his mind even tighter than Mississippi itself. The name brought his
teeth together in a grinding gnash, his mouth so clamped he had to jab a
cigarette between his lips. But it refused to crystallize, just pricked and
poked uselessly at his memory.

At the Royal Gardens, he moved fast along the bar, nodding and "heying" to the slow night crowd, the jukebox blaring, Posey working easy.
Shuck's only thought was why weren't they at home.

In his small office at the very back of the Royal Gardens, behind his
desk, on a secondhand bookcase that he'd salvaged from Momma Bessie's
attic, Shuck kept old copies of jet magazine. He brought the little magazines over to his desk in bunches, flipping through the pages, not knowing
what he was looking for but knowing that whatever it was, it pressed him
to the search, and Pineyville was the reason.

The magazines didn't stack well, kept sliding away from each other
until his entire desktop was a mass of them. And, there it was, dated 1959,
a short five years ago. Leroy Boyd James, charged with raping a white
woman, lynched before he got to trial. The Pearl River County grand jury
in Pineyville, Mississippi, refused to acknowledge that the lynching had
taken place, though his body had been fished from the Pearl River and
he was supposed to be locked in jail. Negro prisoners told of hearing him
screaming and fighting his abductors, heard his feet dragging along the concrete floor, his hands grabbing then slipping their grip on the bars, his
fingernails scrabbling the bare walls near the door. They said they heard his
shouts in their dreams. Celeste had taken herself to a lynching town.

Shuck drew a thousand dollars in cash from his safe. He put five hundred in an envelope along with the little slip of paper. He marked it Celeste,
and pocketed it. The other five hundred he put between the pages of the
jet magazine, his idea of insurance, put a rubber band around it all to clasp
those two things together as if they had been conjoined at some point in
the past, separated and reunited now. He took out his loaded gun, turned
it over in his hands, checked that there were bullets in a small box inside
the safe. He secured the sorry history of Pineyville to Celeste's hope for the
future, bound by money and a gun. It was the riskiest bet he'd ever made
in his life, but he believed in her like he believed in himself. He locked
his insurance in the drawer of his desk. He'd tell Posey what was going.
They'd be ready if the call came, ready to take guns and money and go to
Pineyville.

Shuck drove north on West Grand Boulevard, passing the deep-porched
houses not destroyed by the expressway. At night they were presentable, but
Shuck knew in the light of day you could see the disrepair creeping around
the eaves, the paint chipping off the wood trim, the old people let go of by
their delinquent children. Old people with no one to leave their hard-won
victories to. But at night, the summer smells of fresh cut grass sweetened
the breeze and mixed it with the scents of a thousand dinners, the smoky
residue of backyard barbecues. He smelled chicken, ribs, maybe even turkey
in a smoker. Whatever, it was leftovers now, sitting on a plate in the middle
of the stove for the last one home, or stashed in the back of the refrigerator
for tomorrow's lunch.

Finally, Shuck pulled up in front of Alma Weaver's two-family flat in
a neighborhood already too far gone to save. Isolated apartment buildings
were tended to as they had been years ago, but much of it all had sunk into
disrepair. In the middle of the day the discarded young men stood around
on corners, and women ran from the bus stop to their front doors, hands in
their purses, clutching kitchen knives or sewing shears to ward off junkies.
Shuck closed the convertible top.