Freshwater Road (25 page)

Mrs. Owens held a low-burning kerosene lamp, her tremoring hand
making their shadows move on the wall. Celeste took the lamp from her,
held it to the splintered cypress wood door. Her own hands shook. The
older woman stepped forward onto the screened porch.

Celeste hung back. "We should stay inside." She racked her brain for
the lesson from orientation. Stay in the house? Go outside? Stay under the
bed? What to do now, Margo? In Jackson, she and Ramona were ordered
to always stay low in the apartment at night, to keep the front lights out
or very dim. Don't make yourself a target. But, this was the country, and
Mrs. Owens seemed to know that the coast was clear.

"They gone." She walked around the screened porch checking for damages like she already knew the map of terror. "Bring that lamp on."

Celeste, hunched over and listening toward the two-lane, stepped out
onto the porch to bring the small lamp close to Mrs. Owens, who'd now
found the ragged holes in the thin screen. She unlatched the screened door
and started down the porch steps, Celeste behind her with the lamp but
otherwise useless. Mrs. Owens took the lamp and blew it out, walking on
the path toward the gravel road, seeing just fine in the darkness with only
the moon to light her way. Celeste followed her slowly, stopping where the
path flowed into the gravel road, her ears still ringing with the sound of
guns firing. After that sharp noise, the stillness hurt when it was supposed
to soothe. More noise would've deadened the echoing sound that cracked
the air, not this interminable country quiet. The violent noise had nothing
to slink away into, nothing to be camouflaged by, nothing but crickets and
pitiful dog barks that sounded more like moans now.

Mr. Tucker appeared in the middle of the road. "Look like they shot the
back window in my car." He came closer, clothes thrown on carelessly, his sanctimonious face becoming visible as the darkness stepped aside to allow
the moon and stars more play. "Geneva, you okay?"

Mrs. Owens continued toward him. "Been better."

"Sure you right." He walked with her toward Celeste, never looking at
her. He probably blamed Celeste for this, since she was the rabble-rouser,
the person coming around to stir everybody up to action. Now he'd been
attacked, too, even though he didn't side with the movement. He'd given
her a ride to church in his big Hudson. Now he was a marked man, too.

"You all okay?" Mrs. Owens placed herself between them, Celeste's protector. Celeste stayed still, shielded by the older woman.

"Just tense is all. I'ma drive down and check on Sister Mobley and them
kids." He walked heavily back toward his house and car. That spark of kindness confused Celeste. He was acting like the protective man of Freshwater
Road, the only man around, checking on all the women and children after
the raid. How did that instinct live inside that man? How could he be that
and the dream killer, too?

Mrs. Owens and Celeste turned to go inside. "Ain't nothing new. At
least this time they think they got themselves a reason." Celeste knew that
she was the reason. Her presence was already bringing the wrath of those
who wanted things to remain the same in Pineyville. She wanted to ask
when it had happened before but stayed quiet as they went through the
house checking for bullet holes. The only gunshots she'd ever heard before this sojourn in Mississippi were fired on New Year's Eve and smoked
through the snow drifts in the backyard of Momma Bessie's house.

Mrs. Owens brought the light to every corner of the kitchen looking
for bullet exit holes. The refrigerator and stove were fine. Celeste figured
the bullets probably went right through the thin-walled house to the line
of long-needled pines beyond the clearing. The holes would become visible
when sunlight shined through them in the morning. Mrs. Owens checked
the locks on the back screen door, closed the inside kitchen door, and put
a chair in front of it.

"Celeste, take one of those kitchen chairs and brace that front door. Best
to sleep on the floor now. Just pull that mattress off. Stay down low and
don't turn on the lights. Night, now." She went into her room and closed
the curtain, sounding more like Margo in her soldier way than the Mrs.
Owens she'd come to know. Mrs. Owens had been down this road before
and though she might be concerned, she wasn't going to alarm her guest.

In the torpid heat of midnight, Celeste's teeth chattered uncontrollably
and her hands and feet shook. She lay on the mattress in the close dark
room, the white lace curtains reflecting the only light, and that was from
the moon. No bullets to duck in her bed in Ann Arbor. Cozy in the corner
behind the door, the French windows open. Momma Bessie's quilt. She
couldn't stop shaking.

Her night jar sat across the room near the side window, but she couldn't
get up, felt the warm run of urine on her upper thigh, running between her
legs onto the mattress beneath her. The shaking stopped.

She crawled to her washstand, still listening hard through the pour of
water from the pitcher, the squeezing of cloth and droplets splashing into
the basin. She cleaned herself, changed her nightgown, and pulled the sheet
off the bed, put the wet area in the wash basin and did her best to rinse it,
then spread it to dry by the window. She listened with her innermost ear
for tires crunching over gravel, feet tipping over soft, sandy soil and then
thudding off in a run. Next time, maybe they'd throw a bomb. She put her
towel over the mattress's wet spot, covered it with her top sheet, and closed
her eyes trying to fool herself into going to sleep.

Shuck sat in his car parked outside the Western Union office on Bagley at
Grand Circus Park, the air conditioner blasting and the radio tuned to the
news station. Celeste hadn't been arrested yet, but it might happen soon.
He'd send the the five hundred dollars she'd asked for and hold the other
five hundred as his hedge against disaster.

Shuck had it in his mind that the whole summer of violence and death
would end up being about the politics of people who already had the power.
Not wanting to take a swipe at Celeste's idealism, he kept that to himself
when she called. He had an inkling that surviving a summer in Mississippi
would pretty much demolish her rosy view of what could happen and
how much time it would take. Why hammer the point home? Experience
was the better teacher. He'd spent his life preaching to his children that
their generation could do anything they wanted. Even as he said it, he
knew it wasn't entirely true. It didn't mean the sky was now the limit for
Negroes, but it was getting close. For him, luck had been pivotal. That's
the path he'd taken. He wanted better for his children. Luck had a way
of running out.

Celeste just needed to finish her work and get the hell out of Mississippi
in one piece. That's all he asked. He turned the radio off, hummed Dakota
Staton's "Broadway," saw himself walking on Seventh Avenue toward the
Sheraton Hotel and the cabaret with live jazz and dressed-up women.

The heat wave was setting records for the summer, and an anxiousness
for change bubbled up to the surface. Detroiters grew weary of summer, secretly pined for new seasons to tidy through, clean out the wilted flowers,
re-dress the trees in bursts of color, and lure the winds that swayed the
branches. They ached for summer all winter long, but didn't mind when it
left. There was Indian Summer to look forward to, that last warm spell, and
after that the very first snow, which draped the city in a spectacular white
gown. You just wanted to stand and look at it, pray everyone stayed home,
didn't go out there driving and walking and dirtying it. But life went on.
After a while, you prayed for a break from the slush and bitter cold. Then
you dreamed of spring, pined for buds on trees and soft-voiced birds and
little whiffs of warm air returning. He realized that he really wanted this
summer to be over, that he was pushing it along too fast and with it, his own
life. Better to take it slow, make it last, but Mississippi loomed, confusing
even his sense of time and the good life.

Shuck leaned his head back on the soft leather of his seat, watching
through half-closed eyes as other cars pulled into the small parking lot to the
side of the building. Negroes with big cars and tiny houses, or one-bedroom
apartments in working-class neighborhoods, bringing cash money to wire
to the south-not for daughters and sons working for "the cause," but for
relatives left hanging on by a breath and a thin dime in Alabama, Mississippi, Kentucky. They might be sending money to a household like the one
Celeste lived in right now. Shuck watched them get out of their cars dressed
in house shoes, do-rags on their heads, the sometimes-employed with cigarettes smoked down to the filter, loud-talking and back-slapping.

The city had been a mecca for black job seekers since he was a child.
Truth was the slots had been filled for years, but no one knew how to close
the doors and the leftover people stayed on. He saw the For Sale signs
on houses all over the city, the boarded-up buildings along Dexter and
even on the side streets downtown. A slow, slinking decline. Every week,
the newspapers-the white ones and the Negro one-talked of businesses
closing. The business to be in right now was moving and storage. Shuck
imagined white people scattering out of the city so fast, pieces of their
clothing dangled out of their suitcases and car trunks, overstuffed boxes
bumped the trunks open. They snatched their children off the playgrounds
of schools that had remained integrated right up until the last great migration of southern Negroes in the late 1950s. Then it was, "Let's get the hell out
of here." Southern Negroes coming in the back door while home-owning,
tax-paying white people ran out the front. Even the experts couldn't keep track. It wasn't that there were no tax-paying, property-owning Negroes.
There were plenty. But not enough to support the city.

Shuck didn't know if he should hit the road out of Detroit or stay
put with a prayer. And where would he go? Follow the white folks to the
suburbs? Move the Royal Gardens out there, too? His New York dream
of a supper club with live entertainment languished. The music he loved
lived in whispers. Old people's music, Posey called it. You barely found
it on the radio, and most of the clubs in town, white-owned or Negro,
were filling their jukeboxes with the new music. Young people liked the
singing groups, the dance-stepping, shantung-silk-suit-wearing men who
crooned love songs in rhyming couplets, and the girl groups with their sleek
gowns and puffed hair singing gaunt lyrics. He never got enough of Dinah
Washington and Sarah Vaughan, Gloria Lynne and Ella; he put his ears to
the speakers for Count Basie, Oscar Peterson, and Jimmie Lunceford. His
springtime music would always be dancing in the aisles with Wilamena to
the big bands swinging at the Fox Theatre. Shuck felt like a throwback in
his own city, in his own life.

He checked all around for any lurking do-nothing men, then chastised
himself for having the thought. After all, he was downtown on a street
with traffic, pedestrians going and coming in and out of office buildings.
Teenagers who might be troublesome slept later than he did.

He patted his breast pocket for the envelope of bail money, then glanced
down at his newly polished gray leather loafers, in perfect blend with his
light gray jacket and dark gray slacks. He preferred fall and winter clothes.
Camel hair and wool gabardine, dark suits with French-cuffed shirts. Silk
ties. Didn't like wearing galoshes. First thing was to get this money to Jackson before the shit hit the fan. If Celeste got arrested, he wanted the money
to be there to get her out right away. No Negro person was Mississippi-jail
material. Nothing but nightmares. He didn't want Celeste to see the inside
of a jail in Mississippi or anywhere else.

Inside, the Western Union office smelled of stale cigarette butts. There
were trash bits in the corners, yellow paint going grimy. The big plate glass
window hadn't been washed in a month and featured all sizes of hand
prints, smudges wiped this way and that. Up high, a good half of the yellow
lights on the Western Union electric sign were burned out and the dark
brown writing needed repainting.

Shuck, a standout of perfect elegance in a throwaway-looking place, stepped into the short line of patrons, angling himself so he could see out of
the front window while he waited. Traffic moved around the circle of Grand
Circus Park like a silent movie-Fords, Plymouths, Chryslers, delivery
trucks of all kinds. A halo of decay veiled all of it.

At the counter, he opened his envelope and took out five crisp hundred
dollar bills and splayed them out like cards in a good poker hand, took the
paper napkin on which he'd jotted the One Man, One Vote office address,
and laid it beside the money. He'd send the money and keep praying Celeste
made it through to the end of this Freedom Summer thing. Wouldn't do
for him to go down there. They'd all be dead.