Freshwater Road (4 page)

Love,

Celeste

Frozen where he sat, Shuck heard the flattened-out voices of his customers talking about rights and wrongs, about the tangled history of
Negroes and white folks, saw them gesturing in the air, smoke curling
up and away from their faces. Coleman Hawkins sounded like heaven
must feel. Posey stood behind the bar, hands on hips, farther away than
he should be. Sitting there, Shuck tried to come up with one good thing
he could say about Mississippi. Everybody including his mother, Momma
Bessie, would think Celeste had lost her mind leaving her good life to go
to that godforsaken place. He could go down there and get her, force her
to come back.

Rodney tapped his near empty glass of ice and bar bourbon, his eyes
darting towards the door. "Don't y'all have nothing else to talk about?"

"Rodney, man, stop shaking the table." Chink pressed his weight against
one of the table legs. "What you want to talk about?"

"The weather. That's all he ever wants to talk about." Millicent's iridescent pink sundress and matching jacket soft-lit her face in sunset rose.
Shuck looked at her down the bar. She wasn't a pretty woman, but she fixed
herself up so well, you didn't even notice unless you stared at her.

Rodney's eyes snapped from the jukebox to the front door and back to
the jukebox. "I don't give a damn what's going on down there." He rocked
back on the chair's hind legs.

"You already broke one of my chairs, Rodney." Shuck held onto the bar
to keep from going over and crashing a pitcher on Rodney's head.

Rodney leveled the chair on the floor, gave Shuck a sheepish look.

"Posey, give Rodney another drink. He's scared I got a white man from
General Motors behind the walls listening." Shuck tapped the envelope
corner on the bar top. "And bring me a Crown Royal on the rocks." He
labored to even out his breathing, not sure if Posey heard him.

"I told him two or three times, the only white man comes in here is that
mafia trainee takes the coins out the party girl." Posey's arms, sinews taut
and black as raven wings, moved like precision blades setting up for the
night crowd. "He's in and out so fast, I don't even know what he looks like.
Shuck, you know what he looks like?"

"Posey. Bring me a Crown Royal on the rocks." This time he knew Posey
heard him because Posey's eyes narrowed and clouded over with a question.
Shuck drank from his private stock on momentous occasions. He tilted his
head so the customers wouldn't see his eyes.

Posey stood there. "Who died?" He grabbed the Crown Royal bottle
from its sacred place beneath the bar, scooped ice into a short glass, and
brought it down to Shuck.

Millicent swiveled on her barstool. "Remember when Kennedy got
killed? The only thing Rodney wanted to know was if a colored man had
done it. Afraid every Negro in America was going to pay, especially him."
She released a streamlined breath of smoke that drifted and dispersed in
the space between Rodney's table and the bar.

"Celeste left school." Shuck drank the smooth whiskey down in one
swallow and hit the bar top with the bottom of his glass. "Gone to Mississippi." Shuck could feel the confusion at play across his own face, muffling
the clarity in his eyes.

Posey stepped back like he'd been hit, then seemed to sway with the
realization. "Well, I be goddamned."

"Who's in Mississippi?" Millicent jerked around, leaned on the bar top like
she might slide down to Shuck and Posey, save whoever it was in Mississippi.

"Shuck's daughter." Posey poured Shuck another drink, brandishing the
elegant bottle of Crown Royal.

Shuck felt the question-marked faces of his regulars all turn to him,
stare like they'd just heard some apocryphal madness. The regulars knew
his kids, had watched them grow up.

Iris, her little curls and scalp parts looking like a road map to nowhere,
glanced at the lush Negro images on the walls. "Well, baby, you got a problem now." She finished her drink and lit a cigarette, holding it like one of
the elegant New York-looking women in the wallpaper.

"Shit's going on all over the country. She could come here and be in the
Movement. Everything ain't that great right here." Shuck didn't know if
the words came out of his mouth or not, but he sure thought them hard.
The only thing to do with Mississippi was to leave it, to run away from
it as fast as you could. Or, better yet, blow it off the map of the United
States. Not one more Negro person had to die in that place for the point
to be made. Then a gnawing thought took hold. More than likely that
paintbrush-wielding, blue-jeans-and-sandals-wearing white boyfriend had
something to do with this decision. Shuck's teeth clamped down until his
jaw muscles hurt. Just like a white boy to lead his daughter to hell, a hell he
more than likely would survive without a scratch but where she could die in a
split second. He was white. He could fade into the woodwork of Mississippi
or any place else for that matter. Celeste couldn't.

"Now, see, that's what I mean. You can't control these kids nowadays.
That girl's had the best of everything from the day she was born, and look
at her." Iris sucked on her cigarette, now the authority on raising children, satisfied, as if she and Shuck had something in common because her
seventeen-year-old son had already been arrested for stealing a car.

Shuck sipped his whiskey and thought of a thousand places Celeste
might've gone starting with right there in Detroit. But he knew that in some
way he had something to do with this, that by being a race man himself, he
allowed for the possibility of his children seeing things just like him. Only
he hadn't counted on it going so far. Could be the white boy had nothing
to do with it.

And what about Wilamena? Celeste had a way of not telling her mother
the big things. Wilamena would call him looking for Celeste. He needed a
double shot of Crown Royal. Now Celeste had run off, just like her mother.
No. This wasn't like that at all. Celeste was doing something big, not just
running off. He caught himself feeling a moment of pride. Men went to
war to find themselves, came back different people, some better, some not so good at all. He knew he wouldn't have gone down there for all the tea in
China. Not to Mississippi. And what would it do to her?

Maybe he should've remarried, made a traditional home, instead of living his life exactly the way he wanted and pushing the mothering off on
other people. Never saw any cracks in his way of raising his children until
now. Billy rarely came home. Now Celeste had run to Mississippi and didn't
even tell him until she was already there. That's not how things were supposed to be.

"Why we got to be the ones always fighting for something? Paying
double, triple, quadruple?" In the thin light, Chink's yellow-tinged skin
shone dingy white.

Shuck felt prophetic. "That's what the whole damned thing's about.
Paying dues until they wear you down. What you need is a gun. You got
the right gun, you'll get your rights. Now, you take those peckawoods in
Mississippi. I bet you give those Negroes some guns, they won't have any
problems registering to vote. White folks understand two things. Guns and
money." He might take his own gun and go down there. That would be the
end of it. Bring Celeste home. "Damn."

"You got a gun, Shuck, you better pack it up and send it down there to
your daughter." Iris sounded delighted, gripping the rounded edge of the
oak bar as if the room was spinning. "The government needs to take care
of that stuff anyway."

Shuck put a toothpick in the corner of his mouth, twirled it a couple
of times. "Whole lot of things they're supposed to do." He dropped the
toothpick in the ashtray next to his empty glass, his hands trembling.

"It's those slow-assed niggers in Georgia, Mississippi, and Alabama letting crackers walk all over them. They the ones needing some rights. Not
us," Rodney said.

"You need to leave it alone, Rodney." Chink's warning floated like a
buoy at low tide. "When's the last time you stood up to one, huh?"

Millicent talked to her drink. "Nothing between them and us but a
few miles."

"Not even that." Chink moaned.

Iris shot a look to Shuck. "Where in Mississippi is she, Shuck?"

What difference did it make where in Mississippi Celeste was? It was the
same damned thing. Mississippi didn't have any good neighborhoods for
Negroes. It wasn't like Detroit. Dearborn might be a bad zone for Negroes, but Detroit was a good one. None of that in Mississippi. No place to run.
No place to hide.

"Down south, they have sit-ins, nonviolent stuff. Up here, we have riots."
Millicent's cigarette created a small white crossbar to her brown fingers and
deep pink nails, jabbing the air in Shuck's direction. "Nobody's thinking
about nonviolence up here."

"I'm still happy to be up here." Rodney said.

"You one of them `I'se-so-happy-to-be-here' Negroes, always saying
thank you, massa' for something that was yours to begin with." Posey stared
at Rodney without a hint of fellowship in his eyes. But no matter what
anyone ever said to him, Rodney shrugged it off, burly and untouchable.

Rodney sneaked a look at the floor. "Well, I saw them dogs and fire
hoses on the news. Where would you rather be?"

"Shut up, Rodney." Posey glared at him.

Shuck heard them and didn't hear them, jumping over their references,
scanning his own life and past, seeing Celeste and Billy as children, each
holding one of his hands, walking on the island park, Belle Isle, going
to the movies, buying ice cream, sitting in Momma Bessie's rose-scented
backyard.

"I remember the race riot, man. 1943. Now that was awful. June then,
just like now and already hotter than hell." Posey sounded like he wanted
to say it and didn't want to, like he was pushing a conversation about
something else, anything in the past, to help Shuck.

Rodney yelled out above Posey, above the suction vents, air conditioners, icemakers, humming ceiling fans, jukebox. "Shit always happens when
it's hot." He folded back in his chair.

Shuck let the memory of those old days float into his head. Back in the
forties, waves of Negroes and whites from the south overwhelmed Detroit.
Instead of Packards and Cadillacs, they built tanks, jeeps, army trucks,
airplanes, and PT boats. People lived jammed too many to a room, slept
in closets, on porches, wherever a mattress would fit, or just a folded blanket would do. Lines for food, for streetcars, for housing, for everything.
Momma Bessie even rented rooms in the old house on Whitewood, bringing down the wrath of the few whites who hadn't run when they'd moved
in. Rocks hurled into windows. It never ended.

Chink wagged his head from side to side like a sad-faced dog. "It was
bad on Belle Isle. Never forget it."

Millicent and Iris faced the bar mirrors, thin hazy smoke threads winding from the ends of their cigarettes, heads delicately ticktocking back
and forth.

"People used to cart their picnic things out there on the streetcar."
Millicent's chin dipped.

"The day that riot started was no time to be fooling around on streetcars." Posey dried glasses with a vengeance, clanking them down on the bar
sink. "Peckawoods pulled people off, beat them in the street."

"Whole lot of Negroes got killed," Rodney said.

"Few white boys, too," Chink added.

"Right." Rodney's knee started twitching. "A few."

Shuck went to the jukebox and punched in "Take the A' Train" and
"Broadway," escaping to his New York dream. He sat again, looking at the
night-life Negroes with pearl white teeth and processed hair, Joe Louis
in the ring, Thurgood Marshall on the steps of the Supreme Court, Lena
Horne draped on a Hollywood post, Nat "King" Cole at the piano.

Evening trucks from the post office jarred the big window across the
front of the Royal Gardens. That big plate glass window irked Shuck, though
he liked seeing his Cadillac parked at the curb, the patterns of traffic, the
twist and turn of the seasons-women in their sundresses, hair up off their
necks, then later the first bustling skips of autumn, the snow when it came
lashing with the wind off the lakes, barreling back and forth across the city.
And spring-hard as it was to see spring on Lafayette Street, all black tar
and concrete. Smaller panes of leaded glass would be more elegant, more
mysterious, make the place look less like a dressed-up storefront.

The talk about the riot of 1943 went on around him, the voices heavier,
garbled, swimming in and out of the music, in and out of his thoughts. He
reminded himself that children were born to leave, the universe ordered
it, that Billy would stay in New York, that Celeste would run off to Mississippi. And always there was the thought of Wilamena with her new
husband in New Mexico. He kept thinking of the man as her new husband.
It had been nearly ten years. Longer than that since she'd pulled the plug
on Detroit.