Freshwater Road (46 page)

Sister Mobley coughed, and sighed, then opened her bible, while Dolly
Johnson climbed up to the top bunk rolling her eyes at the entire world,
bouncing around and causing the springs to grind and squeak. Finally,
she settled in, staring at the ceiling. All was quiet except for Sister Mobley
turning those crispy-thin bible pages. A fury of pages turning.

Celeste climbed back up to her bunk, but she didn't want to put her
head on a pillow that smelled like rancid sweat and used Kotex. She leaned
against the cinderblock wall and threw the pillow off the foot of the bed. It
flopped in a dull thud on the floor. She heard the mesh springs under the
moldy mattress squeak as Mrs. Owens lay down. She longed for a glass of
that too-sweet iced tea, anything cold to drink. She imagined a tall glass
of ginger ale loaded with ice, the smell of ginger caught in the froth of
carbonation going right up her nose.

More than likely, she thought, the police would allow Reverend Singleton to make one phone call for the whole group. It was Tuesday morning.
The One Man, One Vote Jackson office would alert the FBI that six people
had been arrested in Pineyville. After the bodies of Goodman, Chaney, and
Schwerner had been found, the number of FBI men in the state shrank. Not
enough agents to investigate every complaint. The Jackson office would send
the bail money down and a lawyer if needed. Nothing to do but wait.

"I sure hope they don't beat up on poor Reverend Singleton and Mr.
Landau. You think they will, Sister Celeste?" Sister Mobley spoke holding
her opened Bible across her chest.

"They may not beat them. Might think arresting us is enough to scare
us off." She hoped she was right.

This arrest tactic was yet another way of obstructing them, slowing
them down. These tactics had worked for so many years, they probably believed they'd work now. Mr. Heywood and his sheriff knew well that Negro
people would eventually be registered to vote in Mississippi. It was a matter
of time-but for this year, time meant everything because of the coming
national elections. Registration would close. The southern whites would win it by slowing the movement's progress to a crawl. No way they'd win in
the long run. Battle lines had been drawn in the red dirt as if the Civil War
and Reconstruction had to be relived again and again, an endless replaying
ofvanquishers and vanquished. Negro people got caught in the middle, the
pawns of both, the scorned reward, disparaged and disqualified.

Sister Mobley ran her thin finger down a bible page, mumbling scriptures.

"It's a good thing those newspaper and television people still shining a
light all over the state." Celeste said it to calm the others more than because
she had any real belief the press would help them now that the three civil
rights workers had been buried. She hadn't seen a television in weeks, had
no idea what was being reported to the outside world.

Dolly eyed Celeste. "Haven't seen any of 'em come down here." She
rambled around in her purse, pulled out a wristwatch. "I gotta pick up my
kids from my sister's."

"It probably won't be much longer." Celeste didn't have a clue as to what
might be next or how long it would take.

Sister Mobley kept reading in a whispery voice, so small on that bunk
bed Celeste wondered how she'd even brought three children into the world
without breaking apart.

"The next group better be ready for tomorrow morning whether we're
still in here or not. You can't let up on these white folks. They see it as
weakness." Geneva Owens's wise observance quietly relaid the gauntlet.
They had to be their own leaders now.

A gray army blanket lay folded across the foot of the bed, as foul as the
pillow. The place reeked of urine. This was what she'd missed in Jackson.
Now, she'd run out of all of Shuck's city luck. God only knew what else
was coming, and it didn't have to happen in this jail. This might be the easy
part, just sitting in a foul-smelling place for a few hours. Who knew what
the night would bring to Freshwater Road?

"Sheriff Trotter never said what we were being arrested for." Celeste
rambled through the instructions that had come from the Jackson office.
Lists of possible charges, bail amounts, conduct for voter registrants, even
words to say in the registrar's office, if they ever got there.

Dolly sat up against her own cinderblock wall, pouting and accusing at
the same time. "That freedom school's against the law."

Celeste stared at Dolly. What was this now? Her new appearance and the words coming from her mouth couldn't have been more incongruous.
Dolly had been the first to send her children to freedom school. Had she
identified herself with the civil rights movement as a matter of style, like
a way to dress? Or maybe her fear had taken over, undermining her new
persona.

"Darn near everything we do is against one law or another." Celeste
kept her eyes on Dolly. Was it possible that feisty Dolly ran back to her
sometimes man, Mr. Dale, and talked about everything and everyone who
came to the church meetings? Celeste had spent the summer worrying
about Mr. Tucker with the devil in his eyes. She searched Dolly's face for
an answer, for the truth.

"Who said so?" Mrs. Owens's tone dared Dolly to say that Mr. Dale had
warned her about the school.

"It's been in the newspapers."

"You brought your own children first, Dolly." Celeste focused hard
on her.

"I didn't know it was illegal." Dolly didn't flinch.

"Because some white folks say it is, doesn't make it so." Mrs. Owens
took the space, the very air from Dolly's words. "Besides, we not in here
because of freedom school. We in here because of voting."

Celeste nodded "yes" to Dolly, thinking of Shuck's perennial line. You
catch more flies with honey. She wouldn't let go of Dolly, not with those
two children's minds and lives being shaped in the balance. "To them, I'm
teaching communism and the overthrow of the government. How they get
that from Negro history and art classes is beyond me."

"See, I told you." Dolly spoke gently to Mrs. Owens knowing now that
the older woman would not put up with her if she went too far. Celeste's
stomach turned. Had she misread Dolly so completely? Or was this jail cell
testing Dolly's resolve? How would she find out the truth? And when?

In her materials, Celeste had read of a Negro girl in Tennessee killed
by the Klan for teaching freed slaves to read and write. She knew that
much about the past. The new laws were descended from the old ones that
forbade teaching slaves. Only now it was more about keeping the quality
of education so pared down to nearly nothing, so unrelentingly dismal,
that it barely prepared a child to be a functioning member of society. But
even that failed, because people so desperate for learning glommed on to whatever was available, and some used it to sail to great heights anyway.
The freedom schools birthed questions in a place where questioning ranked
with impertinence, the reward physical or at least verbal abuse. They did
precisely what the whites feared-dug out and discarded the last vestiges
of slavery, even those with deep roots in Negro people's minds, holding
them down even when the threat had all but disappeared. The movement
challenged it all. The old way of life was unraveling again, just as it had
begun to do during Reconstruction. That's why she'd come here. That's why
she sat in this foul-smelling cell instead of on Shuck's silk sofa in the house
on Outer Drive, or even instead of walking down the streets of Paris with
J.D. She felt energized.

"Did your house get shot into?" Dolly sounded like she was in a beauty
shop, talking about some gossipy thing that happened in the neighborhood.
She was just making conversation, Celeste figured, an attempt to make up
for her earlier lapse of commitment. A world of things had happened since
the night shots were fired into the house.

"Scared me to death." Celeste said. "I slept on the floor for a few nights,
still do most of the time. I tried to get under that bed." No need to mention
how she'd wet the bed out of fear.

Celeste stared over at Dolly and wondered what she might have been
thinking back when she brought Labyrinth and Georgie to the freedom
school the first time. Two children she wanted to free from this dungeon of
oppression, a married white man as one father and a long-gone black one as
the other. She must be terrified. If Percival Dale stopped helping her, he'd
be right in a line that descended from slave masters who refused to sign
freedom papers for their own flesh and blood. Some things had changed
and some others had barely budged. Dolly was surely on that tightrope that
Shuck so feared for Celeste.

"They did that back when my husband, Horation, was alive." Mrs. Owens
spoke from a reverie.

Celeste heard the quiet in her voice, remembered the old photo of Mrs.
Owens and her husband in his World War I uniform hanging above her
bed, that oval of fading life, the old woman's memory of him caught and
alive in her voice as if he'd only died yesterday.

"White folks something, all right." Dolly's eyes grazed her soiled mattress.

Celeste fully expected Geneva Owens to say, "And you oughta know."
But she didn't.

"My Tony wants a gun." Sister Mobley's voice was filled with awe. "He
ain't nothing but a child."

Celeste hoped Sister Mobley didn't think she'd filled her son's head with
thoughts of guns in freedom school. But she would send Tony to "study"
with Mr. Landau in a wink. All summer long, she'd wanted to tip over to
Bogalusa to one of those Deacons for Defense and Justice meetings. People
needed to be able to protect their homes. No more cheeks to turn.

"Mr. Tucker come down and checked on us that night. They sho tore up
that car a his," Sister Mobley said. "He had to take it all the way to Jackson
to get that glass replaced."

In spite of it all, Mr. Tucker hadn't gotten the point-that it didn't
matter that he had not backed the movement. All bets were off. He might as
well get on board the train, because he was just as black as everyone sitting
in that jail cell, just as vulnerable, just as disenfranchised and disinherited
as any other Negro in Pineyville or anywhere else for that matter. He got his
car window shot out for nothing. He hadn't helped to build this movement
but he paid the price anyway. Sissy had to be tapping him on his shoulder
morning, noon, and night. But did he feel an ounce of guilt?

In the small window built high up into the cinderblock wall, Celeste
saw nothing but crystal blue southern sky and white cloud clusters floating. Dark clouds hugged the edges. Where was Ed Jolivette right now? He
felt like those dark clouds always at the rim of her consciousness, never
disappearing, as if he walked with her, touched her arm, or prodded her in
some vague way toward the sureness she strove to have. He and Matt must
be organizing for the end of the summer project. Voter registration rolls tallied, political work leading to the big changes sure to come in Mississippi.
She had to drag Pineyville to the finish line, no matter what, both for herself
and because she knew that Ed expected her to do it. And Shuck did too. Not
enough that she'd come to Mississippi. She had to move the place along.

Trotter's deputy came through the lock-up door and stood at their cell,
his key ring clanking on the bars as he opened it. "You, up top there,
you come on with me." He had more Mississippi drawl than Trotter. He
beckoned to Celeste with his long muscular arm. His other hand was on
his hip, near his gun. "You Celeste Tyree?"

Celeste climbed down from her bunk thinking he knew very well who
she was. "Yes." The word "sir" was on a slow passage from her brain, but a
fearful quick catch of breath and a missed heartbeat caught it, laid it down. Good. She didn't want her cellmates to see her fear. She stood up straight,
had no purse to grab; there was Kleenex in one pocket of her skirt, her
tiny change purse with payphone money in the other along with her Social
Security card and student ID. Her number was up. Her luck, Shuck's luck,
had run out.

Mrs. Owens stood out of her bed, dread filling the gullies on her face.

Sister Mobley prayed out loud. "Behold, the Lord's hand is not shortened, that it cannot save; neither his ear heavy, that it cannot hear; but your
iniquities have separated between you and your God, and your sins have
hid his face from you, that he will not hear."

The deputy looked at Sister Mobley with a full face of contempt.

Dolly Johnson scooted to the edge of her bunk, dangling her legs over
the side like a child.

Celeste felt like she was being led to the firing squad. The deputy reached
for her arm and pulled her through the cell door, his hand like a cold brace
on her. He relocked the door.

"Follow me."

He walked, checking her behind him, down the short hall and through
a metal door, then down a flight of stairs that she'd forgotten coming up
little more than an hour ago. The tan walls were broken by closed dark
doors, her tennis-shoed footsteps quietly padding behind his police shoes
clomping on the concrete floor. Celeste counted doors, then began humming, "Ain't gon' let nobody turn me 'round, turn me 'round." She didn't
remember these doors from their walk into the jail. Maybe it had been the
pull of the handcuffs taking her attention. Fear shutting down the mind as
it had done in the car with Matt. Her hands were free now. She watched the
deputy's holstered gun bouncing gently with the rhythm of his legs.

She couldn't hold the freedom song in her head. When the deputy
passed a clean, white porcelain drinking fountain, Celeste saw no Whites
Only sign. She stopped to drink, delighted to have the cold water in her
mouth. It tasted like first snow. As the cold stream flowed down her throat,
the deputy shoved her head hard into the fountain. She vomited the water
as her mouth slammed into the shining chrome spigot. A quiet crack,
then she saw her blood going down the drain as pain shot from her mouth
up into her head. Stunned, she moved over to the side, her brown hand
slipping from the white porcelain bowl. As she turned to face the deputy,
her feet tangled into a knot and she stumbled to the floor, her head and back bumping into the wall. The black of his police shoes was the last
thing she saw.