Freshwater Road (47 page)

In a tunnel of cottony fog, she heard the words, "That water's not for
niggers," then floated off dreaming of following Mary Evans into the Whites
Only ladies' restroom in the train station on her first night in Jackson. Signs
up, signs down. `Miss sippi ain't nothing to play with, girl." Coming back to,
her head and mouth throbbing, blood still leaking. Lips were blood-packed
things. Her hands were limp, her neck crooked, one leg folded under her
at the knee, one straight out. Gym shoes with pocks of orange earth like
dried blood from walks to the outhouse, from helping Mrs. Owens in her
tiny patch of yard. Thank God, she thought. I wore my gym shoes. She knew
that it was her lip that bled and now felt like an inflated balloon, ran her
tongue over her teeth with tears gathering in her eyes.

Celeste heard a second voice and looked up to see Sheriff Trotter standing with his deputy. They grabbed her under her armpits, hoisting her to
her feet, her shoes barely toeing along the concrete floor until they reached
a door and went into a small room. They sat her in a hard chair, her lip a
few paces behind every move she made. The deputy left the room and was
back in seconds, it seemed, with a glass of water that he slid toward her on
the dark tabletop. She wondered where the water had come from.

"Go ahead. You so thirsty." Trotter stood by a barred window, his arms
folded across his chest, his eyes deepened into his head and looking dark.
She remembered them as blue, but not today.

Celeste stared at the water, needed to drink, but dared not reach for it.
She'd been bullied into self-denial so quickly. Her lip had stopped bleeding,
had left blood on the front of her blouse. The lip had disassociated itself
from the rest of her mouth. She glanced up at Trotter, whose outline fuzzed
in the sunny backlight then cleared.

"Go on." He gazed out the window.

She shook her head "no," words stuck in her chest somewhere. She
needed ice more and none was offered. If it had been, she wasn't sure she'd
have had the courage to reach for it. Fear of physical pain was too fresh in
her mind.

Trotter turned to her. His eyes went yellow in the sunlight. "That
lip'11 heal."

Celeste's hands lay flopped in her lap, her feet wound around the legs
of the chair, her blouse buttoned and blood-splattered and untucked. She felt her change purse in her skirt pocket, hoped her student ID and Social
Security card were still in there, too. Throbs like hammer blows along her
back, her head, and in her mouth. Didn't know if she'd been hit in the head,
too, had been completely out, or just floated in shock on the corridor floor.
She was still alive, and she hadn't been raped. Maybe her luck ran still, but
thin. She needed to see a real doctor, a dentist, finally took her finger and
smoothed it across her front teeth. One tooth was cracked.

"You want a mirror?" Trotter had an overly dramatic look on his face,
dismissive of her injury as if it was a fake theatrical moment.

She shook her head again. She'd better wait until she got back to
Mrs. Owens's house, then realized that maybe she wouldn't get back there,
that they didn't have to let her go. They might do what they did to the three
boys, release her in the middle of the night and call the Klan to ambush
her. Home never seemed so far away, like a mirage in an ever-receding
distance.

"You might well be ruining your future down here meddling in things
that have nothing to do with you." Trotter sat on the window ledge, the
sun haloing behind him.

Celeste shoved thought to his words, fighting to hold her chin up and
level, wanting to hide her swollen lip. "I'm not sure I understand." Then
it hit her. This wasn't about being a coed on some plain of trees in a
four-seasoned place, or sitting in Shuck's bar pretending to be Dorothy
Dandridge playing Carmen Jones with a cigarette hanging from ruby red
lips. This was the real deal. She thrust her head up and looked squarely at
him, then parted her lips and showed him the crack in her tooth that she
hadn't seen herself.

Trotter turned away, eyes drifting around the room, then out the window again. "You're being charged with a felony." Trotter's voice broke into
staccato phrases with little beats between. "Endangering the lives of others." He glanced at her. "I can't protect you, and I can't protect those you're
dragging into this." He paced in front of the window. "Anything could
happen."

She kept her head up, staring at him, her lip flopping around like a
too-fat pancake. No looking down at the dirt. No eyes drifting off to Africa.
Just keep looking him in the eye. Protecting us was not what he'd sworn to
do. And nothing that happened here would matter in Michigan, and if it
did, she'd fight it. True, there were students in southern schools arrested in the movement who lost their places in those schools. She knew better for
students coming down from northern schools. His fabricated tactic wasn't
going to work.

`Anything has already happened. For years." Her voice felt craggy, clogged.

"What if I came to your neighborhood and set about inflaming your
neighbors against you?" He glanced out the window again like he was really
talking to someone out there instead of right in this room.

Celeste tried to figure which side of the building they were on. The sun
wasn't really behind him, but the harshness of the light let her know they
were up above the tree line. The jail faced east. It was past noon.

"And when you go back to your life in your big fancy school, what do
you suppose is going to happen to these people you've riled up?" He looked
directly at her.

She wanted to say she hoped they'd vote people like him out of office.
"They'll become full citizens in this state as well as in this country." Her lip
moved in slow motion. How did he know that she went to a big university?
Ah, the files. There were files on all the volunteers all over the state, files
that passed from the White Citizens Councils to the Klan to the local
authorities and back again.

"You people seem to think you're the only ones who have rights." He
went back to looking out the window.

"I don't think that." She spoke carefully, not wanting her lip to bounce
because it hurt, keeping her teeth from touching top to bottom for fear the
crack would become a break. "The right to vote, the will to be represented
by people who have your interests somewhere in their agenda is all I'm
interested in here." She needed to be quiet, rest her panging mouth.

"Have you looked at your people?" He had genuine surprise in his voice.
"They better off here with us than back in Africa. Wouldn't you say?"

Her anger swelled like tidewater in a storm. "We've been here as long as
you. We helped to build this country, too. The only difference is we never
got paid for the labor and we can't vote in Mississippi." She needed to calm
herself. Be wise. He held all the cards. Let him have his way of thinking.
She'd never convert him anyway. Just like she'd never change Wilamena.
This cost of being Negro is the very thing Wilamena had warned against.
But she wasn't Wilamena and wouldn't be even if she could. "Maybe there'll
come a time when all of this seems like a bad dream."

He breathed as if hit, something deep catching him. He turned slightly to the side. She saw his profile, the strength in his body and his forehead.
He was a handsome man. When he turned fully back to her, there was
something deep in his eyes, as if he wanted to run from everything in his
head. Like Ed Jolivette doing a second line at Otis's bar in Hattiesburg.
Too much to bear. Ed danced it out. What did Trotter do? The grief stayed
in his eyes for a second before the chill returned. The wall slid down like
a steel drape.

"We gon let y'all go today. But I'm telling you, you keep this up and
nobody will be able to stop the people who'll rise against you. Do you understand?" He walked so close she could smell his sweating body. He turned
his face away.

"Yes, I do understand." She followed him with her protruding lip, her
eyes so violent, she imagined, Martin Luther King would have expelled her
from the movement had he seen her.

The Pineyville Six met again at Reverend Singleton's car, a parking
ticket sticking up on the windshield. They climbed in, everyone trying not
to stare at Celeste's lip. She sat in the back by the door, behind Reverend
Singleton, with Mrs. Owens piled in next to her and Dolly on the other
side of Mrs. Owens. The others sat in the front. Celeste leaned the side of
her head against the car window, tried to see a reflection of herself in the
glass. How bad was it? At this rate, she thought, they'd all be crippled by
the time anyone got to register. The back of her head felt as if a wedge of
brain had been carved out. Empty. They were being picked off one by one.
Reverend Singleton yesterday, her today. It was a plan. Did he understand?
They could easily have attacked the whole group physically. They needed to
rethink who went to see the registrar. Older people needed to go to the back
of the line. Mrs. Owens and Sister Mobley shouldn't go-too old, too frail.
But she knew they'd never stand back now. No matter what, they'd keep
coming. Dolly and Mr. Landau could take it. She didn't know if Dolly could
be trusted. But she needed her to stand with them. Mr. Landau didn't say a
word in the car. Celeste figured he was cleaning his gun in his mind.

They drove through town hushed and worn out. Mrs. Owens patted
Celeste's arm then sighed into her own exhaustion. Dolly sank into her
seat, crossing and uncrossing her legs, impatient to get to her own antique
of a car that she'd left at the church early that morning. Reverend Singleton
dropped Dolly and Mr. Landau near their vehicles at the church, then
proceeded to Freshwater Road.

"Never mind you coming to the meeting this evening. Y'all stay here
and rest." Reverend Singleton paused the car long enough to unload Celeste
and Mrs. Owens, then took off towards Sister Mobley's house, orange sandy
dust swirling behind him.

Mrs. Owens went straight to the kitchen and in seconds Celeste heard
the banging sound of ice cubes being crushed, probably by a cast iron skillet. She'd never seen a hammer in this house. She walked to the cracked
mirror and stared at her new face, her swollen lip and cracked tooth making
her look like she'd been in a car wreck. She didn't know whether to laugh
or cry as she sat down on her mattress on the floor. Mrs. Owens brought
crushed ice cubes wrapped in a towel for her mouth and two aspirins. Told
her to lie down and keep the ice on her lip. Celeste slept and dreamed and
sweated. Mrs. Owens tipped in from time to time and changed the ice pack,
brought her iced tea and more aspirins.

The house quieted into evening. Celeste felt hunger rumbling around,
but didn't want to risk breaking her tooth off completely. She'd have to
learn how to take food in on the sides and be careful of biting down with
the damaged tooth. How would she not gnash her teeth at night? There
were nights in Mississippi when her fear drove her teeth into a gnashing fit,
the grinding so loud that it woke her. No dentist in Pineyville would put
his hands in her mouth. In truth, she didn't want any Mississippi dentist
repairing her tooth.

Sometime in the night, when her ice pack had become a soggy towel
and her lip felt closer to its normal size, a reddish-orange flash of light
soared into the sky. Celeste stood to see out of her window. The light flamed
orange and back to red and then settled into a white light that danced high.
There'd been no storm, no trees with burning branches like angry witches
running, no wallops of thunder. The flaming light opened a pearly hole in
the black sky.

In time, the smell of smoke drifted to Freshwater Road. It had to be
the burning of the St. James A.M.E. Church. Nothing else over there.
The meeting had broken up hours ago. People were sleeping by now. She
remained in the dark by the opened window, her eyes needing to close,
to rest, to stop the burning tears coming down her face seeping into her
cut lip. The church would burn to the ground taking Mrs. Singleton's organ, the chalkboard, the door that Sissy opened and closed in fear of her
father's arrival, the aisle that Ed Jolivette had walked down when he first came toward her, the railing, the wood pews and the folding chairs and
Reverend Singleton's precious lavatory with the flush toilet. And the pulpit
she'd spoken from on her first Sunday in town. The bell. The platform
where Reverend Singleton harangued his congregation to get on board the
freedom train. It had all begun in the church. How many songs had Sophie
Lewis sung to help Reverend Singleton build his church?

No one came to pound on the door, and there was no sound of clanging
bells or sirens, no trucks in motion racing to the scene of the inferno. The
flame licks dimmed and died, leaving night in charge of the sky.

Celeste had dressed in a yellow cotton skirt, a white sleeveless blouse, and
her tennis shoes, and gathered her jail-dirty hair into a slack ponytail by the
time Reverend Singleton pulled in front of the house. Before she departed
this town someone had to register to vote, no matter what burned to the
ground, no matter if all her teeth lay at Sheriff Trotter's feet.