Freshwater Road (50 page)

"I can see that." She pondered it. "But Sissy would've run north. She
wouldn't have come this way. We turned south from the two-lane." Celeste
stood, brushed the sand and dirt from her knees, stared at the roots and
vines gnarling around the mud and sand. "We studied how the slaves figured ways to get to the north, as far as Canada. We never talked about
running south."

"She's a child. What'd she know about directions?" He spoke simply.

"We studied it. We talked about the north star, how to find it in the
night sky." She held onto her belief like it had come to her in a clairvoyant
dream.

"At night." He stood. "She disappeared during daylight. Maybe she got
confused." Reverend Singleton stared up at the yellow poplar tree with its
napkin-shaped leaves as if he might embrace it.

The water grew more powerful, as if someone turned the spigot up to
full. She tried to remember if there'd been a big rain that day. Of course,
it rained nearly every day for at least a few minutes. Had it been enough
through here to swell this creek? But the creek was swelling by itself. Maybe,
in the center, the current was strong enough to grab a child's leg if she was
very tired from running, or if she stepped into the water to cool her feet or
to drink. She looked up into the trees and couldn't tell where the sun was.
She turned in a circle trying to find it until she felt dizzy. Maybe it had
been an accident. But with no autopsy, no one would ever know for sure.
She shook her head in a renewal of her disbelief at the way the thing had
been handled.

"I know what you think. You never liked Mr. Tucker, and he never
warmed to what we're doing. I agree with you that he's a hard case. But you
can't think he'd kill his own child for standing in the freedom school door."
Reverend Singleton tried to quiet her agitation, sounding ministerial. She
needed to prick his pat estimation of what had happened to Sissy. Reverend
Singleton was a smart, insightful man. He had to believe what she did. How
could they be so far apart on this?

"It was more than that. I saw it in his eyes. He wasn't just a man who
distrusted the movement, or me because I come from the north. His eyes burned when he looked at me-as if I had done something personal to him.
I didn't." The words spilled out of her in a rush.

"It's over now." Reverend Singleton started towards the car. "Let's go."

"Zenia Tucker knows. She's lost her mind. I heard her talking to Mrs.
Owens." Celeste followed close, afraid to be more than a few paces from
him, eyes going from his back down to where she was stepping, her gym
shoes so dirty now they'd forgotten they'd ever been white.

"What are you saying?" Reverend Singleton stopped and turned to her.
Anger flashed across his face.

"I don't know. Something's not right. Something wasn't right, the way
she was at the funeral." Celeste had lost all sense of protocol; she talked
to him like he was a friend, a confidant, not the leader-man, not the minister of the Negro church of Pineyville. Her lip pulled against itself. "She
wouldn't let Mr. Tucker anywhere near her. Why? Maybe he was touching
his daughter. Maybe she knew it all along and did nothing." Celeste heard
her words and was stricken by the power of what she'd said in front of a
minister. She began praying in her mind for forgiveness even as the words
hung in the thick primordial air.

"You can't say that. It's the most horrendous thing you can say about
a parent."

"Sissy was coming to Mrs. Owens's house for lessons. Sneaking in the
back door. Maybe he saw her." She finally admitted her own complicity and
felt not a whit of relief for doing so.

"Maybe he did. Still, it's no reason to kill a child. Maybe a reason to
kill you, for interfering with his parenting. You shouldn't have done that,
Celeste. We set the rules for freedom school and you broke them by doing
something on the side." Reverend Singleton's disappointment in her was
profound enough to quiet the birds in the forest trees.

"Sissy needed to come to that kitchen." Celeste's eyes burned. "She had
nothing else to hold onto." Another real truth clarified in her mind at that
moment-how she'd used Sissy as a pawn in her little power struggle with
Mr. Tucker.

Reverend Singleton grabbed her arms and shook her. "What you did was
wrong. And if you believed he was capable of hurting her, then why would
you jeopardize her by teaching her in the kitchen when he forbade it? Why
would you do that?" At the moment when she needed Reverend Singleton
to pull her into his chest, to give her a forgiving hug, he let her go as if his disappointment had wiped away his duty as a minister to help her handle
her own pain. She felt selfish and guilty.

"I heard Zenia Tucker say something. Maybe she didn't mean it, but at
least she should've been asked what was going on in that house. And nobody asked her." Celeste shifted the burden back to Mr. Tucker, where she
believed it belonged. "She knows something. She can't say much because
Mr. Tucker's her bread and butter. Even Mrs. Owens said that to her. I
heard it." Her anger began to fade. It was all useless.

"A woman who's lost a child will likely think a thousand different things.
It's over now, Celeste. The child's in the ground." He turned his back and
walked.

"Negro people hurt each other, too, Reverend. No one will even discuss
it." She didn't fight now, just said it quietly as she walked behind him.

"It's over." He walked faster, his footsteps sounding like muffled tomtoms. "Let it go." There was hardness in his voice; a wall of stones had come
down between them. "You're a smart girl, Celeste, but you've got plenty
yet to learn about life." He resumed his role as chief keeper of the spiritual
codes. He offered to lead her out of her confusion and anger, but he knew
something about her now that he'd never known before.

His words stung her. Shuck had said the same thing, but it had been
playful, not a judgment. What did he mean? That a girl child's death didn't
mean as much as the other things pressing on this small town? That this
summer was about voting rights and not about Sissy? Bad enough to face
the Pearl River County power structure, go to jail, be knocked around. But
where was her common sense if not in her suspicion about what had happened? What was the lesson he meant about life? Sissy wouldn't have run
south. Sissy wouldn't have run at all if she, Celeste Tyree, had not come to
Mississippi. She got into the car feeling deranged, her head pounding from
crying, from grabbing at something that kept slipping away. What was it,
she thought, that kept so many people from countenancing the possibility
that Mr. Tucker might have killed his own daughter?

That night, in the bedroom mirror, her cut frightening as a harelip,
the fragile front tooth hanging on by a prayer, Celeste thought again that
the people who stayed in Mississippi had a courage she'd never find in
herself. Slave ghosts held them tight to this ground, whispering, don't let
that chained horrorgo unrequited. They'd been waiting, too. They sang it in
the trees in a patois of lost tribes, their dark eyes and lashed backs living in the closets of every house in the south. She wanted to be out of Mississippi,
to cross any river that had to be crossed to leave this place. She paced in the
small room, stood by the window pining for freedom. She basin-washed
the salt and film of dust from her body before changing into her sleep shirt.
All the while, Wilamena's letter was glowing like a hot rock in the pocket
of her suitcase under the bed.

The locals said the quick rains of summer would soon transform into deep
storms with masses of dark and thunderous clouds. They spoke of hurricanes that swirled up from the Gulf, rolling across Lakes Pontchartrain
and Borgne, pummeling southern Mississippi. Pineyville only tasted what
New Orleans, which sat below the level of the sea, ate from a platter.

Celeste had packed and unpacked her suitcase a hundred times in her
mind. She first started doing it the night the shots were fired through
the houses on Freshwater Road and blasted out the back window of Mr.
Tucker's maroon Hudson. Whoever had done it surely believed this would
scare the Negro people out of their drive for voting rights and scare her back
to where she came from. She fled back to Detroit a hundred times, in her
dreams, in her walks to the outhouse, in her daily struggle with the lack of
running water, in her loneliness.

The Pineyville Six, as Reverend Singleton continued to refer to them,
went back to Mr. Heywood's office every morning. Each time they were
told he hadn't yet gotten to their applications. Celeste was walking on a
wire, waiting to see if it would hold or sizzle to threads. Registration was
closing for the coming elections, but appeals were being filed all over the
state because of the extraordinary delays in processing the applications.
There was no leaving Pineyville until someone passed that test.

Two and a half weeks after filling out their applications, and then returning to the registrar's office every day to check on their applications, the
six went again to see Mr. Heywood. They arrived expecting the same stall they'd experienced on the day before, and the day before that. The three
secretaries ignored them, kept their heads focused on their desktops, their
little fans decorated with red ribbons kiting in the breeze. The dark-haired
woman with the sour face picked up her phone and pushed a button, then
replaced the receiver.

"Mr. Heywood be out here in a minute." She waved a look to the six,
her eyes never focusing.

The outdoorsy woman with the suntan walked to a file cabinet in the
corner by the high windows and opened and closed file drawers as if looking
for something she couldn't find. Even the younger woman who'd offered
Celeste the opportunity to register to vote stared out the windows, away
from them, as the clouds from the Gulf of Mexico rolled through. It might
rain, Celeste thought, following the younger secretary's eyes to the window.
She wished it would rain hard. She'd stand in the middle of Freshwater
Road watching the lightning zag in the sky, feel her bare feet sinking in the
sandy mud, feel the pelting drops on her face and in her hair.

Mr. Heywood came out of his office and looked at them with a surprised
expression as he wrestled into his brown suit jacket, grabbing papers from
the edge of the dark-haired secretary's desk. He stood behind the counter
and swiped a handkerchief over his sweaty face. His hair, parted on the
side, slid across his receding hairline, revealing an expanse of pale scalp.
Celeste noticed again how Mr. Heywood's eyes were darker at the center,
surrounded by a blue-gray marbling. They hadn't seen him once since their
very first attempt in the lobby, when he'd hustled them out the side door.

"Don't y'all have nothing else to do?" His eyes danced around the
countertop, appraised the painting of the Confederate soldier on the wall,
the clock, anything and everything but a look at them.

"Not today," Mrs. Owens said, shaking her head no. "How you doing,
Mr. Heywood?" A yearning look spread over Mrs. Owens's face, a plea that
seemed to beg for his righteousness. He'd told Mrs. Owens to get that "gal"
out of her house. He'd said, "Niggers didn't belong in this building." And
here they were. No one had called out the Mississippi National Guard to
stop them. Mr. Heywood was eating crow because someone more powerful
than he had told him that he had to backtrack on his promise of no Negro
voting in his county as long as he had breath in his body. He had to bend so
now he glided above, camouflaging his loss. His lips nearly parted, but the
greeting died before it could float into the air. Celeste knew Mrs. Owens had ironed his shirts in years past, had greeted his wife with her baskets of
rough-dried clothes. But this was about voting and that had been about
ironing.

"Well, we might as well get this over with. It looks to me like Landau,
Geneva, and Hazzie Mobley now registered to vote in the State of Mississippi." He didn't look at them for as much as an eye blink, spoke the names
without title. In all this time, Celeste never knew Sister Mobley had a first
name. Tony called her Ma, everyone else called her Sister Mobley. Hazzie.

Mr. Heywood flipped a stapled page over, wiping his face again with his
handkerchief though it was dry, smoothing those errant hairs back across
his balding spot. "The other two didn't pass the test." His head wiggled like
a kid standing on the other side of a line in a game. Dolly and Reverend
Singleton hadn't made it. Reverend Singleton, a graduate of the University
of Chicago, didn't pass Pineyville's test. Dolly, one of the best readers in the
group, hadn't passed the test. Celeste knew it was a lie.

Mr. Heywood opened the ledger book on the counter. "Come on now
and sign this book." He cut his eyes at Dolly. "Need you to print your name
and address and then sign your name on the lines." Celeste figured that the
eye-cutting had to do with his disdain for Dolly's relationship with Percival
Dale. That's what not passing the test was for Dolly. It had nothing to do
with what was on the paper. The lie of the south. The second biggest lie
of all. The eye-cut was the tip-off. Moments eased by on a breath. Dolly
knew the rules.