Freshwater Road (54 page)

"But the freedom school. That public school is set up to keep them
back." Celeste pressed her case, desperation flecking the words. "Reverend
Singleton said that's what they should've burned down. I can't leave now."
Her dream of staying singing through her words, she might have been in
the pulpit of Reverend Singleton's St. James A.M.E. Church. She was in a
life and death struggle for a place called home, didn't know what else there
was in the world that she could count on. Shuck slipping away.

Mrs. Owens said nothing for a while, seemed to be considering her
words, mulling them over and over. She adjusted herself in the chair, wiped
her temples with the corner of her apron. Celeste's head pounded with excitement, the anticipation of working out the details of staying, of rebuilding and teaching Tony and his two little sisters, Labyrinth and Georgie,
and maybe even getting the Tucker boys to come. In memory of Sissy, she
wanted to stay on, but in the back of her mind she knew that would be a
perpetual thorn in Mr. Tucker's side, to wake up in September and find
her still there watching him, spreading her freedom songs over the land
into the hearts of other young people and old people, too. He'd never be
able to tolerate that-he'd punish Mrs. Owens and Sister Mobley, too, by
not providing them with the least manly gestures. He wouldn't care then
if they all died.

"What about your daddy? I know he would not want you to stay here.
You can't let him down like that." Mrs. Owens's forehead creased deeply as
if she couldn't imagine Celeste coming up with this idea of staying while a
well-providing father sat at home waiting for her to get on with her education, her own life.

Celeste's breathing grew shallow. She knew very well if she stayed here
it would break Shuck's heart. She licked her scar-lip, her cracked tooth,
nodded her head up and down gently. "He wouldn't like it, but he'd never
tell me not to do it if I really wanted to." She lied like a pro. She'd lied all
summer long, saying she'd write her mother, which she hadn't done and
had no intention of doing. Didn't even know what Shuck would feel after he heard what was in Wilamena's letter. Didn't even know if she'd ever
tell him.

Mrs. Owens looked askance at her, seemed on the verge of disputing her
words, but said nothing for a while. The two of them sat there like boxers in
a circle of light, the kitchen table their ring, waiting for the bell.

"It's time for these Negroes to get up and demand better for their own
children. They live here, they work here, they need to be doing for themselves. You can't spoon-feed people forever, child." Mrs. Owens folded her
arms across her chest, blocking any further incursions. "We do the rest on
our own."

Celeste sighed so deeply her exhaling breath brought her heart to a
near stop. She grabbed at Mrs. Owens's words, moved them around in
her head trying to figure a way through. Spoon feed. "But if someone like
me is here, some things will go a lot faster." She didn't want to admit the
downside-that whites resented the Northerners meddling in the town.

In the quiet that followed, she realized she'd revealed something about
herself that even she didn't want to be there.

"There may be truth in that, but they need to do it on their own so they
know they done it on their own." Mrs. Owens raised her voice but calmed
by the end of the sentence. "You did all you can do to show us to the next
point. And it's time for you to prepare for your own self's life. You done
plenty for ours. You can't hide here. Reverend Singleton means well, but
you got to go home and ready your own life." She slid Sissy's drawing across
the table toward Celeste. "This is the time for us that live here. Sissy didn't
die so you could stay here. We didn't do all we done so you could stay here.
That's not what it was about."

The weight of it, and the rejection in it, sent shivers over Celeste's body.
Nowhere to hide. The words brought heat to her face and ears. She felt her
stomach falling. Mrs. Owens knew precisely what Shuck would say. Celeste
looked away, bit her lip, then looked back at Mrs. Owens in fear that she
might mumble out the truth. So this was the end of her sojourn in Mississippi, the beginning of letting this woman, this house, and this backwater
town go. Now she had to leave-she would never insult Mrs. Owens by
staying in town with some other family.

They were quiet. Celeste's head tilted down. She must not cry, she
thought. She glanced out the back door, around the little kitchen, the refrigerator humming. Mrs. Owens still as a statue.

"You understand what I'm saying?" Mrs. Owens held her face with her
knowing dark eyes.

"Yes, ma'am." Celeste nodded, not understanding all of it, sensed somewhere in what Mrs. Owens said that the Negro people of Pineyville needed
the best: no more half-educated teachers, no more zealous "would-be-if-
onlys." She'd faked herself out by thinking they needed her as much as she
needed them. But everything had changed. This was the end of the first
race. The next race would be different.

The house was sleeved in darkness, the one bare light bulb shining on
their sweaty tired faces. Celeste looked down at Sissy's drawing, saw the girl
in the church door with fear in her eyes, remembered her sitting in the back
seat of Mr. Tucker's Hudson with her big sunglasses on staring up at the
sky. She'd promised to take her to see a movie on a big screen in the dark.
But there'd been no time. Out the back door, the tops of the long-needled
pines sketched dark silhouettes against a moonlit sky. Sissy'd found some
peace and she needed to find some, too.

"All right then." Mrs. Owens got up from her chair. "Good night, child.
Be sure to lock the doors." She passed by her, patted her shoulder, then went
into her room and closed the curtain behind her.

Celeste heard the old springs disturb as Mrs. Owens sat on the side of
her bed, heard the crisp pages of the bible. She turned out the kitchen light,
locked the rickety back screen and door and the front doors, then went to
her bedroom. She propped Sissy's drawing up on the dresser trying to figure
a way to pack it. It struck her that Horation and Geneva Owens in the old
photo looked as calm and contained in that oval frame as if they'd lived a
life of peace, fulfillment, and bounty. How, she wondered, did they subdue
so much? With her gone, Mrs. Owens would have her old room again, sleep
in the place where she'd loved and cried all of her life. The fatigue of the
day overcame her. She went to sleep with the mattress on the bed for the
first time since bullets flew through the house; she didn't have the strength
to pull it down to the floor.

From her window seat on the plane, the opulent green of Detroit's western
suburbs reminded Celeste of New Orleans. The highway shot through like
a concrete arrow. One frost-cool night in late September or October would
usher in autumn and she'd awaken to a celebration of color that was equal
parts enchantment and regret. She smelled the burning leaves at curbside
on Outer Drive, the feel of air thinning to cold. Ann Arbor was twenty or
so miles west, Detroit the same distance east, two worlds that might have
been on different planets. She'd come home, though she no longer counted
on the meaning of the word, would've stayed in Pineyville for a while longer
if Mrs. Owens had agreed to her plan, her maneuver to avoid confrontation
with the import of Wilamena's letter. Shuck had always admonished her
that she was transparent, too apt to carry her heart on her sleeve. Hard as
he'd tried to teach her otherwise, he'd not been successful. Mrs. Owens had
read her like a book she'd read before.

That morning in Jackson, Celeste labored to make herself appear like
a well-off young woman coming home from a Caribbean cruise. Shuck
wouldn't want to see the sweat-drenched, dirty-toed girl she'd become in
Mississippi. Her cracked tooth had been replaced with a temporary one
by the only Negro dentist in town. The nurse in Dr. Fields's office told
her that in the past, Negro people traveled to Memphis to get their teeth
fixed, if they got them fixed at all. White dentists in Jackson wouldn't take
them as patients. She'd reconnected with Margo and Ramona, all of them
staying again in the segregated volunteer apartments for their debriefings. That morning she'd ironed the best of her cotton dresses, a sleeveless peach
sheath with a cropped jacket, for the trip home. She hadn't put on a fully
ironed dress in weeks. At Mrs. Owens's house, she'd taken to running the
iron over the bodice of a dress and perhaps down the skirt front. It was
a thankless and useless task. In minutes, the humidity re-pressed every
wrinkle into soft folds of limp fabric. Clothes stayed rough-dried no matter
how hard you ironed them, helpless against the humidity.

The smooth look she got from setting her hair on Margo's electric curlers
lasted about as long as it took her to walk outside to get into Ed Jolivette's
funky movement car for the ride to the airport. She wore her white pumps
and carried her bulging green canvas book-bag, its frayed corners and dirt
splotches belying all of her primping. A crusty layer of dark suntanned skin
obscured the mosquito bite scars up and down her ankles and arms.

Shuck stood back from the gate at the edge of the waiting crowd, dressed
in a late-summer brown suit with a creamy shirt open at the collar. His
stingy-brimmed hat sat a little back on his head, his forehead the color of
dark stained oak with deep red hues. Celeste walked toward him searching
his living face for what she'd not found in the small snapshot on her dresser
on Freshwater Road. She wasn't there, she feared, not in the shapes or
colors. How had she missed it for all those years? Still, she saw herself deep
in his eyes, a reflection of him, an extension of the man, a hope lodged in
her and her future, her sight and her way of being in the world. Mississippi,
she figured, had deepened that. He was begrudgingly proud.

Shuck grinned and frowned at the same time, eyes saying words he'd
never speak. "Damn, girl, you black as me." He hugged her and kissed her
forehead as he always did.

"It'll fade." She sidestepped that weighty issue and dove into an adolescent
litany of how much work it had taken her, Ramona, and Margo to turn her
back into someone he'd recognize after living raw in the wilds of Mississippi
for two months. She showed him her temporary tooth and told him about
the incident at the drinking fountain with Sheriff Trotter's deputy. Anger
flashed in the dark brown of Shuck's eyes, and Celeste thought for a moment
he might hit the nearest white person. She chastised herself for not waiting
until she got into his car to start telling him her Mississippi stories.

He slung her book-bag over his shoulder then slid his arm into hers
as he always did when they walked side by side, the way they walked the
streets in New York City on a vacation a long time ago. "What you got in here, rocks?" They strolled toward the baggage claim area. "Mississippi dirt.
Rocks. Notebooks and stuff." She'd carried that book-bag all summer, back
and forth to the St. James A.M.E. Church until it burned to the ground.
At the beginning, it held odds and ends, notebooks, maps, chewing gum,
a real purse. She really had added dirt and rocks-a small brown bag, now
torn, full of tangerine-colored soil from Freshwater Road, and a few white
stones from the church clearing, all of which more than likely had tinted
and creased Wilamena's letter, which she'd moved to her book-bag, too.

Shuck looked ahead as if searching for an exit to something. "You
supposed to be registering people to vote down there, not collecting dirt
and rocks."

"Thought I'd have time to study, too. For next semester." She hoped to
convince herself that she'd be ready to return to school after Labor Day,
suggesting her resolve to him, shaky as it was. Just days ago she was begging
to stay in Mississippi, to not come home at all. She might, at that moment,
have grabbed the book-bag from Shuck, dug out the letter, and pled for
answers right there in the airport. She didn't, and she congratulated herself
that maybe this patience meant she'd crossed over into adulthood, left the
nebulous field that separated late adolescence from the rest of her life. No
demanding answers in inopportune places. Wilamena had hurled her out
of childhood, thrown her into deep water.

Passengers zoomed by in both directions, seeming so sure of where they
were going and what their lives would be when they got there. She dawdled,
her step unsure, no streamline of conversation coming out of her, so unlike
her when with Shuck. He'd know something was on her mind if she didn't
snap to.

"Momma Bessie okay?" She was relieved to see the baggage claim ahead
offering a focus outside of herself.

"Getting old." Shuck tugged a bit as if he had someplace to go beyond the
airport. He always had someplace else to go, but it was never very far away.