Freshwater Road (55 page)

Celeste pecked around for things to say, the background noise of the
airport forcing her to give stature to her voice. "And, how's Alma doing?"
She wanted to ask if he was going to marry Alma. She'd wished it in the
past but not now. Feeling so on the edge of his world, she fought an urge
to hold on tight, to own. But Shuck wasn't ownable, and she knew it. Her
questions sounded foreign, untied to history, the small talk of an uncomfortable stranger. Wilamena had hit the mark if her intention had been to drive a wedge between her and Shuck, to create a distance, an uninhabited
plain. She had to break through, restore the life between them, but she
didn't know how. One word in the wrong direction might pitch them over
the brink forever. No word at all meant she'd have it on her mind for life, a
lonely struggle. Her anger rose again and then she felt Shuck there pulling
her into his side.

"She's fine. Going back to work, complaining about how rowdy these
kids have gotten." He scanned the luggage for the suitcase he'd bought her
two years before. "See it on the streets myself. It ain't pretty."

Sissy's almond-eyed face and the faces of her other freedom school children, reticent and shy, filed through her mind. Tony, with more responsibility than a grown man. Little Georgie, staying in Labyrinth's shadow.
And Labyrinth, her little-girl hands on her hips with an expression far
more adult than her actual years and with not a shy bone in her body. The
Mississippi children were never rowdy-hard to tell when it was country
sweetness or just the long grinding effect of being beaten down at every
turn. Shuck gave her the book-bag and grabbed the suitcase. They walked
out into the thinning humidity, summer geared to lose its swagger soon.

The white Cadillac gleamed in the sunshine of the open parking lot,
the convertible top up. After months of no rides at all or rides packed in
Reverend Singleton's car or in movement cars that stank of sweat and old
cigarette butts, she savored this ride. Even though Shuck smoked, the very
first thing you smelled in that car was a gentle memory of Old Spice. She
sank into the soft seat with its scent of rich new leather, put her book-bag
on the floor, gazed at the dashboard with its sleek space-age look. Shuck
quietly smoothed the car out of the parking lot and then east on 1-94, well
above the speed limit, she noted.

She hammered herself into conversation telling him of getting Mr.
Landau, Mrs. Owens, and Hazzie Mobley registered to vote, of spending
those hours in the jail cell, of the church being burned to the ground and
of the plans to rebuild it. She was careful not to mention her brief interest
in staying there to rebuild the freedom school and a library.

"So you went to jail." He floated the Cadillac around the other cars
and trucks on the expressway as if they were buoys on a tranquil lake, his
tires softly thumping over bumps and ridges. "Now you're my criminal
daughter, uh?"

Celeste's laughter was high and thin. "We all did." Jiggaboo girl, criminal daughter. She was his fraudulent child. She stared out the window at the
landscape as it took on more and more houses, small run-down businesses
in lean-to sheds, and weather-beaten garages. The trees saved it from looking like a countryside ghetto. "Well, anyway, it's better than it was before."
She laid into it, bottom-lining Mississippi Shuck-style.

Shuck exited the expressway at Livernois, going north toward Outer
Drive. His silence and his focus on the road ahead told her that he didn't
believe Mississippi was better enough. It would be a while before she told
him about Mrs. Owens's house being shot into.

With the traffic lights and Sunday drivers, they slowed on the surface
streets. Celeste scanned the small storefront businesses, auto repair shops,
and gas stations lining the blocks of Livernois, everything closed, all owned
by mixtures of Negro and white people. No stepping off sidewalks here.
Good to be home. She mulled over her last days in Jackson with Ed and
the other volunteers as they dissected and summarized the achievements
of Freedom Summer. Hard to summarize Pineyville, though. There were
so many stories, burned-down churches and houses shot into and injuries
and incarcerations, but she accepted the movement's statistical version, its
shorthand. Her truest life, she felt, had stretched out over her time on
Freshwater Road. Sissy's death. Ed's birth in her life.

Ramona with her bowl of kinky hair and skin so black from the Delta
sun that her brown eyes glowed, had registered seven people-Ramona
had been in cotton plantation country. You couldn't say the Delta without
thinking of slavery, without hearing a cante hondo blues. Indianola had
strong community involvement, a near war going on between the workers
on the plantations and the owners. Folks had been riled up before Freedom
Summer started. Margo, her blonde hair bleached nearly white and her skin
tanned to brown, looking like she'd been a counselor at a sailing camp in
Massachusetts, had been in Aberdeen over near the Alabama border. She
got four people on the rolls. Celeste kept her chest out anyway because in
some towns not one Negro was registered to vote. In her heart of hearts,
she wished she'd done better. They reminded each other over and over
that it was a beginning, that Mississippi would never be the same. Matt
slapped palms and acted hard-edged and street-wise with the other guys;
he seemed to look through Celeste when he acknowledged her at all. Some
volunteers had decided to take a semester off from school to continue the work through the November elections. She would've done it, too, if Mrs.
Owens had let her stay.

In Jackson, they carried the debriefings from the One Man, One Vote
office around the corner to Mercer's, the only Negro-owned restaurant large
enough to accommodate their group. They hid whiskey bottles secreted in
from Louisiana in brown paper bags stuffed into purses and book-bags
and took them into the restaurant. They ate collard greens, fried chicken,
and cornbread and poured small amounts of liquor into Cokes and orange
drinks, then shoved the booze back into their purses. Miss Mercer winked
at them when she came out of the kitchen and saw their glazed eyes. Some
volunteers had their suitcases stacked in the corner by the door, ready to
get out of Mississippi as soon as the eating was over.

When the dinner plates were cleared, they pushed the tables back and
danced to the music on the jukebox until sweat ran down their bodies. They
were teenagers at an airless basement party, white and black, and after a
couple of drinks, they smeared into one thing, a bunch of students from
as far away as Stanford University, as close as Tougaloo College right there
in Jackson, who'd lived their purpose through to the end of the summer's
effort. In a euphoria of hugging and kissing their goodbyes, they prayed
for the ones who hadn't made it through, and for the families of Mickey
Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andy Goodman, and for Medgar Evers's
wife and children and the others. Celeste prayed for Sissy and for Zenia
Tucker, too.

Ed waited by the door at Mercer's for her to say her goodbyes. He'd
arranged a few hours for them alone in the male volunteers' apartment.
They sat with their backs against the wall on the mattress, the apartment a
reverse layout but in all other ways the same as the one she'd stayed in her
first week and again now with Ramona and Margo, flaunting the rules of
segregation during the debriefings. He pulled her into his chest just like
he'd done on Freshwater Road and she felt relieved, relaxed in the fold of his
arms. They sat like that, the windows open. She saw him dancing his second
line at Otis's bar in Hattiesburg, dancing his demons away. She needed to
dance her own away. They slid down the wall and faced each other lying
on their sides, clung there, pressing their bodies together.

At the airport the next morning, they sat side by side on the black bench
seats. He was driving to New Orleans for a week before going on to Boston to finish his last year of graduate school. With people all around them, they
grew shy, made elliptical promises to call and write. When her flight was
announced, he walked her to the gate, called her "chere," and told her to
keep an eye out for him, that he'd never be very far away. She walked onto
the plane, struggling against his gravitational pull, didn't want to turn
around for fear she'd have missed the flight, missed whatever the rest of her
life was supposed to be without him.

Shuck turned onto Outer Drive and it dazzled, drenched in end-ofAugust sunlight filtering in white dapples through the sheltering trees.
Michigan green framed by the rich black earth, back-dropped in blue sky. A
northern sky the color of bluebird wings with drifts of graying white clouds
riding high. Giant elms glanced over houses, front yards were masterpieces
of diligence with hedges and cascading vines, flowers holding on to one last
dash of color before tilting over into the soil.

Celeste stood on the porch taking in the scents of newly cut grass,
thought of Freshwater Road with its orange sand and gravel chips and bony
barking dogs, the outhouses to the back, Mrs. Owens's leaning porch, the
screen door that wouldn't slam, and the spigot rising out of the concrete
platform. Ed would be in New Orleans by now, even driving under the
speed limit.

Shuck carried her suitcase upstairs while she wandered from the silky
living room to the wide dining room with bowed windows and cushioned
window seats that looked out over the backyard, her favorite place in the
house. She ran up the carpeted stairs and stood in her bathroom goggling
at the bathtub, the separate shower stall, the tile floor so clean you could eat
off of it. Her bedroom with its canopy bed sat like a Hollywood movie set,
the matching lamps and bedside tables prim and perfect. Soft light filtered
in through the sheers. She pushed the curtains aside, saw the white oak in
the back corner on one side of the yard and the towering pine on the other.
No piney woods, no limping plants and buzzing power lines, just a spread
of green and to the side of the house, a garage that Shuck only used in the
dead of winter.

She took Sissy's drawing out of her suitcase and stood it up on the tall
white dresser, using a small crystal bowl that held her barrettes to brace the
drawing in place. She'd have it framed. She could barely look at it, heard
Sissy's little-girl voice in the car, in the kitchen of Mrs. Owens's house, read ing. She grabbed the copies of Reverend Singleton's Kodak shots taken at the
church clearing, their little group standing in the light in front of the space
where the church used to be. She put them with Ed's letter and the pictures
of New Orleans on her bedside table to read when she got into bed.

She showered and lingered around the bathroom, amazed that she'd
managed to make it through the entire summer without one. She changed
into a summer pants suit from her closet, then dumped the big suitcase's
contents over onto the carpet. She hoped no Mississippi bugs hid in the
corners and compartments-better to take it down to the basement for a
good spraying. There on the top of the pile was the blue gabardine jumper
she'd worn on the train going south. A totem of the past, the innocent
spring blue of hyacinths. She'd never wear it again. She stood before the
long mirror inside the closet door, saw how her eyes withdrew into her face
now as if they'd become slightly hooded. The cut on her lip was barely
visible. Shuck was right. She was darker than she'd ever been in her life.
And, she was much older.

She faltered there in the bedroom thinking of Wilamena's letter. Tearing it to shreds would mean nothing at all. The words were imprinted on
her brain. Without Shuck, she'd be anonymous, unmoored, as if her only
known history had been lived out in Mississippi. The rest had disintegrated
into grainy particles, bits and snatches of things that no longer composed a
whole. She wondered if, in time, she'd remember anything of her life before
this summer, as if the letter wiped her life slate clean. It was time to talk to
Shuck. But ifShuck knew nothing, or if he suspected Wilamena's truth a long
time ago and had forgotten it over the years or even learned the hard lesson of
living with it, the letter would open an old wound and break his heart. Was
that something he could've forgotten or forgiven? But if he'd heard rumors,
if people had talked in the days when he and Wilamena had their troubles,
wouldn't this answer all the questions he'd had in his mind anyway? The
truth is supposed to unburden you, free you. Wilamena unburdened herself
with no thought to anyone else. No telling what the so-called truth would
do to Shuck. He might breathe a sigh of relief for her as much as for himself.
And what of those long-ago shadows with Momma Bessie and Ben? Were
they real or had she imagined them because boys always came first in that
house? That was enough to make any girl feel dismissed at times.

Shuck had put on a jazz record, elegant sounding but enough blues in it to know where it came from. A saxophone wailed. In the kitchen, he heated
two plates of food. Celeste set the table recognizing the aromas as Momma
Bessie's cooking. They drank cold milk and ate roast beef with creamy gravy
over a mound of mashed potatoes and green beans on the side. They listened
to the music. Celeste hadn't heard any of Shuck's kind of music since spring
break from school.

"I met a Negro man in Hattiesburg who owns a bar only nobody's supposed to drink any alcohol in there. Mississippi's dry, Daddy." She had an
urge to say, "daddy" over and over again, just repeat it until all of Wilamena's
haint was off of the word.

"If he owns a bar, he must be paying somebody off." Shuck looked at
her. "What you doing in some Negro's bar in Hattiesburg?"

"He works with the movement." She left the rest unsaid, the talk about
corn liquor, the gun Otis wore all the time, and the fact that he had no
whiskey bottles on his bar.