Freshwater Road (6 page)

Celeste tried to gather up some mettle for her cracking, slipping voice.
She leaned down, head in the window, wanting to crawl through the window back into the car. "When do I go?"

"As soon as I see you're ready. Stay low to the floor at night. That apartment's been shot into. Grab the empty mattress. There's another volunteer
in there."

Celeste hefted her suitcase and book bag out of the back seat, wondering how long it would take her to get ready. Ready for what? Nonviolence
training, of course. Practice being oppressed, practice not getting killed.
Taking low to keep the peace, removing chips from shoulders, anger from
lips, history from heart. She lingered by the side of the car, afraid to walk
through open space. Afraid she'd end up like Medgar Evers, shot dead a
few feet from his front door. Across the street, the dark car waited. "What
about the police?" Celeste heard her own dumb question too late to pull
it back. They'd just been followed by the police. The police were all over
Jackson waiting.

"Forget the police." Margo sighed on the verge of impatience. "I'll pick
y'all up in the morning. White volunteers have to sleep in another unit. No
integrating. Not yet anyway." She started the car, staying low, her parchmentwhite face surrounded by her dark bandana and the night. "I'll wait 'til you're
in the door. Go on."

Celeste hunched over and scurried for the door as Margo started the
engine. Her suitcase and book bag scraped along the walkway. She might've
crawled on her hands and knees, anything to not be a walking target. She
found the door knob and felt around for the keyhole, then finally got the
door open. When she turned around, Margo gave her a quick wave and
headed, it seemed, almost directly for the dark car across the street, going
so slowly it seemed to be a taunt.

A miniature lamp sat on the floor next to the mattress but barely lit the
dark corner of the living room. Two folded sheets and a flat pillow with no
case lay on top. In Ann Arbor, Celeste's mattress was on the floor, too, but
not because it had to be, not because someone might shoot at her through
the windows. She positioned her suitcase and book bag at the end of the mattress to form a footboard, or at least a blockade, then undressed down to
her underwear before pulling a light cotton nightgown over her dirty body,
keeping low the whole time. The jumper and the blouse were going in the
bottom of her suitcase, never to be seen again until she got home. No, better
to air out the sweaty clothes before putting them into her suitcase. She laid
them on the wood floor. To take a bath or even to just wash up in the face
bowl meant turning on lights, which would locate her for the mystery men
across the street in the dark car.

She sat on the mattress and leaned against the wall staring at the small,
bare living room. Always she had a sense of waiting. It went way back.
Waiting for Wilamena to shower her with the hugs and kisses she saw other
children receive from their mothers, waiting for Shuck to pick her and her
brother up from some relative's house, waiting for Shuck's numbers to fall.
Waiting for her life to begin. Now she'd begin her own journey with no
clue as to how it would end.

"Your name better be Celeste." The voice wavered, followed by the padding
of bare feet on wood. "Otherwise, I'm going out the bedroom window."

"It is," Celeste called in a whisper. She had hoped the other volunteer
would be sleeping, giving her time to just sit there and mull over the possibilities of what lay ahead.

"Good." A door closed and in seconds there was the sound of a flushing
toilet. A young woman crept into the living room, walking squatted down.
"Ramona Clark."

Ramona sat down on the floor and leaned back against the door frame.
Her hair was a mass of wooly kinks, round like an upside down bowl.
Celeste could make out a small brown face, big oval eyes. "Haven't slept
since I got here."

"Celeste Tyree." She felt her dirty, frizzled, humidity-inflated curls and
waves, every strand symbolic of a contorted family tree. "That car across
the street might keep anybody from sleeping."

"Amen to that." Ramona said. "Where're you from?"

"Michigan. Detroit. Actually, I'm in school in Ann Arbor." She tried to
see more of Ramona's face in the dim light.

Ramona's head moved back and forth, her big bowl of kinky hair swaying. "Ooo wee. Not many black folks up there."

"Not many." Celeste heard the "black." Speakers from the movement
who came to campus said it too. She hoped Ramona wasn't excluding her, tossing her in the "other" pile-the "good hair" pile, the light-eyed Negro
pile. Negroes used to be "colored." Kids used to fight over being called
black. It was the new title, the new calling. Black folks. She wanted to be
in it. Shuck would be. Wilamena wouldn't. Celeste herself hadn't gotten
comfortable saying "black."

"I'm at Howard with the black intelligentsia, the so called `high-yellow
first line of defense,' no offense intended." Ramona's voice eased out, consonants hit then released very quickly, sliding softly off the edges of her
words.

Celeste bristled and lied. "None taken." Shuck was in her head telling
her there was no high yellow, no low yellow, or anything else. There were
just Negroes. Now, just black folks. Period. Celeste gave herself a point.
Shuck was always ahead of the pack, in the vanguard. And she always
trying to catch up.

"Where're they sending you?" Ramona stretched her legs out on the
wood floor.

"Someplace called Pineyville." All she could see was the bowl of hair and
flashes of the whites of Ramona's eyes. "I never even heard of it."

"Boy, you hit the jackpot." Ramona's eyes flared wide. "That's where
they lynched Leroy Boyd James."

"Jesus." Celeste's train-weary mouth dried like dusty bones. She'd never
heard of Leroy Boyd James, either.

"It was in the fifties. I did a paper on lynching in three deep-south states
since World War II. I'm a sociology major." Ramona leaned her head back
against the door jamb.

Every Negro in America was a sociology major, like it or not, college or
not. You had to be. "What happened to him?" Celeste knew before Ramona
said a word.

"They say he raped a white woman. Never got to court. Got kidnapped
from the jail down there, beaten, shot, and dumped into the Pearl River.
The sheriff said it never happened. A fisherman pulled him out. Body got
caught on some tree roots or something. Otherwise, he'd have been swept
down to the Gulf by the currents. Disappeared. A prisoner told the FBI
that the sheriff there opened the door to some men. Nobody was charged
with his murder."

All the air sighed out of Celeste's body. This wanting to know could
definitely give you nightmares. Maybe Ramona exaggerated. Maybe there was more to the story, but she couldn't fathom what that might be. She'd
seen the photos of Emmett Till. She'd seen the range of horror when it came
to white women and Negro men. She tried to stir up enough saliva in her
mouth to swallow. "Where're they sending you?"

"Indianola. In the Delta." Ramona sighed. "Plantation country."

Wasn't Mississippi all plantation country? And what was Pineyville? A
lot more than the Piney Woods, evidently. Leroy Boyd James. A new wrench
of fear cranked her stomach, sent the acids churning and the ghost of that
ham sandwich flying.

"You running your project by yourself?"

"Unless some more volunteers show up. They've got a pretty active
bunch of black folks in the town." Ramona got into her squat-walk position. "Oh, the lady across the way brings biscuits and jelly in the morning.
We've got coffee. The phone in the hall is for emergencies. They said we can
call collect anywhere. The FBI numbers are right next to the phone there."
Ramona disappeared around the corner. "I hope you can sleep. I sure can't.
Don't forget to stay low."

"Goodnight." Celeste shriveled down the wall, legs spread out on the
mattress. She felt like she'd been awake for days. Too many thoughts
swirled in her head.

Sporadic dog barks, crickets, the creaking of trees. No low music in the
background. No laughing voices with conversation riffs in between. It had
to be three in the morning by now. A thickness in the air that made you
think you were hearing things, but when you really pressed your ears to it,
there was nothing there.

Celeste squat-walked to the open front windows, sat down on the hardwood floor, and pushed on the screens. They were locked in place. Lightcolored curtains waited for a breeze, any slight shuffle of air. The car across
the street glimmered in a sliver of moonlight. Ghosts with guns. Sweat
bubbled out on her forehead, under her arms, between her legs. She smelled
her own body, the dampness curdling into a pungent aroma.

She crawled back to the mattress. The heavy air weighted her down on
the thin bed, the hardness of the floor rising into her spine. What had Leroy
Boyd James really done? Was it like Emmett Till? A whistle, a nothing
whistle? She knew there were white girls in Ann Arbor who loved the easy
grace of long dark arms and lips that felt like pillows in heaven. But this
wasn't Ann Arbor. Margo standing at the mimeo machine with that guy? What was that about? Maybe nothing. Margo was from New York. No big
deal. But where was he from? He's the one who'd pay the price. Down here,
death came hunting when you reached across the lines of demarcation.
In Ann Arbor, maybe just a hateful look, a bad name slung across some
busy street. She and J.D. turned heads. Here, crossed love got dropped in
the cracks of old storm shelters, locked away with warning signs marked
Danger. People died for flirting. She'd read enough to know this was the
real deal. Mary Evans's voice in her head, You be careful, girl, you hear?
Miss sippi ain't nothing to play with.

Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and their blue Ford
station wagon disappeared near Philadelphia, Mississippi, on the night of
June 21, gone like a moonlight rainbow after a summer evening storm. The
news flew through the trees, over the creeks, and down the mud-brown
rivers on the rhythm of a talking drum. By afternoon of the first day, the
news was on the dinner table in Jackson. By evening, it was in the fingers
of the lady pressing hair in Canton and on the lips of the waitress in Greenwood. On Tuesday, the second day, their station wagon was pulled from
the swampy waters of Bogue Chitto Creek near Philadelphia. The car had
been burned to a crisp.

Wilamena's admonition about Negro people-they'll never return the
favor-darted through Celeste's mind as she stood on the baking midmorning pavement in front of a local shoe store in downtown Jackson.
She'd brought no wristwatch to Mississippi, had no idea of how fast time
passed or if it passed at all. Judging by the displays in the shop windows, the
out-of-date dresses and rigid hairstyles on the women walking by, Celeste
had a feeling that time was going backwards. Confederate flags adorned
the fronts of every store for as far as she could see. Not a flag of the United
States of America anywhere.

She'd been directed by Margo to hand out flyers for a voter registration
meeting. She was to do this in the shadow of the Mississippi state capitol.
She thought Margo was joking. But there wasn't the slightest smile on
Margo's face. She thought of declining, of begging off, but knew how that would be perceived and talked about in the One Man, One Vote office.
Besides, Ramona had been standing there when the assignments were given
to the last group of volunteers, and she wasn't going to cop out in front of
her, or them.

A police car with two officers pulled in across the street. She caught her
peach short-sleeved cotton dress, her pony-tailed hair, even her tight-lipped
fear reflected in the plate glass window of the shoe store. Celeste frosted a
smile on her face as her fear petrified.

She'd been told to hand the flyers to Negroes and whites with no distinction. When a flyer was begrudgingly accepted or snatched, it got a
quick glance and a quicker toss into the city trash can, as if the flyer and the
message were contaminated. Negro people stepped wide of her, offering
furtive takes to passing whites that said, "I ain't in it." Margo wouldn't be
back to pick her up until noon so there was nothing to do but keep trying.
She shook off thoughts of Wilamena's simmering disdain, her assumed
superiority, as if every kind or giving gesture toward another human being
qualified as a favor that had to be reciprocated. Wilamena never got what
the gesture did for the person offering-not as something to lord over others, but as an expression of one's own humanity. Just like the graduation.

Wilamena couldn't put herself out to attend her own children's graduations from high school, and yet thought it just fine to continue asking them
to come to New Mexico. Some people got it and some didn't. There was no
blessed community in required reciprocity, but there certainly was in just
flat-out giving. So many people had made the commitment, had put their
lives on the line. Wilamena had to be wrong.