And Do Remember Me (2 page)

“I’m from Montgomery, but I’m headed to Greenwood, to work in the movement.”

“The movement? What’s that?”

“Ain’t you heard, girl? This here is
Freedom Summer,”
Lincoln said, a joyous, hearty laugh rumbling in his voice, initiating her, Jessie felt, into a knowledge both frightening and momentous.

“Well, I knew I was gonna get
my
freedom, but I didn’t know nobody else had that in mind,” she said, trembling a little at this burst of humor, amazed at the sudden comfort she felt, confused by how much she liked looking at Lincoln. She wondered what he saw when he looked at her. “You one of them freedom riders?”

“I’ve done just about everything else. Picketed segregated stores. Tried to get Negroes to register and vote. Anything to get us our civil rights.”

“So, you’re a civil rights worker,” Jessie said, suddenly flushed with fear, as if he had told her he was a convict on the run from the law.

“You could be one too,” he said, his eyes cast upon her with serious intent.

“I’d be too scared.”

Six months ago, Alberta Garrison, the daughter of one of the deacons in her mother’s church, had gone off to Jackson to protest something to do with civil rights, Jessie recalled. The girl had gotten arrested and nobody had heard from her since. Alberta’s best friend, Iola Hughes, had gone to Jackson with her and come back to Columbus and told Alberta’s family that Alberta was taken out of her cell one night and never returned. At seventeen, Alberta Garrison sang in the church choir, her luminous contralto never failing to spark a fervent chorus of amens from the congregation. The rest of the week, however, she rebelled against her parents’ strict regime at home by cutting school, and having sex with the town’s most dangerous young men in the backseat of cars, in rented rooms and in cotton fields. But when Alberta met the civil rights workers
who came to town, she changed. Her parents were fearful but proud. Alberta began dressing primly and wouldn’t give a boy she didn’t know a smile or the time of day. Some people got saved, Alberta got civil rights. And now, nobody knew or wanted to imagine what had happened to her.

And on the plantation where Jessie sometimes picked cotton, one afternoon the boss had driven onto the fields, and ordered all the workers to gather around his pickup truck. In the flatbed where cotton was hauled lay a young Negro, his bleeding, purplish lips swollen, his left eye bloated, sealed shut, the skin of his cheeks slit, the scent of his exposed flesh drawing a family of flies around his head. His hands were tied behind his back. “This here is what civil rights is gonna git anybody what wants em,” the boss had shouted. “This boy come around trying to git yall to vote. Well, I just give him a lecture on civil rights he won’t never forget.” As the man drove off, the field hands stood beneath a suddenly grieving afternoon sun, speech bleeding in their throats. Jessie had seen a reprise of the young man’s face for weeks afterward when she read a schoolbook, looked out the window or stared at the sky.

“Hell, I’m scared too,” she heard Lincoln say, his admission yanking her from the hold of memory. “But I’m more scared of things staying the way they are. What about your family? Won’t they miss you?”

“I hope so,” Jessie said, turning away from Lincoln to gaze out the window, “I really do.”

In the backseat were several boxes filled with manuscripts, poems and plays that Lincoln told Jessie he had written. While driving, he recited lines from
King Lear
and
Hamlet
, and told her he was working in the movement, so he could be set on fire and “write an anthem for our people.”

Lincoln made this pronouncement so passionately that Jessie knew he took the extraordinary for granted. She had never known anyone to talk like that. Her parents spoke as little as
possible, as though speech would merely enhance their misery. Growing up in the grip of silence, Jessie’s head had nonetheless teemed with words. Her father had warned her never to tell. Her mother had said over and over, “I don’t want to hear nothing about that man, or what he’s done.” In her house words were contraband, proscribed. Jessie had craved words all the more because they were forbidden. Her daydreams persistent, resilient, consisted mostly of scenes in which happy people talked on and on as though the act of speech were a saving grace.

She had seen the Bullocks, the white family she cleaned house for three days a week after school, sit as though hypnotized by their black and white television set. The words and laughter and jokes and stories just coming at them. Walter Cronkite telling them the news, Red Skelton making them laugh. Jessie had watched them gather around the television set like it was an altar. She knew it was words that brought them in front of the screen.

Lincoln talked nonstop. His vigorous, confident energy affirmed Jessie’s daydreams, and satisfied a hunger she had grown used to feeling. One minute Lincoln was imitating Sammy Davis, Jr., the next telling Jessie that President Kennedy was killed by people high up in the government. He recited parts of the U.S. Constitution and told her about some New York preacher whose last name was X who Jessie hadn’t heard anything about.

But she
had
heard about the Freedom Riders who had ridden interstate buses across the south to integrate them. Negro men and women getting on the buses and sitting wherever they wanted, not just in the back where first the law and then custom said they had to sit. Negroes standing in the white section of the bus station waiting rooms, drinking from the water fountains marked “white only.”

There were white Freedom Riders, Jessie knew that. And all
of them were being beaten by mobs and jailed. The colored folks in Columbus couldn’t stop talking about the Freedom Riders and the whites couldn’t invent curses bad enough for them. The Negro preachers in Columbus said special prayers for them on Sundays and took up collections to help bail them out of jail. The sheriffs of towns and cities across the deep south had sworn to shoot any Freedom Rider, Negro or white, who set foot in their town.

Jessie had watched this fevered push toward freedom from afar, as though she was a spectator at a play, fascinated by the action on stage, unconvinced of its relevance to her.

“I bet you been to college,” Jessie said, throwing her arm across the back of the seat, turning so she could just look at Lincoln all the time if she wanted.

“Yeah, Miles College over in Birmingham.”

“Then how come you ain’t lookin for a job?”

“Some things are more important than a job.”

“Like what?” Jessie asked incredulously. Never in her life had she heard anybody say such a thing.

“Like the right to vote. Like being able to have the same rights as everybody else,” Lincoln said, his voice urgent, his face animated, turning his glance from the road to look at Jessie as he spoke.

“You mean white folks?” she asked. “From what I seen, I don’t want to be like them.”

“No, but I want the same rights they have,” Lincoln said emphatically. “You see what we did in Montgomery with the bus boycott.”

“Vote gonna git us better jobs?” Jessie asked skeptically, thinking about her mother’s demeaning work as a domestic, her father’s meager salary as a janitor for a funeral home and the need for herself, Willie and Junior and Mae Ann to pick cotton to make extra needed money.

“That’s what the vote is for,” Lincoln said.

Jessie leaned forward and turned on the radio.

“Don’t work,” Lincoln told her. They were nearing Winona. The endless flatness of the land with only an occasional house or store was giving way to small clusters of gas stations and restaurants. The sun was now a deep orange slash across the evening sky.

“You ever wonder why God made it so hard for us colored?” Jessie asked wistfully.

“God didn’t do that. White men did.”

“But you really think we’re good enough?” Jessie pressed him. “For equal rights I mean. You know what they say bout us, that we’re in our rightful place.” Jessie wondered if Lincoln could hear in her voice how many times she had thought that was true, how often she had swallowed it whole, lived on the belief as if it were the bread of life.

“They’re wrong about us, Jessie. Always been wrong. We’re gonna set the record straight,” he said, squeezing her hands reassuringly as they lay folded in her lap.

What was she running from? Lincoln wondered. That Jessie was a runaway signaled courage as well as desperation. Her body was firm and mature. He could tell from the condition of her hands, arms and legs that she had worked hard and, of necessity, all her short life. But dimples appeared in her cheeks when she laughed and her eyes were large, clear and honest against the ruddy brown of her face. But those eyes had a furtive edge too, as though they held lethal secrets. Lincoln, who was already beginning to think of himself as a writer, figured secrets made a person more interesting. He knew that everything he saw, touched, learned, felt, would be transformed into words on a page. So what did secrets mean? How could he fear his secrets or anyone else’s when he could change them into anything he imagined or desired.

The girls he had left behind in Montgomery and Birmingham snubbed him because he was an orphan, or listened politely to his poetry and whispered behind his back that he was queer. Talking to those girls he had everything to prove and everything to lose. But when Lincoln began working with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, SNCC, as it was popularly known, the same girls wanted to go out with him because nobody knew if he would live long enough to see the “freedom” he talked so much about, or be dredged from some tributary of the Mississippi River. The hint of possible sudden danger, the knowledge of his obvious courage, made him a marked man. More than one young woman wanted to be able to say that
she
was the last one who had held Lincoln Sturgis alive in her arms.

But he could tell Jessie was different. He liked looking at her, just sitting beside her. Conversation with her was not a bloodletting but a kind of communion. He realized it was going to be hard to say good-bye.

“Why don’t you come on to Greenwood with me?” he asked. “There’s plenty of work to do.”

“I told you, I’m scared.”

“I told you I was too.”

“I don’t even
know
you,” Jessie protested.

“Well, I don’t know you either, but I know you don’t belong in Winona.”

Jessie searched Lincoln’s face for something she could mistrust, some flicker in his eyes, some movement of his lips that would inform her that she was in danger. And when she didn’t find it, Jessie thought of her grandma Bessie. She was running to her only because she’d always been the old woman’s favorite. But then she remembered the newspaper lining the walls of her grandmama’s two-room shack on the outskirts of the city, the old woman’s hard life of survival on welfare and handouts
from a family for whom she had once been a nanny. And what would she do in Winona? Hardly any white businesses would hire a Negro, even one with a high school diploma.

They had entered Winona, and Lincoln stopped at a gas station and filled the tank. Then he drove farther into town and parked in the commercial district and said to Jessie, “I’m not pressuring you, I’m just offering you the chance to do something that matters.”

“Where you gonna stay?”

“There’s a house set up for the movement people.”

“What about me?”

“You’d stay there too. I bet you’d have your own room.”

She had been trying to get away from 468 Davis Road as long as she could remember. It was a street whose tiny frame houses huddled together like heads bowed to avoid being slapped. There were outhouses in some backyards. Peeling, crumbling wood defaced most of the exteriors. In the summertime, the street’s young men gathered on the corners like conspirators thrusting their voices into the seams of the night. Voices desperate to be heard. Desperate not to be ignored. On Davis Road nobody believed in the possibility of civil rights. Nobody even knew what they were. That was the street where everyone had watched the sheriff’s deputy pay regular visits to Elvira McCullough. Everyone sitting on the front stoops remembered the spring evenings when they would see Mr. McCullough walk toward his house, spot the now familiar police car parked out front, and turn away and head toward Bo Willie’s juke joint, where he would get drunk and wait for the white man to leave.

And in her house Jessie had always been lonely. Then she had learned to be afraid. Afraid of white men. Afraid of her father. Because she knew so well the feeling of fear, she knew when she was safe.

She sat twisting the hem of her skirt, her back to Lincoln’s persistent, kind, impatient gaze. Finally he said, “Come on, girl, you just running in circles. At least we know where I’m headed,” and started up the car.

A
MILE OUTSIDE
of Carol, Lincoln’s car shuddered to a halt. He turned the engine on repeatedly. But nothing happened. He and Jessie walked back to town and found a Negro mechanic who drove them back to the car. After looking at the engine he told them the alternator was shot and that he could repair it but not until the next morning. “I got a wake to go to tonight.”

T
HEY REGISTERED
in the rooming house as Mr. and Mrs. Brown. Jessie stood nervously behind Lincoln, his gym bag and boxes of books and papers, her cardboard box, now near total collapse, stationed around her feet like unwashed, unruly children of whom she was ashamed. As Lincoln signed the registry, the elderly woman behind the desk, tall, angular, white-haired, looked at Jessie through narrowed, censorious eyes. Then she led them upstairs to the second floor, saying, “No cooking in the rooms, no loud music after ten o’clock, and yall have to check out by noon or I charge for another day.”

The pink and white wallpaper was water-stained and dingy, its tiny white flowers as cheerless and abused as the chipped and scratched desk and the three-legged table at the foot of the
bed. Last year’s calendar from a local funeral home and a tiny framed picture of Jesus ascending to heaven graced the walls.

“There ain’t but one bed,” Jessie said after Lincoln had brought their bags and boxes up to the room.