And Do Remember Me (7 page)

Eva turned on the lamp and gazed at her niece in disbelief that melted into understanding. Reaching for the girl’s hands, she said, “You know, Jessie, your mama coulda been a Daddy Grace, a Billy Graham. But your daddy broke her heart and snatched out her tongue. A woman can unravel mysteries the average man ain’t even heard of. Imagine that, Jessie, your
mama living the life that was supposed to have been hers. Women don’t birth babies for nothing. Man can’t pull nothing outta his hat to beat that. And put a woman in touch with God, truly in touch, and you’ll see a miracle before your eyes. But, Jessie, your mama looked at your daddy when she was eighteen and thought she was in love. I looked at him and saw a cracked mirror, a black cat and seven years’ bad luck.” Squeezing Jessie’s hands tighter now, Eva said, “He snatched your mama’s tongue and stole her voice, Jessie. You don’t need to tell me a thing, chile, I can look at you and tell what he done took from you.”

By the time these thoughts had unraveled, they lay like shards of glass strewn on the sheets between Jessie and Lincoln. When he turned over in his sleep, and whispered her name, Jessie scurried out of the bed, dressing quickly leaving him alone in the room, afraid to imagine what she would relive if he touched her again.

A
S MACON GAZED
out the window of the pickup truck at the Sparks plantation, she saw the cotton field stretching before her for what seemed like miles. The field was placid, beneath the sun, content in the clear, afternoon sky. The bolls of cotton looked like flowers, resilient, staunch, clinging to the spidery vines.

“You know what you’re made of when you work a full day doing that,” Jessie said, nodding toward the field.

“Where’d you pick cotton?” Macon asked.

“My mama’s daddy one time rented a acre or two and us kids would go there and help him out.”

“But it’s so beautiful,” Macon wondered, turning back to the field.

“Yeah, from over here it’s pretty all right. But you get up on it. Have to pick it with your fingers and let those burrs tear up your hands.
You
stoop over all day long, or pull a sack hitched to your shoulder, and see how beautiful you think cotton is by the time the sun goes down.”

They had come to the Starks plantation to check on Glory Pickering, who had been attending the Freedom School and then suddenly stopped coming. Glory reminded Jessie so much of herself when she was a child that she had determined to try and get her to return to the school. During the drive, Macon had told Jessie, “You’ll have to handle this, I’m just along for the ride.” Jessie had begun to imitate Macon’s walk, the confident stride she noticed most often in men. She had even let her hair go, just stopped worrying about it, cut it short, so she could look like Macon.

“What if her mama won’t let her come back?” Jessie asked.

“There’s nothing we can do about that.”

Macon parked on the highway and the two women walked across the road to the plantation. It was noon and most of the field hands had taken a break for lunch. Jessie and Macon walked slowly through the fields. The Starks plantation covered seventy-five acres and two dozen families sharecropped on the land.

Jessie spotted Glory, eating a sandwich, sitting on a blanket with a woman and two boys. The girl was barefoot, her legs caked with dust. The plaid dress she wore was ripped at the shoulder.

“Miss Jessie, what you doin here?” Glory asked, amazed, scrambling up from the blanket.

“I came to see why you stopped coming to the Freedom School.”

“She got work to do here; we need all the hands we kin git,” the woman spoke up, pushing Glory back onto the ground.

“She was doing real good in her classes,” Jessie said, looking directly into the woman’s eyes.

“Ah’m her mama,” the woman said, moving forward, crossing her arms at her chest, standing firm between Jessie and her children. “She got to help put food in our mouths. Ah knew ah shouldn’t of let her come to them classes in the first place,” the woman worried, her dark face bunched up in fear. Sweat rimmed the edges of the blue bandanna covering her head and her life was etched in craggy stubborn lines across her face. Two teeth were missing in the front of her mouth and the remaining teeth were dark and stained and appeared capable of falling from her gums under the slightest pressure. Looking at her, Jessie didn’t know if Glory’s mother was thirty-five or fifty.

“Did something happen? Did anybody threaten you?” Macon asked.

“The boss man here come around to all us folks and say anybody what goes to try’n to vote or to that Freedom School is gonna git throwed off the land.”

“He can’t do that. Not legally,” Macon said. “If he does, we could sue on your behalf. Sue the state through the Justice Department.”

“What that mean, sue? Sue gonna feed my chilrens? Give em a place to live? Yall folks is trouble. Us gotta live here when yall gone.”

Glory’s mother strode off to the fields, ordering the two boys and Glory to follow her. Glory gazed sadly at Jessie, then picked up her sack and trudged after her mother.

“I thought you knew how to pick cotton,” Macon said.

“I do.”

“Well, why don’t you go on and let them know that.”

“But what good’s that gonna do?” Jessie asked, afraid to approach the woman again alone.

“Go on, Jessie,” Macon said, “I’ll wait over here.”

Jessie took an empty sack from one of the boys in the field and began picking next to Glory’s mother.

“You look like you know what you doin’,” the woman grudgingly admitted, having failed in her attempts to ignore Jessie.

“I do.”

“You from roun here?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Well, then, you knows what ah mean. These folks ain’t playin, they killin people over this silver rights business.”

“I ain’t been alive long, ma’am, but I seen enough to know they ain’t gonna give us nothing without us pushing real hard to get it.”

“She start sassing me since she been at that school,” Mrs. Pickering said, fondling a palm full of cotton bolls as she spoke. “Askin a whole lot a questions bout things I cain’t answer. Askin like she got a mind of her own. Come home and make me feel shamed. And even though ah made her stop comin to that school she ain’t changed back to like she used to be. Ah’d always told her not to look no white people straight in the eye. And she’d listened too. Then she come home wanting to know why she couldn’t look at em just like she look at me.”

“I’m not asking you to do nothing that other folks haven’t done, Mrs. Pickering, nothing I haven’t done. Please let Glory come back.”

“Ah respects what yall doin, but ah’m the boss of this family, and ah just cain’t take no risk like that.”

Macon watched Jessie from several rows over. She could tell she wasn’t winning the woman over, yet Macon watched in amazement as Jessie turned away from Glory’s mother and picked two more rows of cotton, filling her sack, before handing it to Mrs. Pickering and saying good-bye.

T
HE BLACK PEOPLE
who walked into the Greenwood courthouse that summer to register to vote feared the required test as much as the phalanx of policemen and law enforcement officials who increasingly formed a protective flank in front of the building as picketing increased. The test consisted of a series of interpretative questions about the state constitution. The registrar, who administered the test, used his discretion in determining who passed. Negro Ph.D.’s had failed the test, legions of graduates of the voter registration schools had their tests marked invalid after a cursory ten- or twenty-second glance. Grown men returning for the fourth or fifth time and failing once again had sobbed like children in the hallways of the courthouse.

T
HEY’D BEEN MARCHING
about an hour, careful to walk within the boundaries of the square, so as not to block pedestrians or cars. The protest, and the policemen stationed on the courthouse steps, had attracted a crowd that grew abusive and noisy the longer the picketing continued. A rotten tomato landed on Jessie’s arm. She saw an egg fly through the air and hit the twelve-year-old boy in front of her on the ear. In the Freedom House, Jessie had listened to the arguments about nonviolence that went on into the early morning. She had also heard the workers discuss self-defense and how to mentally survive when under attack. But as the voices of the crowd—businessmen on their lunch break, their suit jackets flung over their arms; mothers with children clutching their hands; elderly women, their faces twisted in disgust at the sight before their eyes; young teenaged boys fondling baseball bats, resting their taut, eager-to-fight bodies on the fenders of their cars—
surged like a roar in her ears, Jessie simply wanted to run. A young white teenager threw a cherry bomb near the picketers. The explosion stunned and scattered them, and in the moments of confusion that followed, several young toughs waded into the group of picketers and began to beat them with rubber hoses and sticks. Jessie felt the metal sting of a hose nozzle against her cheek and instantly the warm flow of blood. Screams and shouts swirled around her and she saw young boys moving, running after the protesters, as though they were hunting rabbits. From the ground near a fire hydrant where she had scrambled, Jessie saw the police standing on the steps, silently watching the picketers being beaten. Macon had run onto the grass around the courthouse and lay crouched and huddled, her body protecting two young children who were marching with them. Finally policemen stormed down the wide marble courthouse steps and the youths scattered. The police used prods and clubs to round up the picketers and push them through the courthouse door to be booked on charges of disturbing the peace.

Eight women were crammed into a cell designed for two inmates. As they stretched out on the floor to sleep the first night, Jessie felt a warm trickle of blood between her legs. She had come on her period. She was so embarrassed she began to cry. Unable to convince the sheriff to give Jessie sanitary napkins, each woman tore off a strip of cloth from her clothing and wrapped toilet paper around it and gave it to Jessie to use. Breakfast was watery grits, stale corn bread and salmon. They passed the days planning even bolder actions they would take once they were released. Macon told them stories about Mrs. Ella Baker, who had been one of the founders of SNCC, about Diane Nash, who was willing to go to jail while pregnant and serve a two-year sentence for a movement-related charge in Jackson. Macon told them about meeting Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer and hearing her speak. They sat on the cell floor and
made up songs about those women and sang spirituals with so much conviction that drunks sleeping off a hangover, men arrested for vagrancy or petty crimes locked in other cells, added their voices.

R
EMEMBERING THE FATE
of Alberta Garrison, Jessie swore not to be separated from the other women. Inside the cell the women created a universe that dissolved the bars that held them. All her life, Jessie had longed to hear people speak to one another in a way that made words an affirmation. Before her eyes, sisterhood, deep, spontaneous, blossomed into life. They fought off boredom and despair with confessions and revelation, each woman stitching a square onto the verbal quilt they wove all day and long into the night. Lovers, husbands, children, mothers, fathers, white women, white men, what they’d do when “freedom” came, dead babies, lost sons, hardheaded daughters, the books they would read if they could or if they had the time, miscarriages, their favorite psalm, sexual fantasies, the best-looking man in town, the most stuck-up woman, how they could never go back to
not
fighting segregation, dirty jokes, wondering when somebody’d cook dinner for
them
, wash
their
dirty drawers, how many days among them had been spent in jail. It all strode forth, from mouths censored at work, on good behavior, speechless from fatigue at home, strangely liberated inside this cell. And Jessie sat in the midst of the women, in jail, oddly content, daring now and then to toss a word or thought onto the burgeoning flame of their union.

Six days after the protest, Macon and Jessie sat in the cell alone. Over the past two days the other women had been bailed out one by one. Macon paced the cell, her energies compressed,
screaming for release. Jessie sat on the top bunk, passive, calm, and said, “I never told you how I come to be here. I run away from home. Lincoln give me a lift and then I just followed him here, after he asked me to come that is. It’s like in a way we was both running away. Lincoln wouldn’t never admit to that, but that’s what I think. After this,” Jessie began haltingly, “I don’t think I’ll be afraid of nothing,” allowing herself to believe this, hoping it was true.

“Every time I say that, Jessie, I get a surprise,” Macon warned her, halting her march around the cell’s circumference, slumping on the floor. “I hate this, I really do,” Macon said. “I never get used to being behind bars. And why I’m here doesn’t make it any easier.”

“You know, I almost don’t want to leave,” Jessie laughed. “Being here with just us women. I felt safe. I’m kinda scared to go out in the world again, cause all my life it ain’t been nothing but a man that’s done me harm.”

H
E COULDN’T BEAR
another death. So he began to write. Lincoln sat shirtless in his room at the Freedom House, a small fan on the floor circulating a breath of humid Delta air, and typed another verse in a poem that was already three single-spaced pages long. The day before, the bodies of Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner and James Chaney had been found by the FBI. The civil rights workers were buried fifteen feet apart and twenty feet under the dam of a cattle pond on a farm south of Philadelphia, Mississippi. He couldn’t bear another death. The week before, he had attended the funeral of Carter Langdon, a prosperous farmer who’d been shot in the head as he got into his truck on Main Street, right in the center of town. Langdon,
who had stockpiled over a dozen guns and rifles in his house to fight off the Klan and anyone else attempting to drive him from his fertile ten-acre farm, had just left the courthouse after attempting to register to vote. It had taken Lincoln nearly two months to convince Langdon to register.