Lay that Trumpet in Our Hands (3 page)

The man telling the story stops for a noisy swig of his drink.

“Reed Garnet, y’all know him? Got there little late and that half-dead nigger looks up at him and whimpers, ‘Mr. Reed, Mr. Reed, it’s
me
, Marvin!’ ”

Again the table laughs, this time at the storyteller’s high-voice impersonation of the Negro dialect. Doto glares at us around the table, hazel eyes beading the unmistakable message
don’t make a sound
.

“Well, Reed, he was hoppin’ mad, called those boys a bunch of morons, told them this boy’s mamma works in his house and now what were they gonna do? J. D. Bowman, y’all know that crazy Opalakee boy, just got back from Korea? Well, J.D. he just laughed, pulled out his pistol and shot that nigger boy in the head. ‘Problem solved,’ he told ol’ Reed.”

At this, the table’s other occupants guffaw, slapping the tabletop in high humor. The speaker snickers, “I saw ol’ Reed at the Wellwood Cafe, said I hoped he wudn’t too broke up about it. It’s good t’ kill a nigger every once in a while, keeps the rest of ’em in line.”

More murmurs and loud laughter follow.

“Way
I
look at it . . . one less nigger makes the world a cleaner place. Mary Sue, honey, it’s my turn to buy these ol’ boys their pie and coffee.”

We sit in our booth, silent, lips tight, chests rising and falling in long, slow breaths. Tears collect inside my eyelids; I fight them off by pinching the back of my hand so hard the pain takes my mind off crying. The waitress brings the check to the men next door, hidden by the flowered curtain between our booth and theirs. The speaker pays; coins rattle as she makes change from her apron.

Three men slide and rise out of their booth, backs to us, hitching up their pants. The one closest to us, the storyteller, has on matching green-gray shirt and pants. As he ambles out of the dining room, he lifts his hat—the wide flat brim of a Lake County Sheriff’s Deputy—onto his head. The men disappear out of the dining room, their boots clomping across the hardwood floor like dry thunder rolling off the horizon.

Doto sucks air deeply, bends forward, cat eyes glinting behind her glasses. She hisses: “Not a word until we’re in the car.”

“Awful quiet crew today,” the redheaded waitress tells us with a smile. A curly wire pin on her uniform spells out “Mary Sue.” Pink apron pockets bulge with order tickets and change. “Y’all save room for dessert?”

Ren and I cut our eyes at Mitchell, who’s salivating for his hot fudge sundae.

“Just the check, please,” Doto says with a frozen smile.

Chapter 3

Our family huddles around the kitchen table as Doto re-tells the story we heard in the restaurant. Her lips curl in distaste at the words she must use to tell it exactly. Beside her, Daddy’s jaw mirrors hers in its hardening. Mother’s eyes, red-rimmed from the funeral, stay on his; the single dimple in her left cheek missing in a mask of sadness. Beside me, Ren twists a buried fist in the pocket of his baseball glove. Doto is livid.

“To hear that idiot talk about Marvin like the boy was an animal, a dog to be put out of its misery, I swear I could have killed him with my bare hands.”

The image of my 110-pound grandmother throttling that 200-pound Deputy flickers through my mind. The eyes behind her cat glasses are shooting sparks.

“I want you to call that Opalakee Constable and get him over here. This has got to be an important clue in his case.”

“The Constable has no case, Doto,” Daddy tells her in a flat voice that puzzles me.

“Well, this ought to give him one,” she retorts.

“The Constable is a card-carrying Klan member. His standard line with anything involving a colored is ‘We’ll look into it’ and he never does.”

“But, Daddy,” I say, “Marvin’s
dead!
”

“Can’t you call the Sheriff, or one of the County Commissioners?” Doto demands.

“The Sheriff, the Commissioner, the Opalakee Chief of Police, they’re all Klan members. Even goddamn Governor Fuller Warren is one of them!”

“Governor
Warren
,” Doto snorts. “That’s one Warren that is no
possible
relation of ours!”

Shoving herself up and out of her chair, she paces the yellow linoleum. “The Klan
owns
this state like Capone owned Chicago,” she rails, turning like a teacher, finger raised to make her point. “He owned the city, the county, the state, but . . .” Her eyes lock onto Daddy’s. “You remember how they got rid of
him
.”

Daddy studies his mother and I can see the wheels begin to turn. He leans forward, elbows on the table, chin on top of his folded hands, staring at the squiggly pattern in the blue Formica.

“The F.B.I.,” he says. “I don’t know how Mr. Hoover feels about the Klan, but I know he’s no fan of cold-blooded killing. We could try to contact him . . . but how?” The veins in his temple jump. “We couldn’t possibly call him,” he says. “We’d never get through. Besides . . .”

“Maybelle . . .” Mother says it quietly.

“Would likely listen in and blab all over town,” Daddy nods, completing her thought.

Our family has the unfortunate fate of sharing a party line with our two-doors-up neighbor Miss Maybelle Mason, who’s also the town postmistress and perpetual old biddy. Miss Maybelle listens in on other people’s phone calls as a form of entertainment. At the post office, where everybody has a box, she takes it personal if anyone dares receive a letter without a proper return address. It’s rumored she opens such letters to verify their claim to space in her postal slots.

“That old bird lets out writing a letter as well. If the F.B.I. wrote us back, we’d never hear the end of it. But . . . Buuut . . .” Daddy says. “We
could
send a registered letter from downtown Orlando and use your address in LaGrange for the return.”

“Of course.” Doto lights up in support of the plan. “Blanche would forward it here inside my weekly packet.”

“It could
work
,” I say, seeing it all inside my head.

“It will work!” Doto declares.

“Blanche,” Mother adds softly, “is our trump card.”

“That’s the plan then,” Daddy says. He leaves the kitchen and goes into the small office off the living room. We hear the snap of paper rolling into his typewriter and the clack of the keys punching out the story of Marvin’s murder for Mr. J. Edgar Hoover of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Doto walks to the refrigerator, patting her hair waves. “Lizbeth,” she says, opening the Frigidaire, “I believe I owe these children some ice cream. Got any fudge sauce?”

Chapter 4

I did not go to school the Thursday Marvin died, or the day after that. The funeral was on Saturday; and Sunday went by me in a blur.

“Please,” I begged my parents this morning, “don’t make me go! I don’t want to, not today, not
ever
again.”

The idea of returning to a place where most people’s lives have flowed right along uninterrupted by blood-wet bodies and bald-faced lying and bad people doing awful things; the thought of playing Red-Rover-Red-Rover-Can-Reesa-Come-Over as if Marvin’s alive and laughing as he should be, and his poor old parents aren’t sitting broken-hearted in their house—“I can’t,” I cried, “I just
can’t
!”

Doto, ever the diplomat, replied, “I don’t blame you. I couldn’t ride in that smelly old school bus either. How about we drive down in the DeSoto? Maybe you’ll feel differently when we get there.”

My grandmother is the reason I’m here this morning, trying to pretend like I belong. I sit in the same desk, surrounded by the same children who were here before. Up front, Mrs. Beacham carries on in her same old brown suit and ugly lace-up shoes. But no one, none of it, feels the same.

Sunlight floods through the wall of windows, brightly white. I sit, deliberately opening my eyes to the whiteness, then closing them to ghostly black; seeing day full of life, then, behind flickering eyelids, trying to imagine death.

The idea that life is as fragile and full of holes as a lace curtain terrifies me. The other kids in this room have no idea. Well, maybe one of them does.

I see her two rows over, three seats ahead of me, but we’ve avoided each other’s eyes all morning. May Carol Garnet knows about Marvin. She has to because Armetta works in her house. Beyond housekeeping, Armetta mothers May Carol in ways Miz Lucy Garnet never could. I can tell from here, by her unstarched dress, her plain, unplaited ponytail, that Armetta, May Carol’s other mother, has not yet returned to work at the Garnet house.

May Carol and I know each other. We’ve spent time at each other’s houses, made cookies with Armetta, laughed with Luther, endured Marvin’s big-brother-like teasing our whole lives. But we are not friends.

Maybe it’s her “Southern-ness” that gets in the way. The tendency to sort everything and everyone according to appearances. But maybe, just maybe, it’s my sense of “other-ness,” an in-the-blood inability to be a joiner. Like Doto says, our family runs long on being in, but not of, the places we call home.

Outside, a row of orange trees lines the school play-ground. Six days ago today, I saw Marvin for the last time, standing by the trees that edge our backyard.

“Looky here, Rootin’-Tootin’,” he’d called to me, “here go Mistuh Bee payin’ his respects to Miss Angel Blossom. You know the story, don’t yuh? ’Bout how Mistuh Bee got his stripes, and his wings, too?”

“Tell it to me, Marvin,” I remember asking.

“Well, it goes like this,” he said, sitting on an orange crate. “After God got done creatin’ the world and everythin’ in it, He was mighty proud of the way things turned out. ’Course, His angels was mighty curious ’bout what God done. So, God told ’em, ‘Y’all g’wan down there, angels, take a look-see.’ Now, angels, like humans, come in all different measures and band together with others they size. So, the band of littlest, tiniest, tee-ninchy angels flew down together and landed in a orange grove ’bout like this one, made it smell like heaven on earth. When those angels looked down on God’s new-made ground,
what
did they see? The first big ol’ fire ant, red as the devil, beatin’ up the first big ol’ black bee with a cat-o’-nine-tails, saying ‘
Ah’s
your Massa now, bee, get to work!’ Well, that whippin’ is what gave Mistuh Bee the stripes on his back. And what made the leader of the tee-ninchy angels fly down and cry, ‘You ol’ devil ant, get back underground where you belong ’fore Ah tell the Massa of the Universe what you done!’ Now, that fire ant high-tailed it into his hole right
quick
! Then, the angel no bigger than a blossom turned to poor Mistuh Bee and noticed God had forgotten to give him wings. ‘Here, Mistuh Bee,’ that angel say, ‘you take mah wings, Ah’ll grow some more. You take these wings and you fly ’way up high in them trees, make your home where they
ain’t
never no evil ants.’ That’s how Mistuh Bee got his stripes, and his wings, in a single day. And that’s why, ever since, when the groves grow blossoms that smell like heaven, Mistuh Bee flies back, pays his respects to the Angel Blossoms that set him free.”

“Marie Louise!” Mrs. Beacham’s voice in my ear, her big brown shoes on the floor beside my feet, make me jump.

“Shall I ask the school nurse to schedule a hearing check?” Her face is like a walrus, fleshy folds wobbling off her chin.

“Pardon me?”

“Here’s your worksheet: Transportation Systems of the Ancient Egyptians. There are others that we covered in your absence. Meet me at my desk, please. May Carol Garnet, you may as well come, too.”

While the rest of the class works at their desks, we stand together in front of Mrs. Beacham. I notice with a shock May Carol’s fingernails. Usually shiny and shell pink, the polish is chipped, nails bitten to the quick. Her hair, normally braided, slips limply out of her ponytail. She’s a small thing, pink and pretty (unlike me who’s a medium everything— medium brown hair, middle-of-the-road size, looks I know are “fair to middlin’ ”). I’m surprised to hear May Carol’s missed as much school as I have; and to see that her eyes, like mine, are sunken and dark-circled.

I’d like to ask what she’s upset about—Marvin’s death or Armetta’s absence?—and tell her things I’m
sure
she doesn’t know—about her daddy being there that night and all. But of course that’s not possible. She’s the daughter of a Klansman and I’m to keep my mouth closed.

Chapter 5

It’s an ironclad tradition. On Palm Sunday, the congregation of May-flower Baptist, the only white church in town, has dinner-on-the-grounds.

Under the ruthless direction of Miss Maybelle Mason, the old snapping turtle who runs the post office, Ren and the boys from the Royal Ambassadors bivouac the long tables under the big live oaks beside the sanctuary. While Miss Maybelle fumes over straight lines and wide-enough walkways, Miz Naideen West, the preacher’s pinch-faced wife, fusses over the white sheets she calls tablecloths (which are the exact same ones she calls drapes during the Children’s Christmas Pageant). On top of the sheets, she spreads long palm fronds for decoration. After church, the women will cover them with their specialties.

Everyone knows who cooks what best, and for weeks now, when the church ladies pass each other at the post office or in Mr. Voight’s grocery store, they fawn and nod with exaggerated politeness. “You
are
makin’ your fried chicken, your baked beans, your carrot Jell-O salad, aren’t you?” they chirp like birds to one another.

When they see Mother, these women have one thing on their minds. “Lizbeth, you are bringin’ that
scrumptious
fruit cocktail cake of yours!” It’s always the first dessert to disappear.

Unlike most people around here, we weren’t born Southern Baptist. Doto and her family are self-described Lukewarm Methodists and Mother’s from a long line of Congregationalists, which is practically Episcopalian. When my parents arrived in Mayflower, they were newlyweds, barely past twenty, and kept to themselves. The following year, though, it was obvious that Mother was expecting me and, even more so, that Daddy got the polio. After Doto and Doc Johnny (and Luther, of course), Miss Maybelle Mason, eyes like a hawk, was first on the scene. Of course, she organized the church ladies in nothing flat and the casseroles arrived, like clockwork, for months. As Mother recovered, and Daddy improved, they were honor-bound to repay the brigade for their diligence. The price was membership in Mayflower Baptist Church.

Of course, the major prerequisite is baptism. But it’s an often-told, true story that Daddy caught the polio in the very lake where the baptisms take place, and refused to enter it again or allow Mother to, either. Citing some sort of “Biblical precedence,” the minister agreed, and my parents’ waterless entry into the congregation gave new meaning to the term “dry Baptists.”

It was afterwards that Miss Maybelle, who always has her ears open, heard Daddy playing the piano and revealed his talent to the community. Long story short, Daddy got roped into leading the Mayflower Baptist choir, a job which he vows is infinitely preferable to being a Deacon.

Although we attend every Sunday, my parents take “the long view” on a number of church tenets, the most notable being the ban on alcohol. Daddy, a quick Bible study, never minds pointing out that the Apostle Paul encouraged Timothy to “drink a little wine for thy stomach.” “Surely,” Daddy says, “
Paul
enjoyed a glass of the grape and
so
can I.”

On Mother’s part, she just bakes her fruit cocktail cake exactly as her mother does, flooding the coconut and pecan mix on top of the cake batter with a generous cup of rum, then covering all with brown sugar and dots of butter.

None of this means my family’s not
spiritual
. (Though what happened to Marvin has put me at odds with God these days.) To their credit, our parents have spent considerable time discussing the difference between Faith—the abiding belief in a Divine Creator that’s as plain a part of a hundred-year-old oak tree, or a fiery red sunset, as the nose on your face—and Religion—which is the rigamarole that makes
some
folks figure they’ve got a leg up on everybody else.

Usually, my favorite part of Palm Sunday is the young people’s Bible Drill, the hotly contested game of who-canfind-it-fastest, played in the lag time between the end of church and the blessing that begins dinner-on-the-grounds. Usually I love the competition, and to tell you the truth, usually I do quite well.

But this year, because of Marvin and all, I didn’t feel like competing. In fact, I’d made up my mind
not
to participate until Doto told me about the prize—four tickets to the glass-bottom boat ride at Silver Springs—and suggested, if I won, I might give them as a thinking-of-you gift to Luther and Armetta.

It was Marvin, after
all
, who turned me into a first-class Bible Driller, by sharing his secret.

“Think of the Bible as a rainbow, Roo,” he told me. “See the books in colors. The beginning ones are red: Genesis and all the begets and begats and the Moses books through Judges,
scarlet
red. After that comes the name and story books starting with Ruth and going through the poem books to the juicy Songs of King Solomon. They navel orange. After that, you got the four major prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Daniel, plus a whole batch of minor prophets, twelve actually, Hosea through Malachi. They daylily yellow, and
that’s
the end of the Old Testament.

“Up next, they’s the Jesus stories with the four Gospels and the Acts, they your green section with the words ‘spoken by our Lord and Savior’ in red letters—green and red like Christmas, y’see. Then, they’s the Apostle Paul’s letters to
all
the different churches all over the ancient
world
starting with the Romans through the Hebrews. They blue, Mediterranean Sea blue. At the hind end of things, you got the other letters from James, Peter, John and Jude; they’s violet. No need to give the Revelations a color,
everybody
knows where they is.” Marvin was a patient and inventive teacher.

Today, in his honor, when our Sunday school teacher Miz Agnes Langford calls “Time for Bible Drill!” I join the others elbowing their way into formation in front of the food tables. I prefer, and take, the end.

“Attention!” Miz Agnes commands and we straighten up like good Christian soldiers, Bibles at our thighs, pinned in the curve of our right palms.

“Draw swords!” comes next, which means Bible front and center, face-down on left palm, right hand on top, thumb at the ready.

After that, Miz Agnes calls book, chapter and verse: “Ezekiel 34:12.”

Yellow
, I think,
middle of the book
, and take a breath.

She calls it again: “Ezekiel 34:12,” then gives the command: “Charge!”

I breathe out, thumb the Bible open to the middle, check book name and chapter, top right corner, check verse numbers bottom left, and step forward.

“Reesa?” she says.

“Ezekiel 34:12,” I say, then read,
“As a shepherd seeketh out
his flock in the day that he is among his sheep that are scattered; so
will I seek out My sheep, and will deliver them out of all places
where they have been scattered in the cloudy and dark day.”

Miz Agnes
always
picks out comfort verses.

“That’s right, Reesa, and what a comfort. Attention!”

I step back into the line and we start again. The person who finds the most verses first wins.

One Sunday, only once, she let me call the verse. To amuse the others, I picked a recent discovery from the orange section, Song of Solomon 7:2: “Thy navel is like a round goblet that wanteth not liquor: thy belly is like a heap of wheat set about with lilies.”

Miz Agnes was not comforted and spoke to my parents afterwards. Later, Daddy laughed and asked if I was trying so hard to shock Miz Langford, why didn’t I go with the one about
I am a wall and my breasts are like towers
?

“Be bold,” Daddy told me, “or what’s the point?”

Today’s Palm Sunday Bible Drill comes down to a tie breaker—me versus Billy Roy Sparks, who’s two years older and can say the books of the Bible backwards. I’m not worried. Truth is, I usually beat him.

The others stand back, while Billy Roy and I square off for the final selection. The adults are hungry, their interest roused by whiffs of rapidly arriving country ham, fried chicken and cinnamon sweet potato “sue-flay.” Miz Naideen and several other ladies stand sentry, using long palm fronds to wave the flock of greedy flies and wandering fingers away from the food platters.

Miz Agnes shushes the crowd, holding up two plump hands, palms forward, for quiet. She turns to face us, raises a dramatic, sausage-shaped finger and calls “Attention!”

Billy Roy and I straighten in front of the crowd.

“Draw swords!” she cries.

Ready.

“John 12:12 and 13,” comes the call.

Green section, red letters.

“John 12:12 and 13. Charge!”

I thumb and scan and step out in a flash, but Billy Roy is there, one plaid-shirted, Vitalis-shellacked hair ahead of me.

“Billy Roy?”

“John 12:12 and 13,” he says, and reads, “
On the next day,
much people that were come to the feast, when they heard that Jesus
was coming to Jerusalem, took branches of palm trees, and went forth
to meet him, and cried, ‘Hosanna: Blessed is the King of Israel that
cometh in the name of the Lord!’ ”

As everyone applauds, I’m not mad at Billy Roy. I’m really not. But I could kick myself for not seeing
that
one coming, it being
Palm Sunday
and all.

“You have to think ahead,” Daddy says. I should’ve known.

Dinners eaten, dishes gathered, the ladies of the church having duly noted which pots and pans were picked clean and which weren’t, whose had gone first and whose hadn’t, Mother and Doto wave me over.

“Reesa, please go round up the boys and see if Daddy’s ready to go,” Mother says, her fruit cocktail cake with rum long gone. Not even crumbs are left.

The boys are bent over a hot game of Acorns, jacks played with sticks and nuts scavenged from the feet of the big oaks. I holler at them to finish up and find Mother.

Daddy’s with the men gathered in the deep shade beside the sanctuary. As I walk up, one, a tall, paunchy citrus man named Ralph MacElvoy, is saying:

“Luther and Marvin’ve picked my tangerines for years. Those boys’re damn fine pickers, ’scuse me, Reverend. Fast, too. How’s ol’ Luther takin’ it?” he asks, nodding in Daddy’s direction.

“Hard as any
man
would who lost his only son,” Daddy says, his careful choice of words glinting in Ralph MacElvoy’s direction. My father can’t abide the Southern custom of calling a grown man a
boy.

Mr. MacElvoy gives Daddy an odd, sharp look. His eyes narrow slightly, then slide hastily away from my father’s steely gaze. Daddy’s not a large man, but he has the presence of somebody much bigger.

“I think this business up in Lake County’s made the Opalakee Klanners a little trigger happy,” Aldo Brass, one of the church deacons, says in his slow, thick Alabama drawl.

I learned all about this Lake County business when I got my pre-Easter perm at Miz Lillian’s Beauty Parlor. Not that Miz Lillian told me directly, but it was all the other ladies talked about. The story started a year or so ago, when a white couple was driving home after dark and their car broke down on a back country road. Another car with four young Negroes stopped to help and offered them a ride to the gas station. The man didn’t want to leave the car, so the woman went for help.

“Though what white woman in her right mind would get in a car with four Negroes, I want to know!” Miss Iris, Miz Lillian’s assistant, said, eyes wide in the large mirror that runs the length of the shop.

“And what
husband
would let her!” Miz Lillian wondered, raising a perfectly penciled eyebrow.

The woman didn’t come back, but the next morning, her husband found her talking to the man at the gas station. The woman and the man told her husband she’d been kidnapped. The day after that, she said those Negroes had
bothered
her.

Southern ladies use the word “bother” to mean anything from an inappropriate glance to rape, which is, apparently,
a
fate worse than death
. The more serious the infraction, the further they drop their chins and their voice tones. From the steep descents surrounding me, the woman obviously claimed
the worst
.

All the white men in Groveland got riled up about that and Sheriff Willis McCall deputized the whole bunch into a posse. The posse searched the county for the men who the papers called “the Groveland Four.” One man was shot “trying to escape,” but three others were caught and stood trial together.

An all-white jury declared them guilty, sentencing two to The Chair and the other one, who was only fifteen, to Life in prison. When the N-double A-C-P got wind of it, their New York attorney, Mr. Thurgood Marshall, said the trial was unfair and filed an appeal. The Florida Supreme Court said the trial was fine, but Mr. Thurgood Marshall took the story all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. The U.S. Supreme Court said it wasn’t fair
at all
, on account of the jury being all white men and the local newspaper getting everybody all riled up about it. Miz Lillian read us the part in
Time
magazine where Justice Robert Jackson said, “This is one of the best examples of one of the worst menaces to American justice I’ve ever seen.” So, now there’s to be a new trial for the two men on Death Row.

“And don’t you bet Sheriff Willis McCall is fit to be tied about that!” Miz Lillian’s long, red-tipped fingers expertly flip the elastic cords off the pink and green curlers on my head.

“Isn’t he some muckety-muck with the Klan in Lake County?” Miss Iris asked, wrist-deep in Miz Sooky Turnbull’s henna rinse.

“Nuthin’ I heard about him’d surprise me a bit,” Miz Lillian replied.

“I know some folks don’t think much of the Klan,” Miz Sooky, our across-the-street neighbor, called from the sink, “but as a
woman
, I have to say I sleep better knowin’ the Klan’s around to keep the Nigras from goin’
wild
.”