Same Kind of Different As Me (28 page)

I had bent over to heave up the next stone, but straightened and turned to look at him. “What do you mean you saw her?”

Denver pulled off his ball cap, mopped his brow, and tucked the cloth away in his back pocket. “You know the first night we was here and you took me upstairs to show me where to sleep?”

“Yes . . .”

“Well, I never did go to sleep. And after I had been layin there for a while, Miss Debbie come into the room. ’Cept she didn’t look sick no more. She looked beautiful like she did before the cancer.”

Not quite sure what to say, I tilted my head a little and regarded him carefully. “Do you think you were dreaming?”

“No sir.” He shook his head adamantly. “Like I said, I didn’t go to sleep. It wadn’t no dream. It was a
visitation
.”

In my experience with Denver during Deborah’s illness, everything he’d said had always turned out to be true. The prediction that something bad was about to happen. The angels. Her trying to get to heaven. Even her life expectancy. As a result, I had come to believe things I once would’ve called unbelievable.

I looked over at Deborah’s grave then back at Denver. “Did she say anything?”

“Yessir. She said, ‘You are welcome in our home.’ I got to tell you, Mr. Ron, I felt a whole lot better when she said that, ’cause I was purty sure after she went home to be with the Lord you was gon’ cut me loose.”

“Cut you loose?” I was stunned that he would think that. I had come to take it for granted that he and I would be friends forever, just like he’d said that day at Starbucks. Then I remembered: When I first said I wanted to be Denver’s friend, it was because Deborah pushed me into it. Then, for a while, I had secretly seen myself as some sort of Henry Higgins to the homeless—at least I had thought it was secret. And wasn’t it true that I had promised not to catch-and-release when my wife, the fishing-boat captain, was alive? Now she was gone. Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised that Denver thought I was planning to abandon ship.

Smiling, I took a step closer to him and laid my hand on his shoulder. “Denver, of course you’re welcome here. You’re welcome here even when I’m not here. The kids and I consider you part of our family now, and our home is your home. When I promised not to catch-and-release, I meant it.”

I thought I could see his throat working. He peered down at the ground for a long moment, and when he looked back up, his eyes were moist.

“Forever,” he said. Then he smiled and turned to hoist another rock.

60

I like
the big rock up there at Brazos del Dios, the flat one under the leaning oak. It’s a comfortable place for me, ’cause when I goes up there, I know Miss Debbie’s up there with me. We dedicated the new cemetery in May, and I was mighty glad to see that God blessed the day with a blue sky and big wide blanket a’ yella flowers as far as you could see. There was about fifty people there, mostly the same ones that had come to the burial back in November. We all sang for a while and spent some time talkin ’bout God’s faithfulness to carry us through this time of grievin.

Then I felt like the Lord had given me a word for the people that was gathered there. And when the Lord say “speak,” ain’t much you can do but get up, open your mouth, and see what comes out.

Here’s what come out that day: “Miss Debbie was a close enough friend a’ mine that I prayed and prayed for her, day and night—even to the point of offerin God life for life. ‘Let me go in,’ I said to Him. ‘Let her stay here, ’cause she more worthy than me to stay here on this earth, and I would be better off to go on up to heaven ’cause I ain’t had no kinda luck down here.’”

But everbody there that day knowed it didn’t turn out that way. So I looked at Mr. Ron and Carson and Regan sittin over on the bench that Miss Pame put in, ’cause I knowed what I was fixin to say was gon’ be hard for them to hear.

“I know when somebody you love is gone, that’s the last time you feel like thanking God. But sometimes we has to be thankful for the things that hurt us,” I said, “’cause sometimes God does things that hurts us but they help somebody else.”

I could see folks noddin their heads. Mr. Ron and them just sat still and quiet.

“If you want to know the truth about it, nothin ever really ends but something new don’t begin,” I said. “When somethin ends in our sight, it begins somewhere else where we can’t hear it or see it or feel it. We live in two worlds—a physical world and a spiritual world. When Miss Debbie’s physical body laid down, her spirit rose up. When we come through this world, we just change form ’fore we go on to the next.”

I looked over at her grave at where Mr. Ron’s ranch hands had tucked some wild roses in an old bucket and set em up by Miss Debbie’s head. Then I looked at Mr. Ron again, and I could see him noddin then. He smiled a little, and I thought maybe he was rememberin that I had seen Miss Debbie’s spiritual body with my own eyes.

61

Summer
burned through and September breezed in, its usual hot winds unseasonably cool. Denver and I spent a lot of time together. We talked about what we’d been through and tossed around the idea of writing our story down.

But to tell the story, I needed to know more about Denver’s roots. Had the place he’d come from been as bad as all that? I had been to the plantation in Red River Parish many times in my mind. But the images I conjured had a back-lot quality, as though a stagehand were constructing them using props left over from
Gone with the Wind
. Denver’s vocabulary, meanwhile, was short on adjectives, leaving us just one choice. I knew I had to go with him back to Red River Parish to see and touch the place that had produced this man who had changed my life. Denver had another reason for wanting to go back: to close the door on the past.

Maybe that’s why he clammed up when in early September 2001, we hopped on Interstate 20 and began our pilgrimage. As we motored east in my new Suburban—the old one had logged too many miles by then—Denver was unusually quiet, and I asked him why.

“I ain’t slept much lately,” he said. “Been nervous ’bout this trip.”

He’d been back before, to visit his sister, Hershalee, and his aunt Pearlie May. But in 2000, Hershalee had died, just a few months before Deborah, leaving Denver feeling permanently untethered from the close family bloodlines that bind us to earth and give us place.

We hadn’t been driving long before Denver’s head hit his chest like a rock falling off a cliff. A minute later, he started snoring. For the next three hours, the trip sounded like the scenic route through a sawmill. But once we crossed into bayou country, something in the air seemed to quicken his spirit: He didn’t rouse slowly from sleep but suddenly sat straight up.

“We nearly there,” he said.

The Louisiana air was warm and moist, heavy with the residue of recent rain. Soon, we were whipping by cotton fields, and Denver’s eyes brightened like those of a young boy passing an amusement park. Outside the windows, acres unrolled, and vast blankets of milky-white bolls stretched away to meet rows of hardwood trees that formed a distant horizon.

“Looky-there now, ain’t that purty! Just right for pickin!” Denver shook his head slowly, remembering. “Used to be hun’erds a’ colored folks spread out all the way across them fields as far as your eyes would let you look. And the Man’d be standin by his wagon with his scales, writin down how much ever one of em picked. These days, all that cotton just sittin there waitin for some big ole monster-lookin machine to run through there and strip it off. Them machines cost a lotta folks their jobs. It just don’t seem right.”

Again, Denver’s love-hate relationship with his plantation struck me. It was as though he wouldn’t have minded so much being stuck in an agrarian time warp if he hadn’t seen so much injustice in it.

We drove about another half-mile, Denver’s nose practically pressed against the window. “Here, Mr. Ron. Pull over right here.”

I eased the Suburban onto the gravel shoulder, and the tires crackled to a stop at the edge of the cotton, white rows fanning out like bicycle spokes. Denver stepped down into a muddy aisle and we walked between the rows, Denver running his hand lightly over the fluffy bolls.

“I plowed and chopped and picked the cotton in this field right here for a lotta years, Mr. Ron . . . a lotta years.” He sounded wistful and tired, then brightened as he let me in on a trade secret. “This is a good day for pickin ’cause there’s a little bit a’ dampness in the air,” he said with a wink. “Makes the cotton weigh more.”

“Don’t you think the Man figured that out and factored it in?” I asked.

Denver paused for a moment then laughed. “I ’spect so.”

I pulled a tiny digital camera from my pocket, and Denver slipped into sepia-portraiture mode as if I’d thrown a switch. He dropped one knee into the dirt and peered seriously into the lens through designer sunglasses, looking about as much like a former cotton-picker as Sidney Poitier. I snapped off several shots, and he was still frozen in his touristy pose when the soulful call of a train whistle floated over the fields.

“Was that your ride you caught out of here?” I asked.

Denver nodded solemnly. I wondered how many times he listened to that whistle before he heard it calling his name.

62

I was
mighty anxious ’bout goin back to Red River Parish. I felt better when we crossed the Louisiana line, though. There was somethin in the air . . . memories, spirits, I don’t know. Ain’t every spirit good, but they ain’t all bad neither.

Mr. Ron took some pictures of me in one a’ the fields I used to work. We didn’t stay but just a minute ’fore we got back on Highway 1, which shot straight ahead, cuttin that cotton in half just like a long black knife.

We drove on for a purty good li’l piece till I told him, “Turn in right here.” He yanked the wheel hard right onto a old dirt road. Set back on the left was the Man’s house, and on the right was a new house I hadn’t never seen before.

We bumped down the road purty slow, kickin up a little mud, cotton spreadin all about. Wadn’t too long ’fore we saw a old, abandoned shack, gray and falling down, all the paint wore off it. “That was the Boss Nigger’s house,” I said.

Mr. Ron looked at me kind of funny. I guess he was surprised I said “nigger,” but that’s just what we said back then. Case you’re wonderin what the Boss Nigger did, it was just what it sound like: He was the colored man that bossed all the other colored folks around.

Mr. Ron kept drivin till I said, “Stop right here.”

Right there next to the road on the other side of a wire fence was a two-room shack looked like it was fixin to fall down any minute. There was weeds crawlin up over it. Wadn’t no front door, just a yella jackets’ nest as big as a hubcap. “That’s where I stayed,” I said, kinda quiet.

Wadn’t no place to pull off, so Mr. Ron just stopped the Suburban in the middle of the road. We got out, climbed over the fence, and poked around a bit, pushin through the high weeds, peekin in the windows. Wadn’t no glass in em. Never had been. Wadn’t nothin inside but cobwebs and yellow jackets and heaps a’ trash. I wondered if any of it was mine. But after so much time had gone by, I reckoned not.

Mr. Ron just kept shakin his head. “I can hardly believe you lived here all those years,” he said. “It’s awful. Worse than I thought.”

Lookin at that shack, I could see myself as a young man, so proud to have my own place I didn’t even realize it wadn’t no bigger than a toolshed. I could see myself on the Man’s tractor in that field yonder. I could see myself tendin a hog out back a’ the shack and scrapin to make the meat last. I could see myself rollin out the bed ever mornin before sunrise, tendin the Man’s cotton year after year, and for nothin.

When Mr. Ron asked could he take some pictures of me in front of that shack, I let him. But I only smiled on the outside.

63

When
Denver showed me where he used to live, I could hardly process it. Made of gray plank lumber, it was half the size of the shotgun shacks I’d grown up seeing in Corsicana, nearly small enough to fit in the back of a long-bed pickup truck. I stared up the road the way we’d come and remembered passing the Man’s house—a big white country house, clapboard, with a gracious porch complete with swing. The contrast disgusted me.

Denver didn’t say much as we poked around the place. Then he suggested we move on down to the house where Hershalee had lived. We climbed back into the Suburban, and as we rolled over the red dirt road, he told me how the Man had let her live in the house until she died even though she didn’t work the fields anymore and couldn’t pay rent. Denver seemed to think that was mighty decent of him.

For a moment, my mind drifted down a road it had traveled before: What kind of man was the Man? For decades, one Man kept sharecroppers barefoot and poor, but let a little colored boy earn a brand-new red Schwinn. Another Man let an old black woman live on his place rent-free long after she’d stopped working in the fields. A third Man kept Denver ignorant and dependent, but provided for him well beyond the time he probably could have done without his labor.

It seemed a throwback to the slavery-era doctrine called “paternalism,” the idea that black people were childlike and incapable of living free, and therefore better off as slaves. That it had happened to Denver in the mid-twentieth century shocked me.

About a quarter-mile down the road, we stopped at Hershalee’s. It was a real house—what you could see of it. Tarpaper shingles and grayed, peeling eaves stuck up from a ten-foot tangle of johnsongrass like the last dry deck on a sinking ship. Behind the house, thirty yards off, a pea-green bayou slunk from left to right. I shut down the Suburban, and Denver and I got out to survey the place.

At one time, Hershalee’s house had worn a coat of white paint trimmed in baby blue. But today it looked like a bomb had exploded nearby. All the windows were broken out. Trash and glass—mostly wine bottles—lay scattered in the few patches of bare ground that weeds had not yet overrun. The house sagged askew from sawed-off bois d’arc tree stumps, and the porch was rotten and falling away. From what we could tell, johnsongrass shrouded the house on all four sides. The parts of the windows we could see spilled forth only darkness.