The Return of Buddy Bush

THE
RETURN
OF
BUDDY BUSH

Also by Shelia P. Moses

The Legend of Buddy Bush

A National Book Award finalist

A Coretta Scott King Author Honor recipient

I, Dred Scott: A Fictional Slave Narrative Based on the Life and Legal Precedent of Dred Scott

Margaret K. McElderry Books

Margaret K. McElderry Books
An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children's Publishing Division
1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York 10020
www.SimonandSchuster.com

This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author's imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2006 by Shelia P. Moses

All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

The text for this book is set in Fairfield Light.

Manufactured in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Moses, Shelia P.

The return of Buddy Bush / Shelia P. Moses.—1st ed.

p. cm.

Summary: Following her grandfather's death in rural North Carolina in 1947, twelve-year-old Pattie Mae learns more about her family after reading her grandmother's collection of obituaries and traveling to Harlem, New York, to find her uncle Buddy, who has escaped from the Ku Klux Klan.

ISBN-13: 978-0-689-87431-4

ISBN-10: 0-689-87431-6 (hardcover)
eISBN 13: 978-1-439-11637-1

[1. Family—Fiction. 2. African Americans—Fiction. 3. Race relations—Fiction.] I. Title.

PZ7.M8475Ob 2006

[Fic]—dc22

2004020503

If you call upon your ancestor's names, they shall hear you. Therefore, they will never die.

1 The Obituaries

2 The Milkman

3 The Packing

4 Headed North

5 June Bug

6 Harlem, Lord, Harlem

7 The Walk

8 South of Baltimore

9 The Gravediggers

10 Back South

11 The Courthouse

12 The Storm

Author's Note

Photographs

L
ord have mercy. My grandpa is dead. Dead and gone. Braxton Jones was his name. Today we had his funeral at Chapel Hill Baptist Church, right here in Rich Square. It was a long, sad funeral. Folks did some hollering and crying and I thought his best friend, Mr. Charlie, was going to have a nervous breakdown right there in the church. He was just hurt. His wife, Miss Doleebuck, never made a sound as she held Mr. Charlie's hand tight. So tight that his hand turned red. Red as a beet.

My grandma, Babe Jones, did some crying.
But not out loud. She cried inside with her proud self. Now my ma, Mer Sheals, just cried all she wanted to. Out loud! She was loud like the thunder and lightning outside the church window. It rained so hard the day they buried my grandpa. The ground was wet like my big sister Barjean's face. I believe she did the most crying. Her and my big brother Coy who drove down from Harlem together in his new light blue Cadillac. Blue just like the one that my uncle Buddy Bush used to drive when he moved back down here from Harlem five years ago in 1942. Back down to Rehobeth Road where Grandma said he belonged. I bet she ain't saying that mess now. Don't nobody with good sense be saying it now. Everybody in Rich Square knows that Uncle Buddy should have stayed North. North of Baltimore, where colored men belong, so they can be men.

Grandma ain't saying nothing now because, you see, my uncle Buddy was not at the funeral. He ain't been around for a month. That is why Grandpa is dead. This ain't got nothing to do
with the tumor on Grandpa's brain that the new colored doctor told us would kill him before the cotton bloom. See, the white folks killed Grandpa. No, they did not shoot him. They did not stab him. They did not try to hang him like they tried to hang my uncle Buddy. Grandpa died from a broken heart about my uncle Buddy and what the white folks did to him. Yep, the white folks worried Grandpa right to his grave because they ran Uncle Buddy off. Well, they didn't run him away. Uncle Buddy ran away on his own to stay alive. Had he stayed in these parts, he would be dead too. Dead as Grandpa. It's a shame and a disgrace how white folks treated my uncle. He ain't never done nothing to nobody but had a little white liquor every now and then. Ain't no law against that. But you know what? The white folks got him anyway.

All Uncle Buddy did was take me to the picture show one night in June after we were done eating catfish at Grandma's house just like we do every Friday night. We had such a nice drive into town. We ate ice cream while we
waited for his date Miss Nora to get off work at the sewing factory right across the street from Myers Theater. What happened to Uncle Buddy that night was a shame 'fore God. What happened to our lives next was worse.

See, this white woman that passed Uncle Buddy on the sidewalk that night said he tried to rape her. I said she was a lie then and I say she is a lie now. Look-a-here, I saw the whole dag-gon thing and Uncle Buddy ain't tried to rape her nowhere. What really happened was Uncle Buddy did not do what Grandpa been telling him to do ever since he moved back to Rehobeth Road. Grandpa told him when you see white folks coming, just move over and let them pass. Uncle Buddy said, “To hell with them white folks.' He said he would not move if they paid him.

He should have moved that night. He stood up so the white lady would walk past him, but he didn't move off of the sidewalk for her. So she went to the sheriff and told him her big lie and they arrested my uncle for nothing. Off they went to the jailhouse with Uncle Buddy. Me, they
grabbed up like a rag doll and took me home to my folks on Jones Property.

A few weeks later, while Uncle Buddy was awaiting his trial, the Klan broke him out of jail and tried to hang him. Uncle Buddy is so much smarter than them white folks, because he jumped out of the boot of their car and hid in the swamp where the colored Masons found him and took him North. I tell you the other thing he did, he made it all the way north to Harlem. Well, that's where we think he is.

That was sure good for Uncle Buddy, but all the stress on my poor grandpa was just too much and that is why he's dead and I am sitting on the floor putting Grandpa's obituary in a wooden chest—the chest that Grandpa carved thirty years ago out of an old oak tree that fell after a tornado came through Rich Square in the middle of the night.

I ain't never gone in this chest before. Grandma said can't nobody on Jones Property go in this chest until you are twelve years old. On Rehobeth Road, everything happens when
you twelve. You get baptized, you get your hair pressed for the very first time, and some girls even get their period. But if you are a Jones, you get to go in the old oak chest and put the obituary away after a Jones funeral.

So last year when my cousin June Bug drowned, Grandma would not let me put his obituary in the chest because I was only eleven back then. But Ma put it in right here. His cousin Willies, on his daddy's side, obituary is here too. They both drowned on the same day and we had their funerals on the same day too.

Now here are both their dead folks' papers. Right on top. That's a sad sight. Under them two are so many obituaries that it would take me all day to count them. This is something else. I don't believe a person has died on Rehobeth Road, or all of Rich Square for that matter, that Grandma didn't save their obituary.

I can't believe that Grandma has saved all of those papers. It must be two hundred or more. Yep, I bet it's two hundred in here. Grandma even got the obituary from the twins, Big One
and Little One's funeral. They was twelve when they got killed in a car accident coming from a stickball game. Grandma got Mary Lou's dead folks' paper too. That woman died because she was too fat. Four hundred pounds too fat.

I know I better close the chest up and get back out in the sitting room with all the folks who came to the funeral to say good-bye to Grandpa, I know my best friend, Chick-A-Boo, want me to come back in there with her. She been with me all evening. But she can't come in this room. This room and this chest are for folks with Jones blood only. So she is stuck in there with the gossiping folks from Rehobeth Road. Just listen at them. They just sitting around talking and eating up all the good cakes and pies that folks cooked for us. There ain't going to be a thing left when Toe Worm leave. Poor thing. We call him Toe Worm because his toes are so curled up that he don't hardly wear shoes. His real name is Pen Paul. Heck, I think I would rather be called Toe Worm. Whatever we call him, it don't stop Toe Worm from eating folks out of house and home. He done
eat two helpings of food. Now he's working on Grandmas church friend Miss Thelma's lemon pie. Toe Worm is Miss Thelma's nephew on his ma side of the family.

I put the obituaries back in the chest and close it tight, just like it was when Grandma sent me in here.

Look at these folks just sitting around talking about Grandpa and how nice the funeral was. “Who in the world wrote the obituary? It was some kind of nice,' Miss Ethel Mae say in between eating her third piece of chicken. She don't need to eat another piece because she is as big as a house already.

Ma rolls her eyes at Miss Ethel Mae before she open her mouth. “Ethel Mae, you know good and well I wrote that. You ask the same question after every funeral, like you don't know that when coloreds in Rich Square die, they folks come and get me to write they obituary.”

Miss Ethel Mae just rolls her eyes back at Ma and bites her chicken again. Ma better leave that big woman alone. All she got to do is sit on
Ma, just like she sat on top of Miss Cathy when Miss Cathy was running her mouth at Miss Ethel Mae in the cotton field last year. If she does, I can't help Ma, because Miss Ethel Mae might sit on me, too. Ma said that only crazy folks fight all the time. I say that folks with good sense better keep they mouth closed. Tight!

You know, I really don't have time for all this grown folks' mess. I want them to take their tails home so that I can go back in that room and count some of them obituaries. Maybe I will take one from Grandpa's funeral and give it to Uncle Buddy when I see him. Lord knows when that will be.

While Ma and Miss Ethel Mae still rolling they eyes at each other I go on into the kitchen where Grandma is and wouldn't you know she is sitting in Grandpa's chair, next to the woodstove. I left Chick-A-Boo again, because she and her Ma should have enough sense to go home. I love her, but I am tired and I want to just be with people that got Jones blood.