Mr. Eugene said to me, “You know what happens when you spend too much time looking behind you and not enough time watching where you’re going?”
“You fall down and break your neck,” I said.
“I knew from the moment we met, you were smart.” Mr. Eugene smiled.
He stood up and turned my chair back to the mirror. “Now let me see what I can do with this mess,” he said, taking out his scissors.
THREE
Milwaukee, Wisconsin 1947
I kept going to church with Aunt Vera. Not to get out of the house with Ma like my daddy said. And not for the coffee cake like Mr. Eugene said. And not because I needed God in my life like Aunt Vera said. I went because of the music.
My daddy’s been going to help out the men’s choir, but this week, when I got up to get dressed, Daddy said he was tired and staying home.
“You best bring some cotton for your ears,” he told me, lying on the couch. “I can sing loud enough to drown out most of them, but you in trouble this week.”
My daddy was right. They weren’t the best singers, but their voices were loud and deep, and the congregation clapped and threw their hands up in the air just the same. Mr. Eugene was the tallest, and when they started swaying from side to side, some of them bumped into each other ’cause they couldn’t keep time. The choir director mouthed all the words and moved her hands telling them when to speed up or sing softer but didn’t look like none of them were even paying attention. But even while I stood clapping with everyone else and listened to Aunt Vera singing along loud in my ear, I was looking at Miss Minnie on piano. She rocked from side to side on the piano bench. I could see she had sheet music, turning the pages with one hand while she kept playing with the other, but I don’t think she even needed to follow the music. Made me think ’bout Mr. Danforth at the home and how he told me I could learn the notes for any song if I knew how to read music. When Miss Minnie played, sometimes she was looking at the choir, sometimes at the choir director, and sometimes she even closed her eyes and tilted her head all the way back. Her playing made even the men’s choir sound better.
“…the grace of God and love of the Holy Spirit be with you all.”
When service ended and Reverend Lawson said his last words of the Benediction, I made my way out of the pew.
“Gimme a minute, Aunt Vera,” I said and hurried up through the crowd up to the front. Miss Minnie was still sitting at the piano bench talking to one of the deacons. I stood and waited till they were done.
“You Vera’s boy, right?” Miss Minnie asked me, closing the cover over the keys.
“Yes ma’am. I’m her nephew, Lymon.”
“Vera need something?” she asked, gathering up her music.
“No…no ma’am…” Back in the pew, I had in my head what I wanted to say, now I wasn’t so sure. “Any chance you could teach me how to play piano?”
Miss Minnie stopped moving and looked at me. “I’m no piano teacher, Mr. Lymon.” She laughed. “I know how to play, but that don’t mean I know how to teach.”
“I’m a fast learner. I played my grandpops’ guitar and a little bit of trumpet, but I always wanted to play the piano.”
“Vera know you asking about piano lessons?” she asked.
“No ma’am,” I told her.
“Then I expect you want to learn pretty bad, you asking without permission.”
“I expect so,” I said.
She was quiet.
“Let me think on it a little, Mr. Lymon, and I’ll have an answer for you next Sunday. How’s that sound?”
“Thank you, ma’am,” I told her.
“I didn’t say yes. I said I’ll think about it. And I’m gonna be speaking to Vera.”
When Aunt Vera dropped me back at the house, I ran inside to tell Daddy about Miss Minnie and the piano. Ma was up and in the kitchen cooking dinner, and the whole house smelled like navy beans and ham hocks and cabbage. I ran in the kitchen.
“You know better than running in this house,” Ma said.
“Sorry Ma. Where’s Daddy?” I asked.
“He left out when he got up. I ain’t seen him.”
I went on back to the small bedroom to change out of my church clothes. The day I came back from Chicago, Daddy told me to put my things in the small back porch off the kitchen. We mostly kept some broke-down things there and the room was cold in winter with wind whipping through the cracks. But me and Daddy worked to clean out the room and put all the junk in the backyard. I swept it out good and Daddy bought a small cot and dresser and some extra blankets. He even let me keep our old radio on the dresser.
“Don’t play it loud and don’t play it late,” Daddy told me. “This ain’t no juke joint,” Daddy said in a voice like Ma’s.
“It ain’t much,” he told me, “but a young man can’t be sleeping with his grandma.”
“But Ma’s gonna be scared,” I told him.
“She’ll be all right. I’m out here on the couch, and you back there on the cot. We can hear her just fine,” he said.
I was sure Ma would fuss ’bout being alone, but she didn’t say one word. Seemed to like having the room to herself. I know I did. Wasn’t much to look at, but it was the first time I had a space all to myself, without having to share a room or sleep on a couch or with a roomful of boys since Grandpops died.
I folded up my clothes neat and went into the front room. Daddy didn’t tell me he was going anywhere. My stomach all of a sudden was tight and bubbly. I sat down. Next to the flowered couch where Daddy slept was a bag where he kept some of his clothes. The little closet near the door was where he kept the rest. I made sure Ma wasn’t watching as I got on my knees and opened up Daddy’s bag just a little to see inside. Far as I could tell most of his clothes were there. Then I walked to the closet, looking over my shoulder at the kitchen door for Ma. Since she’s been in the wheelchair, she moves so fast, I sometimes don’t hear her. I opened the closet door slow so she couldn’t hear the squeaking. Saw Daddy’s workclothes hanging next to his one suit. When I was closing it back, Daddy walked in the front door.
“What you looking for?” he asked me, wiping his feet on the rug.
“Nothing…I was looking…for my jacket.” I turned away.
“What would your jacket be doing in my closet?” he asked me, not smiling.
I didn’t answer.
“You hear me talking to you?” Daddy said mad.
I shook my head, but I couldn’t look him in his eyes. “I thought you were gone,” I whispered.
FOUR
Milwaukee, Wisconsin 1947
MA wheeled to the door when she heard Daddy yelling.
“Grady, what are you fussing at this boy about?” she asked.
“This don’t concern you, Ma,” he told her, still staring straight at me.
“You in my house, and you telling me it don’t concern me?” she said loud.
“This is my boy!” Daddy yelled. “And I got a right to talk to him as I see fit. Leave us be, Ma.”
I was waiting for Ma to get up out the chair and pop Daddy in his head. But she backed up her chair into the kitchen.
“What do you mean, you thought I was gone?” he asked me.
I thought ’bout all those times Daddy came for the day and left before I got up, never saying goodbye. Or when he just passed through on his way to another gig, rubbing my head and making me laugh, but never ever being a daddy I could count on. Just like my momma, I spent most of my time waiting on someone to make things better.
Even when I got tired of waiting, soon as he showed up, seemed like he made it right again, till he didn’t.
When I stood in front of my daddy now, my head was just a little bit higher than his. “I don’t know if you’re staying or not,” I told him.
Daddy looked like someone let all the air out of a balloon.
“We family, Lymon. I told you, things gonna be different now.”
“How many times you told me that and left in th
e morning?” Even though Daddy was talking soft again, I could hear myself getting louder. “How many times did you leave without even saying goodbye?”
I could feel the wet on my cheeks, but I didn’t even know I’d started crying. “I came home to tell you about the piano and Miss Minnie, and Ma said you’d gone and I…” My hands curled up tight in a ball.
“I ain’t gonna leave you again, son,” Daddy said soft.
“How many times you said that?”
Ma was in the kitchen quiet, listening.
“How could you leave me in Chicago with my momma when you knew…I should’ve been with you and Ma. And you left me there with Robert beating on me. I didn’t have no daddy to fight for me.” I ran out of words.
Daddy looked down at my balled-up hands.
“You wanna swing on me?” he asked.
I shook my head no, but I wasn’t sure I didn’t.
“Grandpops would have never—” I started again.
“I ain’t Pops,” Daddy said. “Never tried to be. We both lucky to have had him, but there’s only one Pops.”
I opened my hands.
I was breathing hard and Daddy took a step closer. “You know I’m gonna take care of you now. You and Ma. You know that, right?”
He was wanting me to say yes, and wanting me to stop being mad, but I’d been hanging on to promises so long, I realized back in the home there was only one person I could count on. And it wasn’t my daddy.
“I know that when I ain’t got no one else, I got me. I know that.” I told Daddy, looking in his watery eyes.
He nodded his head up and down. “Well, you right about that,” he said so soft I could barely hear him.
Ma started moving again in the kitchen, banging around pots like we didn’t know she was just listening.
“I know you’re mad, son. Got every right to be. I’m asking you to give me another chance, is all,” Daddy said.
Daddy hugged me tight and I let my arms stay by my side, not ready to hug him back. But Daddy didn’t let go. He smelled like smoke and sweat, and I breathed in deep and laid my head on his.
When he let go, I walked through the kitchen to my room and sat on the cot. I turned up the radio loud enough so I could just hear it. I laid back and stretched out my legs long. With my eyes closed I listened to the guitar on the radio and could see Grandpops holding me on his knee while I played guitar.
You got it, son, that’s it. I heard his voice in my ear.
On my legs, my fingers played along to the music on the radio.
Author’s Note
When I created the character Lymon in my debut, Finding Langston, I never imagined he would have a starring role in his own novel.
Initially, I believed Langston’s nemesis, the seemingly angry, small-minded bully Lymon, was beyond redemption. But as I encountered readers of Finding Langston who wanted to know more about Langston’s tormentor, I began to ask myself the question: Are bullies born or are they made? As the story of Lymon emerged, the closer I came to an answer.
Both Langston and Lymon began their lives in the rural South, in communities fortified by family and faith. Both had loving, nurturing relationships with their grandparents. And they both fed their inner lives through a love of poetry and music. It was their move North that provided transformative experiences. Through circumstance or chance, their worlds collided at a time when neither was able to see their common bonds.
After reading Jesmyn Ward’s powerful novel, Sing, Unburied, Sing, the idea of intertwining the stories of Lymon, his father Grady, and the Parchman State Penitentiary (also known as Parchman Farm), was born.
Parchman Farm opened in 1900, and by 1937 housed nearly two thousand inmates. Some were as young as ten years old. Prisoners were underfed, subjected to corporal punishment, and allowed family visitation only on fifth Sundays, which amounted to four days per year.
Most families boarded the Midnight Special train, which traveled through small Delta towns to Sunflower County, Mississippi. Prison superstition held that the first convict to see the lights of the approaching Midnight Special would be the next set free.
Parchman was home to several famous names, including blues greats Son House and Bukka White, who wrote and recorded “Parchman Farm Blues” after his departure.
I was haunted by my further research into the history of the notorious prison, which uncovered stories of countless black men serving extended sentences for minor offenses and being forced to work in the scorching sun for fifteen-hour days in the convict-leasing system. Lessees, such as railroad companies or wealthy landowners, paid fees to the state for the convict labor to farm acres of cotton, clear land that was often in malaria-infested swamps, dynamite tunnels, and lay railroads. Incarcerated inmates were at a dramatically increased risk of infection, disease, and death. This system was a financial windfall to the state of Mississippi and became one of the state’s greatest sources of revenue with yearly multi-million-dollar profits, which in turn led to increased arrests and convictions to keep up with the demand for labor.
Once prisoners were released, they faced Jim Crow laws. The sundown towns that Grady references were white communities that enforced strict segregation and fear tactics to exclude non-whites. A black person’s presence in the town after the sun set could lead to arrest or worse. Between 1890 and 1940 nearly two hundred of these towns existed throughout the country.
The parallels between the history of the convict-leasing system and our current prison systems are at once startling and unsurprising. While much has changed in the eight decades since the fictional Grady would have served his time at Parchman, much has stayed the same. Namely, the disproportionate numbers of African American arrests, the higher conviction rates often for less serious infractions, and the longer jail sentences, again for less serious crimes.
Today, the subsequent impact of incarceration on the families that prisoners leave behind is also apparent.
Though Finding Langston and Leaving Lymon are historical fiction, both are rooted in the troubling histories of the Jim Crow South and reveal how this system adversely affected their lives as well as the lives of future generations of millions of African Americans.
Langston and Lymon arrived in the Northern Midwest from the South during the Great Migration, a period in history where large numbers of blacks flocked to cities in the North. Both young men had loving, yet complex relationships with their fathers that played out in dramatically different ways. I liked to imagine that perhaps in another time and place, they would have been friends.
The forces that shape us and the world around us can be random and, at times, cruel, but the legacy that matters more than any other is a legacy of love, community, family, hope, and finding the music of life, wherever you land.
Lesa Cline-Ransome
Acknowledgments
Thank you again to the entire team at Holiday House Publishers, but especially my editor, Mary Cash, for helping me to find the story within the story.
And to all of those who patiently answered questions and provided much-needed information—Elvera Ransom, Kim and Leif Roschell, and Eduardo Vann.
My amazing reader, Joan Kindig, who combs through every sentence and punctuation mark with love and care.
For friends and family, who read and comment and support—Lisa Reticker, Ann Burg, and Leila Ransome.
For Cheryl Logan, who over breakfast at a café in Lenox, Massachusetts, jotted down a plan that helped me to find time where I thought there was none, and transformed my writing life.
And to my agent, Rosemary Stimola of Stimola Literary, thank you for your trust, patience, and advice. For Rhinebeck’s Starr Library and their patience with my overdue books. For authors David Oshinsky and Timothy Tyson, whose powerfully honest works shine a light on history and injustice.
And always, thanks to my family who cheer me on every step of the way—James, Jaime, Maya, Malcolm, and Leila Ransome; and Ernestine, Linda, and Bill Cline. Our memories lead me to th
e heart of each story.
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