“Front seat,” he commanded.
The seats were dark blue. Leather, it felt like. There was a cage between the front and back, a metal grille. There were two or three radios mounted up front. A shotgun was racked amidships. The interior panels of the doors were badly scratched, I noticed as I bent to enter, and there were craters in the windshield, like what you’d get if you got caught behind a truck hauling gravel.
We rolled out of Colored Town and my insides started to shake. The sheriff drove in silence until we reached the water tower.
“We’re gonna have us a little talk. Quicker we get it done, quicker you’ll get back home. Awright?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I’ll tell you straight out your boyfriend’s got hisself into some serious trouble.”
“Kine of trouble?”
“You don’t know? Don’t lie to me, girl.”
“No, sir.”
“Well. We’ll see.”
He took me to the jailhouse. I had never been inside the chain-link fences surrounding that fearful place. I had never been through the sallyport that protected its windowless keep, those double-locking doors that sealed tight as any airlock.
“Watch her,” Jackson brusquely ordered a deputy. “Gimme the keys.”
The floor was concrete, polished smooth, hard on your feet. The Sheriff rounded the duty desk on his way to a large gray door off to one side. We had all heard stories about what went on behind that closed door. Even white people knew. It was a metal portal, pierced by a tiny, rectangular pane of glass laced itself with some kind of wire or grating. There was a pad of numbered buttons alongside. Collard keyed it briefly. A buzz sounded sharp and loud with the sound of a bolt released.
“Be back in a minute,” Collard nodded to his desk sergeant.
It seemed like an hour. It might have been an age, I don’t know. My bladder was fit to burst.
“I need a restroom,” I called over to the front desk.
“Hold it.”
“I can’t,” I admitted, ashamed.
“Come own, then.”
About the time I was relieved and roughly reseated, Collard Jackson herded Joe Billy back through that damned gray door.
My lover-boy was cut above one eye. His face was swollen. Looked to me like he was dragging a foot as well.
“Book him,” Collard guided Joe Billy with an incongruently gentle hand to the desk.
“Charge?”
“Disturbing the peace. Resisting arrest.”
A laugh wrenched out of Joe Billy’s mouth. Blood trickled fresh out his nose and down his chest.
“Don’t you bleed on my desk, boy,” the desk sergeant growled.
“Give him some towels.”
“He’s messin’ my desk, Sheriff!”
“I said git him some towels. You get him booked, I want him back in the tank and I don’t want anybody in there with him, you clear on that?”
“No prisoners?”
“No prisoners, no law, no preacher—I want him in there by his goddamn self. Nobody sees him till I come back. Have you et, boy?”
“Sir?” Joe Billy cupped his braceleted hands beneath his nose.
“Gimme yer hands.”
Collard released the handcuffs as he spoke again to the deputy. “Call Betty, have her bring him somethin’ to eat. Bring a pitcher of tea, too.”
“He’ll be pissin’ all night.”
“Give him a bedpan. Go on. He won’t drown in it. You won’t drown yourself on me, now, will you, boy?”
Joe Billy shook his head. “Nossuh.”
“How ’bout hanging? Do I need to pull yer sheets out?”
“There ain’t no sheets,” the Deputy supplied.
“Takes care of that, then.”
I watched as Joe Billy was routed back through that gray door. A loud buzz. A bolt shot home. Collard waited for all that business to settle before he turned to me.
I saw the baton, loose on his leg. My heart sucked up into my throat.
“You saw your friend just now?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You wanta help him? ’Cause if you don’t I might have to pay him another visit.”
“Don’t do that, Sheriff! Don’t!”
“You answer my questions, answer ’em straight, he’ll be fine. You smoke?”
“Wha—? No. No, sir.”
“I do.” He produced a pack of Marlboros. Retrieved a Zippo lighter from his shirt pocket, raked it to life across his boot. “While back I got a visit from some fellahs work out of Washington, got themselves real concerned over a church burned in Tallahassee. You know anything about a church burning?”
“No, sir,” I shook my head. “I ain’t burn a church.”
“Didn’t think you did. What about Joe Billy?”
“He never said anything ’bout a church, no, sir.”
“They tell me you got some smarts, girl. Be real smart to tell me what you know and tell me right goddamn now.”
“I don’t know anything about burning churches, Sheriff Jackson. I don’t!”
“There was a truck seen near a church that somebody burned. New Ford. Red. Spinner hubcaps. Sound familiar?”
“That’s Cody’s truck.”
“Joe Billy ever mention seeing Cody in Tallahassee?”
“No, sir.”
“He ever tell you he stole money from the Mount Zion Church?”
“No, sir,” I said. Replying less certainly, having been a thief myself.
“Appear a little unsure about that.”
“Joe Billy don’t have to steal, Sheriff. He’s got money. Got himself a business!”
“Oh, yeah,” Collard chuckled. “I saw.” The smoke from his cigarette catching errant currents of air to mingle with the exhalation of his nostrils. His eyes on mine. I tried not to flinch. “You sleepin’ with this boy?”
“Sir?”
“You get yourself knocked up you think they’ll take you in that college? Think they’ll give a shit?”
“Come to that, I’d get rid of it,” I declared with sudden resolve.
“Just like a nigger,” he grunted. “How old are you, anyway? When’s your birthday?”
“My birthday?”
“There an echo in here?”
I felt my face flush. “I’ll be eighteen this month,” I picked up my head. “October the thirty-first.”
“Right around the corner, then. Halloween.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Dowling Park, wasn’t it? Place where your mama had you?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Yeah,” Collard nodded shortly. “I remember.”
He took a final drag on his cigarette, dropped that coffin nail to the hard floor and ground it out beneath the heel of his well-buffed boot.
“Come on,” he said. “Let’s get you home.”
It was my second trip in the sheriff’s car. I was not as frightened, this time. But then I had not endured the session meted out to Joe Billy on the other side of Collard’s gray door.
We passed beneath the water tower’s swollen belly. Sheriff Jackson salvaged a toothpick from the cruiser’s ashtray.
“You ever hear of a woman name of Meadows?” Barely glancing in my direction with that new line of interrogation. “Fanny Meadows. Ever hear that name?”
“No, sir, I know ’bout Joe Billy’s mama, but her name’s Fanny King.”
“Is now,” he confirmed. “But when she was married it was Fanny Meadows. Married old Clifford Meadows. Sorry son of a bitch if ever there was one.”
“Joe Billy never said much about his daddy.”
“Reckon not. Clifford left ’em when Joe Billy was little.”
“Joe Billy told me,” I nodded. “That’s why he moved to Tallahassee. I just thought he was always a King.”
“A king, yeah,” Collard snorted. “That’s what he is. King of fuckin’ Colored Town.”
I almost missed the derision, so amazed that our sheriff would bother himself to know the
murky genealogies of colored people.
“Mr. Raymond is Fanny’s great-uncle,” Sheriff went on. “Before Fanny and Clifford ran off to Valdosta they used to work at the orphanage. In Dowling Park.”
He glanced at me, then, to see if it was sinking in.
“Clifford worked the dairy. She was a midwife. When your mama got down the river, it was Fanny looked after her.”
“Looked after?”
“What? You thought your mama had you all by herself?”
My own severely autistic mother was never able to supply any details regarding the first moments or weeks of my life. She could not talk about what it meant to be pregnant, to anticipate birth. She couldn’t tell me whether I nursed on a nipple or from a bottle. Whether I was raised on cow’s milk or goat’s. Did I smile a lot? Was I a good napper? Grandmother never answered those questions, saying only that she was overburdened, that it had been too much, and that anyway my first weeks of life were molded in Dowling Park.
I wondered if Joe Billy knew? Surely not! I could not imagine Collard taking time from his interrogation to say, by the way, your mama saw the girl you’re sleeping with way before you did.
Collard dropped me off by my wagon of water.
“Don’t worry ’bout Joe Billy,” came the unexpected solace. “I got a use for him.”
I had to get back to Mr. Raymond, to let him know his nephew-at-remove was jailed. It was late by the time I got back to the old porter’s porch. The fights were already over. I was surprised to see that none of the men had left.
“Where you been, Cilla?” Mr. Raymond’s voice floated over a battery of hostile eyes.
“I been at the jail,” I replied directly. “Joe Billy’s in jail.”
“We know where he is.”
“You get a look at him? How is he?” Chicken Swamp’s father asked that question.
“He’s beat up,” I replied carefully. And then, “I was so scared!”
“Ain’t talking ’bout you, girl.”
It came with the sharp edge of reproof.
“We gone hafta get word to his mama,” Lester scowled.
“Fanny King?” I rejoined.
“Mrs. King to you.” Mr. Raymond put me in my place.
“Sheriff said Joe Billy would be all right,” I volunteered. “He said he’d be fine.”
“Use that stick on you, think you’d be fine?”
“Didn’t have to use no stick on her , though, did he?” Mr. Reed observed sourly. “Got everything he needed without touching a hair on that brillo head.”
I realized then that I had been skillfully interrogated myself, that Jackson had plied me for confirmation to questions whose answers he already knew.
“Ya’ll can think what you want,” tears welled in my eyes, “but Joe Billy didn’t burn any church!”
“That boy,” Lester shook his head. “I knew he was runnin’ from somethin’.”
“He didn’t do anything!”
“Doin’ plenty with you!” he sneered and the porch cawed laughter at my expense.
“Hush that nonsense!” Mr. Raymond spoke and silence fell like a shadow passing over the porch. The old porter stood from his deerhide rocker. “That boy saw something in Tallahassee likely to get us all in trouble and you-all laughin’?”
Heads bowed in contrition all around the porch before Mr. Raymond turned again to me.
“Now you set down and you tell me ever’thing that happen from the time Sheriff pick you up to the time he let you go. Word for word.”
It was apparent to me now that Joe Billy’s plight and Colored Town’s hinged on some question more important than the discovery of my mama’s midwife, so I sat for the next hour recalling every impression of the afternoon, reporting every question put to me by Sheriff Jackson and every scrap of idle talk I could recall that had anything to do with Joe Billy or Tallahassee or Cody’s fire-red truck.
My own history would have to wait.
Chapter fifteen
“Monk Folsom Bids For Sheriff”
—The Clarion
M y eighteenth birthday passed unremarkably. I did not celebrate its passing with tricks or treats. Halloween was not celebrated in Colored Town. Preacher Dipps roundly condemned the hallowed night as a Devil’s holiday and in any event black parents were not amused at the notion of their offspring running around in white sheets offering threats for favors.
The biggest concern in Colored Town the last day of October related to the many fears raised by Joe Billy’s incarceration.
The Sheriff said he had a use for Joe Billy; whatever utility that implied surely could not be good for Colored Town. But at least Halloween passed uneventfully. There were no crosses burned, no midnight rampages through our sandy streets. The night passed without a window smashed or a mail box shotgunned from some speeding vehicle. There were no incidents to report anywhere in the county, in fact, unless you counted the usual misdemeanors at Leb’s tavern.
But then came the first of November and the FBI .
Johnny Boy Masters saw the black car that parked behind the sheriff’s cruiser the morning after Halloween. He saw two men get out, dressed in white shirts and dark-colored jackets and slacks and ties. Johnny Boy’s mama was Wanda Hicks’ maid, and that evening she repeated Wanda’s excited blabber about a sit-down between the sheriff and federal agents.
Rumors circulated immediately that Joe Billy King had fingered Cody for the burning of the by-then-well-known Tallahassee church. Joe Billy, the Clarion reported indignantly, had been discounted as a suspect for that arson. The Federal Bureau of Investigation visited Sheriff Jackson to request a “preliminary interview with the Negro.”
I got to see Joe Billy just once during his county tenancy. It was in early November, not even a week after my birthday on the thirty-first. I’d made a cake, however tardy. Actually Miss Chandler had as much to do with the cake as I had. She loaned me her stove and the fixings. Even gave me eighteen candles. Seven pink ones and eleven blue—we couldn’t find enough of one color.
The sheriff met me at the jail, he and Thurman Shaw. Mr. Shaw was a local attorney just beginning to make his reputation. He still had himself some hair back then, just a shock of red, like a cock’s comb, a bantam rooster of a man not three years out of law school. I walked to the jail from Colored Town, my church dress and flimsy jacket my only insulation against a cold, steady wind.
Mr. Thurman met me at the front desk.
“Don’t you look nice,” he said. The first compliment related to appearance I ever received from a white man.
So there I was, with an attorney and a sheriff, escorted in perfect safety and under no duress, burdened with nothing more offensive than a pound cake, but still I was scared of that gray door and petrified to contemplate the journey beyond, the untimed walk past those iron cages.
“Lookee here. Lookee that tall piece o’ chocolate!”
Catcalls and jeers were my marching tune that day as I plied a strict, straight line down the middle of the passage that divided the cells on either side.
Joe Billy was standing by the time I got to his cell.
“Sorry for these other sons of bitches,” were his first words.
The cut above his eye was not closed. It needed stitches. But his face was not swollen. And he didn’t look to be favoring that foot.
“It’s late for my birthday,” I said stupidly. “And a few days early for yours. Kind of an in-between cake.”
“I’ll take it.”
“You awright, JayBee?” I asked, glancing to the deputy who loitered within a shirtsleeve of our conversation.
“They ain’t beat me again, if that’s what you mean.”
Thurman turned, then, to the standing deputy. I waited for that gaoler’s retreat before I gave Joe Billy my lemon-flavored loaf. Had to turn it sideways to get it through the bars of his cell.
“They wouldn’t let me bring a fork,” I apologized.
Candles went in next, one by one, eighteen of them t
hrough the bars of his cell. Our fingers touched each time.
“No matches, neither,” I cringed.
“‘Long as you make a wish,” he assured me and broke the cake on his lap like a melon.
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