Red River

by Lalita Tademy

  Jackson tries to shake the disquieting feeling that he has been here before, standing in the wake of destruction, toothless in the face of untouchable enemies, surrounded by his sons. He knows he has not, but the phantom memory stays with him and goads him nonetheless. He pauses, leans on his shovel.

  “Shout out your names,” he demands, the necessity of the request overriding everything else. Jackson hasn’t asked his sons to do this in years, but with the strangling smoke filling his lungs and stinging his eyes, suddenly, nothing is more important.

  “Shout out your names,” he insists, ferocious.

  They only look at him, his sons, as if they have confronted an angry bear in the woods and are in those first few critical seconds of developing a strategy for survival.

  Nathan-Green is the first to respond, cupping his soot-coated hands around his mouth. “My name is Nathan-Green Tademy.” It comes out a deafening whisper, the silence of the night and the backdrop of hissing, burning wood amplifying the words.

  “Louder,” commands Jackson.

  “My name is Nathan-Green Tademy.” This time his son’s words carry and become large living things, an echoing roar that surprises all of them.

  “Every one of you,” demands Jackson, and in turn, each of his sons shouts his name.

  Jackson still isn’t satisfied. They have been working through the night, and they are physically and emotionally spent. The flames are mostly out, and the gray dawn provides enough light to see.

  “We wasn’t brought here as no slave, in the beginning,” Jackson says. “We come here from Africa, from Alexandria in Egypt, from the Nile Delta. We come on a boat, free men, working our trade in the sunshine.

  “Squat down closer.” His sons gather around him, and with the tip of his abandoned shovel, in the charred mess at their feet, he draws a triangle with a thin, wiggling stem that trails downward. “This here the Nile Delta,” he says, and points to the triangle. “And this the Nile River.” He points to the stem. “Breaks apart into all these streams in the delta and run out to sea.”

  Jackson looks from face to face, each a distorting mirror of different parts of himself. He sees in those wary young faces that they are a little afraid of him in his current frame of mind, that their growing understanding of their precarious position as colored men in 1907 Louisiana burrows in a deep, corrosive path toward their core. They want to believe their father is strong. They need to believe themselves safe, even though that assurance is impossible.

  “We lost the name for a while after coming here, but my father, Sam Tademy, give us our name back after the war. Same name we had when we was in Egypt. May be one man got the power to burn down a store, take our property, but can’t nobody take away the Tademy name. Tademys was born to be men took serious. Don’t forget. Don’t never forget. Don’t never let your sons forget when the time come.”

  Jackson is so weary he can barely straighten up. “Go on back inside and catch a couple hours’ sleep,” he says to his sons. “We got a full day ahead.”

  Noby Smith shows up just past dawn to find Jackson alone outside by the store site, separating debris into retrieval piles.

  “What happened?” Noby asks Jackson, assessing the blackened ruins. “I smell smoke a mile away.”

  “Jebediah Buckner and some others,” Jackson says. He doesn’t volunteer anything else, doesn’t think to ask why Noby has come.

  Wordlessly, Noby takes off his jacket and joins Jackson in the rubble. The two men walk around the destruction, poking into the carcass of the building with long oak poles, turning over layers of charred wood, exposing hot pockets where flames still smolder, pulling what they can from the wreckage. Toward the back, facedown and buried beneath a singed horse blanket and a thick coating of ash, they find a slate blackboard. Jackson turns it over. The smooth, hard panel still has a part of the children’s last copy-out lesson written in smudgy chalk.

  Jackson lets it fall back into the ashes. “Gone,” he says quietly.

  “We build the commissary once, we build again,” says Noby.

  “They just come to burn it down again,” says Jackson. He hasn’t slept at all since first awakening to the smell of smoke last night, and his mind is slowed by the finality of what lies before him.

  “Least nobody get hurt. Could be worse,” Noby says. “We can fix all those things they put their hands to.”

  “You wasn’t here,” says Jackson. “My family the ones living through them men on our land like they own it, trapped inside the house in the middle of the night, watching and waiting on whatever Buckner and the others take it in their heads to do. As long as they know we keeping a colored school, they coming back.”

  “The school what they come for?” asks Noby.

  “That, and they don’t like to see a colored man with nothing. Not like the school a success. Only six students, and even they can’t come regular.”

  “Those six teach six more,” says Noby. “Almost sound like you ready to give up.”

  Jackson continues to poke around in the ruins with his pole, hits something hard, finds two more glass put-up jars with a congealed, bubbling mess inside, too hot to handle, cooked in the flames. “I got to think about my own. There’s no more money to spare to buy goods to start up the store again, our winter meat is gone, and one charred slate board not enough to keep a colored school going. Better to teach one by one, without catching the white man’s eye.”

  “The slate board coming out whole be a sign,” says Noby. “If not you, who else in this town able to keep up a colored school?”

  “Not no sign,” says Jackson. He has streaks of black soot crisscrossing his pants legs up to thigh level, and his hair is almost white from settling ash. “A sign be more students full-time, not snatched back into the field come harvest or sickness at home. A sign be books don’t have pages torn out and water stains so bad a student can’t read all the words. A sign be reading books that got words with more than three or four letters and real thinking in them.”

  “Every dream got to have a start place,” says Noby.

  “Well, I’m not in the dream business. Not no more. Not if a dream mean my sons got to see me brought low by any riffraff want to cross my path.”

  “Not brought low,” says Noby. “Since when you don’t listen to your own sermons? Turn the other cheek, say the Bible.”

  “The school gonna stay closed.”

  “Your school mean everything to colored in Colfax, Jackson. It go way beyond the six students. Just to know we got a place and a right where our children go further than we able to take them.”

  “You know much as me, Noby. All your children get education at home at the hand of their father.”

  “But that’s not true of most. The colored school matters.”

  “The school gonna stay closed,” Jackson repeats.

  “One man can’t rightly ask another to take on risk, for hisself and his family, but this community in bad need of a school. I’m not sure why I was put here on this earth, ’cept to cheat death and bring forth children, but you put here for the colored school. I’m sure of that,” says Noby.

  “We try again when the time right,” says Jackson. “Mine the family in harm’s way, not nobody else.”

  “Not true,” says Noby. “The school be community business. We all got a stake. Neighbors come tomorrow if you ask, help you rebuild.”

  “Still too raw,” says Jackson. “And I won’t hear no more on this particular subject. Could as easy be my house, not just my commissary.” Jackson changes the subject. “What you doing here so early, anyway?” he asks. “Word don’t travel that fast.”

  “Don’t matter no more now,” says Noby.

  “What?”

  “I was coming to see if you was in a position to buy half the part of the farm I got left.” Noby looks around at the smoldering heaps, the piles of salvage at their feet. “I see the answer to that one for myself.”

  “You already sold most all away already ’cept the pie
ce you living on. What you and David going to do?”

  “I got to pay Hansom Brisco back on the loan right away, or he in trouble with his own land. I can’t leave him hanging after all he done for me and mine. David don’t care about none of that, long as he got his piece free and clear. My part of the farm gone, just like your commissary gone. That’s the naked truth.”

  “We in the same fix, then,” says Jackson. “Set down a peg or two from where we thought we was headed.” Noby’s misery somehow made his own seem smaller. “What you do without the farm?”

  “I’m going ’round to the icehouse, see if there’s paying work for me there, then find a farm to rent.”

  “They won’t let colored deliver ice,” says Jackson.

  “Not deliver. That’s Roy Hadnot’s job. I’m not foolish enough to tangle up with that. But Hadnot almost always sloppy drunk now, shortchanging customers, scaring the children on the route, letting the ice melt out from under him while he sneak off to the bottle. Mr. Fletcher got to be looking for someone to count on to actually do the before and after work. Chopping ice from the river, packing the sawdust, loading, cleanup. No reason can’t be me. I done plenty odd jobs in off-season for Mr. Fletcher before, he know me. We get along fine. Long as I’m not in front.”

  “Emma know?”

  “No need to tell her till I got something to say,” says Noby.

  “Good luck. Sorry about the farm. Wish I could help more. Time to get the boys up, anyway. At least come on in to breakfast and eat with us. Amy fix plenty.”

  “Can’t,” says Noby. “We both got our hands full, and I still got to go see Mr. Fletcher.”

  Jackson shakes off as much of the soot from his clothes as he can before going into the house. He draws water from the well to wash away the worst of the char and smoke, but the sobering reality of the long night still clings to him. His children, little Mary and the boys, sit waiting for him, and Amy dishes up a bowl of thick porridge for him as soon as he crosses the threshold.

  He resists the temptation to linger as he passes by the shelf he has built in the far corner of the front room, resists the urge to run his hands over the neat row of fragile, musty books housed there. His family waits for him, and he must not disappoint. He owns six books, upright side by side on the shelf, two very slim volumes and four thick, braced on one end by the wall, and on the other by a smooth river rock, and each is precious to him. His favorite is the oldest, a worn undersize book, so small it almost fits his hand, with black tape at the spine and the edges of the green cover so worn the cardboard shows through. Sheldon’s Primer, it reads on the front, with a picture of a white girl sitting on a pillow holding a doll. Inside are the letters of the alphabet and reading lessons, the same lessons he uses still to teach the children in his school, the book from which he learned when he and Noby were small boys, and from which he gave his own children their first reading lessons. Jackson glances at the other titles in his library, each special. In front of him is McGuffey’s New Fifth Eclectic Reader, with its rough cover and uneven texture of the title’s raised lettering. There is a curl to the crimped, rounded border, and a reddish coloring to the outer edging of the bound pages within. Jackson yearns to lift the largest book from the shelf by its tattered cardboard spine and hold it. The glue is crumbling, visibly separating away from the original tightness of the pages. He wants to feel the weight and heft, the mere holding like a blessing.

  Instead, he joins his family at the table and sits down to eat. They all concentrate overmuch on the food in front of them, avoiding one another’s eyes. For most of the meal, they don’t talk at all. No one dares to be the first to bring up what pulses among them like a tender tooth, best left alone.

  “I’m thinking on taking the wagon over to Widow Cruikshank’s this morning,” Jackson tells Amy.

  “She got more work?” Amy asks. “I thought you finished mending the fences for her last week.”

  “No work today. But she do have a encyclopedia she selling.” Jackson pushes away the rest of his porridge. He isn’t very hungry. “A big set, nineteen books, only missing a few parts, got descriptions on most every subject inside. Two dollars and a couple weeks moon work plowing her north field, they be ours.”

  “So you keeping the school open?” asks Amy.

  Jackson feels all of them around the table waiting on his answer. “I’ma shut the colored school down,” he says.

  “All our savings tied up in that store, and the heat haven’t even died down off the burnt-up roof out there,” says Amy. “If you shutting the school, why you buying something we can do without and don’t have no money for?”

  Jackson bangs his open hand on the wood table, making a noise so sudden and sharp it startles everyone, including himself. “Opportunity come when it come, not always when things is easy,” he says. “Them books is for the library. Just because the school shut don’t mean everything got to stop.”

  “We don’t got two extra dollars,” Amy persists.

  Jackson pauses. “I’m a rich man,” he finally says. “Money only matter what it buy or who it feed.”

  “Pride don’t fill a empty belly,” Amy says.

  “A full belly don’t make a man,” replies Jackson.

  “Jackson Tademy, you gonna do what you gonna do,” Amy says. “A man always seem to find a way to get what he already decided he want. If you so set on those books, I know the widow give me some washing or ironing. You getting too old for moonlight work. We in need of money, but you already loaded up beyond what you able to handle.”

  “I told you, no woman of mine gonna work in the field or clean up behind white, no matter what, and that be the final word,” says Jackson. “My wife’s only job be looking after me and the children.”

  He jams his hat down low on his head and storms out of the house, barely glancing at the smoldering remains of his commissary, on his way to Widow Cruikshank’s farm.

  Chapter

  27

  1911

  One steamy summer afternoon, three months to the day after her marriage to Nathan-Green Tademy, Lenora Smith Tademy finds herself alone in the front room of Jackson Tademy’s farmhouse. She cannot believe the luxury of having the only two-story house in The Bottom all to herself. She has become comfortable in her new daily routine and what is expected of her. Her time of violent sickness in the morning has passed, and although the baby growing in her belly sometimes drains her of energy, for the most part, she feels strong. At Amy’s insistence, they have their own room, Lenora and Nathan-Green, separate from the others, a situation so unexpectedly freeing that Lenora sometimes finds herself giddy with the selfishness of it. She and Amy have come up with a scheme to divide the household chores, or, more precisely, Amy decided, since she prefers the cooking and outdoor work to scrubbing and washing, which Lenora doesn’t mind at all. This particular morning Amy has taken her little girl fishing down at the bayou, and Nathan-Green is out with Jackson for the day to work the far field.

  Lenora finishes scrubbing the kitchen floor, airs out the empty back bedroom just as Amy instructed before she left, and carries her soapy water bucket into the front room. She uses the back of her callused hand to unstick the sopping wisps from her damp face and away from her eyes. She is self-conscious about her eyes and wishes there were some way to hide them. The offense isn’t in the color, a warm brown like most everyone else’s, but in the steep tilt and narrow almond shape, and in the heavy upper lids that almost hood the smallness of the opening below. They are her mother’s eyes revisited, a cause of torment when she was growing up. Lenora is sorely aware of the double takes and stares whenever she meets someone new, as they try to figure her out, to determine her lineage.

  The day is blistering. At least it isn’t wash day or, worse, ironing day, the two chores where there is no escape from the fierceness of the sun and high humidity. But it is July, Louisiana-summer hot, and the sweat that runs in rivulets from her armpits to her waist and beyond makes the damp material cling
to her body and stick in crevices that force her to be on constant lookout to make sure no one can see her. Lenora hates Louisiana summers, hates that every breath drawn feels as if you’re inhaling liquid flames through your nose, hates that the heat sucks the life out of you and makes the simplest task a superhuman effort. Lenora isn’t the type to complain about the weather. She doesn’t do well with conversation at all, doesn’t like the way talk either deadens a subject or spins ideas off in unexpected directions, demanding something she doesn’t want to give. The possibility of other people focusing in her direction, expectations rising, judgments ready to be made, is enough to keep her as far away as possible from those she doesn’t know.

  Since she moved in, she has explored all of the areas contained within the walls of this house on Walden Bayou. She is perpetually in motion, doing whatever needs doing, never still from first light to eyes shut, washing, cooking, scrubbing, sewing, tending, mending, ironing, mulching, weeding, picking, canning, milking, feeding, making herself available to Nathan-Green and the needs of the household. But Lenora likes the tranquil corner of the front room with the bookshelves best, almost as comforting as church. She carefully dusts the neat rows of Jackson Tademy’s books, lingers as she runs her hands across the spines of the set of encyclopedias. Papa Jackson feels about each one of his books the way most in The Bottom feel about the sanctity of the Bible.

  “Jackson say what’s in those books set our minds free,” says Amy.

  Her mother-in-law stands in the doorway, watching her carefully, bamboo fishing pole in one hand and a bucket of dead fish to be gutted and fried up in the other. Amy came in so quietly, and Lenora was so engrossed, that she missed the warning sounds of her mother-in-law’s approach.

  “Mrs. Tademy,” says Lenora, unsure whether she is in trouble for dawdling.

  “You live here now, child,” Amy says, “married to my son. His bride be my daughter, so again, you call me Mama Amy. Two Mrs. Tademys in this house just cause confusion.”