Red River

by Lalita Tademy

  The wagon stops again. Several pairs of hands unbury Noby from his tomb of hay, moving aside the larger bales, carefully digging him out. They pull him upright, but his body is slow to obey. The stiffness and unresponsiveness of his trunk and limbs insulate him, yet as soon as he is touched, all of the pains he has come to expect in the last few hours are set loose.

  “Papa, we got a way to get you out.” It is Aston, his son. Noby would weep with gratitude if he weren’t so fatigued. “We work it out. Sidney, L’il Hansom, and me. It’s the best way.”

  Noby looks to Jackson and Amy. The drawn-tight muscles at Jackson’s jawline betray his rage, and Amy’s studied composure cannot mask the pitying sadness reflected back at Noby through her eyes. Whatever this plan is won’t be easy. Noby has trouble following a straight line of thought. His sons worked what out? Sidney is east in Alexandria, Louisiana, and L’il Hansom now lives to the northwest, in Oklahoma.

  “We got to put you in a coffin,” Aston says. “If they check colored cars, you too beat up to miss. Even if we pull your hat down low over your face. This way you go in the boxcar. Nobody check that but us, loading and unloading.”

  “How he can breathe?” asks Amy. “He burn up in there.”

  Aston points to the crude pine coffin in the other wagon. “We doctor the box,” he answers. “A Mason work the funeral detail and give this one airholes, pack it down with ice and sawdust. Least going out at night be cooler, and we put the coffin in the refrigeration car. We pack up drinking water for you in there too.” Aston either has the optimism of youth or is trying to put the best face on a bad situation. “The train already in the station and leave for Alexandria in one hour. We gonna load you up and get you in the boxcar now, before more of a crowd come. Sidney know to get you on the switch train to Oklahoma, and by the time you get there, L’il Hansom be ready to pick you up when you get to the last stop.”

  Noby doesn’t allow himself to dwell on the thought of the long, sweltering ride encased in a tight coffin from Boyce to Alexandria. It makes the short trip to the train station underneath the hay seem easy by comparison. A boxcar in the Louisiana summer is bound to be upward of 100 degrees, more if the refrigeration unit fails, as they so often do. There is the added danger of the transfer, changing trains, one boxcar to another on a different track, being maneuvered around the Alexandria station, maybe as the corpse he is pretending to be. Another ride crammed in close quarters from Alexandria to Oklahoma could finish him off, if the beating by a gang of white men, smothering by hay, and stewing by coffin haven’t already done the job, but Noby has to admit that the plan does have a small chance of working.

  Noby chuckles.

  They stare at him, his friends and family, uncomprehending, and he finds that funny too. He begins to laugh, taking in deep breaths of air. He is caught short by a sharp bruising pain around his midsection, and he forces himself quiet. Instead he just smiles, a silly grin he knows to be inappropriate.

  He must be getting better, he tells himself, either that or he has taken a turn for the worse and delirium has taken root. Images of Israel, his father, crowd Noby’s mind, the broken man with the cane hobbling around the cabin where he grew up, afraid to go outside. Although his father faced the mercilessness of a white mob and escaped with his body, they robbed him of his spirit, and he lived out his days as an old man, afraid and subdued. Noby witnessed the decline up close, and he refuses to repeat the pattern. He refuses to be defeated in the same way. To keep the fear at bay, to keep himself intact, he chooses to recast the situation, to see it in a different light. There is a certain absurdity, a certain humor, in his plight, however macabre. His mother has always told him he has cheated death from the time he was a baby, and he will do it again. He is sure of it.

  Figure 20. L’il Hansom Smith

  Figure 21. Aston Smith

  Figure 22. Sidney Smith

  Chapter

  32

  1919

  The wintry end of 1918 and the first few months of 1919 prove colder and more punishing than usual for central Louisiana. Small lakes freeze, and crops lay dazed in the field. Slender icicles weep from rooftops in The Bottom, and the trees stand stark and brooding. Jackson Tademy’s fifteenth grandchild is born during the worst of that winter, at the beginning of 1919, but even the joyous sharing of another family addition cannot lay to rest Jackson’s aching hunger to sit on the front porch in quiet celebration with his old friend Noby Smith, the boy’s other grandfather, now so far away. If Noby were still in Colfax, thinks Jackson, he would be harvesting ice for summer selling, sawing out and storing the precious cold pieces in the icehouse, layering the blocks with coarse sawdust from the sawmill to prevent them from melting.

  Last year, when the loss was fresher, Jackson thought about Noby every day, but now his mind turns to his friend only when he stumbles on a trigger, an association, a reminder, like a bruise that seems free of pain unless you push too hard on it. Jackson carries on conversations with his friend in his head as if he still resides a short walk away instead of in exile. But life takes on a different tempo without their easy patter, possible only with someone who has shared every stage of your life as you’ve lived it, someone who can understand more than you put into words, without explanation or apology. At least Noby has sent word back to them that he is safe in Oklahoma, that even the worst of his physical injuries is beginning to heal.

  Noby’s wife, Emma, has joined him there, at least temporarily, and she will see after him, but trouble brews closer to home. Lucy Smith, almost ninety, has somehow come to blame her son David for Noby’s abrupt departure and is refusing to stay under his roof. She has asked Noby to send Emma back to The Bottom. It is a mess.

  The year moves forward, winter finally giving up its grip, and at the beginning of April, the sun breaks free from the shrouding dark clouds, and the air warms by almost thirty degrees, a heady relief. But by the second week of April, rain has begun anew, and for two straight weeks, it pours every day. The river steadily rises, higher and higher, monitored almost hourly by those in The Bottom. Everyone knows the evacuation will come early this year. The warm spell is sure to melt the ice upstream at a rate too fast for the banks to handle, and the fierceness of the downpours clinches the inevitability of flood.

  At first Jackson calculates they have a day or two more before high water engulfs The Bottom. He and Nathan-Green work as a team, without friction, preparing for the flight to safer ground. The rain is steady but light, with only gentle winds, and father and son work in harmony to erect a raised wooden platform behind the farmhouse, high enough off the ground where many of their leave-behind possessions will be out of harm’s way from the seeking waters when they come, but not so high as to be unstable.

  They have become used to falling asleep to the monotonous, hypnotic pinging of rain on their corrugated tin roof, but in the night, the world outside turns wrathful, as if the devil himself flings hailstones the size of watermelons at the Tademy household. It is a frightening sound that terrifies the children and opens at least half a dozen additional roof leaks that will require patching later, as soon as they return from high country. The nonstop downpour throughout the long night accelerates the evacuation timetable.

  The women—his wife, Amy, their daughter Mary, his mother, Polly, and daughter-in-law Lenora—divide the last of what they need to take with them to the tent city in the hills. They carry a sack of cornmeal, foodstuffs from the rebuilt commissary, clothes and blankets, bed dressings, a couple of pots and pans, matches, three of Jackson’s books wrapped in oilcloth that he refuses to leave behind. Since daybreak, the women have been separating everything into piles, so much to carry with them, so much to leave behind that will hopefully escape the destruction of the rising floodwaters, so much to send ahead when it comes their turn to use the neighbor’s boat later in the morning. Lenora packs as quickly as she can, her hands adept at tying up the carrying parcels, but there are constant interruptions. All five of Nathan-Green an
d Lenora’s children are underfoot, excited in the way children work themselves up to be when adults in their midst are anxious, all but the youngest, a baby boy who sleeps the deep sleep of a three-month-old, though he is sure to wake up soon demanding to be fed. He is a small, willful baby with a bullet-shaped head and Indian-brown skin, like his father. They named him Nathan-Green Jr. but call him Ted, to avoid confusion with the duplicate name.

  The wind howls in the background, making a terrifying racket. Inside, Amy and Lenora struggle with the old front-room sofa, their best piece of furniture, lifting it off the floor, flipping it upside down, and lowering it, legs up, on top of the elevated wood surface of the dining table, hopefully high enough. Outside, Jackson and Nathan-Green secure the last of their leave-behind belongings. Whereas yesterday the rain fell constantly, gentle and measured, today the wind whips the rain around in ferocious sheets, and walls of stinging wetness slap into their bodies as if they are on the receiving end of a fighter’s punch.

  Year after year, they go through the same exercise, but the fastening of the oilcloth in the face of this morning’s screaming gale is trickier than usual. As they stretch the tarp over the top, an end gets away, flicks out of reach, sudden as a cracking whip.

  “Tie down your end,” Jackson yells into the storm. “If Andrew here, it be done already. Stick to it. For once.”

  Jackson regrets his words as soon as he says them. Since Noby left The Bottom, Jackson seems to find himself much closer to anger all of the time, especially with Nathan-Green. He looks to his oldest son, the one who should be clearing the path for the others. On the day Nathan-Green arrived in this world, mewling and kicking, Jackson conferred upon his son the honor of Green’s name to give him strength. But Nathan-Green Tademy seems not up to the challenge. He is who he is. Jackson tries to adapt to that truth, although he finds it difficult to make peace with the disappointment.

  Nathan-Green’s only reaction to his father’s criticism is an obstinate clamping down on his teeth and a press-together of his lips, but he doesn’t utter a word in his own defense. He keeps his head down and tries again to secure his end of the rope. His passivity frustrates Jackson even more.

  The time has come when Jackson feels he must orchestrate the passing of his life’s work, as his father did with him. All of his children except Mary are fully grown. Andrew is the most capable, serious, stable, driven, but his oldest, his stunted son, has never managed to grow into his potential. Nathan-Green is thirty-six, and he, Lenora, and all of their children still live in Jackson’s home.

  How can sons be so different? Of course, Jackson knows the answer, and he even sympathizes. Wasn’t he once in the same situation, buried deep in the shadow of a brother upon whom all hopes were pinned, all expectations channeled, all opportunities first allocated and passed along to him, like a hand-me-down jacket, only when they no longer fit? Wasn’t Green the heir apparent, and didn’t Jackson take stock and come into his own when circumstances demanded?

  It is against the Lord’s plan not to love your own children equally, but Nathan-Green and Andrew have so little in common that it is difficult to believe they were raised in the same house, that both come from Jackson’s seed. Andrew, so ambitious and responsible, so able to see possibility in the smallest opportunity. Able to lead others in moving forward not only his family but the Negro race as well. And then there is Nathan-Green, so absent, not in body but in spirit, willing to drift along whichever way the current pushes, as if his eyes are sewn shut and his arms bound, as if he has no say. Barely able to do for his family, unwilling to provide his wife, Lenora, with as little as a visiting dress so she isn’t ashamed to leave the house.

  Nathan-Green pulls the last piece of rope taut and ties it off with a double knot. Finally, the two men manage to cover the platform, encircle it with more rope, weigh down the pile with rocks heavy enough to keep the edges from working loose, and anchor the tarp as tightly as they can.

  “Let’s get down from here,” Jackson says. “Not much time left. Pull the wagon ’round.”

  They climb from the platform, water running off the brims of their hats in streams and penetrating the slickers they wear over their coats. When they reach the ground, the two men split off in different directions, Nathan-Green running toward the barn and Jackson making his way toward the house.

  Jackson stumbles through the door, bringing the bitterness of the storm in with him before he pulls the door shut against a blast of biting, cold air and heavy rain. He is drenched through, dripping muddy puddles on the floorboards, his hands chapped and raw from the ropes.

  “We going now,” Jackson shouts over the high pitch of the squall. “Over land.”

  “What about the boat?” asks Amy.

  “Can’t wait no more,” Jackson says. “Get the children and animals together. Nathan-Green bringing the wagons out front. Anything not ready stay behind. River too swole to chance any more time here.”

  Once the Red River releases its overflow, the floodwaters will spill the banks and rush over the low ground. The potential speed of the capricious waters holds everyone in The Bottom in its sway, preparing for the worst. Men, women, and children, young and old, black and white, must make their way to higher ground, salvaging whatever they need for the siege, limited by what they can carry or load in the boats, driving their animals hard to set up tent cities in the hills until the water recedes. Sometimes they must stay away for a month or more.

  Jackson checks the shelf that holds his books, his library. He takes one last look. “You pack the others?” he asks his daughter-in-law.

  Lenora already has the children at the front door, ready to thrust herself into the drenching storm and load the last of the goods into the wagon. She stops to nod at Jackson. She cares for his books as carefully as she cares for his son. Jackson trusts her completely to protect what is his.

  “Then let’s get gone,” he says.

  The Tademys jostle over soggy ground in the heavy wagons, driving the horses harder than Jackson feels comfortable, but they have run out of time. Twice the wagons stick in the soupy mud, so clogged with the claylike sludge that they are forced to clean and dig out the spokes before they can continue on toward the hills.

  Jackson drives the horses hard, cracking the whip over their ears. Normally, he treats his animals, whether mules, horses, goats, oxen, or dogs, with almost courtly respect, expecting them to work as hard as he does but giving them their due.

  “You and the beast in a partnership,” Jackson often says. “Both parties got responsibilities.”

  Once past the lowest of the bottomland, Jackson lets up slightly, and he and Nathan-Green both get out and walk at the head of the small caravan to lighten the load, leading the exhausted animals forward at a slower pace. There is an ominous rumble of water in the distance from the direction of their farm.

  They ride and walk south and east for two hours. The rain doesn’t let up, but the terrain changes, from the endlessly flat bottomland to mounds of rolling hills covered with pine trees. Looming ahead of the caravan, the crown of one of the most pronounced hills looks as if a field of giant Easter lilies have sprouted there, white-topped forms spiking up from the ground. They are close to the tent city.

  They ride into the midst of the makeshift community, quickly find a small vacant area in the colored section, and settle, deciding to leave most of the supplies in the wagon until morning. It is too wet and miserable to unload. Even in disaster, white and black keep separate, huddling into their private enclaves, as if loosening the established boundaries can plunge them into uncharted territory as treacherous as the floodwaters that drive them to the high ground. Jackson and Nathan-Green spread a thin tarp on top of the muddy ground. Water seeps from below, and rain assaults them from above, already compromising the largest piece of oilcloth they save for a tent. Jackson tries to build a fire, but the wind and rain make it impossible to keep lit.

  The children huddle together in a row, exhausted, wide-eyed, and
shivering, looking to their mother for assurances they will be warm and safe again soon. Emma, Ellen, L’il Jackson, Archie. Ted, in Lenora’s arms, seems to be the only one among them able to sleep peacefully, his small world simple, defined by the thickness of his blanket, his access to body heat, and the easy availability of his mother’s breast.

  “I’m cold, Mama,” says Ellen to Lenora. The children are wearing all of their clothes, layer on layer, and there is nothing to be done, no dry garments to change them into.

  As much as Jackson misses Noby, he acknowledges that Lenora must have it worse. She comes from a family of thirteen children, yet she is almost like an orphan, her birth family flicked away from her like the water a wet dog shakes from its fur. First her father, then her mother and siblings. Earlier in the year, when Noby Smith sent for her, Emma left Louisiana for Ardmore, Oklahoma, taking the two youngest, Willie Robert and Martha Geneva. It isn’t clear if any or all of them will ever come back to The Bottom.