Red River

by Lalita Tademy

  Lenora’s brothers Aston and Sidney drifted away from The Bottom shortly after, not forced into exile, as Noby had been, but by their own choice, as if the community had a catching disease against which they were determined to protect themselves. After getting Noby away by train, Aston and Sidney left for good, taking up permanent residence in Alexandria and Boyce. They have put The Bottom and Grant Parish behind them without looking back. Even their visits are scarce, as if they can’t bear to step foot where their father was nearly left for dead. Lenora has lost the comfort of her father close, and her children have lost their grandfather before getting the chance to know him. At least he lives.

  A couple of years ago, before Noby’s exile, it snowed, an oddity in Louisiana, and Jackson recalls how the Tademys and the Smiths gathered at his farmhouse. Amy, Polly, and Lenora made buckets of ice cream, packing the scarce snow and coarse salt in a metal container, using the butter churn as an ice-cream maker, cranking until the handle resisted, transforming everyday cow’s milk into a wintertime treat. The children begged for more, as everyone would expect, but so too did Jackson and Noby, two older men on the front porch enjoying themselves as if their childhood had been handed back to them. No one could get enough of the frozen concoction, and the women made batch after batch for as long as the snow held out.

  Ted wakes and starts to cry. They are almost on top of one another under the oilcloth, without space, no place to go.

  “Why that boy crying all the time?” snaps Nathan-Green. “Can’t you keep him quiet?” he says to Lenora, who tries to shush the baby, but Ted won’t be pacified, his milk cry strong and un-relenting.

  “Babies cry,” says Jackson crossly. “Let him be.”

  Nathan-Green turns his back to the others, lies on his side, and settles in to sleep.

  Under the oilcloth, on the soggy ground, barely escaped from the barrage of rain, Jackson acknowledges the wealth shivering beneath the tent’s leaky canopy. Three generations. Jackson Tademy, Nathan-Green Tademy, and Ted Tademy. The past, the present, and the future. They fit together, if uneasily, all the fierce protectiveness of family, if not necessarily the acceptance.

  Jackson has been negligent, waiting too long for life to unfold in the exact way he has envisioned it. Twelve years have passed since his first commissary burned to the ground, taking his father’s legacy of the colored school with it. He and Noby have grandchildren who will grow up without the benefit of formal education, and he can no longer hang back in the blind hope that his firstborn will step up to the task. There is another generation hard on the heels of Nathan-Green’s, and others in The Bottom and Colfax need what Jackson knows is in his grasp to provide. If Andrew is the son who slips into the role of successor instead of Nathan-Green, so be it. Community is as important as family.

  Jackson forms the words he could not force himself to utter on the night of Noby’s departure from Colfax. Out loud, Jackson says to his grandson, now sleeping, “I promise.”

  Though his voice is soft and the storm rages outside, they all hear him, stare at him, not understanding. He leaves them to wonder without clarification. The man to whom he would like to explain is gone, and the baby boy who needs to understand is too young. Jackson is firm in his resolve and absolutely clear about what he must do.

  They return home three weeks later, the rain a memory and the sun at their backs. Water stands in puddles along the saturated ground, but the mud has become firmer with each passing day. At the height of the deluge, the churning water sprayed halfway up the walls of the cabin, leaving rust-colored residue stubbornly clinging like vines crisscrossing the wooden surfaces. They shovel and scrape, sweep out the thick layers of left-behind mud, cart out the big furniture for the sun to dry, open the windows to air out the house, and scrub down the floors and walls to avoid further mildew. They retrieve their belongings from where they battened them down on the makeshift scaffolding behind the house. Soggy fabric, damp for weeks under the tarp, has produced a foul-smelling mess. Everything will have to be washed and properly dried, but there is little long-term damage. The foundation of the house held, elevated on cinder blocks, and the floodwaters didn’t warp the porch too badly. They find nothing major missing, and, except for a smashed piece of Amy’s crockery, a favorite, their damaged belongings won’t be so difficult to replace. They lost a few chickens, but all in all, this flood isn’t as bad as many they have lived through in the past.

  The Tademys carry on the best they can, as they do every year, picking up the pieces and going forward. Sometimes, concedes Jackson, that is all that can be done.

  Figure 23. Tademy Road sign, Colfax, Louisiana

  Chapter

  33

  1925

  I t is just too hot to stay inside his farmhouse, Jackson thinks, upstairs or downstairs. Even the collar of his newly ironed shirt has given up its starched stiffness, and he is drenched. At least today is Saturday, a day away from the schoolhouse. Saturday and his sixty-third birthday, a double indulgence. Amy and the women have been busy in the kitchen since last night, barely pausing to rest, putting pots to boil, baking three-layer cakes, frying up not only minnows from the bayou but chickens and fritters as if it is Sunday. Soon every one of his children and their families will descend on his farm for his celebration birthday supper.

  Aided by his cane, Jackson goes out to the back porch, hoping for a breeze.

  Andrew’s wife, Gertrude, a substantial woman with her head done up in a scarflike turban, dominates the back stoop. Gertrude stands, imposing, overseeing the cranking of ice cream by several of his grandchildren. Polly, too old to stand on her swollen feet for long, sits alongside, queenlike in her rocking chair, shucking a small mountain of corn ears, pulling off the husks and silk of each before moving on to the next.

  “How you feeling this morning, Mama?” Jackson asks.

  “Shoo,” Polly says. “You mens need to get out the way, let us do our work.”

  Jackson is at a loss. His birthday, and he finds himself an interloper in his own house. He joins Andrew and Nathan-Green on the front porch, but he is restless.

  “Let’s us go into town, see the high school,” Jackson says to his sons. “By the time we get back, may be they be ready to treat a man like it his special day. We even take the wagon.”

  Ted, his six-year-old grandson, peers at him from the front stoop, eyes wide with desire. Jackson goes to the library shelf in his front room and comes back outside with an ancient-looking slender blue book with a tattered cover. He tucks it into his jacket pocket.

  “Follow me, L’il Man,” Jackson says. “You going with us.”

  Nathan-Green rehitches the horse, and they take Andrew’s wagon. Jackson situates himself on the back buckboard, and Ted wiggles in to sit close beside him. Jackson sits up straight and plants the length of his black leather shoes on the wooden face board to brace himself. Ted straightens his back and holds his legs out, suspended in air, although his bare feet won’t reach far enough to touch the wooden cross-plank. Jackson loosens his collar. Ted wears a coarse white cotton shirt sewn by his mother, loose at the front, but he fusses with the material around his neck, repeats Jackson’s gesture, as if he too has a collar to loosen. The four of them set off down the narrow piney woods road, past the half-dead oak tree split by lightning, and on along Bayou Darrow leading to Colfax.

  “Comfortable, L’il Man?” Jackson asks.

  “Yes, GrandJack,” Ted answers.

  Jackson takes the frayed reader out of his jacket pocket and passes it to Ted. “Read out page thirty-seven to me. Careful, that book be older than you.”

  Ted handles the book gingerly, knows not to open it too wide and risk any pages falling out.

  Dan has a cod-fish in a pan.

  The pan is a tin pan.

  This is a big cod-fish.

  Dan has a mop in his hand.

  Dan will mop the wet step.

  The mop Dan has, is a rag mop.

  He closes the book and looks to his
grandfather for approval.

  “You coming along fine,” says Jackson.

  “GrandJack, when does I get to go off to high school?” asks Ted.

  “When do I go off to high school,” Jackson corrects.

  “When do I go off to high school?” Ted parrots.

  Jackson laughs. “Not at six,” he says, but when he sees the stricken anguish on Ted’s face, he adopts a less dismissive tone. “You got brothers and sisters ahead of you, and you not old enough yet. You learn everything you can in my elementary school in The Bottom, and wait your turn for Andrew’s high school in town. Only so many be boarding in Colfax at a time. But you keep racing that mind like you do, and I teach you extra myself out of my personal library until it time for you to go. You already better at reading than most. Tademys is special, you know.”

  “We come from Egypt,” Ted offers.

  “Tademys got a long line of history to live up to,” Jackson says. “We come from Egypt, in Africa.” They ride in silence for the better part of an hour, until the woods thin and they see the first signs of town.

  They keep to the wide dusty main thoroughfare, bisected by the railroad tracks, toward Smithfield Quarter on the other side.

  “Take the route past the courthouse,” Jackson says.

  “We don’t have no call to go into white folks’ part of town,” says Nathan-Green.

  “The boy need to see it,” says Jackson. “Colfax our town too. Do like I say.”

  Reluctantly, Nathan-Green turns the horse toward a side road and keeps her at a steady pace. They pass the old Pecan Tree, a landmark with its spreading canopy of branches, and Jackson has Nathan-Green pull up well short of the courthouse square. Three white men sit in straight-back chairs in front of the courthouse building in the shade of the overhang, barely moving, except to fan the flies that linger too long or wander too close to their faces. A day this hot doesn’t lend itself to much more than swapping stories and chewing tobacco. The white men keep their eyes on the wagon, watch the three men and the young boy to see what they will do. Across the street from the courthouse is the newspaper office, but it looks deserted.

  “Your relations fight to hold on to their rights on this very spot,” Jackson says to Ted. “Some make it out, some don’t. They was brave men.”

  Ted stares at his grandfather, questioning, but that is all Jackson is willing to burden the boy with today.

  “We best get gone,” Jackson says to Nathan-Green, and his son giddy-ups the horse. But when they pass closer to the courthouse, one of the men in front calls out to them.

  “Whoa,” he says. “What bizness you boys got here?”

  It is Andrew who speaks up. “No bizness,” he says. “Just on our way to the other side.”

  “Ain’t you that teacher fella, over to the colored school?” the man asks.

  “Yes, sir,” says Andrew. “We going there now.”

  “Well, stay over where you belong,” the man says. He leans back, tips his chair until the top frame rests against the courthouse wall, and puts his hat over his face.

  Again Nathan-Green urges the horse forward, and they head for Smithfield Quarter.

  “Young man, never fight,” Jackson says to Ted. “When you see you getting hot, count down from ten to one inside your head. Only a fool don’t have sense enough to walk away.”

  Once they cross the railroad tracks, the land slopes downward, more prone to flood. Four houses from the end, just past the first row of rough-hewn cabins, is a whitewashed building, smaller than the surrounding houses, but brighter and more pristine. It has been freshly scrubbed down with a fresh coat of limewater that makes it appear to almost shine in the sunlight. Off toward the back is a small vegetable garden, poled off and flagged with crop markers. Each time Jackson sees the colored high school, he gets the same familiar quickening in his chest. The Grant Parish Training School, dedicated to no other purpose but to teach children, a giant stride from one corner of his commissary of so long ago or the small elementary school he runs in The Bottom.

  Out front, in the full force of the sun, a colored man in a wide-brimmed straw hat ax-splits logs into potbellied-stove-size pieces to add to the neat row of stacked pinewood piled along one side underneath an overhang. He is shirtless under his overalls.

  “Brother Boyd,” Jackson calls out in greeting.

  The man stops working and tips his hat. “Jackson, Professor, Nathan-Green,” Nep Boyd replies. “And who this little one be?”

  “Nathan-Green’s boy,” says Jackson. “Nathan-Green Tademy, Jr., but we call him Ted.”

  “Today my day to see after the school,” Nep explains. “We don’t see you much this spring, Jackson. Used to be every week.”

  “I be staying closer to home these days,” Jackson says. “Colfax a little far now. Since Andrew move into town, he take over. My boys carry on the school just fine.”

  “Well, good whenever we sees you,” says Nep Boyd. “The Tademy name hold up special to mean colored education in Colfax. Don’t think we all not thankful for it.”

  Jackson nods. “Come on, L’il Man,” he says to Ted. “See where you coming one day.”

  Inside, the one large room is divided by a partition that goes three quarters of the way to the ceiling. A row of hooks lines the walls, and an iron potbellied stove and a large rectangular table fill the communal space. Two large blackboards and a series of mismatched long wooden benches dominate each of the sections. In a careful hand, MR. TADEMY has been written in chalk in large block letters at the top of one of the slate blackboards, and PROFESSOR TADEMY on the other.

  Jackson walks from one space to the other, marveling.

  “We just raise up the wall inside, Papa,” boasts Andrew. “Makes it easier to separate the grades. This old stove not quite up to the task of heating the whole building, but we do better one day.”

  Jackson picks up a small pot in the corner, half full of brownish water, and holds the pot out accusingly to Andrew.

  “A new roof leak, but nothing a pot underneath can’t handle,” his son says. “Just haven’t had time to patch it yet.”

  “Better to treat the disease than the complaint,” says Jackson. He throws the water out into the front yard. “These children learning more here from you than just their letters.”

  “Yes, Papa. We get to it.”

  “Sooner better than later,” says Jackson. “If I’da knowed, I’da brought my hammer and some wood. We all busy, but at least half-dozen men I can think of come help you if you ask. Nep Boyd be on it this afternoon.”

  “Yes, Papa.”

  “And how you coming along, Nathan-Green?” Jackson asks.

  “I teach the youngest ones,” Nathan-Green says. “We got thirty students, come from far away as Pineville.”

  “One son principal and the other teacher,” says Jackson. He takes one last look around the small space. “Now I’m ready to get back to The Bottom and celebrate my birthday.”

  Figure 24. Colfax colored school, Willie Dee Billes, front row, seventh from left

  Figure 25. Andrew “Professor” Tademy

  Figure 26. Nathan-Green Tademy,

  Sr., and four of his eight children:

  clockwise, Jackson, Archie, Odessa,

  and Ted Tademy, hand on hip

  Chapter

  34

  1933

  S top sniffing ’round that Billes gal,” Aunt Gertrude says. She speaks proper, in the way both she and Uncle Andrew affect, worrying over every slow word, drawing out each syllable, as if their lips are trained show horses, prancing. “What she possibly want with the likes of you?”

  For three months, since Ted came to live in Colfax with his aunt and uncle, Gertrude Smith Tademy has ridden him hard. He endures the constant carping so he can stay in school. True, life is better than when he first arrived from The Bottom. In the beginning, he had to endure the brief humiliation of being put into seventh grade with younger students, even though he was fourteen, but that didn’
t last beyond the first school day. Just last month, and for the second time, his uncle Andrew advanced him another grade, to ninth, not because Ted is the principal’s nephew but because he so clearly outstrips the other students. The lessons in the higher grade are more interesting, challenging, particularly mathematics. The teacher quickly discovered that Ted could hold long columns of figures in his head and produce a sum without writing anything down. She sometimes makes him perform this stunt, problem after problem, but the truth is, he doesn’t mind. He has acquired enough of a school reputation that the sandy-haired girl he fancies talks to him in a friendly way now. Sometimes she even lets him carry her dinner pail on the walk home, and although he knows he isn’t the only boy afforded the privilege, it is progress.

  Ted tries to keep out of his aunt Gertrude’s way, makes himself scarce when she is close at hand, but she is around most of the time. Gertrude spends weekdays at the schoolhouse, teaching classes and helping with the administrative workload, leaving two hours early to cook supper for the family. At night she rules the roost at home, parceling out criticism, disappointment, and chores. Ted endures all of her fault-finding, her picking at him no matter what he does, but she has escalated her advice-giving since discovering he is sweet on Willie Dee Billes.

  “You got to keep your mind on your lessons and off that fickle Billes girl or you won’t end up no better than your father,” she finishes. Aunt Gertrude inflates, full of the import of what she has to say. As Ted watches, she seems to become bigger, the way birds puff themselves up on cold mornings.

  Ted doesn’t know where to begin. In only one sentence, Aunt Gertrude has managed to insult his father, himself, and the girl who, without trying, has wrenched control of his heart.