“You going to Grambling?” Robert asks.
“Yeah,” answers Ted. “Next month.”
“How you getting up there?”
“Hop the rails.”
“That’s what I did too,” says Robert.
There is a popping sound from the right front side, and the car shimmies on the road before coming to a shuddering halt.
“It’s the tire,” Ted says knowingly. “My brother-in-law keeps a spare one in the back, only been patched twice.”
Robert and Ted leave the girls in the car and examine the damage as best they can in the dimness. If not for the full moon, the road would be pitch-black. No other cars or wagons pass. Fortunately, the reflected light is enough. Ted produces a kit from the back, including a jack and tire iron. They roll out the patched-up spare and set about jacking the car up, loosening the bolts, and replacing the ruined tire.
They don’t talk as they work, performing swiftly as a team. When the new tire is on, Ted is ready to get back in the car and head for home. Inside the car, the girls chat with ease.
“Say,” says Robert, “walk over here with me for a minute.”
Puzzled, Ted follows him to the side of the road, where they are still in visual range of the car but out of earshot.
“I expect you in for learning more than you think in college,” says Robert. “Long as you stay up at Grambling, you be all right.”
“I be back holidays,” says Ted.
“Well, stay away from Willie Dee when you come back. She don’t want you,” says Robert.
“How you speak for what she want or don’t want?” replies Ted. “I got just as much right as you to see her.”
“Not the way you thinking about,” says Robert. “Just ’cause your family put on airs in Colfax don’t mean she’s for the likes of you. Wait until you get to Grambling. The Tademy name don’t mean nothing there.”
“Take it back,” says Ted.
“Wasn’t you what started the colored school here, anyway. You all puffed up to no purpose. I say again, Tademy don’t mean nothing.”
Something reckless and wild bubbles up in Ted. A red swirl of emotion takes shape in front of his eyes, and there is a buzzing in his head. Sensing the change in Ted’s attitude, Robert Hadnot raises the tire iron, clearly determined to use what has become a weapon.
Willie Dee and Fern Lee stand watching by the side of the road, their expressions a curious mix of morbid fascination and anticipation. Ted isn’t sure when they abandoned the isolation of the car, how much they have heard.
Figure 33. Ted Tademy stands behind the hood of Walter Jerro’s (brother-in-law) 1930 Chevy; Ellen Tademy Jerro, front
Figure 34. Ted Tademy as a young man
“Somebody got to take the Tademys down a peg,” Robert says.
Ted considers throwing himself at Robert, punching and kicking to land the first blow, consequences be damned, but he backs himself away from both the insult and his anger to take a look at the situation with his rational mind. Robert Hadnot is not merely pretty-boy handsome. He is older and bigger, a muscle-bound mill hand with a weapon in his hands. He has a good four inches of height on Ted, and a gritty determination. But Robert is no bully, no thug. The circumstances have gotten out of hand. If GrandJack were here, he would say, “Always two ways to skin the same cat.”
“How you think it looks, you with a tire iron and me with nothing? You think that makes you look like a big man in front of the girls?” Ted circles around and positions himself so that he is between Robert and the car. He wants Robert to be able to see Willie Dee. He has to trust she won’t egg him on. “Don’t make any difference whether they know the Tademy name at Grambling or not,” Ted goes on, “long as I know what it means. Don’t make sense to get in a fight about it now.”
Robert hesitates and finally lowers the tire iron. “Let’s get the girls home,” he mumbles, and strides off.
Relieved, Ted follows toward the car. Willie Dee stares at him, assesses him. He senses more than sees the change. Willie Dee is looking at him in a new way. He wouldn’t go so far as to call her new attitude a reciprocation of his feelings for her, but it is a thawing, a reconsideration. It is admiration. It is respect.
Chapter
39
1937
P ounding storms have swept over The Bottom almost without break for the last two weeks, and the saturated soil of the pasture is slick and marshy, sucking at the leather of Jackson’s boots. He moves slowly, a diminutive outline against a dense cluster of pecan trees in the north field, not far from his two-story farmhouse. He has become shorter by at least two inches in the last year alone, his shoulders hunched as if coaxed down by a pulley toward the ground, his walk dependent more and more on the oak-branch cane he carries all of the time. He is an old man, alone, surveying his acres, the prideful expanse of land, buildings, and equipment that has taken years to amass. Jackson leans heavily on his cane, pausing every few steps to catch his breath, but he keeps pushing himself forward nonetheless. A vicious, convulsive cough shakes through him.
His grandson appears at a trot from the house, easily catching up to Jackson by cutting across the wide meadow at a diagonal. “GrandJack, can I help?” he offers.
“Walk beside me, L’il Man,” Jackson says. “I got to make the last round.”
“We looking for anything special, GrandJack?” Ted says. “Maybe you should go back to bed. I’ll see to whatever needs doing out here.”
“Not this time, L’il Man,” Jackson says. His breath comes in raspy gulps, as if someone is pinching his nostrils shut. He stops to study Ted’s face, all seriousness and concern.
Jackson gives in to another coughing attack, a deep, harsh hawking that consumes him and sets his thin chest vibrating. Shaken and a little surprised at the force of the assault, he briefly loses the thread of the conversation and can’t find his way back.
“L’il Man, whatever you earn, you save it for a needed time,” Jackson finally says.
Ted nods indulgently and comes to Jackson’s side, holding his arm at the elbow.
“You wait on up to the house,” Jackson says. “I be back directly.”
“GramAmy said bring you back.”
“I got things to finish. By myself.”
Ted hesitates, reluctant to leave his grandfather out in the field, maybe even more reluctant to face Amy without having brought Jackson.
“I say go along, L’il Man.” Jackson makes his voice hard, commanding. Ted turns back, and Jackson continues on his slow, hobbling walk. He walks all the way out to the lightning-split oak tree that marks the beginning of his property, across the Walden Bayou bridge until he can see the better part of the north fields, and down past Mount Pilgrim Rest Baptist Church. His muscles throb, the pressure in his chest is almost unbearable, and he shivers, finding it difficult to control the constant fluttered motion of his hands. He doubles back and heads toward the farmhouse.
It is dusk by the time Jackson drags himself up the front porch stairs, where Amy and Ted wait. They rush to him, one on each side, and put Jackson to bed in the back room. The moist heat of a fever pours from him.
Jackson reaches over to Ted and grabs hold of the sleeve of his jacket with trembling fingers. “We got one more piece of business, you and me. Go to the closet upstairs and carry back my brown hat.”
A look of alarm makes a quick journey across Ted’s face. “Who died, GrandJack?”
“Never you mind, L’il Man. Just don’t rough-handle the hat. It’s been on this earth far longer than you. Top shelf.”
Ted retrieves the hat and brings it downstairs, carefully wrapped up in a length of thin gauze. He carries the whole bundle to Jackson. Amy backs away from the sickbed to give him room.
“Unwrap it,” Jackson says to Ted.
Ted lets the cloth fall to the floor and perches the hat on his knees.
“Tell me what you see, L’il Man.”
“Your funeral hat, GrandJack.”
“Wha
t else?”
“An old brown hat with a heron feather stuck in the brim.”
“A man I once knew would call that a failure of imagination.” Jackson summons up his concentration. “This here hat start out clean and sleek. Just something to keep a man’s head covered and warm. Mr. Isaac McCullen, your great-granddaddy, he come by it after the newness already gone, but he freshen it up with this feather. If McCully alive to hear you now, he be upset to hear you call it a heron feather. Maybe to you or me it look like it come from one of the waders floating in the swamp, but he swear it come from the phoenix bird. Some say no such bird, but McCully, he tell the story of a phoenix live in the desert for five hundred years, die in a fire it sets to blaze its own self, so a new phoenix can spring from its ashes.”
“You believe that story, GrandJack, about the phoenix?”
Jackson props himself up in bed, leans forward, holds the fedora out just inches from Ted’s nose, angles it between himself and his grandson. “I believe this hat just waiting. Mr. McCullen give this hat to my father, and my father give it to me, and once I’m gone, the hat gonna come around to you. Whoever own this hat got a job to do, beyond themselves or even their family. Whoever own this hat got to push forward and reach out for others not as strong, bring them along too.”
“Why you giving Mr. McCullen’s hat to me?” asks Ted.
“This not a gift, L’il Man. This hat a responsibility. Names of men you never gonna know lay buried in the ground for you. Can’t change the past, but don’t mean you not in somebody’s debt. This hat mean no matter how much time pass, no matter how dark it seem, you not allowed to turn your face to the wall, throw up your hands, forget. You a man now, and it be time to turn your mind to men’s things.”
“What you asking me to do?” asks Ted.
Jackson leans back on the bed. “Your day coming, and when it does, it be clear to you. A man sometime don’t know who he is until somebody expect something from him. We all expecting in abundance. Don’t disappoint.”
Jackson closes his eyes, and he floats for a time in the sweet relief of letting go. He is tempted to give in now, to gladly follow the force that tugs him elsewhere. He already told Amy last night that he would soon meet his King, that wherever he goes, he will wait for her to join him. He never thought he would have the luxury to walk his land, to measure out the sum of his life and impart without hurry his last words, and now he is calm, at peace.
Amy fusses with the covers in an effort to make Jackson more comfortable, smooths a cool, wet towel across his forehead, bringing him back to the here and now. He hears her pull a chair to the side of the bed, and then she takes his hot hand into the coolness of hers, but he needs to leave all of that behind. Now he needs to consume himself with the selfishness of dying.
Now he is ready.
Figure 35. Nathan-Green “Ted” Tademy’s teaching certificate
Figure 36. Ted Tademy, U.S. Navy
Figure 37. Willie Dee Billes Tademy and Ted Tademy
Figure 38. Ted and Willie Dee Tademy, with daughters Joan and Theodorsia Tademy
Figure 39. Willie Dee with her children (clockwise) Theodorsia, Joan, Lee, and Lalita
Figure 40. Nathan-Green and Lenora’s grown children: Odessa, Ted, Ellen, Willie, Elmira, Archie, and Jackson at family reunion, 1978
Figure 41. Willie Dee and Ted Tademy, 1980
Figure 42. Nile Delta, drawn by James Tademy, age ninety-three, in Pineville, Louisiana, 2003; first drawn for him by his uncle Jackson Tademy
Figure 43. Nile Delta as it existed in the 1800s
Author’s Note
Some family stories are gloriously specific. With great pride, a family member repeats colorful details of an ancestor’s life, passed down for one or two or three generations. If a researcher is very lucky, another branch of the family fills in gaps, embellishing and confirming or adding a heretofore unknown nugget. But there is also a different type of family story, lacking shape and enthusiasm, only stingily disclosed, rationed within vague hints or whispers, and only then with great reluctance and obvious discomfort by the teller.
So it was with my attempts to understand my ancestors on my father’s side. When I was growing up, and later, as an adult, I became obsessed with tracking down every branch of our family tree, and both types of stories were laid out before me. Certain family episodes were repeated almost verbatim, regardless of which parent or aunt or uncle or distant cousin recited our history. Sam Tademy and his son Jackson always inspired deep reverence and pride, starting with Sam reclaiming the Tademy name after the Civil War—hanging on to the closest phonetic pronunciation he could get to his original African name—and quickly followed by the father and son starting the first colored schools in Colfax, Louisiana. Whenever Noby Smith was mentioned, first he appeared as a sickly baby who’d been laid out in the back of a buckboard wagon to die but was rescued and nursed back to health by Hansom Brisco and his wife. That story was inevitably followed by the tale of a fully grown Noby, beaten within an inch of his life by a white man at a gravel pit and saved only because his family and Freemason brothers spirited him out of the state to Ardmore, Oklahoma, before a white posse could kill him.
The accounts given of my other great-grandfather were not nearly as satisfying. Ellen Tademy Jerro, my father’s sister, still lives in Louisiana, and on my “roots trips,” I would stay at her house in Colfax. No matter how many times I asked her about Isaac McCullen, the most conclusive response I could ever elicit was a single statement: “There used to be a lot of McCullens around here, but not anymore.”
The census records for Isaac McCullen stopped after 1870 in Colfax, Louisiana. Searching for further clues, I visited the Colfax library, the Colfax newspaper office, and the Colfax courthouse, located at one end of the small, dusty town. Outside the courthouse was, and still is, a prominent marker, a state historical landmark:
On this site occurred the Colfax Riot in which
three white men and 150 negroes were slain.
This event on April 13, 1873 marked the end of
carpetbag misrule in the South.
Taken aback, I began to do parallel research on the Colfax Riot, only to discover that the few easily obtained records were all reported from a very specific point of view—the voice of a southern town thankfully purging itself of dangerous troublemakers. I visited the Colfax cemetery, where there is a massive marble obelisk memorial almost twelve feet high dedicated to the three white men who died on that day:
Erected to the Memory
of the Heroes
Stephen Decatur Parish,
James West Hadnot,
and Sidney Harris
Who Fell in the Colfax Riot
Fighting for White Supremacy,
April 13, 1873
I returned to my aunt’s house that evening upset and somewhat testy from my day’s research. I asked Aunt Ellen about the Colfax Riot and what she knew about it. Only then did another piece of our family history dribble out. “Our people were there,” she volunteered for the first time. “Some got out, and some didn’t.” To this day I don’t know if she knew any more than that, but it was the full extent of what she was willing to share. Those words have haunted me from the first time she uttered them years ago. They haunt me still.
I determined to try to imagine the lives of my ancestors—former slaves and then, at long last, United States of America citizens—within the context of this horrific incident. One prominent historian, Eric Foner, calls that Easter Sunday 1873 “the bloodiest single act of carnage in all of Reconstruction.” This novel attempts to overlay the rich anecdotes passed down in my family lore with the times in which they unfolded, a blend of fact and fiction told from the point of view of people whose voices were lost in official records. I want to honor those who were able to reemerge from the “scary times,” to push forward with their lives from one generation to the next. From the comfort of my privileged life over 130 years later, I can still barely comprehend what th
ey had to endure, but I acknowledge I am here only because of their stamina and resolve. They gave their all for me, without knowing me, and for that I am eternally grateful.
Acknowledgments
Novels don’t come easy, but they can be coaxed into the world with the help of voices that are, thankfully, outside of one’s own head.
My agent, Kim Witherspoon of Inkwell Management, and her trusty aide Eleanor Jackson believed in this book at a time when belief was hard to come by, and they helped me shape the final product. Gratitude to my editor for the second time, Jamie Raab, and the rest of the gang at Warner Books.
A very special thanks to Joan Tademy Lothery, my sister, who is always my first reader during the early, tentative, and terrifyingly fragile stages of writing a book. And to all of the other helpful readers along the way, from the first draft to the eighteenth. You know who you are.
I could not have created this work without my aunt Ellen sharing our family stories and her encouragement to document them. Ellen Tademy Jerro just passed in 2006. Neither she nor my father lived to see the publication of this tribute to their family, but they were both proud people who always knew exactly where they came from.
Joel Sipress, professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Superior, provided invaluable help and insight in researching the Red River region during Reconstruction, beginning with his work From the Barrel of a Gun: The Politics of Murder in Grant Parish, and his subsequent generous offer to share his unpublished manuscript, “The Triumph of White Supremacy: The Politics of Race in a New South Community.” Mary Linn Wernet, head archivist at Northwestern State University in Natchitoches, Louisiana, helped me get my hands on several of the documents that appear in the book, particularly the list of dead and wounded on that fateful day in 1873.
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