by Jabari Asim
“What did you say?”
“Hmm? I was talking about picket fences.”
“No, after that. What did you say?”
“I want to make sure Marie has every—”
“Who’s that? Who’s Marie?”
Gabriel smiled shyly. “That’s what I’m going to call my daughter.”
“How did you come up with that?”
“It was my mother’s name. After she died, my dad talked about her all the time. Hardly ever talked about anything else. But he didn’t like to say her name. He always said, ‘Your mother this, your mother that.’ Whenever he slipped and said ‘Marie,’ his voice would break and his eyes would fill with tears. After a while he stopped slipping. And I learned to miss hearing my mother’s name. I said to myself, ‘I know how to fix that. Someday.’”
He turned to her. Her face was tilted upward in amazement. She grabbed his arm.
“Are you trying to tell me you don’t like that name?”
“Gabriel Patterson, pray with me.”
“Huh?”
“You heard me. Pray with me, right now.”
They knelt by the side of the road.
Later Rose prayed again, alone.
“Okay, Lord, you’ve given me a sign,” she said. “Now I need a way.”
Ashes to Ashes
1928
Octavius “O.G.” Givens was relieving himself when the trouble began. He had ambled into Lemon’s Woods behind the barbecue party, his mind on unloading his bladder, burdened as it was with homemade white lightning. He was a young man, just sixteen, but at two hundred–plus pounds and a whisker shy of six feet, he could pull his own weight with strength to spare. The son of a murdered moonshiner, he’d taken over his daddy’s still and done well enough to keep his mama in biscuits and himself in brogans—the shiniest available in Liberty.
O.G. didn’t just spit and swagger like a man. More than one grown gal had sworn to her sisters that those big hands of his were useful for plenty besides bare-knuckle brawling and squeezing cane. Word was he could stroke a woman until she hollered “Lawd, ha’ mercy!” All of that before he got down to the real business of plowing that furrow like a natural-born farmer.
The barbecue wasn’t a church event. Otherwise he’d have left his best hooch at home and relied on his trademark lemonade. Already half-unzipped, he tossed a wholehearted invitation over his shoulder to the Redd twins as he entered the trees and prepared to do his business. He had just shaken off the last drops when he heard a giggle. He looked and saw Annie Mae Redd, the more outgoing of the twins, sashaying eagerly in his direction.
“So you decided to join me after all,” he said with a confident grin.
She answered with a compliant squeak.
Odder even than O.G.’s precocious success was his friendship with Leo “Mile-a-Minute” Madison. The fastest Negro in Liberty, Leo was as devout as O.G. was dirty. As a young boy, he’d seen the Son of God in a cotton field. Later that evening, the folks in the quarters asked him to describe the experience. “It was like looking into a mirror,” he said. “That’s the only way I can describe it.” Since then he’d been convinced that his steps were guided.
The reverend and the rascal, as they had been fondly known since they were knee-high to saw grass, had been closer than brothers from the get-go. They remained inseparable even as they stared down advancing adulthood, which for most Negro men in Liberty meant an endless term of backbreaking labor in the blistering fields or a short, dirty life wrestled to a violent end in a turpentine camp. Leo and O.G. meant to avoid all that, Leo by living the life of Christ and O.G. by living a life of crime. They pursued their respective paths with admirable discipline, thick as thieves all the while.
The day that changed their lives forever proceeded typically enough, with the young reverend-to-be in town praying over the sick while his pal O.G. bounced up and down between Annie Mae’s experienced, willing thighs. So enthusiastic were her squeals and sighs that they drowned out the drama unfolding nearby.
“Well, well, Bufe,” said Bob Stone, “looks like we found ourselves a party.”
Just like that, the happy hubbub of jug, fiddle, and harmonica, the rib eating and backslapping, came to an abrupt and unwanted end.
“Uh-huh, a party,” said Buford, Bob’s idiot friend. Snot was running down his chin.
“We’re just having a barbecue, Mr. Stone. Minding our own business.” That was J. C. Frison, an able hand at the sawmill that Bob Stone’s father owned. The corded veins on J.C.’s forearms were nearly as big as Bob’s sunburned neck.
Bob guffawed. “Business? Now that’s a funny notion, Nigras having business. Only businesses round here are owned by my daddy or his friends. That means one day alla y’all will work for me. Might as well start now. Somebody pull me up a chair.”
While someone dragged a folding chair forward, others began gathering plates and wrapping up dishes.
“Wait just a minute,” Bob commanded. “Before y’all hightail it out of here, I want to sample your fixin’s. Those look like ribs. Buford, nobody cooks ribs like Nigras. I know because I growed up on ’em. Bring us both a plate, and I want first-class service.”
Bob stroked his chin and eyed the women. “Rita Mae, you come wait on Buford.” Rita Mae, the less outgoing of the Redd twins, came forward reluctantly, carrying a plate.
“J.C., get us one of those card tables and a couple lemonades. Set us up right.”
When Bob’s instructions had been carried out, he rested his eyes on Floretha Madison, a coal black beauty much older than he. In fact, she was Leo’s mama. Neither time nor its ravages had left any visible mark upon her lithe figure and unlined face. Despite her comeliness, Miss Floretha, a widow, was treated in the quarters with the deference and courtesy elders used to be able to reasonably expect. Bob Stone was not from the quarters.
“Floretha, I do believe I choose you,” he said, licking his lips.
“Hold on, Mr. Stone,” said J.C. “We don’t want any trouble.”
“That’s right,” Bob said. He never took his eyes off Miss Floretha. “And there won’t be any because you’re gonna sit your black ass down right there on the ground. All of you boys do that, before you get any stupid ideas and find yourselves out of jobs tomorrow.”
Sullen and humiliated, the half dozen or so men at the barbecue shuffled forward and sat on the ground. Rage rose from them as thick and redolent as the smoke that had issued from the barbecue grills not long before. Unlike the smoke, which rode the air over the woods and on to far more pleasant places, their anger had nowhere to go. So they sucked it up and held it inside, where the only damage would be to themselves. Unable to face their tormentors, their women, or each other, they stared at the dirt.
Miss Floretha sat on Bob’s lap as instructed. Trembling but maintaining her dignity, she held his glass of lemonade to his lips after he sloppily tore into each rib. She spoke softly while he sipped.
“Now, Mr. Stone,” she whispered. “I’ve known your family since before you was born. We’ve always gotten along.” Her tone was gentle, motherly. “We sure do appreciate your visit, but we’ve got work to do for you tomorrow. If we don’t go home soon, say our prayers and get our rest, we won’t be any good for you. So why don’t you and Buford just let us go on home? Hmm? Just let us go on home.”
But it was to no avail. Bob elbowed Miss Floretha off his lap. “Bufe, will you look at this? I’ve gone and got sauce on my hands. Hard to eat ribs without your fingers getting sticky.”
“I’ll get you a napkin,” Miss Floretha said.
“No need. No need at all. I’ve got something funner in mind. Bend over.”
A silent second stretched into a long painful minute. Or so it seemed.
Miss Floretha prayed that she’d misheard. “Beg your pardon?”
Bob snorted. “No need to beg for what’s given freely. Bend your pretty self right on over.”
A groan escaped from one of the men. A woman began p
raying softly.
“Don’t like what you see, look away,” Bob shouted.
“Please, Mr. Stone,” Miss Floretha said, still whispering. “Why are you doing this?”
“Because I’m bored, and maybe a little bit drunk too. Now bend.”
Miss Floretha bent from the waist, resting her hands on her knees. Delicately as a maiden adjusting her petticoats, Bob lifted the back of her dress and folded it neatly above her hips.
“All I want to do is wipe my hands, that’s all,” Bob said. “Can’t a gentleman just wipe his hands?”
He mashed his palm against Miss Floretha’s rear, smearing her underpants with sauce. “Bufe, when I’m done, you need to wipe your hands too.”
O.G. sauntered out of the woods, adjusted his pants, and let loose a satisfying belch. Then he looked up and saw Bob Stone with his hands on his best friend’s mama. He unbuckled his belt before he took another step.
“Rita Mae, Annie Mae—whoever the hell you are—get up and get your black ass in position. Bufe’s got a lot of sauce on his hands. Hell, Bufe, you might want to wipe some of that snot off while you’re at it.”
“I’ll whip you like a nigger.”
Bob Stone looked up and saw O. G. Givens standing in front of him and breathing fire, his belt coiled in his fist like a rawhide snake.
Bob slowly and stiffly rolled his head on his shoulders, as if struggling with the effects of a hangover. Suddenly deadly sober, he glared at O.G.
“You ready to die, boy?”
“Right here, dyin’ gets done two ways,” O.G. said. He turned to his friend’s mother.
“Get up, Miss Floretha. You too, Rita Mae.”
The women complied and were quickly hustled away by their friends.
Bob stood up and wiped the rest of the sauce on his shirt-tail. “We know where you live, Ock. Tavius.” He said it like he was spitting a bad taste out of his mouth.
“Ain’t but one place I call home.”
After Bob and Buford slunk away, the gathering returned to life. But partying was the last thing on their minds.
“We got to get you out of town, O.G.”
“They’re sure to come around nightfall.”
“We’ll stand with you, O.”
O.G. grunted and pulled on his belt. “Like you stood with me just now? Don’t y’all worry about it. Y’all have to work for that man’s family. I don’t.”
Annie Mae grabbed his hand. “What are you gonna do?”
“Going back to my place. I’ll wait for them there.”
“They’ll kill you, O.G.”
He grabbed her and kissed her hard. Maybe it would be the last time he felt such softness.
“My daddy wouldn’t live under any man’s heel,” he said. “Neither will I.”
Leo had always been too clever to let a white boy talk him into a footrace, so his speed was known only on the dark side of the tracks. White folks knew him as Leo, or Floretha’s Boy.
Any Negro who saw him that night would not have been amazed to spy him tearing through the fields like a black blur. It had been almost sundown when word had reached him all the way in town, and he had taken off almost immediately, burning up the rough tracks and hidden trails away from the beaten paths where white men traveled. He knew the wild country as well as anyone, thanks to his half-Seminole grandpa. The old man had taught him how to string a bow and stalk game. Together they brought down everything from deer to squirrel, always sharing their haul with O.G. and his family.
As a red moon rose and dropped a haze of sinister crimson over the surrounding darkness, Leo prayed that his shortcut would lead him to O.G.’s shack before the mob got there. If it didn’t, he knew that his friend would die without begging, without showing the least sign of fear.
But there was no mob. Perhaps emboldened by drink or an inflated sense of their own power, Bob and Buford hunted their quarry alone and on foot. It was true: they had to be two of the dumbest white men in the whole South. Leo’s path through the woods enabled him to intercept them nearly a mile from their destination. He walked toward them slowly, waving his white shirt above his head.
“What the hell?” Bob squinted into the darkness.
“It’s that saved nigger,” Buford said. He was holding a bottle and smelled like beer. Snot was running down his chin.
“Please,” Leo said. “You don’t want to do this.” Bob appeared to have a handgun tucked into his waistband. Leo could spot no weapon on Buford.
“You trying to tell white men what they can and cannot do?”
“No, Mr. Stone. All I’m saying is let’s think for a minute. It was my mother you insulted. Deal with me. I’m not trying to fight you.”
“You’re usually a sensible nigger,” Bob said, “not like the one we’re goin’ to see. Wait a minute. Did you say insulted? I gave your mother the time of her life. Hell, I expect she’ll be coming from the quarters any minute now, beggin’ me for more.”
Quick as a cat, Leo pinned Bob to the ground. Almost as quickly, Buford smashed his bottle across Leo’s neck. He wiped his nose with the back of his wrist.
Leo felt a sharp, slashing pain and rolled onto his back. Bob struggled to his feet, breathing heavily. “Want to get yourself gutted tonight?”
“Yeah,” Buford said. “We can kill two niggers just as easy as one.”
“Just let him bleed out,” Bob instructed. “If he lives it’ll be a lesson to him.”
Leo woke up dazed. The red moon above slowly glowed into focus. Remembering the fight, he put his hand to his neck. It came away wet. He crawled to his feet, holding his shirt to the wound. After stumbling back into the woods, he washed his neck in a shallow pool and packed the long, ugly cut with mud. Then he headed to his friend’s home. Staggering, he came to O.G.’s still at the edge of the woods, a short distance from his shack in the little clearing. The two friends had spent many a night together in those woods, laughing, arguing, planning for a future that made room for real men. Real men like Leo’s grandfather, who taught him that any hunter worth his salt was never far from his weapons. Keeping low to the ground, he turned left, walked ten paces to a hollow tree, and reached inside. Without looking, he quietly gathered his bow. Listening hard for sounds of activity at the shack, he strapped on his quiver.
He peered between two branches, where the red moon shone on O.G., beaten and bruised. Leo suspected he’d been shot and pistol-whipped. His arms were bound, and he was kneeling in front of a stump. His pants were around his ankles. His penis was curled on top of the stump. In front of him, Bob Stone had a small fire going. He dipped a knife in and out of the flames while Buford prepared to pee nearby.
“Gon’ whip my ass, huh, nigger? Who’s doing the whippin’ now?”
Bob was raging. O.G. wasn’t gagged but said nothing, determined to go out like a man.
“My glory was fresh in me,” Leo prayed, “and my bow was renewed in my hand.” He notched the first arrow.
Buford’s water leaked out of him as if he was still alive. It trickled steadily to the ground as if he were still breathing and had not died standing up, with an arrow through his throat. His windpipe severed, he couldn’t even gasp. Finally he tipped over, and made an ugly sound when he landed. Snot dripped down his chin.
Bob heard the sound and turned. He stood, just what Leo had prayed for, and took an arrow through the heart.
Minutes later, the reverend and the rascal were dragging two bodies into the still. “You okay?” the reverend asked.
“Yeah, flesh wound,” the rascal replied.
Leo pulled a length of burning wood from the fire and prepared to touch it to the still. “Ashes to ashes,” he said. “Shall we pray?”
“No, nigger, let’s run,” O.G. replied. “Then we’ll pray.”
No black man killed a white man in Dixie and survived. Under cover of darkness and with the help of others who’d followed the same blood-streaked path of the Great Migration, Leo and O.G. fled the South. As did many before them
, they shed their old names to throw any pursuers off their trail.
1968
Now, decades later, Rev. Miles Washington and Ananias Goode were helping dispose of another white man’s body. Minutes before, they had reclined in the luxurious backseat of Goode’s sedan as Guts Tolliver expertly steered it toward the twin gates behind Harry Truman Boys’ Club. Detective Grimes pulled up, unlocked the gates, and waved them through. Guts leaned on the gas. Soon the acreage on which they stood would be turned into ball fields and playgrounds, but at the moment it was fallow ground. Ananias lit up a fat cigar.
“How’s the secretary working out?”
“Rose? She’s a peach.”
Twin beams of light streamed briefly on the field, then shut off. An engine was killed, a door opened, and the undertaker stepped out. “Got him right here,” Mr. Burk said. “Nice and cold.”
Guts went in back of the hearse, slid the body out, and tossed it over his shoulder. It was wrapped in a body bag. The men followed Rev. Washington through an opening in the rear of the club. They paused before a huge crater. “Dump him here,” the reverend said.
With a simple shrug, Guts tossed the last of Detective Mortimer into the pit. Burk followed with a bag of quicklime.
“They pour the cement for the pool tomorrow,” the reverend said.
“Good deal,” said Ananias. “Ready to roll?”
“No, we should pray first.”
“You’re not serious,” the gangster protested.
He looked around. Guts took off his hat and held it over his heart. Burk bowed his head. The reverend cleared his throat.
The gangster sighed. “You are serious,” he said. He bowed his head.
“Heavenly Father,” the reverend said. “Forgive us our trespasses as we dispatch this sinner to the fires of eternal torment.”
“Amen.”
“Amen.”
“Amen.”
“A-muthafuckin’-men.” Ananias looked around, embarrassed. “Sorry,” he added.
They headed back to the field.
Burk turned to the others. “Poker Tuesday?”
Ananias nodded. “Yep.”