We Are Not Like Them

by Christine Pride

  Turning into the parking lot itself brings on a sense of reverence and dread, as if this patch of asphalt is already hallowed ground. My breath grows shallow as I approach the entrance, almost like I’m afraid, which I am: afraid of how this place might affect me. I already feel fragile, like I’m walking around with an open wound.

  Don’t fight the tears. I haven’t cried once since Gigi died, even though crying may be exactly what I need. Maybe that explains this weight I’ve been carrying around with me, all the unshed tears.

  I arrive at a sign near the entrance and stand next to a heavyset white woman who reads it with one hand over her mouth, an apprehensive grimace on her face. I need to move past her before she makes eye contact or looks to me for some sort of reassurance or says something like, God it’s so awful, and I’ll be forced to comfort her. The words on the sign have hit me hard too.

  For the hanged and beaten.

  For the shot, drowned, and burned.

  For the tortured, tormented, and terrorized.

  For those abandoned by the rule of law.

  We will remember.

  A little boy, maybe four or five, runs toward me, wearing a shirt that reads, “I Am My Ancestors’ Wildest Dream.”~ His giggles carry through the air, both welcome and out of place. Otherwise, the small crowd dotting the grounds is quiet, reverent.

  I make my way toward the pavilion, where enormous red stones hang from the ceiling. Each is engraved with the names of victims, thousands and thousands of lynching victims, county by county. The crushing weight of the stones, of history, the pain of my ancestors, feels like grief. A group of people—probably a tour—huddles together, but no one speaks, as if they’re all stunned into silence, reckoning with the atrocities, presented as they are with such unflinching honesty.

  I spot Willie standing with his head bowed, chin to his chest. I move closer and see two wet streaks down both of his cheeks. Before I can stop myself, I walk over to him, so we’re shoulder to shoulder, in wordless communion. Something about this man’s presence, about not being alone here, comforts me.

  “My granddaddy,” he says finally. “William Franklin. That was his name.” He points a long finger at the etching in the burnt-red stone. There are four other names too. Five men tortured and killed.

  I whisper the names to myself, adding another: Jimmy. I have no idea if Willie has more to say and decide to wait as long as it takes. When he finally speaks, I have to move closer to hear him.

  “It was ’44. Granddad just back from the war. Fought with the Ninety-Second over in Italy. He’d opened up a little shop in town, was doing well for himself. The war gave him a sense of dignity, you know? But the white boys didn’t like that too much. Especially when he was cutting into their business. A posse of them came one night. Hit my grandma Thelma on the head when she asked what they wanted with her husband. She was pregnant with my moms. Grandpa didn’t even know yet. She was waiting until she was sure. They left her there bleeding on the floor while they ransacked the place. Grandpa had a few bottles of hooch that they drank, and then they dragged Willie out the house. Grandma says they talked about how they were going to rough him up, but he started fighting back. So they shot him. Shot him like a dog in his own yard.” He takes a quick inhale, almost like he’s catching a sob, before he gets to the last part. “He never even knew he was going to have a daughter.”

  I’m not sure when I grab Willie’s hand, but I’m holding it when he stops talking. Much to my surprise, it feels like the most natural thing in the world.

  There’s a part of me that wants to tell him about Jimmy. But I can’t. It’s too much. This air, already heavy around us, doesn’t need any more tragic stories. He squeezes my fingers like he knows there’s meaning here for me too. Without speaking, we make our way over to the pristine grounds, the grass a neon green, the sun a radiant yellow ball against a sea of blue, all of it incongruous to the bloody history all around us. It’s hard to imagine that people were lynched on bright, beautiful days like this, but surely they were.

  “Willie. You have the same name as him.” I make the connection.

  “Yeah, quite the legacy, I guess.” His tone, bittersweet. “What about you? You never told me your name.”

  “Riley. Riley Wilson.” I could tell him I was named after a relative too, but it would require too much explaining.

  “Well, it was nice to meet you, Riley. You were good to keep me company today, sweetheart.” A smile touches my lips for the first time all day. This man reminds me of my dad, someone who calls every woman under the age of forty “sweetheart” and can’t seem to understand when I try to explain that it’s just not cool anymore.

  His defense: “Get outta here. People need to stop being so sensitive. It’s a term of endearment.” And it does feel that way when this man says it, as comforting as a warm bath.

  Willie pulls a yellowed handkerchief from deep in the recesses of his coat pocket and blows his nose. “I came here today for my moms, you know. Felt like something I needed to do for her. She wanted to come herself and never made it.”

  I understand completely. We’re both here for someone else and for ourselves and, strangely, now for each other. Willie looks to the ground. There’s a sense of panic that I’ll never see this stranger again, our brief friendship as sweet and fleeting as a summer rainstorm.

  “Could I give you a hug, young lady?”

  By way of answering, I open my arms wide, and the two of us embrace. We’re standing in front of an iron statue of human beings chained together. When we part, Willie takes a minute to look at the sculpture; his gaze settles on a figure of a woman with a heavy iron chain around her neck, a baby in her arms.

  “What a world.” He shakes his head and ambles down the path; his words echo even as he recedes. What a world.

  I don’t have much time, and I’m already emotionally depleted, but I decide to make a quick stop down the road at the Legacy Museum too. I need to see the jars of dirt I’ve read about, each one filled with the soil from all the locations in America where there was a known lynching, emblazoned with a name and date, commemorations of the victims lost to history. It’s such a simple, powerful tribute, a way to honor their lives and ensure that people aren’t allowed to forget this particular legacy of violence, the toll it took.

  Jimmy was lynched right here on this soil too. Even though we’ll never know the exact location, his remains are somewhere in this state. His name, the dirt stained with his blood, belongs on a shelf. We—I need to remember, for Gigi.

  I’m hurrying back to the parking lot now, but the walk to my car feels longer than the one to the museum, like history is dragging me down. The first thing I do: reach into my overnight bag to make sure the box is still there, buried at the bottom. It was foolish of me to leave it in the car. I breathe again when I feel the smooth vinyl, pull the box out of my bag, snap it open. Nestled in a bed of plush red velvet—a pearl necklace and bracelet. “Real pearls!” Gigi took great pains to emphasize when she gave them to me.

  It was the day after she told me about Jimmy. Gigi had directed Momma to a safe-deposit box that no one even knew existed and told her to bring the contents to the hospital. In the safe, Momma found a black Hefty bag containing the jewelry box with the pearls, ancient Pan Am stock certificates, a bundle of letters from Grandpa Leroy, and, the kicker, about $3,000 in small bills.

  “Been working the pole, Gigi?” Shaun teased. Momma smacked him on his head even though the joke was lost on Gigi.

  Instead, she reminded us for the umpteenth time about how we shouldn’t keep all our money in banks. “Too big to fail? Yeah right! Y’all need to squirrel away some cold hard cash, a little at a time and then you got yourself a nest egg.” Then she handed me the box of pearls and two notes in her shaky scrawl. I’ve read them both, even the one that wasn’t meant for me. Of course, I’ll do what Gigi wants and give this bracelet to Jen. Eventually. But it all feels—how did Sabrina put it? Tricky.

  The night
Gigi died, I called Jen from a hard bench in the only corner in the lobby of the hospital where I had reception. I kept obsessively retrying, even though I knew it was futile. It was obvious her phone was turned off. I was so desperate to hear her voice. I just wanted to cry with her and miss Gigi together and maybe even beg her to come over and climb into bed with me and tell me every funny Gigi story she could remember. It didn’t matter what else was going on. But she didn’t answer, and I couldn’t form the words to leave in a voice mail. I needed to find another quiet moment to talk to her, one where it would be okay to break down. But it never came—this week has been insane with all the planning and arrangements. I will though. I want to. I need to give her this bracelet. The box closes with a loud snap. I place it carefully on the passenger seat next to me as if it’s a talisman, a companion, as if it’s Gigi.

  All I want is to hear my grandmother’s voice again. I haven’t heard it since she spoke her actual final words, delivered in a ragged whisper the day before she died, the last time I saw her conscious. “You’re a good girl, Leroya, but you gotta let other people help you. You ain’t gonna get any brownie points for doing everything all on your own.” I should have known it was goodbye. And now it’s a too-cruel irony that Gigi passed on and then stopped haunting me, like she’s twice gone.

  Come back, Grandma. I need you. I can’t hear you. I wait, listening for another minute, just in case, before starting the engine and turning on the radio. “River” by Leon Bridges is playing, a song Gigi had loved. I decide to see it as a message.

  US-82 with its billboards for fireworks and porn shops passes in a blur as I push eighty miles per hour the whole way, eager to reach my family now. Every so often throughout the drive to Perote, I catch a faint whiff of Willie’s cigar smoke and find it weirdly comforting.

  I’m off the highway when my bladder feels like it’s about to burst. Gas stations are few and far between on these smaller, emptier roads that will take me the rest of the way. The scarier roads.

  The last few years, whenever I’ve been on a stretch like this, all I can think about is Sandra Bland, and how easily a turn signal or a taillight could turn me into her. I glance in the rearview every few minutes, maintain the speed limit, careful and cautious, all the while resenting that I have to be so careful and cautious.

  I slow when I finally see a couple of beat-up gas pumps. They look like relics from another era; they are relics from another era. An ancient sign rests against the tanks, announcing COCA-COLA SERVED HERE. Out front of the small store, two white guys sit on folding chairs. One has stringy blond hair that nearly grazes his shoulders, the other a newly shorn buzz cut, revealing a scarred bald scalp, lumpy in places.

  I try to assess the situation, the potential for danger, but after six months in Philly my redneck radar is rusty—and with my bladder screaming like it is, I’m desperate. I’ll have to take my chances. In the absence of any sort of parking lot, I pull over on the patchy red dirt, a few feet from where the men sit. The bald one squints at me hard, stands, and quickly closes the distance between him and my car.

  “You need gas?” he asks through the closed window and makes a circle in the air with his closed fist to indicate that I should roll it down, which under other circumstances I’d probably find funny since I haven’t seen a car with a crank window in about forever.

  “Just the bathroom,” I say through the crack as the window lowers. The gauge shows that I have half a tank. Daddy always told me to fill my gas tank before it dropped below half. “Because you never know when you’ll get another chance,” he said.

  “Actually, yeah. Fill it up, regular, please.”

  “Bathroom’s round back. Rooster’s got the key.”

  If I went missing behind this gas station, would anyone ever know what happened to me? I’m an easy target, a woman alone on a desolate road, a tragic headline in the making. My former colleagues a hundred miles down the way in Birmingham might even cover it.

  Rooster spits a wad of tobacco on the ground before he hands over a metal spatula, the kind you use to flip hotcakes, a key tied to it with a dirty piece of twine.

  “Bathroom’s around the side. Sorry ’bout the toilet. It don’t flush real well.”

  I swallow a gag as I squeeze myself into a bathroom the size of a closet. The toilet doesn’t flush at all, and it’s close to overflowing. I don’t want to add to it, but what choice do I have?

  As I come back around the shop, Rooster is standing right in my path to the car. My stomach quivers, then plunges.

  This is it.

  He takes a step toward me, blocking my way, and I don’t even have time to think about where exactly I’ll run, or remember whatever I learned in that one self-defense class I took in college, before he extends his hand.

  “Can I get the key, please? I gotta piss,” he mumbles. “Hope you don’t mind, we went ahead and did the windows too.” Beyond Rooster’s shoulder the bald guy pulls a squeegee across my windshield.

  “You okay?” he asks.

  “Yeah, fine, fine.” Relief quickly spirals into embarrassment.

  “Where you headin’?”

  “Perote.”

  “About a mile to the town line. Welcome.”

  As promised, it’s only a minute’s drive before I see the sign PEROTE BULLOCK COUNTY. I snake through the desolate remnants of what was once probably a bustling main street, now deserted, lined with a general store, post office, the white church, the Black church, a diner, police station, library, and the city hall. The town is neither welcoming nor threatening, but it is depressing. Empty streets, boarded-up buildings, a stillness in the air, a reminder that entire towns, like people, can just wither and die. There’s a certain inevitably to it, the understanding that heydays come and go and life marches on elsewhere while this husk of a place sits abandoned like a dusty artifact. Not even a quaint nostalgia lingers; there’s only the sense of life, opportunity, and better days come and gone. There’s no cell service, though I had the good sense to print out directions before leaving Philly. I had a feeling it’d be spotty. The little icon in the corner of my phone shows zero bars. Going off the grid like this makes me twitchy, imagining all the calls, emails, and news I’ll miss in the next twenty-four hours. What if Scotty needs to reach me? Being completely unreachable almost feels like missing a limb. There’s nothing I can do about it though, and there’s a kind of exhilarating freedom in that.

  The printed directions aren’t much help since not all the roads are well marked. I’m stuck on what seems to be a narrow dead end, hemmed in on all sides by dense brush and knee-high red-ant hills. In my mind’s eye, I see galloping horses and white robes, fiery crosses. I don’t want to be out here after sundown, that’s for sure.

  Creeping along slowly, I search for the house, set back from the narrow road. When I finally see it, it feels like an accident, or like it decided to find me.

  There are a few cars scattered randomly across the wide patchwork of weeds, dirt, and gravel that make up what can only loosely be called a yard. Uncle Rod’s giant RV towers over all of them. It’s bigger than the house.

  I take in the modest brick ranch my great-grandfather Dash allegedly built with his own bare hands, which may explain why it leans slightly to one side. It’s amazing to me that Gigi held on to this land for so long even though she never came back here except for Aunt Mabel’s funeral. She used to rent it out to hunters during deer season and use the small income it generated as her “fun money,” mostly paying the cable bill and buying scratchers. I guess she was also socking it away in that Hefty bag. The place has been empty for a few years though. It’s four tiny rooms and one bath on a couple acres of land, but it was all hers, and Gigi was proud to have it. She said owning a piece of land made you someone, or at least it made you feel like you were someone. And no one could take it away from you… until they could. I have to shake the thought of my parents losing their house. One heartbreak is enough for now.

  The railing shakes a
s I climb the uneven concrete stairs of the porch to the front door. It’s propped open and everyone has gathered in the living room.

  I haven’t seen my uncle Rod since I was a kid. He and Momma have been estranged ever since they had a falling-out after Grandpa Leroy’s funeral over something no one ever talks about. When he steps up to hug me, the smell of his pipe sends me hurtling right back to the second grade. He’s the only person I’ve ever seen smoke an honest-to-God pipe, like a Black Sherlock Holmes.

  I give quick hugs to Aunt Rose and two of my cousins, twin girls in their early twenties who are essentially strangers to me and who immediately return to looking at their phones.

  Shaun thrusts a glass of wine into my hand. “Here, saved this for you. That’s the last of it, and we can’t get more because of the dumbass blue laws down here. So better drink up.”

  The wine tastes like vinegar. That doesn’t stop me from taking three fast sips.

  “Where’s Mom and Dad?”

  “Dad went ahead to the cemetery to make sure everything’s straight. The limos will be here to drive us over in twenty.” Shaun looks me up and down. “Um, so you better start getting ready? Those sweats aren’t going to cut it. You can guess where Mom is.” He nods to the kitchen.

  “Cleaning?” I already know the answer. Momma’s cleaning habits are legendary. Growing up, Shaun and I had a weekend chore list a mile long. In my eighteen years living beneath her roof, the woman never went to bed with a dirty dish in the sink, and now I can’t either. I tried once. I left an ice cream bowl because I’m a grown-ass woman who can leave a dirty bowl in the sink. The freedom! But I was so agitated an hour later, I got up and washed it at one in the morning.

  I was eight when Momma first explained to me that white people often think Black people are dirty. I remember it vividly because it was the night of my very first sleepover (aside from those with Jen, who practically lived with us by that point)—Abigail from ballet was coming over. I had one of those intense little-girl crushes on her, with her long auburn pigtails and her dance bag with her name splashed across it in sparkly cursive crystals. To prepare, Momma and I spent the entire day cleaning. She was on her hands and knees, furiously attacking the linoleum under the kitchen cabinets, when she offered up that explanation. This didn’t make one bit of sense to me, since our house always smelled like ammonia and lemon. I’d learned to vacuum before I could even really walk on my own. Not too long afterward, I was allowed to sleep over at Jen’s house for the first and only time. I thought of what Momma had said as I took in the ring of grime around the tub, the crumbs trapped in the couch cushions.