by Paula Guran
“I shook my head. No, I wasn’t going to sneak up to that place. Whatever was inside there was something I didn’t have to know about. It had too much power—it turned Eddie Grimes around, and that was enough for me. Dee knew I wasn’t fooling. He went around me and started creeping toward the shack.
“And damndest thing, I watched him slipping through the trees for a second, and started following him. If he could go up there, so could I. If I didn’t exactly look at whatever was in there myself, I could watch Dee look at it. That would tell me most of what I had to know. And anyways, probably Dee wouldn’t see anything anyhow, unless the front door was hanging open, and that didn’t seem too likely to me. He wouldn’t see anything, and I wouldn’t either, and we could both go home.
“The door of the shack opened up, and a man walked outside. Dee and I freeze, and I mean freeze. We’re about twenty feet away, on the side of this shack, and if the man looked sideways, he’d see our sheets. There were a lot of trees between us and him, and I couldn’t get a very good look at him, but one thing about him made the whole situation a lot more serious. This man was white, and he was wearing good clothes—I couldn’t see his face, but I could see his rolled up sleeves, and his suit jacket slung over one arm, and some kind of wrapped-up bundle he was holding in his hands. All this took about a second. The white man started carrying his bundle straight through the woods, and in another two seconds he was out of sight.
“Dee was a little closer than I was, and I think his sight line was a little clearer than mine. On top of that, he saw better at night than I did. Dee didn’t get around like me, but he might have recognized the man we’d seen, and that would be pure trouble. Some rich white man, killing a girl out in The Backs? And us two boys close enough to see him? Do you know what would have happened to us? There wouldn’t be enough left of either one of us to make a decent smudge.
“Dee turned around to face me, and I could see his eyes behind his costume, but I couldn’t tell what he was thinking. He just stood there, looking at me. In a little bit, just when I was about to explode, we heard a car starting up off to our left. I whispered at Dee if he saw who that was. Nobody, Dee said. Now, what the hell did that mean? Nobody? You could say Santa Claus, you could say J. Edgar Hoover, it’d be a better answer than Nobody. The Model T’s headlights shone through the trees when the car swung around the top of the path and started going toward Meridian Road. Nobody I ever saw before, Dee said. When the headlights cut through the trees, both of us ducked out of sight. Actually, we were so far from the path, we had nothing to worry about. I could barely see the car when it went past, and I couldn’t see the driver at all.
“We stood up. Over Dee’s shoulder I could see the side of the shack where the white man had been. Lamplight flickered on the ground in front of the open door. The last thing in the world I wanted to do was to go inside that place—I didn’t even want to walk around to the front and look in the door. Dee stepped back from me and jerked his head toward the shack. I knew it was going to be just like before. I’d say no, he’d say yes, and then I’d follow him wherever he thought he had to go. I felt the same way I did when I saw that white smear in the woods—hopeless, lost in the midst of death. You go, if you have to, I whispered to him, it’s what you wanted to do all along. He didn’t move, and I saw that he wasn’t too sure about what he wanted any more.
“Everything was different now, because the white man made it different. Once a white man walked out that door, it was like raising the stakes in a poker game. But Dee had been working toward that one shack ever since we got into The Backs, and he was still curious as a cat about it. He turned away from me and started moving sideways in a straight line, so he’d be able to peek inside the door from a safe distance.
“After he got about half way to the front, he looked back and waved me on, like this was still some great adventure he wanted me to share. He was afraid to be on his own, that was all. When he realized I was going to stay put, he bent down and moved real slow past the side. He still couldn’t see more than a sliver of the inside of the shack, and he moved ahead another little ways. By then, I figured, he should have been able to see about half of the inside of the shack. He hunkered down inside his sheet, staring in the direction of the open door. And there he stayed.
“I took it for about half a minute, and then I couldn’t any more. I was sick enough to die and angry enough to explode, both at the same time. How long could Dee Sparks look at a dead whore? Wouldn’t a couple of seconds be enough? Dee was acting like he was watching a goddamn Hopalong Cassidy movie. An owl screeched, and some man in another shack said Now that’s over, and someone else shushed him. If Dee heard, he paid it no mind. I started along toward him, and I don’t think he noticed me, either. He didn’t look up until I was past the front of the shack, and had already seen the door hanging open, and the lamplight spilling over the plank floor and onto the grass outside.
“I took another step, and Dee’s head snapped around. He tried to stop me by holding out his hand. All that did was make me mad. Who was Dee Sparks to tell me what I couldn’t see? All he did was leave me alone in the woods with a trail of apples, and he didn’t even do that right. When I kept on coming, Dee started waving both hands at me, looking back and forth between me and the inside of the shack. Like something was happening in there that I couldn’t be allowed to see. I didn’t stop, and Dee got up on his feet and skittered toward me.
“We gotta get out of here, he whispered. He was close enough so I could smell that electrical stink. I stepped to his side, and he grabbed my arm. I yanked my arm out of his grip and went forward a little ways and looked through the door of the shack.
“A bed was shoved up against the far wall, and a woman lay naked on the bed. There was blood all over her legs, and blood all over the sheets, and big puddles of blood on the floor. A woman in a raggedy robe, hair stuck out all over her head, squatted beside the bed, holding the other woman’s hand. She was a colored woman—a Backs woman—but the other one, the one on the bed, was white. Probably she was pretty, when she was alive. All I could see was white skin and blood, and I near fainted.
“This wasn’t some white-trash woman who lived out in The Backs—
she was brought there, and the man who brought her had killed her. More trouble was coming down than I could imagine, trouble enough to kill lots of our people. And if Dee and I said a word about the white man we’d seen, the trouble would come right straight down on us.
“I must have made some kind of noise, because the woman next to the bed turned halfways around and looked at me. There wasn’t any doubt about it—she saw me. All she saw of Dee was a dirty white sheet, but she saw my face, and she knew who I was. I knew her, too, and she wasn’t any Backs woman. She lived down the street from us. Her name was Mary Randolph, and she was the one who came up to Eddie Grimes after he got shot to death and brought him back to life. Mary Randolph followed my dad’s band, and when we played roadhouses or colored dance halls, she’d be likely to turn up. A couple of times she told me I played good drums—I was a drummer back then, you know, switched to saxophone when I turned twelve. Mary Randolph just looked at me, her hair stuck out straight all over her head like she was already inside a whirlwind of trouble. No expression on her face except that look you get when your mind is going a mile a minute and your body can’t move at all. She didn’t even look surprised. She almost looked like she wasn’t surprised, like she was expecting to see me. As bad as I’d felt that night, this was the worst of all. I liked to have died. I’d have disappeared down an anthill, if I could. I didn’t know what I had done—just be there, I guess—but I’d never be able to undo it.
“I pulled at Dee’s sheet, and he tore off down the side of the shack like he’d been waiting for a signal. Mary Randolph stared into my eyes, and it felt like I had to pull myself away—I couldn’t just turn my head, I had to disconnect. And when I did, I could still feel her staring at me. Somehow I made myself go down past the side of t
he shack, but I could still see Mary Randolph inside there, looking out at the place where I’d been.
“If Dee said anything at all when I caught up with him, I’d have knocked his teeth down his throat, but he just moved fast and quiet through the trees, seeing the best way to go, and I followed after. I felt like I’d been kicked by a horse. When we got on the path, we didn’t bother trying to sneak down through the woods on the other side, we fit out and ran as hard as we could—like wild dogs were after us. And after we got onto Meridian Road, we ran toward town until we couldn’t run any more.
“Dee clamped his hand over his side and staggered forward a little bit. Then he stopped and ripped off his costume and lay down by the side of the road, breathing hard. I was leaning forward with hands on my knees, as winded as he was. When I could breathe again, I started walking down the road. Dee picked himself up and got next to me and walked along, looking at my face and then looking away, and then looking back at my face again.
“So? I said.
“I know that lady, Dee said.
“Hell, that was no news. Of course he knew Mary Randolph—she was his neighbour, too. I didn’t bother to answer, I just grunted at him. Then I reminded him that Mary hadn’t seen his face, only mine.
“Not Mary, he said. The other one.
“He knew the dead white woman’s name? That made everything worse. A lady like that shouldn’t be in Dee Sparks’ world, especially if she’s going to wind up dead in The Backs. I wondered who was going to get lynched, and how many.
“Then Dee said that I knew her, too. I stopped walking and looked him straight in the face.
“Miss Abbey Montgomery, he said. She brings clothes and food down to our church, Thanksgiving and Christmas.
“He was right—I wasn’t sure if I’d ever heard her name, but I’d seen her once or twice, bringing baskets of ham and chicken and boxes of clothes to Dee’s father’s church. She was about twenty years old, I guess, so pretty she made you smile just to look at. From a rich family in a big house right at the top of Miller’s Hill. Some man didn’t think a girl like that should have any associations with colored people, I guess, and decided to express his opinion about as strong as possible. Which meant that we were going to take the blame for what happened to her, and the next time we saw white sheets, they wouldn’t be Halloween costumes.
“He sure took a long time to kill her, I said.
“And Dee said, She ain’t dead.
“So I asked him, What the hell did he mean by that? I saw the girl. I saw the blood. Did he think she was going to get up and walk around? Or maybe Mary Randolph was going to tell her that magic word and bring her back to life?
“You can think that if you want to, Dee said. But Abbey Montgomery ain’t dead.
“I almost told him I’d seen her ghost, but he didn’t deserve to hear about it. The fool couldn’t even see what was right in front of his eyes. I couldn’t expect him to understand what happened to me when I saw that miserable . . . that thing. He was rushing on ahead of me anyhow, like I’d suddenly embarrassed him or something. That was fine with me. I felt the exact same way. I said, I guess you know neither one of us can ever talk about this, and he said, I guess you know it, too, and that was the last thing we said to each other that night. All the way down Meridian Road Dee Sparks kept his eyes straight ahead and his mouth shut. When we got to the field, he turned toward me like he had something to say, and I waited for it, but he faced forward again and ran away. just ran. I watched him disappear past the general store, and then I walked home by myself.
“My mom gave me hell for getting my clothes all wet and dirty, and my brothers laughed at me and wanted to know who beat me up and stole my candy. As soon as I could, I went to bed, pulled the covers up over my head, and closed my eyes. A little while later, my mom came in and asked if I was all right. Did I get into a fight with that Dee Sparks? Dee Sparks was born to hang, that was what she thought, and I ought to have a better class of friends. I’m tired of playing those drums, Momma, I said, I want to play the saxophone instead. She looked at me surprised, but said she’d talk about with Daddy, and that it might work out.
“For the next couple days, I waited for the bomb to go off. On the Friday, I went to school, but couldn’t concentrate for beans. Dee Sparks and I didn’t even nod at each other in the hallways—just walked by like the other guy was invisible. On the weekend I said I felt sick and stayed in bed, wondering when that whirlwind of trouble would come down. I wondered if Eddie Grimes would talk about seeing me—once they found the body, they’d get around to Eddie Grimes real quick.
“But nothing happened that weekend, and nothing happened all the next week. I thought Mary Randolph must have hid the white girl in a grave out in The Backs. But how long could a girl from one of those rich families go missing without investigations and search parties? And, on top of that, what was Mary Randolph doing there in the first place? She liked to have a good time, but she wasn’t one of those wild girls with a razor under her skirt—she went to church every Sunday, was good to people, nice to kids. Maybe she went out to comfort that poor girl, but how did she know she’d be there in the first place? Misses Abbey Montgomerys from the hill didn’t share their plans with Mary Randolphs from Darktown. I couldn’t forget the way she looked at me, but I couldn’t understand it, either. The more I thought about that look, the more it was like Mary Randolph was saying something to me, but what? Are you ready for this? Do you understand this? Do you know how careful you must be?
“My father said I could start learning the C-melody sax, and when I was ready to play it in public, my little brother wanted to take over the drums. Seems he always wanted to play drums, and in fact, he’s been a drummer ever since, a good one. So I worked out how to play my little sax, I went to school and came straight home after, and everything went on like normal, except Dee Sparks and I weren’t friends any more. If the police were searching for a missing rich girl, I didn’t hear anything about it.
“Then one Saturday I was walking down our street to go the general store, and Mary Randolph came through her front door just as I got to her house. When she saw me, she stopped moving real sudden, with one hand still on the side of the door. I was so surprised to see her that I was in a kind of slow-motion, and I must have stared at her. She gave me a look like an X-ray, a look that searched around down inside me. I don’t know what she saw, but her face relaxed, and she took her hand off the door and let it close behind her, and she wasn’t looking inside me any more. Miss Randolph, I said, and she told me she was looking forward to hearing our band play at a Beergarden dance in a couple of weeks. I told her I was going to be playing the saxophone at that dance, and she said something about that, and all the time it was like we were having two conversations, the top one about me and the band, and the one underneath about her and the murdered white girl in The Backs. It made me so nervous, my words got all mixed up. Finally she said You make sure you say hello to your daddy from me, now, and I got away.
“After I passed her house, Mary Randolph started walking down the street behind me. I could feel her watching me, and I started to sweat. Mary Randolph was a total mystery to me. She was a nice lady, but probably she buried that girl’s body. I didn’t know but that she was going to come and kill me, one day. And then I remembered her kneeling down beside Eddie Grimes at the roadhouse. She had been dancing with Eddie Grimes, who was in jail more often than he was out. I wondered if you could be a respectable lady and still know Eddie Grimes well enough to dance with him. And how did she bring him back to life? Or was that what happened at all? Hearing that lady walk along behind me made me so uptight, I crossed to the other side of the street.
“A couple days after that, when I was beginning to think that the trouble was never going to happen after all, it came down. We heard police cars coming down the street right when we were finishing dinner. I thought they were coming for me, and I almost lost my chicken and rice. The sirens went right past our house, and the
n more sirens came toward us from other directions—the old klaxons they had in those days. It sounded like every cop in the state was rushing into Darktown. This was bad, bad news. Someone was going to wind up dead, that was certain. No way all those police were going to come into our part of town, make all that commotion, and leave without killing at least one man. That’s the truth. You just had to pray that the man they killed wasn’t you or anyone in your family. My daddy turned off the lamps, and we went to the window to watch the cars go by. Two of them were state police. When it was safe, Daddy went outside to see where all the trouble was headed. After he came back in, he said it looked like the police were going toward Eddie Grimes’ place. We wanted to go out and look, but they wouldn’t let us, so we went to the back windows that faced toward Grimes’ house. Couldn’t see anything but a lot of cars and police standing all over the road back there. Sounded like they were knocking down Grimes’ house with sledge hammers. Then a whole bunch of cops took off running, and all I could see was the cars spread out across the road. About ten minutes later, we heard lots of gunfire coming from a couple of streets further back. It like to have lasted forever. Like hearing the Battle of the Bulge. My momma started to cry, and so did my little brother. The shooting stopped. The police shouted to each other, and then they came back and got in their cars and went away.
“On the radio the next morning, they said that a known criminal, a Negro man named Edward Grimes, had been killed while trying to escape arrest for the murder of a white woman. The body of Eleanore Monday, missing for three days, had been found in a shallow grave by Woodland police searching near an illegal distillery in the region called The Backs. Miss Monday, the daughter of grocer Albert Monday, had been in poor mental and physical health, and Grimes had apparently taken advantage of her weakness to either abduct or lure her to The Backs, where she had been savagely murdered. That’s what it said on the radio—I still remember the words. In poor mental and physical health. Savagely murdered.