by Susan Vaught
“Dani, we talk about police brutality and news stories about racism nearly every day, even though we live next to a university full of educated folks.” Mom moved her hand away from Dad, this time covering my knuckles. “Remember when that kid in kindergarten asked you if you were adopted because your skin didn’t match your father’s or mine?”
My eyebrows automatically pulled together because thinking about that always ticked me off. “Yes, ma’am. I got grounded for a week because I kicked him.”
“Exactly. Yes. And your father and I, we chose your schools and activities very carefully after that, so you wouldn’t have to put up with as many painful questions and bad attitudes just because your parents aren’t the same color. We rarely go into Southern rural areas at all, for the same reason. Times are different, yes, but there are still a lot of problems.”
I didn’t know what to say to that, so I just looked at her. Bigotry and racism and discrimination stayed all over the news, but in my school, there were lots of kids and teachers like me and Indri, and lots of different skin tones. Nobody talked about race very much, and nothing really bad had happened to me, so I didn’t think about it that often.
“I hope you never experience the terrible things your grandmother lived through, and your Dad,” Mom said.
I heard the concern in her voice. I almost told her not to worry, but something stopped me. I mean, it could happen. I didn’t want to think that it would, but—maybe?
Stomach churning a little, I pointed to the Fred note, and all the numbers. “Indri and I want to go see Dr. Harper tomorrow and see if he knows what these numbers mean.”
“Fred,” Grandma echoed.
We all looked at her, and she was weeping again.
“Enough,” Dad told me in a tone that meant absolutely, positively no arguing. Then he went back to eating, and he didn’t look at me, or at Grandma either.
I did what I could to distract Grandma with applesauce, and waited for my parents to tell me not to go see Professor Harper.
But they didn’t.
They just stopped talking about the paper I showed them, and discrimination, and civil rights, and Avadelle. They stopped talking to each other, and stopped talking to me, too.
We ate the rest of dinner with just the music in the background, and the pitiful sound of Grandma crying beside us.
8
WARS SHOULD NEVER BE SANITIZED
* * *
Excerpt from Night on Fire (1969), by Avadelle Richardson, page 238
Aunt Jessie sat in the front of the little schoolhouse night class as I held up a battered civics book.
“Any of you remember reading something like this in school?”
Leslie raised her hand, then put it back down in a hurry. Red colored the edges of her cheeks as her eyes darted around the eleven other folks stacked into the kids’ desks. I was teaching in dim light, so nobody could tell we were here, if they looked from outside.
One of the men raised his hand. “That looks like higher grades. Most of us was done by fourth, fifth at the latest.”
I nodded. “It’s around sixth grade, maybe seventh, but even if you went that far in Oxford, you wouldn’t have it. In the South, we aren’t allowed to teach from books that show the United States Constitution, or the Declaration of Independence, or the Bill of Rights.”
This made Leslie shift in her chair, wide-eyed.
“Well, of course not.” Aunt Jessie snorted. “If you read them things, you’ll know that government is supposed to be by the people and for the people. All the people. You’ll know your rights, and how they being stepped on down here.”
After that, Leslie came to my illegal classes every Tuesday night. “ ‘We must be free not because we claim freedom, but because we practice it,’ ” she told me, quoting William Faulkner from an article we read, in Harper’s Magazine four years ago.
Slowly, we worked on teaching a handful of brave folks who wanted to know more about reading and writing and math and civics, men and women who wanted to understand the founding documents of our country, and how they applied to us as Black people—and how they didn’t, at least in the South.
LAST NIGHT, WHEN I WAS feeding Grandma, I got some green bean milkshake and applesauce milkshake smeared on my shirt. When I took it off, I saw the greenish stain and I treated it just like Mom taught me—stain remover, a little water, and letting it sit.
But when I got up this Tuesday morning, it still wouldn’t rub out. It’s like the color dyed the fabric of my shirt—just changed it forever, so it can’t be the shirt it used to be, and I can’t wear it in public anymore.
It made me wonder if ghosts and ghost stories were like stains on a shirt that just won’t come out. Or maybe some things, like wars and hate and discrimination and violence, those things that Indri said were too huge and awful to fix by just saying “I’m sorry,” stain time so nothing can ever be the same again. Did something like that stain the friendship between Grandma and Avadelle, like Mac had stained ours by telling me he couldn’t talk to me anymore? Was there any way I could rinse everything out enough to clean it up for both of them? Could I even convince Dad and Mom that I should be allowed to try?
Still way early in the morning, I sat on a bench in our backyard and watched Dad pull weeds out of raised beds full of squash plants and green tomatoes. His hair and beard glistened in the new sunlight, and he was wearing frayed jeans shorts and a white tank, both already soaked with sweat. He stayed bent over, plucking out little green bits and dropping them into a pile near the wooden slats that held the dirt and plants.
I didn’t know anything about gardening. Dirt sort of grossed me out. But I liked eating what Dad grew, and I liked watching him be happy. Dad liked that he didn’t have to take as much medicine during gardening season, because his nerves got calmer when he could work outside. From March to October, all he had to take was blood pressure pills, and his time in the garden did the rest.
I had gotten ready for camp early, before the nurse came. Mom might actually blow a gasket in shock over my promptness. Before I went outside, I checked on Grandma like I always did. She was sleeping peacefully, and not crying, but I couldn’t forget the sound of her weeping the night before. My throat tightened every time I thought about it, so I used Dad’s iPad to play him music to weed by while I read a book I had checked out from camp—Ghost Stories of Oxford. As Julie Miller’s “All My Tears” played in the early light, I read about people thinking they had seen the ghost of a woman at William Faulkner’s home, Rowan Oak. A few minutes later, Dad got my attention when he stood and used a blue bandana to wipe the sweat off his forehead. Then he nodded to me. “Tough song.”
I closed my ghost story book and focused on the lyrics. It don’t matter where you bury me/I’ll be home and I’ll be free.
“Oh,” I mumbled. “Sorry.” I tapped the pause button. “I’ll find something lighter.”
“No, it’s fine.” He wiped both his cheeks, then folded the bandana and tied it back around his head. He had his beard pulled into a rough braid this morning, and he tugged on it as he looked at me. “That’s exactly what your grandmother believes. You like this version better, or Emmylou Harris?”
I put down my book and picked up his iPad, scrolled through the song list, found the second version, and played it for a minute or so. “I don’t know. They’re both good. Do you think Grandma’s right? Does all pain end when you die?”
“I hope so, baby girl.” Dad came over to the garden bench and sat beside me. He smelled like dirt and salt and wild onions and spices from the oil he used on his hair and beard. He kept his eyes on the beds he had been weeding, but he scooted closer, then folded his hands and squeezed them between his knees like he did when something was really bugging him. “I’m sorry I was short with you last night.”
“It’s okay—” I started, but he cut me off.
“No, it’s not.” He patted my leg, then went back to squeezing his hands between his own knees and starin
g out at the garden. “I want you to understand something. Before your mom and I ever got married, we thought about what our children might go through, on account of us being different races. It never occurred to us we’d end up back here in Oxford. In Mississippi, of all places. But Mama started getting older, and—” He sighed. “Man plans, God laughs, you know?”
I’d heard him say that before, and I knew what he meant. “Oxford’s great, Dad. I love it here.”
Dad smiled, but he looked skeptical. “I never wanted you to have a rough time of it. Not over me, and the color of my skin—or yours.”
I touched my skin, which seemed so light compared to his. “Maybe people just think I’m really tan?”
“Don’t joke.”
“Okay, sorry. But I haven’t had a rough time.”
“Then your mother and I, we’ve done some right things.” He stared off into the sky. “What to tell the babies,” he murmured. “That’s always been a question. When to start. How to warn them. How to make them see.”
I frowned at him. “I’m not a baby, Dad.” His eyes met mine, and his smile seemed sad.
“My baby,” he argued. Dad seemed relieved by this. “I still don’t think it’s a great idea to go poking around about the Magnolia Feud or Oxford’s past, but after watching Mama cry—Dani, maybe you’re right and we should try to ease her mind. Maybe your mom is right too. You won’t be finding out anything that didn’t already happen.”
I laid Dad’s iPad on top of my book, on the bench between us, and I must have bumped the play button because “All My Tears” started back again, with Emmylou Harris singing. I slid the volume down but left it playing. “You and Mom and Grandma taught me a lot. We really have studied the Civil Rights Movement in class, too. I know it was bad, especially in Mississippi. I know it’s happening now, too, with so many people getting shot, and how more people of color go to jail. That’s in the news and books too.”
Dad kept his hands between his knees, and his jaw looked tight. Finally, he nodded, but he said, “What they write in books can sound clean. Wars should never be sanitized like that.”
I thought about that for a few song verses, and my brain hooked it up with the hospice pamphlets and other stuff I’d read about Alzheimer’s disease. “So, it’s like what people write about dying from what Grandma has? Facts and how-to, but nothing about changing diapers and how stuff stinks—or the drool and how tired everyone gets?”
“Exactly.” Dad nodded. “Once the people who yell the loudest and write the most have a chance to clean up history’s rough edges, it can look like revolutions happen without horrible hardships and losses. Then it gets easy to lie to ourselves that the same disasters can’t happen again.”
At that moment, Dad looked almost as far away as Grandma did. My pulse picked up, and the air seemed too hot to breathe. I eased my hand over to his, worrying he’d jump when I touched him. He did that sometimes, if he was thinking too hard about wars and bombs and people he knew getting killed. When my fingers brushed across his, he didn’t flinch, and all of a sudden, I could breathe again.
“Mostly, they leave out how much death hurts,” he said. When he looked at me, his eyes were wet like he might cry. He tried to smile but didn’t make it, then shook his head. “And not just the dying part. Sorry, Dani. It just tears me up to see Mama like she is now.”
“I know.”
He kissed my forehead, giving me a fresh nose-full of wild onions and garden sweat and spiced oil. For a few seconds, I sat there feeling like I had no ghost stories at all, and like maybe Mom’s proverb was wrong, and everything really was everyone’s circus, and all monkeys belonged to all people.
“You and Indri don’t give Dr. Harper too much grief, you hear?” Dad interrupted my thoughts. “He’s old to be keeping summer hours on top of working till midnight all the time, and he might wear out pretty easily.”
“We won’t wear him out.”
“I mean it. Respect his time.”
“I know, Dad.”
He messed with my hair a little bit, then gave me a push off the bench. “Go on now. Don’t make your mom jumpy this morning.”
I slid my book from under Dad’s iPad, then picked up the backpack holding Grandma’s papers and the key and walked away from the garden, leaving Dad to his plants. I heard the iPad music switch to “Whatcha Wanna Do” by Mia X, the first song in Grandma’s attitude mix. I had to smile. That was Dad, trying to change his mindset.
Go, Dad.
Feeling a little better, I went to Mom’s car and climbed into the passenger seat, leaving the door open for air.
* * *
I read my ghost story book for a while, skipping over the stadium cemetery and Saint Anthony Hall tales I had already heard at camp. Instead, I studied the story from the 1960s, about screams coming from the steam tunnels under Ole Miss. There wasn’t much information about it. Just a bunch of people swearing they heard screaming and yelling late at night near the Lyceum, when they were crossing campus alone. If what we learned at camp about why people told ghost stories was true, the steam-tunnel-screaming-and-yelling tale probably had to do with scaring people into acting right. Don’t walk across the campus alone at night. That made sense.
I put down my book, fastened my seat belt, and closed my eyes, listening to birds and traffic through the open car door.
My grandmother’s secrets, they were like a ghost story. Like she was haunted by some ghost or other that only she could see. But she wouldn’t feel all haunted just for entertainment, and she was too smart to be haunted by something she didn’t understand. She mostly acted right, and didn’t tend to try to scare people into doing things her way, and I didn’t think she was scared of dying, either. That left something that should be remembered—only, she couldn’t remember much of anything now. That had to be it. She needed to remember something, maybe say it, or take care of it.
“Jerk alert!” screamed the phone in my pocket. “Jerk alert! Jerk alert!”
My heart whammed as I jumped and grabbed at my pocket, nearly choking myself on the shoulder strap.
What—? I—no way. I managed to get free from the seatbelt strap and get the phone out of my pocket, because Mac Richardson, Mr. Worm Dung himself, just sent me a message.
I fumbled with my code, finally got the stupid thing unlocked, and read, @ campus with GG 2day. If U see us don’t show papers.
Breathe. Air. Must have air.
The phone shook in my hands as I forwarded the message to Indri.
She popped back immediately with, No way!!!!!!!!!!! setting off her alert of, “Best friend texting!” Then, Don’t answer WORM DUNG.
She was right. I shouldn’t answer Mac. Or at least I shouldn’t answer him right away, right?
Leave me alone, I sent back. Then I put the phone down and glanced at the front door. No sign of Mom. She still had five minutes before we would have to hurry. My eyes went back to the phone. The jumble of emotions in my chest turned circles and bashed into each other until they finally settled on pissed off and . . . of all things, curious.
Crud.
The papers. He didn’t want Avadelle to see Grandma’s writing again.
“Best friend texting!” R U talking to WORM DUNG?
No, I typed to Indri on reflex, then sent a quick Yes to make up for it.
“Jerk alert! Jerk alert!” Just keep papers to yourself.
“Best friend texting!” STOP TALKING TO WORM DUNG!!!!!!
“Jerk alert! Jerk alert!” Please.
Wow. Mac wasn’t usually one for politeness or extra words. Please was a real stretch for him. I almost got a case of the warm-fuzzies . . . but then I glared down at the phone. First he blew me off, then he treated me like I was weak and stupid and couldn’t look after myself against a crazy old woman, and now he wanted to tell me what to do?
Blocking your number, I wrote back to him. Then I did it. And a minute later, I unblocked him. Block, unblock. Block, unblock.
I totally needed
to beat my head against a great big tree.
Blocked. There. Leave it.
Mom came out the front door almost at a dead run, and I put the phone on mute and stuck it in my pocket. Too many text alerts got on Mom’s nerves in the best of circumstances, much less early in the morning before her third cup of coffee. Plus, if she found out I was just texting Mac, she’d be way less than happy.
“You ready?” she asked as she got in and fastened her seat belt. She reached over and handed me a signed note, giving me permission to go see Dr. Harper during lunch break at camp.
“Sure thing.” I took the note and tucked it in my pack, closed my door, and tried to ignore the phone vibrating between my butt and the car seat.
9
HISTORY IS CREEPY
* * *
Excerpt from Night on Fire (1969), by Avadelle Richardson, page 299
By the time 1960 turned into 1961, Leslie and I worked like a machine with our teaching, but I could tell she was frustrated.
“Not even seven percent.” She tossed the latest figures on my school desk. “That’s not even one out of ten registered to vote in Mississippi, Cici. In some counties, it’s nobody, not even the war veterans. They’re beating any person of color who tries to register, much less vote. If they can’t vote, they can’t elect anyone who might change the situation.”
I slid the latest literacy test and poll tax documents toward her. “These are getting harder. More subjective. The registrars and clerks are failing preachers and professors, and letting through illiterate Whites with no challenge at all. We don’t have a good strategy yet, and we need more help. We need a plan.”
Leslie rubbed the sides of her head. “And we need to get more men in our class, and— What?”