For days, the boys begged to let John go on the Fourth Day, and Mama Tuway had finally relented, but Ella, Ella had wanted no part of the Fourth Day.
She repeated this over and over each time the subject was brought up. “Too many people over there I don’t know, and I don’t care ’bout gettin’ in no big crowds, and don’t nobody try to talk me into it.”
Mama Tuway had not argued with her—not then.
“All night and two quarts of whiskey,” Berl had said when Willie and John had asked him how long it would take to cook a pig so large as that one. They stood looking down at the pit in the early morning of the Fourth Day. Smoke rose out from under the large piece of tin that covered the meat. John and Willie could smell it cooking as soon as they pulled their boat on shore, even before they had walked over to the church grounds. The sun was still behind the pine trees; a light mist was still rising off the river. “That’s how long it takes for a good pig, and this here is gonna be gooood pig.”
Willie had been there the night before to watch two men bring the big iron grate, which would serve as a grill, out from under the church foundation, where it was stored. When the grill was hot from the coals, the pig, which had been split down the middle, was laid on and a large piece of tin placed on top of it. On one side of the pit was extra fire in reserve, to be tucked under the grill at intervals during the night and as the next day wore on.
In Mama Tuway’s cabin, Ella was muttering to herself for all the world to hear—which at that moment consisted of Mama Tuway. “Ain’t nobody gonna get me out of this house.”
Mama Tuway said nothing as she stood at the kitchen table stirring mayonnaise into a big bowl of potato salad, which would be her contribution to the Fourth Day.
Ella sat at the table, thumbing through one of the magazines Tuway said he had brought for his mother. “I ’spect if you leave me some of that salad, I’ll put it together with a bit of bread to have me my dinner while y’all gone.” She watched the pages of the magazine flip by.
There was no answer. Mama Tuway reached for a dish towel to cover the potato salad bowl. Then she went over to the sink and pumped water to wash her hands. She pulled down the cup towel hanging from a peg beside the sink and dried her hands, slowly watching the water from her fingers sink into the coarse weave of the cloth. Then she leveled her eyes on Ella.
“Now you listen here, and I ain’t gonna say this but one time. You ’spect you gonna stay in my house, on my land, then you gonna have to go by my rules.” She turned to hang the towel back on its wooden peg, then came to sit at the table, directly across from Ella. “I don’t wanta hear no more talk ’bout you ain’t doin’ this and you ain’t doin’ that. You can come with me or you can come on directly, but if you ain’t over there mighty soon, I’m gonna have to make other ’rangements around here.” She pulled her hands back to the table’s edge and pushed herself up out of the chair. “Now look here, child, I ain’t havin’ nobody stay at my house can’t sooner or later walk out of it.”
“But I—”
“Don’t wanta hear nothin’ ’bout it. You ain’t gonna have somethin’ white peoples done to you ruin your life forever.”
“But you don’t know ’bout—”
“No, I don’t know ’bout nothin’ ’cause you ain’t seen fit to tell me nothin’, and that’s all right. I know all I needs to know. The time comes when you got to move on. No matter how much you love or how much you hate, you got to move on. That’s what life is—movin’ on through all that mess.”
“I can’t—”
“Yes you can. Go on and get ready. Put on that pretty blue blouse I sewed up for you. You like that one.” Mama Tuway stood watching, but there was no movement from Ella. She sat with her head down, staring at the open magazine.
Finally, the old woman turned and left the room. Minutes later, she came back into the kitchen, carrying her sun hat. The magazine lay on the table. The only sound was a bee that had found its way into the house and had set up a constant buzz, trying to escape, banging again and again against the window above the sink.
Mama Tuway picked up the potato salad and walked out.
CHAPTER 50
JUST across the creek that separated the lowland swamp from the Bend, smoke was rising in the afternoon sun. People from all over were gathering in the side yard of the Bright Lily CME Church, the only church in the Bend. Men milled around the barbecue pit, giving unwanted advice to Berl and the other self-appointed cooks.
“You know so much, where was you when we was up all last night keepin’ the fire goin’?”
Off to the south, a little distance from the pit, a large iron pot, bubbling with Brunswick stew, was being sampled by anyone who might have an opinion. Next to the stew, and in among a grove of pine trees, a homemade wooden table, supported by braces nailed directly to tree trunks, made up a good thirty feet of flat surface that would soon be covered over with food. Women arrived, putting their offerings on one by one, until it was filled to overflowing with large mounds of fried chicken, a skillet of meat loaf, pots of green beans, bowls of coleslaw, collard greens. Most brought a dessert to go along with their other dish. These were placed in the middle of the table: fried pies, buttermilk pies, peach cobbler, and pecan pies, foods of no rhyme or reason, but specialties of the maker. Big wood bowls filled with loaves of white bread anchored each end of the spread. Smaller children had been assigned to keep the flies away. They walked up and down the table, fanning the food with dish towels.
On a smaller table off to the side, bright tin tubs filled with lemonade sat next to two more washtubs that contained large blocks of ice, which were being chipped into slivers as older children took turns with the ice picks.
Spread out at random on the grass to the front and the side of the church were brightly colored homemade quilts brought by each family to mark its sitting place.
Mama Tuway, wearing her best flowered dress and a straw hat with a cloth red rose on the brim, stood off to herself, watching Tuway, who had just arrived. He drifted through the crowd, saying hello to this one and that, but all the while glancing around to see if he could find Ella.
He was coming toward Mama Tuway now, with something approaching a smile on his face. She knew the first thing he would ask, and she didn’t want to hear it. “No, I ain’t seen her,” she said before he could speak. “Tuway, ain’t nothin’ you can do ’bout that girl. Just leave her be.”
Tuway tried to laugh. “I ain’t messin’ with her. You know don’t nobody mess with Ella ’cept if she take a mind.”
Frustration welled up. “You know my meanin’, Tuway. . . .”
“Yes’m,” he said absentmindedly as his eyes surveyed the tops of heads.
“You know where she is,” she said, spitting it out. “Sittin’ over there, scared of her own shadow.
“Tuway.” She tried to get him to look at her. “Tuway,” she said again, raising her voice.
He smiled vaguely, then looked toward the swamp. She noticed he had on a new shirt.
She was determined to make him listen to what she had to say, but he still acted as if they were talking about nothing more than the crops in the fields or the price of cotton. She grabbed his hands. “Look here, Tuway, I couldn’t even get her to come away from over yonder, and she minds me. What’s you ’spect you gonna do ’bout it?”
“Well, I guess I’ll just—”
In a final attempt, she said the only thing left to her. “Listen here, Tuway. The fact is, you got a face with two colors. Don’t you see that, boy? Peoples think that strange.” She held his hands in front of him. “Look, look at you if you can’t see your face. Two colors. She ain’t gonna get to know a face like that.”
He knew what she was doing; even so, he stared down at his hands and felt a stabbing in his stomach. She had never said it out loud, had never tried to use it against him before.
“That girl don’t care nothin’ ’bout nothin’ ’cept what stirrin’ round inside her head. Don’t yo
u see that?” Tears were in her eyes as she threw his hands down and turned to go.
He called after her. “It’s all right, Mama. That’s what make it okay. She strange, too, Mama.”
Her back was to him, but he could see her shaking her head over and over as she walked on off.
Tuway went to the swamp, looking for her. He searched the main house, then walked down the trail to her place.
She sat on her bed, both hands gripping the side of the mattress, staring down at the blouse she had finally chosen to put on. The room was quiet and dark. Sunlight spotted the walls now and then when a breeze shifted leaves outside the window. Her few clothes lay about the room, on the bed and floor, considered and reconsidered, then discarded. He could imagine her trying on one and then the other, miserable with the outcome. There was not a mirror for her to see. It would only have made things worse.
“Ella?” He said it softly so as not to scare her. It only made him sound strange.
She didn’t look up, knowing his coming was inevitable. He stood in the doorway, watching her as he had often watched some startled something he might come upon in the swamp—a beautiful ten-point buck or a red-tail fox sitting stark still, ready to bolt at the slightest hint—and he, not moving, afraid it might run away if he breathed, and wanting to take it in, all of it, before it was gone.
He had never been alone with her before, but he had thought of what he might say if it ever happened. What he might say should be said after the beginning, when she would look at his face and see him, who he really was, not now. How to begin and not scare it away? “They gonna be some good eatin’ over at the church.”
She had been thinking what she would say to explain to him, to anyone, why she didn’t want to go, why she couldn’t go. Now she got the words all wrong, but still they tumbled out. “I hated where I was before.” She had crossed her arms and was holding herself, almost a stranglehold. “What I did before—but I stayed on.” She looked up at him as if he could understand the whole story of her life with that one sentence. As if he could, in some way, look inside her mind to see the images that flashed there now. The night she was sitting in the barbecue joint in Selma and the white boy from over in Lower Peach Tree came in and couldn’t take his eyes off her, and she was out of work and had a baby to support. “He said he was gonna do for Willie,” she said.
Tuway held his breath. She was speaking to him for the first time—of her own accord. He must not lose the moment, but he mustn’t frighten her. “Berl say this is the best barbecue he done ever made.” He shifted his position slightly in the door frame and nervously picked a splinter out of the wood to examine it. “Course, you know Berl.”
She realized he had said something back to her, but her fear would not let her hear what it was. The images were coming to her mind in great waves now. She could see the house he had rented for her, on a road just out of Selma. She could see a few happy times, followed by more and more misery. In exchange for the house, for the food, for a place to keep Willie . . . Now the worst part—she braced for the flashes of pictures that were coming, images of those terrible nights.
She blinked to try to hear what Tuway was saying. The tone of his voice had sounded caring, but she had missed the words. She let loose the grip on her arms and began to rub the tops of her legs. She knew she must try to explain the next part, but how could she when she didn’t know herself? “Why did I stay?” The skirt she had on was being pulled up and down her legs by her rubbing hands. “Why did I stay?” She looked at him. She must tell him a reason he would understand. Her eyes were wide and wild now. “ ’Cause I couldn’t get out, that’s why. ’Cause I couldn’t get out. He locked the door.” She continued the rubbing motion on her legs. He had not believed her and she saw it. Her head dropped and her voice lowered to a whisper. “Course I could get out. Course I could get out.” She sat there, seeing things from the past.
Like with the buck on a path in the swamp, he knew it was nonsensical to try to communicate, but he persisted, not because he didn’t know the buck’s language but because he thought the sight of it and the sense of it must, somewhere along the line, connect. Of course, the problem was that the sight of her blinded him to the sense of it.
“The choir be singin’ later on this afternoon. You ain’t never heard them sing. . . . ” And midway through this, some part of what she had said came to him, and he ended by saying, “And whoever locked you up, I would kill’m.”
She looked up at him for one moment and seemed about to smile, but then she dropped her head. There was silence as tears fell on her blouse. “I wanted so bad to get out, and now I’m out and I can’t get out of where I am when I’m free.” She began to cry, not an angry cry, but sad, like a child who is too tired to go on. She looked at him, pleading. “What’s the matter with me? What’s the matter?”
He had not imagined it would be like this—the first time he had been able to look through a crack into her jellied soul. He was overwhelmed with wanting to touch her and, at the same time, a terrible sadness overcame him. He felt a stinging in his throat, which he tried to clear by swallowing, but then his eyes began to water as he pushed back the truth. “Nothin’s the matter with you I see. Ain’t nothin’.” He stepped toward her. She flinched and he stepped back immediately. “Don’t you know you . . . you beautiful?”
Her shoulders slumped forward, a turtle pulling back in its shell. He was like the others.
But he, he was so proud of himself for having said it. It gave him courage to continue. “Come on now. Let’s us go on over there, you and me. I won’t let nobody touch you, and you can count on that.” He knew he sounded like a boy and not a man, but he didn’t care.
Tuway turned and left the house to wait for her on the ground. “You know we need to go, so come on now,” he called up to her quietly.
Presently, he could hear water splashing out of the pitcher into the washbowl. She took a long time, washing away the tears, but finally she came out, slowly descending the steps to follow him along the trail to the Fourth Day celebration, still sealed in the cave of her thoughts.
And he, he walked ahead, hearing her footsteps follow. He could not ever remember being happier, because he imagined there was hope.
Lower Peach Tree
TUWAY, where have you been?” Adell Vance looked up from the stove. She always cooked to calm her nerves. This day, several weeks after the Fourth of July, there were three pots of something boiling on the top burners. She lifted a spoon from one pot and began stirring another. “I sent Cal to fetch you. We waited for you, but you never came.” She took a lid that was too big and banged it down on one of the pots. “Finally, I walked him down there myself.”
Tuway had rushed in the back door, out of breath. “Didn’t know there was no meetin’ this afternoon. Cal come for me. I was, uh, visitin’ a cousin over in . . . He said for me to get on over here quick. What happened?”
“It was a special call meeting.” She knocked her wooden spoon on the side of a pot to clear it of what looked like grits. “Of course we all know whose doin’ it really was.” She walked over to the percolator on the counter to the left of the sink, poured coffee into a carafe, and then placed it on a wooden tray.
Tuway turned to rush out the back door.
She raised her hand to stop him. “No mind, it’s too late now. That no-account L.B. . . .” She looked at Tuway, her eyes glazed over with tears. “Here.” She shoved the tray at him. “You take it to him. I can’t bear to.”
“What happened? Where is he?”
“There.” She pointed toward the library. “He’ll tell you.” She picked up a dish towel and began to dry silverware stacked on the sink drain, slinging it, one noisy piece at a time, into the utensils drawer.
The Judge sat with the curtains drawn and the French doors to the sunporch closed. The room felt still and old. Smells of yesterday’s cooking and last night’s pipe still hung in the air.
He gave halfhearted notice to Tuway’s co
ming. “Do I hear the footfall of my man Tuway?”
Tuway put the tray on its usual table next to the Judge’s armchair. He poured coffee into the cup and handed it to him; then he walked over to open the curtains.
“Did you tell me they was havin’ a board meetin’ today, Judge?”
“I am not quite in the mood for light and fresh air, Tuway.”
Tuway paid no attention and unlatched the sill lock. The counterweights of the old window rattled in the walls as Tuway pulled it fully open. Air, fresher and hotter, stood outside and did not come in. “If you did tell me ’bout a meetin’, it plumb slipped my mind.”
The Judge was hunched over, as if he were studying the cup in his hand. A slight jerk in his shoulders meant that he was finding that humorous. “In all the years I’ve known you, Tuway, nothing has ever slipped your mind.” He tried but didn’t succeed in sounding like W. C. Fields. “Don’t be condescending, my good man.”
Tuway finished opening windows. Now, instead of dark and musty, the room seemed bright and musty. Dust danced into the streams of sun that lighted squares on the floor. Tuway was undeterred and moved on to open the French doors. “Well now, Judge, I guess I didn’t miss much, seein’ how you’re back so soon. Wasn’t one of them long meetings that lasted till after dark.”
“It doesn’t take long to swing an ax, Tuway.”
In a final effort, Tuway turned on the floor fan, then went to take a seat opposite the Judge. “Did somethin’ happen, Judge? Somethin’ I needs to know ’bout?”
The Judge sighed and rubbed his forehead with his free hand. “I can see Adell has left the dirty work to me, as usual.”
He looked up and spoke in Tuway’s direction. “Yes, something happened, Tuway. People I busted my butt for, people that I was responsible for getting on the board, people that I thought had more common sense . . .” He lifted his coffee cup without having taken a drink and placed it on the tray he knew was there. “Oh, what the hell, Tuway. I got fired, plain and simple.” He took a deep breath. “Which means you got fired, and probably Miss Maroon, although I’m not so sure about that. He may not want to keep her, but I don’t think at this point he can run the place without her. She said she might quit anyway, but that was only in the heat of the moment. Her family needs her income too much.” He considered for a moment. “No, on second thought, she’ll probably stay.”
Out of the Night That Covers Me Page 27