Out of the Night That Covers Me

by Pat Cunningham Devoto

  “Yes, sir.” John drank down the rest of his tea and slowly got up to follow.

  The Bend

  IT was late afternoon now—6:00, maybe 6:30—from the length of the pine-tree shadows pasted on the ground in front of the cabin. The old woman sat looking down into the tea leaves in the bottom of the china cup she always used. She had brought little Willie back home with her, and after awhile she had brewed them a cup of tea, “to take the chill off,” she said, but it was still blistering hot so late in the day.

  Soon they would bring Tuway and put him in the main room of the cabin. They hadn’t been able to find the girl, and Mama Tuway thought it good riddance. She hoped she washed all the way down to Mobile Bay. If it hadn’t been for her . . . so tainted by the whites.

  In awhile, the cabin would fill up with people and stay that way until the weekend, when they would have the biggest funeral the Bright Lily CME Church had ever seen. She would see to that. They would never forget him.

  She studied the leaves. This was really why she had made the tea, to see what they would say.

  The same thing they always said: Someone was coming—some black Jesus was coming to lead them to better times.

  It was just like her mother and her grandmother had told her—“Don’t trust the tea leaves for yourself, only for other people.” She, Mama Tuway, had given them their leader, and now he was gone, killed by the white man’s girl. Why did she think the tea leaves would know that? She got up, went to the edge of the porch, and threw the contents of the cup out in the dust.

  Now she took a seat in her rocker and watched the line between the sky and the pine trees turn to a silhouette.

  It was almost dark, so she got up and went to the wall and got a lantern off its hook and lighted it and placed it on the table beside her. Small things began to dance in and out of its glow. Night sounds came from up out of the swamp, like they had every night of her memory.

  “Willie,” she called as she commenced slowly rocking again. He had been round back of the house, bringing small loads of firewood to stack in the kitchen. His sore shoulder would not let him carry much. He came running and stood in front of her. His eyes were almost swollen shut from crying. Tears had washed his face clean of the mosquito medicine.

  She looked him up and down for a long moment. “Did I ever ask you if you knowed your numbers?”

  He stared at her and slowly shook his head.

  She gestured toward the screen door. “Go on in yonder and get me that book, the one on the shelf in my room, and bring it on back out here to me.”

  Lower Peach Tree

  THEY could hear a door close upstairs. Mrs. Vance was taking fresh towels out of the linen closet. The Judge sat down in his chair in the study and took the pipe from his coat pocket. “I can fix it.” John walked over to the Judge’s chair.

  The Judge smiled and held the pipe up. “I’d be much obliged.”

  While he looked around the room, John packed tobacco in the bowl like the Judge had taught him. Everything was so familiar, as if he had never left, the books on their shelves, slightly dusty, the view of the side yard out the window. All those nights in the swamp, and this was the place he had dreamed of coming back to, but now that he was here . . . “I always thought of comin’ back here,” he said out loud but to himself, “but when I thought of it, I thought of comin’ back the way it used to be.” He handed the pipe to the Judge.

  “Tuway being gone is going to be a big adjustment for all of us,” the Judge said. He picked up the lighter on his side table and touched its flame to the tobacco.

  John didn’t say anything. He went over and turned on the floor fan and then took a seat in Tuway’s old chair. There was silence except for the fan.

  “What is it?” the Judge said. “It’s not just Tuway, is it?”

  John looked at his feet. “I was thinkin’ that Shell probably hadn’t had ice in a glass all summer.” He was to the point of tears and didn’t know why. He studied the mud that had caked on his ankles and the tops of his too-small shoes. “Is that a stupid thing to think after all this time, after wantin’ to be back here?”

  The Judge inhaled smoke deep into his lungs and then blew it out in a perfect smoke ring that hung in the air. He chewed on his pipe stem and sighed. “No, it’s not stupid.” He took the pipe out of his mouth. “It would be stupid if I thought things hadn’t changed, if I pretended you hadn’t changed.”

  Mrs. Vance appeared in the doorway, smiling. “Everything is ready, John sweetheart. I put you clean towels in the bathroom and your bed has fresh sheets.”

  The Judge felt around for an ashtray and deposited his pipe. “I don’t think John will be staying with us tonight, Adell,” he said.

  “What? What are you talkin’ about? Where would he stay?”

  John stood up out of his chair.

  “But I thought . . .” She looked at John.

  “No, ma’am. I need to be gettin’ on back home. . . . I need to be seein’ about Shell and them.”

  “Those terrible Spraig people?” She looked at the Judge. “Byron, I will not have him associating with those terrible Spraig people anymore.”

  The Judge got slowly out of his chair, as if he hadn’t heard her.

  “Byron, I am perfectly serious. All this summer, we were worried sick about him, and now we have him back and you want to send him—”

  “I don’t want to send him, Adell; he wants to go.”

  “Well, you tell him he can’t go.”

  “Now listen here, Adell. I am not going to raise up another L.B. into this world. If the boy feels a sense of responsibility, we should be proud of it, instead of—”

  “But it’s dangerous out there. Luther Spraig is—”

  “Is his uncle, whether we like it or not. Now go get the car, Adell. Berl left it in the front drive.” He didn’t hear her move. “Bring it around to the side door . . . please.”

  She glared at him, then turned abruptly and left the room. They could hear her slam the front door.

  The Judge reached down to feel for his pipe. “Turn off the lights, son, and don’t forget to turn off the fan.”

  The boy did as he was told and came to stand in front of the Judge, intently watching his face. “There’s just one thing,” he said.

  “What’s that?”

  “Well . . .” The boy crossed his arms over his chest. “Well, what I want to know is, did you say . . . did you say you were raisin’ me up?”

  The Judge smiled and reached for John’s shoulder and found it exactly where he knew it would be. “I did,” he said. He put the pipe in his mouth and immediately took it back out again. “I most certainly did. I’m raising you up.” The Judge was silent for a long moment before he could speak again. “Now, go get me a cane out of the umbrella stand in the hall.”

  He could hear the boy running and leaping all the way to the umbrella stand and back.

  John stopped short when he came in the door and saw the Judge framed by the light from the window and smiling at what he had heard.

  He took the Judge’s hand to give him the cane. “I couldn’t help it, ’cause it’s just like you said.”

  “What did I say?”

  “You know, about words.” John turned and tried to jump up and touch the top of the doorsill as he started back down the hall to the car.

  “I don’t remember. What did I say about words?” the Judge called after him.

  John swirled around in the hall and stuck his head back in the door frame.

  “You know,” he whispered, embarrassed to say it out loud, “about how sometimes they’re like pieces of gold.”

  Very late in the afternoon, they drove out Highway 80 and turned left onto the dirt road. The car stopped where the rise in the land gave the first view of Aunt Nelda’s house. The three of them sat there for a while, watching the sun ease down into the cotton fields.

  Before John left them to walk the rest of the way home, he reached over from the backseat and, with
arms browned and muscled and rapidly changing into the man he would become, he hugged the Judge for a long moment. Then he got out of the car to stand in the same place he had stood once long ago. From here, he had watched Uncle Luther scatter his toys, his books, everything he owned, everything he thought he was—scattered in the dirt. Now he couldn’t remember why he had been so upset by it, but that had been years ago, when he was a child.

  Author’s Note

  There is a place, deep in south Alabama—Gee’s Bend—much like the Kay’s Bend in this story. The tea leaves were predicting a far greater leader for Gee’s Bend than Mama Tuway might ever have imagined. In 1965, Martin Luther King, Jr., visited Gee’s Bend, and after that, things were never the same.

  In 1968, when Dr. King was assassinated, the mules that pulled his casket through the streets of Atlanta were from Gee’s Bend, Alabama.

  INVICTUS

  William Ernest Henley

  Out of the night that covers me,

  Black as the Pit from pole to pole,

  I thank whatever gods may be

  For my unconquerable soul.

  In the fell clutch of circumstance,

  I have not winced nor cried aloud:

  Under the bludgeonings of chance

  My head is bloody, but unbowed.

  Beyond this place of wrath and tears

  Looms but the horror of the shade,

  And yet the menace of the years

  Finds, and shall find me, unafraid.

  It matters not how strait the gate,

  How charged with punishments the scroll,

  I am the master of my fate;

  I am the captain of my soul.

  Acknowledgments

  I think putting the words down is the easy part. It is the mechanism whereby they are heard that tells the tale. My thanks to my Warner Books bosses, especially Maureen Egen, who, with such a fine hand, keeps me pointed in the right direction. To Frances Jalet-Miller; my manuscripts are just pages of words until Frances works her magic. Thanks to Jackie Joiner for her hard work on my behalf and her natural-born kindness as a way of doing business. To Harvey-Jane Kowal for making sure I know what I’m talking about, to Carol Edwards for her meticulous eye and to Chris Dao for keeping the book and me in the right place at the right time.

  A special thanks to my agent, Molly Friedrich, and to Paul Cirone and all the folks at the Aaron Priest Literary Agency.

  Blessings on my fantastic sister Joanne Walker, always the first to have the manuscript dumped in her lap. To her mother-in-law, Mrs. Milton Walker, for her wonderful stories of the Alabama Black Belt. She is as clear-eyed in her ninety-third year as she was when she first moved to the Black Belt in 1945. And to her son, Bill Walker, for imparting so many of his childhood memories of Uniontown, Alabama. To Jackie and Frances Woodfin for our good walks in the Uniontown cemetery. To Gail Black of Uniontown, who makes the best banana pudding in Perry County. To Polly Bennett of Gee’s Bend and Alberta, Alabama, for her beautiful quilts and her stories of the Freedom Quilting Bee. To Laura Seabron of Atlanta for her tales of church homecomings. To Dr. Richard Detleff for information about various skin disorders. To my uncle Weakley Cunningham for providing the background material on cotton farming. To Jack Corley for remembering his days in the fields. To Anne Knight and Jim Baggett of the Birmingham Public Library for letting me wade through the great wealth of information on Gee’s Bend, and to the Alabama Department of History and Archives for letting me do the same. A special thanks to Kathryn Tucker Windham, an Alabama treasure.

  Most of all, to my father, who made sure that I understood, from a very early age, the highs and the lows of the southern farming landscape.