by Randi Pink
Plow your own land. Pass along your methods to your children’s children. Allow the white man to live in what he thinks is luxury while cultivating a valuable life alongside. A life akin to Greenwood. Fight not! Instead, focus on that we can control—ourselves. And one day, just like the tortoise, we shall pass the overzealous hare.
As the teakettle began to whistle from inside the house, Angel couldn’t help feeling cut by Isaiah’s snub. What could have happened between this morning and now? she wondered. Or the better question, who could’ve happened. Muggy, obviously. Angel made a point of hating no one, especially her contemporaries. High school was a tricky place, after all. A place of confusion and judgment. A place of endless searching for oneself but never quite finding the destination.
People did things they regretted in high school, her father had told her. Even he kicked himself from time to time about the smallest of slights he’d committed twenty years earlier. It was a cruel time, he’d said. He was absolutely correct, too. And since she’d been warned, she fought hard and strong to avoid the high school pitfall of being cruel. Sometimes, she thought, she took it too far in the opposite direction, becoming a bit of a pushover. An easy target. But Muggy seemed to find unbridled joy in making others’ lives miserable.
Deacon Yancey burst through the screen door. “I think it’s even better than the last time!” he said with such delight. Then he caught the sight of Isaiah turning the corner and frowned. “I’ll never understand how idyllic Greenwood can produce such a boy. He’s the worst of us. God cursed his sugary sweet mother with raising such a child all alone.” He turned his attention to Angel. “She kind of reminds me of you.”
Angel took a small sip and winced, this time at Deacon Yancey’s harsh judgment, not the tea, which was horrible. She thought of Shakespeare. She wasn’t necessarily Juliet, but Isaiah was definitely Romeo. A poet in wolf’s clothing. A lover playing dress-up in order to fit in with Muggy. A covert reader was what he was, but it wasn’t her place to take up for him. Everyone had to hold on to their own shovel, and decide whether to dig graves deep enough for themselves.
“Deacon,” she started, trying to add a touch of nonchalance to her voice. “You seem to really not care for him. What has he done so horribly?”
Deacon Yancey jammed his feet to the porch floor to stop his swing from swaying. It was an action of pure hatred, which surprised Angel. Deacon Yancey, though old in his thoughts, was basically harmless. She’d never seen his face so twisted up in anger toward anyone.
“It’ll take a minute to tell,” he said with a scowl. “Long, long history of horrible in that family.”
Again, Angel thought of Romeo, but not as the generic-lover-catchall Romeo. The Romeo that everyone despised for a valid reason. Romeo pre-Juliet—a dangerous prankster with a mean entourage and few redeeming qualities. Narcissistic Romeo. While that Romeo only gets a few opening pages in the play, Angel often thought of him. Rescued by love and beauty from a downward spiral of mischief. But why was every reader so quick to forget his misdeeds? So eager to give him a pass for being an awful human? The unwavering power of a hopeful love story, she thought. But not her and Deacon Yancey. They seemed to share a natural skepticism about such things.
Angel glanced at her watch. “I’ve got a little while before I have to be home.” She blew on her tea and forced a large gulp. “What is it about Isaiah?”
Deacon Yancey released his feet and began swinging again.
“That dead daddy of his was always a troublemaker,” he started.
Though his tone was harsh, Angel let out a brief sigh of relief. This had nothing at all to do with Isaiah. This was old foolishness of grudges held hard. She almost jumped up to leave, readying herself for an excuse to abandon Deacon Yancey. Maybe she’d blame baby Michael. Or her papa. Or even her mama. It wouldn’t be a lie—she was sure that between the three of them, somebody needed her back home. She squirmed in her seat.
“Apple fell in the branches with Isaiah, though,” he continued. “Remember my Pete? Never a bad bone in his body, Pete. Every father wants a son like that. A dream of a son, he is.”
Angel wanted to show a tiny bit of interest before she left. “He’s in Atlanta, right?”
Deacon Yancey nodded in response, staring off at the front gate. “Moved there soon as it happened.”
Angel sat back again, intrigued, and took another sip of her tea. “What exactly happened?”
The story of Pete was a convoluted one around town. His legend loomed large within the surrounding cities. Supposedly, he was voted most handsome, most likely to succeed, most popular, all of it. The rumors were that he’d been excelling at absolutely everything.
But the day after graduation from one of the schools a few counties over, he’d left Oklahoma and never returned, not even for his mother’s funeral. It was as if he’d vanished into thin air. Angel had known more than most about this since they’d all graduated high school together—her mother, father, even Isaiah’s parents were in his large graduating class.
Angel realized Deacon Yancey hadn’t answered her. “You don’t have to tell me, Deacon, I understand.”
He looked over at her like someone stuck a flaming dagger in his heart. “I haven’t told a soul about my boy,” he said slowly. “Promised my wife I never would do.”
“I don’t understand, Deacon.”
“That daddy of his lied on my Pete. Told a gang of white men Pete had stolen some tiny piece of something from their grocery. Pete had no reason to steal. More too, he had better sense than to take from the white man. But that ole daddy of his got my Pete beat so bad he never was the same. His mama neither. She’d been dying long before that bitter cold day last September.”
ISAIAH
A coward. A follower. A stupid, stupid idiot for leaving his journal on the bed. For trusting entirely untrustworthy Dorothy Mae. Isaiah hated himself.
Angel had been talking to Deacon Yancey again, too. Things were definitely not looking good for him. Deacon Yancey had disliked him since the day he entered the world, his mother had told him when he was very young. She wouldn’t go into deep detail as to why, but she did say that Isaiah was a firm representation of his only son Pete’s failure. Isaiah’s precious mother was supposed to marry Pete. After a decade of puppy love, Isaiah’s mother met his father. And that was the end of that. According to Greenwood’s vines, she snuck out the back door of her house, leaving Pete on her front porch holding a bouquet of verbena.
In that moment, Isaiah realized just how many verbena had opened toward the sun, happy and healthy. In the spring, Greenwood was overrun with them. So much so, Westerners traveled from all over Oklahoma for photographs. Inspired to write, he sat on a neighbor’s front stoop and removed the journal from his bag.
Fingers itching, he began a stream-of-consciousness poem to the flowers surrounding him.
For the Greenwood Verbena
I’m Confused
But don’t you be.
Bathe in the light.
I cannot quite see.
It’s large for you.
And small for me.
Don’t give up on love.
You’re Confused.
But nothing like me.
I’m trapped in the deep dark.
You’re wild and free.
You do you,
And I’ll do me.
But don’t give up on love.
Then, all of a sudden, the pages of his journal flipped forward so forcefully they knocked his pen to the fertile ground. Fingering through, there was a thick gap in the fanning of the pages. Fringy wisps springing forward from the inner spine, missing pages. He recognized which immediately—the perfectly passionate college letters of intent to Morehouse and Howard.
A wave of hatred overtook the entirety of his body, heat radiating from his trembling fingers. A knot in his stomach released itself; he was no longer afraid. Now, dear Lord, he was enraged. The instant that he realized his intent letters were missing
, he no longer dared to care about Greenwood hierarchy and where he fit in it. Muggy had ripped out a chess piece in his long game. Popularity didn’t stand up to that challenge.
Morehouse would mold him into a man of maroon and white. A big-city fighter feeding poetry and power into the pipeline of Atlanta, where Du Bois lived and, therefore, would certainly take notice.
Or Howard. Equally statured and skillfully placed in the center of the nation’s capital for maximum political impact. He could stand tall on flipped milk crates reciting words into the receptive minds ready for social change.
But trickster Muggy. Small-town Muggy. Muggy with no hope for anything more had stolen a chess piece off of his board.
Surely he could write more letters. Writing was, after all, his forte. But that wasn’t nearly the point. Taken words crossed a line that Isaiah hadn’t realized existed. Not only taken words, but a taken future. Taken escape from the place where every single one of the thirty-five blocks reminded him of his father.
Glancing through angry, squinted eyes, he saw Mrs. Turner’s tiny flower shop, where his father would buy his mother a single yellow rose every Friday evening for no reason at all. A bit farther in the distance, he spotted the ticking clock towering over Mr. Massey’s dry cleaners, who crisped his father’s shirt exactly the way he liked them. And then, looking down at his own feet, he realized he’d taken a seat on the porch in front of the very walkway where his father had taught him to ride a two-wheeled bike.
A burning overtook Isaiah’s nose, and he began to cry. Not a blubbering, but a fuming. Like a teased bull in a ring—surrounded by spectators dressed to witness shame. Like a boar shot to suffer. Like Du Bois.
Isaiah had been a prankster at best. A coward. A follower. A stupid, stupid idiot. But deep down on the inside, he was plotting. Secretly and satisfyingly carving an escape hatch for himself. A path to greatness—leadership. And now Muggy Little Jr. threatened it.
He stood to his feet and headed straight to Muggy’s house. He had three blocks to stretch and squeeze his fists. He was about to beat his best friend’s ass once and for all.
When he reached Muggy’s home, he saw his grinning eye peek through the front blind. Isaiah got to banging on the glass, shamelessly loud and chaotic. Obviously at the end of his lengthy rope, Isaiah was released from his cage.
“Open the door, Muggy!” he yelled in a crazed slur. “Come out and face me like a man!”
But Muggy didn’t come.
“Coward!” Isaiah yelled from the center of Muggy Little Jr.’s front yard. “Coward!”
ANGEL
A dusting came over Greenwood. Brown swirls of road rose knee-high, teasing at Angel’s senses. Long-settled dirt lifted from the curve of the train track with strange beauty. As she felt herself out of Deacon Yancey’s sights, Angel sat on a patchy spot of grass near the track’s edge to take in the look of the quaint town she loved.
Greenwood. “Negro Wall Street” as Booker T. Washington named it. Appropriate, she thought. No better name for such an active place of Black excellence. A few summers ago, when her papa still tilted his hats just so, they’d taken the train to visit family in Florida. Her father told her to prepare herself for a different perspective on Black life. A rougher view, he’d called it. But when they arrived, she was not prepared.
Stepping off the train, she was greeted by a large-breasted woman with a face shaped like the moon. Her own face buried in bosom, Angel smelled the crust of peach pie in her grandmother’s chest. The aroma of love shown through freshly picked fruits baked into desserts. Sitting there in the Greenwood grass, Angel could nearly smell it. She closed her eyes for a brief moment and smiled, but the memory was replaced by the rest of her grandmother’s tiny Florida town.
Dust. Not too different from the very dust surrounding her own town, but the similarity ended there. In Florida, the dirt was sinister. “Red from the spilt blood of our ancestors,” her father had told her to her mother’s chagrin. “Too much, Robert,” her mother had said with an elbow to his ribs. “You’ll scare her to death.”
Angel wasn’t scared at all, though. She was instead curious. When her papa’s mother finally released her, Angel took in the line of shotgun houses. Aproned women went about their business, in and out of their creaking homes, and Angel wondered why they looked so sad. Suspendered men also trudged along with invisible weight hunching their shoulders toward the ground. Children ran through the red dirt, toeing squares into the dust to make hopscotch. The game was to reach the end of the hopscotch before a gust took the lines away and no one could make it in time to win.
As the train left, Angel noticed the small white side of town just on the other side. So close a well-armed pitcher could break one of their windows from where she’d stood. She saw white women cross-stitching patterns in lazy rocking chairs as Black ladies chased their wild children. She saw white men managing broad-shouldered, sweaty Black men to do their hard work in the distance. She saw the very opposite of Greenwood. Her papa was right to warn her.
Now, as the sun began setting to orange, Angel peeled herself from the ground and began to walk home. She thought much about what Deacon Yancey had told her of Isaiah’s father.
Enormous secrets of a small town could create a rot on the inside. And eventually, that sick spot spread to other places like bad fruit in a basket. For the deacon, it spread to Isaiah without a single doubt. The deacon despised Isaiah as a placeholder for his dead father; that much was obvious. But such secrets shouldn’t be secrets, Angel thought.
Deacon Yancey said that there was no one else left alive that knew the truth about Pete. He was the only one carrying around such a load. His wife knew, of course, but she’d gone on to leave him with it. Then, on the last dusty day of the school year, Deacon Yancey decided to share it with Angel.
She wanted to give Deacon Yancey the benefit of the doubt. She wanted to believe he told her as a warning about Isaiah. As a loving church member would. She, however, knew the deacon, selfish and lonely, only wanted to give away a portion of his burden so he didn’t have to carry it all.
Angel wanted to help people, but she also wanted to live a life of her own. Without ghosts and vendettas dropped onto her like blinding raindrops. But now, she had no choice. She was carrying it right along with him, and approaching her home, she swore she’d never share that secret’s burden. Not even with Isaiah.
Michael had to be asleep, because her street was quiet. Making her way onto her cool porch, she pushed the door in to find her precious papa snoring on the couch. He’d already been wiped up and changed by her mother, who was likely exhausted from all that solo work. Guilt took ahold. Not because her mother had done it herself, but because of the relief she felt from not having to help. That’d been the first evening in weeks she’d be able to lay herself down as soon as she walked in the door. She crawled into her bed and fell asleep in her school clothes.
WEDNESDAY, MAY 25, 1921; 6 DAYS BEFORE
ANGEL
“Wake up, sleepy,” her mother called out. “First day of summer break. You know what that means.”
Angel wiped at her eyes and smiled. Lemon pancakes was what it meant, ever since she was small. Another school year done, her favorite breakfast as a reward.
Dragging herself out of bed, she made her way to the kitchen to find no one in there.
“We’re in the front room,” her mother said with less zeal. “Join us.”
Her mother had pushed up a square folding table as close to her papa as possible, likely to catch his dropped food. His untouched pancakes were steaming in front of his weakly smiling eyes. Angel could tell he wanted to lift his hand to greet her but couldn’t. He was failing fast.
“Papa!” Her phony exuberance briefly lifted a cloud from his tired eyes. “And thank you, Mama.”
Angel pulled her own plate to the smallest angle of the folding table to give her father as much room as possible. Her mama had done the same, respectfully leaving him the head and two s
ides. A lion of a man, he’d always deserved such deference. And even now, fighting for life or clamoring for death, they would provide him this long-earned esteem.
“I have news,” Angel announced, eyeing the fluffy holes in her pancakes to avoid looking at her papa’s, in such a pitiful state. “Miss Ferris has asked me and a young man named Isaiah down the street to hand out books for a little extra money this summer.”
An unreadable silence held on too long, so Angel decided, nervously, to fill it.
“She says there are still rough blocks down the way in Greenwood. They mostly keep to themselves over there, I think, because I only see them at Mount Zion on Easter and Christmas Sundays.”
She felt her parents stiffen as she spoke. She stuffed a mouthful of pancakes and began speaking again before they were swallowed.
“Reading is fundamental is what the teachers have been telling us since we started school. We’re riding around on an old bike with a sidecar attached. Never seen anything quite like that. Has to be cleaned up and repaired. I was hoping Mr. Morris felt quite up to sturdying the wooden pieces and then picking up heavy-duty polish from old Mr. Odom’s hardware store down by the barbershop on the Avenue. Poor contraption’s rustier than anything.”
When she was done talking, she gave in to the silence, fully expecting a firm no from both of them. Studying her plate, she’d only taken one pie-slice-shaped hunk from her stack, but she was no longer hungry. Selfishly, she’d wanted out of this house for a few hours every day. Summer meant no escape from Michael, Mama’s braiding, and, most of all, her now-pitiful papa.