by Randi Pink
“You know.”
That’s what he loved most about Miss Ferris. She wasn’t the type to labor him with lengthy speeches and advice. Instead, she allowed the words to come to him as they willed. Besides, he did know. The blundering. The planning of steps and movements. The unsteadiness of thoughts and mind and body. All of this was love. He’d read enough books to know that.
“Do you need to write?” She finally asked the perfectly correct question.
“I do.”
“Pen’s over there,” she said as she ducked out of the room. “Join us when you’re finished. I feel certain this will be a magical poem.”
The jacket of his journal was moist with the sweat of stress and his pen nearly dull. Preferring his own writing utensil, he carefully bit tiny pieces of wood from the tip to reveal more lead. Overwhelmed, he couldn’t bring himself to write a word about Angel. Knowing he’d have to face her again soon, he didn’t want to stir too much more emotion to the raw surface.
He thought instead of the way she’d spoken of Booker T. Washington. Such reverence for a man Isaiah knew to be undeserving. Such selflessness toward a man who only spoke of himself and his accomplishments. Poor Angel, ankle-deep in Washington’s muck. Hypnotized by his tragic beginnings and circumstance, never acknowledging his arrogance, feebleness, and lack of will to stand against his oppressor. A fine speaker with no backbone to speak of. And Angel, ignorant of the workings of the world with no desire to be educated. Anyone else, he would’ve written off; her, he wanted to save.
Booker (for Angel)
Born bonded in bondage,
Billowed and bandaged,
Beaten by bastards,
In bally brimmed hats.
Fledgling and crying,
As kinfolk lay dying,
Still he praised his butchers,
Don’t dare justify that.
Up from Slavery, he bolstered,
Bragged of full civilized meals,
While white men holstered their hostlers,
With loaded prepared steel.
To shoot down his dear kindred,
And ravage his descended,
But don’t blame the white man,
He said, the white man was kind.
No excuses, my Angel,
Not for abuses so major.
No admissions, no bias, or Biblical effervescence,
Just submission, compliance and pitiful acquiescence.
Deserve your deference, he does not,
Nor benefit of the doubt,
Not your reverence,
He was mere denigrate, speeches for aught.
All dialogue without action,
Hasty tongue with no roar,
Only idioms, vernaculars,
Spoken language of strong men who welcomed war.
Now for Angel,
I say,
So sorry to break your precious heart,
But your love for Booker Washington isn’t smart.
As he read the poem back to himself, a heavy weight lifted from Isaiah’s body. Writing was a spewing of corrupted energy for him, clearing the path for the calm decency he longed for within himself. Even flawed or misused, his words strung together in rhythmic clumps, separated by spaces giving them the look of Claude McKay or James Weldon Johnson. The act of writing brought him back to where he was supposed to be. There was no Muggy in that place. No enslaved heroes. No premature death of a parent. Not even Angel was there. In the space after, Isaiah made words work as one in perfect concert, Isaiah found only himself. He could breathe.
Airways clear, he picked himself up and snaked his way back through Miss Ferris’s bookish, artistic home, noticing things he hadn’t before. Most walls in her home had been covered with shelving to house a world of books. Tucked in horizontally, diagonally, and every way they’d stay, books overwhelmed the place. For anyone else it would’ve been hoarding, but for her, it was quaint. The stocked pantry was the only area Isaiah observed without a single book inside.
Fascinated by such a meticulous cold room, Isaiah stopped in to further inspect it. Mason jars of segregated dried beans lined the walls—white beans with whites, speckled darks with speckled, black with blacks. Air-sealed peaches, plums, figs, and apples made up the opposite side of the pantry’s walls. In the center, handmade breads with large craters splitting the center were stuffed in handled baskets lining multiple shelves.
Isaiah breathed in Miss Ferris’s untainted personal space, where she could be whoever she wanted to be—teacher, baker, gardener, a free woman. Such a small thing, the ability to be oneself, but so forbidden to so many of his people, even now. Every Black woman should be able to live in such calm creativity if she so pleased. One thing his angel reminded him to see: Greenwood was unique in that way.
Again, he took in a deep breath. The room smelled of the best sort of home: old-world, delicious freedom. So many would never be able to breathe in such an intangible thing as freedom. Why him? Why Miss Ferris? Why Angel? None of this was fair, but fairness was of no import.
“Observing my spoils, I see.” Miss Ferris startled him.
“I’m sorry,” he replied, heading for the doorway. “It’s just…” He considered sharing his thoughts with her. “I’m sure this was a lot of work.”
Angel’s large, impressed eyes peeked over Miss Ferris’s left shoulder. “You did all this yourself?”
“I did,” Miss Ferris said before angling her body to let Angel inside the pantry door. “I don’t think of this as work, though. This belongs to me. I planted it, grew it, picked it, and will soon eat it. My mother would’ve died for such an opportunity to work for her own pickings. Her mother, too. Working for one’s own benefit is not working at all.”
Isaiah took this as an opening. “Actually,” he said, “that’s why I came in here. The look of it, the care, it’s sovereignty. This doesn’t exist anywhere else in the world for Blacks.” He looked into Angel’s confused face. “I know this may sound stagey, forgive me, but our people don’t get to have this life. What’s so special about the three of us that we do?”
“Follow me into the kitchen,” Miss Ferris said without answering. “I’d say it’s time for lunch; red soup and corn bread. Every ingredient specially pulled from this very pantry.”
Following close behind Miss Ferris, Angel whispered to Isaiah, “I find myself feeling the same thing every time I pass so many Black-owned businesses in Deep Greenwood. I can’t quite press my finger on it. The closest word I can think of is guilt.”
“Yes,” he said as if she’d identified the word his mind had been dancing around without catching ahold of it. “Guilt. As unfounded as it may be, that’s what’s tugging my insides.”
“Have a seat, you two,” Miss Ferris said before pouring two warm bowls of aromatic soup over generous squares of dark corn bread.
ANGEL
Angel was surprised by the scrumptiousness of her first slurp of red soup. It was nearly shocking to her palate. She searched the bowl for a valid reason why this basic red soup should taste so incredible, but only found pole snap beans, scraped corn, and floating bits of tomato. There was no rhyme or reason. Angel decided to close her eyes and enjoy it.
“My Lord, Miss Ferris,” Isaiah blurted out. “What did you do to this soup? It’s the best I’ve ever had.”
Angel laughed and thanked him internally for asking.
“The trick is the roux,” Miss Ferris replied. “And, dear boy, I have no idea how to tell you. A roux is a feeling more than it is a method. You just pour, stir, poke, prod, sniff, then ready. My mama’s mama taught me.”
“I’d love to watch you make it someday,” Angel said with much apprehension. Some women took it as an affront, asking for secret family recipes and tricks in the kitchen, but Angel couldn’t help herself. “If you’ll have me.”
At first, Miss Ferris looked taken aback; then she softened. “That’s a dangerous question to ask a woman, you do know that.”
“I do know that.�
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“I admire your courage,” Miss Ferris joked. “I’d love to show you my roux. Both of you, if you’d like.” They nodded with full mouths. “We should dissect this guilt you’re both feeling,” Miss Ferris said. “Since you’re eating, and enjoying, I’ll begin.”
Miss Ferris wiped her hands on the same checkerboard kitchen rag Angel’s mother had hanging over her stove back home, and settled into a dining chair across from them. Every Greenwood household likely had the same rag, Angel imagined. She remembered stacks of them on display in Mr. Odom’s hardware store window. She recalled that stack shrinking every time she’d passed by. That was one of Angel’s favorite things about living in a town such as Greenwood.
“First of all, I feel it, too,” said Miss Ferris as she clasped her hands and rested her chin on them. “I believe with my whole heart that every Black person living, even those still living under the foot of the white man, feels some small inkling of this. Our people have been fractured, you see? Strategically separated into classes within itself. Angel, you know the passage in Up from Slavery when Booker T. Washington discussed those who went back into bondage? With grinning faces and peppy steps, they housed themselves comfortably underneath the white man’s foot. Why would they do this?”
Angel took a moment to consider. This portion of Washington’s book was much criticized in her world. Broken into pieces and reasons to call her hero an Uncle You-Know-What. Every fabric of her wanted to defend him, especially in the company of her much-beloved teacher and a Du Bois worshipper like Isaiah.
“I…,” she started, then stopped.
How could she offer an explanation? She, sixteen years old and female, would run as fast and far as she could away from such nightmares. Children taken from the arms of their mothers, mothers razed by filthy men, men emasculated by generations of forced submission. All the compassion in the world couldn’t explain that. But she couldn’t dare say that in such company.
“I have trouble vindicating this passage,” she said simply. “I have no words.”
“Ha!” Isaiah shouted, boasting his position. This single, conceited syllable made Angel’s blood boil. “See!”
Angel had nearly lost sight of the dreadfulness of him, but there it was on full display. So blinded by his own will and cause that no one else’s mattered. “You truly only think of your winning, don’t you? No one else exists in the world if you win an argument?”
Just seeing he’d offended her, he cowered. “I wasn’t thinking just then…”
“That’s right, you weren’t thinking,” she snapped her reply. “You’re no better than the pastor cherry-picking sermons to justify his own failures. No better than Muggy. And you know what? No better than the master-minded white man, winning by any means necessary.”
She knew it was too far before she’d said it. She also knew he was nothing like the white man, but in that very moment, she only cared to hurt him as much as he’d hurt her. And when she finally caught his gaze, she realized that she had done what she set out to do.
“Angel,” Miss Ferris interjected firmly. “Never demean a Black man in such a way, you hear me? No matter how angry he makes you, you never compare a good man to such another. Look at me in my eyes, Angel, or you will never be welcomed in my home again.”
Angel didn’t want to look up. Shame weighed down on the back of her neck, and she just wanted to disappear under the table, never to emerge again. She’d crossed the line. Tears burned the bottom rims of her eyes, and an itch came over her now-running nose. The pit of her stomach fell as far down as it would go, but she knew she had to look up. So she did. Locking disappointed eyes with Miss Ferris made Angel cry freely.
“Never…” Miss Ferris forced her words through fenced teeth. “Never tell a good Black man he’s just like the evilest white one. None deserve to be trapped with cruel captors, rapists, murderers. Especially not by a Black woman. Do you understand me?” Angel nodded in response, but that wasn’t enough. “Speak your understanding aloud.”
“I understand.” She blubbered fractured syllables to make up the words and then turned to Isaiah, whose eyes were also filled with tears. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it at all.”
“I know,” he replied, trying to smile and failing. “I shouldn’t have mocked you, either.”
“You really should take care with that, Isaiah,” Miss Ferris told him, voice and face now calmed. “Or else you’ll make yourself look like a know-it-all who knows very little indeed. Now, about that difficult passage in Up from Slavery.”
“We don’t have to—” Isaiah said.
“We most certainly do,” Miss Ferris interrupted. “Listen, both of you. The author of the work is creating contention between you, I see that, but leave that out of this discussion for a moment. The question is why would an otherwise-capable man stay in bondage when he has a choice to leave it? My answer, no matter how hypothesized, is incomparable, unexplainable, unfathomable terror. Such terror should not exist in the God-fearing world, but it does.
“We all get one life to live. One chance to make something beautiful of ourselves or to not, that’s what we know to be true here in Greenwood. That’s the difference between us and them, nothing else. We are no better on the inside. We simply know a Black life can be transformed from that of servitude to that of unmatched intelligence, resourcefulness, creativity, triumph.” She paused to wipe at her eyes.
“That’s the guilt we’re feeling on the inside. It has nothing at all to do with the ability to plant and sow vegetables, or own thriving businesses, or even walk down the street without harassment. It’s the immaterial knowledge that we, Black people, can be even better than whites if we want to be. And furthermore, much to their dismay, we don’t need them to survive. Everyone should possess this knowledge, but the men who stayed in bondage didn’t.”
Thoughtful silence came over the kitchen, and pain crept in with it. No one won the Booker T. Washington versus W.E.B. Du Bois argument in that moment. Truth itself won. Truth that neither stolen innocence nor property outweighed stolen esteem for one’s own capabilities. That was the true travesty of slavery and, furthermore, the true triumph of Greenwood.
“We deserve to be here, though, right?” Isaiah asked Miss Ferris, as if she must have the answer.
Angel waited for her response as well, wondering the same.
Miss Ferris grabbed Angel’s hand with her right and Isaiah’s with her left, clasping them into one clump of three. “Every one of our descendants deserves a place like Greenwood. It’s up to us to make that happen.”
“But how?” Angel asked eagerly.
Miss Ferris nodded toward the unfinished bike in her backyard. “There’s a start. Have you finished choosing your books?”
THURSDAY, MAY 26, 1921; 5 DAYS BEFORE
ISAIAH
Angel chose Up from Slavery; The Secret Garden; Peter and Wendy; Harriet, the Moses of Her People; and The Story of My Life, and Isaiah chose The Souls of Black Folk; The Talented Tenth; The Negro; The Philadelphia Negro; and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. In the end, the books made up a good balance of power and humor, Isaiah thought, a good mix for varying ages. And since he hadn’t actually read The Secret Garden before, he’d taken it home with him that night. He’d never share this fact with Angel, but the book made him cry so hard he had to warm-iron the pages because they’d wrinkled so from his tears. He held the book to his chest and hurried out the door, heading for Miss Ferris’s home.
“Going to work, Ma!” he said, attempting to leave before she called after him.
“Come here a minute,” she replied. “I’ve made morning glories for you.”
He hung his head and respectfully headed to the sweet-smelling kitchen. Isaiah had heard long ago that all mothers had a sixth sense for their evading children, but his mother was a cut above. He sat across from her at the table and folded his hands, knowing to expect questions.
“How was your first day, yesterday?” she asked, pouring herself a cup of tea.
“You got in late last night.”
For time to think, Isaiah stuffed a muffin in his mouth. “Just fine.” He spat bits as he spoke. “You know, work.”
She took a skeptical sip. “The Secret Garden? That’s a unique choice for you. Beautiful book.” She thumbed through the pages with a sweet smile.
“I really need to get to work, Ma.”
“I understand,” she said with much disappointment in her voice. “No time for your mother anymore. At least take another muffin for the walk.”
Isaiah owed her so much more than this. Stronger than anyone he’d ever known and more patient, too, she deserved better. He settled in. “I have a few minutes to spare, actually. I’ve wanted your opinion on something for a while, and never quite found the time to ask.”
That was a lie. He’d had the opportunity thousands of times, but was afraid that her response would be disappointing.
“Anything,” she said, eager to connect. “Ask away.”
“Last week, in Sunday school…,” he began. “You told me that I was behaving in a way that was contrary to our cause. What does that mean exactly?”
His mother looked overcome with something intensely new. Something so new that he couldn’t put his finger on it. She exhaled before speaking.
“Isaiah,” she said, giving herself a moment to close her eyes for a brief prayer, and a few more to admire her only son. “You have always been a fighter. Sometimes fighting battles that you shouldn’t fight with young men you shouldn’t associate with. I respect the fight inside of you. It’s without limits, but you waste it at times.”
“What do you mean, waste it?”
“Even though you know exactly what I mean, I’ll try to explain.” After several sips of tea, she continued. “Du Bois matches your passion. That much is absolutely true. But he’s in the vein of Muggy, influencing a carelessness inside of you that has zero regard for those in your circumference. Including, sometimes, your own dear mother.”