by Wiley Cash
“Yes,” Ella said.
Ella turned away, looked down the porch steps and out into the dark yard toward the empty road. She felt Kate’s eyes on her.
“How far along are you?”
“Not far,” Ella said.
“Has he threatened you before?” Kate asked.
“Oh, yes,” Ella said. She wanted to laugh, but she knew it would be inappropriate and that someone like Kate would not understand. “He talks a game, but he’s a coward. He sold his guitar for this rifle. He likes to show it to me like it means something.”
“Do you think he’d use it?” Kate asked.
“No,” Ella said. “He talks a game, though.”
“Do you feel safe?” Kate asked. “Are you and your children safe here?”
“Yes,” Ella said. “We’re as safe here as we would be anywhere else. I’m not scared of Charlie, I just feel stupid. I should’ve known better.”
Kate’s jacket was folded and sitting on the other side of her. She reached for it, brought it to her, unfolded it across her lap. She reached into one of the pockets and removed an envelope. She stared at it for a moment, and then she held it out to Ella.
“What’s this?” Ella asked.
“It’s for you,” Kate said. “I’m sorry. I’m embarrassed to give it to you. I know you’ll be too proud to take it, but I want you to have it.”
Ella took the envelope and opened it. It was too dark to see what was inside without removing it, and once she did she found money, at least five twenty-dollar bills, maybe more. She slid the money back into the envelope, closed it, held it out to Kate.
“Thank you,” Ella said. “It’s real kind of you, but I can’t accept it. I can’t raise my children to be too proud to accept charity and then accept yours. I can’t face them with somebody else’s money in my hand.”
“It was in my hands before it was in yours,” Kate said. “But it didn’t belong to me. It passed through my husband’s hands, but it didn’t belong to him either.”
“Who’s it belong to then?” Ella asked.
“Whoever earned it,” Kate said. “Probably somebody just like you. If we’re friends, like you said we are, then you’ll take it.”
Ella looked at the envelope. Inside was at least ten weeks of what her pay had been at the American Mill.
“Please,” Kate said. She pushed Ella’s hand until the envelope it held rested on Ella’s lap. “Please accept it.” She reached into another pocket on her jacket and pulled out a small tablet and pencil. She wrote something down, tore the paper free. “And if we’re friends then you’ll remember me,” she said, “and you’ll come find me if you ever need anything.” She folded the paper and slid it into the envelope beside the money.
“Thank you,” Ella said. “I won’t forget this. And I’ll pay you back as soon as I can.”
“Please don’t,” Kate said. “And please don’t even think of it.” She stared at Ella for a moment, reached out, closed her hand over both of Ella’s where they rested on her lap. “It’s late,” she said, smiling. “I may not care about my husband’s opinions of me, but I also don’t want him to contact the police and report me missing.”
“I’ll walk you up,” Ella said. She picked up Charlie’s rifle. “Make sure you feel safe.”
“No,” Kate said. “I’ll be fine.” She stood up and stepped off the bottom step. She turned, looked down at Ella. “I know the way.”
“You sure?” Ella asked. “Charlie’s harmless, especially to someone like you. He’s probably passed out somewhere by now anyway.”
“I’ll be okay,” Kate said. “I’ll yell for you if I need you. You can come save me.” She put on her jacket and cinched its belt around her waist. “It was wonderful to meet you, Ella.” She reached down, took Ella’s hand. “I hope I see you again.”
“I hope so too,” Ella said.
Kate squeezed Ella’s hand, then turned and walked up the road. Ella watched her go, watched until the darkness swallowed her. Her first thought was to gather the jars, go inside, and hide the money. Put it out of her mind and fall asleep quickly. She’d get up in the morning and tend to the children, spend the day canvassing the mills.
But right now, she didn’t have to move, did she? She could sit on the cabin’s steps and let the warm, humid night fold itself around her. She’d go inside soon enough. She’d hide the money. She’d lie in bed and allow herself to go over each step of the evening, to recall each thing she’d said and heard, everything she’d seen. She’d sleep well and wake in the morning and see her children. She closed her fingers around the envelope, remembered that Kate had written down the address of her home in McAdamville. Ella’s life, which had already changed so much in such little time, had changed again.
The sound of music drifted toward her where she sat. She raised her head and listened, wondered if it was Fox Denton’s phonograph, something she’d never heard this far down the road. She closed her eyes, listened closely, and then she heard the music for what it was: the faraway sound of Kate singing “Two Little Blackbirds” as she walked up the road alone.
Chapter Ten
Hampton Haywood
Monday, June 3, 1929
His father had shot and killed a white man in Mississippi in 1910. Hampton had been six years old at the time and had slept through the sound of the man yelling and beating on one side of the cabin’s door while his mother and father whispered and prayed on the other. But what he hadn’t slept through was the sound of the shotgun blast. It had jarred him awake. He opened his eyes, moved his body just enough to look at his two-year-old sister Summer where she lay in bed looking back at him, her open eyes portraying the same measure of fear and surprise that she must have seen in his own.
His mother threw open the bedroom door and struggled to lift Hampton and Summer from the bed at the same time. Hampton had a clear memory of clawing through the blankets as he and his mother fumbled their way toward one another, while Summer cried at the fear of seeing their mother move with such silent fury. Hampton’s mother carried him and Summer into the cabin’s other room. She sat him down, and he watched while she balanced Summer on her hip and gathered what food they had: biscuits, a jar of preserves, dried beans.
Hampton watched his father lean the shotgun in the corner, watched him reach for the framed picture of a praying Jesus that hung on the wall. He removed the small photograph that had, for as long as Hampton could remember, sat in the corner of the frame. His father looked at the photograph for a moment. It was a picture someone had taken of him and Hampton’s mother not long after they’d been married, when she was sixteen and he only two years older. He slid the photograph into the front pocket of his overalls, bent to the mattress he shared with Hampton’s mother, and slipped his hands beneath it and ran them along the floor. He gathered folded dollar bills and a few loose coins and slid them into the same front pocket. Hampton’s father stood and took in the room as if he already knew for certain it would be the last time he’d see it. He found a sack, began to stuff the family’s clothes inside.
His father hurried out of the bedroom, the sack of clothes in one hand, the shotgun in the other. No one had spoken yet.
Hampton’s father cradled the shotgun in the crook of his right arm, knelt and scooped up Hampton. He felt the shotgun press against his back. He turned his head, saw the barrel inches from his face, smelled the bitter residue of its blast.
“Lydia,” his father said. “Let’s go.” Hampton’s mother did not respond, and she did not turn around. She adjusted Summer on her hip, continued the search for food. “Lydia,” he said again.
She stopped moving. Tears streaked her cheeks. She wiped them away with her free hand and then picked up the sack of food she’d gathered.
The cabin’s interior had been whitewashed years earlier. Hampton saw that the buckshot had left a hole and what appeared to be dozens of black fingerprints on the door where the dark night seeped into their home. Hampton had never been awake this la
te at night, and that, combined with the sound of the shotgun, told him that he should be terrified of what could be waiting for them outside.
He was never able to recall whether there had been much of a moon in the sky that night, so perhaps it was the light coming from inside the cabin that allowed Hampton to see the body of the white man where it lay at the bottom of the steps.
“Don’t look,” his father had whispered. He’d hugged Hampton tight to his chest. “Don’t look,” his father had said again, but Hampton had looked anyway.
His father had given the body a wide berth as he’d stepped into the yard. The man’s face was turned and shadowed in a way that Hampton could not see it. But he could see that the man wore a dark suit, that his dark tie had fallen over his right cheek, that his white shirt had been blown open and soaked through with blood. The fingers of his right hand remained closed around a small silver gun. Hampton looked beyond the body and noticed something white resting at the edge of the darkness. At first he thought that the white object must have been a chicken, and he wondered why his father did not stop and grab it and take it with them. But soon Hampton saw that what he’d mistaken for a chicken was the white man’s hat.
His father did not begin running until they reached the edge of the field.
Behind them, his mother ran with Summer in her arms, the sack of food swinging against her thigh. Of all the things Hampton remembered, what he remembered most clearly was the way his father smelled on the night the family escaped, his face buried in his father’s neck, the shotgun barrel bumping against his back with each step his father took. The scent he recalled was something he had not smelled since, yet he often found himself longing for it: the earthiness of his father’s skin, the damp delta soil, and the perfume of the humid Mississippi night.
“That white man wanted blood for his daddy’s honor,” Hampton’s mother would say many times in the years that followed. His parents had been sharecroppers, both of them born to former slaves. Hampton grew up hearing his mother tell the story. “Old Newcomb was holding out on us, and your daddy knew it. But every year, he’d put his specs on and thumb through his books and say, ‘Sorry, Glen, you just barely broke even.’ But your daddy knew it was a lie, and he finally called him on it. Said, ‘No, sir. Not this year, Mr. Newcomb. I need my money.’ And that was it. Newcomb’s son came around that night, drunk, banging on the door, screaming for your daddy to come out. People killed over honor back then. They still do. Well, your daddy had his honor too.
“Of course we had to leave. You can’t kill a white man down south, especially not in Mississippi, and expect to live.” And leaving was what they had been doing that night as they fled across the cotton field.
They had run to Hampton’s grandfather’s house. The old man lived five miles away on a different plantation. He couldn’t have been much older than sixty, but his stooped and arthritic body had been broken by field work and former masters long before it had been freed. Hampton’s mother went inside and roused her father. The old man lit a lantern and led them through the woods to a neighbor’s cabin that sat tucked back in the trees, where the family hid in a crawl space beneath the floorboards. The earth there was musky, and even now Hampton’s nose remembered it, just like his ears remembered his mother’s whispered prayers and his bones still felt the thundering heartbeat where he leaned against his father’s chest and waited.
At dawn came the sound of a horse-drawn wagon creaking to a stop out front. A door opened and someone lifted Hampton and then Summer into the weak light of the early morning and carried them outside, where their grandfather waited by the wagon. Hampton’s father helped Hampton climb into the back, set Summer on his lap. The sound of brief goodbyes, his grandfather’s voice, his mother’s crying, his father saying, “Come on, now. Time to go.” His parents climbed into the wagon. The driver, a man whose face he could not remember, snapped the reins. Hampton’s last memory of the land from which he’d sprung was the image of his grandfather standing with the shotgun in his hand. He lifted it over his head in goodbye. Then he turned back toward the forest and the path that would lead him home. They never saw the old man again.
Whoever had driven the wagon dropped them at the train station in Vicksburg. In the brief hours they’d spent beneath the floorboards of the house, a collection had been taken up, and the money was now used to purchase the family’s tickets. Hampton had clear memories of the colored car because the colored cars had not changed since that day. He could still smell the train and hear the great hiss of the engine because, as a Pullman porter, he would smell and hear those things for the rest of his life.
It was not until the train had left the station that Hampton’s father allowed himself a sigh and his mother allowed herself to shed any tears of fear she’d kept behind her eyes since fleeing only hours before. Hampton knew they must have been a sight, this family of four covered in mud and brambles, nothing with them but two ill-stuffed sacks and the dirty clothes they wore. He would laugh at the sight of these country folks if he had not been one of them.
It was at the next stop, Yazoo City, that the porter came to them and bent to his father’s ear and whispered something that Hampton could not hear. Hampton’s father turned to his mother, took her hands and kissed them, bent his head, and held her palms to his forehead. He picked up Summer where she lay sleeping on the seat and placed her in his lap, buried his face in her hair, and closed his eyes. Hampton listened as his father took deep breaths.
The porter said, “They’re going to come on,” and Hampton’s mother began to cry. His father put his arm around her, pulled her toward him, kissed her on the mouth. He lowered Summer onto her lap. He reached for Hampton, pulled him close so that he stood before his father, nearly eye-level. “You be a man for her,” his father said. He spread his heavy hand across Hampton’s chest, ran his palm along his face and over his head, the work-worn calluses catching in Hampton’s hair. He reached into the front pocket of his overalls and removed the folded bills and slipped them into Hampton’s hand.
People in the car understood what was happening and what was about to happen. They began to move away from the family. Hampton looked up and saw two police officers standing above him. They reached down, took Hampton’s father by his shoulders, raised him to his feet. Hampton watched them escort his father through the car and off the train. His mother sobbed, pulled Summer to her chest, reached a hand toward Hampton. “They just going to talk to him,” she said. “They just going to talk to him.”
She was still saying that as the brakes released, the cars moved forward, and the train left the station. She was still saying it as the train pulled farther away, gathered speed, and rocketed north.
Hampton sat down beside his mother, felt her hand on his shoulder, leaned toward her as she pulled him close. She’d buried her face in Summer’s hair, but he could feel her body heaving in sobs. Summer tapped her mother’s arm, said, “Mama, Mama.” Hampton looked down at the money his father had given him. He unfolded the bills, saw that they’d been wrapped around the old photograph of his mother and father on their wedding day. He stared down at their young, unsmiling faces as they stared back at him.
He kept the photograph in his wallet after that, and for years he teased his mother about not smiling in what she referred to her as her wedding picture.
“Why ain’t you and Daddy smiling if y’all were so happy?”
“People didn’t smile in photographs back in those days,” she always said. “Aside from us getting married, there wasn’t nothing to smile about.”
The entire course of events of their lives and the events’ telling and retelling over the years had conditioned Hampton both to fear and hate white people, especially white southerners and the land they inhabited, in ways he found impossible to explain. Unlike his father, he had not shot and killed a white man to keep that white man from shooting and killing him, but he had witnessed it, and in the witnessing he retained the memory of the shotgun’s heft, the kick o
f its blast. He had not been plucked from a train and made to disappear like his father, the way so many black bodies had been made to disappear in the years before and after, but the simple fact of his continued existence made the possibility of his own disappearance all the more probable.
Growing up, Hampton had struggled to bypass the fear for his own life in favor of the pride he took in his father’s, but now, returning to the South all alone for the very first time in his life at the age of twenty-five, the fear that sat in his belly like a stone was the only thing left of that night in Mississippi. Now that same fear crept up in his throat and left a metallic taste in his mouth. The South had taken itself from him when it took his father. He knew he couldn’t get his father back, but perhaps in returning to the South and inhabiting the same world his father had inhabited, he’d be able to find something of him there. Maybe he’d even be able to change something about that world. This was his chance, but the cost of this chance was a paralyzing, unmitigated terror.
He’d boarded in New York before the sun had fully risen, then changed trains in Washington in midmorning. His final stop would be Charlotte, North Carolina, in the hours before midnight. He’d been promised that Fred Beal did not know about his trip south, had been promised that someone hand-chosen by Sophia Blevin, perhaps even Sophia herself, would meet him upon his arrival, although this was the South in 1929, and Hampton knew better than to believe his meeting a white woman at a train station would go unnoticed. After departing the train, he’d been instructed to head north on Tryon and not to stop walking until someone approached him and said the secret word: spindle. That person would assure his safe passage to Gastonia and the strike at Loray.
Hampton looked out the train’s window and watched fields of Virginia tobacco flash by in bright green blurs. The sun was setting, the edges of the tobacco leaves rimmed with golden light. He knew that, if he wanted to, he could remain seated when he arrived in Charlotte, then switch trains in Atlanta and again in Montgomery. He’d end up in New Orleans. He thought of spending the month of June in the Crescent City among Creole girls with soft drawls. They’d drink beer and eat fresh shrimp in the early summer heat. He’d love all the girls he’d meet, but he’d fall in love with one in particular, and he’d tell her the story of his father, who’d killed the white man who had tried to break down the family’s front door.