by Wiley Cash
Hampton woke to a hot morning that had grown hotter in the hour since, and now he sat looking out the passenger’s-side window, long periods of silence passing between him and Sophia. The brick and glass storefronts on Franklin Avenue in downtown Gastonia quickly gave way to long expanses of forests, broken by farms where men in distant fields guided plows behind mules. Gulches ran alongside the road, rimmed with red gashes of dirt that made it seem that skin had been torn away from a body. On the other side of barbed-wire fences, cotton grew in great green and brown clusters, the bolls bulging as if they would burst open in relief.
Sophia turned off the main road and the truck snaked along the hills and curves that took them past more farms and small houses that sat in the midst of cleared fields. They entered a small downtown that looked like a miniature version of Gastonia. The streets were alive with automobiles and well-dressed white men and women on foot passing in and out of stores, a market, a bank, a post office.
“Is this it?” Hampton asked.
“This is Bessemer City,” Sophia said, “but this ain’t it.”
The it was a settlement Hampton later learned was called Stumptown. He sensed the place even before they pulled off the main road and followed the gravel-strewn dirt lane that led down into it. The land had grown wild once they’d left downtown and the flat farmland rolled into hills. He saw whitewashed, crumbling cabins, churches, and other structures that seemed to be abandoned.
As he and Sophia entered Stumptown, Hampton remembered rural Mississippi: small, rambling shacks, barefoot children kicking up dust as they ran across smooth-swept yards, old women with hard-set eyes wearing bandanas and long cotton shifts walking beside the road. Stumptown felt like a place he’d known before.
The lane was so narrow that trees and bushes enclosed the truck as they descended into the settlement. In the road before them, flakes of mica and pieces of quartz sparkled beneath the bright morning sun. The yellow light that poured through the trees was tinged with a green otherworldliness that made Hampton feel as if the glass in the truck’s windows had been tinted.
Sophia eased the truck down the lane, passing cabin after cabin that seemed too dilapidated to inhabit. Exterior walls were unpainted and left exposed to the elements, tarpaper flapped over windows, collapsed roofs were covered with tarpaulins. Sophia parked at the end of the road, in front of a cabin shadowed by tall trees. She turned off the engine, and they sat there for a moment, looking at the scene before them. “This is where Ella lives,” she said.
“I thought she was white,” Hampton said.
“She is.”
The cabin’s door burst open, and a tribe of dirty children poured onto the porch and stumbled down the stairs. Sophia climbed down from the truck. One of Ella’s children, an older girl, was waiting for her, and the two hugged. Hampton got out of the truck and walked over to where Sophia and the girl stood by the front bumper. The girl held the hand of a much younger girl who must have been her little sister. A boy stood by the porch steps as if waiting to discover the reason for their visit before deciding whether or not to welcome them.
The three children were frighteningly thin, all angles and sharp edges and quick, cutting eyes and bare feet with thick, yellow calluses. The girls, whose names were Lilly and Rose, wore long cotton dresses that once upon a time must have been white but were now an earth-tinged tan that nearly matched the color of the girls’ skin. The boy, whose name was Otis, wore tattered knee-length breeches and a cotton shirt that seemed to have been made at the same time and of the same material as the girls’ dresses. The sight of the children and the cabin in which they lived made Hampton ashamed of his bleach-white shirt, the pressed pants, his leather wingtips.
“Is that him?”
Hampton looked toward the voice and saw a small white woman with dark hair standing in the cabin’s doorway. She wore a collared dress and loose stockings, and she was as thin as the children. She had a young baby in her arms. The baby held what looked like a stuffed sock in its hands and gnawed its tip.
“This is Hampton Haywood,” Sophia said. She touched Hampton’s elbow as if to prompt him. “And this is Ella.”
“Hello,” Hampton said.
Ella nodded, adjusted the baby on her hip. “Welcome to Stumptown,” she said.
Hampton was shocked by the poverty before him, but the source of his horror was the only thing that surprised him. He’d actually expected to come south and find poor Negroes living hand to mouth, barely getting by on what they could earn, save, or grow, but he hadn’t expected to find white people living this way.
He followed Sophia through the yard and up the rickety porch steps. The three older children opened the truck’s doors and climbed inside. The horn honked. Hampton turned and saw Lilly behind the wheel. She raised her hands as if asking Sophia a question. Sophia held up the set of keys so the girl could see them. “Learned my lesson last time,” she said. The girl frowned.
They stepped up onto the porch. Ella kissed the baby’s head and handed him to Sophia.
Ella stepped back and looked at Hampton. She narrowed her eyes and crossed her arms as if appraising him. She looked at Sophia. “I thought you might’ve mentioned something to him about dressing fancy.”
Hampton looked down at his clothes. He thought she might be joking, but it became clear that she wasn’t. He’d never felt fancily dressed before. In the city he spent more time wondering whether his clothes were fashionable enough. It had never occurred to him that he would ever feel overdressed and out of place.
“I guess I forgot,” Sophia said.
Ella stepped toward Hampton. She opened the buttons on his cuffs and folded the sleeves up each forearm; then she unbuttoned the top button on his shirt. Hampton didn’t move, not because he was scared, but because he was surprised. He’d never had a woman he didn’t know, much less a white woman, touch him with such abandon. He’d never been so aware of someone’s skin as it brushed against his own, her thin fingers as they grazed his arms.
“Put this in your pocket,” Ella said. She held up his wristwatch. She’d removed it without his knowing. Hampton looked at Sophia and raised his eyebrows, gave her the first real smile he’d given her since arriving the night before. Sophia kissed the baby’s cheek and stifled a laugh. Ella stepped back and stared at him. She crossed her arms again.
“Wait right here,” she said. She disappeared into the dark cabin.
“I didn’t know about the dress code,” Hampton said. He slipped his watch into his pocket. “Anything else you need to tell me?”
“Nothing comes to mind,” Sophia said.
Ella reappeared holding a dipper full of water. She tossed the water at Hampton’s shoes, as if she were putting out a fire. The water landed between his feet and splashed onto his wingtips. He made to jump away from it, but it was too late; they were soaked, the leather already turning dark.
“What the hell?” he said.
“Go on out in the yard while they’re wet,” Ella said. “Stomp around, get them good and dusty. We’ll be ready to go after that.”
They left the truck parked at Ella’s and set off up the road. Ella’s children stayed behind and played in the truck. Hampton overheard Lilly arguing with Otis about whose turn it was to “drive.”
Sophia and Ella walked ahead of Hampton, and he wondered what someone might think if they were to lift a tarpaper flap and look out their window to see a finely dressed black man following close behind two white women in an all-black town. The sun was hot on his face, and he assumed it was nearing 10 a.m., but he hesitated to consult his hidden wristwatch for fear of drawing Ella’s attention.
“You think she’ll come?” Sophia asked.
“I hope so,” Ella said. “I’d feel a whole lot better if she did.”
Ella and Sophia turned off the road and followed a path toward a cabin that looked just as pathetic as the one in which Ella and her children lived. But there was a domesticity about this place that Ella’s lacked. Th
e path was lined with flowers and short shrubs. Colored bottles hung from one of the trees and clinked together almost soundlessly in the breeze. Clothes hung drying from a line on the porch.
As the three of them drew closer to the cabin, a woman of imperceptible age came around from the backyard. She wore a head kerchief and a long dark dress and held a hoe in her hand. She smiled when she saw them and leaned the hoe against the side of the cabin, wiping her hands on the seat of her dress.
“Morning, Miss May,” the woman said.
“Good morning,” Ella said. “How’s it going back there?”
The woman smiled. “We might not starve come fall,” she said.
Ella nodded toward the cabin. “She up?”
“Will be soon if she’s not already,” the woman said. “I’ll go check.” The woman walked up the porch steps, opened a screen door, let it close silently behind her. A young girl stood in the doorway and looked out at them. Ella waved.
“Hey, Iva,” she said.
The girl opened the screen door. She wore a dress the color of an old potato. Her hair was pulled back in a single braid that brushed the nape of her neck. Hampton saw that, just like Ella’s children, the girl wasn’t wearing shoes. She looked at Sophia.
“Y’all leave the truck down there?” she asked.
“I did,” Sophia said. The girl leaned her head back inside. Hampton heard her say, “I’m going to go down to Lilly’s.”
“You bring them back up here if they hungry,” the woman’s voice said. Hampton saw that Ella stared at the ground as if she hadn’t overheard the conversation.
The girl leapt off the porch and tore across the yard at a sprint.
Sophia called after her. “I told Lilly I’ve got the keys with me.”
The girl kept running and said, “Otis’ll get it started.”
“He better not!” Ella hollered.
The screen door slammed shut, and Hampton looked up to the porch to find a young woman about his age blinking her eyes against the midmorning light. Her hair was plaited into two thick braids that grazed her shoulders. She wore a dress that buttoned down the middle, and it was open at the collar so that he could see the shadows that pooled in the hollowed spaces her clavicles made. She had big brown eyes and a gentle, frowning face that was at once innocent and world-weary. Hampton thought she was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen. She stood on the porch, her hip cocked, and stared down at Ella. She crossed her arms, shook her head. “I done told you,” she said.
“Well, you going to have to tell me again,” Ella said.
“I can’t do it,” the woman said. “I just can’t.”
Ella stepped in between Sophia and Hampton, grabbed hold of his hand, and pulled him toward the porch steps. “This man here came all the way down from New York City to knock on doors,” she said. “You mean to tell me you can’t walk up and down the street?”
“This ain’t New York City,” the woman said. “Ain’t none of your white friends want to see a colored girl join your union.”
Ella pointed to Sophia. “This one does,” she said.
“She’s right, Violet,” Sophia said. “We need you, and we need your help.”
The woman named Violet sighed and shook her head again. She looked at Hampton as if seeing him for the first time. Hampton slipped his hands into his pockets, fingered his watch.
“Violet, you’ve given American Mill Number Two every night of your life for as long as I’ve known you,” Ella said. “Give us the afternoon.”
“Just the afternoon,” Violet said. “And it don’t mean nothing.”
Ella smiled. “It means something to me,” she said.
The four of them spent the rest of the morning knocking on doors in Stumptown, approaching people bent to their work in small patches of gardens, sitting down on porch steps, and standing in open doorways. Although Ella and Violet knew them all, the men and women of Stumptown looked at Sophia and Hampton with stone faces and reticent eyes. Hampton studied the men he met, regardless of their age, and tried to mirror their country formality, tried to stand with the same rigidity, to measure his words with the same deliberateness.
After a lunch of chicken and dumplings at Violet’s mother’s house, they loaded themselves into the truck and drove to a tiny town called Waco, where Ella knew of a few workers who might be interested in the union. Waco, which was near Cherryville’s few mills, was almost an hour’s drive away. When they arrived Hampton saw that it was hardly more than a crossroads of shanties, shotgun houses, and lean-tos set in the midst of rows of cotton fields owned by white people but worked solely by blacks.
Hampton took the lead in Waco, and while he spoke to strangers in hot, crowded rooms with low ceilings, he felt the eyes of his three companions upon him. He did his best to explain the inalienable rights of the worker, how those rights extended to whites and Negroes alike, how disagreement about these rights had caused a major struggle just a few miles away, in Gastonia, in the shadow of the Loray Mill.
But no matter what Hampton said, talk always turned to the weekend-long jamboree to honor Confederate veterans that was scheduled to take place just a few miles away in Charlotte beginning on Friday morning. It was the first news Hampton heard of the Confederate gathering, and although he was from the North, the side that had actually won the war, he’d never seen or heard of any celebrations like this. It seemed to him that the South now reveled in its loss as if it had been a victory.
On the drive to Waco, Hampton had ridden alone in the back of Sophia’s truck while the three women had squeezed into the cab, but the day had turned blisteringly hot, and on the return trip to Stumptown, Violet opted to ride in the open air with him. They sat with their backs against the cab, Hampton’s feet crossed at the ankles, Violet’s legs pulled up beneath her dress. The sun was behind them now, and the cab offered a little shade. Violet looked over at Hampton.
“What about your accent?” she said. The truck must have changed direction because the sunlight hit her eyes. Hampton noticed they were a lighter shade of brown than he’d assumed. Violet lifted her hand and cupped it over her eyes, dropping them back into shadow.
“What about it?” Hampton said.
“Half the time you talk, you sound like you’re from down here,” Violet said. She lowered her hand but didn’t look away from him.
“I am from down here,” he said. “Was, anyway. Went up north when I was six.”
“You got free of it.”
“More like ‘got gone of it,’” he said.
“Where?” she asked.
“Mississippi.” He pulled his legs up to his chest and rested his elbows on his knees. Hampton opened his mouth to speak, but he stopped. He tried again. “My daddy shot a white man. The plantation owner’s son. He killed him before he could get killed.”
“What happened?” Violet asked.
“They yanked him off a train the next morning,” he said. “Never saw him again.”
Violet put her hand on his arm. “I’m sorry,” she said.
Hampton shrugged. “I try not to think about what might’ve happened to him. Just imagine that the South took him. Makes it easier,” he said. “Makes it easier just to say that the South killed my daddy.”
“My daddy keeled over dead in a white man’s field while Mama was pregnant with Iva,” Violet said. “I reckon you could say the South killed him too. Maybe we should have jumped on a train north.”
“Still can,” Hampton said. “Plenty of trains going north.”
“Shoot,” Violet said. She smiled. “You got an extra ticket?”
“Might could find one.”
“Shoot,” she said again, still smiling.
Bessemer City began to make itself apparent around them. A few cars passed going in the opposite direction. The homes were suddenly larger, set closer together. The truck skirted the edge of downtown on its way back to Stumptown.
“So,” Hampton said, “you going back to the mill tonight?”
/> Violet stared down at her lap as if looking for an answer. “I hadn’t decided yet,” she said.
Hampton reached into his pocket and removed his wristwatch, saw that it was almost 4:30 p.m. “You got an hour and a half,” he said.
Violet looked surprised to see him holding the watch. “Let me see that,” she said. He passed it to her. She looked at it for a long time, draped it over her wrist, held it so that the sunlight caught it.
Hampton wondered if she’d ever held a piece of jewelry as fine as his watch. He’d saved up for the watch for more than a year, and he’d owned it for less than that, but something urged him to give it to her. He could not tell if he wished to impress her or to prove to himself that he was capable of such giving. “You can have it,” he finally said.
She stopped playing with the watch and looked up at him. She smiled, shook her head.
“It’s yours,” he said, “if you want it.”
She laughed, handed it back to him. “What do I need a fancy watch for?” she said. “I only care about four times: waking up time, going to work time, getting off time, and going to sleep time. I know when to do what.”
Hampton held the watch for a moment, shame creeping over him as he realized that he’d offered the watch knowing that Violet wouldn’t accept it. He draped it over his wrist and began to fasten it. Violet put her hand over his.
“Put that back in your pocket,” she said. “You already sound like a city boy half the time. No use looking like one too.”
Violet did not return for the night shift at American Mill No. 2 that evening, and over the next four days the four of them canvassed Gaston County in advance of Fred Beal’s Loray rally on Friday night. Four days of heat and rain and Hampton’s ruined shoes traipsing from shack to shack, from lunch counter back rooms in the stark daylight to darkened juke joints set off in the dense woods at night. Hampton’s head buzzed with the names of people he’d met and the names of the communities he’d visited: Ranlo, Booger Mountain, Shuffletown. He’d sat through a Wednesday night church service, smacked mosquitos against his skin that were so fat and full of blood that it looked like he’d been shot, and witnessed a baptism at a muddy creek near a place called Cramerton. He’d eaten things he’d never considered eating before, seen more guns than he’d ever seen in his life. More than once he’d been pulled aside by an older gentleman and asked how he’d come to be wandering through town with three women—two of them white—in tow.