The Sacred Place

by Daniel Black

  Unable to withstand her gaze, Chop screamed, “It w-w-w-was Cllllllement, Grandma!” and pointed at his cousin’s bulged eyes and agape mouth.

  “What about Clement?” she questioned irritably.

  Chop tried to remain composed, but it was a lost cause. “Hhhhhe b-b-bought a sssssoda p-p-pop in de sssssstore t-t-today.” Chop didn’t look at the others, who were planning how and when they would beat him.

  “Clement, where you git money from?”

  “Momma gave it to me before I left home,” he said defensively, hoping Miss Mary’s suspicions would be thus satisfied. They were not.

  “I thought yo granddaddy tole you not to go in dat sto’ unless one o’ us wuz wit cha?” She had her hands on her hips and a look in her eyes Clement could not ignore.

  “I just wanted a soda pop, Grandma. That’s all,” Clement sniffled.

  “Then what chu cryin’ fu? Buyin’ a soda pop ain’t no crime.” Miss Mary searched each face back and forth, knowing there was more to the story.

  Sarah Jane breached their contract of silence and whispered, “There’s more to it, Grandma, and it ain’t good, either.”

  “What chu talkin’ ’bout, girl?”

  All three boys hung their heads simultaneously. Sarah Jane wished she could close her eyes and make everything turn into a scary dream, but Miss Mary’s anger, hovering over her like clouds before an impending storm, disallowed fantasy.

  “I’m talkin’ to you, chile!” Miss Mary banged her heavy fist on the table and completely destroyed Sarah Jane’s fragile composure.

  “Clement disrespected Miss Cuthbert in de store,” she breathed heavily. “He didn’t mean to, Grandma, but …”

  “But what? Somebody better start talkin’ ’round hyeah fo I get a belt to all y’alls behinds!” she hollered.

  Sarah Jane simply relented. “Okay, Grandma. Okay.” Her slow tongue exacerbated Miss Mary’s anger. “Clement went in de store to buy a soda pop”—her hands moved with her voice—“but Miss Cuthbert—”

  “Clement, what did you do?” Miss Mary interrupted. “And I mean I want de truf before I git after you!”

  Clement glanced at Sarah Jane, who shrugged her shoulders helplessly. “I went in the store to buy a soda pop, and I laid the nickel down on the counter and walked out,” he offered lightly. “That’s the whole story. I don’t know why everybody makin’ such a big deal about it.”

  Sarah Jane shook her head pitifully, and explained, “Miss Cuthbert told him to pick up de nickel and put it in her hand, but Clement wouldn’t do it. She was screamin’ after him that he was gon pay for what he did, but Clement ignored her and sassed her back.” Sarah Jane hoped the truth would, indeed, set Clement free.

  “Lawd Jesus!” Miss Mary murmured. Her slow descent into the kitchen chair frightened the once-impervious children.

  Clement felt compelled to explain: “I didn’t do nothin’ wrong, Grandma. I just told her dat I didn’t have to put de nickel in her hand. All I wanted was a soda pop—”

  “Close yo goddamn mouth, boy!” Miss Mary yelled. The children froze. They had never heard her curse before. “You ain’t got no sense at all! You cain’t come down here and act like you in Chicago, boy!”

  “But Grandma—”

  “I said shut up!” She trembled as she screamed louder. “Don’t chu know what happens to Black boys who don’t know how to mind? Huh?”

  Clement assumed the question rhetorical, but Miss Mary took his silence as insolence.

  “I’m talking to you, Mr. Bigshot!” She was angrier than any of them had ever seen her. “Yo momma didn’t tell you what happened to yo uncle Jerry and aunt Billie?” Her booming voice destroyed the grandchildren’s strength and left Clement feeling like a rabbit in a fox-hole.

  Miss Mary suddenly rose from the table and grabbed her straw hat. “Y’all run out to de barn and stay there ’til I come git cha. And I mean stay there!” She exited the front door quickly, clumsily, whereto the children did not know.

  They ran to the barn, understanding from Miss Mary’s reaction the import of Clement’s infraction.

  “I told you!” Sarah Jane cried vehemently once they barred the barn door from within. They climbed the ladder to the loft and sat upon square bales of hay.

  “I ain’t done nothin’!” Clement declared again.

  Ray Ray grimaced, and whispered, “Jes be quiet. We gotta wait and see what happens.”

  Chop wanted to apologize to Clement for exposing him, but he knew nothing he said would appease his cousin’s fury. Everyone seemed irritated with him, Chop discovered, because they turned their backs once they sat down in the barn. He simply wanted to explain that his grandma’s voice had overwhelmed him and forced his tongue from exile. He never meant to get Clement into any trouble, and he certainly didn’t mean to disturb the peace in the Johnson household. But they wouldn’t have listened anyway, he told himself, easing his troubled heart. He knew he’d get blamed, whatever the outcome of the situation, and he prepared himself for the possibility of having no playmates for a very long time.

  The loud banging on the barn door startled the children who, at first, sat transfixed. Ray Ray strained his terrified eyes to see who had come.

  “Children!” Jeremiah’s raspy, hoarse voice called loudly.

  In relief, they scrambled from the loft and unhinged the door. For several seconds, the children stood before their grandfather and Enoch like criminals awaiting sentencing.

  “What happened at de sto’ today? And I ain’t got time fu no foolishness!” The furrows intersecting on Jeremiah’s forehead convinced Ray Ray to tell the truth and to tell it in a hurry.

  “Clement went in de store to buy a soda pop, Grandpa—,” he began explaining, but Jeremiah cut out the middleman.

  “Clement, you tell me what happened since you de one what know. And tell me de truth, boy. I mean it.” He was holding Clement by the shoulder with a monstrous grip.

  “Okay,” Clement mumbled, steadying his nerves. “I went in de store to get a soda pop, and I gave the woman a nickel for it. That’s how much it cost, Grandpa, so—”

  “I know how much a soda pop cost, boy! It’s somethin’ you ain’t sayin’, and I wanna know what it is!” His yelling dissolved Clement’s constitution and freed his tears.

  “Like I said, I went in de store and bought a soda pop and gave the lady a nickel.” Jeremiah’s eyes searched the barn frantically, looking for a strong whipping stick. His heavy breathing and quivering hands urged Ray Ray to offer, “But he laid de nickel down on de counter.”

  “What?” Jeremiah asked, confused.

  Clement resolved that he could not win, so he sighed deeply and admitted, “She asked me to put de nickel in her hand, but I laid it on de counter instead and walked out.”

  “You did what?”

  Clement said nothing more.

  “Is you crazy, boy?” Jeremiah vented each word a little louder. “You jes walked out de do’ like you grown?”

  “Why did I have to put de money in her hand, Granddaddy?” Clement cried desperately. “I laid de nickel on de counter.”

  “’Cause she said so, boy! Dat’s why! Don’t you know dey’ll kill you ova somethin’ like dat?”

  Sarah Jane noticed, for the first time, the gray hairs sprouting from her grandfather’s nose. His huffing caused them to dance sporadically, like a feather at the command of gusty winds. Jeremiah’s flat, African nose occupied at least a third of the width of his face and convinced many that he was full-blood African. In his anger, the wrinkles in Jeremiah’s face deepened until, filled with sweat, they formed brooks and streams running all over his face. Sarah Jane marveled at her grandfather’s ability to smile and comfort one moment and to frighten and intimidate the next.

  Enoch touched his father’s shoulder, and said, “Let’s all just calm down for a minute, Daddy.” His words softened Jeremiah’s expression and made the old man realize how stern he had been.

  “Listen, Clement,
” Jeremiah whispered with closed eyes, “you got to do what I say. Son, you cain’t come down to Mississippi all high-and-mighty. White folks hyeah don’t care nothin’ ’bout you thinkin’ you dey equal. They’ll kill you befo’ dey admit it.” He glanced at the other children endearingly. “Dat’s why you shoulda put de money in her hand. No, it ain’t right and, no, you didn’t have to, but I pray to God we ain’t sorry you didn’t.”

  Enoch asked, “What exactly did de woman say, Clement? I mean exactly.” He searched the boy’s eyes.

  “I don’t remember exactly, but she said I was gonna be sorry.” Tears now flooded his puffy cheeks.

  “What else did she say?” Enoch pressed. “Try to remember, son!”

  Clement pleaded, “I can’t. She just kept telling me I was gonna be sorry.”

  “Oh my God,” Enoch murmured to his father. “What we gon do?” Jeremiah placed his hands on Clement’s shoulder again and transformed back into the grandfather the children had always known. “I don’t know, but for now, we gon watch and pray. Dat’s what we gon do. Now you chillen lissen to me, and lissen real good. Y’all ain’t to leave dis house fu no reason. No reason at all! You undastand?”

  “Yessir,” they said in chorus.

  “And you ain’t to mention dis to nobody else. You hear me?”

  “Yessir.”

  “And whatsoever you do, if you see a stranger comin’, run like hell and get me or your uncle Enoch fast as you can.”

  “Yessir.”

  “This goes fu every one o’ y’all. Y’all look out fu one anotha and don’t spend no time layin’ blame. What’s done is done, and we got to deal wit it. We’s a family, and we gon act like a family. Ya hear me?” Jeremiah yelped.

  “Yessir,” the children affirmed.

  “Good. Now. I’ma tell ya one more thang.”

  Enoch knew what his father was about to say. He, Jerry, and Possum thought they would be the last generation to get The Instructions, as Jeremiah called it, but now Enoch saw that Time had not done what it had promised.

  Jeremiah gathered the children closer and spoke softly. “If anything eva happen to yo grandma, yo aunt Ella Mae, or Enoch, or me, y’all run out de back door jes as quick as you can down to de riva next to de big tree where folks fish. Wade in up to ya neck and walk about a mile north to de railroad bridge. Git out there and walk due west about anotha mile ’til you see a old broken-down shack. There’s a big pecan tree right beside it. Go in there and wait.”

  “Wait for what?” Sarah Jane asked.

  “Don’t chu worry about that,” Jeremiah said. “Jes git there. Everything else’ll be all right. Somebody’ll come for ya.”

  Chop was crying but didn’t know why. He sensed urgency in Jeremiah’s words as though knowing they would, one day, save his life, but for now he wanted to play and forget them all.

  “Ray Ray, you know de most ’bout dis place, so if anythang happen, you make sho to do what I said.”

  “Yessir,” he mumbled.

  “Good. Now y’all jes go on back to de house and git yo work done and keep yo mouth shut.”

  Like mourners in a funeral procession, the children exited the barn, unsure of exactly how to act but certain they weren’t as free as they had once been.

  On their way back to the field, Enoch told his father, “Dey ain’t gon let this go. You know dat, don’t chu?”

  Without looking at his son, Jeremiah said, “Yeah, I do,” and chuckled nervously. He was trying not to imagine what those white folks might do to Clement. “We jes gotta pray,” he continued lightly, disguising the burden his heart carried.

  Jeremiah and Enoch resumed their places in the cotton field. The heat was stultifying, and the end of the row was nowhere in sight. Enoch’s heart was caught between despising the fields and embracing them as heritage and lineage. Grandpa Moses, who folks said was seven feet tall, was brought over as a slave when he was nine and sold somewhere in South Carolina. A year later, Jeremiah told his children, Moses was bought by Elliot Johnson, who was traveling through South Carolina on his way back to Mississippi—a place Moses had never heard of.

  “Daddy and five otha slaves was tied to ole man Johnson’s wagon and walked all de way to Money, Mississippi,” Jeremiah bragged and decried. “And we been hyeah every since.”

  So every time Enoch picked a cotton bole, he felt his grandfather standing proud and regal next to him in the field, and he knew the land was as much his own as it had once been ole man Johnson’s.

  “How we git the same name, Daddy?” Enoch asked on his fifth birthday at the dinner table.

  “Yo granddaddy decided to take de Johnson name so dat any one o’ his chillen what might git sold away would be able to trace dey way back one day. It helped de family stay together and find one another if any of ’em ever got lost.”

  Enoch swore he’d change his name when he got grown so he and old man Johnson would never be mistaken as kinfolks, but when Chapman bought the land a year later, Enoch dropped the issue altogether.

  “Chop dat cotton, son, and save daydreamin’ for later,” Jeremiah called to Enoch. What would those white folks do? Enoch pondered as he glanced toward the Johnson shack far in the distance. Times had changed, he tried to convince himself. There were some places in America where white and colored kids all went to the same school. And they got along fine. Maybe Money was changing, too. Jeremiah told Enoch that, just a month ago, for no apparent reason, a white man had bought Chop a candy bar in the General Store.

  “N-n-n-no ththththank ya, ssssir,” Chop had said apprehensively.

  “I’m just being nice, son. It’s okay. I know you’re not supposed to take it, but this one’s on me. Don’t think anything of it.”

  Chop shook as he mumbled, “I ththththanks ya k-k-k-kindly, sssir, b-b-but nnno thththank you.”

  Just then, Jeremiah turned the corner, and said, “You knows better, boy. I done raised you right.” He grabbed Chop by the forearm and jerked him toward the exit.

  “It was my fault, mister,” the white man explained. “I was trying to offer your boy a candy bar, and he—”

  “He don’t take thangs he ain’t paid for, sir,” Jeremiah announced. “I teaches my chillen dat, and dat’s how dey live. We’se much obliged all de same.”

  “But sir, I meant no harm. I certainly didn’t intend to go against your teachings. I just wanted to be nice. That’s all.”

  The look of sincerity on the white man’s face disturbed Jeremiah.

  “Please allow him to accept it, sir. It’s the least I can do.”

  It was the “sir” that made Jeremiah hesitate. He wondered where in the world this white man had come from.

  “I’d really like the boy to have it, if you don’t mind.” He extended the candy bar and waited for a colored man’s trust. Jeremiah studied the stranger, examining his impeccable clothes and his neatly manicured fingernails, and, against his better judgment, he allowed Chop to accept the gift.

  “We thank you kindly, sir,” Jeremiah murmured as he shook the stranger’s hand harder than usual.

  “No thanks needed. As I said, it’s really the very least I can do.”

  Jeremiah frowned at the man’s insinuation that he owed them something. Indeed, the stranger’s intemperate kindness momentarily disrupted what Jeremiah knew about white folks. Yet once outside, he warned Chop, “This don’t mean nothin’. There’s always one or two who don’t fit the mold.”

  When Enoch heard of the incident, he took the man’s gesture as sign that things really were changing in Mississippi.

  “Get to choppin’, boy!” Jeremiah corrected again. “Chapman see you idle, and he dock yo pay twenty-five cents.”

  Enoch abandoned his thoughts and rendered his labor once again to a man who consumed the Johnson family without a care.

  Jeremiah tried hard not to think of Jerry, but he couldn’t help it. He had never really gotten over his son’s suicidal murder, and now with Clement’s incorrigible behavior, he was af
raid he’d have to revisit the whole ordeal. The smile on Jerry’s face was the only redeeming sight the day they found his body swinging. A rough September wind tossed it to and fro meaninglessly, causing its legs to separate violently like a ballerina’s leap just before the plié. Miss Mary and Billie Faye cried in each other’s trembling arms, while Jeremiah stood alone, staring at one who dared consider himself a man. Pridefully—indeed arrogantly—Jeremiah climbed the old tree and cut the hay-baling twine with his rusty pocketknife. Jerry’s body fell to the earth as though exhausted from a long, hard journey.

  When the white men arrived, salivating, Jeremiah announced caustically, “He ain’t here. He’s gone to see the King.”

  “What king?” they asked.

  Now Jeremiah found himself praying for Clement the same prayer he had said for Jerry. Certainly Clement hadn’t meant any harm, Jeremiah knew, but the trouble he had started was yet to be seen.

  Three

  MISS MARY’S SAVORY MEAT LOAF ELICITED NO COMMENTS at the dinner table that Friday evening, and, much to his dismay, Enoch failed to think of a joke sufficiently amusing to distract the family. Sarah Jane toyed with the same green bean until she asked to be excused. The boys glanced at one another, but said nothing. They, too, wanted to escape the presence of the elders and find solitude elsewhere, although, for whatever reason, they believed their request would be immediately denied. So they sat there and forced food down unwelcoming throats. Only Jeremiah ate freely, unsure of what tomorrow would bring but certain he needed his strength to face it.

  Enoch cleared the table—another anomaly—and asked who wanted peach cobbler. No one answered, so he fixed a bowl for himself alone.

  “Momma, I sho do love yo cobblers,” he proclaimed after the first bite. Still, no one mumbled a word. “These peaches musta come from …” and Enoch relinquished the fight to break ice much too frozen.

  After supper, everyone settled into their own space as they privately nurtured fear of white retaliation. Miss Mary took her seat in the living room rocking chair and continued piecing, with tremulous hands, the quilt she had started months earlier. Her usual hum, which normally soothed the entire household, refused to leave the safety of her soul, so she rocked silently and prayed for a peace she could not envision. Ella Mae washed dishes in slow motion and mopped the old wooden floor three times to keep her mind from wandering. Then she went to bed with the sun, without her traditional “good night, y’all” salutation. On the way, she touched Miss Mary’s shoulder, like a mourner comforting a mother for her loss, and, once inside her bedroom, Ella Mae remained on her knees for the next half hour.