by Daniel Black
Rosenthal wept heavily. He had consciously avoided this memory since the event, but now, with Sutton’s return, he felt the need to confess it.
“Bad thing about it, I knew his parents well. His father, Elijah, was my daddy’s chauffeur for years. Little Joshua used to chase squirrels and eat pecans in our front yard until his daddy finished working. That’s why I couldn’t look at him because he knew me. I asked the men why they had him, and they said he was fucking—that was their word, not mine—some white girl. He was around sixteen then, I believe. He kept shaking his head violently, trying to scream through the rags in his mouth, but it was too late. They tied a rope around his neck and hanged him on a huge oak limb. Then they cut out his genitalia and pinned a note to his clothes that read ‘I’M A DICKLESS NIGGER! ’ It took everything within me to keep from crying, Sutton. I swear it did. Blood poured down his legs and onto the ground as the men drank corn whiskey. I vomited, and they laughed at me. ‘Rosenthal’s got a weak stomach,’ they jeered. When they dropped me off at home, I was trembling so bad I collapsed beneath the pecan tree. The sun rose the next morning before I gathered enough strength to go inside.”
Rosenthal buried his face in his hands.
“A few hours later, Elijah was walking the streets, screaming, ‘Who did my boy like dat?’ His wife Martha marched behind him with a shotgun. When they got to our house, my daddy told Elijah that if the boy was dead couldn’t nobody bring him back now, so he might as well come on to work. Elijah ignored him, for the first time in his life, and I remember my daddy telling me, ‘Niggers are such ingrates. That’s why they never have anything. They’re so selfish.’ I almost told Daddy everything, but I think I was more scared than Elijah and Martha. Then, of course, he would have asked me how I knew so much, and I would have had no choice but to tell him I was there, and I didn’t want anybody to know that, so I didn’t say anything. At supper, Daddy told me that Elijah was scaring people, so somebody shot him and Martha before they hurt innocent white people. Of course I knew the truth, but now it was too late to tell it. I realized in that moment that I could have changed the course of history, but I didn’t. Elijah had worked for Daddy almost twenty years without ever missing a day, holidays included, but that didn’t mean enough for me to tell the truth. I’m so ashamed, Sutton!”
Rosenthal hadn’t cried like that in years. His sides ached, and his eyes burned, like one standing too close to a fire.
“I drew the line that day. Really I did. When I saw those boys again, I gave them the meanest look I could muster. They knew I meant business, too.” He sniffled and huffed. “So, you see, I’ve changed. I wouldn’t ever do something like that again. Never. Yes, that’s the difference between most Southern white men and me. They’re still mean, racist bastards. They’ll probably always be. Folks like that hardly ever change. But, Sutton, I promise to honor you from now on.”
The rain was still pouring.
“We’re gonna get drenched tonight,” Rosenthal said and slid under the ragged quilt Martha Redfield had pieced as a Christmas gift for the family years ago. One last time, he placed Sutton in his palms, and said, “I feel so connected to you now. I thank God I found you. You’re mine.” He pressed the eye gently to his bosom and drifted off to sleep.
Thirteen
POSSUM STARED OUT OF THE TRAIN WINDOW AT THE GREEN cotton plants and remembered what she had tried desperately to forget. In Chicago, she hadn’t seen a single cotton bole and, consequently, she called the place divine. But now circumstances had insisted that she return to the underworld, as she thought of it, and every mile south forced her to admit that hell is usually closer than we think.
“Wow,” Possum mumbled when the train halted in Greenwood. She had prepared herself not to recognize the place, but she marveled that everything looked exactly the same. Some minor difference would have been enough to convince her that a progressive idea had found its way into the Delta, yet the similarity of things confirmed Possum’s long-held belief that God had forsaken Mississippi years ago.
Upon exiting the train, she wanted to ask whomever she saw, Black or white, if they had heard anything concerning the whereabouts of her son, but she determined it was wiser to go home and gather details firsthand.
Out of panic, Possum had left Chicago with nothing but the clothes on her back and a worn pocketbook. The thought of Clement being harassed, molested, or assaulted by white men was enough to make her forgo preparations as she pondered simply how to protect her son’s life in a place committed to its destruction. All she knew for sure was that she needed to get home, so that’s what she did. She would worry about the trivialities of clothes, money, and food later, she told herself.
The four-mile walk wasn’t as bad as she had envisioned. Colored folks waved cordially like they always did, and white folks noted one more nigger to tolerate. Jerry and Enoch became very real for her again as she recalled times with the brothers she thought of daily.
“Where yo’ thang at?” Enoch asked Possum one lazy Saturday afternoon as they undressed to take a dip in the cool Tallahatchie River.
“She a girl, stupid,” Jerry said. “She ain’t got no thang.”
“Then how she pee pee?” Enoch posed, confused.
“She got a split,” Jerry chuckled. “Look. See?”
Enoch put his face directly in front of Possum’s private. Thinking it necessary to teach her baby brother about gender difference, Possum spread her legs voluntarily and looked with Enoch at his first encounter with a vagina.
“Ugh! I don’t like that,” Enoch frowned. “It look funny.”
“You’ll like it soon enough,” Jerry prophesied.
Possum laughed to remember Enoch’s innocence. He and his jokes had kept her sane while imprisoned on Chapman’s land, and she prayed now that he had learned some new ones. She would need something jovial, she thought, if she were to survive the kidnapping of her only son.
Lying in bed one night, Possum asked Jerry, “What do you think hell is really like?”
“Go to sleep, girl!” he sputtered angrily.
Possum pressed her luck. “But I cain’t sleep, Jerry.” She was looking at a cluster of stars shining brightly through a hole in the rusted tin roof of the old sharecropper’s shack. Enoch had fallen asleep the moment his head hit the feather pillow.
Jerry sighed deeply and told Possum, “Ain’t no such thing as hell, girl. Somebody made that up to make us believe what the Bible say.”
Possum’s eyes bulged in horror. “What? Preachers said that when people sin—”
“Ain’t no such thang as sin either,” Jerry interrupted, more annoyed than before. “It just depends on how you define right and wrong,” he explained.
Possum listened intently, overwhelmed by what she saw as her twelve-year-old brother’s extraordinary wisdom.
“Why you think people be fallin’ out, cryin’, and shoutin’ in church every Sunday?” Jerry asked sleepily. Before Possum could answer, he retorted, “Because they’re afraid of going to hell. They’re begging God please not to send them to hell even though they’ve been wrong all week long.”
“But God ain’t dumb enough to believe the shoutin’ every week,” Possum said.
“Precisely,” Jerry confirmed, and lovingly patted his sister’s head. “That’s how you know the crying and stuff is just performance. Ain’t none of it ’bout God for real ’cause if God weighs the heart, there’s nothing people need to say or do. All the hollerin’ is so that other people will think they holy.”
“Oh,” Possum murmured.
“Plus, if you really love God, what do you need a hell for? You do the right thing because it’s right. Period. Not because you scared to go to hell. Wrong motive.”
Possum didn’t know what “motive” meant, but she understood what her brother was saying. She didn’t sleep that night, thinking about how much sense Jerry had made and why, deep in her heart, she believed him. That’s the night she began to see God more like her own mother,
who baked pies in the spring and boiled chitlins in the fall for others simply because she wanted to—not because she wanted or needed something back from them. She liked God better this way, for now she didn’t fear Him. She simply wanted to be His friend. She wanted to ask Him how He hung the stars in the sky without them falling and how the ocean remained salty although rain is always freshwater.
After that night, Possum decided to tell her parents that they could stop worrying about eternal damnation, but Jerry warned against such an announcement.
“Why not? Possum asked in wonder.
“Because they’ve believed it so long, their whole lives would fall apart if they learned something different. It’s all they have, so let them have it.”
“But what if what they have ain’t right?”
“It don’t make no difference, girl,” Jerry asserted. “God judges people on what they believe—not on what’s actually true ’cause don’t no human being know the full truth that God knows.” Jerry glanced to make sure Possum understood. “You’re only wrong when you do what you think God don’t like, and what God don’t like changes from one place and time to another. I was readin’ this book on …”
Possum had heard more than she could digest. How a simple question about hell had evolved into a lecture on the conceptualization of God she could not explain, yet what she knew for sure was that, somehow, her brother had set her free forever.
When she migrated to Chicago, Possum joined First Baptist Congregational Church, not because she needed a public sanctuary wherein to find God, but because she enjoyed watching others purge their guilt. The performances often made Possum laugh boisterously, although occasionally an intense solo yanked a tear from her usually unyielding eyes.
“Oh, Jerry!” she mumbled, and burst into tears. “What have they done to my boy?” Finding strength in a nearby tree, she leaned upon it and unleashed years of pent-up grief. Hugging the tree as though giving birth to it, Possum repeated Clement’s name like a libation, allowing herself the right to mourn the abduction of her only son. Unlike before, she didn’t care who witnessed her cleansing, for the pain of Clement’s trouble was a weight she needed, finally, to relinquish. Prior to this moment, she had refused to weep or crumble because she wanted to assume vicariously the strength Jerry must have had in order to meet death voluntarily. Yet, collapsed against the tree, the thought of life without Clement swelled in her like an ocean tide, and she admitted that her pseudostrength had simply proven ineffectual. Her emotions gathered power and burst every wall within which Possum had tried to contain them. So she let them go without resistance, glad to be relieved of the burden of their confinement.
Possum sat on the ground and leaned her back against the base of the tree. From her purse she retrieved a ragged lace handkerchief her mother had given her the day she left, and, with it, she wiped both tears and sweat in an effort to recover and complete the journey. She rotated and placed her left hand against the tree and remembered, surprisingly, that her father’s rough, work-gnarled hands had felt like the tree bark the last time he caressed her face. “I love you, baby,” he had sniffled, and encased Possum’s face with his dusty hands. “This ole place ain’t so bad,” he said. “But jes in case I don’t see you again, you ’member that I gave you de best I had.” Possum closed her eyes, and Jeremiah’s hands rubbed her wet cheeks dry again. Then, studying the outline of the tree’s bark more thoroughly, Possum noticed that the small, microscopic lines on her own hand resembled the deep, capillary-like indentations on the tree’s bark. “Well, I’ll be damn.” She smiled. She moved her palms lovingly across the bark, up and down, until what was once rough and unpleasurable became soothing, misunderstood history. As a child, she marveled at the coarseness of her grandfather’s hands and couldn’t understand why the wrinkles were so deeply embedded. Now, as she looked at the old tree, she understood that age loves to announce its presence. That tree probably had a smooth, silky bark in its youth, she presumed, but after enduring decades of wind, rain, sun, and bitter cold, the old tree boasted a tough, impenetrable outer shell. Stroking the back of one hand with the other, Possum chuckled at the bygone days of her baby-smooth, delicate skin, and happily joined the ranks of those whose wrinkled, coarse hands marked their adulthood. The roughness was sign of survival, she discovered, as she guessed the tree to be at least a hundred, and, for the first time in her life, she was proud of her callused hands.
The heat waves running across the road guaranteed that Possum would be soaking wet by the time she reached home. She walked on nonetheless, fighting a battle with the sun no human had ever won. Occasionally, she fanned herself with her bare hands, only to be frustrated further by the scorching air that confronted her. Possum looked up and realized that home was no closer now than it had been yesterday.
“I saw a man walk on water one time,” she recalled her grandfather telling her. “You don’t believe it, do you?”
Possum definitely didn’t, but she perceived this to be the wrong answer. At twelve, she had learned to distinguish between truth and Southern Black storytelling, but every now and then the boundaries blurred, leaving her unsure of exactly what to believe.
“Well, it’s de truf, chile,” he continued. He was filling his pipe with tobacco as the family awaited supper.
Possum closed her eyes playfully, and said, “Granddaddy, come on. You ain’t seen nobody walk on no water and you know it.”
“I knows what I done seen, girl! Is you crazy? I ain’t senile!” Granddaddy defended.
He was always telling the children some fantastic tale of the supernatural, swearing every word to be the absolute truth, although no one living could ever substantiate his story.
“Okay, Granddaddy, tell me about it,” Possum surrendered.
“No, no, chile,” he responded, obviously offended by her demeanor. “If you don’t wanna hear it, I sho ain’t gon make you.”
Granddaddy rocked himself, hoping Possum would beg him so he could share the story with genuine enthusiasm. She took her cue.
“For real, Granddaddy! I wanna hear it. Tell me. Please.” Possum actually hated this feigned coaxing, but it seemed the respectful thing to do.
“All right, all right, chile. You ain’t gotta beg.” Granddaddy lit his pipe and leaned forward, preparing to stand although he never did.
“We had jes finished pickin’ two hunnert fifty pounds of cotton,” he explained loudly. “It was a Friday evenin’ and me and yo’ Uncle Brother and some otha boys run off to de river to take a quick dip in de cool evenin’ water. Well, we got to de river and started takin’ off our clothes when we heard some otha kids swimmin’ nearby. We didn’t think nothin’ of it, ’specially since dey wuz colored, too, but all o’ sudden we heard somebody holla”—Granddaddy sat his pipe on the end table, cupped his hands around his mouth, and imitated how the children must have screamed—“‘he’s drownin’! Help!’” Then he reclaimed his pipe and continued the story.
“Yo’ Uncle Brother led de way as we ran to see if we could help. When we got to where de otha chil’ren wuz, two young boys wuz cryin’ and carryin’ on somethin’ terrible. We kept tryin’ to ask them what happened and who wuz in de water, but they wuz too traumatized to say anything clearly. We finally made out dat their big brother wuz tryin’ to see if he could swim all de way ’cross de river when he got tired and went under de water. We ask them if de boy wuz a good swimmer, and they said he wuz, but he started drownin’ for some reason.
“‘He all we got,’ one of the boys cried pitifully. ‘If he drown, we ain’t got nobody.’
“Dat’s when yo Uncle Brother walked out on de water and rescued him.”
“What?” Possum screamed in amazement.
“You heard what I said.” Granddaddy paused, looking around the room for anyone who dared challenge the validity of his tale. “Yo’ Uncle Brother closed his eyes and whispered somethin’ to de Good Lawd ’cause he said amen at the end, then he ran out on dat river jes like it was dry gr
ound.”
“Are you serious, Daddy? I never heard this story before,” Jeremiah told his father.
“Hell yeah, I’m serious! You thank I’d play ’bout somethin’ like dat? I don’t play wit God. You might, but I don’t.” His drama was intense.
“Brother brought de boy back on dry ground, too. He was unconscious so he didn’t remember none o’ it later, but de rest o’ us seed everythang. I’m de only one left of dat crew though.”
Of course you are, everyone thought.
“But I’m tellin’ you what I saw myself. This ain’t no story ’bout what I done heard somebody else say. I seed dis wit my own eyes!” His vehemence made Possum begin to believe him. “At first I didn’t believe it myself, but when he came back wit dat boy in his arms I knowed dat he had really walked on de water. I asked him real slow, ‘Did you jes git through walkin’ on dat water?’ and he said, ‘I did what I had to.’ I asked him, ‘Why ain’t I eva walked on de water?’ and he said, ‘’Cause you ain’t neva needed to. You don’t do it jes to be doin’ it. You ask God to give you dat kinda power only when yo’ own ain’t enough. Otherwise, you ain’t gon git it.’
“De otha two boys looked like they had done seen a ghost. They didn’t say nothin’ to Brother when he come back. They jes stared at him, frozen like they wuz under a spell. Brother laid de otha boy’s body down real gentle and he raised his hands and started shoutin’ and praisin’ God for de miracle, I guess. I ain’t neva seed Brother shout like dat befo’ in my life, and I knowed somethin’ had done happened dat I might not neva see again.”
Possum interrupted. “Did those other boys ever say anything to Uncle Brother about it?”
“Not really,” Granddaddy pondered. “Sometimes we’d see ’em and they’d get real quiet and stare at Brother like he wunnit real, but they never said a mumblin’ word to him, far as I know. Now I think about it, didn’t none o’ us say nothin’ to nobody ’bout what happened.”