by Daniel Black
Jeremiah stood in the water defeated. He didn’t want to go home, he didn’t want to ride in the truck with Pet, he didn’t want to have his grandson’s hair balled up in his fists, he didn’t want to forgive, he didn’t want to forget, he didn’t want to cry, and he didn’t want to die. He wanted to skip death and confront God unannounced. Watching Enoch deteriorate, Jeremiah tried not to imagine what he would do if he had to bury his last son. He looked around at the contented river, the oblivious birds, and the unconcerned cotton stalks, and one bold tear escaped as loneliness teased him like a faint breeze on a hot summer night.
“I cain’t do this no more,” he mumbled. “What are we doin’ wrong? What am I doin’ wrong?” He looked puzzled and confused.
“You all right out there?” Pet hollered from the truck.
Jeremiah ignored him. “I know I work hard, so that cain’t be it. I takes my family to church every Sunday. I only drinks on Saturday nights, and when I do I don’ neva git sloppy drunk. So I don’t understand the problem.” With outstretched arms and a head hung low, Jeremiah’s form resembled the crucifix.
Pet Moore exited the truck and stood on the bank of the Tallahatchie, watching his friend.
“Seem lak every time I ask something of You I cain’t neva git it. Why is that? Huh?” With every question Jeremiah became more incensed. “Negroes is always beggin’ God fu help! I’m tired o’ that. I wanna help myself now. I love God, always have and always will, but I’m sick”—he screamed the word—“o’ feelin’ helpless. Somethin’ gotta change. I’m always waitin’ on God or fate or time or somethin’ to keep my life in order, but why cain’t I do it myself?” Jeremiah didn’t know to whom he spoke, but the speaking itself was too therapeutic for him to stop. The flow of the river around him kept his adrenaline pumping, providing him with just enough energy to purge his soul.
To Pet he looked like the picture of John the Baptist that hung on his living room wall. The only thing missing, Pet thought, was a submissive, willing Christ for him to baptize.
“You know what’s funny?” Jeremiah chuckled and placed his hands on his hips. “Negro peoples been good to white folks ’cause we scared o’ them. It ain’t got nothin’ to do wit bein’ no Christian! You know how I know? ’Cause we treat each other like shit!” he yelled. “We grin and heehaw at whites ’cause we know they got de power to fuck our lives up whenever they git ready. That’s it! And since we ain’t got no power, we can treat each other any kind o’ way ’cause it ain’t gon make no difference nohow. All this time I thought we wuz nice to white folks ’cause we wuz tryin’ to be good Christians. Bullshit! We jes been nice ’cause we scared. We don’t even believe in Jesus. What we believe in is whatever will git us by. That’s it!” he screamed and pounded one fist into the other. “That’s why we don’t neva git ahead ’cause we always tryin’ to figure out how to git ova instead o’ gittin’ along. And white folks know it. So they keep fuckin’ wit us ’cause they learned years ago that, somehow, Negro people like them better than they like themselves. This means they can do whatever they want to us ’cause we love them too much to destroy them. That’s why they did this to Clement! Killin’ them white men suggested that I might love myself more than I love them, and they cain’t neva have that ’cause if that ever happen, they whole way o’ life is doomed. Oh shit!” Jeremiah danced in the river as his analysis became clearer. “They livin’ good only because we love them! Damn! Why did it take me so long to figure this out? That’s why Negroes cain’t git ahead! We think de Bible and its teachin’s is fu how we treat white folk—not each other. ‘To hell wit a Negro man,’ we tell ourselves. ‘He ain’t shit.’ Yep, that’s exactly what we say in our hearts. We might not say it out loud, but that’s exactly what we think. That’s why Clement’s body is floatin’ somewhere in dis river—’cause de rest o’ de Negroes in this goddamn town don’t think nothin’ ’bout no Black boy dyin’. If it was a white boy, everybody would be out here tryin’ to find him ’cause he mean somethin’ to everybody. But that’s all right,” Jeremiah asserted, and began exiting the river. “My grandson mean somethin’, too, and if it’s de last thang I do on God’s green earth, I’ma make somebody know exactly how much he do mean.”
When he reached Pet, Jeremiah was smiling broadly. “Let’s go, man,” he said.
Pet stared at him, unable to understand what had just transpired. “You all right, Mi?”
“I’m just fine, Mr. Pet Moore. Just dandy!” Jeremiah retorted, and the two climbed into the cab of the truck.
“Who was you talkin’ to?” Pet asked as they drove away.
Jeremiah burst into unconstrained laughter, a sign to Pet Moore that something in Money, Mississippi, was about to change forever.
When Enoch arrived home, he found Possum swinging her feet from the porch as they had done hours before, and now she was fanning mosquitoes with a stiff piece of cardboard.
“Didn’t find nothin’, huh?” she said, when her brother occupied the space next to her.
Enoch wasn’t sure if Jeremiah had said anything, so he played it safe. “No, we didn’t find nothin’. We walked de river pretty good, but didn’t find no body. Thank God.”
“Well, I’m glad”—Possum sighed—“’cause I don’t know what I’d do if y’all came back here wit my boy in de back o’ Mr. Pet’s truck. I just don’t know what I’d do.”
“Clement’s gon be all right,” Enoch stated, then hated himself for saying it.
“Ain’t nothin’ in Mississippi all right,” Possum corrected. “This whole damn state is fucked up wit racist crackers who cain’t seem to come out o’ de nineteenth century. And, on top o’ dat, y’all Negroes cain’t seem to do without ’em.”
“Y’all?” Enoch defended.
“Yes, y’all. Why would anybody Black chose to stay in a place where people hate you and kill your children?”
“’Cause this place is our home, too! White folks don’t own de goddamn ground in Mississippi. If anything, we own it ’cause we sho been de ones workin’ it. Dat’s why we still here,” he argued. “We done worked far too hard to walk off and let somebody else reap our harvest. Shit, dis land right here?”—he waved his arms in every possible direction—“dis is my land. It was my great granddaddy’s, my granddaddy’s, then it was my daddy’s, and now it’s mine. No, we don’t own no deed to it yet, but it’s mine all de same ’cause I done gave my life for it. And quiet as it’s kept, it’s yours, too.”
“Hell, naw!” Possum hollered, shaking her head fiercely. “I don’t want no part of dis. You can have it if you want it, but don’t save none fu me!”
“Well, hell, you ain’t doin’ no better up in Chicago! Don’t you work fu white folks, too?”
“Yeah, but …”
“But what? White folks is white folks!” Enoch screamed. “They ain’t payin’ you shit up there, and they ain’t payin us shit down here.”
“But it’s different,” Possum said weakly.
“How?” Enoch bellowed.
“’Cause I ain’t choppin’ cotton all day long out in de hot sun!” Possum hollered back.
“But you washin’ white folks’ dirty draws from sunup to sundown! That makes you feel better?”
Possum paused. “No, it don’t, but still.”
“Still what!” Enoch was standing now.
“Still I’m not sharecroppin’ and makin’ some dirty old white man richer.”
“Yes, you are! Do you own de place where you stayin’? Huh?”
“No, I don’t,” Possum confessed.
“Then you sharecroppin’! They jes got another name for it. They call it rent. But it’s de same thang.”
“How?”
“’Cause don’t care how long you live there and pay, you don’t never own it. You jes keep payin’ and payin’, month after month, and whenever you leave, you don’t take nothin’ but de same shit you brought with you. You done gave some white man thousands of dollars, and you don’t git one dime of it back. Dat’
s de same thang we doin’ down here. But at least we can eat if we git hongry.”
Enoch’s airtight argument couldn’t be refuted.
“See, I’d rather be poor in Mississippi ’cause at least if I ain’t got no money I can still eat. All I gotta do is raise a crop. In Chicago, if you ain’t got no money, you been done starved to death ’cause you ain’t got no land to grow nothin’ on. And you callin’ that better off?”
“Yes, I do,” Possum suggested, “’cause at least I ain’t got to bow and scratch when white folks walk by.”
“OH! So you don’t say ‘yes ma’am’ to dat white woman whose clothes you wash?” Enoch stared at Possum.
She confessed, “Yes, I do, but—”
“Oh, stop dis shit, girl! Negroes is strugglin’ everywhere, and jes ’cause you a slave in de city don’t make slavery in de country no worse.”
“But, Enoch, there are a lotta Negroes who own their own businesses and live in neighborhoods with otha Negroes who doin’ real good for theyselves. The whole time I lived down South I ain’t neva seen no neighborhood of Black folks doin’ good.”
Enoch consented, and Possum seized the advantage.
“That’s all I been lookin’ for—the opportunity to do better. I ain’t doin’ so great right now, but I got the chance to do good. Down here, I didn’t even have the chance. Where are the rich Negroes in Money? Huh? Show me even one! Most o’ dese families been here for three and four generations, and they still doin’ ’bout as good as the first generation did. At least in Chicago you got a chance to do better. It might happen, and it might not, but a chance is better than knowin’ for sho you ain’t neva gon git nothin’ and nowhere.
“I might not ever make it big in Chicago, but I’m shonuff gon try like hell ’cause I done seen too many Negro people do it. And even if I don’t, I get excited just watchin’ other Black people do it. Down here, every Negro I know is in de same boat, and that boat is sinkin’ fast.” Possum regretted her last statement, but since she couldn’t take it back, she simply fell quiet.
The two stared at each other for a long time. Neither wanted to admit the wisdom inherent in the other’s position, but eventually they forsook their stubbornness and burst into laughter.
Possum said, “This is crazy, ain’t it?”
“Real crazy. Two broke people arguin’ about who’s broker!” Enoch chuckled. “That’s how they git us, sis. They make us fight each other instead of them.”
“You right. God knows you right.”
The lavender Mississippi sky caught Possum’s attention. Clouds moved about nervously, unclear about their resting place, and, for the first time ever, Possum examined the night without hatred in her heart.
Enoch read her face. “It’s beautiful, huh?”
“Wow. It’s absolutely gorgeous. I don’t ever remember seeing a night like this when we were kids.”
“You didn’t have the eyes to see it then,” Enoch said.
“Did you?” Possum asked. “Did you always see the beauty of this place?”
Brief spouts of laughter punctuated Enoch’s response: “Hell naw, girl. I wuz tryin’ like hell to get outta here, too. You remember, don’t you? I left here and went to Memphis …”
“Oh, yeah! You was tryin’ to be a comedian,” Possum cackled.
“I wunnit tryin’ to be nothin’. I was a comedian,” he joked. “The only problem was that Negro comedians wunnit makin’ no money in Memphis. I didn’t neva wanna come back here though. But after Jerry died and I moved back, I realized that a man gotta make happiness wherever he is, and home oughta be at least one place where he can always find it.
“So when I got back and realized I wunnit eva goin’ nowhere, I stopped hatin’ the place and started lookin’ for its beauty. Many evenin’s I sat out here by myself just lookin’ at the sky and listenin’ to frogs and crickets until one day I looked up and saw all these colors blended together, and I started cryin’. I cain’t really explain why. I noticed birds dancing in the sky like just being there was a joy and I saw rabbits bouncing around in the garden and squirrels leaping from tree to tree, and when I put it all together, it hit me that I was sittin’ in the middle of Paradise.”
“I wouldn’t say all that,” Possum sneered.
“But think about it. Before humans came along and messed up the balance of the world, every place on earth was probably perfectly beautiful in its own way. You only hate this place because of how Negroes get treated. You don’t hate the place itself.”
Possum studied the magical sky again. “I guess you right, Enoch. I never considered anything beautiful about Money, Mississippi, or any place in Mississippi for that matter. I just wanted to get away.”
“I understand,” Enoch said, taking Possum’s hand. “And now with everything that’s done happened to Clement …”
“No! Let’s not talk about that right now, Enoch. Let’s just watch the sky.”
Enoch rubbed Possum’s hand soothingly as she basked in a wonder she had missed her entire life. Occasionally, she closed her eyes and rocked like an old church mother trying hard to follow a confusing sermon. The jade cotton plants across the field now registered in Possum’s consciousness as majestic fruit of the soil instead of a sign of Negro subjugation. Chirping birds, which throughout her young life disturbed her sleep, now sounded like an ensemble of sopranos, altos, and tenors, all of whom sang in perfect, three-part harmony. Even the baby snake slithering beneath their feet contributed to the splendor of the moment, for instead of running in fear, Possum smiled slightly at the layers of brown, gold, and black that decorated its back.
“An artist could have a field day here,” she murmured aloud.
“Uh-huh,” Enoch mumbled. Then, suddenly, he laughed boisterously.
“What is it?”
“The other night I was sittin’ out here jes like we doin’ now and de Holy Ghost got all over me, and I started dancin’ and shoutin’ right here in de middle of de front yard.”
“What!”
Enoch leaned on Possum laughing. “I ain’t lyin’! Momma was sittin’ on de porch in her rocker, and all of a sudden she heard me screamin’ ‘Hallelujah! Thank ya, Jesus!’” Enoch mocked himself.
Possum’s body vibrated. “You gotta be kidding?”
“No, I ain’t. It was the strangest thing, sis. You know how we used to make fun o’ folks shoutin’ and stuff? Well, dat’s exactly what I started doin’.”
“What got into you?”
“I don’t know. I done thought about it a hundred times, and I still cain’t figure it out. It’s like … just for a moment I was at perfect peace with the world. And I got overwhelmed, I guess.”
Possum was still snickering. “I woulda paid good money to see that, li’l brother.”
“Yeah, I know,” Enoch teased, “’cause then you could start makin’ fun o’ me jes like you used to make fun o’ Miss Ophelia.”
“I never laughed at Miss Ophelia!” Possum giggled. “That was you!”
“What?” Enoch protested. “You wuz de one who taught me how to shout like her!”
“No I didn’t!”
“Yes you did! Everybody thought I wuz de one jes because I liked to joke and clown a lot, but it wuz you and Martha Mae—”
“Me and Martha Mae?” Possum screeched.
“Yep! Y’all would sit in de back o’ de church and shout jes like Miss Ophelia. Don’t act like you don’t remember!”
“That Martha Mae was a fool!”
“You, too! Don’t try to put it all on her!”
“She was worse than me. She could do somethin’ real funny and look you straight in de eye like she ain’t done nothin’. That’s really what made me laugh. She was so good at acting innocent.”
“She was crazy,” Enoch corroborated.
“What happened to dat chile?”
“You didn’t hear? She married Big Thang.”
Possum screamed like she saw a ghost. “Big Thang? I know you lyin’, Enoch.”<
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“Yep, she married Big Thang and they got ten kids.”
“That big ole boy? Get outta here! Ten children?”
“Dat’s right. Now they call her Big Thang, too!”
Possum and Enoch hollered. Miss Mary ran to the front screen, wondering what in the world was wrong, and when she saw the two enjoying each other, she gave thanks for the reunion of her children, and returned to the rocker.
“Girl, Martha Mae bigger’n Momma.”
“You a lie, boy!”
“Wait ’til you see her.”
“She was always so skinny, Enoch! She couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred pounds when we graduated from school.”
“Well now her right leg weighs ninety pounds by itself.”
Possum hit Enoch playfully. “Shut up!”
“I’m tellin’ you! Wait ’til you see her.”
“Oh my God! I used to be jealous of her ’cause she was so cute and had the cutest little figure.”