Yard War

by Taylor Kitchings

  “It’s an expression, Farish. Y’all get on in the car.”

  “Hold it, everybody,” Daddy said, looking at Mama like he was asking her permission.

  “Tell ’em right here?” Mama asked.

  “It’s the perfect time and place.”

  “Go ahead.”

  Mama was smiling, so it didn’t make sense when Daddy said, “Children, I’m afraid we’ve got some bad news for you.”

  Farish held her breath like we were driving through a tunnel.

  “You know those packed-up boxes all over the house?”

  We knew, we knew.

  “We don’t have to put them in the moving van ourselves, do we?” Farish said.

  “Nope.” He smiled big. “You have to help your mama and me unpack ’em.”

  “Unpack ’em?” the girls said together.

  “You mean…?” I was afraid to believe this could be true.

  “We’re not moving after all,” Mama said, and sighed. “We’re stayin’ right here in Jackson.”

  “Yippee!” The girls screamed and jumped and held hands and danced in circles, singing “We’re not moving, we’re not moving….”

  This was such unbelievable news, so not what I expected, I was numb for a second. Then I couldn’t stop hugging them. “Oh man, oh man! When—How did this…?”

  Then I was hugging Willie Jane and saying, “This is why you were so happy! You knew!”

  “I didn’t know for sure, I just prayed it was so. I had a feeling the way your daddy was talkin’ this morning when he came back from the jailhouse, he looked at Miz Westbrook and he said, ‘So are we gonna move or are we gonna stay and fix this?’ He said all the Bethunes in this world couldn’t run him away, that he had almost let it happen. He said he wasn’t gonna run from anybody. Your daddy’s a strong man, Trip. A strong man.”

  Everybody was hugging and laughing.

  “But what about the people saying they’re gonna hurt us?” Farish was out of breath from all her dancing and singing.

  “They’re trying to scare us, sweetie,” Daddy said. “But that doesn’t mean we have to be scared.”

  “Careful,” Mama said. “But not scared.”

  Daddy said we should celebrate with some ice cream, so we drove to the Seale-Lily and ordered six banana splits to go. Mama and Ginny Lynn shared theirs. Dee cradled his in his sling, and we raced to see who could finish his first. Farish raced with us, even though Mama told her she couldn’t. I got a headache from trying to eat it too fast and had to let Dee win.

  When Willie Jane and Dee had changed back into their clothes, we hugged them good-bye.

  “See you tomorrow!” It felt so good to say it.

  That night, Daddy came into my room before I went to sleep. He said he had a long time to sit and think in that jail cell, a longer time to sit and think than he’d had in years, and two lightbulbs came on in his head while he was there.

  The first lightbulb told him that no matter what had happened, Mama didn’t really want to leave her hometown. Things would be different here now, but Jackson was where she had lived her whole life except for when she went to Sophie Newcomb, and no matter how hard he tried to make her happy in Kansas City, he knew she’d be miserable there or anywhere besides her hometown.

  “There’s home and there’s everywhere else,” he said. “Jackson is home, like it or not.”

  He let me think about that a minute.

  “Anyway, we’d be letting everybody down if we moved, right?” he said.

  “You mean Willie Jane and Dee?”

  “Yep. The whole state, too. We all have a responsibility to each other.”

  “Just because we live in the same place?”

  “It’s a special kind of place, don’t you think?”

  “A special kind of terrible sometimes.”

  “Sometimes it is. But there are a lot of good people here, pal, who want the best for everybody. They’re the ones who aren’t shouting and shaking their fists. Only half the congregation walked out, right?” He smiled. “The half that stayed, that’s the future.”

  “Maybe so, but the rest of the world still hates us.”

  “Hey, the world needs to understand that it wouldn’t be the same without Mississippi. Think about the books and the music that have come from here. Without us, you wouldn’t have the blues, which means you wouldn’t have rock ’n’ roll, which means no Elvis, no Beatles. And what about the food? You can’t get Willie Jane’s fried chicken and mashed potatoes just anywhere, you know.”

  “You sure can’t.”

  “I tell ya, Trip, it’s like one day God took the best of what’s good and the worst of what’s bad, stirred it all up, and dumped it between Memphis and New Orleans. You can’t move away from a place like that. You have to help keep the good in the mix.”

  He patted me on the shoulder and stood up.

  “What about the other lightbulb?” I asked. “You said there were two.”

  “The other lightbulb came on when I was sitting there feeling how bad my body hurt and asking why I had allowed myself to get all beat up and thrown in jail. The first answer was I did it to protect you. But I also did it to defend our right to have anybody we like play football in our own front yard. I told myself that if I really believed in that, I had to be willing to fight for it, maybe not just once, maybe again and again. Moving away would be running away, no matter what we kept telling ourselves. And Westbrooks don’t run. Do we?”

  “No, sir.”

  “You helped me remember that, Trip. Watching the way you fought for Dee. You’re a hero.”

  “Hero? I thought I was a goof-up.”

  He laughed and hugged me.

  “I bet all your patients will be glad you’re not leaving the clinic.”

  “I’ll tell you something, I’m thinking about starting my own clinic. One that’ll have a big waiting room where everybody can sit.”

  —

  As much as I hated to move away from 5445 Oak Lane Drive, the house I had lived in my whole life, it was not safe to stay there. Stokes and the Reeveses and Mr. and Mrs. Pinky were still our friends, but that was it.

  I thought and thought, but I couldn’t understand how these neighbors who acted so mean used to be so nice. The closest I could figure, their version of the world was all black and white, and not only in terms of people’s skin. They carried a big line in their heads between what was okay and what was not okay, and I had crossed it. So they looked at me with their real faces like I was the one who had changed…into somebody bad and stupid and dangerous. They were the same neighbors they had always been—I just never really knew them before.

  We finally found out who was making all the calls. It was the Bethunes, like we thought, and their friends, but it was also the Nelsons, the Stubbses, Mrs. Sitwell, and lots of other people. They had gotten together and decided to drive us out of Oakwood. Mr. Bethune held meetings at his house and told everybody we were in league with the Northern agitators and the Freedom Riders, and they needed to send us the message that they didn’t want colored kids playing with their kids, and they didn’t want coloreds taking over the Southern way of life. Daddy said it showed how pathetic they were, that they thought hang-up calls were a way to fight the federal government. We never found out who threatened me and my sisters.

  I can still see Mr. Bethune’s angry, puffed-up face and wonder how that could be the same person who always grinned at me in church and called me a wisenheimer. Where did he get so much hate? If he hadn’t taught it to Tim and Tom, they might have played with us instead of worrying about what color Dee was.

  A lot of things are different now, and mostly better. Willie Jane is still my other mama—that’s not going to change. We moved to a big old house in an older neighborhood closer to town and got a private phone number we don’t give out to anybody unless Mama and Daddy know them. Daddy wears one of those new pagers on his belt to keep up with his patients. The phone still rings a lot, mostly with calls from
Farish’s friends, and I still cringe a little every time.

  We don’t belong to the country club anymore. Daddy says he can’t believe he ever wasted time playing golf. We don’t go to Broadview Baptist Church anymore either. Mama and Daddy have been getting together with some people who think like they do, and they’re talking about starting up their own church, with a preacher who not only isn’t afraid to talk about colored people but would also welcome them into the congregation.

  We still live close enough to Donelson Junior High for me to go there, and I am finally a split end for the Donelson Dirt Daubers—third string, so far, but Coach says I have a lot of potential. People still talk about me and my family, but I’m learning not to care what people say. The Bethunes have gone on to high school, so I don’t have to fool with them anymore. Stokes and I are back to being best friends. I’d rather have one or two good friends than be popular. Andy’s still my pal, and I asked Nancy Harper to go to the homecoming dance. I’m kind of nervous about it, but I figure if we run out of things to talk about, we can always make fun of each other’s accents.

  Roderick’s parents took him out of Donelson right when I was getting to know him. Over the summer, some people blew up his dad’s dental clinic one night, just like they said they’d do. Miss Hooper told me his family moved to Tupelo. Nancy and I talk about going up to see him one day.

  Mama and Daddy say the schools are about to be completely integrated, along with restaurants, hotels, movie theaters, and everything else. They say it’s going to happen fast, and whites will be slow to accept it.

  Mama says she’s learning not to care what people say, too, and she can’t believe it has taken her this long. She doesn’t go to Junior League and garden club meetings as much now. She’s spending a lot of time tutoring Dee and some kids from his neighborhood who want to go to a better school. She says Dee’s a whiz at math.

  We don’t eat Sunday dinner with Meemaw and Papaw that much anymore, and everybody seems to watch their words when we do. Meemaw never has told me she’s sorry for what she said about Daddy. She wants to smile and act like it never happened and seems to expect me to do the same. But every time I look at her, I see that night. Daddy says he’s about to convince Papaw to help him fund a new clinic near where Willie Jane lives. It will be for women who can’t always go to the doctor because they can’t afford it.

  Tomorrow is Saturday and Dee will be coming over. I told Willie Jane to be sure and wake me up early so we can make pancakes before the game. Stokes will be here after lunch. Andy finally ran out of excuses and admitted that his mom wouldn’t drive him to my house. Guys from the new neighborhood have been showing up, though, and we usually have at least three-man teams. My yard is even better for football now, with hardly any trees.

  I have more reasons than ever to live in this place that I love and hate and never will understand. Sometimes, when I think about everything Willie Jane and Dee and me and my family went through last fall, and what everybody in Mississippi will have to go through before things get much better, I feel pretty hopeless. Then I remember what Daddy said after the yard war: “The good guys won here today.” They just might win tomorrow.

  AFTERWORD

  The Jackson, Mississippi, of this novel is based on the one I remember from 1964, though characters, churches, neighborhoods, and schools have been fictionalized. There really was a Willie Jane, I did throw a football with her son in our front yard, and the neighbors did object. That would not happen today.

  I have tried to give my characters language true to the time. When I was growing up, the terms Negro and colored were used by whites who wanted to separate themselves, at least superficially, from those who showed no respect for blacks and commonly tossed around the offensive nigger. I have made an effort to keep that word and other epithets to a minimum, using them only as signifiers of the racism this story deplores.

  A younger, more creative and generous spirit enlivens the neighborhoods where I grew up. Some things, like passionate football rivalries and surpassingly delicious food, will never change and never should. But Jackson is different in a thousand ways from what it was in 1964, and incalculably better in one way: now it belongs to everybody.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Deepest gratitude to my brilliant, witty, and tireless agent, Molly Ker Hawn of the Bent Agency, who believed in this book and made it happen; to the incomparable Wendy Lamb, who pointed me in all the right directions, to assistant editor Dana Carey and readers Sarah Eckstein, Hannah Weverka, Teria Jennings, Alexandra West, and Alex Borbolla; to my wife, Beth, and my children, Mary Katherine and J.T., for changing the world from black-and-white to color; to Mama and Daddy for more than I can say or repay; to Min, Ken, Mabs, and Banana for love, forbearance, and dessert; to my beloved uncle Barry Hannah, constantly missed, who taught me about writing and laughing and yard ball; and to Willie Jane, wherever she may be.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Taylor Kitchings’s roots in Mississippi run many generations deep, though it took him a while to circle back to them. As a college freshman, he recorded the original album Clean Break, now considered a collector’s item. As a junior, he wrote music for mallet and giant Möbius strip, which was performed at Manhattan’s Café La MaMa. In the years between earning his BA from Rhodes College and his MA from Ole Miss, he traveled from Memphis to New York to Europe, writing and performing songs on piano. He and his wife, Beth, have two children and live in Ridgeland, Mississippi, where he teaches English at St. Andrew’s Episcopal School. His short story “Mr. Pinky Gone Fishing” was published in the collection Tight Lines from Yale University Press. Yard War is his first novel.