A Thousand Never Evers

by Shana Burg

  And that’s when I find out it isn’t a jump rope at all.

  “Now then, Mr. Tate, do we agree that if a vine grows ten inches per week, then at six feet, or seventy-two inches, this vine has been growing seven weeks?” Miss Gold asks.

  “Irrelevant!” yells Mr. Hickock. “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “Sustained!” says the judge.

  “Well, then,” Miss Gold says, “let me ask you this, Mr. Tate. To whom did you sell the three hundred twenty-one thousand, two hundred four butter bean seeds?”

  Even from back here, I can see sweat bubble up on Mr. Tate’s forehead. “Well, I, uh, sold them to Mr. Adams before he died. And Bump Dawson stole them.”

  “Speculation!” Miss Gold says.

  “Overruled!” says the judge.

  “And how do you keep track of your sales?” Miss Gold asks.

  “Records,” Mr. Tate says. He folds his arms across his chest.

  “And with your records,” Miss Gold says, “I imagine it would be quite simple for you to prove to the court you sold the butter bean seeds to Mr. Adams, the very seeds you allege were then stolen by Bump Dawson to plant over the garden.”

  Mr. Tate nods.

  “Then, Judge, I would like to request that the witness please retrieve his records, so that we can admit them as evidence,” Miss Gold says.

  But then Mr. Tate changes his mind. He tells Miss Gold he doesn’t have time to keep track of each little sale, and even if he did, he wouldn’t be able to get his records, because they’re in the bedroom where his wife’s sleeping. “She was up all night with the baby. You’re a lady,” Mr. Tate says to Miss Gold. “I shouldn’t have to tell you how hard it is to have a baby and your help up and gone to a trial.”

  Mama and me, we chew up our tongues. And I know if we could, we’d spit them into his beastly face.

  Now Mr. Tate’s forehead drips like he’s hiding something, and I start to wonder what it is. And I reckon Miss Gold wonders too, because when she turns to the judge, she looks like my cat does just before he pounces on a field mouse.

  “Your Honor,” she says, “I request we stop this trial until the records have been subpoenaed and both parties have had the opportunity to review them. I would like them taken from the witness’s bedroom. Immediately!”

  “Go on now. Fetch the records,” the judge tells Mr. Tate. “No hurry,” he adds, and winks.

  Then Miss Gold looks at the judge the same way I look at Flapjack after he’s dragged a dead mouse in the kitchen.

  CHAPTER 28

  October 21, 1963, Late Morning

  Once the case for the defense begins, Miss Gold tells the jury she’s got a witness who can prove Uncle Bump would never wreck Old Man Adams’s land. “My witness, Mr. Pinnington, will demonstrate that Bump Dawson is not a man who seeks revenge but a man who seeks justice,” she says.

  A small white man with a white beard totters to the stand. What with his fancy suit and suitcase, I reckon he’s very important. While he wobbles up the side aisle, he checks his pocket watch, and I can’t believe it takes me all the way till this little man is sworn on the Bible and locked inside the witness-box to remember who he is: Old Man Adams’s lawyer, the man who gave me the television.

  Mr. Pinnington is his name!

  “Did Mr. Adams ever mention anything about his head servant, Mr. Dawson?” Miss Gold asks him.

  “Well,” Mr. Pinnington says, “Mr. Adams did tell me it was because he was impressed by the hard work of his Negro hands, and the kindness shown to him by Bump Dawson in particular, that he wrote his will as he did.”

  “And by the way, just what did Mr. Adams write in his will?”

  “It’s common knowledge,” Mr. Pinnington says. “I reviewed this months ago.”

  “Remind me,” Miss Gold says.

  While Mr. Pinnington checks his pocket watch a second time, I start to heat up because I reckon this little man thinks he’s got somewhere more important to be.

  Then he unlocks his suitcase, pulls out a heap of paper, and reads, “‘I bequeath my gold pocket watch to my head servant, Bump Dawson. To Elmira Grady, my cook, I leave my Dutch oven. To Miss Addie Ann Pickett, my cook’s assistant, I leave my television set. I hereby bequeath my furniture, my books, and the remaining contents of my home to my alma mater, Ole Miss. The house itself will be used as a gathering spot for the people of Kuckachoo. I expect the annual Christmas party to carry on without me. Most importantly, I leave my land to all the people of my community. Together whites and Negroes shall plant a garden.’”

  When Mr. Pinnington finishes reading the will, a man in the first row roars, “That will. It’s a fake!” A lady yells, “Everyone knows Mr. Adams was sicker than a tick stuck in sap.” And there’s only a handful of folks in this courtroom with their jaws still hinged together.

  Of course, the judge calls for order, but he’s got to bang his hammer six times before everyone settles enough for the trial to go on.

  And one thing’s clear: if I don’t get a chance to tell them what the night said, folks with common sense and ordinary logic will pin this crime on Uncle Bump. And if Uncle Bump spends years behind bars without our family, without his harmonica, I wonder if he’ll still have the will to live. It’s a question I hate to ask, an answer I dread to hear.

  Mr. Hickock folds his arms across his chest. He struts up to the little lawyer, Mr. Pinnington, and says, “Now correct me if I’m wrong, sir, but it doesn’t require a stretch of the imagination to believe that when Mr. Adams passed away, Charles ‘Bump’ Dawson felt he deserved the man’s land. As Mr. Adams’s head servant, Bump had grown rather uppity over the years. Some who observed Bump say he even acted as if he’d forgotten his color, since he took care of the old man like he was his very own son.”

  Mr. Hickock rocks back on his heels. “Now, if in fact what you say is true, and Mr. Adams did indeed leave his land to all the people of Kuckachoo, then it stands to reason that when the Negroes were excluded from the sunrise picking, they could have been mad. But Charles ‘Bump’ Dawson would have been angriest of all. Wouldn’t you agree?”

  Mr. Pinnington covers his face with his hands and shakes his head like he can’t stand to stay in Kuckachoo one more second. Then he sighs and says, “I suppose given the circumstances, yes, it’s possible Bump Dawson could’ve grown angry. But he’s just a convenient scapegoat for the injustice that has occurred here.”

  “What’s a scapegoat?” I whisper to Mama.

  “I reckon it’s someone folks can blame for their troubles,” she says.

  Now Mr. Pinnington pops up, unlocks the witness-box himself, and hurries out the courthouse door. And I’ve got another question for Mama.

  “Why won’t he stay and fight?” I whisper.

  “Clean folks don’t want to get dirty,” she whispers back.

  And even though I don’t have the foggiest what Mama means, I’m not about to get in a long discussion here in the courthouse, not when Miss Gold’s calling my very own uncle to the stand.

  Uncle Bump trudges to the witness-box. His shackles clang. He doesn’t bother to lift his feet. They just slide along the floor. He doesn’t try to stand up straight and proud. His shoulders sag. But when I see his fists clenched at his sides, I get some hope, because hands ready to punch tell me he’ll fight for his cause.

  You know how you can half close your eyes and everything looks fuzzy? Well, if you half closed your ears, everything would sound blurry and you’d swear you were sitting in church listening to the reverend and Mrs. Montgomery. That’s because at church, every time the reverend says something, Mrs. Montgomery always shouts back, “Amen!” Even when the reverend says, “Good morning!” Mrs. Montgomery yells, “Amen!”

  And now that’s how it sounds with Miss Gold and Uncle Bump.

  “Did you ever visit the garden after the planting?” Miss Gold asks.

  “No, ma’am!” Uncle Bump shouts.

  “After the planting, did Mr. Mu
dge hire you to weed and water the garden?” Miss Gold asks.

  “No, ma’am!”

  “Do you hate all white people?” Miss Gold asks.

  “No, ma’am!”

  “Do you blame all white people for what happened to your nephew, Elias Pickett?”

  “No, ma’am!”

  “Did you ever break into the garden cabin?”

  “No, ma’am!”

  “Mr. Dawson, did you or did you not plant butter beans over the community garden?”

  “No, ma’am!”

  “No further questions,” says Miss Gold.

  The service is over, and back here in the colored viewing gallery, our good spirits are flying all over the place.

  But that’s all wrecked the second Mr. Hickock swaggers to the witness-box. “We’ve already established that Mr. Tate sold the butter bean seeds to Mr. Adams,” he says. He straightens his bow tie and turns to Uncle Bump. “After your brother-in-law went and got himself killed, you were saddled with the burden of his offspring, meaning your hands were surely fuller than you wanted them to be.”

  Mama squeezes my hand so hard I stop worrying about throwing up on the courthouse floor and start worrying my fingers will break off at the knuckles.

  “Objection!” Miss Gold shouts. “Leading the witness.”

  “Sustained!” says the judge. “Redirect questioning, Mr. Hickock.”

  “Yes, sir,” says Mr. Hickock. “Then, to make matters worse, you learned Mr. Adams’s garden was supposed to be shared, yet you were not invited to the first Garden Club meeting. Now with all that going on, you will admit that you were an angry fellow, were you not?”

  Uncle Bump stares straight ahead at the viewing gallery, but he doesn’t say a word, so Mr. Hickock leans over the railing round Uncle Bump and shouts all rough and mean, “Answer me, boy!”

  A blue vein bulges down the center of Uncle Bump’s forehead.

  Now Mr. Hickock yells even louder, “Answer me, boy!”

  And Uncle Bump explodes. “I’m a man!” His three words rumble through the courthouse like sentences, paragraphs, books.

  “Aha!” Mr. Hickock says. He raises his right index finger. “Indeed you are a man. A very angry man!”

  “Objection! Leading!” Miss Gold cries.

  “Overruled!” The judge bangs his hammer.

  “It’s logical to assume an angry man like you would break into the garden cabin and plant over the entire field with butter beans to get revenge. Correct?” Mr. Hickock says.

  Uncle Bump clenches his teeth.

  “Speak up, boy. I can’t hear you,” Mr. Hickock says.

  A tear hotter than Mama’s iron burns down my cheek. I’m mad enough to slaughter a hog with my bare hands. I see how our case, it’s coming apart—how the law, it’s not on our side. My throat burns raw as buckwheat. I know what I need to do, but I don’t know quite how to do it. How can I, Addie Ann Pickett, get up there in front of all these people? How can I, Addie Ann Pickett, tell them what the night told me?

  But now the crickety-crack of a door rings out from the back of the courtroom, and a fuss splashes through the viewing gallery.

  “What have we here?” the judge asks. He lifts up his glasses and squints at the back of the room.

  I turn in my seat. And what do you know? There’s Mrs. Tate with Miss Springer. “If it pleases the court,” Miss Springer calls out, “my friend, Penelope Tate, has some rather intriguing evidence to present.”

  The judge lowers his glasses back down on his nose. “Oh, I see!” he says. “The lovely Mrs. Tate! Come on up!”

  Miss Springer gives her friend a gentle push forward. Then Mrs. Tate swivels down the center aisle in her pink dress and white hat. She looks just like a movie star—just like Audrey Hepburn.

  CHAPTER 29

  October 21, 1963, Noon

  When Mrs. Tate arrives at the front of the courtroom, she chats a few seconds with Miss Gold. Then Miss Gold talks to the judge. And before long, Mrs. Tate’s resting her palm on the Bible, swearing to tell the whole truth.

  “I’m not one for speaking to the public and all,” Mrs. Tate says soon as she’s settled in the witness-box. “But my friend, Miss Springer, brought me here and my mother’s watching my son because I’ve got something to tell y’all.”

  “Mrs. Tate, if you’ll forgive me,” says Mr. Hickock, “you appear on edge. Truly you don’t need to testify. We’ve already heard from your husband, which is good enough for the both of you so far as I’m concerned.”

  Mrs. Tate closes her eyes like she’s trying to erase the ugly sight. But sorry for her, when she opens them back up, Mr. Hickock’s still there. So Mrs. Tate says, “Excuse me, Mr. Hickock, but I wouldn’t be here if I was just gonna repeat what my husband already said.”

  It’s amazing how Mr. Hickock slinks away.

  “Just talking from personal experience,” Mrs. Tate says, “I think a lot of you would be surprised to know I was actually quite a good student in school. I’ve got more going on than what you see. But folks don’t seem to want to believe two things—beauty and brains—can go together. What’s more—”

  “For the love of the Lord!” Miss Springer cries out from the back of the courtroom. “Quit whistlin’ Dixie!”

  “But I’m not whistlin’ Dixie!” says Mrs. Tate. “It’s a similar case here. Folks don’t want to believe that the person who disrespected you and me and everyone who worked so hard on this garden, the person who doesn’t care whether we eat or don’t eat as long as he eats, the person who has our respect but doesn’t deserve it, could actually be, well, one of us. Folks would rather believe what’s easy: a Negro committed this crime. But the truth is more complicated.”

  With that, Mrs. Tate reaches into her purse, takes out a sheet of newspaper, and hands it to the judge. “This should help solve the puzzle.”

  “Looks like a sheet from the Delta Daily to me,” the judge says. “And the date on it…” The judge lowers his glasses on his nose. “July 18, 1963.”

  “Exactly, sir. If you turn that news sheet over, you’ll see that scrawled beside the crossword puzzle is the list of all the seeds that were left in Mr. Adams’s garden cabin at the time he died. Mr. Mudge wrote up this list at one of our Garden Club meetings. As you can see, Judge, according to Mr. Mudge, when Mr. Adams died, there weren’t any butter bean seeds left in his garden cabin. No butter bean seeds at all.”

  “And so, Mrs. Tate?” asks the judge.

  “And so the idea that someone broke into the shed and stole the butter bean seeds that ruined our garden doesn’t amount to a hill of beans,” Mrs. Tate says. “But this does!” she adds. Then she digs to the bottom of her purse and plucks out a long slip of yellow paper like it’s a quarrelsome buttercup wrecking her lawn. She hands it to the judge.

  I crane my neck off my backbone trying to make out what that long strip of yellow paper could be. What a slip of paper could possibly have to do with mud, tears, and vines, I can’t imagine.

  The judge smooths out the slip with his palm and checks it through his magnifying glass. Mrs. Tate has more to say. “It’s like this,” she begins. The second she opens her mouth, though, the judge holds up his hand like she should shut it back up.

  But I reckon Mrs. Tate is sick of waiting for the judge to figure out what she already knows, because she plows ahead to tell her story. “Just yesterday I’m looking for the perfect outfit for this trial,” she says. “I pick out a yellow dress, a two-piece with satin trim. Of course, I wouldn’t think of wearing that darling dress without my lemon chiffon hat to match. So I search my closet. I open all my hatboxes, one by one, but no lemon chiffon. And I’m wringing my hands because I don’t know where else my hat could be. Not unless I stuck it in one of my husband’s hatboxes by accident.”

  “Objection!” Mr. Hickock calls, and stands. “Irrelevant!”

  “Overruled,” says the judge. “And don’t be rude to the lovely lady.”

  “So I stand on my tippy-toes
,” Mrs. Tate says, “and when I pull down one of my husband’s hatboxes, I hear a strange rustling sound inside. I remove the cover, and there, where his cowboy hat used to rest in peace, are all these long slips of yellow paper instead. I pull them out, one by one, then by handfuls.”

  Mrs. Tate stares down the jurors. Then she tells the most exciting part. “I get a closer look at one of those slips and I’ll be!” she says. “What I see in my hand is…”

  “What?” asks the judge. “What did you see in your hand?”

  “Oh,” Mrs. Tate says, “just the key to the butter bean fiasco.” She bats her blue eyes. “If you must know,” she says, “it wasn’t a Negro who planted the butter beans and ruined our harvest.”

  The jurors sit still as the butter sculpture at Old Man Adams’s Christmas party.

  “As you can see, I never did find my lemon chiffon hat, so last minute I had to switch my whole color scheme to this,” Mrs. Tate says, and touches the sleeve of her pink dress.

  Halfway up the central aisle, I see Delilah. She’s sitting on the courthouse floor, shaking her head in sympathy with Mrs. Tate who tried to dress to match the day but failed.

  “In any case,” Mrs. Tate says, “it pains me most of all to say this: my husband, Ralph, never sold the butter bean seeds to Mr. Adams. He sold them to…to…” Mrs. Tate looks down at her hands like she’s trying to see if she carried her courage here today. When she looks back up, I can tell by the flash of anger in her eyes that she did. “He sold those butter bean seeds to Mr. Mudge.”

  The pictures in my mind slide into place like a television show.

  “Fact is,” she says, “my husband did make this hefty sale, but, Judge, that paper in your hand proves he sold the seeds to Mr. Mudge, not Mr. Adams. That is a receipt of sale, Judge. Receipt of sale! If you look down there at the bottom, you’ll see Sam Mudge’s signature. Now, Judge, when I was a schoolgirl, I thought all that mathematics I studied was a bunch of hooey. How was all that multiplication and division gonna help me?” Mrs. Tate laughs. “Funny, it’s coming in rather handy today!”