The Vain Conversation

by Anthony Grooms

  “Remember Mr. Wright,” Bertrand said from the bed. Luellen looked up as if his voice annoyed her. She turned to another page in the scrapbook. The book was over a hundred pages and still she added to it. Nearly every time The Defender or The Baltimore Afro-American came, she found an article of a lynching or riot or rape to paste onto its pages.

  Bertrand watched her thumb through the book, pausing momentarily over the pictures of grotesque corpses of black men, burned, chained to trees, mutilated. It seemed they fascinated more than horrified her. “It is a mystery,” she had once blurted out to him. “What is it about the whites that makes them do this kind of thing?”

  “It’s not just white people,” he had argued.

  Oh, yes. She knew, she had told him. She knew in her heart that she couldn’t say it was just the whites. She had heard about Indians scalping and mutilating whites, and somewhere she knew that black people probably had done similar things—and to each other. Yes, he remembered her saying: Perhaps in some distant place and time, perhaps I would be one in the press of a crowd, a young woman in love, holding you, Bertrand, around the waist, while we watched a man flailing as a rope strangled him. Maybe in some distant place, Bertrand, but no. Not here. Here is Georgia. Here is America, beautiful and white. Here, whites are the monsters—yes, monsters, she had said, and we are the hunted. She had caught herself. Not Mr. Wright at Rosewood. He protected me. And your little friend, Henson, he might be all right though he has never been tested. You should never trust a white until he has been tested. Bertrand sighed. “Won’t you come to bed, now?” he asked.

  She looked up from the book and sighed. “Who can sleep?”

  “I know it will be hard, but you’ve got to. We’ve got to.”

  “Bertrand,” she said distantly, “I wonder if they haven’t killed Jimmy Lee by now.”

  His jaw clenched and his teeth throbbed. “To say such a thing, Luellen.”

  “Husband, don’t fool yourself.” She flipped the scrapbook shut and stroked her hand across the leather cover. She stood and went to her trunk where she put the book away, and then to a nightstand where she picked up another book, a slim volume by a colored author who had lived in Georgia.

  Good, he thought. Perhaps now she will read herself to sleep. Perhaps the novel would take her mind away from stories of lynching. But then he worried that it might be a novel about lynching. “That isn’t Richard Wright, is it? Oh, some other colored writer.”

  “Jean Toomer,” she said, “A Negro writer.”

  He didn’t know Toomer’s story, and was afraid to ask. He hoped it was a love story, a happy story. But what Negro had a happy story to tell? He looked away from her, to the far window where a light breeze parted the sheer curtains. Outside the moonlight shone on the trees, and the tree frogs and crickets sang. He turned back to her, now the most beautiful creature of God’s making. No wonder in nature matched her for strength and grace.

  For several minutes he watched her as she read, seemingly with interest. She was a round woman, much like his people, but much darker in complexion. He loved the smooth darkness of her skin, so richly colored that sometimes it seemed to anchor sunlight, fluorescing it iridescent and purple. Now in lamplight, her color shone with highlights of yellow from the bridge of her broad nose and her round cheeks. Her face appeared calm, the surface of still water, but Bertrand knew that just below that surface she was perpetually on the verge of boil. This was a part of what attracted him to her, the feeling that she was miles deep. Though others saw her as doleful and sometimes spiteful, he forgave this in her, for he knew that when she opened, albeit sometimes a violent rupture, she opened to an inviting and seemingly unfathomable depth. He knew, too, from long conversations what lay in those regions.

  When Luellen was six, she lived in Rosewood on the west coast of Florida. Rosewood wasn’t much, but it was a colored town, and it was doing all right, a settlement of about thirty families, half of them related in one way or another. The men worked—every day except Sunday—either logging or tapping pines for oil. The turpentine gave the town a sweet, pungent smell. It was in her poppa’s clothes. It was in the furniture. In the bed clothes. It was in the air when the wind blew just right. If it blew one way, it was the fresh, briny air of the Gulf of Mexico just five miles away; if it blew the other way—Ahhhh!—Ahhhh!, she would tell him. Ahhhh! The pines! The clean, cutting smell of the pine oil. When the trains passed through the town, loaded down with pines and cedar, there was that smell again, wafting through the windows; there was also the rumble and measured clanking of the train. It was so good to sleep by.

  But then, they said, a man from Rosewood—never identified—raped a white woman in Sumner, just two miles away. Who from Rosewood would rape a white woman from Sumner, when they got all them fine looking Negro women looking for husbands in Rosewood? Luellen had asked him. Women in all shapes and sizes. Tall and short. Bony, if you like bones, and plump, if you like a lot of woman to grab on to. They were light and dark, and all that goes in between. They had red hair, and brown. Black hair, or salty if you wanted an older woman. They had them with woolly hair, or long Indian braids. Round eyes that bugged out at you or narrow eyes you couldn’t tell if they’re sleeping or not. They were church women or juke house women. You could get them in just about any combination you wanted. So why would a man from Rosewood go over to Sumner for a piece of low class white ass?

  But they said somebody did.

  The men from Rosewood and the men from Sumner all worked together down at Cedar Key, loading up the ships and trains. They knew each other, so over that long week the tension died down, especially since nobody could say who had done it, and everybody knew everybody. Mr. John Wright, the only white man that lived in Rosewood, had a store right there at the main crossroads, knew every black face, and he couldn’t say who it was that had done it.

  But they didn’t know that in Gainesville. They didn’t know that in Perry. In Tallahassee, they didn’t know. In Ocala, and Jacksonville, and across the state line in Valdosta and as far away as Waycross and even over into Alabama in Dothan, they didn’t know. They came, riding those same train tracks that took the logs out: Men carrying shotguns, pistols from the Great War, and sticks of dynamite. Some wore robes; some wore hoods. Some wore street clothes and fedoras.

  They all came looking for that somebody that nobody could name. That nobody had seen, and the woman who claimed it, whoever she was, she couldn’t say. Just a black man. A big nigger. A big stooped over nigger with arms that stretched down past his knees. Hair on his back. And muscles. Big muscles, hard as chunks of tar, all bunched up around his neck. That’s all she could describe. His big, black heaving chest, and how she beat her lily white hands against it. So the men came looking for the big nigger, but they didn’t look hard.

  Bertrand turned to his side in the bed and pushed the pillow under his head. He drew his knees up toward his belly and took a deep breath, trying to distract his thoughts from Rosewood and the terrors his wife had suffered. Through the window on his side of the bed, he could see a bright half-moon riding like a boat above the woods. God is a good God, he thought. He will protect. In the morning he would go to Jacks and Jacks would help get Jimmy Lee a fair hearing. That was the best, after all. To follow the law. Without laws, there would be chaos and chaos was what had happened in Europe—but no, there had been no chaos in Europe, only terror, and it was the law that had made the terror. Again, he moved about in the bed trying to get comfortable, trying to induce sleep.

  A candlefly rested on the ceiling in the circle of light cast by the lamp’s chimney. Another flew past, throwing a soft, dark shadow across the ceiling. It looked for a moment like a bird had entered the room. But, he thought, this is not Europe. This is America, and we have fought the big war to make things right, so now things must get right. If you didn’t trust that things would get right, then they never would. It was the lot of the colored man that we suffer, and yet to make things right we must risk suffer
ing anew. But things would get right, he knew. He had faith that things would get right, even if Luellen didn’t. God decrees that we must have faith and faith is evidence of things unseen. Of course, he didn’t know what Jacks would say, but he had faith that Jacks was good. He turned again, this time glancing at Luellen. She sat still, her attention focused on her book, but he was not certain that she was actually reading it. Her lips seemed to move. “Luellen,” he called softly, but she did not respond. Then she is not reading, he thought. She is dreaming and she would be dreaming about something from her hell book: The boys in Indiana hanged from a tulip poplar. The wood of that tree is soft, but apparently strong enough to hold two flailing boys. Or she dreamed of the man in Birmingham who was beaten and castrated just for the sport of white men. They left him on the side of the road to bleed to death, but he was found and saved. He disappeared from Birmingham, like so many others, to become a ghost in some Northern city. Most likely though, that flutter of her eyelids meant she dreamed of Rosewood. Dream on, my sweet, he thought. We’ll get a cake out of it. The thought of a cake made him smile, for many such evenings, when this distraction set upon Luellen, she baked all night, something about the stirring of cake batter or the smell of baking soothed her. He closed his eyes, and the image of a hulking black ape came to him, and he knew that he was that ape.

  Run. Run. Run.

  Luellen’s poppa had said it first. “Run, y’all, run! Don’t stop ’til ya git to John Wright’s.” Then her momma had said it. Luellen had told him that her mother’s voice was calmer than her poppa’s, but repeated his instructions exactly. Momma handed Luellen her shoes and threw her jacket at her. Luellen sat down to put on her shoes, pulling at the knots in the laces, but Poppa grabbed her by the hand with such a jerk that she dropped the shoes. He pushed her out the back door. “We right behind you.” Then Big Sis came out, her hair wild, her eyes wide, still crusted with sleep. Big Sis grabbed Luellen by the hand and dragged her, her bare feet tripping across the cold, sandy yard. They scattered the chickens, which had gathered in a hub around the front of the hen house. Her hand slipped from her sister’s grip, and she fell face down, then sat up and puckered to cry, but then she saw, now that they were a little distance from the house, the columns of black smoke twisting above the houses, invisible except for the starlight.

  Big Sis grabbed her by the waist and carried her a little ways. More white men than she had ever seen at one time in Rosewood rushed down the street. The men crouched like soldiers, in groups, each moving quickly from house to house, throwing bricks through windows, kicking in doors, or sometimes shooting into the house and tossing in a torch or a stick of dynamite.

  She knew they couldn’t run down the street to John Wright’s. She turned with Big Sis, looking for another way. Then their house went up. It just lifted up like a hand had picked it up and dropped it. Dust came out from under it, and then Momma screamed. Big Sis let out a sound. Who would have thought a girl, just fifteen, could make such a sound? If she had lived in normal times … if things had been … had been … she could have been Marian Anderson. Big Sister. Even that scream, that terrified girl’s screech was a sound like a giant songbird, a pure contralto note in the January chill, as clean as the smell of turpentine.

  For what seemed a year, they stood and looked at the house. The scream had barely settled out of the air when Big Sis ran back, but before she got to the back door, the house became an angel. Not an angel, but like an angel, folding and opening its wings. It glittered like the angels on Christmas cards, or the ones you saw in the windows of the white stores in Gainesville. It shimmered; it became wavy, papery. It fluttered. It turned as golden as a sunset. It sang, or rather it hummed, and whispered. It was doing all of that, and I was dancing. Dancing in that golden light trying to move close, then closer, and then closer into that light and heat. Trying to get right up next to Big Sis.

  Luellen had danced between the heat and the chill, hop-scotching across the thin line of singeing grass. Singing Poppa. Poppa. Poppa. Then, somebody grabbed her from behind. Scooped her up and put a big hand over her mouth. All she remembered then was the woods, being carried by the running man. The man occasionally said, “Hush, hush, child, hush.” She saw the man’s thumb as it moved in front of her eyes. He was a white man. She went limp.

  When she came to, she saw a white woman leaning over her, and then a colored woman. Whispers, lanterns, and a dank smell. She wanted to scream, but then she recognized the woman: Mrs. John Wright, looking every bit like it was her last day on Earth. “Oooh, child,” Mrs. Wright said, and pulled Luellen into her arms, “you gone be all right.” Others were there. Cousin Tisha Mae, and Sister Velma Hawkins from down the street. Suzie Griffin from her class at school was sitting over in a corner clutching one of her precious dolls. They had all taken refuge in John Wright’s cellar, the only building in the town that had a cellar.

  They found Momma about an hour later. Luellen didn’t recognize her. She sat in Sister Velma’s lap, and Sister Velma said, “Daughter, yo’ momma safe. We found yo’ momma. Go now to yo’ momma.” But the woman they helped down the ladder into the lantern-lit cellar looked nothing like Momma. Her blistered face could have been her own, but the broken way she moved, and the dull stare and twisted countenance was not Momma.

  They hid a day in the cellar, and sneaked out early on the second morning. Luellen remembered she alternately clutched her mother, and was clutched by her. At first she was the child, and then she was the parent. They went back and forth like that, not daring to speak, letting the others, Mrs. Wright, Cousin Tisha Mae, Sister Velma speak for them. They got into the back of a mule drawn wagon, and slowly, under the clearest, starriest sky she had ever seen, started down Highway 19 towards Gainesville. The air was sweet and charred, laced here and there with the acrid threads from still fuming homes. It was not until she was a little ways down the street that she suddenly shivered. The landscape had changed. Not a house stood, except occasionally a wall or a few beams of a flame-scarred frame. All that was left was John Wright’s two-story house and store. No one resented it. How John Wright, a white man on his knees before white men, begged to save it while they hid under its floors. If someone on that wagon said anything, it was Mrs. Wright, but what she said didn’t make sense to Luellen, then. “… He openeth the seventh seal, there was silence up in heaven … and when he openeth the seventh seal.…”

  More tortured than these memories was what she imagined about things she never saw, the things she heard about, which replayed, amplified in her mind. She never found out how Poppa died—Momma simply couldn’t remember. She asked around when she was older, and she got bits and pieces that didn’t add up. He had died of a bullet, or from dynamite. She heard plenty of stories about how other men died. Mr. Jim Carrier was made to dig his own grave and then shot so that he fell over into it. Most folks were hanged, some with ropes, some with chains. Cousin Tisha Mae lost a son in the fires. Sister Velma’s son had his brains blown out. Lord God! They said they found Big Sis in the house, a heap in a charred spot. She had been burned down to nothing, except her heart, because a human heart cannot burn. The form of her body lay in ashes. It was silken and powdered, black where her hair had been, white in the outline of her bones. But there in the middle of the powdery ribs, her heart. Red. A little singed and dried of all its blood. At the funeral Luellen wanted to open the casket, to see what was left of Big Sis. Just her heart. That was God’s doing. That was significant of something.

  For years, no one talked of Rosewood. Cousin Tisha Mae died, and then Momma, and then Sister Velma and soon there was no one in Gainesville left to talk about it. She went away to college at Fort Valley, and one day, sitting in Henry Hunt Library, she opened an old issue of The Gainesville Sun to find a picture of Rosewood. In the picture, a group of white men were standing around the smoldering remains of a house. She could never figure whose house it was. No other house was left standing to give her a reference. One of the men wore a brimmed
hat, a stylish short coat, and riding boots. She couldn’t see it, but she knew by the way he stood with his hands on his hips that he wore a holster and pistol. He was looking down at the remains of the house, which were no more than ashes and a few items that escaped the flames—a galvanized wash tub in the foreground, the frame of a metal bed still standing. Next to the photograph, an article, and every word of it a lie.

  She tore out the picture from the paper, letting the sound of the ripping cut through the quiet library. She didn’t care who saw her do it. That was the beginning of her scrapbook, her “America Book,” her “Book of Little Terrors,” her “Book of Remembrance” and her “Book of The Invisible History of the United States of Goddamn America.”

  TWELVE

  Bertrand suddenly woke to find himself in the dark, Luellen apparently having blown out the lamp and gone downstairs. He couldn’t decipher how long she had been gone but judged from the height of the moon outside the window that he hadn’t been asleep for more than a few minutes. He could still smell smoke from the lamp, and from downstairs came the clank of the stove eye covers. He knew Luellen was starting a fire in the stove, preparing to bake cakes.