by Minrose Gwin
The drums drummed on, but just in her head now; her foot had gone dead. “You need to get on back home, baby or no baby,” Dovey said. “You need to get on back. The girl and her ma’am in bad shape. They need tending to.”
“Can’t go back without my boy.”
“The family you got left is the one you need to take care of. Go on home now. Your wife fell down the steps and broke her leg bad,” said Dovey. She made a shooing motion with her hands. She didn’t have time for white folk foolishness and the possibility that flying babies could land without a scratch. She began walking, the dead foot treacherous and heavy, dead weight.
He turned to go and then stopped and turned back to her, his hand raised, as if to say something, to give her some instruction.
Dovey shooed him again. “Get on. No time to lose,” she said sternly, as if she weren’t talking to a white man, as if she were talking to a child.
He turned. There was a deep line between his eyes; he looked hawk-like. “There’s no going back,” he said. “There’s never any going back from something like this.”
She looked at him full in the face. “You can go anywhere on God’s green earth if you got a mind to.”
He looked at her like he knew it wasn’t true, especially for her in that time and that place and she knew it wasn’t true either, but she said it anyway, feeling the urgent necessity of making that particular declaration on that particular sidewalk next to the barely upright First Baptist Church, lily white and proud of it but now burdened with buzzards. Because, she figured, what else was there left to do now but declare her intention to make her way through this world, drums or no drums, foot or no foot, buzzards or no buzzards? So much of her life she had spent looking out a kitchen window at the blue blue world, watching the geese dust the sky on their way somewhere else, places she’d never get to, watching the clothes on the line and wondering when they would finally be dry, helpless before their natural progression.
Now she was in charge, taking action, putting out the one good foot, sliding the other dead-as-a-doornail one along behind. This was what her whole life had led her to, this sliding walk, this strange dance.
So she turned and left the Judge standing there, trying to decide whether to come or go, continue to search for his lost baby son or rescue his wife and daughter, and who would want to be faced with a decision like his? At least Dovey’s mission was straightforward, find whoever was left. She turned down Jefferson to cut over to the Lyric Theatre. She would go there first and then, if necessary, to the morgues, and then, if none of that bore fruit, she would turn back toward the Hill in hopes that Virgil and Dreama and Promise had gone back home, or what was left of it.
She headed east on Jefferson, toward the courthouse and the Lyric. The closer she got to downtown the better things looked. The storm had spared most of the buildings, and there was little debris in the street except for broken glass and an occasional piece of furniture. She heard an agitated cackling above her and when she looked up, there was a coop of chickens directly overhead in a big oak. The chickens were clustered helplessly in one downward corner of the coop two and three birds deep. They pecked at one another, squawking and shitting and beating their wings against the sides of the coop. It was a low-lying branch. She reached up and unlatched the coop and they came tumbling out, wings flapping wildly.
She’d overshot the Lyric on Broadway but decided as she moved along to go first to the morgues, get that out of the way. Then she would allow herself to hold out hope. Before she reached the courthouse she heard a loudspeaker coming from the lawn. Someone was calling out names and announcements. As she drew near, she saw a crowd standing below, listening. They stood under the sheltering wings of the Temperance Lady, the massive statue erected by the Ladies’ Temperance Society that normally shaded a group of old white men with seedy eyes who slouched about the town square sipping paregoric out of the little brown paper sacks they kept in their jacket pockets. At one side of the square, colored folks milled about, waiting for news, but no colored names were being called out, no announcements to or about anybody from up on the Hill or down in Shake Rag.
As Dovey approached the square, an open-bed truck clattered up, piled high with rough pine coffins. There were two men in the truck cab and two more hanging off the sides of the back. A Red Cross lady stood in the doorway to the courthouse. She went over to the driver of the truck and gestured toward the basement. Then she stepped back into the doorway and picked up a large black notebook and began to write and the men began to unload the boxes. They were all sizes, tiny ones and medium-sized ones and large ones.
The man on the loudspeaker called out a name Dovey didn’t hear and a woman on the edge of the square collapsed onto the ground, the small group of people around her bending over her. Then he called out another name: “Burroughs baby.” Women in the crowd began to wail. One said to another, “That’s the last of them. Thirteen in one family, all gone, right down to the little one.”
Old sun was in the west now, and the afternoon light played on the piney wood of the coffins. After the men had carried them all into the courthouse, there was a long pause. Then they began to bring them back down, this time struggling under their weight, sometimes two men at either end. There were names written on the sides of each box, a last name and a first initial. When the small ones started coming, the crowd burst into a collective moan. Then, as suddenly as it had begun, the moan shattered into a thousand shrill cries: bedlam.
Under the fedora, the Shake Rag man drummed on.
Dovey picked her way through the crowd. People were striding back and forth now, an agitated mass of bodies. A woman stood alone, trembling violently and tearing at her hair. One man was beating his chest with the palm of his hand. A little boy pulled on an older boy’s sleeve and pointed upward. “Is Mama up there in the clouds, then?” he asked. The older boy nodded, biting his lip.
In the doorway to the courthouse the Red Cross lady bent over and read the sides of the boxes and checked off each name in her notebook.
“Please, ma’am,” Dovey began. “You know where they took the colored?”
“Not now,” the Red Cross lady said without looking up.
“Please, miss.”
The Red Cross lady looked up quickly, sweat pouring out from under her little hat, which was crooked, having become loose from its pin on one side. “No Negro dead at the courthouse,” she said. “They’re in the alleyway over by the old Hardin’s Bakery. Check with Porter’s. They’ve already picked some up.” Then she took a second look at Dovey and frowned. “There’s blood on your face. Where’s it coming from?”
“My ear.”
“Let me see it. Take off that hat.”
Dovey took off the fedora and turned her head. The Red Cross lady leaned and peered at the ear. “That blood’s coming from inside your head, honey. You need to get over to the Lyric and let a doctor look at that. You may have some serious damage, a concussion at the least. Do you have a headache?”
Dovey nodded.
“Get over there right now, you hear me? You hear me now?” Another small coffin arrived at the door and she turned back to her task.
Dovey turned and began to walk the way she’d come, toward the theater. She needed to relieve herself. There was a house on the corner of Jefferson and South Green that looked unoccupied. She went around to the backyard, behind a row of boxwoods that still had most of their leaves. Just as she was squatting, an old man stuck his head out the back door.
“What you doing out there?” he called. “Get out of my yard. You think you can sneak up on me and take my money? I ain’t having niggers walking through my yard like it’s Grand Central Station. I’ll show you!” He disappeared back into the house.
Dovey realized he took her for a man, with the hat and long coat, but it was too late for her to stop herself. She remained squatting, hoping she could finish before he came back. Just as she was finishing, he reappeared, a shotgun in his hand. He pointed it in her ge
neral direction and fired, missing her but not by much. She scrambled to her feet, pulled up her underwear, and took off as best she could, pulling the bad foot along.
He fired a second shot. She felt it whizz by her head. The first shot hadn’t had much to say except get the hell out of Dodge, but this second one sang in her left ear, over the drumbeat in her head, over the sound of the train whistle now signaling the arrival of another Frisco, over all the shouting and crying out in the streets. It sang to her like an opera singer. It sang to her like a blues singer. It sang all the nastiness of white folk, all the ugliness of the world. It sang the dirty linen, the spots that won’t come out, the tears in the fabric.
She hurried along as best she could, a snail’s pace, though in her mind she zigzagged through the street like a rabbit in the field. When she finally turned the corner onto Broadway where the Lyric was, she came to a halt. A straggly line of ragtag people stretched down the block like they were in line for a Saturday matinee. Some were crying, some silent as death. Some bled from open wounds. At the end of the line a large man stood on one foot and leaned heavily on his wife’s shoulders. She was a small woman, and when she turned to look at Dovey, her face was gray with the strain of his weight. In front of them a little girl stood alone, crying quietly, a bloody rag wrapped around her hand. Dovey had never stood in this particular line but rather in the one for Negroes around the corner, next to the outside open-rail steps leading up to the balcony. Briefly she wondered whether the colored were supposed to stand in the line around the corner, but then she saw several Negroes up ahead. A Red Cross lady pushed a cart with a large water jug and some paper cups, offering drinks. A nurse moved down the line giving tetanus shots, causing a stir among the children, not taking no for an answer. Some people the nurse pulled out of line and escorted into the theater. A CCC boy brought up the rear with sandwiches wrapped in waxed paper.
Dovey took her shot, then a sandwich, cheese and liverwurst and butter. It was heavy with grease, the last thing she wanted to eat. In fact she didn’t want to eat at all. She accepted the offering because the boy’s eyes had filled with tears as he talked to the little girl and by the time he reached Dovey they had plowed trenches down his cheeks.
“That little one lost everybody,” he said, gesturing toward the girl. “Her mama had a chimney come down on her and her dad and little brother got burnt up when the house caught fire.” Then he turned to her with his wet cheeks and glistening eyes and asked, “Sandwich?” and there was no refusing him. Now, as she held the sandwich, saliva filled up her mouth, whether from the need to eat or to upchuck she wasn’t sure. Thankfully, the lady with the water arrived and offered her a full cup and she was able to drink and ask for another, please, and then she knew she needed the sandwich no matter how much she hated the smell of liverwurst.
She peeled back the waxed paper and began to eat, the white bread sticking to the roof of her mouth. Dovey and Virgil and Dreama didn’t eat store-bought bread. For one thing, they couldn’t afford it; for another, they didn’t much like it. Dovey made corn bread and salt-rising bread and Dreama’s favorite, biscuits, which rose fluffy as clouds in the baking pan. Dreama liked sorghum on hers, Virgil preferred the apple butter Dovey put up in the fall. Little Promise had just begun eating his mashed up in milk. Once, a hundred years ago, they had all sat down for supper together, Virgil in his old comfortable house clothes, having shed his cotton-covered overalls; Dreama with Promise bouncing in her lap, waving those fat little hands of his, whapping the table so the plates rattled. Dreama, her head bent over the child, a bowl of porridge before her, the spoon in one hand, a rag to wipe his face in the other. How he fought that washrag, kicked and squirmed and fussed to be let down on his pallet. “He done,” Virgil would pronounce, “past done.” But Dreama was a good mother, she wouldn’t let well enough alone, insisted on that last bite, even if half of it dribbled down the side of his chin.
All that work for nothing! Baby blown to kingdom come. Little mother too. Virgil, well Virgil, no telling about him. No telling about any of them.
The line moved forward. Dovey took a few steps. The bad foot had come back to life. Now it was a tinny little marching drum, ratta tat tat, ratta tat tat. Syncopated and irregular, playing backup to the heavy throbbing beat in her head. Faster and faster now while the drum in her head got slower and slower.
Then, just as she swallowed the last bite of the sandwich, the drum in her head stopped in mid-beat like a radio turned off in the middle of a song and her knees sighed one long exhausted sigh and gave way, and then, to her surprise and deepest embarrassment, she felt someone grab on to her (who?) and holler, “Need help here, got one down back here.”
And then, with no warning at all, old sun gave up the light and the bright, the too-bright afternoon went dark as pitch and the night came rolling rolling in to claim the sky.
TUESDAY, APRIL 7
8
12:30 A.M.
Jo was asleep when they came. They came like rising water, silent and deadly. She didn’t hear them until one of them tripped over Son and whispered crap. Then a cigarette lighter flicked and there was a long pause and a different one said, “Goddamn, ain’t that Son on the floor?” Then a scramble and more cursing. After that they all went quiet again, too quiet. She could hear them in there moving around, and there was a stealth to it that frightened her.
It was dark as pitch again. Where had the day gone? When was the last time she’d fed the baby? Late afternoon? It had been all she could do to get on her feet and get to the kitchen and pull the bottle from the icebox. Only one left now. She wasn’t thinking straight. Why hadn’t she taken little Tommy and headed out to get help? It was her mother, lying there so helpless, so vulnerable, that stopped her initially and after that, she’d stopped thinking in terms of going or staying. She just wanted to sit there, propped up against the wall, little Tommy in her lap, neither of them moving a muscle.
In the distance she could hear a hound bay, long and mournful. She put her hand to her forehead and touched her horn, which now didn’t seem foreign at all. It felt like it had been there since the beginning of time; it felt as though she’d been born with it. But it was heavier now; her neck ached from it, her head a drooping sunflower, stranger than any dream.
Was she alive?
Her lap felt suddenly, warmly wet. She welcomed it because it meant life, the baby was alive and so was she. He had begun to stir.
She reached over to touch her mother. Alice moaned once, then lay still again.
She could hear them moving around the front of the house, living room and dining room, picking up things and putting them down. She’d propped herself up against the wall that led from the circular hall to the living room, around the corner and out of sight. She thought maybe she ought to call out to them, ask them to help her with her mother or go for help, but just then one of them said something about the good silver, where was it kept, and she shrank back against the wall. She recognized their voices. Son’s friends. They wore shiny black lace-ups and oil-stained T-shirts with packs of Lucky Strikes rolled up in their sleeves. They kept their hair greased, parted down the middle. She hadn’t seen them in over a year, since the day her father kicked them out of the house.
They’d been looking at her. When they came in that afternoon, she’d been sneak-reading a Nancy Drew book. Her mother disapproved of Nancy Drew. Nancy Drew was below Jo’s reading comprehension and there were most certainly more edifying and challenging books to read: Les Misérables, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, David Copperfield, serious books about serious topics like war and poverty and deformity, books that would teach Jo what the world was like, how people ought to live.
The house was empty. Alice had had to stay for a meeting after school that afternoon, and Jo had taken advantage of her mother’s absence to pull the Nancy Drew out of her secret stash under the sweaters in her cedar chest. She’d gotten into her favorite reading position, draped over her father’s velvet armchair. It
was spring and her legs were bare and white; they dangled over one arm of the chair and she rested her head on the other. She rubbed the worn velvet as she read, an old childhood habit. Touch and touch again. Nancy Drew was deep into the kind of trouble only she could get into, something about an old clock, a pendulum. Vaguely Jo knew Son and his friends had come in the back door, through the screen porch, but she hadn’t worried. It was 5:30; her father was due home any minute. Absorbed in the book, she hadn’t seen the three of them lounging in the doorway from the hall to the living room, waiting for her brother to come downstairs. When her father came in through the back door and walked up behind them and started hollering, she about jumped out of her skin. When she looked up, she saw them and could tell they’d been eyeing her, were still eyeing her, actually. He told them to get the hell out of his house and never come back. He told them he had a gun, which Jo knew for a fact he did not—he didn’t like guns, said they caused more trouble than they were worth unless you needed to go to the woods for your food. The fact that he threatened them with a gun got her attention. She scrambled out of the chair, blushing, her skirt hiked up in the back from the lounging, which got their attention even more as they were leaving, smirking at her and walking out the front door so as to avoid her father.
When they paused in the front doorway, her father shoved them forward. They allowed themselves to be pushed along, even as they looked back at her lazily, even as she looked over her shoulder at them. When she got into the kitchen and felt her skirt hiked up in back, she blushed even more, imagining them seeing, almost but not really seeing, her underwear, oh please don’t let them have seen her underwear! The thought of their eyes on her body made her feel feverish and shaky.
After they left, her father went up to Son’s room and shut the door and begin to shout. Son had had every advantage. He could have gone to Ole Miss, could still go to Ole Miss, he could be anything he wanted to be. He was a freeloader, a ne’er-do-well who had ruined the good family name. Now he was bringing trash into the house, polluting his own little sister. What Son said back, Jo didn’t know, but the friends had never entered the McNabb house again.