Jessie had watched this fevered push toward freedom from afar, as though she was a spectator at a play, fascinated by the action on stage, unconvinced of its relevance to her.
“I bet you been to college,” Jessie said, throwing her arm across the back of the seat, turning so she could just look at Lincoln all the time if she wanted.
“Yeah, Miles College over in Birmingham.”
“Then how come you ain’t lookin for a job?”
“Some things are more important than a job.”
“Like what?” Jessie asked incredulously. Never in her life had she heard anybody say such a thing.
“Like the right to vote. Like being able to have the same rights as everybody else,” Lincoln said, his voice urgent, his face animated, turning his glance from the road to look at Jessie as he spoke.
“You mean white folks?” she asked. “From what I seen, I don’t want to be like them.”
“No, but I want the same rights they have,” Lincoln said emphatically. “You see what we did in Montgomery with the bus boycott.”
“Vote gonna git us better jobs?” Jessie asked skeptically, thinking about her mother’s demeaning work as a domestic, her father’s meager salary as a janitor for a funeral home and the need for herself, Willie and Junior and Mae Ann to pick cotton to make extra needed money.
“That’s what the vote is for,” Lincoln said.
Jessie leaned forward and turned on the radio.
“Don’t work,” Lincoln told her. They were nearing Winona. The endless flatness of the land with only an occasional house or store was giving way to small clusters of gas stations and restaurants. The sun was now a deep orange slash across the evening sky.
“You ever wonder why God made it so hard for us colored?” Jessie asked wistfully.
“God didn’t do that. White men did.”
“But you really think we’re good enough?” Jessie pressed him. “For equal rights I mean. You know what they say bout us, that we’re in our rightful place.” Jessie wondered if Lincoln could hear in her voice how many times she had thought that was true, how often she had swallowed it whole, lived on the belief as if it were the bread of life.
“They’re wrong about us, Jessie. Always been wrong. We’re gonna set the record straight,” he said, squeezing her hands reassuringly as they lay folded in her lap.
What was she running from? Lincoln wondered. That Jessie was a runaway signaled courage as well as desperation. Her body was firm and mature. He could tell from the condition of her hands, arms and legs that she had worked hard and, of necessity, all her short life. But dimples appeared in her cheeks when she laughed and her eyes were large, clear and honest against the ruddy brown of her face. But those eyes had a furtive edge too, as though they held lethal secrets. Lincoln, who was already beginning to think of himself as a writer, figured secrets made a person more interesting. He knew that everything he saw, touched, learned, felt, would be transformed into words on a page. So what did secrets mean? How could he fear his secrets or anyone else’s when he could change them into anything he imagined or desired.
The girls he had left behind in Montgomery and Birmingham snubbed him because he was an orphan, or listened politely to his poetry and whispered behind his back that he was queer. Talking to those girls he had everything to prove and everything to lose. But when Lincoln began working with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, SNCC, as it was popularly known, the same girls wanted to go out with him because nobody knew if he would live long enough to see the “freedom” he talked so much about, or be dredged from some tributary of the Mississippi River. The hint of possible sudden danger, the knowledge of his obvious courage, made him a marked man. More than one young woman wanted to be able to say that she was the last one who had held Lincoln Sturgis alive in her arms.
But he could tell Jessie was different. He liked looking at her, just sitting beside her. Conversation with her was not a bloodletting but a kind of communion. He realized it was going to be hard to say good-bye.
“Why don’t you come on to Greenwood with me?” he asked. “There’s plenty of work to do.”
“I told you, I’m scared.”
“I told you I was too.”
“I don’t even know you,” Jessie protested.
“Well, I don’t know you either, but I know you don’t belong in Winona.”
Jessie searched Lincoln’s face for something she could mistrust, some flicker in his eyes, some movement of his lips that would inform her that she was in danger. And when she didn’t find it, Jessie thought of her grandma Bessie. She was running to her only because she’d always been the old woman’s favorite. But then she remembered the newspaper lining the walls of her grandmama’s two-room shack on the outskirts of the city, the old woman’s hard life of survival on welfare and handouts from a family for whom she had once been a nanny. And what would she do in Winona? Hardly any white businesses would hire a Negro, even one with a high school diploma.
They had entered Winona, and Lincoln stopped at a gas station and filled the tank. Then he drove farther into town and parked in the commercial district and said to Jessie, “I’m not pressuring you, I’m just offering you the chance to do something that matters.”
“Where you gonna stay?”
“There’s a house set up for the movement people.”
“What about me?”
“You’d stay there too. I bet you’d have your own room.”
She had been trying to get away from 468 Davis Road as long as she could remember. It was a street whose tiny frame houses huddled together like heads bowed to avoid being slapped. There were outhouses in some backyards. Peeling, crumbling wood defaced most of the exteriors. In the summertime, the street’s young men gathered on the corners like conspirators thrusting their voices into the seams of the night. Voices desperate to be heard. Desperate not to be ignored. On Davis Road nobody believed in the possibility of civil rights. Nobody even knew what they were. That was the street where everyone had watched the sheriff’s deputy pay regular visits to Elvira McCullough. Everyone sitting on the front stoops remembered the spring evenings when they would see Mr. McCullough walk toward his house, spot the now familiar police car parked out front, and turn away and head toward Bo Willie’s juke joint, where he would get drunk and wait for the white man to leave.
And in her house Jessie had always been lonely. Then she had learned to be afraid. Afraid of white men. Afraid of her father. Because she knew so well the feeling of fear, she knew when she was safe.
She sat twisting the hem of her skirt, her back to Lincoln’s persistent, kind, impatient gaze. Finally he said, “Come on, girl, you just running in circles. At least we know where I’m headed,” and started up the car.
A MILE OUTSIDE of Carol, Lincoln’s car shuddered to a halt. He turned the engine on repeatedly. But nothing happened. He and Jessie walked back to town and found a Negro mechanic who drove them back to the car. After looking at the engine he told them the alternator was shot and that he could repair it but not until the next morning. “I got a wake to go to tonight.”
THEY REGISTERED in the rooming house as Mr. and Mrs. Brown. Jessie stood nervously behind Lincoln, his gym bag and boxes of books and papers, her cardboard box, now near total collapse, stationed around her feet like unwashed, unruly children of whom she was ashamed. As Lincoln signed the registry, the elderly woman behind the desk, tall, angular, white-haired, looked at Jessie through narrowed, censorious eyes. Then she led them upstairs to the second floor, saying, “No cooking in the rooms, no loud music after ten o’clock, and yall have to check out by noon or I charge for another day.”
The pink and white wallpaper was water-stained and dingy, its tiny white flowers as cheerless and abused as the chipped and scratched desk and the three-legged table at the foot of the bed. Last year’s calendar from a local funeral home and a tiny framed picture of Jesus ascending to heaven graced the walls.
“There ain’t but one bed,” J
essie said after Lincoln had brought their bags and boxes up to the room.
“How bout that,” he said, scanning the room quickly, then dismissing it.
“I’ll sleep on the floor,” he told Jessie, sitting down beside her on the bed, which was covered by a spread whose washed-out, faded colors vainly attempted to match the wallpaper.
“Well, that ain’t fair.”
“Yes, it is. Don’t worry. I’ve slept in worse places.… I’m gonna go get us something to eat. I saw a place on the corner.”
When Jessie heard the front door close on the first floor, she ran to the window and watched Lincoln walk toward the tiny corner restaurant that advertised barbecue and chitlins. Lincoln moved like a man who knew where he was going, but didn’t need to hurry to get there, Jessie thought, watching him nod politely to the people he passed. Turning from the window to once again face the room, she decided not to think about what she had done—wounded her father, run away, hitched a ride with a stranger, checked into a rooming house to spend the night with him, with plans to wake up in the morning to go off and do things that could get her arrested, beaten or killed. No, she decided, a shiver seizing her, threatening to unsettle the contentment she had fashioned from the cloth of this day. She wouldn’t think about any of that now.
By the time Lincoln returned, Jessie had bathed, had dressed in clean clothes and lined their boxes neatly against the wall. They ate fried-fish sandwiches and french fries spread out on the tiny desk. Then Lincoln went to take a bath, while Jessie cleared away the remnants of their meal. But the sound of water filling the tub, Lincoln flushing the toilet, his rich baritone humming “Amazing Grace,” made Jessie so nervous that she decided it wasn’t proper for her to stay in the room with only an unlocked door separating her from a naked man she didn’t know. She couldn’t bear the thought of sitting in the front room, under the landlady’s disapproving gaze. So Jessie sat on the steps outside their door.
When she entered the room Lincoln had made a pallet on the floor, using blankets he’d found in the closet. He wore a tee shirt and a pair of old pajama bottoms. Jessie claimed the bed, scurrying beneath the covers fully dressed.
“You gonna be awful hot sleeping in your clothes,” Lincoln laughed.
“You just let me worry bout that, Lincoln Sturgis.”
“You gonna tell me why you’re running away?” he asked, stretched out on the floor, gazing up at Jessie.
“Maybe one day I will.”
Lincoln turned on his back and said, “I used to run away too. But I wasn’t running away from home, I was running to try and find one.”
Then in a quiet, dispassionate voice, almost as though he were talking about someone else’s life, Lincoln told Jessie who he was. His parents were killed in an automobile accident when he was three and for the next six years he was shunted between the homes of relatives unable or unwilling to care for him. Finally he was put in a Negro orphanage. Lincoln was a gregarious, quick-witted boy who, in order to survive, had learned to read people like books. The head administrator, J. R. Sturgis, took a liking to him and adopted him. While Sturgis treated Lincoln with affection and concern, the boy was never fully accepted by Sturgis’s wife and two sons. When J. R. Sturgis died of a heart attack in Lincoln’s junior year at Miles College, his wife cut off support for Lincoln’s studies, and denied him the money his adoptive father had left him.
“So you ain’t got no family, to speak of?” Jessie said quietly, wondering how that felt.
“Not since J. R. Sturgis died.”
“Don’t you git lonely though, for brothers and sisters?” Jessie asked, hungering in the wake of the question to see Mae Ann, Willie and Junior. She looked at Lincoln’s long legs stretched out before him. She marveled at his big feet, almost pink, not tan like the rest of him. Jessie wondered if he could see, on her face, hear in her voice, the things that had been done to her. The things she’d never told.
The sound of several cars speeding down the street, a woman’s luxurious squealing laughter, a mother calling Re-gi-naaaaaald, come on in, floated in the window. Together they listened, silent, at ease.
After a while, Jessie heard Lincoln say, “You just don’t think about what you never had. About how you been hurt.”
He was wrong, saying that. She knew you never forgot. She had graduated from high school three weeks earlier, and she had begun to wonder more and more why all the older people she knew, the ones she was supposed to look up to, lived, it seemed, on lies.
“How’d you get into this civil rights stuff anyway?” she asked, hugging her pillow, stretching out, waiting to hear Lincoln tell her something she would never forget.
“Well, I didn’t study it in school,” he laughed. “I just started working with friends of mine from other colleges—boycotting, picketing, trying to get people to register and vote. The only family I got now is movement folks.”
“What if I don’t do good? What if they don’t like me where we goin?” Jessie asked.
“The minute you arrive in town, you pass the most important test,” he told her. “Then all you got to do is keep showing up, the next day and the day after that.”
“You make it sound so easy.”
“It is when you realize there’s nowhere you can go until you straighten up things where you are.”
Lincoln turned off the light and said good night. When she knew he was asleep, Jessie removed her skirt and blouse and slipped on her robe. Around three o’clock she woke up and felt Lincoln beside her in the bed. In sleep, his body was tense, poised, Jessie thought, for flight, ready to leave nothing behind. His arms greedily hugged the pillow. Jessie could feel the melancholy sadness of his dreams whispering in the darkened room. She watched him sleep for a few minutes and then lay back down. In the dark, with her back to him, she touched Lincoln’s arm, absorbed the rise and fall of his frame, his craggy labored breathing inside her hand. Then she quickly pulled her hand away. Tomorrow was almost here.
GREENWOOD SAT on the muddy, silent banks of the Yazoo River, surrounded by Itta Bena, Moorhead, Sidon, Pew City. Here, the circumference of the whole world was measured by the boundaries of the cotton field. The Mississippi Delta stretched from Vicksburg to Memphis, two hundred miles of flat, fertile terrain. A million black hands, working from dawn to dusk, decade after decade, had planted and harvested “King Cotton.” Change had come once in the form of the Emancipation Proclamation and curdled into a bitter illusion. Now, a revolution reverberated across the Delta and Greenwood was the crossroads. Reality was becoming legend even as it happened—Sam Block and Willie Peacock coming to town to canvas for black voters, and because they had no car, riding around Greenwood on a mule. Jimmy Travis shot in the neck and almost killed, while driving on Highway 82 with two other movement workers. The bullet didn’t kill Jimmy or the push to get the vote.
In the Freedom House that summer, Jessie heard jazz for the first time, saw a white woman naked and sat down to eat beside a white man. She shared a room with Carolyn Seavers, from Minnesota, one of hundreds of northern college students who had come to the Delta to help register black voters.
Carolyn’s blond hair hung to her waist and her blue eyes were the color of the sky just after a good hard rain. The first time Jessie saw her, Jessie was sitting in the tiny bedroom she had been given, waiting for Lincoln to come back and take her to a church where she would begin teaching adults to read and write, when Carolyn suddenly entered the room carrying a small suitcase. “Hi, my name’s Carolyn,” she said, walking up to Jessie and extending her hand. Her smile wrapped itself around Jessie and lifted her from the bed. Carolyn’s presence filled the room with the feel of something tangible, powerful, Jessie thought. It was the same room that had felt dormant, inert, only moments before. Jessie looked at Carolyn’s hand—the nails, neat, perfectly manicured—a hand so soft and unblemished that to Jessie it didn’t look real. She saw the green birthstone ring on the middle finger, and stubbornly hid her own hands behind her back. No white
woman had ever wanted to touch her. Mrs. Bullock slapped her once because she had broken an expensive piece of china, and then turned and wiped her hand on a nearby towel as if she were afraid Jessie was contagious. And here this white girl stood, pushing her hand in Jessie’s face.
“I’m Jessie Foster,” she said, her voice weak, small, diminished by the blondness, the whiteness, the pinkness, of the girl who stood before her.
“Well,” Carolyn said, dropping her hand, turning hurt and confused away from Jessie, “looks like we’re roommates.”
While Carolyn unpacked her things, Jessie sat quietly on the bed with her back to her. When Lincoln knocked on the door, she ran from the room so fast she nearly fell over Carolyn, kneeling on the floor unpacking her clothes.
That evening, around a table laden with pots and plates of food donated by neighbors, Carolyn turned to Jessie and told her, “Call me Cate, that’s what I go by for short.” Jessie stared at her as though the floor lamp had just spoken and nodded, quickly mustering a halting, “Sure, I’ll do that.” The black and white faces crowded around the table struck Jessie as some perverse, dangerous rainbow. The aggressive friendliness of the northern college students confused and then confounded her. During dinner Jessie heard Odetta and Joan Baez for the first time, their songs filling the room from a tiny portable record player someone had brought. Baez’s lush, pure voice struck Jessie as so perfect, it almost stopped her heart. And Odetta transformed the story, the history, the face, of everybody she already knew, into a thing of majestic glory. When they finished eating, Lincoln read several of his poems, hushing the room’s edgy self-conscious excitement with language that was as resonant as the songs they had just heard. Jessie listened intently, hearing all the things that Lincoln hadn’t stopped thinking about, although he’d told her he had. When Lincoln finished, Jessie spotted Carolyn talking to Marlon Jeeter, a slender young man, so dark that when Jessie looked at him, she shivered. His black skin held not the slightest hint of dilution. Although quite young, Marlon sported a beard, already flecked with strands of gray. Carolyn sat next to him, her laughter spinning concentric circles around their intent, her knee occasionally touching his, shaking her mane of blond hair repeatedly, the way Jessie had seen white girls do in the movies. Lincoln and Hamilton Schwartz, a student from New Jersey, had begun a game of chess at the dinner table.
And Do Remember Me Page 2