THEY’D BEEN MARCHING about an hour, careful to walk within the boundaries of the square, so as not to block pedestrians or cars. The protest, and the policemen stationed on the courthouse steps, had attracted a crowd that grew abusive and noisy the longer the picketing continued. A rotten tomato landed on Jessie’s arm. She saw an egg fly through the air and hit the twelve-year-old boy in front of her on the ear. In the Freedom House, Jessie had listened to the arguments about nonviolence that went on into the early morning. She had also heard the workers discuss self-defense and how to mentally survive when under attack. But as the voices of the crowd—businessmen on their lunch break, their suit jackets flung over their arms; mothers with children clutching their hands; elderly women, their faces twisted in disgust at the sight before their eyes; young teenaged boys fondling baseball bats, resting their taut, eager-to-fight bodies on the fenders of their cars—surged like a roar in her ears, Jessie simply wanted to run. A young white teenager threw a cherry bomb near the picketers. The explosion stunned and scattered them, and in the moments of confusion that followed, several young toughs waded into the group of picketers and began to beat them with rubber hoses and sticks. Jessie felt the metal sting of a hose nozzle against her cheek and instantly the warm flow of blood. Screams and shouts swirled around her and she saw young boys moving, running after the protesters, as though they were hunting rabbits. From the ground near a fire hydrant where she had scrambled, Jessie saw the police standing on the steps, silently watching the picketers being beaten. Macon had run onto the grass around the courthouse and lay crouched and huddled, her body protecting two young children who were marching with them. Finally policemen stormed down the wide marble courthouse steps and the youths scattered. The police used prods and clubs to round up the picketers and push them through the courthouse door to be booked on charges of disturbing the peace.
Eight women were crammed into a cell designed for two inmates. As they stretched out on the floor to sleep the first night, Jessie felt a warm trickle of blood between her legs. She had come on her period. She was so embarrassed she began to cry. Unable to convince the sheriff to give Jessie sanitary napkins, each woman tore off a strip of cloth from her clothing and wrapped toilet paper around it and gave it to Jessie to use. Breakfast was watery grits, stale corn bread and salmon. They passed the days planning even bolder actions they would take once they were released. Macon told them stories about Mrs. Ella Baker, who had been one of the founders of SNCC, about Diane Nash, who was willing to go to jail while pregnant and serve a two-year sentence for a movement-related charge in Jackson. Macon told them about meeting Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer and hearing her speak. They sat on the cell floor and made up songs about those women and sang spirituals with so much conviction that drunks sleeping off a hangover, men arrested for vagrancy or petty crimes locked in other cells, added their voices.
REMEMBERING THE FATE of Alberta Garrison, Jessie swore not to be separated from the other women. Inside the cell the women created a universe that dissolved the bars that held them. All her life, Jessie had longed to hear people speak to one another in a way that made words an affirmation. Before her eyes, sisterhood, deep, spontaneous, blossomed into life. They fought off boredom and despair with confessions and revelation, each woman stitching a square onto the verbal quilt they wove all day and long into the night. Lovers, husbands, children, mothers, fathers, white women, white men, what they’d do when “freedom” came, dead babies, lost sons, hardheaded daughters, the books they would read if they could or if they had the time, miscarriages, their favorite psalm, sexual fantasies, the best-looking man in town, the most stuck-up woman, how they could never go back to not fighting segregation, dirty jokes, wondering when somebody’d cook dinner for them, wash their dirty drawers, how many days among them had been spent in jail. It all strode forth, from mouths censored at work, on good behavior, speechless from fatigue at home, strangely liberated inside this cell. And Jessie sat in the midst of the women, in jail, oddly content, daring now and then to toss a word or thought onto the burgeoning flame of their union.
Six days after the protest, Macon and Jessie sat in the cell alone. Over the past two days the other women had been bailed out one by one. Macon paced the cell, her energies compressed, screaming for release. Jessie sat on the top bunk, passive, calm, and said, “I never told you how I come to be here. I run away from home. Lincoln give me a lift and then I just followed him here, after he asked me to come that is. It’s like in a way we was both running away. Lincoln wouldn’t never admit to that, but that’s what I think. After this,” Jessie began haltingly, “I don’t think I’ll be afraid of nothing,” allowing herself to believe this, hoping it was true.
“Every time I say that, Jessie, I get a surprise,” Macon warned her, halting her march around the cell’s circumference, slumping on the floor. “I hate this, I really do,” Macon said. “I never get used to being behind bars. And why I’m here doesn’t make it any easier.”
“You know, I almost don’t want to leave,” Jessie laughed. “Being here with just us women. I felt safe. I’m kinda scared to go out in the world again, cause all my life it ain’t been nothing but a man that’s done me harm.”
HE COULDN’T BEAR another death. So he began to write. Lincoln sat shirtless in his room at the Freedom House, a small fan on the floor circulating a breath of humid Delta air, and typed another verse in a poem that was already three single-spaced pages long. The day before, the bodies of Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner and James Chaney had been found by the FBI. The civil rights workers were buried fifteen feet apart and twenty feet under the dam of a cattle pond on a farm south of Philadelphia, Mississippi. He couldn’t bear another death. The week before, he had attended the funeral of Carter Langdon, a prosperous farmer who’d been shot in the head as he got into his truck on Main Street, right in the center of town. Langdon, who had stockpiled over a dozen guns and rifles in his house to fight off the Klan and anyone else attempting to drive him from his fertile ten-acre farm, had just left the courthouse after attempting to register to vote. It had taken Lincoln nearly two months to convince Langdon to register.
“When I’m ready,” he told Lincoln. “The day I do it, I want to go down there by myself. I don’t need no escort. I don’t want no protection the Lord can’t provide.”
At the funeral, at the Elks Club, Langdon’s five sons spoke about their father. The oldest told those gathered, “My daddy was a peace-loving man in a hateful world. For all the guns he had, do anybody here recall him shooting anything more than a possum, less somebody aimed a bullet at him? Not everybody that owns a gun can use it. They was scared of my daddy cause a man with a gun’s got something to protect.”
He couldn’t bear another death. The words had streamed from his subconscious, been released out of memory—all in a frenzy. Lincoln had sat down in front of his battered portable typewriter an hour after Jessie told him they found the bodies of Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney and had not stopped, eaten or slept since.
He was writing and so was healed. Scrambled between the lines rumbling into existence, transforming him and all they tried to render, was Jessie. Jessie, who had gone to jail and come out free. Jessie, who was in flight from something too awful to name. Her studied, awesome elusiveness bound him to her. If he had his way, she would become the mama he lost at three, the sister he never had, the family he longed to be a part of, the adopted father who died. He had told her everything, even as she hoarded her own past, sealed it against scrutiny. Her silence was a lock he couldn’t open, with force or love. But it didn’t matter who she was, he told himself then, or what she was running from. Now she was here. Now she was his.
And he had told her about being six and knowing God hated him, else why was love a torn, shredded hand-me-down, thrust at him now and then out of guilt or obligation, never just because. And he told her about being adopted and still feeling like he didn’t know his name, about going one day to the bank with J. R. Sturgis and hearing h
im say yessir to the man behind the big desk, yessir, his hat in his hand, a wide nigger smile splitting his dignity in two, yessir and not holding J. R. Sturgis’s hand when they left the bank because the man he knew had walked into that room but he was sure he had not come out. He even told her about the look Mrs. Sturgis reserved just for him, her eyes narrowed like darts that just missed his throat. And he’d told her how sorrow and sadness and grief made you free. Tasting them, there was nothing else to learn. You couldn’t be surprised ever again.
Poems flowed inside him like the rivers Langston Hughes had known—the Congo, the Nile, the Euphrates. A play lurked in the corners too, one populated by his and Jessie’s ghosts, by the corpses they had stumbled over to find each other. Bones would be reincarnated through speech. Ashes would turn suddenly into flesh. He couldn’t bear another death. He would keep on writing until it was safe to stop.
SHE HAD PRAYED for those three men like she had once prayed her daddy would leave her alone. So, as she had feared all along, there really was no God.
——
THE PLAY DRAMATIZED the life of eighty-five-year-old Mattie Lee. In the one-character drama, Mattie Lee recounted her life as a sharecropper: the births and deaths of children, the two husbands she outlived. The play read, to Jessie, like a long poem, except the poetry sounded like Negroes this time. When she finished reading, Lincoln asked, “What do you think?”
“Why, Lincoln, I think it’s the nicest thing I ever read. What you gonna do with it?”
“We’re gonna put it on. Present it. I wrote this for you. I want you to play the part of Mattie Lee.”
“I can’t act,” Jessie protested nervously.
“Sure you can.”
“Oh no, Lincoln, no, I can’t do that,” she said, rising quickly from the bed. “I’d be afraid, standing in front of a whole bunch of people. I could never remember all those words.”
“I’ll help you. Direct you.”
Holding up her hands in protest, Jessie insisted, “Lincoln, I can’t, I just can’t.”
He walked over to Jessie and held her. “You said you were too scared to join the movement,” Lincoln reminded her, moving in on Jessie and capturing her in his arms before she could back away.
“That’s not the same thing as acting. Nobody’s looking at me all the time, like when you’re acting.”
“You just think they’re not. But they are. Look, read some of this out loud for me, won’t you? I wrote it but I’ve never really heard how it sounds.”
Jessie picked up the manuscript, scanning the paper, looking at the words as though for the first time. And then she began to read aloud, slowly, clearly, her voice trembling now and then at the knowledge of how assured and inevitable was the fusion of her voice and Lincoln’s words. Eventually, she stood to act out the stage directions requiring Mattie Lee to kneel, lean over, lift imaginary bales of cotton and nurse a sick child.
When she read the last line, Jessie handed the play back to Lincoln and said, “I like it Lincoln, I like it a lot, but there’s some things in there that don’t sound like things a woman would say. I know you’re a good writer and you used your imagination and all but there’s a few parts where it just don’t sound real.”
“Well, tell me, Jessie,” Lincoln said, moving to sit beside her on the bed, trying to capture and hold her mood of cooperation, “tell me where it don’t sound real.”
ACTING WAS JUST like daydreaming, except you were living other people’s dreams, Jessie thought. There were moments when she hated Lincoln during the tense, exultant days of preparation for the staging of the play. Beneath his demanding eye she read and then memorized the script. They had spent several days reworking some of the dialogue, making it sound “real.” And when it all sounded right, Lincoln took Jessie by the hand and shepherded her inside the skin of Mattie Lee.
“Think about your mama, your grandmama, all the women you know,” he’d urged her as she had moved from just reciting the words to living them. “Let them talk to you. Go back to your front porch, your backyard, the kitchen, wherever you can to track down these women.”
And so Jessie approached it like a game. Mattie Lee became a skeleton she had to clothe, a phantom she had to find. But all roads, Jessie learned, led back to herself. Back to her memories, and her pain. Lincoln and Jessie fought and made up repeatedly as they gave birth and life to Mattie Lee. They spent eight- to ten-hour days in the basement where Freedom School classes had been held, locked, Jessie sometimes felt, in a prison made of words. Once in exasperation, she screamed, “Being in jail was better than this,” and threw the script at Lincoln. If Jessie told Lincoln she couldn’t create an emotion or a certain feeling for the old woman, he refused to accept her excuse. When Mattie Lee had to cry, Lincoln shouted at Jessie, reducing her to tears within seconds, then swooped her up in his arms, propped her into position and coaxed Mattie Lee’s words out of her. When Mattie Lee had to get mad, he taunted Jessie, wondered out loud if she was as good as he’d thought she was. And, as Jessie charged across the room to pummel him with her fists, Lincoln freeze-framed her actions, shouting, “Now, Jessie, now, let Mattie Lee use your anger.”
Jessie fell into bed at night, drained, her sleep vacant and deep.
When she made her debut, on the stage of George Washington Carver High School, after the curtain went up, it took her ten minutes to move her feet onto the stage. The makeup Lincoln had applied and the wig she wore, all to make her appear to be eighty-five years old, felt like glue enveloping her head. So blinded was Jessie by the stage lights that she couldn’t even see the audience. Her voice veered between inaudible whispers and shouts that echoed up to the balcony of the auditorium, which was filled to capacity. Yet in the seventy-five minutes of the play Jessie risked everything. No one had ever asked her to surrender this much. No one had ever lavished her with such faith. When she stood on the stage, basking in the heartfelt applause of her Freedom School students, the women she had been jailed with, people from the Freedom House and townspeople, Jessie didn’t know if she would ever forgive Lincoln for pushing her this far, or how she could ever thank him.
——
THE NORTHERN college students began to leave the south. Carolyn Seavers was one of the last to go. The morning of her departure, Macon and Jessie drove Carolyn to the airport in Jackson. Much of the mythology about white women that was once lodged in Jessie’s imagination had been shattered in the few months of her acquaintance with Carolyn. Jessie had cleaned up after and born the withering scorn of white women all her life. She had seen the tattered seams, the sharp edges of their lives, played out in full dress before her as though she wasn’t even there. Yet Jessie had imagined that despite the smudged, grubby reality she witnessed in the Bullock home, and in the home where her mother had worked, that white women’s lives were nonetheless a fanciful, jealously guarded dream. For if their lives were indeed perfect, blemish free, if the world denied them nothing, then that would explain how ruthlessly those lives were guarded against intrusion by people who looked like her. Hardly anything she had learned this summer made sense. Hundreds of black people had been registered, but people had been killed, property had been destroyed and all her preconceived notions had capsized. Despite the litany of disclosures Carolyn had recited lying in bed next to Jessie, night after night, the girl remained a brutally complex equation Jessie was unable to solve.
From the backseat Jessie stole a quick glance at Carolyn riding in front beside Macon, and saw her staring out the window, her eyes on edge, tense. Experience, Jessie thought, looking back at the road. She now knew what Carolyn had meant by the word. She thought of the afternoon that she and Carolyn had walked past Lurlee Bascomb’s tiny decrepit grocery store where Negroes could buy food, liquor and beer on credit. Lurlee had spotted Jessie and Carolyn out the window and had run from behind the counter, her cash register open, growling to the customers in line, “Yall wait here, I’ll be right back,” as she handily reached for the rifle that she kept st
ationed behind the cooler full of Coca-Cola and RC, and headed out the door. The grizzled old white woman stood in the middle of the sidewalk, raised her rifle with a hunter’s skill and fired a bullet that spun several inches past Carolyn’s head. “You nigger-loving, whore Communist,” she screamed at them as in shock they turned to look back. Lurlee stood clutching the rifle barrel, shaking it in the air, stamping her feet, her thin sharp voice stinging the air with curses and anguished screams, threatening not to miss next time. Her fury spent, breathless and red-faced, satisfied by the sight of Carolyn and Jessie in flight, Lurlee Bascomb went back into the store and resumed selling food and liquor to her black customers. Meanwhile Carolyn and Jessie huddled in a nearby alley. Jessie was so frightened she had peed on herself, but Carolyn poked her head around the corner, stared at Lurlee Bascomb and raised her middle finger in the air. She turned back to Jessie and began laughing so hard that she couldn’t stand up and fell on her knees in the alley. “That old bitch,” Carolyn fumed, “she’s crazy, and can’t even shoot straight. Now if she was sane, we’d be in trouble.” And she began laughing again.
Jessie recalled the evenings that Carolyn returned to the Freedom House, her arms and face sunburned from the long hours canvassing for voters. She listened to her awed stories of the homes she had been to that day, the people she had met, the poverty she had seen.
And Do Remember Me Page 6