“I never knew this was America too,” she’d told Jessie one evening. “I feel cheated because nobody ever told me.”
“What would you have done if they had?” Jessie had asked.
“I hope I’d do what I’m doing now,” Carolyn had said.
There had been long calls home the first two weeks. Collect calls to Minnesota filled with tears and threats, ultimatums and warnings. But in the end Carolyn had stayed.
Then there were the nights she crawled into bed late, having just left Marlon Jeeter’s arms. So intoxicated was she with the sense of the momentous that on those nights she lay awake beside Jessie, unable to sleep, rousing Jessie to tell all the things Marlon did to her, the places he touched her, how she had never felt the way she felt now about anybody, how Marlon was the first man she had ever been with that way. Carolyn never suspected that Jessie would feel any proprietorship toward Marlon, that she could find Carolyn’s infatuation offensive because of the sheer ease with which it altered history, circumvented white women on pedestals and black men swinging from the end of a rope.
But Jessie was too polite and tried too hard to like the girl to say any of this. On mornings after Carolyn had so casually divulged her secrets, Jessie could hardly look Marlon in the face.
“I’m gonna miss everybody, I really am,” Carolyn said.
“Well, you can always come back. There’ll still be plenty to do,” Macon told her.
“What about you and Marlon?” Jessie asked.
“I don’t know exactly what’s gonna happen with us,” Carolyn said quietly. “The only thing I do know is I’m pregnant.” She said the word pregnant with the easy defiance that Jessie now knew so well.
“Does Marlon know?” Macon asked, alarmed, looking in the same glance at both Jessie and Carolyn.
“I don’t want him to know,” Carolyn told them as though issuing a command.
“Don’t you think you owe him that?” Macon asked solemnly.
“I have to think about myself, but I told my mother and she’s going to have it taken care of when I get home.” Carolyn stared out the window, her face expressionless.
Jessie didn’t know what Carolyn meant by “taken care of” but she was afraid to ask.
At the airport in Jackson, Macon and Jessie helped Carolyn unload her bags from the trunk and walked with her to the entrance. Macon shook her hand and Jessie hugged her goodbye.
Half a mile from the airport, Jessie asked Macon what Carolyn had meant by her mama was gonna “take care of” her being pregnant?
“She’s going to have an abortion. Her mother will pay some doctor to get rid of it,” Macon said matter-of-factly.
In her senior year in high school a girl Jessie knew only slightly, Nadine Colby, had gotten pregnant. She was a buck-toothed, heavy-set girl. A story had been going around that a group of boys had made a bet as to who could be the first to have sex with her. A shy, lonely girl so self-conscious that she stuttered and sat alone in the cafeteria, Nadine had been remarkably easy to seduce.
According to the whispers that streamed between the stalls in the girls’ bathroom, exchanged in front of lockers, when Nadine found out she was pregnant she went to some man who stuck a tube inside her to suck the baby out. Everything seemed fine, then the next day she started bleeding and didn’t stop until she died.
“You think Marlon’ll ever see her again?” she asked Macon.
“I don’t know, Jessie, we’re cooking up a strange brew,” Macon said wearily. “This is what integration, brotherhood, means, and it’s coming one way or another whether we’re ready for it or not.”
“But how can she just get rid of his baby like that? She spent all summer telling me she was in love.”
“Maybe she was, Jessie. Maybe she was. But her parents have got her life planned for her. And they sure as hell didn’t plan on nothing like this. Love or no love, Marlon is a Negro, she’s white. That don’t go down easy north or south.”
“So then, when she gets rid of the baby things’ll be like before?” Jessie asked.
“It’s about choices, Jessie. That’s all it’s about. Some people have them, some people don’t.”
Whenever she was late coming on her period and feared she was carrying her father’s child, Jessie always knew what she would do. She didn’t know how to swim so she imagined jumping into the Mississippi River and drowning, the dark muddy waters lapping around her, sucking her down, filling her lungs, which didn’t have to stifle screams anymore, filling her eyes, which would never again have to see his face. In the days waiting for her period to come she wondered if she could slit her own throat or wrists. Death, she knew, would be the one time she could be in control.
Suddenly her life stretched before her, outside the perimeters of her father’s grasp. He couldn’t touch her and so, she was sure he couldn’t hurt her anymore. She was excited and afraid when she thought about what she would do, where she would go now. Lincoln had been working on a proposal to start a theater company in Atlanta, a company dedicated to dramas about black people. And if he did this, she would be a part of it. Nothing had fulfilled her like the time she’d stood on the stage of George Washington Carver High School. All her life she had wanted to be somebody else. And now she could be, anytime she wanted.
ALL HER SENSES were prickly with perception, as keen as radar. Standing downstage, Jessie heard the voices of the other actors. With great effort, she held at bay her own lines, straining against confinement, waiting for release. She could smell the scent of tobacco ground into the clothes of the man sitting five seats from the aisle in the second row; she could hear a soft murmur in the back of the theater; a crackle of lightning heralding a thunderstorm echoed in her ears. And though she had not seen her, she knew Mae Ann was somewhere out there in the audience. She could feel her, and she knew Mae Ann had done as she had asked. She had sent her a ticket to the play and enough money to take the bus to Carol.
Jessie knew the three other actors on the stage as well as she knew herself. There was Carmen, who would change a word here, a movement there, with each performance to keep, as she told Jessie, “from losing my mind.” Ernest, whose overheated, bombastic acting style, Lincoln had not yet managed to tame, would threaten to obliterate her in the next scene. She stood marshaling the reserves she hoarded to go toe to toe with Ernest each time they performed together. Keesha as usual was playing to the audience, stroking them, offering herself like a prize, breaking the symmetry between the four actors, the psychic unison this particular scene required.
Jessie stood full of all this, bursting and satisfied, edgy and content, heading with each imagined word toward the play’s climax, yet praying it would never end. On stage she had no history, no memory, no past. She was an invention conjured out of singular words strung together like pearls. If there was any feeling she would die fighting for, she would always claim it was this.
THE COMPANY of the Renaissance South Theater had performed, as they often did, in a school auditorium, using the bathrooms as dressing rooms. Jessie had changed into street clothes and removed her makeup. Hurrying out of the bathroom to go find her sister, she saw Mae Ann standing in a corner of the hallway. They had not seen one another since Jessie left home and they ran to embrace, Jessie hugging Mae Ann so tightly that she wriggled in her hold, saying, “Jess. I ain’t goin nowhere, I’m here.” Laughing, Jessie released her.
“You was real good up there. Real good,” Mae Ann said, smiling in pride at her sister.
Jessie let her eyes roam over her sister’s face. The broad, flat nose had earned her the nickname Pug. Her skin had cleared up, Jessie noticed, the acne that had scarred her face so mercilessly was gone. And she was taller now too. As Jessie held Mae Ann’s shoulders and looked at her body she saw that Mae Ann was pregnant.
“Oh, Mae Ann, why didn’t you tell me?” Jessie asked, hugging her.
“I didn’t want yall to worry.”
“He didn’t?” Jessie began, her eyes widening in alar
m.
“Naw. This here is Tyrone Marshall’s baby. You member him?”
“Sure I do. You gonna get married?”
“Maybe us will, maybe us won’t,” Mae Ann said with a brusque yet playful hunch of her shoulders. Jessie had always yearned to possess her sister’s spunk. Mae Ann had threatened Chester Foster with a switchblade she had found on the playground at school, the one time he tried to touch her.
“Come on, let’s go down to the cafeteria and get a Coke,” Jessie said.
They sat in the ugly green-tiled room, sipping their drinks and gossiping about Aunt Eva, Junior and Willie, when Mae Ann suddenly began to cry softly.
“What’s wrong, Mae Ann? I thought you’d be glad to see me.”
“I am, Jess, I am. It’s just that you done growed up. You don’t even look like you did before. You never wore no lipstick or mascara and you done cut all your hair off. How come you wanta look like a man?”
“Do I really look like a man, really, Mae Ann?” Jessie reared back and clapped her hands with delight.
“Well, no, but you know what I mean. Negro women been praying and paying for hair long as I can remember, then you go cut all yours off.” She dabbed at her eyes with a Kleenex Jessie had given her. “You like what you doing?”
“Yes, Mae Ann, I really do.… How is Mama?”
“Why don’t you ast her? I’m living with Tyrone, and his folks. Daddy threw me out the house.”
“They ever talk about me?”
“They know I gits letters from you. I told all what you was doing with them silver rights people and now all this. I don’t think Mama is ever gonna forgive you for not writing her. She say she understand you runnin, she didn’t understand you not writing or calling her. Said you act like it was her that hurt you.”
“She hurt me almost as much as he did,” Jessie said bitterly.
“And him,” Mae Ann grunted. “Near bout drinking hisself to death. Been having real bad headaches ever since you hit him with that frying pan.”
“You know, all those people in that house, and I was always afraid, Mae Ann. Always afraid and lonely. I never had anybody to talk to,” Jessie said quietly.
“We used to talk,” Mae Ann said.
“But not about the things that mattered.”
“How could we, Jess? How could we?” Mae Ann asked. She was silent for a moment. “He said you cain’t come back. Daddy say he don’t never want to see you again.”
“It’s not just his house. Mama’s got a say.”
“Say you tried to kill him and if you come back through them doors he gonna do the same to you.” Mae Ann expelled the awful words in a fast furious stream.
How could he kill me again? Jessie wondered. How could he kill me again? She had convinced herself that since they were no longer under the same roof her father couldn’t reach her. How could he kill me again?
Jessie felt extinguished, buried by a grief that flowed through her body like blood.
“You got away, Jess, you got away,” Mae Ann said, frightened by the look that had suddenly bloomed on her sister’s face. “What it matter what he say?” Mae Ann attempted an unsuccessful dismissive laugh.
“And you know what’s funny?” Jessie said, her voice strained and hollow, “you were the one always running, Mae Ann, you, not me.”
“Yeah, but I never run far. I run like a squirrel or a mouse, just a little ways from the hole, then come back. You run away to stay. You got freedom.”
“But I don’t have you and Aunt Eva no more,” Jessie said, taking her sister’s hand.
“You got a man though.”
“And you got a baby coming.”
“Hell, you think I’d have this baby if I could get rid of it? I tried everything I could think of to make it come out early. Nothing worked.”
“If I can rustle up some money, I’ll send you a present when the baby comes.”
“Don’t yall git paid for this?” Mae Ann asked indignantly.
“Yeah, but not much. Living expenses.”
“Hell, you ain’t got as much as I thought then.”
Jessie saw Lincoln entering the cafeteria and waved to him. When he approached them, Jessie introduced Mae Ann. Lincoln was clearly delighted to meet her and shook her hand warmly. “We’re going to get something to eat, why don’t you come with us?” Lincoln asked Mae Ann as he hugged Jessie possessively.
“I got to head on back to Columbus. It ain’t a real long bus ride but I only got about half a hour before it leaves.”
Lincoln and Jessie drove her to the bus station and after they had hugged her, she said, “Jess, I wish I hadn’t told you what he said. But I had to.”
“Don’t worry, Mae Ann, you did the right thing,” she said, patting her sister’s hand.
But the stricken look that had passed like a pall over Jessie’s face in the wake of Mae Ann’s words remained. Mae Ann felt so guilty and ashamed of her honesty that when she boarded the bus she couldn’t bear to look at Lincoln and Jessie waving good-bye to her.
THEY WERE spending the night in a motel that had begun to rent rooms to Negroes, before heading back to Atlanta in the morning. In the air conditioned, tastefully decorated room with a color television and a radio, carpeting on the floor and more towels in the bathroom than Jessie thought anybody needed, she and Lincoln were arguing. It had started over dinner in the motel restaurant when he asked her, “So when do I get to meet the rest of your family?”
“What?” Jessie had asked, alarmed. “Why do you want to meet them?”
“Why not? I love you. They’re your family. If I had a family, by this time, you’d have met them.”
“Who says I’ve got a family? I’ve got a sister, two brothers, a mother and a father, that’s not the same thing.”
“Well, your sister seems real nice. What are the others like? You never talk about them,” Lincoln persisted.
“They’re just people and we all happen to be related. Nothing special.”
“People aren’t all alike, Jessie.”
“Look, Lincoln, I really don’t want to keep talking about this.”
He had let it drop after that and left her alone to brood over the fried chicken and potato salad she left untouched on her plate. She picked at a piece of sweet potato pie and then pushed it aside, too.
But once he’d closed the door to their room the first thing he’d asked was, “What happened? What did she tell you?”
“Nothing happened. I hadn’t seen Mae Ann in a long time. It was hard saying good-bye that’s all.”
“That’s all?”
“Lincoln, I’m tired. I want to sleep,” she begged.
And so he dropped it again but he couldn’t get it out of his mind. He went downstairs to the motel bar knowing his presence would make the whites so uncomfortable they would get up and leave. He sat in the bar nursing a beer, wondering as he so often did who the woman was that he’d left behind in Room 312.
She was going to be amazing one day. He knew that now. He had watched Jessie pour a hunger for perfection into her acting that made him, as her director, sometimes unnecessary. They had shaped a creative marriage so tenacious that it had inspired a trilogy of plays, all written for Jessie. The reviews of her acting in newspapers from Atlanta to Memphis to Charleston hinted at stardom for her one day. He loved her and yet was humbled by her talent. Often too, he stood powerless before her heart locked like a vault against him.
Jessie had arranged a surprise birthday party for Lincoln at the theater several weeks earlier, and invited friends he had not seen in years. For his birthday she had taken the picture of J. R. Sturgis he carried in his wallet and had it restored and framed.
She had become the critic of his work that he valued the most, sitting up long hours at night listening to his scripts, challenging the truth and authenticity of his characters’ emotions. And Jessie had turned the three rooms they lived in above the theater in Atlanta into a home, by using flowers, plants, colorful cloth and politica
l posters to give the rooms a jazzed-up interior beat.
She had mastered the motions of love. But Lincoln wanted more. He never felt her joined to him, solidly, completely, unless they were working on a scene or reading a script. He had heard her cry often after they made love, and he had grown so used to her protestations that nothing was wrong that he now willed himself into sleep instantly when they finished. There were times that she sat next to him or lay beside him scripting some truth in her head that she could not release, but he could feel. Until she opened up, everything between them was a lie.
ONE DAY SHE would tell him. One day when she knew he would never leave her, always love her, forever trust her, forgive her anything. But, until then, there was nothing she could say. More than once she’d thought she felt secure enough to risk it. At those moments she had seen total pure acceptance shining in his eyes. But then each time the voice inside, her private censor, sabotaged her peace of mind and spit into her internal ear, No not yet, what would he say, what would he do? How could he love a dirty thing like you?
——
“CONGRESSMAN Courtland Hightower,” Lincoln said, raising his glass of wine, winking at Macon and Jessie across the table.
“Yeah, that has a nice ring to it,” Courtland laughed. With only three thousand four hundred and fifty more votes it would’ve been my name.”
“Well, to the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party,” Lincoln said, raising his glass higher, as his friends joined him in a toast to the South’s political present and future. “So, all along yall just wanted to BE the system, not change it, right?” Lincoln chided Courtland with a swift significant glance at Macon.
“What’s this yall bullshit? You were there too. And you know as well as I do black folks change everything we touch, leave our stamp, our rhythm, our squeal on anything we get our hands on. The next twenty years in the political life of America is gonna have white folks thinking they’re in the middle of a bad dream, mark my words.”
Jessie and Lincoln had driven back to Greenwood to see Courtland and Macon, who now rented a small three-bedroom house in a neighborhood that had been all white only a few years earlier. Macon was an administrator of the local Head Start program and worked with adult literacy programs in the state.
And Do Remember Me Page 7