Crow

by Barbara Wright

  I found a wood plank in a nearby yard. We put the little girl on it, and I covered her with the Love Ladies’ jacket. I took the front of the plank, the grandfather took the back, and the woman walked along beside us, waving my sooty white shirt to give us free passage.

  The little girl left a trail of blood and little pink bows. Her cries petered out into hiccup-like gasps, each one shorter than the next, until finally they stopped altogether. As much as I welcomed the pause in her screaming, the silence made me more nervous. Noise meant life.

  By this time, there were sentinels on every block, but no one stopped us. We got her to my house and placed her on the low kitchen table. I was afraid the girl was dead. The grandfather and the woman who helped me must have thought the same thing, for they fled like fleas from a dead dog. Boo Nanny felt the girl’s forehead and pulse and pronounced her puny but alive.

  My faith in Boo Nanny’s potions had weakened of late, but now I prayed that I had underestimated her healing powers, as I followed her into her library of medicinal herbs. There were no labels, but she knew exactly what she wanted and pulled down three jars of dried leaves.

  Her hands full, she said, “Now git that shine in the Mason jar by my bed.”

  She had moonshine in her room? This was the first I’d heard about it.

  “Wipe that look off you face. They’s a thing or two you don’t know ’bout me,” she said.

  In the kitchen, I spoon-fed the little girl clear moonshine while Boo Nanny pounded the herbs with a mortar and pestle.

  “We got us a strong one,” Boo Nanny said after the girl stopped crying. “That chile’s got gumption. Now get youself over here and lend a hand.”

  She gave me a dented tin cup. “Fill that to the first knuckle of your pointing finger with this,” she said, and gave me a jar. “Then add a pinch of this.” She pushed another jar my way.

  “Is this right?” I was afraid I would get the jars reversed. “What if I mess up?” I said.

  “You ain’t gone mess up, Cocoa Baby.”

  She emptied the herbs into a cast-iron pot, then added some other ingredients to make a paste the color of a wasp’s nest. I stood over the stove and stirred the foul-smelling concoction in one direction only, just like Boo Nanny said. After it cooled, she dabbed it on the child’s wound, then bound her arm with clean cloths.

  While the little girl rested quietly under a blanket on the cot that we had moved into the kitchen, Boo Nanny cleaned up. The table was a mess, like the work space at the fish market after the day’s catch was gutted and cleaned. Boo Nanny swabbed down the table and scrubbed it with baking soda.

  I felt relieved that the potion had stopped the bleeding,and was certain that everything would be okay. But Boo Nanny declared that we needed to get the little girl to the hospital at once. She had lost too much blood.

  I didn’t have time to wash, but I put on a fresh shirt and grabbed another jacket. Just as I was ready to start out for the hospital, the sound of gunfire came from the direction of the dance hall, the ramshackle gray-board shack two blocks east. On weekends the place was packed with sinners, or so Boo Nanny said when she forbade me to go near it. But on summer nights, notes of the ragtime piano floated down the block through my open window, and sin never sounded so sweet. Now the pop and sputter of guns stood between me and the hospital.

  While I waited for the streets to quiet down, the little girl came in and out of consciousness, wheezing and whimpering like a puppy, then falling silent. I didn’t leave her side. She was my special charge. I wanted to keep her awake, and thought of telling her one of Boo Nanny’s ghost stories—I knew them all by heart—but those stories only worked when you could thrill to the sensation of being pretend-scared. This was the real thing.

  By the time calm returned to the streets, a cold drizzle had started to fall. I put the little girl inside a wheelbarrow, wrapped her in a blanket, and placed an oilcloth on top to protect her from the rain. She was totally covered, except for her pigtails, which stuck out like the spikes of a sea urchin. She was peaceful and breathing evenly.

  There was no easy way to get to the hospital, which was to the east, in the direction of the dance hall. I turned my wheelbarrow around and took the longer route.

  It was late afternoon, and darkness was fast approaching. On the way I passed a straggling line of Negroes—mainly women and children—headed toward the cypress swamp. They lugged bundles of bedding and clothes. Some children huddled under tarps they held over their heads against the rain, while others shivered in their wet coats. Mothers hushed their wailing babies and hurried the children along in the grim mist, all headed toward a nighttime of uncertainty.

  Lewis and I rarely played in the swamp, especially not in winter. It was too miserable. I wondered if these poor people knew what awaited them: sloshing calf-deep in icy-cold water through the brooding dark, with snakes hiding in the thick vines overhead and the underwater roots and jutting knees of the cypresses slimy with decay, ready to trip up the youngest and nimblest among them. But even this horror was preferable to staying in town. Who could say if they were making the right choice?

  I pushed the little girl in the wheelbarrow several blocks before a sentry stopped me.

  “What are you transporting?” he said.

  “A wounded girl. We’re on the way to the hospital.”

  The militia man cast aside the oilcloth and roughly removed the blanket I had so carefully wrapped around my charge. The little girl cried out in pain.

  “You’re hurting her,” I protested.

  “Got to check for weapons,” he said.

  I reached the Negro hospital, a one-story clapboard building the size of a church sanctuary. It was connected to the rear of City Hospital by a passageway with open sides. In the back, a horrible sight awaited me. The newly arrived wounded spilled over into the yard. Negroes lay on litters in the rain, as nurses rushed to take names and separate the wounded into groups according to how serious their injuries were. Frantic women searched the stretchers for husbands, brothers, and sons. The sounds of wailing and moaning surrounded me, and screams came from the hospital, as if we were in the loony bin.

  Someone had tied a makeshift tarp between trees in an attempt to keep the rain off. A woman stood beside a stretcher underneath and cried out for a sedative for her husband.

  “We ain’t got enough. We can’t even buy whiskey. The ban from the election’s still in place,” a nurse said. Her damp white hat rested atop her twiggy hair like a dove on a nest.

  “Can’t you get some from the main hospital?” the desperate woman asked.

  The nurse snorted, then turned away to attend to a grandmother who clawed at the open wound in her side with bent fingers.

  I found another nurse who was circulating and pleaded my case. “She’s lost a lot of blood. I need to get her help immediately,” I said. The little girl was now quiet, just when I needed her to be loud.

  “You and everybody else, sweetie.”

  “But she’s a little girl. Can’t she go inside?”

  “Full. We don’t have room.”

  Finally the nurse agreed to take us to the passageway between the white and black hospitals. I parked the wheelbarrow there, alongside other people—some on stretchers, some sitting on the floor, others on pallets of old blankets. At least we were out of the rain. There was no traffic, no doctors from the white hospital coming to pitch in.

  At the end of the passageway, I saw Dr. Hudson, our family doctor, who had been at the meeting at Jacobs’s barbershop the previous night. I was so happy to see a familiar face. “Dr. Hudson! Dr. Hudson!” I shouted, but he couldn’t hear me above the din of crying patients.

  I ran up to him and said, “You’ve got to help me. I’ve got a little girl who’s hurt bad.”

  “Son, we’ve got more injured than we know what to do with. We’re short of everything—blood, doctors, nurses. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  “Please,” I begged.

 
“I’ll do what I can,” he said.

  True to his word, he soon sent a nurse to find me. Looking at the bundle in the wheelbarrow, then at her clipboard, she said gruffly, “Name?”

  I panicked. If I said I didn’t know, she might not help us. “Hope,” I said. “Hope Thomas.”

  The name popped out. I didn’t know where it came from. But that was what I needed at the moment. That was what I longed for, and somehow, that was what the little girl meant to me.

  “T-H-O-M-A-S.” I spelled it out, anxious for the nurse to get her on paper, to make it official.

  “You can leave her here. She’ll be in good hands,” the nurse said.

  When I got home, Boo Nanny heated water on the stove and filled up a large galvanized tin, large enough to be baptized in. She left me in privacy to take a bath.

  I was exhausted and numb, but I felt jubilant. I had rescued Hope. On a day filled with unspeakable acts, I had done a good deed. It wasn’t much, but it was a start.

  THIRTEEN

  As the sun set, the streets quieted down, but still we had no word from Mama or Daddy. Darkness brought a whole new set of fears. After my bath, Boo Nanny made me help her peel potatoes to keep me occupied while we waited.

  Mama arrived first, and we crowded around and hugged her. She had been stopped several times on the way home from work, but the Red Shirts had let her through.

  Boo Nanny suggested supper, but Mama said, “I ain’t gone eat till I know Jack’s all right. Let’s wait a bit longer.”

  She played hymns on the organ to pass the time.

  After what seemed like a long while, Daddy appeared at the back door. His white shirt was smudged with soot, his jacket was torn, and his eyes were shot through with wiggly red lines.

  Mom pulled him close, not caring a wit that she got ash all over her dress.

  I waited my turn. He put his hand on my head and said, “Moses, you made me proud today.” He didn’t know about the injured men I could have pointed out to the ambulance driver and didn’t. His praise was undeserved, but it still made me happy.

  He had spent his day sifting through the charred remains of the Record. Almost nothing was left. What had not burned was ruined by water. “Now’s the time our community really needs a paper to make sense of what’s going on. But it’s destroyed, along with all of the back issues. I can’t stand to think about it—the voice of the people silenced, the historical record wiped out.” He choked back tears. But he wouldn’t be Daddy if he didn’t look on the bright side. “At least none of our employees was killed. For that, I’m grateful.”

  I wanted all this trouble behind us, so we could get back to the way things were before.

  We sat down to supper, and Boo Nanny gave the blessing. Sometimes she could get creative, but tonight she was straightforward: “We is together and we is safe, and ain’t none of us gone get greedy and ask for more than that, so thankee, Lord. Amen.”

  Even Daddy, who wasn’t a believer, seemed to draw comfort from her words.

  It was so late by the time we finished supper that everyone went straight to bed. Sometime in the night, I was awoken by a strange sound. Chills tingled along my spine. The sound came again: a long, low whistle that definitely was not a bird. Soon there was an angry rapping at the door.

  I padded down the back hall in the dark.

  “Stay here,” Daddy said, passing by me. He was wearing a red union suit.

  I stood by the back hall door and looked into the parlor.

  “Who goes there?” Daddy said.

  “White men. Only white men.”

  “What do you want?”

  “Open, or we’ll take the door by force.”

  Daddy opened the door, and half a dozen armed men came into the parlor. Two carried lanterns. The men wore red shirts or pieces of military uniforms. It was the most white people that had ever been in our house at one time.

  “Your presence is no longer desired in this city. We’ve reached a compromise. We have purchased you a one-way ticket to Richmond. You will go and not return,” said the bald man holding the lantern. The light cast dark shadows in the hollows where his eyes were, giving him the look of a skull.

  “That is not a compromise. That is a one-sided proposition, which is the exact opposite of a compromise,” Daddy said.

  “We ain’t here for an English lesson from the likes of you,” said one of the Red Shirts.

  I huddled in the dark, terrified. Mama came up behind me and put her arms around me. Boo Nanny peered through a crack in her door.

  “I am a husband and father. My family depends on me as the main wage earner. By what rights can you ban me from my city?” Daddy said.

  It was strange to see him in his red union suit, standing in a room of Red Shirts.

  “It was a unanimous decision by the Committee of Twenty-Five,” said the bald man.

  “I see you hold democracy in high regard for members of your own race. If there’s a unanimous vote by a self-selected group that supports your purpose, you’re all for it. But if the citizens express themselves legally through elections and you don’t like the results, then you feel justified in overturning the will of the people.”

  While he talked, several of the men surveyed the organ, the curio cabinet, the horsehair sofa, examining each object as if ready to make a bid. One man opened the wooden box on the side table and took out the program that the Siamese twins had signed for Mama.

  “I’ll thank you to put that back,” Daddy said firmly.

  “We’re here to take you to the county jail,” the bald man said.

  Mama gave a little gasp, and I was afraid the others had heard her, but no one looked our way.

  “Jail? On what grounds?” Daddy said.

  “It’s for your own protection. You should be grateful. There are angry men out there itching for a lynching bee.”

  “I don’t need your brand of protection.”

  “I’m afraid you don’t have a choice. You can come with us peacefully, or we will take you by force.”

  My heart was working so hard I was afraid it would break out of my chest and gallop across the room. I felt Mama’s arms tighten around me.

  “What crime have I committed? What transgression so grave that I be hunted down in my own home and banished from this city I love? State it, please, so that I may defend myself. In our democratic system, we have courts, judges, and juries for that purpose.”

  The men looked at one another. For a moment I thought he might have changed some minds.

  He continued: “Let’s be clear. This is not about your protecting me or protecting the community. This is about mob rule, a white minority that has seized control of a city and thrown out the rule of law, along with the democratically elected city government. Mark my words, this will not stand the scrutiny of time.” His voice cracked, and he coughed to cover it up.

  A young boy in a red shirt started to sweat and breathe heavily. He was not much older than me.

  “Go outside and wait for us there,” one of the older men told him, then turned back to Daddy. “We come with our heads held high, to take you for your own safety.”

  “And in so doing, do you claim to be more virtuous than if you were covered with white robes?”

  “We got ourselves a silver-tongued Sambo here. Are you going to take this from him?” said one of the Red Shirts.

  “This will shut him up,” said a man in a khaki Rough Riders tunic. The pistol in his hand went click, click, click.

  Daddy waited a moment, then took a deep breath. “I will cooperate with you, because I see that I don’t have a choice and because I don’t want to expose my family to any more trauma. Since you are hell-bent on denying me any shred of dignity, I will take it for myself. You will allow me a few private words with my family. I will be in the back bedroom.”

  Surprisingly, they granted him his wish.

  I followed him to the bedroom. No one spoke as he solemnly put on pants, a freshly laundered shirt, and the shoes
he had shined before going to bed. His hands were shaking so badly that when he tried to attach the shirt collar, it slipped from his hand and landed on the dresser with a soft thud. Mama picked it up and tenderly helped him.

  After he finished dressing and packing his bag, he sat on the bed and called me over to him. With both hands resting on my shoulders, he looked directly at me. “Always remember, you are the equal of every man, and every man is your equal.”

  Tears gathered in my eyes.

  “I want you to take care of your mother and grandmother until I return. Will you do that for me?” Daddy asked. I nodded solemnly. “I’ll be back as soon as I can. You have my word on that, and you know what store I set by my word.”

  He took out Grandpa Tip’s gold watch and put it in my hand. “I want you to hold this for me for safekeeping.”

  I closed my palm around the watch that he had promised to give me when I graduated from college. He lifted my chin. “No tears,” he said, and wiped the corners of his own eyes. “Now, son, give me a few private moments with your mother.”

  I went to my room and put the gold watch in a box with my other treasures. The county jail was a mere five blocks away. If I slipped out and ran to the jail, I would get there before he did. I raised the window and leaped from the sill, aiming wide to clear the rosebush.

  “Halt!”

  There were two Red Shirts stationed outside. I heard the click of a gun.

  “Wait! It’s a boy,” someone cried. I picked myself up off the sand and raised my hands.

  “Oh, God!” It was the Red Shirt youngster who had been in the parlor. He threw his gun onto the sand and staggered back into the magnolia tree. The thick leathery leaves clapped against one another. He bent over, put his hands on his knees, and gasped for breath, as if coming up for air after being underwater too long. The older man tried to calm him. It was only then that I realized how close I had come to getting shot.

  Daddy walked out the front door, head up, back erect, and climbed into the wagon. He didn’t see me in the side yard. The two Red Shirts left me and joined the men posted on the other sides of the house. They all piled into the wagon with Daddy, and the horse clopped off.