.
The click-clack of Lemon’s pestle was the only sound in the cabin. To the fine cornmeal she added a spoonful each of vinegar, vanilla, and cream, then stirred, the fat of her upper arm shaking, as she reached for the cup of soft butter. She folded in four eggs, brought in that day, one and a half cups of sugar, a packed teaspoon of lemon zest. Her pinky finger skimmed a taste from the side of the bowl. Like fairy dust, a pinch of her secret ingredient floated into the mixture she now poured into the pie shell as a knock landed on the door.
Out of all the parents in Little Tunis there was no question of support from Ennis and Lemon Williams, Zilpha Stokes thought. They were staunch advocates for Timbo’s education and continued in the same fashion for Ivoe. She needed only to shore up their faith in the Little Tunis School. She returned the warmth of Ennis’s greeting, but before she could give a proper hello to Ivoe, she had scurried off with her coat and hat. Divine aromas piqued her curiosity as she glanced around the cabin. She could see where Ivoe’s sense of organization came from and smiled to note several pieces of her schoolwork propped up on the hearth.
Dinner for Miss Stokes was a lavish offering of corn pone, Hoppin’ John, hominy casserole, roasted chicken, and the chowchow Lemon was obliged to serve since the teacher had ordered plenty. She placed the jar of relish next to Zilpha’s setting and approved her table, recalling one of her mother’s sayings: “All good meals call for some sacrifice.” The last of the crowder peas, canned at the end of summer, had gone in with the rice and onion for the Hoppin’ John and the cracker pudding had finished the cream. She peeked into the oven to see if the pie had puffed, pressing her fingers gently across the top, listening for the crackle. The chess pie was golden brown and perfectly firm, her finest.
Moments of quiet eating pleasure marked by soft murmurs and the occasional scrape of cutlery against glass plates made the hostess content.
Zilpha watched Lemon turn the pie as though the taste depended on the knife’s point of entry. Juneteenth picnics, church celebrations, weddings: simple ingredients and a few easy steps meant every woman in Little Tunis made custard pies. Zilpha had eaten them all her life. None rewarded in such creamy comfort as this one. She wished for a smaller fork to stretch the sweet moment.
“I tip my fork to you, Mrs. Williams. I’ve never had a pie so fit for devouring. How did you come by lemons in March?”
“In the summer, after you’ve made a batch of lemonade, pack the peel in a jar with about an inch of salt at the bottom and on top. Turns the peel a little orange but otherwise it keeps fine. Nothing to this pie,” Lemon said, shooting Ivoe a serious glance.
Ivoe read her mother’s face and knew she had better not fidget at the table any longer. She excused herself from supper, disgusted that she would miss anything Miss Stokes said. She was fond of the young woman for many reasons—the way she spoke, how she often reached out to touch you in the middle of a sentence where a comma might go and smiled at the end where a period belonged. Miss Stokes had interesting things to say because she had studied at college and traveled. Miss Stokes was not like Momma and May-Belle, and Ivoe meant to study all of her differences and try them on for size. She hurried to and from the outhouse, only glancing at the bucket of water kept on a hook for hand washing. Still, something important had been missed; it showed in the look on the teacher’s face when Ivoe took her seat again.
A shadow of disgust broke across Miss Stokes’s face. “Mind you, it was four weeks before the Department of Education sent anybody. When the man finally did show up—with a box of chalk, a bucket, and a dipper—I was truly outdone. I said, ‘Mister, what good is chalk without a board? I need assistance in quenching the minds of my pupils, many who are fine readers without books.’ Lest he go away thinking Negro students draw from the bucket and play all day. I let him know the department’s so-called relief would never do. I sent him on his merry way back to Galveston with the message that the teacher from Burleson County wishes to teach and therefore requires materials—books, pencils, paper. Didn’t do a bit good. That’s when I posted the signs in town.”
The call for magazines and books nailed to every post on Main Street had impressed Ennis. He especially liked the part: “Help me champion the children of Little Tunis whose lives require the power of education if they are to mold their individual character and become sound citizens and able leaders.”
“Then yesterday a curious thing happened. I awoke to a barricade of newspapers on my front porch. Stacks as tall as you, Ivoe,” Miss Stokes said. “This solves the problem of books for the children. If they can read a newspaper, they can read anything.” Pushing aside her clean plate, she withdrew a paper from her bag and handed it to Ivoe. “The next time I see you, I expect you to have read this entire paper and to have written a report on one of the articles. You are one of my best readers and surely up to it.”
“Surely she is,” Momma said with a look that held the double message: Take the paper and Don’t talk back. “Now, excuse yourself, missy. Teacher gave you an assignment. Get to reading. Let grown folks talk.”
Over coffee Miss Stokes’s hope dimmed. “I’m losing them. Two of my boys are at the county jail.”
“I heard about Peter’s boy,” Ennis said. “Who the other one?”
“A woman caught Brown’s boy kissing a girl behind the train depot. The girl didn’t know any better and sassed the woman.” Miss Stokes dropped her head a little, her cup catching most of her words.
Ennis shook his head. “You tell them things but they forget. I’m always reminding Timbo about the etiquette laws. He knows holding hands and carrying on in front of white people—even with his own kind—is asking for trouble.”
“Those not in trouble are in the fields. Parents are starting to depend on the bit of money the little ones bring in. I mean to get the night school running as soon as I can before I lose them all to sharecropping.”
“Where you plan to meet?” Ennis asked, impressed with the teacher’s thoughtfulness.
“Lord willing and the creek don’t rise, Old Elam Church—if they don’t burn it down too. Reverend Greenwood has designated some of the deacons to stand guard outside while the youngsters get their lessons. I do hope you’ll send Ivoe back. She is full of so much promise.”
In the next room Ivoe crawled into bed with the Starkville Enterprise, her mind a tumult of excitement as she pored over the headline above a reprinted letter: “The Worst Insult to the United States in Its History!” Her hunch said the letter, signed by the Spanish ambassador, had something to do with all of Timbo’s talk about Little Cuba’s troubles. She pulled the covers over her feet. For months she had kept her stolen newspapers a secret. Now she could be seen with a paper any time and no one would wonder how she came by it.
The brisk walk to church filled Ivoe with questions. After Papa told a story or when one of Momma’s pies was baking, the quiet felt just right, not like breakfast that morning. She couldn’t remember a time the cabin felt so heavy. Papa knew better than to ask Momma to join them for church, but sometimes knowing better and what you want don’t jibe and you try anyway. Momma said it wasn’t a thing at Old Elam that she needed and Papa should stop meddling her about it. Papa said the word going around was that the preacher had something important to say and this one time she should be with the people. Momma rolled her eyes and mumbled something about the word of Little Tunis.
Only one other time did Ivoe remember her parents put out with each other over religion. Papa reasoned that bringing the children up Momma’s way, and by Momma’s way he meant Muslim, would make them lonely and children needed lots of folks interested in them. They talked so long, so hard about it till Momma cried. She had asked Momma why she didn’t marry a man who loved Allah like she did, and Momma said wasn’t none to be married and Papa was a good choice because he was honest and fair and knew how to love. Papa got the same question in reverse. Allah was God, Papa
said, “no different. Your Momma think it is and I respect her but ain’t no difference.” Momma showed her a piece of paper to the contrary, written in a hand Ivoe couldn’t recognize. “That’s Arabic. Your grandmother Iraj wrote this down for me when I was half your age, working in the cotton fields. Wore it on me every day. It says ‘The Holy Qur’an, Surah 2:255: There is no God but Allah, the Ever Living, the Eternal One. Neither slumber nor sleep overtakes Him . . . He is the Most Exalted, the Most Great.’” After that Ivoe got tired of going back and forth between them. She didn’t mind parents with two different gods, but she did wonder how the gods felt when Momma and Papa didn’t act like spoke and wheel and go along smoothly.
The latch slipped and the church doors flew open. Eager congregants filled the oak benches. Built on the worst of the wetland, Old Elam called for the sturdiest wood for flooring. The trade-off—benches instead of pews—ensured enough blackjack for the tongue-and-groove boards that sloped from the vestibule, through the sanctuary, down to a raised chancel on which the pulpit was located and where the preacher had just closed his Bible. The closing of the Bible at the start of a sermon struck Ivoe as peculiar.
The minister eyed the congregation the way a teacher took silent roll call.
“Church, for a long time now we been shut out of sight, forced to eat in the kitchen—America’s most loyal servant hid away from the company. Well, I’m here to tell you it’s time to come out of the kitchen and show what it is that we’re really about. Not too long ago we was forced to toil at the plow . . . take up the hammer, the hoe, and anything else there was for us to take up. My daddy’s traveled on to Glory but I can still see his back bent from where he hauled bales from here to yonder—”
Hands waved, heads nodded, sighs escaped the mouths of elders rocking from side to side, a common gesture whenever they heard the pleasing sound of truth. Everyone watched the country preacher whose hard memories showed in his face.
“—and the blisters all over my mother’s hands where the thorn of that devilish stem tore her flesh when she snagged the cotton from the boll. I remember it well. Now, y’all hear me. Any time you’re made to do a thing, that thing don’t count for much—do it?”
Reverend Greenwood scanned the congregation.
“Sister Fanny, when that niece of yours, Roena, does something for you and you ain’t asked her to do, it surely puts her in your favor, don’t it?”
“Amen,” Fanny said.
“And when you got to tell her to do it even when she do it right it just don’t move your heart the same way, do it?”
Fanny shook her head.
“Now in Ecclesiastes, Solomon reminds us that wisdom is better than war, but I believe the president’s war can be the great leveler. Church, we can’t wait to be asked. We must join in the fight for America, even if she ain’t all that she could be . . . ’Cause it just might be our ticket out of the kitchen. Y’all hear me? Don’t it get hot in the kitchen?”
Someone shouted, “Yes!” The preacher stood silent.
“Now to shame the devil, I got to tell the truth. Some of us have put the question to ourselves and to each other: Is America any better than Spain? Some of us thinking, If the white man fail in this war, Cuba might be a free Negro republic. And won’t that help us a little? That’s dangerous, church. We can’t fix our minds and hearts on such questions. As Christians we called to a duty. As Americans we called to a duty. We got to serve God and country too. Can’t serve one without the other. My name’s not Ezra and I’m no prophet but I see this thing clearly: the colored man got to pick up the same gun the white man use to defend his family and country. Then we might stop finding our husbands and sons floating in the creek and hanging from the tree where they ain’t got no business being. Church, I say to you: Let us be ready and willing even more than others in the hour of our nation’s peril. Thus shall we reaffirm our claim and our right to equal liberty and protection.”
.
Ivoe pulled back her blankets, imagining the big red E circled at the top of her paper denoting excellence. She was thinking of her assignment and the comment Timbo made. He said all the talk about war had started with sugar—as important to Little Cuba as cotton was to Little Tunis. Spain—Timbo told Ivoe to think of the country as Cuba’s overseer—was angry that many Cuban sugar plantations did business with the United States, so it imposed high tariffs and that was the root of the trouble. Her brother was good about painting a picture and coloring it with details to make you see it all clearly. During supper Ivoe could hardly eat for listening to Timbo talk about brown-skinned and mulatto folks rebelling against the Spanish. He got so excited talking about the Cuban Liberation Army Momma had to tell him to “hush!” Ivoe asked Timbo why the Cubans were destroying their own land and fighting to death—on account of they were dying of all kinds of strange-sounding diseases. She had never heard of malaria, dysentery, typhoid until Timbo described them. She imagined Little Tunis full of people with chicken pox and measles, which she had already suffered. Timbo said that dignity and freedom would cause you to do anything, even die.
“This will be our first war overseas.”
“Remember the Maine! To hell with Spain!” Ivoe shouted, reciting a headline from the paper. “Timbo, why do you want to fight?”
“You heard what Reverend Greenwood said. It’s good for a man to help his country.”
It was the first time her fifteen-year-old brother called himself a man, and in the light of the lantern that evening Ivoe thought he was beginning to look like one. Later that night she read her letter many times, pleased by how well she had followed Miss Stokes’s direction to think of someone specific when writing. Her questions about Little Cuba and the safety of her brother resulted in a letter to the commander in chief himself.
.
An invasion of the fattest flies he’d ever seen put Timothy off his breakfast. He left the mess tent, patting his breast pocket holding Roena’s letter, and ruffled his hair the way she had done the last time he saw her. Bet she wouldn’t want no parts of you now, he thought. His hair looked like a feather bed and he smelled like a rotten onion from the neem oil he used to ward off chiggers. The men in his company called him Sweetie, teasing that the only reason those chiggers were after him was because he had too many girls sweet on him back home. Not too many, but one special. Roena had listened to him go on about the expectations and doubts he had for his life until the train whistle sounded. As the first sergeant ordered the crew aboard, he took the train steps by twos, moving down the aisle to his seat with Roena following along on the platform outside, waving frantically.
“Timbo, you forgot my good-bye kiss.”
“Ain’t it just like a woman to say that after I been kissing on her all day?” He leaned out the window for her hand, catching up her sleeve instead as the train lurched forward, causing him to tear away her button.
“Even if them Spanish don’t get you Fanny gonna kill you when you get back. This here’s my best dress.”
“Least I got something to remember you by,” he said with a wink.
The train thundered to a slow pace. Soldiers spilled over him for a last look at the crowd, resounding with cheer. It was more colored and white folks together than any of them had ever seen.
Company E was held at Lakeland, Florida, the first and last site for most colored men who had enlisted to fight. War would have been easier—even if it meant dying—than the backbreaking labor that greeted them. Timothy spent the first month rolling hogsheads because the convicts working cane on the prison farm down the road were too puny to move the barrels, several hundred pounds of sugar each. A week later he was draining the swampland on the estate of someone important. His hands and feet were blistered and torn from long hours slogging through gator holes and pulling dead cypress trunks out of foul water. The list of lackluster chores for all-colored crews was long, but jugging and jawing about it wouldn’t i
ncrease the three dollars a week he earned, or give him the big adventure stories Roena expected. His letters were short since he left out the truth: he had come a long way just to scuffle with peckerwoods for talking to him any kind of way. The closest he’d come to battle was when a screeching red egret, protecting her eggs, flew out of a mangrove and flailed him with her wings. The thought made him chuckle as he followed the trail of low-grumbling voices behind the tent.
A pair of dice held the gaze of huddled men. Whatever amount of money was covered by the fat hand had made them careless. Gambling so near the sergeant when the beach was half a mile away was foolish. After a while he cussed the heat, laughed at a few jokes, then volunteered to be the fader so that all six could play and he could spot the competition.
They counted the money twice before handing it over. On what was about to be the winner’s fourth roll something James Junior said on his sickbed—something about keeping his eye on anybody who threw seven after seven—came to mind.
“Wait a minute,” Timbo said, taking his hands off the money, raising them in the air for emphasis. “I believe this rascal done rung in the peeties.” Growls passed among the men. A gaunt man turned to the offender and drew his razor. Someone grabbed his arm. “If Sweetie right, ain’t no need in you exciting yourself about killing no Spanish. ’Cause you and me fixing to have war right here.” The man snatched the dice for inspection, casting a wild-eyed glance that told the cheater he had a minute to leave with his life.
“Give Sweetie the dice,” someone called out.
“Ace caught a deuce!” the gaunt man yelled at Timothy’s come-out roll and slapped him on the back. “Just stick with it,” he advised, “sooner or later that ill wind gonna blow in another direction.”
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