Jam on the Vine (9780802191571)

by Barnett, Lashonda

  Rumbling machines greeted her later on that morning. The paper had gone through stereotyping and was now on the printing press. Whatever the consequence, she thought as she sat down to her desk, her article was condign publication for the apathetic sheriff and the journalistic assignments Edna Standish had denied her.

  Ivoe appeared too busy to care about the noon edition. She stammered through important phone calls, spilled ink on Mrs. Standish’s desk. She had accomplished very little when Edna Standish came to her that afternoon. “Ivoe, if you expect to be paid for today, you’ll need to stay late. Finish at least one of the tasks I have given you.” The phone calls started shortly thereafter. By two o’clock a line of angry subscribers was out the door: no democratic organ should publish the likes of page three.

  Strangely excited by her firing, Ivoe grabbed a stack of newspapers on her way out of the office, then wondered who, other than Ona Durden, would care to read it.

  .

  ON THE SAFETY OF COLORED GIRLS AND WOMEN

  The Negro female is made the test in everything pertaining to American civilization; its high principles of religion, politics, and morals all receive a shock when a Negro woman’s head appears, upsetting all theories and in a conspicuous manner proving that the structure of American civilization is built higher than the average white man can climb. Denied the limited judicial protection offered to white women, Negro women have no recourse when they are victims of assault, maiming, and rape.

  From whom, then, shall the Negro woman seek help? As this is unquestionably the woman’s era, the question is timely and proper.

  Every race and nation that is at all progressive has its quota of earnest women engaged in creating for themselves a higher sphere of usefulness to the world. This fact is now seen in the struggle for woman’s suffrage. In 1910, Washington gave woman her vote; this year California joined the ranks of those states that insist upon the necessity of a higher plane of integrity and equipped woman with the ballot. The place occupied by woman and child is said to be the best test of a people’s advancement, yet the Negro race is denied the fact of its sacred womanhood. In Burleson County, Negro women and girls are accorded neither protection nor the preservation of their own integrity in this land of their birth.

  On the evening of April 27, in the unincorporated enclave known as Little Tunis, a few miles from the county seat of Starkville, a thirteen-year-old Negro girl on the cusp of womanhood met with danger in the short distance from her home. The Negro girl was accosted by two white boys of the approximate ages of ten and fifteen, who demanded the girl give them her musical instrument. The victim was not killed or raped for refusing to relinquish her most prized possession—a clarinet—she was gashed in the face and left to bleed on the road. It is neither plausible nor possible to launch an investigation of the alleged event, the Starkville sheriff concluded to the victim’s mother. It is a case when a custodian of the law turned his back on the defenseless condition of a victim when he should have provided her his best defense. The presentation of such facts is not flattering to the two white boys or their parents (presumably ignorant of their sons’ vengeful act or else why have they not come forward in the spirit of atonement as civilized persons do?); neither are the events pleasurable to the colored family of the girl victim. Nevertheless they are facts that must be considered.

  It is with feelings of respect when members of the Negro race reflect upon the great work that was accomplished in the nineteenth century for the Negro by truly good men and women of the white race. Now the twentieth century is confronted with the sobering fact that there remains yet more work to do, for the progress of the human race depends on each group giving its best energies to the uplifting of all people. The twentieth century in its infancy is striving to grasp what it pleases to call the “Negro problem,” when it is in reality only a question as to whether justice and right shall rule over injustice and wrong for any and every man regardless of race in this boasted land of freedom. It is at this stage of American existence the question must be asked: To whom will the Negro girl cry “Help”?

  —I. L. Williams

  “Looked to me like that girl learned a thing or two in Austin,” Lemon said, laying aside the Starkville Enterprise.

  “Ain’t done nothing but told the truth. I just hope them crackers don’t come looking for her. Can’t go running off at the mouth like that to them people in they own paper,” Ennis said.

  Lemon shook her head. For weeks her husband had barely talked. Never heard nothing the first time—had to tell him things three, four times. He was gone. Just gone—first his speech, then his listening. She hesitated to tell him what was on her heart when it used to come so easy.

  “Who is you, now, Ennis? Who you supposed to be? I just don’t know you no more.” Dead silence. “You full of hell is what you is. Can’t say a right word around you. Can’t touch you. About the only thing I’m good for is to cook and feed you. I’m wondering how long till you recognize you ain’t the only one around here carrying hurt?”

  “Life ain’t fit to live is all. Well, maybe up there in Starkville, but this here we living ain’t fit for nobody. Don’t matter how hard I work—if I can’t see to my family what bit of good do it come to?”

  “You got yourself so twisted up you ain’t thinking straight.”

  “I’m thinking straight for the first time in a long while. Colored man so used to doing what everybody say, he done forgot how to change. Things got to change for us, Lemon. Lessen they do ain’t no future in tomorrow.”

  “Change?”

  “Damn sick of life testing me. How much can you stand? How much can I take from you? I wants to be the kind of man what gets tested another way. How much you want? How much can you get?”

  “That sounds like the white man’s test. You ain’t had the proper schooling for it.”

  “Should’ve left when I first had a mind to. Now that girl ain’t never gonna be right. When I look at her . . . when I got heart enough to look at her . . . They took something from her, Lemon. Maybe next time they core her like an apple. Leave her for dead.”

  It had taken weeks for the swelling to go down, the plum bruise on Irabelle’s face to fade, yet it seemed to Ennis that the scar had spread all over her.

  .

  Neither rotted corn piled high in the cribs or the blood of slaughtered cattle baked on the land outside the smokehouse could be blamed for the rancid odor. The revolting stench blowing in their direction came from the prison farm, where that morning three colored men had been carried out of the black box. Why they were put inside and for how long they had been there no one knew, but the cause of death was simple: with the temperature well above a hundred, suffocation came quick.

  A few neighbors had heard the confined convicts scream for help, but according to the Enterprise that afternoon, the guards had no reason to think the inmates were in distress or suffering. The commissioners’ investigation found that the guards had not violated any laws or acted negligently. They had “exercised poor judgment.”

  In 1907, when Ivoe started at the Enterprise, she began to pay attention to prison farms like the one in Starkville. Each discovery of a new farm sent her to the large swath of butcher paper hanging on her bedroom wall. Four years after she’d first used Momma’s sewing pins to plot a marker, pinheads dotted the entire map of Texas. Silver clusters showed the counties with the most convicts—Houston, Robertson, and, now, as she pushed the fifth pin into place, Burleson County. From conversations at church she learned that in places like Snook and along the Old River, prisoners did more than pick cotton. Private companies rented convicts for labor associated with corn, coal, timber, and granite. Reverend Greenwood had asked for a show of hands from the people who knew somebody at a prison farm. Her family and one other were the only people without raised hands; some raised both.

  Little Tunis, May 27, 1911

  Dear Miss D
urden,

  Angry letters and a steep drop in subscriptions secured my speedy firing after the publication of “On the Safety of Colored Girls and Women.” It was well worth it. Strangely, apart from my family, you and Miss Stokes remain the essay’s only advocates. Not every sharecropper reads but many do, and no one in Little Tunis has offered so much as a single word about it, including the preacher. I don’t know when I’ll return to Old Elam. I am convinced their only aim is to deafen their pie-in-the-sky God with lowly prayers of strife and tribulations. Not one of them seems interested in lifting a finger for change—only for cotton!

  No word in return for the letters of employment I send out to newspapers every month. Mediocrity dressed in pants regularly sees his name in print when no one will so much as read one of my sentences and consider my potential. Convincing any paper to hire me seems as likely as scratching my ear with my elbow. And I am most needed now. Three colored men were murdered at the prison farm. The details are thin and no one among us has any authority to demand answers, least of all your journalist-in-waiting.

  I have taken work at a boardinghouse in town, making beds, emptying basins. These acts fill me with such bitterness I can scarcely write about it.

  Yours (in the wilderness),

  Ivoe

  Austin, June 18, 1911

  Dear Ivoe,

  I worked so hard today that I thought if death should come, I would be grateful. For hours I joined neighbors in sweeping, bagging up trash, then hauling buckets of water to scrub down the sidewalk and streets—in hundred-degree temperature, mind you. And the worst part: there is no place to put the garbage. The city refuses to take it away. We have designated the backyard of an abandoned house—most upsetting for neighbors in close proximity.

  Austin has passed more building restrictions designed to affect Wheatville residents based on a survey that blames us for the accumulation of garbage and waste in the streets when it is the city’s garbage wagons dumping trash in our neighborhood. I have been busy organizing community meetings, writing letters, placing phone calls—none of which are ever returned!

  We are in for a tiresome battle. Many feel we are being forced out, or rather east. I do believe if I were ever to leave Wheatville, I’d leave Texas altogether.

  How much time has passed since we laid eyes on each other? Do you think you might be able to meet me in Dime Box?

  Keep the faith!

  Ona

  Before she had time to gather her thoughts for a reply to Ona, Irabelle entered the room. The trousers she wore bulged a little at the hip where she kept the sheath from plain sight. With her hair cropped close and skin bronzed by the sun, Irabelle reminded Ivoe of Gauguin’s Polynesian boy soldier as she handed her a single piece of mail. No sender’s name. Truxillo Street. Houston. The Freeman’s editor was impressed by her submission, but before she could saddle up to hope, the word apologies stood out like an unwanted penny. Apology number one—for the delayed response, caused by a fire that had destroyed their offices. Her letter had been slow arriving to the space the newspaper now occupied in Houston’s Light Guard Armory. Apology number two—the cryptic return address, a tactic employed by many colored newspapers to protect against organized white vigilantes. With great regret, the editor could not do as well as the Enterprise in offering a job.

  “Ivoe, somebody’s bound to want you soon,” Irabelle said, glancing at the pile of clippings from the editorial she inspired. She admired her sister for wanting to help colored people and to set the record straight for whites. If anyone asked her, civilizing the white race would take a lot more than words. Irabelle couldn’t understand why white people instigated so much trouble when they lived better, had more opportunity. Let them tell it, they had created the world and everything in it, so why meddle with the lowly Negro? Why not leave him alone to his own ruinous ways? It was enough to sow confusion in anybody’s head.

  To straighten out the tangled contempt, Irabelle played her music and devised ways to protect herself. She kept the scissors to her hair—wearing it short would draw less attention and give them nothing to pull. She grew long nails—for clawing. Each meal reminded her of the great work her teeth could do. After Timbo gave her “something to cut with” she practiced on everything from fish to trees. She tore out the fear she had lived with since that day heading home from the Starks’. White boys grew wrong. They grew into terrifying white men, She nurtured a lustful eye for men like her father, men the color of the sky before dawn, obsidian black, ink black, oil black, raven black, devil black. Well, if white boys and their fathers were God (and they were, according to the pictures in the Sunday school books), she wanted the devil.

  Little Tunis had a few of these men. They talked loud, laughed louder; you could always hear them coming. They worked hard, but on an off day you could find one on the porch or out in the yard delighting everybody simply by breathing. A beer drunk too fast brought a belch, and his children fell out from laughter. Undercooked crowder peas made him fart, and his woman cut her eyes and called him trifling in a tone you might call prideful. The old men dreamed as young men do—of big satin thighs, fluty-voiced laughter, a good swat on the behind. “Good God,” he praised in a whisper, whenever a young woman just learning to carry her beauty passed him. Sometimes it was his own woman walking by his porch chair that he caught by the hem and pulled close so that her behind was near enough to bite. Children or whatever company he had snickered. Who could tell if his pull or their snickering tapped her hard bark, but “You . . . so . . . naaa-sty” trickled from his woman’s mouth in a syrupy drawl. No child anywhere had ever been given such a sweet reprimand. He could act ugly too. Sometimes the cabin’s wood frame bulged, the sagging windows rattled, the porch shuddered and shook, his voice boomed and she screamed. But walk past the same cabin later and hear it hum. The humming told who had won, the fight settled between her legs. Like everything you love too much, these men were feared. Why else would there be so many pins on Ivoe’s map and a black box a hundred yards from their door?

  .

  For two weeks Ennis’s mind had been fixed on the journey but breaking the news didn’t come any easier.

  “Any time you can haul three dead colored men out a box and not a damn thing is done about it . . . something got to change. You see Al-Halif gone after what they done. Just up and took his family. Didn’t leave it to prayer neither. Left his business and everything.”

  “Yeah, well, you blame him?”

  “Naw, I don’t blame him. I want to be right behind him. He did what he was supposed to do.”

  “I know why Ivoe wants to leave—two years of city schooling and she’s biggity, but you, Ennis. We done been down this road before. We might not have much but what we have we own. We gonna be colored wherever we go. I don’t see what leaving’s gonna fix.”

  “I’ve decided I’m going on without y’all.”

  Lemon stopped busying herself in the kitchen. “You got to take me with you then . . . Ivoe and Irabelle can make do. Timbo will see to that. Ain’t nobody getting sick around here long as there’s breath in May-Belle’s body. Take me with you.” She could already feel it, emptiness too heavy to carry.

  “Easier for a man to find work when he by hisself.”

  Lemon opened the cupboard and reached behind the flour for the jug of whiskey. “Where you thinking on going?”

  “Kansas. It ain’t just them, the children, what supposed to make us proud. We they parents. Ain’t they supposed to know some kind of pride for they papa?”

  “They love you, Ennis.” And you know I do.

  “Loving and priding is two different feelings. I can’t even protect them. How you think that makes me feel?”

  Something about the way Ennis turned his glass let her know he was already gone. She sank, wounded, into a chair. Here she was worrying, planting, cooking, cleaning, and he had been planning his escape. She took a swig, s
et her glass down hard on the table, and looked him straight in the eye. “What you talking is foolishness. We done seen our way clear of ugly before. We gonna see our way clear of this. You not going nowhere.”

  “Lemon, I’m fixing to hurt somebody real bad if I stay around here. Already watched a man die.”

  “Ssth. I feared something had a hold of you. How you living with that? How you take a man’s life and not tell me?”

  “I ain’t took his life. Just didn’t do nothing to help him get it back when I saw it getting away from him. That’s why you got to let me go. I ain’t no kind of good for y’all no way. Restless in my mind . . . and can’t feel. Can’t feel you. Can’t feel the children. Only person I feel for is myself. Wrong for a man to feel like the only life he can save is his own. He just got that in him. God put it in him to want to see to others.” He would work until he raised means to buy a plot and send for them. A year, maybe two, he figured.

  With the gloaming came dread. Lemon turned away from the kitchen window, where she had watched Ennis talk to Timbo out on the porch until her head began to throb. No use in him telling the boy how to look after them when Ennis was the only one fit to do it. Didn’t he know that by now? All week a bad feeling had seized her. No other way to describe longing for somebody not gone, grieving somebody not dead. That evening during their last family supper she felt as light as dandelion dust. For thirty-one years she had studied that man, knew how to care for him, how to leave him be, how to love him. What if he needed her? Or didn’t he think he would?

  In the next room she could hear her husband talking to Ivoe and Irabelle. “Be a while ’fore folks know y’all here alone. I want it that way, that’s how come I’m leaving tonight. Let peoples think what they want. When I left, where I’m gone, and how long I’m staying ain’t nobody’s business.”