Jam on the Vine (9780802191571)

by Barnett, Lashonda

  Irabelle doubted the horse’s night vision but he assured her the mare could see better than him. And he wouldn’t drive her too fast. Lemon felt her stomach drop. His feet were like lead walking to their bedroom, where he stood in the doorway a long time just looking at her. When he finally closed the distance between them, he pulled her chin up and kissed her.

  Before he opened the first drawer she knew the things he would take and why. Her chest tightened as she watched him pick things out, knowing for certain exactly how he weighed them in his mind. Traveling fast meant traveling light. He filled a gunnysack with his razor and strap, a few tools, two clean shirts, and underwear. “Afterwhile somebody gonna come to you about my shed. Don’t worry about what’s in there. Go ahead and rent it. Should fetch you a few extra dollars a month.” He took the small bronze carving etched with her image off the wall, explaining his plan one more time. He would find work, live cheap, and save money. Once he set their new world to spinning in a town where colored people could live in peace, he would return for them. He promised.

  “Till I get back, don’t give away nothing you know I love.”

  They watched Ennis rattle to the end of their road, stop his horse, turn on his wagon seat, and wave. After Ivoe and Irabelle went inside the cabin, Lemon eyed the chair, his chair, in the corner of the porch. If she sat down, she might not get up. Before she could go inside, she had to figure out what came next. The answer was in front of her like the flowers at the edge of the porch bending this way and that. Her feelings were all in the blue sage the night breeze was having its way with. If life could treat a flower like that, why should she be any different? Stand. She just had to stand. But how when the only somebody to prop her up was gone? She leaned against the cabin, wrapped herself tightly, and looked out into the night sky, taking the journey with Ennis in her mind—past the cornfields . . . orchard . . . beyond Starkville . . . on the road to Snook. She had never been farther than that. It was pitch black when she started reciting the eleven verses of the Surah Adh-Dhuha to ensure her husband’s safe return.

  Ennis. Ennis. Ennis.

  .

  News of Ennis’s flight spread through Little Tunis like water on a grease fire. The Williams family was living proof that working hard and sticking together was all a colored family needed to get by. So, why did he leave? Where did he go? For a little while the boisterous banter of children and guffawing of grown women happy at the heavy thud of their men lumbering down the road at day’s end was silenced by these questions that hung on the tongue as if rooted there. Some said they understood his leaving, what with that uppity wife and the bitter fruit she bore him. That man-boy of theirs was about as handy as a back pocket on a shirt. Couldn’t be depended on for shit. People hated to see him coming, talking about he had something to sell you. And owed everybody. Fanny should’ve known better than letting Roena marry that boy. And that oldest girl was strange as snow in July. Went away for a couple of years then come back asking folks to stand they irons up, stop folding clothes—to talk about a book. Who had even seen the inside of a library with them changing the hours for Negro admission whenever they got the gumption? Ruining that pretty one with music. What Lemon think? That she could keep Ennis cooped up in that strange house forever? Probably talked down on him too much. Or acted like that thing of hers was too good to share. Big ole man like Ennis, you can’t be stingy with your stuff, you got to satisfy. Shit, the man was probably tired of resting on a mattress every night when he should’ve been settling down deep between warm thighs. More than a few were willing to oblige him but he never asked. Lemon had her something too, didn’t she? Faithful and honest and didn’t owe nobody nothing. Never seen him gambling or drinking up the family money. Didn’t beat on her or the children. About the worse thing anybody could recall Ennis doing was cussing a little. Hell, what more she want? Now they would just sit back and see how high and mighty Lemon was when the door was off the hinge or the roof needed mending. They could help, but shit naw, they wouldn’t.

  “Anything with a heart still beating when it catch afire and burn up bound to stank,” May-Belle said to Junebug and Pinky, when they asked why the dead chickens smelled so bad. Her craggy face bent in disgust, she moved about the squash pen, reaching for any gourd not scorched, whispering, “Ashhadu anna Muhammaden rasul-ul-lah.”

  “Nobody was hurt. That’s the only thing that matters,” Roena said, sweeping up the shards and soil from a broken pot.

  Beneath the scent of singed feathers, Lemon detected the hint of sulfur that precedes a storm as she canvassed her garden: disheveled flower tubs and trampled vegetable beds. Pots and pans used to carry water a few hours ago were scattered over the yard. She watched her children try to order the chaos and cupped her hands over her mouth to stifle her cries.

  In the wee hours of the morning she had rolled over, looked out the window, and seen the outhouse in flames. There was no time for modesty; head uncovered and robeless she shook her daughters: “Ivoe, Irabelle, get up. Hurry now. We on fire. Grab something for water. Timbo went to the well yesterday. Water’s on the back porch. Hurry now before the fire spread to the cabin.” Lemon had tried to salvage her garden—the tomatoes, peppers, okra. Pounds of sustenance for family and business had been set afire. She ran to check on her daughters. There was no way to breach the blaze. The chickens trapped in the coop were fully engulfed. “Y’all do something before we lose everything!” Frantic, they drew water from the washtub, spilling most before they doused the flames.

  The screeches of the chickens stopped long before the fire was out.

  A few days after the fire, Lemon rose early to visit May-Belle. She was greeted by jars of her jam, stacked high and in neat rows on her porch. Some of the jars were half-empty. She carried them into the kitchen and was filling the cupboard when Ivoe entered.

  “Just as long as nobody asks for their money back.”

  “They don’t want their money back, Momma. They want us to leave,” Ivoe said. All week Irabelle had reported the loud clucking of old hens at church. Not since the schoolhouse in ’98 had Reverend Greenwood posted deacons outside the church to keep watch during service, “less they do us like they did Lemon’s chickens.” It had been years since they’d had any trouble out of white folks. Stood to reason one of Lemon’s children would be behind it. Didn’t she know any better than to write something like that?

  .

  In the five years since Papa left, life in the Brazos Bottoms had gone from bad to worst. In 1916, the Starkville City Council issued a series of mandates. A new curfew was set, prohibiting colored people from holding evening fraternal meetings and worship services. They were banned from the Starkville post office every day except for Tuesday, between the hours of noon and two, when most people worked. Now Ivoe had to travel miles, usually on some neighbor’s wagon, to post a letter to Ona. She never ceased her inquiries to newspapers. Occasionally she received a short note with praise for her work, but more often her query was met by this painful question: Did she have more recent clippings to submit? Hostage to a dreary life, she often wondered about Berdis, imagined her playing in a London or Paris music hall. The pages of her calendar turned slow until September.

  Once a year, at Labor Day, she took an early bus to meet Ona in Lee County. The hunt for venues accepting two colored women for lunch depleted their time the first year. Thereafter, each hauled sweets and savories especially chosen for the day. As bus stations go, the depot in Dime Box was amenable; they lunched in the small area designated for coloreds, which lacked the clean tables and chairs of the white section but held benches. After lunch they braved the steps of the Presbyterian church, where they took a bench, held hands, laughed and talked. (Ona dared anyone to bar them from the church. If they tried, she was prepared with a letter that stated her affiliation with Willetson, built and maintained by the Cumberland Presbyterian Missionary.) The four o’clock bus always arrived too soon, as Ivoe searc
hed for words . . . “Stay near.”

  In the harvest of 1916, the screen door nearly rattled off its hinge, causing Lemon to jump and May-Belle to shake a little, then return to carving out biscuits from the dough rolled out on the table before her.

  “Ivoe, you done always been crazy about the mail. But this here is getting to be too much. Knocking folks down, running out of here when you hear the man coming . . . then bringing the house down when you come back empty-handed. Whatever it is you expecting . . . What are you expecting?” Lemon said.

  “A word from any newspaper that will have me can’t come soon enough. I can’t wait to get away from here. Folks walking around just as lost as they want to be. Looks like it’s bound to stay that way. Little Tunis—land of the lost colored people.”

  “I’m still waiting to hear what running’s going to prove,” Lemon began, her voice coming out hoarse. The world was broken. Seemed liked patience had slipped through the crack and run off somewhere. First it carried away Ennis. Now it was fixing to take Ivoe. “Sometimes you got to bend low to follow through.”

  “We already bending. Can’t we just follow through to someplace else? Momma, there’s nothing for us here. Even the mill’s closing. Now what you think Timbo’s going to do when it close—but take the dice back up?”

  May-Belle looked up. “My, my, ain’t you running off at the mouth this evening. Mind who you sassing and remember where you sitting. Your feets is still under your momma’s table, girl. Hush with all that foolishness about going away from the only home you got.”

  “Not for long.”

  “Ivoe, I’m not fixing to sit here and let you cross-talk me,” Lemon said.

  This evening, Ivoe could not back down. The last nine years in Little Tunis had taken her hope and her patience.

  “Momma, surely you don’t expect me to stay here. I’ve been home nine years . . . I’ll be around here old as Methuselah doing the same meaningless chores.”

  “Grow you some patience, girl. Always take longer than you think to make things better.”

  “I can grow all the patience in the world. Life for me will not play out in Little Tunis. And if you think Ira—”

  Lemon rose, bristling. “Irabelle is a child—”

  “Irabelle is eighteen and ready to charge hell with an ice bucket. You think she gonna stay here for much longer?”

  “Hand me them onions. And what you suppose we all gonna do in this left-for place? We don’t know nothing about living no place else. Besides, when something belongs to you it’s more than a notion to just walk off and leave it.”

  “We can go to any city we can make it to, Momma. In the city they make and sell everything anybody could possibly need.” Ivoe tried to keep her voice even. “We’ll find jobs. We’ll make do. And before you know it we’ll have more than we ever had.”

  “Listen at you. To hear all them grand plans somebody would think I’m talking to the Duchess of Windsor. I’m too old to start over. Don’t know nothing about no city living nohow. White folks made cities—just another place for us to work indoors. The country belongs to us.”

  “Show me a paper that says anything around here belong to us.”

  “Girl, I’m not studying on no papers. That’s between white folks and they God. Just ’cause you put a price on something don’t mean you own it. Paying for it don’t make it yours neither. ”

  Ivoe already regretted what she had to say. “Momma, what if Papa never comes back . . . because he can’t.”

  “He ain’t dead,” May-Belle said, flashing Ivoe a stern look. “He done lived in two places. Left the last place on a white sun. They took him on a yellow sun, and they letting him go on a red sun. When he come back won’t be no sun at all. A person don’t always come back to you the way he left or the way you remember him. He ain’t dead.”

  Listening to old people talk was a little like trying to catch and hold on to the rain, Ivoe thought. Your hand got wet but you couldn’t carry it far.

  “If he is dead, it’s Momma’s fault,” Irabelle said. “We could’ve left with him if she didn’t go on and on about this little shack. I wanted to go with him.”

  “Irabelle, start the stove for me,” Lemon said. “I don’t want to hear no more talk about Papa or leaving, less they giving away money wherever it is y’all going.” She looked at the clock. Ten after six, but before she could begin to worry the twins shot past her and Roena closed the door behind, yelling after them: “Draw Bicey a picture . . . Touch the typewriter keys gently . . . Leave the clarinet alone.”

  Lemon wiped her tears with her shoulder.

  “Let me finish peeling the onions, Lemon. You ain’t looking yourself. You all right?” Roena said.

  “Every time I stand up, my mind sits down. Doing too much is all, but like they say, ain’t nobody ever drowned in sweat.” Lemon sat down with a large wooden bowl in the vise of her knees, peeling potatoes she tossed into a bucket at her feet. Ivoe sat close to the grate reading her newspaper. Roena and Irabelle sat at the table playing cards with Junebug and Pinky. It was nearly seven; they expected Timbo to show up with more coal for the grate at any moment and then they could prepare dinner.

  “Roena, you quiet tonight,” Lemon said.

  “Your son—” The veins on Roena’s temple swelled as she took a handkerchief from her pocket and wiped Junebug’s nose with unnecessary force.

  “What he do now?”

  “—we didn’t have no business marrying is all. Well, Lemon, it’s true.”

  “Can’t put the rain back in the sky,” May-Belle said.

  “He a fool. I say to him, ‘Timothy, don’t you want to go somewhere? Don’t you want to see something? Don’t you have no interests other than dice?’ He don’t pay me no mind. Still chasing down a game.”

  “What game?” Pinky said in a deep tone, groggy from sleep, that made them all think of Ennis.

  “Lemon, you think the time gonna ever come when you ready to leave here?” Roena said.

  Ivoe looked up from the paper.

  “Ssth. You too? You and Ivoe the most leavingest gals I done seen. What make y’all generation so restless?”

  “Just ain’t you, Lemon. That’s all,” Roena said with sullen politeness.

  Lemon stopped peeling the potatoes and turned around: “What ain’t me?”

  “In the eight years me and Timbo been married and the ten years I watched you before that, I’ve always known you to tend to things. People too. Some of us was put here to do that and you one of them. I am too, that’s why I watched you so. You always been able to see a thing before it rightly reveal itself. So I know you see ain’t nobody ’round here thriving no more. Nobody. I don’t mean you no disrespect. All I ask is that wherever you go, you tell Timbo to gather up his family and come go with you. We can’t stay here. Naw. Sure can’t. Time for a change.”

  Lemon heaved a sigh. How quickly age had come for her. She blamed it on change. At fifty-five years old she had never heard so much about change. What did any of them know about change? She had felt some change of her own—the way Ennis took up less space in her mind, Ivoe’s impatience, and Irabelle, the way she walked around you’d think nobody had ever lost anybody but her. What more change did anybody expect from her?

  Pinky climbed down from his chair. “Bicey, can you tell us a story?”

  Lemon was nobody’s grandmomma, big mama neither. She was Bicey. Soon as the twins commenced to walking good, they’d climbed up her porch steps, flung open the door, and ran in her house just like it was theirs. No hello or nothing. Went on like that for a few years on account of Timbo not raising them proper—just letting them grow up like corn. She couldn’t keep a quiet tongue about the twins’ behavior but had sense enough to make her peace in a way that wouldn’t make Roena feel bad. “Junebug and Pinky just taking over—I don’t know what to think” became the official gra
ndmother’s hello. Come time for the boys to leave, well, they left just like they came, slamming the door, running wild out in the yard. Soon as they got up some size, she pulled them off to the side. “Rascals, that ain’t no way to leave nobody’s house. You walk natural-like so you don’t make folks feel they ain’t hosted you proper. Don’t go running like you can’t wait to be gone. Any time you leave my house you supposed to say bye, see?”

  “Tell a scary one, Bicey.” Junebug grinned, revealing a gap where two front teeth should be.

  Time wasn’t the only truth-teller. Blood will also tell. When Junebug smiled, he was every bit his grandfather, not only in name. “Bicey fixing to cook you something to eat. Irabelle, tell them babies a story.”

  “Y’all just don’t know. Papa was the one that could get a story told. Couldn’t he, Ivoe? Y’all ever hear about the ghostdog?”

  Lemon looked at her daughter. She didn’t have sense enough to keep memories out her mouth.

  Junebug shook his head. Pinky crossed his legs like an old man and sucked his thumb with an alert expression that made Irabelle giggle. “It’s a real good story but scary, scary.”

  “Irabelle, go on and tell it if you gonna tell it. I’m not fixing to do all this cooking by myself. Not when it’s two and a half grown women sitting here with me.”

  Lemon had Ennis on her mind when she started to peel the last potato. She understood the reason he left them, but what was keeping him so long? In the five years since he’d left only one letter had come, September 1911: “I am gud. Wurkin in Okluhomey. To old to work lik this. Soon wil leev for Cansus. Soon wil come for my famlee lack I promussed. Lvoe, Ennis.” He did well with just the little bit of tutoring she had given him when they first met. Now, for the first time, she wondered if anybody had helped with the letter, if he had found a friend, or . . . She hated to question. Questions made it harder to keep a promise. Before Timbo came to the world thirty-three years ago wasn’t nothing for men to just walk off, looking for whatever they thought freedom owed them. She was wrong not to know better, wrong to think Ennis wouldn’t return. After his return and Timbo’s birth, she was wrong for not sitting both men down—asking her husband’s forgiveness, telling James about his son. About the only right thing she did was to make a promise to herself to never doubt Ennis again. The way she saw it, they both had promises to keep.