Reverend Singleton circled a block of neatly painted wood houses with shaded porches, deep green lawns, magnolias and dogwood. "This is where the white folks live," Reverend Singleton said. A woman working in her flower beds stood to watch the Negro man and the young woman driving by. No smile, no greeting. Celeste knew that look, called it the Grosse Pointe stare. Nigger, what are you doing in this part of town? She hoped the woman wouldn't call the police, accuse them of casing the neighborhood for a robbery.
"Do any Negro people live in town?" She stared at the set-back houses, the neatness and calm beauty of it all compared to the drab, rundown look of Freshwater Road.
"Not in the town limits."
Reverend Singleton came back by the Pearl River County Administration Building. The sheriff's car sat in front of it. "Can't go in that front door, either. But that's exactly where we're going when we're ready." People glided slowly in and out in their light-colored dresses, white sandals, summer suits, straw hats. Celeste wanted to walk in with them, stop the insanity of some people trooping around to some other inconvenient door. Not yet. Probably cool and dark inside there, clean and with echoes like City Hall or the Court Building in Detroit.
"I'ma pick you up every morning at nine and take you over to the church for freedom school, then take you back to Mrs. Owens in the afternoon."
"You sure I can't walk there from Mrs. Owens's house?" Celeste was hoping he'd say that during the daylight hours, it would probably be fine.
"Not here. My wife, Etta, will fetch you for the voter registration classes in the evening or I will, and we'll both be driving you home after that." He was back at the traffic light. "Most important to stick to the routine. If you break it, that means something's gone wrong."
"I understand." Gone wrong meant gone missing. It was the breaking of the routine that alerted the Jackson office that Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman were in trouble. No phone call. No check-in. Three gone in one heartbeat.
They passed a road sign: Bogalusa, East, 25 miles, New Orleans, South, 65 miles. Reverend Singleton headed south. Matt had passed this way yesterday, taken the road to Bogalusa. She wanted to tell the reverend to keep going all the way to New Orleans, take her to the airport, and send her home.
In what seemed like a mile or so, he made another turn into a rough sand and gravel road leading to the St. James African Methodist Episcopal Church. He told her they wouldn't stop, but he wanted her to see it. He had pride in his voice. The whitewashed church with a stocky bell tower in the center of its roof sat in a clearing with spurts of weedy grass and gravel, surrounded on three sides by dense stands of long-needled pines, live oaks, and a magnolia or two. The trees stood as shelter from the badgering sun. They offered dark passages of seeming coolness where not a ray of light shone through. She searched the grounds for the outhouse but saw only a water spigot on the side of the building. "The church has a real toilet?" She couldn't contain her excitement at the prospect of working every day in a place with a real toilet, then chastised herself for making such a big deal out of indoor plumbing.
"There's one off my office. I couldn't manage with no phone and no toilet either. Unfortunately, the church body still must use the outhouse. It's well behind the building. You and only you can use the toilet whenever you like." He drove back over the bumpy church road.
"What about the children, Reverend Singleton?" She knew she'd let the children use that bathroom when he was away from the church, make them promise with their blood that they wouldn't tell.
"It's a very small toilet, Celeste. And children can be messy." He turned back on the highway heading in the direction of New Orleans.
She'd be the one cleaning after them, but she didn't care. A toilet meant luxury here and the children should have the experience. But then, she thought, that might create a problem in their own homes, dissatisfaction with what they had. Perhaps she wouldn't let them use it after all, but she'd never let them know that she sometimes used it. The last thing she wanted them to think was that she saw herself above them, more worthy of the nicer things in life than they.
Reverend Singleton drove her by his own neat, flower-fronted house on another side road off the highway to meet his wife. Etta Singleton, a plain woman with a quiet demeanor, was conservatively dressed in a belted day dress with a white collar and mid-arm sleeves with matching white cuffs. She was small next to him. She spoke with no accent at all as she welcomed Celeste to Pineyville and told her she looked forward to seeing her in church on Sunday. She couldn't have been more unlike the city man who was her husband. Riding with Reverend Singleton was like driving the Detroit streets with Shuck, making all of his stops, greeting his friends. It seemed he knew the entire world, and they knew him as well. This world was smaller, but it was the reverend's domain.
The highway out of Jackson had been wide open, all but treeless. This same road, Route ii, out of Hattiesburg yesterday had been lined with pine trees, but never so eerily forbidding as it now was. Celeste felt the nearness of water, but she couldn't see it. She wondered how this inauspicious road led to someplace as joyous sounding as New Orleans.
"We got stopped yesterday on the way down from Jackson." She kept her eyes peeled to the road, to the turn-offs. No surprises, please, she prayed.
"Mrs. Owens told me." He turned his head toward the window and nodded at an inlet of water edged by wild grasses, trees with moss hanging like ragged curtains, a hint of mystery in his voice. "No bayous in Michigan."
Reverend Singleton wasn't going to dwell on the negatives. He was right. If you started thinking of all the beatings and killings, you'd pack it in. Celeste's skin itched. She stared at the marshy land. The earth seemed to tip off into water until finally it was impossible to tell where the land ended and the water began, with roots and tall grass interwoven.
"Along here, it's spurs of the Pearl River. Creeks and bayous." Reverend Singleton enjoyed showing her the sights around Pineyville. He was a takecharge kind of man. That, she thought, seemed deeply southern, too.
The landscape had a dreamy quality. She imagined stepping on what seemed to be grass and then sinking into the black watery muck. What a place to bury the mysteriously disappeared Negro men of Mississippi-the ones who ran terrified in the night, caught by bloodhounds, beaten, shot, thrown into this swampy marsh. She saw again in her mind the photo of Emmett Till's battered and bloated body pulled from the Tallahatchie River, thought again of Leroy Boyd James and the unnamed others. And at no hour of the day or night did she not think of Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman, disappeared from the face of the Mississippi earth.
On the east side of the road, the land was planted in neat orchards of trees that were as different from what was on the other side of the road as night from day.
"Tung trees." Reverend Singleton must have been watching her out of the corner of his eye because he certainly never seemed to take his eyes off the road, never stopped checking his rearview mirror.
Celeste heard "tongue" and had a quizzical look on her face. Reverend Singleton spelled the word.
"The oil from the nuts goes into paints and varnishes. Not as beautiful as the piney woods, but they bring money to the county." He was sweating unmercifully, even with the thumping breeze blustering in the opened windows. He kept his handkerchief at the ready.
By the time they reached the towns of Derby and McNeill, Mrs. Owens's breakfast had drugged Celeste into lethargy. In Carriere, they turned off Highway ii. Her eyelids lowered to half-mast and her head bobbed to the seat back. They turned away from the deserted town center, less interesting looking than Pineyville's, and drove on an alarmingly bumpy blacktop road through a jungle of trees and hanging vines before turning in through an iron gate surrounded by tall iron fencing, rust patches up and down the bars, that went as far as she could see to the right and left.
They drove up a hard-packed earthen road bordered on both sides with immense live oaks and stopped on the gravel driveway in front of a house that stood high above the gro
und with steep stairs leading to a deep wraparound porch. It couldn't have been more unlike the leaning shanty houses of Freshwater Road and even the "white folks" houses in Pineyville. It was a plantation house, a grand stark white mansion with black shutters nestled in a forest of liquid green. Palms and banana trees nestled in bunches near the base of the porch. The land around the house was overgrown with foliage and vines, and it was all strangely beautiful. Celeste imagined a slave girl in a cotton smock would emerge to direct them to the back.
Instead, a large dark woman in a blue tent dress, with a brilliant blue and gold cloth around her head in a kind of citadel, came out of the carved double doors. She beamed a canyon of a smile that seemed to be studded with diamonds. Her gold hoop earrings and her finger rings glittered in the snatches of sunlight that filtered through the shade trees. She waited for them at the top of the stairs, her remarkable teeth whiter than Momma Bessie's sheets.
Celeste stood on the stone walkway staring at the immense house and the grand woman at the top of the stairs. She turned to see again the godly live oaks they'd just driven under, the branches on either side overarching to form a tunnel of iridescent green with black veins branching through. The sun shrank back, rebuffed by the power and grace of those trees. The balmy air had a streak of coolness in it. This was far away from the beach-like sand of Freshwater Road; she was standing in a primordial forest where anything that dropped to earth took root.
Reverend Singleton took the steep stairs two at a time. The woman hugged him and kissed him on both cheeks. Something in her eyes when she looked at him, powerful enough to read even from the bottom of the stairs. Celeste walked up to greet the woman, who had the smooth face and vibrant eyes of a precocious teenager. She ushered them into the house speaking in French, laughing through the few words of welcome that Celeste could understand.
A foyer with silent ceiling fans whirling and great potted palms in every corner opened onto a living room with shuttered French windows and polished hardwood floors. The large room was filled with an assortment of furniture-an overstuffed chaise lounge with a bright print fabric thrown over it, a Victorian sofa, floor lamps and fringed table lamps, an antique record player with stacks of records in brown paper covers next to it, and a grand piano in the center of the floor. The room's coloring reminded Celeste of a Cezanne still life. She gathered herself, remembered she'd been to the big-time cities with Shuck, knew how to walk into a luxurious place. But she never expected all this in Mississippi.
"Celeste, I want you to meet Miss Sophie Lewis, as she's the one who's helping finance our church. Now, if I could only convince her to come on a Sunday morning and sing for us." Reverend Singleton's face expanded to hold his enormous glee at being in the presence of Miss Sophie Lewis.
Celeste had heard both this woman's name and her luxurious voice somewhere along the way. She knew her to be an opera singer of world renown, but why would she live in the swampy primordial forest of southern Mississippi?
The woman evaded a direct response to Reverend Singleton's invitation as her arm swept them toward the sofa. She pulled a fabric cord beside the fireplace mantel and within seconds, a starchy looking Negro man in a white waistcoat served them iced tea with tiny cloth napkins and a plate of thin irregular cookies. He bowed as he left the room. Celeste gawked and had the feeling she'd dropped into the rabbit hole.
"Pralines." The woman nodded at the cookies. "You're from Michigan, then?" She sat on a high-backed, wood-framed chair that might have come from the court of a Spanish queen. "Reverend Singleton told me."
"Yes, ma'am." Celeste straightened her spine and set her iced tea glass on the small lace doily atop the mahogany coffee table. She wasn't sure if the question had to do with the state or the school. She thought of launching into her usual recitation of planning on law school. It's what she always said though she barely believed it herself. Her choice of classes for two years had ranged from anthropology to Middle Eastern Studies to English literature. In truth, she didn't have a clue as to what lay ahead.
"That's good." The woman nodded, taking Celeste in. "And has the good reverend told you of his own illustrious background?"
Before Celeste could open her mouth, the woman told her that Reverend Singleton had a master of divinity degree from the University of Chicago and that he'd been offered a position at a church in Seattle that boasted a large, integrated congregation. He declined it to come back south to lift his people out of despondency. Sophie Lewis's pride in Reverend Singleton beamed out of her like a searchlight. Celeste caught something else in it, too, that the woman wanted her to know she wasn't the only one here from a big white northern university.
Miss Lewis kept her attention on Reverend Singleton, whose chest protruded through his buttoned suit jacket. "Now, what's new in Pineyville?" She said it with a rumbling mirth just underneath. "How you manage to stay there is beyond me, though I'm glad you do. If I couldn't escape every few months, I don't know...."
"But your house-" Celeste imagined herself ensconced on the chaise with a stack of books and a telephone. She noticed that she wasn't sweating for the first time in over a week, and wondered dreamily if there was a way she could do her work from this place. The thought drifted through her head like a fantasy.
"My father built this house, Celeste. He came here from New Orleans when Storyville closed down. I bet you don't know anything about that?" She smiled an alluring kind of smile.
"No, I don't." She sure liked the sound of it. Storyville. A land just off the map of Oz, a place with houses like this one, cool and calm, rich and sensual.
"It was a red light district, so to speak, with grand houses of ill-reputefree flowing sin, you might say. My father owned houses in the area. He sold them all and built this. His hideaway. Nobody knows, including me, how he survived it all as a Negro man. I'm not sure I want to know. My mother's a good deal younger than he was."
Reverend Singleton's head went from side to side in the "it never ends" wag. Celeste wanted to hear the whole family saga.
"I won't stay here after my mother passes on. My father sat on that porch with a shotgun daring anybody to cross his gate until the day he died. I remember that. He was an old man."
Celeste wondered how many times he'd had to shoot. She imagined the old Negro man sitting on his wide front porch with a shotgun across his knees, sipping a mint julep with a servant by his side. From his porch, he had a clear shot straight up that alley of live oaks.
Reverend Singleton cleared his throat and ferried the conversation toward an update on the movement in southern Mississippi and the plans for Pineyville. He ended by telling Miss Lewis that the timing of the summer work had to do with the Democratic National Convention coming in August in Atlantic City. "We have to do our best to register as many Negroes as possible, be ready for the November election."
Celeste joined in. "One Man, One Vote will challenge the all-white Mississippi delegation in Atlantic City." She eyed the pralines.
"I see. The signatures of registered Negro voters will be needed for the challenge." Sophie Lewis knew the plan. "But the point is to get them registered for the next election and beyond."
Celeste nibbled a praline. "Yes, ma'am." The cookie turned to pure sugar in her mouth with pecans all through. She wanted to wrap a few of them in a napkin to eat later that night, her mind wandering around the cool room and examining the vases, the fabrics, the still life paintings on the walls. Had Geneva Owens ever been invited here? What other connections did this woman have to Pineyville? Maybe she was just a woman of means who wanted to stay in the background but tried to be involved in her own way. There were whites, too, all over the South supporting the movement with money for lawyers, calling in favors to protect people. Why not a Negro woman doing the same thing?
When Reverend Singleton said they'd have to be getting on, Miss Lewis took a thick envelope from the pocket of her great tent dress and gave it to him. "This is from New Orleans. I imagine some from other places as well.
And, from me."
Reverend Singleton stuffed the plump envelope into the inside breast pocket of his jacket. "We'll be starting on Thursday. This will give us bail money and help the ones who get fired from their jobs once we go to see Mr. Heywood. Maybe even another row or two of pews. And thanks to Almighty God for sending us this young woman to help with this work."
Celeste nodded to him, the weight of it pressing down on her again. It sounded so grand, so important, and she just a nearly motherless child from Detroit. He spoke as if she was a seasoned volunteer like Matt and Margo. The instructions from orientation squirmed around in her mind, alternating with feelings of fear and general ineptness toward what lay ahead. She was crawling toward the moment of absolute engagement, and the movement had already taken her by the elbows and rushed her to the starting line, her feet dragging in the dirt. What if she registered no one? Would Miss Lewis understand? Would Reverend Singleton think of her as a failure? Would Pineyville be the same in August when she left as it was right now? The questions single-filed through her mind.
"May I use your restroom?" She wasn't going to leave this house without using the restroom. She wanted to flush a toilet, to put her hands under a faucet and turn on the water, have the water pool in a real face bowl.
Sophie Lewis directed her to the foyer and to the center of the house. She entered a guest restroom completely encased in white marble with gold fixtures molded into leopards. There were tiny balls of perfumed soap piled on a gold-rimmed dish and satin-inlaid guest towels fanned out on the marble sink. Silk flowers in crystal vases decorated the marble top. She flushed the toilet and saw the clear water enter the bowl, then flushed again just for the hell of it. Finally, she sat on the toilet seat, not even bothering to line it with toilet paper. No need for squatting here. She washed her hands using the perfumed soap and let the water run into the porcelain face bowl, then dried her hands on a guest towel, folding it neatly and placing it to the side. She had an urge to lock herself in the bathroom and never come out. She stared at her darkening face in the oversized gilded mirror, remembering the week of life under the scorching sun in Jackson before she came to Pineyville. Jiggaboo girl. At this rate, by summer's end she'd be as dark as Ramona. No high-yellow quips then. Wilamena would pass her on the street and not even know her.
Freshwater Road Page 11