Reverend Singleton and Miss Lewis waited for her in the foyer. At the top of the porch stairs, the woman pinned Celeste with intent in her big eyes. "You've taken on a great challenge, young lady, and you will succeed. I will hear of nothing less." She kissed Celeste and Reverend Singleton on both cheeks and said, "Adieu."
She expected success. Celeste's eyes burned. The woman suddenly struck her as both in touch and out of touch at the same time. Elegantly dismissive. Wilamena in a grand dress and a head wrap. Miss Lewis would be off on one of her tours when things came to a boil. But she'd given the Negro people of Pineyville her support in that envelope. Still, Celeste knew they needed people, bodies to line up. Bodies ready to take a beating. She knew also that people did what they could, and it all mattered.
From the car, Celeste and Reverend Singleton waved to Miss Sophie Lewis. She watched them from her porch, a great statue of a woman, her blue and gold head wrap striking against the white of the house, the deep color of her skin. It wasn't easy to leave the cool luxury of that place. Celeste wondered what must it have been like to grow up there, to live there now, leaving and coming back to this grandness. They'd turned back onto the earthen road under the alley of live oaks. The DeSoto barely made a sound.
They drove through Carriere as a thick warm rain smeared the dust on the windshield, shining the green of the trees and grass. Celeste opened her window and stuck her head out to let the rain fall on her face, then cupped her hands and smoothed the lotion-like rainwater up and down her arms.
"You got some country girl in you." Reverend Singleton smiled as he turned on his windshield wipers.
"That's what my grandmother used to say." She cranked the window up when the rain turned to a downpour. "Why won't Miss Lewis come sing at the church?"
"Well." Reverend Singleton's mouth seemed poised to say more. "It's a long story. When all the pews are in and we're as good as we can get, perhaps she will come and sing for us. I certainly hope so."
Celeste stared across him to the sinking land, to the tilting willows at the edge of the bayou. Reverend Singleton pointed out the swamp oaks, sweet bay, and yellow poplars with flowers like big tulips as they drove north towards Pineyville.
9
The next morning, Reverend Singleton drove Celeste to see the dilapidated Negro elementary school. Negro students had to take one of the old school buses parked on the grounds to Lumberton for high school, and he told her what few teachers they had lived in Hattiesburg. He then drove her to see the sturdy brick buildings that housed the whites-only school and its well-maintained grounds and play areas, including a bright green baseball diamond. He didn't need to point out that this was where all of Pineyville's children should be going to school. Celeste stared out of the car window; the effort to push down her anger was making a bothersome knot in her stomach.
When he turned onto the church road, Celeste expected to see a group of excited children waiting on the steps anticipating the start of freedom school. Not one child waited. She didn't blame them. It's a rare child who wants to go to school all summer long. Hard enough to be in there during the regular year, especially in this place of few books and broken-down facilities. They didn't yet understand how very different this school would be. How to get that message out, she didn't know.
Inside, pull shades controlled some of the sunlight roaring in the tallish windows. The side aisle floors were finished wood. The pulpit area, up two steps from the floor, and the center aisle all the way to the door had a thin layer of dark blue carpet. An organ sat to the side of the pulpit area and the preaching stand was off to the other side. A thick rope, the bell cord, was hooked to the side wall and, high above, extended into the small bell tower. There were five rows of wooden pews followed by a few rows of assorted folding chairs, and then more rows of all manner of hand-me-down chairs. It was a work in progress.
"I'll need a chalkboard." Celeste paced across the front of the church, glancing to the front door and praying for the arrival of a child, any child, for her freedom school. "And a couple of boxes of chalk and an eraser or two."
Reverend Singleton sat on the front pew. "Hattiesburg." Celeste thought him so well-dressed in a suit and tie, a spiffy shirt. He still had Chicago in his veins. She wondered what his plan could be, where he saw himself in the future.
"I'm going to need a daily newspaper, too. We'll use it for reading exercises and civics lessons." Celeste sat on the pulpit step.
"We can pick them up in town every morning. I might try to find a couple of nice standing fans to sit on each side here. Give you a little cross breeze." Reverend Singleton leaned over, his arms on his thighs, studying her.
The overwhelming quiet of the place seemed to settle on them. The church clearing was far enough from the highway to shelter them from any sound of cars or trucks. And at just that moment, no birds sang, no insects moved, no breeze stirred the trees. Even the wood snakes stopped to hear the great nothing. Reverend Singleton was openly staring at Celeste.
"Is something wrong?" His stare didn't make her necessarily feel uncomfortable. There didn't seem to be anything lascivious in it. His look was at her and also very far away.
"You remind me of someone I used to know." Reverend Singleton shifted on the pew ever so gently as if to break the spell. "I didn't mean to stare. Forgive me."
"It's all right." Celeste walked to the window to give him a moment to himself. She tried to imagine what had his life been like before he came back south. He'd lived in Chicago, gone to school there. He'd lived a life as far away from life in Pineyville as possible. How in God's name had he returned to live here? Was it only about the dreadful things going on in the south? Or had he come to mend himself, as she had? She was a visitor, an interloper who'd be gone by the end of August. He'd still be there with that other life spinning around inside him. The stare had been about a woman. She wanted to ask him how long he'd been married to Mrs. Singleton, why they didn't have children. She wanted to pry.
"How many children do you think we'll get?" She walked toward him, the light behind her slanting in from behind the shades. Her questions helped ease her own anxiety about the responsibility she had for the job ahead.
"Hard to say. Some folks are plain scared, and some have to negotiate transportation." Reverend Singleton rested back against the pew, and seemed himself again. He knew that she was trying to take the reins.
"How do we get around their fear? I mean, there's good reasons for it." Celeste sat on the pew near him.
"At some point, the fear becomes more of a burden than the action it forestalls. People get tired of being afraid." He angled his body towards her, comfortable.
"I can see that." She'd already felt it since coming to Mississippi, a coupling of fear with fear-fatigue. But she was from the north. It was a shorter trip to that fatigue for her. Not so for the locals who'd learned to live with it morning, noon, and night as a survival mode. The lynchings, the beatings, the scoffs, the many deprivations and denials over years sealed that fear into the human heart, and surely had, at times, saved lives, too.
they waited, Celeste thinking they should grab the bell cord and ring the bell to call the children to the freedom school. She sat gazing at the cord then up into the small bell tower, which really was just an alcove in the ceiling. It was a primitive affair but the church was small, so it was sufficient. They weren't in Paris in a cathedral. They were in a modest, whitewashed church in southern Mississippi. Having a bell at all was remarkable.
"I'll show you my office and my treasured bathroom. I saw that look on your face. Don't you let those children go in there and mess up my privy." Reverend Singleton walked toward the side aisle, a knowing smile on his face.
"Now, Reverend Singleton, I'm gonna do exactly as you tell me." Celeste followed him. They passed a door opening onto the grassy clearing that led off into a thick stand of trees, a deepening forest. His small office had one window with its shade pulled down, the room in shadow. He opened the lavatory door and
showed it off. It was indeed small, with the tiniest face bowl Celeste had ever seen. But there was the toilet, and she intended to use both every chance she got. Out the side door, he pointed to the back and a path that led to the outhouse. Stepping outside was like stepping upright into an oven after being in the relative cool of the church.
By noon not one child had come. Reverend Singleton took full responsibility. When the heat pressed down like the sun had mistakenly moved too close to the earth, they left the church.
Reverend Singleton drove down Freshwater Road, well past Mrs. Owens's house, turning on and off of side roads until she had no sense of where they were. They passed clapboard houses and scattered shanties, some painted bright pastels and some raw cypress wood, some with jalopies parked at odd angles or rusted out trucks. The few people there waved their hands and arms at Reverend Singleton and stared at the girl sitting in his front seat who surely was not Etta Singleton.
Just after six that evening, Mrs. Singleton picked her up to go back to the church for the first voter education class. Not one adult came in the door.
Dear) D.,
I couldn't have imagined this place. Nothing I read, nothing I heard from any speaker on campus, no Bob Dylan song, no blues song, no photograph tells the truth about Mississippi. Its between the monster things that happen, it's in the air. It's the place where hideous nightmares rupture to life then breed and hide behind a cloying magnolia veil. An archeology of hatred, bones in the earth, sowed under the cotton, fed into the roots of live oaks, men, women, and children for over two hundred years.
Mrs. Owens's rocking chair ground against the sagging porch planks just outside Celeste's window. The grating sound roared in her head as she sprawled and sank into the soft mattress, writing to J.D. After stuffing little pieces of tissue into her ears, she took her freedom school books and voter registration materials to the kitchen table. She put her head down on folded arms, small twists of tissue sticking out of her ears. Oceans coursed through her head.
I am so lonely here. There are no paintings, no movies, no bookstores, no fast rides on two-lane country roads with sharp winds in my face. There are trees and cloud-skies and rains that come fast and hard and then disappear, taking all relief with them. The heat is a stockade. I'm bending from the torture of it. I don't know if the people see the sky.
Night had spread its country dark canopy. Celeste took the plugs out of her ears, heard the ritual locking of the front doors as if those frail pieces of wood and puckered screen could protect them from anything but a few flies and summer gnats.
"Mrs. Owens, is that one mailbox for everybody on Freshwater Road?" She counted houses. Maybe ten or so spread way down the road.
"Uh-huh." Mrs. Owens came into the kitchen. "They take they time putting anything in it." She checked the latch on the back screen and locked the back door, cutting off the minute catches of air that sometimes whispered in. "You want to send something out, just raise up that red arm. They'll pick it up directly." She passed behind Celeste and went into her room.
All those people who'd moved to Chicago, Detroit, Texas, and California must send something back, even a scrawl telling where they were and how they were getting on. "They told us in Jackson the post office workers might not give us our mail."
The old woman brought her pitcher to get spigot water from the tiny lip of the kitchen that passed for a back porch. The goal each night was to have enough fresh water on the back porch so no one had to go out front. Celeste watched her ladling the good water from a big bucket. "They just slow."
Emmett Till's mother must've wished with all her heart that she'd sent a letter to Money, Mississippi, instead of her flesh and blood teenaged son, all Chicago sharp and cool, no Mississippi hanging off his shoulders. She wanted her back-home relatives to see her spiffy boy, but she must've forgotten how that look, that free way of being in the world, made white men in Mississippi seethe. Maybe she just believed things had gotten better.
"I'm gonna be coming to that voting class tomorrow evening. I thought by keeping you here, it would be my way. But I need to go on and try to vote before I'm too old to care."
She'd paused in the middle of the kitchen between the refrigerator and the stove, her intense face and eyes plowing into Celeste with years' worth of meaning.
Mrs. Owens read the bible every evening, and Celeste needed readers. From what Reverend Singleton said, not many folks here did much reading. The Mississippi State Constitution was written in i89o, the same year Pearl River County was created. Its text was one gnarled paragraph after another. Now, in order to pass the voter registration requirements imposed by the state, the Negro people of Pineyville would have to sit in a hellishly hot church and memorize whole sections of a document that had been used for years to grind them into sediment. There was no time to teach remedial reading to an entire group of people. Mrs. Owens would help bring the rest of the group along. "That's good, Mrs. Owens. I need you to come."
"Count on me." Geneva Owens walked into her room. "Nighty night, now."
Celeste heard the gentle washing sounds as the old woman prepared for bed, of water pouring into her basin, the cloth being wrung out and rubbed over aging skin, sloshing in the water again and repeated until the final wringing out, until only drips fell into the basin. She wondered if the woman had ever bathed in a real bathroom. Then the old mattress springs spoke briefly as she lay down. These small sounds were her only radio, with the sounds of the country night, distant chirps and calls, a barking dog, a lonely car on the blacktop, a subtle keening always in the background. Country quiet was like no quiet she'd ever heard in her life.
Celeste gathered her materials, went to her bedroom, opened the Mississippi State Constitution, and then shut it again. She wanted to take it outside and drop it in the outhouse hole.
She poured pitcher water into her basin, careful not to splash and waste it because every time it was empty, she had to either go out to the spigot and refill it or go to that bucket on the back porch and ladle fresh water into her pitcher. She refilled at the spigot unless it was raining, giving Mrs. Owens use of all the bucket water. She washed the day's caked sweat and dust off of her body as best she could. She needed a shower, a bath, wanted to feel clean; she hadn't had an all-over bath since the little apartment in Jackson nearly a week ago. Back home, she bathed in a green and white tiled bathroom, then soundlessly walked into a carpeted bedroom with a canopy bed and flows of drapes and sheers.
There must be women in this world of tight-lipped lies who defied the curtained doors and the penitent preachers with their bibles and shadow swords, women who bathed in the streams naked, who walked the banks of the Pearl River and the Bogue Chitto with their dresses tucked into their undergarments, who loved with abandon in stands of pecan and magnolia trees, propped upright by live oaks like dolls, so overwhelmed by the sweetness that they lost themselves. Did they all leave town? They probably escaped to New Orleans. They collected tiny hand-painted matchboxes as souvenirs and wrote notes home on hand-painted cards with scenes of New Orleans life. That's why Mary Evans was so excited to get out of Mississippi, to breathe a free breath. The workers in the post office probably hid those cards, kept them for themselves to take out on Saturday nights when the moon freed their lusts. In church on Sunday morning, they raised their bible hands to God with images of courtyards, lapping fountains, gardens of night jasmine, and naked bodies just behind their eyes.
Celeste paced, her own body smells adding to the dank vapor that lay over everything. She felt like a lonely prisoner in the house, as if the walls, as thin as they were, had already begun to close in on her. She was angry at Margo and the office in Jackson for sending her to such a blighted place with not even so much as a radio. How could she make it through to August like this? She couldn't hold herself still in that cell of a room. She grabbed her towel and tiptoed outside, gym shoes in hand, sliding the bolt back on the front door so as not to wake Mrs. Owens. Before any thought of danger crossed her mi
nd, she went to the water spigot. Her ghostly white sleep shirt would be the only thing visible about her from a distance. She took it off and stood naked, the warm night air like hands on her body, and turned on the spigot, which spewed and evened out into a cool stream of water, splashing on the concrete platform, on her legs and feet.
She soaped herself from head to toe using her hands and the piece of soap Mrs. Owens left on the tin dish. She prayed no one would hear the splashing water in the quiet night, prayed no errant car turned into Freshwater Road while she stood there naked. She bent down to get as far under the flow of water as possible. She rinsed her hair. The cool water assuaged her anger. At least now she felt clean for the first time in days, pulled her sleep shirt over her towel-wrapped hair, and sat down on the steps of the leaning porch, slapping mosquitoes. How, in God's name, did people live here? She removed the towel and let the warm air begin to dry her hair. The new moon seemed lost in the starry country sky. Not a light on all the way down Freshwater Road.
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