Freshwater Road

by Denise Nicholas

  "That's that same song Mahalia Jackson sung out there in Washiton with Martin Lutha King," Mrs. Owens announced in a low voice as Celeste sat down. There was a new intimacy in her tone as if they were now compatriots locked in a dangerous mission that might end in catastrophe, but might, too, end in triumph.

  When Mrs. Singleton hit the opening chords for "We Shall Overcome," Reverend Singleton invited the congregation to stand and join hands. Celeste took Mrs. Owens's hand on one side and on the other, the hand of a man who appeared to be as old as the live oaks in front of Sophie Lewis's big house. She hoped this song, this joining of hands would invigorate the people, give them the courage for the long walk ahead.... Oh, oh, oh, deep in my heart, I do believe.... She believed it or she wouldn't have come down here. The church hummed another verse as Reverend Singleton walked down the center aisle and opened the double doors, inviting the last row out first, backslapping and shaking hands with the men, politely hugging the women, and nodding in the direction of the church picnic.

  The sunlight was staggering after the shady respite of the church. The daily quick rain had left a glisten on the trees and grass. Celeste eyed the food. No one in the food line seemed bothered by the fat flies and silkwinged vagrants flitting over the fried chicken, greens, red beans, cakes, cobblers, and pies. They filled their plates, swatting, fanning, talking quietly, nodding at her shyly as they meandered onto the grass to sit on a variety of chairs, at tables or on the ground, which the sun dried in moments. She'd have to eat something soon or risk offending Mrs. Owens and the women of the church who'd gone to so much trouble.

  "What you think?" Celeste kneeled down to Sissy's size when the girl approached, at ease as if they already knew each other well.

  "I think I wish you was my cousin." Sissy searched her face. "Then I could come to yo' school."

  "Did your momma say you couldn't come?" They'd barely begun. How could a parent deny a child freedom school when regular school was nothing but denial?

  They walked to a small square table and sat on wobbly wood folding chairs, side by side, facing out. To the east, she could see the backs of the shady rain clouds hastened away by lazy breezes from the Gulf. Nothing now but a clear sapphire sky.

  "My daddy say it." Sissy swung her legs, the toes of her shoes surfing the grass. "Say don't want you teaching me nothing."

  Celeste tried to fathom his fear or whatever it was, remembered his face in the rearview mirror of the big Hudson. "Is that all he said?"

  "Yes, ma'am." Sissy didn't seem to mind the sun, looked straight up to the heavens again, like she'd done in the car with her sunglasses. She seemed on the verge of flight.

  "We'll try to get him to change his mind. Don't say anything else. Promise?" Something tugging at Celeste in her eyes as if she expected her to give her wings, a way out of Pineyville, a way from a father who already was bearing down on her in a dream-smashing crusade. Surely Sissy didn't understand all those things yet. "Go ahead now and sit with your momma."

  She pushed her gently in the direction of the Tucker table just as Mr. Tucker came out the side door of the church, anger flashing in his eyes, Reverend Singleton right behind him. He spotted her and paused for a quick second, face tight and hard. She watched him until he sat with his family, returning his anger with her own defiance. All that from the car, she thought? No. Sissy must have been bristling under his clamped-down rearing for a while. Asking too many questions, gazing too far off. Now here came Celeste, the freedom loving rabble-rouser in town to put the finishing touches on Sissy's rebellion. Freedom School. In his mind, it had to mean liberation in a visceral sense. He was right. He had reached his limit. Celeste closed her eyes, dropping her head. She wasn't supposed to look at anyone like that, Negro or white. Too much violence in the tone of her eyes behind those sunglasses, but she knew her body said the same thing. Reflecting that kind of uppitiness to a white person in Mississippi might mean a hit or hot spit in her face.

  "Mr. Tucker says his children won't be coming to the freedom school." Reverend Singleton sat where Sissy had been, his church fan pumping, reaching for his necktie, pulling it away from his sweating neck.

  "She told me. Sissy." The shade trees just beyond the clearing drew Celeste like a magnet. "Did he say why?" Her tone all flat and dry.

  "Well, now, Sister Celeste, some of these people got some old-timey notions about all that's going on. I'ma keep working on him." Reverend Singleton got up. "But in the meantime, you need to be patient. These people been living in this place a long time. They know it better than you can ever have learned it in a week-long orientation."

  Celeste felt the chide. "I'm sorry." She was thinking maybe she could teach Sissy at Mrs. Owens's house after freedom school, when Mr. Tucker was stuck at the gas station working. How had this animosity grown up so quickly? She didn't understand.

  "I don't see Labyrinth and Georgie." She searched the crowd for Labyrinth's hair, a standout in this sea of dark-haired, dark-eyed people.

  "It's hard for Dolly Johnson to mix out here in the open. She comes to church every Sunday but she leaves right after. People swear she's still having to do with that white man fathered Labyrinth. Course, they don't have a thing to say about the Negro man who fathered Georgie. They are afflicted with a double standard and it's easy to see why, I guess."

  Celeste let go of a long deep sigh, shook her head from side to side. "Is their coming to freedom school keeping the others away?"

  "That child, and that white man, are nothing new here." Reverend Singleton's face tightened the slightest bit and he spoke low. Celeste wondered if he was hiding his true feelings or maybe hinting at something from his own life in Chicago.

  "I don't understand, then." Celeste pushed him for more. She knew so little for sure about these people, knew only that white Pineyville hated her being there and the reason she was there. All else was up for interpretation.

  "Well, she gets favors. You know. Money from him. Or so people think. Plus she's got that job over in Hattiesburg and those white folks are good to her." Reverend Singleton shook his head.

  "Oh. You're saying there might be some jealousy in it?" She grabbed the thought as if it was a life raft in rough water.

  "I am. That's not native to Mississippi, I'm sure." He said all he was going to say about that.

  "No, sir, it's not. My daddy says you have to be strong as acid to deal with Negroes, and there's no words to describe how strong you have to be to deal with white people." Celeste felt grown-up and full of wisdom quoting Shuck.

  "He's so right." Reverend Singleton softened.

  Celeste wondered if she should befriend the outcast woman. But if she befriended Dolly Johnson, the other women would read into it. She had to be careful, needed to bring them all in without dragging the quibbles and tensions that divided them. Like Reverend Singleton did from the pulpit, preaching to everyone, bringing everyone along equally.

  "Don't you worry. Be some more children in there tomorrow morning. And some grown-ups in that voting class, too. See there, Mr. Landau, and Sister Mobley's gonna come. Truth be told, that Dolly Johnson's a good candidate for voting, too. It'll be a start." Celeste followed where he gestured and saw Mr. Landau walk away from the group heading for the parking area in front of the church. He was an African-Indian looking man, tall, carved, and dark. "Have to keep an eye on Landau, though, he's partial to those Deacons for Defense over in Bogalusa. They don't believe in taking a lot of crap off of white folks."

  Celeste wanted to stand up and yell for Mr. Landau to come back, to sit down and talk a while. Matt talked about the Deacons in the car and had even gone over to one of their meetings when he dropped her on Freshwater Road. Reverend Singleton left her to float from group to group, nodding, shaking hands, being the good minister.

  Still, Sissy wouldn't be there, and that bothered her. She sat sideways on her wobbly chair, wishing she'd brought the fan from inside the church but too lazy to walk back in there to get it. She watched the crowd in t
heir dresses and suits, jackets off now, tie knots loosened. Her dress was damp, her hair a mad mix of humidity-induced curls and straight sticks. She'd wanted it to be contained for church, had released the rubber for a few seconds to sort the mess out, and in that instant of time, it rose and puffed up all over her head until she had to work to wrestle the rubber band back on it and finally gave up and put the rubber band in her pocket.

  Mrs. Owens chatted with a group of women, glancing over from time to time. Celeste hoped she was convincing them all to come to the voter registration class. Peaceful on the surface at least. A country painting, The picnic at the church. J.D. could paint it, but it would never show the nightmare living just beneath the skin. The people holding their picnic plates and sipping sweet drinks had been terrorized into stepping off the sidewalk when a white person came down the street. They entered the county courthouse through the back door. They drank water from the colored fountain and sent their children to the broken-down colored school-as Labyrinth had called it, the school with no books. They assumed the face of serenity while they seethed inside, until they succumbed to a childish inferiority or stepped out of line. God only knew what that might mean. Some became what white people called them. Others never bent. She needed the unbent ones to help her through. In church, their response had been spirited, with the music lifting them like a soundtrack. She had no idea if that was enough to bring them in to do the real work of breaking down the old ways. She didn't know if someone was going to die.

  Celeste turned her chair to stare into the woods. Piles of cool stones nestled in low ferns, shaded by the modest live oaks and tall pines. The oak branches reached out from the trunks for yards, strong arms offering shade and solace. She could see the tops of long-needled pines way back. She walked to the edge of the clearing to get a better view, hoping to sit out of the withering sunshine. As she eased into the wooded area, a high-pitched scream rang out, stopping her in her tracks. She backed out into the clearing and turned to see the entire congregation gawking at her, some with mouths open, some so stunned they appeared to be marvelously life-like statues. Mrs. Owens hustled over, grabbed her arm, and snatched her from the grove.

  "Chile, you can't go in there." She pulled Celeste back to a table and sat her down forcefully enough to let her know the old woman still had muscle. Mrs. Owens tore to the food table and came back with a cup of punch, then retrieved her own plate.

  The punch was so sweet Celeste smacked her lips. "Was it a snake or something?"

  "Drink it down, settle your stomach."

  She had the exact opposite thought. The sugar might make her sick.

  "You didn't eat nothing all day."

  "Too hot to eat, Mrs. Owens. Was there a snake or something?" The screech still lobbed around in her head though all was quiet except the murmur of voices in the background. She wondered if the churchgoers were talking about her and she didn't even know what she'd done.

  "There's a coupla graves back in there. Can't go there. Have to go around the other way. A few yards in it's sacred ground."

  "Nobody told me." She felt weak, the syrupy liquid oozing into her stomach, shivering her, making her nausea rise, hold there on the ledge waiting for the next surprise. "Who screamed?"

  "Sissy." Geneva Owens talked softly. "She got a big voice for a little girl."

  Celeste sipped the grapey sugar water thinking she probably needed salt more than sugar to offset what she was losing in perspiration. The older woman ate as if she'd just been sitting there sunning herself on a quiet summer afternoon, flowering beads of perspiration forming thin, slow-moving streams that traced her gray hairline, seeped down her forehead.

  Celeste drummed the paper cup on the table. "Who's in there?"

  "Don't make no difference who's in there. It ain't for sittin'." Mrs. Owens finished her food without another word.

  It was hard to tell if Mrs. Owens meant to ever reveal the truth or just didn't want to talk about it right at that moment. Reverend Singleton might tell her, she thought, but that wouldn't be until tomorrow morning when he opened the church for freedom school. She prayed she hadn't lost the favor she'd gained by standing with Reverend Singleton in the pulpit. Again, she felt the sharp yearning to go home, to ride with Shuck in his convertible Cadillac all over the West Side, visit his friends and cronies, stop at Momma Bessie's to rest in the shade of the apple tree with a tall thin glass of minted ice tea and a long slim handled spoon.

  The picnic carried on and people ignored her as long as Mrs. Owens, her guardian and supporter, was there with her. She saw Sissy across the way trying not to look over at Mrs. Owens and her. Mr. Tucker sat with his back to them. Reverend Singleton mingled with his congregation as if nothing had happened.

  Later, the Tucker boys, Darby and Henry, barely opened their eyes when the Hudson stopped short in front of the house. A quick hand squeeze for Sissy, who didn't have a smile anywhere on her face, a grunt from Mr. Tucker, and a nodding rustle of fake flowers from Mrs. Tucker passed for goodbye as Celeste and Mrs. Owens got out of the car, the empty bread pudding pan and the giant collard greens pot smelling sour now. Just as Geneva Owens's hand reached the screened door handle, Mr. Tucker lurched off leaving a train of orange dust and gravel bits. Celeste had a flash of that flowered hat falling down on Mrs. Tucker's face as she stepped into the house behind Mrs. Owens. They headed to the back porch, Mrs. Owens to scrub the pots and Celeste to dry them. "That man from New Orleans give the church the bell, he's buried in that sacred ground. Can't talk about it cause it's against the law to bury white in a colored cemetery. But it's what he wanted."

  Later that night, Celeste climbed onto her bed thinking how it was that every Negro in town knew a white man was buried in the Negro cemetery, knew that if the whites learned it, they'd dig him up and throw him away, his white bones floating down the Pearl River. How long had he been there, who put him there, how had they pulled this off without anybody telling? Was his the only white grave back there? Was it the secret that made the ground sacred? A curl of a smile at the corners of those lips, those sunravaged faces, saying that white people didn't know it all, hadn't made every decision for every life in Pineyville. They must have other secrets, too.

  11

  Shuck had written "Pineyville" on a slip of paper and pocketed the note. Mississippi was as bad as a good number was good, but Pineyville had locked his mind even tighter than Mississippi itself. The name brought his teeth together in a grinding gnash, his mouth so clamped he had to jab a cigarette between his lips. But it refused to crystallize, just pricked and poked uselessly at his memory.

  At the Royal Gardens, he moved fast along the bar, nodding and "heying" to the slow night crowd, the jukebox blaring, Posey working easy. Shuck's only thought was why weren't they at home.

  In his small office at the very back of the Royal Gardens, behind his desk, on a secondhand bookcase that he'd salvaged from Momma Bessie's attic, Shuck kept old copies of jet magazine. He brought the little magazines over to his desk in bunches, flipping through the pages, not knowing what he was looking for but knowing that whatever it was, it pressed him to the search, and Pineyville was the reason.

  The magazines didn't stack well, kept sliding away from each other until his entire desktop was a mass of them. And, there it was, dated 1959, a short five years ago. Leroy Boyd James, charged with raping a white woman, lynched before he got to trial. The Pearl River County grand jury in Pineyville, Mississippi, refused to acknowledge that the lynching had taken place, though his body had been fished from the Pearl River and he was supposed to be locked in jail. Negro prisoners told of hearing him screaming and fighting his abductors, heard his feet dragging along the concrete floor, his hands grabbing then slipping their grip on the bars, his fingernails scrabbling the bare walls near the door. They said they heard his shouts in their dreams. Celeste had taken herself to a lynching town.

  Shuck drew a thousand dollars in cash from his safe. He put five hundred in an envelope along with the
little slip of paper. He marked it Celeste, and pocketed it. The other five hundred he put between the pages of the jet magazine, his idea of insurance, put a rubber band around it all to clasp those two things together as if they had been conjoined at some point in the past, separated and reunited now. He took out his loaded gun, turned it over in his hands, checked that there were bullets in a small box inside the safe. He secured the sorry history of Pineyville to Celeste's hope for the future, bound by money and a gun. It was the riskiest bet he'd ever made in his life, but he believed in her like he believed in himself. He locked his insurance in the drawer of his desk. He'd tell Posey what was going. They'd be ready if the call came, ready to take guns and money and go to Pineyville.

  Shuck drove north on West Grand Boulevard, passing the deep-porched houses not destroyed by the expressway. At night they were presentable, but Shuck knew in the light of day you could see the disrepair creeping around the eaves, the paint chipping off the wood trim, the old people let go of by their delinquent children. Old people with no one to leave their hard-won victories to. But at night, the summer smells of fresh cut grass sweetened the breeze and mixed it with the scents of a thousand dinners, the smoky residue of backyard barbecues. He smelled chicken, ribs, maybe even turkey in a smoker. Whatever, it was leftovers now, sitting on a plate in the middle of the stove for the last one home, or stashed in the back of the refrigerator for tomorrow's lunch.

  Finally, Shuck pulled up in front of Alma Weaver's two-family flat in a neighborhood already too far gone to save. Isolated apartment buildings were tended to as they had been years ago, but much of it all had sunk into disrepair. In the middle of the day the discarded young men stood around on corners, and women ran from the bus stop to their front doors, hands in their purses, clutching kitchen knives or sewing shears to ward off junkies. Shuck closed the convertible top.

  Up and down the street, cars parked bumper to bumper, porch lights on, nothing moving. Monday nights were quiet in Detroit. Dinners eaten early, television, and off to bed so you could be up to face the job the next morning, if you had one. Too many didn't have one. Shuck was an escapee, a free-flying bird. The numbers racket had saved him from daily confrontations with white folks, especially white men. He was as free as a Negro man could be in 1964. Now, Celeste had bound her fate to Mississippi, taking his precious freedom with her.