Freshwater Road

by Denise Nicholas

  Passengers zoomed by in both directions, seeming so sure of where they were going and what their lives would be when they got there. She dawdled, her step unsure, no streamline of conversation coming out of her, so unlike her when with Shuck. He'd know something was on her mind if she didn't snap to.

  "Momma Bessie okay?" She was relieved to see the baggage claim ahead offering a focus outside of herself.

  "Getting old." Shuck tugged a bit as if he had someplace to go beyond the airport. He always had someplace else to go, but it was never very far away.

  Celeste pecked around for things to say, the background noise of the airport forcing her to give stature to her voice. "And, how's Alma doing?" She wanted to ask if he was going to marry Alma. She'd wished it in the past but not now. Feeling so on the edge of his world, she fought an urge to hold on tight, to own. But Shuck wasn't ownable, and she knew it. Her questions sounded foreign, untied to history, the small talk of an uncomfortable stranger. Wilamena had hit the mark if her intention had been to drive a wedge between her and Shuck, to create a distance, an uninhabited plain. She had to break through, restore the life between them, but she didn't know how. One word in the wrong direction might pitch them over the brink forever. No word at all meant she'd have it on her mind for life, a lonely struggle. Her anger rose again and then she felt Shuck there pulling her into his side.

  "She's fine. Going back to work, complaining about how rowdy these kids have gotten." He scanned the luggage for the suitcase he'd bought her two years before. "See it on the streets myself. It ain't pretty."

  Sissy's almond-eyed face and the faces of her other freedom school children, reticent and shy, filed through her mind. Tony, with more responsibility than a grown man. Little Georgie, staying in Labyrinth's shadow. And Labyrinth, her little-girl hands on her hips with an expression far more adult than her actual years and with not a shy bone in her body. The Mississippi children were never rowdy-hard to tell when it was country sweetness or just the long grinding effect of being beaten down at every turn. Shuck gave her the book-bag and grabbed the suitcase. They walked out into the thinning humidity, summer geared to lose its swagger soon.

  The white Cadillac gleamed in the sunshine of the open parking lot, the convertible top up. After months of no rides at all or rides packed in Reverend Singleton's car or in movement cars that stank of sweat and old cigarette butts, she savored this ride. Even though Shuck smoked, the very first thing you smelled in that car was a gentle memory of Old Spice. She sank into the soft seat with its scent of rich new leather, put her book-bag on the floor, gazed at the dashboard with its sleek space-age look. Shuck quietly smoothed the car out of the parking lot and then east on 1-94, well above the speed limit, she noted.

  She hammered herself into conversation telling him of getting Mr. Landau, Mrs. Owens, and Hazzie Mobley registered to vote, of spending those hours in the jail cell, of the church being burned to the ground and of the plans to rebuild it. She was careful not to mention her brief interest in staying there to rebuild the freedom school and a library.

  "So you went to jail." He floated the Cadillac around the other cars and trucks on the expressway as if they were buoys on a tranquil lake, his tires softly thumping over bumps and ridges. "Now you're my criminal daughter, uh?"

  Celeste's laughter was high and thin. "We all did." Jiggaboo girl, criminal daughter. She was his fraudulent child. She stared out the window at the landscape as it took on more and more houses, small run-down businesses in lean-to sheds, and weather-beaten garages. The trees saved it from looking like a countryside ghetto. "Well, anyway, it's better than it was before." She laid into it, bottom-lining Mississippi Shuck-style.

  Shuck exited the expressway at Livernois, going north toward Outer Drive. His silence and his focus on the road ahead told her that he didn't believe Mississippi was better enough. It would be a while before she told him about Mrs. Owens's house being shot into.

  With the traffic lights and Sunday drivers, they slowed on the surface streets. Celeste scanned the small storefront businesses, auto repair shops, and gas stations lining the blocks of Livernois, everything closed, all owned by mixtures of Negro and white people. No stepping off sidewalks here. Good to be home. She mulled over her last days in Jackson with Ed and the other volunteers as they dissected and summarized the achievements of Freedom Summer. Hard to summarize Pineyville, though. There were so many stories, burned-down churches and houses shot into and injuries and incarcerations, but she accepted the movement's statistical version, its shorthand. Her truest life, she felt, had stretched out over her time on Freshwater Road. Sissy's death. Ed's birth in her life.

  Ramona with her bowl of kinky hair and skin so black from the Delta sun that her brown eyes glowed, had registered seven people-Ramona had been in cotton plantation country. You couldn't say the Delta without thinking of slavery, without hearing a cante hondo blues. Indianola had strong community involvement, a near war going on between the workers on the plantations and the owners. Folks had been riled up before Freedom Summer started. Margo, her blonde hair bleached nearly white and her skin tanned to brown, looking like she'd been a counselor at a sailing camp in Massachusetts, had been in Aberdeen over near the Alabama border. She got four people on the rolls. Celeste kept her chest out anyway because in some towns not one Negro was registered to vote. In her heart of hearts, she wished she'd done better. They reminded each other over and over that it was a beginning, that Mississippi would never be the same. Matt slapped palms and acted hard-edged and street-wise with the other guys; he seemed to look through Celeste when he acknowledged her at all. Some volunteers had decided to take a semester off from school to continue the work through the November elections. She would've done it, too, if Mrs. Owens had let her stay.

  In Jackson, they carried the debriefings from the One Man, One Vote office around the corner to Mercer's, the only Negro-owned restaurant large enough to accommodate their group. They hid whiskey bottles secreted in from Louisiana in brown paper bags stuffed into purses and book-bags and took them into the restaurant. They ate collard greens, fried chicken, and cornbread and poured small amounts of liquor into Cokes and orange drinks, then shoved the booze back into their purses. Miss Mercer winked at them when she came out of the kitchen and saw their glazed eyes. Some volunteers had their suitcases stacked in the corner by the door, ready to get out of Mississippi as soon as the eating was over.

  When the dinner plates were cleared, they pushed the tables back and danced to the music on the jukebox until sweat ran down their bodies. They were teenagers at an airless basement party, white and black, and after a couple of drinks, they smeared into one thing, a bunch of students from as far away as Stanford University, as close as Tougaloo College right there in Jackson, who'd lived their purpose through to the end of the summer's effort. In a euphoria of hugging and kissing their goodbyes, they prayed for the ones who hadn't made it through, and for the families of Mickey Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andy Goodman, and for Medgar Evers's wife and children and the others. Celeste prayed for Sissy and for Zenia Tucker, too.

  Ed waited by the door at Mercer's for her to say her goodbyes. He'd arranged a few hours for them alone in the male volunteers' apartment. They sat with their backs against the wall on the mattress, the apartment a reverse layout but in all other ways the same as the one she'd stayed in her first week and again now with Ramona and Margo, flaunting the rules of segregation during the debriefings. He pulled her into his chest just like he'd done on Freshwater Road and she felt relieved, relaxed in the fold of his arms. They sat like that, the windows open. She saw him dancing his second line at Otis's bar in Hattiesburg, dancing his demons away. She needed to dance her own away. They slid down the wall and faced each other lying on their sides, clung there, pressing their bodies together.

  At the airport the next morning, they sat side by side on the black bench seats. He was driving to New Orleans for a week before going on to Boston to finish his last year of graduate schoo
l. With people all around them, they grew shy, made elliptical promises to call and write. When her flight was announced, he walked her to the gate, called her "chere," and told her to keep an eye out for him, that he'd never be very far away. She walked onto the plane, struggling against his gravitational pull, didn't want to turn around for fear she'd have missed the flight, missed whatever the rest of her life was supposed to be without him.

  Shuck turned onto Outer Drive and it dazzled, drenched in end-ofAugust sunlight filtering in white dapples through the sheltering trees. Michigan green framed by the rich black earth, back-dropped in blue sky. A northern sky the color of bluebird wings with drifts of graying white clouds riding high. Giant elms glanced over houses, front yards were masterpieces of diligence with hedges and cascading vines, flowers holding on to one last dash of color before tilting over into the soil.

  Celeste stood on the porch taking in the scents of newly cut grass, thought of Freshwater Road with its orange sand and gravel chips and bony barking dogs, the outhouses to the back, Mrs. Owens's leaning porch, the screen door that wouldn't slam, and the spigot rising out of the concrete platform. Ed would be in New Orleans by now, even driving under the speed limit.

  Shuck carried her suitcase upstairs while she wandered from the silky living room to the wide dining room with bowed windows and cushioned window seats that looked out over the backyard, her favorite place in the house. She ran up the carpeted stairs and stood in her bathroom goggling at the bathtub, the separate shower stall, the tile floor so clean you could eat off of it. Her bedroom with its canopy bed sat like a Hollywood movie set, the matching lamps and bedside tables prim and perfect. Soft light filtered in through the sheers. She pushed the curtains aside, saw the white oak in the back corner on one side of the yard and the towering pine on the other. No piney woods, no limping plants and buzzing power lines, just a spread of green and to the side of the house, a garage that Shuck only used in the dead of winter.

  She took Sissy's drawing out of her suitcase and stood it up on the tall white dresser, using a small crystal bowl that held her barrettes to brace the drawing in place. She'd have it framed. She could barely look at it, heard Sissy's little-girl voice in the car, in the kitchen of Mrs. Owens's house, read ing. She grabbed the copies of Reverend Singleton's Kodak shots taken at the church clearing, their little group standing in the light in front of the space where the church used to be. She put them with Ed's letter and the pictures of New Orleans on her bedside table to read when she got into bed.

  She showered and lingered around the bathroom, amazed that she'd managed to make it through the entire summer without one. She changed into a summer pants suit from her closet, then dumped the big suitcase's contents over onto the carpet. She hoped no Mississippi bugs hid in the corners and compartments-better to take it down to the basement for a good spraying. There on the top of the pile was the blue gabardine jumper she'd worn on the train going south. A totem of the past, the innocent spring blue of hyacinths. She'd never wear it again. She stood before the long mirror inside the closet door, saw how her eyes withdrew into her face now as if they'd become slightly hooded. The cut on her lip was barely visible. Shuck was right. She was darker than she'd ever been in her life. And, she was much older.

  She faltered there in the bedroom thinking of Wilamena's letter. Tearing it to shreds would mean nothing at all. The words were imprinted on her brain. Without Shuck, she'd be anonymous, unmoored, as if her only known history had been lived out in Mississippi. The rest had disintegrated into grainy particles, bits and snatches of things that no longer composed a whole. She wondered if, in time, she'd remember anything of her life before this summer, as if the letter wiped her life slate clean. It was time to talk to Shuck. But ifShuck knew nothing, or if he suspected Wilamena's truth a long time ago and had forgotten it over the years or even learned the hard lesson of living with it, the letter would open an old wound and break his heart. Was that something he could've forgotten or forgiven? But if he'd heard rumors, if people had talked in the days when he and Wilamena had their troubles, wouldn't this answer all the questions he'd had in his mind anyway? The truth is supposed to unburden you, free you. Wilamena unburdened herself with no thought to anyone else. No telling what the so-called truth would do to Shuck. He might breathe a sigh of relief for her as much as for himself. And what of those long-ago shadows with Momma Bessie and Ben? Were they real or had she imagined them because boys always came first in that house? That was enough to make any girl feel dismissed at times.

  Shuck had put on a jazz record, elegant sounding but enough blues in it to know where it came from. A saxophone wailed. In the kitchen, he heated two plates of food. Celeste set the table recognizing the aromas as Momma Bessie's cooking. They drank cold milk and ate roast beef with creamy gravy over a mound of mashed potatoes and green beans on the side. They listened to the music. Celeste hadn't heard any of Shuck's kind of music since spring break from school.

  "I met a Negro man in Hattiesburg who owns a bar only nobody's supposed to drink any alcohol in there. Mississippi's dry, Daddy." She had an urge to say, "daddy" over and over again, just repeat it until all of Wilamena's haint was off of the word.

  "If he owns a bar, he must be paying somebody off." Shuck looked at her. "What you doing in some Negro's bar in Hattiesburg?"

  "He works with the movement." She left the rest unsaid, the talk about corn liquor, the gun Otis wore all the time, and the fact that he had no whiskey bottles on his bar.

  "Oh, yeah?" Shuck had a dubious look on his face.

  "I told him my daddy owned a bar. He was impressed." She might've gone on about how she'd sat at that homemade bar bragging of her knowledge of Paradise Valley. Shuck, she knew, wouldn't take to that at all. To say nothing of how many drinks she'd consumed. "He didn't have any of your music on his jukebox."

  "Too country, that's why." Shuck drank the last of his milk.

  Celeste took their dirty dishes to the sink. Shuck grabbed a dishtowel and stood in the middle of the kitchen waiting for her to wash them. He'd dry them like he used to do, then make a neat stack to take back to Momma Bessie's house with his bag of dirty shirts. "You probably should call your mother and let her know you made it home okay. Don't you think?"

  Celeste heard him but decided to ignore what he'd said, thought of all those hard days washing dishes on Mrs. Owens's back porch using the pump. She'd spent the summer arranging water-mineral spigot water, sulfur-smelling pump water, heating tin tub water for a shallow bath, throwing dirty basin water in the outhouse, always running around that little plank board house arranging for water.

  "Did you hear me?"

  She washed the two plates, the glasses, and the silverware slowly. "I heard you."

  "Well?" He leaned a little on the back of a kitchen chair, the dishtowel hanging down.

  "I don't want to talk to her right now." The anger in her voice came from somewhere deep that she couldn't have camouflaged if she'd tried. "Not tonight." She caught Shuck out of the corner of her eye looking at her like she'd lost her mind. She was on shaky ground. She pretended to rinse out the sink, kept her head down, then looked up at him. "I'll write her a note in the morning."

  "You'll write her now, and we'll take it down to the post office tonight. I need to check on the club anyway." Shuck had put a toothpick in the corner of his mouth, and he wasn't smiling, not his mouth and certainly not his eyes. At that moment he looked like Matt's image of him as a gangster, as a man who might wipe her off the face of the earth if he felt like it. "Get going and while you're at it, tell her you're sorry for worrying the crap out of everybody all summer long."

  Without saying a word, knowing she dared not cut her eyes at him, she turned on her heels and slogged up to her room, scrounged around in her book-bag for Wilamena's orange-tinted letter, and sat on the floor near her Mississippi pile. The flat sounds of the television came up through the quiet house. Shuck waited for her, allowing the television to subdue his anger. She looked
at the cobbled-together snapshot of Wilamena and her husband. In all the weeks since she'd received the letter, it had never occurred to her to consider if Cyril Atwood might be her biological father. Was he the man Wilamena had the affair with? She stared into the photograph, raced back in her mind to the first meeting. She felt nothing special except that the man didn't appear to be Negro at all. Cyril Atwood, Wilamena protested, was Negro, just not very. Was this some new Wilamena game to be revealed at a later date? Celeste had no intention of going through all this again. She tipped into Shuck's room, took his magnifying glass from his dresser top, and brought it back to her room. She held the glass over Cyril Atwood's image. It enlarged and wavered then settled. She saw nothing of herself in his face, though it was hard to tell from a small photograph. His skin was lighter than her own. So was Wilamena's. No marked similarity of nose, eyes, lips. She put the picture down. She balanced her notebook on her thighs and leaned against the bed frame. Out the windows, the trees swayed against the waning daylight, a gentle sweeping across the sky.

  Dear Wilamena:

  Shuck wanted me to write you and tell you I made it out of Mississippi okay. Going back to school in a few days. My regards to your husband.

  Celeste

  Already, she was going back on her word to never speak to Wilamena again. At least she wasn't responding to that letter. She ripped the page out of the notebook, enveloped it, put a stamp on it. Shuck wouldn't ask to see it. Ed's letter waited for her on the small side table like the golden prize of night, along with the glorious photos of New Orleans. She heard his soft accent in her head telling her to "spread those stones." But, they were her stones, and she didn't know if she could spread them. They were now a part of who she was, the most potent thing that connected her to her mother. Maybe that's what Wilamena intended all along, to enslave her with the past, a past she had nothing to do with. Wilamena had recast herself, too, as weightier, more important in her mind. More burdensome, for sure.