everyman

by M. Shelly Conner

  Cornelius wasn’t her grandfather, but he had been responsible for taking care of her mother. She needed to know what happened to him.

  “I knew your granddaddy.” Johnita’s words startled Eve.

  “Pardon?” Eve looked at the woman who had silently appeared at her side.

  “I guess you could say we had relations,” Johnita continued. “I’m not ’shamed to say it. Everybody know it and has throwed it in my face here and there.”

  “My grandfather?” Eve asked. “You mean Hezekiah or Cornelius?”

  “Hezekiah”—Johnita tapped the picture of the man seated at the table—“was your grandfather, chile. What’s wrong with you?” Johnita lit a cigarette and eyed Eve skeptically.

  “That’s Hezekiah?” Eve lifted the photo from the wall and brought it close to her face. It was the first time she’d seen a picture of him. She searched his features for some connection to her own. She saw it in the fullness of her lips and high pitch of her forehead. “He was very handsome. So, you and Hezekiah . . . And this was before Grandmother Gertrude?” Eve struggled to dig for information while relating it to her new source.

  Johnita’s eyes shifted quickly from left to right. “Yeah, nearabouts. Anyway, you like on a treasure hunt? For information?” She dragged on her cigarette and exhaled. “Thought you’d eventually get to me, being your cousin and all—you know, your grandma’s cousin—but the way folks always flappin’ off at the jawbones, I guess they must’ve scared you away. Your grandaddy was here the night he died.”

  It took the force of the world to keep Eve rooted on the staircase. “With you? Hezekiah was with you that night?”

  “Nawl, honey.” Johnita chuckled. “I know this place don’t look like much now, but it was one of the liveliest juke joints in Macon County. Your granddaddy shole loved to play him some cards. He was a lucky sumbitch too.”

  Johnita watched as Claudette pressed herself against Hezekiah and they retreated into her pantry. She tried to follow, but every step brought an inquiry from a patron. They wanted their credit extended or to know why the kitchen was slow in serving their chicken dinner order. Why the gizzards small as crumbs? Why turnip greens instead of collards?

  By the time Johnita was able to glance toward the pantry again, she saw Claudette dash out as Hezekiah bumped into Big C. Ignoring one last plea for credit extension, she caught up with Claudette and they moved to an unoccupied corner.

  “What do you think you’re doing, Claudette?” Johnita still firmly held her wrist.

  “The same as you, Johnny,” Claudette responded, her voice still filled with venom yet unsure as to whom it was directed.

  “Really, Claude? That was years ago!”

  “You sure about that?” Claudette glanced toward the stairs where earlier Hezekiah had squeezed past Johnita.

  Johnita loosened her grip on Claudette’s wrist and gently rubbed it. “Yes, Claude. But what ain’t years ago is Big C. And that stunt you pulled last week! You attacked that man’s manhood and sangin’ about bulldaggerin’! You cain’t be playin’ around with the likes of him.”

  Claudette rolled her eyes and smirked. “Everybody sanging about bulldaggers, Johnny, in the big cities. We can go—”

  Johnita gently squeezed her wrist again. “I’m serious, Claude. That man is dangerous.”

  “I got this, Johnny.” Claudette slowly pulled away from Johnita. “Time to close up shop. Let me do us a song.” She sauntered to the stage as Johnita grabbed the broom and began to sweep at the feet of her lingering patrons, waking those who had fallen into a drunken slumber at their tables. Yet it was Claudette’s voice that raised them all like Lazarus and intoxicated everyone within hearing.

  And if my life is like the dust / Ooh, that hides the glow of a rose

  What good am I? / Heaven only knows

  Words soaked with longing and gin poured from her, past Hezekiah, and hovered on Johnita, her intended.

  Lord, this bitter earth / Yes, can it be so cold?

  Today you’re young / Too soon you’re old.

  Claudette’s eyes closed, and she allowed the song to take over and use her. Tears slowly crept down her smiling cheeks as the hymn played her as an instrument—diaphragm to vocal cords.

  But while a voice within me cries / I’m sure someone may answer my call

  And this bitter earth / Ooh, may not, oh, be so bitter after all.

  Opening her eyes, she strode by Johnita and gave her a reassuring smile. “What good am I?” she sang softly and added, “I’ll see you tonight.” But she did not. She saw the interior of Big C’s Ford before her descent down the seven circles of hell. She saw Big C’s white father, his bones muddled with those of disappeared persons. She saw Native remains by the hundreds, layered in accordance with American land acquisitions. She saw nothingness and then the realization that she had not been seeing at all. She had not been at all.

  Johnita’s face hardened as she left the staircase and opened a credenza in the sitting room. She extracted a glass decanter of whiskey and poured two glasses, taking one and sitting in one of the wingback chairs. “We ain’t stupid or powerless like y’all up north think. We know how to take care of our own. Your mama was our own. Wasn’t right what Big C done.”

  “You mean Cornelius?” Eve slowly followed and grabbed the remaining glass, her movements measured and breath restrained for fear any shift in the wind might disrupt Johnita’s revelation.

  “Mmm-hmm. That’s the muthafucka.”

  Eve was nearly out of air but continued to ration her breathing, sipping the whiskey to steady her voice. “You think he was my father?”

  “Chile, hell nawl. Everybody know he couldn’t get it up. That ain’t the point. Claudette was my—” Johnita’s voice cracked, and she swallowed a healthy gulp of her whiskey. “And he just throwed her down some dark hell where she couldn’t even be buried proper. That muthafucka.”

  Eve nodded, overwhelmed by it all. She remembered Brother LeRoi’s warning to her about uncovering buried truths. At the moment, it was all so exhilarating. It was as if the photographs she had seen were becoming more vivid. At first, hearing about her mother from Geneva and Hezekiah from Deuce was like reading stories in a book. But the more she heard, the more the book sounded like a biography of real people living real lives connected to her own. It’s what she said she wanted. Still, it felt so incomplete. “And what about Hezekiah?” she asked.

  “Hezekiah was kind. Nice. He was a whore though, ain’t no doubt about it,” Johnita bellowed a whiskey-coated chuckle, and she looked youthful for a moment before her face crumpled into sadness and age. “But she . . .” She closed her eyes before continuing, “Claudette was like breathing when you ain’t even know you couldn’t.”

  Eve struggled to breathe through it. Cornelius. Hezekiah. And now Johnita lamenting the thirty-year lost love of a woman. She couldn’t help but think of Nelle through Johnita’s narrative. Had she truly been condemning her friend to choose between a life lived and one unlived with her insistence that Nelle choose men over women? “You really loved her?” she asked Johnita, but her query drifted to Nelle.

  “I really did,” Johnita smiled. “And I know they say it’s wrong, but I never felt so right. And I haven’t felt so since.”

  They sipped in silence after that. Each with their thoughts on love lost. Johnita’s on Claudette, who once told her, “Men ain’t stupid, Johnny, but they shole is foolish.” Johnita smiled at the memory.

  “Men’s foolishness is dangerous, Claude,” she’d warned in response only to elicit a throaty laugh from Claudette.

  Eve’s thoughts went to Nelle. She wondered what it would be like to see Nelle with another woman. Would there be any place for her if Nelle had a woman who could be a lover as well as a friend? She shook away the inquiry, imagining Nelle’s response: That’s a foolish question, Every. Eve lifted her glass
to her lips only to realize that she’d emptied it while lost in thought. Glancing over to Johnita, she saw the older woman was snoring softly, still grasping her own empty glass. Quietly, Eve rose and gently removed the glass from Johnita’s hand. Her gaze lingered on the woman’s face, observing the youthfulness that returns in slumber. Relaxed creases erased the previous moment’s worries, and Claudette and Cornelius disappeared into the recesses of the past. But not for Eve.

  Eve left Johnita’s. She walked by memory the small town’s layout, allowing her mind to examine her surroundings in light of the new information she had been acquiring. Meandering the streets past the old train depot, she followed the street names casually dropped by Geneva and Evelyn until she reached a modest wooden home.

  “This is it,” she said aloud as she stared at her mother’s birth home. It looked inhabited and well cared for. The small lawn that surrounded it was manicured and a wooden flowerbed lined the porch. Eve walked up the porch stairs and rested a hand on the wooden swing that swayed slightly in the breeze.

  The front door opened, startling her, and she gasped.

  “May I help you?” A dark-skinned woman about her own age peered out of the screen door.

  “Hi—hi, um . . .” Eve stammered. “I’m sorry. I’m told this was my grandmother’s house. I just wanted to see it.”

  The woman smiled and opened the door fully, revealing a small infant on her hip. “You must mean Mother Gertrude. Come on in.”

  Eve hesitated briefly, but the lure of seeing the interior of the house propelled her forward. She barely heard the homeowner’s chatter as she stepped across the threshold and was overcome with a rush of emotion that left her breathless.

  “Are you alright?” the woman asked. “Have a sit-down.” She whisked away and quickly returned with a tall glass of the most refreshing-looking lemonade Eve had ever seen.

  Eve obediently sat and accepted the lemonade. “Yes, I’m sorry. I just didn’t know my grandmother . . . Gertrude.” She sipped from the glass. “This is amazing!”

  “I’m Paulette, and this little one is Josie.”

  “Eve.”

  “Well, Eve,” Paulette sat and placed Josie on her lap more comfortably, “Mother Gertrude passed when I was still young. I don’t recall much about her. She left this house to the church, and when I fell in a bad way, they rented it to me.”

  Eve scanned the small, tidy living room. “Do you know if it’s changed much, the house?” She needed to know that if she walked the floors and touched the walls, they were the same as they’d been when Mercy had done it.

  “I don’t reckon it has,” Paulette answered thoughtfully. “The furniture came from the church, but I haven’t painted or anything.”

  “Do you mind if I look around?”

  Paulette shrugged and reclined the baby in her arms as she lifted her shirt. “It’s time for Josie to eat. Make yourself at home.”

  Eve left them, infant gorging on her mother’s breast, and made her way through the small house. The kitchen and bathroom were immediately off the living room. She peered toward them but passed uninterestedly and continued down a short hallway until she came to two bedrooms. Eve drifted into the sparsely furnished one decorated in the vibrant colors of childhood. A small crib, rocking chair, and dresser of mismatched wood lined three of the walls. Eve sat in the chair, inhaling the scent of baby powder. Her gaze rested on the walls, and she rose from the rocker and ran her hand along the textured paint. These were Mercy and Ann’s walls.

  Along the wooden baseboards, she noticed small scratches in one corner. Eve knelt and crawled toward it. She gently rubbed a finger across them and realized that they were etchings of letters, difficult to decipher.

  1950

  “What are you doing?” Ann directed to her sister’s backside as Mercy crouched in the corner of their shared room.

  Mercy turned wearily toward Ann and sat pressed against the wall, clutching a small knife. “Praying.”

  “With that?” Ann pointed toward the knife.

  “We clearly pray in different ways.” Mercy frowned.

  “Didn’t think you prayed at all,” Ann responded and turned on her heels, exiting the room.

  Alone, Mercy turned back to her task, deeply carving an M into the wooden baseboard.

  “What are you doing?” Paulette asked from the doorway.

  Eve turned quickly, clutching her chest. “You scared me.” She slowly stood up. “Sorry, I thought I saw something.” She dusted her hands on her jeans. “Thank you for letting me look around, Paulette. I’m going to go now.”

  Paulette, with Josie joined at her hip, accompanied Eve to the door and watched as she trudged down the stairs. “It’s M heart G,” she called after Eve.

  “What?” Eve stopped and turned.

  “What’s carved in the wood on the floor. It’s the letter M, a heart, and the letter G.” Paulette replied.

  Eve nodded and continued down the path. Who was G? Cornelius didn’t start with a G. Who was this mystery person, and did no one appear to know him? Eve didn’t know where her feet were carrying her until she arrived at Deuce’s home. She walked around to the back porch and caught Evelyn lighting a wooden pipe. “Ms. Evelyn?” she gasped.

  Evelyn inhaled, unperturbed. “Yes?”

  “What is that?” Eve asked incredulously.

  “Reefer. And whatever you say, don’t ruin my relaxation.”

  “Ms. Evelyn, what happened to Cornelius?”

  “Didn’t I just say . . .” she sighed and thought better of it and took a prolonged puff. Her glassy eyes peered through Eve. “Men leave, and women are left to take care of things. Sometimes they take things when they go. Pieces of us.” She inhaled again, holding the smoke deep within her before releasing the rest of her narration. “Sometimes they leave things. Pieces of them. Sometimes it’s not romance or love. Just their leavings.”

  Eve grew impatient. Although they were more forthcoming with information than her aunt, they definitely shared the same lack of urgency. The feeling of dangling on the precipice of knowledge, awaiting one more piece of information, was maddening. “What did you do, Ms. Evelyn?”

  Evelyn smiled. “Chile, men don’t understand that we carry the risk . . . the burden of their lust.”

  “What . . . did . . . you . . . do, Ms. Evelyn? Please.”

  “We killed a monster.”

  “How do you kill a monster?”

  “By feeding it to a bigger monster,” Evelyn answered matter-of-factly.

  The Ideal Sewing Circle had no seamstresses. Their first meeting was about mending human materials as opposed to cloth. They gathered in the summer of 1950 at Johnita’s Place—the juke owner, the churchwoman, and the widow. All defined by their relationship or service to the men of Ideal. They were not rebel women or rabble-rousers for feminists causes. Even if they had wanted to, their race prevented their entry into women’s rights factions, and their gender barred them from serious service to civil rights caucuses. Yet these women enacted their activism and manipulated their occupancy within the concentric confines of multiple oppressions for one fatal cause. Johnita, Evelyn, and Gertrude killed a monster that summer.

  Mercy’s pregnancy and departure were the talk of Ideal. The chatter always circled around Cornelius, fueled by an awareness of Mercy’s contempt for him.

  Johnita looked at Gertrude. “Did he do it?”

  Gertrude had been asked the question so many times by so many people—those whom she welcomed in her life and others who had previously barely been able to manage a passing greeting to her. All felt entitled to ask whether her youngest child had been made an adult before her time. Their eyes questioned her parenting, having allowed her husband’s murderer such closeness and access to her home. She looked at Johnita. “I don’t know,” she answered honestly.

  Johnita pressed. “Do y
ou think he could or would?”

  Gertrude shrugged. “I never would have . . .” She trailed off. She never would have thought it of Cornelius. He was a hard man but always gentle within the walls of her home. No one believed that their relationship was purely platonic. She didn’t expect them to extend any benefit of doubt with regard to Mercy’s pregnancy. “I don’t think so.”

  Johnita planted her hands firmly on the kitchen table, around which they all sat. “Well, I think he killed your husband. I think he tossed Claudette down that well. He is a killer.”

  Gertrude returned Johnita’s gaze. “Yeah, but that don’t make him this. Not all men—”

  Johnita cut through the sentence with her eyes and a heavy snort. “Why else wouldn’t Mercy talk then? She’s scared.”

  Gertrude thought of her headstrong youngest child. “That child don’t know fear. He’s the one scared. I don’t think he did it.”

  Evelyn broke her silence. “I don’t think it matters. He’s done plenty. Hezekiah . . .” She reached and squeezed Gertrude’s hand. “And Claudette.” She glanced at Johnita, whose lip quivered briefly in response. “It’s not enough to have white folks cutting down our every breath but we gotta have our own menfolk preying on us too? Even if he did do it, what would happen to him? Everybody think he did it, and ain’t nothing happened. They’ll be buying him cigars and clapping him on the back come winter.”

  Gertrude nodded. “So, what do we do?”

  The founding members of the Ideal Sewing Circle spent their inaugural meeting discussing the problem of white folks and Black men on Black women. Johnita poured them glasses of the good whiskey she kept locked in her private cabinet. They were quite drunk when the obvious solution came to them through the barrel-aged bourbon. Big C was a monster, and white folks were a bigger monster. Evelyn, new to the seduction of alcohol, summed it up as she slurred, “Feed the lil’n to the big’n.”

  Twenty-two years later, Evelyn—high on Old Fitzgerald and marijuana, with a long-standing familiarity with both—spoke clearly to Eve. “White folks were always on the hunt for colored men for something or another.” She thought of the great lengths to which the community went to shield boys and men from rabid lynch mobs. It had taken the Ideal Sewing Circle very little effort at all to do the opposite for Cornelius. They had simply refused to shield him from any white allegations. They did not act on his behalf. They did not beg or plead his innocence regarding any floating allegations. They did not do what Black women were expected to do. They did not point any fingers, but that was not necessary. Their inaction was enough. If there was any doubt as to the importance of Black women in Black communities, then the death of Cornelius Gaines served as a testament to it, an example of what happened when those women ceased to involve themselves. There was no fury to compare to that of hell. They simply stopped, and a man died.