I realized we were traveling over another bridge. We were leaving North Greenwood and heading north on Money Road. We continued to drive out of town into the dark, down a road that seemed like it could and would go on forever, with slight twists here and there, but no streetlights. Rising out of the darkness was a series of buildings that would be our home for the coming week. The collection of buildings turned out to be houses that made up a hotel called the Tallahatchie Flats. The Flats were reclaimed sharecropper shacks outfitted with electricity, indoor plumbing, and not much else. They were named after the Tallahatchie, the stretch of river that ran behind them, the place of that horrible murder.
Though it wasn’t Emmett Till’s murder that had made the owners of the Flats choose that particular location. There were three places in Greenwood rumored to be the burial site of Robert Johnson, and one of them was a short drive from the Flats. Johnson was a guitarist and singer who Eric Clapton once called “the most important blues singer that ever lived.”
His short life, mysterious death, and enormous talent were the perfect ingredients for a supernatural Delta tale. According to legend, Johnson grew up on a plantation, and in spite of having an intense desire for musical fame, he was a terrible, untalented guitar player. One night, he met the devil at the crossroads and sold his soul in exchange for a drastic increase in his musical abilities. His playing improved, but his life did not.
Theories abounded for decades about what caused his death in 1938 at the age of twenty-seven. It took three days for him to die, during which time he suffered in bed, enduring a death so terrible and painful that, according to Johnson’s mother, he begged for the end to come more quickly. The most common theory about Johnson’s death was that he was flirting with someone else’s woman at a bar one night, so her boyfriend spiked Johnson’s drink with strychnine.
As if to match the eeriness of Johnson’s story, the Tallahatchie Flats were set up in such a way that, when one drives there at night, the shacks seem to suddenly appear out of nowhere. Between the shacks and the road was a vast field, as though the field itself were a stage and the houses were the watching crowd. It occurred to me that if that place was meant to serve as an homage to two great lives both lost in horrific ways, it had definitely succeeded in at least capturing the ghostly, unsettling sense of the afterlife.
I climbed out of the car and looked around. Except for the hum of mosquitos and the rustles and rumbles of our team, there wasn’t a sound for miles. I was sharing a shack with three other members of the crew, but I had my own room, which had a dressing table and chair, a double bed, and loads of dust and cobwebs. There was a photo on the wall of a Black woman staring solemnly into the camera. I knew that in the early years of photography, people remained as still as possible while they waited for the exposure to be made. They didn’t smile, they just looked. Somehow her expression said more to me than that. I wondered who wanted her to have a photograph taken. Was it her? Was it a child who referred to her as his “Black mother”? Or maybe it was a plantation manager who snuck out at night to rape her while his own wife fumed in their bed.
I knew I wouldn’t be able to look at her photo every day for the next week, so I took it down and put it in a closet in the living room.
I joined my housemates soon after. In spite of how tired we all were, we stayed up for a few more hours. They wanted to know about my journey, but they also wanted to understand why I was so passionate about Booker. They sensed the depth of my love for him.
I sat there in that sharecropper shack and told them all about my family. I explained how I hadn’t felt truly connected to my family for years, and how I’d felt confused and unsettled about being Black in a world that prized White skin. One of the girls was a student at Ole Miss who’d offered herself up as a volunteer when she heard about the documentary we were making. She told us she was in graduate school and that her area of study was the trauma of the civil rights movement.
She was looking at the lives of people who’d been intensely involved in the movement and then went on to struggle with various forms of mental illness afterward. They’d paid a price not just when they went to sit-ins and marches, not just when they were beaten. They continued paying the price for decades in the form of untreated trauma. Being relentlessly hated had left a mark on them.
When we were finished talking, I climbed into bed, where I stared at the ceiling wondering about the kind of legacy hate can leave behind.
There was a certain kind of night outside my window, one I was unfamiliar with. It was so black and so dark that it looked dense, as if the night itself was a thick, wet fabric hanging from the sky. Talking about my family always left me feeling exposed, as if I’d removed a protective layer. I closed my eyes and imagined a night beyond my walls that was watching me, seeing my vulnerability.
Since the day I had first watched Booker’s footage, I’d felt something within myself softening, turning tender again. Over the years, there was so much I’d forgotten, but all this looking back into the past had caused memories to drip into my consciousness from a part of my heart I’d dammed up long ago. They were random at first. I saw my sister and me playing in our backyard as little girls, and my mother running out to tell us that Grease was on. My sister and I loved that movie. As the opening credits rolled, my back was facing my mother, but I could almost feel her as she enjoyed the moment. Then at least our happiness was enough to make her happy.
Another time, I arrived home from school, opened the front door, and walked down the hall into the living room, where my mom was sitting on the couch. We said our hellos and I looked over toward the kitchen, where a cake was sitting on a glass cake stand. Of all the desserts she made, my favorite was her lemon cake with added lemon pudding. It wasn’t my birthday. It wasn’t a holiday. She’d made it because she loved me.
All those memories had been packed up, stored away, and completely forgotten. My mother had been reduced to a handful of stories used to illustrate why I was so lost and all the rejection I needed a lifetime to overcome.
I glanced around the room. Everything felt like it was left over from another time. The curtains, blankets, and pillows had clearly been salvaged from another home, another life. My shack felt more like a museum than a hotel room.
When I was eleven and I visited Greenwood with my sister, we’d stayed with my grandma Doris in the home my mother had grown up in. That house looked a lot like the shack I was lying in. They were both so far from the way I saw my mother. She liked new things, things that shined, things that were custom-made just for her.
I took a deep breath and turned over onto my side, facing the window. As I fell asleep, I remembered a story my mother told me once about when she was a little girl living in Greenwood.
My mother, two of her sisters, and her cousin—another girl—used to all play baseball in the street in front of their house when they were young. A car with White men inside would drive by, slowing down to watch the girls as they played. These same men would come back later in the evening and drive up and down their street again and again.
In time, they began knocking on the door, pretending to be the police. My mother thought they were the KKK. She didn’t really know what to believe; she just knew she wasn’t safe. One night her sister Vera was doing laundry. She went out to the back porch where the washing machine was and saw a White man just standing there as if he’d been waiting for her. She cried out and rushed back into the house.
Vera was beside herself. She told her grandmother what had happened, but the woman didn’t believe her. She got up herself, went to the door, opened it, and looked out. Whatever she saw made her slam the door shut. She began to scream, calling for all of the children to help her hold the door closed.
“When you’re little and something like that happens to you,” my mother had said to me, “it stays with you. The house was isolated and those men were coming all the time. They used to try to break in on us. They wanted the young girls. I used to be scared in th
at house. Every time I closed my eyes, I thought I would see something in the dark.”
Booker’s Place
I woke up in the morning with a lot on my mind. There was so much darkness in Greenwood. Despair, poverty, resentment, differing opinions about exactly what was still plaguing the town and who was at fault. It was true that I’d gone there searching for a story about Booker, but deep down I was also looking for a way to help. I wanted to bring hope to the Blacks who’d walked alongside Booker in his life. All we’d achieved the night before at the Bridge was to reawaken dormant emotions and frustrations, then record the aftermath.
I shut my eyes, wanting my thoughts about yesterday to stop. We had a lot planned for today. This was the morning we were supposed to go to Booker’s Place. For the first time, I’d be able to stand in the place where my grandfather had built his own business.
I dragged myself out of bed, showered, and stepped outside. The morning was quiet except for the mosquitos; they were already humming, and even though the sun was barely coming up, the air was so hot it almost sizzled. Beyond the field in front of the Flats, and across the road we had taken to get there, was a wide, dense field of green that ended when it ran into a forest populated by immensely tall trees.
As I stood on the porch of that sharecropper shack, a poem called “The Slave Mother” came to my mind. The poem describes a person who hears a shriek rising wildly. It’s a sound of such immense distress that it has the power to “disturb the listening air.” The speaker explains that the sound is from a mother whose beloved son was taken from her, ripped out of her arms and sold into slavery. When I first read the poem, I imagined it taking place in a field where Blacks are picking cotton under a hot sun, too tired to even swat at the assaulting mosquitoes.
A cry like that would have to be a dark reminder of just how little hope for change they had, and evidence of the resounding, unending sorrow known only to mothers who’ve lost their children. I wondered, was it worse to know a child was dead? Or was it worse to have the knowledge that your baby—maybe even at just eight years of age—was being forced to work all day under a hot sun with an empty belly, to know that your child was being beaten without a mother’s warmth to provide comfort, to know that the innocence in your child’s eyes, the sweetness of your son’s smile, and the joy in his running form were all being slowly destroyed.
Members of the crew began pouring out of their respective shacks, where they’d been meeting to discuss the day’s technological needs. I watched as they loaded lighting and camera equipment into vans against the backdrop of the fields.
It took multiple cars to transport our entire crew. That morning, almost everyone had left before me so they could get things set up at Booker’s Place. Nicki, the associate producer, stayed back to drive me. We headed south from the Flats past the vacant fields that seemed to go on for miles in either direction to Grand Boulevard, with its towering trees and houses with sprawling lawns of pristine green, recently cut shrubs, and wraparound porches. The exteriors of the homes we passed in North Greenwood looked well kept, as if the owners were being careful to maintain their beauty and original architectural details. They were like miniature museums, individual monuments to Greenwood and its legacy of wealth and accomplishment.
The change was not immediate. We crossed the river and saw lots of businesses and homes that weren’t any older than the ones we’d seen in North Greenwood, yet they appeared to be more weathered. The farther south we traveled, the faster the change came. The lovely world around us fell away, and we were no longer in a tranquil sea of ancestral homes; instead we were driving past apartment complexes that reminded me of inner-city projects. We drove through neighborhoods with small houses whose porches were barely standing, with screen doors so worn that the fabric hung from the frames in strips, like flaps of skin. Black children were running around and riding bikes. Elderly adults rocked on porches. Middle-aged adults, mostly men, stood around cars parked on the side of the road talking to one another. Everyone stopped to look at us as we drove by.
Finally, we pulled up to Booker’s Place. There were several people out front, including crew members who’d arrived to set up lights and some locals who were helping us with the lay of the land. One of the people there worked at the local state college. She was in a conversation with someone from the crew and was explaining that when students graduated, she always encouraged them to leave and never come back. She spoke of one student who went away, got a master’s degree, and then returned home with the hope of giving back to Greenwood. She and other faculty urged him to leave, telling him he had no future in Greenwood.
While I eavesdropped on their conversation, I watched as my father made his way over to one of the cars that had pulled up. At first, I thought it was someone else who recognized him and wanted to catch up on old times, but then I realized it was his sister who was driving the car. After talking with her for about a minute, he waved me over. “She saying that,” he began. “She saying that a house got shot up last night. The senator’s house.”
“What?” I asked as I tried to remember who it was the night before who’d talked about how some of the local politicians drove cars worth more than their constituents’ houses. The night before it had struck me as being an elegant and powerful way to show the wealth differential, but after driving through South Greenwood that morning, I was pretty certain that my five-year-old minivan would also qualify as being worth more than some of those houses.
I called Raymond over. I watched as he got the story from my dad and my aunt, half-listening as I wondered if we had been irresponsible the night before by bringing up issues that had simmered for decades when we had no solution, no ideas about how to help people heal. After my aunt drove away, my dad explained that the senator’s wife had recently purchased a new Cadillac. Apparently, two shots had been fired, and no one was injured.
Raymond turned to me and began walking me through the details of what was about to transpire. Finally, I was going into Booker’s Place.
The first time I heard about Booker’s news appearance, I’d had a strong sense of him. I could all but feel his fingers moving through the fields of my life, moving stalks aside to orchestrate everything that was coming to pass—learning about Greenwood through my dad’s story, all the history of the Delta that had come my way, seeing the footage, and, of course, now making a film. However, in the last few months, I’d felt my grandfather less and less. As I stood on McLaurin, sweating under the sun, which seemed to hang lower and burn hotter in the Delta, I was hopeful I’d sense his presence again when I stepped inside the restaurant.
It had been a long time since anyone had gone inside, so long that the crew had had to pry the door open before I got there. When I entered, I found a place that was nothing like what had been described to me. It was abandoned and picked over. It looked looted. The bar was still there, but I suspected that was only because it was too massive to carry away. All but one of the built-in booths had been removed. There were no tables or chairs, and a beat-up, stained recliner took up most of the space in the small kitchen. There were holes in the ceiling where birds had built nests. Boxes full of water-damaged documents dotted the edges of the restaurant. Part of the floor had been pulled up, and what was left had a color to it that was impossible to make out because it was covered in a layer of dust that had been there for so long it was stuck to the floor like paint.
I wanted to leave the moment I stepped in. There wasn’t much to do there besides look around and try to glimpse what had been. I stood where I knew the cash register used to be. It was where Booker was standing when he was shot. I waited, but in the end I felt nothing.
After a few minutes, I left while the crew continued taking interior shots. Then we all went to lunch at one of my dad’s favorite restaurants, a little place called Iola’s. She served us a meal of catfish and several other dishes, which I’d later struggle to recall because the fish was divine. Light, buttery, crispy perfection. I asked for a
cup of coffee, but Iola didn’t serve any. I asked my dad if he knew where I could get some coffee. He said he did and then offered to go with me.
Eddie—the man from the Bridge the night before who’d brought up conflict between Blacks—was with us. He and my father were friends.
When we stepped out of Iola’s, a shirtless Black man with bloodshot eyes was standing next to the door staring at me with deep intensity. I ignored him, and, with my father and Eddie, walked a few blocks to a gas station. I poured myself a cup of coffee, doctored it up with sugar and cream, paid for it, and then walked outside. The shirtless man was still there.
As we crossed the street, he began calling to me. “Hey, baby. Where you goin’?”
My dad turned around and, looking down from his great height, he cursed and threatened the man. Eddie stepped between them and told my dad and me to keep going. As we walked away, I glanced over my shoulder. Eddie had his arm around the shirtless man and was leading him away. I heard Eddie say, “Remember, man, just this week, we’re not gonna bother the people visiting town. Just this week, alright? Leave the White people alone, too. Okay?”
I wanted to ask Eddie about what he’d said, but I didn’t know what to ask. I just knew that I was in a place unlike any other I’d ever been. There wasn’t any way to prepare for Greenwood. The town would show me what it wanted, in whatever fashion it chose, whether or not I was ready to understand.
* * *
WE HAD MULTIPLE INTERVIEWS scheduled for the remainder of the day, but I was beat even after drinking my coffee. I went back to the Flats to take a one-hour nap, which ended up lasting closer to three. When I woke up, I felt out of sorts. Not because I was in Greenwood but because I was beginning to question what I was doing there at all. Raymond, possibly sensing my growing wariness about what we were doing, suggested that he, David, and I grab a bite to eat at Lusco’s.
The Song and the Silence Page 20