I recall one time walking with Daddy to the store in town to pick up some provisions. It was a warm day, and Daddy told me to come with him and walk rather than ride up the road in the truck. “We’ll just walk, enjoy the day, and say hello to neighbors along the way,” he said.
Daddy had a long stride, with legs that made up most of his tall height, so I had to move my legs quickly just to keep at his side. Whenever we came upon a good-sized rock I’d kick it down the road, run in front of Daddy to where it landed, and then kick it again.
As we passed our neighbors’ farms, the families would wave and shout, “Hello, Mr. Jones, nice day.” Daddy and I would wave back and continue on our way. We stopped at one neighbor’s porch, as everyone was sitting outside, and chatted for a while. I was able to visit with my school friends while Daddy talked to the men on the porch. They spoke in hushed whispers. Something had happened that upset the grown-ups. The night before, I had heard my parents speaking in the same quiet voices, with a sense of urgency, or maybe it was fear.
When Daddy was finished visiting, we continued walking the last mile to the general store. He was silent for the rest of our walk. I looked up at him a couple of times, but he didn’t look my way. The wrinkles on his forehead and the blood vessels at his temple stood out large and firm. As we approached the steps to the store I saw a crowd of people on the steps, the porch, and inside the store. They were white, every one of them.
Daddy put his hand on my shoulder, signaling for me to slow down and stay close by his side. He took his cap off and placed it in the back pocket of his coveralls. Then he wiped his brow with his handkerchief. He rubbed the dust off his shoes on the back of his pant legs, and with his eyes cast down he led me up the steps into the store.
People made a space for us to enter, but it was a small space, only wide enough for one tiny person to pass without touching bodies on either side. We crept sideways through them. As I peeked up I could see that their faces were pressed tight, as if they were sucking on sour lemon drops. They smelled too, like the sweat stink lingering on dirty work clothes or a wet dog. I held my nose. Daddy nudged me to keep my face down.
“What you want, boy?” the shopkeeper said in an angry tone to Daddy.
“I need some flour, milk, and a few other things, sir, just some things for the wife. The cupboards are getting bare.” Daddy answered without making eye contact. He looked down at the tips of his shoes, his clean shoes.
“This ain’t a good time. You need to go.” The man looked at the other people and waved his hand at Daddy as though he were a mosquito. “Git out, boy. You don’t belong here now, git out!” As he raised his voice the other people began to close in on us, creating even more tightness in the space between them and us.
“Yes, sir,” Daddy said. He began backing out of the store, holding me tight at his side but pushing me toward the steps. I nearly fell off the top step before we turned around and walked forward.
At the bottom there were three girls in cute dresses, hair pulled back in pigtails with big bows made from fancy pink and yellow ribbons. They stuck their tongues out at me and made hissing noises in my face. I could smell their breath, laced with the scent of chocolate and sugar. I knew better than to look them in the eye or stick my tongue out at them, but I wanted to. That was the closest I’d ever been to white girls.
“Come on, Baby Girl, let’s go home.” Daddy began walking down the road. He didn’t take my hand. His shoulders sloped down, and his stride was slower, as though he had just worked in the fields all day. He kept his head down.
I reached up and took his hand. “It’ll be okay, Daddy,” I said. “Momma and I can find something to cook tonight.” I was shaking all over, and I felt trembling in his hand too. His palm was wet from sweat. I held on tighter.
When we approached our neighbor’s farm they shouted out hello again and called Daddy “Mr. Jones.” Seemed like this made him walk taller, less tired-looking.
Finally I asked him, “What happened, Daddy? What have all the grown-ups been talking about? The whites too.”
He didn’t say anything at first, but then he stopped and said, “A boy was killed, Baby Girl. They killed him.”
“Why?”
He started walking again, shaking his head from side to side. “The boy whistled at a woman. That’s all he did. She was a white woman. They said he whistled at her in a store in Mississippi.”
“He was a colored boy?” I asked.
“Just fourteen years old.” Daddy’s voice trailed off; it felt as if I’d lost him again. “He was from the North—Chicago. He was just visiting.”
“Fourteen! Kids in my class are that age.”
“I know, Baby Girl. He’s the same age as your friends.” He rubbed my cheek as he said this and looked deep into my eyes. His eyes looked as sad as when my granddaddy died.
As our farm came into sight Daddy began to walk faster, with a lighter step. The family was out on the porch, and right away they noticed we didn’t have any food with us.
“Where’s our food?” Momma asked impatiently, but she stopped when she saw the look on my daddy’s face.
“Crowd at the general store. We’ll shop another time,” Daddy mumbled. He took his handkerchief out and dusted off his shoes. “Guess I’ll go clean and polish these. Kicked up a lot of dust on that walk.” He disappeared inside.
Momma took hold of me and gave me a strong hug. She held onto me, rocking back and forth and humming her favorite church hymn. When she let go, she held me by the shoulders and stared at my face.
“What’s wrong, Momma?”
She shook her head, pulled me close again. Then she let out a sigh and went inside.
I sat on the steps by myself, thinking about how strange grown-ups could be.
THE NEXT WEEK at school Miss Parker told us what had happened to Emmett Till—that was his name, the Northern boy who’d been killed for whistling at a white woman. She showed us the awful pictures of him that his family wanted everyone to see. I don’t think our parents would have wanted us to see those images. But Miss Parker thought it was important that we understand the world around us. She said, “You children need to be careful, very careful.”
We gasped at what we saw, how horribly he had been beaten. His body was no bigger than most of ours. His clothes, from what we could make out in the murky picture, looked like things the boys in our classroom might wear, but there were big dark spots all over them.
Chapter Two
I WAS THE YOUNGEST OF TWELVE. WE WERE A homegrown crew of field hands—pecan-pickers, hog-pen cleaners, chicken-slaughterers, house-cleaners, and cooks. My momma was my life trainer. She and the other women in the house trained me to be a good, hardworking wife and mother. “Preparing you for the future,” Momma always said. Unlike my older sisters and brothers, I didn’t witness the frequent changes in my momma’s body, as she moved from standing straight with a strong back to carrying a soft, round belly with a sore back and then returning to standing erect with a baby sucking at her breast. It must have seemed an endless cycle to her. Later it was a cycle I’d see in my sisters and the women my brothers brought home to live with us. Their wives, I was told. We weren’t talkative people. Many things happened without words being spoken; looks and grunts often served as acknowledgment that a change had occurred or an event had taken place.
When a brother married and his wife moved into his sleeping space, a sister would leave our house to do the same at her new husband’s home. The wife took my sister’s place in the kitchen and began to look much like my momma, the wife’s body changing as her posture labored with the weight of another life. On those rare occasions when one of my married sisters returned, she too would have the same full expectant body. There were full-bellied women everywhere. But I didn’t want to be like them. It seemed there must be more to life than lying on your back for a man, getting a swelled belly, having a baby suck your nipple, and working away in the kitchen.
OUR SCHOOLHOUSE WAS a
one-room building two miles from our farm. We always went to school in a group—my sisters, my brothers, friends from neighboring farms, and me. It was precious time away from the farm and our crowded house, time away from the oldest kids in the house and my parents. Although we were all different ages, the twenty children in the one-room school were taught by the only colored teacher in this part of the county. Miss Parker was my idol. Here was a woman who wore pretty clothes every day and shoes that fit her feet—no holes in the toes or straps that didn’t cross the top of her foot completely. Her shoe buckles closed properly, and her dresses were always pressed. On Mondays she wore a dark blue dress with a little white lace collar. The dress had short sleeves, with a small button on the side of each. Tuesday was the flowered dress with a solid green collar and black buttons down the front. Wednesdays she wore a brown dress with elbow-length sleeves, a side zipper, and a thin belt. Then on Thursdays she’d have a black skirt on with a white blouse that had a little ribbon tied in a bow at her neck. Fridays she wore a dark blue skirt with a printed blouse.
Miss Parker often read aloud to us. Cane, by Jean Toomer, was one of my favorites. I loved everything in the book, but my favorite poem was “Georgia Dusk.” Miss Parker would start with the first stanza:
The sky, lazily disdaining to pursue
The setting sun, too indolent to hold
A lengthened tournament for flashing gold,
Passively darkens for night’s barbecue.
When she asked us to read aloud, I was the only one in the class who ever volunteered. After pausing to see if any other student wanted to read, she’d call on me. “All right, Nell, please stand and read to the class.” I’d stand and read the next stanza:
A feast of moon and men and barking hounds,
An orgy for some genius of the South
With blood-hot eyes and cane-lipped scented mouth,
Surprised in making folk-songs from soul sounds.
I’d pause and look at Miss Parker. She would nod and say, “Continue, Nell.” I’d smile and go on. When I finished, I would take my seat and two other girls would stand to finish the reading. Listening to the beautiful words, mouthing them to myself as they read, feeling the words roll on my tongue, I felt I was in church, floating on currents of warm Southern air.
I OFTEN STAYED after school to help Miss Parker clean and prepare for the next day. Black chalkboards lined the wall at the front of the classroom. The letters of the alphabet hung above the boards on yellow heavy-duty paper, so old that the corners were frayed and browning. Each paper showed a capital letter, then a lower-case version, and then the cursive form. We practiced making the letters at our desks, using small copies of the alphabet chart. Before I cleaned the blackboards, I would write out the entire alphabet in longhand. “Very good, Nell,” Miss Parker would say as she watched me write. “Not all the children can master cursive. But yours is quite nice, with a good flow to the letters.”
Sometimes she would sit at her desk while I cleaned, in deep thought. I usually just went about cleaning, but one day I asked her if everything was okay.
“Nell, there’s so much that I’d like to tell you children.”
“Like what, Miss Parker?” I kept cleaning.
“It was nothing. I was just thinking out loud, Nell, that’s all. You do such a good job helping me. Thank you.”
“May I ask you something?”
“Of course.”
“Do you have family? Were you ever married? Do you have children?”
“My, my. I do believe that is three questions, Nell.”
“I’m sorry. Maybe just the first one, then. Do you have family?”
She smiled. “Why don’t you sit for a while, and I’ll tell you a little about myself.”
I sat at my desk and folded my hands.
“I was like you once—a long time ago.” She looked down at her hands, absently rubbing them together while pulling on one finger on her left hand. “I was born here. My daddy and momma were born here too. I think their parents, my grandparents, came from somewhere else, maybe deeper south or even from another part of the world. I never knew for sure. My parents never talked about my grandparents; they were probably slaves on some old farm. Sometimes old folk can’t bring themselves to talk about things that hurt to the bone.”
She drifted into silence, staring at the air with her arms folded across her chest as if she were giving herself a gentle hug. I remained quiet, my hands folded, and hoped she’d say more.
“I’m an only child, at least now I am. I had other siblings, but they didn’t make it to adulthood. My parents are gone too. I’m a reader like you, Nell. My folks weren’t educated, not in the formal book way. They were very smart, though. They knew everything about farming, growing crops, building, mending—anything that needed getting done, they could do. They taught me how to be self-sufficient. We didn’t have books in our house, but one old lady from a neighboring farm had books she’d stolen. She told everyone that the missus had given her the books. No one believed her. It was illegal to teach slaves to read or write. Certainly there was no reason for a former slave to be given books. But that was her story. No one disagreed with her—not to her face, anyway. She’d visit our farm with her books, sit with me and any other children who were around, and read. She only had five books, and each was precious to her. Jack and Jill: A Village Story was my favorite.”
“Why?” I asked.
“The author was Louisa May Alcott, a woman from up North. I liked that the story was set in a part of the world I knew nothing about, so I was learning about cold and snow.
And, I realize now, I liked that it was written by a woman. That mattered to me. To know that a woman could write stories and have them published, and that a slave-owner could own a book by such a writer—that was amazing. Later, when I learned more about who Louisa was—a Northerner whose family were abolitionists and well-educated—I felt a kinship to her in some strange way.”
“Miss Parker, how’d you learn about her?”
“We have family up North, in Boston, where Louisa was from. I wrote to my cousin and asked if she knew anything about the Alcotts. She sent me all the information she could find at the library up there. There was quite a lot. Seems Louisa and her family have important history. But I was telling you about our neighbor, and how I got to reading books.
“The neighbor was a good reader, and she taught me how to read. Once I could read on my own, I read whatever I could find—food labels on cans and jars, information on sacks of flour, instructions that came with tools and farm equipment, bills that showed up in the mail, recipes my momma had written on little cards, the family bible, and church hymn books. We didn’t have a school for coloreds then, but we always had church and Sunday School. I did most of my learning there.”
Silence fell. I sat still for what seemed a long time and finally said, “Miss Parker. What happened to your family?”
“Speaking like this makes me remember. It’s not always a good thing—remembering.”
“I’m sorry, Miss Parker. I should go. Maybe we could talk again. I enjoyed listening to you.” I stood up and started to gather my things. Then I heard her take a deep breath and let out a pain-filled sigh.
“They killed him—my daddy. Eventually they killed my momma, too, although in a different way.”
“Miss Parker?” I stopped what I was doing and stood beside my desk.
She had her back to me, but I could see her wipe a tear from the corner of her eye. She reached into her pocket, took out a white lace handkerchief, and dabbed her nose. I sat sideways on the edge of my chair, waiting for her to speak. My heart was thumping a tune inside my chest, loud as the hammering noise my daddy and brothers made when fixing a fence.
Stillness and quiet were so foreign in the classroom. Usually I could hear the young ones giggling and laughing while they waved their hands in the air, asking if they could go pee. The older kids groaned at this, knowing that Miss Parker would assign someone to
walk the little ones to the outhouse and wait. Once a boy had almost fallen through the hole. He yelled and screamed for help and was a mess after he was rescued. Miss Parker didn’t allow the young ones to go alone after that. The rear of the classroom would dance with whispers and glances from the older kids. Notes written on tightly folded pieces of paper were slipped from hand to hand. The sound of pen knives carving the desk tops often distracted me from my silent reading. All the desks were left with etchings of initials and hearts—proclamations of young love.
Now, with just Miss Parker and me, I heard only quiet. Then she started to speak.
“It was late one night. We had finished supper and cleaned up. I remember the sky was filled with bright stars. I’d wanted to stay on the porch, stare up, and count them. But Momma hustled me inside for bed. I was drifting off to sleep when loud noises woke me. Men on horses, wearing sheets with cutouts for their eyes, noses, and mouths, were circling our front porch. They shouted at Daddy, said he was a thief who had been tried and convicted. Now it was time for his sentencing. They took out a noose.” Miss Parker stopped speaking and folded her arms more tightly. When she started again I didn’t recognize her voice. Usually it was even in tone, gentle, almost soothing; now the voice I heard was deep, strong, filled with the harshness our preacher used whenever his sermon spoke about the work of the devil.
“My momma wailed for them to stop. She pleaded and begged on her knees. She crawled in the dirt at their horses’ hooves. They spat on her. Told her to get out of the way, or else they could make a second noose. Momma was never the same after that night.” Miss Parker stopped again, rubbed her stomach with one hand, and leaned against the wall with her fist clenched. I was afraid she might fall over or faint. She rested her head on her arm for a second, but then suddenly she stood tall, rolled her shoulders back, smoothed her hair, and took a deep breath. In the Miss Parker voice I recognized, she said, “Time for you to go home, Nell.”
Child Bride Page 2