Over the Fence

by Mary Monroe

  “Nothing to be concerned about. He was acting nicer than he acts when he ain’t on medication. That’s all.”

  “Hmmm. Well, medication can do that. Sometimes I get giddy when I take pills. Oh well. If he don’t make it to the party, I’ll pay him a visit on Wednesday to see how he doing.”

  Yvonne’s face suddenly went blank. A little voice in my head told me she had something else to tell me. And since she was holding back on it, it had to be something I didn’t want to hear.

  “All right. What else?”

  She took her time answering my question. “I didn’t want to tell you, but I ran into Lester, too.”

  “Your used-to-be?”

  She nodded. “That low-down, funky black dog is still mad as a hornet about what happened.”

  “Humph! I’m still mad about what happened, too. The nerve of that spook coming up in my house, behaving the way he done. What did he have to say this time?”

  “Somebody told him we was bootlegging and doing good. He said he might pay us a visit someday.”

  “Good!” I said with a nonchalant shrug. “More guests, more money. So long as he don’t start no mess won’t be no mess.”

  “I hope he don’t come, because he said he’s going to get back at me for stealing his money and beating up on him.”

  I gave Yvonne a concerned look and set the knife and the last potato on the table. “In that case, he better not come to our house. Do you know where I can find him at? I’ll straighten him out once and for all.”

  “I don’t know where to find him at.”

  “Ain’t Katy got a cousin on Reed Street? Maybe they staying with her.”

  “Uh-uh. They had moved in with his mama in Tuscaloosa. He caught Katy with another man, and he broke up with her.”

  “Good! If he’s in Branson, I’ll find him and lay him out!” Basically, I was a nonviolent man. I’d had a few scrapes here and there, but only when I hadn’t had no choice. I was ready, willing, and able to beat some sense into Lester’s bone head.

  Yvonne grabbed my arm and shook her head. “Let it go. Lester was just bluffing. He don’t want another beatdown. Now, let’s forget about him and get back to work. We got to go home this evening and start getting the house ready for Willie Frank’s party tomorrow night. We can’t let Lester get us all riled up and put us in a foul mood.”

  “You right, sugar,” I agreed.

  * * *

  I was so excited when I got up Tuesday morning, you would have thought it was Christmas. Mr. Cunningham let me and Yvonne off early so we could go home and finish getting things ready. Him and his recovering wife and all our coworkers was coming to the party.

  A few minutes after we got home, the cat lady from across the street came over with a dishpan full of potato chips. “Milton, I won’t be able to come back until after my Bible class ends at eight,” she explained, setting the chips on the coffee table.

  “Don’t worry about coming late, Sister Hemphill. We liable to party the whole night.”

  By 7:00 p.m., we had more than two dozen folks in the house. Lyla and Emmalou had brung a bunch of deviled duck eggs, a neck-bone casserole, and a bowl of potato salad. Aunt Mattie had baked a huge sheet cake for Willie Frank. Her birthday present to him was a free session with his favorite booty babe, Sweet Sue. I set the cake on the coffee table, and the goodies Lyla and Emmalou had brung on top of the ironing board, which I had put up against the wall. A few seconds later, Yvonne came in from the kitchen with a humongous platter that was loaded from side to side with hush puppies, chicken wings, frog legs, meatballs, and fried green tomatoes. She put the platter on the ironing board. Folks was gobbling, drinking, and dancing up a storm. With all the energy in the room, I had a feeling this would be one of the most unforgettable nights we’d ever had.

  “Where is our boy Willie Frank?” Aunt Mattie asked, looking around the room. She had been in the house only thirty minutes and was already as drunk as a skunk. She staggered to the couch and dropped down like a bale of hay and undid the three top buttons on her purple and gold brocade frock. “Don’t tell me he ain’t going to show up for his own birthday party.”

  “He told me he was going to be late. He got to round up his kinfolks that wanted to come and haul them over here. The way them rednecks is scattered all over the hills, that could take some time,” I replied.

  Aunt Mattie looked toward the door. “What about Joyce and Odell?”

  “Odell ain’t feeling too good,” Yvonne told her. “Joyce came over a little while ago. She said he too sick to come out or be left alone. She cooked him a pot of chicken soup and made him stretch out on the couch.”

  Lyla, who was sitting on the couch next to Aunt Mattie, started laughing. “I ain’t never seen a woman as devoted to a man as Joyce is to Odell. I was almost the same way with my husband.” She stopped talking, and a sad look spread across her face like a veil. “All the time I was a lovestruck fool, that beast I married was playing footsie with his coworker.”

  “Well, that ain’t likely to happen in Odell’s case,” I said. Everybody laughed with me. “His female coworker is old enough to be his mama, and she look like a swamp frog.”

  I excused myself and went to the kitchen to get another platter of snacks. Before I could get back, somebody in the living room hollered, “The police just pulled up!”

  My heart sunk, and my chest tightened. “Oh, holy shit,” I mouthed. I didn’t know what to do next, so I just stood stock-still, rooted in my spot like a tree.

  Within seconds, people stampeded into the kitchen and bolted out the back door. Aunt Mattie was stumbling and wheezing like a mule. She held her bamboo purse close to her bosom when she ducked into the broom closet and slammed the door. There was such a ruckus, with so many folks trying to get out the door at the same time, one of our coworkers opened a window and leaped out like a frog.

  By the time I was able to move and make my way back to the living room, the only person in there was Yvonne. We looked at one another and froze. Before either one of us could say anything, somebody kicked open the door. Four of the meanest-looking cracker cops stormed in, waving shotguns and nightsticks.

  CHAPTER 51

  YVONNE

  “CUFF THEM NIGGERS UP! CUFF THEM REAL GOOD! FRISK EACH one to make sure they ain’t got no weapons!” Hollering at the top of his lungs was a tall, lanky white policeman with a shotgun in one hand and a nightstick in the other.

  “What’s the problem, Officers?” Milton asked in a calm tone. With all the chaos going on, I couldn’t believe that he was still able to behave like the upstanding Christian gentleman he was.

  One of the cops handcuffed Milton with his arms behind his back, and two others started beating him about his head and face with the sticks and the butts of their shotguns. So much blood was spurting off him, I couldn’t tell which wounds it was coming from, the old ones from his other beating that hadn’t fully healed or the new ones. The cop that cuffed me gripped my arm so tight, he almost cut off my blood circulation.

  “What’s this about?” Milton whimpered, spitting out blood. “We ain’t did nothing but have a party.”

  The lanky cop, who seemed to be the ringleader, glanced around the room. “Y’all in a heap of trouble!”

  It was hard to believe that as long as folks had been bootlegging in Branson, we was the first ones to go down for it. That was what I assumed our crime was until I heard what the cop said next.

  “Where that white girl at?”

  “What white girl?” me and Milton screeched at the same time.

  “The one y’all lured over here and had a bunch of wild niggers rape!” The lanky cop snapped his fingers at the one that had handcuffed Milton and the man standing in the middle of the floor, with a dazed expression on his face. “Moe, you and Joe Bob go check them other rooms. Shake a leg!”

  The two men took off running toward different rooms, waving their shotguns.

  Then the lanky cop swiveled his head in my direction a
nd yelled at the one that had cuffed me and was still holding my arm. “Boot, hold on tight to that wench. She look mighty dangerous to me.”

  I was so scared and mad I could barely see straight. But I could see that Milton was in no shape to make much sense. He was moaning and groaning the same way he had when he got attacked that other time. “Y’all must be at the wrong house. We don’t know nothing about no white girl getting raped!” I yelled.

  “Uh-huh! That ain’t what we was told!” the man holding my arm boomed.

  “Who told you that?” I croaked.

  Having my hands cuffed behind my back was bad enough. But I was trembling so hard, I could barely stay up on my feet. What was happening didn’t even seem real. So many thoughts that didn’t make a lick of sense was bouncing around inside my head so fast, I couldn’t tell where one ended and another one started.

  “Officers, will y’all please tell us what’s going on?” I yelled. “We just hardworking, God-fearing colored folks that ain’t never gone against the Jim Crow law and done nothing illegal to a white person, especially a female.”

  The main cop gave me a look that was so mean, it sent shivers up my spine. “Lies, lies, lies! Hush up before I slap a muzzle on you, gal!” Then he kicked over the coffee table, knocking Willie Frank’s birthday cake on the floor.

  I pressed my lips together so tight, it felt like I had glued them shut. The cop glared at me until the other two who were searching the house ran back into the living room. Them idiots stepped in the cake, laughing all the while.

  “All clear, Sheriff Potts. Ain’t another soul in the house,” one of them said.

  “Let’s not worry about them for now. We got the main culprits. We’ll get the names of them rapists out of these two if we have to pull that information out of their mouths with a pair of pliers.” Sheriff Potts looked from me to Milton. Then he shouted, “Milton and Yvonne Hamilton, y’all both under arrest!”

  “Sir, no white girl got raped in this house tonight or no other night,” I insisted, choking on a sob.

  “So you say. I got a call from somebody who claimed he was a eyewitness.”

  “That’s a damn lie!” I shot back.

  “It was reported that y’all had a young blonde with blue eyes up in here, making a sport of her. From what I was told, niggers ravaged her until she passed out. And before y’all set them savages on her . . .” He paused and looked from me to Milton. “You two buggers got her nice and drunk first. If she ain’t laying dead in a swamp, her life is still ruined—same as y’all!”

  “We innocent!” Milton insisted. His voice was so weak and low now, I could barely hear him. “You . . . you must be crazy.”

  Sheriff Potts stomped his foot and poked Milton’s chest with the butt of his shotgun. “Boy, where do you get off sassing me? Where is your manners at? How much did y’all charge them niggers to take advantage of that young girl?”

  “Officer, I don’t believe nobody told you nothing!” I blasted.

  “You calling me a liar?”

  “Yes!” That was the wrong thing to say. The sheriff’s bony hand slapped me across the face so hard, I seen stars of every color in the rainbow.

  “Get these monkeys on the truck!” the sheriff yelled.

  We was immediately herded out the door and marched to a pickup truck that was double-parked in the middle of the street in front of our house. A dusty police car was parked behind it. The cat lady across the street rushed out to her porch, with all eight of her cats trailing behind her. She had a coal-oil lamp in her hand and a horrified expression on her face. I didn’t think her eyes could get no bigger; she had them stretched open so wide now, they looked as big as hen eggs.

  The folks that had come in cars and trucks had left them behind. We’d had such a crowd, vehicles was lined up for several blocks on our street, on both sides. Just when one of the cops started to hoist me up into the bed of the police pickup truck, Willie Frank finally drove up. He slowed down to a crawl, but he didn’t stop. Mama and Papa Perdue was sitting in the cab with him. One of his nephews, his oldest brother and his wife, and the paraplegic grandfather they hauled around in a wheelbarrow occupied the bed of the truck. They all gawked, with their eyes bugged out and their mouths hanging open, but they didn’t react. It was a blessing they didn’t. I didn’t want them to get caught up in a mess we didn’t know who had caused. Willie Frank made a U-turn and drove off.

  As the police truck was pulling away, a few of our neighbors’ porch lights came on. Some of the others rubbernecked from their windows and front porches. Joyce and Odell’s lights didn’t come on, so they must have been sleeping real hard. It was a good thing they hadn’t come to the party, after all. They might not have been lucky enough to get away like everybody else.

  Branson’s jailhouse and teeny-weeny post office was in the same shabby building in the middle of a block in our business district. The jail had only three cells. Like everything else, they was segregated. But only by race. They put me and Milton in the same cell. The prison where I had done time was bad, but the hellhole I was in now was even worse. So many plump roaches was crawling around our feet, it looked like the floor was moving. A bat almost the size of a hoot owl was perched on the windowsill outside, peeping through the bars.

  “Baby, don’t worry. When they find out they been duped, they’ll straighten out this mess,” Milton assured me as we huddled on the floor, shaking like leaves. There was a set of bunk beds with scuzzy gray blankets on the flat, piss-stained mattresses, no sheets. The toilet was a metal bucket in a corner, half filled with foul-smelling, murky water, and there was no toilet paper in sight.

  “Somebody set us up,” I said through clenched teeth.

  “That’s a fact. But there ain’t a lick of proof that we had no white girl raped, so we ain’t got nothing to worry about. God got our backs.”

  We joined hands, bowed our heads, and prayed in low voices for five minutes. After that, we seethed with anger for almost a hour, before we was finally able to go to sleep on the floor.

  Not long after that, I heard the cell door open. Milton was still asleep, and I was still in his arms. Before I knew what was happening, two of the same cops that had come to the house tiptoed in.

  “Come here, gal,” one ordered, pulling me up by my arm. With his other hand, he unzipped his pants. “Well, I do declare. This one is as soft as hog fat, and I bet as sweet as a berry.”

  “Well, Moe, they say the blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice,” the other man snickered, groping me with both hands.

  “Turn me loose, motherfucker!” I screamed. When the man that had pulled me up gripped my head and tried to kiss me, I hawked a big wad of spit smack-dab between his eyes.

  “You black bitch!” he blasted, slapping both sides of my face.

  He was way stronger than me, so there was no way I could fight him off. But I screamed loud enough to wake up the dead. It woke Milton up, but he couldn’t do me no good. While the first man wrestled me to the lower bunk and climbed on top of me, the other one sat on Milton’s back and kept him pinned down.

  CHAPTER 52

  MILTON

  I WAS RELIEVED YVONNE HAD PASSED OUT WHILE SHE WAS BEING raped. A few minutes after them rapist cops rushed out of the cell, she came to and started moaning. I crawled over to the bunk and grabbed her hand and dragged her down into my arms. Before either one of us could speak, I heard the cell door being unlocked again. One of my eyes was swole shut, and the only light was from a naked bulb dangling from a string in the hallway, so I could barely see. Before I could focus, I heard the one voice that gave me some hope: Willie Frank’s.

  “Thanks, Deputy,” he said.

  “Don’t get too comfortable in there, boy! I can’t let you stay but a few minutes,” the deputy barked. He slammed the door shut and left, cussing under his breath.

  Willie Frank rushed over and squatted down on the floor next to us. I started babbling gibberish, and tears was flowing out of Yvonne’s eyes like
a waterfall.

  “Y’all get a grip and talk normal so I can understand you. I had to bribe them deputies so they’d let me in.” The way Willie Frank’s voice was cracking, I thought he was going to start crying, too.

  Yvonne abruptly stopped crying. When Willie Frank seen how bloody my face and clothes was, he shook his head and wiped my face off with the tail of his shirt. Then he wiped off Yvonne’s.

  “Did you find out what the hell is going on?” I asked him.

  He scrunched up his face and took a long deep breath. “Well, according to Sheriff Potts, some anonymous person called him and claimed y’all had a pretty little white teenage girl in the house, being raped.”

  If this situation hadn’t been so serious, I would have laughed. “The only white females in the house last night was Lyla and Emmalou!” I screeched. “Nobody would mistake them wrinkled-up hags for pretty little teenagers! They’ll jump in the bed with a colored man at the drop of a hat, so ain’t nobody got to rape them!”

  “I know this is a setup!” Willie Frank boomed. “Did y’all short-change or insult anybody last night? Maybe somebody found out about the recycled booze.”

  “We didn’t insult nobody, and we the only three that know about us recycling our liquor. If we shortchanged somebody, it was a honest mistake, and I know they would have said something. But they was all regulars, and none of them had no reason to finger us for rape,” I said. “It had to be somebody that want to bring us down. But who?”

  We looked like idiots, sitting in the middle of the floor. I was in too much pain to stand up, and I knew Yvonne was hurting just as much. She sighed and glanced from me to Willie Frank.

  “Maybe it was Delroy Crutchfield. He got a big beef with us. He was right nasty and hostile when he stopped me on my way to MacPherson’s yesterday! I—I bet he made the call!” she choked out.

  “Hold on now. It could have been him, and it could have been somebody else. We still don’t know who it was that beat Milton up. And there is probably folks on the warpath y’all don’t even know about.”