by Lisa Wingate
“Come on, you guys. Let’s not screw it up now.” I try to sound forceful, but really I’m biting back the sting of discouragement. This is unfair to the ones who really wanted this to work. Including me. “These are people we’re talking about. They were real living, breathing people. They deserve respect. Grab your tombstone and your lantern, and get with the program. If you have a costume with you and you don’t have it on, put it on over your clothes. Now.”
My orders gather very little response.
I need help beyond just my few senior adult volunteers, who are largely confined to a sidewalk because the field is muddy and slick, and we don’t want anyone to fall. I did ask one of the history teachers/assistant football coaches to dovetail with us for this project, but he waffled, reminded me that it’s still football season, and said, “Sounds complicated. Did you get school board approval for this?”
There’s been a knot in my stomach ever since. Do teachers go running to the school board every time they want to do a class activity? Principal Pevoto knows about our Underground project…sort of. I’m just afraid he’s not fully processing the scale. He always has a ton on his mind and is moving so fast it’s like talking to a buzz saw.
I wish Nathan were here. The kids keep asking about him. After our awkward brush with his uncles and the blondes last week, chatter and speculation is all over town. When Nathan took me home, he mentioned that he’d be tied up the latter part of this week and through the weekend. He didn’t give me a reason; he wasn’t really in the mood to talk. Eating barbecue while half of the town whispers about you will do that.
I haven’t seen him since a week ago Thursday, though I finally broke down and dialed his number a couple times, then hung up before the answering machine could beep. Yesterday I left a message about tonight’s rehearsal. I keep glancing around, hoping he’ll show. I know it’s silly and right now I’ve got bigger things to worry about.
Like Lil’ Ray, sneaking across the practice field—if a 280-pound teenager can sneak—attempting to join the group late without being noticed. LaJuna trails along in his shadow, carrying what I assume to be their cardboard gravestones. She’s wearing a ruffly pink prom dress with a hoop skirt petticoat underneath and a white lace shawl. He’s wearing slacks and a fancy paisley silk vest that might be someone’s long-outdated wedding attire. A gray jacket and top hat are carefully crooked in his arm.
Their costumes aren’t bad—Sarge mentioned helping LaJuna with hers—but their tardiness nags at the back of my mind. The two of them jostle and bump up against each other as they blend into the group. I watch her hang on his arm, possessive, pleased with herself. Needy.
I understand where she’s coming from. My own memories of those early teen years are real and fresh, even though they’re over a decade old. So is my awareness of the potential risks. My mother started making me aware long before I was LaJuna’s age. She wasn’t shy on topics of sex, teenage pregnancy, the problem of bad choices in relationship partners, of which she’d made quite a few over the years. She was quick to point out that the thing girls in her family did best was get pregnant early, and with loser guys who weren’t mature enough to be decent fathers. That was why she’d left her hometown. Even that didn’t save her. She still got pregnant with the wrong man…and look where that landed her. Stuck working her tail off as a single mother.
The trouble was, it hurt to hear that. It reinforced all my insecurities and the fear that my very existence in this world was an inconvenience, a mistake.
Maybe you should have a talk with LaJuna. I shuffle this to my mental in-basket, along with a dozen other things. And Lil’ Ray. Both of them.
Are teachers allowed to do that? Maybe discuss it with Sarge, instead.
But right now we have a rehearsal to accomplish or a graveyard pageant to cancel, one or the other.
“Listen!” I yell over the noise. “I said, listen! Stop playing with the lanterns. Stop talking to each other. Stop hitting each other over the head with tombstones. Put the little kids down and quit tossing them around. Pay attention. If you can’t, then let’s all just head home. There’s no point going any further with the Underground pageant. We’ll just settle for research papers and presentations in class and be done with the whole thing.”
The rumble dies down a little, but only a little.
Granny T tells them to hush up, and she means it. She’ll report to their mamas about how bad they’ve been. How they wouldn’t listen. “I know where to find your people.”
It helps a bit, but we’re still a zoo. Some kind of wrestling match is breaking out on the left side of the group. I see boys jumping up and doing headlocks and laughing. They stumble and mow over a couple seventh graders.
You should’ve known this would happen. My inner cynic delivers an opportune gut punch. Unicorns and rainbows, Benny. That’s you. Big ideas. The voice sounds a lot like my mother’s—the mocking tone that frequently sharpened the edge during arguments.
“Cut it out!” I yell. I notice a car driving along the street at the field’s edge. It drifts by, the driver leaning curiously out his window, scrutinizing us. The knot in my stomach works its way upward. I feel like I’ve swallowed a cantaloupe.
The car on the street turns around and cruises past again. Even more slowly.
Why is he looking at us like that?
A shrill whistle pierces the air behind me and bisects the chaos. I turn to see Sarge striding around the school building. I thought she was tied up babysitting tonight, but I’m insanely glad that reinforcements have finally arrived.
Her second whistle rises above the din and splits eardrums. It achieves an admirable degree of crowd noise reduction. “All right, you oxygen thieves, it’s cold out here, and I’ve got better things to do than stand around and watch you morons jump on each other. If this is the best you’ve got, you are a waste of time. My time. These ladies’ time. Ms. Silva’s time. You want to act like losers, then go home. Otherwise, clamp your jawbones to the tops of your mouths, and do not release them unless you have raised your hand high and Miss Silva has called on you. And do not raise your hand unless you have something intelligent to say. Is that understood?”
There’s complete silence. A pure, unadulterated hush of glorious intimidation.
The kids hover on a razor’s edge. Leave? Go do whatever they’d normally be doing on a Saturday night in October? Or knuckle under to authority and cooperate?
“I can’t hear you,” Sarge demands.
This time, they answer in an uneasy, affirmative murmur.
Sarge rolls a look my way, grumbles, “That’s why I’m not a teacher. I’d already be grabbing ears and knocking heads together.”
I pull myself up like a rock climber after a fall to the bottom of a canyon. “Well, do we quit here, or do we go on? You guys decide.”
If they leave, they leave.
The reality is that nobody expects much at this school, anyway. Pick any hall, half of the teachers are just coasting by. All that’s really required is that the kids are kept from making too much noise, wandering loose, or smoking on campus. It’s always been that way.
“We’re sorry, Miss Pooh.” I don’t even know which boy says it. I don’t recognize the voice, but it’s one of the younger ones, a seventh grader, maybe.
Others follow once the logjam is broken.
A new direction takes hold. Sarge’s oxygen thieves turn away without further instruction, and take up their tea light lanterns, sort out their tombstones, and find their places on the field.
My heart soars. I do my best to hide it and look appropriately stern. Sarge stands at ease and sends a self-satisfied nod my way.
We progress along with the program, not like a well-oiled machine, but we sputter through as I walk around, simulating an audience.
Lil’ Ray has crafted two tombstones for himself. He is his five times grea
t-grandfather, born to an enslaved mother at Goswood, eventually becoming a free man, a traveling preacher. “And I learned to read when I was twenty-two and still a slave. I sneaked off in the woods, and I paid a free black girl to teach me. And it was very dangerous for us both, because that was against the law back then. You could get killed and buried, or whipped, or sold off to a slave trader and marched away from all your family. But I wanted to read, and so I did it,” he says, and punctuates the sentence with a definitive nod.
He pauses then, and at first I think he’s forgotten the rest of his story. But after the barest breaking of character and a slight twitch of a smile that says he knows he has the audience enrapt, he takes a breath and continues. “I became a preacher once black folks could have their own churches. I was the one who built up many of the congregations in this whole area. And I’d ride the circuit to different ones all the time, and that was very dangerous, too, because, even though the patrollers of slavery days were gone away, the Ku Klux Klan and the Knights of the White Camellia were on the roads instead. I had a good horse and a good dog, and they’d warn me if they heard somebody or smelled somebody. I knew all the places to hide and all the people who would hide me, too, if I needed it.
“And I married the girl who had taught me to read. Her name was Seraphina Jackson, and she used to worry to death when I was gone from our cabin in the swamp woods. She’d hear the wolves sniffing and digging around the walls, and she’d sit up all night with a big rifle we had found by a stone fence on a old battlefield. Sometimes, she’d hear gangs of troublemakers go by, too, but they did not menace her or my children. Why? Because the reason she was a free woman before emancipation is, her daddy was the banker.”
Lil’ Ray alters his posture, puffs his chest, puts on his top hat, and changes tombstones. His lashes droop to half-mast and he eyes us down his nose. “Mr. Tomas R. Jackson. I am a white man and a rich man. I had seven slaves in my big house in town, and years later when it burned down, that’s the land where the Black Methodist Church and the library got built. But I also had three children with a free black woman, and so they were free, too, because the status of the child followed that of the mother. I bought a house for them and a sewing shop for her because the law wouldn’t let us marry. But I didn’t marry anybody else, either. Our sons went to college at Oberlin. Our daughter, Seraphina, got married to a freedman she taught to read and so she became a preacher’s wife, and she took care of me when I got old, too. She was a good daughter and she taught lots of people to read until she got too old and couldn’t see the letters anymore.”
By the time he’s finished, I can’t help it, I’m in tears. Beside me, Sarge clears her throat. She’s got Granny T on one arm and Aunt Dicey on the other, because they insisted on coming out here, and she doesn’t want them to take a tumble.
We move to LaJuna next. “I am Seraphina,” she says. “My daddy was the banker….”
I eventually deduce that she has abandoned her own research project on family roots, to take on a role from Lil’ Ray’s family, now that they are a couple and all.
We’ll have a talk about that later.
I let her finish, and we move along. A few of the life histories are more complete than others, but there’s something magnificent in each one. Even the littlest participants manage to stumble through. Tobias tells, in only a few lines, the story of Willie Tobias, who died along with his siblings so tragically young.
I’m wrung out by the end of the rehearsal, and stand with the volunteers, unable to process my thoughts into words. I’m amazed. I’m elated. I’m proud. I love these kids in a deeper way than ever before. They are incredible.
They’ve also attracted a bit of an audience. Cars have pulled in along the road’s shoulder, where the armchair quarterback dads usually stop to watch middle school football practices. Some of tonight’s observers are undoubtedly parents who’ve come to give kids a ride home. Others, I’m not so sure of. The sleek SUVs and luxury sedans are too upscale for this school, and the people stand in bemused groups, watching, talking, pointing occasionally. The body language looks ominous, and I think I spot the mayor’s wife in her exercise clothes. A police department vehicle drifts around the corner and pulls in. Redd Fontaine swaggers forth, belly first. A few of the bystanders walk over to check in.
“Mmm-hmmm, that’s trouble,” Granny T says. “Meetin’ of the BS—the Busybody Society—going on over there. And mmm-hmm, there goes Mr. Fontaine, struttin’ down the way to see, can he find anybody with a bad taillight or a license tag out of date and write some citations? Just there to throw his considerable weight around. That’s all he’s up to.”
A rust-mottled truck at the far end pulls out and rattles away before Officer Fontaine can get there. Some poor student’s ride home just vacated the area.
“Uh-huh,” one of the other New Century ladies murmurs in disgust.
Heat boils under my jacket and spills out my collar. I’m livid. This night is a triumphant one. I refuse to let it be spoiled. I am not putting up with this.
I start across the field, but I’m waylaid by kids asking how I thought things went, and if it was good, and what they should do with their lanterns, and how can they get costume materials if they don’t yet have what they need? With our dress rehearsal having gone well, the ones who had been lackluster are psyched up.
“We do okay?” Lil’ Ray wants to know. “Are we gonna get to have our Underground pageant? Because LaJuna and me got the advertising posters all figured out. Our manager at the Cluck says if we write up something for a flyer, he’ll take it over to the Kinko’s and get copies made for us when he goes to Baton Rouge to the restaurant supply. Color paper and everything. We’re okay to do it, right, Miss Pooh? ’Cause I got these threads from my Uncle Hal, and I am lookin’ fine.” He shakes LaJuna loose and does a slick 360-degree heel spin so I can get the full effect.
His smile fades when LaJuna is the only one who laughs. “Miss Pooh? You still mad at us?”
I’m not mad. I’m focused on the cars and the bystanders. What is going on over there?
“We okay?” LaJuna prods, reattaching herself to Lil’ Ray’s arm. She looks cute in the prom dress. It’s narrow in the waist and low-cut. Too low-cut. And she looks too cute in it. Teenage pheromones thicken the air like smoke from a spontaneous combustion about to burst forth in full flame. I’ve seen the sort of mischief that goes on under the bleachers at the football stadium. I know where this could be headed.
Don’t assume the worst, Benny Silva.
“Yes, we’re okay.” But I have a feeling the activity along the road means we might not be. “You guys were incredible. I’m really proud of you…most of you, anyway. And the rest, well, you guys help each other out, and let’s get this thing in shape.”
“Yeah, who’s jammin’ now?” Lil’ Ray says and struts away in his top hat. LaJuna picks up her skirts and trails along behind.
Sarge, passing by with a box of tea light lanterns, leans close to me and whispers, “I don’t like the looks of that.” She motions toward the street, but before I can answer, her attention veers to LaJuna and Lil’ Ray, fading into the night together. “Don’t like the looks of that, either.” Then she cups a hand to her mouth. “LaJuna Rae, where do you think you’re off to with that boy?” She strikes out in hot pursuit.
I watch as the audience fades away, parents leaving with their kids and uninvited bystanders idling down the street in their vehicles one by one. Redd Fontaine hangs around long enough to write some poor parent a ticket. When I try to intervene, he advises me to mind my own business, then asks, “You get permission to have all them kids hanging around here after hours?” He licks the end of his felt-tip pen, then goes back to writing in his ticket book.
“They’re not hanging around. They’re working on a project.”
“School property.” All three of his chins wiggle toward the building. �
��This field’s for school activities.”
“It’s a class project…for school. And, besides, I see kids playing sandlot ball here all the time after hours and on the weekends.”
He stops writing, and both he and the unfortunate driver—one of the grandparents who showed for parent-teacher night—look my way. His eighth-grade granddaughter slinks in the passenger door and melts into the seat while the officer’s attention is diverted.
“You tryin’ to argue with me?” Officer Fontaine shifts his bulk in my direction.
“I wouldn’t dream of it.”
“You gettin’ smart with me?”
“Absolutely not.” Who does this guy think he is? “Just making sure all my kids get to where they’re supposed to be.”
“Why don’t you make sure you clean up that field?” Fontaine grumbles, then goes back to his work. “And put out them candles before you set a grass fire and burn down the whole place.”
“I think, with all the rain, we’re pretty safe,” I bite out and give the grandparent an apologetic look. I’ve probably just made things worse for him. “But thanks for the warning. We’ll be extra careful.”
Sarge is waiting for me when I return to the sidewalk by the school building. LaJuna and Lil’ Ray frown in tandem nearby. “Well?” Sarge asks.
“I’m not sure,” I admit. “Really, I have no idea.”
“Doubt we’ve heard the last of it. Let me know if you need me.” Sarge nabs LaJuna to take her home. That’s one less thing to worry about, at least. Lil’ Ray wanders off into the night in his top hat, solo.
At home the house is too quiet. The windows seem dark and eerie for the first time ever. As I walk up to the porch, I reach through the oleander and touch the saint’s head, give it an extra rub for luck. “You’d better go to work, pal,” I tell him.
The phone is sounding off when I come in the door. It stops on the fourth ring, right as I grab the receiver from the cradle.