And Do Remember Me (8 page)

“When I’m ready,” he told Lincoln. “The day I do it, I want to go down there by myself. I don’t need no escort. I don’t want no protection the Lord can’t provide.”

At the funeral, at the Elks Club, Langdon’s five sons spoke about their father. The oldest told those gathered, “My daddy was a peace-loving man in a hateful world. For all the guns he had, do anybody here recall him shooting anything more than a possum, less somebody aimed a bullet at him? Not everybody that owns a gun can use it. They was scared of my daddy cause a man with a gun’s got something to protect.”

He couldn’t bear another death. The words had streamed from his subconscious, been released out of memory—all in a frenzy. Lincoln had sat down in front of his battered portable typewriter an hour after Jessie told him they found the bodies of Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney and had not stopped, eaten or slept since.

He was writing and so was healed. Scrambled between the lines rumbling into existence, transforming him and all they tried to render, was Jessie. Jessie, who had gone to jail and come out free. Jessie, who was in flight from something too awful to name. Her studied, awesome elusiveness bound him to her. If he had his way, she would become the mama he lost at three, the sister he never had, the family he longed to be a part of, the adopted father who died. He had told her everything, even as she hoarded her own past, sealed it against scrutiny. Her silence was a lock he couldn’t open, with force or love. But it didn’t matter who she was, he told himself then, or what she was running from. Now she was here. Now she was his.

And he had told her about being six and knowing God hated him, else why was love a torn, shredded hand-me-down, thrust at him now and then out of guilt or obligation, never just because. And he told her about being adopted and still feeling like he didn’t know his name, about going one day to the bank with J. R. Sturgis and hearing him say yessir to the man behind the big desk, yessir, his hat in his hand, a wide nigger smile splitting his dignity in two, yessir and not holding J. R. Sturgis’s hand when they left the bank because the man he knew had walked into that room but he was sure he had not come out. He even told her about the look Mrs. Sturgis reserved just for him, her eyes narrowed like darts that just missed his throat. And he’d told her how sorrow and sadness and grief made you free. Tasting them, there was nothing else to learn. You couldn’t be surprised ever again.

Poems flowed inside him like the rivers Langston Hughes had known—the Congo, the Nile, the Euphrates. A play lurked in the corners too, one populated by his and Jessie’s ghosts, by the corpses they had stumbled over to find each other. Bones would be reincarnated through speech. Ashes would turn suddenly into flesh. He couldn’t bear another death. He would keep on writing until it was safe to stop.

S
HE HAD PRAYED
for those three men like she had once prayed her daddy would leave her alone. So, as she had feared all along, there really was no God.

——

T
HE PLAY DRAMATIZED
the life of eighty-five-year-old Mattie Lee. In the one-character drama, Mattie Lee recounted her life as a sharecropper: the births and deaths of children, the two husbands she outlived. The play read, to Jessie, like a long poem, except the poetry sounded like Negroes this time. When she finished reading, Lincoln asked, “What do you think?”

“Why, Lincoln, I think it’s the nicest thing I ever read. What you gonna do with it?”

“We’re gonna put it on. Present it. I wrote this for you. I want you to play the part of Mattie Lee.”

“I can’t act,” Jessie protested nervously.

“Sure you can.”

“Oh no, Lincoln, no, I can’t do that,” she said, rising quickly from the bed. “I’d be afraid, standing in front of a whole bunch of people. I could never remember all those words.”

“I’ll help you. Direct you.”

Holding up her hands in protest, Jessie insisted, “Lincoln, I can’t, I just can’t.”

He walked over to Jessie and held her. “You said you were too scared to join the movement,” Lincoln reminded her, moving in on Jessie and capturing her in his arms before she could back away.

“That’s not the same thing as acting. Nobody’s looking at me all the time, like when you’re acting.”

“You just think they’re not. But they are. Look, read some of this out loud for me, won’t you? I wrote it but I’ve never really heard how it sounds.”

Jessie picked up the manuscript, scanning the paper, looking at the words as though for the first time. And then she began to read aloud, slowly, clearly, her voice trembling now and then at the knowledge of how assured and inevitable was the fusion of her voice and Lincoln’s words. Eventually, she stood to act out the stage directions requiring Mattie Lee to kneel, lean over, lift imaginary bales of cotton and nurse a sick child.

When she read the last line, Jessie handed the play back to Lincoln and said, “I like it Lincoln, I like it a lot, but there’s some things in there that don’t sound like things a woman would say. I know you’re a good writer and you used your imagination and all but there’s a few parts where it just don’t sound real.”

“Well, tell me, Jessie,” Lincoln said, moving to sit beside her on the bed, trying to capture and hold her mood of cooperation, “tell me where it don’t sound real.”

A
CTING WAS JUST
like daydreaming, except you were living other people’s dreams, Jessie thought. There were moments when she hated Lincoln during the tense, exultant days of preparation for the staging of the play. Beneath his demanding eye she read and then memorized the script. They had spent several days reworking some of the dialogue, making it sound “real.” And when it all sounded right, Lincoln took Jessie by the hand and shepherded her inside the skin of Mattie Lee.

“Think about your mama, your grandmama, all the women you know,” he’d urged her as she had moved from just reciting the words to living them. “Let them talk to you. Go back to your front porch, your backyard, the kitchen, wherever you can to track down these women.”

And so Jessie approached it like a game. Mattie Lee became a skeleton she had to clothe, a phantom she had to find. But all roads, Jessie learned, led back to herself. Back to her memories, and her pain. Lincoln and Jessie fought and made up repeatedly as they gave birth and life to Mattie Lee. They spent eight- to ten-hour days in the basement where Freedom School classes had been held, locked, Jessie sometimes felt, in a prison
made of words. Once in exasperation, she screamed, “Being in jail was better than this,” and threw the script at Lincoln. If Jessie told Lincoln she couldn’t create an emotion or a certain feeling for the old woman, he refused to accept her excuse. When Mattie Lee had to cry, Lincoln shouted at Jessie, reducing her to tears within seconds, then swooped her up in his arms, propped her into position and coaxed Mattie Lee’s words out of her. When Mattie Lee had to get mad, he taunted Jessie, wondered out loud if she was as good as he’d thought she was. And, as Jessie charged across the room to pummel him with her fists, Lincoln freeze-framed her actions, shouting, “Now, Jessie, now, let Mattie Lee use your anger.”

Jessie fell into bed at night, drained, her sleep vacant and deep.

When she made her debut, on the stage of George Washington Carver High School, after the curtain went up, it took her ten minutes to move her feet onto the stage. The makeup Lincoln had applied and the wig she wore, all to make her appear to be eighty-five years old, felt like glue enveloping her head. So blinded was Jessie by the stage lights that she couldn’t even see the audience. Her voice veered between inaudible whispers and shouts that echoed up to the balcony of the auditorium, which was filled to capacity. Yet in the seventy-five minutes of the play Jessie risked everything. No one had ever asked her to surrender this much. No one had ever lavished her with such faith. When she stood on the stage, basking in the heartfelt applause of her Freedom School students, the women she had been jailed with, people from the Freedom House and townspeople, Jessie didn’t know if she would ever forgive Lincoln for pushing her this far, or how she could ever thank him.

——

T
HE NORTHERN
college students began to leave the south. Carolyn Seavers was one of the last to go. The morning of her departure, Macon and Jessie drove Carolyn to the airport in Jackson. Much of the mythology about white women that was once lodged in Jessie’s imagination had been shattered in the few months of her acquaintance with Carolyn. Jessie had cleaned up after and born the withering scorn of white women all her life. She had seen the tattered seams, the sharp edges of their lives, played out in full dress before her as though she wasn’t even there. Yet Jessie had imagined that despite the smudged, grubby reality she witnessed in the Bullock home, and in the home where her mother had worked, that white women’s lives were nonetheless a fanciful, jealously guarded dream. For if their lives were indeed perfect, blemish free, if the world denied them nothing, then that would explain how ruthlessly those lives were guarded against intrusion by people who looked like her. Hardly anything she had learned this summer made sense. Hundreds of black people had been registered, but people had been killed, property had been destroyed and all her preconceived notions had capsized. Despite the litany of disclosures Carolyn had recited lying in bed next to Jessie, night after night, the girl remained a brutally complex equation Jessie was unable to solve.

From the backseat Jessie stole a quick glance at Carolyn riding in front beside Macon, and saw her staring out the window, her eyes on edge, tense. Experience, Jessie thought, looking back at the road. She now knew what Carolyn had meant by the word. She thought of the afternoon that she and Carolyn had walked past Lurlee Bascomb’s tiny decrepit grocery store where Negroes could buy food, liquor and beer on credit. Lurlee had spotted Jessie and Carolyn out the window and had run from behind the counter, her cash register open, growling to the customers in line, “Yall wait here, I’ll be right back,” as she
handily reached for the rifle that she kept stationed behind the cooler full of Coca-Cola and RC, and headed out the door. The grizzled old white woman stood in the middle of the sidewalk, raised her rifle with a hunter’s skill and fired a bullet that spun several inches past Carolyn’s head. “You nigger-loving, whore Communist,” she screamed at them as in shock they turned to look back. Lurlee stood clutching the rifle barrel, shaking it in the air, stamping her feet, her thin sharp voice stinging the air with curses and anguished screams, threatening not to miss next time. Her fury spent, breathless and red-faced, satisfied by the sight of Carolyn and Jessie in flight, Lurlee Bascomb went back into the store and resumed selling food and liquor to her black customers. Meanwhile Carolyn and Jessie huddled in a nearby alley. Jessie was so frightened she had peed on herself, but Carolyn poked her head around the corner, stared at Lurlee Bascomb and raised her middle finger in the air. She turned back to Jessie and began laughing so hard that she couldn’t stand up and fell on her knees in the alley. “That old bitch,” Carolyn fumed, “she’s crazy, and can’t even shoot straight. Now if she was sane, we’d be in trouble.” And she began laughing again.

Jessie recalled the evenings that Carolyn returned to the Freedom House, her arms and face sunburned from the long hours canvassing for voters. She listened to her awed stories of the homes she had been to that day, the people she had met, the poverty she had seen.

“I never knew this was America too,” she’d told Jessie one evening. “I feel cheated because nobody ever told me.”

“What would you have done if they had?” Jessie had asked.

“I hope I’d do what I’m doing now,” Carolyn had said.

There had been long calls home the first two weeks. Collect calls to Minnesota filled with tears and threats, ultimatums and warnings. But in the end Carolyn had stayed.

Then there were the nights she crawled into bed late, having
just left Marlon Jeeter’s arms. So intoxicated was she with the sense of the momentous that on those nights she lay awake beside Jessie, unable to sleep, rousing Jessie to tell all the things Marlon did to her, the places he touched her, how she had never felt the way she felt now about anybody, how Marlon was the first man she had ever been with that way. Carolyn never suspected that Jessie would feel any proprietorship toward Marlon, that she could find Carolyn’s infatuation offensive because of the sheer ease with which it altered history, circumvented white women on pedestals and black men swinging from the end of a rope.

But Jessie was too polite and tried too hard to like the girl to say any of this. On mornings after Carolyn had so casually divulged her secrets, Jessie could hardly look Marlon in the face.

“I’m gonna miss everybody, I really am,” Carolyn said.

“Well, you can always come back. There’ll still be plenty to do,” Macon told her.

“What about you and Marlon?” Jessie asked.

“I don’t know exactly what’s gonna happen with us,” Carolyn said quietly. “The only thing I do know is I’m pregnant.” She said the word pregnant with the easy defiance that Jessie now knew so well.

“Does Marlon know?” Macon asked, alarmed, looking in the same glance at both Jessie and Carolyn.

“I don’t want him to know,” Carolyn told them as though issuing a command.

“Don’t you think you owe him that?” Macon asked solemnly.

“I have to think about myself, but I told my mother and she’s going to have it taken care of when I get home.” Carolyn stared out the window, her face expressionless.

Jessie didn’t know what Carolyn meant by “taken care of” but she was afraid to ask.

At the airport in Jackson, Macon and Jessie helped Carolyn
unload her bags from the trunk and walked with her to the entrance. Macon shook her hand and Jessie hugged her goodbye.

Half a mile from the airport, Jessie asked Macon what Carolyn had meant by her mama was gonna “take care of” her being pregnant?

“She’s going to have an abortion. Her mother will pay some doctor to get rid of it,” Macon said matter-of-factly.