Freshwater Road (12 page)

"Be careful." Sudden tears stung her eyes. She wanted to say she was sorry
he'd been beaten, sorry things had gotten so testy between them in the car.
"What about money, Matt? Should I give her some money for food?"

"Naw, naw. The movement's taking care of that from donations. If you
want to help her out on the side, suit yourself, but be easy with it. Wait a
while. But make sure your daddy's got that bail money ready for when you
get your project up and running." Matt leaned on the side of the car.

"Forgot about that." She hadn't forgotten about it. She just hadn't come
up with a way to make a call to Shuck and say it. He needed to send the
bail money to the Jackson office in case she got arrested. She'd already been
close. But saying that kind of thing to Shuck meant risking the possibility
that he would come down there and check on her. She needed to see this
through on her own.

"The Sheriff here's Trotter. Don't play with him. Make it count or don't
do it at all." Matt folded his arms across his chest, his shirt and overalls not
looking too bad considering all they'd been through. "You be all right."

She felt like the small girl who got dropped off at a camp she didn't want
to go to. Shuck got back into his car and she was supposed to be grown up
and stay there with all those strange kids for two weeks. She knew before he
turned the key in the ignition that she wasn't going to make it. She bit her
lower lip, tried to hold it together feeling all the while like throwing herself
down in the dirt and screaming to Shuck to please take her home. But she
was grown now and it was Matt, not Shuck. She had to see it through.

Matt patted her fly-away hair, put a frizzled lock behind her ear. "You
almost got you a natural there." He laughed, the knot on his head less
conspicuous now.

"Right." She smirked, thinking of Ramona's soft bowl of hair, and of
what that word meant. No pressing and curling. Just natural. She liked it,
but knew she'd never have that look.

"Pineyville's bad, but it ain't no worse than anywhere else in Mississippi.
Just be mindful of where you're at." Matt's eyes rambled over the ground
near his feet, the house behind them, then off down Freshwater Road.

"Yeah." She wanted to hug him, but she didn't want to aggravate his
bruises. "But, Matt, every town hasn't had a lynching." They stood in a southern Mississippi road in the waning sunlight, facing each other like
students on the green in Ann Arbor, but here they talked of lynchings, of
disappeared people.

"You talking about Leroy Boyd James?" He knew she'd roomed with
Ramona during orientation and that she was an authority on that lynching
business. "Well, we don't know all the towns that have had 'em."

Matt put his hand on the car door handle and opened the door. "Ramona doesn't know it all because the news about a lot of lynchings never
left the small towns where they happened. There wasn't nothing to research.
People never fessed up that a murder had even taken place. Negroes just
disappeared. Mrs. Owens said it."

He was right, of course. What difference did it make where in Mississippi she was? Emmett Till had been in Money, Medgar Evers in Jackson,
Herbert Lee in Liberty. Ambushed and shot, beaten to death and thrown
into a river for organizing for voter registration, standing up to any white
man for any reason, winking, eyeballing, accused of raping a white woman,
whether ever proven or not. Pineyville was in no way special.

Matt sat in the driver's seat. Celeste put her head through the busted-out
window, wanted to climb into that car with him. She kissed him on the
cheek. "All right now." Matt said. "Don't be startin' something you can't
finish." He grinned. "Miss Detroit. You all right, girl."

She'd won him over. She'd never be what he assumed she was at first,
a pampered shallow girl from Detroit. Maybe it had as much to do with
Shuck as it had to do with her. But she'd held up her end, too. They went
through the fire, and they survived. The next step was on her and her alone.
She'd earn the badge of courage or she wouldn't. But still, she'd gladly get
into that car with him. A big part of her didn't want to stay in this house
on this lonely looking road.

Matt maneuvered the dusty Dodge around, tires grinding gravel, grains
of sand flying back, and made the left turn onto the black top going toward
Pineyville and then Bogalusa, the heat of the day softening into the slippery
humidity of a long summer evening. That blazing sun was gone. Celeste
watched the dirty car with the broken-out windows until it disappeared
down the highway, feeling like there'd be no leaving Mississippi, that Freshwater Road was all there'd be to her life She filled her bedroom pitcher at
the spigot, wondering when Sheriff Trotter would make himself known to
her and how.

The aroma of pine disinfectant permeated the bedroom. No closet, only
three nails driven into thin wallpapered walls and a brass clothes tree with
bent wire hangers on which to hang her dresses, slacks, skirts, and blouses.
Celeste dropped sleep shirts and underwear in the four-drawer dresser and
buried her small make-up case behind the underwear, relishing the thought
of going au naturel for the entire summer. She slid her gym shoes, white
pumps, and sandals underneath the dresser, then shoved her suitcase under
the high-sitting bed, everything moving easily across the worn linoleum,
so cool under her bare feet.

A fading, rose-tinted photograph in an oval-shaped wood frame leaned
in from the wall above the bed. In it, a tall dark man wearing a baggy World
War I uniform stood with his hand resting on the shoulder of a seated young
woman. Celeste barely recognized Mrs. Geneva Owens, her hair parted in
the middle and pulled back, a high-collared Victorian blouse touching her
chin, a black skirt hitting her at the ankles. They sat like people of means,
rigidly straight, content and proud.

"That's my husband, Horation." Mrs. Owens stood in the doorway between the parted curtains. Mississippi Negroes floated like ghosts, tiptoed
through life as if to pass unnoticed, so unlike those boisterous Detroiters
shouting from cars and buildings, from street corners in summer, bragging
of conquests, loud-talking each other into crescendoes of noise, like the
regulars at Shuck's Royal Gardens Bar hashing over the day's events, not a
shy one in the bunch.

Mrs. Owens's eyes fluttered then settled on the photograph. "He died
nearly ten years ago. Had a piece of something in his head from the war.
Just fell down and died." The woman's tone was matter-of-fact, as if his early
death had been inevitable.

"I'm sorry you lost him." Celeste knew from orientation that hospitals
in Mississippi wouldn't have treated Mr. Owens anyway. Nowhere was
segregation more strict than in hospitals. No one would ever know how
many people had died because of that.

Mrs. Owens pressed the front of her apron with her hands then let them
drift. "You need anything else?"

"I'd like to open the other window." The front one over the screened
porch was raised, but the side window was shut. Maybe the nearness of
the Gulf of Mexico and of Lake Pontchartrain meant cooler nights in
Pineyville. No sign of it yet, but Celeste prayed for it anyway.

"I been in hereby myself so long, I just leave it closed. Let me see if I can
find a old screen or something so the bugs don't eat you alive."

"Thank you, Mrs. Owens." Celeste didn't know what else to say. The
woman lingered, then patted the lace doily on the dresser like Momma
Bessie would do, eternally smoothing the bumps, beating back all signs
of life's irregularities. You knew how to make do, and you learned how to
make better. She scanned the room, then pulled a wrinkled photograph
from her pocket. "This here's my two boys. They living in Chicago." She
handed Celeste the snapshot.

Celeste turned on the small bedside lamp. The woman's sons were plain
young men whose shirtsleeves hit above the wrist bone, making their hands
seem unnaturally large. They stood grinning with uneven teeth. "Handsome." She glanced again at the wall-photo of Mr. Owens. "Like their
father. Have you been to Chicago?"

"I visited them. Never seen so many people. Too many. They took me
ridin' on that train? Above the streets? My, my." Mrs. Owens's eyes sparkled
with her memory. "Didn't much like it."

"It's beautiful, by Lake Michigan." Celeste regretted saying it. Those
boys probably didn't live anywhere near Lake Michigan or in the beautiful
part of Chicago, from the looks of that photograph.

Mrs. Owens pocketed the picture. "Well, I'm glad they're up there."

Celeste heard the emphasis on "up there." The woman could say it a
million times, but she must never sound as if the north was better. It was
this place that had to be made more livable.

"You mighty welcome here." She floated through the curtain-door, a
heartfelt greeting in her voice.

"Thank you." Celeste wondered if something she'd said had relaxed the
woman. Certainly not her talk of unidentified bones at the dinner table.
Or the woman might well have been wrought up because they arrived a
little late. That was cause for grave alarm in Mississippi. Then too there'd
been a lot of talk in Jackson about manners during orientation. Already,
complaints had come in about some volunteers being too aggressive and
even condescending. So far, she'd stayed away from any of that.

Celeste leaned a snapshot of Shuck and her brother Billy against her
small rubber-band jar on the dresser top and a square silver-framed photograph of Wilamena and Cyril Atwood standing near a blooming saguaro.
She switched the photos back and forth then put her toothbrush, tooth paste, and other necessities between the photos. Wilamena had a tight smile
on her face as if she'd just been pricked by the cactus spikes or perhaps
was seeing out of the photo into this room on Freshwater Road. She never
would've stepped in the door of this slat-board house with no bathroom.
But here she was. Celeste chuckled.

Cyril Atwood's face had not a hint of Negro-ness, certainly not in that
little photograph. Celeste searched his face with her racial Geiger counter,
the one that Negro people keep revved and ready for those quick identifications of passing-for-white-Negroes who were everywhere. Not once did the
machine go off. Nothing Negro there. Wilamena swore he was Negro and
then fussed at Celeste for making so much of it. What difference did it make?
Shuck mumbled, keeping his cool, shook the man's hand and soon after
excused himself. She hadn't packed another photo of Wilamena. This was
it. No photo would be worse. Just because she'd been a motherless child for
most of her growing years didn't mean she had to advertise it.

Lace curtains winnowed the last gray streaks of evening as she scooped
cool water from the metal basin onto her face and soaped her arms, the
tiny abrasions from the car window glass already dried over. In the cracked
mirror, she checked her face for cuts, then poured pitcher water over her
toothbrush, squeezed out a line of toothpaste, scoured her mouth, and spit
in the basin. The scummy basin water now had toothpaste froth floating
on top. She rinsed the toothbrush with clean water, poured a small amount
in her glass and gargled, spitting again into the basin. The old woman had
cautioned her about pouring dirty basin water near the house-best to take
it to the outhouse, far clear of the flowers and vegetables.

Mrs. Owens knocked on the doorframe, called quietly, and came in
with a large pitcher-shaped container and a removable screen.

"If you need to go in the night." She put the jar on the floor on its
own throw rug in the corner. She raised the side window and adjusted the
portable screen, then turned to leave again, eying the photos on the dresser.
"Your people?" There was a slight surprise behind the question.

"My daddy and my brother." She said it too fast and didn't know why, felt
foolish, and cast her eyes down. "That's my mother and her second husband.
Out west." She wished she had a photo of her mother alone, it would be easier
to explain. Wilamena looked like she could be anything.

Mrs. Owens continued towards the door. "Nice looking people you
have. You favor your mother."

"Thank you," she lied. "She's out in New Mexico. I'm going out there for
Christmas." She lied again to design a tradition that didn't exist. Christmas
and family closeness, all those occurrences went with Momma Bessie, not
with Wilamena. No way she'd slave in the kitchen fixing a massive dinner
for a steady stream of people all day long.

"New Mexico. I guess I heard of it." Mrs. Owens closed the curtains
behind her. "Nighty night."

Celeste stumbled over her own "Goodnight." She "favored" her mother.
She'd been hearing that all of her life, though she couldn't see it herself. She
cast it off to a genetic tree whose root system snaked into unknown soils
for more years than anyone could remember. There's some Cherokee back
in there. There's a few different white folks, too, and some blends of this and
that, some African. She should've said something more about her mother
and her second husband, anything. She could create whatever mother she
wanted for Freshwater Road. No one would ever know. She thought again
of storing the Wilamena-Cyril photo in her drawer or her suitcase. Too
late. Mrs. Owens had seen it, was surely thinking her mother was married
to a white man. God only knew what she thought of that. She left the
photos on the dresser. This was the south, and slavery was about more than
economics. There probably wasn't much that Mrs. Owens hadn't seen or
heard before.

Nightjar. Momma Bessie had used that term when she talked about the
old days in Kentucky. If she used it, she'd have to empty it in the outhouse
in the morning, but she'd have to smell it all night in the stifling heat.
There was a kerosene lamp by the back door for night trips to the outhouse.
Celeste grabbed up her metal basin of dirty water, shoved a wad of Kleenex
into her pocket, and walked through the short hall to the kitchen. A narrow line of light angled out from under Mrs. Owens's curtain-door. She
lit the kerosene lantern and made her first trip to the outhouse in the dead
of night, walking hard on the sandy earthen path to scare off any night
creatures lurking along the way.