Freshwater Road (16 page)

"There's one off my office. I couldn't manage with no phone and no toilet
either. Unfortunately, the church body still must use the outhouse. It's well
behind the building. You and only you can use the toilet whenever you like."
He drove back over the bumpy church road.

"What about the children, Reverend Singleton?" She knew she'd let the
children use that bathroom when he was away from the church, make them
promise with their blood that they wouldn't tell.

"It's a very small toilet, Celeste. And children can be messy." He turned
back on the highway heading in the direction of New Orleans.

She'd be the one cleaning after them, but she didn't care. A toilet meant
luxury here and the children should have the experience. But then, she
thought, that might create a problem in their own homes, dissatisfaction with what they had. Perhaps she wouldn't let them use it after all, but she'd
never let them know that she sometimes used it. The last thing she wanted
them to think was that she saw herself above them, more worthy of the nicer
things in life than they.

Reverend Singleton drove her by his own neat, flower-fronted house on
another side road off the highway to meet his wife. Etta Singleton, a plain
woman with a quiet demeanor, was conservatively dressed in a belted day
dress with a white collar and mid-arm sleeves with matching white cuffs.
She was small next to him. She spoke with no accent at all as she welcomed
Celeste to Pineyville and told her she looked forward to seeing her in church
on Sunday. She couldn't have been more unlike the city man who was her
husband. Riding with Reverend Singleton was like driving the Detroit
streets with Shuck, making all of his stops, greeting his friends. It seemed he
knew the entire world, and they knew him as well. This world was smaller,
but it was the reverend's domain.

The highway out of Jackson had been wide open, all but treeless. This
same road, Route ii, out of Hattiesburg yesterday had been lined with pine
trees, but never so eerily forbidding as it now was. Celeste felt the nearness
of water, but she couldn't see it. She wondered how this inauspicious road
led to someplace as joyous sounding as New Orleans.

"We got stopped yesterday on the way down from Jackson." She kept her
eyes peeled to the road, to the turn-offs. No surprises, please, she prayed.

"Mrs. Owens told me." He turned his head toward the window and nodded at an inlet of water edged by wild grasses, trees with moss hanging like
ragged curtains, a hint of mystery in his voice. "No bayous in Michigan."

Reverend Singleton wasn't going to dwell on the negatives. He was right.
If you started thinking of all the beatings and killings, you'd pack it in.
Celeste's skin itched. She stared at the marshy land. The earth seemed to tip
off into water until finally it was impossible to tell where the land ended and
the water began, with roots and tall grass interwoven.

"Along here, it's spurs of the Pearl River. Creeks and bayous." Reverend
Singleton enjoyed showing her the sights around Pineyville. He was a takecharge kind of man. That, she thought, seemed deeply southern, too.

The landscape had a dreamy quality. She imagined stepping on what
seemed to be grass and then sinking into the black watery muck. What a
place to bury the mysteriously disappeared Negro men of Mississippi-the
ones who ran terrified in the night, caught by bloodhounds, beaten, shot, thrown into this swampy marsh. She saw again in her mind the photo
of Emmett Till's battered and bloated body pulled from the Tallahatchie
River, thought again of Leroy Boyd James and the unnamed others. And
at no hour of the day or night did she not think of Schwerner, Chaney, and
Goodman, disappeared from the face of the Mississippi earth.

On the east side of the road, the land was planted in neat orchards of
trees that were as different from what was on the other side of the road as
night from day.

"Tung trees." Reverend Singleton must have been watching her out of
the corner of his eye because he certainly never seemed to take his eyes off
the road, never stopped checking his rearview mirror.

Celeste heard "tongue" and had a quizzical look on her face. Reverend
Singleton spelled the word.

"The oil from the nuts goes into paints and varnishes. Not as beautiful
as the piney woods, but they bring money to the county." He was sweating unmercifully, even with the thumping breeze blustering in the opened
windows. He kept his handkerchief at the ready.

By the time they reached the towns of Derby and McNeill, Mrs. Owens's
breakfast had drugged Celeste into lethargy. In Carriere, they turned off
Highway ii. Her eyelids lowered to half-mast and her head bobbed to the
seat back. They turned away from the deserted town center, less interesting
looking than Pineyville's, and drove on an alarmingly bumpy blacktop road
through a jungle of trees and hanging vines before turning in through an
iron gate surrounded by tall iron fencing, rust patches up and down the
bars, that went as far as she could see to the right and left.

They drove up a hard-packed earthen road bordered on both sides with
immense live oaks and stopped on the gravel driveway in front of a house
that stood high above the ground with steep stairs leading to a deep wraparound porch. It couldn't have been more unlike the leaning shanty houses
of Freshwater Road and even the "white folks" houses in Pineyville. It was
a plantation house, a grand stark white mansion with black shutters nestled
in a forest of liquid green. Palms and banana trees nestled in bunches near
the base of the porch. The land around the house was overgrown with foliage
and vines, and it was all strangely beautiful. Celeste imagined a slave girl in
a cotton smock would emerge to direct them to the back.

Instead, a large dark woman in a blue tent dress, with a brilliant blue and
gold cloth around her head in a kind of citadel, came out of the carved double doors. She beamed a canyon of a smile that seemed to be studded with diamonds. Her gold hoop earrings and her finger rings glittered in the snatches
of sunlight that filtered through the shade trees. She waited for them at the
top of the stairs, her remarkable teeth whiter than Momma Bessie's sheets.

Celeste stood on the stone walkway staring at the immense house and
the grand woman at the top of the stairs. She turned to see again the godly
live oaks they'd just driven under, the branches on either side overarching to
form a tunnel of iridescent green with black veins branching through. The
sun shrank back, rebuffed by the power and grace of those trees. The balmy
air had a streak of coolness in it. This was far away from the beach-like sand
of Freshwater Road; she was standing in a primordial forest where anything
that dropped to earth took root.

Reverend Singleton took the steep stairs two at a time. The woman
hugged him and kissed him on both cheeks. Something in her eyes when
she looked at him, powerful enough to read even from the bottom of the
stairs. Celeste walked up to greet the woman, who had the smooth face
and vibrant eyes of a precocious teenager. She ushered them into the house
speaking in French, laughing through the few words of welcome that Celeste
could understand.

A foyer with silent ceiling fans whirling and great potted palms in every
corner opened onto a living room with shuttered French windows and
polished hardwood floors. The large room was filled with an assortment of
furniture-an overstuffed chaise lounge with a bright print fabric thrown
over it, a Victorian sofa, floor lamps and fringed table lamps, an antique
record player with stacks of records in brown paper covers next to it, and a
grand piano in the center of the floor. The room's coloring reminded Celeste
of a Cezanne still life. She gathered herself, remembered she'd been to the
big-time cities with Shuck, knew how to walk into a luxurious place. But
she never expected all this in Mississippi.

"Celeste, I want you to meet Miss Sophie Lewis, as she's the one who's
helping finance our church. Now, if I could only convince her to come on
a Sunday morning and sing for us." Reverend Singleton's face expanded to
hold his enormous glee at being in the presence of Miss Sophie Lewis.

Celeste had heard both this woman's name and her luxurious voice
somewhere along the way. She knew her to be an opera singer of world renown, but why would she live in the swampy primordial forest of southern
Mississippi?

The woman evaded a direct response to Reverend Singleton's invitation
as her arm swept them toward the sofa. She pulled a fabric cord beside the
fireplace mantel and within seconds, a starchy looking Negro man in a
white waistcoat served them iced tea with tiny cloth napkins and a plate of
thin irregular cookies. He bowed as he left the room. Celeste gawked and
had the feeling she'd dropped into the rabbit hole.

"Pralines." The woman nodded at the cookies. "You're from Michigan,
then?" She sat on a high-backed, wood-framed chair that might have come
from the court of a Spanish queen. "Reverend Singleton told me."

"Yes, ma'am." Celeste straightened her spine and set her iced tea glass on
the small lace doily atop the mahogany coffee table. She wasn't sure if the
question had to do with the state or the school. She thought of launching
into her usual recitation of planning on law school. It's what she always said
though she barely believed it herself. Her choice of classes for two years had
ranged from anthropology to Middle Eastern Studies to English literature.
In truth, she didn't have a clue as to what lay ahead.

"That's good." The woman nodded, taking Celeste in. "And has the
good reverend told you of his own illustrious background?"

Before Celeste could open her mouth, the woman told her that Reverend
Singleton had a master of divinity degree from the University of Chicago
and that he'd been offered a position at a church in Seattle that boasted a
large, integrated congregation. He declined it to come back south to lift
his people out of despondency. Sophie Lewis's pride in Reverend Singleton
beamed out of her like a searchlight. Celeste caught something else in it,
too, that the woman wanted her to know she wasn't the only one here from
a big white northern university.

Miss Lewis kept her attention on Reverend Singleton, whose chest protruded through his buttoned suit jacket. "Now, what's new in Pineyville?"
She said it with a rumbling mirth just underneath. "How you manage to
stay there is beyond me, though I'm glad you do. If I couldn't escape every
few months, I don't know...."

"But your house-" Celeste imagined herself ensconced on the chaise
with a stack of books and a telephone. She noticed that she wasn't sweating
for the first time in over a week, and wondered dreamily if there was a way
she could do her work from this place. The thought drifted through her
head like a fantasy.

"My father built this house, Celeste. He came here from New Orleans when Storyville closed down. I bet you don't know anything about that?"
She smiled an alluring kind of smile.

"No, I don't." She sure liked the sound of it. Storyville. A land just off
the map of Oz, a place with houses like this one, cool and calm, rich and
sensual.

"It was a red light district, so to speak, with grand houses of ill-reputefree flowing sin, you might say. My father owned houses in the area. He
sold them all and built this. His hideaway. Nobody knows, including me,
how he survived it all as a Negro man. I'm not sure I want to know. My
mother's a good deal younger than he was."

Reverend Singleton's head went from side to side in the "it never ends"
wag. Celeste wanted to hear the whole family saga.

"I won't stay here after my mother passes on. My father sat on that porch
with a shotgun daring anybody to cross his gate until the day he died. I
remember that. He was an old man."

Celeste wondered how many times he'd had to shoot. She imagined the
old Negro man sitting on his wide front porch with a shotgun across his
knees, sipping a mint julep with a servant by his side. From his porch, he
had a clear shot straight up that alley of live oaks.

Reverend Singleton cleared his throat and ferried the conversation toward an update on the movement in southern Mississippi and the plans for
Pineyville. He ended by telling Miss Lewis that the timing of the summer
work had to do with the Democratic National Convention coming in August in Atlantic City. "We have to do our best to register as many Negroes
as possible, be ready for the November election."

Celeste joined in. "One Man, One Vote will challenge the all-white
Mississippi delegation in Atlantic City." She eyed the pralines.

"I see. The signatures of registered Negro voters will be needed for the
challenge." Sophie Lewis knew the plan. "But the point is to get them
registered for the next election and beyond."

Celeste nibbled a praline. "Yes, ma'am." The cookie turned to pure sugar
in her mouth with pecans all through. She wanted to wrap a few of them in
a napkin to eat later that night, her mind wandering around the cool room
and examining the vases, the fabrics, the still life paintings on the walls.
Had Geneva Owens ever been invited here? What other connections did
this woman have to Pineyville? Maybe she was just a woman of means who wanted to stay in the background but tried to be involved in her own way.
There were whites, too, all over the South supporting the movement with
money for lawyers, calling in favors to protect people. Why not a Negro
woman doing the same thing?

When Reverend Singleton said they'd have to be getting on, Miss Lewis
took a thick envelope from the pocket of her great tent dress and gave it to
him. "This is from New Orleans. I imagine some from other places as well.
And, from me."

Reverend Singleton stuffed the plump envelope into the inside breast
pocket of his jacket. "We'll be starting on Thursday. This will give us bail
money and help the ones who get fired from their jobs once we go to see
Mr. Heywood. Maybe even another row or two of pews. And thanks to
Almighty God for sending us this young woman to help with this work."