Freshwater Road (27 page)

Celeste looked out the window again, this time to see a rusty chrome back
fender, not the big Hudson's, disappearing down the road. "I was scared to
death. Never done anything like that before." This house, closest to the turn-in
from the blacktop and only half a block from the Tucker house, wasn't a good
choice for this clandestine meeting. "Let's go for a walk. You got time?"

Sissy had her hands on the doorknob. "Yes, ma'am."

"Yeah, let's go." If Mrs. Owens woke, she'd see the spread of papers on
the table, the unlatched back door, and figure she'd gone to the outhouse.

Celeste followed Sissy across the sandy earth towards the pines, both
of them checking back in case the Hudson turned onto Freshwater Road
before they made it to the trees. When they entered the deep forest, there
was no real path, just breaks among the trees. Sissy wound around, heading
away from Freshwater Road so that nothing could be seen of them, Celeste
knew, because she could no longer see the houses or even the electrical
poles. They slowed and walked side by side, the heat infiltrating the trees,
thick but less intense than in the open spaces. The scent of pine laced the
air without the overlay of must and funk.

"What's your college?" Sissy led them through the piney woods like a
scout, stepping slowly, cautiously, eyeing the needle-laden ground. Celeste
wondered if snakes slithered through those woods and what other wildness lived in this place, so close to the house and yet foreign and strange.
She'd never been a girl for the countryside, not on foot anyway. "It's a big
school. Up north. It's called the University of Michigan, after the state."
Mrs. Owens never spoke of the woods, never set foot into them though they
were practically a part of her backyard. Celeste heard the slightest moan of
the trees, the subtle movement of branches high up in the air, responding to
a breeze that never made it to the ground. She didn't want to go too far from
the house, but she didn't want to show her fear of the woods to Sissy.

"My teacher says she went to school in Jackson. At Tougaloo College.
You ever seen it?" Sissy talked easy, slow-gliding between the trees, surefooted and carefree.

"When I was doing my training to come here." Celeste nodded, stepping gingerly over piles of browning pine needles, seeing things that were
not there. "It's a lot smaller than where I go, but it's nice." Margo had taken
her and Ramona on a sightseeing trip to see Tougaloo College and the state
capital. She and Ramona had sat in the front seat with Margo driving, a
visual anomaly for sure. It had to be a challenge to local whites to see them
riding around chatting like it was the most normal thing in the world. Even
as they did, Margo stayed vigilant and so did she and Ramona, checking
behind them and to the side in traffic as heads whipped around watching
the three northern interlopers. It was nerve-wracking even while it was
funny. Margo had a streak of the wild. Sissy had it, too, apparently.

"You got a boyfriend?" Sissy's voice lifted up, nearly sang it.

"I had one. He went away for the summer." She had been thinking of
J.D. less and less frequently.

"You went away, too." Sissy laughed, then stopped short and stood
quietly listening.

"You're right." Celeste whispered, not about to tell Sissy that her boyfriend was white or that one of the reasons she'd come south was to get
J.D.'s white world out of her system. Sissy didn't say a word for a moment,
just stood there looking up into the pines at the streaks of blue sky showing
through.

"Is he cute?" Sissy took off walking again. "Where'd he go?"

"He's good-looking. But he's not my boyfriend anymore." Celeste figured after this summer, if she survived it, they'd at least talk again. "He
went to Paris, France."

"How come?" Sissy pressed her with little girl questions. "Where's that?"

"Well, he comes from a different kind of background. He paints pictures." Celeste struggled to cast J.D. in alight that revealed and secreted him
at the same time. "Paris is a city in another country. Across the ocean."

"You have a lot of places in you." Sissy's voice dreamed again as it did in
the car when she tried to grasp the concept of movie stars on big screens in
the dark. "I never knew someone who painted pictures." Said as if a child
her age should've known someone who painted pictures.

Celeste smiled at the thought of the woman Sissy might become. "I
never did either 'til I met him at school." She remembered the day she'd
first seen J.D. all set up with an easel on the campus green. She'd stopped
to see what was on the canvas. Trees, but not representational. Greens in
all shades and bricks it seemed of black and brown. He'd asked her to have
coffee with him.

"What about your daddy and your momma?" Sissy kept walking.

Celeste didn't answer her right away, listened to the whistle-singing of
birds like she hadn't heard since Ann Arbor. She thought of the idea of
a daddy and a momma as a grouping, a framework. She'd barely known
it before Wilamena took off, had lived all the intervening years with that
slight hollow in the idea of parents. "My mother lives in a place called New
Mexico. My father lives in Detroit. Before I left for school, I lived with
him. Me and my brother." She felt a pang, a prick every time she thought
of how her life had played out so far with a distant mother who always
seemed to be looking in her own mirror. Father. She held onto Shuck.
She'd missed something, she knew, but it was hard to fathom exactly what
it all meant.

"By yourself?" Sissy eyes got bigger and cloudy. "Just you and your daddy
and your brother?"

"Well, my brother left for college first. So, yeah, for a while it was just
me and my father. He's a lotta fun." Celeste saw Shuck in her mind, all
crisply dressed, pinkie ring shining, Cadillac gleaming like a white-iced
cake in the sunshine. Whatever oddness there was in Shuck being a single
parent faded. "My parents divorced when I was younger than you are now." A slippery feeling of unease went right down her spine. She tried to grab it,
make it speak to her, but it was gone. She didn't know if Sissy understood
the concept of divorce. Not sure she understood it herself.

"You got a daddy who's fun?" Sissy stopped in her tracks. "My daddy
ain't no fun."

Celeste heard the child's vehemence, saw the anger in her eyes. "I can
see that. He's protective of you, that's all." Celeste didn't want to get off on
a tangent about Mr. Tucker the dream killer. People were possessive of their
children, though Wilamena had never been particularly possessive of hers.
If that was what it was. She'd seen it in her cousins and in friends, always felt
a draft of loneliness in those moments. Wilamena would drop her and Billy
off at a cousin's house and never seemed to miss them, never seemed to care
if they came back or not. Shuck had never been so dismissive; he'd made
himself a presence no matter how late he stayed out at his bar or with his
pals. That only drew her tighter to him, and to Billy, too. When Wilamena
left for good, that same lonely draft blew even harder, but Shuck took up
the space with his warmth.

Celeste had been walking behind Sissy again. She had no idea of how
far they had gone. "Maybe we better get back."

"Yes, ma'am." Sissy turned and led them unerringly back to the place
where they'd entered the piney woods. Inside the house, the child sat for
a moment at the table with Celeste. Sissy must know the forgotten paths,
Celeste thought, all through the remains of the piney woods. When they
said goodbye, Sissy re-entered the forest, taking the long way around toward her house by walking parallel to Freshwater Road through the pines.
Celeste stood at the back door and followed the yellow of Sissy's dress
until it disappeared in the trees. She didn't have much hope that Reverend
Singleton would be able to convince Mr. Tucker to allow his children to
come to the freedom school. Not now.

The five children who now came to freedom school every day were ages
six to eleven. They were Labyrinth and Georgie, her first students, and
Tony Mobley and his two little sisters, Hattie and Marge. Other children
attended on different days, dictated by the ability of their parents to get
them to the church. On some days, Celeste had as many as fifteen. Sissy occasionally appeared at the church door, but never came inside. Mr. Tucker
had expressly forbidden it. If there'd been any hope that he'd soften, the
gunshots that blasted out his back windshield put that to rest. But Sissy
had shown up again at Mrs. Owens's back door and taken a furtive lesson
from Celeste in the kitchen. And then another.

Celeste stood near the wood railing separating the pulpit from the rest
of the church, her portable chalkboard leaning on a chair, the children
squirming on the hard pew. Though Reverend Singleton's two big fans
created a meager cross breeze and the splotchy window shades were rolled
down against the sun's assault, the late morning swelter made her feel that
she would surely faint if the temperature rose one more degree. She and
the children grew lethargic near noon, the end of the freedom school day.
She longed for a thin current of crisp air, a Canadian breeze with chills at
the outer reaches.

In Jackson Celeste had been taught how racial oppression made children
think less and speak little, bending many of them into the hunched old
people they would eventually become. Celeste added parental oppression to
that list, thinking of Sissy and her clamp-down father. When Sissy appeared outside the church, she would spend the morning opening and closing the
church door, spiraling in and out of the parching sun, her bright-colored
dresses blinking light into the shady church cavity as she kept an eye out
for her father and his big maroon Hudson.

"The first time Frederick Douglass escaped from slavery, he was captured and sent to jail." Celeste's voice bounced limply off the wood walls
and beams, barely breaking through the retributive heat. "He didn't give
up just because he went to jail." She raised her voice so Sissy could hear
the lesson back at the door, hoping the children would connect Frederick
Douglass's journey to what was going on in Mississippi that summer. Sissy
had read Frederick Douglass in the kitchen, but that was their secret.

"Pass it down." She handed the picture of Frederick Douglass to the boy
sitting on the end of the row. "Stand and say your name." She asked them
to stand and say their names before speaking when it became very clear
that they seemed to feel more comfortable staring at the ground when they
spoke. It was a way of encouraging them to inhabit the space they lived in,
a way of for them to plant themselves in the earth and say, "I'm here and
I matter."

The boy jumped to his feet, grinning. "My name be Tony." Tiny white
beads of sleep nestled in the corners of his child eyes and bed lint speckled
his tight kinky hair. Ashy from head to toe. No shoes or socks, toenails
dirty, ankles marked with insect bite scars. Celeste fought an urge to take
Tony straight to Reverend Singleton's lavatory, wash him, rub lotion on
him, comb his hair, then take him shopping for new clothes. "Your last
name, Tony?"

"Mobley, ma'am." He took the picture, gave it a good look then passed
it down.

Sister Mobley, his mother, had committed to the voter registration class
after Celeste spoke from the pulpit. She'd sent Tony and his two sisters
to the freedom school the next day. Sister Mobley and her children lived
farther down Freshwater Road in a raw wood house with a sinking porch
that had spaces wide enough to slip a foot through. Sister Mobley had no
husband. She worked in service part-time and, in her mind, had not much
to lose. Registering to vote and freeing her children from the thinking
they'd been born into had become a small obsession for the thin woman.

Labyrinth and Georgie stared at the picture of Frederick Douglass.
Labyrinth stole a peek back to Sissy at the door. "May I take it to Sissy?"

"Stand and say your name." Labyrinth knew the ritual.

The blonde-haired child stood, looking like a creature from another
planet. Celeste felt an odd kinship and a small revulsion at the same time.
The similarity between them had to do with their overall difference. In
truth, they looked nothing alike. Not many blond Negroes in Mississippi.
Not many green-eyed Negroes either. One thing was for sure, though:
Labyrinth was nobody's fool.

"I'm Labyrinth Johnson." She pursed her lips, not in the least cowed by
the fact that she used the last name of her mother and all the other children
used a father's surname whether or not that father had disappeared from
their lives. "Now, may I take this picture back to Sissy, ma'am?" Clearly,
she felt she didn't need to stand up and say her name every time she spoke.
She knew her name and knew how to be in the world, whether her daddy
was white Mr. Dale who owned the grocery store but didn't own up to her
or not.