Freshwater Road (31 page)

"What you looking at, boy?" Otis sounded like a southern white man
when he said "boy." "That gin come from a sealed bottle. Sealed by the
gov'ment. All these bottles got seals." He pointed under the bar to his stock.

"They wouldn't pee in it, would they?" Celeste wasn't sure if they were
joking again.

"Never know." Otis swiped a rag across the bar and fixed them another
drink.

"That seal's a tax. Nothing to do with what's in it." Ed drifted away,
taking the fun with him. She felt his consciousness reaching out, to keep
them from going over the line from self-mockery to self-hatred.

"They don't make two batches of corn, one for us, and one for them."
She imagined ragged white men stirring gray liquid in vats out in the Appalachian woods and a beat-down Negro coming to buy, looking at the
ground when they filled his jug.

"Don't want you drinking from the same fountain, using the same toilet, sitting on the same seat, hugging the same woman. What you think?"
Otis put a toothpick in the corner of his mouth. "I wouldn't put nothing
from no white man nowheres near my mouth. You hear me?" He slapped
the bar again. Celeste's glass bounced.

Matt reached down the bar for a New Orleans Times-Picayune. "Otis
been working with us since we came into Mississippi. He knows."

Celeste wondered if he could draw his gun fast like a cowboy in a movie.
The gin picked up speed in her veins, flushed her body, made the music
seep deeper inside her, sent it rippling down her spine. She shimmied on
the bar stool, one foot tapping on the curved chrome footrest. She hadn't
felt this good in a long time, sitting at Otis Gilliam's homemade bar with
his old jukebox thumping and Matt and Ed on either side. Johnny Ace sang
"Pledging My Love."

"You play that?" Otis screwed up his face at her. "You know that Negro
killed himself playing Russian roulette? What a Negro doing sitting around
playing Russian roulette? No telling what really happened."

The deeper-than-blues dirge quieted them. Celeste's eyes burned and
she lowered her head. `Forever, my darling, our love will be true..." His voice
was the haunt, not the words. It was the loneliest sounding voice she'd
ever heard. She didn't know why she'd played it. It was some old collective
memory song, a haunting thing whose strains never left you once you heard
it. She couldn't even remember where she first heard it. Probably somewhere
with Shuck. Maybe it had been on the old jukebox at the Royal Gardens,
but it wasn't Shuck's kind of song.

"Kansas City" brought them back, cleared the air, pounded the red
walls with rhythm.

"Things are changing," she said. Even Shuck talked about how things had
changed in Detroit from the time of the big riot back in the forties, always
talking about how she could do anything she wanted to do in this life.

"Changing? Drinking from the same water fountain? What's that do?"
Ed pointed to his head while his eyes gazed into the interminable craggy
cave of historical misfortune. "It's too late, we're already gone."

Celeste wondered if that was the gin talking, or did he have the gift of
prophecy? Could he really believe that-and if he did, what was he doing
in the movement? She couldn't spar, damage for damage, with anyone
from the south. Maybe the gin got inside him and balled up all his bad
experiences. But he wasn't talking about the dreadful confrontations. He
meant a memory of death, the whole experience of slavery and its residuals.
Neglect. Living in too small spaces. Curvature of the soul. Did he mean
there was no repair? No hope?

"You don't believe that." She said it praying he didn't and wishing they'd
stop this conversation.

Ed turned away from her. "If corn liquor doesn't make you crazy, all
the stuff you can't do down here sure will. I'm not even talking about white
against Negro." She tried to ease away from the challenge Ed had just flung
onto the bar.

"You right." Otis dropped ice cubes with his bare hands into their drinks.
"When it comes to some things, everybody in the same boat. Whole lot of
Bible going on."

She wished he'd pour more gin into her glass, she felt dryness coming
into her mouth. "White people bother you?"

"They always botherin' somebody." Otis sounded like Shuck. No rancor. That's just the way things were. A night man. Night men were father
confessors, Buddhas in the temple, men who listened a lot and saw it all.
Exemptions. They would kill, Negro or white, whoever crossed the line.
The gun said it all.

"Keep on Pushing" came on loud and jumping.

"We supposed to just wake up one morning like it didn't happen?" Ed
slid off his stool as if running from the thoughts drumming in his head.
Something chasing him. She thought he was going to ask her to dance this
time. He didn't even look back. But, he said something she heard loud and
clear: like it didn't happen.

She watched Ed moving in the mirror. With his arm out as if he was carrying a staff or an umbrella, he did a high-stepping dance, moving around the
perimeter of the dance floor, between the tables, all over the room. She swiveled
to watch him, aching to join him, to release her own demons in a dance.

"You can't take that out of him. Don't even try." Otis read her thoughts,
spoke to her like he knew her.

What was it that couldn't be taken out of him? The dance was beautiful.

Why take it out of him? Then she knew Otis didn't mean the dance but
what was under it.

"He's one of them Creole muthafuckers." Matt whispered in a huffy
voice.

Ed seemed to lead a line of invisible people who he turned and bowed
to without missing a step. Leaning to one side and then the other, prancing
a strut, swaggering, bending the music to his rhythm, he moved with a
furious dignity, his head thrown back, his eyes nearly closed.

Celeste watched. Creole was a mixture. He didn't look in the least bit
mixed, not mixed with white anyway. Maybe Indian. Maybe somewhere
back there, something else. She glanced at her own darkened face in the
mirror.

"From New Orleans." Matt leaned in to her. "That's a second line. They
do that behind street funerals. A band plays and people dance. After the
body's buried."

If that was a second line, what was the first? The trip to the cemetery?
The band? He looked so free, she wanted to join him out there, second
lining, but felt glued to the barstool. Something intimate and private about
the way Ed moved through the air.

Otis read her. "Go ahead. Ain't nobody in here but us."

"In the Still of the Night" came on the jukebox before she moved off
the stool. Ed walked over and took her hand. She stopped breathing as
they slid onto the big black and white linoleum squares, fluid, like rollerskating, a breeze on her cheeks. But they were dancing tight, clinging body
to body, feet barely moving, thighs clamped together, his arm down at his
side clutching her hand. His heart still pumped the second line. He smelled
of crisscrossing rivers. The room fell away, went black behind her closed
eyes. He whispered, "Sugar," in her ear and she pushed her pelvis into him,
felt him respond.

Spinning slowly on her own away from him, the red cinder blocks
melted into wide brush strokes, slashes of red-orange paint on a giant canvas. Her dress flared, and she knew that the shape of her legs and buttocks
showed. She moved her hips to the music and saw Ed watching her. She
dreamed she was Marpessa Dawn dancing in the streets of Rio. Or it was
a basement party in Detroit with dim lights, old furniture, and spiked
punch. Hard boys and chiffon girls, afraid to go all the way, kissing until
their lips cracked and peeled to rawness, rubbing each other to the corner of madness through their high school dress-up clothes. Ifyou do it to yourself,
it'll drive you crazy.

"You sure from Detroit." He brought her back to him just as she was
feeling too far away.

The hard pocket of lonesomeness she'd been carrying around softened.
The ever-present nagging fear released her. So many thoughts of death, jaws
clenched at night for fear shots would be fired through the house again. The
terror of Mississippi had tunneled into her. She felt worn down and lifted
up at the same time.

"I think you got to come to New Orleans, chere." He made it sound like
an inevitable direction, like this moment created a door that they stood in
with New Orleans on the other side. She had blue sky and white clouds in
her ears, the music thumping and her breath sinking into his.

But for the presence of the northern rabble-rouser, Celeste Tyree, a Pineyville
local eavesdropping on the proceedings inside the church on these summer
evenings would have heard Reverend Singleton teaching freedom directly
from the pages of the bible with a rawboned intensity. When he closed his
book, Celeste opened hers-the Mississippi state constitution and the One
Man, One Vote study materials. Her lessons centered on the clauses in the
constitution's 1890 text that had brought voting rights for Negroes to an
end. She taught her small group about poll taxes, grandfather clauses, and
literacy tests, the legal obstacles they sought to remove once and for all.

Celeste, Matt, and Ed made it to the church from their outing in Hattiesburg just as Reverend Singleton began the bible-study portion of the
voter registration class. Celeste ran for the outhouse. The greasy food from
Miss Grace's Cafe on Short Sixth Street where they'd stopped to eat after
drinking far too many gin and tonics at Otis's red cinderblock joint-it all
kicked high. She threw up, lurching over the black hole, avoiding a look
into the well of corrosion and quicklime as the last soft light of evening
shafted through the wood slats and the small window. She lit a kerosene
lamp, replacing the protector glass carefully, turned the flame down low.
Her stomach felt queasy but no new wave of vomit came. She stopped at
the spigot on the side of the church, already dreading a late night trip to
Mrs. Owens's outhouse, but so thirsty she thought she'd never make it
through the class without the water. She splashed it on her neck and face,
head thundering as she leaned over. Shuck said don't let me see you drunk. That meant don't get drunk. He never said, `Don't drink. "Alcohol flowed like
water on campus, but she'd never been drunk before. She dug around in
her book-bag for a piece of stale Juicy Fruit, which she chewed and sucked
nearly dry before coming in the side door of the church to take her place up
front with Reverend Singleton.

Matt and Ed, cool and composed, had taken seats in the back as representatives of One Man, One Vote to size up Celeste's voter education class.
In the car coming from Hattiesburg, they'd decided to ask Mrs. Owens
if they could sleep in their sleeping bags on her parlor floor rather than
risk traveling to McComb, their next stop, in the dead of night. Celeste
imagined inviting Ed to sleep in her bed, but nothing would've been more
out of the question in Mrs. Owens's house. She'd never do anything of the
kind in Shuck's house, either. Something unmanageable had been let loose
in Hattiesburg, her pent-up loneliness, her rebuke of the clamped-down
world she was living in, so starkly opposite to the freewheeling life of Ann
Arbor. Now she had to tuck that freedom taste away again.

Celeste slowly got into the rhythm of the class and only had the slightest
feeling of being off-balance. She taught Williams V. Mississippi, the 1898 case
that sealed the fate of Negro voters in the south when the United States
Supreme Court decided in favor of the State of Mississippi. The rest of the
southern states followed Mississippi's lead. A county clerk had the power
to select a passage from the state constitution for a potential registrant to
interpret. A black man was given a difficult technical passage. A white
man, a simple sentence. It was the end of Negroes voting in the south. By
Freedom Summer, very little had changed.

In the course of each class, Celeste laid out the sections of the constitution that would more than likely appear on a voter registration test.
The sample tests from One Man, One Vote had questions ranging from
extremely difficult interpretations of constitutional clauses to ridiculously
obvious ruses meant to stump people. A question might ask how many
grains were in a cup of sand, or how many bubbles in a bar of soap. These
inconsistencies in testing procedures made some Negro folks the more determined to pass whatever test was put in front of them, and made others
apply themselves only in a half-hearted, oh-what's-the-use manner. For
many, it meant they'd rather not try at all.

Dolly Johnson attended the voter education class regularly by now. To
Celeste's eye, she'd undertaken a broader personal transformation, going from a woman who wore low-cut dresses and tight-fitting slacks to more
conservative styles. Dolly was evolving. Still, if Labyrinth was the apple,
Dolly was surely the tree. At close to thirty years old (as Celeste found out
from Etta Singleton), she didn't look a day older than Celeste, and she had
the same feisty spirit as her daughter. Mississippi hammered women into
a tight-lipped passivity, but not Dolly. Even Geneva Owens camouflaged
her spunk and guarded her speech and demeanor most of the time. She'd
survived a rugged life on her own after the death of her husband. She'd
earned the right to be on the earth with a voice. But Mrs. Owens stayed
quiet, until she decided to let her voice be heard in her will to vote. After
making that decision, Mrs. Owens proceeded cautiously. Dolly spoke her
mind at the slightest provocation. About the voter registration test, Dolly
intimated that her good relationship with Mr. Percival Dale might offer her
a leg up. Of course, this was exactly the wrong thing to suggest in front of
the class, but it didn't stop her.