Freshwater Road (32 page)

Mr. Landau brought the message of the Deacons for Defense and
Justice to the meetings. He lived near Pineyville, but worked in Louisiana
at Crown Zellerbach. He regularly went across the state line to attend the
meetings of the Deacons, and he carried a rifle in his truck. The Deacons
promised to defend themselves against any marauding whites, to protect
their lives, their family's lives, their property, and the lives of civil rights
workers who came to their towns. It didn't matter to them if the whites
had on uniforms or sheets. Freshwater Road had been used as target
practice in the middle of the night, the very kind of thing the Deacons
for Defense and Justice defended against. Mr. Landau never would've
allowed that, he eagerly reminded everyone in the church. He created a
stir whenever he spoke. There were those who mumbled their agreement
with the Deacons (still short of joining them or of starting a group in
Pineyville) and those who stayed in lock-step with Reverend Singleton's
strict adherence to nonviolence. The only self-defense was in spiritual
and actual nonviolence. In Celeste's mind, the spiritual part required the
greater work. A person might live a long time with a heart full of violent hatred, sing God's praises in church with vengeance and retribution
just on the tip of the tongue. Reverend Singleton admired Mr. Landau
and feared him, too. He thought of the Deacons as Louisiana Negroes
walking a thin line that bordered on crazy. Wild Negroes, he called them. Celeste believed in her heart of hearts that "Wild Negroes" were just what
they needed, but she couldn't say that to Reverend Singleton.

Celeste couldn't imagine Shuck doing any violence to anyone first but
she knew darned well he'd never walk away if he was attacked or, worse,
roll into a ball on the ground. If he did walk, it would only be to get his
gun. There was a code on the streets and without teaching it in words, he
lived it. Celeste wobbled on nonviolence, worked hard to keep the principle
focused in her heart. But she knew, too, that if she was alone, walking on
a Pineyville street, and an individual assaulted her, that person might get a
response and she didn't really know what that response would be. She felt
very clearly a hardening of her anger over the situation in Mississippi. She
also knew real fear for the first time in her life. She continually pushed it
down, sat on it, buried it, but still, it was there.

Along with Dolly Johnson and Mr. Landau, Sister Mobley, Geneva
Owens, and Etta Singleton rounded out the class. Mrs. Owens and Mrs.
Singleton were the best readers in the group. Others came and went, taking it all in, nodding and rustling around in nervousness. This was a big
step to take for people who had been denied the vote since the end of
Reconstruction, for people who lost their jobs if they even whispered about
voting, whose homes were bombed if they walked in the front door of the
courthouse. They had no memory of the meager, long-ago days when they
could vote. The people remembered being told by the registrar of voters that
voting wasn't for them, that they should stay out of whites folks' business no
matter how many times they tried to register. They had clear memories, too,
of the men who'd been shot, whose homes had been burned to the ground
when they pushed the issue of voting farther than white folks allowed.

The Mississippi constitution gave everyone a headache but they read
and reread it. They studied it and they studied the United States Constitution, too. Celeste grilled them and Reverend Singleton quoted bible
passages that helped them stay with it. He knew his people well-he
knew that he could slide a whole lot of new food onto a plate that had been
greased by the bible. It was a long class that night, interminable to Celeste,
who fought the residues of the alcohol's effect and who never stopped feeling Ed Jolivette's body close to hers on Otis Gilliam's linoleum-squared
dance floor. Behind her talk of voting rights and grandfather clauses, she
conjured ways for the night to never end, for Ed to decline going on to McComb in the morning, to stay there in Pineyville with her. She knew
it wouldn't happen but she allowed herself the dream anyway.

Matt unloaded both sleeping bags out of the trunk and helped Mrs.
Owens from the car on Freshwater Road. He'd been quiet on the trip back
from Hattiesburg and nearly sullen after the class on the ride to the house.
He'd seen with his own eyes how Celeste had danced with Ed. Celeste
hoped it wouldn't influence his report on her project. Mrs. Owens chatted
away in the car, grateful to have both men staying the night in her manless house. When she closed the front door behind her and Matt, Ed and
Celeste took off for the pay phone to check in with the Jackson office.

Celeste scrunched down in the front seat watching Ed on the phone.
She checked the main street for headlights, movements. The Pearl River
County Administration building and Sheriff Trotter's office were three
short blocks away. She hoped Sheriff Trotter and his deputies had turned
in for the night.

Her eyes came back to Ed, tall and leaning, skin nearly as dark as the
night. He couldn't have looked more different from J.D., but something
about him reminded her of J.D. regardless. Danger? J.D. loved to roar his
motorcycle over those country roads even when they were wet and slick,
hanging on to the edge, pushing it as far as he could, snuggling up real close
to death. Then there was his pursuit of her; she hadn't thought about that
kind of risk until Shuck had nailed her on the subject of Negro women with
white men. J.D. never spoke of how it might've thrilled him to swim hard
against the tide. She too felt that rush walking the campus with him, seeing
the heads turn now and then, seeing even a scowl or two and sometimes
a tight-lipped smile.

Ed stood there with one elbow on the metal platform holding the pay
phone, open to her. He was no back-facing man. Another daredevil, but
with a calm voice denting the quiet night. Mississippi made the motorcycle
rides and dating a white boy feel senseless. What was it for? Personal excitement, a high like a ride on a roller coaster? This high was defying guns and
beatings to stand up in the face of history. But was there still an adrenaline
rush? Maybe that, too.

"Ed Jolivette checkin' in." Accent falling on theJol. "Pineyville. All right,
then." She loved the music in his way of speaking, thinking her own voice
must sound very flat with its midwestern clip and drag.

"We going into McComb tomorrow." No fear, not in his voice anyway. Death defying. Ed sounded generous, unruffled but wary at the same time.
He stood perfectly still in his bibbed denim overalls and a light shirt. Any
white man with a gun could shoot him dead right before her eyes. At least
she could duck down to the floor of the car. She scanned the darkness
beyond the circle of the convenience light.

"Everything else fine here. Project's going good. Saw it tonight." He put
in the good word for her, though she wasn't convinced it was going all that
well. Voter education needed speeding up, that's for sure.

With no exhausts from cars and trucks, no smells of cigarettes and
cigars, no tumultuous breathing locals, the mawkish aroma of the magnolias
lining the main street of "downtown" Pineyville clung to the night air
like a cheap perfume. Just half a block from the pay phone was the stingy
drugstore, the only place she'd spent any money since coming to Pineyville.
Each time she'd gone in there, the straw-haired white woman, red-faced
and plump, sat in the breeze of a whipping table fan behind a glass case
displaying faded peach shelf paper and an assortment of odds and ends:
toothpaste, Band-Aids, mercurochrome, hydrogen peroxide. The chewing
gum and candy bars were arranged in designs on the top of the display case
with a slight covering of orange dust. She kept the Kotex in the back. When
Celeste had gone in, the woman smiled an empty smile that matched the
coldness in her eyes. When Celeste left, the woman called her "y'all" and
invited her to come back soon.

Ed turned the car around in the gas station. "Pineyville's so bad, black
people better not even laugh when they walk down the street."

"Not much to laugh about anyway." She said. "It's not safe out here this
time of night." Then, "You say black."

"Negro is their word. Black is mine." It sounded like a challenge, like
he was trying it out on her to see where she was with it.

The thickness of the day's journey had thinned down to the two of
them. She wanted to lean into him the way she had on the dance floor, rest
her head on his chest.

"You know what running drunk is?" Ed smiled.

She checked behind them, to the front, and to the dark sides of the
road. She hoped he wasn't going to lecture her about drinking too much in
Hattiesburg. It seemed forever ago even though it had only been a couple
of hours, long enough for the night to go from soft to deep black. She
wanted him to find a place, some cluster of trees big enough to camouflage them while they pressed themselves together, rolled naked on a bed of pine
needles, picking up scalded orange dust in their hair, in the creases of their
elbows and knees. "Never heard of it."

"I got so drunk one night, my legs started running down Canal Street. I
grabbed onto light poles and swung myself around to slow down. I was headed
for the ferry to go home to Algiers. Thank God the ferry was at the dock, or
I woulda run right into the Mississippi River." He glanced over at her.

She didn't want to talk about being drunk, but she had an image of
what he said and it made her smile. He hadn't had as much to drink as she.
But he hadn't been trapped in Pineyville for weeks either. "Algiers? Algiers
is in Africa."

"Cross the river, where I grew up." His dark face glowed. "I go to a place
in New Orleans got a man with two peg legs who stands on his hands on
a table and tap dances on the ceiling." He glanced sideways at her to see
her response.

"You're exaggerating." She laughed.

"No, chere, and that ain't the half of it. You ever hear of Plaquemines?
Leander Perez country in Louisiana. They got a special prison for civil rights
workers. Old French fort full of snakes and dried bones. Make Mississippi
look like a vacation." He spoke as if he knew the place intimately.

She looked at him. "You been there?"

"Oh, yeah." He stared at the blacktop, the front lights of the car reaching ahead of them. "Two years ago. We tried to grow up a voter registration
project down there. Never been so scared in my life. Couldn't hardly find a
piece of dry ground to even sit on, and you better not go to sleep. We ended
up hunched over on some stones left from the fort. Slept in shifts."

She didn't want to think about it but he'd put the picture in her mind,
a snake-infested swamp prison with a bayou floor. Why did he tell her
this? The guys in the movement swapped stories, one-upped each other
when they sat down to drink and relax. She'd seen that in Jackson. Like
guys in a war movie talking about the taking of this hill or that town. They
spoke reverently of the injuries sustained by fellow fighters. The battles
changed them forever. Ed was bringing her into his inner world talking
about Plaquemines. It must be his nightmare place, the setting and time
he'd never forget. One more nightmare, and she might not make it.

As they neared Freshwater Road, Ed turned off the headlights. There wasn't
another car on the two-lane. The darkness of the night was astounding.

Her whole body sighed in disappointment when he turned into Freshwater Road. She had a thought to ask him to go back to Hattiesburg,
go back to Otis's and finish dancing the night away. He parked near the
remains of the house across the way, some distance from the front of Mrs.
Owens's house. Stars like jacks, the moon a thickening arc that had been
tucked away in a toy box of clouds. No rolling around on the earth making
love in the pines. They were quiet. No lights down Freshwater Road, and
it wasn't yet midnight.

"Other places are better." He paused and checked behind them.
"Natchitoches, Evangeline, Vermillion, St. John the Baptist. Lot of places
to see besides Plaquemines." The words rolled off his tongue like warm
honey off the tip of a tablespoon. He enticed her with these place names,
which called to mind bunches of blood-red flowers growing along the side
of a road. "I take you to the bayous. Cypress trees grow out of the water,
nets made of Spanish moss."

The words poured out of his mouth in a rush. She knew then that
these words were a cover for his fear. He wanted to say words that sounded
far away from this place, sweet story-sounding words. He'd been to that
French fort in the swamps, and he'd made it out. A good ending. But with
so much work still to be done, he might not make it all the way through.
The aura that surrounded the volunteers was fear, shining like a halo. Good
fear, walking-in-God's path fear.

"You come to New Orleans, we'll run on the levee." He'd captured her
but showed no hubris, no swagger. "Better than running drunk."

"You're right about that." She was floating downstream in his river on a
barge loaded with indigo-dyed cotton and peg-legged men who tap danced
on the sky. "What'd they say in Jackson? You leaving tomorrow?" She knew
she had to stay and do what she'd come there to do, but she didn't want him
to leave her all alone in Pineyville. Promised God she'd never get drunk
again if He'd make Ed Jolivette stay or take her with him.

"We got to check on McComb." He slumped down in the car, his liquid
hands draped over the steering wheel. "Somebody threw a bomb in the
voter education center. We got to stop by there and rev people up again.
Scared some away."

She knew about McComb. Herbert Lee, Louis Allen. Dead. The dark
unnamed. People beaten for working in voter registration. Children born
of numb-mouthed parents, jailed for months, singing insane songs to stay sane. Bombs thrown into churches. Black smoke rising, leaping licking
flames on a crusade of destruction. Fire on the cross. He knew where he was
going, and knew he might not come back. No time for holding on.