Freshwater Road (41 page)

"Let me get these greens in the box." Celeste heard Mrs. Owens's chair
move away from the table, heard her forking greens into bowls and refrigerating them. "He wouldn't know what to do without you."

The only words flying through Celeste's mind, ready to leap from her
mouth were, "Lord, have mercy." She felt as if Mrs. Owens had betrayed
Zenia Tucker and her, too. But Mrs. Owens wasn't a betraying kind of
person. What did this mean?

"I don't know what to do with him no more." Mrs. Tucker sounded
distant.

"You got to think about them boys. They your children, too." Geneva
Owens brought her practical reality to the table.

Celeste heard it but somehow it wasn't enough to justify the rest. Mrs.
Tucker had to make it through this crisis because of her two other children.
Understood. But was staying there with "the devil" the only way to do
it? Clarity came so slowly. What else was a poor woman with two other
children supposed to do? Run away from home? And do what? Celeste's
head pounded.

"I better get on." A chair scuffed the floor. Bare feet softly padding over
the linoleum. The back door opened.

"Watch yourself now." Mrs. Owens relatched the screen door, alarms
laying quietly in her voice.

"Don't feel I have much to lose one way or the other." She must've been
walking away because her voice disappeared.

"It'll be better in a while." Mrs. Owens called it out.

The old pump on the back porch sucked, gurgled, and spewed, the gears
grinding in their connection.

Celeste crawled back into her room, sat on the floor leaning against the
bed, staring into the lightless room. Sissy had escaped to the only freedom
she would ever know. A crank turned in Celeste's stomach. She tried to
wrap her racing mind around the possibility that Mr. Tucker molested his
daughter, that he killed her. Mrs. Tucker seemed to be saying that and not
saying it at the same time. As mean as he was, Celeste wouldn't allow it to
take shape in her head. How, in these tiny wood houses where every creak
and groan echoed through the rooms? Had Mrs. Tucker covered her head
with pillows, put orange dirt in her ears and gone to the outhouse in the
middle of the night instead of using her night jar, sat on her screened porch
rocking and singing to herself, blotting out the sounds? What about those
sons? They wouldn't even know the difference. Zenia Tucker reached for
reason in an unreasonable world, but still, Mr. Tucker had a hand in killing
Sissy, Celeste believed. If he didn't hold her head under the water, he chased
her to the water's edge and damned her to save herself.

The day after Sissy's funeral, Celeste woke to the smells of chicory-laced
coffee and frying bacon. A scattered dog bark, a blackbird's cawing. She lay
there staring at the ceiling. Late summer felt like a sojourn through hell's
basement with no vents and no stairway out. Birds flew short trips from
shady tree perches to any nearby water. Dogs slept during the day under houses, cars, rocks. Mississippi's already slow-moving life rhythm became
a piteous crawl, the blood flow thickened like molasses.

In Detroit, a thousand cool lakes and pools relieved. When things got
too oppressive, the city opened water hydrants to cool the roaming summer
children. In Mississippi, you sat and rocked and fanned. You drank iced tea
and lemonade until it ran out of your ears, until the sweetness made your
teeth ache and your stomach turn.

At the funeral, the Tuckers had sat in the front row near the stained and
polished wood casket, which was balanced on two sawhorses with a white
drape, the lid half open. The freedom school children placed their strings of
flowers across the lid. Other homemade flower arrangements surrounded the
casket. Reverend Singleton taught the lesson of II Samuel, Chapter 12, on
the death of a child, saying that during the time Sissy could not be found,
eyes feasted on tears and hearts cracked, feet trod the forests in the night
searching. Now Sissy lived in her new home and it was time to celebrate
her placement in God's Kingdom. He spoke of her death without saying
what had happened to her, as if she was a sacrifice for the greater good, as
if she'd died to pull them together and move them forward. Celeste sat in
the church staring at the back of Mr. Tucker's head as she'd done in the car
the first day she met Sissy, suppressing the urge to stand and testify against
him, to tell all she'd heard Zenia Tucker say in Mrs. Owens's kitchen. The
Negro community had closed ranks against the truth.

When it came time to file past the casket, Etta Singleton played "Amazing Grace." Mr. Tucker stood and put his hand out for his wife. She didn't
move. It seemed he stood there for the longest time waiting for her to get
up. He leaned in trying to pry her from the seat, but she brushed his hands
off and lowered her head, her shoulders caving in, sobs coming from her
that were so wrenching that soon the entire church body wept openly.
Crying and fanning with the desolate music squeezing out the last heartfelt
memory of Sissy, and anyone else who'd died in recent memory.

Finally, Mr. Tucker walked alone to Sissy's casket, stood briefly, then
took his seat, his head down. Then Mrs. Tucker got up and leaped towards
the casket, flinging herself over it, rocking the sawhorses, sobbing. Reverend Singleton, in a white robe that flew out behind him, rushed over to
comfort her and to pry her fingers from the edges of the casket. He walked
her back to her seat. She stayed well away from Mr. Tucker, on the other
side of her two boys, and never once looked at her husband.

When Geneva Owens and Celeste walked past the casket, Celeste set
her eyes on the cloth cradling Sissy. She didn't want to see the lifeless brown
body that used to be a living, breathing child whose face was all questions.
Finally, she looked at the dead child. What marks had been hidden by the
mortician's "good" work? Those almond eyes pressed close, set above high
cheekbones in a delicate oval face. Dark hair plaited and adorned with
white ribbons. Celeste wanted to raise her up out of the coffin and shake
the life back into her. Pineyville needed a second line, a better way to release
this pain.

When she and Mrs. Owens turned from the casket to resume their seats,
Celeste felt the eyes of Mr. Tucker on her like firebrands. He glared with
open hostility, seemed ready to come after her right there in the church. The
mourners wept and squirmed in their seats, but no one stood to testify, to
call out a thought as to what had really happened to Sissy. Someone filled
with anger and impatience, some man or woman of the town who'd grown
weary of having no police except ones who terrified them, might have stood
up for Sissy's life and her death. But they didn't. They mourned her as if
by rote, as if mourning children compared to feeding chickens. The Negro
community of Pineyville crying, sobbing really, but no one said a word.

They buried Sissy just beyond the sacred ground in the regular cemetery.

On the way back to Freshwater Road, Celeste stopped at the pay phone
and dialed the Jackson office, not sure if the words to come would be a
begging plea to be relieved of her responsibility or not. She asked to speak
to Ed Jolivette and when he came on the line, she didn't know what to say.
After a long pause, she got out, "We just buried Sissy." The sun knuckled her
under. "I don't think I'm going to make it." Her lips moved, desert winds
of heat crossing her mouth, her head leaning against the metal frame that
held the phone, knees locked so she wouldn't fall. Reverend Singleton and
his wife and Mrs. Owens waited in the car.

Celeste dreamed of death like an old person reaching back for life. Sissy,
a low-flying angel, swept through her nights. Celeste thought before she
awoke that soon she'd be with Sissy, flying free; they'd wave to Mickey
Schwerner, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, Medgar Evers and all the
others, and life would be so peaceful and clean, so beautiful, you had to
turn your eyes away. Unbearable beauty. That turning away woke her
thinking in real time that her days were numbered. She'd been spared
when the troopers beat Matt on the highway, untouched when the cops in
Jackson picked her up for littering the sidewalk with her fliers. It was about
averages. Much like walking on balance beams. You had to fall sometime,
and you knew it would hurt. Going to see Mr. Heywood, the registrar of
voters, she figured, would be her time for falling.

Reverend Singleton set up a mock registrar's office in the space between
the front row and the pulpit steps. He'd seen the registrar's office on more
than one occasion and described it for them. A polished dark oak counter
divided the large space into a waiting area with hard chairs near the entry door
and a typist/secretary area with desks, where three white women sat talking
on the telephone and typing. A large Confederate flag was tacked up on one
wall of the typist area. The windows on the their side overlooked the main
street and the entrance to the building. On the countertop, large ledger books
were stacked like squat posts. A small shiny chrome press-bell illuminated the
counter. The inner door with "Mr. Heywood" in block gold letters led to the
registrar's office. Reverend Singleton said he'd never gotten that far.

Those who had chosen not to go on the first try play-acted the roles of
the whites, berating the would-be registrants, even pretending to hit them.
The first-round volunteers had to fervently embrace nonviolence. The fury
unleashed when a Negro person fought back could not be anticipated or
measured. Beprepared to drop to the floor, pray, singfreedom songs, do whatever you can to protect yourself, but do not retaliate. The moral responsibility
for what happened lay then at the feet of the aggressor. Some whites didn't
care. Some Negroes wanted to fight, didn't have any more cheeks to turn.
Mr. Landau was that kind of man.

Mr. Landau was the only man besides Reverend Singleton to attend all
the voter education classes over the summer. But he was still a member in
good standing of the Deacons for Defense and Justice in Bogalusa. No way
for him to go with the first group to see Mr. Heywood unless he disavowed
all violence, self-defensive or not. He'd as soon pull out a shotgun and start
blasting if the going got rough-especially against the women. The Deacons would provoke no violence, but they'd let no attack go unanswered.
The various church members who'd listed in and out of the class all summer
volunteered for the second, third, and fourth groups.

At Sunday church services, Reverend Singleton continued to make
reference to the memorial service in Meridian, preached more than one
sermon about why the three had been killed, about how that put the torch
in the hands of each of them to carry on. He never talked about Sissy. Their
children, he said, must know what those young men stood for, that they
laid down their lives for freedom. He vigorously underlined the fact that
two of the dead boys were white. This freedom was beyond and above race.
There was no turning back now. They'd spent the summer in preparation
for the days to come and everyone had to be on board the train. If you
couldn't ride in the first car, that was fine, ride in the second or the third.
It didn't matter if you ended up in the caboose as long as you were on
the train. He preached more calmly, laying it out for everyone. Celeste
heard Ed Jolivette's quiet, zen-like approach in the reverend's new way of
preaching. He fired up the congregation for only the briefest moment. She
wondered if the churchgoers were disappointed, if he'd intentionally left
them smoldering rather than allowing them to release their pent-up and
sometimes furious spiritual passion, a religious passion that had, it seems,
as much to do with oppression as with anything else. They were going to
need all of that and more to get through what lay ahead.

On a Monday morning, Celeste and Mrs. Owens climbed into the back
seat of Reverend Singleton's car dressed in their churchgoing clothes. Mrs.
Owens wore her hat, her hair braided and snuggled at the nape of her neck.
She brought along her bible, as if the experience of going to see the registrar
of voters had some religious significance. Celeste had washed and ironed
her peach cotton dress, but decided not to wear her pumps in case things
got out of hand. She wore her tennis shoes-she wanted to be able to dodge
any blows without slipping in those pumps, or getting her toes squashed in
her sandals. Her hair was pulled back in her usual summer ponytail.

Way down the road, Reverend Singleton stopped for the thread-thin
Sister Mobley who stood outside her house in a much-washed summer
dress, holding her bible and a small cotton purse. She climbed in next to
Reverend Singleton in the front seat. Celeste wondered if the bibles were
meant to protect them from blows to the head. Or maybe they give solace,
a spiritual buttress against the realization that the white people of Pineyville
despised them beyond their wildest and worst anticipations, possessing
a simmering hatred, an unqualified disdain that could be provoked by a
laugh or even a smile, and ratcheted up quickly and irrationally to physical
abuse. The local Negroes knew this, but had learned to live in fear of it,
had bowed down in the unyielding face of it for too many years to count.
The hope was that nonviolence would tamp down the hatred a bit, keep it
from erupting like Vesuvius when these awakened Negro people stood up
and said, I'm here, I matter. Celeste knew already that this hatred would
not be conquered by the summer, or by a winter or any other quantification
of time.