Freshwater Road (51 page)

"You must be out of your mind." Dolly sounded confused, hard, her
voice bringing Celeste back into the room.

Mrs. Owens stepped up to sign, proud, her face barely able to contain
her personal joy, as mixed as the joy had to be that everyone hadn't made
it. Mr. Landau and Sister Mobley stepped up right behind her, proud to be
signing in that ledger book, finally.

Mr. Heywood leaned on the counter like the keeper of the gate, like the
owner of the lock. He'd let them sign in his book and then would close it
again for God only knew how long before he opened it to another Negro
hand. He'd sit on it, bury it in an unmarked grave before he let another
Negro hand touch it, unless that hand held a feather duster.

Celeste watched how they printed their names, their addresses, and
then, in their unpracticed scrawls, wrote their signatures. She held onto
the edge of the counter, euphoric with triumph, wanted to whoop right out loud in the office, to scream that they'd made it. Things would change,
and it started right then and there. No more stepping off the sidewalk to
let a white person pass. Negroes could laugh, talk, be their Negro selves
right there in Pineyville. No running back to the woods. No more looking
at the ground instead of dead into the eyes of any white person who came
along. This was the beginning, at last, a hundred years after the end of the
Civil War, a hundred years after the Constitution gave them the rights of
citizenship.

Reverend Singleton braced, erect and proper though she knew his heart
had to be breaking. He'd lost his church for this and now he'd lost this, too.

Dolly had stepped aside with a flush on her face to let the others sign
the book, but now she spoke again. "What kind of shit is this?" Her voice
was barely loud enough for the people behind the counter to hear. She no
longer wore a purse to the Pearl River County Administration Building,
but rather carried her necessities in her pockets like Celeste. Her tone, her
words didn't match her copycat college girl looks. She moved to the counter
beside Celeste and stared Mr. Heywood right in his face. "You crazy for
sure. I wanna know how come I didn't pass your test?" Her eyes nearly
popped out of their sockets, her hands flew to her hips. Her gym-shoed feet
paralleled for balance.

Mr. Heywood backed away from the counter. "We don't have that kind
of talk in here."

Celeste put her arm on Dolly's arm to calm her. Dolly yanked it away.

Reverend Singleton's dark skin went ashy. "Perhaps there's been some
sort of a mistake." He spoke quietly, not a note of anger or threat in his
voice. He knew the Mississippi State Constitution as well as he knew that
Bible he preached from every Sunday morning. "May I see my test please,
too? Show me where I answered incorrectly."

Things were spinning out of control again, going in the wrong direction. Mr. Heywood tugged at the sleeve of his suit jacket. He angled his
body to include the secretaries behind him who now stared, eyes wide
as if they expected a brawl. Reverend Singleton and Dolly had done the
unthinkable-they'd questioned a white man's authority and intelligence
in front of other Negro people and white people, too. Panic rippled through
Celeste's body.

Dolly banged her fist on the counter. "You got no right or reason to do
such a thing." The press bell bounced. Her hand flattened out on the counter top and slapped it. "I know I passed that test. You just trying to punish me
for something that doesn't have anything to do with voting."

Celeste grabbed Dolly's arm more forcefully this time, pulled her away
from the counter, keeping an eye on the three women in the back. If one
of them picked up a phone, it would surely be to call Sheriff Trotter. In
her head, she heard one of those women on the phone: Sheriff, you better
come on up here and get these niggers, they gettin'surly again. Mr. Heywood
is under attack.

"Let's go, Dolly. It's a beginning." Celeste hissed the words into Dolly's
ear, held her as tightly as Trotter might. She wanted to sock Dolly. "Calm
yourself. I'm not going back to that jail cell, and neither are you." They'd
gotten a piece of what they came for. That was enough. She bottom-lined it
like Shuck would've done. "Let's go, now. Come on. I don't want any more
of my teeth cracked in Mississippi."

Mr. Landau, Mrs. Owens, and Sister Mobley finished signing in the big
book and stepped back with nervous eyes darting around, nobody knowing
quite what to do. Mr. Landau, Celeste knew, had been on his best behavior
for the cause of this voter registration drive, but he couldn't be contained
forever. They needed to get out of there before something awful happened.

Dolly retreated, tears overlapping the anger on her face. Reverend Singleton moved to Dolly and put his arm around her. "Quiet, now. Just like Sister
Celeste said, it's a beginning. We knew going in it wasn't going to be easy.
Be happy for the ones who did pass."

Celeste stared at the side of Mr. Heywood's face. "They'll take the test
again and again."

Mr. Heywood walked towards his office door. "I guess you may do that.
I've done all I'm going to do." He disappeared, closing his inner office door.

Everything went quiet. Just the pearl blue sky and and the roofs of the
neighborhood houses peeking through breaks in the trees. Green below,
blue above. They were suspended on the second floor of the Pearl River
County Administration Building. Celeste longed to get out of the registrar's
office, out of the building with its institutionalized disdain for Negro people,
out of Mississippi.

The secretaries' voices lifted, chatting about a yard party planned for the
weekend. They'd turned their backs on the Pineyville Six. They spoke again
as if behind a glass, as if the six were not there. Pineyville's voter registration
summer project effectively ended.

Reverend Singleton shook his head in wonderment as he exited the registrar's office, the rest of them filing like wingless ducks behind him. Would
there ever be a complete success? Would joy ever ring clear up to heaven?
Celeste knew very well that Dolly might never get registered because of
Percival Dale. No way to know if Dale's wife had called Mr. Heywood to
remind him of the situation. As if anyone in town didn't have an unspoken
reference to it on the tips of their tongues at all times. Dolly probably needed
to move to New Orleans; she'd fit right in with those black Creoles.

In the cool hallway, Celeste surveyed the people coming and going,
searched for any uniforms and clanking handcuffs. She saw none, heard no
hard-soled boots hitting floors. She went straight to the drinking fountain
and slurped the cool clear water into her mouth, let it sail down her throat
cooling her entire body. Reverend Singleton pulled her away, though, telling
her the water fountain wasn't included in the package they'd just gotten.

They started down the stairs. Mrs. Owens walked with Reverend Singleton. She had known him longer than anyone else in the group. She would
be his comfort as he had been for her. Reverend Singleton, as Pineyville's
own civil rights minister, might never sign his name in the ledger book for
Pearl River County. They had burned his church, and now they wouldn't
let him register. He would pay for being uppity. They wanted him out of
Pineyville as much as they wanted Celeste out.

Celeste grabbed the banister and walked down with Dolly, smoothtalking her out of gouging the wall with her car key. Mr. Landau took Sister
Mobley's arm as they descended like debutantes floating in the big sunlight
of the stairwell windows. Sister Mobley beamed and lifted her head up
grandly coming down those stairs from Mr. Heywood's office, clutching
her bible proudly to her heart.

The whites in the lobby barely noticed them. They'd been in this building every day since they took the test, coming in the front door each time.
Celeste wondered how long it would take the rest of the Negro people of
Pearl River County to come up that front walk, come through the front
door, go up those stairs, and demand to take that test to register.

Going back to the car, the sun brazenly hot after the cool of the brick and
stone building, Celeste ran it through her mind. Three people made it, two
didn't. Only five people even tried. She remembered Ed and Matt stalking
around in the St. James A.M.E. Church as if they owned it, questioning her
about how many children she had in freedom school and how many adults in voter registration class. Where would her project rank with the others
all over the state? She'd find out in Jackson, when the volunteers all met to
be debriefed and to say a goodbye that strained against reality. Some of the
success of a project had to do with the selling skills of the volunteers and
some of it just had to do with how hard and brittle a particular town was.
Celeste reminded herself that Negro people all over the south still stepped
off the sidewalk to let white people pass. It was entirely possible that some
towns didn't register anyone at all. Then again, places like Hattiesburg or
even Gulfport or Biloxi might have done a lot better.

Later that night, Mrs. Owens got to pumping water and heating it on
the top of the stove and dragged out the portable tin bathtub for Celeste's
bath. Said she deserved a victory bath. They pumped, heated, and poured
water until she had enough in the big tub for an all-over bath. Celeste
closed her curtain-door and sat in that tub like she was in a marble bath
in a palace in France. She slid down and rested her head on the thin rim,
then folded a towel to use as a headrest. She swooned in it. As the softness
of it settled onto her body, she relaxed and then the tears streamed down
her face without sobs, without breath or break.

In her dreams, Celeste skittered from trumpeting the rights of Negro people
as a harried lawyer to being a beret-wearing backroom revolutionary grinding out mimeograph copies until her hands bled. She even turned up as a
sad-eyed expatriate languishing in an exotic city sipping muddy coffee in a
dark cafe. Ed Jolivette sat opposite her planning their escape.

When the smells of scorched chicory coffee, pork fat, and collards wafted
into the room, she woke fully from her dream-drenched sleep. As they had
so many times this summer, thoughts of the letter kept her nailed to the
mattress. Not just her suitcase but the room itself had become a holding
zone for Wilamena's missive. She eyed that glowing Pandora's box peeking
from under the bed frame.

"Why did she tell me this now?" Celeste talked to the raw wood ceiling
from her mattress on the floor. Grandma Pauline used to say, "Let sleeping dogs lie." Wilamena evidently never listened. Maybe the dog slept for
everyone but her.

"Who you talking to in there?" Every grunt and mumble sailed through
this house. "Ain't nobody in here but us." Celeste loved being grabbed up in
Geneva Owens "us," heard the clanking pots and refrigerator door opening
and closing, wondered what could be going on in that kitchen.

"Myself. I'm losing my mind." She called out, still in the habit of speaking as if she had a real door instead of a curtain separating her room from
the rest of the house. She got up from her mattress, heaved it onto the
bed frame, checked her tooth and her lip scar in the washstand mirror, then stuck her head through the curtain. "Just gonna put on some clothes,
Mrs. Owens."

"Take your time, child." The ringing merriment of a freshly registered
voter in her voice.

Celeste washed herself, relishing a slight lifting of the morning heat,
glorying in the fact that she hadn't sweated away last night's tub bath while
she slept. She pulled on slacks, a soiled blouse, and her gym shoes. She
grabbed her hair back with a rubber band and stepped into the kitchen
carrying her small basin of dirty water, ready to help Mrs. Owens.

Light streamed in through the east-facing back door and the sidewindow. Mrs. Owens had tied back the white eyelet-embroidered curtains
with a black shoestring. Cooking utensils covered the small kitchen table.
Every pot and bowl she owned lay around on the stovetop, the shallow
counter, on top of the refrigerator. She turned to Celeste and nodded towards the steaming coffee pot, her knotty hands sliding the shell from a
hard-boiled egg and adding it to a bowl full of them. "We gon have something around here. A celebration, a something. A hello to votin' and a send
off for you. I don't care what else." She'd thrown years off of herself over
night, her apron splotched with dark grease spots and circles of dampness.
Joy, Celeste thought, had to be the greatest palliative against age.

Celeste headed for the outhouse with her basin, ready for any relief from
her tangled thoughts of leaving, of jail cells and burned down churches, of
missing Ed like a lost limb, of Shuck and Wilamena. She poured out the
dirty water and used the facility, hating it as much today as the first time
she'd used it two months ago. On the back porch, she rinsed her basin with
pump water and bleach, and noticed the smooth, hard Mississippi-grown
muscles in her arms for the first time. In her room again, she grabbed her
pitcher and thudded out the front door to the spigot.