Home In The Morning (23 page)

Yet they marched on. Several times, bits of paper from Daddy’s files fell out. Jackson chased them down, Daddy stuffed them back into place, but no further mention or use was made of them. Everyone they passed, black and white alike, greeted Daddy with the utmost respect. Good Morning, Doctor, the men said, tipping their hats, and Good to see you looking so hearty, Doctor, the women said with gracious smiles. Although they bid Jackson a fine day as well, no one, not a single soul, asked him how he’d been since last he’d visited home.

It was strange because it felt so unnatural, so anti-home. This was not the way Mississippi treated even its most prodigal sons. On the other hand, he realized he should have expected the cold shoulder from all and sundry because, of course, no one, especially the black people, wanted to be linked publicly with his recent history, with his defense of L’il Bokay, now the infamous Mombasa, or his insistence that the true authors of his daddy’s adversity were the drivers of a certain green Ford Maverick, two young men who yet walked the streets of Guilford while their accuser slept sound and certain in New Haven. It wasn’t right, but it was the way humans behaved, he knew that. Still, it was one thing to understand such treatment, it was quite another to experience it.

Spring, 1964

I
T TOOK SOME FANCY FOOTWORK
, but Jackson maneuvered the family into taking two cars over to Mickey Moe’s, the venue of Stella Godwin’s introduction to the extended Sassaport clan. The idea that either of them might be squished against Bubba Ray in the backseat of Mama’s Eldorado was more than he could bear. It did not escape him that his resolution to show Stella the South he loved, the one he’d missed every day of his long exile up north, had devolved into keeping her as far away from Bubba Ray as possible. He didn’t like the way his brother sidled up to her during breakfast or hovered over her when she took a little swing on the back porch. Every moment she spent in proximity to him fueled Jackson’s animus. He began to wonder if they would get through their trip without an ugly episode.

He chose a route to Mickey Moe’s that took them through the village, as Jackson wanted to point out to Stella the places where he and Mombasa Cooper scampered about as children, the house in which
Katherine Marie grew up, and also the site of the Little Children of Jesus Baptist Church. Things had changed. Many of the old tar-paper shacks he remembered, ones that served him as signposts in the deep wood, no longer existed. In their place were charred or otherwise broken-up mounds of rubble, left all in a heap like war memorials, and next to them a variety of replacement mobile homes—used ones, dented, rusted, with sheets of tin peaked over the roofs to run off the rain, the occasional expando porch at the rear, and in front vegetable gardens, green with spring growth under a cover of chicken wire as protection against night critters. Before he left home, Jackson thought life in the village the meanest possible. Once he went up north and saw the ghettos there, experience bathed his memories of the village in a sentimental wash of bucolic charm. Countless times he’d remarked in a bout of the exile’s bombastic pride that at least the poor back home had something beautiful to look at from their windows every morning: flowers and trees and birds and the river, the kind of beauty that gives a man hope and faith in God’s mercy. Now, confronted with a glaring vista of battered metal under the noonday sun, he was hard pressed to see a distinction between urban blight and its country cousin. Poverty’s poverty, he thought with a young man’s startled sense of enlightenment, whether countenanced in cement or magnolia.

It’s not the way you described it, Stella said.

No, it’s not. A tornado must’ve come through here.

It’s like a ghost town, Jackson. Where are all the people? A bright warm day like this and not a single child playing outside. There’s no one working in the yard, no one strolling the babies, not a soul looking out a window. Look. Everyone’s got their curtains drawn, if they got ’em at all. And where are the dogs? Every other place we’ve driven through down here is loaded with dogs. What do you think that means?

Jackson thought about it. I do not know, darlin’. Maybe somebody died.

At least the Little Children of Jesus Baptist Church looked almost as he recalled, although the yard out front was wildly overgrown with weeds and tall grass. One of the windows was boarded over. There could have been any number of ways the glass had broken, but the possibility of tornado damage seemed to Jackson the more probable, the most reasonable. Some of the headstones in the graveyard must be hidden by all this vagrant vegetation, he determined, as it didn’t look to him as if there were half the graves there used to be, and those that remained were curiously spare in floral tribute, a neglect unheard of in Mississippi. Whoever died, Stella observed as they passed, the funeral isn’t taking place here, is it?

Jackson’s daddy always said that Negroes switched houses of worship like a woman changes her dress on a hot afternoon. Maybe, he told Stella, the pastor of the Little Children of Jesus Baptist Church went out of favor.

Mickey Moe was now a married man. He’d done well working as a salesman for Uncle Tom-Tom’s insurance agency, well enough to buy Great-Aunt Lucille’s farm when she passed. He moved his wife and Aunt Beadie into the big house, kept a horse and two goats in the barn, leased out most of the fields, and scaled back his hours at the agency because, as Mama told Stella, he’s just a good old boy at heart who likes nothing more than tinkering with tractor engines and strolling up and down rows of cotton.

When they drove up the long road to the big house, Jackson saw with pleasure that Mickey Moe had arranged a feast fit for the celebration of kings. Near the riverbank under a row of shade trees were picnic tables draped in red checkered tablecloths on which Sassaport women laid out huge platters of greens, biscuits, coleslaw, and deviled eggs while Sassaport men elbowed one another around the barbecue pit preparing the meat. The scent of spice-rubbed chicken, brisket, and ribs wafted through the air along with clouds of hickory smoke. Small children
stood on benches and folding chairs at strategic positions around the tables wielding fans to keep flies off the food. Larger ones gathered sassafras leaves to use as napkins for greasy fingers later on. The eldest Sassaports sat in a long row of wicker chairs on the verandah of the big house. And next to, under the grandest shade tree of them all, Mickey Moe himself manned a bar with sweating pitchers of ice tea and lemonade for the women and children, plus bottles of beer set in tubs of ice and quarts of hard liquor lined up for the men.

The two cousins greeted each other like Esau and Jacob. Stern, solemn, they stood apart and extended hands, gripped hard, then burst into smiles wide as the river at its widest and hugged, Mickey Moe lifting Jackson off his feet. The men watching them hooted and hollered, made rude jokes about their manhood, and then each hugged Jackson in his turn.

At the same time, the women descended upon Stella like a cloud of birds, wings outspread, gathering an errant chick. She disappeared into the vortex of their number and was swept away to be initiated into the feminine mysteries of the Sassaport clan, which consisted of a series of rules such as (a) let the men see to themselves, (b) let them feel guilty about that, and (c) wield the power of said guilt on truly important occasions only, no squandering of such precious currency allowed. There were other rules of blood regarding issues of loyalty and the raising of children of which the affianced had no need yet, so the Sassaport women were silent on those matters even though they were more intrinsic to the survival of family and thus far more serious. Stella was overwhelmed as it was. She did not notice nor consider that more in the name of family allegiance might be required of her in the future. As she reported to Jackson afterward, half of what she absorbed that afternoon had to do with recipes and home décor, two areas of domestic life she rarely pondered. It’s likely she missed the point of much wisdom dispensed to her by metaphor that afternoon,
a fact that might explain a lot about how her clan relations went later on.

While she was busy misapprehending a large portion of what was so generously revealed to her, Jackson was busy catching up with Mickey Moe. He apologized for not attending the latter’s wedding, feigning an obligation to take an oral examination before his provosts in order to complete a course in constitutional law that winter. Mickey Moe looked at him askance. I thought it was the influenza you’d come down with, that’s what your mama told me, he said. While a flustered Jackson flapped his jaws, trying to come up with an explanation, his cousin stared stonily at him then broke into another wide, disarming smile. Son, he said, clapping him on the shoulder and putting a beer in his hand, you still can’t set on a mountaintop and see a bald joke comin’ from half a mile on a clear day. It don’t matter to me you didn’t come to the weddin’. I know you had your reasons. Jackson don’t come home no more, I told my gal. Why do you think we’re havin’ this party? All of us down here notice you ain’t been home a very long time, a very long time. Makes your visit quite an occasion. We know you have your reasons. Jackson wasn’t quite sure what Mickey Moe meant, what he might know, even less how he knew it. He thought it best to dissemble. You all noticed? he said, veiling his fears in a quizzical demeanor. Mickey Moe had moved on. Never knew two brothers so dis-alike, he said, gesturing with a mason jar half-full of bourbon poured over shaved ice in the direction of Bubba Ray, who stood underneath a bald cypress with his hands clasped behind his back and his head tilted upward as if he were a tree inspector studying the cypress for rot or infestation.

Neither man spoke for a bit. Each regarded the creature that was Bubba Ray with grim detachment. Mickey Moe broke first: Let’s take a little walk together. There’re a few matters transpired hereabouts I feel you should know. But the rest of the family doesn’t have to bear witness.

They strolled along the riverbank in silence until they were well out of earshot of the others.

You’d be surprised what confidences people tell their insurance agent, Mickey Moe said, both before and after tsouris strikes. I don’t want to sound proud, but your family would be in very dire straits if I hadn’t convinced your daddy to take out that disability policy not six month before he got hurt. He didn’t want to, you know. He didn’t think he could afford it. He was concerned about your college tuition and ol’ Bubba Ray. Why, he’s never spent a day of that boy’s life he wasn’t worried about his future. And I confess, those premiums were high. But I told him he couldn’t afford not to make sure you all were covered if disaster came ‘round. And come ‘round it did, didn’t it, Jackson?

Yes.

Yes, indeed it did. Your mama was very, very grateful to me after the fact. She confided in me. Oh, the talks we’d have sittin’ outside your daddy’s room over to the burn unit. She said she wasn’t sure where it came from, but you and Bubba Ray were sworn enemies, couldn’t hardly bear to be in the same room. She felt it had somethin’ to do with your bein’ complete opposites at first, but it grew so strong over the last few years she thought there might be some dark secret at bottom, jealousies as dark as Cain felt toward Abel. She tried to see if I knew what the secret was but hell if I know, I said, every time she asked, hell if I know. Anyway, she feels caught in a trap between you. She knows it’s the Sassaport way to treat your children equally, no matter what, but she feels you can take care of yourself and she’ll need to watch over Bubba Ray the rest of her natural life. To tell the truth, that’s my feelin’ as to why she spoiled the decency out of that boy and left him, well, what he is. And that’s why her life insurance policy has his name on it, not yours.

Mickey Moe halted, stood back, and looked his cousin in the eye, waiting for a reaction. All he got was a shrug. This is the way Jackson
looked at it: Bubba Ray was the son who stayed home after Daddy got hurt and he the son who went back to college. No matter that it was Mama herself who insisted on her elder son’s swift return to Yale in those difficult and complicated days, principally because he was annoying the authorities with his version of events, or that Bubba Ray was just a kid with no place to go. She hadn’t had to push that hard. He was eager to flee. For that reason, Jackson considered his departure a filial betrayal, one that hung over his head like the sword of Damocles. He’d spent not a few restless nights wondering what future price he’d have to pay. If the only price were his birthright, a mother’s devotion to her firstborn, he’d got off easy. He’d paid it already, the very day Bubba Ray came into the world. News of the policy’s beneficiary didn’t hurt him, didn’t faze him in the least. Mama was right. He could support himself. Who knew about his brother? If character was fate, that child looked destined for the gutter.

I don’t care, Mickey Moe. It’s alright.

Well, there’s more, son.

Tell me.

She puts cash money aside for Bubba Ray’s future, too. You won’t need it, she says. He will. But I’m here to tell you, that boy can take care of himself.