One Night in Mississippi

Cover

The lot was not a large one, but it belonged to us, and that in itself was significant. My father had bought the house and the farm from a white store owner for three hundred dollars — all the money that he had managed to save during long, hard years as a tenant farmer. The work had marked him. His face was dark and wrinkled, the skin on his arms was papery thin, revealing the tendons and ropy muscles underneath, and the knuckles on his hands were so swollen that he couldn't close them into a fist. Still, I had never heard him complain. It was a proud day for any black man in Mississippi to come to own a piece of land, and he had probably never dreamed that he would someday have to bury his son on it.

Pastor Lonny and a few family members had arrived the night before the originally planned funeral day, and my father had to find space for them during the delay. The house was not very big to begin with, just a wooden shack set up on cinder blocks with a small porch in the front and a set of steps in the back. In some spots there were spaces between the floorboards large enough that you could see the ground underneath, and when it stormed, the boards lifted and bowed, and sometimes had to be hammered back in place after the storm had passed There was a narrow hallway with two rooms on either side, each square and plain with a single window. On one side of the house were my parents' room and a kitchen; on the other side, one bedroom for Graden and me and another for Glenda and Etta.

When Pastor Lonny arrived, he was given our room. The women were split among my parents' and sisters' rooms, so during the three-day wait Graden and I, two uncles, and eight cousins were relegated to sleeping on the floor of the kitchen and the hallway, our bodies locked together in the cramped space like jigsaw pieces. On the third night I was overcome by the heat of too many bodies. I took my blanket and picked my way through the maze of legs and arms out to the porch. Glenda and Etta were already there, perched on the top step.

Etta looked up at me.

“Can't sleep?”

“Too damn hot,” I said sitting next to her. “And Uncle Jerry snores.”

“So does his wife.”

She rolled her eyes and nudged her shoulder into me. The crickets that usually filled the night were mostly silent, and the three of us sat there, huddled in our blankets in the dark until Etta spoke again.

“I just want this to be over. They always take the best of us.”

Glenda tightened her blanket around her neck and stood abruptly, walking back inside without looking at me.

“I'm sorry,” Etta said. “I didn't mean nothing by it. Don't let her bother you.”

“It's all right. Can't be hurt by what's true.”

She put her hand on mine.

“Warren, he was bent on this. There wasn't anything to be done.”

I said nothing, and she let it go. We cooled ourselves in the night air before picking our way back inside to lie down among the mass of bodies, she in her room and I on the hallway floor.

After the truck delivered my brother's body and drove away, the family gathered at the southeast corner of the yard where my father had dug the grave. He had hit hard-packed clay about four feet down and had to settle for that depth. I had sat in the backyard at times and watched him, unable to hold a shovel with my crippled right hand, a painful reminder of my place bestowed on me by a grease-slick white boy during one of my rare visits into town. The doctor had to sever the ring and pinky fingers just ahead of the second knuckle, leaving useless, wiggling nubs. The middle and index fingers were curved inwards towards the palm, the tendons too damaged to stretch them straight. The entire hand was withered, the palm and the back dark with scar tissue.

I was unable to help my father in any way other than to bring him water and the occasional piece of bread or cured meat, which he accepted in silence, not looking at me. Other times, I simply couldn't watch and had to go back to the house.

The head of the grave was marked with a plain wooden cross, and Pastor Lonny stood beside it as he delivered his eulogy. I heard very little of it. I stood off to the side, away from the rest of the family, and stared off over the pastor's shoulder. Rows of cotton trailed out behind him, blooming white tufts speared on cracked and drying twigs. Beyond that, a small patch of peanut plants, then the woods, thick patches of pine and oak and chestnut. There were deer in the woods as well, feeding on wild oats and peas, and in the dense underbrush, the occasional sign of trails left behind by the Indians who had hunted them.

I looked around the makeshift congregation, who were turned towards the pastor, their heads bowed. A rare breeze drifted across the yard, bringing with it the faint but undeniable stench of filth from the outhouse, but if anyone noticed, they gave no sign. The pastor continued, “A young man of passion, of vision, of commitment. One of our brightest lights snuffed out far too soon, and all our lives are a darker place for it. But if each of us keeps but a piece of his memory alive, then we also keep a piece of that light alive.”

The breeze died as suddenly as it had come up, and the stifling heat reclaimed the now-still air. Tiny black gnats resumed their buzzing around the sweat-soaked necks and faces. No hand was waved to deter them.

When the pastor had finished, he nodded at my father. The coffin was a simple pine box that he had built, with four makeshift handles. There was nothing to put inside as a cushion, and I thought I heard my brother's remains bump against the side as my father and my uncles lowered the box into the shallow grave. I stared at my father with a sudden and unreasonable anger, but he returned my look with an expression so fierce it made mine seem pale. Pastor Lonny offered a final benediction, my mother dropped a single flower atop the pine coffin, and the ceremony was closed with a moment of silence.

I bowed my head, but my jaw was clenched. I had ignored most of the eulogy, but I didn't have to hear it to know that it was a long, drawn-out, and overly dramatic summary of how Graden had lived, with not one word about how he had died. Just as there hadn't been one word said about it among ourselves in the months since he had first gone missing. Papa had kept working the field, Mama had kept tending the kitchen, and Etta and Glenda had kept doing their chores. Everyone had carried on, but no one had talked about it. We had turned inward when we most needed to come together, and no one more so than I.

Anger swelled up inside me, and I understood that it was Graden's anger that I felt. I remembered a day when Mama had taken Graden with her while she went to do some cooking and cleaning for a white family. I was out in the field when they returned, and when I walked into the house, Graden was standing in the hallway looking at the floor.