The Twelve Tribes of Hattie (5 page)

Floyd hid in an alcove a few doors down from Cleota’s. It was late and the street was quiet. The men from the club came outside to look for him, their shouts covered the sound of his sobbing. He didn’t know where Lafayette lived. He didn’t know his last name or where he worked. Floyd bent at the waist, hands on his thighs for balance. The night was cooler than the previous one had been, and the breeze calmed him. Lafayette had mentioned that his mother’s house was on the outskirts of town. It was not much to go on, but the town was small; he could find Lafayette and ask his forgiveness, and they could leave that very night as Floyd had imagined. Floyd had parked on one of the side streets, though he didn’t recall which one. He walked quickly to the corner.

“What you rushing for?” a man called, a bottle in his hand. He crossed the street toward Floyd. “I said, where’s the fire?” He looked Floyd up and down.

“You know that boy?” he asked.

Floyd walked on.

“You ain’t got time to speak? Guess you got to get where you going?”

The man’s footsteps quickened behind him.

“I seen that boy look at you. You going to see about him?”

Floyd turned. The man held the bottle by the neck.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“You don’t know what I mean? You got the nerve to be proper too? I mean your friend.”

“I don’t know him.”

Floyd balled his fists for the fight. Just then, a woman’s voice called from the other side of the street. “Sam! Come on now! Jim gonna ride us in his truck.” The man gave Floyd another once-over and walked away.

Floyd hung his head like a whipped dog. He told himself he had done the right thing, it would not have been prudent to admit he knew Lafayette. What could have been gained but a fight that would delay his search? He rounded the corner and leaned against the façade of a building to catch his breath. The car, he remembered, was just off the main drag. To hell with these people. To hell with them. Action was required. He would do this one thing; he didn’t know what would happen after that, but he could do this one thing that was right. As Floyd jogged toward the car, he noticed a hint of dawn, just a sigh of pink at the bottom of the sky.

“Hey! That you, Floyd?”

Darla stood in the middle of the street.

“Lot of fools around here, ain’t it?” she said, walking toward him. “You got a cigarette?”

Floyd shook his head.

“Ain’t nobody got a cigarette in this whole town, and the store’s closed. This a funny little place, that’s sure.” Darla rummaged through her handbag. “I always keep one in my purse for emergencies. You sure you ain’t got one?”

“I’m sure.”

Darla cocked her head to the side and considered Floyd for a few seconds.

“Ain’t that your car?” she asked.

“Uh, yeah. I guess it is.”

“You skipping town?” Darla chuckled.

“No, just going for a walk.”

“Is that right?”

She sidled closer to him. “You want to get in the backseat?” Floyd shoved his hands in his pockets and looked down at his feet.

“No, you don’t. I wonder if you ever really did.” She paused, “Maybe it’s a cigarette in the car?”

Darla walked to the Packard and looked in the windows. “Now I know why you keep going from place to place every two and three days.”

Floyd wanted to slap her.

“I saw you go in them woods with that boy last night,” she said. “Is that why you in a dash for the car?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Floyd replied.

“I saw you.”

“It wasn’t me.”

“Ain’t nothing to me. I mean, I think it’s nasty but I can’t say as I really give a damn.”

“It wasn’t me.”

“It ain’t nothing new. Though I reckon you ought to play it close. You seen what happened to that boy.”

“I don’t know him.”

“Aww, come on, Floyd.”

“It wasn’t me you saw.”

Darla bent to fiddle with the door handles. “You got the keys?” she asked.

Floyd smelled his cowardice; he was all rot inside. If he saw Lafayette in the street at that moment, he wouldn’t be able to meet his eye. He unlocked the car door and sat in the passenger seat. He put his hand on his thigh to steady the twitch in the muscle. Darla climbed in next to him. “Get out,” Floyd wanted to say. She searched the glove compartment for cigarettes, and finding none, she moved to exit the car, but Floyd reached for her arm and pulled her back inside. “If we leave now,” he said, “I can just make the next gig. Two hundred miles.”

“You must think God made me a fool,” Darla said, wriggling free of him and getting out of the car. She took a few steps away, then turned to face him and said more softly, “You better get yourself together if you gon’ drive all that way.”

Floyd watched her tip tap down the street in her run-down heels. The sun rose in an angry orange ball. Could be another earth, another earth just like this one all up in flames. The upper sky was still a dark layer of purple clouds. Floyd turned the key in the ignition and thought, I should hang myself like Judas.

Six

1950

T
HE REVIVAL TENT WAS
smaller than Six had imagined. Fewer than thirty people stood inside and already it was crowded. Six, seated with two other men on folding chairs in the front, looked past the crowd, through the unfastened tent flap, to a stand of trees. A steady rain pelted the trees, and the tender green leaves bobbed on their boughs. A family came in, saw Six behind the pulpit, and went out again. They left because of Six, because he was only fifteen, and a northerner, and no one had ever heard of him. The other preachers sitting with him were unknowns too, but they were middle-aged and looked the part. When he first met them earlier that day, they had called Six green. They chucked him under the chin and joked that he was still wet behind the ears. They tousled his hair with their wide hands. Six felt their palms—dry or clammy, steady or trembling—through the fuzz of his shaven head. He distrusted their kindness and playfulness.

Six’s was the tent of lesser lights. That was fine with him. He’d preach and the people who’d brought him there would see they’d made a mistake and send him back home to Philadelphia.

A few hundred feet away, in another, larger tent, the pages of the hymnals rustled and a piano played. The crowd had already started singing. Six’s audience looked tired—too worn out for good preaching, too worn out to feel anything.

Six returned his gaze to the trees; a woman in a bright yellow dress stood beneath them, soaked to the bone. Her skirt clung to her thighs and her blouse was slick against her breasts. Six thought it peculiar that she didn’t use an umbrella. Most of these people didn’t, he’d noticed. They entered the tent shaking the rain off of themselves, a sign, surely, of their backward country ways. He recalled an image of his mother, Hattie, stepping out of the back door and into the rain, her umbrella held high. Two of her long strides and she was already halfway down the alley. Hattie walks like a train comin’, August would say. Six always knew where his mother was in the house, which room she would charge into next. He was home too often. Hattie didn’t like that he was such a homebody; she thought he ought to be out with his brothers. To avoid her displeasure, he skulked around the corners of the house and spent most of his time in the bedroom he shared with Franklin and Billups. His favorite hiding spot was a recess under the stairs, though he was too big to fit there comfortably and had to curl himself into a ball with his knees touching his chin.

He felt best in the cubby, hidden from view, the house and its inhabitants bustling around him like so many bees. He could hear Hattie in the hallways and his brothers calling to one another quietly—Hattie would not have shouting in the house—his father whistling, his sisters whispering. His scars didn’t bother him when he was under the stairs. He couldn’t feel the keloids pulling across his neck and curving around his torso and back. Though they were years healed, they itched and burned as intensely as they had when Six was a child and the wounds first scabbed.

Six kept his constant discomfort a secret, not because of stoicism or bravery, but out of bitterness. His pain and weakness made him special—especially wronged and especially indignant—exceptional because he had suffered. His pain was his most precious and secret possession, and Six held on to it as fiercely as a jewel robbed from a corpse.

The tent flap blew open again. The woman in the yellow dress darted out into the rain. Six could not see her well enough to know if she was pretty, but his pulse quickened at the way her skirt clung to her thighs. She was young, he knew that much. He wished she would come into his tent. She would be disappointed at hearing him preach—they all would—but his scars itched powerfully in the steamy close tent, and she might distract him from his suffering and homesickness.

Six had preached four times before at Mount Pleasant Baptist church near his house in Philadelphia. The Word had come over him like a fit; it hijacked him utterly. The first time was nearly two years before, during the evening service one Sunday. Just before the call to prayer, Six heard a low flat whistle, like the sound of air blowing through a hollow bone. He felt something—spirit? demon?—coming toward him. When it reached Six, it entered him, not like the dove of the Holy Spirit that the Bible talked about, but like a thunderclap that wakes the neighborhood in the middle of the night. The force of it bent him double. He squeezed his throat with his hand, but that did nothing to stop the Word rising in him. He was so afraid he thought he might vomit. The Word collected in his mouth like a pile of pebbles and pushed itself out through his lips.

Afterward, the parishioners told him he’d preached like God’s anointed for nearly thirty minutes. Six remembered very little of what he’d said or done. There remained only a lingering euphoria that faded quickly and whose departure left him depleted and confused. At home in his hiding place under the stairs, Six squeezed his eyes shut and tried to summon God, or whatever had come to him, but it was like trying to remember a dream—the longer he thought about it, the further it receded. The preacher had said it was grace. But what was grace if it came on him like a seizure and then left him as frail and hurting as he had been before its visit? There wasn’t anyone to ask about it: Hattie said it was just the same as when the church ladies caught the spirit and spoke in tongues, which only showed they were excitable. August said there were some odd things you just couldn’t explain in this world, and Six’s fits were one of them.

Six wasn’t sure that religion was any more than a lot of people caught in a collective delirium that disappeared the minute they stepped out of the church doors and onto the street. And who could blame them? Who would not want to be carried away by something bright and exalted? But Six wasn’t like the other church people. His experience of God was a violent surge he couldn’t control. He came to believe that, like everything else in his life, his preaching had something to do with his poor health. He could not see that perhaps there was a blessing in it, that some help was being extended to him. In the middle of the night while his family slept and Six was insomniac with body aches and bouts of itching, he knew his Jesus spells were another indicator that he was a freak, not merely of body but of spirit. His soul was susceptible to God’s whimsy, just as his body was susceptible to any opportunistic thing that might hurt it. If he’d known how to pray, Six would have asked God to take his gift away.

The people in the tent settled for the service. Six hadn’t any idea what he’d preach. The congregants watched him. He didn’t want them to see him squirm, but in his agitation his skin had ignited like a match head. He looked at the other preachers: one held a dog-eared Bible with a brown leather cover crisscrossed with creases and the other read his notes, stopping every now and again to glance heavenward and mouth a prayer. Most of what Six knew of the Bible he’d learned in Sunday school or from snippets of sermons he’d heard when his Aunt Marion took him to church. August and Hattie only went to services at Christmas and Easter or for christenings and funerals. Aunt Marion said they’d suffered because of it. “If you don’t come to the Lord’s house, he won’t come to yours,” she was fond of saying.

Six had not said good-bye to his brothers before he left Philadelphia to come to the revival. He’d been bundled into a car in the predawn before anyone on the block was awake to see him leave. Six beat a neighborhood boy badly the day before. From the depths of him emerged a violence he had not known was there. The boy’s relatives wanted revenge, and the neighbors said he was crazy.

The journey to Alabama took two days. Six slept in the car one night and was hosted on the other by a church-going lady in Tennessee. They stopped in the dead of night on a country road with no streetlights. The moon was a sliver. It was so dark that Six could not see the borders of his own body, and he and the darkness were one indivisible thing. An old woman holding a lantern opened the door to the house and told them the electricity was irregular. Hers was the only house on the road; inside it smelled of grass and dew and the rooms buzzed with mosquitoes. It seemed to Six that the walls didn’t serve much purpose other than to keep people from looking in. He didn’t sleep at all for the vertigo caused by the darkness and the bugs and the silence. In the morning he saw that the house was little more than a wooden shack, leaning under the weight of its roof, the window frames too slanted to accommodate a pane of glass.

Now, Bible in his lap, he thought of John 3:16 and Jesus walking on water and Daniel in the lion’s den. He tried to feel something about these stories, to reproduce his religious fervor, but his heart kept its steady beat; he was lucid as could be, and frightened. Six closed his eyes and his Bible and decided to open it at random and preach about whatever he found there. Leviticus 14:20, the rituals for cleaning a leper. Genesis 49:9, “Judah is a lion’s whelp.” He didn’t know what a whelp was. The tambourines stopped, and a man approached the card table that served as a pulpit.

Two days earlier Hattie shook him awake at dawn. “Shhh,” she’d said and held her fingers to her lips. She laid out a jacket and tie that he had never seen before and indicated that he should dress quickly in the bathroom. It was barely light. He descended the stairs, and they were all there, Hattie and August and their old friend Revered Grist, assembled in the vestibule by the front door. Reverend Grist said they were leaving right then, at that very moment. Tent revivals in Alabama were starting in three days’ time; they could make a circuit around the state and be gone for two weeks.

“Two weeks!” Six said.

“Boy, after all this mess you done caused you lucky it ain’t two years,” August said.

“You think that’s long enough?” Hattie asked.

“I guess we gon’ find out,” August answered.

Six had never been away from home. He looked toward the second floor, where his brothers and sisters were sleeping.

“No time for good-byes,” Hattie said.

She opened the front door, and the four of them moved toward a car parked at the curb. Reverend Grist carried the travel bag Hattie had packed for Six. She lagged behind the group, stiff and unreadable. At the very last minute, when he was settled in the back seat and the car’s motor choked to life and Six had given up hope for a farewell from his mother, Hattie rushed forward and held a Bible out to him. She squeezed his hand when he took it, then turned her back to him and walked into the house.

THE CROWD FIDGETED.
Six opened his Bible again and his finger fell on the Beatitudes: ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit … Blessed are they who mourn …’ And the meek and the merciful and so on. Six did not want to be meek. Sickly and scarred as he was, people mistook his physical limitations for humility. Six thought mercy and weakness were the same thing and was as revolted by them as he was by his own frail body. He wanted to punish, not forgive. He wanted to be a sword, not a lamb.

The story of Joshua came to mind. Six vaguely recalled a wall and a city whose name he could not remember. He had trouble finding it in his Bible. The man behind the pulpit led the congregants in prayer. It was a long and passionate supplication. Someone in the tired-looking assembly even let out a shout. Six’s hands were slick; the pages of his Bible clung together in the humidity, and the pads of his fingers left smudges on the corners of the pages. He wanted to loosen his tie and unbutton the collar of his shirt. Jericho! He remembered the name of the city.

“Amen,” said the man leading the prayer. “Amen,” the congregation said in response.

“We gon’ bring you the Lord’s Word three ways tonight,” he said “He done blessed us with three of his servants.”

Six found the passage. There was no battle as he had hoped, only a few trumpets and the Israelites walking around the city walls. The man who’d led the prayer said, “We got Six Shepherd all the way from Philadelphia.” Six kept his head bowed so he could finish reading.

“Look like our young Brother Shepherd done lost hisself in the Word.” A pause followed, but Six did not raise his head. “I say,” the man said clearing his throat. “This gon’ be a sermon to remember!”

When Six stood, the crowd leaned forward expectantly. They whispered to one another. Someone said, “He ain’t no bigger than a minute.” He walked to the pulpit and made a show of placing his Bible on the table and turning the pages back and forth, careful not to lose his place. His eyes teared. They probably already knew the story of Jericho. Everyone knew that story. He ought not to be here, he ought to be sitting on the ledge in his bedroom window in Philadelphia watching his mother make her way down the alley.

“I’m gonna talk to you about Joshua,” he said. “If you could … if you could turn your Bibles to the book of Joshua.”

The assembly looked at him. There was none of the flutter and fidget that usually followed the announcement of the scripture. The man who’d led the opening prayer came up behind him and whispered, “Lot of these folks ain’t got they Bibles with them. You gon’ have to read it.”

“Oh! I … Excuse me. I can just … I’ll read …” He lost his place, and the words moved around on the page so he couldn’t find the verse he’d chosen.

“Cain’t hear you!” someone shouted from the back.

“I’m sorry. It’s, er …” Six took a deep breath. “Joshua 6:15,” he shouted at them. His voice was artificially loud and deep, like a child imitating a man. He read aloud in his false baritone. He dared not look up. He could feel their boredom. But as he read, the scene took shape in his mind. Six saw a man leading a mighty army dressed in white; the hundred followed the bearded Joshua astride his black horse. In front of him, other men carried horns and trumpets shining so fiercely in the sunlight that their glinting could be seen from across the desert. They marched around a high, thick wall beyond which nothing could be seen. Once, twice, a third time, a fourth, Joshua’s army marched around the wall. Nothing happened. The army of the Lord began to doubt its leader.