Whistling Past the Graveyard (20 page)

The silver-and-blue Greyhound bus was running, but the door was still open. I climbed up the steps. There was two seats on either side of the aisle, not hard benches like the school buses we rode on field trips, but nice, soft chairs. Most of them had people already in them. The inside of the bus smelled as stinky as what come out behind it. The driver stood there looking out from under his uniform cap with his hand out like he wanted money. Eula was carrying our money. I only had the dollar Miss Cyrena give me in case of an emergency, and he wasn’t getting it.

“Your ticket, miss?”
“Oh!” I’d forgot it was in my hand. I gave it to him.
He looked at the stupid note on my shirt. “You the one traveling

alone?”
“Yes, sir. Going home from Grandma’s.” I pointed to my note and
shut my mouth fast, to keep the details that my mind was making up
from coming out.
“Don’t wander far from the bus when we stop. Restroom and right back. Is that understood? I run a tight schedule and don’t have time to
hunt you down when it’s time to pull out.”
He didn’t have to be so grouchy about it. I bit down hard to keep
from saying that out loud. Miss Cyrena would be mad if I got in a fight
before we even left the station. I nodded.
“All right, then.” He lifted his chin for me to go on.
I leaned this way and that, looking for Eula and James. I didn’t see
them. They shouda been on by now! It had to be the right bus, it was the
only one at the curb. I turned, ready to get back off and find them, then I
heard James cry. I knew James’s sound. It couldn’t be no other baby. They was clear at the very back, stuck in the corner. Eula’s head was
bent like she was trying to get small as she could, but I saw her Sunday
hat over the seat backs. A couple of empty seats were around them. So
I went down the aisle, looking to sit as close as I could.
“Hold on, missy,” the bus driver called. “Up here. Where I can keep
an eye on you.”
I turned around. There weren’t any people coming on behind me.
“It’s a free country. I can sit wherever I want. I ain’t a baby.” His eyebrows shot up. “Is that a fact? Well, this is my bus and I don’t
want an unsupervised white child sitting in the back.” The way he said
“the back” made it sound like it was full of snakes or something. “Get
up here.” He pointed to a seat in the second row.
I heard some coughing in the back of the bus. It was Eula. I turned around and went to the second row, but I didn’t sit in the
seat he pointed to. I went across the aisle and excused myself to the lady
on the aisle so I could get to the window seat. I sat down with my lunch
sack and my suitcase on my lap.
The lady sat back down next to me. She was smiling.
The driver wasn’t.
He reached across the lady. I flinched, but he wasn’t going after me;
he grabbed my suitcase and slid it on a rack up over the seats. “Behave
yourself.”
I waited until he turned around before I stuck my tongue out at
him.
The lady looked like she was trying not to laugh. She reminded
me of Mrs. Knopp from Sunday school. Except she smiled more. She
tried to get me to conversationing, asking about where I was going, my
grandma, and whatnot. I answered a few questions, then told her, nice
and polite, that I was sorry but I was real tired from getting up so early
for the bus.
She smiled and told me to just close my eyes, she’d wake me when
we got to a rest stop.
The window was slid open in front of our seats. I laid my head on
the glass next to me and pretended to go to sleep, holding my lunch on
my lap so it wouldn’t slide off.
After a while I opened an eye and looked out the window, but it
was my reflection in the glass that I saw, not the fields on the other
side of it. The new, black-haired me looked like a stranger staring back.
Miss Cyrena said the color would go away someday and my hair would
get red again. As black as it was, I didn’t believe it. For some reason
that made me want to cry. Mamie would be glad; but lately I hadn’t
been thinking too much about Mamie. If I saw Troy again, he wouldn’t
know me. I closed my eyes so I could pretend I was Red again—just a
girl at a carnival riding the Tilt-a-Whirl.
Thinking about that made me think on how my carnival got ruined. Eula had said carnivals didn’t hold any good memories for her.
I wondered what happened that ruined hers. Had it been no-account
Charles? Her pap? Or her white husband? Or something else? I bet it was no-account Charles. He ruined everything.

Miss Cyrena had been right. It was gonna take forever to get to Nashville; we had to stop at almost every town we went through to let some people off and more people on. The first time we did, in Canton— which reminded me a little of Caygua Springs—the bus driver looked at me and said this wasn’t a rest stop and to stay right where I was. He’d tell me when it was okay to get off.

I told him I didn’t even want to get off the stupid bus.

He looked perturbed, but I didn’t care. He didn’t have to be so dang bossy just ’cause I was a kid.
The bus was on a real highway, number 51, not the back roads me and Eula traveled on, so it was a little more interesting. Not only was there the towns, there was signs along the road. Billboards trying to get you to stop at a restaurant, or a motel. Colonel Clean had some reminding you not to be a litterbug. But the ones I liked the best wasn’t just one sign, they was a string of little ones all spaced out, telling a rhyme. You had to keep your eye out to get the whole rhyme— but they all ended with the same last sign
BURMA-SHAVE
. They was for some sort of shaving cream. They was all so good, I remembered them:
A shave / That’s real / No cuts to heal / A soothing / Velvet afterfeel / Burma-Shave
Past schoolhouses / Take it slow / Let the little / Shavers grow / Burma-Shave
If you dislike / Traffic fines / Slow down / Till you / Can read these signs / Burma-Shave
They sure stuck in my head. Why couldn’t I remember Momma’s return address then?
After a while, when we was between towns, the brakes hissed and the bus rocked as it turned off the highway into a gravel parking lot. It pulled to a stop in front of a white-painted cinder-block building with rounded corners and big front windows. A sign sticking up from the top of the roof had writing in a neon light:
RIEDELL’S DINER
.
I looked at my Timex. It sure seemed later than nine o’clock in the morning. Yesterday had run into last night, and last night had run into today with just a nap in Miss Cyrena’s car.
The bus driver grabbed the silver lever and opened the doors. “All right, folks. Thirty-minute rest. Restrooms inside for whites. Behind the building for colored. Y’all might want to get some breakfast while you’re here. Riedell’s has the best biscuits in the whole of Mississippi.”
Ha! That driver never ate Eula’s biscuits.
“They don’t serve colored. Thirty minutes.”
There wasn’t anyplace else around, just a couple of houses and a cow pasture. I wondered where the colored people were supposed to eat if they were hungry.
I left my lunch bag—full of enough food for a whole day—on my seat, thinking I might just have me a snack from it when I got back on. If one of the colored folk was hungry, maybe I’d share. I wondered if that’s what Eula’d meant about stuff happening to coloreds on the bus, that they never got to eat.
That made my other questions start poppin’. I’d already been itchin’ to find out if Charles ruined Eula’s carnival. The questions about her before Wallace met her in the movie house had been piling up. I was tired of waiting—what if I forgot one? So when I got outside the bus, I pretended to be interested in some of the rocks from the parking lot for my pretend rock collection. Since I’d talked to the lady on the bus and nobody even gave us a look, I figured it’d be okay to talk to Eula like she was a stranger; that’s what Miss Cyrena said, Eula was a stranger. It’d look most normal if I asked her about her baby while we walked to the building at the same time.
Eula and James was the last to get off the bus, even after all the other colored people. Her eyes got big when she saw me, but she didn’t turn her head. She just walked on past like I was invisible.
I had to hurry to catch up. “Lady. Lady, your baby a boy or a girl?”
She took one quick look over her shoulder. “He a boy, miss.” Then she squinted her eyes at me. “He sick. Might be catchin’, so you best stay away.”
I thought about the empty seats around her. That must be how she kept people from asking to see him.
“Oh, I never get sick,” I said real loud, in case anybody was listening. “And I just love babies.”
She kept going, headed to the corner of the building where a sign with an arrow pointed toward the colored restrooms. I stuck with her.
Once we got around the corner, I asked,“Was it Charles that ruined your carnival?”
She looked around. But all the colored folks were already behind the building, and the whites stayed up front.
“You and me ain’t supposed to be together. Get on up to the white restrooms and take care of your business.”
“Tell me and I’ll go.”There wasn’t nothin’ to do on the bus but listen to what was buzzin’ in your head. I couldn’t stand sitting there the rest of the day not knowing.
“Why you got to know this now?”
“’Cause I do. So was it?”
“No. Now get on.” She jerked her head toward the front of the building.
“What was it, then? What ruined it?”
She rolled her eyes and huffed. “Child, remember what Miss Cyrena told us.”
“Nobody’s payin’ us any attention.” Nobody’d seen James was white. We was far from the Jenkins boys and there wasn’t any police around. What did it matter? Since she was so overworried, I gave her a reason to spit it out. “Tell me ’fore anybody comes back this way.”
“You like a dog with a bone.” She looked like she’d like to give me a swat. “I just had an unpleasant time, that’s all.”
“The rides make you sick?”
“Didn’t go on no rides.”
“Well, why didn’t you like it?”
“I jus’ didn’t.”
“That ain’t true and I ain’t going back up front till you tell me. Was it while you lived in Jackson with your momma?”
She started talking real fast. “Me and Momma down south visitin’ my aunt. Weren’t supposed to go to the carnival, me and Cousin Henry. But I talk him into sneakin’ out.”
“Did Charles tell?” I knew he had to have a part in it.
She shook her head. “Jus’ me and Momma visitin’. Up in Jackson, they a night just for colored at carnivals. But not in Henry’s town. We shoudn’t’a gone. It was—bad.” Her eyes were watery; she was holding a secret. “Now I told you. Get on.” She started walking again.
“What happened? What’d they do to you and Henry?” I hadn’t asked Eula about babies when I should have; I wasn’t gonna let this secret ruin her, too.
She turned around right quick. “They beat Henry so bad he never walk right. Strip his bloody clothes off him and hang ’em on the fence by the road; a warnin’ to others might have ideas about comin’ to the white folks’ carnival.”
I felt like a hundred red rages was wound up inside me. “And you?” I was shaking. I could hear my own breath puffing through my nose. “What’d they do to you?”
“They too busy draggin’ Henry off to bother me.”The way she said it gave me goose bumps. “I run for help, but couldn’t get no one to come. When I got back, Henry naked on the ground. I help him home. Had to watch his face swell and his momma cry over him.” Tears wet her face, but she didn’t look stronger like she had after she’d told about her baby. She looked . . . broken. “That was worse than bein’ beat my own self.”
She turned and walked on down the path that led to the colored restrooms.
I wished Miss Cyrena was here. Eula getting this secret out didn’t make her feel better at all. I musta done it wrong.
I followed along behind her, my questions all bottled up behind a big lump of shame. I wanted to tell her I was sorry. Sorry for making her tell. Sorry about Henry. Sorry about the Jenkins boys. Sorry Charles stole her baby. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry.
Then I saw where the colored passengers were lined up and got even sorrier.
Down the dirt path was a crooked outhouse that looked ready to fall down. Not a lick of paint on it, except for the words
COLORED DINING ROOM
over the door.
All of the sudden it hit me why Eula was nervous as a cat in a roomful of rockers and Miss Cyrena told me to stay away from her on this trip. The law finding us wasn’t the only danger. Sometimes colored got picked on just ’cause they was colored in a white place—like eating places, carnivals, and bus seats.
I went back and got on the bus and sat there with a blackness rolling around inside me.
When Eula got back on, I couldn’t look at her. I pretended to be picking something out of my lunch sack—even though I felt too sick at my stomach to eat.

22
i

reckoned lots of colored restrooms were nasty like that, since that was one of the things Miss Cyrena said needed fixing by the Ndouble-A-CP. Truth be told, I’d never thought serious about it before our stop at Riedell’s. Now every time I watched Eula and baby James go toward one, I hoped they wasn’t as awful as that outhouse with its nasty joke on the outside. I was almost curious enough to go look a couple of times, but we was travelin’ invisible again.

No, that wasn’t the truth at all. I didn’t look ’cause I was afraid of what I might see.
I couldn’t explain the tangled-up way things was making me feel. Mamie said I’d understand when I got older. But the older I was getting, the more confused I got.
Last month, me and Mamie had been watching the news when a story come on about a colored man getting shot in his own driveway. “Agitators! They brung death on that man,” Mamie had said. “We didn’t have trouble like this before the agitators. Things are the way they are for a reason. And everybody here is happy with it. Those outside agitators need to stay home where they belong.”
I just kept thinking about that man shot in the back, bleeding in his driveway in the dark. He sure wasn’t happy. And his kids had been right inside the house. I couldn’t even think about my daddy getting shot dead just outside our house.
“Agitators,” Mamie had said again. “Things were fine till they started comin’ down from the North, stirrin’ up trouble, tryin’ to make their ways ours.”
That had got me thinking. I’d never been to any other place. Weren’t things the same everywhere? When I’d asked Mamie, she’d snorted cigarette smoke out of her nose and said, “Point is, it’s none of their damn business.” Mamie didn’t cuss a lot, so I knew she was real worked up. She leaned close and pointed the two fingers holding her cigarette at me. “That’s the point. Not if it’s the same or not.”
That night I wasn’t gonna ask any more questions. Mamie was mean enough without getting her worked up. I stayed confused about if it was the same everywhere until I met Miss Cyrena.
Now I got to thinking again. Miss Cyrena didn’t seem like an agitator, stirrin’ up trouble. She was a nice lady that helped people who needed it, people like me and Eula. She helped the N-doubleA—CP, too, so they probably needed it for a good reason . . . like that nasty colored restroom at Riedell’s and Eula’s cousin Henry getting beat bloody ’cause he wanted to go to a carnival. Miss Cyrena said things were better for the colored up North, but still had room for improvement.
Once the bus had got going again, I got to thinking hard. Colored water fountains never had a cooler like most of the white ones did. Didn’t colored people like cold water when it was hot as the hinges of Hades? And Miss Cyrena’s school. No swings. All kids liked to swing, so I bet the colored kids didn’t think things was fine the way they was. Just as I was thinking that, we passed a sign that said
WELCOME TO TENNESSEE
. I sat up straight and looked out the window. Thank goodness we were almost to Momma!
The lady next to me must have been paying attention to me. She pointed to the stupid note on my shirt. It was getting dirty and crumpled some. “We’re only halfway to Nashville.”
“But we’re in Tennessee!” I said.
“And we’ve spent all day so far in Mississippi. States are big. It takes time to get across them.”
Now that was a disappointment. I got in my lunch sack and pulled out an apple.
Pretty soon we come on Memphis. It was even bigger than Jackson.
I asked the lady next to me, “You been to Nashville? Is it bigger’n Memphis?”
“Why, I live in Nashville. Have all my life. And, no, it’s not big as Memphis, about half the size.”
That made me feel some better. I wasn’t sure how easy it’d be to find anybody, even if they was famous, in a city big as Memphis. Just then, I realized I’d ruined my story of coming home to Nashville from visiting Grandma in Mississippi. I closed my mouth and decided not to open it again until after I was off this bus.
We stopped at the bus station to trade some passengers and “use the facilities.” We were north of Mississippi, but still there was a colored and a white waiting room. I wondered how far north a person had to go for it to change.
We left the station and chugged through stoplights for a while. Then an interesting thing happened. We made a turn and climbed a hill up to a giant road. Even though I wasn’t talking to her anymore, the lady next to me told me it was an inner state highway and it was brand-new, the very first one in Tennessee.They were building them all over the United States. She said on inner states we didn’t have to stop at stoplights and whatnot, so we’d travel much faster.
I was all for that, but just nodded and made sure I kept my face toward the window. Inner state roads really was amazing. We went over roads just like they was rivers. Other times we was the river running under another road. The lady was right, we never stopped at all.
Turned out inner state highways might be fast, but they got real boring. I fell asleep PDQ.