All-Bright Court (7 page)

“Johnson ain't new. He been in there a year. People voted for him 'cause of JFK. That's why I voted for him.”

“Get out,” the butcher said. “You're in the U.S.W. If they thought you voted for Goldwater, they would bounce you. No, first they would collect your dues. Then they would give you the bum's rush. Hey, what happened to your hand? You get burned or something?”

“Naw,” Moses said. “When that wind was kicking up last week, I slipped on some ice coming out the Welfare Building and broke my wrist.”

“Well, I hope Capital is taking care of you. That company is a damn money tree,” the butcher said. “I used to work for them, you know.”

“Is that right?” Moses said.

“Yeah, but there wasn't enough money being shaken my way. I hear things are better now. You get that thirteen-week vacation.”

“Right,” Moses said sarcastically. “Ten years from now I should get it.”

The U.S.W. president had negotiated a thirteen-week sabbatical once every five years for workers in the top half of the seniority rank of their plants. Though Moses scoffed at the paid vacation because his would be so far in the future, the sabbatical was a major victory for the workers. An average member of the rank and file would be able to take three or four before he retired.

“Word is, the union president got us this deal so he can look good. There's a election coming up. But I ain't voting for him. He the one led that strike back in 'fifty-nine. We ain't had a raise since then. But he making fifty thousand,” Moses said. “1 don't see how he expect us to live. I ain't hardly making it.” He pulled out money to pay for the turkey.

“You pay for it at the front check-out.”

Despite what Moses told the butcher, he was doing very well. He was making $4.00 an hour when the average steelworker's wage was $3.70. He was still paying on the three rooms of furniture he and Venita had bought, but he managed to put money away. He had even gotten a car, a brand-new 1964 Thunderbird, a beautiful red hardtop with bucket seats. Moses had ordered the optional lights that told him when the fuel was low and a door was ajar.

Venita thought those features were a waste of money. “How you wouldn't know you didn't have gas? And there ain't but two doors on the car. It seem like you would know if one of them was open,” she said to Moses.

This car was for their trip down south. There was no way Moses wanted to arrive in Starkville on a bus. He was going back in style, in a car that moved people “in a special atmosphere.”

But he and Venita never made the trip. When Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner were unearthed in Philadelphia, Mississippi, Venita refused to go. “I don't want to be on the road,” she told Moses, “not down there. I can see my people some other time.”

“We ain't going that far south, and we ain't going down there to start no trouble,” Moses said.

“You believe they was starting trouble? Them crackers killed them for the fun of it. Don't be stupid.”

He hid within the shell of his words. They were a way of protecting him from the truth. He did not believe the three men were agitators. They were close to his age. One of them was black, Chaney. Moses knew what could happen to a black man on a lonely road in Mississippi. Goodman and Schwerner learned what could happen even to white men.

Moses and Venita took a proletariat vacation to Atlantic City instead.

 

On his way to pay for his turkey, Moses passed down the dairy aisle. A small boy dressed in a snowsuit was leaning over the case. The boy opened a carton and began dropping eggs, one by one, to the floor. Moses was about to say something to the boy when he saw Samuel Taylor coming up the aisle pulling a red wagon filled with groceries.

“Mikey, what is you doing?” Samuel yelled as Mikey was dropping another egg.

Moses rushed past the pair without looking at them. He paid for his turkey and left the store. His car was parked in the gravel lot in back. As Moses neared his car, he saw a woman and a gaggle of children coming up the street. It was Greene and her brood.

That summer Greene and her six children had come up from Florida. They just showed up at All-Bright Court in a dusty yellow pickup that broke down the day they arrived and had to be towed away. No one knew them, and not a week after they moved in, the bats came.

Out of the twilight they appeared as shadows, first a few, then hundreds. But under the pale light of the full moon they became bats. Isaac led a group of boys on a bat hunt. With brooms and sticks they managed to kill a few bats they chased off from the main group. No one had ever seen anything like it before, and when one of the women mentioned it to Greene, she said, “I want to get my hands on one of them bats. I could use one of them bats.”

And that was all it had taken. The next morning, the question “What she want with a bat?” was being asked by the women from one end of All-Bright Court to the other.

“Where them bats come from out of nowhere and then just disappear?”

“You reckon she called them?”

“And
what
she was doing with a bat?”

“What you think! She into hoodoo.”

“Mark my words, she going to hoodoo somebody.”

“Hey, girl, you see her teeth? Looking into her mouth make you feel like falling in a pit.”

All of Greene's teeth were covered in gold, and none of the women knew how she could afford them. Despite the fact she wore a wedding band, no husband came north with her. And Greene had no trouble attracting men.

“Country nigger” is what the women said of Greene. Of the men they said, “Only a country nigger would think her mouth look good.”

Greene was accused of not leaving her country ways behind. Her accusers knew, because they were country niggers too. Over the years they had claimed to be from Birmingham, Fayetteville, Jacksonville, Jackson, New Orleans. But they were really from Plain Dealing, Zenith, Goshen, Acme, Gopher. They had come from specks on the map. They knew the country and its ways well. They had seen spells cast, fields dry up, floods come, moles cast in women's wombs. And then there were the bats.

The bats had come with Greene's arrival. This did not stop some of the husbands in All-Bright Court from passing in and out of her back door. They came to explore the riches of her mouth. They left knowing the secrets beneath her tongue.

All of her children wore asafetida bags around their necks. The bags and strings turned black and greasy and smelled of garlic.

In the parking lot Moses rolled down the car window with his good hand and spoke to Greene as she passed with her children. “Cold enough for you?”

“I'm telling you, I done moved to the coldest place there is,” Greene said.

“It ain't all of that. You get used to it. Your blood get thicker,” Moses said. Even in the thin air, he thought he could smell the rankness of the bags. He did not believe in their power, or hers. His wife, Venita, thought Greene to be a conjure woman, a woman whose power should not be overlooked.

“You must have a hole in your head if you thinking 'bout going to her. How many times I got to tell you you ain't in the country no more,” Moses had told Venita.

Samuel came around the corner, pulling the Radio Flyer stuffed with so many bags of groceries that Mikey, who was sitting in the wagon, had to hold a bag on his lap. Samuel walked with his head bowed to the wind, the wagon skidding on the newly fallen snow.

As they approached the lot, Moses cranked up the window. Silently, he watched Samuel and the boy pass his car and continue down the sidewalk. Then he gunned the engine of his sleek red Thunderbird and flew right by them.

9

S
OMEWHERE
in the field, hidden among the tall weeds, was a hungry boy. He was lying on his stomach, stuffing slices of bologna in his mouth. He put so many pieces in his mouth that he gagged, and a ball of pink flesh fell out into the weeds.

“Kiss it up to God,” he said, and kissed the meat. He began eating it, pulling off a few twigs and an ant as he ate.

“Dennis,” a voice called from somewhere in the field. “Where you at, Dennis? My mama want to talk to you.”

The boy stopped eating. He pitched the half-eaten meat over his shoulder and lay still. He would not come out of hiding because the pack of bologna he was lying on, he had stolen from the Red Store.

He had put the cold package inside his pants, but before he could get to the door, Mr. Jablonski was shouting, “Hey you, hey boy,” coming from behind the counter with a bat in his hand. Dennis beat him to the door just as Mrs. Taylor, Mikey, and the baby, Dorene, were coming in. He knocked Dorene to the ground and escaped.

“Don't ever come back in my store! If I see you again, I'll beat your brains out,” Mr. Jablonski screamed.

Mrs. Taylor bent to pick up Dorene.

“No, I'll get her,” Mr. Jablonski said as he picked up the crying child. “You're in no shape to be bending like that.”

“Don't his mama got credit with you?” Mrs. Taylor asked.

“I cut her off. She never pays me. Every time she gets her check she has a story, or she doesn't show up at all. I'm in business here, you know.”

“The boy hungry. It's a shame.”

“It's a shame, but what can you do?” Mr. Jablonski said as he returned behind the counter.

At one time Mary Kate thought there was something she could do. The boy had begun showing up on her doorstep not long after Mikey started kindergarten. Before she ever saw him, Mikey had come home with stories of Dennis.

“He never be having milk money. He always be a sharer, Mama.”

“What's a sharer?”

“When you don't bring in milk money, Mrs. Franco split a milk and let you have some.”

“That's nice of her,” Mikey's mother said.

“Yeah, Mama, but the kids that be sharing all the time be nasty. This boy Dennis, he colored, and he stink. This little white girl be so dirty. Them two always be sharing. Kids be picking on them.”

“I hope you not one of them, Mikey. They can't help the way they is.”

Mikey was silent. Once he had stuck out his tongue at them when Mrs. Franco wasn't looking. The other children laughed. It was fun. But one Monday toward the end of October, the fun stopped.

Mikey left home with five pennies knotted in a handkerchief, but when he arrived at school, they were gone. He had to share a milk that day with Dennis.

The little white girl shared one with a Puerto Rican girl. All four of them sat at a small table and had their milk in Dixie cups. Mikey did not want to drink his. He didn't even want the windmill cookies Mrs. Franco passed out. He sat staring at the three others at his table.

The white girl drank all her chocolate milk with one lifting of her cup, and there was a brown mustache on her face. Mikey stared at her whiteness. Tiny green veins pulsed around her gray eyes. Thin streams of dirt ran down her arms. She didn't say anything to Mikey, but when she saw him staring, she opened her mouth full of cookies. Mikey turned from her and looked at the Puerto Rican girl.

She looked clean. Her black hair was swept up in a single ponytail and curled in a tight corkscrew. There were gold hoops in her ears. She never looked up from the table, though. She ate slowly, taking careful bites and cautious sips.

Mikey glanced to his side, at Dennis. He had already finished and was licking the crumbs from his napkin.

“Dennis, stop that,” Mrs. Franco said.

Dennis smiled. “Them some good cookies, Mike. Don't you like 'em?”

“I had milk money,” Mikey said.

“Don't you like them cookies?” Dennis asked.

Mikey stared at the boy's hair. It was uncombed and matted. “You eat 'em.”

Dennis grabbed the cookies and stuffed both of them into his mouth, hardly bothering to chew them.

“I'm glad you here, 'cause they don't talk. That one stupid,” Dennis said, pointing at the white girl. “The other one stupid too. She can't even speak no English. You hear her in class? ‘Monita conita Frito corn chips.'”

Mikey wanted to laugh, but he remembered why he was at the table with the sharers. “I ain't supposed to be here. I lost my money. I ain't going sit here tomorrow.”

“Oh,” Dennis said. “You want your milk?”

Mikey did not sit with the sharers the next day. His mother had money to send, four pennies knotted in a handkerchief, pinned in his pocket. He had his own milk, in a carton, the way milk was supposed to be. He had a straw and blew bubbles. Sharers never got straws. He did not want to look over to where they sat, but he did, and each time he looked over, Dennis smiled or waved. “Mike,” he silently mouthed. Mikey smiled.

Mikey had found a friend. Dennis began following him home from school. He and Mikey would play until it was time for dinner.

“You got to go home now,” Mikey's mother or father would say.

The boy would leave Mikey's house, but he wouldn't go home. He would play by himself out back or disappear around the end of the row, only to return in ten or fifteen minutes, asking, “Can Mike come out?”

One Friday night in late November, Mr. Taylor went out to empty the trash and found Dennis squatting next to the back step.

“Boy, you crazy? What you doing out in the snow?”

“Can Mike come out?”

“No, Mike can't come out. It's seven o'clock. You better get on home.”

“My mama ain't home.”

Mr. Taylor put the garbage in the can and stared at the boy. The boy did not head for home. He stood there looking at the ground until Mr. Taylor invited him in and then went up to bed.

Mrs. Taylor fed him a bowl of black-eyed peas and a piece of corn bread. Dennis ate the bread and peas, and licked the bowl.

“You want some more?” Mrs. Taylor asked.

“Yeah. Them good beans.”

“You got a good appetite, Dennis. Mikey won't eat peas. He had peanut butter and jelly for dinner.”