Yard War (14 page)

“ ‘Magnolia curtain'?”

“The old-fashioned way of life that separates us from the rest of the country.”

“Way of life like Jim Crow?”

“Yes. There is such a thing as a bad tradition, like you said. I know Mississippi is gonna have to change, but when you've grown up a certain way, it's hard to rethink everything…especially when life has been good to you the way it has to us.”

“But not so good if you're colored.”

“No.”

“And you don't have anything, and you can't do anything.”

“We need to fix that, we do. It will take time.”

“I guess it doesn't matter anyway if we're movin'.”

“We'll wait and see about that.”

She kissed me on the forehead and said good night.

I stayed awake a long time, thinking about it. Part of me still wants to get away from these yahoos. But most of me can't even think about living anywhere else.

—

I don't know what the age limit is on trick-or-treating, but twelve must be close, because putting on a costume and going around begging for candy didn't seem that great to me. I was more excited about the fact that Ole Miss was playing LSU. But I found some jeans with holes in them and an old red-checked shirt, and Mama made me a pouch out of a scrap of cloth, and we filled it with newspaper and tied it to the end of a long stick for me to carry. I got Mama's straw yard hat from the storage room and there was my hobo outfit. Or Huckleberry Finn outfit. I just didn't feel like being scary this year. Real life was scary enough.

Stokes was a vampire, supposedly. All he did was wear fake teeth and slick his hair straight back. I thought it would be me and him and Andy and Calvin, but Stokes said Andy and Calvin had decided at the last minute to go to another neighborhood. It took a while to cover the three main streets of Oakwood. Sometimes people would open the door smiling, then see me and stop smiling and throw candy in our bags
like they couldn't wait to shut the door. I asked Stokes if it seemed like people weren't as friendly as they used to be. He said I was right, they weren't. Maybe they thought we were too old, especially with Stokes being so tall now.

When we got back to the house, Mama said she was disappointed with the turnout this year. Halloween is right up there with Christmas for her. She strung giant spiderwebs in the bushes and bought extra Kraft caramels and chocolates and everything. She carved an extra pumpkin so we could have two, one smiley, one scary. This neighborhood's so full of kids, she said she couldn't believe more of them didn't come to our house.

Me and Stokes ate candy and listened to the Rebels lose—by one point. We spend the night at each other's houses all the time, but after the game, he said he had to go, that his mom wanted him home for some reason. I went on to bed. Daddy likes to say, “I've enjoyed about as much of this as I can stand.” That's how I felt about Halloween this year.

Farish woke me up, tugging on my arm.

“Trip, wake up! They wrote all over the house!”

“Who wrote?”

“Bad words. Mama's going crazy! Come on!”

I put on my robe. Mama was stomping up and down the porch.

“Trip, do you know anything about this?”

“No, ma'am!” I couldn't believe she asked me that. I guess she was just that desperate to find out who did it.

Daddy was looking off down the street with his arms folded.

Ginny Lynn pointed to the front windows and said, “Look, Trip, look!” like a fun surprise had happened.

The windows would be easy to clean off. They were all scrawled over in soap with terrible things. Every window, top and bottom. Over on the shingles past the porch was a giant
LOSER
in black spray paint. First, I thought about how we would never get that off the house. Then I knew they were talking about Ole Miss losing to LSU and I knew who had done it. I would be sitting in church with them later that morning.

They wrote
GO BACK TO AFRICA!
in white spray paint on the garage. That one made me the angriest because it was about Dee, who was my friend whether he thought so or not.

“Call the police, Sam,” Mama said.

“I'm not gonna call the police about a Halloween prank.”

“This is more than a Halloween prank! They have ruined the front of our house! What are you saying, we just stand around and wait for whatever's next?”

“I'm saying I'll take care of it.”

She strained up to his face and yelled, “Call the police! Or you'll have a crazy wife to take care of!”

She started crying, grabbed the girls, and went inside.

Daddy said we had time to wash the soap off the windows, but the other would have to wait. He was too mad to say anything else. When we had finished with the windows, I told him it might be a good day to stay home from church. He said no, it was more important than ever to go to church so we could ask God to forgive whoever did this, that somebody needed to forgive them. I guess he meant he couldn't.

After church, we tried scrubbing the paint with turpentine. You could still read the words, only now the letters were smeared, so it looked a lot worse. Daddy said we would have to call some painters. Tim and Tom weren't in Sunday School, but after lunch I saw them come by our house in their dad's beat-up white truck and slow down and look at each other and laugh. You can get your learner's permit when you're fourteen and a half. You're supposed to have an adult in the car with you, though, and they drive around all the time by themselves.

When I told Daddy I had just seen the Bethunes drive by and laugh at our house, a dark cloud moved over his face, and he said, “Maybe I'll call the police after all.” He held up his hand for me to stay out on the porch, but when I heard him on the phone in the den, I stepped inside and listened.

“…and I'm telling you we can't answer our phone
because these people are calling the house at all hours and hanging up. They even threatened my son. On the phone. Yes. And now they have painted ‘Loser' and ‘Go back to Africa' all over the front of my house. Yes, I'm white. It's directed at my maid's son. No. And they wrote racial epithets with soap all over the windows. Epithets. Insulting words. Yes. I know last night was Halloween, but these are the same people who have been calling and hanging up….”

“Trip?”

“Aaahh!”

Farish was right behind me.

“Go away!” I whispered as loud as I could and still be whispering.

Of course she had to stand there too now and wouldn't go away, and I didn't want to make any more noise by arguing with her. I was pretty sure Daddy had heard me scream, but he was still talking.

“Look, is there a way to find out who it is? About a week ago, I guess. Well, we just thought we'd be able to handle it but after—No, I am not going to change my phone to a private number! I'm a doctor, for God's sake, people have to know how to reach me. Yes. Well, I know it's not a simple thing. There
is
a pattern of criminal activity, I just told you….Yes….Dr. Sam Westbrook. Fifty-four forty-five Oak Lane Drive. All right. Good-bye.”

I pushed Farish toward her room and ran to the
bathroom and flushed the toilet and came out when I heard Daddy walking down the hall.

“Did you call 'em?” I asked.

“They're sending somebody over.”

Daddy talked to the policeman on the porch. When he was gone, Daddy told us that just like he thought, the cops weren't going to be much help. He said there was no way to trace hang-up calls because they weren't staying on the line, and we had no real proof of who defaced the house, so there wasn't much to be done about that either. The police said to report any further problems.

It was a terrible word, “defaced.” Our house used to have a face and they
de
-faced it.

Daddy told Mama about talking to Mr. Bethune. He had claimed not to know anything about any writing on our house. He said his whole family had stayed home on Halloween.

—

The painters painted over the writing. But the phone wouldn't stop ringing, and we didn't know what would happen next. Mama's eyes looked worried all the time now, which made the girls worried too. Mama said we didn't need to scare them by talking about it.

My stomach jumped now whenever I saw a white truck or heard the crack of a .22 from over in the
woods. Tim and Tom were probably just shooting at bottles or squirrels and blue jays. It might not have even been their gun I was hearing, but shooting inside the city limits was against the law, and I didn't think there could be that many people around here who didn't care about the law.

Two weeks later, it was kind of a relief when we came back from Sunday lunch at Morrison's and found our mailbox lying around in pieces. At least now I knew what the next thing was.

We had gone straight to lunch after church, so it could have happened any time between about nine-thirty and one-thirty. Me and Daddy went next door to the Cargyles' to see if they had seen anything. Mr. Cargyle and Stokes came to the door. They said the parents had gone to church and let Stokes and Andy stay home, and they had heard the explosion but didn't see who did it. Stokes acted like he didn't really want to talk to me. I figured it was because he had invited Andy to spend the night instead of me.

Then we went to ask the Nelsons, Mrs. Sitwell, and the Cooks. Nobody had seen or heard anything and nobody smiled and nobody wanted to talk to us.

This time a different policeman came to the house. I told him it had to be the Bethunes because Tim and Tom loved to set off cherry bombs. He said it looked like a lot more than a cherry bomb, that it was
probably some kind of Drano bomb or something. He looked around the yard and asked Daddy if he wanted them to talk to Mr. Bethune again and Daddy said no, that it wouldn't do any good and he would handle it. The policeman told him to be careful how he handled it. And to report any further problems.

When they were driving off, I asked Daddy why the policeman had told him to be careful when it was our mailbox that got blown up.

“They don't want me to do anything illegal,” he said.

“Of course you're not gonna do anything illegal.”

“If it comes right down to it, I might.”

—

Mama and Daddy never said they blamed me. I would have felt better if they had just come out and said it: “This is
your fault.
” When Farish said it, I raised my hand like I was gonna swat her, but I didn't. All I ever wanted was for Dee to do the same things with me my other friends do. I guess I went about it the wrong way, like Mama said. But what was the right way?

This trouble people were giving us was pointless. Dee hated my guts. Maybe they'd leave us alone if I put up signs all over north Jackson:
YOU CAN RELAX. TRIP WESTBROOK DOES NOT HAVE A COLORED FRIEND ANYMORE.
Maybe then life could get back to normal. But I wouldn't feel normal until he
was
my friend again.

I've been telling Willie Jane how bad I feel about
what happened with Dee. I found her ironing in the playroom and asked her again to bring him back over.

“Trip, I told you so many times. Dee's better off at home, with all this stuff goin' on.”

“What about the fact that I really want him to come over?”

She set down the iron and looked around the playroom like she was seeing it for the last time.

“Pretty soon it won't matter anyway. Y'all about to go off and leave me. I heard your mama talking about Kansas City.”

“Mama doesn't want to move to Kansas City any more than I do. Why should we let 'em run us off, is what I say. I'm not scared.”

“You should be scared. I know what some kinds of white people will do. Dr. Westbrook has to keep y'all safe.”

“If we do move, you and Dee can come with us.”

She shook her head. “I don't expect that's gonna happen.”

“I could ask Daddy to move y'all up there with us, get you a house and everything.”

“No you couldn't.”

“Wouldn't you rather be in a better place for colored people? And you would still have us. I mean, I don't want to leave Mississippi, but I don't know why a colored person would want to stay here.”

“Same reason as you. It's home. You take the bad
with the good. Anyway, it costs too much to get out. If I did, I 'spect I'd miss it. But I wouldn't mind findin' out for sure.” She smiled.

“If we move, you'll get the chance to find out.”

“No, no, no, you just leave that alone.” She started ironing again. “My brothers got out. One went to St. Louis and one to Detroit. Dee's daddy used to talk about when he would move us all up North. He wanted to get away so bad.”

“What happened?”

“I think wanting it so bad for so long and not getting it…it finally drove him crazy. He quit his job. He quit caring about things.”

“Willie Jane, especially if we move, I have to see Dee again.”

She set down the iron again.

“Child, it makes me happy you want to see him so bad. You keep on about it so much, I guess I'm gonna have to tell you the truth.” She lit a cigarette and looked at me like she had so much to say, she couldn't say it all. “Dee doesn't want to come over here. He says too many bad things happen when he's here.”

“He had fun with us, I know he did.”

“He did have fun with you, playing football and all, but he doesn't think you did him right, taking him to the white people's club.”

“But I was trying to do something good. I need a
chance to make him see that. That's why he has to come over, so I can explain. I feel so”—something hot rushed up into my eyes and made them clench—“so bad about everything.” I ran the back of my hand over my face.

“I know you do, darlin'. I'm past fussin' at you about it, but you know you got me in trouble that day, too.”