Yard War (18 page)

Mama kept looking across the sanctuary at where
Meemaw and Papaw were sitting with the girls. Meemaw was shaking her head, like “I told you so.”

Dr. Mercer was holding out his arms: “Everyone! Please! Please!”

“Tell
them
to leave,” yelled Mr. Ganderson from the back. “
They're
the ones should be leavin', not us!”

“Yeah!”

“That's right!”

“Tell 'em, preacher!”

Dee was about to jump up and run, and I was ready to run with him. Willie Jane told Daddy we ought to leave. She was pretty upset.

“We're stayin',” Daddy said in a mean tone of voice. Then he made his voice softer and said, “I think it's important that we stay. If y'all are willing to. They'll settle down.”

“Everyone, please calm down!” Dr. Mercer kept saying.

Finally people got quiet. There were half as many there as when the service started. They looked at Dr. Mercer like they were expecting him to say the words that would fix this. I thought he would yell at them for their bad behavior. I was ready for every word of this sermon.

Dr. Mercer folded his hands on the pulpit and looked from one side of the congregation to the other and said, “Perhaps it's best to begin today's message.
I'd like to ask everybody a question today, and I want you to search your hearts before you answer….”

I was thinking he'd say, “Do you believe God only loves white people?” That would be a good question.

“…And the question is, am I a Mary or am I a Martha? I'll say it again. Am I a Mary or am I a Martha? Turn with me in your Bibles, if you will, to the Book of…”

I couldn't believe it. A regular old sermon. Like nothing had happened. In the next thirty minutes, he never said a word about Dee and Willie Jane being there.

We sang “Just as I Am” at the end, which is when people are supposed to come down and ask to be baptized or rededicate their lives and stuff like that. Dr. Mercer waits for them down front and sometimes he talks on the microphone between verses: “Won't you give your heart to the Lord today? Won't you come?” Some Sundays he won't give up until we've sung the hymn through twice. Today we sang two verses and quit. The service was over.

Daddy said to get up and walk out slowly, not like somebody was chasing us. We met Farish and Ginny Lynn in the vestibule and you would have thought they had been away for months, the way they ran up and hugged Mama and Daddy. Daddy said they had to hold all questions until we got to the car.

Dr. Mercer was standing at the top of the tall steps,
shaking everybody's hands as they came out, like he always does. Papaw was having a long talk with him. Daddy guided us around them, and we started down.

“Go back to your own kind,” came a kid's voice behind us.

“And stay gone!” yelled Johnny Adcock.

Him and his friends yelled more ugly stuff. I heard adult voices, too.

“You must stop this immediately!” Dr. Mercer said.

They didn't stop.

“Keep walking,” Daddy said. “Don't look at them.”

I had to turn once, real quick. Dr. Mercer was holding his arms out, looking back and forth at everybody. Some of them were waving their fists. Papaw was just standing there looking confused in a way I've never seen Papaw look. When I looked back around, Meemaw was halfway down the steps with us, putting her arm around Mama.

“Honey, oh, honey, I don't understand what you're doin', but…I'm still your mama,” she said. “I'm so sorry…about…about…” And she started crying. Then Mama started crying. We stood at the bottom of the steps while they hugged and cried, while people streamed by us or yelled down at us.

The sun was so bright I could hardly open my eyes against it to see where the station wagon was parked. Meemaw hugged Mama one last time and went back to find Papaw.

“Okay, we're to the car,” said Farish. “You said you would tell us.”

“Daddy got in a fight, sweetheart. But it's all gonna be okay.”

We were all standing at the back of the station wagon.

“The church is mad at us,” Ginny Lynn said.

“Maybe it's not our church anymore,” Daddy said.

“Who were you fighting, Daddy?” Farish asked.

“We were fighting lots of people,” I told her. “They got me on both sides of my face. The police came and everything.”

“Police?”

Daddy looked up at the sky, and I knew I shouldn't have said that.

“Did you have to go to jail?” Farish asked.

Mama shook her head at me and Daddy, like “Don't talk about it.”

But Daddy said, “Just for a little while.”

“Did Trip have to go to jail?” asked Ginny Lynn.

“No, darlin'.”

“But they let you out?” asked Farish.

“Oh, yeah. They let me off with a slap on the wrist.”

Farish looked at Mama with her eyes wide. “They
slapped
him? I didn't think policemen were supposed to
slap
people.”

“It's an expression, Farish. Y'all get on in the car.”

“Hold it, everybody,” Daddy said, looking at Mama like he was asking her permission.

“Tell 'em right here?” Mama asked.

“It's the perfect time and place.”

“Go ahead.”

Mama was smiling, so it didn't make sense when Daddy said, “Children, I'm afraid we've got some bad news for you.”

Farish held her breath like we were driving through a tunnel.

“You know those packed-up boxes all over the house?”

We knew, we knew.

“We don't have to put them in the moving van ourselves, do we?” Farish said.

“Nope.” He smiled big. “You have to help your mama and me unpack 'em.”

“Unpack 'em?” the girls said together.

“You mean…?” I was afraid to believe this could be true.

“We're not moving after all,” Mama said, and sighed. “We're stayin' right here in Jackson.”

“Yippee!” The girls screamed and jumped and held hands and danced in circles, singing “We're not moving, we're not moving….”

This was such unbelievable news, so not what I expected, I was numb for a second. Then I couldn't stop
hugging them. “Oh man, oh man! When—How did this…?”

Then I was hugging Willie Jane and saying, “This is why you were so happy! You knew!”

“I didn't know for sure, I just prayed it was so. I had a feeling the way your daddy was talkin' this morning when he came back from the jailhouse, he looked at Miz Westbrook and he said, ‘So are we gonna move or are we gonna stay and fix this?' He said all the Bethunes in this world couldn't run him away, that he had almost let it happen. He said he wasn't gonna run from anybody. Your daddy's a strong man, Trip. A strong man.”

Everybody was hugging and laughing.

“But what about the people saying they're gonna hurt us?” Farish was out of breath from all her dancing and singing.

“They're trying to scare us, sweetie,” Daddy said. “But that doesn't mean we have to be scared.”

“Careful,” Mama said. “But not scared.”

Daddy said we should celebrate with some ice cream, so we drove to the Seale-Lily and ordered six banana splits to go. Mama and Ginny Lynn shared theirs. Dee cradled his in his sling, and we raced to see who could finish his first. Farish raced with us, even though Mama told her she couldn't. I got a headache from trying to eat it too fast and had to let Dee win.

When Willie Jane and Dee had changed back into their clothes, we hugged them good-bye.

“See you tomorrow!” It felt so good to say it.

That night, Daddy came into my room before I went to sleep. He said he had a long time to sit and think in that jail cell, a longer time to sit and think than he'd had in years, and two lightbulbs came on in his head while he was there.

The first lightbulb told him that no matter what had happened, Mama didn't really want to leave her hometown. Things would be different here now, but Jackson was where she had lived her whole life except for when she went to Sophie Newcomb, and no matter how hard he tried to make her happy in Kansas City, he knew she'd be miserable there or anywhere besides her hometown.

“There's home and there's everywhere else,” he said. “Jackson is home, like it or not.”

He let me think about that a minute.

“Anyway, we'd be letting everybody down if we moved, right?” he said.

“You mean Willie Jane and Dee?”

“Yep. The whole state, too. We all have a responsibility to each other.”

“Just because we live in the same place?”

“It's a special kind of place, don't you think?”

“A special kind of terrible sometimes.”

“Sometimes it is. But there are a lot of good people here, pal, who want the best for everybody. They're the ones who aren't shouting and shaking their fists. Only half the congregation walked out, right?” He smiled. “The half that stayed, that's the future.”

“Maybe so, but the rest of the world still hates us.”

“Hey, the world needs to understand that it wouldn't be the same without Mississippi. Think about the books and the music that have come from here. Without us, you wouldn't have the blues, which means you wouldn't have rock 'n' roll, which means no Elvis, no Beatles. And what about the food? You can't get Willie Jane's fried chicken and mashed potatoes just anywhere, you know.”

“You sure can't.”

“I tell ya, Trip, it's like one day God took the best of what's good and the worst of what's bad, stirred it all up, and dumped it between Memphis and New Orleans. You can't move away from a place like that. You have to help keep the good in the mix.”

He patted me on the shoulder and stood up.

“What about the other lightbulb?” I asked. “You said there were two.”

“The other lightbulb came on when I was sitting there feeling how bad my body hurt and asking why I had allowed myself to get all beat up and thrown in jail. The first answer was I did it to protect you. But I also did it to defend our right to have anybody we like
play football in our own front yard. I told myself that if I really believed in that, I had to be willing to fight for it, maybe not just once, maybe again and again. Moving away would be running away, no matter what we kept telling ourselves. And Westbrooks don't run. Do we?”

“No, sir.”

“You helped me remember that, Trip. Watching the way you fought for Dee. You're a hero.”

“Hero? I thought I was a goof-up.”

He laughed and hugged me.

“I bet all your patients will be glad you're not leaving the clinic.”

“I'll tell you something, I'm thinking about starting my own clinic. One that'll have a big waiting room where everybody can sit.”

—

As much as I hated to move away from 5445 Oak Lane Drive, the house I had lived in my whole life, it was not safe to stay there. Stokes and the Reeveses and Mr. and Mrs. Pinky were still our friends, but that was it.

I thought and thought, but I couldn't understand how these neighbors who acted so mean used to be so nice. The closest I could figure, their version of the world was all black and white, and not only in terms of people's skin. They carried a big line in their heads
between what was okay and what was not okay, and I had crossed it. So they looked at me with their real faces like I was the one who had changed…into somebody bad and stupid and dangerous. They were the same neighbors they had always been—I just never really knew them before.

We finally found out who was making all the calls. It was the Bethunes, like we thought, and their friends, but it was also the Nelsons, the Stubbses, Mrs. Sitwell, and lots of other people. They had gotten together and decided to drive us out of Oakwood. Mr. Bethune held meetings at his house and told everybody we were in league with the Northern agitators and the Freedom Riders, and they needed to send us the message that they didn't want colored kids playing with their kids, and they didn't want coloreds taking over the Southern way of life. Daddy said it showed how pathetic they were, that they thought hang-up calls were a way to fight the federal government. We never found out who threatened me and my sisters.

I can still see Mr. Bethune's angry, puffed-up face and wonder how that could be the same person who always grinned at me in church and called me a wisenheimer. Where did he get so much hate? If he hadn't taught it to Tim and Tom, they might have played with us instead of worrying about what color Dee was.

A lot of things are different now, and mostly better.
Willie Jane is still my other mama—that's not going to change. We moved to a big old house in an older neighborhood closer to town and got a private phone number we don't give out to anybody unless Mama and Daddy know them. Daddy wears one of those new pagers on his belt to keep up with his patients. The phone still rings a lot, mostly with calls from Farish's friends, and I still cringe a little every time.

We don't belong to the country club anymore. Daddy says he can't believe he ever wasted time playing golf. We don't go to Broadview Baptist Church anymore either. Mama and Daddy have been getting together with some people who think like they do, and they're talking about starting up their own church, with a preacher who not only isn't afraid to talk about colored people but would also welcome them into the congregation.

We still live close enough to Donelson Junior High for me to go there, and I am finally a split end for the Donelson Dirt Daubers—third string, so far, but Coach says I have a lot of potential. People still talk about me and my family, but I'm learning not to care what people say. The Bethunes have gone on to high school, so I don't have to fool with them anymore. Stokes and I are back to being best friends. I'd rather have one or two good friends than be popular. Andy's still my pal, and I asked Nancy Harper to go to the
homecoming dance. I'm kind of nervous about it, but I figure if we run out of things to talk about, we can always make fun of each other's accents.