I can swear on the Bible I never put a black face and a name together in one spot until I was maybe seventeen. I’d be hard pressed to recollect a Jew, and if there was one, he or she probably
changed their name and went to the Presbyterian or the Baptist church.
It wasn’t so much a source of pride as a fact with us that the black people had all been run out of Prince George before anyone here had a telephone or a storm window. It was seventy-five years ago and I felt no connection to it. Mother remembered it. But she hated to talk about it. I think it still pains her in some way. All I ever knew was white and Christian people. I never knew any other kind while I was growing up here. I see no evil in myself because of that. I didn’t find out how ignorant I was, until I’d lived in Birmingham for many years.
One Saturday morning early about a month before they shot him, I tried to warn the man myself. It was around six-thirty in the morning. The first thing I do after I start the coffee is grab some air on the porch. There was a strong mist on the lake. I wasn’t sure right off that it was him. All I could make out was a silver line of boat and a blue shirt. By walking all the way to the end of our dock, I could see that white hat with the yellow band around it. It was him all right.
I must have been a sight trolling that water in Dashnell’s boat in my nightgown with my life jacket around it. The water was flat and gray. The sky was moody. There wasn’t another soul except him and me out there on that lake. I was thankful for that. If Dashnell held to his usual Saturday morning sleep pattern, I figured I had an hour, plenty of time to get back before he’d even know I’d been gone.
It took fifteen minutes of trolling through weeds to reach the other side of the lake. It took five more to make it up into the backwater where he’d tied his boat to a cypress stump. I killed the engine and made my way by pushing off the bottom with my oar. The man was standing up in his boat, fixing to cast off. It was a nice boat. It had padded yellow seats. He looked at me with that protective curiosity strangers feel encountering another in an otherwise deserted place.
“They bitin’?” I smiled.
“Just got here,” he says.
I could see he had a tent still folded and a camp stove up on the shore. He meant to stay the night in the woods.
“Looked like rain earlier, but I believe it’s going to burn off.” I hadn’t planned what to say.
“We had a cloudburst down in Yellow sometime in the night.”
Yellow. So he really was from Yellow. He
knew.
“Well, I’ll say.”
But say what? I’d headed across that lake so deep in my intent, it hadn’t occurred to me how I’d put words to it.
“Water’s awful cloudy,” I tried. “You probably won’t catch much in these parts—except trouble,” I added with that stupid weak smile I use when I say things I know I shouldn’t. He went about his business. “Appreciate it,” he says. Nice looking man. Oxford style clothes, a little fancy for fishing. Starched cotton like Carmen wore. He’d order them with heavy starch from the laundry, then iron more starch into the collars himself before he went to the office. Dashnell liked to have had a fit.
“Mister,” I tried, and I wasn’t smiling now. I was scared for him. I was scared for me. I wanted to turn around and look at my house across the lake, but I was afraid I’d see Dashnell on the dock staring at me. Or maybe a neighbor who’d want an explanation for why I was across the lake in my nightgown talking to that fool black man.
“Mister, somebody is going to shoot you.”
“Appreciate it,” he says again.
Only his eyes were narrow now. I was the enemy, I was some damned fool white woman in a raggedy nightgown, hair in curlers, life jacket pinned around me representing things in his mind. At the very moment he was thinking that, I was feeling far away from all that I had ever known. It was more than I had ever done about anything outside my family in my entire life. I was weak from it and he had completely missed my point. I wanted to choke him.
“I have no personal truck with you, sir.” Did he have any idea how my ears would burn if Dashnell heard me calling a black man “sir?”
“I have no personal truck with you either, ma’am.”
“Mister, I truly hate to bother you like this, but these people around here, they’re pretty set in their ways.”
“Yes. I understand you. Thank you for your kindness. I’d like to fish now.” He settled himself back down into his boat and the reeds blocked my view.
“Well,” I called out, “I reckon fools come in all shapes and colors.” I paddled back out to the open water and cut the engine on high. I fixed my eyes on the house, but my mind stayed back there with him. I was furious. I wanted to call him a derned fool. I wanted to turn that boat back around. I wanted to holler, “Man, you think you know so damned much.” I could imagine his drift, I could just hear him telling me what year it was and what country it was and all about his inalienable rights, as if that would ever mean anything in Prince George County, Alabama. I cut the engine back and I turned back towards him. I didn’t go all the way up into the reeds this time because I knew he could hear me all right.
“Look here,” I shouted. “I don’t care what constitutional things you think you’re doing up here—”
“Appreciate it.” His voice stabbed me in two. For a minute I wondered if he was like some kid saying the opposite of what he really meant. It just slayed me. To this day I don’t know what people would say and do if they had any idea that I was out there on the lake engaging the man in conversation. The thought of it makes me tremble. But I did it.
The White Oak Reporter,
our local paper, ran a story to the effect that an “as yet unidentified body” had been found in a boat on the lake. You’d have an easier time finding out who actually crucified Jesus Christ. At least Jesus Christ was charged with a crime before they murdered him. I don’t want the details. If it was Dashnell who pulled the trigger, then he used somebody else’s gun. His .38 was in the drawer and his .45 was in the glove compartment of his panel truck. I went and looked after the women left that night. Not that it makes any difference. One of them, meaning all of them, did it. Dashnell’s as guilty as the next one.
The night it happened I sat on the porch after the women had all gone home. There wasn’t much moon. It had dropped cool and
there was mist off the water. Once I thought I heard a pinging sound. An hour later, I could hear the men laughing and talking down at Jake’s and Marjean’s. Sometime later, though I wouldn’t look, I was pretty sure I could hear Dashnell out there blubbering drunk on Jake and Marjean’s dock.
I try to comfort myself with the fact that I warned the poor man; but I feel a part of it. I was too scared in my kitchen that awful Saturday night to beg the men not to do it. I was too scared to call the sheriff and ask him to stop them. It wasn’t that I thought they would kill me. It wasn’t just that Dashnell would have never let me hear the end of it. Right or wrong, speaking out would have been setting myself apart from them. It would have forced me to declare the unspoken contempt I have for them. What they did was evil. But what I didn’t do was worse.
I went to church the next morning and I prayed that this thing will pass over us. I actually asked God to let the evil stand! If I step forward now, if I open my mouth, if I tell the wrong people how I feel, I really will be in a mess. Somebody will run me off the road coming home from Mother’s one evening; or I’ll be found in the lake floating face up.
Meanwhile, everybody else around here goes on like it never happened. I’m weak enough to want it all to go away. But this thing is just a loop in a raveling evil. I get so afraid some mornings alone here in this house, I can’t pull myself from my chair. There is something lurking in the cedars, something gathering like an invisible storm in the air. I try to tell myself it’s just my guilt; but this feeling, this raveling evil, is turning. Or maybe I’m just losing my hold on things.
H
ez returned home like a prodigal son. He held himself back from chasing women and he didn’t touch liquor. He had been delivered from the swamp and he attempted to honor his deliverance with gratitude. He went to work six days a week beside Grandfather running sap in the turpentine grove. He tried to get holy. On Sundays, he stayed in church from morning till night. He spent six nights a week studying Scripture. Whenever he found a biblical passage he couldn’t understand, he walked into town and waited in the alley for the old white Episcopal rector to call him up on the back porch. The old man would ramble on for half an hour with his interpretation, always admonishing Hez to build cathedrals in his heart to the One True God of the English kings.
Eventually he began preaching wherever they would let him. It was hard at first because the woods were full of preachers, most of them eager to holler and sweat and cast out demons. But Hez possessed an eloquence that set him apart from the local preachers. He considered it his legacy from Beauty B. He was soon being asked to orate at the smaller established churches in the area. These were in country towns, communities where ordained and educated ministers were a rare commodity. He did all this and a good deal more, hoping to feel called up or inspired or revealed unto. But that didn’t
come to pass. Nor did any righteousness steal over him, no matter how hard he sought it.
Instead Grandfather had his first stroke. The old man was bedridden after that, so there was no one to help Hez tap and boil the pine tar. It was hot, hard work for two men. But it was impossible for one. Hez soon grew to resent it. It had been to God’s work and His will that Hez had returned out of the Everglades. Hez had tried to regard his daily labor as toiling in the vineyards of the Lord. Gradually it had come to feel more like a thankless curse. Now the nickels seared his palms when he dropped his turpentine kegs at the warehouse by the railroad track on Saturday afternoons. An inexplicable sadness, an angry longing, gradually stagnated his zealous efforts to repay God for lifting him out of the black waters of the Everglades. Try as he would, through prayer, meditation and positive thoughts, he could no longer accept his empty life as his place and his time in the overall scheme of things. Time ran through his nostrils in pointless drafts of sleepless summer night air. The Scripture he read in the evenings seemed a deliberate and unsolvable puzzle sent by an unjust heaven to mock his good sense. His life refused to take root or purpose. The walls of sanctity he had built around his soul grew thin and tired. Eventually he took greater solace from corn whiskey than all the Songs of Solomon.
Now Beauty B.’s Bible gathered dust on the shelf over his bed. Now he was walking out after dark to the shadowed places where transients and low men gathered to drink and gamble and easy women lurked. He pacified his nameless rage in the warm flesh of a hundred women whose names he forgot as quickly as he learned them. He regarded the daylight as a scourge to be endured until the night drew him out again and again. This went on almost a year. Then he came home just before dawn one steamy August morning and he found the old man dead.
He sent to Charleston for Moena, his mother, who was by that time blind and working as a seamstress. It was an awkward reunion. The two were strangers. Moena held herself in. It troubled Hez that his mother was so stiff and pulled-back with him. He had looked upon her coming as a last ditch hope to feel some
connection to the rest of the world. She packed up two of Beauty B.’s quilts and a couple stuffed tobacco dolls for remembrance. She told him he could burn the rest. Hez busied himself building the coffin and digging the grave in the woods. He had a great desire to tell his mother what had happened in the Everglades. He had never shared Seraphine with anyone. But Moena’s face was a mask of indifference and her manner reminded him of dry oak. His efforts at more than necessary conversation were answered with a measured sigh that silenced him.
He hid his troubled heart from her. She kept herself shut away from him. Her coming had been an enormous disappointment. He wanted to bury the old man quickly and send her away as soon as possible. With Grandfather gone and the Army recruiting for the Big War raging in Europe, he figured to enlist.
Hez recruited several young men to help haul the casket up to the graveyard and dig the hole. After it was lowered, he read a little Scripture while the men rubbed their dirty hands on their pants legs and Moena stood back slightly with rigid shoulders that seemed to defy anyone to give them further weight.
They were sitting in the yard waiting for one of the cousins to take Moena back to the train after the funeral.
“Boy, we some hard people.”
It was like words left lying around in a dry old jar you might use to catch rainwater. Moena would swear Hez had spoken them. Hez would go to his grave believing the words had come from her. The truth is it was probably a thought felt simultaneously. It was a white, hot afternoon. Suddenly something had let in a little air.
“We got no other choice.”
That was Moena. Hez thought she meant her blindness or Beauty B. taken by lightning from the back of a wagon and the hard edged, low down life they plodded through as if it made sense. Moena caught his drift.
“You don’t know nothing.”
The tears were streaming down her cheeks. She was three weeks shy of thirty-seven; but suddenly she looked like a tormented child. He felt an overwhelming desire to comfort this strange woman he
called mother. But he sat back and waited for her to speak. Finally, when it was evident that she couldn’t, he tried to patch the holes in the awkward silence.
“You want some water?”
“Yes.”
But she was still crying when he came back from the house. She held the cup between her fingers as if it contained the rest of her life. When she was calm, she said, “You didn’t know him.”