Authors: Susan Vaught
“That’s a stupid question,” he says.
“But would you?”
Clay stops jiving and shrugs. “I guess. Why?”
“No reason,” I say, and hope I’m telling the truth.
Friday, 8 August 1969: Night
“Heard about you kids at Blankenship’s today.” Grandmother Jones offers me a bowl of butterbeans.
“Yes, ma’am.” I battle dread and serve myself a spoonful of green lumps, trying everything on the table like I’m supposed to. In these small things, I try hard to make this grandmother happy. “Clay took us for a malt.”
“Sat at the front counter, Officer Bolin said.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Grandmother Jones has on her rock face, the one with no smile or frown. Not one single twitch or line to hint at what she’s feeling, or where she might be headed. She reminds me of Pastor Bickman, making one of his long pauses during a sermon. He says he does that to make us think.
I think he does it because he forgets his next line, but I’ve never challenged him. Small things to make Grandmother Jones happy.
Like introducing myself at church. Would it hurt me to do
such a little thing?
Even as I think that, my stomach clenches. I feel like if I take such a step, everything I’ve ever known might just … dissolve.
Grandmother Jones looks anything but happy as she says, “Hearing from the police makes me nervous, Ruba. You know that officer, he wasn’t being nice, telling me what you’ve been up to. He was warning me because you’re new around here. And different.”
“Yes, ma’am. But the front counter at Blankenship’s isn’t white-only now. Clay says it’s legal and we should—”
“It’s legal, child. In Mississippi, lots of things are legal. That doesn’t mean they’re accepted. Or smart. Blankenship’s, the white-only beach, some of the schools—white folks still have spots they’ll rise up about.”
“Why should we deny ourselves so white folks won’t rise up?” My voice comes out louder and higher than I intend. The hot feeling in my chest surprises me. “Why shouldn’t we push for our rights, like Clay says?”
Grandmother Jones lays her fork on her plate. She rubs her eyes as if she has not slept in days. “There’s pushing, Ruba, and then there’s shoving. People fight back when you push, but they fight crazy when you shove. Like Dr. King said, we can’t allow our protests to
degenerate into physical violence.”
The heat in my chest rises to my throat, my face. If she had any idea what Ba was, what I am—how could I ever learn to just push when I’ve been trained to shove?
It’s all I can do not to yell when I speak. “Should we pretend laws don’t exist just so we don’t make white folks angry? Just so they don’t get violent?”
“Child, you’ve been here three weeks.” Grandmother Jones stands. Abandons her plate, and me, and bothers with pots on the stove. “I’ve been living in this place my whole life. You’re as bad as the Student Nonviolent kids, down from the North a few years back.”
I jump to my feet, feeling like my blood is on fire. “Clay told me the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee brought volunteers. Risked their lives, got beat up and killed—and still kept fighting! Got the people registered. Got them to vote.”
Grandmother Jones sighs, and I see her shoulders sag. “It’s more complicated than that. Freedom Summer—the volunteers—don’t go making it some sweet dream. There were good things that came of it. And bad.”
“What bad things can come of good change?” I demand.
“People dying.” Grandmother Jones turns. She wields the spoon from the butterbean pan like a knife, pointing it. Sauce drips on the floor. Her rock face shatters into
dark, shifting sand. Rearranging in ways I don’t like.
“You listen to me, and listen good, Ruba Jones. Freedom isn’t worth much if you’re too dead to enjoy it. Like poor Gisele’s mother. I swear … Now sit your butt down and don’t open your mouth cross to me again, you hear?”
I sit.
But I think I wouldn’t mind dying for what I believe.
Grandmother Jones lowers her spoon. “Lots of us down here, we didn’t want Freedom Summer—not because we didn’t want the change, no ma’am. Because we didn’t want the deaths, and we didn’t want rich Northern white folks taking over our movement and our choices, pushing local folks like Fannie Lou Hamer and Lawrence Guyot aside. We hadn’t registered many voters, but our leaders were growing, and we were starting to change. Our way, in our own time.”
Slow, I think. Slow, slow change. Anything Grandmother Jones would approve of, it would have to be slow and safe.
“But SNCC came,” she says, pronouncing it
snick
. “And the changes came faster, and all that’s good. Won’t take anything away from any of those folks risking what they did. They’re all heroes, if you ask me. Every one of them. But it didn’t end there. Our problems didn’t go back North with them. This isn’t a bedtime story, and
we’re not living happy ever after.”
I think hard about how I know that. How this woman must think I’m stupid.
“Lots of SNCC’s volunteers stayed after Freedom Summer. And they did good things—but the Movement’s different down here now. Mrs. Hamer said it a few years ago. The Mississippi Movement’s gotten colder. Bigger. Less love and acceptance. And kids like Clay and you, y’all are impatient and angry. Demanding new answers to old questions—and fast answers. I just don’t know if y’all will move us forward or drive us back in the long run. Or do both at the same time, like Freedom Summer did.”
I don’t answer, because I don’t know what to say. I’ve lived here only three weeks, and every day I feel unfairness and injustice. It settles on me like ropes, and it burns. I’m burned with Grandmother Jones. With older people. With white folks and the white world. I want to go back to Haiti. To a place with ten thousand black faces. Ten million. A place that might make some sense.
My fingers curl, and I stare at my plate. I would die. Yes, I would die rather than live like a less-than forever.
Grandmother Jones sits. As if reading my mind, she makes her face a stone again. Or wood. Like carved mahogany, weathered and scarred. “Y’all are so ready to die. But if you’re patient, if you push instead of shove,
maybe you won’t have to die so fast, and change can still happen. Sometimes a little push is plenty enough to get things moving.”
I force myself to nod, but I find my eyes leaving Grandmother Jones. Studying the floor. The wall. Anything. She doesn’t understand what I feel.
“Eat your dinner, child,” she says. “Please.”
I jam a spoon into my butterbeans and dump the lumps into my mouth. Chew the hateful things. Like wet paper. No taste at all.
Grandmother Jones studies the ceiling. “Time was, sitting at a white-only counter would get us arrested. That, or parking too close to a fire hydrant halfway around the block. Or reckless driving when you haven’t even moved your car. Every day, you had to watch. Every step, looking over your shoulder. Behind you. Beside you. Worrying, and wondering, and waiting. I’m not sure how much better it is now.”
Her voice sounds far away. Like she is not even talking to me. “Mississippi’s hard. Mississippi’s the worst of the worst, like they said. And this fight, it’s far from over, Ruba. I hope you realize you’ve landed in the middle of a battle bound to last your whole life. Don’t spend all your rage these first weeks. You’ll need it later.”
I still say nothing, but something inside me stiffens. What does this woman know of fighting? This battle or
any other? Her job, her life—she’s busy hiding from trouble. That much seems as clear as the stained-glass dove in her precious church’s biggest window.
“Guess all of life’s a fight.” Grandmother Jones shakes her head. “One time I got my jaw busted, over at Blankenship’s, because I sat to eat my hamburger where I bought it. At least they didn’t mob me and smear me with ketchup and mustard like they did Pearlina Lewis and Anne Moody at Woolworth’s up in Jackson. That was a scene. Hundreds of people. A riot—one boy almost got killed.”
My butterbeans stick in my throat, and I force them down with a sip of sweet tea. Curiosity shoves my anger aside faster than I can take another breath. “Did you—at Blankenship’s—when you went in, did you …”
I try, but I can’t ask the question. Doubt I can believe the answer.
“Go to Blankenship’s and do it on purpose?” Grandmother Jones’s rock face doesn’t crack. Not a single chip. “My boy and your mother, they would have done it if they’d been here. But they weren’t, so somebody had to. Lord, but those girls in Jackson, they were just kids. Not much older than you.”
She goes right on eating, as if she has not shattered my perceptions of her like a thousand stained glass doves flung against rocks. And she shows no emotion.
Grandmother Jones talks about courage, about facing hate, all with less feeling than when she orders me to look at my feet and be polite around white people.
Like Ba spoke of the war women and their killing. Matter of fact. As if it’s something anyone would do, given the same choices
.
A numbness creeps into my mind. Up until now, I’ve seen mostly differences between my two grandmothers. Now, a sameness I didn’t expect.
And yet, my temper won’t be quiet. How could Grandmother Jones show her courage and expect me to put mine away? Why would she want me to keep my eyes on the ground?
I can’t find the nerve to ask. That might earn a day’s cold silence. With this strange woman, who can tell?
“Did you and Ruba Cleo—your Ba—actually trace the family back to Africa?” she asks before I recover my balance from her first set of surprises. “I know lots of Haitians come from there because of slaving. But have you really been able to reach all the way back to Dahomey?”
The potatoes on my fork feel heavy. I open my mouth. Close it. What do I say?
“We have the song,” I finally manage.
“What song?”
“W-with a drum, we sing our mother’s names, back to
the guards of Dahomey’s first king. Past that, we can’t know, since mothers weren’t named.”
Grandmother Jones stirs gravy in a dish, slow circles, as if she might divine truth from grease and browned flour. “Why didn’t women know their mothers back then?”
“Dahomey women did,” I explain. “But Amazons weren’t regular women. They were soldiers. They were taken from their parents, raised and trained behind palace walls, and they gave up any family ties except loyalty to each other and the king. He was like a god to them. That’s why they fought so well, so wild—”
My voice dies in my throat as I see Grandmother Jones’s puckered lips. Her furrowed brow. Dread settles on my heart.
“Thou shalt have no other gods before Me,” she quotes from her Bible. “Those women shouldn’t have seen a king as a god.”
I don’t answer, and slowly lower my gaze back to my plate.
Grandmother Jones closes the conversation with a cough, and we finish our meal in silence.
Later, in my bedroom, she finds my cloth bag where I stupidly left it out on the bed after my walk today. How could I have been so forgetful?
I wring my hands even as she snatches it up, wrapping
the strings around her knotted fingers. “What’s in this?” she asks, swinging it back and forth. “As if I don’t know.”
She’s so short I could just reach down and snatch the bag from her old hands. It would be easy, like taking a bone from a little dog.
But I don’t.
“Just herbs,” I mutter. “I got them on my walk, so I could—”
“I know what you got them for. I’m not stupid.” She opens the bag and pours the herbs and my other secrets into her apron pocket. “Matches and candles, too. Mm-mm. You took these from the church, didn’t you?”
Her eyes burn like a thousand lighted candles. “Not in my house, girl. Not now, not ever.”
With that, she thrusts the empty bag back at me. “I don’t want to take away things your grandmother Ruba Cleo gave you, but if you put anything else in this bag that doesn’t belong in my house, I’ll be keeping it from then on.”
I stare at the bag in my shaking hands. I can’t look at her. My muscles feel like sticks jammed under my skin, hard, brittle, ready to snap and just beat on something—probably her—until they break. Or she breaks.
“God forgive this child.” She talks in her quiet prayer voice, then puts her cold hand on my cheek. “She doesn’t know right from wrong yet. She needs to make herself
known to the church, to you, to save her soul from the pit.”
“There’s a storm coming,” I say in a tone that feels part mine, part Ba’s. “I sense it. There’s something evil inside all that wind. I have to gather what I need to fight it, and you’ll have to trust me, or we’ll all die.”
Grandmother Jones swells, like she’s puffing for a rage, but instead she sighs. Her hand stays on my cheek, but the pat becomes a pinch that feels barely controlled. “Don’t imagine trouble, Ruba. You got enough that’s real right here. God will help us with whatever comes. Witchcraft is the devil’s work.”
She lets me go. My cheek smarts where she pinched me. I strangle the cloth bag with my fingers.
She leaves, finally.
I’m alone again, finally.
My only comfort is a quick glance at the loose floorboard Grandmother Jones seems not to notice.
At least she didn’t find all of my special things, my weapons, hidden under that board. I might have what I need to fight the storm, or most of it—but it won’t matter. She’ll never trust me.
It takes little time to get into bed, but I can’t sleep. Minutes pass, then more and more. Finally, I hug my pillow and cry as dinner churns in my belly. Visions of Ba haunt me. I see her younger and stronger, helping me
nock my first arrow, lovingly stroking my shoulder as I fight the string.
You aren’t fast, and that’s no shame, girl. The fastest shoot the muskets. Those of us who run slower, we make archers. You and I, we’ll work on your arms until they’re strong enough to fire as many arrows as it takes
….
I see Ba a year later, looking sicker but smiling at me, stirring fish stew over a fire on the beach. I see her singing to the wind that spring, magic in her voice, bringing rain for our flowers and palms.