One Night in Mississippi (8 page)

“Is this the one? This the one that put his hands on Penny?”

The girl covered her face with her hands. Her shoulders shook with sobbing, but she still looked at me and nodded.

“Bring him over to the truck.”

I was dragged over to the gas station. The boy shouting instructions removed his jacket. He tossed it into the back of his truck, then lowered the tailgate. He turned and punched me hard in the jaw. I went limp, slumping backwards.

“Hold him up. You want to touch my girlfriend? Huh? Huh? Grab his hand.”

They pressed my hand against the back of the truck, just above the taillight. The boy who punched me grabbed the tailgate and slammed it upwards. The pain brought me back into focus. My leg twitched, drawing a half-moon in the dirt. My head lolled. I bit my tongue and felt fresh blood on my chin. He shouted something at me, then the gate slammed again, and I felt it like a thump in my chest. A twist of the boy's thickly gelled hair had come loose at the front, swinging wildly about his now-sweating forehead. His mouth was pressed closed, the lips thin and white. His eyes were in shadow, as if they had sunken deeper into their sockets. The gate slammed once more, then he stepped back, panting, reaching up to put the rebellious lock of hair back into place. The arms beneath me let go, and I fell to the ground, curling up and bringing my arm in against my chest. The dark-haired girl was crying in the doorway of the service station. Before the boys got in the truck to drive away, one of them went back for his Coke.

Chicago, 1965

A few weeks after
Graden's funeral, I packed up and headed north. No one tried to stop me. Mama unfurled the apron in the cupboard and gave me everything she had saved up, a total of seventeen dollars, but she didn't argue against my going.

The money was enough for bus fare to Chicago. I sat by the window. I wouldn't look at any of the other passengers. Instead I watched as the landscapes rolled past — Tennessee, Kentucky, Indiana — places I had never expected to see. I remember little. I stepped off the bus into the cool Chicago air and felt my skin constrict. I had never owned a jacket. It was early morning when I arrived, not yet light out, and I pulled what few clothes I had out of my bag and covered myself with them so that I could sleep a few hours, huddled against the station wall.

I walked the city by day, starting by the waterfront and working my way out further and further in exploratory circles, then returning each night to the relative safety of the bus station to sleep. The station master woke me once, cap in hand and a stern look on his face. I could see the words ready to form on his lips to send me away or possibly to call the police, but after staring at me for a few moments, he placed his cap back on his head and walked off. It was the first act of kindness that I had been shown by a white man, and I slept that night without fear for the first time in a long time. When I woke up, there was a piece of paper curled inside my shirt pocket, with a name and the address of a northside diner.

I was dirty and tired when I entered the restaurant, bag in hand. The owner looked at the note, studied me, then nodded for me to come around the back.

“You're a southerner?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You ever work in a restaurant before?”

“No, sir. I can read, though, and I know some math.”

The owner wiped his forehead and laughed.

“Well, none of that is going to help you much here.” He looked at my gnarled right hand. “Can you hold a mop with that?”

He brought me in through the kitchen and put me to work washing dishes and mopping the floors and bathrooms. At the end of the shift, he gave me directions to a shelter. It was the first time I'd slept in a bed other than the crooked wood-framed cot back home in Mississippi. I woke in the middle of the night and listened to the sounds of the men resting in the darkness around me. I had never been so lonely. I looked across at the spot where Graden would have been sleeping, but in his place was a grizzled and sickly thin man in a tank top. I pulled a journal and a pencil from my bag and angled myself into the moonlight to practice the mathematics that he'd taught me.

I wanted to thank the station master for his kindness, but I never went back. I continued walking the city in the mornings, then working at the diner afternoons and evenings. I stole books. I picked them up from café patios when people left them at an unwatched table or forgot them on buses or park benches. I read them at the diner at night whenever the owner stepped out, or I pulled the journal from my waistband and scribbled out problems.

One night, a man tapped me on the shoulder while I was mopping. It was early, and I was rushing to get the floor cleaned before the supper crowd came in.

“I think you dropped this.”

I turned to see a man holding my journal. He was about my height, but thin. In his sweat pants and loose sweater, he looked more slovenly than athletic. I guessed he was probably about Papa's age, but his years had not been as hard as Papa's. He didn't have the creased skin, the greying hair, the stoop from years of hard labour. The man extended the journal towards me, his hand trembling as he did so.

“Thank you.”

“You're welcome. I made a few notations. I hope you don't mind. It was open,” he added hastily. “I didn't pry.”

I opened the journal, and he showed me where he had made corrections. The tremor in his hands was more pronounced as he traced the figures across the page.

“Are you a math student?”

I laughed off his question and lifted my mop. “No, sir. I'm a floor washer.”

“Well, for a floor washer, you're pretty good with numbers. Who taught you math?”

I gripped the mop tighter and looked at the floor. I thought of Graden often of course, but it was when he came up unexpectedly that his absence hit me the most. I exhaled and muttered something about getting back to work.

“OK,” the man said. “But if you want to keep learning, you should call me. I'm Tim. Tim Barnes. You've done well, and I'm guessing you've done it mostly on your own. Everybody needs a little help sometimes.”

He scribbled his number in my notebook, gave me a brief smile, and returned to his table. I laid in the bed at the shelter that night, going over the corrections. I wanted Graden to be there to show me where I'd gone wrong. I pictured Graden's writing on the page; Graden's fingers going over the figures; Graden's voice explaining the error.

Two days later, I called Mr. Barnes from a pay phone, and he invited me to come see him, giving me directions to his house. I was still wary of white people, but he seemed completely harmless.

His house was a plain brick duplex a few blocks from Lakeshore. He welcomed me in and offered me a slice of meatloaf and a baked potato. I thanked him, and he apologized for not having something more.

“I used to be quite the cook,” he said. “Even before my wife passed, I was always the one to make dinner.”

He held up his shaking hands and smiled wistfully. “It's getting harder though.”

“What's wrong with your hands?”

“Palsy,” he replied. “I have good days and bad days, but lately even the good days are not so good. And your hand?”

I pretended to chew while I considered how to answer.

“I made a mistake.”

“I see. Well, I hope you find Chicago more … forgiving.”

He raised his glass, and I was thankful he didn't press for details. I cleaned the dishes after our meal and put them away in the cupboard. He laid out textbooks on the kitchen table. His hands sometimes locked so that he could barely turn the pages, but he tutored me in math, science, and literature, much like Graden had. At first I only visited occasionally. Then I began going to his house more and more often, cleaning the yard, clearing the eavestroughs, and performing whatever chores he couldn't do himself, although my own crippled hand was often scarcely more useful than his.

I told him about life in the South, about growing up on the farm, and about leaving Mississippi to come north, but I never mentioned Graden and he never pushed me for more than what I was willing to tell him. After a few months, I moved out of the shelter and into his basement. He arranged for me to attend classes at the high school where he taught. I graduated at the age of twenty-nine.

I enrolled in college with the money that I'd saved from my job at the diner. It wasn't enough, but my history was. The dean gave me special dispensation to attend.

I excelled at my courses, but avoided social contact as much as possible. I was the only southerner on campus, and the wide-eyed and idealistic young men and women, mostly black, but some liberal-minded whites as well, wanted to know what it was “really like” in Mississippi. I thought of Graden, standing in the Townsends' barn, lit by lanterns and encouraging an uncertain crowd of farmers and labourers to exercise their rights. I thought of the northerner in the brand-new coveralls that everyone looked at reverentially while he spoke of things he knew nothing about, and I knew now where his kind came from. I wanted nothing to do with any of them.

I cultivated an isolationist persona, a deeply ingrained separateness. I would offer argument to any opinion, even to one I agreed with. I feigned indifference to the other students' activities and blocked off any potentially probing conversations by simply shrugging and grunting, rather than giving real responses. I didn't simply withdraw from people; I aggressively pushed them away.

The students watched grainy footage of James Meredith entering Ole Miss under armed guard. They watched fire hoses and dogs turned on children. They stood in school halls and the courtyard and the cafeteria and shouted about injustice and about fighting to support their “brothers and sisters in the South,” and they couldn't understand why I wouldn't stand beside them. They began to whisper behind my back that I was a traitor and a coward. They finally began to avoid me like I avoided them. They held the most perverse of jealousies against me: they envied my suffering.

I listened to them speak and looked at their faces and felt certain that they knew nothing about Mississippi. The ones who went down on buses to “help the cause,” came back quiet, stunned. I saw the same look years later on the faces of those white boys returning from Vietnam. They left convinced of their own invulnerability and sense of right, with dreams of glory, service, and heroism, and they came back having learned far too much about the world. The world is not a place of theory, not a place of ideas. It is a concrete slab that is cold, hard, and unyielding.

I met Anne in the college library. It was the way she moved that first caught my attention, an effortless gracefulness while she floated down the aisle, trailing the tips of her fingers across the spines of the books as if offering them her blessing. She wore a long cotton dress, grass-green, tied tight around her waist, and alternately clinging and loosening about her knees and thighs, offering a glimpse of her form, then taking it away. She seemed to move just a fraction more slowly than everyone else in the room, as if she knew that the world would wait for her.

She tilted her head and smiled, then walked over to the table where I was reading and sat down, across from me. She was an array of colours — kinked black hair flowing over caramel skin, studying me with water-blue eyes.

“Do you like jazz?” she asked.

I had grown up listening to the country station out of Hattiesburg. I had heard a few jazz standards at the gin shack, but for the most part I had no idea what it was. I nodded anyway.

“Good,” she said. “Otherwise this will never work.”

“What won't?”

She smiled again. “I don't think people can ever really love each other. But they can share a love for common things.”

She stood and walked away without another word. It took me two weeks to learn her name, and another week before I was able to find her again. I spent hours in the jazz section of the library. I scoured nearby blues joints hoping for another glimpse of her. I visited record stores and finally found her working at one, just off campus. I spent most of the meagre amount of money I had saved on records by Sonny Rollins and Charlie Parker. She played them for me in the store, and she swayed slightly behind the counter while we spoke, making it hard for me to concentrate on her words.

“They say that Coltrane sometimes practices until his gums bleed. Can you imagine that? Having that kind of commitment to something?”

I pictured the criss-crossing scars on my father's arms as he smoked on the porch, Graden being lowered into the ground, his remains rattling against the side of the coffin. Bleeding gums seemed an easy sacrifice, but I nodded anyway, mesmerized by how deeply moved she could be.

I spent all the time I could with her. I was still working at the diner, but I ran home after each shift to clean up, spending any tips I'd earned taking her to hear jazz in smoke-filled clubs. When we didn't have money, we would sit outside on the sidewalk and listen to the music streaming through the doors and into the street.

Anne was something I had never encountered before. I'd known people who lived simple lives, and if they had a passion for something, like Graden, that passion was focussed towards one end. Anne was worldly, and her energy was not harnessed by any one interest. She spoke Spanish and German and sometimes teased me with words I couldn't comprehend. She drew incessantly in a spiral-bound sketchbook that she carried with her at all times. Besides music, she taught me about art and literature, making my own math studies seem dull by comparison. She sometimes stopped in the middle of a conversation to make grand proclamations.

“Sometimes I think that the world's problems could be prevented if you could get the right book to the right person at the right time.”

“How so?” I asked.

“What if Stalin had read Sartre instead of Marx? What if Hitler had read Neruda or Gabriela Mistral?”

“It wouldn't change anything,” I said. “It would just make them well-read dictators.”

We were sitting on the curb in front of a coffee shop, and she threw a balled up napkin at me.

“That's your problem, Warren. You have no imagination. You look at the world and see what it is, instead of what it could be.”

“People die trying to figure out what the world could be. People survive by accepting what it is.”

She pouted playfully and crossed her arms.

“If everyone had your attitude, things would never change.”

“Maybe they never will.”

Halfway through my first year, Mr. Barnes passed away. Anne was ready to console me, but it wasn't necessary. I had become close to him, but I understood loss in a way Anne couldn't, and I moved on.

I found a place in a hostel near campus, and Anne moved a few of her belongings in as well. We laid face to face in the dark and whispered to one another. While I told her little about my past, she told me everything about hers. She offered her childhood up to me in great detail along with her opinions about everything from political issues to the quality of the soup that I brought home from the diner. She seemingly gave voice to any random thought that strayed through her mind, and I absorbed it all, fascinated, while carefully sharing nothing in return.

During this period, I had the same brutal dream, night after night.

I was sitting on a bench in Jackson Park, looking out over Lake Michigan. The waves lapped gently at the shore break. There was a man on the bench beside me, throwing out bits of corn. Seagulls circled overhead, but none were drawn by his offering. Instead, a single crow pecked about on the pavement, picking up the kernels one by one. It hopped about awkwardly, as if its wing were injured. I could not see the face of the man beside me.