Freshwater Road Read online

  J.D. the painter had gone to Paris for the summer. Here she was in Mississippi, in a cab going she knew not where, embarking on an adventure that had death written in the small print. According to Shuck, even as a kid she'd always had a deep sense of justice and fair play. He was pushing her to go to law school. She couldn't see it. Wilamena, her mother, thought it silly of her when she wanted to share her dolls and candy with other kids, Negro kids, who didn't have the abundance that she had. Told her she was a fool to think they'd ever return the favor. Surely there was enough injustice in Mississippi to validate her coming, and she didn't consider it a favor. Or did she? She tied her reasons for making this sojourn to all of that, and to Shuck, her father-her so wanting to be like him and so wanting to be unlike her mother who'd spent her life running away from Negro people. From herself.

  Celeste's head popped up from the seat back. That woman had squirmed back into her mind, in spite of her prodigious efforts to keep her mother at bay. Her memories of Wilamena had a blurry quality. She didn't leave Celeste's mind for long, though, like a touch of arthritis that flares and subsides in an aging person's body (Momma Bessie called it her new friend, "Arthur"), unannounced and unapologetic.

  The cabby caught her eye in his rearview mirror. A crooked smile emerged on his turned-down mouth. She returned it, tight and small. Wilamena had moved to New Mexico with Cyril Atwood, her second husband. When they'd first gotten married, ten years ago, they'd lived in Chicago. Then Atwood got tenure at the university in Albuquerque, with research perks in Los Alamos. Away they went. She'd spent the years before her second marriage running in and out of town, more out than in, always with a suitcase packed and ready. When she and Shuck divorced, Celeste and her brother Billy stayed with Shuck. Since her remarriage, she'd never come back to Detroit, not even for Celeste's and Billy's high school graduation ceremonies.

  Wilamena never did like Detroit-too blue collar, too Negro, too much of the blues underneath the city's swagger. She used to say Detroit had a veil of soot that most people couldn't even see. Of course, she never tired of asking her children to visit her in New Mexico, but Celeste pulled the curtain down when Wilamena didn't show for the graduation. She had no desire to spend weekends in a cavernous house (as described by her mother in one of her letters) making graceful conversation about weapons research and Indian art. They wrote and talked on the phone from time to time, curt little conversations that crunched rather than flowed. She sent turquoise jewelry (that Celeste kept packed in velvet bags and rarely wore) and boxes of etched stationery. Celeste figured it was her mother's investment in their continued communication.

  Prickly Wilamena's escape to New Mexico suited Celeste fine. Now, she could be Shuck's daughter and be done with it. No more rough ride with Wilamena, not knowing whether she loved you or wanted to be rid of you. Besides, what Negro person moves to New Mexico? But then, what Negro person moves to Mississippi?

  "We's y'here." The old man aimed his taxi to the curb.

  Thank God, Celeste thought, shaking off her reflections. New people, new meanings. It was all perfectly timed. J.D. gone to Paris, Wilamena stashed in New Mexico, Billy living in New York, Shuck cool and easy in Detroit. And she was in Mississippi, of all places.

  The cabby pulled in front of side-by-side storefronts on a commercial stretch near downtown Jackson and Celeste leaped out, the lights of the capital building haloing in the midnight sky a few blocks away, it seemed. Two police cars were parked across the street, the officers sitting there watching. Inside the well-lit One Man, One Vote office, heads and bodies moved around behind windows plastered with flyers and posters.

  The old man carried her suitcase to the door. "Thank y'all. Thank y'all fer comin' down y'here." He doffed his cap and smiled a broken-toothed smile.

  Celeste paid and tipped him like Shuck taught her to do, then walked in, the reflection of the police cars in the glass door, fear crawling into her like vine tendrils creeping up the back fence in Momma Bessie's yard.

  2

  Heat sizzles jitterbugged off the pavement on Lafayette Street. Shuck maneuvered his sleek white convertible Cadillac into his parking spot a few steps from the Royal Gardens door. On Shuck's map this bar, as much as he loved it, was just a mark in pencil, a stepping-stone to a New York-style supper club. Women would sing blues and jazz with gardenias in their hair. Men would blow heartbreak licks on burnished horns, feet tapping to the beat. If he could fit Count Basie's whole band in there, he'd book them in a New York minute. He flicked his cigarette to the pavement and walked inside, the late afternoon sun warming the back of his head.

  In the cool uneven bar light, Shuck nodded to his soft-talking regulars already curled around their first drinks of the day. The blown-up figures in his custom-made "best-of-Negro-life" wallpaper stepped out of hard-glossed cars in tuxedos and draped white dresses; Duke Ellington, Paul Robeson, Dorothy Dandridge, Lena Horne and Louis Armstrong were there. Shuck clanked change into the jukebox, punched in Gloria Lynne, the Modern Jazz Quartet, and Coleman Hawkins. Posey, his bartender, nicknamed the big Wurlitzer the "party girl" because it lit up the alcove where it stood like a hooker caught in a police car's siren light on a corner in Paradise Valley. He took his usual seat at the back end of the bar with Gloria Lynne singing "I Wish You Love." He stacked his mail to the side and skimmed the front page of his Detroit News. The Tigers left for St. Louis. The mayor huddled with business leaders on Mackinac Island. Lenny Bruce's trial convened in New York City.

  "Kids from all over the country going to Mississippi to register Negroes to vote. Negro and white kids. Volunteering." Shuck realized he'd said it out loud after he said it, then checked to see if anyone had heard him over the music. He'd been following the news about the happenings in the south. Rosa Parks had left Alabama to live in Detroit. Martin Luther King had come through there, too. But the newspaper specifically said "Negro and white kids volunteering to go to Mississippi," and that was a whole different thing.

  Millicent sat on a stool at the other end of the bar fingering her pearlplated cigarette lighter. "I'd kill my children myself before I'd let them go to Mississippi." She punctuated this with a good swallow of her drink before thudding the glass down on the bar top. Millicent was a supervisor at the main post office, dressed well, nursed her drinks, and went home early.

  Celeste had been so impressed by the speakers coming up from the south, full of talk about the new, nonviolent revolution. She told Shuck about the organizing on campus. He shuddered as a tremor of dread moved through his body. He remembered her awe, her naive view of the south apparent in every word she spoke. He stared at the newspaper and ducked his head, sorry they'd heard him before he finished the article. They chimed in just like they did when anyone brought up some tidbit of news in the bar. You could barely get a thought out before they jumped all over it.

  "They won't treat those white kids the way they treat us." Iris sipped gin and tonic from a tall glass, eyeing the opulent Negroes on Shuck's wallpaper. Her hair sat in the neat rolled curls left by the curling iron. She more than likely had plans for the night and didn't want to comb it out too soon in the summer humidity. Iris, with three boys and a teenaged daughter, didn't have a steady man and wasn't going to get one. No matter. Going out and having a good time after working all week long precluded the need for a man.

  Posey, his waist wrapped in his bar apron, brought Shuck's orange juice. "In Mississippi, a nigger lover and a nigger's the same damn thing."

  "Notjust in Mississippi." Chink sat with Rodney at a small bar table near the juke box, smoking his filter tipped cigarettes, taking shallow inhales because the doctor told him he wasn't supposed to be smoking at all.

  "That's the truth." Millicent's lips pursed in finality or dare.

  Iris looked out the front windows of the Royal Gardens. "You wrong."

  Shuck lowered the paper a bit, then turned to the continuation of the article. "Says here they added one hundred new police officers, bought a truckload of ne
w rifles, and they're using the fairgrounds as a prison in Jackson. The governor's hired seven hundred more highway patrolmen. Damn." Shuck's butter-cream, short-sleeved shirt flared against his dark brown arms like a lantern burning yellow in the back corner. He wondered if all those new hired hands had any training and what kind of training it could possibly be. He didn't want to think about it. Figured they were just a bunch of southern white boys whose main job would be to crack heads all summer long. "Go to Mississippi and end up like Emmett Till. They don't even kill like normal people," he mumbled, putting the paper down.

  "Man, y'all need to forget Emmett Till. That shit happened a long time ago." Rodney, ever vigilant and eternally afraid of the wrath of white people, shook his big surly head in little swipes. He must've been reading Shuck's lips.

  "How you gon' forget that, Rodney?" Shuck stepped on Rodney's words and didn't apologize, wanted to tell him to shut up, but he was too good a customer to insult.

  No Negro person in his right mind would ever forget Emmett Till. Back in 1955, the regulars from the General Motors Cadillac Body Plant stumbled in the door of the Royal Gardens with a jet magazine wedged in their back pockets. They told Shuck they'd done what they always did every time the new jet came out-bought a copy and immediately flipped the pages to the centerfold photo of a big-legged, tiny-waisted, soft brown girl in a bathing suit. This time, they never got to the centerfold. Emmett Till, pressed into his fourteen-year-old's coffin, a bullet hole one inch above his right ear, body beaten and bloated from its dead-boy float in the mudbrown waters of the Tallahatchie River, jumped out and grabbed them on page six. It was their most god-awful nightmare come true, and not one of them had ever even been in Mississippi.

  Like every Negro in America, Shuck had heard the story of Emmett Till, how he'd whistled at a pretty white girl in Money, Mississippi, and that was the last time he ever whistled. But he hadn't seen those pictures. It was like Cassius Clay had sucker-punched him hard in the stomach. With Billy and Celeste drinking soft drinks on two stools at the back end of the bar, Shuck wiped tears from his eyes and vowed he'd never let a child of his go below the Mason-Dixon line in this life or any other. Later, he talked to Billy about what had happened to Emmett Till in Mississippi. Billy told Celeste, who hadn't understood his words, but she peeked at the photos in the magazine. The kids didn't so much as mumble on the ride to Momma Bessie's that day, as if they too had come to understand something that was way beyond their age, visceral and eternal. He chastised himself for letting Celeste see those photos. He questioned himself about Billy seeing them, too, but he was older and he was a boy. The images mesmerized everyone who saw them and there was more than one lesson in them, he knew.

  Big Rodney's knees bounced up and down, vibrating the ashtray across the small Formica table. "What happened to the nonviolence? Sound like they ready for war."

  "Nonviolence's for us." Chink sat slouched over his ginger ale, seeming smaller than he really was next to big Rodney, and lighter, too.

  "White folks not giving up a thing to Negroes without a fight." Shuck knew nothing came easy except the sweet money from hitting a dream number. "Mississippi's gonna be a bloodbath. Worse than Birmingham."

  Chink uncoiled, shaking his head "no." "Nothing worse than Birmingham, man." He steadied his ice-clogged glass so Rodney wouldn't bounce it right off the table. "They bomb so many houses and churches, people callin' it Bombingham." Chink harbored a deep interest in the city where he'd been born, though as time went on he admitted it less and less.

  "Man, no place is as bad as Mississippi. You know that as well as I do." They didn't know it from firsthand knowledge, but they sure knew it from myth and whispers and the running feet of all the Negroes who'd piled into Detroit. "Who knows how many Negroes been killed down there, or how many houses been bombed? Bet your sweet ass they'll know this summer with all those white kids running around. Bet you the whole damned place will change." With Shuck, everything presented itself as a possibility for a wager. He slid the stack of mail in front of him, slapping through the bills and stopping when he saw Celeste's large but even handwriting on the front of an envelope postmarked Chicago. She hadn't said anything about going to Chicago.

  "See, they not going to let white kids be strung up and shot down. They not gon' do that." He tore the envelope open and pulled out the one-page note. "Anybody wanna bet?" Nobody said a word.

  She'd written June 13 on the top of the letter. It was already the fifteenth.

  Dear Daddy:

  By the time you read this, I'll be in Mississippi volunteering for the Freedom Summer project to help with voter registration.

  Shuck double-checked the envelope and looked hard at the handwriting. It was Celeste's. No doubt about it. He reread the date on the top of the page, the first line. She was already in Mississippi.

  I know you know what's been going on down there. Lots of kids from schools all over the country are going down. It's a big thing. Maybe by the end of the summer, the whole racial thing will be different in the south, the rest of the country, too. This will be great if I go to law school, don't you think? I'll be fine. Don't worry. You can leave a message for me at the One Man, One Vote office in Jackson, Mississippi. Will call as soon as I can.

  Love,

  Celeste

  Frozen where he sat, Shuck heard the flattened-out voices of his customers talking about rights and wrongs, about the tangled history of Negroes and white folks, saw them gesturing in the air, smoke curling up and away from their faces. Coleman Hawkins sounded like heaven must feel. Posey stood behind the bar, hands on hips, farther away than he should be. Sitting there, Shuck tried to come up with one good thing he could say about Mississippi. Everybody including his mother, Momma Bessie, would think Celeste had lost her mind leaving her good life to go to that godforsaken place. He could go down there and get her, force her to come back.

  Rodney tapped his near empty glass of ice and bar bourbon, his eyes darting towards the door. "Don't y'all have nothing else to talk about?"

  "Rodney, man, stop shaking the table." Chink pressed his weight against one of the table legs. "What you want to talk about?"

  "The weather. That's all he ever wants to talk about." Millicent's iridescent pink sundress and matching jacket soft-lit her face in sunset rose. Shuck looked at her down the bar. She wasn't a pretty woman, but she fixed herself up so well, you didn't even notice unless you stared at her.

  Rodney's eyes snapped from the jukebox to the front door and back to the jukebox. "I don't give a damn what's going on down there." He rocked back on the chair's hind legs.

  "You already broke one of my chairs, Rodney." Shuck held onto the bar to keep from going over and crashing a pitcher on Rodney's head.

  Rodney leveled the chair on the floor, gave Shuck a sheepish look.

  "Posey, give Rodney another drink. He's scared I got a white man from General Motors behind the walls listening." Shuck tapped the envelope corner on the bar top. "And bring me a Crown Royal on the rocks." He labored to even out his breathing, not sure if Posey heard him.

  "I told him two or three times, the only white man comes in here is that mafia trainee takes the coins out the party girl." Posey's arms, sinews taut and black as raven wings, moved like precision blades setting up for the night crowd. "He's in and out so fast, I don't even know what he looks like. Shuck, you know what he looks like?"

  "Posey. Bring me a Crown Royal on the rocks." This time he knew Posey heard him because Posey's eyes narrowed and clouded over with a question. Shuck drank from his private stock on momentous occasions. He tilted his head so the customers wouldn't see his eyes.

  Posey stood there. "Who died?" He grabbed the Crown Royal bottle from its sacred place beneath the bar, scooped ice into a short glass, and brought it down to Shuck.

  Millicent swiveled on her barstool. "Remember when Kennedy got killed? The only thing Rodney wanted to know was if a colored man had done it. Afraid every Negro in America was going to pay, especial
ly him." She released a streamlined breath of smoke that drifted and dispersed in the space between Rodney's table and the bar.

  "Celeste left school." Shuck drank the smooth whiskey down in one swallow and hit the bar top with the bottom of his glass. "Gone to Mississippi." Shuck could feel the confusion at play across his own face, muffling the clarity in his eyes.

  Posey stepped back like he'd been hit, then seemed to sway with the realization. "Well, I be goddamned."

  "Who's in Mississippi?" Millicent jerked around, leaned on the bar top like she might slide down to Shuck and Posey, save whoever it was in Mississippi.

  "Shuck's daughter." Posey poured Shuck another drink, brandishing the elegant bottle of Crown Royal.

  Shuck felt the question-marked faces of his regulars all turn to him, stare like they'd just heard some apocryphal madness. The regulars knew his kids, had watched them grow up.

  Iris, her little curls and scalp parts looking like a road map to nowhere, glanced at the lush Negro images on the walls. "Well, baby, you got a problem now." She finished her drink and lit a cigarette, holding it like one of the elegant New York-looking women in the wallpaper.

  "Shit's going on all over the country. She could come here and be in the Movement. Everything ain't that great right here." Shuck didn't know if the words came out of his mouth or not, but he sure thought them hard. The only thing to do with Mississippi was to leave it, to run away from it as fast as you could. Or, better yet, blow it off the map of the United States. Not one more Negro person had to die in that place for the point to be made. Then a gnawing thought took hold. More than likely that paintbrush-wielding, blue-jeans-and-sandals-wearing white boyfriend had something to do with this decision. Shuck's teeth clamped down until his jaw muscles hurt. Just like a white boy to lead his daughter to hell, a hell he more than likely would survive without a scratch but where she could die in a split second. He was white. He could fade into the woodwork of Mississippi or any place else for that matter. Celeste couldn't.