Summer of the Redeemers Read online

  “Why’d they try to hang him? He hasn’t had a trial yet.”

  “No need for a trial,” Jamey Louise said, her chin lifting a bit. “He’s guilty. He didn’t deny it. He said he killed Mr. Fallon.”

  “But Mr. Fallon killed his brother.”

  “Yeah, but he was just a nigger. That don’t count.”

  Maybe it was the way she said it. I knew suddenly that Effie was at the jail to protect a Negro man she didn’t even know. Folks around Jexville were thinking like Jamey Louise. That Ollie Stanford had killed a white man without good cause. In their minds there was no reason for a nigger to fight back. They could fight among themselves, but they couldn’t fight a white man. It was the law, unwritten but very real.

  “Take me to the jail.”

  “Your granny said to bring you straight on home,” Emily Welford said, already sounding nervous.

  “I want to go to my mother.” I was scared, and it made my voice sharp.

  “Don’t go getting on your high horse with my mama,” Jamey Louise said. “You can’t order us around like you do Alice and the others.”

  “Mrs. Welford, I’ve got a terrible feeling that Effie may need my help. Is she down there alone?”

  “I don’t know,” Emily admitted. “Not many folks feel the same way she does. Not white ones, at least. And the Negroes are too scared to go down there.” She cast a nervous glance in the rearview mirror and our eyes met. Emily Welford would never admit in public that she agreed with Effie, not about a black man. But she felt something, and a reflection of it was in her eyes. She frightened me.

  “What is it?”

  “I heard there was a crowd gathering at the jail. Joe Wickham called her and said the men folks had been drinking and were getting rowdy. Your mama called some lawyers in Hattiesburg, but they couldn’t get to Jexville in time. That’s why she went down there. She was afraid something violent would happen. She went to stop it.”

  “By herself?”

  Emily nodded.

  Mama was alone. In all of my life, I’d never been afraid of the people living in and around Jexville. There was always talk about fights and brawls, but none of it touched Kali Oka Road. These were folks I’d grown up with, or at least heard about. Now I was afraid for Effie. She’d stepped over the line by going to the courthouse.

  “Take me to be with her. If there’s trouble, we’ll both ride home with you.”

  “Now, Bekkah, your granny said—”

  “If Mama gets hurt, Emily, it’s going to be your fault.”

  Cold and flat, the words made Jamey Louise gasp. “Well, I never heard such a thing in my life. It won’t be anybody’s fault but hers. No one made her go there. No one—”

  “Jamey Louise, you’d better shut up.” I was rigid with fear. The Welfords’ old Plymouth rattled toward Chickasaw County.

  “We’ll ride by the jail,” Emily said slowly. “We can see if your mother’s okay. Then we’ll decide. If it looks dangerous, I’m not going to stop. Your mother is an adult. Besides, the sheriff is there with her. Nothing bad will happen.”

  “It already has,” I whispered. I could feel it. There wasn’t a name for it, not exactly. In a week’s time, though, something very important had changed. “Please hurry, Mrs. Welford.”

  It was only another twenty minutes to town, but it seemed as if my eyeballs had gone completely dry. I couldn’t blink. The white lines disappeared beneath the front of the car and the tires whirred. Pine trees whipped by, followed by red dirt roads cutting into the woods. More pines. A few fields. A house here and there. The outskirts of Jexville. There wasn’t any air in the car. My fingers gripped the back of the front seat until the little plastic bubbles on the seat covers were permanently indented. There was the Soloman wrecker business that marked the east side of town, junked cars parked all around a nice house. Then the little house on the right beneath the hill, where one or another of Effie’s school friends had been beaten by her husband with a dog chain. I never knew the whole story, but I’d heard Mama Betts and Effie whispering about it.

  The old stores of downtown crested the top of a hill. There had once been enormous oak trees that canopied the main street, but the power company had cut them all down. What was left was a flat, ugly, half-mile strip of shops that needed a lot of paint and a lot of money. I knew every business on the street. Arly or I could walk in any of them and charge anything we wanted by saying our parents’ names. Most days I enjoyed shopping in Jexville, but I didn’t see the display of summer shorts in the window of the Dale Shop. The dark recesses of the Jexville Drug held no secret promises of ice cream and comic books. I wanted my mama. I wanted Effie, to feel her hand on my shoulder or tugging my braid.

  Emily turned left at the second red light and drove the two blocks to the county jail. Old and square and red brick, it was surrounded by a twelve-foot chain-link fence with rolled barbed wire along the top. I knew it was bad when I saw the men standing in the jail yard with rifles held across their chests.

  On the east side of the jail a large crowd had gathered. They were milling and talking. Mostly men, there were a few women scattered in it, and a handful of children. There wasn’t a sign of a Negro anywhere.

  They didn’t seem to be doing anything, just staring at the old jail. Two stories with crumbling masonry, the jail operated on a mutual-agreement basis. Convicted felons agreed to do time in the jail so they wouldn’t be sent to the state pen in Parchman. The jail wasn’t exactly secure, and often the prisoners were allowed out to pick up litter or to walk down to the Coffee Cup to get their lunches handed out of the kitchen door to them. About five times a year one of them would tie his bed sheets together and escape from the second floor of the jail. Since the crimes committed were seldom worse than burglary or public drunkenness, nobody got terribly upset. Joe Wickham would generally wait for the prisoner to get his business done and return to jail voluntarily.

  What struck me, though, was that if the jail couldn’t keep prisoners in, it certainly couldn’t keep that crowd of people out. From the distance of the courthouse yard, it didn’t look too bad. But there was something about the crowd, like a pot just getting ready to boil over. When it happened, it would be sudden and dangerous.

  Emily Welford slowed down when several of the men walked across the street in front of her car. They acted like they had more right to the road than she did, and she obliged them by almost stopping. It was my chance, and I opened the back door and made a dash for the courthouse. I knew where Joe Wickham’s office was, and I was hoping Effie was in there. I hadn’t seen her anywhere else, and I knew she wasn’t mingling with the crowd.

  For all the hubbub outside, the courthouse was quiet. The heavy wooden door to the sheriff’s office was hard to push, but I slipped in. I’d been in there several times with Daddy and Mama, and it was normally a place where the men leaned back in their chairs and talked on the phone or joked among themselves. There was only one sheriff and one deputy, but there were always a handful of men who volunteered to be constables. They liked the law enforcement work. Daddy said they were bullies by nature and deadbeats by fact. I didn’t fully understand what he meant, I just knew he was careful around them. He didn’t like any of the officers except Mr. Wickham, yet he was always harping how they needed more pay. There were lots of things about Daddy I didn’t understand, but as I walked up to the high wooden counter, I would have given anything I owned to have him with me.

  “Where’s Effie Rich?” I asked. I was tall enough to see over the counter, so I saw the glance the men exchanged. There were two volunteers and the deputy sitting around a scarred old desk. They were all smoking and drinking coffee from thick white mugs.

  Not a one of them answered me.

  “Where’s the sheriff?”

  “He’s busy.” The deputy smiled at his friends and then walked over toward me. He was holding his cigarette between two fingers stained yellow. “He ain’t got time for little girls.” His name tag said WAYLON SMITH.
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  “I’m Rebekah Rich, and I’m looking for my mother.” He frightened me. He was playing with me like a cat plays with a mouse, and I didn’t know why.

  “Tell me something, Rebekah Rich. Do you like niggers as much as your mama?”

  One of the men at the desk laughed. The other one put his coffee cup down and slowly stood up. “Maybe that ain’t such a good idea,” he said to the deputy.

  “I simply asked Miss Rich a question. She looks like an educated young girl. She can answer a simple question, can’t you, Miss Rich?”

  My lips were very dry and my tongue was sticking to my teeth. I knew they were being mean, but I didn’t understand why. I had the sudden thought that the plane had brought me back to a place I didn’t know. I’d come home to the wrong Jexville.

  “Maybe Miss Rich only talks with niggers.” The deputy leaned on the counter. “Is that the problem? Am I too white to answer?”

  The man at the desk laughed again. With a grumble of disgust, the other man left the office. He banged the door hard behind him.

  “I want to see my mother,” I said, trying not to let my voice shake but doing a bad job of it. I grabbed the edge of the counter and held until my knuckles turned white. “Where is she?”

  “She wanted to be with her nigger friend, so we put her in there with him.”

  The deputy’s little brown eyes were rimmed in red. As he leaned over the counter, his breath smelled of wintergreen. He’d been eating Life Savers. The roll was still in his shirt pocket.

  Mr. Wickham had given me a tour of the jail the past year when The Judge had taken me to the courthouse while he bought a car tag. The only way to get to the jail was through the sheriff’s office and out a back door that opened up in the jail yard. I’d have to run across the open space of yard to the jail building. That was a big metal door that required a special kind of key. I remembered Mr. Wickham showing me the key and how he hung it by the back door. With that mean deputy watching, I knew I couldn’t get the key and get inside, but I could call out for Effie and make sure she was okay.

  The deputy and his friend were chuckling at something else he said. Part of the counter swung up and revealed a door. I knew how it worked because Mr. Wickham had shown me. While the deputy was half watching me, I lifted up on the countertop with all of my strength.

  The wood, though heavy, swung up easily on well-oiled hinges. When I had it about halfway up, I felt a sudden resistance followed by a yelp of pain. I gave it an extra heave and it broke free of whatever was holding it. I didn’t realize I’d hit the deputy until I’d swung it wide open and was rushing through. When I looked back, I saw the deputy grabbing his nose. Blood gushed out from between his fingers. I ran as hard as I could. The door out of the office was unlocked, and I pushed through it and ran to the outside door. In a few seconds I was sprinting across the jail yard.

  “Mama!”

  My cry caught the attention of the milling crowd outside the fence.

  “Hey! Hey, you!” Several men in the crowd challenged me. “You, girl! Get out of there.”

  “Effie! Mama! Mama!” I had to find her before the men with the rifles came to stop me.

  “Bekkah?”

  The voice that answered me was incredulous. “Rebekah?”

  “I’m down here, Mama. I came to help you.”

  There was the slightest pause. Behind me the crowd was pushing toward the fence. Fingers laced into the chain link and the crowd surged. For a moment it looked as if the fence would give.

  “Rebekah Brighton Rich, what are you doing here in this jail?”

  “I came to be with you, Mama. Mrs. Welford brought me.”

  “Emily Welford hasn’t got the sense of a runover dog.”

  Mama’s voice was coming from one of the barred windows, but I couldn’t tell which one. The crowd outside the fence was growing louder. It buzzed, sort of like an insect. Occasionally someone’s voice would rise above the hum and say something about nigger lovers. It was only men talking. None of the women said anything.

  “Must be nigger-loving runs in the family,” someone yelled.

  I turned to look at the crowd. Shock must have registered on my face because there was a sudden tiny silence. I couldn’t believe I saw Mr. Sargeant, the butcher-shop owner with a rifle. He still had on his apron smeared with blood. And there was Theo Fontaine, who ran the Western Auto where Arly and I got new bicycles for Christmas every four or five years. They were looking at me like I was something terrible. I turned back to the old red brick wall. “Mama, why are you in jail?”

  “According to Joe, for my own protection.”

  Effie was pissed off in a big-time kind of way. I couldn’t believe Sheriff Wickham had put her in jail, but he had. And when she got out, he was going to pay.

  “Mama, let’s go home.” There were four windows on the bottom and four on top. I was having to talk loud for her to hear me, and I thought her voice was coming from the upper right-hand window, just above me. Sure enough, she stuck her hand out through the bars.

  “Bekkah, get out of this yard and back inside the courthouse. Just wait in the sheriff’s office for me. I can’t leave here until some of the people from Hattiesburg get here.”

  “I’m not leaving here without you.” I’d expected the men with rifles to run me out of the jail yard, but they were too intent on watching the crowd. The insect noise had increased. The air hummed all around me.

  “Rebekah!”

  Mama’s hand pointed down at me.

  I didn’t see the glass until it struck the dirt at my feet. It was heavy and green, a vicious jag from a 7-Up bottle. Part of it had a dark stain on it. When I bent down to look at it, another spatter of red fell on my hand. I looked up and saw the blood on Effie’s arm.

  “That’s for you, you nigger-loving bitch!”

  The voice that came out of the crowd was young. It was taut with fury, a boy’s voice breaking with emotion. I searched the crowd and no one would look back. The hum had stilled. There was only silence. When I looked back up at the window, Effie’s arm was gone. There was a streak of blood on the bricks at the windowsill.

  Fifteen

  MHE twenty-seven stitches in Effie’s arm brought Daddy home.

  The university paid for his flight. Mama Betts said they were courting him hard. She said that like an anxious groom they were willing to buy anything to win his favor. That wasn’t true. Daddy had already told them he wasn’t going to stay there and work for them. I tried to tell her that, but she wasn’t inclined to listen. She was too upset over Effie, her own one-time baby. The shock of someone hurting Effie was almost too much for Mama Betts to take in. She was also upset that she’d been home on Kali Oka when it all happened. In Effie’s hour of need, Mama Betts felt like she’d let her down. Of course that wasn’t true. Had Mama Betts been there, nothing would have gone differently.

  The ruckus at the jail died down shortly after Effie was carried out by ambulance. She lost a lot of blood real fast. No one in the crowd really wanted to hang around once they realized she’d been cut bad. A few people, including the deputy, grumbled that she’d gotten what she deserved. Mostly they just sort of drifted away, one or two at a time, until there wasn’t anyone left standing outside the fence. When the ambulance got there, it drove right to the jail. They carried Effie out on a stretcher, and I rode in the ambulance with her to the hospital. There wasn’t a sign of Emily and Jamey Louise. For that I was thankful.

  Daddy’s flight came in that night, and Arly and I rode with Effie to get him. Even though it was against the law, Effie let Arly drive.

  Her arm hurt, and she was sick to her stomach. The doctor had wanted to keep her at the hospital, but she was so mean he finally let her go.

  Once Daddy got off the plane and slid behind the wheel, my whole world started feeling better. Arly was in the backseat with me, where he belonged, and Mama and Daddy were together.

  “You did a brave thing,” Daddy said to Effie as we headed down the
dark road to Jexville. The traffic was sparse, and there were long passages of time when there was only the glow of the dash to illuminate the car.

  “I only intended to go there until the defense lawyers from Hattiesburg could arrive.”

  “You made the effort, though, Effie. You stood up for what you believe.”

  “And it shouldn’t have been a big deal. Every man deserves a trial. Why is that so hard for those people to understand?”

  “ ‘Cause he’s a nigger,” Arly piped in. I could tell by his voice that he wasn’t being smart-alecky. He was trying to explain it to Effie. I also knew he was in for it now.

  “I didn’t realize that was a word my son used,” Mama said softly.

  “Well, that’s what folks are saying.” Arly’s voice was edgy. He knew he’d stepped in it. “I don’t normally say that word, but that’s what folks are saying and that’s why they don’t think he deserves a trial.”

  “And what does my son think?” Effie asked.

  “Let it go tonight, Effie,” Daddy said softly. “We’re all tired. The children have been scared to death. No one’s thinking right.”

  “I’ve got twenty-seven stitches in my arm because someone disagreed with my views. And my child is in the backseat of our car aping the words and attitudes of the type person who cut me.”

  The more she talked, the higher her voice went. She’d held back in the hospital. It was all about to boil out and burn us.

  “Arly didn’t mean anything,” I said. “It’s what people are saying. Jamey Louise said the same thing to me today.”

  “Jamey Louise is a moron. I expect better from my children.”

  “We know better, Mama. Arly just slipped up.” I wasn’t in the habit of defending him, but I wanted everything to be good. Daddy was home. I didn’t want any fighting. What got started between Mama and Arly could carry over to Mama and Daddy. It had happened before. In the back of my head I remembered the past week in Missouri. Me and Daddy and Cathi hadn’t argued for a minute. That scared me. I kicked Arly as hard as I could in the shin. His fingers dug into my arm, and it was all I could do not to cry out.