Moonrise over new jessup, p.16
Moonrise Over New Jessup, page 16
Most times, it was a couple hours on the living room sofa, or sometimes at the kitchen table next to the phone, which is where I was waiting on Raymond one early morning when the logging truck rumbled by the window. It was late October, and the sweetgum was blazing crimson in the height of fall. I shot up from slumbering on my elbow, thinking it was the wrecker coming back, but when I looked outside, a pickup loaded down with men zipped by on the road as the sun spread across the horizon. Behind it, a logging truck hungry for logs lumbered to the shoulder next to the camellias. The pickup turned off way at the opposite end of the garden, turned left, and disappeared into the pines. I fixed the coffee, looking and listening for any signs of work while I started breakfast, but the distance between us swallowed the roar of any chainsaws and turned swaying treetops into a trick of the wind.
We’d married August 8, 1959, and left the honeymoon suite at the Collier House for Raymond and Percy’s old bedroom. It had moss green carpet, car wallpaper, and their two beds pushed together in the middle of the room, short-sheeted by my new in-laws before they left town. He dropped my suitcase and we walked right back out the house, past the high corn, past blood-red roses, through the bursts of hydrangeas, inventing names of colors since God ran out, until we finally stopped at a wall of woods so thick and dark with trees it looked like somebody cut the lights out inside. Behind there was another mess of land belonging to the family, where we’d dreamed about building our own house.
We walked Pop out to the land a few days later, and he craned his neck all the way back, scratching his chin, looking up at the canopy of ancient cypress and live oak extending to the sun. Then he turned his eyes to a line of giant carpenter ants marching across the never-disturbed ferns and moss covering the forest floor as we explained our plans.
“You wanna build . . . way out here?” he asked with amused skepticism.
“It’s just on the other side of the garden. This way, we ain’t gotta clear any of the fruit trees to make way for the house,” Raymond said.
Pop’s laugh burst from him so loud and spontaneous it sent the birds fleeing from branches overhead.
“Your husband has finally lost his mind,” he said, his shoulders heaving with soundless chuckles. “Y’all don’t wanna take down some itty-bitty cherry trees, some little old peach trees, but you wanna down these thousand-year-old cypress?” He laughed so hard he looked to be choking on the sound. It was teasing fun, if just around the bend from ridicule. “I’m old enough to remember what it took to clear these trees, all these men out here. Why do you think so much of it’s still standing at the edges of town?”
He cared nothing about me and Raymond’s conversation with Harold Jenkins about the project. That builder didn’t have equipment fancy enough, Pop told us, to finish our house before Easter. But the Jenkins had driven nails in the first Jessup, and every Jessup since, Harold boasted as he inspected the site, gave one or two of the trees a fleshy slap, and declared that we needed five bedrooms, not four. Four bathrooms, not just three. Two stories, and not just one with all this good wood.
Pop straightened up and looked over to his place. The way his face fell, the other side of the garden may as well have been the end of the earth. It was close enough to see his house as a speck off in the distance, but far enough that a holler would disappear in the air between us. A two-minute drive, I measured, from door to door.
“See? Two minutes,” Raymond said when I objected that it was too much house for Pop alone and worried about his laundry, his meals, his nighttime company. Who needs all that space to be alone? I argued. With nothing bouncing around, no life to fill it or soak into the walls. To sit with the quiet company of nothing. Thinking of that, watching him crane his neck, squint his eyes, and look off towards his place, I promised him a room in our house big as me and Raymond’s bedroom (bigger, even!). They raised those identical eyebrows at me. Pop snorted his appreciation.
“Thank you for your charity, Alice,” he said, “but I have a home, right off yonder. Y’all are welcome to visit any time.”
Cypress logs twice as thick as a man is tall lined the truck bed when I got home that first day, and it seemed things would go smoothly. It crawled by the kitchen window on four near-flat tires to offload at the lumber mill. All that, but in the distance, it hardly looked like a single leaf had fallen. After carrying on like that for another day or two, inside the wall of trees was a forest of stumps.
Raymond drove we three into a dining room fit for giants one crisp night after supper. The Studebaker crawled through such dense pine and magnolia that the thick, gnarled branches groaned and snapped against the metal. The trees swallowed the tire-track driveway behind us and hugged us tight inside, where the golden hearts of stumps big as eight-tops glowed softly in the moonlight. We three climbed atop one and soaked in a midnight sky priceless with diamonds, out there in me and Raymond’s Alabama. Raymond inhaled the enchantment deep into his lungs, and with his arm wrapped around me, my head against his chest, I heard his heartbeat quicken just before he continued words started between them earlier in the day at the shop.
“See, Pop? I told you these trees would come down quick.”
Pop snorted and laid his head back, resting on the tree’s golden heart.
“Heh heh, yeah. But what about these stumps?”
“Harold said the excavator’ll make quick work of the stumps.”
When Pop stopped cackling, he said, “Alright. But back in the day, the old-timers used dynamite.”
“Say old man, speaking of the old-timers?” Raymond started before he paused. “You . . . know that thing we were talking about earlier?”
“This again?”
“Will you just hear me out?”
“Go on ahead with your fairy tale,” Pop sang dismissively. I squeezed around Raymond’s waist to give him a little courage.
“You’re sitting in my living room right now, old man. You know that? So you gonna hear me out or what?”
“I’m sitting on a cypress stump right now, Raymond,” he said. “A cypress stump that Harold’ll need dynamite to get rid of, you watch what I’m telling you. Boom.” But Pop was at home atop that tree, eyes closed underneath our saints watching from above. “Same as they used when I was in short pants, living in these woods with New Jessup coming up around me. So before you say anything, remember that Big Poppa built all this up with his mind bent on Negroes owning the land, whether we were our own city or not. So why now?”
I had not imagined how, when, or if he would broach the subject of municipality with his Pop. We had not discussed it, and I figured news of seeking city status and any revelation about his work with the NNAS would go hand in glove. Which meant I thought it was Raymond’s news to share. So as I listened to his heart pounding, and his words, to reveal the whole truth of his doings, my heart started beating a little fast, too, since I had also kept this secret about the NNAS from Pop.
As Raymond explained about dollars and dimes, wanting to preserve what the town fathers built, a star’s mischievous wink brought to mind Mama and Daddy and white Jesus. Rensler was the kind of segregated where whitefolks went anywhere they pleased. Including Mount Glory Baptist—a church house full of Negroes—where a giant picture of white Jesus hung behind the altar on Sundays though we had not a single white worshipper among us. Yet there He was, arms outstretched with ruddy, pink skin, and long, wavy brown hair offering salvation.
But when I was little, Mama would drag feet on Sundays. When we were just ready to go, she’d say, “C’mon, let’s all go pray to white Jesus.” Me and my sister would laugh, because of course Jesus was white. He was right up there over the pulpit, and all around Rensler, whitefolks seemed to be doing just fine. Without cracking a smile, Daddy would tell me and my sister to pray for Mama and ourselves. That we were raised in a church of godliness, and we were to repent and ask for His grace.
But one Sunday, under that portrait, Pastor preached 1 John 1:8–9.
“If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us. If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.”
Forgiveness from all unrighteousness? For the sale of my daddy and the nigger baths and the sunset silhouette trying to drag me behind the toolshed? For 1903 and the swamp? All manner of hatefulness forgiven, and a place in heaven assured, because of words confessed with a last, miserable breath? Under that beautiful night, as the star winked at me and our kin watched us from above, the same question formed in my mind that I’d had when I was a little girl: who was seated next to my folks? My people? Was the rich reward we had been promised for our earthly suffering only an eternal blackdamp? Because it seemed no kind of heaven for Negroes if our tormentors could just apologize and follow us right into the stars.
“It ain’t about desegregation, Pop.” Raymond continued a thought I’d missed. “I can assure you me and Alice’s children will go to New Jessup schools with students and teachers who look like them. But since the beginning of time, whitefolks hear ‘integration’ and they automatically call it ‘infiltration,’ when Negroes around here ain’t even interested in fellowship. We want our resources. The nickels and dimes we’re already owed without them telling us how to spend it. Nothing more.”
“You think they won’t fight you over nickels and dimes, son? That was greed and envy in the hearts of men driving us into the swamp, just because we had some coin to our names.”
“I know it, but at least we take mixing off the table. Look, you got a better solution, Pop, I’m all ears. But I don’t want my kids in a desegregated school, and this movement has new life on both sides. For whitefolks, that’s young blood reviving old ideas about violence and intimidation. For us, it’s fresh ways of thinking, including this. We can’t stop this momentum, but we can take this energy and make something for ourselves. We already have separation here, and it works.”
With his head still rested in his hands, his back still on the stump, Pop trained his gaze on me.
“Did you know about this municipality scheme, too? First I ever heard anybody in this house mention this was today.” He seemed unsurprised about my sheepish shrug. “So you want this too, then? You’re on board with it?” he asked me.
“I don’t want New Jessup to change, if that’s what you asking. I want our people to stay separate, to have our own heaven here on earth, and I can only hope it’s like this for our kin up there, too.”
He sat up then, looking steadily at Raymond, and I braced myself to hear him admit his doings with the NNAS.
“Tell me the truth?” Pop said.
“Truth,” promised Raymond.
“Your Monday nights playing cards with the fellas? This is what y’all been cooking up all along?”
“Yessir, for a while there. Till all that business with Patience, anyway. Been laying low since then. But we have a short window for a big change, so,” he paused, and I just knew the whole truth was in his lungs, waiting to pass his lips, “it would sure mean a lot to have your blessing. Maybe you could help smooth the way with some of the old heads for us? You always said Campbell meant something in this town. That it was our duty to put our community first. This is me, the rest of the fellas, trying to do that.”
The opportunity for truth came and went on the breath leaving his mouth. Floated off and vanished. Pop looked at Raymond with a mixture of pride and fear in his eyes. Then me. He stared at us for a long time before he leaned back on top of the stump in our living room, looking up at our saints as they winked, spied, and protected us from their place inside the sky. Then, he said, with equal parts apology and permission,
“You do what’s best for your family, son. That’s all a man can ever do.”
sixteen
Even the sprinkling of carols from the supermarket speakers seemed unable to soothe Percy into conversation at first. He followed me around the store like a man who never set foot inside a grocery: hovering at my shoulder, watching me check prices and pick the brands I thought best, peering at the labels like he was newly discovering the idea of selection. When we reached the end of the aisles, he placed a hand on the front of the buggy, telling me to wait while he looked left and right, like we were crossing an intersection in the car. We only started talking in earnest about halfway into the trip, just when we reached the baking aisle.
He was only with me because Dot twisted both our arms after he showed up to the house full of Christmas cheer for everybody, and a slight winter’s chill just for me. Me and Dot spent mornings together while the men walked, and worked, the job site before breakfast—her, rubbing a seven-months round belly and eyeballing my flat one. Squirming and shifting, she breathed hard, trying to get comfortable as the baby twisted around inside her.
“Mama Cat always told me these Campbell babies are hard to birth, but easy to love,” she said, rubbing her stomach and trying to put a brave face on the baby giving her fits. But she seemed pale and tired, like being big hurt her, though she insisted I lay a hand on her belly to feel the baby kicking. That child kicked three times—whack, whack, whack—not once, and I joked that she was too small to be expecting such a mean-seeming baby.
“My baby isn’t mean,” she scolded as she winced and grabbed her back like he was mean. “Just active, and that’s a good thing. Besides, you know any child of Percy Charles Campbell has to start life fussing about something.” She winced again and put her cup down, changing the subject.
“You wouldn’t even know there’s a house being built out there,” she said, looking out the window towards the pines.
“It’s just a big patch of mud right now, but it’s supposed to be done before Easter,” I said. “Harold says after the holidays, it’ll go quick. But Harold always says it’ll go quick.”
She nodded absentmindedly as she sat back in her chair, looking out the window. Her eyes didn’t even register my joke; instead, she just looked outside at our land, deep in thought, with the common sigh, and the drifting eyes, of a Negro woman somehow exhausted by the world. Her eyes squeezed at some memory she kept to herself, and I dared not ask what ached her other than the baby, because she would tell if she wanted to tell. I needed not know the particulars of slight to know the look and language of hurt, to know the world well enough to know how hard she was working to keep this wound from stilling her heart. But her voice—breathy, soft, and slower than I had ever heard—surprised me with something other than the sadness behind her smile.
“We’re coming home, you know. Me, Percy, and the baby. He wants to be in New Jessup, to work with Raymond, to raise our family here,” she said.
“I never heard a bigger lie,” I told her. She smiled and shook her head that quick way that said she was satisfied with my reaction to her surprise. “Dorothy, you talking about your husband? My brother-in-law? Percy Charles Campbell?”
“Unless you know another one.”
“Well, he must’ve been body snatched, then, to be talking about coming home to New Jessup, Alabama.”
“You’d better hush talking about my husband like that.”
“I’m just saying . . . now, I have really heard it all.”
“Yeah, honey. He’s planning to tell Pop and Raymond at breakfast. By the time we laid head to pillow last night, he’d already plotted our house right next to yours, down to the paint on the walls.”
“What color paint then?”
She smiled and looked at me with the sparkles returned in her eyes.
“You hardly have to ask. Whatever Raymond picked, you know.”
“And he’s . . . gonna join Raymond for those meetings, too?”
She nodded.
“Percy has his own mind, make no mistake about that. But Raymond does know how to move his brother. Sometimes, it’s talking. Sometimes, they used to tussle—you saw that at Christmas last year, and lord, I hope that season of their lives is over. But mostly, when the talking doesn’t work, Raymond just . . . does his own thing. No words; just deeds. Percy can’t help but notice, think on it, and then poke out his chest like it was his idea all along. Just like he is about this move, bless his little heart; he’s pretending to forget that I’ve been wanting to come home since college. But my husband is a smart man, Alice, and he can be reasonable, given some time, you know?” There was a soft edge of pleading and demand in her voice. “Like when I told him last night he’d better not plan on feuding with my sister-in-law forever, and you and him need to have a conversation. He grumbled about it before going to sleep but woke up saying he thought y’all should talk. Whatever. Just have a conversation with him? For me?”
So with Percy behind Blue Lightning’s wheel, the two of us drove to the supermarket for ginger ale, canned pineapple, and some other things we needed on Christmas Eve. Along the way, he ground the gears and complained that “they” had yet to fix my car properly although an entire year had passed. But other than wishing they had listened to him about the water pump, the ride was jerky and quiet. When we arrived at the ginger ale, he picked up the Schweppes and I grabbed the store brand.
“That’s high today,” I said. “And I have a coupon for this other one.”
“But this is the one she keeps at the house.” I put mine back and he placed his in the buggy. Then, he watched me put 7-Up in the cart with a slight, questioning frown. “She likes this one,” he said about the Schweppes again.
“Ginger Ale’s for her. 7-Up’s for the cake.” He nodded and we moved on in silence that felt like somebody needed to fill it as we next wound our way down the baking aisle.
“I’m glad to hear we’ll be neighbors,” I told him. He nodded and scanned some prices for instant pudding. “Your brother, Pop, they over the moon. Your father told me him and Miss Catherine always thought their closest grandbabies would be in Montgomery.”
“Yeah, they used to say that all the time. Trying to guilt Regina and Edward or Trevor and Emma Jean to move back, or at least come home more often.” He picked up a can of evaporated milk, bounced it in his hand, and placed it back, label front, on the shelf.
