The last thing you surre.., p.39
The Last Thing You Surrender, page 39
“How is she?” asked Mamie.
“She got hysterical,” said Gramp, breathless from being pulled across the basement. “Told us to get out. I ain’t never seed her like this. She wasn’t nothin’ like herself. Nurse made us leave, ’cause Thelma wouldn’t stop hollerin’. ‘Get out of here. Get out of here. Get out of here.’ Like she hate us. Like she blame us for what happened.”
“Oh, my Lord,” said Mamie.
“Maybe she be better after she done had a chance to calm down,” said Rafe.
Mamie seized on the hope in his voice. “Yeah,” she said, “you probably right. Can’t expect her not to be torn up, somethin’ like that happen. And the memory still fresh.”
Their conversation seemed to be happening in another room. It was a droning sound of which Flora Lee was only vaguely aware, submerged as she was inside her own pain. And all at once, she knew what she had to do. Rafe was saying something about coming back tomorrow. Flora Lee interrupted him. “Would you please see that Gramp get back home?” she asked.
They regarded her strangely. Mamie said, “You ain’t goin’ back with us?”
Flora Lee said, “No. I done been enough of a burden on you folks already. And I got somethin’ I got to do.”
Rafe studied her. She read concern in his dark eyes. “Miss Flora Lee,” he asked, “are you all right?”
Flora Lee inclined her head toward the building behind her. “Just take care of her,” she said. “She gon’ need a lot of help.”
“What about you, Miss Flora Lee?”
“I be along directly,” said Flora Lee, hoping the lie did not sound as transparent as it felt. “Just got to do somethin’ first.”
She moved away from them before they could question her further, one hand already digging into the front pocket of her work pants, searching for change to ride the bus. The first bus sailed right past the stop, so jammed that people were standing in the stepwell. When the second bus came along 15 minutes later and the front door whisked open, she elbowed her way past a tired-looking man in a battered hat and dirty overalls who said, “Geez, lady, wait your turn, would you?” But she was already on and did not care.
Twenty minutes after that, she stepped off at the end of the line and began to walk. It took her another 20 minutes. She walked past where the streetlights ended. She walked past where the asphalt ended. She walked through trees dripping Spanish moss onto a carpet of wild grass.
The late spring sun was waning in the sky when she came to a cleared space where about a dozen large tents were erected, six or seven trailers were parked, and families were huddled before cook pots on open flames, barefoot, sullen-eyed children looking on hungrily as mothers stirred the evening meal.
When she emerged from the woods, they stared at her as if she were an apparition. “Flora Lee,” said a man with a single tooth hanging from the top gum of his grimy mouth. He did not think to keep the surprise out of his voice.
A woman suckling an infant at her breast with her left arm while stirring a cook pot with her right hand said, “Didn’t expect to see you again.”
Another woman said, “You come back to him, huh?”
Flora Lee ignored the question, nodding toward the last trailer in the row. “He here?” It was the only trailer from which no light emanated, and she was pretty sure she already knew the answer.
“Nope,” said the man. “Ain’t seed him yet. Tell the truth, since y’all busted up, he don’t usually come in till late.”
Flora Lee looked at them, her neighbors for most of the time she had been in this city, people whose children she had watched, whose fires she had tended, whose small secrets and sins she had dutifully kept. She seemed to see them as if from some great distance.
“I’m gon’ wait for him in the trailer,” she said.
“Oooh,” the women cooed, their voices rising together in a siren of suggestiveness.
“You go on and do that,” one of them said. “He be along directly.”
The man with the single tooth—Barney, his name was—leered at her and said, “’Fore y’all get too carried away makin’ up, you best remember some of us got to get up and go to work in the mornin’. Don’t y’all keep us awake.”
Salacious laughter followed Flora Lee up the single step to the trailer door. She tried her key and the door opened. Flora Lee stepped inside and closed it behind her. The small interior was stifling and rank. Flies buzzed about a tower of dishes in the sink. Clothing, his and hers, was strewn about the floor. The little fold-down ironing board was open. One of Earl Ray’s shirts lay on it, a scorch mark in the shape of an iron prominent across the sleeve.
She tossed the shirt aside and folded the board back into its spot on the wall. At the far end of the little space, just beyond the sink, was the hard little bed where they had slept. A nightstand, molded into the frame of the trailer, jutted from the wall opposite the sink, narrowing the passageway and giving the sleeping space some vague illusion of privacy.
By now it was dark in the trailer, the sun fully gone, the only light filtering in through the louvered kitchen windows from the two-thirds of a moon that hovered above. But Flora Lee did not need light. She knew this space, its contours as familiar to her as the inside of her own mouth. She pulled open the top drawer of the nightstand and rummaged around for only a moment before she found what she was looking for. Then she closed the drawer and went back to sit on the couch at the table near the front. From outside, she heard meals being dished onto plates, heard children fussing with each other, heard the sharp rapping of wood on wood as somebody triple-jumped somebody else’s checkers, and the man who had pulled the feat off hooted in triumph. Insects sang to the night. She closed her eyes and waited.
She had tried. The Lord knew she had tried. She had tried to make the marriage work, living with a mean, impossible man until fear for her very life had driven her away. And she had tried to make her new life work too, had gotten a job, had found friends and a place that felt like home, and had even begun to make plans for herself beyond this war, beyond this place. She had tried. And Earl Ray Hodges had ruined that, too.
From her youngest days, she had been the girl the other girls giggled about when she passed, the one they closed ranks against because to admit her into their circle was to make their circle—indeed, the very idea of circles—meaningless. She had grown used to not having a friend, used to her aloneness, used to whispering her secrets only to God. And then Thelma had come along and changed everything. Maybe she had thought Flora Lee mousy, ugly, and contrary, too, in addition to being white—which, in her world, Flora Lee was starting to understand, would be the worst thing of all. Yet despite that, and at great risk to herself and everyone around her, Thelma had taken Flora Lee in. Even though she had had every good reason not to be, Thelma had been her friend.
And look what had happened. Earl Ray had beaten her. Raped her. In so doing, he had taken away the one good thing in Flora Lee’s life. And then, almost as if her hatred had conjured him up, she heard him coming.
Flora Lee’s eyes came open slowly at the sound of his distinctive gait on the gravel, his voice yodeling some tune she didn’t know as he entered the clearing. “Evenin’ boys,” he called out. His voice sounded jocular—and drunk. “How y’all doin’?”
Some time had passed. She didn’t know how long. But she no longer heard the women and the children, so she guessed they were back in their trailers and tents now, the children having bedded down for the night, the women picking up their sewing or some book to read by lamplight. A few men would still be sitting around outside drinking and playing checkers. She heard Barney cackle in response to Earl Ray’s greeting. “How we doin’? We not doin’ as good as you, ol’ buddy.”
“You got that right,” slurred Earl Ray. “Fine as frog’s hair, that’s me.”
“No,” said Barney with another cackle, “that ain’t what I meant a’tall. What I meant is, you got a surprise waitin’ for you yonder in that trailer of yours.”
“What?” Earl Ray asked. “What surprise?”
“Why don’t you go on up there and see for yourself?” Barney said.
There was a moment. Earl Ray would be standing there mystified, trying to figure out if they were putting one over on him, trying to decide if any of this carried some hidden insult to his pride. And then, yes, she heard the scrape of his step on the gravel, felt his weight on the step outside. The trailer door came open.
“Hello?” he called to the darkness. “Who’s here?”
“Close the door, Earl,” she said. And she scratched a match and lit the kerosene lamp on the table.
“Flora Lee?” he said as light leapt into the room. His voice rose toward hope, and happy disbelief lifted his mouth in a smile as he closed the door behind him. “Is that really you? You come back to me?”
“No, Earl,” she said. “I ain’t.”
His glassy eyes needed a moment to register this, and she took that time to study him. His clothes were sweat-stained and rumpled. She was surprised that a man who took such fastidious pride in his appearance would go out looking like this. Then she realized he had no choice. She was the one who had done his ironing and his washing. And before that, his mother.
“What do you mean, no?” he finally asked, honestly confused.
“Why did you do it, Earl?”
The glassy eyes squinted. “Why’d I do what?”
“She my only friend, Earl. The only one I ever had. Why did you have to take that away from me?”
Earl Ray’s mouth puckered. “The nigger,” he said. “That’s what this is about?”
“Her name is Thelma!” Flora Lee found herself yelling it. “And you ain’t had to do that to her.”
“She messed with white folks’ business!” Now Earl Ray was shouting, too. “She messed with my business. When a nigger do that, she deserve what she get.”
“So you raped her. You like to killed her.”
A nasty smirk hoisted a corner of Earl Ray’s lips. “You best to shut up, Flora Lee, ’fore you piss me off and I go back and finish the job.”
Flora Lee brought the pistol up from her lap and pointed it at him. It was a pearl-handled revolver he had inherited from his father. “You ain’t finishin’ nothin’, Earl Ray Hodges. You ain’t gon’ never touch me nor her again.”
Earl Ray’s eyes tightened as if he could not make himself believe that he was actually staring down the barrel of his own pistol. Flora Lee’s hands trembled. Shooting him had seemed so easy when it was a rage throbbing in her temples like a headache, driving her back to this place with a single-minded determination. But now it was real, now he was real, not a hated thought or a despised memory, but a man with shining eyes and sweating brow, facing her from five feet away, and she suddenly realized it wasn’t easy at all. She didn’t know if she could do this.
He saw. “Just give me the gun, Flora Lee,” he said. “Give me the gun and everything will be like it used to be.”
She raised the pistol higher in her shaky grip, shook her head no.
He exploded. “Goddamn it, Flora Lee!” he cried, hammering his fist on the table. “I told you to give me the goddamn gun!” And he lunged toward her.
Her index finger made the decision for her, pulling on the trigger. A hard bang! filled the tiny space. She had reflexively squeezed her eyes shut. When she opened them again, she saw Earl bringing one hand to a ragged hole in his neck, blood spilling over it. He looked confused. He looked as if this could not be happening.
Then his eyes rolled up and Earl Ray Hodges fell dead across the table.
Flora Lee felt a calmness that surprised her then. She regarded Earl Ray with distant dispassion. From outside, she heard the sounds of commotion, people asking if that was a gunshot, people calling out to her and Earl Ray, wanting to know if they were all right, children crying, men debating whether it was safe to approach the trailer. This, too, Flora Lee regarded with distant dispassion. It had nothing to do with her.
She looked down, surprised to find the gun still in her hand. She placed it on the table next to the dead man’s head, then folded her hands and just sat there, thinking nothing, feeling nothing. Flora Lee was still sitting that way 40 minutes later when she first heard the distant wail of the sirens.
twenty-four
ON THE DAY SHE WAS TO RETURN TO WORK, THELMA WOKE UP screaming.
Her eyes came open to find Gramp looming above her, shaking her energetically. “Thelma! Wake up.” She heard a mouse skitter across the floor, unnerved by the commotion.
“I’m awake,” she said, sitting up. Her mouth was cottony. “I’m awake.”
In the darkness of predawn, the old man was little more than a shadow. Even so, she saw the relief that etched itself on his face. “You had that dream again,” he informed her uselessly.
“I know, Gramp.”
Thelma breathed heavily. Even freshly wakened, rescued from sleep, she could still feel Earl Ray’s touch upon her. The terror had become a routine.
“Are you sure you ready for this?” asked the old man. Ollie would be picking her up for work in a few hours. It would be the first time she had been back since.
“I’m sure,” she told Gramp. She spoke with confidence she did not feel.
“Thelma, it’s only been a few weeks since.”
That was the word they used: “since.” She refused to allow anyone to finish the sentence, refused to let them speak of what had happened to her, what had been done to her. She didn’t say it herself, not even in the private recesses of her thoughts. To say it was to make it real.
“Been two months,” she corrected.
“Still ain’t long enough, bad as you was hurt.”
“Doctor say I’m ready. Besides, I can’t malinger here forever, old man. We gon’ run out of money. We got to eat, don’t we?”
“I could get a job,” he said.
“Gramp,” she said, and then stopped. She had intended to remind him that he was blind and over a century old. Instead, she said, “Thank you for offerin’. But I got to get back sooner or later. Most folks already been back a long time.”
This was true.
The shipyard had been in turmoil for a week after the riot, hardly anyone showing up for work, Army and State Guard troops patrolling the city, protecting Pinto Island. The production of ships in one of the nation’s most important shipyards had fallen to virtually nothing, right in the midst of a global war. A thousand colored workers had petitioned the federal government for permission to transfer to other plants. The petition had been denied. So, many had simply left the city altogether.
Finally, the shipyard came up with a plan. The local newspaper praised it, the federal government accepted it. It was segregation—the very thing the president had prohibited in Executive Order 8802. But there was a war on, so 8802 was forgotten. The races were separated on the ferry that took workers over to the island. They ate in separate lunchrooms. And the shipyard opened four colored-only shipways where Negroes were allowed to work every job except foreman.
Even at that, the bosses had been reduced to holding mass meetings at the colored YMCA and going so far as to visit individual workers in their homes to coax and beg Negro women and men to return to work. It was a hard sell. Colored people were frightened for their safety. One of the bosses had come to Thelma’s home, too, trying to cajole her into coming back to work as soon as possible. But he had taken one look at her and said, “Come back when you’re up to it.”
“Most folks,” Gramp answered her now, “wasn’t hurt near as bad as you. Are you sure you ready for this? Are you sure you healed?”
“My wrist is fine,” she said.
“Wasn’t just talkin’ ’bout your wrist,” he told her.
For some reason, it made her furious. Not that it took much these days. “Don’t need you tryin’ to be no mother hen to me, old man,” she snapped. “Why don’t you just go back there and go to sleep and leave me alone? You worry about you and let me worry about me, all right?”
Her eyes had adjusted somewhat to the darkness, so she could more easily see the hurt that settled into her grandfather’s features then. It made her feel guilty, made her want to apologize. But she couldn’t think of the words.
“Fine then,” he said. And he got up and made his way stiffly to his room.
Thelma lay back down, her hands crossed beneath her head, and watched the ceiling. There was no thought of going back to sleep. Sleep terrified her. Earl Ray Hodges lurked in sleep. But she knew that made no sense. Earl Ray Hodges was dead.
She knew this only because of a cryptic letter that had arrived in her mailbox two weeks after the riot. The return address was the women’s jail. When she opened it, a story torn from the newspaper slipped out. The headline: “Woman Held in Husband’s Death at Hillbilly Worker Camp.” The brief story beneath told how Flora Lee Hodges, 24, had been arrested after police were called to investigate a gunshot at the camp and had found one Earl Ray Hodges, 28, deceased from a gunshot wound. Flora Lee had been taken into custody without incident. There was a note scrawled in the margins of the newspaper. It read, “You ain’t got to worry about him bothering you no more.”
The note was unsigned but of course Thelma knew who had written it. Thelma didn’t know how to feel about it all. There was something frightening, powerful, and somehow … intimidating about the idea that Flora Lee had killed her husband. And that she had done it for Thelma. She had told herself she should visit the jail, go see Flora Lee, if only to acknowledge what the little woman had done. Besides, Flora Lee was soon to go on trial. She probably needed a friend. But Thelma simply could not be that friend. Luther had been right. Nothing good came of mixing with those people. The best thing you could do was stay as far away from them as you could get. Wasn’t she living proof?
Thelma lay there staring at the ceiling for two hours. When dawn began to burn the shadows from the room, she sighed, threw off her thin blanket, and climbed up from her makeshift bed. She opened the curtain and gazed out upon the new day. The sky was pink at the edges, fading up toward a robin’s-egg blue overhead—a beautiful dome for an ugly world. For a moment, Thelma was content simply to watch the waking day unfurl itself from darkness.
