Fire in beulah, p.16
Fire in Beulah, page 16
When Graceful set the crate on the worn linoleum, her mother took one look at her and instantly turned away. What? Graceful thought. What’d I do now? But she knew. She had asked questions, and T.J. had told, and now the truth was burned on her, right into her skin, her face, her eyes sharp with fear. Well, maybe she couldn’t hide it from Mama, but she could hide it from whitefolks. She knew that she could. Jewell was sitting at the table, bleary-eyed, her chin in one hand. Mama snapped, “All right, Graceful’s here now. You happy? Go on in yonder and get yourself some sleep, we got a big day tomorrow.”
“Mama?” Jewell said sleepily. “I’ll stay with the children. You can let LaVona go to church.”
“Take you and LaVona both to mind that many wild children.”
“Me and Graceful can do it.” Jewell smiled hopefully at her sister.
“We’ll see. You go on and get in the bed.”
Jewell came and hugged Graceful, hard and quick. She’s the sweetest one, Graceful thought. She the best of any of us. Little Jewell, the peacemaker, who was no longer little but tall and thin, like T.J. As Graceful hugged her sister’s long boniness, she thought, I know one thing, I’m not going back to work for whitefolks. I’m not leaving them no more. The tail of Jewell’s nightgown had hardly disappeared through the doorway when Mama came at her, whispering hard, “What’d I tell you? What did I say? Answer me!” Her mother’s face was such a fury that Graceful was afraid to speak. “What you got to go and ask him questions for?” Mama turned, sank into a chair at the table. Graceful watched in terror as her mother sagged, trembling, with her face in her hands.
But when Cleotha looked up, long minutes later, her face was clear of emotion, masklike, stony. She stood, moved purposefully toward the cookstove. “Go wake up Delroy. Quiet, now. I don’t want them children getting up again.” She turned, held her daughter’s eyes a moment, looked away finally, across the kitchen, to some blank and empty space on the wall. “I guess you’re going to have to go with them.” Cleotha snatched the tin percolator off the stovetop and in the same motion went to the bucket, began to dipper water into the pot.
The sky had begun to lighten in the east by the time Delroy turned his Nash truck out of the yard. Graceful looked back once, but the sight of the black shack in the gray dawn and her mother alone on the bowed porch was too hard, and she quickly turned front, stared through the windscreen. Her uncle seemed to be still half dopey with sleep, though she’d watched him drink down three cups of scalding coffee, standing at the stove blinking and yawning, before he’d gone out to prepare the truck.
Neither of them talked as they drove north across the bucking land. To the right the sky began to glow rose-colored, brightening to coral at the line of the earth. Straight up above arched a teal, gleaming vault, but in the west the heavens stayed indigo, lit here and there with a few winking stars. The toenail moon hung suspended, spurs up, very high in the turquoise sky, and Graceful saw now the shadow above it, the black, dense orb snugged against the gleaming crescent. Old moon sleeping in the new moon’s arms, she said to herself, repeating Grandma Whiteside’s old saying, and suddenly she was overwhelmed with a wash of grief that made her shudder, made her want to weep and wail from some lost place, made her long to cry out. The feeling was new to her and at the same time familiar. She shut her mind against the future. Shut her mind to everything but what was in front of her eyes, beneath her body, what her senses received.
The truck shook and shivered and rumbled over the humped hills. Again and again they hit bumps hard enough to jar her teeth, make her thrust out her arm and brace herself against the dash. She thought, My Lord, that must be some terrible ride in the back. She wanted to turn and look down into the truckbed, see if they were still covered. She wanted to ask Delroy to slow down some, it was too rough for them back yonder, and she wanted to urge him to hurry up, hurry, and she listened to the chugging of the motor, watched the world turning light, said nothing at all.
As the day opened they began to see wagons coming toward them filled to the tailgates with fine-dressed Negroes on their way to Sunday morning worship, and Graceful would gaze at them with that same new-old feeling, while Delroy lifted one hand from the steering wheel in greeting. But when whitefolks passed in their motorcars or wagons, she’d hold herself as still as she could in the bumping truck, hardly breathing, and she would turn her face away. Every white farmer in overalls lumbering along with his family in a spring-wagon, every elegant whitelady with a filmy tied-on hat beside a smirking whiteman speeding by in a roadster filled Graceful with dread and loathing, with the cold beginnings of hatred, and a fierce, driven protectiveness for T.J. and the other two hidden under the mildewed tarps in the back.
It was full morning by the time they reached a town. Delroy still had not spoken, and Graceful asked him nothing, and it was only because she saw the building on the horizon and the sign before it etched with scrolled letters that read LANGSTON UNIVERSITY that she understood where they were. She thought, Oh, sure, now, this is a good idea—Langston! Six hundred blackfolks going to school in this town. T.J. and them’ll disappear here like nothing. But Delroy drove straight past, and on through the all-black town, or it was supposed to be a black town, but the streets were empty. The fear stirred in Graceful. She stared hard at the frame houses shuttered against the heat, the closed stores on Main Street, the cinderblock church, which was silent on Sunday morning, the big front door shut, and she prayed that any minute Delroy would stop at a good place, a safe place, but Uncle Delroy did not stop. Her tongue tried a dozen times to ask where they were going, where were all the people, but her mother’s angry face kept coming to her, saying, You got to keep your mouth quiet and not ask questions, girl. And then her mind’s eye saw the silhouette of a colored boy hanging from a tree.
They drove east now, into the brilliant sun, and the only words that passed in the truck cab were when Delroy asked for the water jar or to be handed a piece of cornbread, and once Graceful asked in embarrassment could he stop a minute by that clump of cottonwoods yonder. The tense unbroken silence was not the only way the trip was different from the drive out to Arcadia, as the absence of Willie’s smiling face wasn’t all, or the fact they were traveling in a different part of the state. For Graceful the journey was a lifetime’s worth of different. All that she’d held away from herself before was now fully present. What was known could not be unknown; what had happened could not be pushed away.
Every time they neared a white town, the nausea and fear would come hard on her, and her hands would begin to quiver so that she’d have to jam them against the seat to keep Delroy from seeing. She’d bite her lip, stare at her lap in order to not look at their stores, their houses, their white faces coming from church; she wouldn’t lift her head until they were driving in the open land again, so different from what they’d driven through on the way to Arcadia. Every time the truck shuddered to the top of a rise, she could see the red dirt road descending, and rising again in the distance, miles of faded prairie sloping down, and then up, and then down again, in all directions, like ridges in a giant washboard big enough for God. But always they continued east, and at the top of one rise, Graceful suddenly thought with relief, Why, we’re going home to Tulsa! Yes. We just going by a different road, that’s all. Mama’ll be coming soon. Quick as she get those kids took care of, she’ll come. From that moment, satisfied with the answer she’d made up in her own mind, Graceful felt her fear and sickness begin to ease, and she allowed her unasked questions to float through the open truck window and out across the undulating prairie with the hot wind.
Late in the afternoon, Delroy turned off the dirt track, drove down into a caney creekbottom way back off the road. He set the brake, killed the motor, groaned a little as he climbed down and moved off toward the rear of the truck. Graceful sat gazing discreetly ahead until she heard the thundery sound of the big tarp being pulled off the back; she turned to watch T.J. jump down and stretch, take a sip from the water jar Delroy held out to him. It was the first time Graceful had seen the two women. She stared first at the mother, who grunted when T.J. helped her climb down. The woman was much older than Graceful had expected, considering how young the children in the house were: saggy-bosomed and heavy, her skin ashy as she moved stiff-limbed off into the brush. And then Graceful turned her eyes to T.J.’s girlfriend, and her breath caught. Lord God, I bet she’s not a year older than Jewell.
The girl stood beside the truck in a sleeveless cotton shift almost the same color as the dirt beneath her bare feet, a sort of soft, washed-out red. Her skin was coppery, her unprocessed hair the dull color of an old penny, and Graceful could see that she was too thin, her arms like a child’s arms, her knobby neckbone protruding from the scoop of neckline like a chicken neck, though she had big buttocks that stuck out firm and high beneath the faded cotton. She kept her face turned every minute toward T.J., even when he disappeared into the bushes, and when he came back, his eyes darting about restlessly, his flared nostrils sensing the air, she touched him on the arm as he passed. But T.J. ignored her, as if her touch were no more than the brush of a mothwing. The girl turned once, feeling Graceful’s eyes on her, smiled up quickly, and as quickly turned away. She was a little frog-eyed, Graceful thought, but pretty. When her mother came back from the canebrake, the girl darted off the way the woman had come, and Graceful thought, What is T.J. doing messing with a young switchtail like that?
At once she was ashamed. The girl’s brother had been lynched. That woman’s son. Graceful had been hearing about lynchings all her life; she’d never known a family it had happened to. She watched in a kind of humble fascination as the mother leaned against the tailgate, her face deadened, her natty hair matted and sticking up at the back of her head. Looking at the woman’s ruined face, Graceful felt the cold nausea welling up again, and the hatred. Again her mind saw the boy hanging, hands tied behind his back, his body slowly turning, but it was T.J.’s face she saw on the lynched body, and despite herself she had to look over to make sure that he was really standing there, alive, on the dirt ground. Yes, it was T.J., her living, breathing brother T.J., bending secretively toward Delroy, speaking low and urgent as their uncle hoisted the orange can.
Graceful could tell by how high Delroy held it that the can was almost empty. We’ll have to stop and buy some. Her belly clenched at the thought of driving into a white filling station. Maybe we got enough to get to Tulsa. Her brother and her uncle spoke without expression, first one, a beat of silence, then the other. There’d always been that closeness between them, like Delroy was T.J.’s brother instead of Mama’s, though he was fifteen years older than T.J. and had taken care of him since T.J. was a little child. Delroy nodded at something T.J. said—a quick, slight dip of his forehead—and they met eyes an instant, then turned away; in that passing was too much knowledge and a flat, closed understanding, and Graceful craved to know what they were saying. Though she knew they’d hush as soon as she got out of the truck, she shoved the door open, jumped down to the ground.
Uncle Delroy was screwing the cap on the big can as he walked toward the rear of the truck. The moment and its knowledge, whatever it was, had already passed. T.J. looked up impatiently. “Better hurry.” He turned to help the mother climb up. Graceful watched as the woman pulled herself onto the tailgate, though there was such bled-out despair in the woman’s face that she wanted to turn away, as she’d turned her eyes from her own mother while she read the letters from T.J. This mother was as unlike Mama as it was possible to be, but Graceful felt, watching her, that they shared grief from the same source. The only difference was, in Mama grief turned brittle hard; it made this woman soft as an old shoe. The girl appeared from the undergrowth then, sidled up behind T.J., reached a fluttery hand out to touch him.
“Get in the truck,” T.J. told her.
She kept her round eyes on him, watching him in mute, hopeless expectation, though what she expected Graceful couldn’t tell.
“Y’all want to eat something?” Graceful said, as if that had been her intention for getting out of the truck, but T.J. spoke before the others could answer. “We’ll eat when we get there.” He hopped up on the tailgate, reached a hand down. The girl, obedient and shy-acting, took it and climbed into the bed. She hesitated, said softly, “Can’t we leave it off now? I can’t breathe, T.J., feel like I’m going to choke to death.” Her voice was as fluttery and mothlike as her fingers. T.J. didn’t answer, but moved front and settled himself on the pile of rags and blankets against the cab as if he’d been traveling this way, hiding this way, his whole life long. The mother, with her despairing face, lay down beside him, and then the girl came and curled up on the other side, and T.J. glanced around, reached above the girl’s head and picked up a yard-long piece of blackjack from a hidden fold of blanket, grasped it by one end like a club. He nodded at Delroy and lay back flat, the oak limb cradled across his chest. Graceful watched the girl’s face, the still terror on it as the tarp came up and buried her, how she put a hand up over her head to make air space.
Moving on leaden feet toward the cab, Graceful tried to push her own terror down, hold it tight in her gullet, since she could not shove it away. She stood with her hand on the handle, taking big gulping breaths, before she climbed in. Delroy looked hard at her when she banged the door shut. “You all right?” he said.
“Fine.”
He shoved the big gearshift into reverse and began to back up.
By the time they drove into the familiar eastern scrub-oak hills, it was almost dark. She worried that they’d run out of fuel, because Delroy didn’t stop again. What if they ran out of gas by a sundown town? There were so many towns with green laws, you’d never know if you were in one. Most were marked with signs at the edge: No Negroes Allowed Within These City Limits Between The Hours of Sunset and Sunrise—or sometimes just plain NO NIGGERS AFTER DARK—and she knew that Uncle Delroy knew the worst ones, Henryetta and Norman, the towns every colored person had heard of; she knew he’d never drive within miles of those towns at twilight. But there were so many small towns, Delroy might not even know he was by one, and anyhow every Oklahoma town was dangerous after dark, mixed or white, if it was colored people driving. The only safe towns were the black towns. Graceful thought sleepily, Maybe he fixing to stop at Redbird or someplace, get some more gas.
The sky was full-dark when they turned north again, and still Delroy drove on. Graceful slept before she knew she’d done so, and it was only by her head bumping against the side glass, knocking her awake, that she realized she’d slept. She worried now that Delroy would fall asleep driving, crash them into a ditch, but her exhaustion was so complete that before she knew it she’d dropped off again. She didn’t dream, or if she did, she didn’t know it, for the sleep was a velvety black warmth of nothing wrapped around her, and then she’d be thumped awake again, and before she could come fully to consciousness, the fear would be there.
The last time she was knocked awake, she thought for sure she must be dreaming. She blinked at the thousand winking lights rising up out of the darkness, and she thought that all the stars had been shaken down from heaven and landed in stacks on the plains. And then the stink came to her, and the sound, and the great mechanical sense of it, and she saw small figures of men moving about in the lights, but most of all it was the fetid smell that was so familiar, and she knew what she was looking at was not a dream but the lights on a tremendous bank of oil refineries. Maybe we’re back in Tulsa, she thought, trying to wake up, trying to get some sensible thoughts in her head. That must be the refineries by the river. But Delroy kept driving toward them, and Graceful didn’t see the dotted skyline of Tulsa on the far side, didn’t see the Arkansas River or any familiar mark, but just the great stacks of belching, smoking, stinking vats and chimneys amidst the steel girders, and men moving about, working in the brilliant white light spreading out on the dark prairie, miles from any city, miles from any reasonable place on earth.
Delroy turned off the road, and in another moment the truck’s headlamps revealed the tangled growth of another creekbottom, though this one was not caney and willowy, as the last had been, but clotted with scrub oak and sumac, matted with thick vines snaking through the undergrowth, looping down from tree limbs, crawling over limestone boulders made distinct and strange in the refineries’ glow. When Delroy cut the motor, he sat so long with his head on his arms draped over the steering wheel that Graceful began to get scared; it reminded her too much of Mama at the table, and after a while, her tremored voice rising with the sounds of the nightcreatures scrabbling and chirring all around the truck, she said softly, “Uncle Delroy? We going to sleep here?”
Delroy snapped his head up so fast Graceful jumped back. “No.” He looked around, took a long, deep breath. “No, honey.” He blew the air out, hard. “We’re not there yet. Listen, you’re going to have to stay here with them. I’ll be back quick as I can get here.” His voice was hollow, dreamlike. He lifted his hand twice before he could get it connected with the door handle, and then he pushed the squeaking door open in slow motion; his movements were thick, lugubrious, like he was dreamwalking, moving underwater. He disappeared slowly into the darkness at the back of the truck. She could hear him talking to T.J., heard the gas can scrape on the metal truckbed, although she didn’t hear the tarp being pulled off. She sat very still, listening, her heart beating hard, but Delroy left so quietly she never knew when he walked off.
The only sound was her own blood and the ceaseless chorus of crickets. The air was ruddy with reflected light from the refineries, hidden beyond the treetops, though the stink and the low hum told her they were not far away. The moon hadn’t risen, or she couldn’t see it yet, but the truck was so wrapped around with undergrowth and the pinkish glow was so strange that she couldn’t tell if it was getting close to morning. Maybe they getting some sleep now, she thought. At least we’re not bumping around all over creation. It didn’t come clear to her in words that the one she hoped was sleeping was the whispery too-skinny girl who felt herself buried alive beneath the tarp. Graceful stretched out across the seat to try and sleep, but each time she’d start to drift she would see white faces at the window, white hands reaching to snatch the truck door open, and she’d jerk full awake, her heart pounding. She got up, rolled the windows up tighter, lay back down, sweating. She felt naked. She wished she had a big chunk of blackjack, like T.J., something to protect herself besides her own quaking, shivering silence.
