Paper son, p.9
Paper Son, page 9
Roberson came in again, his color a little high. Reynold stood.
“Uncle Pete,” he said, “thanks for seeing me, and for being so understanding about my failings as a relative. Cousin Lydia, now we’ve met, I look forward to hearing more about the New York Chins. Don’t be a stranger. Mr. Smith, a pleasure meeting you. If there’s anything I can do to help Jefferson—today’s news notwithstanding”—he glanced at Roberson—“you’ll let me know. I do hope to see all y’all again soon.”
All us-all echoed the sentiment. Everyone exchanged business cards, the better to stay in touch. Pete and I hugged Reynold, and, since he was family, Frank Roberson, too. We crowded onto the little porch to watch them drive off. From the next-door fence, HB sent up a few farewell barks, and then fell silent.
15
“Cousin Reynold seems like a nice guy,” I said as Pete closed the door. “For a politician.”
“Now, now. I imagine his boy Frank is saying the same of us. ‘Your cousin Pete, he seems like a nice guy, for a gambler. And that pretty little Lydia and her friend, they seem nice, too. For Yankees.’”
“I’m sure you’re right.” I paused. “Pete, do you really think this business, Leland and Jefferson, won’t affect Reynold’s chances?”
“No idea. Hope it doesn’t, though. Reynold’s opposition, this Mallory, you may have already figured out he’s not my type of gent.”
“Is he crooked? Or just seriously conservative?”
“‘Seriously conservative’? This politician thing must be catching. No, Mallory’s honest—at least, politician-honest, from what I hear. But in love with the past. In Mississippi, we got a lot of folks looking over their shoulders to some magical time when life was simpler. They mean for their kind, of course. Probably you’ve got folks like that up north, too, but here, it’s a cottage industry. The people who think that way, bless their hearts, but they’re not my people. Not likely to be any Chinese person’s people, especially a grocer’s kin. Still, from what I read in the papers, Reynold’s playing this one more conservative than he has in the past.”
“It’s close, then?”
“Seems that way. Reynold’s the known quantity, but Mallory’s offering something a lot of folks seem to want.”
“So it might be a problem.”
“Might could. But what Roberson said, I think he’s right. Not a lot of families in Mississippi without a skeleton in the closet. Long as Reynold didn’t kill Leland himself, people will likely forgive him for being related to Jefferson. No matter what the end of it all is.”
“Pete, about the grocers,” said Bill, who’d been ferrying glasses and plates into the kitchen. “You promised us a history lesson. Can you tell us about the Chinese grocers, and explain what you mean by ‘especially a grocer’s kin’?”
Behind Pete’s back, I gave Bill a thank-you thumbs-up. He winked and threw a kiss. I’d have rolled my eyes, but that was too predictable, so I threw a kiss back. Pete saw that one.
“If I’m in y’all’s way . . .”
“Oh, sit down, Pete,” I said while Bill laughed. “We want to hear the story.”
“Well, all right. And in return, you’ll tell me what kind of detection you accomplished today. But first, why don’t you bring your bags in and get settled?”
I glanced at Bill. “Get settled? We were planning to find a motel or something.”
“You’ll do nothing of the kind. You came all the way from New York, least I can do is offer you hospitality. Lydia, you’ll stay in the spare bedroom. Bill, I got a convertible couch in the basement. Don’t worry it’s a basement, we’re high enough above the creek so unless it gets to be like ’27, you’ll be cozy down there.”
“Twenty-seven?” I said.
“Seriously? What do they teach you people up north?” Pete threw up his hands. “The Great Flood of 1927! Mighty Mississippi rose ten, twelve feet, more in places. Wiped out whole towns, from Tennessee to the Gulf. Near to thirty thousand acres underwater. That’s like as though all of New England up there was drowned. Hundreds of thousands of folks lost homes, farms, businesses, and I don’t mean just had to run away and then came back when the water went down. No, sir. That river took all kinds of things with it, houses, barns, livestock, good Mississippi topsoil. And plus, those towns that got washed away, they lost all their records, too. People come back to where their farm used to be, another guy’s there with a shotgun saying this land’s mine and you can’t prove it’s not. That flood’s why we have the levees like they are today—” He broke off, dismissing us with a hand wave. “Oh, never mind. Yankee ignorance. Go get your things. Rooms are all made up, both of them. Warning you, though, I can’t cook.”
“They don’t cook at the Days Inn, either,” I said. “Okay, Pete, we’ll take you up on your offer, and I’m sorry for being ignorant. But as far as cooking, don’t look at me. If you were hoping for some home-cooked Chinese meals, we’ll have to send for my mother. Although Bill can cook.”
“Spaghetti and meatballs,” Bill said. “Omelets, I make good omelets. And I’ll learn to whip up pork dumplings real fast if it means not sending for your mother. I’ll get the bags.”
In a fit of optimism, I hadn’t brought much, and Bill always, as Pete had put it, travels light. I took my overnight bag down the hall while Pete led Bill outside and around to the basement door.
I paused in unpacking to look out the window, at the sloping yard and the brown, sluggish creek. Across the water, the land angled up again, the hillside covered with bare-branched trees. Ranch houses like Pete’s peeked from the undergrowth at the top of the bank. Not much like the Mississippi of my mind, all slow, hot days with flower-scented air, cicada-filled nights, big houses with deep verandas, tar-paper shacks in the cotton fields around them. But then, that Mississippi, the product of movies, TV, and high school history classes, was entirely a story of black and white. Yellow had never been mentioned.
Bill emerged from the door below me. I opened the window, stuck my head out, and said, “Howdy.”
He looked up. “Yo.”
“How is it down there?”
“Cozy. Up there?”
“Right nice.”
Apparently not worried about predictability, he rolled his eyes.
I asked, “Did you know about that flood?”
“Of course. I’m from these parts.”
“I do believe those are different parts. Well, I’ll be along directly. I’m fixing to meet y’all in the living room.”
“Don’t go native on me,” he warned. “Don’t do it.”
Back in the living room, Pete offered more sweet tea, but even Bill turned him down.
“Right, then.” Pete crossed his ankle over his knee. “Tell me, how far back do I have to start? Y’all didn’t know about the Great Flood, so how complete is y’all’s ignorance?”
“Hard to say,” said Bill. “Not easy to know what it is you don’t know.”
“Bill knew about the Great Flood,” I said defensively. “But about Chinese grocers in the South being a thing, I think we’re both mystified.”
Pete nodded. “Yup, pretty complete. Okay. Well, the grocers. Not so much in the whole South, though yeah, Memphis, Atlanta, Macon, there were some. But mostly, in the Delta.”
“Even weirder,” I said. “From a Yankee point of view, of course.”
Now Pete rolled his eyes. At least I was provoking consistent reactions.
“Story goes like this,” Pete said. “You know we built the railroad?”
“With the Irish,” I said. “Bill’s people.”
“Erin go Bragh,” said Bill.
Pete waved a hand. “Yeah, yeah, the Irish. When they drove that Golden Spike in 1869 and the railroad was done, the Irish went and got themselves jobs on farms and ranches and that. Blended in, you might say. But it was the end for the Chinese. All these laborers suddenly nobody wanted. They tried to plant crops, pan for gold, but people ran them off. Burned their houses, sometimes whole towns. Every now and then, lynched somebody. I’m talking about the West here, not the South, which is where you Yankees always think of when you hear ‘lynch.’
“Well, wasn’t like these guys could get on a ship and go home. They couldn’t pay the passage, and plus a lot of them were supporting families back in China on the chicken feed they were paid here. So some went east, to where there were already Chinese people, like to your Chinatown up there in New York. Meanwhile, here in the Delta, planters had started to clear the land for cotton.” Pete paused. “Now, you’ll notice this was after the Civil War.”
Bill and I both nodded.
“This meant those planters, they didn’t have slaves to work their fields. They wanted their cotton picked, they had to pay for it. Now, hiring black field hands, paying them money—well, that just went against some folks’ grain. So someone had the idea of bringing in Chinese, recruiting from the railroad workers. They proved out west they could do hard labor, and there wasn’t the history of bad feelings like there was between black and white.”
“Chinese came here to pick cotton?” That, like pretty much everything else about the Delta Chinese, was news to me.
“That’s why they came. But the work didn’t suit ’em. Not that it suited black folks, but once Jim Crow took hold, they didn’t have much choice. But the Chinese did. They didn’t like the picking, but they liked the Delta. Hot and damp, soil was fertile, hunting and fishing were good—reminded them of home. They looked around, and this is what they saw: black folks needed the necessities. Grain, sugar, coffee. But the stores were all owned by white folks. Some wouldn’t sell to them at all. The ones that did, they’d make them wait out in the street while the shopkeeper went for their goods. Black sharecroppers, hard for them to scrape up capital to open stores of their own. But the Chinese, bunch of them put their pennies together, they’d have enough to finance a store, and then they’d all work there, sleep in the back. So all over the Delta, Chinese opened groceries in black towns, or in black neighborhoods in mixed towns. It was understood, once a Chinese store made a little money, the group would stake the next guy to a loan.”
“Hui,” I said. “That’s how it works in Chinatown, too. Rotating shared capital. My father’s hui group financed his restaurant.”
“So there you go. Stores got established, people brought over their brothers, cousins, friends from the village. The new men would work in the store for a while, learn the ropes, then start a store of their own in a different neighborhood or a different town. Bought dry goods off the Jewish peddlers who worked the river, got their grain and seed, coffee, salt, canned goods, whatever else, from the same suppliers the white stores used. Some of those suppliers, they didn’t want to deal with black, but they’d deal with Chinese. We were somewhere in between—not white, for sure, but not black, either.”
“‘Colored folk of a different color,’ Jefferson’s friend Tolson Reeves said.”
“That’s the way it was,” Pete said. “A lot of the places black folk couldn’t go, we couldn’t, either—restaurants, hotels—but sometimes, we could, depending on the owner. Or, could and couldn’t. Daddy, he used to fish out in the sun in the summertime. Couple of years, he got so dark they wouldn’t serve him in this one restaurant he went to in the winter.”
“Didn’t they recognize him?”
“Well, sure they did. They apologized, but see, if someone who didn’t know who he was saw him through the window, they might think they were letting black folks in there.”
“Seriously?”
Pete nodded. “Across the river, in Arkansas, you were black or you weren’t, so when grocers started bringing their wives over—now that they were merchants, not laborers anymore, law said they could do that—their kids could go to the white schools. Here in Mississippi, you were white or you weren’t, so the kids couldn’t. Eventually, the grocers and their churches went and set up Chinese schools. See how it was?”
“I do,” I said, trying to digest this. “If you don’t mind my saying so, it sounds nuts.”
“Why would I mind? But if you’re looking for the Mississippi mind-set, that’s it right there.”
“So all this, it’s what your friend Sam Shoemaker meant when he said most blacks were raised thinking Chinese were good people,” said Bill.
“Well, it was black customers made it possible for the grocers to survive. And Chinese grocers returned the favor, gave credit as a matter of course. Which the white stores wouldn’t, not to black, even if they let them shop there. See, sharecroppers didn’t get paid but once a year, when the cotton got brought in. At best twice, if there was winter wheat, too. In the weeks just before, cash could be hard to come by. Chinese grocers carried their customers through some hard times. Those debts got paid, too. Not always, but mostly.”
“Are a lot of these stores still operating?” I asked. “Like H. Tam and Sons?”
“No.” Pete shook his head. “They were, up to the last twenty, thirty years, but Walmart and them killed ’em off. Don’t know that anyone’s done a count, but I’d suppose there aren’t but a dozen Chinese stores left up and down the Delta. Plus, the second and third generation wanted nothing to do with the stores. Parents sacrificed so their kids could go to college, make something of themselves. Well, they did. Professionals now, doctors and lawyers, teachers, bankers. Even if they wanted to stay in the Delta, there’s nothing for them here. Like Leland’s sisters, moving to California, and Jefferson running off to Oxford.” Pete slapped his hands on his knees and stood. “Hey, giving history lessons is thirstier work than I expected. Anyone want a beer?”
Bill accepted, I declined. Pete made a trip to the fridge and came back with two Budweisers. He popped a top, slurped up foam, and said, “So, Cousin Lydia, is it all clear to you now?”
“Yes. And no. I’m thinking about what it must have been like for those first Chinese men—a couple in this town, a few in that one . . . Out west. there were twenty or thirty of them in a railroad gang, but here, it must have been really lonely.”
“Must have been something,” Pete agreed.
We sat in silence for a while. The setting sun broke through the clouds long enough to lay strips of gold up the trunks of the riverbank trees. As the brightness faded again Pete said, “So, now tell me what all you two did this afternoon. You talked to Callie Leblanc, right? And a friend of Jefferson’s?”
“Tolson Reeves,” I said. Together, Bill and I filled Pete in on our meeting.
Pete frowned when we were done. “Jefferson went to Burcell? I gotta tell you, I don’t like the sound of that.”
“We didn’t, either,” I said. “Is it true there’s no other reason he could’ve had for going there, besides the meth trade?”
“Can’t say. Got to be twenty years since I been down to Burcell myself. Don’t know what truly goes on there, what’s real, what’s tall tales. Never had a wish to find out.” He drank some beer, pointed a finger at me. “Tell you who might, though. Just beyond Burcell, behind the levee, there’s a town goes by the name of Oldman’s Brake.”
“Reeves mentioned it.”
“Can’t hardly call it a town, just a pile of houses, but one of the folks who lives out there’s a bluesman called Big Bone Stafford. He’s playing this week at the Shacks. Him and me, we go up to Tunica together sometimes. Maybe you big-city detectives could talk to him. Likely Big Bone knows more about what’s going on in Burcell than I do. We have to get dinner somewhere anyhow, and the Shacks makes a mean catfish taco. What do you say?”
“Blues and catfish tacos, and we can call it work?” Bill asked. “When do we leave?”
16
The Shacks, known formally as the Shack-Up Inn, turned out to be a constellation of sharecroppers’ shacks centered around a former cotton gin a few miles outside of town. “Moved here, most of them,” Pete said as we parked, “from plantations all over the Delta. Tourists on the Blues Trail love it, staying in a sharecropper’s shack. ’Course, when they moved ’em, they put in plumbing, electric, real roofs.”
I walked with Pete and Bill across the lot, impressed by all the stars I could see through the nippy night.
The café and music hall occupied the interior of the old cotton gin. I don’t know what actually goes on in cotton gins, but apparently they’re pretty much the size of small airplane hangars, high-ceilinged, flat-roofed, and built from corrugated steel. Whatever insides this one used to have were gone, replaced by tables, a bar, and a stage. A pair of electric guitars, a drum kit, and two chairs were onstage, waiting. The grill-scented air was promising.
A thin blond waitress in a Santa hat turned to greet us when we walked in. Her canned smile wavered when she saw Pete. “Oh, hey, Captain Pete. Good to see you. Gotta tell you I’m sorry. About Leland, I mean, and . . . you know, Jefferson . . .”
“Kind of you, Reba,” Pete said as she led us to a table. “This is my cousin Lydia and her friend Bill, from New York City. Reba here’s from just up the road, in Marx.”
“New York City! That old Big Apple. Got to get me up there one day.” Reba’s relief at the change of subject was as palpable as her discomfort had been. “Well, welcome to Mississippi, y’all. What can I get you?”
Bill and Pete asked for beers, and I got a club soda. We all ordered the catfish tacos, Pete because he knew they were good, Bill because they sounded good to him, me because when in Rome. We’d arrived half an hour before Big Bone Stafford was scheduled to go on. That left plenty of time for Reba’s discomfort to be repeated in the dozen or so people who came over to offer Pete their condolences, some of them Shacks staff, others diners or drinkers at the bar.
