Midnight Without a Moon(11)

Hallelujah tipped his hat. “Morn’n, Queen,” he said. “Didn’t mean to wake you.”

Queen ignored Hallelujah as if he were a leaf on a tree. Instead, she glowered at me. “Can y’all hold down the noise?”

“Queen, Levi Jackson got shot last night,” I said.

Queen shrugged. “Niggas get shot round here all the time.”

Hallelujah stared at Queen, his eyes narrowed. “Levi’s dead, Queen,” he said sternly. “They say some white men in a pickup forced him off the road and shot him in the head.”

For a brief moment, shame crossed Queen’s face. Then, as quickly as that moment came, it vanished. Queen turned up her nose and said, “I knew that uppity nigga would get hisself killed one day.” She stormed back into the house, allowing the screen door to slam shut behind her.

Hallelujah and I stared at the door in silence.

A few seconds later, I sighed and shoved myself off the porch. “I’ve gotta get back to the field,” I said. “Ma Pearl will beat the black off me this evening if she finds out I’ve been sitting around talking to you instead of working like I’m supposed to.”

“Preacher’ll be back shortly to pick me up,” Hallelujah said. “I’ll just head on up the road and meet him.”

“No!” I said, grabbing his arm.

Hallelujah flinched with surprise.

I quickly moved my hand and said, “Don’t walk down the road by yourself.”

Hallelujah stared at me, confused. “I meet Preacher along the road all the time.”

I told him about my encounter with Ricky Turner.

He slumped back down on the porch. “I’ll wait for Preacher,” he said.





Chapter Five


TUESDAY, JULY 26


THAT MORNING, MR. ALBERT WAS RIGHT BACK IN Mr. Robinson’s cotton field with sixteen-year-old Fish and one of his younger sons, Adam, barely ten. Adam would replace Levi.

Mr. Albert’s three older sons had left, one by one, for Detroit six years prior. Like Mr. Pete, they had packed up their young families and fled the dirt clods of the Delta as soon as they saved up enough money to start a new life someplace else.

Nobody talked about Levi, at least not in my hearing, anyway. Ma Pearl and Papa acted as if their words might get picked up by the wind and carried over to Mr. Robinson’s ears if they said anything about the shooting. Hallelujah had said that folks acted the same way when Reverend George Lee was shot in Belzoni back in May. Some, he said, even claimed it was the preacher’s own fault that he was killed. “If he’da just took his name off them voting records like the white folks told him,” he’d heard a woman at church whisper, “he wouldn’ta got hisself kil’t.”

I was glad when I saw Reverend Jenkins’s brown Buick stirring up dust along the edge of the field, as I was sure Hallelujah would have some news about Levi.

When Hallelujah jumped out, Reverend Jenkins—?his thick glasses glaring in the sunlight—?said something to him, probably instructing him to mind his manners. Then he waved and drove off. He honked and waved at Papa at the far end of the field as the tires of his Buick crunched rocks on the road.

I paused (not that I was doing much work anyway) and leaned against the hoe. “Hey,” I said, waving at Hallelujah before he even reached me.

Hallelujah smiled and waved back. It was good to see him smile again. But as hot as it was out there—?and I mean heat that wrapped its arms around me like a long-lost relative giving a hug—?that boy was wearing his dark brown fedora instead of a straw hat.

“What you trying to do,” I said as he got closer, “get black like me? You gonna burn up in this heat.”

Hallelujah touched the tip of his hat and grinned. “The blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice.”

“Who told you that lie?”

“Read it in a book,” he said.

I chuckled and started chopping again. “Even the devil got sense ’nuff to wear a straw hat in this heat.”

Hallelujah followed me as I crept along the row. Again, he didn’t bother to stop by the barn and pick up a hoe to help out. But there really wasn’t much to chop, seeing that Papa knew how to take good care of cotton. We didn’t have many weeds, like I’d heard about in some fields. But I was still slow. Even little Adam could outchop me.

I was dressed in Fred Lee’s too-big overalls and his long-sleeved shirt, and it took a lot of effort for me to walk up and down quarter-of-a-mile-long rows of cotton in the suffocating heat for five hours straight. I stopped for a water break at the end of every row. It’s a good thing I worked under Papa’s supervision instead of a white supervisor like Ricky Turner’s evil pappy.

“What’s your business today?” I asked Hallelujah.

Hallelujah shrugged. “Preacher let me take a break from the store. ‘A couple hours only,’ he said.”

“You helping Miss Bertha today?”

Hallelujah nodded. “Yep.”

“And you need a break already,” I teased him.

Hallelujah grinned and pretended to wipe sweat from his brow. His aunt, Bertha Jenkins, owned a small grocery store—?the only Negro-owned business in Stillwater. Even though she sold mostly staples, like flour, cornmeal, and sugar, white folks still weren’t too happy about her store, seeing that it took business away from theirs. It had been broken into more times than anybody cared to count. She could barely keep her shelves stocked. The police dismissed the vandalism as “coloreds destroying their own property to try to make God-fearing white folks look bad.” But we all knew who was really trying to sabotage Miss Bertha’s business.