Midnight Without a Moon(12)
“So, what’s Miss Sweet cooking today?”
No matter how many times I heard it, I just couldn’t get used to people calling Ma Pearl “Miss Sweet.” She was about as sweet as a slice of lemon soaked in vinegar. Her real name, of course, was Pearl, but I couldn’t see how that one fit her either, seeing that a pearl is usually a thing of beauty.
I squinted at Hallelujah. “It’s Tuesday. Not Sunday. What else she go’n cook besides beans?”
“What kind?”
I shrugged. “Pinto, I reckon.”
“That’s good enough for me,” Hallelujah said. “Beats the air soup I would’ve eaten.”
I teased him. “So you really stopped by to get fed, huh?”
He patted his thick middle and said, “Yep.”
I glanced down the row to make sure I was still far away from Papa, as he and Fred Lee were coming back down the row toward me. “Heard anything about Levi?” I asked under my breath.
Hallelujah stuffed his hands into his pockets. “Preacher’s getting the NAACP involved.”
Spit caught in my throat, and I almost choked. I stopped chopping and placed a finger to my lips to shush Hallelujah. “Not so loud,” I said, my eyes darting toward Papa.
NAACP—?Ma Pearl said if I ever uttered those letters in her house, it would take a year to wash the taste of lye soap from my mouth. The letters stood for National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. And according to Hallelujah, the group was trying to do just that: help colored people advance. “To help our people find their way out of these cotton fields,” I once heard Reverend Jenkins say.
Reverend Jenkins was involved in the group. Secretly, of course. So Hallelujah knew all about it, had even been to some meetings. I knew nothing, except what I got from him or from the discarded pages of the Clarion-Ledger newspaper, which I sneaked and read while out in the toilet. The Clarion-Ledger was the largest white-owned newspaper in Mississippi, and it was the Robinsons’ favorite. What it reported about the NAACP was that it was nothing more than a bunch of northern Negro agitators coming to the South to incite good colored people to stir up trouble with whites.
And Ma Pearl agreed.
“The Robinsons is good white peoples,” she said. “So we ought not ’sociate with Negroes who stir up trouble.”
She said we were lucky. Mr. Robinson let us keep hogs, chickens, and a cow on his place when other landowners wouldn’t. Most coloreds had to buy overpriced meat, eggs, and milk from the white stores because Miss Bertha didn’t have the means to keep such things at her store. Or they had to just do without. So we should’ve been grateful for Mr. Robinson’s generosity, especially with the way he kept our house furnished, always allowing Mrs. Robinson to buy items she’d soon tire of and then pass them on to Ma Pearl.
Even Mr. Robinson himself had said he’d run any Negroes off his place if they caused trouble. “Any nigra bold enough to drink that poison the NAACP is pouring out is bold enough to find another place to stay,” he’d said. “Including you, Paul,” he told Papa. And Ma Pearl was taking no chances on getting “thowed off” Mr. Robinson’s land.
The only thing I was grateful for was having a friend like Hallelujah, whose papa wasn’t afraid of white folks—?or at least knew how to sneak around them. If Ma Pearl and my own grandpa wouldn’t tell me anything, Hallelujah sure would. My thirsty ears drank up that “poison” as quickly as he could pour it out.
“Preacher said they’d try to get Medgar Evers to come this way and see if he can get the sheriff to do something,” he said.
“Medgar Evers?” My heart pounded. Medgar Evers was a big name in the NAACP, from what I’d heard. Field secretary. I wasn’t sure what that meant, but I knew Ma Pearl would’ve scourged me if she’d known I was learning such things from Hallelujah.
I started chopping again, in case Ma Pearl decided to spy on me from the kitchen window. Sweat poured down the sides of my face, and I wiped it with my sleeve. “Didn’t Medgar Evers go down to Belzoni when Reverend Lee got killed?” I asked. “Nothing happened then. Nobody got arrested. Didn’t even make the papers,” I said.
Hallelujah corrected me. “It didn’t make the white papers. Plenty of colored papers like the Defender reported it. And Jet, of course.”
“That contraband?” I said, teasing.
Hallelujah laughed. The first time he brought over a copy of Jet magazine, Ma Pearl caught a glimpse of it while we sat in the kitchen flipping through it. Unfortunately, all she saw was the shapely, bathing-suit-clad model in the centerfold. She yanked the magazine out of Hallelujah’s hand, flipped through it herself, and immediately judged it preachy and pompous. “A bunch a high-class northern Negroes trying to make everybody else feel bad ’bout how they lives,” she said. She tossed the magazine back to Hallelujah with, “Preacher oughta be ’shamed of hisself letting you read that trash full o’ half-nekked womens.”
She never said that the fashion magazines Queen got from Mrs. Robinson were trash. Yet they too held plenty of pictures of bathing-suit-clad beauties, except they were white.
I shivered, even though sweat poured down my sides under my two layers of clothing. It scared me that the only newspapers and magazines I read were the ones the Robinsons read—?the safe papers—?the papers that didn’t report the story about a preacher being gunned down for registering himself and others to vote.