Midnight Without a Moon(17)
When I saw the picture and the headline, I screamed and flung the paper as far away from me as I could. My stomach did somersaults as Hallelujah retrieved the paper from the trunk of a nearby tree.
He thrust the paper into my face and said in the deepest voice he could muster, “Read it!”
“No!” I said, shielding my eyes with my hands. My body trembled, and sweat poured down my sides. I didn’t have to see the paper again. Its headline, PREACHER’S MOUTH SHOT OFF, would be seared in my mind forever, along with the gruesome picture of Reverend George W. Lee with his face sewn up like Frankenstein.
As if loaded down by a heavy weight, Hallelujah dropped his body next to me on the stump. He sighed loudly and said, “I promised Preacher I’d never show you this.” He paused and stared back at the cluster of mourners congregated around the Jacksons’ yard. “But after seeing how people reacted about Levi’s death, like it’s not a big deal, I had to share it with somebody.” He extended the paper toward me. “You need to know the truth, Rosa.”
My stomach churned, but I took the paper hesitantly. I glanced at the headline again. PREACHER’S MOUTH SHOT OFF, TONGUE SHOT INTO, ALLEGEDLY, BY WHITE MEN. Across the top of the page read Southern Mediator Journal. I had never heard of the paper.
“A Negro paper?” I asked.
Hallelujah nodded. “Yes. Arkansas. Little Rock.”
He pointed at the top of the paper, where it read, “The South’s Progressive Negro Weekly. Little Rock, Arkansas.” Hallelujah took a deep breath, then exhaled. “His face was ripped in two. The undertaker had to suture it back together.”
A chill crept over my body.
“Hundreds of shotgun pellets in his face,” Hallelujah continued, anger burning in his eyes, “and the sheriff dismissed them as dental fillings. He didn’t say a thing about the bullet holes in his shot-out tires.”
As I studied the paper, Hallelujah said, “Dr. T.R.M. Howard in Mound Bayou said some Negroes would sell their grandmas for half a dollar, but Reverend Lee was not one of them.”
“Negroes like Ma Pearl,” I said, glancing up at him.
“Judas niggers.”
“What?”
“Judas niggers,” Hallelujah repeated. “Negroes who’d sell their grandmas for half a dollar just to stay in the white man’s favor.”
I told him what Ma Pearl said about Levi having “a whole lotta stupid” in his head and how she’d kill her own if they registered to vote.
Hallelujah leaped from the stump. “That’s bull crap!” he said, banging his fist in his palm. “We have rights too. And that includes the right to vote. A man shouldn’t have to die for wanting to vote.”
I tugged his shirttail. “Calm down before folks get suspicious.”
He slumped down on the stump with a huff.
“Reverend Jenkins know you talk like that?” I asked.
A quick shrug of his right shoulder was Hallelujah’s only reply.
“You shouldn’t use such strong language. You might start cussing like Queen.”
“These white folks around here will make even a preacher cuss,” Hallelujah answered.
“Well, don’t you start,” I said. “Be a shame for a good boy like you to end up in hell.”
“I live in Mississippi,” he replied tersely. “I’m already in hell.”
“Hell is hot, and it’s full of demons,” I said.
Hallelujah glared at me and said, “And so is Mississippi.”
August
Chapter Nine
FRIDAY, AUGUST 19
JULY HAD COMPLETELY MELTED AWAY, AND WE WERE more than halfway into August before we heard from Mama up in Chicago. The cotton-chopping season had ended, and I had nothing to do except work like a donkey around the house while Queen sat around acting like, well, like a queen.
God had sent ol’ Gabriel down with more buckets of blazing heat. And being as faithful as the Bible describes him to be, ol’ Gabe poured that heat on us good. Everything around us was as parched as a winter peanut. Except the cotton. It was growing strong.
Papa prayed every day that it wouldn’t rain. Rain would ruin his crop. Sun would help it prosper. And every day, it seemed, a wide, dark cloud hovered right over the cotton field, then suddenly poofed away without leaving a trace of water. Every night, Papa fell on his knees and thanked God for holding the rain in the clouds for one more day.
It was too hot to do anything besides work in the house anyway. So there I was, down on my knees, scrubbing the kitchen floor, my hands chafing from lye soap, while Queen relaxed on her lazy behind in the parlor, lost in the wonderful world of radio soaps.
School wouldn’t start for another two weeks. And I couldn’t wait. Folks said the colored school was haunted, said it was built over a cemetery. And since the white folks who built it didn’t bother to relocate the sixty-nine Negro corpses that rested beneath it, angry ghosts appeared randomly throughout the day to scare away the intruders. Papa said it just wasn’t right to disturb a sacred space that way, said he didn’t blame the haints if they showed up. “Wouldn’t want folks stepping on my grave either,” he said.
Personally, I never saw any haints, unless you count the little round white man with the doughy face who visited on occasion to make sure “you folks have all you need ovah heah.”