Midnight Without a Moon(33)

“That don’t mean Ma Pearl can’t cook,” she said, jumping up off the bed. “Can’t believe I got to git my own food.”

“Don’t you ever care about anybody other than yourself?”

“Niggas oughta quit acting a fool round here,” she said, yanking back the sheet in the doorframe. “Nothing I can do ’bout him missing. He probably somewhere hanging from a tree by now anyways.”

I lay on my bed, shaking. A colored boy from Chicago was missing in Mississippi, and my own cousin was too callous to care.

No. He wasn’t missing.

He had been taken.

By two white men.

And they knew exactly where he was.

Fear gripped me and wouldn’t let go. What if Queen was right? What if he was hanging somewhere from a tree? It wasn’t as if we hadn’t heard plenty of stories like that before. What kind of place was I living in, where white men could just walk into the house of a colored person and take away his kin? What if it had been Fred Lee? Would Papa have just let him go? Or would he have put up a fight?

At the thought, a sick feeling invaded my stomach. Papa might not have fought.

When the sheet hanging in the doorframe of the bedroom moved and I saw that the hand moving it wore a diamond engagement ring, I shut my eyes and pretended to sleep.

“You didn’t go to sleep that fast,” said Aunt Belle.

I didn’t answer.

“I see your eyes moving under your lids. And your breathing is all wrong. You ain’t asleep, Rose Lee.”

I opened my eyes and stared at Aunt Belle standing in the doorway.

“You okay?” she asked.

Though she smiled, worry crisscrossed her face. I wanted to smile back at her and tell her I was okay, but my emotions wouldn’t allow me. It wasn’t until that moment that I realized how angry I was at her. She had been in Mississippi for a whole week, and I had seen her only once—?on the day she arrived. The day when all she could talk about was the NAACP and what needed to change in Mississippi, and not a word about what life was like for her up north. The day she brought fancy pantsuits for Queen and none for me. The day she allowed Ma Pearl to humiliate me in front of all her sophisticated Saint Louis friends and didn’t utter a word in my defense.

I turned my eyes from her and stared at the ceiling. Even now, she wasn’t really in that room to see me. She only wanted to know how I was feeling about what was going on around me. It took a missing Chicago boy just to get her to the house. And that’s only because Papa took her place and forced her to stay with Ma Pearl.

Without an invitation, she entered the room and sat on Queen’s bed. “Sorry I haven’t been around much,” she said, sighing.

Much? You haven’t been around at all, I wanted to tell her. But I didn’t say anything. I was no longer a brokenhearted seven-year-old whose head she could fill with dreams from a Sears and Roebuck catalog. I was a thirteen-year-old who finally realized that when black birds flew north, they outgrew the ones they left in the South. Unless the ones they left were old enough to vote. Then they came back and asked them to risk their lives by registering. And for what? To be gunned down before they could even set foot in the courthouse?

Ma Pearl was probably right. The boy from Chicago was probably stirring up trouble just like Aunt Belle and Monty were doing. Without my permission, words suddenly flew out of my mouth. “Don’t you care if you die or not?”

“What?” Aunt Belle asked, as if my words had startled her.

I sat up on the bed and faced her. “Don’t you care about dying?” I asked, my voice shaking.

“Of course I care about dying. We all care,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean we should shrink back and not fight for our rights.”

“You have your rights. Nobody is gonna kill you for voting in Saint Louis like they did Levi Jackson or that old man Lamar Smith.”

“But that’s why we’re here.”

I turned my face from her and said, “I thought you were here to visit your family. That’s what you told Ma Pearl. And that’s what you’ve been doing for the past few years, visiting family, not rounding up people to register to vote.”

Aunt Belle came and sat beside me on my bed. “Things have changed, Rose. Do you know what Brown versus Board of Education means?”

I nodded. “The Supreme Court outlawed school segregation in the state of Kansas.”

“That’s right,” Aunt Belle said. “And soon it will happen all over the country.” She shifted her weight on the bed and asked, “Do you know what the White Citizens’ Council is?”

Again I nodded. “Hallelujah told me about them.”

“That group formed right here in the Delta, in Indianola, not too far from Stillwater. They formed shortly after the Supreme Court passed down their ruling. Their membership spread like fire throughout the South. They want to make sure the government doesn’t force integration on the South the way it had to do in Kansas.”

“They’re in more than one state?”

Aunt Belle nodded. “Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana. They’re all over the South.”

I told her about what I heard at the Robinsons’ a few days after Levi’s death, how I heard Mr. Robinson himself say they had to put a stop to the NAACP, calling them the National Association for the Agitation of Colored People. “Mr. Robinson even threatened Papa and Ma Pearl that he’d throw them off his place if they got involved with the NAACP.”