Midnight Without a Moon(47)

My clothes clung to my sweaty body, and all I wanted was a cool bath in the tin tub. But since it was only Tuesday, I knew I wouldn’t get one. I’d have to wait for Wednesday, then again on Saturday. In the meantime, I had to make do with a wash-up, a bird bath, as Ma Pearl called it. Besides, there on the front steps sat Hallelujah, waiting for me.

Friend or not, I resented him sitting there in his freshly pressed clothes, that fedora atop his head, his penny loafers shining—?not even a drop of sweat on his nose. But then I remembered that he had promised to bring me something to read, and my heart skipped a few beats. He had promised to bring me a book Reverend Jenkins had ordered for him from a teachers’ catalog. The book was called Native Son, and it was written by a colored man named Richard Wright, who was supposedly born and raised right here in Mississippi. Like that phenomenon of colored and white children sitting side by side in classrooms up north, a colored man from Mississippi with his name on the outside of a book is something I’d have to see to believe.

By the time I reached the edge of the porch, Hallelujah was grinning.

I dropped my sack on the ground and asked, “What you so cheerful for?”

“Look what I got,” he said, waving a magazine toward me.

“Contraband?” I said, staring at and, for the first time, resenting the copy of Jet. The cover was powder blue and white, and it, of course, had a picture of a beautiful Negro woman on the cover. “Where’s the book you said you’d bring me?”

Hallelujah scowled. “Preacher said Native Son wasn’t a proper book to be sharing with a lady.”

I winced and said, “I ain’t no lady. If I was a lady, I wouldn’t be wearing myself out in that cotton field. I’d be sitting under a shade tree like Mrs. Robinson and sipping on some ice-cold lemonade.”

Hallelujah laughed and placed the magazine in my hand. “This is better than the book right now,” he said. “It’s last week’s edition. There’s an article about Emmett Till. Page three.”

“Oh,” I said, my perspective changing as I took the magazine from his hand.

“How Dark Negroes ‘Pass’ Down South,” the cover read. That, at least, sounded like information I could use. But when I opened the magazine to the article on Emmett Till, my jaw dropped. “Oh my God, Hallelujah. He looks so much like you.”

“Looked,” Hallelujah corrected me. Then he said, “I know. Gave me chills when I saw it. Preacher even said we have the same birthday. July twenty-fifth.”

I stared at the picture, a professional shot of a smiling, handsome boy wearing a fedora, a starched shirt, and a tie—?what Hallelujah wore every Sunday. I couldn’t believe the resemblance, as if they could have been brothers.

“Glad he didn’t wear glasses,” Hallelujah said, his voice low. “That would’ve been too close.”

“Uncanny,” I whispered. “That’s the word Miss Johnson would use.”

When I glanced at Hallelujah, I noticed that goose bumps were creeping up his neck. I wondered whether he was thinking about our visit to Miss Addie’s and her strange reaction when she saw him. I sure was. I rubbed away goose bumps from my own arms as I pondered on how she “sensed” that something bad might happen by just looking at Hallelujah.

I started reading the article out loud: “??‘A fourteen-year-old Chicago junior high school student, Emmett (Bobo) Till, who was kidnapped by a trio of gun-toting whites early Sunday morning while visiting relatives in Money, Miss., was feared a lynch victim because he “whistled at a white girl.”?’”

I looked up at Hallelujah. “I thought folks have been saying that the third man might be colored.”

Hallelujah shrugged. “What difference does it make? If he was colored, he’s still as guilty as the whites.”

I read on silently.

“What you think of Preacher Mose sticking around for the trial?” Hallelujah asked.

“What trial?”

“The trial for Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam next week.”

“A trial?” I asked, glancing up from the magazine. “Next week?”

Hallelujah nodded.

“In Mississippi? For a white man killing a Negro?”

Hallelujah grinned. “Two white men. And they could go to prison for life if found guilty.”

“Praise the Lord,” I said.

“Sinners can’t praise the Lord.”

I narrowed my eyes at him. “They do every Sunday at Greater Mount Zion.”

Exasperated by my remark, Hallelujah ripped the magazine from my hands and turned to the article on Emmett Till. He read, “‘. . . the sheriff ordered the family of sixty-four-year-old Rev. Moses Wright, a retired Church of God in Christ minister and the boy’s uncle, to “take his family from the town for their own safety.” The minister, however, refused to leave his home after making arrangements to hide his wife, three sons, and two visiting Chicago grandsons, Curtis Jones and Wheeler Parker.’” He peered at me and asked, “You think you could be that brave?”

“He’s braver than most Negroes,” I said. “I don’t know if I’d be bold enough to hang around. Not after what they did to his nephew.”

“I would,” said Hallelujah. “I wouldn’t let those crackers run me from my home either. I’d stay and testify too.”