Midnight Without a Moon(58)

After having subverted Ma Pearl, I knew to use the front door and walk all the way around the house to the pump rather than get water from the bucket in the kitchen. By the time I returned with the towel, Papa was sitting in his chair with his unlit tobacco-filled pipe in his mouth.

Aunt Belle was stretched out on the sofa, her head resting in Monty’s lap as he and Papa chatted. The Sears and Roebuck catalogs were, again, neatly stacked in the corner.

I handed Monty the towel, and he placed it on Aunt Belle’s jaw.

“You all right?” I asked her.

“Um-hmm,” she replied, half moaning, her words garbled. “I bith my tongue. But I’m okay. She’s beath me worth with that blat strapth of hers.”

The black strap of terror, its sting worse than that of a thousand hornets. I shivered as I recalled the many lashes I had received from it myself.

“She had no right to hit you with her fist like a man,” Monty said.

“I shouldnth sassth my mama,” Aunt Belle replied. “I was raisth bettha.”

Monty smoothed a curl from her face. “Stop trying to talk and rest that swollen jaw. Can’t have you looking like Frankenstein.”

“Donth makth me laugth,” Aunt Belle said, chuckling. “It hurths.”

“So they ain’t going to prison,” Papa said softly.

His words snapped Monty and Aunt Belle out of their banter and back to reality.

“No, sir, Mr. Carter, they’re not,” Monty said, the grimness returning to his face. “A jury of their peers found them not guilty. They get to go home, back to their families, back to being the good citizens of Mississippi that they always have been.”

Monty’s sarcasm hung in the air like thick perfume. Good citizens of Mississippi. Good citizens who had put a northern Negro in his place and sent a message to the rest of the country: Mississippi makes its own rules, and nobody can make us do otherwise, not the NAACP, not the Negro press, not even the president of the United States. We can kill all the Negroes we want. You can make us have a trial, but you can’t make us find our white citizens guilty.

“Mr. Carter, you registered to vote?” Monty asked, his eyes squinting, challenging Papa.

Papa removed his pipe and shook his head no, even though he knew Monty already knew the answer to that question. “What good would it do, son?”

“Do you know why that jury was all white, Mr. Carter?”

“?’Cause they always is,” Papa answered.

Monty grimaced. “Because there are no Negroes registered to vote in Tallahatchie County, Mr. Carter. That’s why the jury was all white.”

Papa placed his pipe back in his mouth as he considered Monty’s words. The only noise in the house at that moment was the distant clanking of pots and pans as Ma Pearl released her fury in the kitchen. Finally a hearty laugh rocked Papa’s lanky body. I had never seen him laugh so hard, not even when he occasionally read the funny pages. When he finally composed himself, he asked Monty wearily, “Young man, do you really think they woulda ’lowed a colored man in that jury box?”

“Of course not,” Monty answered. “But at least we could have made a case for it.”

“Every colored man in the county coulda been on the courthouse reg’stry as voters. Still wouldn’ta made a diff’rence,” said Papa.

“Will you even consider it, Mr. Carter?”

“Trying to git on the voting reg’ster?”

“Yes,” Monty said, nodding. “Signing up. Registering to vote.”

“Son, I have a family to provide for. Gittin’ shot down at the courthouse won’t put food on the table.”

Aunt Belle raised her head slightly. “How can anythinth chane if our people won’th voth?”

As the room went silent, I imagined Papa, aging and hunched over, walking up the courthouse steps in Greenwood. The next thing he knows, a bullet strikes him in the back. Then another. Then another. They keep hitting him, even after he has fallen and tumbled down the stairs.

“When I’m old enough, I’ll register to vote,” I said. Everyone stared at me, not saying a word. “Papa’s right. He has a family to take care of. He can’t take chances like that. It’s the young folks who have to take a stand while we can. Before we have families depending on us.”

When Monty smiled and said, “Good for you, Rose,” my heart melted. And it melted for two reasons. One, Monty was handsome and smart, and I was glad he was about to marry my favorite aunt. And two, I thought about Levi Jackson and how, simply because he wanted to vote, he was shot and killed. What if that happened to me and I never got a chance to even vote in the first place? What good was my name on some voters’ list if I was dead? Fear rose up in my throat at the thought of something so daring. Now I understood why folks were fleeing to the North rather than staying and fighting. Why die in Mississippi when you could live up north?

But everybody couldn’t leave, or wouldn’t—?like Papa, who seemed to be perfectly content with living and dying in Mississippi. I had never asked him before, but that moment seemed as good as any to pose the question.

“Papa, how come you didn’t leave?”

“Mississippi is home, daughter,” he said. “I’m a farmer. I loves the land. I loves the fresh air. My animals. The cotton.”