Midnight Without a Moon(9)

Actually, I decided I would have a house better than Mrs. Robinson’s, and it certainly wouldn’t be in Mississippi. It would be in Chicago. Because no matter what it took, I was going there one day, just like Mama and all the rest of them.

In Chicago I’d go to the finest school they had—?a school where coloreds and whites went together. No white school with good stuff and a colored school with a bunch of old stuff. And we’d all use the same bathrooms and drink from the same water fountains, too.

Then I’d graduate from that school and go to a fine college, a college where only the smartest people could go. I’d study to be a doctor, like my friend Hallelujah wanted to be; then we could both be rich like that colored doctor he told me about who lived in Mound Bayou. After I became a doctor and made a lot of money, I’d come back down to Mississippi and buy Papa a brand-new car, one better than Mr. Pete’s. And I’d teach him how to drive it. Next, I’d buy him a big white house just like Mr. Robinson’s, and I might let Ma Pearl live there with him. Then again, I might not.

Those were my plans. Chicago. College. And caring for my family.

Daydreaming—?it’s how I survived that dusty cotton field.

“Rosa Lee!” a second-soprano voice called.

Before I even turned, I knew I would find Hallelujah Jenkins standing at the edge of the field, waving at me.

Nobody called me Rosa but him. “A pretty name for a pretty girl,” he’d said.

“A preacher’s son ought not to tell lies,” I’d said back.

Besides, who else would’ve been calling my name from the edge of a cotton field midmorning instead of working in one? I glanced up at the sky. The sun was between nine and ten o’clock. Every Negro I knew, other than Queen, was somewhere working, either in a white man’s field or in a white woman’s house.

Hallelujah Jenkins was the most privileged colored boy in Leflore County, Mississippi. Slightly chubby and not so athletic, he always wore starched shirts, creased slacks, funny-looking suspenders, and brown penny loafers, even in hundred-degree weather, just like his daddy, Reverend Clyde B. Jenkins the Second. And he was constantly pushing his thick black glasses up the bridge of his pudgy nose.

Hallelujah was actually Clyde B. Jenkins the Third. But everybody called him Hallelujah. When he was eighteen months old, that was the first word out of his mouth, at a funeral, no less.

Hallelujah even dressed nice when he helped us out in the field on occasion. And trust me, those occasions were few and far between, as the old folks used to say. Ma Pearl said he was too delicate for farm work. But Papa said it was a sign that Hallelujah would be a man of books and not of brawn. “A learned man like his daddy,” Papa said.

“Erudite” is the word my seventh-grade teacher, Miss Johnson, would use to describe him.

Hallelujah was a strange kind of fellow, but he was also my best friend. And when I saw him that morning, I remembered it was his birthday. He was finally fourteen. “Fourteen going on forty,” as Papa would say. But to Hallelujah, fourteen seemed to be the magic age when he thought Queen—?the girl he claimed he would one day marry—?would finally pay attention to him. Guess he forgot that she would keep having birthdays too.

Like me, Hallelujah didn’t have a mama. Well, I had one. She just didn’t act like one. But Hallelujah already had three mamas in his brief lifetime. Hallelujah’s first mama, his real mama, died when he was four, his second mama when he was eight, and his third mama when he was twelve.

It’s true. They all died four years apart. Folks said Reverend Jenkins killed them. They said he bored them to death when he forced them to listen to his sermons all week before he put his congregants to sleep with them on Sundays. Rumor had it he was on the lookout for wife number four. Too bad every woman in Leflore County did her best to avoid even shaking the poor man’s hand on Sunday morning, in case there was any truth about his sermons boring his deceased wives to death.

Hallelujah trudged on up the row toward me, his penny loafers collecting dust along the way. It was so hot that even he wore a wide-brimmed straw hat to hide his face from the sun, when a fedora usually graced his head.

“How come you didn’t grab a hoe?” I asked him. “Can’t you see I need some help?”

Hallelujah shook his head. “Can’t. Preacher let me stop by for only a minute.”

“What? Long enough to eat some of Ma Pearl’s cooking?”

Normally, Hallelujah would’ve laughed. But that day he didn’t. He didn’t even smile.

“Happy birthday,” I called, hoping to at least conjure a lip curl.

But Hallelujah’s expression remained stoic. With a wave of his hand, he gave me a dry “Thanks.”

I leaned on the heavy hoe and wiped sweat from my face with my sleeve. When Hallelujah got closer, I could see that his eyes were red, as if he’d been crying.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

Hallelujah tilted his head sideways. “Didn’t you hear?”

“Hear what?”

“About Levi.”

My legs went weak.

I knew something bad had happened.

With Ma Pearl acting jittery that morning and Papa being quieter than usual, I knew something had happened that they didn’t want me to know about it. Mr. Albert, Levi, and Fish had been working with us in Mr. Robinson’s fields for as long as I could remember, and they had never missed a day of work.