Long Division(69)

The lady went on, saying words like “organization” and “compassion” and “justice” and “education” and “future,” but I was zoned out. The last thing I heard her say at the end of her long speech was, “Last year this time, y’all probably already know this, but our house got fire-bombed. My daughter was hit in the head with some pillars off the fan, and I got my face a bit burnt up trying to see about her.”

“Why’d they bomb your house?” Baize asked. “I mean, I know why they bombed people, but why you?”

“They been shooting in folks’ houses, burning down they’ churches, anything they can to scare us away from working with them college kids,” she said. “That’s enough questions. What y’all doing up in here? We told all the children to stay in they’ house this week. Didn’t nobody tell y’all?”

If I had wanted to hear the words coming out of that woman’s mouth, I could’ve stayed in 1985 and watched PBS. I just kept looking at Baize wondering how what she said about her parents being City and Shalaya could even be true. I hadn’t seen any pictures of us in her house, but then again, maybe we looked completely different 20 years older. Or maybe I was too focused on other things to look for pieces of myself in her place. Or maybe she took down all the pictures because it made her sad.

“Wait,” I said to Baize. “Were your parents really married?”

“Yeah. Why?”

“Just wondered.”

The woman walked over to the man, who now had his head on the desk. She looked at us and didn’t say a word, so I just started looking up at the bird’s nest at the top of the room. Thin pieces of nest kept falling to the ground.

“Before y’all came in, I was trying to tell this one right here to put that bottle down. This one here is in serious need of a test.”

“Why?” Baize asked her.

The woman told us that the man sitting in front of us cut trees for a man named Gaddis. That was the same name as the park Baize had talked about back in 2013. Gaddis had a sixteen-year-old daughter named Brianna. Brianna came out to watch the man cut down some trees a week before that Freedom Summer was announced. Brianna and the man had known each other for years, so they talked and laughed for a while. When Brianna got ready to leave, the man patted her on the bottom of her back and said, “Good luck with everythang, baby. Fine as you is, you sho’ ain’t gon’ need it.”

Baize said, “You can’t put your hand on a Becky or go around calling them ‘baby’ and expect good to come from it.”

“Who is Becky?” I asked her.

She ignored me.

Neither of us knew what to say after that. Baize was really into what was happening, but I was just looking at her, trying to see if I could find a part of me in any part of her face. People always said I looked like all these people who I never thought I looked like. That made me think I really didn’t know how I looked at all. Baize definitely had my hips and maybe she had my forehead, but other than that, I couldn’t see or hear a drop of me in her. If she was my daughter, I hoped to God that she had my tiny belly button and not one of those big ol’ country ones like Shalaya Crump that made you look like you had a brown Vienna sausage growing out of your stomach.

“Is your mind or mouth broke?” the woman said to me. “You gonna let your baby do all the talking for you?”

“Umm. Oh, naw,” I said. “I talk. She ain’t my baby, though. We’re from a land far away.” Baize just looked at me and started shaking her head. “Um, have you ever heard of a man named Lerthon?”

Baize cut her eyes to me. “Lerthon Coldson?” she whispered to me. “You never said we were looking for Lerthon Coldson. You said we were coming to save your friend.”

The old man with his head down on the desk started giggling. “Yeah, we know who he is,” he said. “We know that lowdown son of a bitch good and well, don’t we, baby?”

“Where can we find him?” I asked and got closer. “I got some information Lerthon might need.”

“Found!” the man said. “I’m ’Thon. Why you asking?”

Mama Lara never married my granddaddy, and now I understood why. You could tell that one day, maybe a long time ago, maybe even a month earlier, Lerthon Coldson was one of those beautiful men that people, including other men, loved to watch smile. Even now, he had the kind of smile that made you think that all people, no matter how old, were beautiful eight-year-olds who drank with their whole mouth covering the water fountain. That didn’t mean he wasn’t also completely drunk out of his mind, though. Shame, shame, shame, I thought to myself. “Oh, okay. Mr. Thon, I have a message for you?”

“Is it a message in a bottle?” he asked me. “If it is, just gon’ and give me the bottle. You can keep that message, though, big boy.”

Lerthon wouldn’t stop laughing and then he started slowly crying and apologizing while he was laughing. “Gotdamnit,” he said, “folks do whatever they can to stay alive. I just be hating that mirror. That’s ’bout it. That little white girl was going off to school. She was making them eyes at me so I told her what was on my mind.”

“But you said she was 16,” I said.

“Don’t tell me,” he said. “I know how old she is. I got me a 13-year-old daughter myself. Shit, if her daddy woulda called my daughter ‘baby,’ wouldn’t nobody be after him. Wouldn’t nobody get to shooting and carrying on, would they?”