Long Division(75)

Baize pulled out her phone and started taking pictures of the man. “Should we take his sheet off, too?” she asked me.

“Nah. It’ll be harder to hurt him if we take it off. He looks like a monster now, right?”

“Not really,” she said. “More like a white boy in a white sheet.”

“Good point.”

Baize and I started busting more jokes about monsters, goons, and Klansmen when Shalaya Crump hugged Evan with her back to me. I looked up and his eyes were closed. When they opened, he came near me.

“City, I ain’t mean no harm with all this,” he said. “You think you can save someone’s life, you do it. I reckon it can get messier than you think. You know what I’m trying to say?”

“Not really,” I said.

“That’s my brother,” he said and pointed to the Klansman. “Never thought in a million years I’d have to let loose on my own brother with a rifle.”

“I never thought in million years I’d follow a white boy who calls himself Jewish into a hole in the ground in 1964,” I told him. “Thangs happen, I guess.”

“Ev, come on, man,” the Klansman said through the sheet. “These folks ain’t none of your friends. Tell ’em why we did it. I never did nothing disrespectful to a Negro in my life. You know that.”

“You shot my granddaddy,” I told him, “just because you could. That ain’t disrespectful enough?”

“No I didn’t,” he said through that sheet. “I didn’t. We were just coming to burn the school down.”

“With him inside?”

“Yeah, but they said he’d already be dead.”

“Who shot him?” The taller Klansman didn’t answer so I looked to Evan. “Who shot him, Evan? You?”

“City, you know he didn’t shoot no one,” Shalaya Crump said. “Quit being so Perry Mason.”

“How do I know? Just because y’all went through something, I’m supposed to trust him. His plan got all us in trouble in the first place. How come you can’t see that?”

Baize went in her bag and started blowing her nose and hocking up mucus. She spit it in these blue napkins she’d brought with her.

“Mr. Gaddis probably did it,” Evan said.

“Wait. It’s real convenient that folks can blame everything on Gaddis, ain’t it?” Baize asked, but she didn’t wait for an answer. “And how come you ain’t the real Klan? Y’all were gonna burn up this building with a black man’s dead body in it, right? And y’all wearing white sheets with holes for eyes, right? That’s real Klan-ish of someone who ain’t in the Klan, don’t you think? Maybe all white folks in the Klan are just Klan-ish, you feel me?”

I looked at Baize and loved her smart mouth so much in that second. I didn’t love it because I was somehow responsible for it. I just loved that there was someone alive who could say the things I thought but didn’t know how to fully say. It would take me a week of planning to come up with the clever stuff she could come up with in seconds.

“Yeah,” I said to Evan. “Y’all might not be all the way Klan, but y’all both are mighty Klan-ish to burn down a building with my granddaddy in it.”

“But they didn’t burn down the building,” Shalaya Crump said. “Nothing got burnt down.”

“We was just trying to save our family,” his brother said. “That what y’all were fixing to do, too. If it’s right for y’all, it’s right for us, ain’t it?” It was so odd to hear a teenager’s voice coming from under a Klan sheet. “Some of these folks hate anyone who ain’t them. If you ain’t the right kind of white or you ain’t Christian or you ain’t Southern or you ain’t whatever they want you to be, you might as well be a Negro, especially with that Freedom Summer coming.”

“But y’all can hide,” Shalaya Crump finally said to the brother. “Don’t you see what we’re saying? We can’t ever hide.” She looked hard at Evan. “That’s all I was trying to say earlier.”

“We been trying to hide long as I remember,” Evan told us. “And hiding, it’s damn near worse than the getting caught. Because you only hiding from yourself. How you supposed to like yourself or anyone else if you done convinced yourself that you deserve to be hunted by yourself?”

“First, that’s too many ‘yourselfs’ in one speech,” Baize told him. “And whatever you talking about, y’all decided to fix that by walking around in sheets, acting like the Klan?” She looked up at me. “Can I cuss?”

“Go ahead.”

“Fuck that, Mr. Klan man,” she said. “This ain’t Halloween, yucka.”

“Yeah,” I said. “This ain’t Halloween, yucka. What’s a yucka?”

Baize laughed at me and shook her head.

“Say what you want,” his brother broke in. “They was coming for us just like they came for y’all and we was just trying to survive. What would you do if y’all were in our position?”

“But that’s the point, dummy,” Baize said. “We can’t be in your position. They came to you to get us. Would they ever come to us to get y’all? Ever?”