The Kindest Lie(55)
“Yes, we had good times all right. But all good things come to an end, as they say. I don’t think I ever told you about my cousin Alfonso. He was just like a firefly. Alfonso moved so fast you had to catch him before he lit someplace else.” Mama slid her hand between the pages of the photo album and pulled apart the ones that stuck together. She pointed to a boy about twelve or thirteen, in tan overalls and a brown derby hat pulled low over his eyes.
“He was a pretty boy. He’d be right there when we jumped rope and all the girls would chase him around. One day he was showing off for us and jumped in the air, clapping his shoes together. I tell you he was a mess. This one time he lost his balance and fell in the dirt and it caked to his backside. But he got up dancing and the girls ate it up.” Mama laughed while gazing at the photo of her cousin.
“I bet he was something else. I wish I’d known him,” Ruth said.
“He would’ve gotten a kick out of you and your brother. Sometimes, I wish he would have made less of a scene, less of a spectacle, you know. Anyway, that day, the girls were cackling and screaming when Alfonso went to the bathroom at the general store to clean himself up. He wasn’t paying any mind to what he was doing, and he started to open the wrong door. He realized his mistake quick and headed for the colored bathroom. But by then these three white men had walked up. I’ll never forget that one who said, ‘Did I see your nigger hands touch that door?’”
Mama spat the n-word like it had a sour taste. Ruth had grown up hearing from her grandparents about whips and police dogs and fire hoses spraying Black folks, but it always felt like an ancient tale. Like something she had read about in history books or watched in documentaries. Something older people used as leverage to prove that people her age had it easy. Or rhetoric they hoped would motivate them to take advantage of opportunities that had been hard won. Ruth didn’t know if she could bear hearing more of the story, as she felt like a child inching closer to a flame, not sure if she should touch it or not.
“Those men kicked dirt in Alfonso’s face and walked away laughing about it. He stood there and took it. What else could he do? That night he was supposed to come over to our house for supper. He loved Ma’s greens and cold-water corn bread. We were all sitting around the table talking about Sunday school lessons and the price of lumber coming down. But Alfonso never showed up.”
Mama tilted her head up to the ceiling and closed her eyes. The living room felt small and tight, with a pall of melancholy covering it.
She went on with her story. “Then we heard some commotion outside, and my father went out to check. There was Alfonso running fast, zigzag-like, with these white men chasing him. Then he just turned in circles, his hands stretched out, his eyes glowing in the dark. Those men were everywhere, and he was trapped. Pa walked right out there and stood in front of Alfonso and told those men to take him, do what they needed to do to him instead of his nephew. But they didn’t pay that no mind. They said this was the little nigger that tried to use the white bathroom and he needed to learn a lesson.”
“I can’t imagine.” Ruth rested her hand on Mama’s thigh.
Papa used to tell stories about the civil rights marches decades later that moved through Chicago to support the striking Memphis sanitation workers. He said he drove up there to march with them holding a sign that screamed in bold letters I AM A MAN. Every time he talked about it, Ruth thought there was something screwed up about a world where a man needed to carry a sign to remind the world and maybe even himself that he was indeed a man. She honestly couldn’t fathom what they’d endured in Mississippi in the 1930s.
Mama continued. “They wrapped a long rope around the tree where we had just picked walnuts the week before. It had rained not too long before. You know, one of those summer showers that’s over before you know it. So the ground was wet. All those men made a big circle around Alfonso. He’d turn one way to try to run and then the other. Every time, he’d kick up mud and it would splash on his pants. He reminded me of a caged animal, and I figure that’s how they saw him. It’s about what they thought of him. You can’t think nobody’s human and do that to them. I stood in the doorway with Ma and Mitch and we watched them hang Alfonso.”
Ruth’s breath caught in her throat and she looked down at her hands, which were clenched in fists. “Dear God. I don’t know what to say.”
Watching her grandmother, she imagined that little girl in pigtails from the picture, and anger welled inside her until it spilled from her face in hot tears.
“What did you do?” Ruth said, her voice barely a whisper.
Mama’s mouth twitched, and her words emerged hard and gravelly. “What could we do? Not a damn thing right then unless we wanted to be hung next. We just stood there real still until it was over. I’m telling you this story because of your son and what I said to you when you brought him into the world.” She leaned back in her chair.
Ruth wondered how that lynching long ago could be connected to her child. “I don’t understand,” she said.
“That next morning after they hung Alfonso, my folks made your uncle and me pack our suitcases and we all headed to the train station. They’d had enough. You hear the old folks who used to say they were sick and tired of being sick and tired? We left Mississippi and came here to Indiana and stayed with family that had come before us. We didn’t have much else but a hope and a prayer. And each other. But it was a fresh start, and that’s what we needed.”