The Last Ballad(86)
The porter said, “They’re going to come on,” and Hampton’s mother began to cry. His father put his arm around her, pulled her toward him, kissed her on the mouth. He lowered Summer onto her lap. He reached for Hampton, pulled him close so that he stood before his father, nearly eye-level. “You be a man for her,” his father said. He spread his heavy hand across Hampton’s chest, ran his palm along his face and over his head, the work-worn calluses catching in Hampton’s hair. He reached into the front pocket of his overalls and removed the folded bills and slipped them into Hampton’s hand.
People in the car understood what was happening and what was about to happen. They began to move away from the family. Hampton looked up and saw two police officers standing above him. They reached down, took Hampton’s father by his shoulders, raised him to his feet. Hampton watched them escort his father through the car and off the train. His mother sobbed, pulled Summer to her chest, reached a hand toward Hampton. “They just going to talk to him,” she said. “They just going to talk to him.”
She was still saying that as the brakes released, the cars moved forward, and the train left the station. She was still saying it as the train pulled farther away, gathered speed, and rocketed north.
Hampton sat down beside his mother, felt her hand on his shoulder, leaned toward her as she pulled him close. She’d buried her face in Summer’s hair, but he could feel her body heaving in sobs. Summer tapped her mother’s arm, said, “Mama, Mama.” Hampton looked down at the money his father had given him. He unfolded the bills, saw that they’d been wrapped around the old photograph of his mother and father on their wedding day. He stared down at their young, unsmiling faces as they stared back at him.
He kept the photograph in his wallet after that, and for years he teased his mother about not smiling in what she referred to her as her wedding picture.
“Why ain’t you and Daddy smiling if y’all were so happy?”
“People didn’t smile in photographs back in those days,” she always said. “Aside from us getting married, there wasn’t nothing to smile about.”
The entire course of events of their lives and the events’ telling and retelling over the years had conditioned Hampton both to fear and hate white people, especially white southerners and the land they inhabited, in ways he found impossible to explain. Unlike his father, he had not shot and killed a white man to keep that white man from shooting and killing him, but he had witnessed it, and in the witnessing he retained the memory of the shotgun’s heft, the kick of its blast. He had not been plucked from a train and made to disappear like his father, the way so many black bodies had been made to disappear in the years before and after, but the simple fact of his continued existence made the possibility of his own disappearance all the more probable.
Growing up, Hampton had struggled to bypass the fear for his own life in favor of the pride he took in his father’s, but now, returning to the South all alone for the very first time in his life at the age of twenty-five, the fear that sat in his belly like a stone was the only thing left of that night in Mississippi. Now that same fear crept up in his throat and left a metallic taste in his mouth. The South had taken itself from him when it took his father. He knew he couldn’t get his father back, but perhaps in returning to the South and inhabiting the same world his father had inhabited, he’d be able to find something of him there. Maybe he’d even be able to change something about that world. This was his chance, but the cost of this chance was a paralyzing, unmitigated terror.
He’d boarded in New York before the sun had fully risen, then changed trains in Washington in midmorning. His final stop would be Charlotte, North Carolina, in the hours before midnight. He’d been promised that Fred Beal did not know about his trip south, had been promised that someone hand-chosen by Sophia Blevin, perhaps even Sophia herself, would meet him upon his arrival, although this was the South in 1929, and Hampton knew better than to believe his meeting a white woman at a train station would go unnoticed. After departing the train, he’d been instructed to head north on Tryon and not to stop walking until someone approached him and said the secret word: spindle. That person would assure his safe passage to Gastonia and the strike at Loray.
Hampton looked out the train’s window and watched fields of Virginia tobacco flash by in bright green blurs. The sun was setting, the edges of the tobacco leaves rimmed with golden light. He knew that, if he wanted to, he could remain seated when he arrived in Charlotte, then switch trains in Atlanta and again in Montgomery. He’d end up in New Orleans. He thought of spending the month of June in the Crescent City among Creole girls with soft drawls. They’d drink beer and eat fresh shrimp in the early summer heat. He’d love all the girls he’d meet, but he’d fall in love with one in particular, and he’d tell her the story of his father, who’d killed the white man who had tried to break down the family’s front door.
On a Saturday morning, they’d jump a train to Vicksburg and find the piece of land where his parents’ cabin still sat on the edge of the cotton field. Hampton would take the girl’s hand and lead her down the rows of black earth, the white wisps of cotton—something he’d never seen up close before—gathering like snow around their feet. By now, all these years later, the cabin would have begun to lean one way or the other, and he’d tell the girl that it wasn’t safe, to stay right there in the yard in front of the cabin with the hot sun on her back. He’d take the first tentative step, as if the stairs might collapse under his weight, but sensing their stability he’d go up onto the gallery—for that’s what they called a porch down there—and find that the door had been left open, the sunlight filling the room like a houseguest. He’d creep a little farther, shuffle his feet so as not to upset the fragile state of the settled cabin or its equally fragile place in his family’s history. He’d find the old wooden door where it had been left open against the wall, a spray of buckshot blown right through its middle. He’d step inside, close the door, witness the yellow sunlight blast itself through the myriad holes the shotgun’s work had left behind.