The Last Ballad(93)

“How’d they find out, Sophia? This was supposed to be quiet.”

“And I tried to keep it quiet,” she said. “I did. But this place is a hornet’s nest, Hampton. I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s loud and busy, and sometimes you can’t hear over the noise and you can’t find your friends, and if you shout you don’t know who’s listening.”

“Well, no more shouting, then,” Hampton said.

“We won’t have to,” she said. “You’re here.”

She looked down the street at the house with the gables. Hampton turned and looked at it as well. Faint light burned in a few of the windows.

“That’s your boardinghouse,” Sophia said. “Miss Adeline takes Negroes.”

“I know,” Hampton said. “Use the back door and the back staircase. I’m here visiting family. Don’t talk to white folks. Don’t look at white girls.”

“Very impressive,” Sophia said, trying to smile.

“You can take the boy out of Mississippi.”

“There are so many people I want you to meet,” she said. “I told you about Ella May, but there are so many wonderful people here.”

“I hope they’re all just as wonderful as Beal and Reed,” Hampton said.

“I’m sorry,” Sophia said. “I didn’t know that any of that was going to happen. But you made it, and we’ll start organizing tomorrow. I’ll pick you up at eight a.m. and we’ll head to Bessemer City and meet up with Ella. She’s got a list of workers to visit.”

“Eight a.m.,” said Hampton. He had no idea what time it was, but 8 a.m. did not seem very far away.

“Get some sleep,” Sophia said. She turned and walked up the street in the direction from which she’d come. Hampton bent to pick up his duffel and then he heard Sophia call his name. He looked up, saw her a block away, a shadowy figure on the sidewalk.

“Spindle,” she said.

Hampton stood, threw the strap of his duffel bag over his shoulder, looked in the direction of the boardinghouse, looked back at Sophia. “Spindle,” he said.



The next morning, Hampton found himself the lone passenger in a rickety truck en route to a town called Bessemer City with Sophia at the wheel. He’d slept poorly in his hot attic room, opening his eyes at every sound: each pop or crack of the house during the night, the rumble of every passing automobile, and, at dawn when workers left their shift at Loray and headed home, the cacophony of footsteps and voices on the street three floors below.

Hampton woke to a hot morning that had grown hotter in the hour since, and now he sat looking out the passenger’s-side window, long periods of silence passing between him and Sophia. The brick and glass storefronts on Franklin Avenue in downtown Gastonia quickly gave way to long expanses of forests, broken by farms where men in distant fields guided plows behind mules. Gulches ran alongside the road, rimmed with red gashes of dirt that made it seem that skin had been torn away from a body. On the other side of barbed-wire fences, cotton grew in great green and brown clusters, the bolls bulging as if they would burst open in relief.

Sophia turned off the main road and the truck snaked along the hills and curves that took them past more farms and small houses that sat in the midst of cleared fields. They entered a small downtown that looked like a miniature version of Gastonia. The streets were alive with automobiles and well-dressed white men and women on foot passing in and out of stores, a market, a bank, a post office.

“Is this it?” Hampton asked.

“This is Bessemer City,” Sophia said, “but this ain’t it.”

The it was a settlement Hampton later learned was called Stumptown. He sensed the place even before they pulled off the main road and followed the gravel-strewn dirt lane that led down into it. The land had grown wild once they’d left downtown and the flat farmland rolled into hills. He saw whitewashed, crumbling cabins, churches, and other structures that seemed to be abandoned.

As he and Sophia entered Stumptown, Hampton remembered rural Mississippi: small, rambling shacks, barefoot children kicking up dust as they ran across smooth-swept yards, old women with hard-set eyes wearing bandanas and long cotton shifts walking beside the road. Stumptown felt like a place he’d known before.

The lane was so narrow that trees and bushes enclosed the truck as they descended into the settlement. In the road before them, flakes of mica and pieces of quartz sparkled beneath the bright morning sun. The yellow light that poured through the trees was tinged with a green otherworldliness that made Hampton feel as if the glass in the truck’s windows had been tinted.

Sophia eased the truck down the lane, passing cabin after cabin that seemed too dilapidated to inhabit. Exterior walls were unpainted and left exposed to the elements, tarpaper flapped over windows, collapsed roofs were covered with tarpaulins. Sophia parked at the end of the road, in front of a cabin shadowed by tall trees. She turned off the engine, and they sat there for a moment, looking at the scene before them. “This is where Ella lives,” she said.

“I thought she was white,” Hampton said.

“She is.”

The cabin’s door burst open, and a tribe of dirty children poured onto the porch and stumbled down the stairs. Sophia climbed down from the truck. One of Ella’s children, an older girl, was waiting for her, and the two hugged. Hampton got out of the truck and walked over to where Sophia and the girl stood by the front bumper. The girl held the hand of a much younger girl who must have been her little sister. A boy stood by the porch steps as if waiting to discover the reason for their visit before deciding whether or not to welcome them.