Coming of Age in Mississippi (16 page)

But the day before Linda Jean moved, all my plans were upset. Mama had the baby, another boy—she named him Ralph. In addition to that, the pulpwood truck fell completely apart. I went to bed that night and prayed for something to happen so Linda Jean them would have to stay another week.

As soon as I got to work the next morning, I knew my prayer hadn’t been answered. Linda Jean and Mr. Jenkins were wrapping all the china in newspaper. I just stood in the kitchen looking at them.

“Good morning, Essie,” Linda Jean said when she noticed me there. “I left Donna and Johnny over to Mama’s. She is gonna keep them until we finish packing. The man is coming to move us at two o’clock, so we’ve got a lot to do before then. Honey,” she said to Mr. Jenkins, “let Essie help me with these dishes.”

After we finished packing them, she asked me to take three glasses over to her mother and see if Donna and Johnny were all right. “Oh! Tell Mama to make some sandwiches for us for lunch, I don’t have time,” she said.

I took the glasses and headed for Mrs. Burke’s. Walking to her house was like walking on quicksand. I had no desire to get involved with Linda Jean’s mother. We shared a mutual dislike for each other. From the way she tried to treat me I knew how she felt about Negroes. She was one of those whites who would let her dog occupy a seat at her dining table before she would a Negro.

Now that I was facing that big white house, my knees were
trembling. “Why am I shaking so?” I thought as I walked up the wooden steps into the front porch. I missed one and almost fell. Trying to compose myself, I stood facing the screen door. “What am I scared of?” I thought. “Linda Jean will be gone tomorrow and I won’t ever see this woman again.” I knocked.

“Yes!” I heard her say as she came down the hallway. “Did you come for Donna and Johnny?” she called from behind the door.

“No. Linda Jean sent these glasses and told me to tell you to make some sandwiches for lunch for us, that she is too busy,” I answered.

Mrs. Burke opened the door now and took the glasses from me. “Does
Mrs. Jenkins
want me to bring the children over, or will you come back for them?” She sounded very indignant.

“She didn’t say, but I can come back for them,” I said innocently.

“Tell
Mrs. Jenkins
to send some diapers for Johnny,” she said as I was walking down the porch steps.

When I carried the diapers over a few minutes later, she met me at the door with a smile. I stood there looking at her baffled by the change in her attitude.

“Come on in, Essie, and change Johnny’s diaper for me. I’m on the phone,” she said in a pleasant tone of voice.

I followed her down a long hallway that was as big as our whole house. The only piece of furniture in it was an office desk with a telephone on it.

“The children are in the dining room, Essie,” Mrs. Burke said, picking up the phone.

I stood there wondering where in hell the dining room was. “How does she figure I know where it is?” I thought as I walked into a bedroom. “It’s over here, Essie,” Mrs. Burke said, pointing to a room on the opposite side of the hall. I walked in there feeling a little stupid.

Donna and Johnny were sitting in a corner of the dining room as quiet as two mice. They looked as though they were
scared to death. I realized then how mean Mrs. Burke was. Donna and Johnny were as noisy as ten children when they were home, and they never stayed in one place.

Mrs. Burke came in just as I finished putting on Johnny’s diaper. She stood smiling at me for a while.

“Essie, are you planning to take on another job now that Linda Jean is moving?” she asked. I just looked at her with my mouth wide open. She had purposely said “Linda Jean.”

“I can use some help if you want work,” she finally said, still smiling.

I was too stunned to answer.

“Well, you think about it and let me know before you leave Linda Jean’s today.”

I did think about her a lot the next few hours. She was a strange woman and she puzzled me. I just couldn’t make up my mind to work for her. However, when I got home and was again faced with a sick mother, crying babies, an unemployed stepfather, and a plate of dried beans, my mind was made up for me. I knew that I had to take that job, I had to help secure that plate of dry beans if nothing else. I went to work for Mrs. Burke the following morning.

I was so uneasy that first day at Mrs. Burke’s. However, I felt better after becoming familiar with the rest of the household, and making the discovery that Mrs. Burke was the only nasty person in there. Her mother, Mrs. Crosby, was a very nice old lady with long braids wrapped around her head. She thought I was a beautiful girl and took a keen interest in me from the start. Wayne, Mrs. Burke’s son, was my same age and grade. He was very much like Linda Jean in the sense that he also treated me as his equal. It was hard for me to accept the fact that he and Linda Jean were Mrs. Burke’s children. I didn’t meet her eldest son, Dennis, who was her favorite. I didn’t meet him, but I knew that if he was her favorite, he too must be evil with a negative attitude toward Negroes. Mr. Burke,
her husband, was difficult to figure. He was very seldom home, and when he was he hardly ever said anything.

Mrs. Burke, an ex-schoolteacher, was a typical matriarch. She ruled her whole family and even tried to rule me. She had a certain way of doing everything in her house from sweeping to setting a table. I guess all the maids she had had before catered to these little wishes of hers. But I had no intention of doing so, and I had my own little ways of resisting her rule. When I first ironed some shirts for her she brought all fifteen of them back for me to redo. “Take out these cat faces, Essie. Wayne can’t wear these shirts looking like this. I watched you do these and I see you have no set way of ironing shirts. Let me show you how it’s done.” I stood back and watched her do one shirt. Then I went over all of the remaining fourteen. But the very next week I did the ironing, I did all the shirts my way, and Mrs. Burke watched me do them too. But this time she didn’t have me redo them. In fact, she didn’t say anything.

I had always used the front door when entering and leaving her house. The morning after that second ironing I walked up on the front porch and discovered that the screen door was locked.

“Who is it?” Mrs. Burke called as she heard me knocking.

“It’s me, Essie!” I answered.

“Use the back door, Essie, it’s open!” she yelled to me.

The tone of her voice told me that she was again trying to subdue me. I went to the back door that morning. But the next morning I walked up on the front porch again and knocked at the front door. I knocked for what seemed like ten minutes and she still didn’t answer. I didn’t stop knocking though. Finally Mrs. Crosby came to the door and let me in. When I walked in, I noticed that as usual Mrs. Burke was occupying her favorite chair in the living room, which was the first room to the left as you entered the hall. I knew she had heard me knocking. “That’s all right,” I thought. “I will knock at the front door tomorrow morning again and the day after that too.”

When I knocked the next morning, Mrs. Crosby was standing in the hallway as if she was waiting for me. She let me in that morning and every morning at seven-thirty after that.

Soon Mrs. Burke decided to let me do things my way. I would have quit had she not. And I think she knew it. She really had no complaints about my work so she let me be. In a way, working for her was a challenge for me. She was the first one of her type I had run into.

Not only did I enter high school with a new name, but also with a completely new insight into the life of Negroes in Mississippi. I was now working for one of the meanest white women in town, and a week before school started Emmett Till was killed.

Up until his death, I had heard of Negroes found floating in a river or dead somewhere with their bodies riddled with bullets. But I didn’t know the mystery behind these killings then. I remember once when I was only seven I heard Mama and one of my aunts talking about some Negro who had been beaten to death. “Just like them low-down skunks killed him they will do the same to us,” Mama had said. When I asked her who killed the man and why, she said, “An Evil Spirit killed him. You gotta be a good girl or it will kill you too.” So since I was seven, I had lived in fear of that “Evil Spirit.” It took me eight years to learn what that spirit was.

I was coming from school the evening I heard about Emmett Till’s death. There was a whole group of us, girls and boys, walking down the road headed home. A group of about six high school boys were walking a few paces ahead of me
and several other girls. We were laughing and talking about something that had happened in school that day. However, the six boys in front of us weren’t talking very loud. Usually they kept up so much noise. But today they were just walking and talking among themselves. All of a sudden they began to shout at each other.

“Man, what in the hell do you mean?”

“What I mean is these goddamned white folks is gonna start some shit here, you just watch!”

“That boy wasn’t but fourteen years old and they killed him. Now what kin a fourteen-year-old boy do with a white woman? What if he did whistle at her, he might have thought the whore was pretty.”

“Look at all these white men here that’s fucking over our women. Everybody knows it too and what’s done about that? Look how many white babies we got walking around in our neighborhoods. Their mama’s ain’t white either. That boy was from Chicago, shit, everybody fuck everybody up there. He probably didn’t even think of the bitch as white.”

What they were saying shocked me. I knew all of those boys and I had never heard them talk like that. We walked on behind them for a while listening. Questions about who was killed, where, and why started running through my mind. I walked up to one of the boys.

“Eddie, what boy was killed?”

“Moody, where’ve you been?” he asked me. “Everybody talking about that fourteen-year-old boy who was killed in Greenwood by some white men. You don’t know nothing that’s going on besides what’s in them books of yours, huh?”

Standing there before the rest of the girls, I felt so stupid. It was then that I realized I really didn’t know what was going on all around me. It wasn’t that I was dumb. It was just that ever since I was nine, I’d had to work after school and do my lessons on lunch hour. I never had time to learn anything, to hang around with people my own age. And you never were told anything by adults.

That evening when I stopped off at the house on my way to Mrs. Burke’s, Mama was singing. Any other day she would have been yelling at Adline and Junior them to take off their school clothes. I wondered if she knew about Emmett Till. The way she was singing she had something on her mind and it wasn’t pleasant either.

Mama was dishing up beans like she didn’t know anyone was home. Adline, Junior, and James had just thrown their books down and sat themselves at the table. I didn’t usually eat before I went to work. But I wanted to ask Mama about Emmett Till. So I ate and thought of some way of asking her.

“These beans are some good, Mama,” I said, trying to sense her mood.

“Why is you eating anyway? You gonna be late for work. You know how Miss Burke is,” she said to me.

“I don’t have much to do this evening. I kin get it done before I leave work,” I said.

The conversation stopped after that. Then Mama started humming that song again.

She put a plate on the floor for Jennie Ann and Jerry.

“Jennie Ann! You and Jerry sit down here and eat and don’t put beans all over this floor.”

Ralph, the baby, started crying, and she went in the bedroom to give him his bottle. I got up and followed her.

“Mama, did you hear about that fourteen-year-old Negro boy who was killed a little over a week ago by some white men?” I asked her.

“Where did you hear that?” she said angrily.

“Boy, everybody really thinks I am dumb or deaf or something. I heard Eddie them talking about it this evening coming from school.”

“Eddie them better watch how they go around here talking. These white folks git a hold of it they gonna be in trouble,” she said.

“What are they gonna be in trouble about, Mama? People got a right to talk, ain’t they?”

“You go on to work before you is late. And don’t you let on like you know nothing about that boy being killed before Miss Burke them. Just do your work like you don’t know nothing,” she said. “That boy’s a lot better off in heaven than he is here,” she continued, and then started singing again.

On my way to Mrs. Burke’s that evening, Mama’s words kept running through my mind. “Just do your work like you don’t know nothing.”

“Why is Mama acting so scared?” I thought. “And what if Mrs. Burke knew we knew? Why must I pretend I don’t know? Why are these people killing Negroes? What did Emmett Till do besides whistle at that woman?”

By the time I got to work, I had worked my nerves up some. I was shaking as I walked up on the porch. “Do your work like you don’t know nothing.” But once I got inside, I couldn’t have acted normal if Mrs. Burke were paying me to be myself.

I was so nervous, I spent most of the evening avoiding them going about the house dusting and sweeping. Everything went along fairly well until dinner was served.

“Don, Wayne, and Mama, y’all come on to dinner. Essie, you can wash up the pots and dishes in the sink now. Then after dinner you won’t have as many,” Mrs. Burke called to me.