One Night in Mississippi (5 page)

Mississippi, 1961

We kept the secret
from our father for six days. He remained in bed for three days after our trip to town. On the fourth day we heard him scuttling about the kitchen in the dust-coloured dawn and just as quickly heard Mama's animated whispers, telling him to get back to bed for more rest. On the fifth day he woke vigorously and ordered Mama to fix him up a colossal breakfast — six eggs with two thick slices of crusty bread and a half-inch thick slab of ham — but he ate little, his appetite fading after a few triumphant mouthfuls. He went out to the porch to sit in the weak sunlight and, after a reluctant nod of the head from Mama, Graden and I pounced on his plate, slathering our fingers and chins with grease, while Etta and Glenda watched with reservation. After a short time on the porch, Papa sank back into his previous state and spent the rest of the day in bed.

We woke on the sixth day to the sound of wood splitting in the backyard. We found our father, axe in hand, sweating and still gaunt, but no longer as hollowed out as he had been the previous days. We stacked wood as he split and knew by the pace that his strength had returned.

We worked through the morning without saying a word. Mama poked her head out the back door and called us for lunch. I had spent the hours outside racking my brain for a way to avoid telling my father the truth, and in the end I'd decided the simplest thing was to say that Mr. Stevenson had short-changed us. It would be believable enough — the reason Papa always went to town himself was to prevent us from being taken advantage of — and it would make sense that, feeling ashamed of the fact, I would wait as long as possible to tell him what had happened. I dipped my hands into the water bucket and started rubbing them clean, turning myself so that I would not have to look at my father when I told the story, but Graden spoke first.

“I think Mr. Stevenson's been cheating you, sir.”

I turned in shock, eyes wide. Papa looked at Graden as well, but his face was calm. He said nothing.

“His figures didn't add up. We brung fourteen sacks, but he wasn't going to pay for fourteen sacks. Warren and I tried to explain it to him, but he just got real angry.”

I flinched at hearing my name. Graden's expression was unchanged, and I realized that he actually thought he was helping. That he was giving me credit for standing up alongside him, when it wasn't true. I wanted no part of it then, and I wanted no part of it now. I shrunk against the side of the house as I dried my hands on an old rag and waited for my father's anger.

It didn't come. Papa stared at Graden for a few moments, then spoke quietly.

“Go on in the house.”

He walked away from us. We did as we were told, but he didn't join us. He picked up his axe again, and we ate corn and strips of ham leftover from breakfast in the kitchen, listening to the rhythm of his chopping.

I was getting ready for bed when Mama appeared in the doorway.

“Your father wants to talk to you. He's on the porch.”

Papa was holding a thin, hand-rolled cigarette and blowing wisps of smoke into the dark blue dusk. He had built a bench, and he gestured for me to sit beside him.

“I bought this from a Mr. Parson.”

For a moment, I thought he was referring to the cigarette, but Papa was gazing out over the yard, at the carefully groomed dirt lawn and the chestnut tree.

“There wasn't no house on it then. It was just a scrubby patch of trees and bushes. Been cleared once, of the big trees, but then had overgrown again. Your uncle and I spent the better part of a year re-clearing it. Cut down all those trees and bushes, pulled out all those stumps. Hauled one rock out of the ground the size of a pig. Some of that wood I sold. Some of it I used to build this house. Most of it, well, Mr. Parson sent a few boys over and they just took it. Wasn't much I could do about it.”

I sat silently, studying my father. There was a lantern on the porch, but my father never liked to light it because of the insects. My father was just a shape in the darkness, a shadow shrouded in sweet-smelling smoke.

“Your brother's a smart one. And brave too, ain't no arguing against that. But every man has his place in the world, and there ain't much mercy for a man who tries to change that. I hear these men on the radio sometimes, talking about changing things, talking about protestin' and the like. But those men ain't from here. Some of 'em might be from Mississippi, but they ain't from
this
Mississippi.”

Papa raised the cigarette to his lips, and the faint glow seemed to shine off the lighter-coloured scar tissue criss-crossing his forearm. I had never been curious about the scars before, but now I couldn't stop looking at them.

“I heard Mr. Parson sold that wood for a good penny. Stuffed his pockets real good off this property, too. I knew I was paying more than what someone else would have had to, but that's the way it is. I could have fought, but then what would I have now? Sometimes a little common sense beats a whole lot of courage.”

Papa turned and leaned in towards me, close enough that I could make out his face. His eyes were yellow, and I realized that he was drunk.

“I ain't as dumb as your brother thinks I am. And he ain't as smart as he thinks he is. All them figures and science and history he learns, those are things that I ain't ever gonna know, but I know things that he ain't ever gonna learn, either. I know how to survive. Graden don't. All those smarts ain't gonna do nothing but get him in trouble. You need to look out for him. You hear me?”

“Yes, sir.”

Papa turned his gaze back towards the darkness, and when no more was said, I got up to leave. Graden was lying in bed. The lantern was lit, and he was writing figures on a sheet of paper. I watched him for a moment, replaying my father's words in my head, until the meaning of them finally was clear. Papa was afraid of Graden. Not afraid for him, but of him. And I realized that I was a little afraid of him too. Papa had called him “brave,” but that was the wrong word. Graden was fearless, and that fearlessness made him dangerous, to himself and to all of us. Graden was capable of anything, and that realization terrified me, but also excited me.

I sat beside him on the bed and looked at the sheet of numbers. Some of it looked familiar from the few classes that I'd taken, but most of it was not.

“Can you show me that?”

Graden held the sheet towards me so I could see it.

“No, I mean
show
me that. How to do that.”

Graden hesitated, thinking it was some joke. Then he smiled broadly and handed me an empty sheet of paper and a spare pencil. We stayed up until early morning.

Amblan, 2008

I left one copy
of a photo of the man in the taxi in an envelope in the foyer message slot, with instructions for faxing, and then went up to the room. There were no hotels in town, but Etta had made some phone calls and found someone with a room for rent. The room was one of three on the second storey of an aging country-style home, which had been shoddily partitioned to house tenants. My door opened on to a square living space, just large enough to hold a small desk. To the right, a cramped and mouldy bathroom, and straight ahead, the bedroom. There was no furniture save the bed — a musty mattress laid flat on springs — that rolled across the floor if I moved in my sleep and a lamp, placed directly on the floor. The floor was cracked and faded hardwood, and when I removed my shoes, I could feel the cold through my socks.

I laid my hat, gloves, and scarf on the desk, but chose to keep my coat on. I carried my small bag into the bedroom, opened it, and laid the other copy of the photo on the bed. The lamp's light was barely strong enough to reach beyond its shade. I opened the curtains and felt a blast of cold against my thigh. The wind whistled through a small crack at the bottom corner of the window, the line of it traced with frost. Beyond the window, a diner backed onto an alley where black garbage bags had been pecked open by blacker crows that were hopping about the strewn trash and cawing a raucous symphony to their found treasure.

I walked around to the other side of the bed to keep from blocking the light and examined the picture again. Eight men walking down the front steps of a Mississippi courthouse. I remembered standing there, most of the men wearing pressed suits and freshly shined shoes, smiling and shaking hands, all charges against them having been thrown out. The men who killed my brother.

On one side of the steps, a crowd of whites were cheering, clapping, and whistling; greeting them like heroes. Someone reached out to pass them cigars. On the other side of the steps, I was gathered among a group of black men and women, young, angry, and impotent. No signs or slogans or even shouts, for fear of retribution. A hard-eyed white man who reeked of Klan watched us from the other side, scanning our faces, writing down names. One white man holding about sixty blacks silent, with nothing but a pad and a pen.

I tried to match the face in the photo on the bed to the face of one of the men walking down those steps, the freshly shaven young man in simple pants and a plain white shirt, standing beside his father.

I wavered. I looked at the photo of the man and at the other photos and files that I'd laid out. There were police records, FBI interviews, testimonies that had taken decades to extract because of fear, and one autopsy report. The cold, clinical summation of the life of Graden Williams.

I flipped through the pages of the autopsy report, as I had countless times before. There was no anger anymore; just a cold feeling. I preferred the anger, and each time I opened the report, I wished that I could muster it again.

I let the autopsy report drop to the bed, the black-and-white photo of my brother's body falling beside the picture of the old man on the street. There were dark blotches across Graden's body. Some were severe burns, others were places where the moss had eaten through the skin. His lower jaw was blue and swollen and set at an angle that did not match the upper. There were other cuts and bruises, and his right arm was bent in too many places. He had been castrated, and they had stuffed the testicles into his mouth.

The coroner had ruled the cause of death to be drowning. They had found enough water in his lungs to know that he was still breathing when they had dumped him in the swamp. It was the only photo I had of my brother.

I pulled my coat tight around my neck and stared out the window at nothing. In the alley below I could still hear the chorus of crows as they picked contentedly amongst the scraps.

Mississippi, 1963

The frosts that year
held until the first week of November. We spent a couple of weeks cleaning the field, then settled in for the slow period that would stretch until mid-to-late February, when it would come time to start prepping the ground for spring planting. There was still work to do — minor repairs on the house, chopping and stacking piles of wood, clearing out another portion of land for future planting — but we had much more idle time during the winter months and that meant more time for lessons.

After that first night, listening to Papa's warning on the front porch then seeing Graden hunched over his papers and finally asking him to teach me, I spent every evening studying with Graden by lantern or by candlelight. I was slow to learn at first and frustrated. Graden seemed to pick things up so easily while I had to ask to have the same thing shown to me again and again, but Graden was patient with me and after several months, I had advanced to the point where I could understand most of the lessons he taught me the first time through. I caught Graden once, incorrectly summing a series of numbers, and although I tried to hide my pride and excitement I could not sleep the rest of the night.

Even though Papa needed his help, Graden still managed to slip away to school most days, and eventually our father stopped trying to hold him back. I used to resent the days that Graden snuck out of chores, but now I felt something else. Jealousy. It was compounded by the fact that Papa spent those days in a sour mood, working me extra hard as if he held me somehow responsible.

The only consolation was that I knew that whatever Graden learned on those days, he would share with me at night. I would hold my pencil in fingers sliced raw and swollen from picking cotton, leaning in close to make out the words and numbers in the flickering light. Graden would sit across from me, fiddling with paper and pencil, pretending to work on a lesson, but most times he was already done and just waiting for me to finish.

Graden had continued to grow tall and strong. At seventeen, he was a head taller than I was and outweighed me by a good fifteen to twenty pounds. I continued to pull bullying pranks on him to try to maintain my superiority, but in the end I realized that he tolerated them not out of meekness, but with a weary patience, and I wondered if this had always been so.

One night, late in November, I heard shuffling in the darkness in the bedroom.

“You getting the lantern?”

“Not tonight. We'll do double lessons tomorrow.”

I sat up in bed. My brother was dressing hastily in the moonlight.

“What are you doing?”

“I can't tell you. Go back to bed. Don't say nothing.”

Graden knew exactly which floorboards in the house would squeak and which wouldn't. He moved silently into the hallway and was gone. It seemed like a long time that he was gone, but it was difficult for me to tell. It may have only been a couple of hours. When Graden returned, he removed his clothes and slid back into bed without a word.

Graden's secrecy bothered me more than I wanted to admit. He was sneaking out at night once a week, never saying where he was going. Around that same time, I started to slip away some evenings as well, cutting through the woods and up the road to a hillside shack where a few other boys from neighbouring farms would gather. We'd tune the radio to whatever music we could find through the static — Duke Ellington, Sam Cooke, Buddy Holly. We'd play cards and pass around cheap cigarettes and drink foul-tasting gin or moonshine. Mississippi was a dry state in name only, and booze was never hard to come by. If cotton indeed were king, then alcohol was surely a prince.

A few of the more liberal-minded girls would show up now and then, and the group of us would dance late into the night before some coupled to go a little farther up the hill to find a private spot while the others drifted home. The shack was set far enough back from the road to avoid attention, and cars rarely passed through that area at night anyway, but we were still cautious not to let things get too loud.

On these nights, I would tiptoe back into the house with great exaggeration and wait for Graden to ask where I'd been so that I could spitefully tell him it was none of his business. But Graden never asked. He could certainly smell the gin and the smoke on my clothing, and after I had lagged through the day, I felt sure that Papa knew about it as well, but nothing was said.

On the nights when we were both home, we continued to light the kerosene lamp and work through the math problems, history questions, or readings that Graden had been assigned, but more and more often we worked in silence.

One day, I pulled Glenda and Etta aside and asked them if they knew where Graden went at night — I wondered if he had said anything to them — but they were puzzled. They hadn't known he was sneaking out at all.

My brother left the house on the same night every week: on Tuesday. Finally, I couldn't stand it any longer. I had to find out where he was going. One night, I turned the lamp off at bedtime and slipped under the covers with my clothes still on. I waited for Graden to get up and leave, then counted to thirty and rose to follow him.

I went out the back door and looked around. The nights in winter were eerily quiet. No chirping crickets or bellowing bullfrogs. I spotted Graden halfway through the cotton field and waited for him to finish crossing before following him. Strands of spider webs caressed my shins and ankles, and I could feel my pants getting damp from the moisture that was beginning to collect already on the few remaining leaves. The moon was mostly hidden by clouds, and as intimately as I knew the field, I still had to move carefully on the uneven ground.

On my own nights out I'd turn left after the field, cut through the woods, and loop back on to the road to the gin shack. Graden turned right. He continued along the edge of the property, marked by a shallow ravine that had once been a creek, but had dried up long ago. He picked up a long, thin branch and inched his way over the edge. I counted off the seconds again in my head. When I reached the edge, Graden was still there, just below the lip. He held a lantern that he'd just lighted.

“If you're coming, you should get yourself a stick.”

“For what?”

Graden inclined his head towards the wild grass and bulrushes lining what would have been the creek bed. “Snakes.”

“Where the hell you going? Ain't nothing out this way but the Townsend and the Dale farms.”

Graden shrugged and walked away, swishing the stick through the grass in front of him to ward off any snakes. I looked around for a stick of my own.

The Townsends were sharecroppers. They lived and worked on a farm, but they didn't own it. They'd moved onto the land a few years back, and Mama and the girls had gone over to welcome them with a pie, but we had seen and talked to them very little since. When Graden and I reached their backyard, I was surprised to see lights on in the barn. As we climbed up the short bank, I could hear voices. For the thirty minutes or so that we had walked along the creek, Graden had said nothing to me about where we were headed.

A person stood outside the barn door and raised a lantern.

“It's me. Graden Williams.”

“Who you got with you?”

“This is my brother, Warren.”

The face peered around the edge of the upraised lantern.

“All right, then. The more the better, I guess.”

The man opened the barn door, and Graden dropped his stick in the yard and shook the man's hand.

There were close to forty people inside. I recognized most, but not all, of them. Lanterns hung from the beams, glowing balls surrounded by swarms of insects. The floor had been swept clean and bales of hay had been neatly stacked along the sides of the barn. Chaff from the bales drifted idly, coming to rest in the hair and clothes of the people gathered, or touching the lamps and instantly singing out of existence.

Everyone was packed tightly together and dressed in dark clothes so that they could arrive and leave, hidden by night. Those closest to the door greeted Graden warmly but quietly, and I trailed along in his wake. There were a few women, but mostly the crowd was made up of men. Their faces were serious and their eyes scanned back and forth constantly, even though the barn had no windows.

“What is this?” I whispered to Graden.

“This is where I've been coming. Every Tuesday.”

“For what?”

“You'll see.”

At the far end of the barn, Mr. Townsend was talking with a light-skinned man I'd never seen before. He was dressed like a farmer, in coveralls and a white shirt, but his clothes gave him away nonetheless. His shirt was too clean — no yellowing or discolouration from sweat — and the hems of his coveralls were neat, not frayed. Mr. Townsend was taller than him, but Mr. Townsend slouched and bowed his head so he was still looking up to this young stranger, who stood straight and confident. The man turned to inspect the crowd and nodded to two similarly dressed young men on his right.

“OK, let's get started.”

The three gathered together, but all attention was focussed on the man who had been conversing with Mr. Townsend. If I strained to listen, I could hear a clear northern accent. I'd heard voices like it on the radio from time to time, but I'd never actually seen a northerner before, and I stiffened, recalling my father's warning about looking after Graden.

At the front of the barn, the stranger smiled widely and clasped his hands together.

“It's almost time. I know you've all been doing a lot of meeting and planning, and I assure you, you are not alone. The same meetings and the same plans have been taking place throughout this county and in counties across Mississippi, because, brothers and sisters, we are all united by one desire — dignity.”

There was a murmuring of approval in the crowd, but there was a palpable sense of uneasiness as well.

“The government of the United States says that we are equal to any white man in this country, even the president himself. In fact, we have the power to pick the president. We have that choice. We have that
right
. But there are those who don't want to see us exercise it. There are those who still think that they should make all our decisions for us.”

The murmuring became louder and more certain. I placed my hand on Graden's elbow and whispered, “We shouldn't be here. This is trouble.”

“This isn't trouble,” he replied. “Trouble is that gin shack you spend so many nights at. This is progress. This is a chance to
change
things.”

“This is a chance to get killed, that's what this is! Papa will whip us both if he finds out.”

“I know he will. But that's because this is something that Papa can't ever understand.”

Graden turned his attention back to the young man standing in front of us. He was talking now about buses going to Jackson, and voter registrations and rallies. I could see beads of sweat on his forehead, and the people closest to him were swaying, as if they were listening to hymns. So this was where Graden had been coming for the last two or three months.

I remember thinking that Graden was wrong, and that Papa understood this kind of thing all too well. Papa would know that a meeting like this was trouble, that these young, light-skinned men at the front of the barn were exactly the kind of people he was talking about when he said they didn't know
this
Mississippi.

Here was my chance to tell Graden about my conversation with Papa, about how dangerous this all was, and about how courage was not always the best course, but I looked at the rapt expression on Graden's face and knew he would not be dissuaded. And I knew that wherever this led, I would go with him.

On New Year's Eve it snowed. We'd seen snow before of course, but never like this. It came so thick it seemed to be falling in layers, like something had ruptured in the sky and was spilling out across every house and farm and road, turning the world white for as far as we could see. It carried on through the night and by morning there was snow on the ground halfway up our shins. We didn't own boots, but on the first day of 1964 we ran out of the house anyway, sinking into it, falling, rolling, rising, and throwing ourselves into it again.

Etta came out in just a dress, and Mama yelled at her from the porch not to get it wet, but Etta didn't listen and Mama, seeing her skipping and leaping around the yard, didn't repeat the warning. Glenda took the time to change into warmer clothes, then wandered slowly with her hands outstretched, palms turned upwards, catching slowly falling flakes then letting them melt between her fingers.

I sat down in a small drift that had collected beside the porch and lifted a handful of snow into my mouth. Etta continued to dance through the snow and Glenda began to sing. I felt a sudden spear of ice along my spine and gasped in shock. I turned to see Graden laughing, his hands white with evidence of the snow that he had dropped down the back of my shirt. My skin burned with cold, and my breath shuddered out from my mouth in bursts of grey.

“You're dead!” I shouted.

I crawled towards him on all fours and grabbed him by the leg. I tackled him and pushed his face into the ground, but he continued to laugh anyway, and I could not help doing the same. The girls joined in as well, pointing at us and giggling as we wrestled beneath the tree, soaked through and shivering, but delirious. Etta took Glenda's hand and Papa stepped out onto the porch to put his arm around Mama's waist, and I held Graden's face down with my forearm, knowing all the while that he could throw me off with a shrug anytime he chose. I wished that it would snow every day.