But the terrible day I experience is neither imagined nor remembered. It rattles there like one of Wee Mother’s Dresden cups when a semi lumbers past trying to avoid the weigh station on the other side of town. It’s a confounding experience as mysterious to me as life itself. In my younger days I considered discussing it with someone. I thought maybe a minister or a doctor of some kind. I still held some hope the thing could be explained away. But then one time maybe five years ago I slipped back to the day.
The roses on the parlor walls were dripping, oozing purple and red spots that rolled into nothing on the carpet. There was a lake where the road had been and the branches of the trees melted into fountains. Across the road smoke billowed from the ashes of Moena’s house. Behind it in the fields there were clusters of the unhappy dead
driven by the shame of blood on the land. The dead were moaning beneath the curse that come in the night and unhallowed their ground. They were abandoning us, severing us from the rightful order of time and place, dropping us here to live out the blight that had come in the darkness. I turned away from the window and looked through the long skirts and the muddy shoes towards Wee Mother in her casket and I saw the lady smile. This that I’m about to tell is a sacred truth. The lady was the Angel on the Road and the Angel was Rose of Sharon. Her smile drove a beam of light into my heart and it drew up tight like a fist of hope that became the will that keeps me clinging to this life.
It was a day of great sadness and shame. It was a day that tilted all the days that came after in a darker direction. But it brought me the hope of illumination through the light of my Angel Rose. It promised healing and redemption through the child who would replace me on this earth.
Listen to me. Listen! I am not godly or sworn to Jesus. But this is real and has to be told, especially now with the Trouble returning, the threat of more blood and darkness looming. The angels are gathering for the battle. I hear myself telling you this and think, “Gibbering Fool, hush! Fall into your trance and die.” O God, I have come through this life the longest and the deepest way, let me rest!
Rose of Sharon had told me that Lily is wild about country ham. I had one desalting in a washtub by the back door. Last Thursday. I have to concentrate or I’ll be off again. Or was it Florence who loved country ham?
Florence’s wedding day! We had copper skies then too. Red purple swirls over the front yard. Some of the Birmingham cousins called us country because we served country ham. If that insulted Mother, she never let on. Or maybe she was too upset to notice. Florence was marrying a Republican, no small grief in our house at that time.
But this ham was Thursday. It was too warm and close and a violent sky threatened. I’d been soaking the ham in a washtub two days. I stepped out into the yard to run the hose into the tub and cleanse the water of the salt. Then Nadine showed up with fresh
killed quail. Rosie took them inside to dress them. I was set on cooking that ham, but I’ve learned to go with a day when it does me like that. The ham would wait. The quail wouldn’t unless we froze it. I’ve had iris bulbs in the freezer forty years waiting for me to plant them.
The ham water was still drawing brine. That ham needed another day’s soak and two or three more hard rinses. I let it be and pulled my Oriental out and went to stringing fringe. Lily watched me fascinated like I was turning straw to gold.
It was drawing up on suppertime. Lily was beside me. She’s a fine girl and my only regret is that it took so much sorrow to bring her to our house. Time was dripping down over us, beading up silently like an ice storm in the night.
Mother stood by the door watching for the funeral wagon to carry Wee Mother down to the church. She was real held together. I think it was part relief that Wee Mother’s suffering was over and part exhaustion from being with Mrs. Brown all night.
“Ya’ll want me to cook this quail?” That was Rose of Sharon in the kitchen. She forgets I can’t wait that long to eat. If it gets past five o’clock, I get over being hungry. A car pulled into the driveway. Rose of Sharon came into the parlor to peer out at it. I glanced around from my chair on the porch to look at her, long enough for her to catch the faraway look on my face. Rose knew I was experiencing back time.
Mother was fussing because it looked like rain and the undertaker had been so long bringing the wagon.
Rose of Sharon stepped towards the door
where Mother was standing
and I saw her step back a little so as not to walk directly into Mother as she walked out onto the porch. Her eyes froze on mine, asking me for confirmation. I nodded. She’ll get it a little along—same as I drew it out of my mother as she aged. The dead and the past are always with us. The past has unfinished business which some in the living present are chosen to complete. This I have come to accept without formal indoctrination. The past is as inescapable as death. It presents itself to us and our salvation comes when we endeavor set it to rights. This was told to me by my mother. This I hold sacred above all other tenets. As Rose of Sharon moved past me and
descended the porch steps, I saw that she was crossing over to receive her duty out of time.
A Buick had just pulled into the driveway. I don’t know cars, but I can always tell a Buick. A black woman, well dressed and quietly determined, got out of the car. There had not been a black human being on this property in seventy years. I saw its meaning at once. The Day of the Trouble was coming back. Lily looked at me as if she was seeing a ghost. Rose took a folded sheet of paper from the woman. In a minute the woman got back into her car and drove off. Rose went on back inside. Lily asked me if anything was wrong. I don’t know what I said. I was perspiring like the Fourth of July.
Rose did what she always does when a thing passes before her, changing everything. She went on as if nothing had happened, dressing quail, folding a load of dish towels and starting supper. It seemed best to give her berth, so I went on into my bedroom and switched on the news. It was close, almost hot, so I opened a window. When I looked out into the backyard I saw Lily standing at the very edge, staring down through the orchard into the pasture. I stood there a minute, watching the orange sky darken through the apple trees. It wasn’t just my room. A wall of warm air nearly knocked me down when I opened that window. Through the door that leads to the hall there came the sound of the kitchen window fan starting up. Lily heard it too. She turned around and eyed the house. She had removed her sweater. She held it in her hand. In a minute she saw me and approached my bedroom window.
“Weird,” she said referring to the sudden warmth and eyeing me the way the young will look to the old for an explanation or an accounting.
“Mother?” Rose had entered my room. She was standing behind me. Sweat was dripping off her forehead. “What’s going on?”
I told her I didn’t know. It felt like August before a storm.
“Y’all!” Lily shouted. Behind her the tall dead pasture grass had begun to bend and a hot wind was blowing up out of the woods, shaking the bramble and the weeds in the consecrated patch that had once been a cemetery. Lily took out for the house and as she did a streak of pure white lightning split an apple tree fifty yards
behind her. The wind was so warm and dry that it lifted patches of wet earth and spun them into little cyclones. Dust was beginning to fly.
“It’s like January in hell,” Rose said as the windows started to rattle and the curtains flew up in my face. There wasn’t a cloud of any mentionable size anyplace. The air was screaming now. It choked us. A sudden hail slammed against the house, cracking windows and hissing like a thousand serpents on the roof. Then in a minute, like we had imagined the whole incident, all was stillness and the air was cool.
Lily came into my room.
“What the hell …?”
“Weather pocket,” Rose said as if she had seen one before. It was feeble, but it was more explanation than I could offer.
“I thought it was the end of time,” Lily said. Then she giggled, sinking onto the bed.
“Miss Eula,” she says, “your eyes were as big as teacups,” and then she laughed proper. Rose either thought that was hilarious or she needed an excuse to laugh, because she squealed, bending double. That set me tittering. The three of us sat on the edge of my bed and laughed and laughed until it was pitch dark and the melted hail on the yard was working itself back up into a light frost.
Later Rose made us toasted cheese sandwiches and popcorn. We ate off our laps in the parlor which had gotten so chilly that we lit the new gas logs. I generally want the lamps bright, but that night we kept them low and the light reminded me of how it felt when I was a child. Or maybe it was that Rose and Lily were like children that night. They wanted stories. So I told them about the Trouble, some of which Rose had heard and some I only remembered as I spoke. It was late when we went to bed. I closed my eyes thinking something had shifted, something was better or accepted or completing itself. Something had slipped back into the house after a long, bleak absence. Maybe it was love or laughter or my imagination. It seemed to me that a good life was being lived there again. Or that it would be. Or that things would be as mysterious and troublesome as ever, but all right. Just before I nodded off, I heard
Rose slip down the hall and into the living room to turn off the gas logs.
Rose stuck her head in my room to say good-night. I asked her what that woman on the driveway had given her.
“The keys to the kingdom,” she says. Even later when I knew what the note meant, I didn’t really understand her words. Some time after it dawned on me. She hadn’t meant those words as some mean personal triumph over Dashnell. That woman had given Rose the means to end the spell of evil that had laid on this land since that Sunday my grandmother lay a corpse in the parlor. Thursday last and that evil Sunday more than seventy-five years ago had blended into one.
I
t raveled. The thing just raveled. The news story helped. As quick as Hez put out the word he was going back to Prince George, he had several dozen calls—half of them white people—all them declaring themselves ready, willing and able to march in Prince George County with him. That was Monday morning. Monday afternoon the wire services grabbed hold of it. CBS News ran footage of the Klanspeople tossing bricks and bottles at the first marchers. The next day there were pictures on the front page of every major paper in the country.
The Atlanta Constitution
ran a headline: “American Apartheid!” If Doctor King had descended from heaven, stood on a mountaintop and proclaimed this march a new covenant, there would not have been a bigger reaction.
Tuesday morning rained phone calls. Hez and Heath had three churchwomen helping out the receptionist. They gave five interviews Tuesday afternoon. By that evening, Heath called the phone company and had five extra lines installed.
The governor called around one o’clock. He flew up from Montgomery to meet with Hez and Heath the next morning. They were expecting five thousand marchers by now. They wanted state patrol protection. They wanted the head of the Prince George County sheriff turned around and inside out. They wanted the Klan out of the state on Saturday morning. The governor, who had just fielded
a phone call from the White House about the upcoming march, was more than willing to comply with their requests.
It raveled and it raveled and it raveled. Money started pouring in on Wednesday morning, one, two, ten thousand dollars to pay for buses and banners and everything else they were going to need. Hez took phone calls from movie stars and senators and UN delegates. Area hotels were booking up. Rental car desks were selling out. Suddenly, it was as if the whole damned world had put their heads together and said it was time to whip Prince George County’s butt. They were expecting a special train from New York City. A group was flying in from Sweden.
Thursday morning, Hez called back over to the governor’s office and advised him to prepare for enough troops to protect twenty thousand marchers. The Guardian Angels wired from New York to say they were coming. By Thursday afternoon, the giddiness was wearing thin. Hez and Heath were trying to plan portable johns and bus service to Prince George and meeting with crowd control experts. They called the governor and secured advance National Guard troops to flush through the area in case of snipers. They arranged food vendors and emergency medical services until late Friday night.
He got home around one A.M. Moena was sitting at the kitchen table. He pulled a hot plate of ribs out of the microwave and sat across from her. She asked him why he was so late. It made him feel sixteen.
“Plans for the march.”
Moena knew all about it. She had seen it on the news.
“We’re all going,” she said, stuffing a wad of corn bread into her mouth.
“Who all?”
“Cheryl, the kids, Dereesa, me …”
“Mama, you can’t march five miles.”
“I got a chair. They’ll push me.”
It didn’t make sense. She had never marched before, not even in the big one to D.C. in ‘63. He’d even begged her that time.
“Why this march?”
” ‘Cause we’ll be marching home this time.”
Hadn’t Beauty B., his grandmother dead and gone fifty years, held him as a boy under a pump drawing icy spring water and baptized him in the knowledge of that? Wasn’t that the thing she had burned into his mind above all other things?
We was run out of Alabama
. Could Hez name another county in America where a black man in this day and time was so afraid to tread?
Moena had only talked to him about it once before, on that sticky Sunday afternoon they had laid Grandfather in that South Carolina pine grove. She had been a lost and bitter young blind woman then. She was tender as she called it up now.