A Matter of Souls Read online

  Jimmy Lee was still amazed that he was somebody’s father. And he took it seriously. He’d had some practice, looking out for Son, but he was already a knuckleheaded kid—not a sweet baby girl. Jimmy Lee had big plans for Bernadette, like her going to college instead of straight to work like he and Willa had. And traveling, and eating in fancy restaurants, and …

  “There ain’t nothin’ else I can do to change your mind?” Willa stared up at him with wide eyes. He could see himself in those eyes; he could see himself inside the fear that was looking at him.

  He shook his head. This time he didn’t smile.

  “There ain’t nothin’ else I can do, except this, to change it for her, Willa. You know it well as I do.”

  He opened the door and stepped out. He moved fast. The dirt road puffed up around him. He didn’t notice the dusty powder settling on his shoulders and his shoes. He didn’t notice because he was moving with purpose.

  Around corners. Up the paved street. Onto the sidewalk. Past the post office, where the voting was supposed to be. Where the newspapers and radio said the voting was supposed to be.

  He saw his father’s fedora in the middle of the clump of brown-faced men stopped at the steps of the public library. Jimmy Lee saw two White men, both men he knew, both vets like his daddy, scowling down at the men from his neighborhood.

  Jimmy Lee hurried to be a part of them.

  “What y’all boys doin’ here, Bernie?” one of the men called out to Jimmy Lee’s daddy.

  “We here to vote!” his daddy called back.

  “You boys don’t want no trouble, now.” The other man folded his arms and moved real easy-like, blocking the door.

  “We here to vote!” Jimmy Lee’s uncle Booker shouted from the crowd. All the brown men began to make noise. A White lady stuck her head out of the library door, but quickly yanked herself in again.

  “You musta got it wrong, Bernie. Ain’t no Coloreds votin’ here today!”

  “That ain’t right!” Jimmy Lee heard himself yelling.

  Jimmy Lee shifted his weight from one foot to the other. He was getting mad, getting hot. He had waited for this day! Dreamed of it. He was a husband, a father, an upstanding member of his church. Willa had baked him a yellow cake with jelly icing. He had dreamed of all that.

  And he had dreamed of entering his legal manhood by walking up to vote in his church suit and his brand-new oxblood shoes.

  Yeah, Jimmy Lee was hot.

  When the brown men moved forward toward the library, Jimmy Lee moved with them. He only faintly heard the screech of car wheels somewhere behind him.

  But he did hear the unmistakable sounds of the shotguns being pumped. And there was all of a sudden a crash, like something breaking, and smoke rising up at the same time as a thunderous booming sounded behind him. Shots blasted against screams and running feet. One shot, two. Many.

  Jimmy Lee saw his father go down.

  For one crazy second, Jimmy Lee imagined the evening yet to come. He saw ahead to his family all around and pictured himself bouncing Bernadette on his lap and laughing at the grape jelly smeared all over her face.

  And then he felt a strange, burning explosion inside his chest, and he was lifted, lifted into the air, right out of his oxblood shoes.

  It was November 6, 1956. Jimmy Lee’s twenty-first birthday. His last.

  Part Two:

  Father

  The boy hung at the edge of the crowd, soaking up the energy thrown off by the fear and excitement of the moment. He followed the group of Colored men dressed to the nines and moving as one body, because he had no mother to beg or threaten him to stay away. The danger made his skin itch and tingle, but the righteousness of it, the righteousness of this march through the dusty streets of the unimportant Mississippi town, the boy never doubted. Thanks to his father, the boy’s notion of justice was sharp as a straight razor.

  Son had skipped school. On a different day, Papa would have whipped his behind for that, even though he knew his boy could already pretty well outsmart the poor, barely educated “teacher” that the White superintendent had hired for the ramshackle, one-room Colored school. Besides, the boy thought as he passed the deserted-looking town hall, he had a feeling that he would learn more today than he ever had before.

  The public library was the place. The town didn’t really have much of a main street to speak of. If you zoomed by in your car the way most Colored people had to, by the time you shifted gears to clear the hill and checked your rear mirror to see if you’d been followed, you were already on the other side of the lumber mill at the edge of the city limits.

  A local politician had finagled state money to put in a dozen live oak trees to “beautify” the dull stretch, instead of demanding money to expand the mill and make more jobs. Papa said the man preferred to contemplate any kind of shade other than the shade of the skin of third of his constituents. Today those brown men rolling up the street had decided to open his eyes a little bit.

  It was a dangerous business, trying to vote in this county—dangerous if you were Colored. Son himself had heard a man in the grocery talkin’ all loud about how he would “strongly discourage” any niggras from showing up at the town hall for the governor’s election last year. And a few years before that, a man down their row—you couldn’t rightly call the badly built line of leftover sharecropper’s cabins a street—had started up an NAACP chapter. He and a handful of souls, men and women, had been dragged out of their meeting and beaten like they’d stolen money.

  Come to think of it, maybe that was how White people saw it, Son suddenly thought. A voting Negro might want a good job, too. And a Negro with a job maybe meant a White man without one. Papa had come back from the war to marry, and when Son was only a year old, his janitor’s job was gone, his wife dead, and his eighth-grade diploma wouldn’t get him full-time doing much outside the cotton fields. He was smart enough to capture six Germans by his lonesome and hold off the enemy for two days after his unit got routed, but there was no respect for him in his hometown.

  Papa and Uncle Bernie and Cousin Jimmy Lee were determined to vote today because they said voting would change things. Voting made their voices louder without shouting, Papa liked to say.

  “All I want is my due, Son. When you get to be a man, you deserve to get as good as you give. ” He’d rubbed Son’s round red head this morning and set out. Yes, Papa was brave through and through.

  As the boy smiled to himself, a harsh voice whispered from the front porch of a house just across the street from the red brick building.

  “Son Collins! Where you think you going? You better—”

  He rolled his unblinking gray-green eyes. He was ten years old, not tall yet, but solid. Certainly he was a match for the shriveled dark woman in the stiff-starched maid’s uniform, if she got a mind to try and stop him.

  The fierceness of his look seemed to cut her voice. She mumbled, and he turned his head, intent on seeing the scene unfolding a few feet away. He only half-recognized her, anyway … most women had ceased to matter to him a long time ago. He even had difficulty recalling his mother’s face now.

  Over his shoulder, he heard the woman suck her teeth and growl at his back.

  “Hinckty little yellow bastard. Y’all gonna end up seeing what’s what!”

  Fool! he wanted to shout, but he suddenly caught a glimpse of his father’s bearlike body nearing the steps. Papa was in front, along with his brother-in-law Bernard and his nephew Jimmy Lee. Papa wouldn’t let anything stop him. He was a born leader.

  Son stepped quickly over to the nearest tree and shimmied up the trunk, stretching his body out along a sturdy branch. He scooted a bit and then had a clear view through the leaves. He heard himself panting and knew it wasn’t from the effort of the climb.

  The big oak doors of the library were opening, and two White men stepped out. At the same time, the brown men fell silent and moved more tightly together. Son glanced across at the second-floor windows and saw pale
, painted faces and blonde curls pressed up against the glass panes.

  A freckled man in a Panama hat moved down one step.

  Son recognized him from the Veteran’s Day parade—he’d ridden on top of a tractor hung with a sign that read “Sibley and Sons, Farm Equipment.” He had grinned and waved and thrown penny candy.

  “What y’all boys doin’ here, Bernie?” he asked, as if it wasn’t clear as day.

  Uncle Bernard stepped away from the group. “We here to vote!”

  Son’s papa moved forward. The other White man folded his arms and stood straddling the door.

  “You boys don’t want no trouble, now,” he drawled without dropping the cigarette from his lips.

  Jimmy Lee and one of his friends began to make noise. Son could see that there were a good number of women in the group, too. They were dressed fine, fancy hats and all. Uncle Bernard and Papa were in the lead, shoulder to shoulder.

  “We here to vote,” Papa repeated. Son wished that he could see his father’s face. Was he calm, or defiant-like? Had his nostrils flared wide, the way they did when he was about to jump hot?

  The smoking man shrugged. “You musta got it wrong. Ain’t no Coloreds votin’ here today!”

  “That ain’t right!” Jimmy Lee yelled, pushing his way to the front. He was wearing his brand-new wing tips. Cream and oxblood. Jimmy Lee had let Son tag along when he went to the shoe store to buy them, and even asked for Son’s opinion. Jimmy Lee was like the brother Son always wished for and never had. Jimmy Lee was a cool cat. He was out there, ready to take heat just so he could vote like a grown man. Son thought Jimmy Lee was brave, but he’d never tell him that.

  Today was Jimmy Lee’s birthday, and there would be cake and ice cream at his house tonight. Son had dropped off a card this morning on his way to school.

  “We comin’ in, Sibley,” Jimmy Lee’s father, Uncle Bernard said, and the Colored crowd surged forward. But Son was distracted by the hum of a car engine, a hum that shifted gears into a roar, and he leaned so close to the rough bark that it scraped his left cheek.

  The dark Chevy barreled around the corner, heading straight for the library steps. Son hugged the branch, opening his mouth wide to holler, but time happened too fast. Time ran as fast as that car did, but the car swerved just as it pulled up even with the three Colored men in front; wheels screeched and drowned out the boy’s warning, and his second call was blown back into his throat by the explosion and fire that leaped out of the passenger side of the car. Shots rang out in the smoke; women screamed and men ran.

  The car pulled away as quickly as it had appeared. Son blinked down into the smoke as it mingled with gunpowder and burned up his nose. There was blood: on the steps, on the ground, on the street. Blood on the White men.

  Blood was seeping out of the still bodies on the sidewalk. One was turned away. That must be Uncle Bernie. One slim, young form was sprawled in the arms of Jimmy Lee’s best friend, Marcus. Son leaned dangerously off the limb. Those shoes … That was Jimmy Lee! Son swallowed hard. Where was Papa?

  A giant, bear-shaped figure was slumped on the bottom step, his arm stretched out. Was Papa making a fist? Or was he reaching for help? Son kept pressing his eyes together, opening and closing them, hoping to see something different. But the smoke was dissolving.

  He raised his head. Across the street, staring directly at him from one of the upstairs windows, was a pink-faced woman with silver hair and lips the same color as all the blood. Her gray eyes were wide, meeting his.

  She turned away.

  Son breathed in and his chest hurt. Slowly, he climbed backward and made his way to the ground. He could hear the police sirens coming. He could hear panicked voices asking each other what happened. He already knew that there would be no answers. He already knew his father was dead.

  He trudged along to Jimmy Lee’s house and stumbled up to the backyard’s chicken wire and wood post fence. As he climbed over he had the feeling that he was traveling through some kind of dream; the chickens in their nearby coop didn’t even flutter, and though he came down smack in the middle of the vegetable plot, he barely brushed the giant clumps of collard leaves. At the corner of the garage he paused to wipe what he thought was sweat from his cheeks. He noticed a trickle of brown figures coming down the hill in front of the house, making a raggedy line in the direction of the front door.

  Son realized that it had become Willa’s house, and in one afternoon all the men left in his family were gone for good.

  He spun around to the toolshed and pushed the door open. Then he sat on the cool dirt floor in the shadows and leaned his head back against the musty wall to wait.

  Finally, the sun faded and Willa pulled the door open with a sudden jerk. He sat up just as quickly, bumping his head.

  “Well,” she said, her arms folded and her head tilted so that he could not read her features. He wondered if she did that on purpose. From now on, either everything had a purpose, or nothing did. “I’m not stayin’ round here. Soon as I bury Jimmy Lee, I’m gettin’ the hell out. You may as well come.”

  Numb as he was, dazed as he was, all he could do was shudder. Willa accepted that as a yes, and in barely two weeks’ time, Son was a conflicted resident of Washington, DC.

  Part Three:

  Mothers

  He was mad. He was ticked off. He was in a rage nearly every waking hour. Willa was only nineteen, hardly knowing how to mother her own baby girl and manage a job. Son was out of her league. His anger met her coming and going.

  She put him in school, and though the teachers recognized his brightness the same as his father had, he fought them with disrespect. When Willa tried to talk to him or chastise him, he fought her with silence.

  In the mostly White neighborhood of Anacostia the few Colored kids teased him for talking “country,” for dressing in the too-small castoffs that Willa could afford, for having no mother or father or drive. He declared allout war on them, throwing rocks and curses and punches.

  Years slipped by, counted only by Willa’s sighs and Son’s detentions and suspensions. On the evening of his thirteenth birthday the DC police brought him home for vandalism with a promise to arrest him next time.

  Son watched Willa slump on the front porch as she spoke to the cops in low tones. He knelt by the pallet on the floor where Willa’s daughter Bernadette lay sleeping. He stared at her in wonder, the way he often did, and for a moment his nothingness took the shape of fondness. She smiled at him in her sleep.

  How can little kids dream, he thought sadly, when growing up hurts so much? Willa had never shown him love. She shared her home and food and the little attention she had to spare, but she couldn’t spare any love.

  “Well.”

  He turned from Bernadette to face his new future like a man, because he knew that’s what this conversation would be about.

  Willa was tired. He heard it; he saw it in the haphazard way she pulled her frizzy brown hair back with a cheap rubber band. He saw it in her eyes: scared, somehow still not-quite-woman eyes. How could that be?

  “I’m—I’m sorry, Willa!” he blurted out, and to his embarrassment, fat tears rolled down her face as she hugged herself harder.

  They were family, he suddenly realized. The only scraps he had. Willa and Bernadette. And he had screwed it all up.

  “I’ve tried, Son. God knows I have.”

  He dropped his head. Nothing had stung him so far in his battle with the world like her words did, because he knew she was telling the truth.

  “Come on out back,” she whispered.

  He stumbled after her, into the tiny overgrown yard of the house she managed to rent. He tried not to see the scraggly pole beans in the weedy little garden plot. He thought of Jimmy. Uncle Bernie. Papa. He thought of Men.

  I could’ve mowed the grass, he thought.

  I could’ve kept her garden up for her, he thought. I could’ve tried.

  “Son, I gotta tell you something.” She looked straight at him.
He could feel the muscles in his legs tighten, but he didn’t run. What was the use?

  “I can’t keep you no more.”

  He nodded again, looking dry-eyed at his feet. Willa had run out of second-hand sources to keep up with his size twelves; she had bought these tennis shoes new.

  “I just—I just don’t have what it takes to raise you. I’m real sorry.”

  His lips quivered.

  “And I—” She hesitated. There was a change in her voice. He heard guilt. He raised his head. The familiar anger suddenly began to roll around the bottom of his stomach like hunger.

  “—I don’t know how to say this, except to say it. Your mama ain’t dead, Son. She never was. Your daddy and her brother, Jimmy Lee’s daddy—well, they made it all up. To protect you.”

  He rocked, but his knees didn’t bend. Willa put a hand on his shoulder. He wanted to shrug her off, but he couldn’t.

  “It wasn’t right for them to lie, but they had their reasons, I guess. I kept it because it was their lie, not mine. People talk bad, and they don’t forgive. They say she left him, left your daddy. Say she claimed she wasn’t satisfied or some such foolishness. I can’t even imagine! With a perfect baby child—”

  She caught herself and blinked at him. “I don’t know how she could ever leave you,” she said honestly. “Maybe, most probably, you would have turned out different if she had stayed.”

  “Why? W-why—?” he stuttered, unable to get a complete sentence out.

  But Willa nodded, seeming to understand anyway. “I’m tellin’ you now, ’cause she needs to finish her job. You need somethin’ I can’t give you, Son. I’m tellin’ you, ’cause I think your mama might be the only one who can help you see straight.”

  Son still couldn’t speak. Her job. What was a mother who didn’t want to be one? Just some woman. Just a quitter. She couldn’t have loved either of them. And was his father a better man for hiding the truth? Maybe. But all his preaching about right and justice seemed kind of hollow in the light of this mighty wrong. Had he really been protecting his boy, or protecting himself?