Catfish Read online

  Catfish

  A Novel

  Madelyn Bennett Edwards

  Copyright © 2017 by Madelyn Bennett Edwards

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Madelyn Bennett Edwards

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictional manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events, is purely coincidental.

  The point of view of Susie Burton, used in the first person throughout this book as narrator, has no reference or relation to the author and is purely a fictional character.

  The town of Jean Ville, Louisiana is similar to the town where the author grew up, Marksville, Louisiana; but most of the specific places such as the Quarters, St. Matthews Church, Assumption Catholic School, and other areas, streets, and places are all fictional.

  Printers CreateSpace and IngramSpark

  Book design by Mark Reid and Lorna Reid at AuthorPackages

  Edited by JT Hill and Jessica Jacobs for detailed editorial advice; and Sally Dubroc for extraordinary line editing.

  Photography by Brenda Oliver Vessels

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Edwards, Madelyn Bennett, author

  Subjects: Coming of age, romance, race relations, Jim Crow, 1960’s, KKK, LSU, Southern University, Sarah Lawrence, Louisiana, Cajun

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  First Edition

  Copyrighted Material

  For my mother

  Mary Frances Taylor Bennett

  Who died just before Catfish was published.

  I wanted you to hold it.

  ------------

  And

  My friend

  Sue Couvillion LaPrairie

  You were the best of us.

  You would have been proud of me.

  My nephew

  William Joseph ”Joe” Bennett, Jr.

  You left us way too soon.

  I wanted to see what you would give to the world.

  When I began graduate school in 2015 and while I wrote, Catfish, Mama, Joe, and Sue were very much alive. Sue died in March, 2017 as I completed the final revisions. Joe died in June, while I submitted queries to publishers. Mama died in August, just as the cover design was completed. Your deaths inspired me to take this to the finish line without delay, because we have no idea whether we will be here tomorrow to reach our goals.

  I miss you.

  Table of Contents

  Part One: 1963

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Part Two: 1964-65

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Part Three: 1966-67

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Part Four: 1968

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Part Five: 1969

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Part Six: 1970-71

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Part Seven: 1972-1974

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  More books by Madelyn Bennett Edwards coming in 2018 and 2019

  Acknowledgements

  Part One: 1963

  Chapter One

  Night Raid

  1963

  AFTER MY GREAT UNCLE died, Daddy bought the biggest house in Jean Ville, Louisiana from his widow and moved us up South Jefferson Street from our small ranch style house. I was eleven, going on twelve, and my bedroom, which faced the road, had floor-to-ceiling French windows that opened onto a deep front porch that spanned the entire front of our antebellum home.

  We had only been in the Big House a year, when I was reading in bed and smelled smoke through the opened window. It seemed to hang in the air, mixed with a distinct barnyard smell and the stench of burning rubber. A loud roar, like thunder, rose from the ground and my bed shook. I crawled out of the high four-poster, pulled my long hair into a ponytail and tiptoed to the divan between the two front windows. Kneeling on the rough tapestry, I pulled the thick, blue drapes back a few inches and peered through the blinds.

  Engines revved and horns blared while horses galloped over the sidewalk and through our front yard. I watched as if in a dream while three pickup trucks, their beds loaded with people in white sheets, dunce hats and white fabric over their faces with two holes for eyes, pulled into the driveway and drove across the wide, front lawn.

  It was summer, almost five months since Mardis Gras. What was the occasion for this parade, or was it a celebration? White-costumed people in pickups and on more than a dozen galloping horses waved torches in our front yard.

  Two of the men—now I knew they were men because I could see their boots and jeans under the sheets that flapped open in the fronts—jumped out of a truck bed and ran towards the front of our house. Their boots thumped up the thirteen steps onto the porch. They were so close I could have touched them. I cowered behind the heavy curtains, still peeking through the opening but instinctively backing a few inches away from the window, stretching the drapes out in front of me. One of the men held a can of paint while the other dipped a brush into it several times and wiped it across the white wood. He saw me peeping through the open window.

  “Get away from here, girl. Go back to bed,” he said. “You don’t need to be involved.”

  I backed away, moved to the other window.

  Three other ghost-clad people carried what, from the back, looked like a huge crucifix, into the middle of the yard. When they stood it up, it was twice as tall as the tallest of the men. Two more men ran up behind them with shovels, dug a hole and within seconds, planted the body-less cross.

  Then they packed the dirt around the bottom with their boots and lit the cross on fire. The men on the porch joined the ones in the yard to form a circle around the cross and chanted something I couldn’t understand. All the while horns blew, men yelled, trucks revved, and horses galloped in circles around the ring of men, tearing up our yard and making so much noise I saw the lights go on in Dr. David’s Switzer’s house across the street.

  I was so enthralled I didn’t hear Daddy come into my room.

  “Get back to bed, Susie!” he said, pulling the drapes fully opened and lifting the blinds in one whisk. I backed up and stood behind him. He put one of his big hands on either side of the window and leaned forward as if to make his head go through the screen. When he saw the action he stormed out of my room, through the hall and onto the porch, just as the men jumped into the beds of the pickups, and the caravan of trucks and horses with men carrying lighted torches, paraded down South Jefferson Street towards the Quarters, where Tootsie and Catfish lived.

  “Hey, you renegades,” Daddy yelled. “Get off my property before I call the sheriff.”

  But it was too late. They’d already left and no one moved to stop them.

  Daddy called the sheriff and spoke to a man who said he was the only deputy on duty and couldn’t leave the jail—he’d give the message to the sheriff in the morning. Someone would come by to check out the scene. Daddy mumbled something about the sheriff being, “In on this,” and hung up.

  The cross in our yard burned brightly for hours. I was scared and the bright light of the fire kept me awake so I crawled in bed with Mama and Daddy and laid my head in the crook of Daddy’s arm and cried. He stroked my hair and whispered to me until my
eyelids got heavy and I stopped sobbing. He explained that those people called themselves the Ku Klux Klan and harbored hate in their hearts. He said they wanted to keep blacks and whites separated and used fear tactics to make sure that happened, but would never go so far as to hurt a little girl.

  I asked him why they came to our house.

  “It’s a warning,” he said. “They think I should stop being friends with Ray Thibault.”

  Daddy said that colored people were the same as whites. He grew up on a farm in Backwoods, Louisiana, population 400, about twenty miles from Jean Ville, the parish seat of Toussaint Parish, where we lived.

  “I was friends with Moses’s son, Rufus,” Daddy said. “We played and ate supper together and hunted and fished, like brothers. We talked a lot. He had feelings and dreams and aspirations just like I did. God doesn’t see differences because someone’s skin is darker than another’s.

  “Jesus had dark skin, you know,” he told me that night. I didn’t know that. The Jesus at Assumption Catholic Elementary School I attended with my brothers was white—the one hanging on the cross, the picture with the big heart, the statue in the grotto—they were all white men.

  Daddy said the KKK hated Jews, too, but they didn’t bother the Switzers because they provided medical care for the Klan members and their families.

  Dr. David and Dr. Joseph Switzer, brothers and two of only a handful of physicians in Jean Ville, were Daddy’s friends. The older brother, Dr. David, lived directly across South Jefferson Street from our house and had delivered all five of us kids. He made house calls when I was sick and reminded me of the Santa Claus I had believed in when I was little—what with his jolly, loving manner, and all.

  Daddy said God was colorblind.

  But while he talked, I thought about the different things Mama had taught us. Mama was what you might call, prejudice—I mean, she thought differently.

  “I’m from North Louisiana” she said. “Where Negroes are Negroes. They know their place, and there aren’t many of them. We ran the uppity ones off early on.” She told me and my brothers to stay away from, “those people,” except for our help, Tootsie. But even with Tootsie, there were lines we shouldn’t cross, like going to visit her in the Quarters or kissing her brown cheek.

  Mama rolled her eyes behind Daddy’s back when he talked about coloreds being people and God loving us all the same. We’d laugh to each other because we knew she’d tell us the opposite once Daddy was gone. When he wasn’t around she told us colored people had tiny brains and were the “inferior,” race. And she treated Tootsie something terrible, didn’t pay her much money, and made poor Tootsie do all the dirty work like scrubbing toilets and sifting through garbage if we lost something. I always wondered why Tootsie stayed. She could have worked for any white family in Jean Ville but she worked for Mama until I went off to college, years later.

  The Klan visit only made Daddy more determined not to change his stance on colored people. One day I heard him tell Mama that he had coffee with Mr. Ray Thibault at Charlie’s Diner downtown every morning before heading to the Toussaint Bank where he was vice president at the time.

  “I love to watch the looks on the faces of the sheriff and his cronies when they come in the front door, look around, and spot me at the corner table with Ray,” he said. “They’ll have to do more than burn a cross in my yard and paint words on my house to make me change who I am as a man.”

  “I don’t know why you have to be friends with that Negro,” Mama said. “There are lots of white men in this town who admire you and want to be your friend. Why do you waste your time?”

  “Ray and I have a lot in common,” he told her. Then he proceeded to explain all the reasons why it didn’t matter what color Ray Thibault’s skin was. Mama listened and rolled her eyes behind his back.

  I thought about the only two colored people I knew, Tootsie and Catfish. Tootsie had been with us since I was an infant and I never thought of her as any color. She was more of a mother to me than my own, and I loved her almost as much as I loved God.

  Catfish was a dark man who walked in front of our house every afternoon on his way home from work. I first met him when I was little, about six or seven.

  *

  A deep ravine separated the front yard of our old house from South Jefferson Street and was where we caught crawfish, tadpoles, turtles and, sometimes, after a hard rain, even minnows in its muddy waters. I held a bucket in my small hands. The weight of the hard-shelled snapper in my daddy’s galvanized pail made me bend over as I carried the load down the driveway and onto the road. I was bringing it to Catfish, a tall man who my brothers and I saw almost every day. I walked slowly with the bucket, afraid for so many reasons.

  I was not allowed to talk to people who lived on the other side of Gravier Road in the “Quarters.” It was only about a block away, but it could have been miles, it was that much of a mystery. Our mother told us, “Those people eat white children,” which, of course, only made my brothers and me more curious about them.

  I was seven and I knew about Vampires. I read Nancy Drew mysteries and even some of the Hardy Boys. If this tall man smiled I wondered whether I would see fangs.

  But the bigger mystery that day had to do with a rumor about Catfish, who often stopped to whistle a tune or play his harmonica and dance for us, right there in the street. We’d overheard our mother and her friends talk about him during their Wednesday afternoon bridge game.

  “They say he eats turtles,” Mrs. Rousseau said, fanning her cards in her left hand and rearranging them with her right. “I’ll bid two hearts.”

  “You don’t say!” Miss June looked across the table at Mama who was her bridge partner and said, “I’ll bid two spades.”

  “Turtles? Well, what do you expect from those ignorant Negroes,” Mrs. Ruth said. She looked at her cards and peered over them at her partner, Mrs. Rousseau. “I’ll bid two no-trump.”

  “Catfish is nothing but a dumb clown. He dances in the streets to entertain the kids sometimes. That’s about all those people are good for,” our mother said and all the women laughed. “I’ll say, four spades.”

  “Four spades? Anne must have a strong hand.” Miss June began to lay her cards on the table while Mama smiled and said, “We’ve got this, June.” And they did, win the hand, that is. Mama always won at bridge, she was something of a phenom at cards.

  My brothers stood on the hill above the ditch, and watched me carry the turtle down the driveway and onto the road. My little brother, Will who was six, was worried about what would happen to me. He cried and yelled, over and over.

  “Don’t go, Susie. Please, don’t go!”

  James, our older, wiser brother was ten, and he wanted the man to eat me so he screamed out.

  “Go on, Susie. Go on!”

  I wasn’t sure what to do but I had already yelled across the ditch and told Catfish that we had the turtle, and my brothers were too chicken to take it to him.

  I was a nervous child, the nails on my short, plump hands bitten to the quick, almost non-existent. My palms felt damp as they gripped the bucket’s handle.

  I reached the bottom of the driveway and turned right, onto the blacktop road. He stood about three or four yards away. It was hot and humid and the sweat in my palms matched the perspiration that ran down my back. I knew the sweat was not totally from the heat.

  Before I got to him he called to me.

  “Hey little girl.” His voice was smooth and sweet, almost creamy. He sounded a lot like Tootsie. “You don’t need to be scared of me.”

  “Who, me?” I tried to act big and brave but I knew my voice trembled. “I’m not afraid.”

  He laughed. It was a hearty laugh, from deep in his belly. In fact, he held his belly while he laughed. It made me want to smile, but I was too terrified.

  “Come on little girl,” he said. “I won’t bite you.”

  I stopped dead in my tracks. Bite? Maybe Mama was
right! It felt like my feet were glued to the pavement. My arms started to tremble and the bucket began to swing.

  He took a step towards me. I wanted to run, but my feet were stuck. I gripped the handle so tight my hands started to tingle, like pins pricking my palms. I craned my neck upward and stared into his eyes. I couldn’t look away. It was as if a magnetic force ran between my eyes and his.

  It only took him two steps to reach me.

  “You gonna hand me that bucket or you gonna hold on to it?” he asked. Creamy.

  “I, uh, I, um, I’m going to give it to you,” I said. But when he reached down to take it, I couldn’t let go. My fingers were frozen around the handle.

  His hand stopped in midair, as if he was afraid to touch my hands. We stood there, both cemented in time, staring at each other.

  I noticed how long his hand was, and thin, not like my daddy’s whose hands were round and thick and hairy. Catfish’s nails were not bitten. They were smooth and pink, which contrasted with the color of his skin—dark, not black, not brown, but darker than any I’d ever seen, even darker than Tootsie’s.

  “I promise I won’t hurt you, Missy,” he said. Again I noticed how kind his voice sounded. Is this a trick? “I’m much obliged for the turtle.”

  I didn’t move.

  “I’m going to make me some turtle stew.” He spoke slowly, his voice like syrup flowing off the sides of a stack of pancakes. “I’m gonna boil it till I know it’s dead, then I’m gonna break the shell, me. It’s the meat inside that’s good, yeah.”

  I knew the boys were excited because we had solved the mystery, but here I was, stuck in the street with this man I wasn’t supposed to talk to, riveted by the sound of his voice, the depths of his eyes, the color of his skin, the length of his legs.