Chapter Eight

Mrs. Holliday was a chaperone when several Gulf Coast schools took a field trip up to the Delta to tour Parchman Farm, the Mississippi State Penitentiary.

For hours, the buses rolled in a caravan through scrubby piney forests, then through lush kudzu-covered hill country. Ernie’s bus from Libertyburg High was in front of ours, and he sat in the back, turning to wave at Charlene every now and then. Beneath the seat in front of me, someone had left a Look Magazine, and I picked it up. On the cover, guys with long hair made peace signs at the photographer while girls glowing with body paint danced under a brilliant California sun. Something magical was happening out there. Those kids looked beautiful, as if they understood something about life, and how free you could be. Charlene looked over my shoulder. “Look at that guy with the face paint,” she said.

“You can hear the music, when you look at that picture,” I said. “Jefferson Airplane, you know? Don’t you wish we were there? It’s Berkeley.”

But she’d caught Ernie’s attention again and blew him a kiss. “What?” she asked, but I didn’t answer.

Finally, we made it past Jackson, heading toward the Delta, where James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, the three civil rights workers, had been murdered near Philadelphia, Mississippi three years before. This was the kind of place where the Neshoba County sheriff and his deputy could sit in a courthouse with their cowboy boots propped on the table, chewing tobacco and grinning, while they were being arraigned for murder. It was the kind of place where the sheriff was still free.

Flat cotton fields stretched for miles on either side of the road. Parchman Farm sprawled in the middle of a big cotton field. I wasn’t sure why it was important that we kids tour a prison, but it gave everybody a chance to giggle when Mr. Miller, the social studies teacher, talked about the “penal institution” we were going to visit. He’d push his glasses up on his nose and frown, like he didn’t have a clue.

Mrs. Holliday huddled close to Mr. Miller when they took us around the barracks. She warned the girls not to get too close to the inmates, and certainly not to ask them what they’d done to get sent to Parchman. We might hear stories we had no business hearing, she warned. “There’s stories here about rapists, bank robbers, even those who have murdered little …”

Mr. Miller caught her arm and shook his head, so she quieted down, a funny little smile on her lips.

When we walked outside, she pointed to the long whip that was looped on a hook on the side of a building, coiled there like a sleeping rattlesnake.

“Black Annie,” she told us, fingering the tip of the whip, as if there might be blood dried there. She whirled around and whispered to Mr. Miller, “Twenty lashes from her, that would cure Joe Holliday. Cure any man’s crime. No, make it fifty lashes.” She planted her spectator pumps and cracked an imaginary whip in the air.

Mr. Miller flinched, his thin shoulders hunching under his plaid sports jacket, as though crimes we couldn’t imagine lay hidden in his heart, waiting to be cured.

“Hah!” said Mrs. Holliday, flailing her whip against the air once more. “But would it cure a woman’s crime?”

Was she talking about Mama? I grabbed Rob’s hand and hurried by, pretending I hadn’t heard or seen anything.

The warden himself took us to see the electric chair. “Anyone care to try it out? Have a seat,” he said, smiling. He waved his arm at the contraption, like he was just exercising good old Southern hospitality.

Ernie Crenshaw grinned and sat down in it, with those great wooden slabs for arms, and the dark leather straps hanging down. It sat up on a wooden platform like a throne. Charlene grabbed his hand and pulled him back. The warden laughed, and so did some of the kids, like it was a scary ride at the state fair in Jackson. Or part of the freak show. Grady Pickens laughed so hard he bent over double, holding his stomach. It was just because he still liked Charlene, I thought. I remembered how hard he’d laughed because he was scared of Joe Holliday’s Halloween decorations. Now he was laughing because he was jealous.

“You know it can’t be turned on,” I whispered, looking around for a plug. But Charlene looked like she might cry.

“That’s where Levi Litvak should’ve sat,” she told me. “Why did we have to come to Parchman and not him? Who wants to see a bunch of convicts?”

I nodded. “Yeah, I bet kids in Berkeley get to hear Allen Ginsburg read poetry on their field trips.”

“Who?” asked Charlene, but she wasn’t listening. She was staring at the electric chair.

I stared at it, too: the monstrous thick belts everywhere, the hideously stained seat, as if grown men had left their urine there. Levi Litvak could have fried in that seat till his hair sizzled and his eyes smoked like Uncle Clayton’s burned steaks.

“That’s where Cecil Price should sit,” said Rob, meaning the deputy sheriff who was in jail for killing the civil rights workers. “This place is creepy.”

My skin prickled, and I shivered. But in the spring of 1968, it was already so hot that Charlene said that it seemed like God wanted everybody in Mississippi to fry, like we were all guilty of something we didn’t even know about.

Led by one of the prison authorities, a slight man in a white shirt, we filed through a room where women in striped dresses sat at sewing machines, zipping out seams straighter than Mama ever could. None of them looked up at us. They kept their heads bowed and one black woman moved her lips gently, as if she were praying over the cloth.

The guide waved and led us to the next stop, a gray corrugated tin structure that must have been blazing hot in the summer. The noise was so loud inside we heard a buzzing even before we got to the doors. Men in black and white stripes stood at long tables covered with sheets of metal. Perspiration streamed down their faces, made dark circles under their arms. A burly man with tattoos on his hands stamped out rectangular pieces of the metal, and at the end of the room, someone else stacked car license tags in boxes. Over each number was a big white magnolia, with “Mississippi: The Magnolia State,” at the bottom. The guy who loaded them up wiped off the sweat from each plate with a gray rag.

“What do you think they did?” Charlene yelled, over the noise. “Think they murdered somebody?”

I put a finger to my lips. Maybe they hadn’t done anything but been in the wrong place when a white person was mad about how his day had gone.

It was a relief to step out of that noise and into air that was cool by comparison. At the end of the day, the prison band played so we could dance. “Parchman celebrities,” Loretta Holliday tugged at Mr. Miller’s sleeve and whispered in his ear, though he pulled away from her. “Just look at them. Black as night.” She pointed to the bass guitarist and the drummer.

They did songs like “Mountain of Love” and “Ring of Fire” and “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” things that made me think about Mama’s music, so I didn’t feel like dancing. Nobody else was dancing, either. The music was a long way from the Beatles.

Kathy Holliday started laughing at the three guitarists and the drummer in their striped pants and shirts. She giggled until a wave of hysteria went over some kids huddled in the far corner, but the band sang harder. A white guy with terrible acne sang, his tendons straining against his neck, like they were trying to escape the prison of his skin. He didn’t look much older than we were. A sound like howling or shrieking came from their scarred guitars, the kind of music Mama loved, Big Bill Broonzy and Robert Johnson. We were deep in blues country, with its nooses and moonshine whiskey and the Klan silently moving through cotton fields. Teardrops sliding down the mountainside, many times I been there, many times I cried …

It made me want to cry, too, and Rob put his arm around me. He could tell when I was sad, that was one of the things I liked about him. I leaned my head against his shoulder, but Mr. Miller wagged a finger at me to sit up straight.

“We might as well be in jail, too,” Rob said, and he wove his fingers through mine.

Ernie tugged at Charlene’s hand to pull her out on the dance floor, an empty spot in the cafeteria where rows of scratched formica tables had been pushed away. It was probably just to show up the kids who were laughing at the band, and it made me wonder how much he cared about Charlene’s feelings. “C’mon,” he kept telling her, his other hand flat against the small of her back, pushing. “Let’s show ‘em.” It was just like Ernie, wanting to dance to that sad music, to make some holier-than-thou point.

Charlene tried, but Ernie danced almost as badly as Rob did. It was a slow bop, and he tried hard to find the rhythm. Then he gave up on the bop and started doing the twist, looking like some machine gone crazy, its parts moving in different directions. Charlene finally stopped shuffling her feet. It was Elvis’s “Jailhouse Rock,” but no one could make it come to life in that place. All those men in stripes, and Levi Litvak not among them, though I couldn’t help searching for a brown pompadour, rising above a face that might’ve gone gray from prison.

Rob was looking at me, his blue eyes piercing. “You’re still looking for Levi Litvak, aren’t you? You’ll drive yourself crazy. Try to get over it.”

“It’s not like having the chicken pox and you get over with a few little scars,” I said. “I’ll always be different because of what happened to my mother.” Every time I thought Levi Litvak was finally gone, he reappeared in a dream, a carpenter hammering nails into a wooden coffin, or a cop who would stop me in the truck to give me a speeding ticket, blue lights flashing until I could see the face above the badge. He’d push back his blue cap and there was Levi Litvak, the cleft chin and brown eyes squinting, as if I were the one who’d done something wrong.

“I’m trying to help you,” said Rob, but the music swept his words away.

The guy with the acne kept straining with a desperate ache in his voice, as if he could make his girlfriend hear, wherever she was. Mountain of love, mountain of love, you should be ashamed … He wasn’t singing to us. His eyes were fixed somewhere far away. I felt better. He surely didn’t know Kathy Holliday was laughing at him the way she probably wished she could laugh at her dad.

After that day, I knew I needed to go as far away as I could, like Mama had probably wanted to. While Charlene was skipping classes to be with Ernie, I doubled up on advanced courses at Tallulah High, and even went to summer school so I could graduate early. Rob didn’t like it, and one Sunday afternoon, we came as close as we’d ever come to having a fight.

“You won’t get to graduate with me, Jubilee,” he said. We were sitting at the kitchen table, drinking Cokes Marilyn had poured. “Just think, we can go to Mississippi Southern together. We’ll get out of Biloxi, just wait.” The only problem was, Mississippi Southern was in Hattiesburg, up north about an hour and a half away.

“Yeah, sure,” I said. “The kids at Southern come here to have fun, that’s how boring Hattiesburg is.”

His eyes drooped. “How about State? They have a great math program. We could go to Jackson for fun.”

“If I can get in, I’m going to Berkeley. That’s where the whole world is changing.”

“My parents would never pay for me to go out there,” he said. “C’mon.”

“If I can’t go there, I’m not going to college. It’s the only place I want to be.”

“Not even with me?” His voice dropped.

I didn’t have a chance to answer. Charlene came in, carrying the Sunday comics. She dropped them on the table and invited herself to have a seat. She was waiting for Ernie to come. “You’re so weird, Jubilee. That’s where all the anti-war protesters are,” she said. “What would you do way out there in California?” She’d been eavesdropping. Typical.

“That’s why I want to go, to find out,” I said.

“I’m the only one in this family who’s not weird.” Charlene put the comics in front of her face.

“It’s hard to get into Berkeley,” said Rob. “You should at least apply to State, for back-up.”

A wave of anger rose from my stomach to my face. “’For back-up’?” I imitated him. “You think you’re so smart.”

“You’re smart, too.” His voice was quiet. “I just want to be sure you get to college.”

“Well, you’re saying all the wrong things,” I told him.

Charlene stared at Peanuts, where Charlie Brown sat in front of Lucy’s psychiatrist’s booth.

Rob was silent for a while. “I guess I could come out to visit,” he said slowly. He was watching my face, and I tried not to look at his eyes. There was too much to look forward to in California, and I couldn’t let Rob hold me back. “Maybe at Christmas.”

I nodded. “Sure, if your parents will pay for a plane ticket.” There was sarcasm in my voice. I didn’t know it was there till I heard it.

Rob’s jaw was working the way it did once when football players called him a faggot and he kept on walking across the school parking lot. He was brave, I said, but even as I had taken his hand, something in me wanted him to fight back, to at least call them rednecks. “Maybe they will,” he said. “Do you want me to come, or not?”

Charlene gathered up the comics and left.

“’Bout time,” I said to her retreating back.

“Well? Would you want me to come?” asked Rob.

“Sure,” I said, but I already knew there was no place for Rob in the world where I wanted to be. Maybe there was no place for even Charlene and Daddy. Who knew? Maybe there would be no place for me there, either. And if there wasn’t, then I might not belong in the world at all. I’d live the rest of my life inside my head.

For my application, my statement of purpose was a long poem I wrote about growing up in Mississippi, about how my trumpet could blow away the blues, how the music could blow ghosts away. I worked on it for weeks, trying to make it sound like the notes that echoed off the garage walls. I even painted some of the lines in day-glo on our bedroom walls and ceiling, so I could read them in the middle of the night when I couldn’t sleep.

Charlene got mad about it. “Are you and Rob in some kind of a cult?” she asked. “All those letters give me the creeps. God didn’t make words to glow in the dark.”

“It helps me concentrate,” I told her. “When I wake up at night, I think about my poem. It’s hard work.”

“You think it’s really great stuff, don’t you?” Her eyes narrowed like she was focusing a pair of binoculars to scrutinize me. “Well, I guess we all have to find a way to feel good about ourselves, don’t we? Even if it’s trying to be a hippie poet.”

“Is that why you hang out with Ernie, to feel good about yourself?” I tried to curl my lip the way she did.

She looked shocked, staring at me wide-eyed, the binoculars gone. “That’s a terrible thing to say to your own sister. I’d help you through anything and you know it. So would Rob, and you don’t even appreciate how he’s trying to help you get into Mississippi State.”

“Why did you say my poem is just a way of feeling good about myself, then?” I asked. “How does that help me?”

“You’re too sensitive,” she said, and stormed out of the room, banging the door behind her.

“What’s going on?” called Daddy from the living room, where he and Marilyn were watching a western called Palladin on television. The hero would flash his card: “Have Gun, Will Travel.” I liked the show until I realized he was always on someone else’s mission. “Have poem, will travel,” I thought, and it would be no one’s journey but my own.

Neither of us answered Daddy. I turned out the lights in our bedroom. The words stared down at me in green through the shadows. Maybe they would work their magic at Berkeley’s admissions office.

When the letter finally came with the University of California at Berkeley seal at the return address, my hands started shaking. The rest of my life lay inside. I ripped it open and had to sit down. The poem must’ve been what got me in, because they gave me a scholarship, too. When I could believe the words, I showed the letter to Charlene.

“Look.” My hand was still shaking when I stuck it between Charlene’s face and the magazine she was reading.

She read it twice, then took it from my hands and ran her fingertips over the raised gold insignia of the University of California. Her face was glowing when she looked up.

“I prayed for this, Jubilee,” she said. “I know I’ve said some mean things, but I want you to be happy.” Her face shone with tears and triumph, whether in pride for me or for her successful prayers, I couldn’t tell. I hugged her and a sob came out of my throat, a sound I didn’t expect.

Charlene was happy, but she would be left all alone in that house. She had Ernie, though. So why was I crying?

Aunt Sylvia persuaded Daddy to let me go. She came down for a visit to get to know Marilyn, and they all started talking about Berkeley as they sat around the kitchen table drinking coffee.

“What?” Daddy said. “A teenager running off to California all by herself? To live in a dormitory with who knows what kinds of dope addicts? Why, all she’s ever known is Biloxi.”

“Jubilee and I’ve been independent for a long time,” said Charlene.

Marilyn scraped an emory board across her fingernails, back and forth, like everybody knows you’re not supposed to do. “And sex maniacs,” she added, not even looking up.

“What?” We stared at her.

From the look on Charlene’s face, she was wondering what Marilyn might know about what she and Ernie Crenshaw had been doing in the back seat of his car. Marilyn liked Ernie, mostly because he admired the soldiers in Vietnam so much that he wanted to join the Army.

“What do you mean, sex maniacs?” Charlene asked, her face flushed.

Marilyn looked confused. “Dormitories full of dope addicts and sex. That’s what Harry said. Listen to your father, Charlene.” She looked at me. “You too, Jubilee. Berkeley’s a strange place. Anything could happen.”

Aunt Sylvia let out a snort: the first time I’d heard her make a noise like that. “It’s one of the best universities in the country …”

The timer on the stove began to shriek, and Marilyn jumped up to turn on the television for The Price Is Right. It was her favorite show because she was so good at it from studying the catalogs she kept stacked in the bathroom. She forgot everything when the game shows were on. Talk about drugs, Charlene said; just look at Marilyn sitting in a trance before the TV.

“But those hippies running around out there,” Daddy told Aunt Sylvia. “Look what’s happening in your own city, up there at Columbia University, students going wild, having sit-ins. What on earth would Bernice have said, God rest her soul?” He lowered her voice, so Marilyn couldn’t hear. He rubbed his stomach, like his ulcers were acting up again. For the first time I could see how much he’d aged. His cheeks caved inward and gray hair sprouted just above his ears. But his eyes had aged the most. They were like gray caves hollowed into his head, forlorn places where a hermit might live. And then I saw it clearly, how marrying Marilyn had been a life raft that couldn’t hold his weight. He was sinking again, the way he did right after Mama died. Marilyn would get jealous even when I’d sing Mama’s old blues songs at talent shows. Maybe she had reason to be. Daddy’s eyes would get misty and soft, like he wasn’t even seeing me perform, but remembering Mama. Then, sure as rain, Marilyn would pick a big fight with him. So if he mentioned Mama, he kept his voice quiet.

Sylvia was quick. “Bernice would say ‘go for it,’ that’s what,” she snapped, a glint in her eyes. Then she smiled at my father’s fears. “Don’t you worry your handsome little head, Harry,” she teased, tousling his hair so that a curl flopped down his forehead. She wiped the pomade from her fingers on a paper towel, laughing. “Jubilee’s a good kid. And smart, too. How else would she have gotten that scholarship? Bernice would’ve been so proud. Don’t take that away.” Then she looked over at Charlene. “Of course, we’re all proud of Charlene, too. You have two wonderful, smart girls.”

While Aunt Sylvia was there, Walter Cronkite broke into a TV show to announce that Martin Luther King had been killed. At first we sat stunned, unable to believe it. It made me want to leave the South even more. When the Biloxi Sun-Herald ran an editorial suggesting that King was shot so he could become a martyr for civil rights, Aunt Sylvia wrote a letter to them about what she called Southern Nazis.

The night after they printed the letter, Daddy was sitting out in the backyard drinking a bourbon and water, trying to avoid the irate phone calls we’d been getting. Somebody kept calling and breathing heavily, but most people wanted to tell Sylvia that all the outside agitators like her could go back where they came from. One woman said whoever pulled the trigger on Martin Luther King was a hero. Some of the callers remembered that Aunt Sylvia had married Claude. A slut, one guy called her.

Daddy poured himself a stiff drink and slammed the back door behind him. It was the worst he’d seen of Biloxi, he said, his face pale. Aunt Sylvia and I were arguing with Marilyn about what Martin Luther King stood for, when Charlene spoke up. She played with the salt shaker, not looking up. “Just think, tiny babies trying to grow up in a world like this. How would you raise it?”

I guessed she thought that if she had to live with Marilyn, she had to be more philosophical about things. After all, I was the one leaving home in a few months, so I could afford to mouth off to Marilyn. Look how much better the junior high basketball team was doing since the school integrated, I was saying, when the screen door slammed and Daddy came inside.

“Damn these mosquitoes!” he said. “They’re everywhere.” Marilyn got up to squeeze at his arm, and we heard her whisper, “You got an agitator in the family, hon.”

“Shut up.” The words shot from Daddy’s throat, and he headed over to the cabinet above the sink to reach for the bourbon. I’d never heard Daddy tell anybody to shut up before, and Marilyn looked like she’d been slapped. Charlene and I stared at each other. Marilyn left in a huff and soon the bedroom door slammed. Daddy poured himself another drink. As soon as he took a sip, the phone rang again. This time he answered. “What is it?” he asked. Then his mouth knotted and he hung up. In a voice so low I could barely hear, he told Aunt Sylvia someone was threatening to kill her. He picked up the phone again and dialed the police, but all they did was tell us not to leave the house.

Aunt Sylvia packed her clothes and some sketches she’d done and left for a Holiday Inn in New Orleans, saying she’d never come back. “This isn’t my home anymore,” she said.

“You won’t come back even for us?” asked Charlene.

Aunt Sylvia stopped long enough to hug us. “Of course I’ll come back for you.” She reached for a strand of her long hair and twisted it, the way she did when she was worried. “And you visit me whenever you want.”

She didn’t give up the campaign for me to go to Berkeley. She called from New York and told Daddy things like, “People are people, you know. They’re not so different out in California.” But when I got on the phone, she told me, “It’ll be different out there, honey. Wait and see.” I told Charlene she could come, too, out where people wouldn’t point at you or call you names, but Charlene said she didn’t think there was such a place, not on earth, anyway.

Sometimes I prayed to Mama, telling her I was going to Berkeley, that I was going to find clubs there to sing in if I could. Or a band where I could play my trumpet like Miles Davis. It would make her happy, I knew.