The next day JimmyTrotter told Miss Trotter he was hopping over the creek to watch more of Apollo 11. “I’ll be back in the morning for milking. I’m gone.”
“I’m gone!” Vonetta and Fern mocked.
“Go on, then,” Miss Trotter called after them. “If you call that gone.”
Vonetta wanted to ride JimmyTrotter’s bike, and he said, “It’s yours while you’re here. Ride it all you want.”
“Hear that?” Vonetta said to me.
“Just don’t go too far ahead of us,” I told her. “Hear that? And walk it over the bridge, Vonetta. Walk it!”
Vonetta sucked her teeth and ran off to get the bike. She’d better run.
JimmyTrotter smiled. He thought it was funny, the way Vonetta and I fussed with each other. But then, he was used to it, seeing how Miss Trotter and Ma Charles kept up their sniping from the Trotter side of the creek to the Charles side.
Ma Charles was delighted to have JimmyTrotter in the house, whether he was dropping off milk bottles or bringing one of Miss Trotter’s remedies that Ma Charles had no intention of trying. I could see the personal victory swell up in her whenever she had her sister’s great-grandson under her roof, at her table, or in front of her television.
“Make sure you feed him well, daughter,” she said to Big Ma. “Send him back over the creek with some meat on his bones.” She shook her head in make-believe sorrow. “Poor Miss Trotter. So fragile she can’t lift a pot.”
JimmyTrotter laughed and said, “Great-granny feeds me just fine.”
“Now that’s how you’re supposed to raise them! Loyal and respectful,” Ma Charles said. “That’s right, boy. Don’t tell on your old great-granny.”
JimmyTrotter gave her a “Yes, ma’am.”
Big Ma set a plate before JimmyTrotter with the same amount she’d heap onto Pa’s or Uncle Darnell’s plates.
“Why can’t I get that much?” I asked.
“I’m trying to grow you into a young lady. Not a horse.”
To that, Fern neighed and Vonetta whinnied and shot in a “Greedy gut.” Vonetta felt safe at the table, seated out of kicking range, next to her protector, JimmyTrotter.
“Throw another chop on her plate, daughter,” Ma Charles said. “And some butter beans. Some gravy. Can’t have her running across the creek eating up all your great-granny’s weeds and berries,” she told JimmyTrotter. “Go on, daughter. A nice big piece. We’re doing mighty fine on this side of the creek. Make sure you tell your old granny how well you’re fed.”
“The Lord don’t like ugly,” Big Ma told her mother.
“Any more’n he likes you celebrating the troubles of others, be they rich or poor.”
Big Ma had taken to reading her supermarket gossip news out in the open, and Ma Charles was none too pleased about “these chirrens today.” The constant coverage of the space program had taken its toll on Big Ma, and she missed hearing about other news in the world.
“Don’t know why you care so much about the troubles of rich folk,” Ma Charles scolded. “Daughter, I might not agree with men poking up in God’s heaven, but that’s news. Now, if you had a husband—”
“Come on, son, and watch your ’Pollo ’Leven,” Big Ma said, knocking off vowels like she was knocking off the suggestion that she needed to get married. “May God show them astronauts and their families a mercy.”
JimmyTrotter scooted before the television and I scooted along with him. I wasn’t into the space race, but there was no way I’d miss the moon landing.
I almost fell asleep on JimmyTrotter’s shoulder but Caleb bayed long, fitful notes and wouldn’t stop. We all looked around. A rumbling pounded beneath me. JimmyTrotter sprang up in one motion and ran to the window. Caleb bayed on and on.
Big Ma said, “Boy! Get from that window! You know better.”
“I want to see them, Aunt Ophelia.”
“You’ll see nothing. You know what it is.”
“See what?” I wanted to know.
“Klan riding,” JimmyTrotter said. “Sounds like a dozen of ’em.”
“Riding horses?” Fern was excited.
“Get from that window,” Ma Charles said to Fern. “It’s no Wild West show.”
“I want to see the horses,” Fern said.
“And I told you”—Big Ma was firm—“there’s no horses to see.”
Before I had sense enough to stop myself, I was in the window—not even crouching, but every inch of me standing tall. The riders had long ridden past us and into the pines. It was too dark to see horses but I could still feel their hooves punching the ground our house stood on. I could see white ghosts moving in the night, and torches against the black. I could see the sheets. White sheets.
“Get out that window, gal! Get out!” Big Ma shouted at my back.
I might as well have been twenty-one and not twelve. In my bones I knew I had outgrown my fear of Big Ma and that there was nothing she could do to me, but I stepped away from the window. I was both afraid of the Klan and fascinated by them. They weren’t in a newspaper article or on the evening news; they were here. I felt them pounding their horses’ hooves into our land, and saw them riding past the fields and into the pines. The way Caleb sang, loud and sad, I couldn’t tell if he was baying at them or if he wanted to be with them. It was a long, sad song.
“JimmyTrotter.” Ma Charles’s voice had lost its cackling. “Don’t worry about your great-granny. None of this is new to her. She knows what to do. She’ll be all right.”
“Yes’m.”
There was no sympathy for me. Big Ma scolded, “Delphine. I can’t understand why you went running to that window, looking for trouble. I don’t care what kind of power they’re shouting about in Oakland and in Brooklyn. You don’t know nothing about nothing down here.”
“Besides,” Ma Charles said, “no secret who’s underneath them hoods and sheets.”
“Ma,” Big Ma steamed, “I’m trying to tell her something to save her life while she’s down here.”
Ma Charles behaved as if she didn’t hear and that in itself was funny, but I didn’t dare crack a smile. “Just count all those who have horses in this one-cow town.” She said “hoss” with no r.
Fern said, “Two-cow town,” but no one was listening.
“There’s a way to stay alive and a way to be dead,” Big Ma said. “Your father surely didn’t send you down here to be among the dead. He surely didn’t.” Fern mimicked her. He surely didn’t. “That’s one phone call I don’t intend to make to your Pa: to inform him his child is among the dead, strung up or shot up by the KKK. Girl, don’t give me cause to make that call.”
Ma Charles shook her head and said, “Poor Caleb. Only reason that dog carried on is he sniffed out his litter kin when the Klan rode by. He was just barking and pining for his brother and sisters. That’s all.”
JimmyTrotter nodded in agreement. “It’s been years but Caleb most likely smells them whenever the sheriff drives by.”
It took a few seconds for me to hear what Ma Charles and JimmyTrotter were saying. Saying as calm as they might say Mr. Lucas grows pecan trees.
“The sheriff’s the Klan?” I asked. My voice loud, excited. No wonder cousin JimmyTrotter had given him a bunch of “Yes, sir”s.
Ma Charles nodded. “All the Charleses on the white side are Klan. Then there’s my Henry’s people.” She beamed. “The colored side.”
“Ma!” Big Ma said. “Yawl stop talking about this. No one needs to know this stuff.”
It was all still swimming in my head faster than I could really grab hold of it, let alone accept it. “Our relatives are KKK?”
“That’s not your relative,” Big Ma said. “Just let it lie.”
Ma Charles said, “If the bloodhound don’t let it lie, why should she? That’s not a lazy dog. That’s a sad dog. Miss his kin. Calling out for all them pups he nipped at.” Then she said thoughtfully, “Maybe I’ll call Davey Lee. See if there’s a female for Caleb.”
“You mean have the Klan come over to this house?” My head was spinning. My heart was beating fast. This was crazy. Alabama crazy.
Ma Charles did me the way she did Big Ma. She went on like she didn’t hear how crazy it all sounded.
“That poor dog needs a wife like you need a husband.”
“A mercy, Lord. Throw me down a mercy, please, Lord. She’s going to wake up every Trotter, Charles, and Gaither with this old stuff.”