CHAPTER 8

“Bernie, be pleased,” Miss Lula said as we sat together on the front porch some days following her recovery, her eyes taking note of my repressed tears as I’d glanced at the newspaper she read and noticed the front-page article: Burning.

Her with her needlework and me with a basket of snap peas that I’d picked and washed, the sun burning hotter every day as summer approached in just-noticeable increments over the cooler morning, drowning it slowly in shorter nights. Darn hummingbird came by, and we watched it for nearly ten minutes, Miss Lula resting her head on the cushioned part of the rocker while I sat directly on the ground with the basket to my side.

“Seems like every day there’s something new,” she said with the newspaper opened, her thoughts having careened like this for several days as we’d sat together on that porch. “Don’t make no sense. Wish they would just end it all and everything go back to normal. That’s what I pray.”

She looked to me for confirmation that I felt the same. But Miss Lula had prayers much different than my own—her prayers born of her circumstance, and mine born from mine, as if there was a white god and a black god depending on the petitioner. And while I knew there was no need of beating your head on the same stubborn stone unless you planned on learning something from it, and that I should just smile like usual, her words still brought nothing but pain to me, as those memories of Henry and our past came to mind as swiftly as his life had likely departed, that life he’d given to me in song and time and love. I said nothing to her, my anguish bursting from the seams and running down my sides, pressured like firemen’s hoses within my pursed lips. I was lost here, forever confined in today and yesterday with no future, a clear view of the trails that bus left behind as my soul swept up in the smoke from its exhaust. Unseen in rearview mirrors, invisible to them like black faces on the pavement, like buoys lost at sea, I could no longer keep quiet.

I knew very well that the negro controlled almost nothing in this world, having that white hand strangled around our necks so tight, with our sights in constant view of what little we had—our toil and our souls and our God—His land a bounty stretched in front of me, belonging only to the white man. That surge of blood coursed through my brain and caused those few cars on the road before me to burn red hot beneath the sun as it cast mirages over the fields like a sea of watery graves out amongst the cotton and peat moss, graves that ran for miles in both directions and caused the soil to sway just like that vast ocean it mimed, those graves placed out there for the just folk, I knew, someplace my Henry most likely laid.

For here, the negro worked, his hands grown harder and his heart just the same, his hair not flowing and dainty but rough, his eyes a darkness that grew to handle the sun, and his feet a plagued callus he stood upon. Looking up from my seat of discontent I found the Missus still in her frustrated state and felt my stomach sour, my tongue water with urge to speak, and my hands tremble from that struggle to hold it all down. I could say so many things at that moment but knew Floyd was right, and so I kept quiet, forcing those thoughts back into the depths of my mind for God’s watchful eye to keep. Instead, I remembered Henry as I did each night, and his smile gave me peace. I thought of Floyd and acted like the good nigger I was supposed to be as I watched the land along with the Missus, the cotton a misery to me that she prayed would always be present in our lives, something my daddy knew and his daddy before him, too—that whiteness to be a devil.