Nine times out of ten it was women who got him into trouble. He had red blood coursing through him like any man.
But the day Juke met the girl who would be his wife, it was String he had his mind set on seeing. He’d been sent by his daddy to the feed and seed in town, and he took their john mule, Lefty. They had a barn full of mules then, mostly spritely young mollys who could plow in their sleep, but Lefty was the only john, and Juke’s favorite. He was near big as a horse and spotted black on white clear through his mane. He’d been George Wilson’s favorite too. It had been George who’d finally taught him to turn right.
It was 1901, just after the Wilsons had built the mill and moved from the farm into town. George Wilson and his brothers had inherited a hill of money from an uncle in the railroad business. In a few years George had grown bored of planting, of buying up land all over Cotton County. He got it into his head to buy rights to the Creek River at the edge of town, where the river and the Straight and the new railroad converged. He borrowed more money from his brothers in north Georgia, one in the turpentine business, another in sawmills. He found builders and then mill hands in the same way, by riding his horse from farm to farm. He needed Juke and Juke’s father at the crossroads farm, but he pulled whole families from cropper cabins five counties around. On the train from Marietta, George’s brother sent cars full of farmers’ daughters in search of work. He sent the sheriff around to the Fourth Quarter to find loose-foot Negroes. The sheriff offered them the chain gang or the picker room. They chose the picker room. All of Florence was mighty proud of that mill.
Juke wanted to see it himself. So, after fetching the three sacks of corn seed, he tied the mule and its cart to a gum tree by the road and walked down to the river to wait for String to walk home from school. It was springtime, the wiregrass along the river wild with cornflower. Juke kicked off his shoes to chase tadpoles. When String came along the railroad and saw him, he let out a yelp of joy. “What in Hades you doing out here?”
The Wilsons’ new house was the biggest house Juke had ever gotten close to, with a porch that wrapped around three sides. From the front porch you could see the cotton mill straight down the hill, three stories of bricks and as long as a freight train. The Creek River rushed rapid out of the woods there, feeding into the new dam that formed a pond at the head of the mill. To the east you could see the three-acre garden Parthenia Wilson had planted for the mill families, and Lefty, still tied to the tree by the Straight. To the west you could see the mill village, where the mill families lived, just a dozen clapboard bungalows then and more rising before Juke’s eyes, houses no bigger than the shacks on the farm, the spaces between them no bigger than each house. And the Wilsons owned all of it. At ten years old, John Jesup—he was not yet called Juke—had traveled no farther than Macon, hopping the freight train with String and his cousins, and that city, with its smokestacks and street trolleys and brick-paved block after block, had left him feeling nauseous with longing and homesickness and the penny candy String’s cousins had stolen from the sweets shop, though they had plenty of pennies in their pockets. There was so much to see he’d had to close his eyes.
That was how Juke felt on the porch of String Wilson’s new house. He wanted, and he didn’t want to want.
String seemed to know not to invite Juke inside. He left his school satchel on the porch and snuck Juke into the mill through the picker room in the basement, where colored men were opening bales, standing up to their knees in clouds of cotton. They paid the boys no mind.
“Looks like they in Heaven,” Juke said to String as they passed through.
String laughed. “This here Heaven is the onliest place you’ll find darkies in the mill. We won’t hire them for nothing more.” Up a narrow staircase, they came to the shop floor, the biggest room Juke had ever been in. A wall of windows, tall as silos, stretched from his elbow all the way up to the ceiling, and down the room, laid out like pews, was row after row of spinning machines, a girl standing at each one. “Look like church,” said Juke.
String laughed again. “If there was only girls.”
“That’s the church for me,” said Juke. “Bout as hot as church too.” He took off his cap and fanned himself with it.
“We hire girls for spinners, mostly. Ain’t nothing to it.” String kept his voice low, and over the sound of the machines, Juke hardly heard him. “Most of the work boys do in the spinning room is sweeping.”
“You sound like you the boss already, tombout all this hiring you doing.”
“My daddy’s learning me on the floor.” String fetched a couple of push brooms hanging from the wall and handed one to Juke. “You know how to sweep?”
“I live on your daddy’s farm, don’t I?”
“Just push it around while we walk about, and Mr. Richard won’t give us no trouble.”
Juke put his cap back on his head and did so, following String down the line of machines. The women were studying so hard on their work that they barely raised their heads at the boys. They were too young to be called women, too tall to be called girls. The spinners all wore their hair in the same high, heavy pile, like a round loaf of bread on top of each of their heads, and their hair was dusted with the flour that was cotton lint, cotton everywhere, down their dresses, in the air, catching in Juke’s broom, so much cotton that he felt he might sneeze, and then he did.
As he passed a girl at her machine, she looked up at him. This one was a girl, no bigger than Juke. She wore her yellow hair like a girl’s, in a braid down her back, with a red satin bow hanging limp at the end of it. She wore a calico dress to her chin and a dirty apron and no shoes on her dirty feet. “God bless you,” she said to Juke, and then returned her eyes to her work.
“Thank you kindly,” said Juke, leaning on his broom. Like him, the girl had freckles, and he went near cross-eyed staring at them. “Ain’t you hot in here,” he asked, “standing at that machine all day?”
“Reckon we all hot,” said the girl, not looking up.
“Y’all oughta open the window and let in some air.”
“Daddy won’t let them,” String cut in. “When the breeze comes in it musses up the threads.”
“That so?” said Juke. He took his cap off again and wiped his brow with it. Already he was damp with sweat. “How old are you?” he asked, yelling over the whirr of her machine.
The girl said she was twelve, and though Juke was ten he said he was too. He hadn’t thought to ask the girl her name, but as they pushed their brooms into the weaving room, String told Juke it was Jessa. She’d come to the mill on the train from up near Atlanta, and she had no family but the one she boarded with in the mill village. “And she ain’t no twelve years old,” String said, “no more than we are. Twelve’s the youngest we’re supposed to hire.”
He left only with her name. Jessa, Jessa, Jessa. The sun was setting over the mill village when Juke emerged from the mill. The mill hands, finishing the second shift, were making their way to their porches. Juke didn’t yet know if he loved the mill or hated it. His stomach was empty and he hoped String would ask him to stay for supper but he didn’t. Juke’s eyes adjusted to the dusk, the open air. He’d forgotten the mule, he’d forgotten its name, he’d nearly forgotten his own legs and how to use them. He was both relieved and panicked to see him there—Lefty—like a baby shocked to tears when its mother returns to a room. “Good boy, Lefty. There you are. Did you think I left you, Lefty boy?” There was Lefty, there was the cart, but inside it were only two bags of corn—one, two—and Juke had bought three. That much he knew.
His daddy whipped him good, of course. It was darker than pitch when Juke and Lefty finally returned to the farm, and his daddy came out of the house and hauled Juke down from the mule. Juke tried to explain, but his daddy ripped a branch from the chinaberry tree and right there under it by the light of his lantern switched his behind. Juke’s father was angry about the stolen seed, but he was angrier that Juke had gone to the mill. “That ain’t the place for you,” he said, panting, after Juke was good and whipped. “Ain’t this house enough?” He couldn’t feel his behind but he could feel the wet warmth on his legs and hoped he hadn’t messed himself. He was relieved to see it was blood.
Come August, Juke took Lefty to the mill once more. His sore behind had healed; enough time had passed that he was willing to risk another one. This time he didn’t see String, who was out riding freight cars with his cousins. But he took what he’d come for, a cart full of corn, sickled down from the garden in broad daylight, not near as much corn grown from a sack of seed, but it would have to do. Juke Jesup had a long memory, long as the shadows laid across the Twelve-Mile Straight on the ride home. He closed his eyes, feeling the sun press against his lids, remembering the tremor of the train as it made its way from Macon to Florence, the stolen butterscotch on his tongue, the taste of the city’s sickly sweetness.
* * *
It was two summers later, just after his stepmother left the farm, when he saw the girl again. She was standing at the same machine, a few inches taller, her braid a few inches longer, and Juke watched her unnoticed. At the other end of the room String and his cousins were horsing around with the other spinners, hiding under their machines and tugging their aprons from below to scare them, pretending they were getting caught in the machines. Then one of the girls, distracted, really did get her apron caught. The machine tore it clean off and ate it up. The supervisor tossed the rest of the boys out and Juke dropped to the floor where he stood and hid behind her machine. She was concentrating so hard she didn’t see him as he made himself flat and rolled under it. That machine was hot as a woodstove, and under it was a film of cotton lint no broom could reach. He was afraid he might sneeze again. Juke’s shoulder nudged an empty bobbin and set it scattering across the floor, but she didn’t notice. From under the spinning machine, lying on his belly, he looked at her bare feet, the delicate map of bones and veins, the cotton lint caught between the webs of her toes. If he looked close, and he did, he could see that her legs swayed slightly as she worked, the muscles in her pale calves tensing. If he had a few more inches, he could have looked up under the hem of her skirt. But it didn’t matter. It was her feet he loved. Two years of saying her name under his breath, and now he was close enough to touch her. His ears full of whirring and his nostrils full of cotton, his pecker went hard as a broomstick against the wood floor. His hand drifted up, but instead of taking hold of the edge of her apron, it closed around her ankle.
Quick as a chicken, she leapt back and yelped, knocking his arm against the hot metal frame of the machine. Then it was Juke who was yelping.
“I’m sorry,” he said, crawling out and getting to his feet. “I didn’t mean to spook you.”
“What in Heaven you doing down there?”
He held his wrist to his chest. He’d burned it something awful. “You got the prettiest feet in Cotton County.”
She looked hard at him, her eyebrows knit, and then unknit, then knit again. The girl at the next machine leaned around it to get a look at them, but no one else came by.
“Reckon you’re fourteen now,” he said, smiling like an idiot.
“Reckon you are too.” The hair around her face was damp with sweat, her dress so wet it stuck to her arms.
“Still is hot as Hades, ain’t it?”
“Go on and follow them boys out.”
“My name’s John Jesup. My daddy runs George Wilson’s farm. We work like mules, but at least we got air to breathe.”
“Go on now, John Jesup,” she said. “You gone get me in hot water.”
“Your name’s Jessa. You don’t got to tell me. I’ll be going, now, Miss Jessa, like you say.”
Before he did, he fetched the runaway bobbin from the floor, lifted the closest window, and propped the bobbin under the sash. From the narrow space under it came a breath of country air. “You can blame it on John Jesup,” he said, and Jessa smiled lengthwise at him, not meeting his eyes as she went on spinning. “I aim to be in hot water anyway.”
That was the second time he met the girl who would be his wife. That time he left with a scar on his wrist the size and shape of a pea pod. He told his daddy he’d burned it in a campfire he’d built with String, but for the next twenty-eight years, until that scar was lost inside another web of burns, he’d tell the truth to any stranger who asked. “She done branded me like a bull, right then and there.”
* * *
His weakness was for women, and the only thing that made it worse was liquor. Best place to get both was Young’s, the colored juke joint in town.
He led String there for the first time when they were fifteen, crossing the railroad tracks into the Fourth Ward through the dark. When he’d heard the field hands talking about it, he’d imagined something grand, but it was just a shack slapped together with corrugated tin, flimsy as a soup can under the full moon. It leaned like a drunk on the Easter Hotel next door, a two-story brick building with boards over the windows, though they didn’t close out all the light inside. It was said to be run by an old colored woman named Easter Moore, who had five daughters she rented out to men in the five rooms. Out back, on the clothesline between two gum trees, several pairs of ladies’ stockings tiptoed in the breeze. Juke could hear the piano and smell the barbecue from the tracks. “We ain’t allowed in there,” String whispered. “They’ll skin us alive.”
“We allowed anywhere we please.” Juke leapt over the tracks. He was near grown, his father’s boots pinching his feet. “It’s them ain’t allowed places.”
Inside, the men did not skin the boys alive. They glanced uneasily at one another, then relaxed, then smiled. The man at the upright piano did not slow his playing. Juke held out his palm and String dropped his dime into it and Juke slapped it on the counter.
“You looking for barbecue?” said the man behind it.
“We like two corn liquors, please.”
The man laughed, his white teeth the brightest thing in the dark room. “You would, would you?” His eyes waited for a nod from someone over Juke’s shoulder. “All right. Just a taste.” From under the counter he took a jug of piss-colored liquid and began filling two glasses. “This your first drink, son?”
The power of the coin and the power of the liquor made Juke feel drunk already. “Naw. But this here’s my first time in a juke joint.”
Again the man laughed. “That right?”
Juke laughed back, so they’d be laughing together, and after he’d downed his glass and most of his friend’s he wandered outside and nearly took his head off on the clothesline, then fell down and rolled onto his back and laughed some more, the stars pulsing gently above him.
He couldn’t get back fast enough. Every night he could take Lefty and steal away into town, he’d beg String for a nickel or a dime. When String stopped lending him money, he collected scrap metal and threw papers and stood at the crossroads with his wagon, selling squash and corn and cabbages. His daddy was proud, took him for an entrepreneur, didn’t know half the money was going to the Fourth Ward. “Gotta get me back to that juke. That liquor like to light my skin on fire.”
“Juke, juke, juke,” String said. “That about alls you can say.”
He didn’t remember who made the name stick—String or the bartender. Before long only their daddies still called him John. Juke’s daddy didn’t worry much where the name came from. It was a nickname like any other, a Jack or a Jake, a Butch or a Buddy or a String. The women on his lap, the daughters from the Easter Hotel, whispered it in his ear, “Juke, Juke, Juke,” women with names like Epiphany and Sabbath, who wore stockings that felt like liquid under his hands. Juke could feel their skin and the burn of the liquor, the same golden honey glow, the whole way back to the farm. Lefty slowed the last few miles, and Juke’s daddy would worry about him in the morning, wondering why was he so plumb tired, good for nothing son of a bitch, couldn’t hardly take two steps without falling over. Juke was better than the mule at hiding the night on him, chewing on a handful of the pennyroyal that grew wild along the road. He didn’t return to his bed, just brought Lefty straight to the barn and began the morning milking, resting his forehead on the cow’s warm side, dawn brightening the corners of his moonshine-sweet sleep. In his dreams, Jessa was the one on his lap, the barefoot girl from the mill, her long legs pale as milk straight from the cow’s tit.
One black winter night, drunk and wanting, he left String on his porch and staggered into the hushed mill village. It was so cold Juke couldn’t feel the ears under his own cap. In the house he thought was Jessa’s, he thought he saw a candle burning in the window. He’d seen her a few times in the years since he’d burned his wrist, but not enough. He scrambled down into the blackberry bush outside the window, pressed his fingers to the smooth glass. He felt his body go all cold, then all hot. He played his fingertips on the pane, tapping out the blues in his head.
“John?”
It was a man’s voice, gruff and full of concern. Juke squinted at the lantern bobbing toward him.
“What in Hades you doing out here, son?”
George Wilson, bareheaded, wrapped in a coat, stepped down the hill with the light.
Juke saw now that he was only a few yards from the Wilsons’ house, that the house he’d chosen was not a house at all but the Wilsons’ own shed. Through the window, he could make out the dark shapes of shovels and hoes, shiny as arrows.
The liquor lapped inside Juke’s skull. He tried to think of which lie to tell, and figuring it would hide the rest, settled on a truth. “I’m looking for a girl.”
Mr. Wilson chuckled. “Don’t keep no girls in the shed, honey. No girl who’d like to court in the middle of the night.”
Juke’s legs felt weak. His body had gone cold again, bone cold. “I didn’t mean no harm,” he said. He fell to his knees and let his sick out, out into the frost-studded dirt, in the cone of light from George Wilson’s lantern.
“Oh, for pity’s sake,” said Mr. Wilson, taking a step back.
It had been five years since String, without a word, had asked Juke to wait on the porch, assuming as Juke did that that was the way his father would want it. What was Juke to make of it now, the way Mr. Wilson invited him in without a second thought, opening the door and stepping through it himself first, leaving Juke to follow and pull it closed? In the Wilsons’ sitting room, Mr. Wilson gave Juke a tumbler of hot tea and a cotton blanket that smelled like a woman. Not like Epiphany and Sabbath, who smelled of sweat and salt and hair oil. It smelled like lavender soap. It smelled, Juke imagined, like a mother. He sat back against the cool, duck-feather pillows of George Wilson’s sofa, String asleep somewhere above him, willing himself not to cry. “You boys got enough sense to at least cavort a little quieter,” Mr. Wilson said. “Your daddy’s like to have your hide, should he find you been laying out at all hours of the night, smelling like a juke joint.”
“Well, that’s my name, ain’t it? Juke. You can be calling me that now, sir.”
Juke spent the night there on the sofa, and at dawn Mr. Wilson sent him to fetch Lefty in the woods. George intended to hitch his carriage to the mule and his mare and drive Juke back to the farm. He’d tell Juke’s father just enough, that his son had been sick, that he thought it best to let him rest there for the night. That would call for enough whippings, George thought.
But when Juke found Lefty, he was lying on his side on a bed of pine needles, as though he’d just settled down for a rest himself. “Get on up, Lefty,” Juke said. When the animal didn’t rouse, Juke thought he’d been got by a coyote, or a boar. But it was his big mule lips, blue and barely trembling, that gave him away. Over Lefty went the cotton blanket. Perhaps the sun would warm him. But after George and Juke had reached the farm, then returned to the woods with Juke’s father, Lefty was like a block of ice, his brittle legs useless. “He’s worn out and half froze both,” said George. Juke’s father hitched a rope around his middle and together the three of them tried to raise him up. Lefty shifted and slid across the ground. He was an old boy, George reminded them. He didn’t have but a handful of years left. George had known that spotted mule as a boy himself, traveled with him up and down the Twelve-Mile Straight a thousand times, worked him across every godforsaken acre of that farm. They had to tie two of their handkerchiefs together, Juke’s father’s dull one and George Wilson’s bright one, to make a blindfold. George tied it over the animal’s eyes. Then Juke’s father handed Juke the twenty-two. “You do it.”
“Ernest,” said Mr. Wilson. “He’s just a boy.”
“Go on,” his father said.
“Ernest, you make that boy shoot that mule, I’ll have you out that big house by tomorrow.”
“Thas all right,” Juke said, taking the gun. “I can do it.”
“Ain’t a boy’s job,” Mr. Wilson said. “That’s my mule and I don’t want it taken out the world by no child.”
So Juke’s father took the gun. Solemnly he aimed it between Lefty’s glassy eyes and pulled the trigger. The next week, Mr. Wilson would send the mule breeder out to the farm with a young molly named Mamie.
Juke and his father were made to dig a hole for him. The clay was so solid that Mr. Wilson sent his yard boy with another shovel, and then String snuck out to help, and Juke and his father accepted it. They were ashamed but also desperate, which made them more ashamed. By the time they were done, it was coming on night, their fingers frozen to their shovels. They buried the mule there in the pines by the railroad tracks, on the land owned by George Wilson.
* * *
There was love between the two men still. They had loved String first. Then, because he was kin to String, they had loved Freddie.
When Juke had driven his daughter out to the mill, good and pregnant, he had sat there again in George Wilson’s sitting room, drinking lemonade a servant girl had poured him. Elma waited on the porch. “I can’t no more control my kin than you can control yours,” George told him. When Juke replied that if Freddie didn’t step up, he would step down, George just laughed. “Honey,” he said. “You think I couldn’t put any man in the county in that house?” He patted Juke on the back as he walked him out.
George had called his bluff. Nothing had changed. Juke had continued his deliveries to the mill, though he didn’t see him again until the middle of that night in July, when George was awakened by the sound of drunken gunfire. From his porch, in his nightclothes, he could see his grandson’s truck under the moon, parked in the middle of the village. At first he’d thought it was a deer or boar he’d shot and dragged behind him. Then he saw Freddie cut the body from the truck, and then Freddie looked up at George on the porch and saluted him. It was a habit the two shared, their way of saluting String, but what would String think, George wondered, about this? George did not return the gesture, but he didn’t run out to stop him, either. Freddie got into his truck and drove off, and then a dead man was lying in the road.
If what Sheriff had told Juke was true—that George Wilson wouldn’t stand for his grandson’s name to be dragged through the dirt—then Juke would face him. He wouldn’t hide. Guilty men hid. Guilty men ran. Freddie had run faster than Juke could’ve bet on. Juke hadn’t even had to oil him up. He hadn’t had to draw the picture for him—how unkindly the law would look on him, how many years on the chain gang he had coming if he stayed. He didn’t even have to say, “Let me clean this up, son. I’ll take whatever’s coming.” He didn’t have the chance to tell him because he was gone.
So Juke didn’t wait for George to send the lynch mob back for him. After Sheriff left and after church, he drove into town, following the tracks that Freddie’s tires had made in the mud, between them the shallow rut the body had left in the road. He found him in his office at the mill.
“For pity’s sake, son,” George said to him, and let him in.
It wasn’t what Juke had expected. George didn’t look outraged; he merely looked tired. It was because he hadn’t been there, Juke realized. He hadn’t seen it with his own eyes. Old man thought his boy was coming back, but there was no coming back from what they’d done. Both of them. Freddie and Juke. They’d done it together.
Juke settled into the calfskin chair. He began to pour himself a drink. Then George took the glass.
“And all that?” He nodded to the scar tissue that crossed Juke’s arms. “You burn the darky up too?”
“Saved a dog,” Juke said. “Some months back.”
“Only dog you saved was yourself.”
Juke unrolled his sleeves. Most delivery days George carried a pistol in his pocket. Juke wondered where it might be today, under his pillow or in the drawer of his desk. “Eye for an eye. Ain’t the good book say? That man harmed my blood.”
“An eye for an eye? Then you’d reason I should take an eye too? Shall I kill you now, now that you’ve harmed my blood?”
“Freddie harmed himself. It weren’t my truck the man was dragged behind. That’s what I aim to tell you. I didn’t want it this way, George. Weren’t no stopping him.”
George stood over Juke, holding his glass, and Juke, feeling he should raise his eyes up to George’s level, stood too. When he was upright he realized he was standing because he was leaving. George had only let him into the office to dismiss him from it.
“Why’d you keep him on?” George asked.
“Who? Freddie?”
“The Negro. After you knew what he was up to with your daughter. What your daughter was up to with him. Hard to keep that girl out of trouble, I reckon, but folks say—”
“Ain’t nothing to keep her out of except a certain Chevy truck.”
“I gave you too much authority. That was my mistake. I gave you a false impression. I let you hire and fire any man in the county, and look how you squander my goodwill. That boy’s playing around with your daughter, you don’t do nothing but give him a kick in the ass?”
“I got too much forgiveness in my heart, I reckon.”
“No. You got a heart full of hate. You wanted to keep him there, where you could see him. You’d rather have a man in that shack you were born in who’s lower than the low-down white trash you are. You wanted someone to beat on. You wanted to feel the size of your own pecker.”
Juke said nothing.
“I know you, son. I know you because I lived in that house too. And because all day long I play you like you played that poor nigger.”
“Alls I aim to say—”
“I know. An eye for an eye.” George shook his head. “I can take an eye,” he said, “whenever I please. I can take both your eyes, the farm and the still both.” He drank the gin in Juke’s glass. “But why blind myself?”