Amelia stayed in the apartment with Ella to keep the child from being exposed to more hate-filled comments. She had continued to flay and cry out in her sleep. The daytime hours dragged as Al worked on the store’s books spread across the table and Ella held a copy of Little Women, but never turned the pages.
In mid-week, Cora knocked on the door. “We just sold your dress. Another customer wants one like it in yellow gingham for springtime.”
Ella stared for a moment at Cora and then her lips parted in a faint smile. “Maybe I’ll make my way sewing clothes.”
Al flipped to blank pages in the store’s ledger. “You want me to show you how to keep your business records? I’ll give you some pages from my account book until you get one of your own. You can track your profit.”
Amelia wanted to hug the dear man as Ella scooted next to him and began following his instructions on how to enter the cost of her material and thread and patterns and then where to post the money she received for her dresses. As the figures took shape on the page, the child became more and more animated.
In the late afternoon, McAdoo stood smiling at the door, his black coat over his arm and his white collar opened. “It was hotter than hell in that hallway. We won all the way around. We got Packerman indicted.” McAdoo grinned so big that his cigar-yellowed teeth showed. “Schutze told me that even the white members of the grand jury concluded that Al had a right to defend the school.”
“They didn’t indict Al?” Amelia wasn’t sure she heard correctly, wasn’t sure it could be true.
“You betcha. Al’s free of it. And Packerman’s staying in jail until his trial.” McAdoo bent to his knee beside Ella’s chair. He spoke soft as a whisper. “You understand you’ll have to testify again at the trial? And your brother, too?”
Ella had laid her pen down and not moved a muscle from the instant McAdoo entered the room. “When will that be?”
“After planting. Early May. Meantime, we’ll talk about what will happen. You and Ezra will have to answer questions. Some of them hard.”
Ella nodded, her young face tilting upward. “Sometimes I dream what they’ll ask. It’s like hard practice.”
Amelia hoped to see Al relax with the good news. Instead, his jaw clenched as he stared at Ella accepting without drama what might lie ahead. Life looked easier when those living it remained ignorant of what might be.
Al stood abruptly. “Let’s go home. The sun’s probably dried the roads. It’s going to be a clear night.”
Amelia shared in her letters to Helga every step of the construction of their two-story home that rose above the north part of the old foundation. She drew the floor plan, explained how they incorporated Samantha’s roof-top cistern and fancy toilette. She omitted most of what occupied in their lives. She assuaged her growing guilt by telling herself that Helga’s danger came without warning from the Gulf of Mexico.
Amelia roamed every day through the skeleton frame of their house. She hugged herself as she moved into the parlor where windows from the old mansion opened onto porches. The kitchen across the back of the house welcomed the southeast breeze and gleamed with a new cast iron cook stove, a hand pump over the sink, and a hand-carved table where she and Al planned to watch the sunrise. One of the mahogany banisters and a newel post from the big house anchored the staircase that rose to their bedroom and a guest room across the hall. Windows on both floors opened onto porches that offered shade and allowed a breeze to sweep through the house. A brick fireplace stretched like a red tower on the north end of the white house.
The scar left by the old brick foundation healed under Amelia’s gardenias and wisterias. Rains encouraged irises to carpet the raw earth.
They finished moving in just before Jarrell Packerman’s trial. Amelia thought of it as Ella’s and Ezra’s trial.
All the neighbors, even those outside the Waters co-op, headed to Brenham. Most would sleep outside and crawl under their wagons if it rained. But they would be present. Ella and Ezra would know they were not alone.
Entering Brenham along the edge of Camptown, they met shouts of encouragement. Several women rushed into the road and handed up loaves of bread and fresh-baked cookies. Children passed Ella flowers held together with ribbons.
Ella and Ezra had sat stone-faced between Mama Zoé and Hébert on the trip into town. But the excitement, which verged on a celebration, washed over them like a blessing. Ella began to lift her fingers in tiny waves to children who shouted her name. Ezra, slower to respond, ducked his head and smiled when a few boys called to him.
After settling everyone in the apartment, Al and Amelia walked to the hotel. The desk clerk stared at them through the glass in the double front doors. His wire frame looked like a brown pencil in his buttoned-up coat.
“Do you have reservations? We’re full.” His mouth puckered like he’d tasted something sour.
“John McAdoo let you know several weeks ago that we’d be staying here.” Al’s voice––soft as a viper’s whisper––scared Amelia.
“Mister Waters, we reserve our rooms for whites. The management is wondering. Since your son admitted to being colored if you’re, perhaps, trying to pass.”
“No.” The word came from somewhere deep inside of her. She would not let this hired hand provoke trouble. “We’ll take our room key. Now.”
The twitching little man backed off. He’d had his pleasure. He’d managed an insult.
Al still breathed hard when they reached the second floor. “You kept me from doing something stupid.” He turned the key and opened the door into a room so small they could barely squeeze between the narrow bed and the window that opened onto the alley.
She pressed against him, holding him until she felt his body relax. “This gives us an excuse to touch. And we don’t need to share our bed with Ella tonight.”
Ella appeared almost serene when she took the witness chair. Her eyes searched the courtroom and rested on Mama Zoé while McAdoo led her gently through the account of Jarrell’s attack. Just as they’d expected, Jarrell’s lawyer tried to turn the trial into a condemnation of the children and the entire Camptown community. Ella visibly flinched when he called her mother a whore despite McAdoo’s loud objections. Then he goaded the child about her mother abandoning her, again over McAdoo’s objections. Even the judge demanded civility, and some on the jury began to lower their heads as tears streaked Ella’s cheeks and dripped on the front of her new gingham dress.
When Ezra took the stand, his eyes stared like he could see a ghost. Immediately the lawyer demanded to know why he didn’t help his sister when she was attacked. Ezra looked out across the courtroom––a frightened colt ready to bolt. “I was scared of that white planter.”
The lawyer laughed, splayed his raw red hands on his bulging vest and preened at the jury. “The boy here says he’s afraid of a white planter.” He whirled around and bent into Ezra’s face. “If you were so afraid of a white planter that you couldn’t even protect your sister, tell us why you willingly went home with Albert Waters. He’s one of the county’s biggest white planters.”
Ezra frowned, raised his head and stared at the lawyer. “He wasn’t no rich planter.”
The lawyer turned, raised both eyebrows, enjoying the laughter that trickled through the courtroom. He leaned into Ezra’s face, almost touching the child with his forehead. “And what in this world made you think Albert Waters was not a rich planter?”
“I went there with my pappy. When the Union League was signing up folks. I saw for myself. Mister Al lived in that little house across the road from the big house.”
The room erupted in laughter. Even the jurors had trouble regaining composure as the judge pounded his gavel for quiet.
Al clutched Amelia’s hand and whispered. “Bless him.”
Several of the Parson neighbors testified they knew what Malaila Parson did to support her kids after her husband died. Without batting an eye, to a person, they claimed to have seen Jarrell Packerman at the Parson house.
Beulah Chambers, wearing a black hat with a nest of redbirds in its crown took the stand. She followed McAdoo’s lead in explaining how they discovered what happened to Ella and how her attacker jumped out the window and got away on his horse.
Al watched to see if Jarrell would tell his lawyer that he did not jump out the window, that he had walked away without anyone noticing. Instead, Jarrell’s head shot up and he stared about the room––a man facing a raging stampede––unable to defend himself.
Jarrell’s lawyer strode to the front and leaned close to Beulah Chambers’ face. “Why didn’t you people call a doctor to see about Ella? You know rape can’t be proved without evidence of penetration.”
The Negro woman’s breasts under her black dress heaved upward like an ocean wave, and for an eternity she stared into his eyes. Her voice boomed across the courtroom. “No white doctor would come to help her. I saw for myself a tore-up child, bloody as a butchered hog.”
The room fell silent.
Jarrell Packerman’s blond head bent forward.
The jury deliberated a little over three hours before returning with a guilty verdict. The foreman explained that the delay was because of a holdout who wanted to hang Packerman. Instead, he got five years in the Huntsville Penitentiary.
The room erupted into shouting factions––those who believed he was an innocent white man and those who thought he should have had a harsher sentence.
The bailiff led Ezra and Ella out a side door into the judge’s chambers where they waited with McAdoo for the crowd to disperse.
Mama Zoé and Hébert clutched the children against them. “It’s over. It’s over for good,” Mama Zoé cooed.
Hébert’s big square face streaked wet with tears as he stroked the heads of both children.
As they rode out of town, a silent procession of Camptown residents and white––mostly German—supporters marched alongside their wagons as they passed a thin line of jeering men.
“Say, Waters, you got a nigger son.” “Are you passing?” “What nigger gal did you rape?”
“Ignore them. You are better than that.” Mama Zoé sat behind Al’s wagon seat, and her voice stayed steady as she kept up the calming words. “Don’t give them the pleasure of looking at them.”
How can I continue to write glowing letters to Helga, pretending our life is an extended rich harvest? Amelia gripped the metal armrest on the wooden wagon seat and kept her eyes on the late afternoon clouds drifting like puffs of soft cotton, remembering that when she and Helga were girls in Germany, they loved to stretch out in a haystack and look for images in the clouds. Would Ella and Ezra ever hold warm childhood memories?