Alabama, 1927
15. SYLVIA AND HER FATHER, Carlyle, reach Gee’s Bend shivering in total darkness. They are stranded by faulty kerosene lamps and a useless moon that hardly does more than display clouds that look like the foam in the mouth of a rabid dog. The files for the case warm their knees.
When their boat docks, the scattered lights in the distant woods don’t feel kind. Sylvia asks her father if they can go another way, but his warm palm only guides her forward.
They hike through sloped back roads to reach the widows in the woods. The tent where they pray for their murdered husbands towers above them, and the leaves of weeping willows brush its sides, making a sound like sighing. The tent: handmade, somebody tells her, over three nights by forty quilters. Scraps from worn-out jeans and cotton tablecloths unified in a faultless pattern.
The raucous wailing from within strikes Sylvia between the eyes like a punch as she stares up at the stitching in the ceiling. Remembered and passed down through centuries, the vibrating cry of the mourners stands out from all of the others. Distinct from sadness, it is a skillful weeping, a sound that will transform all the mourning in the room into power.
Sweating, Sylvia rips off her silk gloves, but fear has turned her hands numb. Four small wooden boxes crowd the dais. So small and slender, they could only be caskets for cats.
Carlyle is a civil rights lawyer; his name is known. To protect Sylvia, they stay in separate places. Across town, he prepares arguments by candlelight under the hind legs of cured pigs in the local butcher shop. She revises his opening statement by lantern in the house of one of the widows. She will interview the others in a few days for the case. In the house, they keep the lights off and the moon gives the rooms a blue darkness that Sylvia worries is too shallow to keep her safe.
At the breakfast table (cheese grits, smoked sausage, coffee), some numbness has dwindled. Sylvia’s right hand can clasp a fork and her left hand has feeling in three fingers again. In the evening, she learns from the widow that the caskets are small because the husbands inside are in pieces.
The morning after, both of Sylvia’s hands turn numb again, so numb that Sylvia can pick off the skin around her nails without feeling anything. She cannot stop thinking of the caskets.
That day, more widows arrive. After telling Sylvia the stories of where and how they found the bodies of their husbands, some become slack, saying they need a good chair to hold them up, a feeling like their own bodies are suddenly without bones. Some hold on to the widow, changing positions to do the holding and be held. Others stay in the tub for hours, long after the water turns cold. Some get under covers with their shoes and coats and hats still on and sweat. Some force their faces into pillows to muffle their cries. Sylvia watches one woman part the shutters on the front windows and scream.
On the morning of the trial, in the car on the way to court, Sylvia’s body finally demands rest. She drifts off, waking up seven times to a sky that is still the color of fresh water. Her father practices his arguments with the windows down. She’s written most of them, and even half-awake she can decipher the terrible changes that he insisted on. Changes that soften the women’s stories and bend the truth. She keeps her hands hidden from him in her white gloves. She has peeled and picked at the skin around her nail beds so deeply that the flesh shows.
They are not welcomed at the nearest rest stop, so he holds up the plaid tablecloth that has been their picnic blanket and faces the woods while she pees. Two fingers wrapped around the trigger on the handgun inside his breast pocket.
They arrive, but their protection—a procession of Black and white journalists—has not. Looking out at the empty road where the journalists should have been, Sylvia finds it hard to steady herself. She walks wide, as though each marble step to the courthouse were a seesaw.
It is difficult to breathe inside the courtroom, a place full of the dust from blinding sunlight and faded antebellum curtains, beaten daily but never washed.
“Our case is not with Mr. Lawrence, nor his hounds and cousins. It is with the state of Alabama for its failure, it’s consistent failure, to offer Negroes equal protection under the law …”
As her lips move to her father’s voice, speaking the words she’s written, Sylvia looks around the courtroom for signs of danger. Are they the subject of the whispers a couple of pews behind her? Her own scent, a whiff of the foulest sweat, shoots up her nostrils and she forces herself to be calm. She closes her eyes.
They lose the case on the grounds that there are no witnesses. In what is left of their time in Alabama, a foggy early evening, Sylvia can hardly make out more than their clients’ silhouettes. The widows wrap themselves around her and hold on. Her tears seem to spring out from the tightness of their grip on her body. Their words keep her from breaking. They are praising her courage, praising her tongue.
On the road, her father works hard to avoid her eyes. She doesn’t look his way either. She can feel the rage steaming from him; it’s like a gust of warm air on the side of her body. It soothes.
Sylvia hears it first. A sound like treading water. A little ripple of cold wind into her right ear. Something cracks the glass on the front window. Then deafness that comes and leaves within the same ten seconds. It seems for a moment that nothing at all has happened. But there’s something about the way her father’s head is hanging, swinging loosely on his neck, that tells Sylvia he’s dead. She feels the car drifting off the road and grips the steering wheel, pulling it toward her.
The scent of her father’s blood resurfaces days later. It wakes Sylvia out of sleep on the train home to Boston. It does not dissipate with time. The scent grows and grows in presence and forever becomes a part of her. That and the screech of the tires, when they’d started to drift from the road.