And Do Remember Me (3 page)

“How bout that,” he said, scanning the room quickly, then dismissing it.

“I’ll sleep on the floor,” he told Jessie, sitting down beside her on the bed, which was covered by a spread whose washed-out, faded colors vainly attempted to match the wallpaper.

“Well, that ain’t fair.”

“Yes, it is. Don’t worry. I’ve slept in worse places.… I’m gonna go get us something to eat. I saw a place on the corner.”

When Jessie heard the front door close on the first floor, she ran to the window and watched Lincoln walk toward the tiny corner restaurant that advertised barbecue and chitlins. Lincoln moved like a man who knew where he was going, but didn’t need to hurry to get there, Jessie thought, watching him nod politely to the people he passed. Turning from the window to once again face the room, she decided not to think about what she had done—wounded her father, run away, hitched a ride with a stranger, checked into a rooming house to spend the night with him, with plans to wake up in the morning to go off and do things that could get her arrested, beaten or killed. No, she decided, a shiver seizing her, threatening to unsettle the contentment she had fashioned from the cloth of this day. She wouldn’t think about any of that now.

By the time Lincoln returned, Jessie had bathed, had dressed in clean clothes and lined their boxes neatly against the wall. They ate fried-fish sandwiches and french fries spread out on the tiny desk. Then Lincoln went to take a bath, while Jessie cleared away the remnants of their meal. But the sound of water filling the tub, Lincoln flushing the toilet, his rich baritone humming “Amazing Grace,” made Jessie so nervous
that she decided it wasn’t proper for her to stay in the room with only an unlocked door separating her from a naked man she didn’t know. She couldn’t bear the thought of sitting in the front room, under the landlady’s disapproving gaze. So Jessie sat on the steps outside their door.

When she entered the room Lincoln had made a pallet on the floor, using blankets he’d found in the closet. He wore a tee shirt and a pair of old pajama bottoms. Jessie claimed the bed, scurrying beneath the covers fully dressed.

“You gonna be awful hot sleeping in your clothes,” Lincoln laughed.

“You just let me worry bout that, Lincoln Sturgis.”

“You gonna tell me why you’re running away?” he asked, stretched out on the floor, gazing up at Jessie.

“Maybe one day I will.”

Lincoln turned on his back and said, “I used to run away too. But I wasn’t running away from home, I was running to try and find one.”

Then in a quiet, dispassionate voice, almost as though he were talking about someone else’s life, Lincoln told Jessie who he was. His parents were killed in an automobile accident when he was three and for the next six years he was shunted between the homes of relatives unable or unwilling to care for him. Finally he was put in a Negro orphanage. Lincoln was a gregarious, quick-witted boy who, in order to survive, had learned to read people like books. The head administrator, J. R. Sturgis, took a liking to him and adopted him. While Sturgis treated Lincoln with affection and concern, the boy was never fully accepted by Sturgis’s wife and two sons. When J. R. Sturgis died of a heart attack in Lincoln’s junior year at Miles College, his wife cut off support for Lincoln’s studies, and denied him the money his adoptive father had left him.

“So you ain’t got no family, to speak of?” Jessie said quietly, wondering how that felt.

“Not since J. R. Sturgis died.”

“Don’t you git lonely though, for brothers and sisters?” Jessie asked, hungering in the wake of the question to see Mae Ann, Willie and Junior. She looked at Lincoln’s long legs stretched out before him. She marveled at his big feet, almost pink, not tan like the rest of him. Jessie wondered if he could see, on her face, hear in her voice, the things that had been done to her. The things she’d never told.

The sound of several cars speeding down the street, a woman’s luxurious squealing laughter, a mother calling Re-gi-naaaaaald, come on in, floated in the window. Together they listened, silent, at ease.

After a while, Jessie heard Lincoln say, “You just don’t think about what you never had. About how you been hurt.”

He was wrong, saying that. She knew you never forgot. She had graduated from high school three weeks earlier, and she had begun to wonder more and more why all the older people she knew, the ones she was supposed to look up to, lived, it seemed, on lies.

“How’d you get into this civil rights stuff anyway?” she asked, hugging her pillow, stretching out, waiting to hear Lincoln tell her something she would never forget.

“Well, I didn’t study it in school,” he laughed. “I just started working with friends of mine from other colleges—boycotting, picketing, trying to get people to register and vote. The only family I got now is movement folks.”

“What if I don’t do good? What if they don’t like me where we goin?” Jessie asked.

“The minute you arrive in town, you pass the most important test,” he told her. “Then all you got to do is keep showing up, the next day and the day after that.”

“You make it sound so easy.”

“It is when you realize there’s nowhere you can go until you straighten up things where you are.”

Lincoln turned off the light and said good night. When she knew he was asleep, Jessie removed her skirt and blouse and slipped on her robe. Around three o’clock she woke up and felt Lincoln beside her in the bed. In sleep, his body was tense, poised, Jessie thought, for flight, ready to leave nothing behind. His arms greedily hugged the pillow. Jessie could feel the melancholy sadness of his dreams whispering in the darkened room. She watched him sleep for a few minutes and then lay back down. In the dark, with her back to him, she touched Lincoln’s arm, absorbed the rise and fall of his frame, his craggy labored breathing inside her hand. Then she quickly pulled her hand away. Tomorrow was almost here.

G
REENWOOD SAT
on the muddy, silent banks of the Yazoo River, surrounded by Itta Bena, Moorhead, Sidon, Pew City. Here, the circumference of the whole world was measured by the boundaries of the cotton field. The Mississippi Delta stretched from Vicksburg to Memphis, two hundred miles of flat, fertile terrain. A million black hands, working from dawn to dusk, decade after decade, had planted and harvested “King Cotton.” Change had come once in the form of the Emancipation Proclamation and curdled into a bitter illusion. Now, a revolution reverberated across the Delta and Greenwood was the crossroads. Reality was becoming legend even as it happened—Sam Block and Willie Peacock coming to town to canvas for black voters, and because they had no car, riding around Greenwood on a mule. Jimmy Travis shot in the neck and almost killed, while driving on Highway 82 with two other movement workers. The bullet didn’t kill Jimmy or the push to get the vote.

In the Freedom House that summer, Jessie heard jazz for the first time, saw a white woman naked and sat down to eat beside a white man. She shared a room with Carolyn Seavers, from Minnesota, one of hundreds of northern college students who had come to the Delta to help register black voters.

Carolyn’s blond hair hung to her waist and her blue eyes were the color of the sky just after a good hard rain. The first time Jessie saw her, Jessie was sitting in the tiny bedroom she had been given, waiting for Lincoln to come back and take her to a church where she would begin teaching adults to read and write, when Carolyn suddenly entered the room carrying a small suitcase. “Hi, my name’s Carolyn,” she said, walking up to Jessie and extending her hand. Her smile wrapped itself around Jessie and lifted her from the bed. Carolyn’s presence filled the room with the feel of something tangible, powerful, Jessie thought. It was the same room that had felt dormant, inert, only moments before. Jessie looked at Carolyn’s hand—the nails, neat, perfectly manicured—a hand so soft and unblemished that to Jessie it didn’t look real. She saw the green birthstone ring on the middle finger, and stubbornly hid her own hands behind her back. No white woman had ever wanted to touch her. Mrs. Bullock slapped her once because she had broken an expensive piece of china, and then turned and wiped her hand on a nearby towel as if she were afraid Jessie was contagious. And here this white girl stood, pushing her hand in Jessie’s face.

“I’m Jessie Foster,” she said, her voice weak, small, diminished by the blondness, the whiteness, the pinkness, of the girl who stood before her.

“Well,” Carolyn said, dropping her hand, turning hurt and confused away from Jessie, “looks like we’re roommates.”

While Carolyn unpacked her things, Jessie sat quietly on the bed with her back to her. When Lincoln knocked on the door,
she ran from the room so fast she nearly fell over Carolyn, kneeling on the floor unpacking her clothes.

That evening, around a table laden with pots and plates of food donated by neighbors, Carolyn turned to Jessie and told her, “Call me Cate, that’s what I go by for short.” Jessie stared at her as though the floor lamp had just spoken and nodded, quickly mustering a halting, “Sure, I’ll do that.” The black and white faces crowded around the table struck Jessie as some perverse, dangerous rainbow. The aggressive friendliness of the northern college students confused and then confounded her. During dinner Jessie heard Odetta and Joan Baez for the first time, their songs filling the room from a tiny portable record player someone had brought. Baez’s lush, pure voice struck Jessie as so perfect, it almost stopped her heart. And Odetta transformed the story, the history, the face, of everybody she already knew, into a thing of majestic glory. When they finished eating, Lincoln read several of his poems, hushing the room’s edgy self-conscious excitement with language that was as resonant as the songs they had just heard. Jessie listened intently, hearing all the things that Lincoln hadn’t stopped thinking about, although he’d told her he had. When Lincoln finished, Jessie spotted Carolyn talking to Marlon Jeeter, a slender young man, so dark that when Jessie looked at him, she shivered. His black skin held not the slightest hint of dilution. Although quite young, Marlon sported a beard, already flecked with strands of gray. Carolyn sat next to him, her laughter spinning concentric circles around their intent, her knee occasionally touching his, shaking her mane of blond hair repeatedly, the way Jessie had seen white girls do in the movies. Lincoln and Hamilton Schwartz, a student from New Jersey, had begun a game of chess at the dinner table.

What Jessie sat witnessing was such a mockery of everything she had been taught, she was almost afraid to continue looking. The Freedom House was alien territory, a foreign
country lodged in the solid hard heart of Mississippi. Jessie didn’t know if she could learn to speak the language required on this soil. And the fear that she could not made her jittery and headachy and suddenly so afraid that she ran onto the porch and sat on the steps. Here, finally, she could breathe.

Moments later, Lincoln joined her and asked, “What’s wrong?”

“I ain’t never in my life seen nothing like what’s going on in there,” she told him, shaking her head in disbelief, terrified of even glancing back over her shoulder into the living room. “Everybody all mixed up together. Like color don’t matter,” she whispered breathlessly, terrified of even saying out loud what her eyes had seen and refused to believe.

“That’s what the movement’s about,” he said gently.

“I thought we was just gonna register people to vote.”

“We are. But that’s gonna change everything, Jessie, everything.”

That night in bed beside Carolyn, Jessie hugged the edge of the mattress, so fearful was she of touching the girl who slept in only a bra and panties.

She heard Carolyn stir. In response Jessie moved closer to the edge of the bed, her nails digging into the soft round edges of the old mattress, her hips, back, stomach, all sucked in to make her small and unobtrusive. The room was humid. The air outside the window was still, unmoving. A mosquito buzzed around Jessie’s ear. Carolyn had turned on her side and Jessie felt the warmth of her breath on her neck as she said, “My parents would die if they knew I was here. They think I’m in New York.” The girl’s voice was giddy, glazed with excitement and dread as she waited for Jessie’s response.

Jessie felt a moment of empathy and wondered if Carolyn Seavers had run away from home too.

“They wouldn’t give me permission to come down here. So I told them I was going to visit a friend in Rye, New York. Can
you believe it, Jessie, they dared me to come. They don’t let me do anything,” Carolyn complained, turning on her back. “They shelter me all the time, from life, from reality.” Carolyn spoke in that blunt, energetic, fully self-possessed way characteristic of the northern college students. They talked, Jessie thought, as though words were invented just for them. And the words Jessie heard them use were hard, abstract words that they could command like a toy, or play with like a game.

“Did your parents do that to you, Jessie, you know, keep you from having experiences?” The girl’s voice was genuinely distraught, and in it Jessie could hear all the arguments, the crying and the screaming that went on in the nice big house Carolyn Seavers had left in Minneapolis.

But what, Jessie wondered, did Carolyn mean by experiences? Did that mean living, the things you went through every day, the stuff you had to put up with, couldn’t get away from no matter what? Or did that mean something different? Something you decided you wanted and then went out and did.

Jessie didn’t know and so she said reassuringly, “I think you’ll get a lot of experience this summer, Carolyn. When you go back home you’ll have plenty to tell.”

But restless, unsatisfied by Jessie’s words, Carolyn left their bed, to sit by the window and smoke a cigarette. Watching Carolyn’s profile cast against the window, highlighted by the glow of the moon, Jessie wondered what it took for white people to be happy. They had claimed all the beauty and goodness in the world and wrapped themselves up in it. With none left for anybody else. And just like Carolyn Seavers, that still wasn’t enough. Carolyn sat there for a long time, quiet, but agitated, Jessie could tell, before suddenly asking, “I guess you’re used to being scared, huh?” her voice easily intruding, poring over the outline of Jessie’s life. Jessie wondered how she knew, how this white girl from the north knew.