Page 4 of The Reformatory

“Yeah, he kicked me, Pa,” Lyle said. “Wasn’t nothin’, though—”

Red McCormack boxed Robert’s right ear so hard that he and his sister screamed.

2

Robbie kicked Lyle McCormack. And Red McCormack saw.

Gloria’s thoughts wouldn’t let her sleep. Memories slapped at her as she lay in the bed her parents had shared, already an uneasy place to rest: Lyle McCormack’s sour breath on her neck. Robbie’s kick to Lyle’s knee. (His knee! And he wanted to play football for Florida State!) Red McCormack storming over so quickly that he might have meant to snap Robbie’s neck. And blue flames in Red McCormack’s eyes as he boxed Robbie’s ear, daring her to move or speak.

What would Mama have done?

Mama had kept most of her childhood stories locked in her eyes. Mama’s stories were unsuited for the ears of children—stories of evil without consequence and pain without cease—the unholy things that happen when God blinks. Or maybe sleeps. Surely God sleeps sometimes, Gloria thought; the evidence of slumber was all around. Secretly, since Mama’s passing, Gloria wrestled with her father’s unshakable belief in God, but sometimes she made peace with the notion that Mama’s cancer had come while God’s eyes were shut. Mostly God’s eyes are open, but God blinks, there’s a hurricane, or, blink, there’s an orphan. Reverend Miles had never put it so plainly, but to Gloria it was a truth as bright as summer sun.

At least Mama’s terrible crying and sweating had a swift end. Mama’s dying had a measurement: it began, it flashed with bright pain, it ended. Emptiness so big it made her feel blind. Painful enough to make any good in the world a lie. But it ended.

Papa in Chicago was a different thing entirely. They needed him now. Papa had fled to Chicago and she did not know when, or if, he would send for her and Robbie. He said he would try to bring them to Chicago by fall, but it wasn’t certain… and fall was months away. She couldn’t hear his laugh or feel him nearby when she heard night noises outside her window. He hadn’t called her at Miz Lottie’s at his usual time on Sunday, so her father might already be dead and they were the last to hear. And if that were true, God help them—

She couldn’t form new thoughts beyond it, though she knew she had to. She needed a plan. Mama and Papa both were planners: Mama had run her six sewing and laundry girls like a sea captain, and Papa knew how to move men to singing and unionizing.

Gracetown had a long history of beloved Negro singers, but the history of union-talking Negroes was bleak. Everyone knew that—Papa especially. But still he’d called a meeting and spoken before twenty-five colored mill workers—at least!—and said enough with his voice raised to be chased out of Gracetown that same night. She could have told him that you can only trust explosive secrets or plans with three people at most. Maybe four. Beyond that, loyalties tended to buckle beneath the thrill of the telling.

So of course at least half a dozen men had gone running to the bosses before Papa even warmed up or said the word strike. What happened next had been a Negro “riot,” or, by eyewitness accounts, a mauling of Negroes by twice the number of white men with clubs, tire irons, and shotgun butts. Clyde Frazier—the barber who worked from his back porch near the railroad tracks on Lower Spruce—lost an eye. But at least no one died like when Papa was a boy and had to hide out in the woods with his parents, grandparents, and cousins during the Marianna riots. Or like the Rosewood survivors a dozen years prior, like Mama. And the way Papa’s grandmother had hidden under her bed in 1909, when three Negro boys went missing on McCormack land—and when their papa fired a warning shot demanding news of his sons, a mob of angry whites killed him and rounded up a score of other Negro fathers, brothers, and sons who were never seen again.

On Florida soil, sometimes killing broke out for its own reasons. Florida’s soil is soaked with so much blood, it’s a wonder the droplets don’t seep between your toes with every step, Mama used to say. Sometimes, when Gloria walked along McCormack Road, she thought she heard whimpers beneath her footsteps. She wondered if blood turned the muddy clay roads in Gracetown the stubborn red-orange color that stained the folded cuffs of her dungarees.

This time Papa had been the one they wanted to hang. They wanted to swing him up like Claude Neal in Marianna when Papa was a boy; Papa had seen the body swinging in front of the courthouse, and on that day he decided he could not let white people scare him or he’d be scared all his life. Most of Papa’s lessons were about the ways of white people, which made it all the more unthinkable that he had not heeded his own warnings.

While the mobs had been looking for Papa, trying to scare the shotgun house dwellers at the far end of Lower Spruce, someone invented a story that Papa tried to rape a white lady behind Pixie’s. Anyone who knew Papa knew that was a lie, since he’d had eyes for no other girl but Mama since they were both in third grade. And he didn’t drink, gamble, or frequent juke joints. But that hadn’t stopped somebody from pointing a finger toward the house Papa was building out on the other side of McCormack’s land. This had not surprised Gloria either—she knew from school that not everyone was happy Papa had scraped together savings to build a house “out near the lake,” as her once-friend Rose had put it, as if lake water and comfort were a betrayal. By the time the Klan burned down their unfinished house, Papa had hopped a train and asked Miz Lottie to keep an eye on Gloria and his namesake, little Robbie. And Miz Lottie, a spinster with a glass eye at eighty-three, couldn’t watch her own self, much less a boy of twelve and a girl of sixteen. Gloria had felt less safe at night knowing she had to keep Miz Lottie’s oyster knife sharp under her pillow to protect not just her and Robbie but maybe the old woman too. After three weeks, she and Robbie had gone back to their own house to live. She’d promised Miz Lottie she was grown enough to care for her brother—and she’d believed that until they ran into Lyle on McCormack Road.

Their cabin felt like a dead space now. Empty chicken coops and a chicken wire yard of dusty grass patches. Soured memories in every corner, especially the formerly happiest, the wooden table for four where they had shared so many meals. It was a hostile space too: so many dripping places when it rained, flies and mosquitoes wheeling freely inside the walls, so much stagnant heat and darkness, not enough windows, and Reynolds Wrap instead of curtains. Her great-grandfather had not built big windows like Miss Anne’s and the houses in town.

Even before Mama got sick, they had begun to talk about the cabin as their old place, a relic from Papa’s slave-born grandfather, a parcel doled out to a dying servant. (“White folks can love their property like a hunter loves his hound,” Papa had said.) Papa and his friends had built the new house from sturdy Florida pine, board by board—three bedrooms. An indoor bathroom and plumbing he’d hired workers for, not an outhouse. A picture window in the living room looking out on the lake.

All of it burned now. A black circle seared in the soil. That burned-up house had been Mama’s dream for them before she died. Now all of their dreams were dead. Every photo carefully posed in Mama’s ornate frames felt like a lie, even the photos of her and Robbie. They looked too young. The photo taking had stopped when Mama got sick.

Robbie kicked Lyle McCormack. And Red McCormack saw.

Should she take Robert on a train to Papa and try to make it to Chicago to find him? She had no money for train fare, so she imagined getting arrested or thrown off the train, stranded somewhere trying to find work with Robbie in tow. And what “work” was waiting for a girl who knew more about Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston than the laundering, sewing, and cleaning Mama had tried to teach her?

Robbie kicked Lyle McCormack. And Red McCormack saw.

Gloria turned on the dim lamp on the night table beside her mattress. The cabin had only one bedroom, and no door separated her from Robbie’s sleeping form on the trundle bed on the other side of the old cabin’s coal stove and dining table. She heard his calm, steady breathing and longed to be in his place—untroubled, all fears forgotten with sleep.

Gloria hunted down a pen and lined paper in the night table drawer: Papa had forever been writing his thoughts and plans, sometimes late into the night. She found a blank page and addressed it in neat lines the way Mama had taught her before Gloria even started school:

Mr. William Jones

101 47th Street, Apartment 16A

Chicago, Illinois

It was not his actual name or address, Papa had explained, but that was where he’d arranged to pick up his mail from a friend. She stripped her report to the bare facts: Robbie had kicked Lyle McCormack and his father Red had witnessed it and boxed his ear bloody. She added that Red McCormack had sworn to make Robert’s life a misery, so I can hardly think of all the sorrow that will rain on us if we stay here.

Papa had complained for years about how petty the McCormacks were, how tightly they held their grudges. Papa’s family had once been owned by the McCormacks, and both sides of the McCormack fence held long memories. With their cabin so close by, half the things Papa said were rules to keep away from McCormacks. Two years ago, Papa had announced that he and Gloria weren’t allowed to swim there anymore, even if they were invited.

Too late, she now fully understood why. If she’d known how casually catastrophe might strike, she and Robert could have stayed closer to the tree line and far on the other side of the road to keep away from that McCormack fence each day. Robert was sleeping as if he thought the kick on the road was forgotten, that his bloodied ear had squared him with the McCormacks. But Gloria knew better. Knew in her heart.

Gloria Patricia Stephens did not sleep that night.