Page 70 of The Reformatory

Gloria and Miz Lottie waited in tense silence while the deputies returned to their car, doors slamming. Miz Lottie moved her hand out of the laundry basket and brought out her gun, a wink in the sunlight, and nestled it between her legs before she cranked the truck into gear.

“Thought I was gonna have to kill both of them crackers today,” Miz Lottie muttered. She said it like she had avoided a sudden rainstorm or a nail in the road. She glanced sidelong at Gloria. “It’s all right now, pumpkin.”

Gloria nodded, but her heart hadn’t slowed. Her imagination was lost in the woods; her hair caught in brambles, bare skin chafing against pebbles and soil. So real. So close. Gloria shivered in the heat like Mama in her sickbed.

“Least I’m awake now,” Miz Lottie said, giving Gloria a laugh for show.

Miz Lottie coaxed Ole Suzy back to the road to follow the lawyer to Gracetown.

Since they got back to Gracetown at eleven twenty and they weren’t due at the courthouse to meet the lawyer until noon, Miz Lottie stopped by her house so Gloria could change. Her good dress was muddy, so Gloria went through the tight stacks of hangers packed in Miz Lottie’s closet, one fabric nearly glued to the next, until she found a black dress that seemed better suited for a funeral. The dress was nearly too long for her and far from fashionable, but it might make the judge feel sorry for her. She couldn’t come in wearing too nice a dress anyway or the judge or anyone who saw her would say she was putting on airs. Lyle’s words in his yard, in the dark, lanced at her: You Stephens niggers are so uppity. Even a white man’s not good enough for you. How many others, white and Negro, felt that way about her family? How would they feel when they saw her in the courthouse with an NAACP lawyer in a New York City double-breasted suit?

Gloria stared in the mirror while she patted down her hair with the unmarked jar of pomade Miz Lottie kept on her kitchen sink. She looked tired-eyed and sullen, so she tried on a smile for the judge. Each smile looked more forced than the last. Imagine Robbie coming home, she told herself, and her face filled with a grin. Then tears stabbed her eyes because it wasn’t real. Not yet. Her shivering had not stopped since the deputies. She didn’t want anyone’s eyes on her. She wanted to be invisible in an old woman’s funeral dress.

By eleven thirty-five, Gloria and Miz Lottie were parked in front of the courthouse while they waited. The truck smelled like cold fried chicken from Miz Rita’s refrigerator, the best Miz Lottie had been able to gather on short notice. It would be better hot, but Miz Rita’s lunch window wasn’t open yet—it was supposed to open at eleven thirty but she often didn’t have food ready until noon—so they’d taken yesterday’s leftovers: a large breast and a couple of wings. From time to time, Miz Lottie patted Gloria on the knee, as if to apologize she couldn’t have made a better world for her.

She and Miz Lottie did not speak in the parked truck. The time for talking had passed.

A familiar car inched by, and Gloria recognized Miss Anne on Main Street, heading back toward Juniper. Maybe she had been to the bank!

“Be right back,” Gloria told Miz Lottie, and she jumped out of the truck to catch Miss Anne at the stop sign at the intersection.

There, Miss Anne seemed startled and eager to drive on until she recognized Gloria in the dress so long that Gloria nearly tripped on the folds.

“Gloria? What in the world—”

Gloria leaned into Miss Anne’s window, excited. “We found a Negro lawyer. He’s coming to talk to the judge right now.”

“That’s wonderful news,” Miss Anne said, looking left and right, with no celebration in her voice. Now every parking space was filled on the street in front of Meg’s Diner, the Main Street Pharmacy, and the Gracetown Herald office while whites strolled the sidewalks. “But don’t make it a spectacle.”

Gloria spotted the light green envelope marked FIRST BANK OF GRACETOWN on Miss Anne’s passenger seat. “Is that for me? The two-fifty?”

“Yes—here.” The envelope was fat and heavy. Gloria had felt none like it. “You asked for it in fives, but I got a hundred in tens. Just imagine the queer looks I got. Don’t walk with it out in the open. Slide it under your arm. Hurry.” Miss Anne’s hand trembled as she helped Gloria adjust the envelope beneath her arm, tucked out of sight. Miss Anne looked from corner to corner to make sure they weren’t being watched. The sidewalk and center courtyard with the Confederate statue of Captain Powell were empty. Gloria wondered what the long-dead captain would think of his great-granddaughter giving money to Negroes. “Get out of the street, Gloria. Go on, now.”

Miss Anne drove off before Gloria could thank her. Without wishing her good luck, even.

She was scared out of her head—a white woman! Councilman Powell’s daughter. Miss Anne must truly believe the Klan had run her father off the road. Or that the statue was watching her.

Standing at the intersection, Gloria realized she was ignoring every warning, just like Papa had. She was a Stephens. The town had expected to chase her and Robbie away, to force them to hide like mice, and she was in the middle of the street in the noontime sun. She was like Mama eating ice cream in broad daylight on the Whites Only bench.

Mr. Moore’s black Model T drove up. As Mr. Moore inched past her, John Dorsey’s window was closest, so he called out, “Where’s the marching band?”

“Girl, get out of the road,” Harry T. Moore said. “What’s wrong with you?”

Nothing was wrong, not at that moment. Gloria’s trembling from Suwannee County had stopped. She gazed past the hanging tree to the courthouse’s regal clock face—noon, the Roman numbers said—and her face was washed in the dizzying rush of sunlight.

The bell tolled through Gracetown as if she had willed its song, a reckoning come at last.

19

Miles away, back toward town, the courthouse bell was ringing so faintly that Robert’s ear missed every other toll. But the thin breeze carried the bell like a memory of long ago. Was Mama ringing to him? Was music her way of watching him? He strained to hear the bell’s song, not wanting to miss a note—and the music carried an image of Main Street’s colorful awnings and Miz Lottie’s house on Lower Spruce. With every toll, he forgot about the sun burning through his thin work shirt to his scarred and bloodied back. He floated away free in the chimes.

Then the bell stopped, and the day’s heat smothered the endless cornfield. The corn stalks were already tall in late June, up just past Robert’s eyeline, shiny green tips as far as he could see, except where two muddy trucks were parked near the fence on the farm road back toward the gate. The corn wouldn’t be ready for harvest until fall, so none of the corncobs had grown in. The field looked like rows of giant weeds.

Tall enough to walk through. Tall enough to disappear in, especially if he stayed low.

Imagining himself sneaking off unseen in the stalks helped Robert keep up his pace although his hands were still raw from his previous day’s work tugging bare-handed at the spiky, spindly ragweed nearly as tall as the corn. Yesterday, his first day in the field, his back had felt like it was ripping apart when he bent over. The ragweed was taller than the water hemp for grabbing, but weeds needed to come up by the root. Boone had promised a smack with his strap for every half-pulled weed he found anywhere. Some of the older, trusted boys had tools, but Robert only had his sore hands. No amount of scrubbing would clean the mud from his fingernails. Mama would have a fit if she could see. Papa too. Robert had wondered what it would feel like to be a sharecropper like his grandfather, or a slave in a history story, and now he knew. His skin knew. His back knew. His hands knew.

And no one he could whisper to or call a friend. Another dozen boys were to the left of Robert, heads bobbing through stalks in the field as they worked, but Robert did not know them. None had been as friendly as Blue and Redbone in the kitchen his first day. The field was not a place for talking. Redbone was three rows to the right, no more than fifteen steps away, but his back was always turned away from Robert. Redbone had not come near him yesterday either.