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I want people of twenty seven languages walking back and forth saying to one another hello brother how’s the fishing and when they reach their destination I don’t want them to forget if it was bad
—The Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You, Frank Stanford
There are people in small rooms all over the world, in impersonal cubicles in large offices, in malls, in ghettos, and behind fenced mansions—who thrive on a little chaos, enjoy the occasional taste of 220 volts, live for the beauty of the flaw in the grain.
—It Came from Memphis, Robert Gordon
No, I do not weep at the world—I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.
—“How It Feels to Be Colored Me,” Zora Neale Hurston
Herein lie buried many things.
—The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. DuBois
Contents
Some names were changed or omitted in light of the interpretive nature of this account. Others because they still live there. People may have been rendered as semblances and composites of one another. And others, spoken into being. Memories have been tapped, and newspapers consulted. Books referenced. Times fused and towns overlaid. This is not a work of history. It is a report full of holes, a little commemorative edition, and it aspires to the borrowed-tuxedo lining of fiction. In the end, it is a welter of associations.
Up and down the towns in the Delta, people were stirring. Cotton was right about shoe top. Day lilies hung from their withering necks. Temperatures started out in the 90s with no promise of a good soaking. School was almost out. The farm bells slowly rang for freedom. The King lay moldering in the ground over a year. The scent of liberation stayed on, but it was hard to bring the trophy home. Hard to know what came next; one thing, and one thing only was known, no one wanted to go home dragging their tow sack; no one wanted to go home empty-handed.
Over at the all-Negro junior high, a popular teacher has been fired for “insubordination” for a “derogatory” letter he wrote the superintendent saying the Negro has no voice. No voice at all. It was the start of another cacophonous summer.
It smells like home. She said, dying. And I, What’s that you smell, V. And V, dying: The faint cut of walnuts in the grass. My husband’s work shirt on the railing. The pulled-barbecued evening. The turned dirt. Even in this pitch I can see the vapor-lit pole, the crape myrtle not in shadow. My sweet-betsy. That exact streaked sky. The mongrel dog being pelted with rain. Mine eyes pelted. All fear. Overcome. At last. No scent. That’s what she said. Dying in the one-room apartment in Hell’s Kitchen.
MR. EASTER, AN OUTLIER [with FISH 4 SALE]: It’s probably a rat snake. Had a couple in the old storm cellar. My son-in-law accidentally caught it on fire and it killed ever one of my snakes.
+ + +
I came in by the old road from Memphis, the old military road. Across the iron bridge. No one in the field. Not a living soul.
I drove around with the windows down. The redbuds in bloom. Sky, a discolored chenille spread. Weather, generally fair.
The marchers step off from the jailhouse at Bragg’s Spur, 8:17 a.m. More police than reporters. More reporters than police.
The self-described Prime Minister of the Invaders, 31, and five others have begun their trek. SWEET WILLIE WINE’S WALK AGAINST FEAR is on the move.
V: We had the water and the shoes in my car. There was a black man named Stiles. [He was a midget.] He kept that water good and cold [for the marchers].
The threat they say is coming from the east [of the six Negroes walking to Little Rock and the white woman driving a station wagon].
It was something you came through that.
V: It was invigorating. It was the most alive I ever felt in my life.
FBI followed me for a long time. Stringers for the Gazette and the Appeal trailed me for a year. Once every ten or twelve years, I will get a caller. I used all of my life. I told my friend Gert, you’ve got your life until you use it.
I park in a spot of
