Chapter Six
THE COLUMNS
The sun was setting scarlet by the time Levi drove past the last cluster of tenant shacks and turned onto the generously graveled lane leading up to the Columns. Like emerald-suited soldiers, house-tall cedars lined both sides of the quarter-mile entrance. The Buick slipped between the last pair of trees and Levi slowed, proceeding at a crawl as if in reverence to the white mansion that rose up before them. Vida was forever in awe that something that gleaming bright had been plopped down in a heat-distorted world of mules and shanties and sweating field hands.
Tonight half a dozen cars were already parked in the circular drive. Instead of joining them, Levi pulled off the lane onto a rough track used by mules and tractors, and drove carefully around to the rear of the house, bringing the Buick to a stop at the back gate. He got out and walked over to the cast-iron bell that sat atop a cedar post. He pulled the rope three times. The bell clanged loudly.
The kitchen door was flung open and Vida was relieved to see that it was Lillie Dee Prophet, the Senator’s cook, who came out, limping across the yard up to the fence.
“That you, Brother Pastor?” she asked, squinting hard into his face.
“Hello, Sister Prophet.” He formally tipped his hat to the wizened woman. “How you this evening?”
“Ain’t jumpin’ no stumps, Rev’rund.”
Vida’s father laughed and shook his head in the way that made you feel like you were really something for saying what you did.
Lillie Dee bent her head down and strained to make out the shadows inside the car, her toothless gums working without pause. “But it’s like I told my last boy over there,” Lillie Dee said, nodding her head toward the woodshed in back of the house, “like I told Rezel, ever day I can get out of bed, I count it as a blessing from the Lord.”
Hearing Rezel’s name, Vida crooked her head to see around Lillie Dee. She spied him standing in the shadows, hard-muscled, wearing overalls and a ripped cotton shirt, gathering an armload of stove wood. She tried to catch his eye. Sullen, he stubbornly kept his gaze away from the place where people were bandying his name about. Vida’d heard stories about him singing the blues at the juke joints in a way that could turn sisters one against the other. Yet the Rezel she knew was gentle and shy-mannered, sometimes stopping by her house when her father was away with flowers or pears stolen from the Senator’s own trees. And he was good to Nate. They never talked about it, but maybe Rezel would take her and Nate in. He would be a good daddy. He could protect her, and, maybe love her enough to kill the man who wanted to hurt her child.
Her father said to the old cook, “Well, Lillie Dee, you certainly blessed to have your boy staying on with you. That bound to be a comfort.”
“Rezel?” Lillie Dee shook her head sadly. She looked back at the boy, throwing her voice loud enough for him to hear. “He the same as all the rest of them. Talking about going up North. Say people up there pay him money to sing that devil’s music. Pardon my snuff, Rev’rund.” Lillie Dee spit juice on the ground and continued, “Why, you think it be the Promised Land, the way they all heading off up thataway.”
For a moment the news saddened Vida. Then her spirits lifted. Maybe Rezel was planning to ask her to go with him to this Promised Land! Out of the reach of the white man. And if he was too shy to ask, then she would certainly ask him.
“I’m sorry to hear about it, Sister Prophet,” her father said. “They still plenty of good life left in Mississippi for the upright colored man. ’Cause of you, Rezel got him good work here with the Senator. Too bad he can’t see that.”
“That’s the truth, Rev’rund.” Lillie Dee grinned slyly at Levi. “Carrying my wood never did you no harm, did it?”
Vida saw that Lillie Dee’s comment brought a rare expression of bashfulness to her father’s face, and for a moment Lillie Dee was no longer a member of his flock. This was the woman who had overseen his chores when he was the houseboy for the Senator’s father.
He cleared his throat and removed his hat. “Lillie, will you tell the Senator that I need to conference with him on something weighty?”
“Senator’s got company tonight, Rev’rund. Why don’t you come back in the morning after breakfast?”
“It can’t wait. Tell him it’s about the election. He going to want to see me and my girl.”
The old woman worked her gums thoughtfully for a moment. “Well,” she said, “y’all drive on up in the yard and I’ll tell him.” As she unlatched the gate, she said, “I’m warning you, now, he ain’t going to ’preshate it. They been drinking most the afternoon and just commenced they supper.”
While Vida, Nate, and Levi waited in the car, the Senator’s bird dogs sniffed around the Buick and, one by one, hiked their legs and relieved themselves on the tires. Field hands drove tractors and led mules in through the gate and put them away in the barn for the evening. White people’s laughter, cold and brittle, broke over the darkening yard. For over an hour, Levi sat sweating behind the wheel, mopping his face and jumping in his seat every time the door opened. But each time the screen swung back, it was only Lillie Dee announcing the start of another course.
This was not how Vida had imagined the “conferences” her father talked about so proudly. She had expected the Senator to welcome her father on the front gallery under those grand columns and make him comfortable in a room fit for Solomon while her daddy advised the Senator on important matters.
The smells from the Senator’s supper drifted into the car, and Nate began to whimper and tug on Vida’s braids. She tried to comfort him by stroking his soft black hair, but her own fingers trembled.
“It’s a ways past Nate’s suppertime, Daddy. Maybe we ought to do like Lillie Dee says and come back again.”
Her father gripped the steering wheel tightly, staring through the windshield into a grove of pecan trees rapidly disappearing in the dark. “Can’t. The Senator know we out here. Anyway, he be glad we come with a warning. He going to thank us. You wait and see.”
There was something missing from her father’s words.
“He’ll show that peckerwood which road leads out the county. I know he will. You wait and see if he don’t.”
At last Lillie Dee poked her head out of the door and called, “I just served them they cake and coffee. Won’t be too long now.”
Levi turned to Vida, his eyes pleading through the darkness. She had never seen her father fearful, and the sight jerked at her stomach.
“Now, Vida, you pay respect to the Senator. Say ‘yessuh’ and ‘nosuh.’ Don’t look him in his eyes. Don’t shame me, girl.”
“I’m scared, Daddy. What he going to do to Nate?”
Her father didn’t seem to hear Vida’s question. “The Senator been good to me. He raised up my first church. He believed in me when I told him about seeing the shining face of God in a mighty whirlpool of churning water, calling me to be a preacher of the Word. He believe me then. He’ll believe me now.”
Like a cannon, the voice of the Senator came booming from the kitchen. “All right now, Lillie Dee. Tell Levi to come on in.”
