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We learned of the death by lynching of Norbert Washington today. A witness at the lynching site in that area of Eudora called “the Quarters” said that Washington, a tobacco tanner at a plantation in nearby Chatawa, had been heard making rude and suggestive comments to a white lady in the Chatawa Free Library.
Upon investigation it was discovered that the town of Chatawa did not have a library, free or otherwise. That information notwithstanding, the eyewitness stated, “The hanging was most exciting, gruesome and, I must add, satisfying in its vengefulness for the niggerman’s impertinence.”
I was glad that I kept reading, even though I wanted to look away. The final sentences were, for me, the most startling:
When interviewed, Chief of Police Phineas Eversman said that he was unaware of any lynching that previous evening in Eudora. A visitor in Chief Eversman’s office, the respected Eudora Justice Everett Corbett, agreed. “I too know nothing about a lynching in Eudora,” Judge Corbett said.
I let the newspapers fall to the floor. No wonder Roosevelt needed someone to sort out this tangle of contradictions, half-truths, and outright lies.
Loneliness also gives a man time for thinking. It broke my heart to be so far away from my family—and to have left on this trip without a single kind word between Meg and me. From my valise I drew a small pewter picture frame, hinged in the middle. I opened the frame and stared at the joined photographs.
On the left was Meg, her smile so warm, so bright and unforced, that I found myself smiling back at her.
On the right were Alice and Amelia, posed on the sofa in our parlor. Both of them wore stiff expressions, but I knew the girls were seconds away from exploding into laughter.
I studied the images for a few minutes, thinking only good thoughts. I wished there were some way I could blink my eyes and bring the pictures to life so that all three of them could be here with me.
Chapter 27
EARLY THE NEXT MORNING, I discovered that the current Maybelle, a pleasant and blustery woman, was not much of a cook. I sat at the dining room table, poking at breakfast: a biscuit as tough as old harness leather, grits that were more lumps than grits, and a piece of salt pork that was 100 percent gristle.
“Miss Maybelle, who belongs to that bicycle I saw leaning against the shed out back?” I finally asked. “I need to see a few people around town.”
“I keep that for the boy runs errands for me after school,” she said. “You welcome to borry it, if you like.”
Five minutes later I was rolling up my pant legs to protect them from bicycle chain grease. Two minutes after that I was sailing down Commerce Street. I felt like a nine-year-old boy again, keeping my balance with my knees while extending my arms sideways in a respectable display of balancing skills.
I was nine again, but everything I saw was filtered through the eyes of a thirty-year-old man.
I rode the bicycle two circuits around the tiny park in front of the Methodist church, took a left at the minister’s house and another left at the scuppernong arbor. At the end of the vine-covered trellis stood a simple white wooden structure that was unsupervised by anyone’s eyes and universally known among the young people of Eudora as the Catch-a-Kiss Gazebo.
It was here that I came with Elizabeth the summer I was fifteen. It was here, on that same wooden bench, that I leaned in to kiss Elizabeth and was startled down to my toes by an open-mouthed kiss in return, full of passion and tongue and spit. At the same moment I felt her hand running smoothly up the side of my thigh. I felt the pressure of her nails. My own hand moved from her waist to her small, rounded bosom.
Then Elizabeth pulled away and shook her head, spilling blond curls onto her shoulders. “Oh, Ben, I want to kiss you and kiss you. And more. I want to do everything, Ben. But I can’t. You know we can’t.”
I had never heard a girl talk like that. Most boys my age were hopeless when it came to discussing such matters—at least, in Eudora they were.
There were tears in Elizabeth’s eyes. “It’s all right,” I said, but then I grinned. “But we could kiss some more. No harm in that.” So Elizabeth and I kissed, and s
ometimes we touched each other, but it never went any farther than that, and eventually I went away to Harvard, where I met Meg.
Now I rode that bicycle fast down the lane, leaning into the curve, rounding the corner at the preacher’s house, faster and faster, remembering Elizabeth Begley and the first taste of sex that had ever happened to me anywhere but in my own head.
Chapter 28
I PEDALED THAT BICYCLE all the way from my growing-up years to the present day. And I began to see people I knew, shopkeepers, old neighbors, and I waved and called out “Hi.” A couple of times I stopped and talked with somebody from my school days, and that was fine.
I rode over to Commerce Street, past the Slide Inn Café, past the icehouse where a bucket came flying out of the darkness just in time to trip up poor George Pearson and send him to his death by hanging.
The exhilaration of my first ride through town was fading under the glare of a morning sun that was beating down hard. I was out of training for Mississippi summers. My thirst was demanding attention, and I remembered a pump at the end of the cotton-loading dock at the gin, just down from the depot.
I pedaled down Myrtle Street to the end of the platform that ran from the cotton gin beside the tracks of the Jackson & Northern line. I leaned my machine against the retaining wall and turned to the pump.
As I worked the handle and reveled in the water—half drinking, half splashing my face—I heard a loud voice behind me, an angry voice.
“What the hell makes you nigger boys think you can come high-walkin’ into our town looking for a job? All our jobs belong to white men.”
At the other end of the platform were two large and burly men I recognized as the Purneau brothers, Jocko and Leander, an unpleasant pair of backwoods louts who had been running the cotton gin for Old Man Furnish as long as I could remember. The two of them towered over three scrawny black boys who looked to be fifteen years old, maybe even younger.
