AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Neither do I.” Mr. Jones stared into his nearly empty glass. “What I mean is, just one week earlier, from my seat on the train, Edna had looked like a nice, thriving little place with wildflowers growing in the tall grass down near the tracks—an explosion of color, pink and orange and purple. But now it looked dead. A ghost town.”
Mr. Powell didn’t like the word ghost. The residents of Boley were descendants of former slaves. They carried their ghosts inside them. When Mr. Powell looked around at the town of Boley, four thousand souls and counting, he saw the future. He imagined more Boleys in a nation that would finally live up to the ideals it espoused. “Could you have been on a different route, maybe?” he said, trying to be helpful.
Mr. Jones was resolute. “No, sir. It was the same route. I saw the sign: Edna. But this time? Two big fat vultures circled above the town square. And those wildflowers that had been budding up nice and pretty? Well, Mr. Powell, they were dead as could be. Not a thing growing there, from what I could see.”
Mr. Powell had grown up in the church. The filmmaker’s story sounded biblical to him, like Sodom or Admah. Still: “Maybe it had to do with the angle of the sun, or maybe there had just been a flood and folks had been forced to evacuate.” He was grasping for answers. The story of the dead town crawled under his skin. He wanted to be rid of the feeling.
“I even asked one of the porters if he’d noticed the change. But he just said he’d been busy with passengers and hadn’t paid any mind to it,” Mr. Jones continued. “But that town looked… haunted to me, sir.”
“Goodness. That is something.” Mr. Powell cleared his throat. “Fine day today, isn’t it?”
Mr. Jones took the polite cue. He swallowed the last of his drink. “Indeed. And that lemonade was mighty refreshing, thank you. I do believe you promised to show me that bank.”
“Yes, sir. Coming right up!” Mr. Powell left the porch and walked ahead, proudly talking about Boley’s status as one of the nation’s wealthiest towns run by and for black folks. Mr. Jones nodded along. But he remembered something else glimpsed from the train window. Something he was too afraid to mention. The sun had just sunk below the horizon; evening swooped down over the plains. He’d watched the vultures as they’d flown a figure eight, going tighter and lower, until they hovered above a scarecrow-like figure of a man in a coat and a tall hat standing alone on that flat, ashen land. Electricity arced about this man until he, himself, glowed with its energy. The man punched his hands up toward the sky as if he might ri
p the guts from it. The clouds roiled and groaned as if in pain, like it was giving birth to some new horror, and the man in the hat laughed and laughed, as though nothing at all mattered and soon, nothing ever would.
SOME WOUNDS
Memphis had been out of New York City only once, when he was around six, and he and his mother had gone to Baltimore to see the cousins. It dawned on him now that it was probably during that trip that his mother had taken him to a Project Buffalo office to be evaluated. Memphis had no memory of going to an office and answering questions about any powers he might have. All he recalled was running barefoot with his cousins and gobbling up spoonfuls of rice and sòs pwa while fireflies blinked against the dusk. It was funny what you chose to remember and what you chose to forget.
After Harlem, the wide-open space of the South was a shock to Memphis. Everything was so spread out. You could walk for ages and pass nothing at all but some kudzu or an old man rocking on his front porch, a spittoon at his feet. Everywhere he looked, though, Memphis saw something he wished he could tell Isaiah or Theta about. He never realized quite how much of his day he saved up to share with his little brother, or what tiny stories he tucked into a pocket to tell Theta about later, when they were lying in each other’s arms. If you didn’t get to share what you saw, what you experienced, it was almost like it didn’t happen.
Now that the immediate danger had passed, he took a moment to marvel at how different this part of the country looked from New York City. It was such a big country. A fella could forget that walking the same streets all the time. And each place was different from the last. From the train, he’d seen the tiny mountain towns of West Virginia, the leafy green tobacco fields of North Carolina, and the red earth of Georgia, where his father’s people were from. When this was all over, he hoped to take another train with Isaiah and show him how big it all was. Look it there, he pictured himself saying to his wide-eyed brother. You know why the dirt is red like that? ’Cause it’s wounded and needs a healing.
“How long you think before we get to Bountiful?” Memphis asked. They’d been walking for some time, and his shirt stuck to his back with a damp sweat.
“Depends on the trains,” Bill said.
“My feet are blistered balloons,” Henry complained. “Buh-listered buh-loooons, buh-listered b-b-b-uh-loons,” he sang, drifting into a hum.
“We haven’t seen anything but railroad tracks and that river for miles now,” Memphis said.
“That’s not just a river. That’s the Mighty Mississippi,” Henry said.
“Okay,” Memphis said, annoyed. He wasn’t looking for a geography lesson. All he wanted was to get back to Theta and Isaiah and put things right.
“The Mississippi is more than two thousand miles long! It goes from Minnesota all the way to the Gulf of Mexico, like a big scar down the middle of the country.”
“Mmm.”
“It’s looking awfully high, though. It’s been eight months of rain. If the levees break…” Henry whistled. “You don’t want to be anywhere near it.”
“But the levees’ll hold, right?” Memphis cast a nervous glance at the swollen river.
Henry shrugged. “The levees are man-made. The river’s the river. It’s got a rebellious, unpredictable spirit.”
“Swell,” Memphis said under his breath.
The rich black earth of the Mississippi Delta was fertile and promising and flat. Sun beat down on the bent backs of workers planting seed, some singing to one another as they did, a call-and-response that put Memphis in mind of his days as the Harlem Healer in the storefront church, with his mother looking on proudly in her Sunday hat. The singing was a way to break up the monotony of the labor, Memphis knew, and a way to feel less alone out there under all that sky. Memphis was struck by the lush beauty of Mississippi, and by what he knew it had cost families like his to create it. He’d had ancestors on his father’s side who’d worked the cotton and tobacco fields, who had harvested sugar and rice. Men and women whose labor had made other men and women rich. Looked to him like it was still that way. The anger of the injustice, the beauty of the land, the resilience of the people raised new passion within him. He tried to commit what he saw and felt to memory so that he could write about it later. He no longer felt that he wanted to write; he felt compelled to write. All of it. Whenever they stopped to rest, he hurriedly scribbled down the words that had been playing in his head, and as they traveled the roads, Memphis left copies of these poems here and there, in the hope that they would be found. He thought of them like little seeds. “Like Johnny Appleseed,” he told himself.
“What’s that about apples?” Henry called over his shoulder.
“Nothing,” Memphis said.
The Delta revealed itself like a dream, in wind-stripped wooden shacks and children running after a dog that had treed a squirrel, in migrant workers selling food from the back of a truck, in billboards full of smiling white faces drinking Coca-Cola, and overhead, in clouds so fat with pink-gold light they seemed as if they’d been painted by a heavenly brush. At a crossroads, they waited while a procession of black churchgoers dressed in crisp white crossed in front of them, the ladies with their protective umbrellas held high against the sun, singing on their way to a pond for a mass baptism. “Heard the floods might come like Noah,” a woman at the end of the line explained from under the shade of her parasol. “Don’t wanna be caught unprepared.”
Back a ways from the road, a mansion rose up, white-columned and black-shuttered. Its many windows stared out, keeping watch over the land like a double row of eyes. “Plantation,” Bill said, frowning. A little farther on, they passed a lean-to where a grizzled man sat on the front porch picking out a blues song about the Devil and the moonlight that did nothing to put them at ease.
