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“They’re afraid we won’t come back. They call Greenville the ‘Queen of the Mississippi Delta.’ Why, Mr. Al Jolson himself played the opera house. But the money comes from the fields we work. And all the money goes right back to landowners like Mr. LeRoy.”
Memphis listened to Nate’s story and felt his anger boiling up again. He wondered where Isaiah was just now. If he was safe or had found enough to eat. If somebody with a rifle was making him work on a levee. If that man with the gun had an itchy trigger finger. He felt that the worry would drive him mad.
“We’re from New Orleans. Musicians,” Henry said, answering Nate’s question at last, and Memphis was
glad Henry would provide the cover for them.
“Really, now? What do you play?”
“Piano,” Henry said.
“Guitar,” Bill said.
Memphis wiped his brow. “I just came along with my cousin to see the country.”
Nate grunted as he shoved a sandbag into place. “Well. You don’t mind my saying, you sure picked a sorry time to come to Greenville.”
At the end of the day, the men were exhausted and muddy.
“I’m so worn out I can’t even feel my face,” Henry said. “I still have one?”
“You still talking, ain’t you?” Bill jibed.
Nate Timmons invited them to stay with his family in their two-room house out on the edge of town, near where Nate and several other families worked the land. They walked past the railroad tracks and into town to Washington Avenue and Main Street. Nate pointed out the various points of interest—a jewelry store and the printing shop where his friend Gibson worked. There was a grocery store, Joe Now New, run by a Chinese family, and Henry made a note to tell Ling about it later. Memphis’s heart leaped when he saw a bookshop.
“That’s Mr. Granville Carter’s shop. First black man to own a bookshop in Greenville. Fine man. Over there’s the hotel, and there’s Main Street, which goes on for a good long while, all the way out to the white folks’ cemetery.”
“The cemetery,” Memphis repeated with a look to Henry and Bill.
“Yes. Cemetery. Don’t they bury folks where you’re from?” Nate joked.
“Yes. But sometimes they don’t stay buried,” Henry said.
Bill coughed loudly in warning. But Nate just laughed. “Oh, that’s a mighty good one! Here now. We’re coming up on our neighborhood,” Nate said.
To Henry, it felt as if they had crossed an imaginary border, from white spaces to black. From a certain freedom Henry took for granted to a newfound awareness of just how that freedom was assumed or refused.
The Timmons house was small—two rooms with a covered front porch and an outhouse ’round the back where they also kept chickens in a coop. Around a modest supper, Nate and Bessie told their guests about their life working the land in Greenville, about their desire to migrate north—“Got kin in Chicago and St. Louis. There’s good work there.”—and about their fears of a flood.
“Steamboats come yesterday, took the white women and children to Vicksburg and other parts, to their people. No steamboats coming for us,” Bessie said, nursing her baby girl, Loree. “Some folks got on a big old barge, but it was so full I was afraid it’d tip over out there in all that river. Good thing we got Remy’s houseboat. Remy’s a Cajun, came up from Louisiana and stayed.”
Henry thought of Louis, his drawl peppered with bayou French. Every time he figured he’d healed that wound, something would come along to pop the stitches of it again. It was what David always feared, that Henry was still in love with another man—a ghost. David. Henry hadn’t spoken to him since they’d made their big escape. Was David worried about him? Was he spending his nights down in the Village with other boys? That thought made Henry jealous, which surprised him. Henry hadn’t felt jealous in a very long time. He usually kept things light, flitting from fella to fella, never committing to just one. But now, suddenly, he wanted David.
“…Anyhow, Remy’s got a houseboat he built himself. He’s real nice to our boys,” Bessie finished, pulling Henry back to the present.
“Anyway, Mr. Will made it so’s we couldn’t leave. So now here we are. Got the National Guard and their rifles to keep us here, make us work for free.”
“And if you refused?” Memphis asked.
“Kind of hard to argue with a rifle in your face,” Nate said. “And if you’re looking for the law to be on your side, well, the Greenville County Prosecutor’s the Exalted Cyclops of the local Klan.”
“Exalted Cyclops. Grand Wizard. Why do all of those Klan titles sound like terrible fantasy novels?” Henry said.
“Nate and I’ve been talking,” Bessie said. “Flood or no flood, we’re heading north. I’ve been taking in wash for Mrs. Stein and saving every cent for train tickets to St. Louis.”
The Timmons boys, Tobias, age seven, and Moses, age ten, clamored for attention, and Memphis got a lump in his throat watching Nate and Bessie with their sons. It reminded him of evenings with his mother and father, when there was music and laughter in their house on 145th Street. Long before Memphis had ever heard of Project Buffalo or the King of Crows or Diviners. He longed for that time again, but you couldn’t go backward. There was only forward.
“Mama, can we go play with Buddy?” Moses asked, and Memphis saw that there was an old yellow hound dog sniffing around the front porch.
