Here
It comes to us the way a quilt comes to be, in scraps, each one cut from a different cloth and stitched by a different hand: from the porches of the near side of the levee road, where the lights were watched and never spoken of; from a boy in left field who grew old with a shirt folded in a chest; from a man at his kitchen table who read a notice in the morning paper and folded it away; from a seamstress behind a curtain the color of weak tea, with pins in her mouth and her eyes on the hem; from a friend who rode out into the cold bottoms behind the hounds; and last, from the far side of that road, where the dark used to come down early, every one of them telling only what could be seen from where they sat, the paper being sealed and the river, which has taken a great deal from this county, being left to carry the blame for the rest, so what is told here is only what the people kept, and none of it the whole.
“We heard it before we understood it, those of us on the near side of the levee road, where the sidewalks ran clear to the end of the block and the grass was cut by men the county paid to cut it, and where a summer evening was a thing you sat on a porch to be handed. It was the kind of night you could have wrung out like a dishrag, the heat lying over the town thick as sorghum, and up out of that heat, from across the road, came a sound the night itself seemed to have decided to say: low, and rising, not music and not quite a shout, the sound of some hundreds of people drawing one breath at the same moment and holding it, and then letting it go. It was the first night of the lights. We did not know it was the first night of the lights. We knew only that for as many summers as any of us had been keeping count, the dark on the other side of that levee road had come down at dusk the way a lid comes down on a pot, and that the children who lived under it had been sent in by it, sent in to their suppers and their pallets and whatever else a child is sent in to when there is nothing left to see by, and that on this night, above the tin roofs and the chinaberry trees and the long green back of the levee, there stood a glow the color of a lamp in a kitchen window, as if somebody over there had gone and left the whole sky on. The poles had gone up that week. We had watched the truck, and the crew, and the creosote black pine laid out along the shoulder like the masts of some ship that had mistaken the Delta for water, and we had watched them dig, in ground that gave up its wet at three feet the way a man gives up a name, all at once and with a kind of relief. We had watched the wire strung. We had not asked what it was for, because in a town like ours the asking of a question is already half of an opinion, and an opinion, once it is out in the air in August, will find its own way to wherever it can do the most harm. So we sat.
The mosquitoes hung in the evening like ash the soot of an invisible furnace trapped beneath the heavy lid of the Delta air, and the cicadas had run through their long wire of sound and quit, and into the hush they left came that breath, and then the crack of a bat, which is the one sound God ever made that will carry the truth over any wall and any distance and any law, and then a cheer so large and so unpracticed it seemed to startle the very people who made it. A man two porches down, who could explain away a hurricane as a stiff breeze and had done it more than once, said it was the river. Said the river did that on still nights, picked a sound up in one place and set it down in another where it had no business being. And we said yes. We said it was the river. And we went in, one by one, and left our own porch lights burning, which is what a town does when it wants to be able to say, later, that it was never in the dark.”
“Pull your chair up, child, and hand me that shirt out of the cedar chest, yes, that one, with the number on the back. Now, I’ll tell you about the night I got my shadows.
I was ten years old, and I had never in my life worn a thing that somebody else hadn’t worn first. We were poor, now, but I don’t mean poor the way a person means it when they say it for a story. I mean we were poor as Job’s turkey, and didn’t have two nickels to rub together on a Saturday night, and what clothes we had came to us the way water comes down a row, from somebody higher up, already used. My cousin’s shirt. My brother’s shoes with the toes stuffed out with newspaper. A coat that had been a white child’s coat in some house I would never see the inside of. I walked around in the leavings of the world and thought that was just what clothes were. And then, on a Saturday in June, they gave us the shirts. They came in a cardboard box tied up with string, and when the lid came off there was a smell I would know in my grave: starch and new cotton, and something sharp and clean underneath, like a dime. The smell of a thing nobody had been inside of yet. Mine had a number on the back, and across the front, in red, the name of Cook Service Station, and I knew good and well that was a white man’s business, and I didn’t care. It was my shirt. It was starched so stiff it could have stood up on its own and answered for itself, not the way you see it now, gone soft and yellow like a thing that´s been kept, and when I outgrew it, I would be the one who did the outgrowing. That’s all I’m trying to tell you. A thing can belong to you first.
Mr. Ward called the roll before every game. Mr. Elwyn Ward, say it, child, the whole of it, the first and the last, the way, the way he said ours, who ran the parks and the ball fields for the whole town. He stood at the end of the bench with a card in his hand, a big man, thick through the shoulders, and he read us off it one at a time, the whole name, first and last, and whichever one he said was yours, you were to answer here. Now I had been called a great many things by a great many white men in my ten years, and nine times out of ten the word was boy. But nobody had ever read my name off a card and then stopped, and waited, with his head up, for me to answer it. Nobody had ever treated my answering like it was something that might not come. I said here so loud the boy next to me laughed. Mr. Ward didn’t laugh. He made a mark on that card and went on to the next one, and I understood, without anybody having to say it, that I had been counted, and that I would be counted again at the next game, and the next, and that this counting was not going to quit.
That same afternoon, before any of us got there, I had seen him on the big tractor, out on the infield in a straw hat gone gray with sweat, going round and round the same ground, mowing it himself. A man who could have hired a hundred hands to do it. I watched him from the road and I couldn’t make it fit, a white man at that work with that look on his face, like it wasn’t work at all but some long promise he was keeping with the grass.
And then the lights came on. I have tried to tell my own children what that was, and they look at me politely, your mama among them,because to them a light is a thing you touch a wall for. But I stood at that plate with the bat heavy as a gatepost on my shoulder, and all around the field the big white banks came up out of the dark one after another, thunk, thunk, thunk, and I looked down at the dirt, and I had four shadows. Four. Spread around my feet like the spokes of a wheel. I had lived my whole life with the one shadow the Lord gave me, and it had always been the darkest thing around, and now I had four of them, and every one was me. I swear before God it was like the loaves and the fishes, like I’d been multiplied. The moths came boiling down through the light over my head like snow in a country that never saw any. My daddy stood at the wire behind the backstop in his work clothes with the field dust still on him. I saw him when I turned around. He had taken his hat off. He held it flat against his chest with both hands, the way you do when the hearse goes by, or the flag, and he stood there bareheaded in that white light with his whole face open, a face I had seen shut every day of my life. And I understood he wasn’t looking at a ball game. He was looking at the one thing in the state of Mississippi he had never once been able to give me, and he was watching somebody else hand it over.
I struck out. We all did, that first night. It didn’t matter. The whole field was making that sound, and I walked back to the bench inside it like a man wading into a river, and years after, when I cleaned out his house, I found that shirt folded in the bottom drawer, underneath his own good Sunday one. He never said a word about it, and neither did I. It´s been in the cedar chest ever since, and it´s the one in your lap now. Fold it back up the way he had it, child, sleeves in first. There. Now you know what you´re keeping.”
He read it at his kitchen table, the morning it came out, with his coffee going cold at his elbow, because his wife had learned over the years not to say a word to Otis until the paper was folded. It was a short notice, a few lines, set in the same type as the cotton prices and the Rotary luncheon, Bessie Burton, of the Negro community, has been named director of recreation. He read it twice.
He did not think of himself as a hard man. He had never laid a hand on anybody who hadn’t first put himself in the way of it, and he gave to the church, and one bad year he had carried a family on his books three seasons without a cross word, and he would have told you, and meant it, that he held nothing against the colored people of this county, who were, as a class, patient, and mostly well-meaning, and tolerable folks, and in need of looking after. What he held against the notice was the arithmetic of it. He turned it over like a coin he suspected. There had been a woman, a white woman with a name in three churches, a good woman, a safe woman, who everybody had figured would get it, and that man had stepped right around her. A man hired from Hattiesburg, out of the piney woods, who hadn’t been in the Delta long enough to learn to be afraid of it. Elwyn Ward had gone and put a colored woman in the chair, with a title, and a desk, and money to spend, over the heads of the people who had been born to say where such things went. It wasn’t that it would work, he told himself; it would not work. It was that it had been done at all, plain as day, in print, between the soybeans and the Rotary, like it was nothing, no more worth remarking on than the weather.
He thought about what comes to a man who goes against the grain, and he found, a little to his own discomfort, that he knew the answer by heart and could have recited it in his sleep. It wasn’t a plan. That was what he would have said, if anyone asked, and no one would. It was only that a place like this had a weather of its own, and a man who walked out in it with his coat open was going to learn about the weather. Nobody had to teach him. You can’t un-ring a bell, and you can’t talk a hornet’s nest into being a bird’s nest, and some things you let alone because they will tend to themselves. He folded the paper. His wife began to speak. He never once crossed the levee road, not then and not later. He didn’t need to. But in the summers that followed, on certain nights, when the dishes were done and the heat lay in the yard like a wet dog, he would walk out past the edge of his own lawn, where the light from the house gave out, and stand at the back fence among the crape myrtle, and listen to what came across that levee road. A cheer, a bat, a whistle. He told his wife, once, when she asked what on earth he was doing out there, that he was listening for rain. And she looked up at a sky that hadn’t held a cloud in six weeks, and said nothing, and went in.
He was not a villain. That was the trouble with him and with the whole long line of him: he was no villain, and it made no difference, because a thing like the thing that was coming has no need of villains to build it. All it asks for is a great many decent men standing at the backs of their own yards, listening, and saying it’s the weather, and folding the paper.
“Now I’ll tell you what a curtain is good for.
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There was a room behind the shop where I did my work, and between that room and the fitting room hung a curtain the color of weak tea, and when I took the position, a colored woman hired to sew and keep out of the way, Mrs. Ward herself, who never said a thing she didn’t mean, told me the curtain was there for the customers’ privacy. And so it was. It was also the finest listening post in Washington County, because nobody in the history of the world has ever thought to count the other side of a curtain as a place where a person might be sitting, with pins in her mouth and a hem across her lap, hearing every word. I knew the two of them by their shoes. Mrs. Ward’s came in quick and quiet, a woman who owned her own floor. Mrs. Carter’s came in slower, a woman carrying weight that had nothing to do with her size. They’d shut the fitting-room door, and anybody passing would think what anybody is meant to think, that two white ladies of standing were back there deciding on the length of a skirt. It was the one room in Greenville where two such women could close a door and not be asked a thing.
“They will vote yes to a ball field,” Mrs. Carter said, one afternoon. “They will not vote yes to a Negro anything. So we will not bring them a Negro anything. We will bring them a ball field.” “And the sponsors?” “The sponsors will see their own names on a shirt. A man will sign for a boy in a ball cap quicker than he will sign for a cause. Put his name on the front and he thinks it is his own idea.” A pause, and the sound of a person smoothing a skirt that had no wrinkle in it. “You never ask a man to be brave, Jimmie. You ask him to be sensible, and you show him the sums, and you let him think he’s been generous. Brave comes later, if it comes at all. Mostly it does not need to”
“He will not stop,” Mrs. Ward said. She meant her husband. I did not need her to say so. “No,” said Mrs. Carter. “I did not bring that man up from Hattiesburg to watch him stop.” And then, lower: “I only mean to see that he does not get crushed in the going. A town like this will let Elwyn Ward build whatever he likes, so long as it is slow, and so long as it is quiet, and so long as he never once says out loud what he is building. It’s a piano, Jimmie. You do not lift it. You move it an inch at a time with a rug underneath, so the floor never knows.”
I ran my needle through that hem, slow, and I thought: there is a floor, and there are people living under the floor. Neither one of those women gave it a thought. They were good women, and they were slicker than the men they had to get around, and what they were doing was hard and it was real, and when it was done there would be boys with light to play by. But I sat on my side of that curtain and I knew what they could not know, which was what the rug was made of. My mama used to say that when two elephants fight it’s the grass that gets trampled, and I’ll tell you she wasn’t talking about elephants. That rug was us, the ones on the other side of the levee wall. We were the ones who would stand where the piano had passed, and we were the ones the town would remember when it was angry and a man was too tall to reach. I didn’t say it. A woman with pins in her mouth says nothing; she has been taught the value of it. I only noticed that Mrs. Carter, at the last, took a letter from her handbag and read it, and folded it small, and put it back, and that she didn’t say what it said, and Mrs. Ward didn’t ask. The two of them sat a minute longer behind that closed door, being, for that one minute, nobody’s but their own. I’ve pondered that minute for fifty years. I’d have liked, if it had been up to me, to hand them both a cup of water, and I never did, because of the curtain.”
“I’ll tell you about the dogs, because that’s where I learned him.
We went out into the bottoms in the dead of the year, when the cypress stood bare and the black earth had gone hard and cold under the horses, and he brought the hounds, the Walkers, a big lean brindled pack he fed himself out of a washtub, cornmeal and drippings and something he would never name, stirring it with a paddle like a woman making lye soap. He wouldn’t let anybody else do it. I asked him once, and he said a dog that has been hungry will remember it the rest of its life, and it’ll make a worse dog of him. I thought, Mr. Ward, you are not talking about dogs. He knew the weight of what he´d just dropped, and he knew I was the one standing there to catch it.
Out there the hounds went ahead of us in the dark with their voices going up like something being poured out, and a man who has hunted with them long enough learns to read every note: the strike, when one finds the scent, and the long cold-trail moan, and then that change in the tongue, high and sure, that means treed, that means come on. We rode behind on the horses with the lantern swinging, and the whole cold wood smelled of leaf rot and creek water and woodsmoke, and I was, for those few days at a time, the happiest man in Mississippi, and sober for most of it, which tells you what those woods were to me. Before we went in, every time, he counted. He stood in the yard in the gray with the lantern, and he said each dog by name, Junior first, because Junior was the champion and he never let that dog forget it, and then the rest, and then the horses, and then, last of all, in the same voice, no louder and no softer, Shorty. I was the last thing he counted. Every time. And when we came out he did it again, even if it was only the two of us, even if the rest had been sent home with a sack of something. He said it standing there with his breath smoking, like a deacon reading the roll in a church he didn’t altogether trust to remember.
One night a dog didn’t come back. A young female, whose name I will keep, since he kept it. We made camp at the edge of a slough and I slept, because I’m a man who can sleep through the Judgment, and I woke at three in the morning with the fire burned down to its last red, and he was sitting up on a log with the lantern between his boots, still counting. Not out loud. His lips were moving. He was going over the names the way an old woman tells her beads, and every time he came to the end he started over from the first and left a gap where she should have been. I said, “Mr. Ward. She ain´t lost to these bottoms. A hound like that got a map of these woods bred right into her bones. She´ll come on out.” “I expect she will,” he said. He didn’t look up. “What is it,” I said, “you keep counting up out here? The woods don´t keep no ledgers.” He was quiet so long I thought he had gone off somewhere in his head. The fire ticked. Out in the slough a bullfrog tried one note and thought better of it. And then he told me, not the way you tell a thing about yourself, but sideways, the way he told everything, the way a man hands you a coat by the sleeve. “There was a woman,” he said, “kept a lamp lit in her window every night after her husband went down to the river and didn’t come back. Everybody told her to put it out. Said it was wasting oil. Said he was gone, and a lamp wouldn’t bring him. And she said, it’s not for him. She said, it’s for whoever else is out there. That was all. He didn’t explain it. He wasn’t a man for explaining. I sat across the coals from him and thought of the poles going up along the levee road, those great white lamps set over a field where the dark used to come down at dusk, and I thought, oh. I thought, oh, Lord, that´s what they are.”
The young dog came in at first light, mud to the shoulders and ashamed of herself, and he got down on one knee in the leaves and ran his hands over her, every inch, ears and legs and ribs, like a mother checking a child for fever, and said her name, and counted her. I looked off at the trees, because there are some things a man ought to be left to do in private, even in the middle of a wood. But I’ll tell you what I felt, before she came in, sitting there in the dark with him. The woods had gone still. Hounds will do that sometimes, all at once, when something passes over, an owl, or a change of weather, or what the old folks call a coming. The whole cold bottom held its breath. And I had a feeling I can’t account for, the feeling a man gets when he hears the river rising a county away: not yet his trouble, but already on the road to being it. I said nothing. I looked at him on his log with the lantern and his two big hands open on his knees, counting, and I knew, the way you know a thing in a dream, that there was one number he was never going to get to come out right. It wasn’t going to be a dog. It wasn’t going to be me. And I would have given up the house he built me, and the roof, and the step, to be wrong about it.”
“It was the last night of the lights, and this time every one of us knew it. We heard the whistle blew at ten as it always did, and the boys always groaned, and went on anyway, as boys will, and one after another the big banks of lights went out over the field, thunk, thunk, thunk, from the far end in, until the last one stood alone above home plate like a single white eye, and then it went too. The moths fell. They came down through the dark in a long soft ruin, onto the infield and the grass and the hair of the children, and the crowd began breaking up and going home along the levee road, talking low, because they knew, all of them, that in the Delta, a Black man´s sorrow had to be carried small and tucked away, lest the town mistake it for a threat.”
“And we on the near side, on our porches, with our own lights burning, heard it end. We heard the car doors and the gate chains and the mothers calling boys by their names, and then the particular silence that comes after, a silence with a field in it. Some of us, some summers, walked out to the edge of our yards, where our light gave out, and stood there, not knowing what to call what we were doing. We said it was the river. We said it so long it took on the shape of something true, which is how most of what a town knows about itself comes to be known. But it was never the river. The river has taken a great deal from this country, and it has been accused of a good many things, and in all its long history it has never once been accused of that: of lighting a lamp for children the dark had sent in, and holding it there against the whole weight of a state.
We knew what it was. We knew who it was for, and who had built it, and what a town like ours does in the end to a man who builds such a thing, slowly, and quietly, and where no one is made to say it aloud. We knew. And we left our porch lights burning, and kept our own counsel, and waited to find out what we would be.
But hear it now from the other side of that road, from those of us who were sent in by the dark and then, one summer, were not.”
“The poles are gone. They rotted, or were pulled, or were hauled off by somebody who needed good pine, and the field is grass again, and the town has made a great show of forgetting which side of the road it was on.
The record of how Mr. Ward died was sealed, and then it was lost, and then it was said never to have been; a Friday in June has ninety minutes in it and four hours more that no one has been made to account for. Let them keep their paper. Whatever else was taken, by a flood that never came or a ledger that never was, this was not, and cannot be. Ask any man who wore the shirt. Ask him his number. He will tell you without thinking, and then he’ll tell you the name on the card, and how it felt to say it out loud to a white man who waited.
The lamp was never for the husband lost at the river. It was for whoever else was out there. We were out there. We were the ones that lamp was for, and Mr. Ward lit it, and kept it burning as long as they would let him, and then longer. Elwyn Ward counted us in. Every one, by name, twelve teams of us, and the mothers, and the fathers standing bareheaded at the wire. There are a great many people who have spent a great many years trying to make him not count, and there is not a one left in Greenville, Mississippi, with the power to count us back out. And when the roll is called, in that field and every field we have made since, we say what we said then, ten years old, loud enough to make the boy next to us laugh. Here.”
