Gone Crazy in Alabama

  “With Old Man Crump?” Mr. Lucas asked. He almost coughed.

  “Yes, sir,” Jimmy Trotter said. I mimicked, “Yes, sir,” just hating the South in him. I didn’t care if he caught me or not.

  Both Mr. Lucas and Uncle Darnell shared a laugh about Old Man Crump. “Son,” Mr. Lucas said, “I know some World War Two cats who can show you a thing or two if you really want to fly. Leave Crump and his crop duster alone.”

  “You know that’s right,” Uncle Darnell said.

  “I wouldn’t mind getting into an aviation program,” JimmyTrotter said. “I just want to fly.”

  Fern piped, “Like a bird in the sky.”

  Ma Charles laughed. “Scratch your back for feathers, son. Can’t feel a one? I guess God told you.” There was a twinkle in her eyes so I knew she meant him no harm. Of course not. She just loved JimmyTrotter.

  “Oh, son,” Big Ma said. “They don’t let coloreds fly planes.” Uncle D said, “Ma,” but Big Ma wouldn’t stop. “And I don’t blame them. Say what you want, but a colored man’s mind isn’t made for flying an airplane. Too many dials and levers. Too many decisions to make. The colored man can be a good many things. A preacher. An insurance salesman. A mayor of a colored town. Educated, respectable things, but he can’t go thinking he can do everything and anything. He can’t go above himself. Suppose he makes a mistake up in the air with all the people watching?”

  Mr. Lucas said in a low, sad voice, “Ophelia . . .” but JimmyTrotter said nothing. Nothing. And if I weren’t a little steamed at him for always taking Vonetta’s side I would have said black people have the power to be whatever they wanted. I would have said don’t let the Man keep you down, even though this time the Man was my grandmother. But JimmyTrotter was happy to be oppressed and that was fine with me.

  Uncle D, Mr. Lucas, JimmyTrotter, Ma Charles, Big Ma, Fern, and I all looked toward the TV screen. Our excitement grew as the picture and sound came in clearer and clearer. The camera switched from the Saturn V rocket in Florida to mission control in Houston, a roomful of men in mostly white short-sleeve shirts, and then to the crowd, where our former president and his wife, LBJ and Lady Bird Johnson, stood squinting, smiling, and looking up. We cheered when we saw a black person in the crowd. At last!

  Clouds of white smoke seemed to float out of the tall rocket, held up by the hugging arms of a kind of straight Eiffel Tower. JimmyTrotter said the white clouds were there to keep the rocket cool, but I doubted anything could keep that rocket cool.

  Every ten or fifteen seconds or so, the mission control person counted down by “T-minus” and threw in “We are a go,” while clouds of smoke billowed and they showed the rocket from close up and then from far away.

  The countdown clock showing on the screen was now closing in on two minutes and counting. I doubted they could stop the launch if they wanted to. The Saturn V rocket seemed too monstrous to be made to heel by the control room in Houston.

  I hoped my parents were also tuned in to the launch and counting along with us—Pa and Mrs. by TV and Cecile by radio. I knew my father and stepmother would be thoroughly amazed, and my mother would see the act of man landing on the moon as cause to write an oppressed woman’s poem. There was nothing Cecile couldn’t turn into a poem. Even so, it was nice to picture all of us watching or listening to the same thing at the same time. But if Miss Trotter showed up on Ma Charles’s porch, now that would be something to see.

  Everyone was exited but Fern, who folded her arms. “Is this it? Is this the blastoff?”

  I knew that “Phooey” look on Fern’s face. She probably felt gypped about the event that the news kept promising would be the most exciting thing for mankind to ever witness. As far as she could see, there wasn’t any magic. Just a roomful of men sitting at control panels, crowds of people waiting for something to happen, and a tall space rocket with a lot of white smoke surrounding it.

  “Hang on,” JimmyTrotter told Fern. “It’s coming. Just don’t blink.”

  Fern moved away from JimmyTrotter and sat closer to me. Vonetta mouthed, Baby, and Fern kicked her. I moved Fern to my left side to keep them separated. At least someone kicked Vonetta. That was good enough for me.

  The mission control man reported that one of the astronauts said, “It feels good,” although I doubted sitting on a million tons of rocket fuel could feel good at all. JimmyTrotter’s precious Saturn V rocket stood ready and Ma Charles shook her tambourine. Before we knew it, the Eiffel Tower’s arms were letting go of the rocket and we were all counting down with mission control. Even Big Ma and Ma Charles. All of us.

  Five

  Four

  Three

  Two . . .

  Klan

  The next day JimmyTrotter told Miss Trotter he was hopping over the creek to watch more of Apollo 11. “I’ll be back in the morning for milking. I’m gone.”

  “I’m gone!” Vonetta and Fern mocked.

  “Go on, then,” Miss Trotter called after them. “If you call that gone.”

  Vonetta wanted to ride JimmyTrotter’s bike, and he said, “It’s yours while you’re here. Ride it all you want.”

  “Hear that?” Vonetta said to me.

  “Just don’t go too far ahead of us,” I told her. “Hear that? And walk it over the bridge, Vonetta. Walk it!”

  Vonetta sucked her teeth and ran off to get the bike. She’d better run.

  JimmyTrotter smiled. He thought it was funny, the way Vonetta and I fussed with each other. But then, he was used to it, seeing how Miss Trotter and Ma Charles kept up their sniping from the Trotter side of the creek to the Charles side.

  Ma Charles was delighted to have JimmyTrotter in the house, whether he was dropping off milk bottles or bringing one of Miss Trotter’s remedies that Ma Charles had no intention of trying. I could see the personal victory swell up in her whenever she had her sister’s great-grandson under her roof, at her table, or in front of her television.

  “Make sure you feed him well, daughter,” she said to Big Ma. “Send him back over the creek with some meat on his bones.” She shook her head in make-believe sorrow. “Poor Miss Trotter. So fragile she can’t lift a pot.”

  JimmyTrotter laughed and said, “Great-granny feeds me just fine.”

  “Now that’s how you’re supposed to raise them! Loyal and respectful,” Ma Charles said. “That’s right, boy. Don’t tell on your old great-granny.”

  JimmyTrotter gave her a “Yes, ma’am.”

  Big Ma set a plate before JimmyTrotter with the same amount she’d heap onto Pa’s or Uncle Darnell’s plates.

  “Why can’t I get that much?” I asked.

  “I’m trying to grow you into a young lady. Not a horse.”

  To that, Fern neighed and Vonetta whinnied and shot in a “Greedy gut.” Vonetta felt safe at the table, seated out of kicking range, next to her protector, JimmyTrotter.

  “Throw another chop on her plate, daughter,” Ma Charles said. “And some butter beans. Some gravy. Can’t have her running across the creek eating up all your great-granny’s weeds and berries,” she told JimmyTrotter. “Go on, daughter. A nice big piece. We’re doing mighty fine on this side of the creek. Make sure you tell your old granny how well you’re fed.”

  “The Lord don’t like ugly,” Big Ma told her mother.

  “Any more’n he likes you celebrating the troubles of others, be they rich or poor.”

  Big Ma had taken to reading her supermarket gossip news out in the open, and Ma Charles was none too pleased about “these chirrens today.” The constant coverage of the space program had taken its toll on Big Ma, and she missed hearing about other news in the world.

  “Don’t know why you care so much about the troubles of rich folk,” Ma Charles scolded. “Daughter, I might not agree with men poking up in God’s heaven, but that’s news. Now, if you had a husband—”

  “Come on, son, and watch your ’Pollo ’Leven,” Big Ma said, knocking off vowels like she was knocking off the suggestion that she
needed to get married. “May God show them astronauts and their families a mercy.”

  JimmyTrotter scooted before the television and I scooted along with him. I wasn’t into the space race, but there was no way I’d miss the moon landing.

  I almost fell asleep on JimmyTrotter’s shoulder but Caleb bayed long, fitful notes and wouldn’t stop. We all looked around. A rumbling pounded beneath me. JimmyTrotter sprang up in one motion and ran to the window. Caleb bayed on and on.

  Big Ma said, “Boy! Get from that window! You know better.”

  “I want to see them, Aunt Ophelia.”

  “You’ll see nothing. You know what it is.”

  “See what?” I wanted to know.

  “Klan riding,” JimmyTrotter said. “Sounds like a dozen of ’em.”

  “Riding horses?” Fern was excited.

  “Get from that window,” Ma Charles said to Fern. “It’s no Wild West show.”

  “I want to see the horses,” Fern said.

  “And I told you”—Big Ma was firm—“there’s no horses to see.”

  Before I had sense enough to stop myself, I was in the window—not even crouching, but every inch of me standing tall. The riders had long ridden past us and into the pines. It was too dark to see horses but I could still feel their hooves punching the ground our house stood on. I could see white ghosts moving in the night, and torches against the black. I could see the sheets. White sheets.

  “Get out that window, gal! Get out!” Big Ma shouted at my back.

  I might as well have been twenty-one and not twelve. In my bones I knew I had outgrown my fear of Big Ma and that there was nothing she could do to me, but I stepped away from the window. I was both afraid of the Klan and fascinated by them. They weren’t in a newspaper article or on the evening news; they were here. I felt them pounding their horses’ hooves into our land, and saw them riding past the fields and into the pines. The way Caleb sang, loud and sad, I couldn’t tell if he was baying at them or if he wanted to be with them. It was a long, sad song.

  “JimmyTrotter.” Ma Charles’s voice had lost its cackling. “Don’t worry about your great-granny. None of this is new to her. She knows what to do. She’ll be all right.”

  “Yes’m.”

  There was no sympathy for me. Big Ma scolded, “Delphine. I can’t understand why you went running to that window, looking for trouble. I don’t care what kind of power they’re shouting about in Oakland and in Brooklyn. You don’t know nothing about nothing down here.”

  “Besides,” Ma Charles said, “no secret who’s underneath them hoods and sheets.”

  “Ma,” Big Ma steamed, “I’m trying to tell her something to save her life while she’s down here.”

  Ma Charles behaved as if she didn’t hear and that in itself was funny, but I didn’t dare crack a smile. “Just count all those who have horses in this one-cow town.” She said “hoss” with no r.

  Fern said, “Two-cow town,” but no one was listening.

  “There’s a way to stay alive and a way to be dead,” Big Ma said. “Your father surely didn’t send you down here to be among the dead. He surely didn’t.” Fern mimicked her. He surely didn’t. “That’s one phone call I don’t intend to make to your Pa: to inform him his child is among the dead, strung up or shot up by the KKK. Girl, don’t give me cause to make that call.”

  Ma Charles shook her head and said, “Poor Caleb. Only reason that dog carried on is he sniffed out his litter kin when the Klan rode by. He was just barking and pining for his brother and sisters. That’s all.”

  JimmyTrotter nodded in agreement. “It’s been years but Caleb most likely smells them whenever the sheriff drives by.”

  It took a few seconds for me to hear what Ma Charles and JimmyTrotter were saying. Saying as calm as they might say Mr. Lucas grows pecan trees.

  “The sheriff’s the Klan?” I asked. My voice loud, excited. No wonder cousin JimmyTrotter had given him a bunch of “Yes, sir”s.

  Ma Charles nodded. “All the Charleses on the white side are Klan. Then there’s my Henry’s people.” She beamed. “The colored side.”

  “Ma!” Big Ma said. “Yawl stop talking about this. No one needs to know this stuff.”

  It was all still swimming in my head faster than I could really grab hold of it, let alone accept it. “Our relatives are KKK?”

  “That’s not your relative,” Big Ma said. “Just let it lie.”

  Ma Charles said, “If the bloodhound don’t let it lie, why should she? That’s not a lazy dog. That’s a sad dog. Miss his kin. Calling out for all them pups he nipped at.” Then she said thoughtfully, “Maybe I’ll call Davey Lee. See if there’s a female for Caleb.”

  “You mean have the Klan come over to this house?” My head was spinning. My heart was beating fast. This was crazy. Alabama crazy.

  Ma Charles did me the way she did Big Ma. She went on like she didn’t hear how crazy it all sounded.

  “That poor dog needs a wife like you need a husband.”

  “A mercy, Lord. Throw me down a mercy, please, Lord. She’s going to wake up every Trotter, Charles, and Gaither with this old stuff.”

  Keeping Up with the Kennedys

  On the second day after the space launch Big Ma said to JimmyTrotter, “Now, son, you’ve watched enough flying spaceships for today. I need to see my program.”

  By “her program” she meant the other channel, whose midday news show was more interested in the drowning of that secretary in Cape Cod than in the moon mission. The astronauts could have shaken hands with moon men on live television. As long as one of the Kennedys was in the news, Big Ma had to know all about it.

  JimmyTrotter was too respectful to utter an “Aw, shucks” and too old to poke out his bottom lip and pout. He scooted up like he had been sitting on hot coals and said, “Yes’m, Aunt Ophelia.” Yes’m, and not the full-out “ma’am,” a word that belonged back in the slavery days.

  He strode over and bent low to kiss Ma Charles. “I have to be going. See about Miss Trotter.”

  “You stay put, son,” Ma Charles fussed. “You can see your spacemen right here.” But at this point, they weren’t showing the telecast of the real Apollo 11 spacecraft, only a simulation of it racing toward the moon. And at times we heard the astronauts’ voices going “Roger this” and “Roger that” to mission control.

  JimmyTrotter grabbed his basket of eggs and went back over to kiss Big Ma, who wiped his kiss away like she’d been buzzed by a fly. He waved to me a good-bye and left.

  “See that, daughter?” Ma Charles said. “Don’t you feel ashamed, chasing that boy outta here? Heaven knows what he’ll tell his old great-granny about our un-Christianly kindness.”

  Big Ma said, “Mama, I can’t listen to this program and listen to you.” That was practically a “Hush up,” although our grandmother didn’t dare say those words to her mother.

  Ma Charles went on tsk-tsking about “these chirren today.”

  “I’ll tell you, daughter. I won’t be here forever to take care of you.”

  Big Ma uttered a faint “Yes, Ma,” mesmerized by the darkness and glow of black-and-white photos of the sorry Ted Kennedy and the drowned blond secretary who could not be saved. I doubted my grandmother blinked once during the news show—even when there was no more actual news to report about the drowning. Her eyes were pulled into the television screen like JimmyTrotter’s had been as he hoped for a glimpse of the astronauts instead of those simulations and the broadcasts of mission control. Like JimmyTrotter, Big Ma was hoping for more.

  I knew which parts Big Ma liked. She liked the parts about how the Kennedys were like kings and queens in America and how tragedy followed anyone named Kennedy. Big Ma wouldn’t vote for a Kennedy, but in secret, she liked both the ballroom gowns and the pillbox hats Jackie wore as Mrs. Kennedy, and frowned upon the slacks and shades she wore as Mrs. Onassis. She liked seeing the young, important Kennedy families, and in her way, she liked the sadness of the country weeping for th
em. It was the story of them that she liked. When the newscaster gravely reminded us that this new tragedy sealed the final ending to “our nation’s Camelot story,” Big Ma said, “Yes, sir. It surely does.”

  Ma Charles wasn’t finished fussing with Big Ma. “But you’ll send me to my rest worrying about my only child.”

  Big Ma said, “Don’t worry on my account. The Lord will provide for me.”

  “Wish you took as much interest in a husband like you do in them Kennedys.”

  “Can’t hear, Ma.”

  “Won’t hear,” her mother corrected. “You know, Elijah Lucas won’t be eligible forever. One day you’ll look over and—”

  Big Ma finished it for her: “Smell his wife’s pecan pies cooling on the windowsill.” Big Ma added, “I have a husband waiting for me in heaven. Don’t need another.” She pulled herself out of the chair to turn up the volume on the television and then plopped back down.

  “Can I make you some tea?” I asked my great-grandmother, who continued her tsk-tsking even if Big Ma couldn’t be moved.

  “All I’ve done, I’ve done for that one there.” Ma Charles pointed at her daughter, but Big Ma refused to look her way.

  “I’ll boil the water,” I said.

  “I don’t want tea,” Ma Charles snapped. “Tea won’t fix this curse.”

  “What curse?”

  Big Ma sighed, long and heavy, a moan beneath it. Still, her eyes stayed pulled toward the newscaster.

  Ma Charles began to tell me about the curse. That Big Ma had to wait ten years before she had Junior, my pa. And then another dozen years before Darnell came.

  “Maybe she was sick,” I offered quietly. I thought about Mrs. at home sick, throwing up at the sight and smell of food.

  “Sick? What sick? I tell you, it was a curse put on my own child to get back at me.” My nose and mouth scrunched up in disbelief but Ma Charles went on. “Nothing would give my father’s other daughter more pleasure than to see my generations cut off before they got started. The Lord shows you, be careful what you wish on others. You’ll wish it on yourself.” She almost smiled, but then fixed her face, probably so as not to gloat over Miss Trotter’s family tragedy.