Red River

  Ted has just turned sixteen and is short for his age, although not so short he has to suffer the indignity of a nickname like Half-pint or Peewee. His do-or-die hustle on the court, so unlike his quiet demeanor off, assures his place on the high school basketball team, but he is convinced that another growth spurt, just one or two inches more, would go a long way toward improving his performance both on the squad and with the girls, specifically the sandy-haired Billes girl. Ted is skinny but muscular, unable yet to grow the kind of mustache he knows will confer increased stature. His future hasn’t yet shaped up with the substance or speed he longs for, and he is keen to get on with his life in some pursuit that doesn’t involve horses or plows or crops or unruly children and a chalkboard.

  Every so often he is tempted to just pick up and go away from this town, hop a freight train and ride to wherever the tracks lead. But today held his interest, a mystery. There was something thick and dangerous enveloping the church, hidden just beneath the veneer of polite words, festering underneath the niceties, and he wants to listen to what the adults talk about over dinner.

  Another wagon pulls up outside, and Ted offers to carry the flat pan of ollenberry cobbler to the women inside. He maneuvers up the front steps, past the porch where GrandJack and a cluster of old men congregate, and makes his fifth delivery inside the house. Grandma Emma has pulled up a chair and sits by Great-Grandma Lucy’s bedside in the front room, stroking her mother-in-law’s thin hand. The old woman looks so delicate and shrunken that Ted almost believes he can see through the sagging folds on her thin arms where they lie limp atop the fancy starburst-pattern red quilt. The quilt is brought out only for company. As soon as the guests leave, it will be carefully refolded and stored.

  Ted slows his steps as he passes through to the kitchen. His great-grandmother is not only alert but talking to his grandmother.

  “He say he never step foot back in Louisiana, long as he live,” Lucy insists. “Say he never come back.”

  “He dead, Grandma Lucy,” Emma explains. “Your son is dead.” She waits for the old woman to grasp the meaning of her words before continuing, feeding her one fact at a time. “Died in Oklahoma.”

  “Dead,” Lucy repeats. “So many dead.” Her eyes, clouded, are sunk deep in a face ravaged by age.

  “Noby say to bury him where he born,” says Emma. “He put aside money for the burying here, not in Oklahoma.”

  “Oklahoma?”

  “The body be here. In Bagdad Cemetery.”

  “God bring my boy home?” Lucy finally asks.

  “Your son, my husband. God bring Noby Smith home to us at last.”

  “Couldn’t keep them brothers in the same room,” says Lucy. “I lay that at Israel’s door. A father ’sposed to love his sons equal.”

  “That’s all behind us now, Mama Lucy.”

  “Lord, that man preach,” Lucy says. “You hear him preach?”

  “Yessam, Mama Lucy,” Emma says. “You thinking of Noby’s father with the preaching.”

  “Why he don’t preach for us now?” Lucy pushes.

  “We talking about your son, not your husband. Noby, your son, he dead, Grandma Lucy,” Emma says patiently. “We bury him not a hour ago.”

  “Dead?” Lucy says. “Nothing but dead piled far as the eye can reach. Bones still coming up from the courthouse ground.”

  “You mixing together your husband and your son, Grandma Lucy. Noby’s father got out the courthouse. No need bringing that up. We mourning Noby today.”

  Emma continues to stroke Lucy’s hand until the old woman calms and closes her eyes, but now Emma’s face is set tight and fierce. Ted doesn’t say anything, just slips past unnoticed as he carries the cobbler to the kitchen.

  The back room is a hive of activity. Ted’s mother, Lenora, is in the kitchen with the rest of the wives and daughters, wrapping the casseroles and bowls of stew to guard against bugs and to keep pilfering hands from getting at them, covering the biscuits and three-layer cakes with towels to keep them moist. Since the telegram informing them of Noby’s death from consumption, and his wish to be buried in Louisiana, Lenora has drawn even deeper into herself. She gives Ted an absent smile when he delivers the cobbler into her hands.

  Unwilling to stay tucked up behind the women, Ted drifts back outside to the front porch, where Jackson and the other old men hold court. Ted finds a place on the lowest of the front steps, his chin almost level with GrandJack’s feet. Emma’s front porch shelters the oldest of the old from around Colfax, most seventy and above. A small parade of women brings out plates of food for their men and then retreats back inside. They split off cleanly, women from men, tending to the needs of guests, visiting among themselves, mourning in their own way.

  GrandJack sits erect in a straight-back pine chair, dressed in his Sunday best, his dark jacket smooth, a sharp crease steamed into his pants, a freshly starched and ironed collar, the old, misshapen brown fedora pulled down snug on his head. Ted feels as if he is eavesdropping, an invisible youth sitting here among his elders. Even his father and Uncle Andrew, well into their fifties, younger by a generation, seem out of place.

  “Buried Easter Sunday, of all days,” Jackson says. The older men nod their graying heads in agreement, knowingly, a heavy sadness to the acknowledgment.

  “The past don’t let go,” says a man in the group. He looks to be in his early eighties, but his age is difficult to determine. The features of his cocoa-colored face are thin and sharp, although he has a weak chin and has lost all of his upper teeth. He wears a stiff straw hat, and tight, woolly pillows of white fringe poke out underneath.

  “Not supposed to,” says Jackson. “If we let the past go, how we know about those hundred colored men march down to Colfax and vote after the Civil War? My father and Noby’s father done that.”

  “I remember,” the old man says. “I was one year short of twenty-one, too young. I couldn’t vote that first time, but I remember. Wasn’t safe.” The old man pauses, his rheumy eyes lingering on Jackson’s face. “I knowed your daddy. Noby’s too. Good men, willing to stand up.”

  He leans back in his chair, closes his eyes, lost in his own memories. No one else speaks, waiting. “I voted, though,” he finally says without opening his eyes. “Twice.” He leaves his faraway state behind, is with them again. “We vote Republicans in to Colfax in 1872 and stood down Democrats trying to steal the election in ’78. Wasn’t no more voting after that.”

  “I never got the chance to vote,” Jackson says. “Not even the one time.”

  “Colored could vote, GrandJack?” Ted asks.

  Nathan-Green shoots him a withering warning glance for silence in this gathering of elders. “Keep quiet and listen,” he says.

  “Least L’il Man show interest,” snaps Jackson. Ted doesn’t remember ever seeing his grandfather this testy. “Your daddy never had curiosity,” he says more deliberately, directing his comment to Ted, leaning back in his chair. Jackson shifts his focus once again, looks squarely into Nathan-Green’s face. “You never got your sons to shout their name,” Jackson says, accusing. “How he going to know who he is? You let tradition die, too lazy to honor the past. Andrew know better.”

  The two middle-aged brothers, Nathan-Green and Andrew, sit motionless on the front porch, side by side. They are as quiet and unresisting as if they are ten years old, caught dipping their finger into the butter churn. Silently, they endure their father’s rage. “Letting go of the past is like letting go of the Lord,” Jackson says.

  Nathan-Green looks away, says nothing in his own defense.

  Much of this is lost on Ted. It has been a long day for everyone, starting before dawn with preparations for both Easter Sunday and the funeral, and then a full day spent at the church and cemetery. There is tension in the air, the mingling of memory and regret loosening tongues and outing thoughts long unsaid, but airing family business in public is unexpected and out of character.

  “Was a time colored men vote just like white.??
? Jackson addresses the group at large again, continuing his thread of thought as if the awkward moment didn’t happen.

  Ted wants to draw attention away from his father, still smarting with the shame of a public reprimand. “Was Grandpa Noby in the riot, GrandJack?”

  Jackson Tademy’s face pulls back into itself, his lips tight. “Wasn’t no riot,” he says slowly, his voice a harsh whisper. “Don’t never let nobody tell you it was a riot. I was there. Your grandfather Noby was there. Our fathers was both there. It was a massacre.”

  The word massacre still rings in Ted’s head as Grandma Emma bursts through the front door of the farmhouse, the wire screen banging behind her.

  “Come help me, Ted,” she says. “Take the plates out for the hog.”

  It is a strange request, the women’s work she asks him to do, but he has no recourse but to obey. He collects as many of the dirty dishes as he can carry, stacking them one on top of the other, and takes them behind the house to scrape the half-eaten food into the pig’s slop bucket.

  “No need to stir up that old mess today,” Emma hisses to the men on the porch once Ted is gone. “Leave that boy out of it, you hear?”

  Figure 30. Lenora Smith Tademy

  Figure 31. 1936 basketball champions, back: Irving Hall, Ted Tademy (center, holding basketball), Willie James; front: Owen Brew, I. V. Billes

  Chapter

  36

  1935

  Jackson unhitches the mule and walks in from the field toward the house. The day is bracing and chilly, but the wet season hasn’t arrived, not yet. A string of crepe myrtle trees marks a path all the way from the house down to the edge of the bayou. It is so late in the season that their gauzy dark pink blooms are almost gone. Amy sits in her usual spot on the front porch of their farmhouse, framed by a cedar tree on one side and their mulberry tree on the other, swatting now and again at the last of the fall flies. Polly rests in the rocker kitty-corner to her daughter-in-law with her eyes closed. Jackson never tires of the familiar scene, of Amy waiting for his return, of his mother still spry enough to get around by herself, although slowly, after a century of living, both waiting for him. Amy embroiders a green-and-red-threaded pattern on the edge of a cotton pillowcase, her nose so close to the wood hoop it looks as if she is trying to smell the material. She hears him approach, lifts her head, and smiles.

  “Nathan-Green’s boy inside,” says Amy. “Into your books again. Walked from Colfax and been here since directly after school.”

  “What he want?” asks Jackson.

  “Won’t talk to no one but you,” replies Amy. “But I think it about college.”

  “He going,” says Jackson.

  “Ted the one to talk to, not me. May be he quiet, but he stubborn just the same.”

  “He a Tademy all right,” adds Polly, drawing herself awake. She has lost the last of her teeth, her lips cave in around her gums, and her eyes are so clouded over she has trouble making out anything beyond shapes, but she is still observant.

  “Sound like the two of you got the boy all figured out,” says Jackson.

  “His way fool some into thinking he just going along easy on the ride of life, but quiet don’t mean he don’t got appetites,” says Polly. “If there something he want, he fix on getting to it no matter what other folks throw in the path. I sees something in that boy.”

  “Just let me shake off the day’s dust,” Jackson says, “and then I’ll talk to him.”

  Jackson creaks when he walks now, his bones and joints in combined protest to all he has forced them to endure over the years. When he was younger, he thought he could go on strong forever. If he moves slowly now, deliberately, putting thought into each motion, if he swings his feet out of bed before trying to push himself up in the morning, if he adjusts positions often, though only slightly, whenever he sits for long periods, he can keep his aches and pains at a tolerable level. There is no denying he has gotten old. He and Amy both. Polly, on the other hand, seems to go on forever.

  Jackson spends more time now thinking than doing. It used to be that the days were so overfull, he’d hitch up the mule and plow half the night by the light of the moon. Turning the soil and turning his mind at the same time. Amy sometimes scolded when he stayed out too long, but she always fixed him a big breakfast come morning—minnows fresh-caught from the bayou, biscuits and syrup, soft, runny eggs fried in bacon grease, thick, warm milk from the cow, hot chicory coffee. “A skinny man with a big appetite,” she’d tease. It pleases her to coddle him, to cook his favorites, to iron his shorts and handkerchiefs, rub his feet, darn his socks, in the same way it has always pleased him to keep her from either the fields or a white woman’s kitchen. They came to agreement on this point early on. His wife’s only job is the Tademys, himself and the children. They never once violated the bargain, not in fifty-three years.

  Getting old means the gradual mutiny of his body, and too much time spent in the mazelike warren of his head, but all in all, Jackson knows he has much to be thankful for. He is at peace with God, never misses a Sunday going to church, owns the land he works, reaches out to help his neighbors whenever he can, and is fortunate enough to pull through life in tandem with a woman who fits him.

  For years he has worked tirelessly to breathe life into his father’s dream, and now Colfax has its own colored school, run by his son, a school his grandchildren and maybe their grandchildren can attend. Jackson has given each of his five offspring a good start, more than anyone would have thought possible when he was coming up, and given a plot of land to each of his sons to develop for themselves. His children. The mistlike haze of nostalgia thins, and reality intrudes. The specifics of his children don’t conform to his tidy accountings of his life’s blessings, but each has become a teacher, albeit of differing ability, interest, and application. Though he loves all five of his children, he harbors disappointment and regret too.

  Still, a new crop of Tademys is maturing, a new breed, not grounded enough in their understanding of the past or appreciation of the land to suit Jackson, but with an impatience that isn’t all bad. There is no clear heir apparent yet, the way Andrew emerged so early as the obvious one to take over Jackson’s work, but then Jackson himself was late in his own development. These new ones, the next generation, bear watching and cultivating.

  Of all his grandchildren, Ted visits the farm and Jackson’s library most often. If Jackson allowed it, his grandson would have three or four books pulled down from their places on the bookshelves at once, spread out at his feet, reading passages from first one and then another, like a hummingbird sampling nectar in a newly blooming field.

  “One at a time, L’il Man,” Jackson warned for years, until Ted understood the books would be there whenever he was ready. Three shelves full of knowledge, waiting for a beneficiary.

  “He waiting on you,” says Amy.

  Jackson leaves Amy and Polly on the front porch and goes inside to the front room of the farmhouse.

  Ted crowds seventeen years old, almost good as grown, and Jackson finds him curled up on the floor, his back to the wall, legs pulled up in an inverted V to provide support for the book, his favorite posture since Jackson taught him to read at age six. Ted once told Jackson that losing himself in the library was as good as playing basketball. Ted approaches each new addition to Jackson’s library in the same way, indirectly, patiently, postponing the pleasure, warming to the idea of the book in his head before ever allowing himself to touch it with his hands, sometimes delaying by a matter of weeks the moment when he finally cracks the spine of the book to read the pages inside.

  Jackson has accumulated more than fifty books over the years, not always in the best condition and seldom new. In Jackson’s view, a used book holds the promise of information in the same way as a new one, at a fraction of the cost. He owns a few volumes of fiction, not his favorite reading, but most of his collection are dense, impressively bound tomes, many purchased as incomplete sets. Three sturdy pine shelves run almost the
length of the wall, one above the other in neat rows. They hold encyclopedias, almanacs, teachers’ manuals, and several progressive-farmer magazines. He also has a special set-aside place for newspapers, a stack three feet high, curled and badly yellowed at the edges, with articles Jackson has saved for one reason or another. Only he is allowed to touch these, since one of the oldest newspapers almost turned to dust in his hands. Some go back to the last century.

  Preoccupied with his reading, Ted doesn’t look up when Jackson enters the room. The book in Ted’s hands is the Encyclopaedia Britannica, one of twenty-four in a set, an impressive purchase missing only five of the original volumes.

  “L’il Man, don’t never exchange health for wealth,” Jackson says as he eases himself into the chair. “Health not for sale. You just turn around and spend up your wealth trying to get it back.”

  Ted looks up. “Not a good day, GrandJack?”

  “Good as I got a right to expect, I guess,” says Jackson. “What brings you all the way out here to see us?”

  “Just reading and thinking. A couple years, I’ll be graduated, GrandJack.”

  “So what you gonna be? What you gonna do with your life?”

  “Something different, GrandJack,” says Ted.

  “Nothing finer than teaching.”

  “It’s just . . . What I like is to make something where there wasn’t anything there before.”

  “Like farming? Turning a crop? I see a lot of progressive in you. Let me make a progressive farmer out of you.”

  Ted shakes his head. “More like building a chicken coop or raising a house. Cutting the wood, figuring angles, how many pieces there need to be, how it comes together. Planning the roosting shelf, pitching the roof right so the water runs off but not too fast.”