Home In The Morning (27 page)

Now, Mama, you have to prepare yourself, he said slowly. I don’t know if it’s going to be all that easy.

It shouldn’t have been, but in the end it was.

On entering the courtroom, Mama nearly fainted catching sight of Bubba Ray parked on the defendants’ bench and dressed in a jailhouse jumpsuit. When the list of charges against him was read out loud by the bailiff, the list was so long Daddy couldn’t take it all in. He retreated within his mind to a hospital ward and began asking court officers if they knew where the requisitions were, growing increasingly agitated when such did not materialize so that his wife was forced to come to herself and seize control. She ordered Jackson to take his father out for some fresh air, which usually helped clear his head. But Mama, Jackson protested, you need my help here. I can explain the procedure.

No. I know what to do. You just get him out of here. Can’t you see how he’s irritating everybody? I don’t need two men locked away.

For the next two hours, Jackson walked his daddy up and down in front of the courthouse with the occasional breather of sitting on the steps until Mama appeared at their head with Bubba Ray, now attired in the fresh shirt and pants she’d brought along in a brown paper bag. Her eyes glinted like one mad.

It’s all over, she said. The charges are dropped.

Mama, you must not have understood. Didn’t you post bail? Isn’t that what’s going on?

No. The charges were dropped. Here, read the paperwork you don’t believe me.

To his great astonishment, Jackson discovered his mother was right. How did you do that, Mama? How?

It was simple. I requested an audience with the judge and the sheriff in the judge’s chambers. You all think I don’t know what goes on in the world, but I do, I do. You know there’s been trouble around here with the draft board drafting too many coloreds and not enough whites. Even the toughest of these old men are deep-down terrified of the federal government nowadays, so I made them an offer to put them in the clear. I told them that in exchange for my boy’s freedom, Daddy would sign deferments for anyone they wanted. That they could draft white boys all day long but Daddy would make sure they had asthma or flat feet. He still has his license. He’ll sign whatever dotted line they want. Well, Lord, didn’t they get on the phone fast after that. The judge called this one, the sheriff called that one, and all of a sudden Bubba Ray was free. I even got him a job out of it. He’ll be the courier. They’ll pay him to go over to the draft board and pick up the forms and the names and then Daddy will fill them out and sign them and Bubba Ray will bring them back. Keep it all in the family.

Jackson was appalled, his sensibilities deeply offended. He tried to point out to Mama that rather than let Bubba Ray pay for his mistakes, she was spoiling him worse than ever she did before, and his behavior
would get more and more wicked down the line. Plus, she put herself and Daddy in great danger under this arrangement, she was committing federal offenses up, down, and sideways. Mama was having none of it. Why are you so afraid? she asked him. That judge and sheriff and the draft board aren’t going to tell anyone. Neither are the boys who weasel out of the Army. That leaves you. You’re not telling anybody are you, son? Of course not. Now, you just focus on getting married this weekend. We’re going to put all this behind us, tell the Godwins it was a colossal mistake, and have us a party. Isn’t that right?

No, thought Jackson. It wasn’t right at all.

But it was what happened. Aaron and Seth arrived the following day. The canvass was hung over the tent scaffolding. The fans were hooked up. The liquor was bought. The catering trucks came at precisely the scheduled hour. The flowers were perfect, Stella was a vision in her dress, Rabbi Nussbaum officiated with panache, and the only snafu—when Aunt Sofie tried to lay her platter of baked oysters with bacon stuffing on the hors d’oeuvres table, claiming it just wasn’t a Sassaport wedding without them—was hushed up in a flash before any of the pitifully few Yankee guests were the wiser.

Spring, 1995

F
ROM THE DAY THEY WERE
married, kitchen maintenance was Jackson’s job. In thirty years, he’d never come to trust Stella with the glassware or crockery. Her idea of a spotless countertop was one that looked tidy when squinted at with the overhead light off. Sometimes, he felt she’d tricked him during the honeymoon, that she’d feigned ignorance of what a properly hygienic kitchen was in order to weasel out of a chore she had no use for. So when Hinds County’s Unsung Civic Hero of 1995 told the others after Katherine Marie’s brunch to go set themselves in the front parlor where she’d join them after washing up, Jackson protested.

I’ll do that, he said, you must be tired from your big night.

No, no, no, Stella insisted. It was a big night for everybody. The two of you did all the work so far. Let me do my share.

Jackson and Katherine Marie settled down on the parlor couch together, photo albums balanced on their knees. They went through
old pictures that made them laugh: Jackson with hair to his shoulder blades and muttonchop sideburns the years he worked in Washington for the Civil Rights Commission; Stella standing on a ghetto street corner dressed in a pantsuit, holding her black-bound social worker’s case book aloft the way a preacher does his Bible; Katherine Marie in an Afro that blocked out half the face of whomever she stood beside. There was one of Mombasa that made them both tear up. Although neither could remember the year or the occasion, he stood impressive and impassioned behind an outdoor lectern studded with microphones. A sea of young black students surrounded him. He wore a jellaba, a giant wooden cross was slung around his neck, and his fist was raised, clenched.

The sound of glass smashing followed by the clatter of tin hitting the floor interrupted them. Stella! What broke? Jackson yelled out. Not much, came her weak response. He made an apology to their guest and rose to see what disaster Stella had wrought. When he got to the kitchen, he found his wife on her knees picking up shards of glass while dishes were so precariously balanced in the dish drainer it was only by the grace of God that a few more plates and pots had not hit the floor. He kicked Stella out to finish the cleanup himself. Because he was thorough, this took a while.

By the time he returned to the front parlor, Stella and Katherine Marie nestled together on the couch like sisters. Joined at the shoulder, their feet side-by-side on the coffee table, they held hands and spoke in hushed tones on intimate matters the nature of which he could only guess at from his position just outside the room. Something about Katherine Marie’s children, he gathered from a syllable caught here and there, or Stella’s miscarriages. He heard Mombasa’s name, he thought, and Dr. Carnegie, Stella’s doctor in the old days when they’d lived in Washington those terrible years. Then in the midst of reminiscing, one of them, he wasn’t sure which, sighed in a most sorrowful way. He poked his head around the corner to watch the two women face
each other and embrace, at which point Jackson felt it most politic to back off and leave them to their feminine comforts unobserved. When he heard the shift of couch springs, a murmured joke, and small, wry laughter, he guessed they’d moved on from their special moment and coughed to let them know he was about to enter. They pushed apart to make room for him on the couch, both patting the central cushion in welcome.

Jackson, Katherine Marie said. Stella just had an idea I think might help Mombasa at his hearing.

He put his arm around his wife and bussed her cheek. Well, we know how brilliant she is. Whatever advice she gives, I’d say follow it.

I’m glad you feel that way. Well. Here it is, then.

Immediately on hearing Stella’s idea, Jackson regretted his largesse. It seemed the women, lost perhaps in some remarkable haze of forgetfulness, thought it would help Mombasa if Jackson appeared before the parole board to testify on his behalf. Or it might have been they wanted him to represent him. They weren’t that clear. Oh, I don’t know what good I’d do, Jackson started to say when the two of them interrupted to dissuade him. Stella: You’d do worlds of good. You’re the missing link. Katherine Marie: We’ve tried everything else. What’s left to lose?

Only my sanity, thought Jackson, but then he looked at the women looking at him. Their eyes were bright as full moons, their lips open and damp. They looked prepared to thwart any argument he might propose, even the most reasonable one, which was that, although a member of the bar, Jackson had no experience in parole matters. He was just a country lawyer with a civil practice. He drafted wills and wrote commercial contracts. He rarely litigated. After they’d all moved back south and lawyers were hired to petition that Mombasa be moved from the federal penitentiary in Virginia to the one in Yazoo City for his family’s sake, he’d not even been called upon to draft a letter. How
could he prevail where some of the best minds of the ACLU had failed? What had he to add to the case beyond a few personal anecdotes that might lend context to Mombasa’s crimes but could hardly effect anything else? What were these women thinking? He looked into their eyes again, sighed. Under the fierce light of such determination, he was forced to acquiesce.

Alright, I’ll try. But Mombasa has to agree. I have to see him beforehand and he has to agree. What do you think, Katherine Marie? Can you get me an audience with himself, then? Will he see me?

I’ll make certain of it, don’t you worry about that.

Alright. If you do, I’ll try.

The women fell on him then, fondling and kissing him in the most pleasant way imaginable. He found it entirely impossible that he was in the middle of them once again after all these years. The wonder of it all had an odd effect on his reasoning, inspiring a surge of hope that maybe he could get Mombasa sprung from federal prison after all. How strange life is, he thought, entirely euphoric, how strange these two women met in the first place, how much stranger the friendship that sprang up between them, how even stranger than that, the fact that they’d reconciled after more than a decade of estrangement preceded by the worst argument he’d heard of in his life between two mature women, absolutely the worst.

Not even the most desiccated skeptic would deny that from the beginning Katherine Marie and Stella’s bond was a fateful one. It originated at a time and place no one expected, during an era when Jackson had decided his childhood friends were lost to him forever. Stella considered their storied selves two more of those ghostly attachments Southerners revel in, stuck in the past as they always were, her husband no exception.

Stella and Katherine Marie met independently of Jackson, which was the fateful part, on the maternity ward of Hamilton Hospital,
an understaffed, poorly endowed health-care establishment that was more clinic than hospital, located in one of DC’s poorest neighborhoods. Stella was taken to Hamilton in an ambulance after passing out four months into her pregnancy in the home of an illiterate single mother of five whom she was helping fill out the new forms for food stamps. Katherine Marie was there to hand out Black Warriors of the African Jesus pamphlets on child-raising to the new mothers on the ward. At first, she only glanced at Stella, her brows knit with dark surprise that some white woman was taking up space a sister needed, a white woman who didn’t look half poor enough to belong there. As it happened, Stella Godwin Sassaport looked over in her direction at the same moment.

Jackson’s wife had already bled out the child he’d given her after three years of ardent, fruitless trying. She lay on a gurney in the hallway waiting for him to arrive and take her home. In those days, communication was neither swift nor certain. It was unclear whether Jackson knew yet where she was or why. She’d already waited three hours for him. If she’d been strong enough, she would have walked out and taken the subway home. She tried to get up on her own steam every twenty minutes or so, but her head swam each time. It was too much, the best she could do was half sit up. She was stuck there waiting, bleeding, stoic, dry-eyed, but she didn’t have to like it.

And now this black woman dressed like an African missionary in a white robe and head wrap, a giant wooden cross around her neck, cast a look at her that was not at all pleasant, so Stella stared back at her as if to shout: Dammit, do I look like I want to be here? In that moment, their eyes locked with the suddenness of a thunderbolt’s strike in an open field on a dry afternoon, each overwhelmed by an attraction, a comprehension neither could define, an intimation perhaps of the pairing between them that would take place in the days and months to come, although neither understood it at the time, neither could tell you
what it meant even today. Still, there it was—undeniable, pulsing, hot as a living thing, pulling at each of them, striking then pulling them toward each other, and because they were women, they gave in to its force. Katherine Marie walked over to Stella, stood there at the side of the bed, and asked: Do you need something? Yes, thank God you’re here, Stella said, resisting an urge to take up the stranger’s hand and kiss it, her gratitude was that strong. You look like a kind woman. I lost my baby today. I want only to go home. They say my husband’s been called, but I’m not sure. I’ve been waiting hours and hours. Can you find out for me if a Jackson Sassaport is on his way to collect me? Could you, please?