Little Sacrifices (28 page)

By late afternoon we were sun crisped and tired. Little groups broke off to explore a bit inland. It was a small place, three miles long, and narrow enough at its southern end for a short walk from the beach to the marsh. Over its centuries–old human history, Tybee saw a lot of traffic. Yamacraw Indians pitched up on its shore for oystering, fishing and collecting salt, and South Carolinians sailed down to settle their grudges away from their own state’s anti–dueling laws. Expeditions from across Europe anchored in its narrow harbor, and Loyalists congregated there during the American Revolution, waiting for the ships that would carry them to the more British–minded Caribbean islands. It hosted more than one fort for coastal defense and, most recently, we white folks liked to lounge on its beaches.

With Lottie sound asleep, I stepped into my sandals and headed for the dunes, with a mind for a walk. I didn’t get more than a couple hundred yards before the day’s indulgence in Coca–Cola made me anxious to find a bathroom. The public facilities near the parking lot were a welcome sight, and I managed a little dance to shed my bathing suit in the cramped space. While I was wrenching on my suit again, I heard someone leaning against the outside wall. The urgency with which she muttered to herself kept me in the sweltering outhouse, listening. She was crying. I recognized my friend.

‘Hey, Fie, what’s wrong?’

She spun around, gripping her chest. ‘Holy God, May, don’t sneak up on a person like that!’

‘Sorry. What’s happened?’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘Is it about Jim?’

‘You know?’

‘Uh huh, Lottie spilled the beans. What happened?’

‘I just made the biggest sap of myself.’ She watched the clouds, trying to bring her voice under control. They were walking between the dunes, she said, talking about nothing in particular. Most of the beach was flanked by a double row of sand dunes. Getting down in between them encouraged all manner of clandestine activity. Fie worked up her courage, stopped Jim and kissed him, just like we’d practiced on our arms. When I asked her what he did, she started sniffling again. He didn’t do anything. He didn’t say anything. He just blinked at her.

‘He was probably just surprised,’ I offered.

She didn’t think so. He acted, she said, like she’d never puckered up on him at all. That did seem a little discourteous, not even to thank her. I said so, and told her he was a jerk.

‘Well, I like the jerk.’

‘Obviously.’

Her tear ducts exploded once again.

‘I’m sorry! I’m sorry, Fie! I just meant that, of course you do.’

‘And now he probably won’t even want to be friends with me!’

‘Don’t be ridiculous. You know that once Jim’s decided to be someone’s friend, he doesn’t go back on that. Right?’

‘What am I going to do?’

‘I wouldn’t do anything.’

‘Nothing?’

‘Absolutely not. You’ll only make it worse.’

‘I feel like an idiot.’

‘Join the club.’

I gave her the best advice I could. As if I was in any position to counsel on matters of the heart. We walked around, and talked around Jim until it was time to go. She was mortified well beyond my comforting. Time alone had the medicine to take the sting out of the day.

Chapter 39

When Ma woke me, there were no cricket sounds. She needed to talk to me, she said. ‘Now?’ I squinted at the hall light coming through the doorway.

‘Yes, now. Come on. Downstairs.’ Grabbing my bathrobe, I shuffled down the stairs behind her.

Duncan stooped in his favorite chair with his forehead in his hands. Blood covered his shirt. When he looked at me through his fingers, I plainly saw stains on his hands.

We talked all at once, me asking what was going on and them assuring me that the blood was not my father’s. Well then, whose? Duncan was disinclined to rush his answer.

‘May, something has happened that you need to know about. Out at the schoolhouse tonight. A man was shot.’

‘And you were–’

‘And I was there, yes.’

‘I don’t understand.’

Duncan’s mysterious operations started in September, just about the same time that Ma set out to give Eliza an education. I should have known he wouldn’t leave all the social work up to her. There were fifteen men, he said, give or take, who he was teaching. Everyone met at the schoolhouse, the one he made me visit when we first arrived. Black men or white men, I wanted to know. Black men, he said. There’s no reason to have to teach white men to read. No, he wasn’t being secretive, only expedient. The men worked all day long just like he did and after dinner was as good a time as any for learning. The schoolhouse was close to the plantation where most of the men lived, so it was an easy walk for them.

‘Then it was a Negro who got shot?’

‘Yes.’

‘By who?’

‘By a white kid.’ At the same second Duncan heard the explosion he saw Walter Johnson’s body implode, yanked off his feet as if by strings from his shoulders. Blood spattered the homemade chalkboard behind them, making tracks through Duncan’s neat handwriting. He struck the floor with a squelch. Silence moved into the wake of the blast, then sucking sounds were heard, as Walter tried to breath despite the holes in his chest. ‘Noooooo!’ screamed his son, scrambling to grab Walter. Walter looked confused by the sudden turn of events. Blood trickled from his nose.

Duncan heard a truck’s tires spin, throwing sand and rocks and accusations about dirty Negroes. He ran to the door, clambering over the men trying to get to Walter.

‘And you saw him?’

‘Yes.’ One boy sat on the truck’s windowsill with his hand on the roof, while his buddy did his best to drive fast and straight. He held his shotgun with the ease of a country boy. He looked surprised to see Duncan, and he smiled as they drove from sight.

‘Is he alive?’

‘It’s a miracle, but yes, so far. We drove him to the hospital where they operated.’

I began to shiver despite the September heat wave. Ma put her arm around me. ‘May. We need to make a decision.’

I didn’t have to ask about what. ‘You know who did it.’

‘Yes.’

He was a student, Jimmy Seibert’s brother, the kid Duncan told off in his class when we first arrived. To say I was surprised was about as under as an understatement got. I didn’t think rednecks went to college. I still had a lot to learn about the face of hatred.

‘Are you sure you saw?’

‘As clear as I’m looking at you now.’

‘Did you see who was driving?’

‘Uh uh.’

‘Did anyone else see them?’

‘I expect so.’

‘So they can tell the police what they saw, right?’

‘They won’t, though.’

I knew why not. The Black Code operated throughout the Southern United States. They started as laws made up after the Civil War, aimed at keeping the status quo. Many of those laws dictated what Negroes could and couldn’t do when it came to legal matters. Though the laws were struck down one by one over the years, the mindset lingered. Testifying against white men just wasn’t done. Everyone knew what happened when blacks dared to stand up for themselves. As often as not, they ended up at the business end of a noose. Even if the other men did literally risk their necks and tell what they saw, their testimony went about as long as a temper in the heat with a Southern jury.

‘What are you going to do?’

He was hoarse. ‘I don’t know.’ I suspected the consequences for us of bringing the shooter’s name to Minty’s father. We were weighing up just how to live with the consequences of not speaking up.

The next day Mister Johnson was still alive, but his spine was broken. He was paralyzed. Duncan went to pay his respects to the family. Missus Johnson didn’t speak for a long few minutes after he grasped her hands and said how sorry he was. She asked quietly whether he was going along to the police station. She said no one else had volunteered so far. He didn’t give her an answer.

It was the uncommon sound that woke me a week later. Not the noise of suspicious men whispering, or of feet running away, but the exhalation of air rushing to flame like strong wind through a loose sail. The wood popped and crackled as moisture made its way to steam and blew itself free. Leafy shadows flickered on the walls. I knew what it was. You couldn’t live in the South in those days and not know.

A ten foot high cross burned on our front lawn. Living room lights started to flare along the street as our neighbors realized one after another that the Klan was exercising its right to free expression on our grass. They lingered in their doorways, our one–time friends, stretching their necks for a good look. Shadows hopped in the road as the pyre threw umber light into the flowerbeds. Once I saw it, I realized I’d lived with its expectation since the shooting. But the sight still knocked me breathless.

The wood spit as the flame fought to catch hold. They’d used green wood. It came to mind that they must make them one at a time. As the occasion dictates. Our very own. Customized. I wondered whether they came in different sizes in keeping with the offense, and whether ours was big or small compared to all the others.

The gasoline burned off, freeing thick smoke to collect in the still air. A bitter stink drifted through the window, making my eyes tear. Ma held my arm with a shaking hand, watching with me from my bedroom window. She didn’t say anything as the tears ran to her chin. After a little while the flame woke up and stretched. Wooden arms supported the blaze as a strong man might hold up bales of cotton.

Duncan’s shouts hurried us downstairs. He touched Ma, then me, then Ma, over and over. ‘Okay? You okay? Okay. Get in the kitchen and stay away from the windows. It’s okay. Everything’s okay.’ He was white eyed in the hallway light, his voice hoarse. Okay was one thing we weren’t. Suddenly the glass in our front windows shattered, one after the other. ‘Oh my God, they’re in the house,’ she whispered.

Duncan moved for the door. ‘They’re not. They’re cowards.’

‘Duncan, no! What are you doing? Don’t, not out there. Don’t.’ Ma’s voice popped and cracked in unconscious imitation of the warning outside. Deep lines crisscrossed her forehead. Her body drooped on its frame as she tried to hold him.

My father wrenched his arm free and strode to the porch. ‘You can’t intimidate us!’ He shouted into the flickering dark. ‘We won’t be bullied!’ No one who mattered heard him. They ran away as soon as the bricks crashed into our living room.

Ma and I huddled together on the cool linoleum, listening for strangers’ footsteps or more crashing glass. My hair was damp, Ma’s hands clammy on my back. ‘We never should have come here. It was too much. Too much to expect,’ she said as she rocked me.

Jim had bragged that the Klan wasn’t in Savannah. He neglected to mention that the Association of Georgia Klan was alive and well just over in Atlanta, and more than happy to travel. Ma couldn’t stop crying. ‘Hush Sarah. It’ll be okay.’ Duncan gathered us awkwardly to him on the floor. ‘It’ll be fine.’

‘Fine? Duncan, nothing is going to be
fine
. The Ku Klux Klan stood on our front lawn while we slept. They poured gasoline over a cross and set fire to it. They could have killed us and you know it.’

‘Sshh, Sarah. Don’t talk like that. No one is going to kill us–’

‘How do you know? How can you possibly know that? Because they do, Duncan. They do kill people, and you damn well know they do.’

‘It’s just a warning, that’s all.’

‘That’s all?! Isn’t that enough? Duncan, just keep out of the whole thing. I’m very sorry for the Johnsons, but you can’t change anything. He won’t walk just because you go to the police. You can’t undo what’s been done.’ She jerked her shoulder away from his touch. I let him keep on hugging me. He needed someone to reassure.

‘It’s not about undoing what’s been done, it’s about making sure it can’t happen again.’

‘But it will. This place is evil, Duncan. It’s full of evil people.’

‘That’s not true. All Southerners aren’t monsters, Sarah. Most people are reasonable around here.’

‘Reasonable. Duncan, for God’s sake, will you open your eyes and see the world the way it really is? There is a
cross
burning on our front lawn!’ Her foot caught in her nightgown as she tried to stand. Angrily she yanked it clear. ‘Damn it, Duncan, just mind your own business. This isn’t your fight.’

‘I think you’re wrong, Ma.’

‘What?’ Her eyelids disappeared in her frown.

‘It is our fight. Duncan is right. They’re just trying to intimidate us.’

‘Well, it’s working.’ Her lip twisted. ‘I’m scared to death.’

Duncan walked to Ma and put his arms around her. Her body exhaled against him. ‘I know. I’m sorry.’ He tipped her face back to look into his. ‘I promise I’ll do everything I can to protect us all. I promise. Okay? We can’t let them bully us. You know that isn’t going to do anyone any good.’

She jerked away. ‘Suit yourself, Duncan. You always do.’ She moved toward the living room window. ‘We should call someone to put out the fire. I don’t see any of the neighbors running over here with buckets.’

‘I suppose so.’ Duncan lifted the receiver. ‘Hello. Can I have the fire department please?’

Minty’s father had a big mouth. The news that Duncan was a witness to the shooting was all over school within the week. Once again I walked into conversations stopped in mid–sentence and eyes that wouldn’t meet mine. But I was a year older and a lot smarter. I walked straight up to the girls at their lunch table. Most of the popular kids were withing listening distance, like I knew they’d be. Their utter silence told me they were surprised to find me standing in front of them.

‘I want to clear something up with you all,’ I said, with my hands clasped in front of me to keep them from shaking ‘A couple weeks ago, two boys drove by a schoolhouse and shot a man inside. He’s in the hospital right now, paralyzed. My father saw who did it and went to the police. He did the right thing.’ I looked from face to face. Only Minty had the guts to meet my gaze. ‘Do you have anything you want to say to me?’ I’d love to claim I delivered my speech off the cuff, but the truth was, I practiced all morning. Silence met my question.