Things Too Huge to Fix by Saying Sorry (13 page)

“Don't stare at the Colored people,” said the woman in line behind Leslie, rattling the shoulder of a girl next to her who couldn't have been more than eight years old. “It isn't polite.”

“Why can't we eat over there?” the child asked, pointing toward the open windows where the music played.

“Because,” her mother said in a pretend-whisper, “those people are dirty, and they smell. If you lie down with dogs, you'll end up with fleas.”

“Everything smells in this heat,” Leslie said from
the service window, her back still to the woman and child. “I know I do.” She scratched at the back of her neck. “Well, now. Is that a flea bite?”

D
R
. H
ARPER GOT UP AND
retrieved his tablet from his desk, and brought it back to the table. When he sat down, he popped the tablet into place and typed on the keyboard fixed to its case. I was amazed at how fast his knobby fingers moved on the keys.

“Hmm,” he said again, moving the tablet around. It looked funny, the shiny new computer in its purple case, mixed in among the papers and all the old books on his table. “Yes. Here it is.”

He turned the tablet around so Indri and I could see it.

Indri and I both leaned back at the same time. The screen had a drawing of a Black man hanging from a tree. It looked real, with its swollen face and the tongue hanging out.

“Dr. Harper,” Indri said. “What—I mean, that's pretty awful.”

He turned the tablet back around. “Hmm? Oh! Sorry. Yes, absolutely awful. But that's what the numbers mean.” He scrolled down from the nasty drawing. “There's the information without the graphic.”

He turned the screen around, pointing to the figures. “Your grandmother was using this website's estimate of the number of people murdered by lynching in the State of Mississippi between 1882 and 1968.” He tapped the tablet again. “It's the
ultimate form of mob violence, one of the most vicious tools used to keep one group of people terrorized and under the control of another.”

The image of the hanged man flickered in my brain like something I couldn't un-see. It didn't help that the drawing had been of a man who looked like Dad, beard and all. I wanted to rattle my head back and forth to keep myself from putting Dad's face on the drawing. Indri had her mouth pressed tight, like she did when something made her mad. Was she angry about the drawing, or seeing scary stuff in her own head?

Dr. Harper kept right on showing us things on his tablet. “This number here, five thirty-nine, is the estimate of Black citizens lynched in Mississippi during that time period, and this one here, forty-two,” he pointed to the smaller number, “that's White citizens, or other races. They were likely lynched for showing sympathy or support to a person of color. The total comes to five eighty-one, like your grandmother noted. The Tuskegee Institute over in Alabama puts the total number much higher. I believe they have a count of five hundred thirty-eight lynchings in Mississippi between just 1883 and 1959—the most of any state.”

I didn't know what to say. In school, we had learned about a boy named Emmett Till who got murdered in 1955 down in Money, Mississippi, because he talked to a White woman. I remembered the photo of his ruined body lying in a casket. Some people thought the publication of that photo, and
how mad everyone got about it all over the world, marked the beginning of the modern Civil Rights Movement.

“I knew about Martin Luther King and Medgar Evars and Malcolm X getting assassinated,” Indri said. “I didn't know there were this many more.”

“And many beyond that that we'll likely never know about,” Dr. Harper said. He turned the page on what Grandma had written, to page six, and showed us other dates. “May I see the next page?”

Indri and I exchanged looks. Then almost at the same moment, we seemed to come to the same decision, that we needed Dr. Harper's help if we were ever going to find the answer to what happened between Grandma and Avadelle. I reached into my pack, got the envelope out, and carefully removed the next few pages. All of them looked like page five and six—dates, with notations after the dates.

“I'll show you these,” I said, “on one condition.”

Dr. Harper looked surprised, but he waited. A few butterflies bumped around in my stomach, because I had never tried to put conditions on a grown-up before, much less a professor who was friends with my grandma and knew my parents.

“Uh.” I swallowed and gripped the pages tighter. “Yeah—well. Grandma wrote this for me back when everything was still a straight line. I mean, this is—it's mine. She meant it just for me until I decide what to do with it. I showed it to Indri because I needed her help understanding it, and I need your help too, but it's still mine.”

“Meaning, I can't use it for my own purposes,” Dr. Harper said. He gazed at me like he might be looking at a student in one of his classes, all professerly and stern, but his eyes still twinkled just a bit.

“Yes,” I said, “and you can't tell anyone about it.”

His look got even more stern, and the twinkle went away. “Like your parents.”

“Exactly.” I let out a breath, then gulped another before he spoke again.

“A secret.” He fussed with his sleeves again, then studied Indri, and came back around to me. “Dani Beans, I don't much like keeping secrets from childrens' parents.”

“I don't much like secrets either,” I said in a hurry. “So let's consider this . . . a private project?”

“Oh, well.” He shoved up one sleeve, about halfway to his shoulder. “That's completely different. I agree to your condition of privacy in full.”

Indri gave me a quick thumbs-up when I checked with her, and I handed over the time line.

Dr. Harper moved through the next four or five pages quickly, shifting them between us so I could see they were an ongoing time line, and mumbling out loud about yellow fever epidemics and Spanish flu, and then flooding in the Delta that left almost a million people homeless. “Here,” he said, pointing to the center of page eight. “In the 1920s when your grandmother was born, Mississippi schools made it illegal to teach evolution—right around the time her favorite writer,
Mr. William Faulkner, was buying his Rowan Oak homestead. We got a brief stretch of peace, then World War II came along, and we had more unrest and more riots because the military integrated, but the state didn't.”

He showed us page nine.

“A maybe-massacre in Centreville,” Indri whispered. “How is it even possible that we still don't know if it actually happened?”

Dr. Harper made a pained sound. “What few academic papers I've reviewed were disturbing. For example, Private Walker, the murdered soldier, was listed as separated from service, with no indication that he was killed by a local sheriff, or indeed that he was dead at all. Military officials have indicated that the records necessary to get to the bottom of this mystery were accidentally destroyed in a fire in the 1970s.”

“Do you believe that?” Indri sounded as worried and sick as I felt, and I could tell she was thinking about her dad again. Losing him in battle for his country would be bad enough,
but losing him in some covered-up horrible crime because somebody didn't like the color of his skin—never finding out what really happened to him—it was unthinkable. I put my hand on hers, and she didn't pull away from me. She wasn't crying, but her eyes had gone wide and glassy.

“I honestly don't know, Indri,” Dr. Harper said. “On the surface, it seems preposterous, until you realize how many other cover-ups, injustices, and instances of ignoring race-based murder happened in this country between 1865 and the late 1960s.”

The sad thing is, Oops, it won't make any sense to you unless you understand where I came from. . . .
Grandma's words echoed through my head, like she had spoken them out loud instead of writing them down.
In the final analysis, this is my history, and it's yours, too. Read it carefully before you read about Avadelle and
Night on Fire.
Understand it before you judge me—and before you judge her.

I put my hand over Dr. Harper's before he spoke again, and I gave him the first four pages. He read them quietly. Then he read them a second time, and dabbed at his eyes with his fingers.

“I see,” he said after a third pass. “I do see.”

Indri and I looked at him, neither of us sure what to say, or what to ask. I didn't want to tell him the whole truth of it, that Grandma never got to the part about the fight, because it was so sad, but also because I worried he'd lose interest and stop helping us.

Dr. Harper piled up the papers he had and worked with them until they fell into a neat stack. “The information that may be in here—well, I don't need to tell you, many publishers, both book and periodical, would pay quite a bit of money to have it.”

“The stuff about the feud, Ms. Beans—” Indri started, but I hushed her with a warning glance.

“I don't think Grandma wanted a bunch of publicity,” I said.

“No,” he agreed.

“She wanted me—maybe all of us that were close to her—to understand,” I said. “And for me to decide what's best to do with it all. But why did she start way back with Mississippi turning into a state?”

“I haven't heard of any of the people Ms. Beans mentions in those first eight or nine pages,” Indri said, pointing to the small stack on the table. “Like Charles Lang or Ernest Green.”

“The anonymity of those murder victims was a point Ruth liked to make when she discussed this state's history,” Dr. Harper said. “The true human cost of struggles like the Civil Rights Movement can get pushed aside over time. Once that occurs, mountains of progress can erode almost overnight. Ruth didn't want that to happen.”

I thought about the stained glass window with the University Grays, and the unmarked graves in the cemetery behind the stadium. I looked at the papers I had shared with
Dr. Harper. A list of forgotten events and forgotten people, murdered because they were Black, or some color other than White, or nice to Black people, or seemingly for no reason at all.

Who had more right to become ghosts and haunt us, the people on this list who died in a war nobody admitted was a war, or the soldiers who fought in named battles but didn't even get their own graves?

Both?

I had no idea. I felt ashamed, and I wasn't sure why.

“How will any of this help Dani and me understand Ms. Beans's fight with Avadelle Richardson?” Indri asked.

Dr. Harper pushed up his rolled shirt sleeves so they rested on his bony elbows. Then he moved Grandma's writing aside, got up and dashed to his desk, and came back with a white piece of paper and a giant box of crayons. Indri and I stared at him as he sat and scribbled on the clean paper with dozens of colors, one right on top of the next. Finally, he took a black crayon and scribbled over the top of the chaos, then smiled at us, and pointed down to the crayon-covered paper.

“What did I just make here, Indri?”

She shrugged and he looked at me. Zero idea. The best I could come up with was “Um, a kindergartener mess?”

He laughed, and it sounded a little like a turkey call. “Indeed. A big, sloppy mess. Let's say all those colors I started with were events. History. Like the items on your
grandmother's time line.” He touched the black crayon layer. “And this, this is a more recent occurrence.”

He reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a paperclip, then unfolded it and handed it to me. “Here, Dani. Use the end to scratch your name into this mess.”

“Oookay.” I did it, slowly, forming the D-A-N-I with careful strokes. To my surprise, my name emerged out of the jumbled darkness perfectly clear, in rainbow hues.

Dr. Harper waited, like he wanted Indri and me to understand what that meant at some deeper level—like his coat-hanging gag.

“Everything underneath makes the color of her name show through and not be just black or white?” Indri said, in what I thought was a valiant first try.

“Yes!” Dr. Harper clapped his hands together and beamed at her. “The colors, the events leading up to the recent occurrence, the moment you scratch a word into it, form
context
. The recent occurrence blocks out so much, and yet when Dani scratches her name, those past events still come shining through. In fact, they determine how her name will look, much more than the darkness of this recent occurrence.”