When I Crossed No-Bob (6 page)

Already, Little Bit has drawn our winding road with a line that looks to be a snake. She is marking it with the trees we see, even putting in some squirrels and birds.

We stop at the cemetery for the black folk so Little Bit can stand there and draw that in too. Most all the markers or stones are gone and there are just places where there are graves that are sunken in.

"Did you know Miss Tiller?" Little Bit says.

"No," I say. "I don't know many of the black folk in Smith."

Little Bit walks up and down the graveyard telling the stories of everybody she knows. I think,
How does she know all these people?
I think,
I only know white O'Donnells.
I don't know any of the people in this here graveyard.

I think of Mr. Frank's map up at the schoolhouse. What Momma and Pappy had between them—that fierce love—was
not on that map. All the jokes I played on Mr. Frank were not on that map. The war was not on that map, and neither was the surrender. What is on a map, what does get recorded, and the way things look don't have much to do with what's going on with people. That makes me happy and sad—happy because I know the streams will keep streaming and the skies will keep clouding and clearing, even as we people fight and tear and claw at each other. But the big world going about its business no matter what we do makes me sad too because what difference do we make? Looking around me, at all the graves and leftover destruction—seems we just keep on messing up a darned good thing.

Little Bit gives me the pencil and I write down the names she calls out. I write what all I know too. Every place has a name. Every name has a story. My letters turn out better.

We both hear singing that's a might bit better than mine or Little Bit's.

"Hey, look," Little Bit says. "The black folks got church going at the schoolhouse. Let's go listen."

I heard about this schoolhouse, but I have never seen it. This schoolhouse was built after the war for any free slave who wanted an education. They used the schoolhouse for their church services same as us.

You never can tell about church because you never can tell about the preacher. Seems to me a church is only as good as its preacher. One year in No-Bob, a passing preacher called for a foot-washing. I got stuck with Stump O'Donnell's feet, and by the time church was over, his feet were still black. It was so nasty that afterward, we all of us complained, and even the preacher had to admit that the duty of washing the feet should be performed in a private capacity only.

Little Bit and me listen to the black folks singing "Steal Away."

Up at our school, Mr. Frank said that before the war was over, on the day of emancipation, most all the field hands were called in and told they were free. White folks told their field hands they had to boss their own business, told them it was up to them to find their own work. If they wanted to stay on, they'd get paid, but most never did get paid. Most went into debt. They got turned loose without nothing.

I never knew much about freedom or slavery myself. None of the O'Donnells could afford slaves, but they would have had them if they could have.

I think I understand why some of the colored folk stayed and keep on staying. They're like me. They don't know anywhere else like they know home. And so many of the ones
who stayed were old, past the time when a body can move on. They stay and they do the same thing they did before the war, when they were slaves, but now they work for money or land that they never seem to get. They stay with their freedom. Their free is inside their heads and I can't help but wonder if that is free enough.

Inside the schoolhouse they must be having a baptizing, because the preacher is talking about baptizing and saying how Baptist is the only real religion. He's saying a while back everybody had to offer up sacrifices, a goat or a sheep or something. But Jesus come and changed all that. He says, "Father, I'll die for them." But why did he go and die for people who were poking and prodding him, sticking thorns on top his head, filling his dry mouth with vinegar? Who would die for such a sorry lot? And so it was that he became a sacrifice.

My brain itches, thinking on what the preacher is saying. Our sacrifice, his father's sacrifice, or Jesus's, I cannot figure which.

"Presbyterians don't go down under the water like Baptists do," Little Bit whispers.

Soon enough they start singing my favorite, that song called "Old-Time Religion."

This singing is so good that Little Bit and I stay on until
the end. When they all come out, Little Bit waves after one of the little boys I recognize. Jess Still. He comes running over and we all three say hey.

He laughs when he sees Little Bit.

"You're red, Little Bit!"

She laughs, painting his cheek with a leftover juniper berry. "You're purple."

He's small and I see the asafetida he wears round his neck in a little bag.

"Can I smell?" I say, pointing to the bag.

He nods, telling me his ma, Early Rise, gave him the bag to keep him from having asthma, smallpox, measles, and any other diseases.

"I used to have one too." The herbs together smell sagey and sweet.

"Guess your momma figure you don't need one anymore now that you're grown up and safe from disease."

"Maybe," I say. "Maybe not."

He looks me over. He has what my momma used to call a traveling eye. His one eye stays fixed while his other eye roams. I think on how handy that would be, how it would keep you safe.

Jess lifts the bag off his neck, then puts it around my neck.

"There," he says. "Now you're safe."

"What about you?" Little Bit says.

"Momma will make me another one."

He asks me my name and I tell him.

"Addy," he repeats after me. "Sounds like Adam. What's it short for?"

"You're the first person in the whole world who ever asked me that," I say, smiling. "It's short for Adeline, but nobody ever calls me that."

"Then
I
will," Jess says. "Wanna race, Miss Adeline?"

And we do. Back and forth, the three of us run and run just for fun.

Mr. Tempy and Zula leave the following day, way before sunup. They want to get an early start so they can get a good amount of cash for their hogs in Mobile. That night, me and Little Bit, we go back to that little schoolhouse church, and we keep going back almost every night after that like it's our very own treasure. The first few times we use our map to make our way back, but after a while, we know the way by heart. Seems like every night they're singing, or listening to the preacher, or having some kind of get-together. And every time we go, Jess Still is there, happy to see us.

I tell him he's lucky because they have such a good preacher.

"But every time he starts, I fall to sleep. Every time," he says, snapping his fingers. "Like clockwork, Miss Adeline."

Jess Still reminds me of me before I met Mr. Frank and Miss Irene, only Jess is happier because his ma and pa aren't like mine. He doesn't wear shoes and he talks the way he talks without anybody bothering to correct him. We catch crickets and butterflies and then turn them loose. We three soak our feet in the creek. He teaches us the words to the church songs we like best. Because Jess's ma made him and Little Bit both a new asafetida bag, we three even smell alike. In no time flat, Jess Still is my second friend.

On Sunday there is the biggest crowd, and Little Bit and I stay just to hear the extra-special good singing.

But then all at once, in the middle of an amen, we hear horses and men shouting. I hear a familiar man-voice, but I can't place it. I hear him say, "We have to fight for our life, boys, more desperately than at Shiloh and Vicksburg. What is called for here is loyalty, courage, and grim determination."

"Well, peas and rice," Little Bit says. "It's just getting good. What is it now?"

Little Bit is right. The singing is just getting good, when out of the woods come these folks wearing old Confederate
uniforms and white or dark gray cloth masks over their heads with cut-out spook faces. At first we want to laugh at the cutout eye, nose, and mouth holes, but then we see that these men are not here for fun but to do something mighty fearsome, and too soon they begin to foul the air with curses.

"It's them Ku Kluxers that Mr. Tempy was talking to Mr. Frank about a while back," I whisper.

At the hem of a long patch of tall grass, we duck under the scrub bushes and get a good look at the passing men. And I am relieved to see that they are just men. These are not the spooks they mean to appear to be. Nor are they wildcats or worse. They are just men. White men, all of them.

Some of the men get down off their horses. Some of the men stay on their horses, howling and yelping and shouting out ugly things. The men on the ground set to work. They take a pine log over thirty feet high and lash another, shorter arm to it. They set the big pole into the ground and there stands before us the tallest cross I ever seen. They soak burlap bags in turpentine I can smell, then they wrap the bags all around the wood.

It is dark and hard to see. I move closer.

"Addy, don't," Little Bit whispers. "We don't know those men. We don't know what they would do to us."

"What about Jess?" I say. "Where is he?"

"He's inside," Little Bit whispers.

The wind starts up, the clouds clear, and the moonlight lights up what there is to see. One man has the fanciest hood, with extra slits above the eyes, mouth, and nose, like worry lines. He crouches, then lights a match, and the flame lights up the mask of his hood and all the worry lines look like so many lit-up rivers.

Something is happening here. Something else, above all that happened before. I can smell it the way I can smell a rain coming. The air has changed.

"We should tell Jess to stay inside," I say.

"Addy, no," Little Bit says, pulling me back into the thicket. "His ma and pa are with him."

Some of the men on horses hear us and turn our way to look.

I see the man with the match stand and look around toward us. He is a tall, powerful-built man and I want to run to him, push him down, and say why? Why would you burn a cross? Why would you turn something good into something bad?

It feels as though the ground is dropping out from under my feet, and the feeling is not funny the way it should be. Did everything change as fast as all that, in the time it took for this man to light that match?

How can good be made evil in so short a time?

The tall man drops the lit match on the burlap bags. The wind picks up and the fire takes off fast up and down the pole that quickly turns black and brittle. The men on horseback and on foot now stand back to look at the fire as the wind blows harder. Little Bit and me both stand because no one is looking our way. Everyone is facing the fire. Someone yells, "Timber!" in a joking way, and sure enough, the whole cross comes tumbling down and down and down onto the roof of the schoolhouse. Part of the roof caves in. Part of the roof catches on fire.

People come screaming out, but we can't see Jess.

"Jess!" I scream.

Little Bit yells, "Is that him?"

It is so hard to see.

We are looking as more and more people come running out of the schoolhouse.

It seems like the whole world is on fire just then. I look up and down the road. Where is help? Isn't anyone going to come and help?

One hooded man goes into the burning schoolhouse as though to help and drags out a colored man who is coughing something terrible. This man with the hood does what so
many masters in these parts done to their slaves before the war. He tears off this man's half-burned shirt, and while someone holds him down, he whips this man. He uses a strap with holes in it, so that they raise big blisters. He is mean the way I seen O'Donnells be mean. Mean the way I seen Uncle "Tiptoe" be mean, when he whipped a man who had strayed into No-Bob till the blood came, then had somebody else anoint the man's flesh with red pepper and turpentine.

What's to be done with all that you know and see? What do you do with so much meanness in this sorrowful world?

Some of the men under their masks are laughing.
Laughing.
They are
happy.
They are having
fun.
They use their good singing voices to sing a nasty song about how they would be back to see all the black people, how they were coming back to get them all. Everyone around them is screaming and running and shouting and crying, and these hooded men are whooping and having themselves a big time.

More and more people from the schoolhouse come pouring out, coughing, yelling, screaming, crying. There are babies here. Children. Where is Jess?

What is happening to us?

Little Bit is crying, not looking at what I'm looking at. She
is looking at me. She is saying,
Addy O'Donnell, if you go out there now, you will get us both killed.

What does this look like on a map? I think of what the fire might look like from way high above. It would be small but hard to miss. I used to think about Jesus ascending into heaven and I wondered exactly how long that took. And how long does it take to descend? To come back down and help out, maybe even fix a few things that have gone and broke or just plain come undone.

We are falling backwards, back before our mommas, teachers, and preachers taught us how to be good, back into a dark, muddy time before we knew better. What is happening?

The wind picks up again and blows the fire to make more fire. It's dry. We haven't had rain in over a month. The leaves blow around, and with the wind going the way it's going, it doesn't take long for the fire to spread from the roof to the entire schoolhouse, and all at once the whole building is ablaze and lit up, hot and powerful and awful. Even the hooded men stop what they are doing to stand in awe of the flames.

Some of them hitch up their horses, ready to leave.

"My baby. My baby. Where's my baby? Jess? Jess Still, where are you, boy?" Jess's momma, Early Rise, runs back
and forth across the schoolyard and I can't help it no longer. I run out of the bushes and Little Bit comes running out after me, saying, "No, Addy. Don't."