Freeman, page 23
Immediately, the alley was filled with laughter and applause. Men patted Jesse’s broad back.
“Look at that rascal go!” someone said. “He ain’t gon’ stop til he reach the river.”
“Might not stop then,” someone else said, and the laughter renewed itself. “Might not stop til he halfway through Arkansas.”
“Good job, Jesse,” a woman said.
Jesse lowered his eyes, smiling his embarrassment. “Aw, I ain’t done nothin’,” he said. “Weren’t nothin’ but a boy. Scared boy at that.”
“I know his family,” said Paul. He had come up behind Bonnie without her realizing. “They not too bad for white. I talk to his pappy tomorrow if you like.”
Prudence said, “I would like that very much, Paul. Please see to it.” She gave Bonnie a meaningful look. They had quarreled over the wisdom of setting up a guard at the school. Prudence felt vindicated now, Bonnie knew. If Jesse hadn’t been here, there was no telling what mischief the boy would have accomplished.
Bonnie couldn’t deny that. But she still felt a faint unease bubbling up from the very center of her. She could not place it, but she couldn’t deny it, either. Bonnie touched Paul’s arm. “Come,” she said, “let’s go read.” She said this softly, for his ears only; he would not want the crowd in the alley to know she had been teaching him privately for weeks.
Together, they slipped away from the knot of people still laughing and congratulating Jesse Washington. She was aware of Prudence’s eyes upon them, watching them go.
“What’s wrong?” asked Paul, as they climbed the stairs to the loft where Bonnie and Prudence had their office.
“Nothing is wrong,” she told him.
She felt him smile behind her. “Bonnie, you need to tell that lie to someone don’t know you. You might fool them, but you don’t fool me. You still worried ’bout havin’ them guards in here.”
“‘Those’ guards,” said Bonnie. “‘Them’ is incorrect.”
“Don’t change the subject,” he said.
She turned on him. “What do you want me to say? Of course I am worried. But what can I do?” She stood on the landing. He was a step below, looking up at her, his eyes full of sudden gravity.
“You can talk to her,” he said. “Tell her you think puttin’ a guard in here make things worse. It’s like askin’ for trouble.”
“You think I do not know that?” she snapped. But the anger wouldn’t hold. It passed like an April storm. “Oh, Paul, I’m sorry,” she said. “The truth is, I do not even know what I think. Part of me is happy to see us standing up for ourselves. But another part is fearful of where that’s going to lead.”
“That the part you need to listen to,” he said.
“I am not the one who needs to listen,” she told him, moving to the wooden table that stretched lengthwise between the two desks. “It is Prudence. And you know her. She does not listen. She is stubborn and headstrong. She always has been.”
“That Prudence a caution, all right.” Paul sat opposite her at the table.
“Indeed. She is the most stubborn woman I have ever known,” said Bonnie, reaching for a McGuffey primer.
“But that ain’t all there is to it, is there?” said Paul.
Bonnie looked at him. “No,” she said finally. “She is brave, too. She is also the bravest person I have ever known.” She pushed the book across to him.
“Sound like you of two minds,” said Paul, not reaching for the book. “You love her, but sometime you wish you could strangle her.”
Bonnie surprised herself by laughing. “Yes,” she said. “Something like that.” She tapped the book. “Come,” she said, “I believe we left off at page 56.”
Still Paul didn’t reach for the book. For a long, uncomfortable moment, he did nothing except stare. She felt herself shifting anxiously on the rough bench. “What is it, Paul?” she asked.
“I was just wonderin’,” he said. “What about you?”
“What do you mean?”
“When you gon’ get to do what Bonnie want? When you gon’ get to live your own life? Way you tell it, only reason you come down here in the first place is ’cause it’s what she want. Get the feelin’ you done that a lot in your life, doin’ things just ’cause she want.”
“I am not angry about that,” said Bonnie. “After all, if Prudence hadn’t insisted we come down here, you and I might never have become friends.”
“Friends,” he said. His smile was faint as a mid-morning moon. Bonnie felt herself blushing. “Well, ‘friend,’” he said, “that still don’t get to the crux of the thing, do it?”
“What do you mean?” she managed to ask.
“What I mean?” he repeated, still smiling that barely there smile. “What I mean is, you got a life of your own, ain’t you? You ain’t tied to her with no string, is you? Only thing I ever hear you say is what Prudence want. I ain’t never once heard you talk about what Bonnie want. You a person too, ain’t you?”
“Of course I am. But right now, Prudence needs me.”
“Ain’t doubtin’ that. And you’s a good friend to be there for her. But what I want to know is: what do Bonnie need? Seem like you should be askin’ that sometime. And if you won’t, I will.”
She looked at him, he looked at her. All at once, Bonnie felt as if she was standing at the rim of a cliff. “What I need,” she said, forcing a laugh, “is for you to open this book and stop putting it off.” She pushed the primer to him.
He took it, turned it, opened it, looked at her. “Seem to me, I ain’t the one puttin’ off,” he said.
Without another word, he lowered his eyes and began to read, struggling laboriously through the simple words. Bonnie hardly heard him. Instead, she heard him asking again and again what she wanted for her own life. And she heard her own emptiness in response, a silence deep as a graveyard at dawn. It was the silence of absence, the silence of having no answer. She did not know what to say.
And how could that be? She was 26 years old, an educated woman. How could she not know what she wanted in her one and only life? Was he right? Was she truly so intertwined with Prudence, so beholden to Prudence’s vehement sense of mission that she had no wants or aspirations of her own?
Questions she had never thought to ask herself before poked through Bonnie’s mind. If you had no wants of your own, what did that make you? Were you even a person? Weren’t you really just a shadow of one? And what mortified her even more than the sudden questions surfacing in her thoughts was the fact that this man of all men had put them there—this rough, unlettered man she barely knew, but who somehow understood her well enough to articulate truths so painful and private she had hidden them even from herself.
What did those truths mean? What did they amount to? In order to separate from Prudence, to detach herself and carve a life of her own, was she required to leave the school they had built? Did it matter that she loved teaching, that teaching had taught her and fulfilled her in ways she had never realized it would? Did it make sense to abandon that in order to prove a point? And if so, prove it to whom? The more she considered it, the more confused she became.
“Did you hear that?”
It took her a moment to swim up from the depths of her own thoughts. She was almost surprised to find herself in the loft across from Paul, who was staring at her, his eyes urgent and bright.
“What?” she asked, feeling disconnected and slow.
“I said, ‘Did you hear that?’”
“Hear what?”
He slammed the book closed. “I think it was a gunshot,” he said. He was already on the stairs, taking them two at a time. By the time she managed to get to her feet, he was already out the door.
She ran behind him, holding up her dress so she did not trip on it. She rounded the building into the alley—and stopped.
The boy had a squirrel gun so old she was surprised it had not exploded when he pulled the trigger. Jesse was holding his left bicep, blood trickling through his fingers. The woman from across the alley was trying to hold Jesse back—“You ain’t hurt bad, but let me see to it,” she pleaded—but it was like trying to restrain a steam engine. His teeth bared in a feral snarl, his eyes twin bonfires burning gentleness and bashfulness like paper in a hearth, Jesse Washington advanced on the white boy, who gulped and fumbled, trying to reload the rifle.
“Boy, if you smart, you get your ass out of here,” Paul told him.
But the boy was rooted and Jesse was not to be held back. He tore free of the woman’s restraining grip, grabbed the boy’s throat in one massive hand and lifted him til the rifle dropped from his useless hands and his raggedy shoes were pedaling air. “Why you all the time got to mess with us?” demanded Jesse in a voice that seemed to issue from some dark cavern in his soul. “We ain’t doin’ nothin’ to you all! Why you can’t just leave us alone?”
The boy made gurgling sounds, his hands prying hopelessly at Jesse’s grip. “Jesse, please!” Bonnie rushed forward, took hold of a bicep that seemed made of iron. “Jesse, don’t do this!”
Paul and the woman were pulling at him from the other side. He seemed not to notice either of them, staring up at the struggling boy with a volcanic fury. Bonnie was dimly aware of Prudence approaching at a run from Miss Ginny’s house on the far end of the alley. She was yelling something unintelligible. And that was the problem, Bonnie realized. Everybody was yelling at once. Nobody was being heard.
Standing on tiptoe, she touched Jesse’s cheek. He looked down at her as if he had never seen her before, his face unrecognizable, streaked with tears. Recognition took a moment. “Miss Bonnie,” he said, “I ain’t done nothin’ to him. Just sittin’ back here, mindin’ my own business, just watchin’ over the school like I’m s’posed to.”
“I know,” she said, conscious of the white boy’s feet still churning the air, but sluggishly now.
“Why they got to be so mean to us? Ain’t done nothin’ to them. Just tryin’ to live, Miss Bonnie.”
“I know,” said Bonnie, “but if you do not put this boy down, you are going to kill him. You don’t want that, do you? You don’t want that on your conscience.”
“Miss Bonnie…”
“Think of all the trouble that will bring down on the school. They will shut us down. That would hurt everybody—particularly the children and the old people. We won’t be able to teach anymore.”
For an agonizing moment, he stared as if she were yelling at him in some foreign language he could not understand. Then something like surrender crept into his eyes. “All right,” he said. And he flung the boy as a smaller man might fling a wad of paper. George flew through the air and did not stop until he slammed the wall of the school. He crumpled to the dirt, hacking and vomiting and holding his throat.
“Just want ’em to leave us alone,” said Jesse softly, his gaze encompassing them all, Bonnie, Paul, the woman, and Prudence, who was just now coming to a stop. “Just don’t want ’em to bother us no more. Ain’t nothing wrong with that, is it?” The gaze was focused on Bonnie now, his voice that of a lost child.
Her mouth opened upon a silence. She did not know what to say. The woman from the house across the alley saved her. “Need to dress that wound,” she said. “Look like it just nicked you, but we should stop the bleeding.”
She pulled at him to go with her. He gave Bonnie a look that broke her heart with its helplessness. Then he allowed himself to be led away.
“The boy came back,” said Prudence, apparently needing to give voice to the obvious.
Bonnie nodded. “Yes, he did.”
“He shot our guard,” she said.
“Yes,” said Bonnie.
“Got more than he bargained for with ol’ Jesse,” said Paul, glancing over at the boy, still on his knees in the dirt. Paul’s laughter was bitter.
“There is nothing funny here,” said Bonnie.
“I agree,” said Prudence. “And what if it had been one of the other men? Jesse is big. He’s young and he’s strong. But what if it was Rufus? What if it was Lemroy?”
Bonnie didn’t speak. The answer was too obvious for speaking.
“And there is no law we can approach,” said Prudence. “There is no one who will make them leave us alone.”
She was working up to something. Bonnie knew this with a sudden chill certainty. “Prudence, what are you thinking?”
Her sister’s face was mysterious and cool. “I know what we need to do,” she said.
“What?”
“Not now,” she said. And then, to Paul: “Paul, I want you to open the school tomorrow. Have the children practice their penmanship until Bonnie and I return.” She looked at Bonnie. “You and I are going downtown,” she said. “We are going to send a telegram.”
“What are you talking about?” asked Bonnie.
They paused as the boy scrabbled painfully to his feet and walked away, his gait hobbled and crabbed.
Prudence gave her a direct look. “I intend to make sure this never happens again,” she said.
And without another word, she turned and walked back toward Miss Ginny’s house, passing the limping boy at a brisk step without giving him so much as a glance.
She marched in much the same way down Main Street the following morning, her head held high, her eyes looking neither right nor left. White people gaped at her. None tried to impede her progress. But they paused in their commerce and gossip and stared after her, muttering in disbelief. Bonnie caught snatches of it.
“Ain’t that the Yankee schoolteacher?”
“What she doin’ here?”
“I heard one of her niggers beat Georgie Flowers up somethin’ fierce.”
Prudence must have heard, but she gave no sign, head still up, still striding at that same imperious pace. Bonnie had to struggle to keep up. She felt like a raft tugged in the wake of a steamship. It was, she realized ruefully, an apt metaphor for her entire life with Prudence Cafferty Kent. What was it Paul had asked?
What do Bonnie need?
The question pinpricked at her conscience.
But there was no time. Prudence turned in at A.J. Socrates’s store. The sallow man was slouched upon a stool, his face buried in a dime novel. He looked up at the sound of them and a scowl pinched his face.
“Thought I told you you wasn’t welcome here,” he said.
“Nevertheless, I am here,” said Prudence. “And I am sending a telegram.” She produced a folded paper from her bodice and held it out to him.
He made a show of folding down a page in the dime novel before accepting the paper. Seconds later, his body had become an exclamation point. “Do you realize what you’re doing?” he said.
“I am sending a telegram,” repeated Prudence. He gave her an odd look and she stared back, daring him to object or even say another word.
A cold dread shivered Bonnie. “Miss Prudence,” she said, “what is going on? What are you doing?”
“She is kicking a hornet’s nest barefoot!” snapped Socrates. “That’s what she is doing!”
A thin smile curled Prudence’s lips. “I am making certain our people are protected,” she said.
Bonnie looked at her a moment, then snatched the message from the man’s unresisting hands. “She’s trying to raise an army,” he said. He spoke in a whisper, his eyes never leaving Prudence.
“Oh my God,” said Bonnie, reading.
It was a message to David, Constance’s husband in Boston, describing the attack on Jesse and asking him to procure eight rifles and ship them to her without delay. From now on, her guards would be armed.
Bonnie felt her heart kick hard. “You cannot send this,” she breathed.
“Of course I can,” said Prudence, airily.
Now Bonnie was yelling it. “You cannot send this!”
It seemed to catch Prudence by surprise. “Do you not understand?” demanded Bonnie. “Do you not understand anything?”
“I understand we can no longer allow them to bully us,” said Prudence, and her voice was icy.
“Bully us? Sister, they will burn us down. Do you really think these people will sit still for you arming the Negroes of this town?”
“I am only trying to protect my property,” insisted Prudence. “I have a right to do that.”
She reached for the note. Bonnie held it away, then ripped it into pieces that fluttered to the floor like snow.
“What are you doing?” demanded Prudence.
“I am saving you from yourself,” said Bonnie. “Saving us all. For once in your life, would you stop and think before you act? You do not understand these white people. You do not understand how this would provoke them.”
Prudence’s laughter was filled with air and light. “Do not understand white people? Have you forgotten that I am white?”
“It is not the same,” said Bonnie.
“You should listen to the nigger,” said the sallow man.
Prudence looked at him. Bonnie looked at him. All at once, she simply felt tired, fatigue soaking her bones like water in a sponge. “Yes,” she said, “listen to the nigger.”
Prudence gaped. Bonnie didn’t care. She walked out. After a moment, she heard Prudence following. Bonnie glanced back and chanced to catch sight of the sallow man watching after them through the window of the store. She swallowed hard. Hatred burned in his eyes.
The stone chimney lay in pieces in the yard. The split-rail fence was broken in two places. The grass brushed at their knees. Ben stopped. His mouth gaped wide. His arms hung as if the hands at the end of them were weights.
“This here yard was her pride,” he said in a soft voice. He pointed. “Over there, that was the flower bed. I still remember, she make Hannah get out there with her and they pull ever’ last weed show its head above the dirt. Old colored man name of Hanks, he be out here once a week in the summer with that scythe, mowin’ the grass on down.”
“That grass has not been mowed down for a long time,” said Sam.
“Not since forever, look like,” said Ben. He led Sam through the side yard to the back door, and rapped on it. Ben’s face was tight. He was anxious and Sam couldn’t blame him. Ben had escaped these people seven years before. Now he was appearing at their door at the end of a ruinous war. Who knew how they would respond? They might press a rifle in his belly. They might spit in his face. They might do anything.
