FREEDOM SUMMER
JESSIE FOSTER stood on the side of Highway 82, just outside Columbus, the Mississippi sun blistering her neck, tiny rivulets of perspiration huddled in her armpits. The once crisp wad of bills she had pinned to her brassiere, thirty-two dollars in fives and ones, lay wilted and damp against her skin. The white blouse she’d ironed that morning several hours before she took flight was covered by a thin film of dark Delta soil. Dry, breathless winds occasionally lifted the hem of her skirt and parched the skin of her thighs. The tissue with which she wiped her forehead was so moist from use that it crumbled in her hands, leaving tiny white specks scattered across her face. All the work she’d done on her hair before leaving and still she could feel it napping up at the edges, the roots crinkling and surrendering without a fight, overwhelmed by the sweat gathering beneath the glistening strands of her Dixie Peach-scented hair.
Five minutes earlier, two white men in a truck had sped up and driven dangerously close to where she stood on the shoulder of the road. The tires missed her feet by a few inches and through the grimy haze of dust the screeching tires raised, Jessie saw the men’s sunburned faces and their gaze moving like footsteps across her face. The men sat in the truck, idling the engine, so close to her they could have reached out the window and touched her. They sat there trying to decide whether to drive on or to relieve their boredom by terrorizing her.
When finally they began to drive away, their careening drunken laughter was the only sound, besides Jessie’s heart, filling the sun-beaten afternoon. Then a few hundred yards up the road, one of the men leaned out the window on the passenger side and stared back at Jessie, a beer bottle dangling from his hand. The truck began a slow, relentless drive in reverse. Fear rattled in her mind like chains. She was so frightened that she picked up the string-tied cardboard box packed with her clothes and walked in the opposite direction. She kept her eyes downcast, plotting in her mind some form of escape across the flat, endless cotton fields on either side of the highway. The truck’s tires rolled across the uneven buckled tar of the road with a soft whine. When she heard the squeal of brakes, she thought her life was over, but a moment later the engine revved up, cranking and irritable. Still Jessie kept walking, not stopping when the strap on her sandal broke. And even when the twine on the box she carried snapped, Jessie retrieved the box from the ground without missing a step. Counting silently, she shoved fear momentarily from her mind. When she reached one hundred Jessie stopped and dared to look behind her. The truck was now only a flicker of red on the distant horizon and she collapsed in relief, falling heavily on the cardboard box. Her heart was pounding, scratching for release like some tiny animal chewing its way out of a trap.
Jessie swallowed a wad of spit, trying to quench a sudden, parching thirst and ran her tongue across her lips. Heat shimmered and danced in waves, as she gazed across the highway. In her imagination, the sun locked its sweltering hands around her neck. Nausea quickened in the pit of her stomach and in a hot, vivid flash of memory, she felt her father’s hands unbuttoning her blouse, cradling her breasts. He had sneaked up on her, like some kind of thief, as she was standing at the stove, turning on the fire beneath the black cast iron frying pan. She had been daydreaming. Daydreaming because Chester Foster’s hands couldn’t reach her there. Daydreaming to save her life. But then, he was on her like a smell, like a fever, his tongue on her neck, his knee jammed between her legs and his hands holding her breasts, squeezing them so hard that tears welled in the corners of her eyes. And she had whispered, “No, Daddy, please no.”
Even now, Jessie couldn’t say why yesterday was different. Why yesterday at the moment her father turned her around to face him, she had let her hand reach for the handle of the frying pan, been grateful for its weight, and hit her father on the head once, then again. She didn’t know why she had stood there watching him stagger and fall onto the cracked, dull green linoleum of the kitchen floor, before sinking to her knees as solemnly as if to pray, and hit him a third time as he lay in a slick, glistening stream of blood. At the sight of her father’s body, monstrous, unmoving, Jessie felt a smile tremble as cautiously as a nervous tick on her lips. Chester Foster wore a pair of blue-striped boxer shorts and a sleeveless undershirt and a stocking cap to protect his pomade-scented waves. Walking down the street, Chester Foster turned his muscular former boxer’s build into a taunt. At home he walked around shirtless, his solid body bludgeoning his family into silence and obedience. Now he lay crumpled at his daughter’s feet. Jessie couldn’t hear him breathing. And she didn’t care. The feel of the warm pan handle against her palm had pumped her full of an anger so pure, she never wanted the feeling to end.
The blood began to stain her skirt, and Jessie rose from the floor just as Mae Ann, a bag of groceries in her arms, entered the kitchen. Mae Ann’s eyes ballooned in terror and she dropped the bag, cans and jars and boxes crashing around their father’s frame.
“What yall done done?” she screamed. Mae Ann’s voice wailed, as unsettling and stunning as a siren. That’s when Jessie ran.
She went to Aunt Eva’s, telling her as she sat in Eva’s living room, her arms wrapped around her body as if afraid she would disintegrate if she let herself go, “I did a terrible thing. A terrible thing.”
Eva escorted her back home, where Jessie stood trembling with fear on the sidewalk in front of the house, not daring to go in. Eva got her clothes and told her sister, Jessie’s mother, Olive, that Jessie said she wasn’t coming back. Junior and Willie had stared at her from behind the screen door while Aunt Eva was in the house. Junior gazed at Jessie, from a face that seemed to her to be a blunt, dangerous instrument. Then he turned and walked back into the house, appearing to evaporate in the cool shadows of the hallway. Willie stole quickly down the steps and hugged her, pressing a five-dollar bill in her hand, his light brown eyes whispering good-bye because he did not want to say the words. Mae Ann ran around from the back and grabbed Jessie’s hands. “They done took him to the hospital,” she told Jessie breathlessly. “He woke up when they put him in the ambulance.” Then she begged, “Take me with you, Jess. You cain’t be the only one gits away.” When Aunt Eva came out to the porch, Mae Ann said to Jessie under her breath, “Send for me, you hear? Send for me,” the plea fluttering mournfully, choking Jessie’s heart as she watched Mae Ann run to the back of the house.
As Eva and Jessie drove away the sound of Olive Foster’s voice calling Jessie’s name again and again drenched the warm night air. Jessie sat straight and still in the front seat, refusing to hear. She would never know that her mother sat on the porch until daybreak praying and waiting for her to come back home. Aunt Eva, who had never married, who owned a small beauty shop, who had been to Atlanta, Memphis and New York with her church, said to Jessie as she spread a sheet on the sofa in the living room that night, “You done sent your daddy to the hospital and I wants to know why.” Lighting up a Lucky Strike, her head a field of pink rollers, her lean, angular body swathed in a blue chenille robe, Eva crossed her legs, stared at Jessie and said, “I’m listening. I ain’t been your aunt all this time for you to start lying or trying to hold back on me now. What’s been going on in that house?”
Jessie answered Eva with a sob so resolute, so complete, that Eva stubbed out her cigarette and reached for Jessie, cradling her in her arms.
“I can’t tell nobody. I can’t never tell nobody. Not even God,” she said. Eva sat on the sofa holding Jessie against her breast until the girl fell into a longed-for but tortured sleep. Three hours before Eva was due home the next afternoon, Jessie packed her things and left.
Copyright © 2011 by Marita Golden. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
