Now Nat felt inspired to move to a smaller town, like the one near Lafayette where Darlene had grown up. The pregnancy seemed to make his wishes inevitable, even necessary. Somewhat randomly, Nat chose Ovis, Louisiana, a village on the shores of the Mississippi, half submerged under the poverty line, in part for its odd name. The name sounded humble to him, like the sort of place where he could organize and mobilize small-town black folks. He’d also gotten inspired by Tom Bradley’s and Maynard Jackson’s political careers; it seemed a portal had opened for black mayors to get common people to recognize that safety and power came with the right to vote and that involvement in politics could raise their standard of living and prevent injustices like the one in Pensacola. The nation would soon turn two hundred years old—it was about time.
The fetus, however, as if to scorch the edges of their idealism, did not come to term. Nat and Darlene kept the door to the second bedroom of their new home closed for the greater part of the next year as they regained the strength to want a child again.
The following September, Eddie was born—prematurely, and the difficulty of caring for him added to the upheaval in his parents’ lives. With so little money, they ended up waiting to get married until Eddie was about six months old. They had no doubts about their relationship, but the official fussiness and expense of a wedding, added to the obligation to mobilize their families, had always seemed trivial and irritating compared to their monumental romance, their social dreams.
Though Nat, through his family, had known the stubbornness of rural folks firsthand as a child in East Texas, he still maintained a dreamy faith about the potential they represented. He had, after all, made something of himself, and he knew others could also. Occasionally he’d speak immodestly of himself as a Moses-like figure leading his people through the desert, but in truth, he faced a maddening grind convincing people to register to vote when they still felt that they might be harmed for attempting to better their lives. Nevertheless, Nat and Darlene opened a general store called the Mount Hope Grocery on the town’s tiny main street, and lonely, destitute men and women gathered in its back room to drink in the peace and companionship of similarly hopeless people. For the most part they admired Nat’s determination to mobilize the community, his fund-raising, his voter-registration drives, but they did not expect rapid change.
Sparkplug McKeon, however, a shiny-faced man whose compact body had taken on the shape of the three-legged, threadbare living-room chair that was his favorite in the dusty yard out back, would shake his head diagonally every time Nat launched a new initiative. Won’t none of this come to no good, he growled. I seened it too many a time.
He told three tales of recent, nearby woe to illustrate his point. The first involved a Northern activist, a black girl of seventeen who had been abducted, raped, and gutted with a fish knife in Acadia Parish, probably by the Ku Klux Klan.
Cold case, Sparkplug said, raising an eyebrow, and we all know what that mean.
The second had to do with a Jew who was shot in the face outside Baton Rouge because of a rumor that he’d been having an affair with a white woman prominent in the community. Sparkplug told this one to prove that the hatred ran deeper than just prejudice against Negroes.
Catholics too, he said. Ain’t nobody different had no chance in this damn state, he asserted, shaking his head.
The third tale was about his own uncle, Louis McKeon, who had refused to give up a parcel of land to a white man and gone missing soon afterward.
My cousin Grant wasn’t but six month old at the time. You tell me what McKeon man gonna leave off his new child like that, Sparkplug said, never hearing hide nor hair of him again. I tell you it never happen—we honorable folk. My cousin Geneva? Said she heard some white man talkin ’bout that they dumped Uncle Lou’s body in the Mississippi and watched the gators feedin on it, and they was jus a-laughing, taking bets or some shit. And white folks say niggers is animals, that we next door to a ape. I tell you I’d rather be next door to a ape than next door to a goddamn cracker. At least a ape be my friend from Africa, wouldn’t sell his damn house on Tuesdy if I move next door on Mondy. See, to these folks, a animal is even more of a nigger than a nigger is. And you know animals is some beautiful creatures of God. What they think so bad ’bout being a ape?
And yet the residents of Ovis appeared to have accepted the injustices they’d suffered as inescapable. Nat felt he could’ve knelt down in front of their strained smiles and gathered their impacted anger in his hands as he went door to door and filled baskets with the harvest, but his attempts to plant it or grow it into any kind of action often proved futile.
Well, he’d ask Sparkplug, why don’t you register to vote, my man?
Sparkplug, the most frankly angry man for miles, often in the process of arranging his poker hand, didn’t usually look up. The one time he did reply, he said, Vote for who? The son of the cracker sumbitch killed my uncle?
The men passed laughter between them like beer, mollifying a shared disappointment, frustration, and rage intense enough to turn murderous if you provoked it, though the opportunity to vent wouldn’t ever arrive. Even if they got a chance, the talons of injustice would swoop down soon enough, dismember these men, and be gone, and everybody would forget that any of it had happened, leaving no trace aside from a lingering miasma that might rise into the Spanish moss.
Gradually, though, some of the men and women came to Nat privately, and he began to convince these few to see past their hopelessness and wrath into an easier future, if only a slightly easier one. A few signed up. They joked about a time when their despair would lift, when someone would cut them a break, and with a proud smirk, Nat saw that they’d taken the first step toward shedding their perpetual despair. But all his activity, despite the optimism at the heart of its politics, quickly attracted negative attention in the form of threatening phone calls, unpleasant words on the street, and bad service in local businesses. They’d been through this sort of thing before, from their own people, Nat reminded Darlene, so they should know not to pay it any mind. Still, Nat tended to measure these minor wrongs against far larger ones, like the atrocities committed against Henry Marrow, Medgar Evers, and Emmett Till, so he failed to see them for what they were: the opening moves of a chess game he could never win, considering how many moves ahead his opponents were already thinking.
4.
We Named the Goat