But what stood out most and made me remember Miss Vergene’s funeral was not her white hair or her frowning face; it was her thirteen children and the way those children, especially her eight sons, wept and wailed and fell out on the floor in a dead faint as they cried out for their mama.
Before that day, I had never seen men cry. And every time they cried out “Maa-maa,” I cried too, because I knew what it was like not being able to see your mama every day. I cried so hard that I had bruises under my eyes for seven days.
So that Saturday morning, as I sat packed in a pew at Little Ebenezer Baptist Church, I stared at the black casket that held Levi Jackson’s dead body and I didn’t even try to hold back my tears. Every time one of Mr. Albert’s sons cried out, “Lord, why they kill my brother?” I thought about Fred Lee and how I would wail too if somebody killed him.
The air was putrid with perfume and perspiration. All around me, people fell backwards on the wooden pews, wailing and weeping. Levi’s mama, Mrs. Flo-Etta Jackson, or Miss Etta, as everyone called her, stood at the end of my pew. She wore her white usher’s uniform and her thick-soled white shoes. As head of the ushers’ board, she took her job seriously, standing at her post even at the funeral of one of her own. Nevertheless, tears rolled down her round cheeks and onto the collar of her white dress as she used one hand to fan mourners and the other to distribute tissues, not bothering to wipe her own tears, even though they flowed heavily enough to flood the church floorboards.
“Gawd has called one of his angels home,” the flat-nosed Reverend E. D. Blake bellowed from the pulpit. “Too soon, some might say. But Gawd says right on time. For his ways are not our ways, and his thoughts not our thoughts.”
Tearful “amens” rose from the congregation, as if what Reverend Blake had said was the truth. I shouldn’t have been surprised to hear such nonsense coming from him. He, like Papa and Mr. Albert, was the kind of Negro who stayed in his place, which was probably why Mr. Albert chose to have Levi’s funeral at Little Ebenezer Baptist Church rather than at our church, Greater Mount Zion Missionary Baptist Church. He knew that Reverend Jenkins wouldn’t have been afraid to speak the truth about how Levi died.
God didn’t call Levi home, I wanted to shout at Reverend Blake. A white man’s bullet did. But I couldn’t shout that any more than I could shout “Hallelujah!”—?because there was no proof that it was a white man’s bullet that killed Levi. Only the word of disgruntled Negroes who, according to a group called the White Citizens’ Council, wanted to stir up trouble in Mississippi.
I’d heard of the White Citizens’ Council from Hallelujah, but three days after Levi’s death I got the chance to hear from them with my own ears. That Wednesday, Ma Pearl sent me to Mrs. Robinson’s to pick up a bag of her older son Sam’s old clothes for Fred Lee. I was supposed to go by at twelve, during my break. Instead I left the field early and went by around a quarter before noon. Four cars were parked in front of the Robinsons’ house. All four of them belonged not to Mr. Robinson but to other white landowners and businessmen. While I waited at the back door, I heard Mr. Robinson and the other men, who were sitting in the dining room and ranting about what the Citizens’ Council must do to protect the rights of white folks. And one of those things was not to let that group, the National Association for the “Agitation” of Colored People—?the NAACP—?contaminate the good colored citizens of Leflore County. When Mrs. Robinson returned with the bag of clothes and realized I could hear everything being said in the dining room, her face turned as red as a tomato. She practically shoved me out the door after handing me the clothes.
So I was not surprised when the NAACP tried to get involved after Levi’s death and Mr. Albert told them to let it be. “The boy’s already dead,” he said. “Stirring up trouble for other Negroes won’t bring him back.”
Just thinking about it made me shiver. For if it had been Fred Lee lying in that casket dressed in a cheap brown suit donated by Mr. Robinson himself, Papa might’ve said the same thing.
“Peace over power” is what he always said.
“How can a man have peace if the fear of death is always at his back?” I asked him.
He said he’d learned to do like Paul the Apostle and be content in whatever state he was in.
I’ll be content, I said to myself, when the state I’m in is no longer Mississippi.