“Can you come outside for a minute?” he whispered.
I poked a chicken thigh with a fork and slid it onto the next person’s plate. The chicken pan was still half full, so I asked Miss Doll to cover for me while I talked to Hallelujah.
As we slipped out the back door, my nose rejoiced. I was glad to be out of the Jackson house, which always smelled like day-old cabbage and musty feet.
Unlike our house, the Jacksons’ house was surrounded by trees instead of cotton fields. As the yard was congested with people picnicking on blankets in the shade, Hallelujah and I went for a walk in the wooded area out back.
Mr. Robinson, it seemed, owned half the land in Stillwater, plus land dotted throughout the county. What he didn’t use for farming, he built shanties on and rented them to colored people at exorbitant rates. His wooded land, he used for lumbering. There were plenty of stumps in these woods, where trees had lost their lives for the shacks Mr. Robinson built.
We walked away from the house until we could no longer hear the whispered chatter of voices—?some mournful, some confused, but all angry, either at the white men who killed Levi or at Levi himself for getting killed.
We sat together on a wide stump, and Hallelujah placed a newspaper on my lap.
When I saw the picture and the headline, I screamed and flung the paper as far away from me as I could. My stomach did somersaults as Hallelujah retrieved the paper from the trunk of a nearby tree.
He thrust the paper into my face and said in the deepest voice he could muster, “Read it!”
“No!” I said, shielding my eyes with my hands. My body trembled, and sweat poured down my sides. I didn’t have to see the paper again. Its headline, PREACHER’S MOUTH SHOT OFF, would be seared in my mind forever, along with the gruesome picture of Reverend George W. Lee with his face sewn up like Frankenstein.
As if loaded down by a heavy weight, Hallelujah dropped his body next to me on the stump. He sighed loudly and said, “I promised Preacher I’d never show you this.” He paused and stared back at the cluster of mourners congregated around the Jacksons’ yard. “But after seeing how people reacted about Levi’s death, like it’s not a big deal, I had to share it with somebody.” He extended the paper toward me. “You need to know the truth, Rosa.”
My stomach churned, but I took the paper hesitantly. I glanced at the headline again. PREACHER’S MOUTH SHOT OFF, TONGUE SHOT INTO, ALLEGEDLY, BY WHITE MEN. Across the top of the page read Southern Mediator Journal. I had never heard of the paper.
“A Negro paper?” I asked.
Hallelujah nodded. “Yes. Arkansas. Little Rock.”
He pointed at the top of the paper, where it read, “The South’s Progressive Negro Weekly. Little Rock, Arkansas.” Hallelujah took a deep breath, then exhaled. “His face was ripped in two. The undertaker had to suture it back together.”
A chill crept over my body.
“Hundreds of shotgun pellets in his face,” Hallelujah continued, anger burning in his eyes, “and the sheriff dismissed them as dental fillings. He didn’t say a thing about the bullet holes in his shot-out tires.”
As I studied the paper, Hallelujah said, “Dr. T.R.M. Howard in Mound Bayou said some Negroes would sell their grandmas for half a dollar, but Reverend Lee was not one of them.”
“Negroes like Ma Pearl,” I said, glancing up at him.
“Judas niggers.”
“What?”
“Judas niggers,” Hallelujah repeated. “Negroes who’d sell their grandmas for half a dollar just to stay in the white man’s favor.”
I told him what Ma Pearl said about Levi having “a whole lotta stupid” in his head and how she’d kill her own if they registered to vote.
Hallelujah leaped from the stump. “That’s bull crap!” he said, banging his fist in his palm. “We have rights too. And that includes the right to vote. A man shouldn’t have to die for wanting to vote.”
I tugged his shirttail. “Calm down before folks get suspicious.”
He slumped down on the stump with a huff.
“Reverend Jenkins know you talk like that?” I asked.
A quick shrug of his right shoulder was Hallelujah’s only reply.
“You shouldn’t use such strong language. You might start cussing like Queen.”
“These white folks around here will make even a preacher cuss,” Hallelujah answered.
“Well, don’t you start,” I said. “Be a shame for a good boy like you to end up in hell.”
“I live in Mississippi,” he replied tersely. “I’m already in hell.”
“Hell is hot, and it’s full of demons,” I said.
Hallelujah glared at me and said, “And so is Mississippi.”
August
Chapter Nine
FRIDAY, AUGUST 19