“You running away?” I asked, assuming that any bags she had packed must have been tossed outside, seeing that her hands were empty.
With a wave of her hand, Queen shushed me again. “Naw, fool. I ain’t running away.”
“Then why you sneaking out the window?”
She sucked her teeth and said, “None a yo’ ol’ ugly business.”
The shock of her angry reply made me jump. Then I heard a horn. It sounded as if the tooter just barely touched it, so as to alert only someone who knew to be listening for it.
Queen glanced out the window. “Go back to bed,” she hissed at me like an angry snake.
I stalked toward the window. “Who’s out there?”
Queen blocked me with her arm. Her nostrils flared. “Like I said, that ain’t none a yo’ business, ol’ ugly spook,” she said, her teeth clenched.
When I tried to push past her, she shoved me to the floor. Before I could get back up, she was out the window faster than a gush of wind. I stumbled to the window just in time to see her race to the edge of the field, where a rusted-out white pickup waited.
My stomach twisted. The pickup belonged to Ricky Turner.
Chapter Fourteen
SATURDAY, AUGUST 27
HALLELUJAH STARTED DRIVING WHEN HE WAS ONLY eight years old. After the second Mrs. Clyde B. Jenkins the Second died, Reverend Jenkins was so torn up that he couldn’t even remember how to start his own car. So eight-year-old Hallelujah jumped right on into the front seat, started it for him, and drove straight down the road without missing a beat. And at fourteen he was a master behind the wheel.
When he pulled up in front of the house that morning, I beamed. And if I had been the squealing type, I would have done that, too. Hallelujah might have been his daddy’s chauffeur at eight years old, but Reverend Jenkins rarely allowed him access to the keys once he was actually almost old enough to drive.
I hopped into the passenger seat of the brown Buick, my grin stretching from my right ear to my left, and commanded, “?To Miss Addie’s, my good man.” I held on tight to my crate of eggs, as I knew what would happen next.
Gravel flew behind the car as Hallelujah sped off. Good thing Ma Pearl had gone fishing that morning, else she would’ve barged out of the house like a giant mama bear, yelling, Gal, git outta that car with that foolish boy!
Gravel beat on the sides of Reverend Jenkins’s Buick like popcorn popping in a skillet of hot grease. Hallelujah and I both hooted, as if we were a couple of city gangsters who had just pulled off the heist of the century. I knew to cherish the moment, as there was no telling when I’d see another one like it.
After catching Queen sneaking off into the night with Ricky Turner, I finally told Ma Pearl and Papa about him chasing me off the road nearly a month before. I told them right in front of Queen, hoping she’d take a hint. She didn’t do a thing but roll her eyes at me.
Ma Pearl threw a fiery fit when she realized that Miss Addie never got her eggs and had to make do a whole month without them. “Eggs is needed for everything,” Ma Pearl had yelled at me. “You should’ve told somebody. I oughta slap the black off you right now.”
Papa interrupted her rant and said he’d get Preacher to take me the next time. The preacher sent his son instead. So there we were, Hallelujah and I, rumbling down the road to Miss Addie’s, when Hallelujah decided to spoil my adventure by telling me that another Negro had been killed in Mississippi for helping colored people register to vote.
“His name is Lamar Smith,” Hallelujah said. His voice was quiet, and his eyes were fixed intently on the noisy rock road ahead of us. “He was sixty-three years old. A farmer and a war veteran. He had voted only a few weeks ago. When he was shot down, he was at the courthouse, trying to help other Negroes register to vote.”
I, too, stared at the rocky road ahead, saying nothing as Hallelujah gave me the horrible details of this man’s murder. By the time we pulled into Miss Addie’s yard, which was only big enough to accommodate the Buick, I was trembling and had broken into a cold sweat.
“You better stop all that shaking before you break them eggs,” Hallelujah said, nodding toward the crate in my lap.
I tried to smile at his attempt to calm my nerves. But how could I smile when a sixty-three-year-old man had been gunned down in broad daylight just for voting and taking other Negroes to the courthouse to vote?
Ten o’clock in the morning?
Right on the front lawn of the courthouse?
The sheriff saw the killer leaving the scene covered in blood, and he did nothing?
Mississippi had to be the most evil place in the world.