I thought about the ages of the people who had been killed in just a few short months. Reverend George Lee was fifty-one. This man, Lamar Smith, was sixty-three. And Levi Jackson had just turned twenty-one. They all risked their lives to try to make a change.
Reverend George Lee, from what I was told, was a man of means, like Mr. Pete. But rather than running up north, he chose to stay down south and fight for his rights. I didn’t know much about Lamar Smith, except his age and that he had fought in the war, but he was older than Papa. Yet he decided to go to the courthouse and help other colored people register to vote. Then there was Levi, who was almost finished with college. He could have waited one more year, then left Mississippi and started a new—?better—?life somewhere else. Instead, he risked his life, even though he knew that Reverend George Lee had been killed only a few months before.
I could now understand why people like Mr. Pete chose to leave. He had his own land, on which he grew plenty of cotton. He had a nice house in Greenwood. He was better off than a lot of white folks in Leflore County, or even in Mississippi. Yet if he did something as simple as register to vote, like one of them, he could be killed.
At first, after seeing Mama and everyone else leaving Mississippi for a better life up north, I wanted to go only because I wanted that kind of life too. But after hearing that white folks in Mississippi would kill anybody, regardless of age, for simply wanting to exercise their right to vote, I wanted to leave before I was old enough to face the life-and-death decision of whether to stand up for my rights or just sit back and leave things the way they were.
Hallelujah turned off the motor, got out, and then ran around to the passenger side and opened the door for me. Either Reverend Jenkins had taught him well, or he didn’t want to take a chance on my dropping Miss Addie’s eggs.
Miss Addie’s yard was so small that we were practically at the rickety front steps when we got out of the car. I was almost afraid to climb the steps and walk across the tattered porch, even though I had done it too many times to count. Each time, I wondered whether it would be the last.
At nearly 102, Miss Addie had been born a slave. And since she lived on Mr. Robinson’s place and her last name happened to be Robinson as well, we all assumed that her family had been owned by Mr. Robinson’s family. And from the looks of her house, it appeared she was still living in a slave shack.
But slave or not, Miss Addie, like the abolitionist Frederick Douglass—?whom my old teacher Miss Johnson frequently quoted—?could read and write. And from what I had heard, she was a person with rather strange insight, and she had delivered not only nearly every colored baby in Stillwater but a few white ones as well.
Before I could tap on the door, she called out in her crackly voice, “Y’all come on in.”
Miss Addie’s house had three rooms—?a front room, a middle room, and a back room, which held a table, no chairs, a woodstove, and a tiny icebox. The house was what folks called a shotgun house. If you shot a gun at the front door, the bullet would zoom straight through the house and go right out the back door, assuming nobody (or nothing) was in its path.
Miss Addie’s front room served as her bedroom as well as her living room. In it she had no other furniture besides her bed, a rocking chair, a spit cup for her snuff, and a large tree stump that sat right in the middle of the floor, as if someone had chopped down a giant tree and built the shack right around it, which I think they did.
The middle room was where Miss Addie’s granddaughter, Jinx, slept. Jinx, who was also Miss Addie’s caregiver, was a forty-something-year-old spinster who sat around giggling all the time when there was nothing actually funny. I’m not sure whether Jinx was her real name or not, but I imagine that when it came time for choosing which relative would live with and care for Miss Addie, someone probably pointed at her and said, Jinx! You’re it!
I was hoping that Jinx wouldn’t be there when we arrived. But as soon as Hallelujah and I stepped through the door, she emerged from the middle room, giggling for no apparent reason and asking for the eggs. “How come you didn’t bring ’em last time?” she asked me.
Miss Addie, rocking back and forth in her rocker, said with some exasperation, “I told you dat boy run her off da road, Jinx.”
Jinx giggled, hugging the egg crate to her chest, as if I might take it back. “How you know a boy run her off the road, Mama?” she said. “You ain’t left this house in ten years.”
Miss Addie picked up her spit cup—?a tin can that once held store-bought peaches. She spat in the can, then wiped dripping snuff from her chin with a dingy handkerchief. “These old eyes sees what others cain’t,” she said.
With eyes nearly as silver as dimes, Miss Addie, some folks claimed, was born with a caul, or sixth sense, and therefore could “sense” things that other people couldn’t. But most folks, like Jinx and Ma Pearl, just thought she was plain ol’ senile.
“Set a spell, chi’ren,” she said, motioning toward the stump.