I nodded. “The Supreme Court outlawed school segregation in the state of Kansas.”
“That’s right,” Aunt Belle said. “And soon it will happen all over the country.” She shifted her weight on the bed and asked, “Do you know what the White Citizens’ Council is?”
Again I nodded. “Hallelujah told me about them.”
“That group formed right here in the Delta, in Indianola, not too far from Stillwater. They formed shortly after the Supreme Court passed down their ruling. Their membership spread like fire throughout the South. They want to make sure the government doesn’t force integration on the South the way it had to do in Kansas.”
“They’re in more than one state?”
Aunt Belle nodded. “Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana. They’re all over the South.”
I told her about what I heard at the Robinsons’ a few days after Levi’s death, how I heard Mr. Robinson himself say they had to put a stop to the NAACP, calling them the National Association for the Agitation of Colored People. “Mr. Robinson even threatened Papa and Ma Pearl that he’d throw them off his place if they got involved with the NAACP.”
“Then you know why we’re here,” Aunt Belle said. “The White Citizens’ Council uses those scare tactics to keep Negroes from registering to vote. They know that if colored people voted, the South would lose its fight to keep Jim Crow laws intact.”
“They ain’t just scaring people, Aunt Belle. They’re killing them,” I said. “Levi is dead. Lamar Smith is dead. Reverend Lee is dead. And for all we know, that boy from Chicago—?Mr. Mose Wright’s nephew—?could be dead. And like Ma Pearl said, we don’t know what he did to make those white men angry enough to take him from his uncle’s house.”
Aunt Belle’s expression grew dark. “Well, I assure you it wasn’t registering to vote. The boy is fourteen and from Chicago. And for all we know, he didn’t do anything. It wouldn’t be the first time these crackers lynched a colored man just because they felt like it.”
I grabbed my chest. “You think he was lynched?”
Aunt Belle shook her head. “No, no, no. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to say that.” She looked away, but not before I saw the tears in her eyes.
“Aunt Belle,” I said quietly, “do you think he’s dead?”
She grabbed my hand and squeezed it. “Let’s not think that way, okay?”
I nodded, but the thought lingered in my mind like a bad dream. I didn’t know the boy from Chicago, but I knew my own little brother. And I would want to die myself if something happened to him, especially if he was taken in the middle of the night by white men.
Aunt Belle turned back to me and said, “Come here.” She embraced me and held me tight. “I know you’re scared. This is a hard place to live in, and it’s a hard time to live here as well. But you’ve got to be brave. We’re in a war. And there has never been a war fought where everyone lived. Some folks will have to die.”
My body shook. “But I don’t want that somebody to be you,” I said. “Can’t you just stop? Can’t you just go back to Saint Louis? Why do you have to risk your life just so colored people in the South will vote?”
Aunt Belle pulled away and held me by my shoulders. “When I first left for Saint Louis, I swore I would never set foot in Mississippi again,” she said. “Then I came back to visit, and I saw the plight of my people. It broke my heart. Once I met Monty and learned so much about our history from him, I wanted to do something about it. I wanted to come back and help my people.”
I shook my head and muttered, “I don’t wanna be here. I wanna leave. Go to Chicago. Saint Louis. Anywhere. As long as it ain’t the South.”
“And you will,” Aunt Belle said. “When you’re old enough.”
“What about now? Why can’t you take me back with you when you leave next week?”
Aunt Belle shook her head. “I can’t.”
“Why not?”
Her forehead creased. “Besides the fact that Mama won’t let you leave?”
I didn’t answer.
Aunt Belle sighed and said, “I can’t. I just can’t right now, because I didn’t come down here to take you back to Saint Louis, so I’m not prepared to take care of you.”
“I don’t need you to take care of me,” I said, my voice pleading. “I know how to take care of myself. I can cook and clean and do anything a grown person can do.”
With solemn eyes, Aunt Belle simply shook her head and said, “I’m so sorry, Rose. But I just can’t right now. That’s not why I came.”
Aunt Belle’s words closed in and crushed me, just the way Miss Addie’s shack had crushed me in my nightmare. And at that moment I wished the nightmare had been true. I would have preferred being buried under the rubble of Miss Addie’s fallen shack than sitting there holding the ruins of my crushed dreams.
Chapter Eighteen
SUNDAY, AUGUST 28