After a moment he directed his gaze back at Fred Lee and pointed. “Boy, is you ready?” he asked. “Is you ready to die?” He feigned a puzzled look. “No?” he said, as if Fred Lee had answered him. His next question seemed to be aimed at all of us left on the mourners’ bench. “Y’all think that boy from Chicago was ready to die? Y’all think he would’ve followed them white mens outta his uncle’s house if he knowed they was go’n kill him? That boy didn’t come to Miss’sippi to die. That boy come to Miss’sippi to live. To eat some good ol’?fashion’ home cooking. To smell the scent of fresh air. To see green fields and white cotton bolls. Instead he saw the bottom of the Tallahatchie River. Death don’t ’scriminate, and it don’t give you no warning. Be ready!”
I gasped when Fred Lee stood. All week long, like me, he had not taken the mourners’ bench seriously. As he took the seat of the right hand of fellowship, I couldn’t believe that with one sermon, a little country preacher had convinced him otherwise.
Shouts erupted from the crowd, with Ma Pearl shouting the loudest.
I didn’t shout, but I smiled. I was happy that my little brother got religion, even if I wasn’t ready to make that commitment myself. It took the church several minutes to finish shouting and dancing over Fred Lee’s conversion.
But even after another ten minutes of spewing fire and brimstone, Reverend Mims couldn’t move the last five of us mourners from that bench.
Chapter Twenty-Five
TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 13
I DIDN’T BOTHER WIPING THE SWEAT THAT POOLED beneath my eyes. I simply trudged toward the edge of the field, homebound, lugging the stuffed-to-the-brim cotton sack behind me. That evening, it seemed my sack was heavier than I ever remembered. I hadn’t worked any harder than usual, but the sack seemed a bigger burden regardless. Perhaps it was because for the past week and a half I had watched Queen and Fred Lee hop into Uncle Ollie’s car and head into town for school while I headed out to the field with Papa.
It made no sense. I was the smartest of the three, but I was the one stuck in the field. I could understand that Fred Lee was only in seventh grade, and perhaps Ma Pearl and Papa wanted him to at least finish that much. But Queen was headed off to the tenth grade. She was the one who had more schooling than she needed, not me. And she was pretty enough that any man would want to marry her, like Mr. Pete married Mama. But that ungrateful girl was wasting her time with the likes of Ricky Turner and wouldn’t even give a smart colored boy like Hallelujah the time of day. I’d be happy if someone as smart as Hallelujah was bent on marrying me. Not that I was looking at marriage as my way out. But like almost any other girl, I looked forward to a family of my own someday too.
My clothes clung to my sweaty body, and all I wanted was a cool bath in the tin tub. But since it was only Tuesday, I knew I wouldn’t get one. I’d have to wait for Wednesday, then again on Saturday. In the meantime, I had to make do with a wash-up, a bird bath, as Ma Pearl called it. Besides, there on the front steps sat Hallelujah, waiting for me.
Friend or not, I resented him sitting there in his freshly pressed clothes, that fedora atop his head, his penny loafers shining—?not even a drop of sweat on his nose. But then I remembered that he had promised to bring me something to read, and my heart skipped a few beats. He had promised to bring me a book Reverend Jenkins had ordered for him from a teachers’ catalog. The book was called Native Son, and it was written by a colored man named Richard Wright, who was supposedly born and raised right here in Mississippi. Like that phenomenon of colored and white children sitting side by side in classrooms up north, a colored man from Mississippi with his name on the outside of a book is something I’d have to see to believe.
By the time I reached the edge of the porch, Hallelujah was grinning.
I dropped my sack on the ground and asked, “What you so cheerful for?”
“Look what I got,” he said, waving a magazine toward me.
“Contraband?” I said, staring at and, for the first time, resenting the copy of Jet. The cover was powder blue and white, and it, of course, had a picture of a beautiful Negro woman on the cover. “Where’s the book you said you’d bring me?”
Hallelujah scowled. “Preacher said Native Son wasn’t a proper book to be sharing with a lady.”
I winced and said, “I ain’t no lady. If I was a lady, I wouldn’t be wearing myself out in that cotton field. I’d be sitting under a shade tree like Mrs. Robinson and sipping on some ice-cold lemonade.”
Hallelujah laughed and placed the magazine in my hand. “This is better than the book right now,” he said. “It’s last week’s edition. There’s an article about Emmett Till. Page three.”
“Oh,” I said, my perspective changing as I took the magazine from his hand.
“How Dark Negroes ‘Pass’ Down South,” the cover read. That, at least, sounded like information I could use. But when I opened the magazine to the article on Emmett Till, my jaw dropped. “Oh my God, Hallelujah. He looks so much like you.”
“Looked,” Hallelujah corrected me. Then he said, “I know. Gave me chills when I saw it. Preacher even said we have the same birthday. July twenty-fifth.”
I stared at the picture, a professional shot of a smiling, handsome boy wearing a fedora, a starched shirt, and a tie—?what Hallelujah wore every Sunday. I couldn’t believe the resemblance, as if they could have been brothers.
“Glad he didn’t wear glasses,” Hallelujah said, his voice low. “That would’ve been too close.”