After a long silence, Slow John answered, “I gots to go d’work in the moan’n. I need to take y’all home d’night.”
Aunt Ruthie wrapped her arms around her waist, dropped her head, and muttered, “A’right.”
“Lawd, have mercy!” Ma Pearl cried. She threw her giant hands in the air and stormed toward her bedroom.
Papa gave out one more warning. “Ruthie,” he said, almost as a sigh.
“Let’r go, Paul,” Ma Pearl called over her shoulder. “She’ll learn ’ventually. That school o’ hard knocks is a dirn good teacher.”
With tears rolling down my cheeks, I, too, turned and went to my room, knowing my heart couldn’t take the sight of Aunt Ruthie walking through that door, especially with fresh blood seeping through the clean rag Papa had just wrapped around her busted head.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 21
“BEER!” MONTY YELLED. “BEER. IN A COURTHOUSE. During a murder trial. Stupid and senseless,” he hissed.
I sat on the floor in Grandma Mandy’s old mothball-scented room next to the kitchen, my ear pressed against the wall, straining to pick up every word of the conversation from the adults huddled around the kitchen table. There was so much excitement over the third day of the trial of Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam that I was sure the week of September 19, 1955, would go down as one of the best weeks in Negro history in Mississippi. Our little unpainted house on Mr. Robinson’s place buzzed with commotion that Wednesday night, and with so much hope. After Reverend Mose Wright had stood before a courtroom full of white people and pointed out J. W. Milam for the jury, Reverend Jenkins and Monty couldn’t stop bragging of his bravery.
But obviously Monty was livid over someone drinking beer during the trial. Having never been in a courtroom myself, I had no idea whether this was normal behavior.
“Mississippi is making a mockery of the justice system,” he said. “No one should be allowed to drink beer during a trial. It’s just plain stupid.”
“When you have the judge setting the example,” Reverend Jenkins chimed in, “what can you expect? He sat there and sipped on a Coca-Cola.”
“This kind of tomfoolery would never be tolerated in a northern courtroom,” said Monty.
“Baby, calm down,” Aunt Belle said with a slight laugh. “We can’t worry about what these people do or do not allow to go on in their courtroom, as long as they let the Negro press in to report the story. God knows we can’t depend on the white press to tell the truth.”
“Amen to that, Baby Sister,” said Reverend Jenkins. “Thank God for the Negro press—”
“But did you see that press table?” interjected Monty. “All our people cramped around a card table against the wall? And they made Congressman Diggs sit there too? And what’s with that fat sheriff strolling in there, greeting them with ‘Hello, niggers’ every morning?”
“Baby, we’re not gonna let the negatives overshadow the positives, okay?” said Aunt Belle. “Reverend Mose did a fine job. Stood right there in the midst of all that white, pointed, and said, ‘There he is.’”
I was exhausted from a long day of picking cotton, frustrated at all the learning I was missing at school, but somehow I stayed there on the floor, my legs stretched before me, my head resting against the wall, the nutty scent of Maxwell House coffee lingering in the air. The conversation of colored people discussing the trial of two white men accused of lynching a Negro made me feel good. But then there was Ma Pearl, and she simply had to toss in her two coins.
“I don’t like all this crazy talk up in my house,” she said. “Coloreds and whites was gittin’ ’long jest fine ’fo all these NAACP peoples showed up.”
“God, Mama,” Aunt Belle said. “How can you call this master-slave existence getting along?”
“I ain’t nobody’s slave,” Ma Pearl said. “I gits paid for my work.”
Even from the other side of the wall, it seemed I could hear Aunt Belle’s eyebrows shoot up when she asked, “What? Three dollars a week?” She sighed and said, “It’s a shame how that woman got you thinking she loves you.”
“Y’all young folks thank you know everything,” Ma Pearl said. “Don’t know nothing. Thank them northern Negroes go’n be round when the Klan show up at ol’ Mose’s do’step tonight? Nah, they ain’t. They go’n be somewhere hidin’ behind they own locked do’s.”
The kitchen was silent for so long it was as if they all had suddenly fallen asleep.
Finally Ma Pearl spoke again. “Not all white peoples is bad,” she said.