“But why Rose and not Fred Lee and Queen?” asked Monty. “Wouldn’t you have harvested faster with the extra help?”
“Because Rose is apt,” Papa said. “She don’t need no school to learn. She’ll find a way to get her learning, just like Belle did. Queen and Fret’Lee don’t have them kind of smarts. If I keep them outta school even for the harvest, they’d soon give up. They’d accept that way of life. But not Rose. She know how to make a way outta no way.” Papa’s expression brightened a bit when he said, “Even now she’ll catch up and outrun every child in that school.”
“But why now?” asked Monty. “Why have you suddenly decided she should go when the cotton is picked?”
Papa scowled and said, “?’Cause a Negro without proper schooling ain’t nothing to the white man but a nigger.”
Smiling, Monty turned to me and said, “I hear you’ve been considering a fresh start.”
I gave him a questioning stare.
“Saint Louis?” he answered, his brows raised.
“I . . .” was all I could say before the words jumbled up in my mouth and refused to come out. I glanced at Aunt Belle. Like Monty, she was smiling.
“Belle and I have been talking,” Monty said. “She told me about your conversation when we were here a few weeks ago.”
“Our . . . conversation,” I stammered, glancing from Monty to Aunt Belle, then back again.
“I gaith whath you askth me thome thought,” Aunt Belle said.
Monty patted her on the knee, reminding her to rest her jaw. “The last time we were here,” he said to me, “we weren’t prepared to take you back. But after giving your request some thought and talking it over,” he said as he glanced lovingly at Aunt Belle, “we’d love to have you in Saint Louis.” He nodded at Papa and said, “That is, if it’s okay with you, Mr. Carter.”
My heart raced. I should have been smiling, leaping for joy at Monty’s words, but instead, my stomach churned with nervousness. Since the day Mr. Pete took Mama away in his train of a car, I had wanted nothing more than to go with them. To live a life up north. A life I could experience only from the way colored people from up north dressed, from the way they talked, even down to the way they laughed—?which was vastly different from the way things were for colored people in the South. I couldn’t believe the door to that good life was suddenly standing open before me. Monty and Aunt Belle were asking me, Rose Lee Carter, to go back to Saint Louis with them.
Like me, Papa seemed to have lost his ability to speak. He sat there, his expression unreadable, staring at Monty. When he didn’t respond after what seemed to be more than a minute, Monty spoke. “We’ll of course wait till after the harvest, if you’d like.” He smiled at me and said, “What do you say to the first week of November, Rose?”
Good thing I was sitting, else I would have hit the floor. Not only were my knees weak, but my whole body seemed to have melted like warmed butter. Here was my chance to leave Mississippi, and my emotions were in a whirlwind. Especially when I saw the look in Papa’s eyes. It was the same look of defeat that held Aunt Belle captive when Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam were set free from the charge of murdering Emmett Till.
“Papa,” I said softly. “You want me to go?”
When Papa shook his head and said, “You know the answer to that question is no,” my heart took a dive.
But then he said, “But I won’t hold you back.”
“You won’t?” I said, my voice cracking.
Papa’s expression brightened. “Not no mo’,” he said, shaking his head. “Not no mo’.”
Chapter Thirty
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 25
“‘LET NOT YOUR HEART BE TROUBLED: YE BELIEVE IN God, believe also in me. In my Father’s house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also.’”