Little Rock.’
It was a little shotgun house with the kitchen cluttered with pots, pans, sheet music and war mementoes, including a gas mask. Mother recalled how ashamed she was that we ate like we were starving, gobbling his peach preserves and government-surplus peanut butter after eating half of the fat back and greens which had been simmering on the stove. So when Buster promised Lil pancakes and sorghum syrup for breakfast, Mother said, ‘You better stop or I won’t never get her back up Jersey way.’
Next thing, Buster sat himself at the piano and created a song, a ragtime thing with some made-up lyrics about not letting Lil go back to Jersey.
Mother said everything in the kitchen was swinging and she got Lilian to dance, because Lil could always cut a shimmy.
We must have all been having a ball in that Delta heat until I strained to fill my diaper and Mother rushed me to the outhouse. While she held me over the toilet, a car rolled into the yard and backfired. Mother thought nothing about it, beyond wondering who Buster and Mamie knew who could afford an automobile. But it soon drove off again and next she heard Lilian calling. When Mother made her way to the front yard with me trailing behind, she found Lil standing over Buster who was sprawled motionless on the ground. His face and hair were covered in dust and blood and Lil was shooing the flies off him. Mother used to say, ‘What was I meant to do? I was young and stupid and there he was on the ground with his eyes swole like two baseballs and blood streaming from his nose and mouth. I thought he was dead.’
Of course she started bellowing, because she never could cope with the sight of blood, and when she bellowed, Lilian joined her and then I started.
She didn’t know if she’d walked into some kind of feud, but the whole scene petrified her, and there were no neighbours for miles. So grabbing us kids she ran in the house, shouting at my sister, ‘Did you see what happened? Who done it!’ But Lilian was crying hysterically by then and couldn’t get a word out.
No phones. No neighbours. No real knowledge of Mamie or her brother. She was in a completely strange place with two little children, and a man she’d just met was in a heap on the ground. Mother was frantic that the culprits would return while Buster was laying out in his front yard with his chin split open and flies settling on his bloodied face.
She didn’t even know where the water pump was to get water to clean his wounds, so she tied me to a chair with an apron she’d spotted and grabbed the pot of greens. Lilian followed her back outside where one of the roosters was pecking at Buster’s trouser leg. Using the pot liquor and one of my diapers to wipe some of the blood from his face, all Mother could do was cry and say, ‘You’ll be all right. Just tell me what happened.’ He never spoke.
Lil was just learning to count that summer and wasn’t able to say whether Buster had been attacked by three or four, men or boys. All she knew is that while Mother had me in the outhouse, some white men had driven up and called Buster to the porch. He had told her to stay in the house so she’d watched from the door.
What had she seen? Did Buster resist being beaten and kicked to the ground? Who did what? Were words exchanged? At five years old Lil had no clear answers. ‘One hit him with the stick and the others were kicking him,’ she’d cried. The tyre mark across his shirt suggested that the car may have driven over him.
Mother couldn’t move him so she placed an apron she found in the house over his face to keep the flies off it and made a promise to Lil: ‘Let the Good Lord get us back to Jersey and we’ll never come to Mississippi again.’
When Mamie arrived in the late afternoon to find her brother unconscious in the yard, she hardly seemed surprised. ‘He pestered them bosses over at the reserve board for his disability pension and when they turned him down, he started putting it around that he was gonna write to Washington.’ Mamie was a big woman, tall, broad and heavy hipped. Not the sort to back off a fight, but she sat on the porch and removed her hat and earrings and slung them on the ground.
Mother said Mamie had then pumped Lilian with questions that no child of five could have managed, like what kind of car had come and what ages were the men.
In later years, whenever my sister wanted sympathy, she used to tell the Buster McMichael story. But she was thin on facts.
When he died that evening, without regaining consciousness, Mamie’d said, ‘I hope his uniform still fits, cause he’d want to be buried in it.’
Five years later in our room above Mack’s, Mother said, ‘You’re going to Sippy, Lil, like it or not.’
So that’s where we headed with the proceeds from the sale of Miss Hortense’s furniture. May 1, 1930. And my sister thought our lives were ending. In some ways they were.
We took the bus south and although Mother tried to look happy and tell us that living with Mamie was going to be good for us, I faced the prospect with as much dread as my sister, because she was the leader then. Lilian was going to turn ten that June and kept reminding me that I was going to miss my Holy Communion.
‘Can’t I take it in “Sippy”?’ I asked Mother when we settled on the bus.
But Lilian pinched me to be quiet.
On the bus one woman talked about President Hoover as though he were God or a magician, but nobody could fix what had taken years to happen.
Our driver between North and South Carolina was one of those men born heartless or else his generosity had been stretched to the limit.
It was getting dark when he tried to get rid of a dirty, blond, sunburnt woman who boarded the bus at a deserted stop with four children and no tickets. He expected some of his passengers to help him, but everybody just sat there tight lipped. The grown ups were watchful, knowing they could be in her shoes.
The woman, whose old-fashioned straw sun bonnet shadowed her sunken cheeks, pleaded in a flat, southern drawl. ‘We gotta get to Knoxville.’
With one arm, she cradled a baby on her hip, while her bow-legged toddler clung to the frayed hem of her floral dress. His dirty diaper was around his knees, and mucus streamed from his nose. Her two eldest boys, probably younger than I was, had struggled to climb on board with a burlap sack the size of a pillow case. The small cardboard suitcase in her free hand was more worn out looking than Mother’s big carpet bag which had a piece of clothesline for a handle.
When a pot fell out of their burlap, making a racket as it clanged down the bus steps, the driver threatened to push the five of them off. Though I didn’t know where or how it would come, my every muscle was braced, anticipating violence.
Mother poked Lilian in the side and mouthed, ‘White trash,’ which made my sister and I smile for the first time in two days.
We were one of only three coloured families uneasily parked at the back of the bus. Scared to even whisper, because to remain invisible was the nearest thing we had to self-defence. Mother admitted years later that she’d been afraid that the driver was going to tell the woman that she could have our seats and that we’d be the ones turfed off.
During that journey I got my first glimpse of the way that twilight gradually blackens green hills. I still had the childish audacity to feel occasional pangs of joy at the sight of a baby lamb with its mother. I saw the silhouettes of herds of horses and cows as darkness fell. What I couldn’t see was that my childhood was nearing its end.
As the bus bumped along, Mother’s head bobbed in sleep. She was leaving Camden behind, but Lilian and I took it with us. I worried from time to time whether Mack would somehow tell her about the caramels.
I kept thinking about the previous morning when I’d sat at my desk in St Anthony’s, fidgeting with the empty inkwell and a girl told Sister Elizabeth that she’d dreamt that Mack had cut off Sister Octavia’s head. Then the Italian boy who had arrived in the middle of the term from New York raised his hand to say that he had had a nightmare too. But none of them could have been as scared as I was, expecting each night to be strangled in my sleep by Mrs O’Brien’s ghost.