The Twelve-Mile Straight

“Enough!” Juke said now, spitting the tobacco into the dirt. He’d walked to the barn for his sickle and now he cut down Genus before he’d been dead ten minutes. “I can’t stand to see a man hang all night.”

That might have been the end of it, but Freddie thought folks in town should get a look at the body. Juke had gone back to the house by the time Freddie tied Genus’s bound wrists to the rear of his Chevrolet truck and drove back down the Twelve-Mile Straight, continued into Florence where the road became Main Street, then, at the far edge of town, left him in the middle of the street in the mill village. In fact, everyone had gone home by then. No men had jumped into the back of the truck, and no joyful shots were heard as the vehicle made its way into town; Mancie Neville’s hound had not chased the body down the road, tearing an ear from his head; the mill workers had not rushed from their homes to claim a finger; Tom Henry had not fallen from the truck and broken his left arm—if you asked him later, he’d tell you he’d fallen from his hayloft. If you asked folks the next morning, as the sheriff did, where they were at midnight, you’d learn that they were home in their beds, every last one of them, sleeping like babies.

TWO (#ulink_d349cbe5-36ec-503c-a371-78abe74ca310)

COTTON COUNTY WAS IN THE SOUTH-CENTRAL PART OF THE state, an anvil-shaped box at the edge of what they called the Wiregrass Region. There were acres and pale acres of sorghum and cotton and peanuts and corn, piney woods spotted with sandhills and cut through with the blades of rivers and swamps that made the sky seem even bigger, reflecting it like the back of a spoon. The rivers that ran north past the fall line ran rusty with red clay, but most of the clay in Cotton County was white as chalk. The Creek River was grand enough to power the Florence Cotton Mill in town, though six miles west, at the Wilson farm, it was no bigger than your biggest cow, tongue to tail. That year the drought had dried it to little more than a creek carved into the shoulder of the Twelve-Mile Straight, which ran alongside the river like a twin. It was known to most as the crossroads farm, since it was where the Straight crossed what was now called String Wilson Road. On the southeast corner of the crossroads sat the Creek Baptist Missionary Church, and catty-corner to it was the crossroads general store, where after church on a Sunday folks could be seen milling about on the porch, the Jesups among them. The Jesups had been the principal sharecropping family at the crossroads farm since the turn of the century, when the Wilsons built the mill and moved from the farm to the county seat, and the Jesups moved from the tar paper shack into the big house.

They called it the big house, but it wasn’t big. It was one of those single-story dogtrots you saw in the country in those days, built high off the ground, split in two, with the kitchen and front room on one side and the two bedrooms on the other. Down the middle of the house was a hallway open to the outdoors, so the breeze could come and go and keep the rooms cool. A front porch faced the creek and then, over a plank bridge, the road, and a back porch faced the outhouse and smokehouse and sugarhouse and barn, which had a little cotton house attached to it, and the garden and the shack, with stump-strewn fields to the north and to the west and the edge of the acres dense with pines along the road. There were four mules and four cows in the barn, and four or five hogs that preferred the cool clay refuge under the house. The hallway was so wide the house almost seemed to be two houses. But a single tin roof covered both halves. On windy autumn nights, pecans blasted the roof like rain.

Since the spring of 1912, when in a single week he lost his father to consumption and his wife, Jessa, to childbirth, the farm had been in Juke Jesup’s care. He returned from burying his father with his people in Carolina to find two hundred acres and a baby girl waiting for him. His mother had died the same way. Juke told Elma he’d have buried his own arm to have her resemble her mother, but it was Juke she favored.

It was Ketty, the colored maid, who delivered the baby. She’d been a granny midwife since she was old enough to tie a knot, and she’d lost mothers before—“Midwives is just delivering the Lord’s wishes,” she said. But she wore Jessa’s loss hard. She washed her friend and prayed over her and dressed her in her wedding gown and took care of the baby until Juke came home, carrying Elma out to the barn to suckle from the cows. She refused Maggie’s milk but loved Ida’s (it was just the two cows then); until Ida quit milking, it was only hers Elma would drink. Juke kept Ketty on to cook and clean and look after Elma while he worked the fields with Ketty’s man, Sterling. Ketty and Sterling lived in what used to be the Jesups’ shack, behind the big house, the two buildings strung together with the dull flags of their shared laundry. It was the shack Genus Jackson would live in years later.

Elma was four when Ketty had her own daughter, Nan, and five when Ketty cut out the baby’s tongue with her scalpel so she wouldn’t die like her great-grandmother and her grandmother and, when Nan was twelve years old, Ketty herself, cancer eating their tongues like a weevil through a cotton boll. The baby was old enough then to wean, and Elma helped the poor child learn to eat milky grits with a spoon. When Elma asked Juke what had become of Nan’s tongue, he told her, laughing, that Ketty had eaten it, for that’s what coloreds did—didn’t she see what unsavory parts they took of the pigs each winter? Ketty ate tobacco and Ketty ate dirt, so Elma believed her father. After she cut out her tongue, Ketty fed Nan dirt too, white clumps of clay she found between the road and the creek. She ate real food, but it took her a long while and she made a good mess. The white clay was creamy and it was free and it gave her something to chew.

Used to be George Wilson would pay Sterling and Juke the same, for their work was the same, but after the boll weevil came, they were glad if they broke even. If there was anything left, it went to Juke. When Nan was little more than a baby, Sterling left on a freight train, saying he was headed for the steel mill in Baltimore, that men were needed now that the country was taking up with the war, that he’d send for Nan and Ketty when he was settled. The war ended. He didn’t return. But he sent money when he could, and a Buffalo nickel every birthday. When Ketty died, he sent two, and Nan moved into the big house, into the pantry off the kitchen, and began doing the housework her mother used to do. Juke said, “No use having your pretty head get wet in the rain.” He would give her a nickel too when she was good, and with her mother gone she began to take over her midwife work, delivering the younger brothers and sisters of the babies Ketty had brought into the world. The money she earned that way came back to the big house, for they were meant to share. As for the shack, George Wilson came to allow Juke to put who he pleased in it, and to share how he pleased as well. And because he was the kind of man he was, Juke divided the fruits of their crops when there was fruit to divide. If he told the field hands he was overseer, and maybe he did from time to time, it was only because that was the closest word for what he was.

The girls grew up working side by side on the farm, Nan after her chores and Elma after school. (Why couldn’t Nan go to the colored school in town? Elma asked her father, and he said, What tongue’s she gone use to learn her letters?) At picking time, Elma stayed home from school to help. She picked and she chopped and she plowed and she tilled, riding in her father’s lap over the harrow while Clarence and Mamie pulled them, thrilling at the thrum of the disks spinning the earth beneath their feet. Nan did the listening—she was good at listening—and Elma did the talking and the telling and the singing. Elma sang on the porch and in the kitchen and in the fields, to the guineas and chickens and cows and mules, “Amazing Grace” and “Down in the Valley” and “Down by the Riverside.” She sang while she picked cotton and while she shelled peas, while she washed her hair in the creek and while she brushed it. She sang in church, though she didn’t need church to sing, or even to praise God, since God lived in the sky and in the trees, Ketty had liked to say, in the dirt and the seeds they scattered over it.

Elma worked so hard her daddy didn’t notice he had no sons. She was her father’s daughter because she couldn’t be anything else. She had the same mineral-red hair as Juke and the same glass-bottle-green eyes. She had the same widow’s peak over the same high, sunburnt forehead. She had the same swift, steady way of walking, picking up her feet as though the ground were hot through her shoes, and always straight, even when she wasn’t in the field, as though there were corn growing up to her elbows on either side. And she was tall, Elma was, near as tall as Juke. She wore three different dresses to school and to church, but on the farm she seemed mostly to wear her daddy’s old Sears, Roebuck overalls, the sleeves of her flannel shirt rolled to her elbows, a bird’s nest of a straw hat perched on her head, worn clean through at the crown. From the road, looking out across the acres with the sun in your eyes, used to be it was hard to tell whether the body in the field was father or daughter.

Nan wore dresses, though now she looked like a boy herself. She’d cut her hair short when she was thirteen, the way Negro men wore it, almost no hair at all. She was as skinny and dark as a shadow. That was the way Elma’s daddy put it. Elma’s daddy said Nan was so skinny because she ate so much dirt.

There were times, growing up, when Elma wished she were as dark as a shadow. She liked the way the sun warmed the skin of the men in the fields, their arms and necks and cheeks glowing the color of sorghum syrup by summer’s end. She hated her freckles, hated the way the sun turned her pink, how it burned her skin like paper. When she got a bad burn, Ketty mixed up a bowl of aloe and black tea and slathered her with it, which wasn’t so bad, because the inky jelly was cool on her skin and made it look darker, darker even than little Nan, whose skin was the woody brown of the paper-shell pecans that fell in the yard.

It gave her an idea. One morning when she was seven, when her father had gone to town, she found a jar of syrup in the pantry, made from their own sweet sorghum. She stripped down to her britches and painted herself with it, using the brush they used for basting. She covered every exposed inch, from her widow’s peak to her toes. When Ketty came into the kitchen carrying Nan on her hip, she let out a holler.

Elma said, “Look, Ketty! I’m Nan’s sister.”

The sorghum wasn’t as soothing as the aloe and black tea, nor was the kerosene that Ketty used to scrub it off. She poured it right into the water in the tub on the porch, and it stung worse than any sunburn. “You like playing around like a colored child, do you? Lucky your daddy ain’t here,” she said, holding Elma’s face and scrubbing her chin. “I won’t be telling him, and I suggest you don’t, either.”

“He won’t be mad, Ketty. He done the same thing hisself when he was a boy.” Elma told the story of when her father and his friend String, George Wilson’s son, had painted themselves with tar to play like colored folks. That was the first time George had told String not to play with Juke, but it wasn’t the last. It was true that it was Juke’s idea. He’d found the tar in a pail in the shed. It was the tar they used to paper the shack. The shack smelled of it, and as a child living there Juke had loved the smell and later he loved it because it smelled like that day with String, and now Elma loved it too.

Ketty shook her head and scrubbed some more and said, “You both crazier than a rat trapped in a tin shithouse. Ain’t enough kerosene on God’s earth for you fools.” Then, her voice softening, she said, “I reckon I should be glad this ain’t tar.” Ketty sent her to the creek to wash off the kerosene.

Now Ketty was gone, the only mother Elma knew. It was the three of them, Juke, Elma, and Nan, living in the big house, and though it all belonged to George Wilson—the house, the mules, the seeds in the ground—it was easy to think it was theirs, that they weren’t true sharecroppers, since other than the Wilsons the only ones they shared with were each other. They didn’t struggle the way of the other halvers-hands down the Straight, farmers with eight, ten, twelve mouths to feed, who wandered from county to county each harvest, who even before the hard times came were on hard times. The big house had glass in the windows and rugs on the floors. The Lord had blessed them.

(“Nigger lover think he mighty, three a them in that big house,” a neighbor might be heard to say. And then the wife would remind him, “You ain’t talk like that come slaying time, when you needed him to do for the hogs.” And the husband wouldn’t remind her, because she didn’t like to be reminded, how much he did like Juke Jesup’s gin.)

So the three of them worked the same fields, ate at the same table, shared the same Bible, Elma reading to Juke and Nan each night. And now that Nan slept in the big house—well, if they weren’t sisters, what were they?

Every Sunday morning since she was a girl (except for the winter ones, when she would heat water for the tub on the porch), Elma would follow the clay footpath through the pines behind the big house to bathe in the creek. A hundred years before, the Creek River had been called the Muskogee, for the people who had lived on its shores, but after the tribe was forced west and the land surveyed and mapped and distributed to whites, the town’s founder had renamed it the Creek, the tribe’s more civilized name, and a more suitable one for modern Florence. (It was the age when Georgia named her towns after the craggy city-states of ancient Europe—Athens, Sparta, Rome—though Florence was the name of the founder’s mother, who went by Flo.) That made the creek, when the river trickled into one, Creek Creek. George Wilson’s grandfather had been one of the men distributed two hundred acres of land along the road they called the Twelve-Mile Straight, for that was the age when they named a thing for what it was and no more. The Straight was straight, no kinks or curves, just a rise here or there, barely a hill.

Nobody called Creek Creek by its name. Some—the few Black Dutch left in the Indian village east of town—still called it the Muskogee. Most just called it the creek. Elma called it Lizard Creek, for the lizards that darted at her ankles and also because from the sandhill bank, it was shaped like a lizard looking over its shoulder, and the surface was as green and scaly as a lizard’s back. Sunday mornings she’d string up her clothes on the lowest branch of the catalpa tree—the overalls she’d stepped out of, and the clean dress she’d change into—slipping the branch through the sleeves like an arm, so the clothes hung from the tree side by side, two friends keeping her company while she bathed with a soap cake in the creek. It was the place where her father had taught her to fish, plucking a fat catalpa worm from a leaf and threading the hook through its leopard hide. In the fall, Elma and Nan would gather the catalpa’s pods from the bank, long as their arms and rattling with seeds, and they would make music with them and weave them into wreaths.

Nan did not go to church with the family (what did she need with the Lord, Juke said, when He had already withheld his blessings?), and so she did not go to the creek with Elma on Sundays. It wasn’t proper to bathe with coloreds, Juke said, though Elma had washed Nan in the tub when she was small, though they went to the privy together, and though Elma had shown Nan how to fold a rag when her bleeding came last year, just as Ketty had shown her. Nan bathed on Tuesdays, the day they did the wash, and Elma’s father bathed in town at the mill when he made deliveries, in a shower stall with heated water.

So late one September night in 1929, when Elma went to the privy and heard footsteps on the path to the creek, she thought it must be the new field hand. The footsteps were slow, careful. Branches snapped. Genus Jackson had lived in the tar paper shack for little more than a month. Other than the field hand they called Long John, he was as tall a man as she’d seen, but he made his way through the cotton field hunched over on his long, cornstalk legs, his back sickle shaped, his gait tight, as though hiding some pain in his gut. He’d said barely ten words since he’d come to the crossroads. He didn’t join in the songs while he picked. He kept his distance from Elma and Nan, from Ezra and Long John and Al and, when they were there, Al’s three sons. He hid his face under his hat. But the other day, when the gate to the chicken yard had come off its hinge, he’d helped her lift it back into place, and when he’d smiled she saw that one of his front teeth was missing, and when she looked again she saw that it wasn’t missing but gray as a fossil. He told her his name. He asked for hers, and nodding at the house, Nan’s. The tooth made him look like a little child and an old man at the same time. He was, she noticed, not much older than she was, which was seventeen. On his head was a corn-shuck hat and on his feet were a pair of boots made from what looked like alligator hide.

Now he walked without shoes, and without a lantern. There was a slice of moon to see by, and under its white glow, through the privy window, Elma watched him disappear in his union suit through the pines.

It was Saturday—maybe Sunday already. In a few hours, she would wake to do her milking and her feeding and then she would go down to the creek herself. And in fact the next morning, the cake of lye soap she’d left in the crook of the catalpa tree wasn’t yet dry. She had made it herself, with bits of cornmeal and lavender leaf, in the same tub where she washed the laundry and cooked the lard. She held the soap to her nose, then ran it roughly between her legs, then dried and dressed and went to church with her father.

That evening, after a day of picking, after supper, she knocked on the door of Genus Jackson’s shack with a slice of blackberry pie. He wasn’t there. She looked in the fields, in the yard, the barn. She found him in the hayloft. He tossed a bale of hay down the ladder and almost knocked her over with it, knocked the plate out of her hands instead, sent the fork flying. He raced down the ladder fast as he could in those boots, swearing under his breath. “Miss Elma! I could a crushed you flat!”

Under the bale, the pie was smashed to muck. Elma laughed, and then Genus laughed at her laughing, and then seeing the tooth’s dull shine made her stop laughing and filled her chest with an icy heat. She shook the hay from her apron. “Well, there goes one delicious slice of blackberry pie,” she said.

She could see he was pained by this. She wondered if he was sorry for her trouble or just hungry. He took breakfast and supper alone in his shack, and dinner with the other hands, under the cottonwood tree. Nan delivered it to him in a straw basket.

“I’m powerful sorry, miss,” he said. The barn cat appeared and began to lick the plate, and Elma let her. “And you just trying to do me a kindness.”

“What happened to your tooth?” she asked him, pointing to her own incisor. He touched the tooth. He had large hands and long fingers and fingernails the shape and color of the inside of an almond. She could smell the sweat on him, and her soap, lavender and lye.

“My auntie called it my shark tooth.”

“You were born with it?”

“Naw. I got kicked by a horse name of Baby.”

Elma laughed again. “Did it hurt?”

“Like the devil. She had the devil in her, that one. Horse the same color as the tooth. I reckon she didn’t want me to forget her.”

“It don’t look like that,” Elma said. “It’s pretty as a silver tooth.”

He smiled, showing it again.

“How come you walk bent over that way? Was that the devil horse too?”

“You ain’t afeared of asking questions, are you, miss?”

“My daddy says I got a loose tongue.”

“You ever carry a cotton bag over your shoulder?”

“Since I was a tot.”

“Well, you tall as I am, it’s inclined to bend you in half too.”

Then it was Genus’s tongue that got loose. He had questions for Elma, about the house, the farm, about Nan. With her mind Elma followed the sweat traveling down his temples. She traced the curve of his nostrils. They stayed out in the barn until the yard was in shadow.

“Stay here.” She held up a finger. “I’ll get you another slice of pie.”

But from the porch, Elma’s father saw her coming through the yard looking dazed, saw her smoothing her apron, pulling hay from her hair. He stood up from his chair. Where had she been? What was she doing in the barn? She was to bring no one no kind of pie, get in that house. And Elma went inside and Juke went to the barn, where he found Genus Jackson sitting on a hay bale, sweaty and satisfied, licking blackberry juice from the tines of a fork. When Juke returned to the house, he said to Elma, “Learned that boy not to come near you again. Don’t make me take the hoe to you too.”

He had never taken a hoe or a hand to her. She had not known him to take a hand to anyone. So she had said nothing. She had not protested. She had not explained. She did not know how bad a beating it had been. Later, when she suspected how bad, when she began to learn to protest, she would wonder why her father had kept Genus on the farm when he could have had a new man in the shack by dark. If only he had run him off the farm! But Genus woke up same as always and carried on, and so she did too. She believed she must have done wrong, that she had invited Genus’s punishment, and that she must be very careful.

The following Saturday, there was rain. They were all glad. Genus did not go down to the creek in the middle of the night, or Elma didn’t hear him.