The Twelve-Mile Straight

She took a step back into the breezeway. Her first fear was the gin—had he noticed it was missing, one jar among so many jars? Or the book—had he discovered it under the mattress? Then she feared Elma would hear. Or did she want her to hear? She could have walked across the breezeway and slipped into bed beside Elma, and then everything would have been different. He would have left her alone, gone back to his bed. But instead she stepped into her own little room, thinking she could quiet him, thinking she knew how to quiet him. She closed the pantry door softly behind her. His face was dead as a stone, and she knew then that he knew. He was drinking, the tumbler nearly empty.

“Where you been, girl?”

The tongue is the worst curse, her mother had told her. Ketty’s grandmother had been beaten by her master for running from his bed, but worse? Worse was the shame of lying. Worse was having to look at his white face and say, “I like it” and “I love you.” There was dignity in silence, Ketty said, in keeping your truth inside.

“Cat got your tongue, kitty cat?” He kept his voice low. He sat up in her bed, placed the tumbler on the floor, and wrapped his hand around her thigh. “You been swimming at this hour?”

She mimed washing, rubbing soap through her hair.

“Washing?” He yanked up her nightdress, plunged his face between her legs, and sniffed. “You ain’t washed good enough.” Then he yanked her down to the bed, rolled her onto her back, and pinned her against the wall. “I seen you knock on that nigger’s door,” he whispered. His breath was flaming with drink. “You think y’all are here to skinny-dip? That how you repay me for the food on your plate? The roof over your head?”

Nan shook her head.

“You ain’t live in that slave shack no more. You ain’t no slave. You live in my house now. You know how many folks’d like to sleep in this here big house? That how you repay me, run back to that shack?” He was slurring. “Don’t let me see you with him again. You hearing me? I see you within ten feet of that door, I’ll kill him dead.”

She might have stroked his cheek to calm him, she might have kissed him, but he was holding her down, one arm to the bed, one arm to the wall. She wished her nipples didn’t show through her wet nightdress. She wished her rabbit heart weren’t beating so quickly. Surely he could feel it in her wrists. You could take away the tongue, she thought, you could put out a person’s eyes, but still the pulse betrayed your fear.

Across the breezeway, through one board-and-batten wall and then another—thick walls built by George Wilson and two hired Negroes whose names he did not know and painted some years ago a milky blue, now fading—Elma sat up in her bed. She had been sleeping, or had been trying to. She had been trying to scare away the image of Nan and Genus in the creek, but every time she closed her eyes, it floated into her mind again like a ghost. When she thought she heard a thump against the kitchen wall, she thought it must be Nan returning from the creek, and then when she heard another, she thought it must be Genus in there with her, and though it was beyond her belief—that Nan and Genus would be so bold in her father’s house—it was not beyond her imagination. Once the idea was in her head, it wouldn’t turn her loose. She sat up in bed, remembering suddenly the night a few weeks back when a man had come to the house looking for Nan to deliver a baby. Elma had looked all around the house and the yard, but she couldn’t find her. The man had left in a huff and a panic. And though Nan had been at the still with Juke, it seemed clear to Elma now that she’d been with Genus, and humiliation knocked her flat on her back. She stuffed her pillow over her face, to drown out the noise and to muffle the sound of her own tears.

What was happening in Nan’s room was beyond Elma’s imagination. She would have sooner imagined that the noises came from the wall itself, the house coming to life, growing a mouth, giving voice to its ghosts. That was the way Nan felt suddenly—that the walls that had protected her had now betrayed her with their thickness, not keeping her safe but trapping her. This was not her home. Home was the tar paper shack Genus Jackson lived in, before he lived there, before he slept in the bed she used to share with her mother. She thought herself back there now, walked herself from the cabin down to the shack. She wished herself all the way back, the taste of tobacco and clay on her mother’s lips, the smell of her father’s pipe, the warmth of the grits cooking on the woodstove in the morning. She would even wish away Genus, though her heart seized like a fist when she thought of his name—Genus, who was settling into that bed now, oblivious as Elma. She wished he’d never set foot on the farm.

There was no wool blanket. It was back in the cabin. Here in her room, Juke did not pull away. She could feel his seed seeping into her, thick as egg yolk. Through the mattress, she could feel the shape of The Book of Knowledge under her back. She kept her eyes on the pantry shelves beyond him, the okra she’d pickled, the sorghum syrup, the cornmeal, the salt.

Afterward, he cried. “Don’t do me like that again, honey,” he said. “Don’t make me do that again.” There was no uglier sight in the world, Nan thought, than a naked white man crying.

FIVE (#ulink_b069878c-3674-5fac-8195-fda4d7bb1e46)

BEFORE SHE GOT IN THE FAMILY WAY, ELMA HAD BEEN SET ON going to the teacher’s college in Statesboro. It was where two girls from her class said they were going. Elma had the grades. She just didn’t have the money. The fall of her last year in school, she tried to get work at the Piggly Wiggly, at the theater, at the crossroads store. She even put up a notice on the bulletin board at church: ELMA JESUP. MOTHER’S HELPER AND HOUSEGIRL. CLEANING. COOKING. SEWING. Nobody hired her. Every week she checked the board to be sure the note was still there. Then one Sunday, on that same bulletin board, another notice caught her eye: the Florence chapter of the Georgia Woman’s Christian Temperance Union was offering a college scholarship to “a young lady of good character.”

Elma liked school. She just didn’t like the people there. Boys had always liked her because they liked her daddy’s liquor. They thought they might come out to the farm and get into his stash and get under her dress. They called her Red. Clever! They said, “You wanna go have a pull from my bottle, Red?” They pawed her braids. “You watch them town boys,” her father told her. Freddie was the only one he didn’t mind. The girls weren’t particular about her because the boys were, and because they thought she was white trash and a drunk, and because already they were following their mothers to the WCTU meetings at the Hotel Chanticleer. In fact Elma had never had a drink—“Ain’t for womenfolk,” her daddy said—and that was fine by her, she didn’t like the way it smelled on a man’s breath and made a man loose and rough and mean.

There was no reason, she thought, she shouldn’t have that scholarship. She’d get out of Florence and become a schoolteacher, and if it meant joining the WCTU, she’d do it. She told her father the dollar was for her graduation cap and gown, and though he grumbled about it, and had to collect it in coins, he gave it to her. She asked Josie Byrd if she could go with her to a meeting after school, and Josie Byrd said certainly, it would be grand, and loaned her a felt hat that looked like a bathing cap. Only later did Elma discover that for every new member you brought in, your name was entered in a raffle for a year’s supply of Octagon toilet soap.

The women at the Hotel Chanticleer all wore rhinestone broaches and white ribbons and strands of evening pearls down to their navels. They poured Elma tea and piled her plate with shortbread cookies and said, “How do you do?” She knew Tabitha Quick and Carlotta Rawls and of course she knew Parthenia Wilson, she had opened her legs to Parthenia Wilson’s grandson in the bed of his truck the day before, but by the time she was shaking Mary Minrath’s hand, she understood they were pretending they didn’t know her, that they were forgetting that she was Juke Jesup’s daughter. They were meeting her for the first time. And maybe they were! Maybe she would be reborn, fatherless, in the WCTU! Elma understood this was because they wanted her dollar, and they wanted her to sign, at the end of the meeting, their abstinence pledge. And yet she let them court her. She let them compliment the felt hat that wasn’t hers. She told them what soap she washed her hair with and let them stroke it. She answered questions about her favorite subject in school, her favorite church hymn, her favorite meal to make for supper. Is this what they did in women’s clubs? Eventually they began to speak in a code. They referred to each other as “Comrade” and “Sister”; they spoke with reverence of their “Foremothers”; they spoke with disappointment of “unfortunate girls.” They spoke about Hoover (well, the white-ribboners believed in Hoover) and about “rum and ruin” and “the flag of booze.” They spoke with growing concern about how they might bring Christ to the country, to the Negroes and halvers, the heathens and drunkards. Tabitha Quick said Georgia was in such a state of debauchery that if God didn’t intervene, “Black heels will be on white necks.”

Elma didn’t understand. She thought of black necks. But this was before the lynchings had started up again. “White necks?” she whispered to Josie.

Josie tried to shush her. Elma did not seem to be the only woman ruffled by the phrase. Josie whispered back, “They mean the Negroes will take over town. The ones at the saloon.”

“Young’s, I believe it’s called,” said Tabitha Quick.

“Not the Robert Youngs,” someone clarified.

“They belong in the county camp,” said another.

“Let’s not pretend it’s just the blacks. White heels on white necks too.”

“Perhaps one white heel in particular,” said Mary Minrath under her breath.

“Perhaps one redneck in particular,” said another woman, more loudly.

“Might as well be a black heel,” said Mary Minrath.

“Enough,” Tabitha Quick said, standing up to pour more tea.

“She could be useful,” said Mary Minrath, and only then did Elma understand they were talking about her, and about her father.

Parthenia Wilson was quiet. She fanned herself with her newspaper. It was her silence that infuriated Elma. Elma shat in the same privy Parthenia Wilson had once shat in. She didn’t want to be reinvented by her; she wanted, even then, to be recognized.

Someone said, “We don’t mean to make you feel unwelcome, honey.”

Another said, “We couldn’t be more pleased to have you.”

Elma put down her tea. She didn’t know what to say. Was she to defend her father? What was it they hated about him? Was it just that he was a bootlegger? Or that he was friendly with Negroes?

She thought of the way her father protected the still. She was not to visit it. She did not care to visit it, she had no fascination with it, only a fear of it and a fear that it would be taken away. Her fear was her father’s, that the still might be destroyed and him with it. Sometimes when a car came for Nan in the middle of the night and he was one kind of drunk, he’d come running from the cabin with his shotgun, mumbling about “guvment men.” For all her shame about her father’s work, she knew that, without it, they’d be as poor as any of the croppers on the Straight, as poor even as the Negroes in Rocky Bottom.

She didn’t want to betray her father. But she wanted that scholarship.

She looked around the hotel lobby, the circle of women with their tea saucers in their laps, all of them waiting for her to speak. They were not looking at her like she was a young lady of good character. They were looking at her like she was an unfortunate girl. The scholarship, she knew, was not hers. She did not know that it had already been promised to Josie Byrd.

Parthenia Wilson had said nothing, but she was the target Elma settled on. “Takes more than one white neck to bootleg,” Elma said. “Takes a rich white neck, from what I hear.”

Parthenia Wilson paused her fanning for a moment.

Elma looked at her and said, “Your grandson don’t care what color neck I got. He just cares about necking.”

Parthenia Wilson opened the newspaper she was holding and appeared to begin to read it. She did not remove the newspaper from in front of her face for the rest of the meeting.

Elma might have been excused if it had not been considered impolite. Besides, they wanted her dollar. She didn’t give it to them. She didn’t sign the abstinence pledge. They spent the rest of the meeting organizing a meal train for Bette Hazleton, who was suffering from pleurisy.

After the meeting, Josie Byrd’s mother carried her back to the farm in their Ford. She saw Mrs. Byrd scanning the farm for the cabin, her eyes moving right past the stand of pines along the road. Juke asked her where she’d been, and she told him. She couldn’t lie. She gave him back his coins. “It’s low, Daddy,” she said. “Folks look on us like we’re low.” She waited for the whip of his temper, but he was the right kind of drunk—merry—and he said, “That still is the reason you ain’t eating hog hearts.”

So Elma did not become a schoolteacher. She did not go to the teacher’s college in Statesboro because she didn’t have the money and because already, sitting in the lobby of the Hotel Chanticleer, she was pregnant. Her father pulled her out of school that winter. Soon her belly would start to grow. Her father kept her home from town, from church, made sure she couldn’t be seen from the road. Folks in town went up in arms about a baby born without a ring on the momma’s finger. Didn’t matter if the ring was made of corn silk, long as it was a ring. It had happened to a girl at the mill last year and the other spinners had made sure George Wilson found out. He sent her back to Marietta with her baby on the train she’d come in on. Elma thought that girl was lucky, to be sent away from all those judging eyes. She had come back six months later with a baby and a husband. No telling if the husband was the father of the baby, but that hardly mattered.

Freddie had said he was saving for a ring, but Freddie had all the money he needed. He stopped coming around the farm so much, and then he stopped coming around at all. Before she stopped going to church, before she was stuck on the farm, folks told Elma he was laying out all night in the mill village, where he was sometimes seen on a porch with this girl or in his truck with that one, having a big time. She wondered if it was what she’d said to Parthenia Wilson in the Hotel Chanticleer, or if Freddie would have dropped her anyway, if his grandmother’s disapproval was a handy excuse. She couldn’t let it go; she wrote him a letter. Is it your grandmother who don’t want you tied down? she asked. And if she don’t want you tied down, is it tied down at all, or tied down to me? She didn’t expect a response, was disappointed but not surprised when day after day the postman brought none. He had probably never gotten the letter, she told herself. His grandmother had surely intercepted it.

When her father was yet another kind of drunk—very drunk, tired, weepy—he’d tell Elma her mother would be proud she’d gotten so far in school, even if she didn’t finish. Elma’s mother, Jessa, hadn’t gotten past the fifth grade before she came to town to work in the mill, and Juke hadn’t gone at all, had been sent into the field at six years old with a ham biscuit, a bull-tongue plow, and a john mule named Lefty. After the babies came, he told Elma that her mother would be proud she was such a good momma herself, and though Elma mostly wore a serious face, like a white stone mask, some color rose high in her cheeks then. Jessa had lost her chance to be a mother, and when Juke watched Elma soothe a crying baby on her shoulder, he looked as pleased and loving and haunted as if he were watching his dead wife herself. And though the baby would be calm by then, he would cross the room and take it in his own arms, rocking it, humming a song only it could hear, saying, “Come on and give Granddaddy some sugar,” saying, “Come on and hug my neck.” Sometimes he came in from the field and went straight for Wilson’s crib, lifting him up to study his face.

At times, Elma missed the notion of a husband. When she was lying awake at night, nursing a baby, she thought it would be nice if there were a grown body sleeping next to her, if she could reach over and touch a man’s bare back. But it wasn’t Freddie she wanted there. Just because her pride was hurt didn’t mean she was sad he was gone. Sometimes it was Genus’s long, slim back she imagined, when she couldn’t keep the picture from her mind, but then she saw him disappear into the woods in his union suit, the same suit he was hanged in, and then her mind reared up and trotted away like a horse with a snake on its heels.

One morning in that blazing and interminable month of August, when Elma arrived with her wagon at the crossroads store, a man she didn’t recognize offered to help her carry the eggs inside. No one else was about—not Jeb Simmons nor his son Drink, no one playing checkers on the porch. Or had she seen the man before? The sun was in her eyes. She could manage fine, thank you, but he wouldn’t hear of it. She held the door open for him while he carried in the crate, placing it on the shop counter, behind which Mud Turner eyed her, cigarette hanging from his mouth.

Overhead, a ceiling fan spun. Elma stood with the man just inside the door. “Must be nice to step off the farm,” he said to her, and that was when she placed him—the sharp-edged suit, the neat mustache. He took off his hat and introduced himself: Q. L. Boothby, the editor of the Testament. He’d driven down from Macon that morning. Wasn’t it a fine morning? But already so hot. “A good morning for a Coca-Cola, Miss Jesup. What do you say?”

Behind the counter, Mud raised an eyebrow. The last time Elma had had a soda was with Freddie, at Pearsall’s drugstore in Florence. Winter, before she was showing, before he’d stopped calling on her. They’d just seen Anna Christie at the theater next door, Elma’s first talkie, and her heart was still pounding with the thrill. Ordering her soda, she tried to imitate Greta Garbo’s voice—“Gimme a vhiskey, ginger ale on the side. And don’t be stingy, baby.” Freddie laughed. Excepting the colored one, there were no saloons to order a drink from in Florence, just the cotton mill, where it was mostly the men who drank from mason jars on their porches. Elma’s father wouldn’t let her set foot in the mill village, but here she was, out on the town with her fiancé, Freddie Wilson, whose family owned the biggest business in town, the whole glittering evening, her whole life, before her, and who cared how Freddie got his money, it was the way her father got his money too, and it was buying her a movie and a soda. The bubbles fizzed in her belly. Or was that her baby, kicking already?

Elma tasted that ginger ale now, cool and sweet, the tinkle of the ice cubes as she stirred them with her straw. She looked at Q. L. Boothby, his hat still in his hands. He was as finely dressed a man as she had seen, his black Oxfords shiny as a piano, a blood red handkerchief flaming from his breast pocket.