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For The Love Of Amber When The Jonquils bloom again Book two by J. G. Knox © Copyright 2008 by J. G. Knox PO Box 65130 Vancouver, WA 98665 1-360-690-0842 Contents: Ch 1 A pawn and a king 1 Ch 2 A Dark Night 13 Ch 3 LOVing Amber not brussel’s sprouts 23 Ch 4 Momma’s court 31 Ch 5 football 39 Ch 6 Long Knights 47 Ch 7 Pulpit rock 57 Ch 8 the preacher & the pitchfork 67 Ch 9 the temple of love 75 Ch 10 albert’s army 87 Ch 11 the preacher’s devil 99 Ch 12 hell at home 109 Ch 13 the woods of home 119 Ch 14 fort benning 127 Ch 15 albert’s devil, part one 133 Ch 16 albert’s devil, part two 145 Ch 17 albert’s night job 157 Ch 18 bill 167 Ch 19 albert’s vendetta 177 Ch 20 wwii & the Atlanta pd 189 Ch 21 pastor paul & changes 201 Ch 22 albert’s night out 215 Ch 23 margret 223 Ch 24 home 233 Ch 25 the home coming 245 Ch 26 sex and crutches 257 Ch 27 wedding day jitters 271 Ch 28 South carolina knights revisited 279 Ch 29 final justice 291 Ch 30 the legacy of zeus 301 Epilogue 311 Chapter 1 A Pawn and A King
In 1908 a black man runs for his life, will lose without a chance, without a hope. In 2008 Barack Obama runs, not for his life, but for our lives, will win, bring change, bring hope. March 22, 2008 Calhoun, South Carolina The New York to New Orleans Express, like a one-hundred-twenty ton bull, charges south, stubs a toe, wheels on a damaged joint, a spark, a lurch, a hard clickity clack; the train attacks at seventy three miles an hour, steel hooves on steel rails, horns lowered, cattle catcher skimming the track, goring an unhealed wound, a gash in a gentle hill; a bank bleeds clay red in first light. 6:43AM, my great granddaughter sways with the jolt of the clickity clack. She squints at the glow of the bank. And she moves our bags into the hall. Passengers on the Amtrak 19, we are close to the end of our trip, close to the beginning, close to having red clay on our shoes. “GrrGrandma, why is the dirt red?”She says. I say, “Daddy said, ‘Killing turned the clay red, blood red.’” I think about what else Daddy said. Not an airplane or bus, far from an engine, floating along continuous welded rails, a quarter of a mile between joints, between clickity clacks, trains are quieter now. Everyone on the sleeper car hears me shout, “Don’t jump! Wait for the train to stop. Get off at the station!” The conductor moves between me and the door. I see it in his eyes, crazy old woman, but I am not crazy. If he knew what Amber told me, what Daddy told me, and what Butler told the newspaper editor, if he knew--- Lizzy says, “It’s nothing. She’ll be fine.” Then says, “Are you alright, GrrGrandma?” “Sorry, Ma’am.” The conductor backs away. March 22, 1908 Calhoun, South Carolina Sunset, not sunrise, dusk, no welds, tracks made of 39 feet rails with joints between them, continuous hits on steel wheels, continuous clatter. A bigger, smokier bull hammers rail joints on this same stretch of track. In a first class Pullman, or a freight train, the deafening, staccato rhythm of train travel is clickity clacks. A boy, framed in a boxcar door at sunset, rocking with the shifts of the car, dancing to the music of the rails, rising off his shoulders, amber hair waves in the wind; black smoke from the engine and red clay tumble by. The boy is the center of a universe, unmoving, a glowing reflection of the sun, silent, fixed in time and space. Clickity clack, the earth moves. Zeus watches. When was his hair last cut? When was this boy last in a bed, or a tub? When was he loved by a mother, or a father? Closing his eyes, Zeus absorbs the portrait and hangs it in his mind beside portraits of other boys. Zeus loves him, sees him, his hair cut and washed, off the freights, secure, growing roots in red clay. Resting his arm around the boy, he holds a vision. The weight of his arm, as heavy as an ordinary man’s leg, pulls the boy back from the door. Shifting together they watch farms roll by, sway to the music. Clickity clack. Zeus says, “You think those fields will grow cotton tall enough for you, Sammy?” “If it grows it, I’ll pick it,” the boy says. Zeus watched the boy work. He cut greens with him in Tupelo. He planted peas with him in North Carolina. He will be a help with the spring planting, during the growing season and picking. Ella Mae, Zeus’s wife, never complains about feeding another mouth, if it is attached to a smile and working hands. Almost home, Zeus stops thinking of the past few weeks, stops feeling the music of the rails, stares across a field at a shanty, two large oaks in the yard. He sees his boy playing ball with other boys, older boys, almost men, boys he has brought home on previous trips. He feels a different music beat in his heart, another song: crickets chirping in the night, bugs humming in the bushes, his dog, Rupert, howling at the moon---and Ella Mae. Where is Ella Mae? Is she fixing supper? Smoke rises from the chimney. A glimpse of her would warm his heart, in the morning he will see her, hold her in his arms and sleep with her beside him tomorrow night. To far to smell the smoke, he knows collard greens and pork fat are cooking on the stove, potatoes and corn bread in the oven; one last can of beans and he and Sammy will be eating home cooking. Filled with home, Zeus is not thinking about trains, tracks, hobo camps or Southern politics. He is thinking about his family. The train racing by, the boys playing in the yard, Zeus wishes Sammy and he could jump off now, but trains slow starting, slow stopping and fast in-between take him to stations or yards, not to his farm. Getting off is an hour and a half on foot passed their farm. They are all right and will be waiting when Sammy and Zeus walk through the front gate tomorrow. Zeus and Sammy’s train across the field, the fifth train today, do the boys see Zeus and Sammy standing in the boxcar door? Do they see Zeus wave? Do they know their Daddy is home? Old enough now, his boy will remember him. Eight years ago Zeus looked for work, hopped a freight train. Three months later, when he got home, his boy forgot him. This time his boy will not forget, will be waiting; other boys will be waiting; Ella Mae will be waiting. They have one child, a boy, born to them. Picking up more boys, he finds two of them eating out of garbage cans in Birmingham, others from nearer home. Ella Mae and Zeus raise them as their own. Only one this time from Mississippi, Sammy is a good one. He will make them proud, can read, write, and do numbers, will go to school after the cotton is in, keep learning. Zeus thinks he will make a teacher, if he gets the chance. The boy teaches Zeus, picking up a dog-eared, half-gone magazine thrown away in Charleston, Sammy reading it to him: Einstein, some sort of physicist in Germany, has ideas, strange ideas, something about time and space. Does the boy understand this? Sammy talks like he does. Zeus likes the picture. The boy points out Mercury, Venus, Earth, the solar system: our piece of the universe, but only two pages are left of the astronomy story in the magazine, one in color, the picture. Somebody has to help Sammy. A boy like this does not belong on freights. Zeus watches another hobo looking at Sammy as he reads about Einstein: not a look of interest, of a learner, the look of a hunting dog sniffing an rabbit. Zeus pulls Sammy to him, puts an arm around him. “Read it again, Sammy.” Sammy glances at the other man, slides closer to Zeus. Zeus’s eyes, not blinking, pierce the hobo’s eyes. A rat terrier having sniffed out a rabbit protected by a bear, the man backs to the other end of the car, his tail between his legs. A worrisome thing is Sammy’s color. The boy says he is colored, but he looks white. The county takes away white children staying with colored families, and colored people---Will they accept him? He does not talk like he is colored, was not raised colored, and thought he was white till his Daddy and Momma were killed. It is up to Ella Mae. Zeus wants her take on it before he tells the boy what he is thinking. He could tell her the boy is staying, and that be the end of it, but they decide as a family. Her sweet voice, Zeus thinks. Her voice has a say in things. They do things together, from planting and picking cotton, to deciding if a boy stays. “You ready to get off, boy?” “Yes, Sir” Seeing worship in those gray eyes, they follow Zeus everywhere he goes, never letting him out of their sight. At rest on a train moving fast, there, secure, Zeus watched the boy relax, watched him close his eyes, and watched him sleep sound on trains; Zeus will be there when he wakes. On the ground, Sammy sleeps close, fears waking with Zeus gone. Up in the middle of the night, the call of nature, the result of a big man’s hunger and a rabbit too long dead before cooked over the campfire, Zeus trudges out of the camp. He startled seeing a shadow following him, the boy. “Sammy. I have to go to the toilet. Go to sleep.” Sammy went back, lay under the blanket, but he did not close his eyes till Zeus was beside him. Telling Zeus how his mother and father died, of his fears, of his life, does he feel safe with Zeus’s arm around him, need him, need a father? That night Zeus knew he would be Sammy’s father. Holding the small built boy with his arm, watching the smoke rise from his cabin, Zeus will talk to Ella Mae tomorrow afternoon, and tell Sammy at supper, “You’re home.” Another red bank with a veneer of waving dry grass on top races by. Sammy says, “The train’s going too fast isn’t it, Zeus?” “It’ll start slowing down; station’s a piece ahead. Train takes on water there. We needs to get our things together.” Tying their gear with ropes, they bundle everything into two blankets, including one tattered science magazine. Ready to drop his blanket, jump, tuck and roll, the boy can hop off a moving train. “Won’t jump and roll this time; it’ll slow to a walk where we needs off,” Zeus says. The drumbeat of clickity clacks slow as the train slows. Zeus’ song is of home and family, a father’s love story. The sun settling into the horizon, the train’s shadow, a dotted line in trees across a field, rises, disappearing into heaven, South Carolina at day’s end is home. Does the boy know South Carolina is home? Zeus lets Sammy think he knows a farmer, a place to work for a few days, a week, then back on the rails, back to the only place Sammy has felt at home since his parents’ deaths. Sleeping without the sounds of rails, looking at stars at night, is a break, a chance to make money, buy food, not home. Telling Zeus the names of constellations and pointing out the North Star, Sammy relived nights with his father before the Knights took him, remembers when he had a home and a father, and grows quiet, lays close to Zeus, feels his arm, the strength of it, the father of it. Then he sleeps. Zeus lets the boy expect sleeping in a barn with cows lowing, keeping him awake, no stars, no clickty clacks. Every time they get off the train, it is this way. After a sleepless night, the first days work off a train is hard for Sammy. The boy likes looking at stars on a flat bed car, with wind in his hair and clickty clacks to put him to sleep. Unaccustomed to sleeping without sound, he is used to the rails, has been a long time on them. Zeus does not know how long. Five months, seven months, does the boy remember? Zeus has been with Sammy 24 sunsets and 23 sunrises. Are these days worth living for the boy, days beside a man worth growing by, being a boy by? Will Sammy remember these days, as Zeus does? Zeus leans out of the car. Sammy follows him. “Ready, Sammy?” “Yes, Sir” They jump, land, their feet running in a ribbon of red dirt beside the gravel track bed. They jog to a stop in another world, another universe. On the ground, nearer the wheels and rails, the clickty clacks are louder. The drumbeat goes on, fades as the train leaves them. Their songs quiet, dampened by red clay and empty rails. Zeus sees a man five-hundred yards down the track on horseback, a beautiful horse, a palomino, avoiding getting South Carolina dirt on his boots. The motionless boxcar and moving earth slows, disappears down the track, a vision in space and time, like the vision in the mind of Einstein half a world away. The train abreast of the man, the clickity clacks sound less in Sammy and Zeus’s ears, more in the man’s ears. The drumbeat slows to a dirge as the train approaches the station, their songs eb, its protection fades as clickity clacks fade. Zeus says, “Too late to walk, night’s coming. I wants you to meet people, good people. We’ll fix dinner, have a night’s sleep. We get cleaned up near the station in the morning, get you a haircut. We’ll go out to meet them after you’re presentable.” Zeus takes the boy’s blanket. “Go get some firewood, Sammy. We got beans to fix.” Zeus knowing a spring near an old live oak, good water, he takes the pot through the hobo camp to the spring, dropping their blankets. Sammy goes the other way, seeing a fallen tree, good for fire wood. Zeus, secure with an hours walk to go, thinks of home, his universe back up the track, lets his guard down. Sammy in a new place, a new universe, not his universe, watches, keeps his guard up, the boy feels a shift. Another universe, the same space, another time, eight years ago, the first year Zeus took to the rails to feed his family, climbed in a moving box car, sat looking out the freight car door, cried wanting to go home, watched fields go by ten miles from his farm, Zeus watched another boy, a thin, seventeen-year-old, white boy in a field picking cotton in bare feet as the train passed him by; the man now on the palomino horse was that share-cropper boy---a poor white trash kid working from dawn to dusk and not making enough to buy food. An hour after Zeus watched him in the field, his father’s black mistress beat him so bad he could not walk to school the next week. Not enough rain, cotton was thin that year, a hard time for small farmers and share-croppers. That boy, now a man, hates picking cotton. Not picking a bole in the last four years; he never plans to pick one again. Picking cotton is for blacks, not him. They like being bent over all day, sweat dripping off their broad noses, a sack of cotton on their backs. He can spot one of them with nothing more on their simple mind than picking cotton five hundred yards away. He hates blacks, especially the one his father told him to call “Ma”, the one his father met picking cotton on Mr. Jake’s place, picking then talking, then slipping off into the woods with her, leaving him, his hands hurting, picking with a bunch of blacks, then taking her home. Now a man he hates all blacks like he hated her, seeing nothing good covered with brown skin, at worst they are mean like her; at best they are simple minded. The man on the horse is in his universe, his red clay, and it is his move. He watches Zeus, a black man, head for the camp, and Sammy, a white boy, head for the tree. He nudges his palomino. The horse walks forward, hoof at a time, pressing shoe prints in red earth. He draws closer to Sammy, but his eyes stay on the camp and Zeus. On solid ground, does he see the sunset, grass move on a red bank, beauty in a moment or thoughts of time and space? Has he heard of Einstein, or know physics is not a type of laxative? In his mind floats visions of different things, golden things: coins with pictures of presidents on them, things green as grass: bills with pictures of presidents on them. He thinks of things these can buy, things men of power have, things he wants: a different universe. Two days ago, Bill, a friend, a Klansman, a messenger, came by the store. Bill said, “Bob, Mr. Butler and another gentleman, an important one, want to see you, your house, 7:00 PM tomorrow?” “You know what it’s about?” Bob straightened his apron, dusted the flour off it. “They didn’t tell me, but it’s important. Be ready.” Bob knew it was important. Mr. Smith had that look, the look he had when Bob asked for his daughter’s hand: a worried parent of an only-child look, a cold banker’s stare, a sharp hawk-eyed business deal squint. Bob took the deal, took the girl, took the money, and traded his soul. Mr. Smith’s eyes, not his smile, his smile was a preacher’s smile, warm, welcoming, “a brother, what can I do to help you smile,” but his eyes, sky blue when the fire wasn’t in them, Bob saw fire that day, the fire of soul taking, a deal Bob wanted. What good was his soul when it was bare foot and hungry in a cotton field? Mr. Smith had smiled that smile this morning, something sweet was on Bob’s plate, something singed in the fire, something good to eat. All the old man said was, “Be ready tonight.” The night, after Mr. Smith smiled and gave Bob his daughter, Bob sat a good horse by Mr. Smith’s side, for the first time not walking to his father’s house, in borrowed boots and a borrowed sheet, Bob sat in the back with the boys, his Daddy’s black wench writhed under the whip till her back bled rivulets of blood. The man doing the beating said, “Nigger, you whipped a white boy, sleep with a white man like you was his wife.” Turning to Bob’s father, he coiled his bull whip and looped it under his sheet on a belt hook without giving him a lash, “You sleep with this nigger somewhere else. We’ll be watching. You got your pay from the cotton. You here in three days, I’ll be whipping you.” Bob never saw his father or his woman again after that night. Looking at Bob’s feet on the ride home, Mr. Smith said, “Got business in Atlanta, Bob. Come with me. You going to marry my daughter, you got to have better clothes, and I’ll get you some boots, some boots for riding with the boys. Best not to wear your everyday, or Sunday boots when riding with the boys.” The next night in the dining room at the hotel in Atlanta, Mr. Smith said, “It taste good doesn’t it, Bob?” The T-bone steak tasted good, but not as good as a good the taste that simmered in his gut, that kindled a fire in the back of his eyes, that satisfied a hurt that had been eating Bob for all the years that woman sleeping with his father had been beating him. It tasted good, a good better than busting up the black maid at college, better than forcing the black girls he and Bill caught in the woods. That black, his father’s black, watching her scream, watching her bleed and pass out from the pain---that was justice. He liked the screaming, the pain, but he wanted more, watching the light go out in dark brown eyes: he hated the prey, liked the whipping, but loved the kill. He looked at his rich, banker father-in-law. The banker didn’t need to buy his soul, Bob gave it to the devil sometime in his youth, just as Zeus had given his soul to God: both motivated by emotion: one love, the other hate. Riding with his father-in-law the fire was in Bob’s eyes. Before the old man every met him, Bob’s soul was a burned out cinder. But a deal is a deal, first came the store, then the house, then the city council seat, ball at a time. When Mr. Smith made a man, threw him a football. If the receiver caught the ball, ran with it, made a touchdown, the gold flowed. If he fumbled, Mr. Smith took his ball back. The old man could break Bob as easily as he made him. The only hold Bob had on the old man was his daughter; Bob needed his own reins, his freedom. On his way out the door for Savannah, Mr. Smith carried his football, passed it to Bob. Leaving Bob standing, holding the ball, Mr. Smith said, “Two men are coming to see you.” Picking cotton four years ago, Bob didn’t pick cotton last year with Bill, or the year before. He would be more at ease if his wife were home, would listen to her father, then tell him what to do, but the instructions were simple: meet the men. Bob said, “I need to get a bottle of moonshine, some eats?” Bill said, “Not moonshine, Butler’s a religious man, he likes Coca-Cola, don’t touch a drop of alcohol.” Bill was Bob’s boyhood friend, next door, down the creek; caring for Bob, the smarter boy, the one with ideas; Bill, the brawn, the muscle to make thoughts material, and he had a floor to sleep on. Their relation was special: two men acting and thinking as one. Bill had a mother and father, some love. Bob had nothing. Bob’s mother dying of a fever when he was five, his father a little-working, hard-drinking, white-trash hillbilly never paid attention to the boy. He cared for his black wench, she officially living in a shack behind the house, always sleeping inside, and hating her lover’s white child, beating him every time he got within razor strop range. Bob, a motherless boy, unloved, living on hate for the only mother he had, passed into puberty with thoughts, not of girls sighing, but her crying. Some things from his real mother, moments of love before she died, Bob learned to read from her, never unlearned the hunger for knowing, for her pats on his shoulder as he acquired a new word from a book. Doing well in school, not owned by Bill’s working family, no one caring or responsible for what he did, he stayed in school, scrubbed his two pairs of clothes and self in the creek winter, spring and fall, then walked three miles to school every day. He picked cotton, cleaned out barns, did what he could to eat and live, but couldn’t get enough school. The first member of his family to attend high school, he graduated. Bill dropped out like all his family. When Bob spent a year and one semester in college before being expelled for beating a black maid, he had expected to graduate. Sleeping on the floor at Bill’s house, Bob picked cotton again, got the attention of the banker’s daughter and marrying her, life was looking up. Two months after the marriage, the smell of perfume, Miss Bea drifted in the store’s front door. The finest whore in two counties, at least to Bob’s taste, he had the money in his cash register. Nice to have the money, Bea could handle a razor strop as good as Bob’s step-mother, and Bea would do that cheap. She charged a pretty penny to take her panties down and hand the strop to a customer though. Bob’s pants on in the storeroom, his wife and his best friend coming in the door, and Bea’s buggy parked outside, Bill knew what was going on. He came in shouting for Bob. An extra dollar to keep Bea crying quietly in the storeroom and a kiss for his wife, and all was well. Bob’s wife never noticed the perfume or buggy, or if she did, she said nothing. Bob’s tastes were not his wife’s. Boring him in bed, if she knew what he was doing, she wouldn’t say. If he saw Miss Bea, his excitement exploding, his wife would get what she wanted when he got home. If his father-in-law knew, he would cut Bob off without a cent, have him back picking cotton by sunset, but Bob couldn’t stop. Careful, not because of guilt, but fear of getting caught, stopping by Bea’s place, not having her come to him again, he used Bill to watch the store, his father-in-law and wife. Feeling grit, ties of marriage, of ordinary nights in bed with his wife, of needing her daddy’s money, he needed money of his own. His wife five months pregnant and another ball from the old man, this felt good, felt like money. Bob said, “Bill, if this is it, I’ll take care of you.” “You didn’t have to say it, Bob,” Bill said hugging him. The men could have met at Hannity’s house, one of the better houses in the best part of town or Butler’s place over his store, but there, overflowing with children, could the men talk? Could they talk at Hannity’s with black servants listening? Bob’s place private, only him, his wife at the Beach in Savannah with her family, no servants, it was a good meeting place. Nervous the next night, 6:50PM, Bob sat sweaty palmed on the porch waiting. In the dining room they talked. “Bob, we like you, like your work. You’ll go far, and the railroad has the dollars to back up my words,” Hannity, the attorney for the railroad, and a friend of his father-in-law, said. “I’ll second that, Bob. You have what it takes to be the congressman our district needs, and the Knights have the votes to back up my words,” Butler, a local leader, said. Bob said, “What do you want me to do?” “We don’t ask anything of you, Bob. We know you mean business, won’t tolerate misuse of the railroad---” Hannity said. “---Or Southern womanhood, Bob,” Butler said. “We’ve supported congressman Biggs for a long time, Bob, but he has gotten too big. He doesn’t listen to the people, or the railroad, anymore. Time for a change. Time for you. You can win this race, with our help. We can make a better South. What do you think?” Hannity said. “I’m with you,” Bob said, listened. He thought, God, what I can do with that office, with that money, and with that power. The potential to be the youngest congressmen in the nation, this is his chance. A city councilman for two years, it is a spring board, or a spring trap. To wait was to vegetate, to have time to make mistakes, sour and lock into being a small-timer for life. Two years in Congress, and he would make friends, do little in Washington, and say much in South Carolina, secure a position he may never have the chance to seek again. He was ready to move. He knew Biggs, a good man, a man too long in Washington, too distant from the farmers of rural South Carolina, an easy target this election: with boll weevils eating half the cotton crop in his district, the farmers needed someone to blame. Biggs’s greatest vulnerability, making a mistake in New York ten days ago, talking politics with Booker T. Washington was a mistake, having a picture taken with him was political suicide. The picture was on the front page of every newspaper in South Carolina. The Knights and railroad money behind him, Bob could run in the primary, outspend Biggs, and win. The fall election against a Republican, if one ran, was no contest. In 1897, George Henry White, a Republican, a black man won a seat in the house from North Carolina. He was the last African-American representative from a Southern state for the next 78 years. In 1908 there were no black faces or Republicans in office. Every partisan elected office in the state of South Carolina---local, state or federal---was held by a white Democrat, and Blacks could not vote. Write in candidates got more votes than Republicans. Most elections in the fall were unopposed. The South a one party region, Democrat, a special kind of Democrat, Southern Democrats are more conservative and almost as pro big business as Southern Republicans who replaced them six decades later. Bob needed the money to run by next week. Without support, he would lose, be considered a puppy in a dog’s game and remain in city government for the next ten years. He needed to make a hit, something for the newspapers, something to make him a man among boys, local boys. Bob thinks of the big universe, the big man’s universe, the one where ordinary men are pawns, a row of pieces on a board, insignificant. Knights, pieces standing at attention, their hands on their scabbards on the back row in the woods by one bishop, the other on the other side of the board doing his sideways move, Bob’s other bishop waved a handkerchief, signaled him, walked out of the camp toward Bob, made his move, the other players waiting Bob’s command, the game was Bob’s. Sleeping in a feather bed, riding a fine horse, Bob will decide where roads, schools and factories are built. He will make decisions affecting people’s lives, and be remembered one hundred years from now, for what he does today. Bob picks up a pawn, rubs it in his hand, lifts it up. This pawn feels good, one of God’s pawns, a cotton picking one, watching grass, sleeping on the ground and walking home: a peasant. Bob, no longer a share-croppers son, now royal, a king, it is his move. The pawn in his trap, in his grasp, reaching in his pocket for a white handkerchief to wave, he is ready, but the pawn, hot, burning his hand, Bob puts it in his gun holster, by his pistol trigger. What is this? Can God’s pawn burn the Devil’s king? Not this king, it is a long march across the board for a pawn to become a queen and checkmate a king. This pawn will never make it. Bob has his handkerchief in his hand. |
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