And Do Remember Me Read online

  More glowing praise for Marita Golden

  and her wonderful novel,

  And Do Remember Me

  “Golden has always been her own artist, crafting clean, straightforward prose that never gets in the way of the story it is trying to tell. In this latest, we get the feeling that Golden really cares about Jessie—and wants us all to help her pull through a difficult and vital time in her life.”

  —The Boston Globe

  “[Golden’s] heroines arrive at a middle-aged wisdom that is both convincing and comforting.”

  —Entertainment Weekly

  “And Do Remember Me is a sad tale, but Golden does not hammer the reader with pain. Instead, she explains the ‘whys.’ ”

  —Detroit Free Press

  “Golden’s style is modern, refreshing and accurately captures a slice of African-American life.… Golden paints with a broad brush, including significant, easily identifiable themes.”

  —St. Petersburg Times

  “Strong stuff—unsubtle and sharp as an axe blow.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  ALSO BY MARITA GOLDEN

  Migrations of the Heart

  A Woman’s Place

  Long Distance Life

  A One World Book

  Published by Ballantine Books

  Copyright © 1992 by Marita Golden

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  This edition published by arrangement with Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.

  All of the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 93-91088

  eISBN: 978-0-307-79491-8

  v3.1

  FOR JOE, THE ONE

  I WAITED FOR.

  I wish to thank Dr. Endesha Ida Mae Holland, Dorie Ladner, Alberta Barnett and Lawrence Guyot for their time and assistance.

  For B., I understand now.

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Freedom Summer

  Bright Lights

  Passages

  Requiem

  About the Author

  FREEDOM SUMMER

  JESSIE FOSTER stood on the side of Highway 82, just outside Columbus, the Mississippi sun blistering her neck, tiny rivulets of perspiration huddled in her armpits. The once crisp wad of bills she had pinned to her brassiere, thirty-two dollars in fives and ones, lay wilted and damp against her skin. The white blouse she’d ironed that morning several hours before she took flight was covered by a thin film of dark Delta soil. Dry, breathless winds occasionally lifted the hem of her skirt and parched the skin of her thighs. The tissue with which she wiped her forehead was so moist from use that it crumbled in her hands, leaving tiny white specks scattered across her face. All the work she’d done on her hair before leaving and still she could feel it napping up at the edges, the roots crinkling and surrendering without a fight, overwhelmed by the sweat gathering beneath the glistening strands of her Dixie Peach-scented hair.

  Five minutes earlier, two white men in a truck had sped up and driven dangerously close to where she stood on the shoulder of the road. The tires missed her feet by a few inches and through the grimy haze of dust the screeching tires raised, Jessie saw the men’s sunburned faces and their gaze moving like footsteps across her face. The men sat in the truck, idling the engine, so close to her they could have reached out the window and touched her. They sat there trying to decide whether to drive on or to relieve their boredom by terrorizing her.

  When finally they began to drive away, their careening drunken laughter was the only sound, besides Jessie’s heart, filling the sun-beaten afternoon. Then a few hundred yards up the road, one of the men leaned out the window on the passenger side and stared back at Jessie, a beer bottle dangling from his hand. The truck began a slow, relentless drive in reverse. Fear rattled in her mind like chains. She was so frightened that she picked up the string-tied cardboard box packed with her clothes and walked in the opposite direction. She kept her eyes downcast, plotting in her mind some form of escape across the flat, endless cotton fields on either side of the highway. The truck’s tires rolled across the uneven buckled tar of the road with a soft whine. When she heard the squeal of brakes, she thought her life was over, but a moment later the engine revved up, cranking and irritable. Still Jessie kept walking, not stopping when the strap on her sandal broke. And even when the twine on the box she carried snapped, Jessie retrieved the box from the ground without missing a step. Counting silently, she shoved fear momentarily from her mind. When she reached one hundred Jessie stopped and dared to look behind her. The truck was now only a flicker of red on the distant horizon and she collapsed in relief, falling heavily on the cardboard box. Her heart was pounding, scratching for release like some tiny animal chewing its way out of a trap.

  Jessie swallowed a wad of spit, trying to quench a sudden, parching thirst and ran her tongue across her lips. Heat shimmered and danced in waves, as she gazed across the highway. In her imagination, the sun locked its sweltering hands around her neck. Nausea quickened in the pit of her stomach and in a hot, vivid flash of memory, she felt her father’s hands unbuttoning her blouse, cradling her breasts. He had sneaked up on her, like some kind of thief, as she was standing at the stove, turning on the fire beneath the black cast iron frying pan. She had been daydreaming. Daydreaming because Chester Foster’s hands couldn’t reach her there. Daydreaming to save her life. But then, he was on her like a smell, like a fever, his tongue on her neck, his knee jammed between her legs and his hands holding her breasts, squeezing them so hard that tears welled in the corners of her eyes. And she had whispered, “No, Daddy, please no.”

  Even now, Jessie couldn’t say why yesterday was different. Why yesterday at the moment her father turned her around to face him, she had let her hand reach for the handle of the frying pan, been grateful for its weight, and hit her father on the head once, then again. She didn’t know why she had stood there watching him stagger and fall onto the cracked, dull green linoleum of the kitchen floor, before sinking to her knees as solemnly as if to pray, and hit him a third time as he lay in a slick, glistening stream of blood. At the sight of her father’s body, monstrous, unmoving, Jessie felt a smile tremble as cautiously as a nervous tick on her lips. Chester Foster wore a pair of blue-striped boxer shorts and a sleeveless undershirt and a stocking cap to protect his pomade-scented waves. Walking down the street, Chester Foster turned his muscular former boxer’s build into a taunt. At home he walked around shirtless, his solid body bludgeoning his family into silence and obedience. Now he lay crumpled at his daughter’s feet. Jessie couldn’t hear him breathing. And she didn’t care. The feel of the warm pan handle against her palm had pumped her full of an anger so pure, she never wanted the feeling to end.

  The blood began to stain her skirt, and Jessie rose from the floor just as Mae Ann, a bag of groceries in her arms, entered the kitchen. Mae Ann’s eyes ballooned in terror and she dropped the bag, cans and jars and boxes crashing around their father’s frame.

  “What yall done done?” she screamed. Mae Ann’s voice wailed, as unsettling and stunning as a siren. That’s when Jessie ran.

  She went to Aunt Eva’s, telling her as she sat in Eva’s living room, her arms wrapped around her body as if afraid she would disintegrate if she let herself go, “I di
d a terrible thing. A terrible thing.”

  Eva escorted her back home, where Jessie stood trembling with fear on the sidewalk in front of the house, not daring to go in. Eva got her clothes and told her sister, Jessie’s mother, Olive, that Jessie said she wasn’t coming back. Junior and Willie had stared at her from behind the screen door while Aunt Eva was in the house. Junior gazed at Jessie, from a face that seemed to her to be a blunt, dangerous instrument. Then he turned and walked back into the house, appearing to evaporate in the cool shadows of the hallway. Willie stole quickly down the steps and hugged her, pressing a five-dollar bill in her hand, his light brown eyes whispering good-bye because he did not want to say the words. Mae Ann ran around from the back and grabbed Jessie’s hands. “They done took him to the hospital,” she told Jessie breathlessly. “He woke up when they put him in the ambulance.” Then she begged, “Take me with you, Jess. You cain’t be the only one gits away.” When Aunt Eva came out to the porch, Mae Ann said to Jessie under her breath, “Send for me, you hear? Send for me,” the plea fluttering mournfully, choking Jessie’s heart as she watched Mae Ann run to the back of the house.

  As Eva and Jessie drove away the sound of Olive Foster’s voice calling Jessie’s name again and again drenched the warm night air. Jessie sat straight and still in the front seat, refusing to hear. She would never know that her mother sat on the porch until daybreak praying and waiting for her to come back home. Aunt Eva, who had never married, who owned a small beauty shop, who had been to Atlanta, Memphis and New York with her church, said to Jessie as she spread a sheet on the sofa in the living room that night, “You done sent your daddy to the hospital and I wants to know why.” Lighting up a Lucky Strike, her head a field of pink rollers, her lean, angular body swathed in a blue chenille robe, Eva crossed her legs, stared at Jessie and said, “I’m listening. I ain’t been your aunt all this time for you to start lying or trying to hold back on me now. What’s been going on in that house?”

  Jessie answered Eva with a sob so resolute, so complete, that Eva stubbed out her cigarette and reached for Jessie, cradling her in her arms.

  “I can’t tell nobody. I can’t never tell nobody. Not even God,” she said. Eva sat on the sofa holding Jessie against her breast until the girl fell into a longed-for but tortured sleep. Three hours before Eva was due home the next afternoon, Jessie packed her things and left.

  THE DARK GREEN Ford, one headlight missing, the front fender smashed, its body caked with dust, sputtered toward Jessie in a fog of sun and heat. She stood up, dusted herself off and stepped closer to the highway to see who was driving. Slowly she raised her hand. The car slowed down and stopped right in front of her. Inside the car was a young man with a trace of freckles that mapped his nose and cheeks. Around his mouth were the stubbly beginnings of a beard.

  “Where you headed?” he asked, leaning over to the passenger side.

  “I’m goin’ to Winona, can you gimme a lift that far?”

  “You running away from home, ain’t you,” he grinned, his face more smug than Jessie could bear.

  “How come you ask that?”

  “You got a running away from home look on your face.”

  “So what if I am, ain’t none a your business,” Jessie countered, stepping back quickly from the car.

  “I didn’t say it was. Come on, I’ll give you a lift.”

  “Where you headed?” Jessie asked, leaning back through the window.

  “I’m driving over to Greenwood.”

  Jessie opened the door and pressed her cardboard box under the dashboard as she settled in the front seat.

  “What’s your name?” he asked, starting the car.

  “Jessie, Jessie Foster.”

  “Hi, I’m Lincoln Sturgis. What’ll you do when you get to Winona?”

  “I got some people there, my grandmama. But she don’t really know I’m coming.”

  “So you are running away,” he laughed.

  “I didn’t say that. You sure ask a lot of questions,” Jessie said, squirming in discomfort beside Lincoln, his curiosity pricking her with guilt. “Where you from?” she asked, turning to look at him. He was lanky, with tributaries of blue veins riddling the light skin of his arms, which seemed burnished by a tan that made him golden and perfect.

  “I’m from Montgomery, but I’m headed to Greenwood, to work in the movement.”

  “The movement? What’s that?”

  “Ain’t you heard, girl? This here is Freedom Summer,” Lincoln said, a joyous, hearty laugh rumbling in his voice, initiating her, Jessie felt, into a knowledge both frightening and momentous.

  “Well, I knew I was gonna get my freedom, but I didn’t know nobody else had that in mind,” she said, trembling a little at this burst of humor, amazed at the sudden comfort she felt, confused by how much she liked looking at Lincoln. She wondered what he saw when he looked at her. “You one of them freedom riders?”

  “I’ve done just about everything else. Picketed segregated stores. Tried to get Negroes to register and vote. Anything to get us our civil rights.”

  “So, you’re a civil rights worker,” Jessie said, suddenly flushed with fear, as if he had told her he was a convict on the run from the law.

  “You could be one too,” he said, his eyes cast upon her with serious intent.

  “I’d be too scared.”

  Six months ago, Alberta Garrison, the daughter of one of the deacons in her mother’s church, had gone off to Jackson to protest something to do with civil rights, Jessie recalled. The girl had gotten arrested and nobody had heard from her since. Alberta’s best friend, Iola Hughes, had gone to Jackson with her and come back to Columbus and told Alberta’s family that Alberta was taken out of her cell one night and never returned. At seventeen, Alberta Garrison sang in the church choir, her luminous contralto never failing to spark a fervent chorus of amens from the congregation. The rest of the week, however, she rebelled against her parents’ strict regime at home by cutting school, and having sex with the town’s most dangerous young men in the backseat of cars, in rented rooms and in cotton fields. But when Alberta met the civil rights workers who came to town, she changed. Her parents were fearful but proud. Alberta began dressing primly and wouldn’t give a boy she didn’t know a smile or the time of day. Some people got saved, Alberta got civil rights. And now, nobody knew or wanted to imagine what had happened to her.

  And on the plantation where Jessie sometimes picked cotton, one afternoon the boss had driven onto the fields, and ordered all the workers to gather around his pickup truck. In the flatbed where cotton was hauled lay a young Negro, his bleeding, purplish lips swollen, his left eye bloated, sealed shut, the skin of his cheeks slit, the scent of his exposed flesh drawing a family of flies around his head. His hands were tied behind his back. “This here is what civil rights is gonna git anybody what wants em,” the boss had shouted. “This boy come around trying to git yall to vote. Well, I just give him a lecture on civil rights he won’t never forget.” As the man drove off, the field hands stood beneath a suddenly grieving afternoon sun, speech bleeding in their throats. Jessie had seen a reprise of the young man’s face for weeks afterward when she read a schoolbook, looked out the window or stared at the sky.

  “Hell, I’m scared too,” she heard Lincoln say, his admission yanking her from the hold of memory. “But I’m more scared of things staying the way they are. What about your family? Won’t they miss you?”

  “I hope so,” Jessie said, turning away from Lincoln to gaze out the window, “I really do.”

  In the backseat were several boxes filled with manuscripts, poems and plays that Lincoln told Jessie he had written. While driving, he recited lines from King Lear and Hamlet, and told her he was working in the movement, so he could be set on fire and “write an anthem for our people.”

  Lincoln made this pronouncement so passionately that Jessie knew he took the extraordinary for granted. She had never known anyone to talk like that. Her parents spoke as little
as possible, as though speech would merely enhance their misery. Growing up in the grip of silence, Jessie’s head had nonetheless teemed with words. Her father had warned her never to tell. Her mother had said over and over, “I don’t want to hear nothing about that man, or what he’s done.” In her house words were contraband, proscribed. Jessie had craved words all the more because they were forbidden. Her daydreams persistent, resilient, consisted mostly of scenes in which happy people talked on and on as though the act of speech were a saving grace.

  She had seen the Bullocks, the white family she cleaned house for three days a week after school, sit as though hypnotized by their black and white television set. The words and laughter and jokes and stories just coming at them. Walter Cronkite telling them the news, Red Skelton making them laugh. Jessie had watched them gather around the television set like it was an altar. She knew it was words that brought them in front of the screen.

  Lincoln talked nonstop. His vigorous, confident energy affirmed Jessie’s daydreams, and satisfied a hunger she had grown used to feeling. One minute Lincoln was imitating Sammy Davis, Jr., the next telling Jessie that President Kennedy was killed by people high up in the government. He recited parts of the U.S. Constitution and told her about some New York preacher whose last name was X who Jessie hadn’t heard anything about.

  But she had heard about the Freedom Riders who had ridden interstate buses across the south to integrate them. Negro men and women getting on the buses and sitting wherever they wanted, not just in the back where first the law and then custom said they had to sit. Negroes standing in the white section of the bus station waiting rooms, drinking from the water fountains marked “white only.”

  There were white Freedom Riders, Jessie knew that. And all of them were being beaten by mobs and jailed. The colored folks in Columbus couldn’t stop talking about the Freedom Riders and the whites couldn’t invent curses bad enough for them. The Negro preachers in Columbus said special prayers for them on Sundays and took up collections to help bail them out of jail. The sheriffs of towns and cities across the deep south had sworn to shoot any Freedom Rider, Negro or white, who set foot in their town.