Part 20

She was a soft, plump little woman, almost the same colour as her son, full of kindness and forgivingness. She had had no part in the feud between her husband and the preacher. She had always gone to church at the Old Ship of Zion. When Draper became a part of it she had accepted him without question. He preached only hate and fear: hate of the unconverted, of the liberal-minded, of white people, and fear of, almost equally, God and the devil, but she didn’t see that. She was perplexed and frightened when her husband denounced him as unchristian and withdrew his family from the church. That had been fifteen years ago, when Woodie was a baby.

Other people had followed Tampa Simmons--who was a good deal of a leader in his own right--but not for long. There was fascination in the very boards of the Old Ship and a dread fascination in Draper. His gift of torrential oratory was unlike anything the Piney Woods had known. His congregation whispered that he “had a hand,” and shivered with dreadful pleasure, seeing his power as half from Satan and half from God, and wholly interesting. Their meagre lives would have been barren of entertainment, their genuine religious fervour denied an outlet, without Draper and the Old Ship. Everyone had drifted back but the Simmonses.

Woodie’s mother had remained away solely from loyalty to his father. As Woodie lingered, looking down at her, he realized with a pang that at any time during the fifteen years she would have returned to the Old Ship, if she could, as a carrier pigeon to its home. She had never really understood how his father felt, nor why. Woodie had understood, even five years ago--when he was too young to talk about it. He could have talked about it now, and now it was too late.

He went into the other room. Pieces of dark cloth had been tacked up at the windows to keep out the light. Two old women were bent together beside the fireless hearth. He had always called them Aunt Caroline and Aunt Miranda, but they were not related to him. He could barely see them in the half dark, but the mound of his father’s body beneath a sheet on the bed stood out clearly. Nothing could have lain so still which had not once had life in it. The room smelled of medicine and snuff and food, and somehow faintly of death. The old women were talking in whispers and dipping snuff.

There was another woman in the lean-to kitchen, beside the stove, where he had never seen anyone but his mother. She was cooking dinner: collards, turnip greens with pork, and crackling bread. The strong odours made him a little queasy. The woman was stout and black and shone with perspiration. She had big, loose breasts and cheeks and lips and shrewd, tolerant eyes. She wore the garbled remains of white women’s clothes: shoes broken at the bulges, a black silk skirt that had split on the creases, and a newly blackened waist still damp with pokeberry dye. Her face looked strange to Woodie without its usual half smile. Her name was Maria Knox, and her husband was a truck gardener. He had known her all his life, but when they spoke to each other their words were stiff and unnatural. He had played with her children almost every day until he went away, but now it seemed that it wasn’t he who had known them.

He was feeling more clearly and deeply than he had ever felt; the impressions made upon him were going to last until he was an old man, but because he kept seeing himself as if he were someone else, he thought he wasn’t much affected, and was disappointed in himself. He couldn’t help seeing the house as if it were a stage-set for a play about inferior people, and the people in the house as if they had been actors, and that seemed to him cruel and unworthy.

He went on out of doors and sat on a stump near the house, where his father used to smoke his pipe in the evening. It came to him there that _he_ was the head of the family now. Somehow he had to take the place of the strong, resourceful man who was dead. He felt slight and ignorant--incompetent. The flash and fragrance of the spring day seemed inappropriate and unnatural. He held up his hand to shield his eyes. The fresh yellow-jasmine-scented air was strange in his nostrils.

He stared off across the clearing. That, too, seemed like a scene in a play, and yet no other spot of ground was so familiar. The climbing sun lit as if they had been candles the red trumpet flowers that hung on a twisted pine. There had always been a trumpet vine on that tree....

Something moved near the base of the tree. He looked more closely and saw that it was a woman. She was waving her hand--beckoning. He got up and walked across the clearing.

As he came nearer he recognized a spry, birdlike creature who played the melodeon in the Old Ship. He remembered that she used to give him tea cakes.

“Why, howdy, sis? Charity?” He held out his hand.

She took it and peered at him with nearsighted eyes from a kindly face as wrinkled as a nanny-oak ball.

“Howdy, Woodie? Yer sho’ has growed lak’ er weed! De spittin’ image uv yer maw! Ah called yer over hyeh ter keep from disturbin’ her. Ah--Ah got somethin’ ter tell yer.”

Her eyes blinked rapidly; she put her head first on one side and then on the other with quick little jerks and her fingers worked nervously together.

“Dat low-down nigger, dat Zach Draper”--she looked around uneasily--“when he preach ter yer paw’s funeral ter-morrer, he gwine--gwine”--her voice shook--“_he gwine sen’ his soul ter hell!_”

Woodie stared in blank amazement. “He’s go’n’er do _what_?”

“_He gwine sen’ yer paw’s soul ter hell!_”

“But--but how can he? What’s _he_ got to do with it? Don’t everybody know Pappy was a good man? Do you think anybody will believe him?”

“_Ev’ybody_ b’lieve um! Ain’t he de preacher? An’ ain’t yer paw laid his ’ligion down? Fer fifteen years he ain’t gone ter church nowhar!”

“There warn’t anywheres else to go but the Old Ship.”

“That ain’t gwine make no diff’rence ter most folks. Dey’ll say Brudder Zach’s got de right ter decide ’bout dat. He’s er powerful man when it comes ter de ’splainments uv de Sperret!”

Woodie had the feel of things crumbling down inside of him. “I’ll--stop him somehow!” he said in a choked voice; but he felt frightened and confused. He looked into the troubled eyes of the little organist. “What can I do, sis--Charity?” he faltered.

“Ah dunno, chile! Ah dunno! Ah’s knowed yer paw all mah life, and, preacher or no preacher, Zach Draper ain’t fitten ter tote swill fer um!”

“Can’t you--can’t you change him somehow? Can’t you talk him out of it?”

“Ah’s done tried ter! Ah’s talked ter um till he won’t listen ter me no mo’.”

Woodie shook with sudden anger. “Did you tell him he’s ornery--lowdown--mean?”

“Gawd A’mighty, boy, Ah dassent! Ah’m skeered uv um! Ev’ybody’s skeered uv um!” She lowered her voice almost to a whisper: “Dey do say he’s got er han’!”

Woodie shivered. You got a “hand” from a conjure doctor, and it gave you supernatural power over your enemies. He had thought, off at school, that he had come to regard such things as nonsense, but down here a deep live current of terror ran through the people, and he found himself tingling to it as he used to do.

Woodie stood for a long time beneath the swaying trumpet flowers, thinking. There was one person who could stop Draper if she would. Miss Jinny Pickens could stop any coloured man or woman in that county from doing anything. His grandfather and grandmother had belonged to her, and he had seen his father and mother turn to her in every emergency. He went to her now as naturally as they would have done.

But first he told the three women what Charity had said, and made them promise to help him keep it from his mother.

From the other side of the gentle tree-smothered valley that stretched before it the house lifted itself with its old air of remote nobility, but when he had walked up the long, winding driveway under the oaks and hickory trees and sycamores, he saw that the paint had flaked from the tall Corinthian columns--which no longer had the effect of propping up the sky--and that the iron balcony behind them drooped like a disillusioned mouth.

And at the rear, where all coloured people were supposed to enter and his feet took him of their own accord, the arms of the tall fig tree couldn’t hide the broken shutters at the windows, the gaps in the railing of the upstairs porch, nor the rotting boards of the steps--the air the old place had of dropping minutely into ruin, bit by bit.

The harsh smell of fig leaves in the sun came to him strongly, and he took a sudden sharp breath. It brought back his father more vividly than even the sight of his dead face had done. Tampa Simmons seemed to be standing against the big three-fingered leaves, heavily listed to the left on account of his lame leg, just as he had stood that day when he had brought cream (and Woodie) to the back yard and Miss Jinny had come out to talk with him.

“Miss Jinny, ma’am,” he had said, “Ah don’t want mah li’l’ boy ter grow up ter be lak’ Ah is! Miss Jinny--look at me!” He had spread out his work-twisted hands in the mellow sunshine of late afternoon and looked at her earnestly, and Miss Jinny (and Woodie) had looked at him. “Ah don’t know nothin’; Ah can’t read an’ Ah can’t write; Ah ain’t got nothin’ an’ Ah ain’t never goin’ ter have. Ah’m jest er cawnfiel’ nigger--er li’l’ better’n er mule. Don’t yer expec’ that mebbe somehow it might be fixed so’s mah li’l’ boy might be--diff’rent?”

Woodie heard again the grave, self-respecting bass and saw the deeply furrowed, kindly face looking out at him with what had come to be to the boy the wistfulness of their race.

Miss Jinny, too, had seen and heard, and felt, and in the end had found a man in Boston--and Jerusalem seemed no farther from the Piney Woods--to send Woodie away to school and give him such an opportunity as had fallen to the lot of no other coloured child he had ever known. Even his vacations were provided for: that the experiment might have a thorough chance, he had spent them, until this year, with a prosperous Negro family who had a summer place in Maine.

Behind the humble Simmons family always, as protection, somehow, from any hardship too great to be borne, had stood the great rock of Miss Jinny Pickens: impoverished, elderly, and alone, but a Pickens; knit into the fibres of the state; indomitable by nature and affiliations. Woodie felt her there. He stepped up and knocked at her door with confidence.

The door was opened by a woman of his own race whom he did not know. “_She_ ain’t hyeh!” she said, with inflections that suggested that only the undesirable wouldn’t have known it. “She done gone ter Leestown, ter see Miss Sadie Lee.”

The Lees were cousins of the Pickenses. He hadn’t thought of any of the old names for a long time. He asked when Miss Jinny would return.

“Mebbe ter-morrer an’ mebbe not. Is you Tampa Simmons’ boy?”

When he said he was she told him what Draper meant to do at the funeral. She told him with sympathy, but with a strange gusto. There had been a trace of it even in the kindly Charity.

He had come through the woods. As he went back by the road and one Negro after another stopped him to tell him the same thing in the same way, the sick consciousness dawned within him of something which he could not have expressed. The sympathy of these people was real enough, but there was in it an excitation of horror that they craved; a brushing near of occult and of awful things. They awaited his father’s funeral in a state of delicious, morbid expectancy.

If Miss Jinny failed him!...

He got out the old white mule and started for Leestown.

When he returned the mule to the stable a round white moon was pouring light steadily into the velvet darkness. Sore and stiff, he stumbled into the kitchen, where a pallet had been fixed for him on the floor.

He had ridden the mule to Leestown and back--twenty-four miles. He had had to ride slowly, because the old mule tired easily and had gone a little lame. He would have made the trip by stage, but no stage went in the afternoon. Both towns were off the railroad.

He had gone to Miss Sadie Lee’s house, and again Miss Jinny had been away. Miss Sadie had taken her motoring. The best he had been able to accomplish was to leave a note, to be delivered to Miss Jinny immediately upon her return. He hadn’t dared wait for her. If she wasn’t going to stop Zach Draper, he had to do it himself.

He couldn’t sleep. His mind ran all night, as uselessly as the arms of an unconnected windmill. It showed him scores of unrelated pictures: the faces of boys he knew off at school; the little white New England church in the village there; Draper, laughing at him; a bend in the creek where he used to swim; his father’s body; the corner of a cornfield behind a snake fence covered with purple morning glories. It repeated scraps of the day’s conversations. On and on and on. It reverberated soundlessly with the voodooistic terror that ran through the Negroes of the Piney Woods at the prospect of the morrow’s sensation. Fear, like a hot wind, blew across it, searing and drying his thoughts. He felt things older and bigger and more terrible than he had realized threshing around him in the hot, humid Southern air....

Finally he got up and rummaged in a cupboard and slipped his father’s old pistol into the pocket of his coat, where it hung over the back of a chair. He had a plan now. It was as simple as Cain’s....

Toward morning he slept a little.

* * * * *

Woodie sat on the front pew in the Old Ship of Zion, between his mother and Maria Knox. His mother was heavily swathed in borrowed black. Her plump, innocent features, still swollen from weeping, looked purged and peaceful beneath her veil. She alone was unaware of the air of tense expectancy that bound the rest of the congregation together.

In front of them stood his father’s coffin, on two sawhorses banked deep with cape jasmine, which had just begun to bloom; dead-white, half-opened flowers set stiffly in stiff, glistening green leaves. Their heavy odour lay like a blanket over the place in spite of the open windows. A score of spring scents outside strove against it in vain.

Behind him the church filled steadily. He could feel the waiting people: row on close-packed row, all their faces turned one way--tense--expectant--frightened. They were all very still. Somewhere in the distance a man was calling hogs. The long-drawn notes of his voice sounded like a horn. It died away, and the kind of silence that belongs only to funerals fell upon the little church. Into it the clock on the wall plumped nine twangy notes.

Charity spread her thin black fingers over the keys of the melodeon. Draper erected his bulk in the chancel and began lining out the first hymn: “Shall We Gather at the River?”

Woodie’s hour was on him, and Miss Jinny hadn’t come.

Things swam together and went black. He clutched the butt of the pistol in his coat pocket with a cold, damp hand and stared at Draper. The man seemed of superhuman size. He was like something the little church had been built to hold. Woodie shook with fear.

His mother laid her hand on his arm. “Is yer all right, Son?”

“Yes’m,” he muttered thickly, “I’m all right.” But he scarcely heard her and was barely aware that he had replied.

The first notes of the hymn came whining out of the old melodeon. He rose with the rest, and the congregation sang. It passed over his mind in a blur of sound.

Draper knelt beside the pulpit and prayed, and the people bowed their heads to the roll of his voice. Woodie listened long enough to be sure the prayer held no menace for the dead man; the rest of it became a confused rumble in his ears.

Draper rose from his knees. Omitting the hymn between the prayer and the sermon, he looked out over his people--gathered them in with his eye. A hush fell upon them. The faint, lazy call of a distant flycatcher pulsed its way clearly through their midst, and he spoke, slowly.

“Brethren an’ sisters, de hymn done ax yer, shall we gather at de river, de beautiful river dat flows by de throne uv Gawd? An’ _Ah’m_ a-axin’ yer”--he paused, spread out his arms in a slow gesture of restrained power and let his voice fall upon a note that went through the waiting people as a wind through leaves--“_Ah’m_ a-axin’ yer, brethren an’ sisters, when yer gits ter de river, de beautiful river dat flows by de throne uv Gawd, is yer gwine ter be fitten ter _git on de boat_: de big boat dat’s a-waitin’ by de bank, wid de steam a-shootin’ outer de chimbley an’ de paddles a-splashin’ in de water--de big boat dat’s a-waitin’ dar ter take yer on down ter de throne itse’f? _Is yer gwine ter be fitten?_”

A groan went over the people. A scarcely audible sigh of anticipation came out of them. Draper caught it and fanned it. His voice began its steady march toward its goal. Woodie’s mouth grew dry. His heart seemed about to burst.

“It ain’t gwine do yer no good ter _sneak_ on ter de big boat ef yer ain’t fitten, caise’ yer can’t fool de Lawd Jesus! Yer might fool de cap’n er de boat, or de Angel Gabriel, but”--the creak of an automobile brake came through the window--“yer can’t”--his outstretched hand sank to his side--“fool----”

His big features stiffened with displeasure. He stood silent, staring toward the door.

Woodie turned with the rest. His heart bounded like a toy balloon and then crowded up into his throat and stuck there.

Miss Jinny Pickens was coming down the aisle.

But not the Miss Jinny Pickens he remembered: a frail, little old woman with bent back and brown time spots on her wrinkled cheeks, who wore shabby clothes and walked slowly, leaning on a cane.

A swift sense came back to him of the Miss Jinny whose foot had tapped the floor as positively as a woodpecker’s beak against a tree; whose back had been as straight as a child’s; whose movements had been marked with crisp decisiveness; whose clothes had been magnificent.

Or had they only seemed so to the ragged little boy who had never owned a pair of shoes or seen a train? Was it possible that she had been old and frail and shabby then?

He couldn’t tell; but then and always she had been _Miss Jinny Pickens_, and a member of the super-supreme court which in the last analysis settled everything of importance in that countryside. No Negro in the state had ever openly crossed one of them and lived out the day. He looked with swift hope at Draper--and saw that things had changed.

Something inhered in Miss Jinny that stood for power, but Draper didn’t see it. He waited there in haughty, calculating silence, watching her progress down the aisle, through contemptuous, half-closed eyes, unimpressed and unafraid. The consciousness that the issue lay solely between him and Draper grew tight about Woodie’s heart. Miss Jinny faded out for him almost before she had settled herself in the chair that someone brought from the little room behind the melodeon.

And Draper, too, as soon as he began to talk again, forgot her. His voice took on the sound of something started on its way which could not be stopped--not even by the preacher himself. There had been but one rebellion in the Old Ship of Zion since he came: now was the time to stamp out any last lingering embers of it. As he slowly raised his hand and swung back into his march of words, Woodie’s vitals seemed to melt and flow downward. Despair boiled in him like vomit.

“De Lawd Jesus’ll be a-waitin’! He’ll be a-settin’ on de edge er de great white throne, a-waitin’--a-waitin’ fer dat boat! An’ when He see it comin’, He’ll holler out ter de angels: ‘Hi’st up de silver spyglass ter Mah eye!’ An’ de angels’ll h’ist it. Twelve angels it’ll take ter h’ist up de silver spyglass ter His eye.

“An’ den He’ll p’int de silver spyglass, an’ ef dere’s anybody on dat boat dat don’t belong--_He’ll see um! He’ll see spang through um!_

“An’ He’ll say: ‘Lean de silver spyglass erginst de throne, an’ lif’ up de speakin’ trumpet dat’s made er gol’!’ An’ de angels’ll do it. Twenty angels it’ll take ter lif’ up de speakin’ trumpet dat’s made er gol’!

“An’ den de Lawd Jesus’ll put His mouth ter de speakin’ trumpet, an’ He’ll holler out loud an’ cl’are: ‘Mistah Cap’n, yer hyeh Me?’” very slowly and solemnly: “‘_Yer got er onbeliever on dat boat!_ Yer’ll have ter stop an’ go back, Mistah Cap’n, an’ lan’ um----’”

Woodie’s hand closed round the pistol, when his eye chanced to fall on Miss Jinny’s face. Her look of quiet certitude startled him. He leaned forward, scarcely breathing.

“‘--an’ lan’ um whar he belongs!’”

Miss Jinny cleared her throat, but Draper didn’t notice.

“‘Back whar de brimstone’s at, an’ de fire----’”

Miss Jinny moved her chair, but Draper didn’t even look her way.

“‘Back whar de smoke’s a-curlin’ out de groun’, an’----’”

The sharp pounding of Miss Jinny’s cane fell across his sentence and broke it as brittelely off as if it had been a rod of glass.

* * * * *

Woodie dropped back limply into his seat. He opened his mouth to still the sound of his breathing. He grew weak under the surge of his relief. For a moment all that he could realize was that he hadn’t had to shoot--that Miss Jinny had saved him from that.

She sat on the edge of her chair, as delicately separate as a white hepatica, looking straight at Draper, and as the sense of her sank into Woodie it seemed to him that she was a part of the backbone of life itself, and again he looked at the preacher with a flaming up of hope.

But the big Negro was staring at the white woman in blank amazement, without meeting her eyes, much as he might have stared at the roof if it had fallen in; uneasy only because the mood he had induced in his people had been threatened.

For a moment he was silent, while he reassembled his scattered powers. He shifted his weight until the floor creaked. He leaned forward and began to speak again, and Woodie’s hope sank slowly and heavily. It was going to take more than the pounding of a cane to stop Zachariah Draper.