All the Days Past, All the Days to Come: List 4

“That’s why we want you to come home, Cassie, to help figure that out. If they catch him in Michigan, then he’ll soon be on his way to Mississippi. If you get together with Lawyer Tate, maybe you can find a way to stop the extradition.”

“We got sleeper berths for them on the train. Cost more, but Christopher-John, Man, and I figured them to be comfortable.”

I gave him a placid smile as I went to the table and checked the bag of groceries.

“Which one you want me to answer? Your first question or all your insinuations?”

It was something very few Negroes had the opportunity to do, and I reveled in it.

They were movies depicting the American Negro as enslaved, shiftless, ignorant, usually following behind or at the will of some white person. Few showed the Negro as heroic. Very few showed the Negro as standing up for herself or himself, educated, with a mind of her or his own.

Big Ma balked at having to give up her wood-burning stove, but she liked the idea of the refrigerator, which kept her foods from spoiling.

It was one of the law students, and from the sound of him, he was already inebriated.

Santa’s eyes went big in mock surprise as Maureen made her wish known, then Santa nodded profoundly and said, “Well, I sure will try to do my best, little girl! I am sure I’m the man for the job.”

“I can make it fine on the bus,” I said, heading for the pile of coats on one of the settees.

The lawn, brownish now, rolled down unencumbered to a rocky cliff. There were no fences.

A stately blue spruce towered high above the garage and grounds and stood like a sentinel guarding the back gate.

A stately blue spruce towered high above the garage and grounds and stood like a sentinel guarding the back gate.

There seemed very little for me to do except take orders and accept all the menial cooking assignments such as chopping celery, onions, and green peppers to simmer along with the turkey while it cooked, and chopping the same for the potato salad, as well as peeling and dicing the potatoes.

Being a southern woman, Dee cooked chit’lings, calves’ brains, neck bones, tripe, and the like, but she could not abide the thought of a hog head, coon, or pig’s feet simmering on her beautiful new stove in her newly remodeled, modernized, immaculate kitchen, so she relegated Stacey to the basement washroom to cook his hog head and all the other southern delicacies, such as coon, which he annually brought back from his hunting trips to the woods of Upper Michigan.

Being a southern woman, Dee cooked chit’lings, calves’ brains, neck bones, tripe, and the like, but she could not abide the thought of a hog head, coon, or pig’s feet simmering on her beautiful new stove in her newly remodeled, modernized, immaculate kitchen, so she relegated Stacey to the basement washroom to cook his hog head and all the other southern delicacies, such as coon, which he annually brought back from his hunting trips to the woods of Upper Michigan.

Hog-head souse. It was one of those delicacies born in slavery. Like so many foods now rooted in our culture—meats like chit’lings and tripe, neck bones and pig’s feet, calves’ brains and hog head—they were the leavings of the slaughter.

“Now, Mama, how’d we get on that?” chided Papa.

“You expecting they would?” asked a cynical Uncle Hammer.

Went from slavery to so-called freedom. What freedom? Still got to kowtow to those white folks down there, other parts of the country too. Can’t vote down there. Can’t drink from their water fountains.

From what you said, they hung an effigy from a tree right there on the school grounds.

Stacey had gotten to be a master storyteller and we all deferred to him, calling on him to recount the events as we all remembered them, and he did so with great gusto, acting out the parts of all persons involved, standing up to show their action and mimicking their voices.

Rie and two of her girlfriends were in the recreation room with the children, along with a gangly young man who had come courting Rie on this Christmas Day.

All boys who ventured to see Rie knew the protocol and they adhered to it. They knew they could only visit on Sunday or a holiday, knew they had to be wearing a suit and tie, and knew above all else that Rie was to be treated with respect.

She was a gregarious girl, high-spirited, as beautiful now as she had been as a baby, and the boys flocked around her.

“Maybe. But a paper pusher who’s made a dent, maybe an indelible impression.”

We were all shocked to see Moe and berated him for risking coming back into the States.

He said that during those moments, he wondered how he could have fathered such beautiful, talented, and vivacious daughters.

He talked about a man being beaten for having the audacity to insist on his voting rights.

As you probably know, back in forty-seven when there was that interracial bus ride through part of the South—the Journey of Reconciliation, it was called—those riders were arrested; some even served on chain gangs.

The reason given for the removal was that the woman had no appointment and had become belligerent when she was told she had to leave.

Guy read through the papers. “Obviously, there’s a strong case here. The woman needs to sue. But tell me, Cassie, are you billing for any of this, or is this another one of your pro bono causes?”

Following his lead, I developed a penchant for making jewelry, mostly out of beads and organic material found in the forest surrounding Guy’s house.

They get along better with colored children most of the time, but then there are those times when colored children turn on them too, beat them up, say they’re acting uppity, think they’re better than the rest of the colored kids because they look so white, straight hair, light skin.

So, I vacillated between making a commitment to Guy and totally breaking off the relationship.

The news in May was riveting.

The white riders would sit in the back seats relegated to black passengers, and black riders along with some of the white riders would sit up front in seats reserved for whites, and in those states that chose to enforce their segregationist laws, all would refuse to move from their seats.

Colored college students sitting quietly in the white library and they were the ones charged with breach of the peace!

With every civil rights stand we took—every sit-in, every bus ride, every kneel-in, every demonstration—the white backlash of terror that followed gave a black eye to America and embarrassed the government.

Now this war was at home and we were fighting an adversary we knew all too well.