The Twelve-Mile Straight

Copyright

4th Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.4thEstate.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2017

First published in the United States by Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers, in 2017

This eBook edition published in 2017

Copyright © 2017 by Eleanor Henderson

Eleanor Henderson asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum in Hyde Park, New York, for reprinted excerpts here of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s November 28, 1930, Warm Springs, Georgia, radio address, http://www.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/_resources/images/msf/msf00416.

This is a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it either are the work of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008158682

Ebook Edition © September 2017 ISBN: 9780008158712

Version: 2018-06-04

Dedication

For my father, Billy

Epigraph

And the children struggled within her; and she said, If it be so,

why am I thus? And she went to inquire of the Lord.

And the Lord said unto her, Two nations are in thy womb.

—GENESIS 25:22–23

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Part I

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Part II

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-One

Twenty-Two

Twenty-Three

Part III

Twenty-Four

Twenty-Five

Twenty-Six

Twenty-Seven

Twenty-Eight

Twenty-Nine

Thirty

Thirty-One

Thirty-Two

Thirty-Three

Thirty-Four

Thirty-Five

Thirty-Six

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Also by Eleanor Henderson

About the Author

About the Publisher

ONE

GENUS JACKSON WAS KILLED IN COTTON COUNTY, GEORGIA, on a summer midnight in 1930, when the newborn twins were fast asleep. They lay head to toe in a cradle meant for one, Winnafred on one side and Wilson on the other. In their overstuffed nest, with the delicate claws of their fingers intertwined and their eyelids trembling with blue veins, they looked like a pair of baby chicks, their white skullcaps like two halves of the single eggshell from which they’d hatched. Only if you looked closely—and people did—could you see that the girl was pink as a piglet, and the boy was brown.

“He’s just complected dark,” Elma had told her fiancé, Freddie Wilson, that afternoon, when he’d peeked into the cradle for the first time. “It’s my great-great-granddaddy’s Indian blood.”

“He don’t look like no Indian,” said Freddie, who was as freckled as Elma, with hair as pale and straight as straw.

It was Elma’s father, Juke—who’d nearly killed Freddie himself for failing to make her his proper wife—who first accused Genus Jackson. Nine months back was harvest. There were plenty of colored men who worked as Juke’s field hands in October, boys Juke picked up every morning in the Fourth Ward and piled in the bed of his Ford—civilized, God-fearing, Cotton County Negroes. But Genus was the one Juke had hired year-round, who’d moved into the tar paper shack behind their house after he showed up on the Twelve-Mile Straight looking for work, his clothes still black with the soot of the boxcar he’d leapt from. Juke had pitied him, folks said, for that was the kind of man Juke Jesup was. He’d give his last cow to the devil if the devil was hungry. He had a soft spot for colored folks, had liked to drink and dance with them since he was a boy—why else was he called Juke? So he kept Genus on even after he was discovered with a stolen pint of Juke’s gin, even after he was discovered last fall in the barn with Elma. He should have run him off the farm then. George Wilson, who was Freddie’s grandfather and the landlord, had told him as much. But instead Juke had given him another chance and a beating to remember. “You old enough to know better than to be found with no darky,” he told his daughter, who was eighteen.

Late on Saturday night, coming up on Sunday, Juke and Freddie and three other trucks full of men left the mill village, drove to the farm, and walked the twenty paces across the scrubgrass yard from the house to the shack. Genus was asleep on his cot when the men came in without knocking, hauled him up by the collar, and threw him out onto his knees. He was wearing shoes on his feet, a pair of alligator boots. What kind of man but a guilty one slept in his shoes? Juke had never liked those boots. He shouldn’t have trusted a man in those boots. The man took off down the dirt road like a swamp rabbit out of a briar patch, as though he’d already been running in his dreams.

A storm had passed that evening. That was the year drought had seized the state in its bone-dry jaws, but that night the Twelve-Mile Straight was pocked with puddles, the night air moist with the copper smell of rain on stone. Down the washboard road, into its white clay ditches, over the rabbit tobacco and wiregrass that grew along it, through the turkey oaks and hip-high cornfields, the men’s torches lit after Genus’s boot prints. At Tom Henry’s farm, Tom joined them with his rifle; at Mancie Neville’s, Mancie joined them with his hound. The Jesup girl’s been raped! Find your daughters! Lock your doors! The men hopped in and out of the beds of their pickups; their headlights crept along the road. The Sloane brothers came on their horses. Lettuce Jones came on foot, his wife in her nightdress behind him. It was no night for a woman, but hell if he was going to leave her home alone with a mad brute roaming the country. Someone had seen him in Mancie Neville’s peanuts; someone had heard him in Jeb Simmons’s barn. The whole McArdle family streamed out of their house, the boys clutching slingshots, the girls armed with shovels, the baby in its mother’s arms howling at the moon. Someone shut that kid up, a voice said through the dark, and the mother put the baby to her breast right there, another child’s hand in hers as she rushed them along the edge of the road, hissing into the night as though looking for a lost cat. It must have been an hour the hunt went on; some said it might have been three. It must have been a mile they spread out, or it might have been ten. But it was in the creek not a stone’s throw from Jesup’s barn where they found him, only his mouth above the surface, gulping water and air, and Lord if those weren’t baby Wilson’s lips.

He was so wet he might as well have been naked, his union suit slicked to his skin, when Juke and Freddie thrust him into the front room where Elma sat nursing the twins in her rocker, one curled in each arm, helpless to cover herself. Both straps of her overalls were undone, her shirt unbuttoned to the world. The other men stood behind him in the doorway, trailing out onto the porch. At the window just over her shoulder, two little boys pressed their faces to the glass, watching her through their dirty fingerprints.

“Go ahead,” Juke said to her. “Tell us what he done.”

Elma stopped rocking.

“Go ahead,” he said to Genus, wrestling his arms behind his back. “Tell us that ain’t your kin.”

Genus looked away from Elma’s white breasts.

“This girl and her child ain’t done no sin,” said Juke. “They’ll be spared by the Lord. But the Bible says when a man lies with a girl in the field, his neighbors must rise up and do what’s called for.”

Genus’s boots, still on his feet, squeaked with creek water. The only other sound in the room was the babies’ suckling.

“Boss,” Genus said, struggling to catch his breath, “I’d lie with your mule before I’d lie with that girl.”

Elma gasped, as though bitten by one of her babies. Freddie lunged after Genus, but Juke held him back. She looked from Genus to Freddie to her father, and just for a moment, her eyes filled with tears. Only then, lowering her eyes to the floor, did she offer the smallest of nods.

That was enough for Freddie and Juke. Some of the men waiting outside said they should send for Sheriff Cleave. Some of them didn’t. All of them followed Juke with their torches and guns as he ordered Genus onto his swayback mule. They held his hands behind his back while Freddie tied them with a short length of rope. The mule’s name was Mamie, and the colored man had been seen atop her back before, ambling up and down the Twelve-Mile Straight when the day’s work was done. Now Juke led Mamie and the mob through the yard, over the charred remains of another shack, to the edge of the field. There were plenty of trees to choose from. There were black gum and cottonwood, pecan and pine, oak trees trimmed with silver tinsel, weeping over the road. But it was the gourd tree they settled on—not a real tree at all but a post shooting up over the sorghum cane, four strong wooden beams crisscrossed at the top like the telephone poles in town. From the beams hung a dozen gourds, bleached white from the sun—birdhouses for the purple martins, who were said to keep the mosquitoes away. Elma had carved and dried and hung the gourds herself, close enough to each other to make a dull kind of music, like wind chimes, though there was no wind tonight.

“It’s all right, old girl,” Genus could be heard to say. “The Lord will take me. The Lord will have me.”

Freddie looped another rope over one of the crossbeams and the noose around Genus’s neck. Genus didn’t struggle, and Mamie didn’t have to wait for Juke’s tap. Spooked by the dark, or the crowd, she dashed out as soon as she was free of their hands. Genus dropped, his neck snapping like a chicken’s, his body falling limp. The martins shot out of the gourds, black as bats, and for a moment formed a single shadow above them.

From the tin in the chest pocket of his overalls, Juke took a grab of loose-leaf chaw and arranged it along his gums. He did this while cradling a shotgun, a Winchester twelve gauge, as easily as the mother on the road had held the baby to her breast. Genus swung in the July night, the moon near full above him. He was tall, and Mamie was not. The toes of his boots hovered but a foot from the ground.

Then one boot, heavy with water, dropped into the dirt. Freddie let go of his rifle and picked up the boot and inspected it. “That real alley-gator?” He slipped the other one off, carefully, as though not to wake a sleeping lover, and then he unlaced his own shoes. They fit the dead man snugly. The boots were loose on Freddie, but they looked fine. “Now we square!” he said, doing a little dance, and the people cheered.

The children threw the first stones. Then some drunk fool with a twenty-two started unloading bullets. It was Tom Henry, or it was Willie Cousins, or it was Willie Cousins’s cousin Bill, or it was all three shooting wildly, into the sky, into the empty sockets of the gourds, the post and the body receiving the bullets with the same soft thud. “Ain’t no nigger lover now, ain’t you, Juke?” The next day, and for weeks afterward, boys would come to the gourd tree to run their fingers over its scars, to collect the stray bullets at its feet.

“Enough!” Juke said now, spitting the tobacco into the dirt. He’d walked to the barn for his sickle and now he cut down Genus before he’d been dead ten minutes. “I can’t stand to see a man hang all night.”

That might have been the end of it, but Freddie thought folks in town should get a look at the body. Juke had gone back to the house by the time Freddie tied Genus’s bound wrists to the rear of his Chevrolet truck and drove back down the Twelve-Mile Straight, continued into Florence where the road became Main Street, then, at the far edge of town, left him in the middle of the street in the mill village. In fact, everyone had gone home by then. No men had jumped into the back of the truck, and no joyful shots were heard as the vehicle made its way into town; Mancie Neville’s hound had not chased the body down the road, tearing an ear from his head; the mill workers had not rushed from their homes to claim a finger; Tom Henry had not fallen from the truck and broken his left arm—if you asked him later, he’d tell you he’d fallen from his hayloft. If you asked folks the next morning, as the sheriff did, where they were at midnight, you’d learn that they were home in their beds, every last one of them, sleeping like babies.

TWO

COTTON COUNTY WAS IN THE SOUTH-CENTRAL PART OF THE state, an anvil-shaped box at the edge of what they called the Wiregrass Region. There were acres and pale acres of sorghum and cotton and peanuts and corn, piney woods spotted with sandhills and cut through with the blades of rivers and swamps that made the sky seem even bigger, reflecting it like the back of a spoon. The rivers that ran north past the fall line ran rusty with red clay, but most of the clay in Cotton County was white as chalk. The Creek River was grand enough to power the Florence Cotton Mill in town, though six miles west, at the Wilson farm, it was no bigger than your biggest cow, tongue to tail. That year the drought had dried it to little more than a creek carved into the shoulder of the Twelve-Mile Straight, which ran alongside the river like a twin. It was known to most as the crossroads farm, since it was where the Straight crossed what was now called String Wilson Road. On the southeast corner of the crossroads sat the Creek Baptist Missionary Church, and catty-corner to it was the crossroads general store, where after church on a Sunday folks could be seen milling about on the porch, the Jesups among them. The Jesups had been the principal sharecropping family at the crossroads farm since the turn of the century, when the Wilsons built the mill and moved from the farm to the county seat, and the Jesups moved from the tar paper shack into the big house.

They called it the big house, but it wasn’t big. It was one of those single-story dogtrots you saw in the country in those days, built high off the ground, split in two, with the kitchen and front room on one side and the two bedrooms on the other. Down the middle of the house was a hallway open to the outdoors, so the breeze could come and go and keep the rooms cool. A front porch faced the creek and then, over a plank bridge, the road, and a back porch faced the outhouse and smokehouse and sugarhouse and barn, which had a little cotton house attached to it, and the garden and the shack, with stump-strewn fields to the north and to the west and the edge of the acres dense with pines along the road. There were four mules and four cows in the barn, and four or five hogs that preferred the cool clay refuge under the house. The hallway was so wide the house almost seemed to be two houses. But a single tin roof covered both halves. On windy autumn nights, pecans blasted the roof like rain.

Since the spring of 1912, when in a single week he lost his father to consumption and his wife, Jessa, to childbirth, the farm had been in Juke Jesup’s care. He returned from burying his father with his people in Carolina to find two hundred acres and a baby girl waiting for him. His mother had died the same way. Juke told Elma he’d have buried his own arm to have her resemble her mother, but it was Juke she favored.

It was Ketty, the colored maid, who delivered the baby. She’d been a granny midwife since she was old enough to tie a knot, and she’d lost mothers before—“Midwives is just delivering the Lord’s wishes,” she said. But she wore Jessa’s loss hard. She washed her friend and prayed over her and dressed her in her wedding gown and took care of the baby until Juke came home, carrying Elma out to the barn to suckle from the cows. She refused Maggie’s milk but loved Ida’s (it was just the two cows then); until Ida quit milking, it was only hers Elma would drink. Juke kept Ketty on to cook and clean and look after Elma while he worked the fields with Ketty’s man, Sterling. Ketty and Sterling lived in what used to be the Jesups’ shack, behind the big house, the two buildings strung together with the dull flags of their shared laundry. It was the shack Genus Jackson would live in years later.

Elma was four when Ketty had her own daughter, Nan, and five when Ketty cut out the baby’s tongue with her scalpel so she wouldn’t die like her great-grandmother and her grandmother and, when Nan was twelve years old, Ketty herself, cancer eating their tongues like a weevil through a cotton boll. The baby was old enough then to wean, and Elma helped the poor child learn to eat milky grits with a spoon. When Elma asked Juke what had become of Nan’s tongue, he told her, laughing, that Ketty had eaten it, for that’s what coloreds did—didn’t she see what unsavory parts they took of the pigs each winter? Ketty ate tobacco and Ketty ate dirt, so Elma believed her father. After she cut out her tongue, Ketty fed Nan dirt too, white clumps of clay she found between the road and the creek. She ate real food, but it took her a long while and she made a good mess. The white clay was creamy and it was free and it gave her something to chew.

Used to be George Wilson would pay Sterling and Juke the same, for their work was the same, but after the boll weevil came, they were glad if they broke even. If there was anything left, it went to Juke. When Nan was little more than a baby, Sterling left on a freight train, saying he was headed for the steel mill in Baltimore, that men were needed now that the country was taking up with the war, that he’d send for Nan and Ketty when he was settled. The war ended. He didn’t return. But he sent money when he could, and a Buffalo nickel every birthday. When Ketty died, he sent two, and Nan moved into the big house, into the pantry off the kitchen, and began doing the housework her mother used to do. Juke said, “No use having your pretty head get wet in the rain.” He would give her a nickel too when she was good, and with her mother gone she began to take over her midwife work, delivering the younger brothers and sisters of the babies Ketty had brought into the world. The money she earned that way came back to the big house, for they were meant to share. As for the shack, George Wilson came to allow Juke to put who he pleased in it, and to share how he pleased as well. And because he was the kind of man he was, Juke divided the fruits of their crops when there was fruit to divide. If he told the field hands he was overseer, and maybe he did from time to time, it was only because that was the closest word for what he was.

The girls grew up working side by side on the farm, Nan after her chores and Elma after school. (Why couldn’t Nan go to the colored school in town? Elma asked her father, and he said, What tongue’s she gone use to learn her letters?) At picking time, Elma stayed home from school to help. She picked and she chopped and she plowed and she tilled, riding in her father’s lap over the harrow while Clarence and Mamie pulled them, thrilling at the thrum of the disks spinning the earth beneath their feet. Nan did the listening—she was good at listening—and Elma did the talking and the telling and the singing. Elma sang on the porch and in the kitchen and in the fields, to the guineas and chickens and cows and mules, “Amazing Grace” and “Down in the Valley” and “Down by the Riverside.” She sang while she picked cotton and while she shelled peas, while she washed her hair in the creek and while she brushed it. She sang in church, though she didn’t need church to sing, or even to praise God, since God lived in the sky and in the trees, Ketty had liked to say, in the dirt and the seeds they scattered over it.

Elma worked so hard her daddy didn’t notice he had no sons. She was her father’s daughter because she couldn’t be anything else. She had the same mineral-red hair as Juke and the same glass-bottle-green eyes. She had the same widow’s peak over the same high, sunburnt forehead. She had the same swift, steady way of walking, picking up her feet as though the ground were hot through her shoes, and always straight, even when she wasn’t in the field, as though there were corn growing up to her elbows on either side. And she was tall, Elma was, near as tall as Juke. She wore three different dresses to school and to church, but on the farm she seemed mostly to wear her daddy’s old Sears, Roebuck overalls, the sleeves of her flannel shirt rolled to her elbows, a bird’s nest of a straw hat perched on her head, worn clean through at the crown. From the road, looking out across the acres with the sun in your eyes, used to be it was hard to tell whether the body in the field was father or daughter.

Nan wore dresses, though now she looked like a boy herself. She’d cut her hair short when she was thirteen, the way Negro men wore it, almost no hair at all. She was as skinny and dark as a shadow. That was the way Elma’s daddy put it. Elma’s daddy said Nan was so skinny because she ate so much dirt.

There were times, growing up, when Elma wished she were as dark as a shadow. She liked the way the sun warmed the skin of the men in the fields, their arms and necks and cheeks glowing the color of sorghum syrup by summer’s end. She hated her freckles, hated the way the sun turned her pink, how it burned her skin like paper. When she got a bad burn, Ketty mixed up a bowl of aloe and black tea and slathered her with it, which wasn’t so bad, because the inky jelly was cool on her skin and made it look darker, darker even than little Nan, whose skin was the woody brown of the paper-shell pecans that fell in the yard.

It gave her an idea. One morning when she was seven, when her father had gone to town, she found a jar of syrup in the pantry, made from their own sweet sorghum. She stripped down to her britches and painted herself with it, using the brush they used for basting. She covered every exposed inch, from her widow’s peak to her toes. When Ketty came into the kitchen carrying Nan on her hip, she let out a holler.