He’d also heard that the Klan had lynched a Black teenager somewhere on the Gulf coast, then dumped his body into the bayou. A week later, it has yet to turn up, and likely never will if the gators reduced him to chum.
Maybe it didn’t happen at all. Maybe it wouldn’t happen here. Or now.
As always, the island’s peaceable kingdom ignores his presence. Night birds chatter in overhead branches, and stealthy creatures rustle bordering fronds. Half a dozen wild horses graze in a clearing. One of Marceline’s many cats, a sleek, well-fed black fellow with lime-colored eyes, strolls across his path without glancing in his direction.
He wonders whether the animals would react differently to mainland interlopers, sensing danger. He wants to think he’d be capable of the same response. He wonders if the Black teenager in the bayou had sensed his executioners in his midst, and then he wonders whether the boy might be a myth—fodder to fuel the racial tension.
He turns up the lane that leads to Marceline’s place. It’s larger than his own two-room abode, framed by mossy live oaks and resurrection fern. Her front door is also blue, and her crepe myrtle tree covered in blue bottles.
You’d be hard-pressed to find a yard on Barrow Island without a bottle tree, or a door painted any color other than haint blue, both to ward off evil spirits. The Gullah culture is alive here. Virtually every islander is of West African descent, their ancestors transported to America by wealthy Southern planters. A century ago, after the Civil War, freed slaves had populated Barrow and several other Sea Islands along the southern Atlantic coast. Some have since moved on. Marceline’s family had largely left the island to find work during the Great Depression and most had settled on the Georgia mainland. Three of her four sisters are still there, along with various extended relatives.
But Marceline plans to live out her days on this insular island, steeped in low country tradition and lore, language and food.
The windows are closed against the chill, and his footsteps are muffled in the grass, yet the front door opens before he reaches the house. If he asks, she’ll say she didn’t hear him coming.
“I can always feeeeeel you,” she’s told him all his life, and taps her heart. “Right there.”
In her world, maternal instinct is more powerful than any of the five senses.
By day, she wears bright dresses and turbans, earrings jangling like wind chimes. Tonight, she’s barefoot in a simple white nightgown, her thick cornrows hanging long and loose.
“’S’mattuh?” she calls from the porch—Gullah shorthand for “What’s the matter?”
“I brought you some ham hocks from the store,” he says, holding up the package wrapped in brown paper and twine. By day, most days, he mans the counter at a small mainland butcher shop.
She thanks him with a cursory “T’engky”—and asks again what’s wrong, why he’s here.
She really does seem to feeeeel him. But will she understand him, and will she empathize? He suspects the answer is no. His mother isn’t just intuitive, brilliant, and resourceful—she’s fiercely opinionated.
No turning back now. He takes a deep breath. “I need to talk to you about something.”
“You in trouble?”
“Yes.”
Marceline holds the door open wide. “Come.”
He crosses the threshold into a wide little house with low beadboard ceilings, pocked wide-planked floors, and whitewashed walls.
He’d entered this world in the back bedroom in 1938, three decades almost to the day after Marceline had been delivered in the same room, same bed. Her father, too, had been born here back in the late nineteenth century. His father, born into slavery, had expanded the place from shanty to home.
Cyril thinks of his great-grandparents whenever he gets to fretting that Negro lives will never evolve in the South. They may have a long way to go, but they’ve come a long way in the last hundred years. Oh, how he longs to stay alive for the better part of the next hundred to witness Dr. King’s dream become reality.
A plank propped across a pair of sawhorses holds a row of sweetgrass baskets Marceline weaves and sells to mainland vendors. She’d always hoped to get a real worktable, but could never afford it, struggling to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table and figure out a way to further his education.
How proud Marceline had been when he’d earned his high school diploma, hanging it in a frame on the wall above the sofa.
At eighteen, he’d worked three jobs—as a shrimp boat fisherman, busboy, and meat cutter at a processing plant. He’d put aside his dream of enrolling at Bethune-Cookman University down in Daytona. There was no money for that, and he couldn’t leave her alone on Barrow. But he’d spent every spare moment at the Wilder Park Negro Library in Jacksonville’s Sugar Hill neighborhood. There, he rubbed shoulders with successful, educated people and got to know the fine woman who’d led him into activism. Mrs. Willye F. Dennis was the branch librarian and a driving force in the burgeoning civil rights movement.
Predictably, his mama hadn’t approved. “Why’s that woman runnin’ around protestin’ all over creation when she got a husband and two children at home?”
Cyril suspected that she was just jealous of his relationship with any female who wasn’t her, and that she was worried for his safety. She’d surely been beside herself eight years ago, when he and a group of fellow NAACP Youth Council demonstrators had been attacked by a mob of two hundred white men armed with makeshift clubs.
Not just fearful, though. Outraged, and proud that he’d taken a stand. She never said as much, but he could tell. And she no longer pitches fits about his activism.
She leads him to the kitchen. A savory supper scents the air hours after she washed the pans and plates on the drainboard.
She turns on the overhead light, turns, and looks him up and down. “You wasting away, son. When was the last time you had supshun? I got frogmore.”
Supshun is nutritious food; frogmore, a stew of shrimp and smoked meat, potatoes, and corn.
Cyril shakes his head. He can’t recall the last time he sat down for a meal, but he can’t choke food into an anxiety-churned stomach.
She fills two jelly glasses with sweet tea and sets them on the table. It’s pushed into a corner, with the pair of ladderback chairs that have been here all his life. Marceline takes her seat, closest to the stove. As Cyril sinks into his, his body remembers to distribute his weight to make up for the wobble due to one wooden leg being a hair shorter.
Now he’s got a permanent wobble of his own, due to his broken ankle. He supposes he should be grateful that the Axe Handle Saturday injury had kept him out of ’Nam—he’d been declared 4-F when they’d tried to draft him a few years back. Though he won’t see active combat in a foreign jungle, he’s engaged in an ongoing, escalating battle just the same.
Marceline sips her tea and gives him an expectant look. “Well?”
“There’s a woman . . .”
She nods. “There is aaaalways a woman. You runnin’ round with that crookety Glenda again?”
Crookety—the Gullah insult she reserves for his on-again, off-again childhood sweetheart. Sometimes he thinks she wouldn’t like any woman in his life. The oldest of five sisters, she’d told him from an early age never to take a female at face value.