Jesus Land. Julia Scheeres
Bare-chested and wearing cut-off jeans and baseball caps. You can tell they’re farmers by their sunburns: Their faces, necks, and arms are crimson but their torsos are pasty, as if they’re wearing white T-shirts. If you looked up “redneck” in the dictionary, they’d be there to illustrate, and I’d say as much to David if they weren’t marching toward us with tight faces.
They halt in a row behind the fence. I glance at David. Behind his smudged glasses, his eyes are wide with fear.
“Whatch y’all doing?” the tallest one asks as a cow moos in the distance. He takes off his Caterpillar cap and fans his face with it.
“Just looking!” I say breezily, as if this was Montgomery Ward’s and these boys were salesmen come to check on us.
“This here’s the final resting place of my great-great-granddaddy!” yells a boy with a Snap-On Tools cap.
The tallest boy tugs a piece of field grass from the ground and sticks the end in his mouth. He chews it slowly and saws his eyes back and forth between David and me.
David’s mouth is gaping. I step between him and the farm boys, still grinning.
“We just moved out here from town and . . .”
“Obviously y’alls ain’t from around here, else you wouldn’t be in there,” says a third boy—this one in an International Harvester cap.
The runt of the litter, an acne-scarred boy in a Budweiser hat, grabs the fence in his fists and shakes it violently, rattling our bikes. Behind the tall iron grate, his stumpy body heaving back and forth in anger, he looks like a caged monkey having a tantrum.
“This here’s an American cemetery!” he shouts. “Only Americans are allowed in there! It’s the law!”
I take a deep breath and look back at David, who’s now gaping at the trampled brambles at his feet. Close your mouth.
“That’s fine,” I say, shrugging. “We’ll just leave, then.”
I move toward the gate, and the human fence behind it, listening for the rustle of David’s footsteps at my back. Move.
“What’s wrong with blacky?” the runt asks. “Cat got his tongue?”
He lifts his Bud cap and orange hair falls to his neck. I ignore him, keeping my eyes on the road beyond him, the road that will lead us to safety. He moves aside at the last moment to let me push open the gate. I’m on a hair trigger. If they so much as breathe on us, I’ll bloody their eardrums with my screams. I stop and wait for David to walk through the gate, then follow him to our bikes.
The farmers are at our heels.
“That darkie your boyfriend?” one of them asks to a burst of snickers. I pull my bike upright and wheel it forward so David can get his.
“No, he’s my brother.”
They crowd around us.
“What, your momma git knocked up by some Detroit nigger?”
There’s a shuffle of dirty laughter and the runt leans forward, his pimpled jaw working up and down. He hawks a glob of chew into the dirt, narrowly missing David’s sneakers. I glare at him and he throws his shoulders back and grins proudly, a string of spittle stretching from his pink face to the dust. David contemplates the lump of brown slime at his feet with knitted eyebrows, as if it were the saddest thing he’d ever seen. Don’t you freeze up on me. Don’t!
“Let’s go,” I order David, elbowing him in the ribs.
“Yeah, you’d best skedaddle,” the tall one says.
As we mount our bikes, they watch with crossed arms and slit eyes. We’ve got enough fear ricocheting through us to propel ourselves all the way home without stopping. We ride in silence, cringing and waiting for the gunning motor, the flash of red behind us.
Only when we bump down the gravel lane to our house do I notice the trembling cottonwoods, the frenzied chirruping of sparrows, the dirt devils churning across the back field. On the horizon, heat lightning dances along a column of towering thunderheads. The air is suddenly sweet and cool, refreshing. It’s perfect weather for a tornado.
Down in the basement, I fling myself belly-down on the cot and stare out the window at the trees pawing the green air. David’s out there somewhere, walking Lecka before supper.
Neither of us uttered a word about what happened. We never do. But I can’t smudge it from my mind. The farm boys’ sneering red faces. The runt shaking the fence. The brown lump of spit tobacco. The anguish in David’s eyes. They don’t know the first thing about us; they just hate us because we’re black.
The first time I felt surrounded by such hate was in 1977, when we were ten. We were driving down to St. Simons Island, Georgia, for vacation and stopped at a roadside diner in Birmingham for supper. David and I were cranky with hunger because we’d stuffed the liverwurst and lettuce sandwiches Mother passed out for lunch under our seat cushions in the van.
Dad led us to a round table at the back of the restaurant that was big enough for the eight of us, then David and I busied ourselves with the game on our placemats as we waited for the waitress to take our order. This was in our dill pickle stage, and while we looked for animals hidden in a jungle on our placemats, we debated whether to share a side of the crunchy sour disks or order a bowl each. We knew Mother’s rule: We had to finish whatever we ordered, or eat it for breakfast the next day. We decided breakfast pickles wouldn’t be half bad and to order a side each.
After a while, we noticed a silence and looked up. Our parents and older siblings—Deb, Dan, Laura, and Jerome—sat like statues, and beyond this familiar circle, the other diners glared at us with disgust stamped on their faces.
I was used to the curious looks and occasional frowns David and I gathered as we walked down the streets of Lafayette—I assumed people were as perplexed by my brother’s skin color as I was when I first saw him—but I’d never seen anything akin to the contempt reflected in the eyes of those Alabama folks.
Mother gazed down at her place setting with a clenched jaw, and my father’s cheeks burned red as he watched the waitress refill the coffee cups of the patrons at surrounding tables. David and I put down our crayons and focused on our parents, waiting for them to show us what to do.
After several minutes of this silence, Father pushed back his chair and stood up. He nodded curtly at Mother, who swept her arms upward like the choir director signaling us to stand, then bustled us out the door.
As we drove from the parking lot, I looked back at the diner. Through the window, I saw the waitress scrubbing our unused table with a rag and a spray bottle. No one mentioned what happened—not that night as we sat in the van, silent and hungry and searching for a drive-through—or ever afterward.
“Learn to leave things be,” Mother likes to say when bad things happen. “Turn the other cheek.”
And that’s what we try to do. Pretend these things don’t happen. But they do, again and again.
Outside, the sky has dimmed to olive, and I hear Lecka bark playfully. David’s home safe again.
I wonder what would have happened that night in Alabama, if, instead of walking out in defeat, our father had stood up and rebuked those people for treating a God-fearing family in such a shameful fashion. Our family was hungry just like they were. Didn’t we have a right to eat? Weren’t we all equal in the eyes of Jesus Christ? How dare they deny small children food? This was America after all, a country founded on the principles of Christian love and harmony!
Maybe he felt the same way we did this afternoon—outnumbered and out-hated. Maybe it is better to turn the other cheek in certain situations.
Reverend Dykstra often tells us that this world is not our home.
“This place is merely a proving ground,” he says. “Our suffering shall be rewarded in Heaven.”
But