The Twelve-Mile Straight. Eleanor Henderson
knuckle in wax paper, and everyone was disappointed.
It wasn’t a nod, Elma told herself. She had not nodded. She had lowered her head, then lifted it to find her father’s eye, then lowered it again. Lowered, lifted, lowered. A hesitation of the chin, no more. She had not given her permission. Her permission was not required. What was she to do to stop fifty men from carrying out what they were bent on carrying out?
Freddie would have done it anyway, with or without Juke’s help, with or without Elma’s blessing—that was the way her daddy put it. Weren’t no stopping him, he said again and again, weren’t no stopping him, until she came to believe it as he seemed to. “You ain’t done no wrong,” he said, and that was all—they were not to speak of it. He didn’t mean that he, her father, was to blame. He meant to absolve both of them. There was no one to blame, because there had been no wrong. All the blame there was, and there wasn’t much, he tagged on Freddie. Elma didn’t know whether that had been his aim all along or whether he’d been lucky enough for Freddie to accept the blame before Juke could offer it. She didn’t know if, in private, her father saved any blame for himself, if he prayed to God outside of a church pew, if the body that swung in her nightmares swung in his too. She supposed she wouldn’t ever know. Genus was buried in the ground and her father was out in the field like it was any day of the week, for though it was July and laying-by time, there was ragweed to cuss at.
Elma moved from room to room, sweeping the floors clean, across the breezeway, her elbows tucked to her sides. If she kept her head down, her chin lowered, if she didn’t look out the kitchen window, her eyes would not catch on the gourd tree. The gourd tree would not be there. And if she didn’t sing, no one could hear her. No one could say, What are you doing, Elma Jesup, singing like you don’t have a care in the world?
In the first days, there was only brief mention of the babies, and usually the press got it wrong. One paper left out Winna; another said they were mulatto twins. It was only after one paper reported that the two babies born to Elma Jesup were of decidedly different complexions that the other papers sent their reporters back, and Juke came in from the fields to invite them inside. Now that their attention was off Genus Jackson, he didn’t mind being in the papers. The babies he almost seemed to be proud of. “Ain’t no use hiding them,” he said to Elma. “Might as well grab us ahold a some fame.” Besides, it was good for business. The reporters came thick as field mice, with their folding cameras and notepads, standing shoulder to shoulder on the porch steps, wanting to take a look at the twins. They aimed their cameras over the edge of the cradle. They left with more gin, paying Juke directly now, having gotten a taste for it. This would piss George Wilson off something good, but what did it matter now? Juke had already pissed George Wilson’s pants off.
In the weeklies Juke brought home from the crossroads store, Wilson and Winnafred were the same inky gray, bound in blankets, sleeping. But the headlines spelled it out. The one in the Atlanta paper said, GEMINI TWINS BORN TO COTTON CO. WOMAN. Elma read the articles to Juke. After a while she got tired of the papers and made up stories. “There ain’t nothing about us in this one. It’s just about the price of corn.” Then Juke wanted to know more—what was it about the price of corn? “It’s fine,” Elma said. “It’s holding steady.”
She swore off the papers, but in a few days she was dashing down to the crossroads store to read them again, searching for some mention of the children. She couldn’t tolerate the thought of them being talked about behind her back. It was like hearing her name whispered in church and not being able to tell who’d said it.
First of August, Elma flinched at the word “lynch” in a headline in the Testament. She hadn’t been expecting it. It was the babies she was looking for. But it wasn’t about Genus Jackson. She looked closer. An elderly Negro politician who owned forty acres in Montgomery County, sixty miles from Florence, had been flogged over the head by a mob of masked men. The men had come to his door late at night and roused him from his bed, where he had been asleep with his grandson. They put him, barely conscious, in the back of a truck, drove him to Toombs County, and left him by the side of the road. At dawn a white farmer on his way to Vidalia with a load of tobacco found the Negro in his bloody pajamas, and the Negro offered him seven dollars to be driven home, where he died of a cerebral hemorrhage.
There was outrage in Montgomery County. The Negro was an important man. A delegate to the National Republican Convention. Secretary and treasurer of the Widows and Orphans Department of the Negro Masonic Lodge, with an office and a secretary. Recently he had run for chairman of the Montgomery County Republican Committee, and before he was elected he accused his lily-white opponents of fraud. He implied, some said, that they were poor white trash. “That’s all right,” one observer reported them saying at the convention. “We’ll see you later about that.”
It was the second official lynching of the year, the article stated, though a July incident in Cotton County was still under scrutiny.
Elma did not read the article to her father. She didn’t even bring home the paper, just read it standing next to the tower of cans, folded it up, and buried it back in its pile. Maybe now, she thought, the reporters would be busy in Montgomery County. She stepped out onto the porch of the store. The Coca-Cola thermometer read 96 degrees, and Elma’s collar was damp with sweat, but now her neck went cold and she shivered. She had not seen Genus’s body but now in her mind she saw the old man in Montgomery County, on the side of the road in his nightclothes, saw him there on the Twelve-Mile Straight in front of the crossroads store like a dog dead in a ditch.
“Can I help you with that wagon?” asked Drink Simmons, half standing up from his table.
“No, thank you.”
“You look right peaked, Miss Elma.”
“I’m all right, thank you kindly.”
“You hear any word from that fiancé of yours?”
“What are you asking after?”
“I never took Freddie for yellow.” Drink shrugged. “I wouldn’t up and leave my woman nor my younguns, even if the law was hot on my behind.”
Elma bumped her wagon down the steps and into the sun, and now her body flashed hot. She would not think about the man in Montgomery. It was easier to be mad. “Don’t you and your daddy have some squirrels to shoot, Drink?”
The people of Cotton County were distracted from Genus Jackson, and it was the twins who seized their attention. Through August, as the corn grew high in the fields and the next truckload of pickers showed up, people came to see the babies. They came from church and town and neighboring farms, bearing booties and blankets, biscuits and pies. Mary Minrath, the home supervisor who last fall had been sent from town to help with the canning, brought the peach cobbler that had taken honorable mention at the Cotton County fair. Bette Hazelton, the bank manager’s wife, brought a box of secondhand clothes she’d collected from the congregation at Florence Baptist. Camilla Rawls, the doctor’s wife and the president of the local chapter of the WCTU, brought two golden-edged, pocket-size Bibles. “Every child of God needs his own.” Even the chain gang that made its way down the road left a gift stuffed in the mailbox, a bouquet of blue hound’s tongue picked from the shoulder of the Straight. They came by cart and by foot and by automobile, Hoover wagons and two-wheeled jigs, feigning errands to the crossroads store, delivering news. Some clucked and cooed; some shook their heads. All of them prayed over the cradle. “Haven’t seen you in church, Elma,” said Josie Byrd, whose daddy owned the biggest peanut farm in the county. She was leaving for Emory, for nursing school, and she wore a new pair of leather shoes, white with white laces, so clean they hurt Elma’s eyes. “They got Mary Collier in your place in the choir, and pretty as she is, she sings like a gopher frog.”
Elma said she’d be back in church when she