The Twelve-Mile Straight. Eleanor Henderson

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