Page 63 of The Reformatory

The tires vibrated with ruts as they crossed the bridge over the Suwannee River. Each time Gloria woke, Miz Lottie was still singing under her breath, a personal song to her Lord.

Gloria woke to the sound of women’s sad, sour laughter.

Her vision rocked as she straightened. The world was dust and too-bright light. The dust was smeared across the windshield of Miz Lottie’s truck, she remembered. Miz Lottie’s seat on the other side of the laundry basket was empty, the door open. Gloria rubbed away the tension from her neck, which was sore from deep sleep against her door. She stared through her window.

The yellow two-story house where the truck was parked was a style unlike any in Gracetown, walls ribbed with markings that made it look like it belonged in a faraway place, like a Spanish mission in St. Augustine. The house was halfway hidden behind thick palms planted at the curb. Even Miss Anne’s house wasn’t as big and didn’t have the exotic half-moon carving atop her chimney or the attic window’s flourish. The house was dressed like a mansion. Most of the houses on the street were no better than Miz Lottie’s, and some reminded Gloria of her cabin with strips of rusting tin. And Miz Lottie was talking to a woman in the doorway. The front door. Was this a Negro woman’s house?

“Oh, she’s sixteen now. Actually, turned seventeen in May. Out there ’sleep. Worn-out, po’ thing,” Miz Lottie was saying. And as much as Gloria liked knowing what other people were saying about her, she nearly dozed off again. She’d had little sleep three nights solid now. She was so tired that her limbs and eyes ached. She dozed again. When she woke up, the laughter was gone and the door to the house was closed. Miz Lottie had gone into the house. I should get up and help Miz Lottie, she thought, but sleep took her again.

The next time Gloria woke up, a stout woman was standing directly at her window, round face peering inside as she studied Gloria, scowling in the sun. Gloria gasped. Miz Lottie chuckled, hoisting herself back into her seat by tugging on the steering wheel.

“Well, she’s awake now. Jumpin’ at shadows. Gloria, this here’s Ruby McCollum.”

The woman at the window smiled wanly at her. Gloria recognized the woman’s name from the cover story she and Miz Lottie had devised—but couldn’t smile right away because she was swallowed by knowing Ruby McCollum, although she’d never met her before now. Mama had called it déjà vu: you think you’ve done something before. Except, for Gloria, it was always more like seeing the future. Like the time she’d seen Mama standing at the sink and thought, out of thin air, Mama’s sick. Or when she and Robbie had run into Lyle McCormack on the road, a sad inevitability from the second she’d seen his stupidly grinning face. Ruby McCollum’s eyes twinkled, fresh from laughter, but Gloria tried to hide her sudden tears.

“Don’t worry none, you’ll get your brother back,” Ruby McCollum said, and Gloria couldn’t explain she wasn’t crying for Robbie: she’d seen something in this woman’s eyes like a long ribbon into her life, and the feelings as deep as feelings went: grief and rage and a long, slow dying. Gloria knew this woman told lies, and was lied to. She was boastful, but only as a mask over feeling like nothing her whole life. And she could hold her temper longer than some, but if she was pushed too hard, if she hurt too much, she might shoot a white man down—a white doctor, even—and not care who saw her do it. Gloria tasted the stranger’s future rage and thought about Lyle McCormack putting his hand on her, and she almost said, I know what you did and what he did to you. Ruby McCollum would kill a white man who touched her. She was living her last good year in her pretty house and didn’t know it. Soon, every Negro in Florida and Zora Neale Hurston herself would know Ruby McCollum’s name.

Gloria’s hands trembled in her lap.

“Miz Lottie, I’ll slap you if you’re drivin’ up and down Suwannee County without protection,” Ruby McCollum said.

Miz Lottie patted the laundry basket. “Shoot, I got my protection.”

“Just making sure. I hope Bob don’t have you tangled up with communists.”

“Ruby, now you sound just like them. Don’t forget: I know where you started, chile. I got stories all the way back to grade school.”

“Works both ways,” Ruby McCollum said. “We both got stories, then.”

“We sho’ do,” Miz Lottie said, and they both laughed again.

Ruby McCollum slapped Gloria’s door as if to share her cheer. “Yeah, go talk to ’im. Like I said, he seems all right to me. Seditty like all northern folks who come down here like it’s a safari in Africa; thinks he’s a big man. I don’t think he wants nobody to know he’s here, but Belle says every other word out of his mouth is ‘N-double A-C-P.’ ”

The lawyer was real, not a myth or a hope! And he was in Live Oak. Gloria squirmed, flushed with blood from her celebrating heart.

“Good thing you always in e’rybody’s business,” Miz Lottie said. “And e’rybody’s always up in mine and Sam’s.”

“Don’t give ’em so much to talk about, then.”

Miz Lottie turned the key and the engine choked and died. As usual, it didn’t catch until her second try. Gloria’s legs bounced anxiously against the laundry basket and the glove box. If she had known where to run, she’d have jumped out of the truck. She couldn’t help what she knew, or thought she knew, about Ruby McCollum’s future, but she could help change Robbie’s. Gloria kept her eyes cast down from the woman’s face, avoiding the mask of coming grief that hovered over the woman like a cloud of fruit flies. The truck pitched backward as Miz Lottie reversed. She made a perfect half-U shape to the roadway, barely missing Ruby McCollum’s elegant brick columns and her bright, well-tended grass. Gloria’s neck snapped back as the old truck’s brakes whimpered and moaned.

“Learn who you can trust,” Miz Lottie told her. “You wouldn’t know it, but Ruby and Sam is the richest Negroes you likely to meet. They pay off the sheriff, ev’rybody, with that bolita money. She couldn’t do none of that if she didn’t know how to keep secrets.”

Ruby McCollum waved as the truck drove off, and Gloria almost saw the secrets spilling at her feet: the secrets of others, and her own.

17

Gloria spotted him right away. As soon as she and Miz Lottie walked into the roomy, steam-filled kitchen of Belle’s wood-frame boardinghouse, she knew the young man sitting at a corner table in a dapper gray suit, a cigarette balanced on careless fingers, had to be John Dorsey. She had expected him to be fair-skinned like Thurgood Marshall, the way she imagined all NAACP lawyers must be, but he was as brown-skinned as she was, his curly hair conked. He was well shy of thirty, no more than twenty-six or twenty-seven. And he was holding court with two men standing over him at his table, one in overalls and a thinner man closer to Papa’s age in a black suit and tie. Neither man moved to sit in the table’s two empty seats.

John Dorsey spooned teaspoon after teaspoon of sugar into his coffee, punctuating each sentence. On the table before him lay a long yellow pad crammed with writing.

Yes, he was the one.

All colors, smells, and noises orbited him: the frying bacon that rumbled her empty stomach, the phonograph near the open window playing “Am I Asking Too Much” by Dinah Washington like Mama used to, and the din of a dozen other people, mostly men. Aside from the small corner tables, customers were shoulder to shoulder at the counter or eating at two long tables as they passed biscuits and gripes. Many of the men wore mill shirts. Two or three, like John Dorsey, were dressed like travelers who had found Belle’s in the Green Book. A Coca-Cola sign glowed in the window like Belle’s was a five-and-dime.

Gloria took two steps toward the lawyer’s table before she felt a sharp tug on her arm. “I see ’im too,” Miz Lottie said, keeping a firm grip at Gloria’s elbow. “Be still. You don’t jus’ run up on a meeting, chile.”

A middle-aged mill worker tipped his hat as he rose from his seat at the corner of a nearby table, making room for Miz Lottie. The boy her age who was with him reluctantly rose too as he glanced over Gloria’s overalls, doubting she was worth the inconvenience. Gloria’s cheeks flared. She hated to be on display to boys, but she patted down her hair. She’d had thick French braids from Miz Lottie for more than a week, and they were loosening at her scalp and forehead.