Page 89 of The Reformatory

The Klan had burned down her cabin.

Gloria guessed before she saw the thin gray smoke rising out from the McCormacks’ way: her knowing sharpened and she fixed on a sadness that told her everything she owned was gone. But she had to wait through the night to hear the story because the cars and trucks never stopped their ruckus up and down the street. Gloria thought Sheriff Posey might come, but Miz Lottie told her he wouldn’t unless someone got killed—and maybe he wouldn’t come even then. They all agreed his deputies probably were the ones making the most noise. Gloria wondered if the deputy who had taken Robbie to the courthouse was outside with the rest of the angry white men.

When no fire came at Miz Lottie’s, Gloria slept beside her in her bed fit for a queen. At first daylight, Gloria woke beside Miz Lottie and walked past Mrs. Hatchett sleeping open-mouthed on the couch and went outside to join June and Waymon on the front porch. It was strange to see so many people milling early in the morning up and down the street in the sad sunlight, no one going anywhere, men in sleeping clothes in their yards or on their front porches at every house. Waymon had put on his Army private’s uniform, his Sunday clothes, and sat on Miz Lottie’s porch rails with his legs swinging, a sentry daring someone to trespass. Uncle June stood beside him with his shotgun in plain view. Across the street, Clyde Frazier, the barber, had his hunting rifle, and Mr. Hatchett paced his porch with a baseball bat over his shoulder.

Lower Spruce wasn’t ducking and hiding anymore. Let the Klan come, then.

The last of the whites were congregated near a truck at the far end of the street, about ten or twelve who looked like teenagers. A few of them had shotguns or hunting rifles. It felt like a standoff in a western picture, except everyone had been up all night and was too tired for shouting. Still no sign of the sheriff. But she saw the smoke’s haze to the east. She turned away, trying to ignore the acid twisting her belly. “What are they doing?” Gloria asked.

Waymon spat. “Wishing they had more nerve. Look at ’em. What we been so scared of?”

“We’ll see,” Uncle June said, watching.

Then Uncle June and Waymon shared a look, and Gloria figured what was coming. “Just say it,” Gloria said. “You think I don’t see the smoke?”

Waymon looked surprised, mopping his face with a handkerchief, and soot came off. In the daylight, she could see his hair was flecked with white ash. He nodded, glad she had guessed so he would not have to tell her.

“What happened?” she said.

“I was cutting grass over on Grove Street when this guy, Jake, grabs my arm and about pulls me off my feet. Looks scared like Mantan Moreland in King of the Zombies.”

“Just get to it,” June said.

“Jake says, ‘Klan’s headed down to your little cousin’s house.’ And I say, ‘Come on with me to see after her, then,’ and he just looks at me like I’m crazy. These scared country Negroes, I swear. I didn’t know if you was in that cabin or not, so I went as fast as I could.”

He told her how he’d borrowed a friend’s car and driven out in time to see two or three trucks turn off McCormack Road to the rutted dirt path that led to her cabin. He’d parked behind a fallen tree and gone the rest of the way on foot. The trucks had parked at the front of the cabin, so he’d gone around back and whispered her name, tapping on the windows. Trying to rouse her.

“I saw this on the wall and snatched it through the window,” he said. He picked up a small gold-tinted picture frame he’d been keeping beside him on the railing. Mama and Papa’s wedding photo had been on the nail next to the stove. The frame’s glass was cracked, but the photo was untouched. Mama had a laurel wound into her hair and Papa’s hair and moustache were styled like Nat King Cole’s. Waymon must have carried it with him through the woods and through Miz Lottie’s window and had kept it with him to give to her when she woke. Waymon had never done such a kind thing for her.

Gloria hugged him. When soot rubbed off on her, she wondered which room the ashes had come from. Which memory was touching her lips?

“That’s all I got, sorry, cuz,” Waymon said.

Gloria nodded, trying not to think of her bedroom, or Mama’s clothes, or Robbie’s toys. And the other photos, lost. Thinking would make it real. She’d promised Robbie she would bring him home, and now she had no home to bring him to. She pulled clear of Waymon’s smoky scent. “Then I got the hell out of there. I stayed hid while it burned in case they’d leave—thought I could go in and save some things—but they stayed to watch. All of ’em took bets on if you were hiding and you’d come running out on fire. ‘She’ll come through that window.’ ‘No, it’ll be the door.’ I tell you, if I’d had June’s gun—”

“We’d all be burned up,” Uncle June said. “Or swinging from a tree.”

“Red McCormack finally drove out, told ’em to go home ’fore they burned down his turpentine farm. He was madder’n a hornet. He had a truck, made ’em douse it with water.”

“Dumb as hell, setting a fire so close to McCormack land,” June said, shaking his head.

“Did he ask after me?” Gloria said.

“Nah—they just said, ‘Nobody’s home.’ But I didn’t know my own self ’til I saw you.”

They fell into a hard silence, all of them realizing how close she’d come to dying. What would the men have done to her if she’d tried to escape? Or if they’d seen Waymon? Gloria let herself remember Mama’s bookshelf behind the dinner table—her Zora Neale Hurston, W. E. B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Lewis Carroll, and Anna Julia Cooper books, some of the pages marked with old receipts, grocery lists, mementos. Gone. Gloria would remember one shelf, one cabinet, at a time. That was as much as she could let herself think of it. Already, her stomach was withered.

Uncle June reached over and tousled Gloria’s hair like a boy’s and Gloria ducked her head away. “We can’t take none of it with us,” he said. “That’s what I’m always tryin’ to tell Mama.”

“Shoot—one match and Mama’s house would go up like the Fourth of July,” Waymon said, peeking over his shoulder at the window, not wanting Miz Lottie to hear.

“Mama all right?” Uncle June asked Gloria, already moving on from the fire.

Gloria nodded. “Sleeping.”

“Then we blessed it wasn’t worse.”

“Aw, shoot,” Waymon said, peering down the street. He jumped down from the porch.