Then Jay adds, “You know if he talked to any cops recently?”
“About what?”
“Nothing,” Jay says, thinking better of it. He hangs up the line.
Stella’s number is busy the first five times Jay tries it. When he finally gets through, the line rings some twenty times before Jay simply gives up.
He thinks of calling the cops on his own, but can’t bring him self to do it.
He remembers his own advice:
It’s a warning that lives under his skin, in his DNA.
He’s not proud of his fears, but there they are, pinching at him from all sides like too tight shoes, restricting his movements, limiting his freedom. A shame, considering the real reason he marched so many years ago was to prove fear was dead, that it belonged to another time, to men like his father.
Jay sits at his desk, thinking about Jerome Porter.
The same image always comes to him, like a well-worn photo graph in his mind, a snapshot of another time. It’s an image of his mother, eighteen, sitting in the front seat of her daddy’s pickup truck, Jay’s father, twenty-one and strong, behind the wheel. They were newlyweds, the way Jay always heard the story. His mother, Alma, was just starting to show. They were riding on a farm road that ran behind Jay’s grandmother’s place, a barbecue joint and greengrocer, where his parents were both working the summer after they married. Jay’s father was driving his young wife home ’cause she wasn’t feeling too good on her feet.
There was another truck on the road that day, riding their bumper and honking the horn, two white men in the cab and a loaded rifle rack in the back window. This was Trinity County, 1949, a lawless place for men like Jerome Porter. The police were white. The sheriff and the mayor. And they made it known that the countryside belonged to them. There had been a rash of poul try theft that fall and winter, somebody (or bodies) sneaking onto people’s farms after dark, spiriting away valuable hens, some times going so far as to slit a guard dog’s throat in the process. Wasn’t no way to tell who it was, but white folks got it in their minds that it was niggers’ doing. They set up vigilante groups, guarding property with rifles and axes, questioning folks coming in and out of the grocery store, even harassing little boys coming out of the colored elementary school. They stopped people on local roads, demanding to search their cars and making citizens’ arrests if anything was out of order. And local law enforcement didn’t do a damn thing to stop them.
Jerome, Jay Bird, as Alma called him, was careful not to go above thirty miles an hour. He didn’t want to give the men in the truck any excuse to stop the car, which it turns out they did any way by pulling their pickup ahead and blocking the road. Jay’s parents were in Alma’s daddy’s truck, and she knew he kept a pistol in the glove box. She reached for it, but Jerome told her not to make it worse. He got out of the car, let the men have a look around, and asked them politely to let them go on their way. “My wife’s not feeling well,” he explained.
Something about the self-satisfied way he said it seemed to set them off. Maybe they didn’t have wives or didn’t like the ones they had, but they got kind of rough then, poking around on the passenger side, near Alma, making Jay’s father understand that nothing in this world really belonged to him. It was all within their reach. His father was a tall man, taller than Jay. He stood up straight, looked the men in the eye, and said, “Y’all need to get away from there now. Leave her be.” The men turned to each other then, agreeing on something, an approach, some thing choreographed from their repertoire. They were small and squat, and they charged at him like yard dogs, coming at him from two sides. Within the first couple of blows, it was clear they would not be satisfied by some regular beating, a few kicks in the dust. They were going for something else, scratching past his skin and bones, punching at his spirit. They had him near ’bout to the ground when Alma got the gun out of the glove box, a little .25-caliber pistol her brothers had taught her to shoot. “Your daddy took one look at me with that gun and said, ‘Alma, don’t you dare.’ ”
As a kid, Jay listened to this story in disbelief.
It was nothing like the cowboy movies he watched on televi sion. There was no explosion, no gut shot, no hero. Not his father anyway. Jerome Porter wouldn’t let his wife save him, afraid of what would happen to her if she pulled the trigger. There was no coming back from shooting a white man in Trinity County, 1949. If a mob didn’t get you, the courts would.
It turned out the gun scared them anyway, it was shaking so in Alma’s hand. The men couldn’t be sure Jay’s mother would heed her husband’s instruction not to shoot. They ran back to their truck and took off. A red Ford was all anybody ever remem bered. No license plate, no names.
Jay’s daddy was beat pretty good about the head.
He managed to get himself into the truck. He turned the engine over, but never got the car into gear. He turned to his wife and said, “Alma, I think you better drive.” He passed out a few moments after that. She pushed him over to the passenger side by herself, even in her condition. The nearest colored hos pital was all the way to Lufkin. She didn’t think Jay Bird could make it that far, so she drove him to St. Luke’s Faith Memorial in Groveton. In the waiting area, the nurses went so far as to let Jay’s mother fill out all the paperwork, let her think her husband would be the next one in line. Alma sat with him, holding his hand, his head resting on her lap, wondering why they were let ting other people go ahead of Jerome. It wasn’t until late in the evening, the waiting room empty and the two of them the only ones still waiting, that she understood what was going on, that this white hospital had no intention of treating her husband.
She laid his head softly on the bench, then got up and called over to her parents’ place. Somebody needed to run up to Jerome’s mama’s house, she said, and let Mrs. Porter know her boy was in trouble, that it looked bad. She asked her brothers to drive down, to help her get her husband all the way to Lufkin.
They got him out of St. Luke’s and into Alma’s brother’s Dodge so Jay’s father could lie out in the backseat. He came to at least once, but he never said a word. Just looked at Alma and kind of smiled. He died somewhere between Groveton and Lufkin. That was December. Jay was born five months later.
He would never be like his father; he’d decided that a long time ago. He was going to live to see his son. Or a little girl. Two maybe. The world would be different for him. As a kid, he watched King, Bayard Rustin, and the others, watched the boys in clean sweaters and pressed pants at the lunch counters in North Carolina, getting spit on and pushed around. And even then he thought they were missing the point. Even then he thought he’d shoot a motherfucker before he’d let them spit on him. He wanted something more than the early movement’s fight for legal equality and freedom in the streets. Jay’s dream was for freedom in his own mind, liberation from the kind of soul-
