wrappers for food and drinks being sold to raise money for the band and baseball team to buy equipment.
The PTA had put a table alongside the wall. They had soft drinks in a couple of coolers and they made hot dogs on the spot, pulling the dogs from an electric stew pot with long tongs, slapping them on mustard- and relish- coated buns.
It took about fifteen minutes for the auditorium to fill, and fill it did. There were even a few people standing in the back.
When the lights went down, two white men dressed in blackface with white lips came out, one played a banjo, and they both sang. The songs were what many think of as slave classics, like “Way Down Upon the Swanee River,” “Jimmy Crack Corn,” and later on a few religious numbers, like “The Great Speckled Bird” and “I’ll Fly Away.”
There were jokes, all of them with Negroes as the butt. The jokes had to do with fishing, eating watermelon and fried chicken, being lazy and happy as birds; just funny colored people who loved to laugh, sing, and dance, and make white folks smile.
I was getting into the spirit of things, laughing along with everyone else, when I heard a loud coarse laugh from the back of the auditorium. I turned to look. It was the old colored janitor standing by his rolling trash can, a broom sticking out of it. He was laughing so hard I thought maybe he might have to be knocked unconscious to shut him up.
In that moment something switched on inside of me. And I thought, here’s a colored man who thinks this is funny. That making fun of him and his people is humor.
I didn’t laugh another time. And it wasn’t due to resistance. Nothing they did on stage the rest of the night struck me as funny.
On the way home I was so silent, Daddy asked me if I was okay, if I had had fun.
I told him I had. I didn’t know what else to say.
Callie said, “Well, I laughed a few times, and I liked the music, but I don’t know any colored people like that. I don’t think Rosy Mae would have liked it.”
“It’s not for Rosy Mae,” Dad said.
“My point exactly,” Callie said.
I looked at her, sitting across from me on the back seat, and I truly loved her for the very first time in my life. I had come to like her in the last few days, but now I loved her.
Mother said, “I think you’re right, Callie. Actually, me going to see that makes me a little ashamed. And did you see that sign? Nigger Minstrel. Not even Colored or Negro. But Nigger.”
“No harm’s meant in it,” Daddy said.
“It hurt my feelings,” Mom said.
We drove to the Dairy Queen, parked out front, under the canopy, and with the windows rolled down we could hear the rain pounding on it.
A young blond girl in blue jeans and a man’s shirt, her hair in a ponytail, came out to the car. Water was splashing up and under the canopy and hitting her on the shoes and blue jeans and you could tell from the look on her face she didn’t like it.
When she saw Callie she shrieked, and Callie shrieked. This seems to be the teenage girl greeting. Obviously they knew each other. Callie seemed to know everyone. They exchanged greetings, said we have to talk, then the girl, whose name was Nancy, took a pencil out from behind her ear, a pad from her back blue jeans pocket, and asked what we’d have.
We ordered and Nancy went away. Daddy said, “You girls sound like wounded birds.”
“Oh, Daddy,” Callie said.
When the food came, it was on a tray that fastened to Daddy’s window. He sorted out who had what, and we sat there and ate. Daddy tried to bring up the minstrel show, to talk about a funny moment here and there, and though we had all laughed at times, none of us were proud of it, except maybe Daddy, who couldn’t see any wrong in it.
We ate, gave up our tray, and drove away from there, the rain pummeling us harder than ever.
16
SUMMER VACATION was winding down. I was nervous about the prospect of starting a new school, and I had Bubba Joe on my mind. At night, when I tried to lie down, I no longer thought of something ghostly. I thought of Bubba Joe. The way he had looked at me just before the light went out of his eyes and his soul fell down that long tunnel to hell.
Bubba Joe had deserved it. Buster had saved my life. But it wasn’t that easy. Someone cleared their throat, the water gurgled down the sink, it sounded like that gurgle Bubba Joe had made before he let go and went away.
Even some of the movies we showed bothered me. The way people died on film was not the way Bubba Joe died. No last words, dramatic moments. Just bloody and dead.
I tried to stay busy, and one thing I stayed busy with was mine and Buster’s mystery. I guess it was Callie’s mystery too. I kept her informed but she didn’t show much interest.
She started dating Drew Cleves. He seemed nice enough. He had treated me well enough that day on the hill.
Mama liked him.
Daddy didn’t. Then again, he wasn’t crazy about any boy who dated or even wanted to date Callie.
Because of Drew, Callie was out on dates a lot, driving away the summer, going downtown to the indoor movie, hanging out at the drugstore over hamburgers and malts.
The family still thought about Bubba Joe now and then, but not much. It was assumed he had moved on since the cops hadn’t heard of nor seen hide nor hair of him.
I, of course, knew he was dead, and every day I woke up as if waiting for the other shoe to drop. A big shoe. Bubba Joe’s body found somewhere along the creek. In time, though, even I thought less about him.
Daddy had gotten used to me going out to the projection booth to spend time with Buster, and I think, in the back of his mind, he thought I was learning better how to run the projector. It was a practical consideration for him. For me it was fun.
We had still not talked to Winnie.
I asked Buster about that.
“I’m holdin’ back,” he said. “This is a game to us, but that was her daughter got killed.”
“I really do care who killed her. I’d like to see the police nab him.”
“That may be, Stan, but this woman, she don’t understand that.”
“What is there to understand?”
“She gonna believe some boy and a nigger gonna get her daughter justice? That’s hard to buy, even if we are sincere . . . And you know, I don’t think there’s a chance in hell we’ll solve anything. I’m doing it to keep from thinkin’ about whiskey and what I ought’a have done and didn’t and won’t never and can’t never do. You understand what I’m sayin’, boy?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I ain’t sayin’ your heart ain’t in the right place, I’m just tellin’ you life ain’t fair. Just ’cause you want somethin’, don’t mean you’ll get it. It ain’t like them Sherlock Holmes stories. They help you to think. Why I gave the book to you—You keep it. I don’t want it back. Anything happens to me, all them books are yours—”
“Nothing is going to happen—”
“Just listen. Life ain’t fair, and it don’t always have everything fit together like a puzzle. Some things just are and there ain’t no explainin’ them. You can come up with maybes, and sometimes you’ll find the real reason. But a lot of what happens don’t never make sense and don’t never jibe together. Hear me?”
“Yes, sir . . . But, isn’t there some way we can talk to her?”
Buster grinned at me. “You ain’t no quitter. I give you that. Maybe there is. I been thinkin’ on it. If I do talk to her, it ain’t gonna be we. It’s gonna be me.”
“But you said—”
“Don’t remember what I said, but I ain’t gonna drag no little white boy off to a whore’s house to chat about
