Read Online All-Bright Court by Connie Rose Porter - Free Book Online

there. I can see my people some other time.”
    â€œWe ain’t going that far south, and we ain’t going down there to start no trouble,” Moses said.
    â€œYou believe they was starting trouble? Them crackers killed them for the fun of it. Don’t be stupid.”
    He hid within the shell of his words. They were a way of protecting him from the truth. He did not believe the three men were agitators. They were close to his age. One of them was black, Chaney. Moses knew what could happen to a black man on a lonely road in Mississippi. Goodman and Schwerner learned what could happen even to white men.
    Moses and Venita took a proletariat vacation to Atlantic City instead.
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    On his way to pay for his turkey, Moses passed down the dairy aisle. A small boy dressed in a snowsuit was leaning over the case. The boy opened a carton and began dropping eggs, one by one, to the floor. Moses was about to say something to the boy when he saw Samuel Taylor coming up the aisle pulling a red wagon filled with groceries.
    â€œMikey, what is you doing?” Samuel yelled as Mikey was dropping another egg.
    Moses rushed past the pair without looking at them. He paid for his turkey and left the store. His car was parked in the gravel lot in back. As Moses neared his car, he saw a woman and a gaggle of children coming up the street. It was Greene and her brood.
    That summer Greene and her six children had come up from Florida. They just showed up at All-Bright Court in a dusty yellow pickup that broke down the day they arrived and had to be towed away. No one knew them, and not a week after they moved in, the bats came.
    Out of the twilight they appeared as shadows, first a few, then hundreds. But under the pale light of the full moon they became bats. Isaac led a group of boys on a bat hunt. With brooms and sticks they managed to kill a few bats they chased off from the main group. No one had ever seen anything like it before, and when one of the women mentioned it to Greene, she said, “I want to get my hands on one of them bats. I could use one of them bats.”
    And that was all it had taken. The next morning, the question “What she want with a bat?” was being asked by the women from one end of All-Bright Court to the other.
    â€œWhere them bats come from out of nowhere and then just disappear?”
    â€œYou reckon she called them?”
    â€œAnd
what
she was doing with a bat?”
    â€œWhat you think! She into hoodoo.”
    â€œMark my words, she going to hoodoo somebody.”
    â€œHey, girl, you see her teeth? Looking into her mouth make you feel like falling in a pit.”
    All of Greene’s teeth were covered in gold, and none of the women knew how she could afford them. Despite the fact she wore a wedding band, no husband came north with her. And Greene had no trouble attracting men.
    â€œCountry nigger” is what the women said of Greene. Of the men they said, “Only a country nigger would think her mouth look good.”
    Greene was accused of not leaving her country ways behind. Her accusers knew, because they were country niggers too. Over the years they had claimed to be from Birmingham, Fayetteville, Jacksonville, Jackson, New Orleans. But they were really from Plain Dealing, Zenith, Goshen, Acme, Gopher. They had come from specks on the map. They knew the country and its ways well. They had seen spells cast, fields dry up, floods come, moles cast in women’s wombs. And then there were the bats.
    The bats had come with Greene’s arrival. This did not stop some of the husbands in All-Bright Court from passing in and out of her back door. They came to explore the riches of her mouth. They left knowing the secrets beneath her tongue.
    All of her children wore asafetida bags around their necks. The bags and strings turned black and greasy and smelled of garlic.
    In the parking lot Moses rolled down the car window with his good hand and spoke to Greene as she