Read Online And Do Remember Me by Marita Golden - Free Book Online Page B

women. Inside the cell the women created a universe that dissolved the bars that held them. All her life, Jessie had longed to hear people speak to one another in a way that made words an affirmation. Before her eyes, sisterhood, deep, spontaneous, blossomed into life. They fought off boredom and despair with confessions and revelation, each woman stitching a square onto the verbal quilt they wove all day and long into the night. Lovers, husbands, children, mothers, fathers, white women, white men, what they’d do when “freedom” came, dead babies, lost sons, hardheaded daughters, the books they would read if they could or if they had the time, miscarriages, their favorite psalm, sexual fantasies, the best-looking man in town, the most stuck-up woman, how they could never go back to
not
fighting segregation, dirty jokes, wondering when somebody’d cook dinner for
them
, wash
their
dirty drawers, how many days among them had been spent in jail. It all strode forth, from mouths censored at work, on good behavior, speechless from fatigue at home, strangely liberated inside this cell. And Jessie sat in the midst of the women, in jail, oddly content, daring now and then to toss a word or thought onto the burgeoning flame of their union.
    Six days after the protest, Macon and Jessie sat in the cell alone. Over the past two days the other women had been bailed out one by one. Macon paced the cell, her energies compressed,screaming for release. Jessie sat on the top bunk, passive, calm, and said, “I never told you how I come to be here. I run away from home. Lincoln give me a lift and then I just followed him here, after he asked me to come that is. It’s like in a way we was both running away. Lincoln wouldn’t never admit to that, but that’s what I think. After this,” Jessie began haltingly, “I don’t think I’ll be afraid of nothing,” allowing herself to believe this, hoping it was true.
    “Every time I say that, Jessie, I get a surprise,” Macon warned her, halting her march around the cell’s circumference, slumping on the floor. “I hate this, I really do,” Macon said. “I never get used to being behind bars. And why I’m here doesn’t make it any easier.”
    “You know, I almost don’t want to leave,” Jessie laughed. “Being here with just us women. I felt safe. I’m kinda scared to go out in the world again, cause all my life it ain’t been nothing but a man that’s done me harm.”
    H E COULDN’T BEAR another death. So he began to write. Lincoln sat shirtless in his room at the Freedom House, a small fan on the floor circulating a breath of humid Delta air, and typed another verse in a poem that was already three single-spaced pages long. The day before, the bodies of Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner and James Chaney had been found by the FBI. The civil rights workers were buried fifteen feet apart and twenty feet under the dam of a cattle pond on a farm south of Philadelphia, Mississippi. He couldn’t bear another death. The week before, he had attended the funeral of Carter Langdon, a prosperous farmer who’d been shot in the head as he got into his truck on Main Street, right in the center of town. Langdon,who had stockpiled over a dozen guns and rifles in his house to fight off the Klan and anyone else attempting to drive him from his fertile ten-acre farm, had just left the courthouse after attempting to register to vote. It had taken Lincoln nearly two months to convince Langdon to register.
    “When I’m ready,” he told Lincoln. “The day I do it, I want to go down there by myself. I don’t need no escort. I don’t want no protection the Lord can’t provide.”
    At the funeral, at the Elks Club, Langdon’s five sons spoke about their father. The oldest told those gathered, “My daddy was a peace-loving man in a hateful world. For all the guns he had, do anybody here recall him shooting anything more than a possum, less somebody aimed a bullet at him? Not everybody that