Read Online Freshwater Road by Denise Nicholas - Free Book Online Page B

Do
not resist. The trooper dragged Matt along the side of the car, and Celeste
heard his shoes scuffing and grating over the gravel. She lifted out of her
seat, twisting around to see, didn't know if she should get out of the car,
try to talk to them quietly, plead for Matt. Matt had told her to let him
do the talking. She'd heard around the office that he'd been arrested more
than half a dozen times.
    "Turn round and face front," the trooper barked.
    He shoved Matt into the hands of the other trooper and came back to
the opened door.
    "I said, turn round, less you want some of this!" His lips were drawn up
into hard lines making his teeth look big. His arm muscles pressed against
the fabric of his shirt. He cracked his billy club against the side of the car.
It sounded like a gunshot. Celeste's spine jolted like a steel rod had been
shoved through her body. Ain't gonna let nobody turn me round, turn me
round, turn me round. She sang softly, her breath coming in frightened
pants. Fear deadened her memory so that she could only recall two lines of
the song. Matt said it didn't work out here, but there wasn't anything else.
The words drifted in and out of her mind like a ghost echo as if they weren't
really coming from her at all.
    A thud and the car lurched. She had to be still, be quiet. They had guns,
billy clubs. Cattle prods. Margo always said if you got stopped like this,
hold onto your training, pray and sing, otherwise you'll only make it worse.
You can't win by fighting here. They have all the guns. Celeste kept singing.
Gonna keep on walking, keep on talking, on my way to freedom's land.
    "Bet you got them three boys right here in this car, nigger." The trooper
spat the words out, his accent chopping off the consonants.
    An excuse to open the trunk. Sweat poured into Celeste's eyes. Her
hands gripped in tight fists in her lap. She sneaked a look back. The trooper stood to the side of the car. Matt and the other, the one holding him, were
hidden by the opened trunk. She hoped they wouldn't take the freedom
school books or her suitcase. The trunk slammed shut, rocking the car. Then
the sound of punches, and a sharp crack. Matt moaned. His nonresistance
didn't stop the blows that followed. Now she didn't want to turn around,
didn't want to see what they were doing; she set her eyes on a black-barked
shade tree marking the turn into a dusty side road. Beyond it stretched rows
of crops, peanuts maybe or beans. Neat. No dark people cranked over at
the waist between the rows.

    "Nigger. Go back where you came from."
    She'd love to be gone. Far off in the tranquil blue sky, rain clouds began
to pile up like scoops of vanilla ice cream. There was the sound of air expelled in a moan. They must have hit him in the stomach. She didn't know
which trooper was talking now. One of them snarled at Matt about niggers
chasing white women. If they got on that, Matt was doomed and so was
she. Better to be anything else, to have horns even, than to be accused of
chasing, whistling, winking, even looking at a white woman. For a moment
she thought of J.D.-those last times together, when a kind of desperation
perverted their lovemaking, changing it from the joyous connection of
two people clamped together by a fierce electrical charge into something
dark and painful that they both identified as the falling away of love and
attraction. She had hardly believed they could go from one to the other so
fast. In the end, there had been silence. J.D. went back to his studio and she
cowered in the apartment on North Oak Street, depleted and sad. Celeste
felt pitiful and weak now again, sitting there by the side of the road listening
to two white Mississippi troopers beat the shit out of a black man. Her head
down, she prayed they wouldn't kill him.
    "You just a bunch of communist outsider agitators. Come down here to
stir up our nigras. Everything was fine til y'all got here." After each phrase,
Celeste