by Gene Novogrodsky
I look at the bed, narrow, and two thin blankets. I’ll need them. There is already frost on the brown ground under the full moon, cypress strands drooping pale white. I’m in a Mississippi state park cabin; ice glazes the man-made lake around which the cabins circle. I saw the frost, trees, and ice when outside for a moment. I want to go outside again, to see the moon, the other cabins, the stars; the park is closed for the winter, but Gloria had begged her uncle, the park superintendent, to let me stay there two nights. He consented, but wasn’t happy; he was angry, almost seething, but she was his favorite niece and had helped at the park the past three summers. He knows she met me on a Greyhound when she was coming back from a lonely weekend in Daytona. I was on the Greyhound, going north, no particular destination. We started to write letters, and she invited me to northern Mississippi, giving no thought to where I’d stay, or what her family would think about a Northerner, a Jew to boot, a Civil Rights marcher. I go outside the cabin, and bite the cold night. Coon dogs bark off in the low hills and deep swamps. Shotguns sound. The dogs bark. I lean against an oak, its brown leaves burying my shoes. I think of the black sharecroppers’ shacks just miles from the park. A hundred years after the Civil War, a short step from slavery. I think about the Northern troops sweeping deep into Mississippi, burning plantations, burning crops, taking horses and cattle, ignoring the slaves. Raiding, burning, raiding, burning. A society in flames, deservedly? I think about the millions of backs who left Mississippi after World War One for Chicago. Illinois Central, click clack, click clack. I think about lynchings. From the end of the Civil War to now in the early 1960s, trees, ropes, bodies, crowds. What am I doing here? Gloria, cute, with a button mouth, small face, knows none of this; she’s at a white women’s private school, learning to be an elementary teacher. We kissed once since I hitched down from Tennessee, with me pushing her against a rusted plow next to a field that had been picked clean of cotton. Brown stalks like bayonets pointing into a cloudy sky. She pushed me back, and stepped away from the plow. She and her father took me on a mail route. He was the local mailman. We drank Cokes in the cramped pick-up. He handed government checks to old black men and women who came out of shacks where blue white smoke drifted from roofs and sides. I heard voices. I thought Gloria and her uncle had gone, but they had only driven some yards away to where he parked his pick-up. I moved deeper into the oak stand. The dogs barked. More shotguns sounded. Maybe the dogs belonged to her cousins whom I’d seen at her parents’. They stared at me while they dropped cigarette ashes into to their jeans’ cuffs. They kept staring, and one told Gloria that they had a long night of hunting. They left, and never said a word to me as I sat in a chair away from the hot wood stove. “Look, I didn’t really know he’d come. I was just being nice,” Gloria said to her uncle. “I’m really sorry, really sorry.” It is so strange, the letters, I feel stupid,” she continued. I know honey. I know you’d never seriously ask someone to come see you based on a bus ride and some letters. I know. Damn, a Yankee and Jew, probably a nigger-lover, not you at all,” her uncle said. “I can’t do much, Uncle, at least right now in the night. I’ll try to explain we comeback in the morning, and tell him he must go,” she said. And I heard her softly cry. “I’ll tell him that a neighbor died, and that we all have to help with the funeral, and that since I’m in the church choir I’ll be needed all day. That should get him to leave, I hope,” she added. Did I hear another whimper, a cry? “That might work, honey. If not, you’ll just have to right out say he has to go,” her uncle said. “Now, it’s cold out here. Get in the truck. Hope it’s cold in there, and the water is off; let him get a taste of how those niggers he loves so much live. Hey, hear those shotguns, sounds like the boys are getting out of the swamp yonder, going a little higher. What a night for coons,” her uncle said. “Good that the boys didn’t figure out too much about him back in your folks’. If they had, they might give him a shotgun shower above the roof, not a bad idea, really. If I were younger…” her uncle added. Gloria was quiet. I heard the pickup doors shut the engine start and then tires crunch on frozen earth. I stood quietly against the oak. The dogs barked, the shotguns echoed… I went back inside. The electricity was off. There was no water. There was no heat. Her uncle had told me such when he unlocked the cabin fifteen minutes earlier after picking Gloria and me up at her folks’. But he did say there might be some extra blankets in the closet. There weren’t. I got on the soft bed, moved until the springs accepted me and I then wrapped the musty blankets from the bed around me, keeping my clothes and socks on. I heard an owl. The dogs were still barking. The guns were going off, regularly. I fell asleep and left the next morning, well before Gloria and her folks came for me. I folded the blankets, pulled on my shoes, checked my backpack, shut the door and went outside, the frost was thick. The lake iced. The earth hard. I peed outdoors, my piss steaming as it hit the frost. I walked a half mile to the road north, hoping that Gloria and her folks were still asleep, same for her uncle, same for her cousins, their hunt over, the shotguns cold, the coons skinned, the dogs fed and asleep. The shacks; each had smoke rising. The yellow sun was just above the hills filling the swamps and lake with first light. The first car, a black hospital worker going to a 12-hour shift in Memphis, just an hour away, stopped. He said he usually stopped for hitchhikers, and asked if I was cold. I said I was, so he turned the heat up. Gloria wrote a week later, and tried to explain differences. I wrote back and said I understood. We never wrote again.
