Chapter Fifty
Fifty
We left Defiance for the noisy pockets of Detroit and settled into a small two-bedroom clapboard postage-stamped in between matching homes on Neff Avenue.
There we folded ourselves in with the millions of other industrial working folks—a yearning for my dear Honey and Junia, the ol’ grandmother mountains of our beloved Kaintuck always present and pulling.
Honey would give us a respite, visiting from time to time, but saying farewells opened old wounds and left us all gloomy for days.
Still, we could never go back with our past hitched so close, tempting the fates on such whims.
My kitchen calendar was a slow-ticking reminder that it was only 1964 and we still had fourteen more years to go until Jackson’s banishment from Kentucky was lifted. My own, now infinite.
Today, under muted Detroit skies, I made my way home from the library where I worked as an assistant three days a week.
I’d parted ways with one of my patrons just a block from home. Looking over my shoulder, I quickened my steps, knowing Jackson would fuss.
Know’d I couldn’t risk it happening again.
A few months ago, I’d left the library after dark when two boys snuck up behind me only a few blocks from home and demanded my pocketbook. They didn’t look but maybe three or four years older than my eleven-year-old Elijah Jack.
I’d backed up to a streetlamp. The lanky one pulled out a knife and tried to snatch it from my hands.
But I yanked it away.
“Lady, gimme your purse,” he’d demanded, wriggling the long knife.
The boy looked more frightened than me, and his hand shook as he swiped a dangling curl from his brow.
“I don’t have money, young man.”
“Now,” he yelled as his friend nervously glanced around.
My backside brushed against the light pole.
“I only have books.” I breathed heavily, snugging the bulky pocketbook closer to my body, its contents full of dime paperbacks I’d borrowed from the library and the forged baptismal record and library card.
More precious than gold, the documents had given me safe passage for years.
And I’d kept them hidden in the inside compartment and always within arm’s reach.
“Gimme the bag, or I’ll slice you from gut to chin.”
There was something in his eyes that said he’d do just that and I saw in his blackened soul that he might’ve done it before.
Pa’s gravelly words had rose from the grave and nipped at my bone: Daughter, like the bear or bobcat that makes itself bigger, never show fear, only your might.
I puffed up as best I could and squared my shoulders. “I reckon you’re gonna have to do some bloodletting to steal my pocketbook.” I pressed it tighter to my chest. “But I have to warn you boys, I’m a Blue, and my blood carries the blue curse,” I hissed, struck out my chin.
They both stared at me a moment, taken aback.
“A pox that you and your kin will carry for two hundred years!” I raised an ink-stained finger, warning.
“Let’s go,” the other boy said and slapped his arm. “She’s a loco witch for sure. Just look at her. One of them gypsy freaks that’ll curse our asses forever.”
“Ain’t leaving without it. Lady, gimme that damn purse, and hand over your jewelry.” The boy pointed the knife at my wedding ring. “Grab her, Clancy.” He motioned to his friend, then to me with the weapon. “Gimme it now!”
Clancy side-eyed me and shook his head. “Nuh-uh, I’m gonna beat feet. Ain’t getting no blue cootie curse.” He lit off.
The boy yelled after him, darting his bottle-brown eyes between his fleeing friend and me. Then he lunged with the knife. I jerked away but still felt it slash across my wrist, the flash of pain slowly fading as my anger climbed.
His cowardly eyes bore into mine, and an unspoken dare lifted from my jutted chin.
A porch light flicked on and a man bellowed from his door. “Hey, what’s going on out there?”
I took a step closer, raised the bloody wrist, and then stretched out my neck like an ol’ snapping turtle and hissed again, but louder this time, the spittle flying off my teeth.
The boy shrank back, and his eyes bugged as he glimpsed the dripping blood. Shifting from one foot to the other, he jiggled the knife against his pants, then cursed loudly and scrambled away.
“What are you punks up to?” the man yelled again, then ran out with a baseball bat and gave chase to the hooligans.
Clutching my pocketbook, I eased down onto the edge of the chipped sidewalk with my shoes in the gutter. I’d peered at my chocolate-colored blood and suddenly burst into nervous titters as the fright finally hit. Cackled like the blue witch I had them believe me to be.
In a few minutes, a nearby rail car rumbled into a factory’s whistle, beckoning the evening shift.
Straightening, I wiped away an amused tear and lifted my gratitude to Pa.
The doctor had given me seven stitches, though he was more fascinated about the color of my blood and blue-darkened flesh.
I’d said little, only that I was under the care of my family doctor and then added to the fib, in Georgia.”
After he’d sewed me up, he called two other doctors and a nurse into the room to ogle me. Jackson snapped and removed the doctor’s fingers off my face. “We’ll be taking our leave now. C’mon, Angeline.” He’d pulled me away from their befuddled gazes and prying hands.
Jackson had driven me straight home. “And they didn’t get your purse or jewelry?” he’d asked again, sneaking a puzzled glance at my bandages. “Those thieving thugs just ran away and without the goods?”
“I reckon the man done scared them off.” I rested my head against the truck window and realized my carelessness. Know’d I could’ve been toe-tagged in the crowded city morgue where other poor victims rested eternal.
Eternal. It had been years since I thought about my angel crown.
Or what I imagined more, a death crown. I had finally convinced myself it had been a prophecy for a blank page waiting for a new chapter.
A rebirth from a troubled past… Though recently, I’d discarded my handmade bed pillows and purchased the latest in bedding after I had read the advertisement for the new store-bought polyester-filled ones—insisting Jackson also mail a pillow to Honey for good measure.
After Jackson dropped me off from the hospital, he’d grabbed his hunting knife and went looking for the boys. But they’d disappeared, and from the fright on their faces, likely into another rat-crawling crevice of the city’s dark alleyways.
When he’d returned home, we’d talked in whispers inside our dimly lit bedroom while Elijah Jack slept.
Jackson had plied off his boots and said, “There was a recent article about a new medical study going on over in Cleveland. It could be a chance to go home when my banishment is lifted.”
I’d turned away from him and kneaded my temples, a dull ache rising. I’d finally resigned myself to a life in Detroit to keep us safe. And we’d been on the run so long, sometimes I forgot what we were running from.
But as the years passed, Jackson soured on the city, longed to be free of the shackles of its cage.
He’d point out homes where more and more folks had barred up their windows because of rising crime.
“I’d take a shack in our hills over any of these expensive houses.
Having the biggest here like that, well, hell’s bells, it wouldn’t be enough,” he’d remarked.
Until that moment it had never occurred to me that I might not be enough for him.
“It’s been a day.” I’d lifted my bandaged wrist, hampering the talk of medical news.
“Medicine is changing, Cussy Mary. It’s the sixties,” Jackson had pressed.
“And the advances they’re making are like none this world has seen.
Why look at what they’ve done now. We’ve got vaccines for polio and measles.
They’re even transplanting kidneys, livers.
Hell, even lungs.” He thumped his chest. “Every day brings more medical news. More miracles. Just think, if they could cure you, it would no longer be a burden for us.”
“Jackson.” My voice cracked as I remembered Pa saying almost the same thing long ago when he tried to get me cured. Fought to marry me off.
“I’m sorry I’m a burden to you, Jackson. I give you permission to leave me,” I’d barely breathed.
He’d jerked as if the words scalded him.
“I love you, but I don’t want to be a weight that anchors you here. You can divorce me.” Tears sprung to my eyes as heartbreak and misery squeezed the breath out of me, my hands night-sky-colored and trembling.
“Cussy Mary”—he’d choked—“I’ve been trying to find a way out of here to get back home.” Jackson bowed his head, searching inside himself. Slowly, the words came. “But I would never leave my bride.” He rubbed his thumb across my cheek. “We are more than man and wife. We’re knitted in bone.”
Jackson clutched hold of me and we’d wept quietly.
***
As I stood in front of our home today, I could hear Jackson and Elijah Jack working out back.
I paused to watch the neighbor girl, her braids slashing through the spring winds as she played hopscotch on the chalk-drawn sidewalk.
In the backyard, music thinned across a heavy truck’s gasping airbrakes as I slipped through the gate.
Our gray-muzzled pup, Yeats, pushed himself up from the grass, wobbled, then found his starched legs and ambled over to greet me. I bent over and pulled his snout to my face, gingerly rubbed his ears and dropped kisses atop his head.
Jackson had found the flea-infested mutt nine years ago at his construction site. He’d scooped him up from a pile of dirt and rubble, and the pup quickly wriggled his way into our hearts.
Yeats followed me to the patio as Lesley Gore cried out “It’s My Party.
” The snappy tunes drifted across the yard.
Elijah Jack was fond of the strange new sounds called rock and roll, especially a group named after what sounded like a hardshell bug that had swept the airwaves.
He carried his pocket transistor radio everywhere, the leather case worn and curling.