And Do Remember Me Read Free Page A

go out with him because nobody knew if he would live long enough to see the “freedom” he talked so much about, or be dredged from some tributary of the Mississippi River. The hint of possible sudden danger, the knowledge of his obvious courage, made him a marked man. More than one young woman wanted to be able to say that
she
was the last one who had held Lincoln Sturgis alive in her arms.
    But he could tell Jessie was different. He liked looking at her, just sitting beside her. Conversation with her was not a bloodletting but a kind of communion. He realized it was going to be hard to say good-bye.
    “Why don’t you come on to Greenwood with me?” he asked. “There’s plenty of work to do.”
    “I told you, I’m scared.”
    “I told you I was too.”
    “I don’t even
know
you,” Jessie protested.
    “Well, I don’t know you either, but I know you don’t belong in Winona.”
    Jessie searched Lincoln’s face for something she could mistrust, some flicker in his eyes, some movement of his lips that would inform her that she was in danger. And when she didn’t find it, Jessie thought of her grandma Bessie. She was running to her only because she’d always been the old woman’s favorite. But then she remembered the newspaper lining the walls of her grandmama’s two-room shack on the outskirts of the city, the old woman’s hard life of survival on welfare and handoutsfrom a family for whom she had once been a nanny. And what would she do in Winona? Hardly any white businesses would hire a Negro, even one with a high school diploma.
    They had entered Winona, and Lincoln stopped at a gas station and filled the tank. Then he drove farther into town and parked in the commercial district and said to Jessie, “I’m not pressuring you, I’m just offering you the chance to do something that matters.”
    “Where you gonna stay?”
    “There’s a house set up for the movement people.”
    “What about me?”
    “You’d stay there too. I bet you’d have your own room.”
    She had been trying to get away from 468 Davis Road as long as she could remember. It was a street whose tiny frame houses huddled together like heads bowed to avoid being slapped. There were outhouses in some backyards. Peeling, crumbling wood defaced most of the exteriors. In the summertime, the street’s young men gathered on the corners like conspirators thrusting their voices into the seams of the night. Voices desperate to be heard. Desperate not to be ignored. On Davis Road nobody believed in the possibility of civil rights. Nobody even knew what they were. That was the street where everyone had watched the sheriff’s deputy pay regular visits to Elvira McCullough. Everyone sitting on the front stoops remembered the spring evenings when they would see Mr. McCullough walk toward his house, spot the now familiar police car parked out front, and turn away and head toward Bo Willie’s juke joint, where he would get drunk and wait for the white man to leave.
    And in her house Jessie had always been lonely. Then she had learned to be afraid. Afraid of white men. Afraid of her father. Because she knew so well the feeling of fear, she knew when she was safe.
    She sat twisting the hem of her skirt, her back to Lincoln’s persistent, kind, impatient gaze. Finally he said, “Come on, girl, you just running in circles. At least we know where I’m headed,” and started up the car.
    A MILE OUTSIDE of Carol, Lincoln’s car shuddered to a halt. He turned the engine on repeatedly. But nothing happened. He and Jessie walked back to town and found a Negro mechanic who drove them back to the car. After looking at the engine he told them the alternator was shot and that he could repair it but not until the next morning. “I got a wake to go to tonight.”
    T HEY REGISTERED in the rooming house as Mr. and Mrs. Brown. Jessie stood nervously behind Lincoln, his gym bag and boxes of books and papers, her cardboard box, now near total collapse, stationed