Cross Justice Read Free Page A

Chicago.
    “A soda,” I said. “I think it’s carbonated prune juice.”
    “That’s disgusting,” Jannie said.
    “No, it’s actually good,” I said. “Kind of like Dr Pepper. My mom liked it. So did my dad. Remember, Nana?”
    “How could I forget?” My grandmother sighed.
    “Did you notice neither of you ever uses their names?” Bree said.
    “Christina and Jason,” Nana Mama said quietly, and I glanced in the mirror again, saw how sad she was all of a sudden.
    “What were they like?” Ali asked, still looking at his iPad.
    For the first time in decades, I felt grief and sadness about the loss of my mom and dad. I didn’t say a word.
    But my grandmother said, “They were both beautiful, troubled souls, Ali.”
    “Train coming, Alex,” Bree said.
    I took my eyes off the rearview and saw lights blinking and safety gates lowering. We slowed to a stop two cars and a panel van from the gates and watched the slow-moving freight cars rumble by.
    I flashed on images of myself—eight? nine?—running along these same tracks where they passed through woods near our home. It was a rainy night, and I was very scared for some reason.
Why was that?
    “Look at those guys up on the train!” Ali said, breaking into my thoughts.
    There
were
two people up on one of the boxcars, one African American, one Caucasian, both in their late teens, early twenties. As they went through the crossing, they sat down, legs hanging off the front of the container car, as if settling in for a long trip.
    “We used to call men who rode the trains like that hoboes,” Nana Mama said.
    “Kind of well dressed for hoboes,” Bree said.
    As the car the young men were on rolled through the crossing, I saw what Bree was talking about. They wore baseball hats turned backward, sunglasses, headphones, baggy shorts, black T-shirts, and shiny high-top sneakers. They seemed to recognize someone in the car ahead of us, and each of them gave a wave with three fingers held high. An arm came out the driverside window of that car and returned the salute.
    And then they were gone, and the caboose of the train soon after that, heading north. The gates lifted. The lights stopped blinking. We drove on across the tracks. The two cars went right, and I had to slow to let the van take a left at a sign that said CAINE FERTILIZER CO .
    “Eeeuw,” Ali said. “What’s that smell?”
    I caught it too, said, “Urea.”
    “You mean like in pee?” Jannie asked, disgusted.
    “Animal pee,” I said. “And probably animal poop too.”
    “God, what are we doing here?” she said with a groan.
    “Where are we staying?” Ali asked.
    “Naomi made the arrangements,” Bree said. “I just pray there’s air-conditioning. It’s gotta be ninety, and if we’re downwind of that smell …”
    “It’s eighty,” I said, looking at the dash. “We’re up higher now.”
    I drove on by instinct, remembering none of the street names but somehow knowing the way to downtown Starksville as if I’d been there the day before and not three and a half decades ago.
    The town center had been laid out in the early 1800s around a rectangular common that now featured a statue of Colonel Francis Stark, a local hero of the Confederacy and the son of the town’s founder and namesake. Starksville should have been a place you’d describe as quaint. Many of the buildings were older, some antebellum, some brick-faced like the factories at the edge of town.
    But hard economic times had hit Starksville. For every business open that Thursday—a clothing emporium, a bookstore, a pawnbroker, a gun shop, and two liquor stores—there were two more that stood empty with their front windows soaped over. For Sale signs hung everywhere.
    “I can remember when Starksville was not a bad place to live even
with
the Jim Crow laws,” Nana Mama said wistfully.
    “What are Crow laws?” Ali asked, scrunching his nose.
    “They were laws against people like us,” she said, and then she pointed a