Freshwater Road Read Free

would blame her white boyfriend-now ex-boyfriend-for this decision to go south. Shuck's gaze charred the air in front of the student union
when he first laid eyes on J.D. He'd ordered her into his sleek Cadillac and
drove around in circles, telling her that a Negro woman with a white man would always be lonely. She'd never seen Shuck like that. "It has to do with
history," he said. "And no one woman is strong enough to buck it."

    Shuck's words never left her head-even though she and J.D. kept
doing what they'd always done, like going to Blues Night at Glinty's Bar
and taking long rides on his motorcycle over two-lane country roads. But
she and J.D. started arguing, about the blues of all things. J.D. claimed
immense knowledge; he could produce long lists of blues singers he'd seen
and heard, and swore he understood the blues as well as anyone. Celeste
roared back, hands flying to her hips like someone she'd seen on a Detroit
street, that unless he'd been shackled nude before the world, sold like a head
of cattle, and hated like the plague, he didn't know a damned thing about
the blues. When J.D. argued that Celeste didn't even look particularly
Negro, that she'd grown up in circumstances as comfortable as he had
(proving that she had no more claim on the blues than he), her fury erupted,
spewed, and blistered until he'd walked out the door. She tried to flick off
the implications of the deeper truth he'd touched upon-the truth of her
own privilege-but in the end, it was Shuck's belief that she clung to, that
race in America lived outside the purview of class or privilege, out there in
a world all its own, not tethered to anything except hatred. That belief of
Shuck's went deeper than any other, and J.D. helped her know it.
    A floral sweetness floated on the midnight air. Shadows behind trees
and hedges, white faces staring at the Negro cab prowling the lonely streets.
In Ann Arbor right now, small groups of students roamed the campus,
lingered in the clubs, made out in each available hallway, alcove, doorway,
grove of trees. At Shuck's Royal Gardens Bar in Detroit, music and jolly
repartee mingled with clinking ice cubes in every sort of glass. Laughter
rang in the dim blue light. Bluesy jazz swore in the pauses. But here in
Jackson, Mississippi, nothing moved that you could see except the police
cars that patrolled the streets in droves, parked at intersections as if expecting an army of gun-toting gangsters or armed revolutionaries.
    Away from Shuck, she began to lose ground, his sheltered world losing
dimension, unable to project out to the galaxy beyond the West Side of
Detroit, where things hadn't changed much in two generations. In Ann
Arbor, she'd tested herself on the wrong seas. By the time the Movement
speakers appeared on campus looking for recruits and money, she volunteered, gladly. There was always Shuck's voice in her head talking his race talk, pulling her back to home base and pushing her out into the world-to
the south-at the same time.

    J.D. the painter had gone to Paris for the summer. Here she was in
Mississippi, in a cab going she knew not where, embarking on an adventure
that had death written in the small print. According to Shuck, even as a kid
she'd always had a deep sense of justice and fair play. He was pushing her
to go to law school. She couldn't see it. Wilamena, her mother, thought it
silly of her when she wanted to share her dolls and candy with other kids,
Negro kids, who didn't have the abundance that she had. Told her she was a
fool to think they'd ever return the favor. Surely there was enough injustice
in Mississippi to validate her coming, and she didn't consider it a favor. Or
did she? She tied her reasons for making this sojourn to all of that, and to
Shuck, her father-her so wanting to be like him and so wanting to be
unlike her mother who'd spent her life running away from Negro people.
From herself.
    Celeste's head popped up from the