And Do Remember Me by Marita Golden Read Free Book Online Page A

say is true, they won’t get away with it. They can’t.”
    “There’ll be a trial and a jury of their peers and they’ll get off. Look at what happened with Medgar,” Courtland said wearily.
    The search for the three men involved dredging the rivers of the state. In the past few weeks a score of anonymous, long disappeared Negro bodies had been brought out of the terrible Mississippi waters. These missing people had sparked no nationwide or even local manhunt. They had been considered just another nigger gone by whites, by Negroes an issue that, if pursued, could result in other disappearances. But as more and more bodies were found in the black communities of the Delta, the day of reckoning arrived. Children’s questioning eyes inspired overdue revelation, and long-dreaded encounters with a truth parents denied more to spare themselves than their offspring. Family members dreamed of and remembered transgressions that had put those who disappeared and were now found in jeopardy. The truth washed ashore along with the dead.
    The movement was creating bonds between black and white that were tenacious and tenuous. Lying next to Courtland, she thought of the clandestine affair between their friends, Marlon Jeeter and Carolyn Seavers, who had proven to be one of the most hard-working people in the Freedom School. Marlon had confided in her about his affair with Carolyn, saying, “She’s just so different, so special. I mean I never met anybody like her.” He sat on the steps of the Freedom House next to Macon, jittery with infatuation and desire. “She’s just so different,” he kept saying, an amazed smile flickering across his face. Macon fought to control the bitterness she felt in the face of Marlon’s admission, but lost the battle, saying angrily, “She’s white, Marlon, that’s all, she’s white.”
    She had begun to pray fervently and often. She prayed in therapturous midst of the Sunday sermon beside the Greenwood women fanning and sweating, and praying and testifying and amening. She prayed driving along the back roads she traveled, and as she escorted someone into the courthouse. She prayed when the sun came up and when it went down. And the prayer, a simple God be with me, convinced her that she and Courtland and their friends would somehow be all right.
    I T WAS TWO o’clock in the afternoon, the extravagant sun and heat melting even the hardiest souls. Jessie was lying on her bed, resting up for the evening session at the Freedom School when Lincoln entered her room. He sat on the edge of her bed and whispered, “Jessie, Jessie, are you asleep?” She had been dreaming. She was lost and trying to find her way back home. Wandering down a circular dirt road that twisted mazelike and stubborn, a road that had no end. She had knocked on countless doors but no one ever greeted her whom she could recognize or who wanted to claim her. The tears shed in the dream had just begun to infiltrate her consciousness, were threatening to moisten her cheeks, when she heard Lincoln’s voice. Jessie opened her eyes and saw his face. With a quick movement of her hands across her cheeks she dried her face. She sat up and Lincoln gently thrust a bouquet of black-eyed Susans between them. The plaintive yellow and black flowers grew in a small garden in the back of the Freedom House, along with tomatoes, greens and pole beans.
    Jessie gazed in quiet gratitude at the flowers, whose scent was so enticing that it made her imagine that one day she would find her way back home. Lincoln kissed her, the kiss acomplex language of entreaty, demand and desire. She had tried to ignore the feelings Lincoln inspired, feelings that she now felt nudging her out of sleep. Lincoln took her face in his hands and kissed her again and Jessie felt him in her arms limp with need for her.
    Most of what she knew of love had been taught in her father’s greedy, corrupt hold. So Jessie had in the weeks she had known Lincoln censored thoughts of