Axeman's Jazz

1

EACH TIME I imagined the execution I saw it from a different perspective. First as a simple observer, then as a catalyst in the tragedy. Female then male. Once I was an officer. Next time a common foot soldier.

The sky was always lime, as just before a storm. Pine trees lined the meadow where the gallows stood. A commander — sometimes he was me — called, “Halt!” The prisoners, thirteen of them, all but two cleanly shaved, stopped in the dewy clearing, the chains around their ankles and wrists murmuring in disturbed unison, like a flock of startled birds. Their military uniforms were well-pressed and pleasing to see. A pair of them had soiled their britches; shit and fear tinged the air, along with the mulch of rotting cotton nearby. Several armed cavalrymen, following the commander’s orders, led the condemned men to two rows of folding chairs in the field’s center. The chairs were set back to back, six on one side, seven on the other.

From the perspective of a simple observer, a young woman much like myself — someone on the fringes, that is — I see the gallows’ fresh timber, flesh-colored against the green and cloudy predawn sky. (Women, of course, were officially barred from the field that day as the army dispatched its duties.)

And to be clear, when I say “flesh,” I mean my own light skin, not the boggy darkness of the men about to be hanged. In its coloration, the terrible contraption looked like me, not them.

A bonfire licked the sky’s first gold streaks. By an earlier fire’s sparks, the night before, the Army Corps of Engineers had erected the death-rig on hasty, top-secret orders. This I know from my perspective as an officer, just as I know the prisoners requested, at their trial, death by firing squad, a more dignified military exit than hanging. As I stand here swatting mosquitoes, I understand the significance of refusing the prisoners’ request, the example of lynching more than a dozen black men.

Am I uneasy with my knowledge? Is the sweat on my upper lip caused by more than humidity, stifling here in deep East Texas, even in fall, even in the hour before sunrise?

Might I be a better witness, come to a fuller understanding of these events, as an infantryman? You must know everything, a teacher once told me. So, mentally, I switch identities again, like pouring water from one cup into another. Now, standing among mesquite trees at a rough pace of twenty yards from my comrades, I see, just below a straw-covered hill, two rows of unpainted pine coffins next to thirteen open graves.

The six Mexican laborers hired by the army last night near the little river in San Antonio stand beside the crude boxes, wringing their hands. They will be asked, shortly, to untie the hangman’s knots and to bury the corpses, each with a soda water bottle in his pocket holding a paper ribbon typed with the prisoners’ names and ranks and the statement “Died September 11, 1917, at Fort Sam Houston.” As a foot soldier, just following orders myself, I suspect the Mexicans cannot read these statements and do not know where Fort Sam Houston is; but if they could decipher the words, I doubt even they would be fooled into thinking this slovenly, hidden field is anything resembling a fort.

As the prisoners sit, remarkably calm, in the folding chairs, surrounded by Sheriff John Tobin of Bexar County, seven deputies, 125 cavalrymen, two white army chaplains, and a black civilian minister, the hangman adjusts his knots. The men have refused blindfolds. They stare at the two waist-high wooden triggers, manned by twelve soldiers, where the ropes converge on the platform. Softly, one of the bound fellows drones a hymn, “I’m coming home, I’m coming home.” The others take it up with him, one by one, low and even.

Finally, the commander calls — I call — “Attention!” then I summon them, coldly (distantly, to protect myself, hunched and dyspeptic with my burdensome knowledge), to the scaffolding.

In my many varied draftings of this scene, I have never once viewed it from the prisoners’ perspective. Which of the doomed would I choose to be? I’ve recovered a name — Cletus, Cletus Hayes — from the bottom of a cardboard box in my mama’s chest of drawers. But which one is he? All accounts of that morning’s events, admittedly highly subjective, possibly wildly inaccurate, agree that only two of the men were unshaven. One of them, then: with distinguishing whiskers. To isolate him one more step, I could say he is one who shat his pants. But do I want this figure, with possible family ties to me, already disgraced by history, to be marred further by cowardly grime?

He steps forward with the others over a series of trap doors in the scaffolding, and I lose him again. It is too difficult to see, much less be, Cletus Hayes in my mind, so, as the men burst a last time into song — “Coming home, Lord, coming home!”—and the white guards from the Nineteenth Infantry yell to them, with grave sincerity, “Good-bye, Boys of Company C!” I become, again, a young, light-skinned woman — no: a white woman — standing on the fringes, watching in horror.

I am not supposed to be here, but because I may have suffered a trauma at the hands of one of the prisoners, the army, at my family’s request, has perhaps allowed a special dispensation (no orders exist confirming this), hoping the sight of punishment will restore me to myself. But as I witness the triggers’ swift arcs, the beams’ awful shudders, I want to shout, “Cletus!” both to save him and to cast him into Hell. I will never again know clearly what I want out of life, and therefore, I will never again know clearly who I am. My curse is a variety of perspectives, and I will pass it on.

The army seems as paralyzed as I am, torn between the desire to comport its duties with dignity and the need to hide its shame. As soon as the bodies are hustled down the straw-covered hill, into the steaming, unmarked graves, the Mexicans are ordered to dismantle the gallows and burn the lumber. By noon, the clearing looks as if no one had ever set foot in it, and the grassy fringe where the frightened white woman may or may not have trembled now begins to expand — not just by distance, but by years. Years of silence, uncertainty, sorrow, and lies.

This morning, I awoke from a dream of the lynching and, naked in hot sunlight, twisted in clammy sheets, wondered for a minute where I lay. Not home in my apartment in Dallas, where I would have heard my aquarium bubbling, my parrots chattering, demanding the day’s first affection. Instead, I was aware of close, rough walls, the difficulty of breathing — the scorch of each intake — and remembered: Houston. The leafy, humid sump, the Cajun-Southern-niggery mess of the neighborhood known as Freedmen’s Town.

Yesterday evening, late, when I showed up with my suitcase on Bitter’s porch, he glanced up at me, indifferently at first, then with recognition. We stood yards apart, both aware of my daylight skin next to his night-color, and said nothing for a while. He looked me over — my short, boyish hair, my slender hips — and slowly shook his head, as if sorry for my confusing physical geometry: a creature who can’t fully settle on what she really is.

Finally, I set my suitcase down on his cracked plank porch, where old honeysuckle vines, crushed and heavy and rancidly sweet, grew up between the boards, and said, “Hello.”

He rattled the ice in a Smucker’s jar of weak red tea, swatted a horsefly, and watched me wipe the sweat from my face. My very pink palm. I half expected him to pitch a story, some silly yarn out of nowhere. I’m nothing but a old mose, he used to tell me, spinning hot air and hoo-raws. The old-school patter, the uncle-jive: who he’d always been, or pretended to be. Instead, he only grinned and, with a twist of his pear-shaped head, led me around back to what he called his mud-dauber shack, an old wooden tool shed, empty now except for a mattress and sheets. The shed was clustered around, he said, with “couronnes de chene,” and I remembered, like a lantern flaring on in the middle of the night, this lovely Creole name from my childhood visits here. “Mistletoe,” I said.

He tossed melting ice from his jar into the high yellow grass. “That’s right, Seamstress. So. Some of the Bayou City did rub off on you.”

“More than you think.”

“This here’s my guest-house now, since I got need no more of my tools,” he said. “May smell like gin. Mostly buddies of mine sleeping off weekday drunks in here. You welcome to it for now. Back door of the house’ll be open when you need a john.”

“Thank you.”

“Pretty low-rent for a mayor’s girl.”

“It’s just fine. It’s more than I expected on such little notice.”

“Well. It’s late now. I’ll let you get settled. Back door’s open, too, when you ready to chat. That letter you sent, girl. It was short.”

“I know. I’m sorry. I knew you didn’t have a phone — ”

“Don’t turn this around on me.”

“I’m not. Thank you. Tomorrow? Tomorrow we’ll talk?”

“Sure, we’ll tow out the cotton whenever you ready. Don’t see nothing, don’t say nothing.” That was the way he used to tell me good-night when I was little, and I smiled.

He left me then in the dusty mud-dauber shack with only a flashlight to steer by. In the corners, sprawling, elaborate spiderwebs. Dirty-towel curtains. He wanted me to breathe “low-rent” again, to take old sharecropper dirt into my lungs. Punishment. Nostalgia. He wasn’t about to give me any of that poor-mulatta-bullshit you saw in the corny old stories or fall back praising my credentials.

As I unlatched my suitcase I remembered the word gris-gris and an afternoon when I was eight or nine, here in the yard, and Uncle Bitter instructed me in bayou lore. “Never pull down curtains from windows and doors to wash in the month of August. Sure as you hang a clean curtain back up in August, you gonna be hanging a shroud on your door ‘fore the month is done. Never kill no spiders, neither, girl. Never. That’s bad luck for a longtime.”

So, since we’re only midway through August, the spiders and towels will stay, I thought, turning back the sheets.

And that’s how I woke this morning, fresh from a hanging, surrounded by the pure good luck of crawlies and filth.

I folded yesterday’s clothes and buttoned on a new cotton blouse. A piece of red flannel was nailed to the wall above the mattress, and I wondered if this was another bit of gris-gris: some happy charm for helpless drunks, or a spell to chastise long-lost kin. I remembered more of Uncle Bitter’s magic from years ago. Dried frogs on a doorstep bring tragedy to a home. If an alligator crawls beneath your porch, it’s a sure sign of death. If a gal cheats on her man just before baking, her bread won’t rise. Bitter swore an innocent neighbor of his was beaten to death by her husband when her muffins kept failing.

“Gumbo ya-ya,” my mama used to snap whenever she’d pass through a room to find my cousin Ariyeh and me sitting in Bitter’s lap, listening to his tales. It meant, she told me once, someone who blabbed all the time.

“What you Yankee niggers know ‘bout the bayou?” he’d toss back at her.

Her light cheeks turned the color of raspberries.

It’s a measure of how place-bound my family has been that my Houston kin have always regarded Dallas, both suspiciously and with awe, as “the North.” Mama, tight-lipped, snatched me up and took me north one day, in 1974, when I was three years old. We made four or five visits back to Freedmen’s Town, all before I was ten, then never returned.

As a teenager I missed my uncle’s stories, his sweet affection for my cousin and me. He called me Seamstress — Small Woman, in his parlance — and Ariyeh, Junebug, because she was chubby and round as a child. When I slipped into my twenties, went to college, then got a job with the Dallas mayor’s office, I lost sight of “Down South,” like my childhood had all been a fever dream. A heat rash in steamy swamp-grass. I got one scribble from Uncle Bitter, on my twenty-second birthday, telling me how much it pained him that I hadn’t been to see him in so many years. It didn’t open “Dear Seamstress.” “To the mayor’s girl,” it began, and ended, “You and your mama too fine for us folk?” By then, I believed that was true; I threw the letter away. Three years passed before I finally answered him, earlier this week, saying, “I need to come down. If you can make room for me somewhere, I promise not to be a bother.”

Thinking back to last night, I count it as a good sign that he greeted me, finally, as “Seamstress.” I suspect, too, he knows why I’m really here … maybe better than I do. I’m traveling on impulse, the way Mama used to do, and — no. No. Mama never acted impulsively in her life, and neither have I. If I could believe she left here impulsively I might be more at peace with her ghost, more at ease with myself. Truth is, I think, she fled deliberately because she was determined I’d become someone else, not the girl who’d grow up here.

I pluck a toothbrush and a comb from my case, walk across the yard, tap on the back door, painted blue but peeling. No answer. “Hello?” The door creaks like a rope pulled taut as I push it open, gently. I recognize nothing in the house. The furniture I’ve always remembered as gaudy, big, but these old chairs are faded, green, and small. Rugs cross the floor, fraying, the color of exhausted dirt. The place smells of onions. On a cutting board next to the kitchen sink I find a handwritten note: “Seam — Gone to do my Sunday business. You on your own til tonite. Some of us gather round ten at Etta’s Place over on Scott Street,” and he gives me an address. “See you there if you so incline.”

His Sunday business, I recall Mama saying sadly long ago, was dominoes and bust-head in some raggedy-ass ice house somewhere. She used to fret about his drinking; he had what he called “high bloods.”

This kitchen. I remember afternoons here, the bready smell of catfish frying on the stove, a saxophone signifying from the phonograph in the living room, and Mama running a hot-comb through Ariyeh’s abundant hair. A dry, singed, old-cloth odor. I wailed, wanting the hot comb too. “Honey, you don’t need it,” Mama said. “You got that pretty hair, thin and wavy.”

“But I want to look like Ariyeh!”

Even then, I was tugging against her conception of me.

On my way to the bathroom, I pass the old Crosley and stop to inspect the records. Louis Armstrong. Leadbelly’s “Pigmeat.” I laugh, remembering how fine the blues made me feel as a girl — all tingly, and happy/sad — despite Mama’s disapproval of the music. My uncle’s real name is Ledbetter, tagged after Huddie Ledbetter, Leadbelly’s given name. I couldn’t say the word as a child. It came out “Bitter” and stuck to him.

Down the hall, in the corner bedroom I shared with Ariyeh, Uncle’s Needle Men stories whisper in my memory. The Needle Men were medical students from the Charity Hospital who roamed the streets in summer looking for bodies to practice on, “since stiffs get scarce that time of year.” Uncle explained, “All they got to do is brush by you, and bingo, you been pricked. Some kinda sleeping poison. They whisk you away to a room ‘neath the earth where they can cut on you.”

I sit on the old bed, now, recalling hot breezes through the window screens filling drapes while Ariyeh and I tried to sleep. Each sound outside — boys hurling stones at streetlamps, dogs pawing through wet newspapers, winos stumbling through weeds — became an abduction or a murder in our minds. We imagined crouched figures in green medical smocks, needles gleaming in moonlight, approaching our house. West of us, about a mile, the Southern Pacific made its midnight run; its metallic clanging was a lonely man curling his sour-egg breath through a clarinet. All over the neighborhood, children were vanishing, pricked with poison or sliced by the soft precision of a blade: in alleys and behind the markets, beside the barbershop and fireworks stands, which only opened on New Year’s, Juneteenth, and July Fourth, and so were more sacred than church. Ariyeh’s damp palm clung to mine; my nose, next to her popcorn-curly hair, opened wide with the pleasure of her sage and peppermint smell.

Nights, I remember, Mama quilted in her room down the hall: just a pencil line of lamplight beneath her bedroom door, a scrap of tune, a hiss of thread. Since she was so distant, I depended on Ariyeh to protect me, though I knew she was just as scared as I was. We stared at our open window. Later, when the air had gotten cold in the room, she sometimes jarred me awake, tussling with dreams. If her hand had slipped out of mine, I’d find it again and squeeze until she calmed, sighing back into the mattress.

Now Uncle uses this bedroom for storage. Boxes clutter the floor and the bed, some of them mildewed and webby. I rise slowly, hearing the box springs’ catlike creak. Ariyeh and I used to giggle about it in the mornings.

I freshen up now, brush my teeth. The bathroom mirror is old, coppery, and streaked; it dusts my face darker than it really is, makes me feel squirmier here than I already did. An imposter. A mistake.

So: I have the day to myself, to see how well I recall the old neighborhood, to see what I can find of Cletus Hayes, to see how much trouble I can get into asking questions about secrets Mama told me never to unearth.

My Taurus still smells of tacos, bought in Huntsville yesterday on my way down from Dallas. I kick the empty food bag under the seat and roll down my window. The streets here are narrow, old, faded bricks knuckling through cracks in the asphalt. More weed lots than I’d remembered: houses gone, rotted, bulldozed, scraped away for progress. I imagine the land here has doubled or tripled its value over the years — like a bully, downtown Houston has crept a few miles closer, gobbling up space, since I scoured these alleys as a girl looking for horned toads. Tall, glassy, air-conditioned bank buildings, mortgage firms, investment companies cast fat shadows over dilapidated row houses worth nothing compared with the rich red dirt they’re cluttering up, over heaps of wheezing washers, busted plumbing, sundered families worth even less on paper than the materials their rickety homes are rigged with.

I glimpsed Tomorrow in the news this morning, the Business section, open by chance, stained with egg yolk and orange juice, on Bitter’s kitchen table: If we could clear out two dozen houses on lots along West Gray Street, within a year we could open a strip mall that, guaranteed, would turn a healthy profit by its second biennium.

I’m amazed, then, it’s not already snowing eviction notices here, onto all the broken-glass-and-gravel lawns.

A Chicano boy bangs a stick against a mossy fire hydrant. A dog in a dirt yard licks a little girl and she licks him right back. Five or six teenage boys, like a cluster of heat-addled flies, lounge around a rusty, wheelless Cadillac, propped on cinder blocks, sharing joints and big blue cans of malt liquor. Now I am nostalgic for my childhood.

Shit man you got that you fucking got that, they say. They say, That’s all-reet ‘bout that ol’ shit man. Slapping hands. Yeah you got that slick I reckon you got that shit stone cold.

They stop and watch me in my new purple car, and I imagine them thinking: White bitch. What her fucking business here?

Look again, I want to shout.

Instead, I give it the gas.

Of course, it wasn’t in Freedmen’s Town — “Niggertown,” even we used to call it — where Cletus Hayes sealed his fate. I check a city map. Reinerman Street, Washington Road. Lillian. Rose. San Felipe. The heart of the riot. All west of here.

In the summer of 1917, Reinerman Street was in a nice white part of town by Camp Logan, a U.S. Army base. The camp had just made room for the Twenty-fourth Infantry, Third Battalion, an all-black unit exhausted from chasing, in vain, Pancho Villa through northern Mexico. The black soldiers were posted on a woody lot, surrounded by a barbed wire fence, about three miles from Logan and the white soldiers there. They were charged with protecting army property. A drainage ditch separated the regiment from Reinerman Street; a Southern Pacific Railroad track isolated it from even more expensive neighborhoods.

Few history books dwell on the movements of black military units, most of which were formed just after the Civil War; from monographs I first studied in school, I’ve learned that the army preferred to station black troops away from heavy population centers, stateside — far from white folks in the cities. But the Twenty-fourth, despite its failure with Villa, had shown uncommon valor and courage in the field. Prior to their Mexican engagement, the troops had fought bravely in the Philippines. Posted to San Francisco in 1915, the forces’ provost guards so impressed the police chief, he tried to hire several of them. These were “good boys,” so no one expected trouble when they arrived in Houston, an unusually courteous place as Southern communities went.

That summer in the Bayou City, as elsewhere, scores of white families were anguished at seeing their sons conscripted into the service and shipped to the widening war in Europe. The sight of any soldier must have rattled them. Local politics were rawer than usual then — patriotic fervor stirred the soup on every level — while the days lengthened, grew steamier, more humid, lifting indolence and anger closer to the surface of everyone’s life.

Now, I park my car near a bike path winding into a neat, managed oak grove. Nearly eighty years after the events I’ve returned here hoping to plumb, this part of town is still nice and white. Paved. Well-trimmed. The streets have been swept and a sweet smell of late-season honeysuckle zizzles the air. Couples picnic in the grass. A toddler chases a pigeon. I push through brambles, deeper into shade.

No traces remain of Camp Logan. Following the First World War, the base served as a convalescent center, then it was dismantled. In the twenties, a wealthy, English-born music teacher gave millions to the city to turn the vacant land into a memorial for soldiers who’d paid the ultimate price. She had lived for a time near the base, rented rooms to soldiers’ wives, played golf with them on the camp course, and had come to love the woodlands there (I imagine her as the type of person my mama always wanted to be, refined, respected, dignified, and quietly remote).

Eventually, bridle trails crossed Memorial Park; a polo club opened; no doughboy or doughboy’s wife could afford to go near it. In my duties for the Dallas mayor’s office, I’ve learned a lot about Houston. The two cities often compare themselves, competing in sports, finance, real estate. Several (white) lawyers jog in Memorial Park. Wealthy singles convene here, plumed in spandex, hoping to find True Love, or at least a love that will support them in the manner to which they’re accustomed.

The ghosts of the old Twenty-fourth remain, now, only in the wind huffing through all the soft magnolia leaves.

Across the street, wood-trimmed brick homes murmur with TV baseball. Lawn mowers buzz, barbecue sauce spices the breeze … what didn’t Mama like here?

I used to wonder why the city would place an army base so near a residential neighborhood. But the military was universally respected in those days (I’m what my stepdaddy calls a “cynical, post-’Nam babe”). Houston looked at World War I and saw a rainbow; it was the country’s largest cotton port and stood to reap a bundle from the feds.

Texas’s Anti-Saloon League recognized that young recruits might get rowdy from time to time and convinced lawmakers to establish a five-mile zone around all military installations, banning bars and bawdy houses. Citizens referred to these areas as white zones, long before the Twenty-fourth arrived.

Initially, the battalion settled peacefully into Houston. The city’s “colored population,” as it called itself then, hailed them as heroes. Businessmen welcomed the army’s money. From court records following the riot, I have testimony from a well-to-do widow who lived by the base. “I didn’t want those niggers tromping through my yard on their way into town, scattering all my chickens,” she said, “so I decided to make friends with them right away. Baked bread for some of the boys, let them use my kitchen phone now and then. I didn’t much like them — didn’t like the way they smelled — but I figured cordiality was the best policy.” So, through cordial, gritted teeth — the Southern way — the camp’s immediate neighbors accepted the “dark guard,” at first.

Most of the soldiers had never served in the South, had never been so intimate with Jim Crow, even on his best behavior. Right away, they resented the city’s streetcar conductors, who expected them to stand at the back of the cars. They resented the stares they got from white workmen at Camp Logan. They resented water coolers in their own camp, roped off and labeled WHITE for construction workers, GUARD for the troops. Cops on the beat, noting the newcomers’ attitude, began to mutter, “I never …,” started to whisper, “Uppity.”

By most accounts, on the night of the riot, August 23, fifteen black soldiers, ignoring their white commanders’ pleas, armed with Springfield rifles and ammunition pilfered from the post’s storage lockers, marched down Washington Road toward the streetcar loop. They opened fire on a jitney, killing the driver, severely wounding a passenger.

Over a hundred other troops, led by a previously exemplary sergeant named Vida Henry, avoided Washington Road’s bright lights, sticking instead to the smaller streets, Lillian and Rose, crossing Buffalo Bayou into the San Felipe district. They shot randomly into the dark in these usually quiet white neighborhoods. Two hours later, when the mutiny petered out, twenty people lay dead or dying in the streets.

Apparently, the whole thing had flared around the rumor that a pair of Houston cops had killed a Corporal Charles Baltimore of the Third Battalion. Later, he turned up in camp, beaten and bloody, but alive. More to the point, several weeks of “uppity” anger had broken free at last.

Court records show that Cletus Hayes, a young private, was captured neither on Washington Road nor the other rioters’ paths. He wound up near dawn, by himself, on Reinerman Street.

I walk there now. This block is not so well-appointed as its neighbors. A failed flower shop, dry and cracked, drops light orange paint flakes onto the grass next to Brock’s Combo Burger #2 and a row of modest homes. As a former history major, I can’t help but imagine the births and deaths, the tilled soil, the spilled blood on this spot, all so Brock can make a profit, now, off his fatty foods. The march of progress. Onions in the air.

Slack wire frames a vegetable garden by a sagging wooden home. The house is painted yellow. Corn wilts in the hard soil. I recall the court transcripts, following the riot: “Defendant accosted the young lady, Sarah Morgan, in her mother’s garden.” But over five hundred pages detailing this single incident fail to explain the woman’s presence among the cabbage at four o’clock in the morning.

That particular garden is gone; this yellow house, like those around it, dates from the thirties, no earlier. An accurate picture of the neighborhood as it appeared in the summer of’17 is impossible now.

But this might as well be the place. The Morgan home had to be near here. If Private Hayes had been hiding that night near the bayou, as MPs later claimed, then he would have approached this block from the southeast, up Oak Street or Pine, past the spot where a pimpled high school kid flips burgers now in Brock’s cockroachy kitchen.

Sergeant Vida Henry, the riot’s leader, shot himself by the bayou at around 2:05 A.M., several hours after the uprising ended. Private Hayes never denied accompanying him, though he claimed at the trial he’d never raised his weapon. Realistically speaking — if nothing else, peer pressure would have been irresistible — he’d probably shot out a window or two, shattered some white woman’s crystal lamp as she crocheted in her den.

If only I could see wholly from his perspective, slip past the surface details I’ve gathered and melt into the man … his strategies, hopes, rages — at whites? Women? White women?

Standing at the garden’s edge, I concentrate so hard my head hurts in the swirling afternoon heat. I try to lose myself, pour my ego from one container into another …

If I were Cletus Hayes that night, what would I do? I’d chuck my rifle, my cap, even my coat, so in the dark, in the swift sweep of headlights, I might not be recognized as a gunner. I’d stick to alleys and narrow paths between homes. I’d want to return to camp as soon as possible — to claim, perhaps, I’d never left my bunk. I wouldn’t dawdle — why would I dawdle? — in a wide-open vegetable garden in an all-white neighborhood.

Am I dumb? Impulsive? Arrogant? Who the hell am I?

Car horns blare by the burger joint. I open my eyes. Why do I care? Why go to all this trouble to snatch a ghost? Because, for some time now, I’ve suspected my origins are linked with his … but that’s an abstraction, no realer than believing the Founding Fathers had me in mind when they formed this nation. No realer than the Needle Men.

But maybe Cletus is my hoo-raw: a spirit dragging life and death behind him, like a wedding car’s clattery tin cans; a breath from the past who could fill my present if only I can inspirit him, inhabit him … so I shut my eyes … take up his uniform …

… and slink like a scarecrow down Reinerman Street, shivering, rank with dirty bayou water. I hear sirens south of here where several white-owned businesses — the Ruby Café, Claude’s Coffee Shop, Jack’s Fine Shoes — flatten in flames. Gunshots echo in the dark. No lights illuminate the homes. I pick my way past small magnolia trees, Fords big as buffaloes parked in narrow drives, wooden porches large as gallows, until I come to a neat, clear patch staked out in Bermuda grass. There — waiting for me? — among cabbages, tomato vines, and yellow-tipped cucumbers, a young lady in a blue cotton dress.

Then I lose him again. My perspective shifts to this other family ghost. Sarah Morgan, whose father has fallen on hard times. He’s lost his cotton farm — hard to manage in this glorious war boom — and moved with his wife and child to the city. Sarah stands there among the scorched, growing things, watching the young colored man, wary, exhausted, approach.

She is my great-grandmother, and I know as little about her as I do about him. I know her family was reckless with money (“Foreclosed, First City National Bank, 8/21/16”). I know her father, like his old man, mourned the loss of slavery (“The darkies were happier then — just ask them”: signed editorial, Houston Post, 5/8/15). But Sarah? I know, from the transcripts, she wore a blue dress in the early morning hours of August 24, 1917, shivering in her mother’s garden. She was twenty-five years old, living at home with her parents. Unmarried. Plain? Ugly? I have no photographs, no detailed description. I do have a handwritten letter, signed C, addressed to Sarah, found among my mama’s things the week she died. C thought Sarah “exquisite, like mist in a cornfield early in the morning.”

Private Hayes denied accosting the young lady. There were no witnesses, only the emotional testimonies of Sarah Morgan’s folks, with references to a ripped dress and the rhetorical question, “What else could have happened?” In over five hundred pages, the young lady herself remains mysteriously silent: a special dispensation from the court, perhaps. (Repeatedly, others describe her as nervous.)

So I am left with the moment itself. The early-morning garden, trembling with the breath of innocence and the possibility of a fall. The nervous young woman, dressed as if for church. And the army private, dark as the neighborhood soil, grimed with Houston’s muck. They meet to the distant sound of gunfire, a city coming apart.

The court finds him guilty and sentences him to be hanged by the neck until he is dead, along with twelve other mutinous souls. But more and more in my mind — since Mama’s death and my discoveries in her lint-filled chest of drawers — he merely reaches out to touch her sleeve, to stroke the wrist he has stroked so many times before.

Does she pull back? Does she welcome his gesture? Does she know, even now, this meeting will lead to an unhappy dawn, a hidden grassy fringe, her confused shout as the gallows’ triggers roar back and ropes tighten like cramping muscles?

An old woman shoves her screen door open, now, and stands, wearing a floured apron, on the yellow house’s porch. She squints at me, crouching in her garden. “Hello? Can I help you, young lady?”

I rise, brushing my pants. Brock’s Combo Burger burps harsh, sizzling sounds through its window screens. Jukebox guitars: lost love, country-style. Pickles and mustard. Something sour.

“No, thank you,” I call across the yard. “I was just admiring your peppers.”

She frowns.

I leave, knowing what Cletus Hayes must have felt many times. Harried. Undesired. But wearing my privileged skin, I can pass through town in ways he never could. I return to my car, moving with the confidence of someone secure behind a mask. I pull into the nice wide streets and vanish into the anonymous safety of white drivers going shopping or hauling their kids out to play in the parks.

On Allen Parkway, heading back to Freedmen’s Town, I pass row after charred row of neglected public housing. Neglect is the easiest form of eviction. Eventually, folks will move out on their own, worried for their children’s health (here, it appears to be mostly single black mothers and Vietnamese refugees). Then the land can be developed. It’s a little trick I’ve seen often since going to work for the mayor.

Kids’ bikes rust in glass-toothed parking lots, dogs nose through mounds of shoes, abandoned baby clothes, Burger King bags. Empty gas cans, stuffed with rags, rust among sticker burrs, as if arson were as natural as shooting hoops. A way to pass the day.

Around the block, a SWAT team, stealthy as an army, busts up a confab on a pitted volleyball court. Right out in the open, eight or nine teens, cuffed and forced to their knees. Down the street, nine- or ten-year-olds, signifying, mill around a liquor store. Shit man your nappy haid done been hit by a hurrican’. Like a ol’ rubber in the gutter, man, like your mama’s funky ol’ Milk Dud drawers. Facts is facts, they hard as rocks, your mama’s got a pussy like a Cracker Jacks box. I speed on by, then exit the parkway.

The part of Freedmen’s Town I knew best as a girl curls around a cemetery dating back to slavery times, the Magnolia Blossom, on South Ruthven Street. Uncle Bitter’s house sits across the alley from it, with the AME Church just down the block. Bitter used to tell me his grave was already waiting for him, roomy and fresh, but I didn’t believe him. Visiting, I’d sit against the warm old stones on summer days, reading, coloring, or playing with my dolls.

I park my car now in front of the house, grab my bag, and head for the boneyard. Afternoon services are just beginning at the church. Voices rise to the sky. Hallelujahs and praised-bes. I settle by a tomb so ancient and worn, the only legible date is “18—.” Baby’s breath blooms, early, in the grass nearby: a soft, white smell. Through tree shade I see what remains, across the road, of some of the first homes built by ex-slaves here after the Civil War. Two-by-fours weak as cardboard, pressed by years of wind and rain into the ground; shingles like marked cards, forgotten by a tarred-and-feathered gambler. Sunlight warms my shoulders. A bit of a tan wouldn’t hurt, I think and laugh a quiet, rueful laugh.

Three weeks ago I found in Mama’s things, along with C’s letter to Sarah Morgan, a yellowed copy of the Crisis, the official publication of the NAACP, dated July 25, 1917—about a month before the Houston riot. I pull it from my bag now. What better place than a field of ghosts to read the words of the dead?

On the journal’s second page, circled in pencil, a letter appears from Private Cletus Hayes, Twenty-fourth Infantry, Third Battalion, praising the Crisis editor, W. E. B. Du Bois, for his “noble fight for manhood rights for our people.” He closes with a promise that the “entire enlisted command of the Twenty-fourth Infantry is ready to aid you in any way.”

The phrase “manhood rights” also occurs in the personal letter: “We troops are asked to defend the United States’ interests abroad, when very often we are denied our manhood rights here at home. But oh my dear Sarah, when I think of your vitality, your loveliness, and your understanding, I know what I am fighting for.”

Standard wartime sentiments. But the near-certainty that C was the Cletus Hayes praising Du Bois in the Crisis, the same man later hanged for mutiny, rioting, and rape, makes his gesture toward Sarah Morgan anything but common.

Why did Mama keep these things if she wasn’t going to talk to me about them? And she wouldn’t orate, ever, on anything significant. Once, when I asked her why we’d left Houston, she looked at me, said, “Sometimes you come to a crossroads,” and refused to say any more.

Am I obsessed with Cletus Hayes because she was so mum about him? Sometimes, I see my search for him as defiance, but also, since her death, as a way of snuggling closer to her. Wearing her perspective as if it were a hand-me-down.

I fold the Crisis back into my bag. It’s not an Alex Haley thing, this scrabbling after roots, though I am hoping Bitter can fill me in on Daddy as well as Cletus Hayes.

It’s more like this story I read in college. A man fasts to astonish paying crowds. Abstinence is not a skill so much as the curse of his life. As he’s dying, he admits, “If I could have found food I liked, I would gladly have eaten.” Somehow, I felt the truth of that line in my skin. Nothing I was supposed to like was giving me any nourishment. And so — what? I find myself back in Houston, looking for palatable old recipes? Well, but it’s not that simple.

In Dante’s Hell — another outlook I ran across in college — damnation is a constant lapsing backward, repeating one’s sins. Swimming against the current, never getting things right: I understood that too. But my family’s original sin, the start of the cycle: Cletus, Daddy, Mama. It had to do with them.

Else, why would Mama have fled?

I need to know it, nail it — whatever it is — so I can shut the fucker down. “Everybody has a buried story,” my teacher told me, the one who assigned Dante and Kafka. The one who told me, You must know everything. “And everyone’s purpose in life, no matter how foolhardy their attempts may be, is to be heard.”

Down the street, the church is humming now with the preacher’s calls to witness. I been sanctified, Lord, and offer up a joyful noise in Your name, amen! Sometime I get to ‘membering the slothful sinner I surely usta could be, and FALL on my knees, Lord, humble before Thee, handing up my soul, amen! Touch me with your flame, amen! Take my tongue and teach your grace through me. Enlist me in your mighty army, Lord, amen!

In the testimonies, I hear blues rhythms, the pacing of Uncle Bitter’s hoo-raws, the gumbo-okra lilt of the Deep South, Louisiana, Africa, and the Caribbean, our misty ancestral sources. I’m a rampaging, devil-dousing soldier for Christ, amen! I hear the music of my childhood — music that, like the blues, Mama worked to drum from my head. I was sixteen the last time I set foot in a church — the day Mama married a Dallas lawyer. By then, we were living in a perfect, all-white world, and I was, on the surface, a perfect, all-white girl. My skin was twice as pale as Mama’s. I could waltz into any public place, in any part of town. My mop had thickened by then — I no longer had that “pretty hair”—and so, for both of us, to maintain the mask, Mama kept the bathroom stocked with Frizz-Away: “Deluxe Hair-Straightener — No Lye, No Muss, No Fuss!”

I’m a salesman for my Lord, stepping door to door with a surefire sin-cleaner. Its name ain’t Hoover. Its name ain’t General ‘Lectric. No sir. It’s Jesus Christ, amen! He’ll leave you sparkle-plenty!

Last month, when the breast cancer finally carried Mama home, I refused her Methodist church, her lawyer-husband (“You’re her daughter, you should be here!”), everything but the parched north Dallas graveyard once she’d been laid to rest. I visited late one evening, alone, carrying a sorry, paper-wrapped rose from a nearby Safeway. Her stone was simple, just her name, fitting a taciturn woman. But her last words to me rapped like a faulty pipe in my mind: “I’ve tried to be a good woman, Telisha. God spare me! God spare me from Hell!”

What was it she was afraid to repeat? And why? And how did her trap become my own? For surely that’s part of my story, too.

She left for me her perfect world, darkened only by the whispered admission, years ago, that my great-grandmother, Sarah Morgan, was once attacked by a black man and never recovered. All the rest I’ve stumbled over, as through neighborhood debris, on my own.

Still no witness to my daddy. Nothing to tell me, directly, who I am. So I keep spinning from one perspective to the next.

One day I’ll be coming on home, Lord, coming on home —

I left the rose on Mama’s grave and determined to return to Freedmen’s Town. Or at least, her passing is one of my reasons — my most conscious excuse — for coming back. Now, I zip my bag up tight. No matter what I find here, probably my life won’t change. Even if I alter my thinking, I won’t be any more, or less, welcomed anywhere I go.

So why the hell am I here?

My legs tingle, nearly asleep. I shake them out, stroll the alley behind my uncle’s house, where Ariyeh and I used to prowl with empty shoe boxes, hoping to catch lizards and horned toads for Bitter to use in his spells. He’d slip the boxes from us, bend to hear the creatures’ scratchings, mumble some gris-gris, then tell us to set our prisoners free. He didn’t need their bodies, he said. “I drawed their spirits clean out of their skins, see. Now I hold the power in my fingers!”

The alley smells of gin, spaghetti sauce, and urine, the way it always did, and I long to see Ariyeh again, to laugh with her, run with her through drippy bayou heat, past vacant lots where the first freedmen here sharecropped and sang. I wonder if she’ll be at Etta’s tonight with Bitter and his pals? What will Etta’s look like? I’ve never been inside an ice house.

Someone in the church takes up a mouth harp, wheezes a plea to God. I remember my confusion, as a child, listening to the spirituals — Lawd, Lawd, oh yes my Lawd — then walking home from Sunday school with Ariyeh, past the railroad tracks, hearing the winos whistle and yell at us, “Oh Lawd! Oh yeah! Gonna be fine someday!” What was the difference between the sacred and the old men’s wolf calls? Is this what Bitter meant when he said, “The world sure does love a nigger joke. Always playing tricks on us.”

The church melody evokes for me lonely soldiers in a field, squatting around a campfire, stuffing their backpacks with gris-gris — frog legs, dried scorpion claws — to give them luck in battle. For a moment, as I stand dazed in a mosquito swarm in the alley, I can almost walk up to Cletus Hayes, in my mind. I can almost see his face. Then: the mad red welt around his neck.

The church thunders with voices, mouth harp, tambourine, sharp guitar. Laughing and clapping. I wipe the sweat from my face. My very pink palm. There’s a train acoming, Lord, and I’m gointer be on it! I know these people. Yet I don’t. I’m hoboing my way to Heb’n! They are making a joyful noise, and keeping Death at bay.