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.