Devil on My Heels Read online

  Mr. Stone said the Klan even got General Robert E. Lee behind them. Mr. Stone seemed real proud of that fact. Although he admitted General Lee wanted his support to remain invisible, which, according to Mr. Stone, is how the Klan got nicknamed the Invisible Empire. The way I see it, if General Lee was ashamed to have his name associated with the Klan, except in secret, that doesn’t speak well for the Klan.

  Looking back, I can see Mr. Stone probably had reasons of his own for telling our class what he did. Maybe he even belonged to the Klan. Lord knows, he certainly spent a lot of time talking about Communism and how we had to be on the lookout for any suspicious folks who might be Communist spies, even our own neighbors.

  But the picture I can’t seem to get out of my head these days is the one Billy Tyler passed around in fifth grade, the picture of that poor colored man hanging from a tree.

  So for now, anyway, I have stopped asking Delia and Chase and everyone else questions about the pickers. Because the truth is, I am afraid of the answers.

  On Friday night I am sitting at my desk, staring at my open geometry book, which doesn’t seem to have anything to do with me. Monday’s math test looms out there somewhere in space, a figment of Mr. Weaver’s imagination. This is somebody else’s life I’ve accidentally stumbled into. Time feels as if it’s stretching and stretching, farther and farther—a rubber band that sooner or later is going to snap back and catch me in the face. But right now this math test doesn’t seem real. Nothing does.

  It is the roar of my dad’s truck that finally pulls me back into myself. I rush down the hall to the guest room window in time to see him heading down the dirt road to the highway.

  My skin is prickling all over. I need to know what’s going on. No matter how afraid I am of the answers.

  I race down the stairs, grab a set of keys from the row of hooks by the phone, and head outside. The black pickup is still here. Dad took the red one. Without any plan beyond finding out where he’s going, I climb into the driver’s seat. My driver’s permit is upstairs in my purse. It doesn’t matter. I am not supposed to drive without an adult in the car anyway. Either way, I’m in trouble. But I don’t much care.

  The dust kicked up from the tires of Dad’s pickup hasn’t even settled yet. It drifts back into the open windows of the truck I am driving as I tear down the road after him. My skin buzzes with a kind of tingly electricity. Like a bat zeroing in on a mosquito, I home in on Dad’s taillights, keeping enough distance between us that he won’t recognize who is behind him.

  I try to pay attention to where we’re going because I’ll have to find my way back home on my own. We pull off the county highway, go a few miles down a narrow road, then turn onto a dirt one. I know where we are. I have been coming to Fourth of July barbecues here ever since I can remember. We are heading straight for Spudder Rhodes’s ranch house. I turn off the headlights, keeping only the parking lights on. I stay as far behind Dad as possible, hoping he can’t see these dim lights in his rearview mirror. To my right is a small clearing. I pull the truck into it and park behind a thicket of saw palmetto. It probably isn’t more than another five hundred yards to Spudder’s house.

  But when I sneak up to the front yard, there is not a single car, truck, or motorcycle in sight. Only the honking bullfrogs and the buzzing cicadas remind me that I’m not home in bed dreaming all this.

  A light comes from the back of Spudder’s house. I slip across the yard to the front bay window, where I stumble over the azalea bushes and scrape the dickens out of my legs. From here I can see through the dining room to the lighted kitchen. Spudder’s wife, Nadine, is at the sink washing dishes. Or washing something, anyway. She has on bright green shorts. Her hair is wound in small wire rollers. Best I can tell, there is no one else around.

  Across from Spudder’s place, on the other side of the dirt road, is a meadow, and beyond that more woods, thick with oaks and pines. The moon is still bright enough for me to see that tire tracks have been cut through the grass in the meadow. I have never been on this side of Spudder’s property. I’m not even sure it belongs to him. But I set off across the field, keeping to the ruts, until I get to the other side. I don’t see anything but trees up ahead, not until I’m past the first few rows of dense woods and shrubs. Here the ruts suddenly bear sharply to the right, where I find another dirt road. It is hardly wide enough for a truck to get through. I can tell it’s been well traveled. The dirt is rock hard here.

  The mosquitoes are bleeding me dry. I don’t swat at them. I am afraid someone might hear the slapping sounds. My eyes sting from salty sweat. The air here is so heavy I have to struggle for each breath.

  The moonlight doesn’t reach this far into the woods. I can barely see my sneakers. It is all I can do to keep to the road. Sweat streaks down my face. It runs from my armpits along my sides. But I keep moving forward.

  A harsh glaring light suddenly bursts in front of me. I slip behind a saw palmetto, hunch down, and rub my eyes. I pray that it wasn’t a flashlight someone was shining in my face.

  In the distance I hear voices. I creep out of my hiding place and inch slowly up the road, which is now brightly lit, sticking close to the edge of the woods. And there, off to my left, attached to the top of an old telephone pole, is the biggest cross I have ever seen. Both sides of it are covered with white lightbulbs. This is where the glaring light is coming from. It’s as if somebody has adjusted the moon to concentrate all of its light right in this one spot. I don’t dare walk the rest of the way on this road. Somebody will spot me for sure.

  I keep low, making my way through the shrubs. My shorts and blouse and socks are covered with sandspurs. They sting my arms and legs. I don’t slow down. I keep following the light and the sound of voices.

  When I get to the edge of an open meadow, I hunker down behind a rotting tree trunk. Across the way, next to the telephone pole with the cross, are a pale green cinder-block building and a silver trailer, side by side. There are so many cars and trucks that I can’t even begin to count them all. They are parked in neat rows over to one side of the field.

  I want to be dreaming. I don’t want any of what is happening here to be real. Because I know in a heartbeat what this place is. This is where the Klan is meeting. Not in Alabama. Not in Mississippi. Not someplace else. It’s meeting right here in Benevolence, Florida.

  Some of the men are hanging around outside, smoking and talking, including Moss Henley and Jimmy Wheeler. This doesn’t surprise me any. If Spudder’s in the Klan, he’s not going to want anybody working with him who doesn’t see things his way. The door to the cinder-block building is open, but I can’t tell what’s going on inside. I don’t see my dad, but I know he is here. Judging from the large crowd, it looks like something big is going to happen.

  A light spills from the windows of the silver trailer. The door opens and Jacob Tully steps outside. Two other men follow behind him. One is my dad. Jacob turns around to say something to the other one. He puts his hand on the man’s shoulder, then steps away. When he does, I find myself looking straight into the face of Chase Tully.

  I dig my fingernails into the decomposing log. Bark flakes off in chunks. The exposed areas are soft, which surprises me. I bend my face close. The musty smell of decaying wood drifts up my nose. I close my eyes. Everything is buzzing and humming on different frequencies—cicadas, peepers, bullfrogs, mosquitoes, crickets—all screaming inside my head. The more I try to block out the noise, the louder the night sounds. But the voices of the men are winning. They drown out everything else. If I open my eyes, I will have to look at them. At Chase. At Dad.

  I turn away and crawl along the ground behind the shrubs, keeping the dirt road in my line of vision. I don’t look back. Sharp twigs gouge my palms and knees. I pick up more sandspurs along the way. But I don’t stop to pull them off. Their sting helps me to focus.

  When I am far enough from the blazing lightbulbs, I get to my feet and run. I run until my lungs burn, until my stomach cramps. I run
past Spudder Rhodes’s house, which is now dark. Nadine has gone to bed. I wonder if she has pulled the covers up over her head. Does she know what is happening less than a half mile from her house? Does she care?

  If I could I would keep on running forever. It isn’t until I am almost to the end of Spudder’s road that I remember I drove Dad’s truck here.

  19

  I head back to get the truck and ten minutes later I am pounding on Luellen Sutter’s apartment door. She stands there in a red satin robe, holding a comb. The hair on one side of her head is in rollers, the other side hangs wet and limp.

  “Dove Alderman?” The way she says my name tells me just how crazy it must look, my showing up at her door at this hour of the night. Somebody she knows only as one of her customers. Somebody with gritty bark under her fingernails, dirt all over her hands and knees, sandspurs stuck to her clothes and hair, and sweat dripping off her a gallon a minute. That she doesn’t slam the door in my face right on the spot is a tribute to her good manners.

  “I’m real sorry, Luellen, bothering you like this, at this hour. But I need to talk to Rosemary.”

  Luellen takes a step back. “Well, sure, then. Course you can. Come on in.” She points the comb in the direction of the kitchen table. Rosemary looks up at me from where she sits, surrounded by open books, writing something in her loose-leaf binder. She takes one look at me and is on her feet in a flash.

  “Did something happen?” She takes me by the arm, steers me into a chair at the kitchen table, and gets a bottle of RC Cola from the fridge. Luellen hasn’t moved from her post at the front door. She is probably hoping this will only take a minute or two and I’ll be heading out.

  While Rosemary, wearing an oven mitt for protection, plucks sandspurs out of my hair and off my clothes, I tell her I have a bad feeling that something is going to happen to some of the pickers. If not tonight, then sometime over the weekend.

  She doesn’t ask me how I know this. But Luellen does.

  I shake my head. Soda fizzes up my nose. I can barely swallow it. “I just do, okay?”

  Luellen backs off. She closes the front door. I guess she’s figured out I’m not leaving anytime soon.

  I ask Rosemary to drive Dad’s pickup. It will go better for both of us if we are caught. At least she has her license. Right now I’m not sure my mind would be on my driving, anyway. And Rosemary knows how to get to the migrant camp.

  On the way she tells me how Travis Waite transported a busload of Mexicans across the border into Texas last fall and then brought them to Florida. “He said he would pay their way and they could pay him back. Except most of them don’t speak English,” Rosemary says. “Travis, he tells them they can get credit at the camp store, which he owns along with the camp. He’s going to set them up just fine. Uh-huh.” Rosemary shakes her head, looking disgusted. “Only, when it comes time to pay them, he says their wages have to go to paying off their debts. He keeps the money. They never see a cent.

  “Besides what they owe him for bringing them here, he’s charging them even more than he charges the other pickers for rent and food, which is already way too much. The Mexicans, though, they don’t know the difference. The other pickers know what’s going on, but they don’t have much choice but to take what they get.

  “Gator tried to explain it to the Mexican pickers. He told them Travis has been cheating everybody for years. Not just them, the Mexicans. If Travis gets fifty cents for each box the workers pick, he maybe gives them ten or twelve cents. Keeps most of it himself. The other crew leaders aren’t much better, and some are a lot worse. Doesn’t matter whether they’re white or colored. Some of the colored crew bosses cheat their own kind too. They figure if that’s how white folks do business, then that’s just how it’s done.”

  “Gator—has he been trying to do something about Travis cheating the pickers?” I ask her.

  Rosemary misses her turn. She hits the brake and backs up the truck a few feet. She tugs at the steering wheel to get us back on course.

  “He’s been talking to some of them is all.”

  “Just talking?”

  She turns on the high beams. She doesn’t answer me. The moon has been swallowed up by dark clouds. The night is as thick as tar out here. We don’t talk the rest of the way.

  The camp is about two miles outside of Benevolence, heading northeast. It is tucked back in an open field just off the highway. Two dull, moth-cluttered spotlights shine down from a pole, spreading their dim light over the camp.

  On one side of a wide dirt road stands a row of long buildings with alternating doors and windows that puts me in mind of a barracks or a shabby motel. Even in this dim light I can see most of the paint has flaked away over the years. The tin roofs are crusted with rust. Across the way sits a bunch of small shacks. A few still have a light on inside. Some have one front door with tiny screenless windows on either side. Some just have a door. The sides are wood, with poles propping open tin flaps to let in air. Like the row buildings, they have rusty tin roofs and sit on wooden posts a few feet above the ground.

  Clotheslines stretch between the shacks, weighted down with soggy faded shirts and dungarees. Women’s underpants and bras—gray and worn—hang limp from some of the lines. I think what it must have been like the night those men came through here and set one of the clotheslines on fire. I know how scared I was the night the lightning hit our barn, and how sad and empty I felt later.

  Everywhere I look, rusted oil drums overflow with garbage. Some lie on their sides. Knocked over by dogs more than likely, or raccoons. I see something darting around one of the piles, its long wormlike tail writhing as it noses through the trash. I spot another, and another. Rats. Dozens of them. My stomach does a little flip and I look away.

  At the end of the road is a larger building. Unlike the other buildings, this one has a porch. Although it isn’t anything more than a row of boards nailed together. No roof.

  Rosemary pulls off the road and parks beside the only cinder-block building in the whole camp. For all its flaking paint and rusted tin roof, it stands like a solid fortress among crumbling ruins. “This is the camp store,” she says, which I’d already figured out.

  She points to another building a few hundred yards away by the edge of a wooded area. “Over there, that’s where the outhouses are.”

  I don’t need to look. I can smell them from where we sit.

  Rosemary climbs out of the pickup. “I’m not taking your daddy’s truck the rest of the way,” she says. “It might scare some folks.”

  I want to ask her how my dad’s truck could scare anybody, but I don’t. I’m afraid she will tell me his truck has been here before. Has maybe even carried men with torches who set people’s clothes on fire.

  I follow Rosemary. We walk close to the row buildings. I am eye-level with the windows, looking into rooms that are lit by a single naked lightbulb hanging from the ceiling. I see only some beds lining the walls and a few orange crates. Used as what? Chairs? Tables? Some have clothes piled in them.

  The whole way here I have been wondering why Rosemary has brought me along. She could just as easily have gotten word to Gator and the others on her own, which was why I came to her in the first place. But now I realize she wants me to see all this for myself. She wants me to understand what it’s like, living in this camp. Travis Waite’s camp.

  “Up ahead . . . that’s what they call the bunkhouse,” Rosemary says. “The unmarried men rent space there.” She slows her steps and looks over at me. “My daddy would skin me within an inch of my life if he knew I was over here.”

  So would mine, I’m thinking, even though my dad has never laid a hand on me.

  We walk toward the bunkhouse at the end of the dirt road. Somebody has a radio on. Jerry Lee Lewis is pounding out “Great Balls of Fire” on the piano keys. We pass a rusted Buick parked between two shacks, which seems to have been converted into somebody’s bedroom. The tires are gone. The car sits up on cinder blocks. Somebody’s
feet are sticking out the back window.

  Voices, low and anxious, drift back to us from a group of men on the porch of the bunkhouse. Rosemary pulls me over to the side of the building and lifts a finger to her lips. “Stay here,” she whispers, then disappears around the front.

  A few minutes later Rosemary’s head appears around the corner. In the dark, it looks as if it’s floating above the ground, bodiless. She signals me to come with her. When I round the corner, the men look up. I count seven of them. There is a light on inside the building, which is nothing but a big open room with rows and rows of bunk beds. The only light on the porch comes from a kerosene lantern.

  “I told them you’re here with me,” she says.

  Well, of course she did. I understand that now. I am the daughter of the enemy. I am not to be trusted.

  For the first time since we drove up to this place, I am scared. I am in a migrant camp for colored folks—a white girl, standing here in front of a bunch of Negro men who are sitting on an open porch late at night staring at me. Every terrifying, ugly story I have ever heard about colored men doing unspeakable things to white girls comes crashing down on me, and the weight of those stories almost brings me to my knees.

  Chuck Berry is belting out “Johnny B. Goode” from a black-and-white transistor radio that leans against Gator’s hip. Gator. I feel the air returning to my lungs.

  Seven dark faces are watching me. Their eyes shine like coal in the flickering light of the lantern. I recognize the two men I overheard that day in our groves, the mustache man and the barrel man. Gator looks down at me. He doesn’t bother to stand. None of them do. “Rosemary says you got something to tell us.”