LITMIR.BIZ

      In the first days, there was only brief mention of the babies, and usually the press got it wrong. One paper left out Winna; another said they were mulatto twins. It was only after one paper reported that the two babies born to Elma Jesup were of decidedly different complexions that the other papers sent their reporters back, and Juke came in from the fields to invite them inside. Now that their attention was off Genus Jackson, he didn’t mind being in the papers. The babies he almost seemed to be proud of. “Ain’t no use hiding them,” he said to Elma. “Might as well grab us ahold a some fame.” Besides, it was good for business. The reporters came thick as field mice, with their folding cameras and notepads, standing shoulder to shoulder on the porch steps, wanting to take a look at the twins. They aimed their cameras over the edge of the cradle. They left with more gin, paying Juke directly now, having gotten a taste for it. This would piss George Wilson off something good, but what did it matter now? Juke had already pissed George Wilson’s pants off.

      In the weeklies Juke brought home from the crossroads store, Wilson and Winnafred were the same inky gray, bound in blankets, sleeping. But the headlines spelled it out. The one in the Atlanta paper said, GEMINI TWINS BORN TO COTTON CO. WOMAN. Elma read the articles to Juke. After a while she got tired of the papers and made up stories. “There ain’t nothing about us in this one. It’s just about the price of corn.” Then Juke wanted to know more—what was it about the price of corn? “It’s fine,” Elma said. “It’s holding steady.”

      She swore off the papers, but in a few days she was dashing down to the crossroads store to read them again, searching for some mention of the children. She couldn’t tolerate the thought of them being talked about behind her back. It was like hearing her name whispered in church and not being able to tell who’d said it.

      First of August, Elma flinched at the word “lynch” in a headline in the Testament. She hadn’t been expecting it. It was the babies she was looking for. But it wasn’t about Genus Jackson. She looked closer. An elderly Negro politician who owned forty acres in Montgomery County, sixty miles from Florence, had been flogged over the head by a mob of masked men. The men had come to his door late at night and roused him from his bed, where he had been asleep with his grandson. They put him, barely conscious, in the back of a truck, drove him to Toombs County, and left him by the side of the road. At dawn a white farmer on his way to Vidalia with a load of tobacco found the Negro in his bloody pajamas, and the Negro offered him seven dollars to be driven home, where he died of a cerebral hemorrhage.

      There was outrage in Montgomery County. The Negro was an important man. A delegate to the National Republican Convention. Secretary and treasurer of the Widows and Orphans Department of the Negro Masonic Lodge, with an office and a secretary. Recently he had run for chairman of the Montgomery County Republican Committee, and before he was elected he accused his lily-white opponents of fraud. He implied, some said, that they were poor white trash. “That’s all right,” one observer reported them saying at the convention. “We’ll see you later about that.”

      It was the second official lynching of the year, the article stated, though a July incident in Cotton County was still under scrutiny.

      Elma did not read the article to her father. She didn’t even bring home the paper, just read it standing next to the tower of cans, folded it up, and buried it back in its pile. Maybe now, she thought, the reporters would be busy in Montgomery County. She stepped out onto the porch of the store. The Coca-Cola thermometer read 96 degrees, and Elma’s collar was damp with sweat, but now her neck went cold and she shivered. She had not seen Genus’s body but now in her mind she saw the old man in Montgomery County, on the side of the road in his nightclothes, saw him there on the Twelve-Mile Straight in front of the crossroads store like a dog dead in a ditch.

      “Can I help you with that wagon?” asked Drink Simmons, half standing up from his table.

      “No, thank you.”

      “You look right peaked, Miss Elma.”

      “I’m all right, thank you kindly.”

      “You hear any word from that fiancé of yours?”

      “What are you asking after?”

      “I never took Freddie for yellow.” Drink shrugged. “I wouldn’t up and leave my woman nor my younguns, even if the law was hot on my behind.”

      Elma bumped her wagon down the steps and into the sun, and now her body flashed hot. She would not think about the man in Montgomery. It was easier to be mad. “Don’t you and your daddy have some squirrels to shoot, Drink?”