Mississippi Bridge Read online

  “Nigger!” he hollered at Josias. “Ain’t I done tole you to get off this bus?”

  “Y-yes, suh. But I—I done paid my money . . .”

  “You get it back.”

  “Y-yes, suh, but I . . . I gots to go on this bus! I gots to go today!”

  “What for?”

  “I . . . I got business,” acclaimed Josias. “I got awful ’portant business.”

  The driver, he laughed. “Onliest important business I done ever know’d a nigger to have is with a jug of liquor or some gal. Which one waitin’ on you, boy?”

  Josias ain’t answered. He just done sat there on that backseat, his head hung all low. I know’d how come he wanted to go so bad, but I know’d too, he couldn’t tell that bus driver how come. Wouldn’t have made no difference anyways, I reckon.

  “’Ey, boy, you hear me talkin’ t’ ya?” Josias, he reared up his head. “What business ya got?”

  Josias stood. He picked up his bundle of clothes and he give up his seat. He took himself some slow steps to the front of the bus. I moved over to the door waiting to say my spell to him, but he still ain’t got off. He stopped hisself right front of that driver and he gone to pleading. “Please, boss . . . I got to get to the Trace t’day. Please, boss. I done got my ticket. I done made all my plans. Folks spectin’ me. I gots t’ go on this bus!”

  “Nigger, I said you gettin’ off.”

  “Boss, please . . .”

  That bus driver, he ain’t give Josias chance to say no more. He jerked Josias forward to the door, put his foot flat to Josias’s backside, and give him a push like Josias wasn’t no more ’n a piece of baggage, and Josias, he gone sprawling down them steps into the mud. The bus driver, he throw’d Josias’s bundle after him, his ticket money too. I ain’t know’d what to say. Josias, he done looked at me, then he picked hisself up. He picked up his bundle and his money and walked away, back toward the bridge. “Josias!” I called. “Wait on up a minute, will ya? Josias!”

  I run after him but Josias, he ain’t stopped.

  “Josias! I’m right sorry! Sorry ’bout you can’t go on that bus! Josias, ya hear me . . . ?”

  He stopped now and looked back at me. I stopped too. “Well, that’s jus’ the way, ain’t it?” he done said.

  I nodded that it was and he gone on, and I just stood there staring after him. I was staring so hard on him I ain’t heard Pa coming. Next thing I know’d, Pa was all over me. Pa could hit ya’ blind from any side and he done got me good this time.

  “Pa!” I yelped.

  “Ain’t I done told you ’bout snivelin’ after niggers?”

  “But, Pa, I wasn’t—”

  He struck me again. “Don’t you backlip me!” He boxed my ears good.

  “No, suh, Pa.”

  “Now you leave off being so friendly with these niggers, ya hear me? They got they place in this world and we got our’n and they place ain’t ’long ’side us ’cause they ain’t the same as us. You understand me, boy?”

  I hung my head and took to studying my feet. “Y-yes, suh, Pa.” But that wasn’t the truth. I ain’t understood. No, suh, I sure ain’t. I liked that boy Stacey and that girl Cassie and little ole Christopher-John and Little Man. I liked Josias too. But I ain’t told Pa that. To me, folks was just folks, but Pa he jus’ ain’t stood for no wrong way of thinking, so I ain’t spoke up.

  Pa gone on back into the store, and I looked up from studying my feet. I looked back at the store, then up toward the bridge. The fog was so thick I couldn’t see the bridge or Josias, but I run for them anyway. Soon’s I figured I was out of Pa’s hearing, I started to calling Josias. I know’d he was there up ahead and I know’d he heard me, but he ain’t waited for me and he ain’t answered. I ain’t give up though. I kept on running.

  Then I heard the bus. I looked back, done seen its lights coming, and I jumped out the way onto the bank at the side of the road. That ole bus it passed and I jumped right on back down again and gone speeding after it. The bus headed on to the bridge. I done too. I ran, ready to bust my whole heart out trying to catch up with Josias. I run like a lightnin’ strike.

  I got to the bridge, and I got to tiring. My ole feet just couldn’t seem to pick theyselves up and flatten down one more time. I couldn’t see Josias, but I could see that bus shooting ’cross the bridge like it was scairt something was ’bout to catch up with it. I put all my mind to moving my feet, to racing that bus, but the bus it broke clean away from me. It gone too fast, I reckon, ’cause it wasn’t half across when it spun out crazy, zigging and zagging on them rotten planks, then zinged off like a bullet into the railing, smashed through it, and shot straight down into the waters of the Rosa Lee.

  I ran toward the broken railing. Josias, he come through the fog, back from the other way. Josias, he done caught me as I run up ’cause I was flying now and he hadn’t’ve caught me, I’d’ve gone over into that water too. Josias held me and we stood there staring off that broken rail with the rain pounding down on us. The bus was all bellied up like a dead catfish and was sinking fast. Then I thought of Miz Hattie and Grace-Anne, and I screamed. “Josias! All them folks! Josias! They gonna die!”

  Josias, he put his hands on my shoulders and calmed me down, made me remember I was a man. “Now, Jeremy, you go on back t’ that store,” he said. “You go right now, ya hear? Get your pa, your brothers, ever’body else ya can! Tell ’em the bus done gone off the bridge!”

  “But Miz Hattie and Grace-Anne, Josias—”

  “I see to ’em. I’m gon’ go right on down t’ see ’bout ’em all. Now you run, boy! You run fast now!”

  I wasn’t hardly in my right mind when I nodded that I would, but somehow my legs done straightened out and Josias done pushed me away from him, and I gone sprinting back across that bridge and over that slop of a road. I weren’t tired no more, but I was plenty scairt. ’Fore I run all the way down to the store, I looked back to the bridge. There was a break in the fog, but I couldn’t see Josias. He had already slipped into the water. I run on and gone to hollering, “Pa! The bus done gone off the bridge! Pa! Pa! Come quick, Pa! The bus done gone off the bridge!”

  What with all the rain beating down, ain’t nobody heard me till I got on the porch and stormed inside, and Pa, he ain’t looked too pleased with me. He squinted his eyes and barked: “Boy, what kinda ruckus you carryin’ on?”

  Another time, I’d’ve gone to stammering, but wasn’t no time for stammering now. “Pa, come quick!” I shouted loud and I shouted hard. “The bus, it done gone off the bridge! I seen it, Pa! Jus’ now! I seen it!”

  “Oh, Lord!” exclaimed Mr. John Wallace. “Ya sure? Ya ain’t funnin’ now, boy, is ya?”

  “I seen it, Mr. John!” I screamed back. “Me and Josias, we both done seen it!”

  The men ain’t waited no longer. They all jumped up and run outside for the bridge. I was near to out of breath, but I ain’t took me no time to rest. I shot down that road right with them and I ain’t slowed down. We come to the bridge, and Pa and Mr. Wallace, R.W. and Melvin and the other grown-up folks, they run straight for where the bus gone off. The railing, course it was gone and all there was left was a big open space. The men, they gone for that hole and stopped just short of going off theyselves into the water. They all stood there like they ain’t ’spected to see that bus, but it was right there. I ain’t lied. Then Pa, he took charge. “Melvin, R.W.! Y’all go the west bank! Rest of us, we take the east!”

  My brothers and all the other men, they done obeyed his words quick! And quick as spit, they gone to running. But ’fore Pa gone into the waters, he looked back at me. “Jeremy, boy!” he yelled. “You go on up t’ the church there and ring that bell! Ring it loud, ya hear me? Ring it so’s everybody round’ll hear! Ring it so’s folks’ll come!”

  “Yes, suh, Pa!” I promised, and he gone into the water.

  I started to do like Pa said, but then I seen Stacey and them come running onto the bridge, back from delivering their milk. Th
ey ran right to that busted rail, and they was hollering, “What happened? What done happened?” Then they seen the bus and they screamed. “Big Maaaa!”

  I run right over. “She all right!” I cried. “Your grandmama, she fine! She gone on home!”

  They looked like they ain’t believed me.

  “But . . . but she was on that bus,” said Stacey.

  I shook my head. “Naw . . . naw, Stacey, she wasn’t.”

  “She was so too on that bus!” Cassie, she screamed back.

  “Naw . . .” I looked at them feeling right ashamed to tell them what happened, but I done it. “Wasn’t . . . wasn’t ’nough room for everybody, and the bus driver, he . . . he done made all the colored folks get off. Your grandmama, Josias, Rudine, and her mama, they all got off.”

  The four of them just stood there staring at me, as if they couldn’t trust my words.

  “What? Y’all don’t believe me?” I said. “I wouldn’t lie to y’all! ’Specially not ’bout somethin’ like this! Josias, he down there, ask him y’all don’t believe me! Ask Josias! He was headin’ back to home when that bus gone over and he down there now pullin’ folks out! Y’all don’t believe me, just y’all ask him!”

  Stacey looked over the bridge. The fog had drifted back and there was no sign of Josias. He looked at me again, then he said, real quiet-like, “Come on. We goin’ home.”

  “But, Stacey, Big Ma—” started Cassie.

  Stacey’s eyes were set right on me. “She at home,” he said, and I know’d he believed me. Then, without another word, he took off streaking down the bridge and Cassie, Christopher-John, and Little Man, they was right behind him, running hard as they could for home. I started to follow after ’cause the church was back up that way, but then the fog shifted and I seen Josias come out of the water and he was carrying a small bundle that looked like it wasn’t no more than a wet doll with sunshine hair, and I ain’t moved. He laid his bundle down on the bank, real gentle-like. He laid it right down next to a still, white body with a summer-sky-blue hat pinned to its hair. He laid it right next side to Miz Hattie.

  “Josias!” I screamed, and he looked up to the bridge and me standing there. Then I run down from the bridge, shrieking to the heaven above. “Miz Hattie! Miz Hattie! Grace-Anne!” I run right for them bodies lying so still and unmoving on the bank. Josias, though, he caught up with me before I got to them.

  “Hold on there, boy,” he said. “Hold on.”

  “Josias, they ain’t . . . they ain’t—”

  “Yes, suh, boy . . . they is.”

  I shook my head and looked up at him. “But how come, Josias? How come?”

  Josias, he shook his head too and he give a mighty sigh. “Ain’t for me t’ know. Can’t go questionin’ the ways of the Lord. Onliest thing I know is that the good book, it say the Lord He work in mighty mysterious ways.”

  “But, Josias—”

  “Jeremy!”

  I looked to the other side of the water. It was Pa.

  “Ain’t you gone yet?” he hollered. “I said go ring that bell! Now, get!”

  I looked up at Josias. He patted my shoulder and said real soft-like, “Go on, boy. Go on and ring the bell.”

  I glanced again at Miz Hattie and Grace-Anne, again at Josias, and I turned and I ran back up the bank to the road. I ran down past the store, ran down toward the school of Jefferson Davis and the church. The rain was beating hard on me now and I was glad of it, ’cause I was crying hard too. Weren’t much difference between rain and tears, and I ain’t needed to wipe neither one away. I run straight up to the church, straight up to the belfry and I rung that bell, rung that bell as hard as I could, and all the while I was crying ’cause I couldn’t understand nothing about the day, about how come Miz Hattie and Grace-Anne was on that bus, and Josias, and Stacey’s and them’s grandmama and Rudine and her mama wasn’t. Mysterious ways, Josias done said. Well, if the Lord was punishing, how come Grace-Anne and Miz Hattie? They ain’t hurt nobody.

  I rung that bell till I figured I couldn’t ring it no more, then as folks started coming in answer to the bell, I run with them back to the Rosa Lee. Josias was still there, hauling folks out. I gone down to the bank, took one more look at Miz Hattie and Grace-Anne, then I gone to join Josias. I slipped into the water and give him a hand.

  Me and Josias, we was there all the day.

  Text copyright © 1976 by Mildred D. Taylor

  1

  “Little Man, would you come on? You keep it up and you’re gonna make us late.”

  My youngest brother paid no attention to me. Grasping more firmly his newspaper-wrapped notebook and his tin-can lunch of cornbread and oil sausages, he continued to concentrate on the dusty road. He lagged several feet behind my other brothers, Stacey and Christopher-John, and me, attempting to keep the rusty Mississippi dust from swelling with each step and drifting back upon his shiny black shoes and the cuffs of his corduroy pants by lifting each foot high before setting it gently down again. Always meticulously neat, six-year-old Little Man never allowed dirt or tears or stains to mar anything he owned. Today was no exception.

  “You keep it up and make us late for school, Mama’s gonna wear you out,” I threatened, pulling with exasperation at the high collar of the Sunday dress Mama had made me wear for the first day of school—as if that event were something special. It seemed to me that showing up at school at all on a bright August-like October morning made for running the cool forest trails and wading barefoot in the forest pond was concession enough; Sunday clothing was asking too much. Christopher-John and Stacey were not too pleased about the clothing or school either. Only Little Man, just beginning his school career, found the prospects of both intriguing.

  “Y’all go ahead and get dirty if y’all wanna,” he replied without even looking up from his studied steps. “Me, I’m gonna stay clean.”

  “I betcha Mama’s gonna ‘clean’ you, you keep it up,” I grumbled.

  “Ah, Cassie, leave him be,” Stacey admonished, frowning and kicking testily at the road.

  “I ain’t said nothing but—”

  Stacey cut me a wicked look and I grew silent. His disposition had been irritatingly sour lately. If I hadn’t known the cause of it, I could have forgotten very easily that he was, at twelve, bigger than I, and that I had promised Mama to arrive at school looking clean and ladylike. “Shoot,” I mumbled finally, unable to restrain myself from further comment, “it ain’t my fault you gotta be in Mama’s class this year.”

  Stacey’s frown deepened and he jammed his fists into his pockets, but said nothing.

  Christopher-John, walking between Stacey and me, glanced uneasily at both of us but did not interfere. A short, round boy of seven, he took little interest in troublesome things, preferring to remain on good terms with everyone. Yet he was always sensitive to others and now, shifting the handle of his lunch can from his right hand to his right wrist and his smudged notebook from his left hand to his left armpit, he stuffed his free hands into his pockets and attempted to make his face as moody as Stacey’s and as cranky as mine. But after a few moments he seemed to forget that he was supposed to be grouchy and began whistling cheerfully. There was little that could make Christopher-John unhappy for very long, not even the thought of school.

  I tugged again at my collar and dragged my feet in the dust, allowing it to sift back onto my socks and shoes like gritty red snow. I hated the dress. And the shoes. There was little I could do in a dress, and as for shoes, they imprisoned freedom-loving feet accustomed to the feel of the warm earth.

  “Cassie, stop that,” Stacey snapped as the dust billowed in swirling clouds around my feet. I looked up sharply, ready to protest. Christopher-John’s whistling increased to a raucous, nervous shrill, and grudgingly I let the matter drop and trudged along in moody silence, my brothers growing as pensively quiet as I.

  Before us the narrow, sun-splotched road wound like a lazy red serpent dividing the high forest bank of quiet, old trees
on the left from the cotton field, forested by giant green and purple stalks, on the right. A barbed-wire fence ran the length of the deep field, stretching eastward for over a quarter of a mile until it met the sloping green pasture that signaled the end of our family’s four hundred acres. An ancient oak tree on the slope, visible even now, was the official dividing mark between Logan land and the beginning of a dense forest. Beyond the protective fencing of the forest, vast farming fields, worked by a multitude of share-cropping families, covered two thirds of a ten-square-mile plantation. That was Harlan Granger land.

  Once our land had been Granger land too, but the Grangers had sold it during Reconstruction to a Yankee for tax money. In 1887, when the land was up for sell again, Grandpa had bought two hundred acres of it, and in 1918, after the first two hundred acres had been paid off, he had bought another two hundred. It was good rich land, much of it still virgin forest, and there was no debt on half of it. But there was a mortgage on the two hundred acres bought in 1918 and there were taxes on the full four hundred, and for the past three years there had not been enough money from the cotton to pay both and live on too.

  That was why Papa had gone to work on the railroad.

  In 1930 the price of cotton dropped. And so, in the spring of 1931, Papa set out looking for work, going as far north as Memphis and as far south as the Delta country. He had gone west too, into Louisiana. It was there he found work laying track for the railroad. He worked the remainder of the year away from us, not returning until the deep winter when the ground was cold and barren. The following spring after the planting was finished, he did the same. Now it was 1933, and Papa was again in Louisiana laying track.