The Bernice L. McFadden Collection. Bernice L. McFadden
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Although she had been living here with me for more than six years, she could not remember when they arrived, or the photo that had been taken of them on the front porch of their new home. The names and faces of the people here came and left from her mind just as quickly as the hours moved through the day. She suspected that her daughter didn’t like her; the boy, however, seemed to worship the ground she walked on.
Even the moments before that moment, which found her standing in the middle of the road staring longingly at the Mingo Bailey’s retreating back, were hazy. What was bright in her mind was leaving home that morning headed to the Payne house to deliver johnnycakes. The next fresh memory was slipping behind the tree. She was sure that somewhere between the Payne house and the immediate moment she had consumed coffee, because it was swishing loudly in her stomach. She asked herself, Why in the world would I drink coffee when I abhor the taste of it?
Doll gave her head a hard shake, praying that the movement would retrieve the lost hours, but all it did was free a memory that Doll could only fathom as a dream.
In that dream, Mingo was headed to town with a pair of loaded dice in one pocket and two dollars in change in the other. His mind was so fixed on the money he intended to cheat his way into winning, that he barely noticed Doll waving at him from across the road.
“Mingo? Mingo Bailey?”
“Ma’am?”
“Can you help me to the bridge with these oranges? They’re heavier than I expected.”
Mingo looked toward the center of town and then back at Doll.
“Just to the bridge,” she reiterated.
“Okay.”
She hummed as they walked, and greeted passersby with bright, sunny hellos. When the humming stopped she raised her hand to her throat and began to stroke it.
At the bridge, Doll looked around and saw that there wasn’t a soul in sight.
“Mingo?” she said in a voice far away from the one that had beckoned him from across the road.
“Yes, ma’am?”
“Would you like to have me?”
“Ma’am?”
“Have me. You know, the way you’ve had so many other women.”
“Ma’am?”
“Fuck me. Do you want to fuck me, Mingo?”
He looked across the bridge toward Nigger Row. “I must be losing my goddamn mind,” he muttered with a laugh.
“No, you’re not,” Doll assured, and pressed her hand against his crotch.
Beneath the bridge, on the Candle Street side, Doll became an animal; a spitting, scratching wildcat that Mingo struggled to gain control of. Above them, the sounds of shod feet, bicycles, and the clomping of hooves and the rolling wheels of buggies masked the sound of their lovemaking.
“Our Father, who art in heaven—” Doll croaked as Mingo pounded into her.
“Stop that!” he warned.
“Hallowed be Thine name …”
Mingo closed his hand over her mouth.
After he was done with her—wait, I think the correct thing to say here is: After she was done with him— Mingo patted Doll on her ass and said, “Fix yourself up, you look a mess.”
She hadn’t taken offense when Mingo pressed his filthy hand over her mouth, but for some reason the pat to her bottom struck her as impolite and disrespectful.
“How dare you,” she hissed, and then struck him hard across his face. “Don’t you know that I am the wife of a reverend?”
The assault took Mingo by surprise. His hand curled into a ball. “W-woman,” he stammered between clenched teeth as he patted the damp soil in search of his cigarette. When he found it, he slipped it between his lips and began to laugh at the absurdity of the situation.
“What’s so funny?” Doll asked.
He didn’t answer her question, he just kept laughing, even as he tugged his trousers up around his waist.
August was sitting in the living room when Doll walked into the house covered in mud. At the sight of her, he sat straight up and his face went bright with alarm.
“Doll, what happened to you?” he asked as he stood and moved toward her.
Doll looked stupidly down at her soiled clothing. “I think I fell down the river bank.”
August frowned. “You think?”
“I did,” Doll mumbled. “I slipped down the river bank.”
“My goodness!” August declared as he took Doll gently by the elbow and guided her up the stairs. “Are you hurt?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Why were you walking so close to the edge?”
Doll tried her best to remember, but couldn’t. “I lost the oranges,” she whispered. “The bag broke and they tumbled into river and I went after them.”
“You went after them? Oranges? You went after some stupid ole oranges?”
Doll nodded ashamedly.
August snaked his arm protectively around her waist. “Thank God it was the oranges that rolled into the river and not you.”
By April of 1927, most folk in Mississippi couldn’t think of anything but rain, mud, mosquitoes, and flooding.
Not a drop of rain had fallen between May and July of 1926, but on the first day of August the skies opened up and remained that way for a very long time.
Bullet rain. Bucket rain. Rain as soft as rose petals. Mist.
You’d think that so much water would have washed the stench of sin right out of the air, but it didn’t. The water infused it, transforming it into an invisible vapor that hung in the air like fog.
Sin was what was on August’s mind when he shrugged on his gray slicker and shoved his Bible into one of the oversized pockets. Retrieving an umbrella from the stand in the small vestibule, he opened the door and stepped out into the downpour.
It was Good Friday and he was headed to the church a few hours early to go over his sermon. It gave him no pleasure to be thinking about sin on one of the most blessed days of the Christian calendar, but try as he might, he could not shake the troubling thoughts, nor could he decide if the sin had ushered in the rain or the rain had made way for the sin. Whatever the case, both the sin and the rain were there—growing mightier with each gray, wet day.
Weeks earlier, one parishioner after the next had approached him with: “Reverend, could I have a word, please?”
August listened quietly and intently as the men confessed to gambling, drinking, and fornicating. The women’s offenses were light in nature compared to their male counterparts. Their transgressions involved gossiping and coveting. August prescribed scripture and prayer and sent them on their way.
But he soon realized that sin hadn’t infected just his community; it was wreaking havoc all across the state. Every new day brought another horrendous report of evildoing:
William N. Coffey, aged 48, confessed he’d murdered his bigamous bride, Hattie Hale Coffey, clubbing her to death with a baseball bat and then tossing her into the Mississippi River.
In the town of Alligator, plantation owner V.H. McCraney shot and killed plantation owner C.G. Callicott and then put the pistol to his head and blew