Black Water Rising by Attica Locke Page A

the ones they had, but they got kind of rough then, poking around on the passenger side, near Alma, making Jay’s father understand that nothing in this world really belonged to him. It was all within their reach. His father was a tall man, taller than Jay. He stood up straight, looked the men in the eye, and said, “Y’all need to get away from there now. Leave her be.” The men turned to each other then, agreeing on something, an approach, some thing choreographed from their repertoire. They were small and squat, and they charged at him like yard dogs, coming at him from two sides. Within the first couple of blows, it was clear they would not be satisfied by some regular beating, a few kicks in the dust. They were going for something else, scratching past his skin and bones, punching at his spirit. They had him near ’bout to the ground when Alma got the gun out of the glove box, a little .25-caliber pistol her brothers had taught her to shoot. “Your daddy took one look at me with that gun and said, ‘Alma, don’t you dare.’ ”
    As a kid, Jay listened to this story in disbelief.
    It was nothing like the cowboy movies he watched on televi sion. There was no explosion, no gut shot, no hero. Not his father anyway. Jerome Porter wouldn’t let his wife save him, afraid of what would happen to her if she pulled the trigger. There was no coming back from shooting a white man in Trinity County, 1949. If a mob didn’t get you, the courts would.
    It turned out the gun scared them anyway, it was shaking so in Alma’s hand. The men couldn’t be sure Jay’s mother would heed her husband’s instruction not to shoot. They ran back to their truck and took off. A red Ford was all anybody ever remem bered. No license plate, no names.
    Jay’s daddy was beat pretty good about the head.
    He managed to get himself into the truck. He turned the engine over, but never got the car into gear. He turned to his wife and said, “Alma, I think you better drive.” He passed out a few moments after that. She pushed him over to the passenger side by herself, even in her condition. The nearest colored hos pital was all the way to Lufkin. She didn’t think Jay Bird could make it that far, so she drove him to St. Luke’s Faith Memorial in Groveton. In the waiting area, the nurses went so far as to let Jay’s mother fill out all the paperwork, let her think her husband would be the next one in line. Alma sat with him, holding his hand, his head resting on her lap, wondering why they were let ting other people go ahead of Jerome. It wasn’t until late in the evening, the waiting room empty and the two of them the only ones still waiting, that she understood what was going on, that this white hospital had no intention of treating her husband.
    She laid his head softly on the bench, then got up and called over to her parents’ place. Somebody needed to run up to Jerome’s mama’s house, she said, and let Mrs. Porter know her boy was in trouble, that it looked bad. She asked her brothers to drive down, to help her get her husband all the way to Lufkin.
    They got him out of St. Luke’s and into Alma’s brother’s Dodge so Jay’s father could lie out in the backseat. He came to at least once, but he never said a word. Just looked at Alma and kind of smiled. He died somewhere between Groveton and Lufkin. That was December. Jay was born five months later.
    He would never be like his father; he’d decided that a long time ago. He was going to live to see his son. Or a little girl. Two maybe. The world would be different for him. As a kid, he watched King, Bayard Rustin, and the others, watched the boys in clean sweaters and pressed pants at the lunch counters in North Carolina, getting spit on and pushed around. And even then he thought they were missing the point. Even then he thought he’d shoot a motherfucker before he’d let them spit on him. He wanted something more than the early movement’s fight for legal equality and freedom