My Selma by Willie Mae Brown

Author:Willie Mae Brown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR)

7.

Later that afternoon somebody was coming up on the porch as I started down the hall. It was Joe peering through the screen door, head and neck stretching to see if he could see anybody. He seemed anxious.

“Hey der, Wil’ Mae.” He cut off my name and asked me if my dad was home, and I told him no and that Ben and I were on our way out to East Selma to get Dah and Mama. Joe wanted to see Ben. I called for Ben to come to the door, and Joe asked Ben if he had been here when Urmagene came over to play. Ben said yes, he had, and asked what was the matter.

“Just ask your daddy to come by and see me fo’ he turn in tonight, please,” Joe replied.

“Yes, sir, I sure will,” said Ben.

Joe walked off the porch toward his house. He seemed to be upset about something, and I knew what it was, but I couldn’t care at that moment. Ben decided to go out to East Selma to see Dah and Mama. He wanted to get to Dah before Joe did. “Now, Willie Mae, you just stay home with the doors locked and let me take care of this.”

An hour later, Ben was back. He told me that he and Dah had spoken at length about everything that happened with Urmagene and me, and how Urmagene started it all. “I witnessed the whole thing,” Ben had said.

Dah had assured Ben that he would talk to Joe when he got home, no matter what time it was. Dah told Ben, “They are nice people and they pay their bills on time. I don’t want any foolishness going on to cause them to leave.” He wanted someone like Joe in the rental house because of the talks of boycotts and more marches. He said that Joe was a no-nonsense man and he came from a good family of people in York, Alabama.

Ben told me that Dah had said that Joe’s daddy was the son of a sharecropper who eventually owned acres of land over in York, near Mississippi. “Still do,” Ben added. “Bertha and Joe met and was married less than a year when she come up with that girl they got. That’s not Joe’s first child. He got another one, a boy about fifteen or sixteen, in Mobile, with the child’s mama and the man the child’s mama married after she and Joe broke up. Serinna, that’s her name. She’s a nurse and don’t look anything like Bertha. Both of them are like night and day. One light-skinned and small, the other dark and heavy. Mama says Bertha was the only one took pity on Joe when the divorce come through. Before the divorce, folks claim Joe drove around with Serinna like he had a ‘Ejypshun queen’ on his side. Everywhere you saw her, you saw him.”

Ben cautioned me, “Willie Mae, Dah had been drinking when he told me this, so he was open to talking.

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