Gone South Page 4

restaurant meal in two months.

  He walked into the secretary’s empty office. She was apparently out to lunch. He looked through the window into Farnsworth’s office, and it gave him the creeps. Farnsworth looked just the same as when Jerry had first seen him: white shirt, loose tie, suspenders, shiny bald head. He was picking over papers like a buzzard would pick at a bit of road kill, and, at Jerry’s knock, looked up as though he detected a threat to his prize.

  Farnsworth motioned him in, and Jerry stood before the man’s desk. “Set down there, Boy. I’ll be with you in a minute.”

  Jerry sat, and Farnsworth let him sweat while he continued to pick over his kill. Finally, he raised his beady eyes and looked right through Jerry clean to the other side of town, maybe even all the way to Denver.

  “Boy, I heah you been raisin’ a ruckus out there. What you been up to, Boy?”

  “I’ve been doing my best to teach school, Mr. Farnsworth.”

  “Well, what you been doin’ is preachin’ out there, usin’ Bibles for school books, an’ I told you not to go preachin’ to my Negras. I oughta fire you right heah and now, an’ I think I will.” Farnsworth’s eyes blazed, and his voice had climbed several octaves.

  That’s when Jerry lost it.

  “Mr. Farnsworth! Those aren’t your ‘Negras’ out there. They are people that have been entrusted to me to teach, and yet there aren’t enough books on that whole island for even one child. All I had was my Bible and three others that belong to the students. And do you know what? I’m glad because they are learning about Jesus and learning their letters at the same time, and I will not have you bullying me! I won’t be cowed by you, Sir!” Jerry slammed his fist down on Farnsworth’s desk.

 

  For about three seconds, Farnsworth looked taken aback. “Boy, you get outta my office and get back to that island before I have you fired and then arrested.” His face was livid as he shoved it to within two inches of Jerry’s nose. Jerry had never smelled such a fowl blowhole. He turned to leave.

  “Where you goin’ Boy?” Farnsworth screamed.

  Jerry turned. “I’m going back to those people, those precious kids. I love them, Mr. Farnsworth, and I will teach them. I don’t need you or your books. If you don’t pay me, I’ll eat squirrel, but I aim to finish the job I came here to do. Good day, Sir!”

  Jerry shook all the way back to the docks, where Mr. Glendening was waiting. Jerry said, “Mr. Glendening, I don’t know whether the school system will pay you for the ferry. I may have lost my job. Do you still want to take me back out there?”

  “You jess git on that boat, Boy, and let me worry about the runnin’ of it. Shoot, Boy, let’s go ’fore they sic the dogs after us.” They went.

  When they got back to the docks, Mr. Glendening proffered his hand. “Good luck, and God bless you, Son. If Farnsworth fires you, he will come and do it in person. He may have to swim back if he does.”

  In the weeks following, Jerry heard nothing from Farnsworth, but his pay kept being delivered to him right on time.

  Winter ran slowly toward spring, and he still had students sitting on the floor. There was no room for more chairs in his classroom. His oldest student was 80 years old and hard of hearing, so he put her near the front. Miss Ella never missed a Sunday service. Sarah’s baby thrived, and so did Sarah. She was able to go to Mr. Dickenson’s store and count out her own money.

  One morning when it was just getting ready to break spring, just as the sky was turning pink in the east, three barges nosed quietly through the channel that led to the docks. About eight o’clock Jerry heard someone outside yelling at the top of her lungs, “Mr. Cherrybooks, Mr. Cherrybooks! Come quick!”

  He rushed to the door, thinking someone had gotten hurt, or worse. Lou Anne, a fourteen-year-old student, was standing in the yard looking wild-eyed.

  “What is it, Lou Anne?”

  “Mr. Cherrybooks, they is a load of boards down at de docks wit a note under a rock. I cain’t read all it say, but I think it say de lumber yo’s! Come read it!”

  Jerry followed the girl to the docks, and sure enough there lay a huge pile of lumber. The note read: “To Mr. Cherrybooks: From the surrounding churches, there is enough lumber to build a church. Don’t tell we give it.”

  “Is it yo’s, Mr. Cherrybooks?”

  “No, Lou Anne, this lumber belongs to this community.”

  The news sped around The Island in the peculiar and mysterious way that news traveled in that part of the country. Old Mr. Purdy donated one end of his cornfield to build a church, and build a church they did. Jerry took his class down several days and taught the kids how buildings were put together.

  When the building was finished, it wasn’t very big, and it barely held the people that first Sunday. By the time it was finished, he had a lead choir, and they let the hammer down that Sunday.

  Miss Ella came in and found a seat on a straight-backed cane chair. A woman offered to let her take her seat on the pews, but Miss Ella refused. Jerry noticed her tentatively raise her hands as the choir sang, “Down By the River Side,” and he saw tears streaming from her eyes.

  A few mornings later as she walked with her coon dogs, she met him on the way to the school.

  “Mawnin’ Mistuh Cherrybooks. Ain’t it a beautiful mawnin?”

  “It sure is, Miss Ella. Why, you’re looking spry as a Banty rooster.”

  She stopped when she got up to him. “Mistuh Cherrybooks, I want to thank you fo’ all you’ve done heah. I ain’t been right toward you, and I’m sorry.”

  “That’s OK, Miss Ella. Are you coming to church Sunday?”

  “Why, Chile, I wouldn’t miss it fo’ de worl’. Now if you need anything you jus’ come on and see me, you heah?”

  “Yes, Ma’am, I will surely do that.”

  The first week of July the Klan burned the church down, and left a note: “No niggers can have no church.”

  That was what had brought Jerry to this place at the end of this cornfield. The tears fell freely as he beheld the smoldering embers of his church. He looked over the field of corn and remembered the scripture he had taught his students:

  John 4:35: “Do you not say, ‘There are still four months and then comes the harvest’? Behold, I say to you, lift up your eyes and look at the fields, for they are already white for harvest!”

  John 4:36: "And he who reaps receives wages, and gathers fruit for eternal life, that both he who sows and he who reaps may rejoice together.”

  “The Klan has done its harvesting,” he mused. He was done with his crying, and his face had a set look to it as he turned to go.

  He next morning he was at the docks as Mr. Glendening pulled up in his boat. He told Mr. Glendening of the incident on the ride to town.

  “I told you they would come after you, Son. Is there anything I can do?”

  “No, Sir, but I know someone who can!”

  They didn’t talk much on the way to Mound, and when the boat pulled up to the docks; Jerry leaped off and set his face resolutely up West Main toward Farnsworth’s office. He didn’t stop at the secretary’s desk; she saw the look in his eyes and said nothing. He kicked the door open to Farnsworth’s office, and stood before the desk.

  “Mr. Farnsworth! Is the Klan running this parish to the point where they are free to burn down a church?”

  Farnsworth kept his eyes on the desk. “I heard what happened, Son. I might have been a little rough on you, but this is not what I wanted, nor is it what the most of this town wanted. You know by now there are some decent folk in this community, and if you will give me a little time I will straighten this thing out.”

  The short of it was, he did. He went to the lumber company, which he knew was owned by a Klan member and leader.

 

  “Joe, I am putting you on notice that you will go out there and put up another church, and it will stay up! And you are paying for every penny of it, because if you don’t, I aim to call in the governor, the state police, a
nd the federal government, and by the time the FBI get through with you, you’ll be turning eighty in the state pen.”

  “Now Farnsworth, you know you cain’t prove I had anything to do with that. And what do you care about a bunch of no account niggers?”

  Farnsworth jabbed his bony finger in Joe’s left nostril and backed him up against the counter.

  “Owww!” Joe blubbered, as Farnsworth shoved hard, his eyes blazing.

  “I can’t prove anything; I don’t need to, Joe Wiggins. I got the state police, the FBI, and the federal government to do all my provin’. An’ it’s Mr. Farnsworth to you, you sorry back-stabbin’ sack of hog guts.”

  Farnsworth jerked his bloody finger out of Joe Wiggins’s nose, and turned and marched out of Joe Wiggins Lumber Company, glaring at the employees as he went. They all of a sudden found something to do.

  Two days later three more barges pulled up to the docks, plus a barge load of carpenters. They started carrying boards and nail kegs toward the end of that cornfield. Four days later there was a church with a cross atop it, shining in the morning sun. Some in the parish swore it was the fastest they had ever seen a building go up.

  Eyes watched from the woods as the men