Nine O'clock Blue

By Teresa Henkle Langness

Nine OClock Blue tells the lyrical but gripping tale of a man haunted by his past and a young girl, Delia May Burris, whose family battles the racism of the pre-civil rights South. Delia confronts her childhood trauma again as an adult during the 1992 Los Angeles civil unrest. She seeks solutions in the wilderness and stumbles into an environmental controversy. One surprising turn of events after another brings her face-to-face with her nemesis. Mystery, history and a touch of magic realism bring this poignant story to life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jul 19, 2000
• ISBN: 9781469764344

Teresa Henkle Langness

Teresa Henkle Langness began publishing in 1973. Her prior books include poetry, environmental and educational titles. In 1992, she co-founded a program for at-risk students, which still serves Los Angeles youth. Ms. Langness lives in Southern California with her husband David. She has two grown children and two stepchildren.

Book preview

AUGUST 8,1928

A creature of visceral passions lies suspended in a black bath.

A loom of eucalyptus trees spews webs of light onto the black.

Snarls of moss cling to the roots along the bank.

Sea-brine baked winds breathe through the trees.

Summer comes humming down through the tangles of a South Georgia swamp and a pale, russet-haired boy stares into it all with wonder. He inspects the gray-green creature and puts down his fishing pole and picks up a small stone shaped like a dish. He warms up by waving his forearm back and forth a few times and then skips the rock toward the leathery snout that heaves gentle breezes across the backs of water skippers. The boy scoops up a whole handful of ammunition, caressing each specimen to find another flat one. He flings the best of them, one by one, at his target. A pellet skiffs the gator’s eyelid so lightly it seems not to notice, even when the rock plops into the water and stirs a pinwheel of ripples on the liquid mirror beyond.

Bull’s-eye.

The boy speaks safely from behind the cattails and lets his toes dig potholes into the soil beside his fishing pole. The gator never flinches. The boy skips another, and another. Only the gator’s smile interrupts its stoic pose. The heckling game begins to bore the child, whose opponent gives less fight than a soup bone in a vat of broth. He runs up to the hut perched above the bank and squints through a hole in the mud caulking, but he cannot make out much more than a bowl on a wood plank table across the room. When dirt sifts through one set of eyelashes, he switches to the other eye and spots his friend Mayella Huckster, a tall woman of indeterminable age with broad shoulders and a forehead so high as to give her an air of regality. She straddles her legs on either side of a small stool, singing and snapping peas into a pot in front of the stool. She works so vigorously, it sounds as if she breaks a finger with each snap. Sweat dampens her kerchief on this summer day, and her mahogany face works overtime to enunciate the years of living that earned her the status of Grandma among all the black children, kin or not.

Gran Mayella.

The boy calls her name through the crack and then runs down to hide in the cattails. He speaks her name again with the ecstasy that comes to young rebels when they curse.

Who’s that? Sound like somebody I know.

Gran Mayella appears in the doorway wearing a closed-mouth smile. She looks ahead and pretends not to see the boy as she walks straight down to the swamp bank and then suddenly turns to him and throws up her hands in surprise.

Well, look at that, a giant sunflower growin’ in the cattails. She leans over and tousles his hair and tickles his ear until he laughs out loud, an affectionate tradition she can only maintain in the absence of company. Whenever they meet alone, she treats him just like her own, knowing that motherless children all need the same thing, whatever their color or kind.

Gran, he begins, as she picks up the fishing pole he abandoned and takes the bait off the hook and shows him the proper way to bend the worm.

Gran, my papa took me out again last night.

Her half-moon eyes widen.

Shame on that man. You too young to be filled with hatred.

The boy recalls the clap of the white sheets as the men press against the darkness with torches and hunting dogs. He feels ashamed of the excitement that still tingles on his skin.

It feels like we’re going duck hunting. But I know it’s different. He cannot look her in the eye. She frowns at the worm as she speaks.

Sometimes we have to kill for food. But your daddy, he think life worth nothing. He’d shoot a colored man fast as he’d shoot a duck. Only way to prove hisself better. He just try to make sure he’s the only one left.

The boy bows his red head in shame. She turns to him and rubs a callused hand against his neck.

Oh, don’t mind your Gran, Honey. I oughtn’t burden you. I just hopes you can get past it some day, but I expect you be the same. Have to be that way, born to a man like that.

No, Gran. I don’t want to hurt no negras. You know I don’t.

She looks at him like family and buries his face in her immense arms and rocks back and forth and coos shh to calm him and speaks in a whisper.

Just remember, child, we all in this together. That blackbird’s a cousin to the lark. That gator down there, he got just a few more teeth than you and me. Remember we all connected, and don’t hurt no part of this world if you don’t have to, boy.

He smells the sweat and smoke and prescience that compose the matter of her life. It all clings like history to her calico dress, which he baptizes with a few confused tears. She cradles his head and pulls him so close that her breath feels like the warm breeze that announces a changing season. Then something crackles in the brush.

If your daddy find you here, he whup you till your britches light up like a firefly. Now go on. Get yourself home, Mister.

He picks up his pole and scrambles up the bank and behind the hut, only to find that the crackling has turned into footsteps and the footsteps into a form and the form into his father’s face, red and bloated with anger and filling up the whole landscape, so that the body and the woodland and the sky all blur and the face fills the child’s entire range of vision. Then the face sprouts legs and moves toward him faster than he can run and hide under Gran Mayella’s washtub. He falls to the ground trying.

You little rascal, you, the man says, stooping to grab the boy by the collar. Close up, the face exudes the scent of whiskey. Fine gray stubble blankets the chin. The porous nose twitches slightly but the red-veined eyes do not blink. They only dart back and forth between the boy and the woman, cobalt bullets seeking their mark and finally settling on the boy.

What’re you doin’ here? I told you never to come here again. He jerks the boy up, tightens his grip on the collar and raises his other hand in a fist. The boy closes his eyes and hears something move through the air. He braces himself for the blow, but when he opens his eyes, he sees that the sound comes from Gran Mayella’s long legs brushing against her skirt as she runs up the bank.

Don’t you hurt that child! Gran Mayella strides over to the washtub, thrusts herself in front of the boy and stands eye-to-eye with a fully grown white man for the first time in her life. There’s been enough hurting ‘round here, she states through clenched teeth. She tilts her head so high that the muted light illuminates the tawny expanse of her forehead and the fringes of her eyelashes and burns in the hot tallow of her eyes. She peers at her enemy through those warrior eyes that look both backward and forward in time, back onto the battlefields of the Massai heroes from whom she descended and forward into the urban battlefields through which her progeny will march. The boy watches her breathe calmly into the face of his father and suddenly, in this moment, the boy believes she sees all things.

The old man’s arms fall to his sides and the boy scrambles for cover behind Gran Mayella. The grizzled chin drops a little and, slowly, the left hand reaches up to pull the rifle from the right shoulder. Until the man speaks, the boy cannot tell whether he will lay the gun down or raise it up. The voice starts in a soft growl but bellows louder with each word.

Just who do you think you are, you old coon, tellin’ me how to raise my boy? Now you step aside and let me give him the back end of this gun, or you’ll get the front end.

Gran interrupts in an even tone, fixing her eyes on his and resisting the urge to spit in his face. You going to beat this child, you have to beat me first.

She raises up to her full five feet, nine inches and clutches the boy’s trembling shoulders behind her. The man’s eyes hollow. The last trace of mortal anger drains from his face, leaving him barren of his own soul. He raises the gun butt without expression and swings it toward her, hitting her stomach with the thud of a slamming door, striking so hard that she cannot wheeze or scream. She simply caves in at the waist and falls forward, gaining momentum as she lumbers down the embankment toward the waiting jaws of the soup bone that has suddenly come alive. She skids on the boy’s arsenal of skipping stones and her head claps down against the rocks as she slips, unconscious, into the water.

The child tries to run to her, but the father retrieves his own emotions and grabs the boy’s collar, twisting it hard.

Leave her be, he scolds.

But the gator’ll get her!

That gator’s got better things to do than to mess with the likes of her. And the same goes for you. He turns his head and spits in the dirt as he wrestles the boy away from the scene. Nothin’ worse than uppety colored folk. And you, messin’ around her place. I ought to tan your hide.

The little arms tear wildly at the taut wrists, but the man’s clutch only tightens and he swings at the boy’s backside with the gun as the boy winces and tenses and finally falls limp in his father’s grasp. He can see Gran Mayella floating listlessly amid the sedge, the gator careening toward her. His father grabs a swatch of his hair, yanks his head back and speaks directly into his face, so close that the scent of whisky sours the boy’s stomach.

Now you forget about that woman. From now on, remember who you come from. And remember where they come from. And don’t you never let one of ‘em stand in your way. Don’t you forget now.

To make sure he won’t, the father takes one more swipe, this time with such force that the child falls to his knees. His father grabs him by the middle, hoists him waist high and heads for home. The boy cries out as he catches one last glimpse of Gran Mayella struggling to her feet, planted thigh-deep in the indigo water, her face bleeding and her calico skirt splayed across the surface like a lily pad, just inches from the gator’s snout.

He knows he can never go back. He will have to remember her this way, struggling, encased in darkness yet somehow staring through him. He collapses in a faint, his vision of her immersed in the blackness of the swamp.

Blackness swallows the hem on the calico skirt of Mayella Huckster. Blackness hides the sanguine tint of human blood. Blackness erases all but the most visceral of passions.

SEPTEMBER 7,1959

Summers in Beauganville, Louisiana always exploded out of spring and leaked into fall, brimming with so much humidity that nothing as finite as a calendar could contain them. In the nine-year-old memory of Delia May Burris, every major event in life happened against a clammy green backdrop, perhaps designed to melt everyone just enough so the soles of their feet would stick to this earth, keep them together, and prohibit their wandering off into another crook or hollow of the universe.

The thought of it lured her eyes out the window to study the proverbial glue of the waning summer. Even with school in session, the wet heat still hugged everything from dawn until dark, when the crickets tried to wring it out with their sawing legs. She looked for them in the stretch of grass that grew in ragged mustache tufts from the back door clear out to where the landscape yawned into lush fields interrupted only by a few oak and sweet gum trees and by the paper mill, whose gargantuan smoke stacks rumpled the continuity of the whole thing.

Off in the other direction, a platoon of cypress trees blocked off the Louisiana marsh and all its inhabitants and the air perspired with the remnants of family suppers and honeysuckle and music composed of sheer determination to love the little scrap of land her people owned, down where the willow roots brace the banks of the stagnant river and children bury their secrets and fears in tackle boxes and crawfish pails.

The girl stared into it all, out the open window. She looked down the bayou’s protective enclave and back to the road whose destination she had never seen.

Looking out the window for answers again?

Her brother towered over her with his hands on his slight hips. You think somebody been carving arithmetic problems on the fence? She came back to the room. He curled his lips and laughed out loud, then went about the business in his tackle box. Delia Burris tapped a pencil stub against the clapboard table and erased her last answer and rubbed off the flecks and felt the erasure crumbs wad up like spitballs in her hand.

Now look here, her brother tapped his finger on her head, I aim to get in a little fishing before work. And I can’t go till I see you through them numbers. So hurry up, before I finish this lure. She leaned over her paper and he suddenly spoke to her quietly. Always staring out the window, aren’t ya? Thinking about who-knows-what.

Thinking about a whole lot of things, she explained.

I bet I know what you’re thinking—that the world out there has to be bigger than the back streets of Beauganville.

Nu-uh. I was thinking something else.

And now you got the same look in your eye what Sydney Jefferson had right before he went off to the city.

What look?

That cagey look, you know. Well of course, here a body would never think of strutting down the street wearing a bright purple shirt, medallions and a turban on his head, unless it were Mardi Gras in N’Orleans. Folks would think his mind had gone to seed and lock him in the chicken house the rest of his life. So Sydney went to Memphis, just to see what it was like.

What’d he do there? She had heard countless variations of the story, which always made her want to ask again.

’Twas a sad thing. Anthony shook his head and let his chin drop for effect. Poor cuss hadn’t been there but two hours wearing them silly clothes. He walked into a bar and come out with eyes purple enough to match his shirt. They slugged some humility into him, they did. He smiled to see her wince.

That’s what happen to folks more interested in the world outside than in arithmetic.

He grinned and she punched his arm and he protested, feigning pain. Don’t beat up on me, girl. You know I got me some serious fishing to do and ya’ll are truly moving slow as molasses.

Oh, yeah? Well you’re slow as molasses in a bad freeze.

And you’re slow as molasses in a bad freeze turned upside down to defy the law of gravity. She loved it when he pronounced his consonants with the clipped precision of a play actor.

Well, you’re slow as moss growing on an old tree—no, you’re slow as the tree itself, taking a hundred years to get grown up.

Anthony shook his head, banged the back door and took the back yard in three strides, allowing her to revel in the knowledge that she had beat him at their favorite game. She watched him and called out a sudden afterthought.

Last time you told me Sydney Jefferson got beat up because he was colored. Had nothing to do with arithmetic!

He kept running and she went back to the table, shut her book and picked up another she had borrowed at the library. The librarian had told her she probably couldn’t read well enough to get through it and if she could, she probably wouldn’t understand it, which was exactly why Delia had borrowed it. She wasn’t one of those kids on the bayou who skipped school to go fishing, as much as she liked to fish with Anthony. Even if she hadn’t gone to school, her brother would have taught her to read as well as her father taught her brother to read. That librarian lady didn’t know. She was just one stiff old cotton-tip, always popping her consonants so that each word came out as an indignant little puff. Her voice sounded as chipped up as Anthony’s sounded smooth.

Delia smiled at the thought of reading the forbidden literature. She went outside and found a spot to sit on the top step and laid a rag on the pavement baked by a dull afternoon sun that turned the sky from shale to chalky white. The scent of the paper mill wafted in and out of the yard and eventually overcame the competing scent of the gardenias because begonias don’t smell Mama had planted along the house. The mulberry and chinquapin trees dressed up the front yard so much that Papa had once told Mama she didn’t need begonias, but Mama had planted them anyway and Papa had winked at Delia and told Mama that if she’d only move out of Beauganville with him, he’d buy her a whole botanical garden full of sweet-smelling begonias. Mama had said she didn’t know what was the difference between a botanical garden and any other kind of garden and she couldn’t imagine a place where things could grow better than in her own yard. So the conversation had ended and now Delia sat looking at those begonias and smelling the paper mill.

A soda pop lid caught her eye and she snatched it up instinctively, remembering a time when she was three or four and her brother taught her to read logos by collecting soda lids and empty cartons. R and C were the first letters she had learned. She and Anthony had spent every Saturday that summer piling their collections of those pop tops, along with oil cans and rubber tire pieces that they sculpted into treasure mountains while their mother sold fresh vegetables at a roadside stand. She remembered painting a mud face on a tomato one time.

Get yourself away, child. Go on. You spoil Mama’s tomatoes. Her mama had sent her off to play with road litter instead.

Mama grew vegetables every summer. Greens. Tomatoes. It didn’t matter what. Everything grew for Mama. On Saturdays when she was off work, she would set up her stand out by the highway, where strangers from neighboring towns might pass by.

Mama would fuss with her vegetables and look at the oily waves of heat in the sky and hope out loud for a cool breeze. Cars would pass at 45 miles an hour while Delia laid her head on the ground to smell the exhaust and watch the tires spin like tops, blurring until all the hubcaps looked alike although Anthony assured her that not all hubcaps were created equal. He had a collection to prove it.

Their father was always away on one of his famous road trips so Anthony kept an eye on Delia while her mother stacked the rows neatly and waited on customers. When people stopped, Mama would smile and square her broad shoulders, proud as any vegetable farmer in town. She had to be proud about something. Daddy was too wrapped up in talking about his education to get his hands dirty doing any work. Educated up North, he found little to do in a town like this. He couldn’t take the heat in the factory and did not know farming, just Latin, which did him no good in a town with no universities, where whiteness was the main prerequisite for a desk job. So he took a job as a traveling salesman for a company based up North, but when the company went out of business, Papa just spent most of his time traveling around town, from the library to the Pollywog, where he claimed they paid him to tend bar, but folks usually found him on the customer side of the bar. He had come to Beauganville because Mama didn’t want to leave her people, but they had almost all died off anyway. Now Papa didn’t think about it too much. He just drank and dawdled and dreamed away his life while Mama worked at the factory and brought in money from the vegetables. Even so, Delia loved him. She loved the way he stroked her hair and told her that her high forehead indicated intelligence and her high cheekbones nobility and that she would one day live into her rich heritage. She loved her daddy’s mind and his heart, and the only person she considered a better mentor was Anthony.

Delia and Anthony enjoyed helping their mother set up the vegetable stand every Saturday. Sometimes the days steamed on sluggishly, but one lady, a Catholic sister, always stopped by, even though she told Mama she had her own garden. She was originally from El Salvador and Mama liked her so much, she had named Delia after her. When Anthony wanted to tease her, he would call her Sister Delia.

There was only one other customer Delia remembered as well. He only stopped once, on one of those Saturdays when she and her brother played next to an old ice box someone had lain by the road. She had just learned the letter W and Anthony was teaching her how to spell Westinghouse when a man in a Ford truck pulled up. Delia inspected his hubcaps until his glare made her retreat back to the ice box into which Anthony had crawled. The tall man seemed to forget all about her anyway when he took a closer look at Mama. He jacked up his pants by the belt, wiped the sheen from his forehead with his sleeve and scooped a wisp of hair back with his hand. All the while he never took his eyes off Mama’s cotton skirt, how it swayed and hugged her legs with the rush of air created by each passing car. Her muscular calves stuck out at the bottom of the skirt, always steady and strong if not large from where Delia sat. Mama was big-boned but the man was even bigger, with slight hips and a barrel chest and a ruddy face.

He turned and spit a wad alongside the vegetable stand. Delia stared at the bubbles as they popped, too young to be as much offended as fascinated. He rolled up his sleeves and picked up a tomato, squeezing it hard until it burst and the clear juice oozed down his fist in little streams.

Mama took a step back. He kept his eyes on her ankles. Delia remembered because she could see up into his pale eyes. She couldn’t tell the color of his hair because he had greased it back so he looked like the James Dean pictures she had seen.

How much? He stared at Mama’s chocolate eyes but she instantly looked away.

Them’s ripe tomatoes. You got to handle ‘em right. Her face twitched and she pretended to brush away a fly.

It’s okay. That’s not what I want.

Some greens then?

I want you to come over here.

Anthony crawled out from behind the ice box, and Mama nodded at him just before the man leaned in, grabbed her chin and yanked it up close to his face.

I said I want you to come over here.

You got no right. She hesitated to touch the man, but when she did, she dug her nails into his arm and looked away from the shiny red nose, slicked-up hair, and swamp-water eyes.

Anthony got squirrelly and picked Delia up and shoved her inside the ice box. He did not shut the door but pushed a rock in front of it too big for her to move. She heard a scuffle and the breaking of wood, then each vegetable fell with a soft plop. Anthony’s grunts made her envision him punching hard flesh, and Mama’s cries sounded muffled as if her mouth were closed. A tractor moaned toward them from where Hawkins Road met the highway.

Delia could not stand feeling left out of the action, so she cried loudly and tried to squeeze past the boulder for what seemed like forever. By the time she succeeded in twisting her hips and shoulders through, the tractor noise drowned out the last screech of the tires as the truck spun off down the road in a pillow of smoke and exhaust. Mama laying biting her lip and gulping air, clutching her right leg just above the knee.

Off like a spooked animal, Anthony muttered.

What happened? Delia ran over to Mama, who held her at bay with an outstretched arm.

Don’t talk it up. Only make it worse. She ignored Delia and glared at Anthony. And don’t breath a word to your papa. No use him blowin’ off steam about it.

Anthony silently held out a hand. She grabbed it and pulled herself up slowly and looked around, bewildered, as he turned his attention to gathering the spilled vegetables and piling them into a bushel basket. He picked up the basket and led the way home, with Mama limping all the way.

Delia remembered that day like last night’s supper, young as she was at the time. She rolled the soda pop lid in her hand and threw it as far as she could from the house.

The sulfuric scent of the paper mill had permeated her clothes and made her want to hold her breath now. She read and read until her eyes hurt from the haze, then she went inside and read some more. When Mama came home from the mill and Papa came home from swapping stories and whiskeys down at the Pollywog, they caught her lying on the sofa with a book on her chest and Mama told her to get up before she wore it out. Mama rode too hard on her sometimes. If only she could be like Anthony, Mama often said. He always did what his mama liked. Maybe she was grateful for that day he saved her from the James Dean man, Delia figured.

The percussion of spitting grease broke the silence of the long afternoon and the aroma of blackened pork chops oozed over her, but her own memories had taken away her appetite.

Delia, her father called softly, and she knew by the cool contentment of his voice that he had done more talking than drinking that day. When sober, he spoke his syllables so articulately Mama accused him of wanting to rub off all his tarnish and find out a white lawyer underneath. Clean up, so we can eat, dear.

Uh-uh. Not hungry.

Delia May Burris, her mother scolded from the kitchen. Have you been into somebody’s larder again? I work all week to buy one pork chop dinner and ya’ll aren’t hungry.

Your mama’s right. Her father smiled gently and folded her hand in the warm pocket of his own. Wash up, Delia.

She did so, but only for him. After dinner, she said she wanted to walk up to visit the widows Magdalene and Naomi, to see whether they needed something picked out of their vegetable garden. Mama raised one brow and cocked her head to the side.

You never want to pick them greens for me. What’s so special about other folks’ gardens? But she handed Delia a hunk of her cornbread for Magdalene and Naomi and waved her on with a dismissive flick of the wrist.

Once out of sight, Delia turned up the main road and headed for the Gas ‘n Go where Anthony worked, half a mile away. The sun wedged itself in the thicket of a dogwood tree up the road, carving deformed shadows and inspiring a few warblers to take up their sunset vigils, croaking in the trees. Delia walked past the Harris house and a few other roadside shacks and said Evening to everyone who sat out on their front porches rocking, but she hoped they would not tell her mama they saw her pass Magdalene and Naomi’s place.

Prisoners of the paper mill by day melted into wax figures by seven o’clock every evening, draped over hammocks and front porch railings, waiting for night to slake the thirst of a heat wave that robbed perspiration from every living thing. Even the dogs flopped on porches and kitchen floors and stopped wagging their tails, as if their tails could not wade through the soupy air. She passed them all as quickly as possible.

The cornbread settled in her pocket and the cooler evening air began to purge the high humidity. Gladly distancing herself from the scent of the paper mill, she passed a huddle of willow trees and a wall of cottonwoods that rustled from a puff of a downwind breeze, the first motion in the sky all day. The breeze drowned out the