Jay Stevens

By Jim Robertson

When Jay Stevens best friend Jimmy Burletson, made the decision to keep the black baby that somebody had abandoned on his front porch, Jay had to make a choice. He could either accept what Jimmy had done, despite how crazy it was, or he could turn his back on his friend.

Then too, there was the problem of the good-looking high-yaller named Sweet Alice Nelson, whom Jimmy had hired to help out. She was always around, and, to Jays consternation, he found he enjoyed being in her company. That was a strange feeling for a white man in Southwest Mississippi, and he knew it.

When Sweet Alice moved to New Orleans, Jay could have put her put of his life completely then and there, but he didnt. If he had, his life would have been very different, but he was quite certain it wouldnt have been as interesting.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Apr 15, 2013
• ISBN: 9781475983043

Jim Robertson

Jim Robertson is a native of Liberty, Mississippi. Before becoming a writer, he was a member of the Mississippi House of Representatives and a college teacher both in Mississippi and in Texas. He and his wife Linda now live in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, where he is working on his next novel and dreaming up ideas for other books.

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Copyright © 2013 by Jim Robertson.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents, organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. First names, place names, and historical figures are real.

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ISBN: 978-1-4759-8303-6 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4759-8304-3 (ebk)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013905368

iUniverse rev. date: 04/09/2013

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Many people helped to make this novel a reality, and they have my undying gratitude. Numbered among them are all the members of my family and the following friends: Jerry Agent, John Bedenbaugh, Jeff Daughdrill, Sharon Evans, Judy Harrell, Ethan Warden, Wayne Husted, James McMahon and Linda Vasquez. Special thanks go also to Nova Corley and Galand Nuchols, both of whom gave me many hours of their time and helped me in more ways than they could possibly know.

Chapter 1

Until August 31, 1959, my life in Southwest Mississippi was just about ideal. I was 23 years old, unattached and quite content to keep it that way . My social calendar was full enough to assure boredom would set in only if I was stupid enough to let it. Many of my old friends had gotten married while still in their teens. Most of them didn’t seem to regret it, but I liked the idea of being free.

I believed I was controlling my own destiny, and I planned to keep it that way. It never crossed my mind that a single event, and one that occurred in the life of my friend, Jimmy Burletson rather than mine, for heaven’s sake, could have a profound effect on me, but that is exactly what happened. For Amite County, Mississippi, that event in Jimmy’s life was extraordinary, even phenomenal. Despite all that, he didn’t bother to tell his best buddy about it.

Though my legal name is James Allouicious Stevens, thank goodness, my mama started calling me Jay the day I was born, and she made it stick pretty well. In fact, no one had made the mistake of calling me by any part of my legal name since the fifth grade when my classmate, Milton Wentworth, thought it would be funny if he called me Allouicious. Five minutes later, when he was still trying to stop the blood draining from his nose, he told everybody he guessed they all ought to just call me Jay, the way they had always done.

When I graduated from Liberty High School in 1954, Mama and Daddy sent me on a tour of Europe to round out my education. Some people still called that experience the grand tour, and it surely was appropriately named as far as I was concerned. I loved every minute I spent in my travels, and learned things that broadened my perspective and gave me a great deal of joy as well. I learned, for example, that it was no accident French women had the reputation of being great kissers.

True to Mama’s instructions, though, I spent most of my time visiting the great institutions in Europe’s capital cities as well as many others. I immersed myself in art, music and culture throughout Western Europe and as much of the rest of the continent as I could manage.

When I returned home, both Mama and Daddy wanted me to go to college at Mississippi Southern like my best friend, Jimmy Burletson. I would like to have pleased them, but going to college just wasn’t what I wanted to do. What I liked better than anything else was making money, and I was good at it. Daddy was good at it, too, but he made a point of never showing it. In fact, when he and Mama sent me to Europe, they, very carefully, kept my trip a secret. Daddy believed that the worst thing you could do was to flaunt the fact that you had more money than other people. I agreed with him, I guess, but rather than focusing on not flaunting what I had, I just kept trying to make more.

Daddy gave me a lot of the stock he owned in a company that eventually came to be known as Xerox, and I put it to good use. I sold some of it when the price looked right and invested that money in property of various sorts in a number of different places.

By continuing to live at home, I kept my expenses low and was able to invest money every month. Early on I had learned to employ the use of experts where my investments were concerned, and that decision paid off quite well. The fact I started working and saving my money when I was ten years old hadn’t hurt anything either.

Although I made it a point to continue to work as hard as most anybody, I did take off and go on trips when the notion struck me. I went to Chicago, New York, Boston, Charleston, Washington and other cities of interest from time-to-time, but my favorite city was always New Orleans.

I had a beautiful 1957, two-tone, Bellaire Chevrolet, which I dearly loved, but for long trips I normally preferred the train. I could depart from McComb, twenty miles away from my hometown of Liberty, very conveniently. Unless I wanted to make anonymity more likely by going to the Jackson station, that’s usually what I would do. Over the years I acquired a number of friends in other states, many of whom were females and visiting them added a nice dimension to my life.

As a result of all the positive experiences I was having prior to August 31, 1959, I had a pervasive feeling of well-being. That feeling was seriously disturbed, however, by some words I didn’t want to hear. I heard them late in the afternoon, purely by accident.

I’d gotten a haircut and was walking over to the M. and T. store to get a new pair of blue jeans when I overheard a conversation about Jimmy between two old men. They were sitting on the loafers’ bench in front of the barbershop visiting with one another as I passed in front of them. The one doing the talking at that moment was at least 80 years old, but his voice was good and strong. Very clearly, he said, Somebody left a nigger baby on Jimmy Burletson’s front porch early this morning.

I wasn’t trying to overhear him, but he was talking so loudly anybody within fifty feet would have been privy to what he said. Despite the fact I was halfway inside the M. and T. before he finished his sentence, his final words were as clear as a bell. They were, And he’s planning to keep it. Besides that, he’s hired a good-looking, high yaller nigger girl named Sweet Alice Nelson to help him. As soon as I closed the door behind me, I thought, Old men can say some foolish damn things. No one in his right mind would believe that Jimmy Burletson would do something that crazy.

I went on and did my shopping, and when I got back outside, the loafers’ bench was empty. It didn’t matter though. I wasn’t about to pursue the ridiculous conversation I’d overheard between two old men who didn’t know what they were talking about. I knew perfectly well that even if someone had left a baby on Jimmy’s porch, especially a nigger, he would have taken it to the Welfare Department.

Over the next several days, however, my original convictions were challenged everywhere I turned. It seemed that everybody was talking about Jimmy, and they were all saying essentially the same things. He wasn’t getting many compliments either, that was for sure. Eventually, the pressure of all of it was more than I wished to stand, so I drove out to Jimmy’s house to see for myself what was going on.

To my horror, even before I pulled off the road onto his driveway, I saw that the unbelievable had really happened. Jimmy was sitting on his porch swing holding a baby, and it was a nigger, alright. Anybody could see that.

I didn’t smile at Jimmy when I stepped up on his front porch. Even if I had wanted to, I don’t think I could have. The sight before me was more than I could handle. It wasn’t simply that he was holding that baby; he was holding it as if what he was doing was a normal thing for a white fella to do.

I got madder and madder at Jimmy the more I looked at him. As if he couldn’t tell it, though, he stood up and told me the baby’s name was Hope. Struggling to keep myself under control, I asked him what he was doing.

Well, he said, "before you came up, I was reading The Grapes of Wrath to Hope."

I don’t mean that, Smart Aleck. I mean, what are you doing keeping that baby?

For a moment I saw real anger in his eyes, and I thought he was going to tell me where to get off. As I watched him, however, his face relaxed a little and he said, Tell me what you’ve heard, and I’ll fill in the details.

In my excitement, I talked fast as I told him about all the rumors that were flying around. I didn’t leave anything out.

To my amazement, nothing I said seemed to cause him any concern. I didn’t see any way he could feel indifferent about all of those rumors, so, in a very loud voice I said, You can’t keep a black baby. I’m not sure I had ever hollered at him before, and it caught him by surprise. I could tell it made him mad, too, and I was glad I hadn’t called Hope a nigger. He probably would have slugged me if I’d used that word. Even so, I knew he was going to at least holler back at me. But, to my surprise, he didn’t. Instead, he touched my arm and started talking to me in a completely calm voice.

He said, At first, I didn’t even think about keeping this baby, I just tried to take care of her until I could figure out what ought to be done. As you know, I have always prided myself on being rational. He paused then and looked out across his pasture, and I could just about see his mind moving. In a moment, he turned back to me and said, My insistence on being rational about everything worked pretty well until this baby came into my life. Even then, for a while, I was able to force myself to be logical. Doing what my mind rather than my heart told me to do, I made an effort to find somebody to give her a home. At that point, he paused again, but, instead of looking at his pasture, he turned his attention to Hope and continued talking. Jay, he said, Things might have turned out differently if Hope hadn’t started smiling at me all the time. When she started that, she captured my heart, and there wasn’t anything else for me to do but to keep her.

As Jimmy sat back down and began moving the swing up and back, I found myself wondering if this was the same man who had been my best friend since the first grade.I always assumed our beliefs were compatible. Apparently, I had either been wrong, or, somewhere along the way, he had changed.

That’s what I was thinking, anyway, as I stood there looking down at Jimmy with the baby sitting in his lap, her head resting against his chest. Then, as if she felt she ought to be involved in everything that was happening, she looked up at me and, almost instantly, gave me a smile. It wasn’t one of those fleeting smiles, either. She held my attention with it, and I was put in the uncomfortable position of trying to figure out what I was supposed to do. No baby had ever smiled at me before, and certainly not a black one. My first thought was that it likely wouldn’t be right for me to smile back at her, but then I thought, If I don’t do that, what will I do? The more I looked at her the more I felt it would probably be better for me to just do what she was doing. I doubted my smile was as pretty as hers, but I gave it my best shot under the circumstances.

After a moment, thank goodness, something else caught the baby’s attention, and she turned her head away from me. Feeling a little as if I’d been freed, I stepped over and leaned against the porch rail. I stood there for several moments and just waited. Perhaps Jimmy will think of something else he wants to tell me, I thought.

It didn’t turn out that way, though. Almost as if I wasn’t there, Jimmy moved the swing back and forth and just held the baby while he continually rubbed and patted on her. I had no way of knowing, of course, if she liked all that or not, but she surely did seem content. I took a real good look at Jimmy and concluded that whatever the baby was feeling, he was feeling it, too, and in double measure. I couldn’t keep myself from being touched by what I saw, but down deep I still didn’t like what was happening. In my mind the Welfare Department was still a viable option, regardless of what Jimmy said.

Pretty shortly I figured I’d done everything I could, so I let Jimmy know I was about ready to leave. He looked up at me and asked when I reckoned I’d be coming back. Without really looking directly at him, I told him I just wasn’t sure.

Just before I stepped off the porch, it occurred to me that I might ought to offer some words of encouragement to Jimmy. I moved slowly enough to give myself time to think of some, but it didn’t work.

When I got to my car and leaned down to get in, the thought crossed my mind that it might be nice if I turned and gave Jimmy a smile. Somehow, though, that gesture didn’t appeal to me, so I just got on in and cranked up.

When I got to the road running in from of Jimmy’s house and started to pull away, I considered putting my hand up and giving Jimmy a wave. Just as quickly, though, I figured he might not even see it, so I just drove on.

In my better moments, I felt that I would have done all of those things. Mostly though, I didn’t have those better moments. As a result, I was left with