Roscoe’s crime hadn’t been directed at the Franklins, however. It had come as an odd cloudburst, a crackling of the rage he’d carried since the day he was born. Miss Rose said that he’d come out of her with a temper churching in his arms and legs, though he’d been a pretty child, the first in a line of similarly beautiful children: dark-dark with red underneath his skin, so that when the sun touched him, he seemed to glow.
In the year since Roscoe had been sentenced, Miss Rose had begun to keep her daughter close. After her pronouncement against Spelman, she walked the house at night and checked on Belle when she hoped the girl was asleep. She began to say Belle had a gift for fixing hair. Belle could start her own business, right in Chicasetta. No need to leave, for there were plenty colored women who’d let her touch their hair.
Miss Rose hadn’t considered that, while she didn’t allow Belle out of her sight anymore unless her child was climbing in the truck with Hosea to be dropped off at the new colored high school in town, there was church on Sundays and at church, there was Uncle Root. Her daughter’s great-uncle had been saving money for Belle’s college tuition since she had turned three years old and had recited her ABCs in front of the church congregation, before turning to recite from the first Chapter of Genesis, to the amazement of everyone there. Looking at that tiny girl talking about, in the beginning was the Word.
Throughout Belle’s seventeenth summer, Uncle Root methodically plied his charm. On Saturday mornings, he drove to Chicasetta from the campus of Routledge College, steeling himself against the possible danger on the country roads. Twice, he had passed white men, but he did not show his fear. To his shame, he pretended to be a fellow white man, giving them friendly waves as he passed them by, instead of the frightened respect that a Negro man would. His great-niece needed him to listen to her mother’s harangues, so he took the chance. He sat beside Miss Rose in the glider as she informed him she wasn’t gone lose another child.
“I understand,” he said. “I see what you mean, niece. Folks don’t understand a mother’s love.”
“Naw, they don’t!” Miss Rose said. “I carried that girl! Not nobody else!”
In the rocking chair on his other side, his sister watched him. Dear Pearl would snap her bowl of field peas. Or she’d peel tomatoes. Or she’d peel peaches. Or, in the sparse light of the evenings, sew scraps of cloth together to make quilt squares.
In the fall, before the weather broke into a chill, Uncle Root suggested to Miss Rose that if Spelman College was too far away for Belle to attend, maybe she could let Belle travel a short piece up the road to Routledge College, where he taught history, instead. It was only twenty-five miles away. And Dear Pearl rocked in her chair and gave her brother a sideway smile but kept her hands busy on her task. She was the big sister, had held that baby boy in her arms the day he was born, and after their mother had died in the 1918 influenza epidemic, Dear Pearl had raised him. It had been she who had given him the nickname “Root,” because of that almost supernatural charm of his.
That next fall, in 1962, Miss Rose, Hosea Driskell, and Belle drove in the pickup truck toward Milledgeville, then took the turn off toward Thatcher, where Routledge College was. For the journey in the truck, Belle and her parents donned church clothes. Though he wore brogans for his corns, Hosea was in a suit with a white shirt and string tie. Miss Rose wore heels, stockings, an all-in-one girdle, and a light-blue dress over that. In the truck, they squeezed their daughter against the passenger window. Pine, wisteria, and cedars passed by, nodding to Belle, Hey, girl, you finally got out your mama’s house! She didn’t know what to expect, but the campus was covered in the same trees as her parents’ farm.
A gravel road leading to the gates and beyond, until a grand structure appeared. A steeple reaching many feet: De Saussure Chapel, and the mother touched her daughter’s arm. Since Belle had received her letter of admission, Miss Rose was grateful for bragging rights. Negroes in town had expressed their public sympathy about Roscoe’s stint in prison, but word had come back to Miss Rose that folks were saying she thought herself above people, what with Uncle Root being a professor and Hosea and Miss Rose making such a good living on the Pinchards’ land. Her son’s crime was the Lord’s judgment against pride. But now Belle would be a schoolteacher, the highest rank for a Negro woman, and that shadowed her brother’s fall. Don’t tell Miss Rose that God won’t able.
They climbed out of the truck and Belle’s daddy unloaded her boxes and walked them up the stairs of the dormitory. After the boxes were settled on the floor of Belle’s room, he kissed the top of her head, but when the mother put her arms around her daughter, Miss Rose didn’t want to let the girl go.