Jimmy was lynched right here on this soil too. Even though we’ll never know the exact location, his remains are somewhere in this state. His name, the dirt stained with his blood, belongs on a shelf. We—I need to remember, for Gigi.
I’m hurrying back to the parking lot now, but the walk to my car feels longer than the one to the museum, like history is dragging me down. The first thing I do: reach into my overnight bag to make sure the box is still there, buried at the bottom. It was foolish of me to leave it in the car. I breathe again when I feel the smooth vinyl, pull the box out of my bag, snap it open. Nestled in a bed of plush red velvet—a pearl necklace and bracelet. “Real pearls!” Gigi took great pains to emphasize when she gave them to me.
It was the day after she told me about Jimmy. Gigi had directed Momma to a safe-deposit box that no one even knew existed and told her to bring the contents to the hospital. In the safe, Momma found a black Hefty bag containing the jewelry box with the pearls, ancient Pan Am stock certificates, a bundle of letters from Grandpa Leroy, and, the kicker, about $3,000 in small bills.
“Been working the pole, Gigi?” Shaun teased. Momma smacked him on his head even though the joke was lost on Gigi.
Instead, she reminded us for the umpteenth time about how we shouldn’t keep all our money in banks. “Too big to fail? Yeah right! Y’all need to squirrel away some cold hard cash, a little at a time and then you got yourself a nest egg.” Then she handed me the box of pearls and two notes in her shaky scrawl. I’ve read them both, even the one that wasn’t meant for me. Of course, I’ll do what Gigi wants and give this bracelet to Jen. Eventually. But it all feels—how did Sabrina put it? Tricky.
The night Gigi died, I called Jen from a hard bench in the only corner in the lobby of the hospital where I had reception. I kept obsessively retrying, even though I knew it was futile. It was obvious her phone was turned off. I was so desperate to hear her voice. I just wanted to cry with her and miss Gigi together and maybe even beg her to come over and climb into bed with me and tell me every funny Gigi story she could remember. It didn’t matter what else was going on. But she didn’t answer, and I couldn’t form the words to leave in a voice mail. I needed to find another quiet moment to talk to her, one where it would be okay to break down. But it never came—this week has been insane with all the planning and arrangements. I will though. I want to. I need to give her this bracelet. The box closes with a loud snap. I place it carefully on the passenger seat next to me as if it’s a talisman, a companion, as if it’s Gigi.
All I want is to hear my grandmother’s voice again. I haven’t heard it since she spoke her actual final words, delivered in a ragged whisper the day before she died, the last time I saw her conscious. “You’re a good girl, Leroya, but you gotta let other people help you. You ain’t gonna get any brownie points for doing everything all on your own.” I should have known it was goodbye. And now it’s a too-cruel irony that Gigi passed on and then stopped haunting me, like she’s twice gone.
Come back, Grandma. I need you. I can’t hear you. I wait, listening for another minute, just in case, before starting the engine and turning on the radio. “River” by Leon Bridges is playing, a song Gigi had loved. I decide to see it as a message.
US-82 with its billboards for fireworks and porn shops passes in a blur as I push eighty miles per hour the whole way, eager to reach my family now. Every so often throughout the drive to Perote, I catch a faint whiff of Willie’s cigar smoke and find it weirdly comforting.
I’m off the highway when my bladder feels like it’s about to burst. Gas stations are few and far between on these smaller, emptier roads that will take me the rest of the way. The scarier roads.
The last few years, whenever I’ve been on a stretch like this, all I can think about is Sandra Bland, and how easily a turn signal or a taillight could turn me into her. I glance in the rearview every few minutes, maintain the speed limit, careful and cautious, all the while resenting that I have to be so careful and cautious.
I slow when I finally see a couple of beat-up gas pumps. They look like relics from another era; they are relics from another era. An ancient sign rests against the tanks, announcing COCA-COLA SERVED HERE. Out front of the small store, two white guys sit on folding chairs. One has stringy blond hair that nearly grazes his shoulders, the other a newly shorn buzz cut, revealing a scarred bald scalp, lumpy in places.
I try to assess the situation, the potential for danger, but after six months in Philly my redneck radar is rusty—and with my bladder screaming like it is, I’m desperate. I’ll have to take my chances. In the absence of any sort of parking lot, I pull over on the patchy red dirt, a few feet from where the men sit. The bald one squints at me hard, stands, and quickly closes the distance between him and my car.
“You need gas?” he asks through the closed window and makes a circle in the air with his closed fist to indicate that I should roll it down, which under other circumstances I’d probably find funny since I haven’t seen a car with a crank window in about forever.
“Just the bathroom,” I say through the crack as the window lowers. The gauge shows that I have half a tank. Daddy always told me to fill my gas tank before it dropped below half. “Because you never know when you’ll get another chance,” he said.
“Actually, yeah. Fill it up, regular, please.”
“Bathroom’s round back. Rooster’s got the key.”
If I went missing behind this gas station, would anyone ever know what happened to me? I’m an easy target, a woman alone on a desolate road, a tragic headline in the making. My former colleagues a hundred miles down the way in Birmingham might even cover it.
Rooster spits a wad of tobacco on the ground before he hands over a metal spatula, the kind you use to flip hotcakes, a key tied to it with a dirty piece of twine.
“Bathroom’s around the side. Sorry ’bout the toilet. It don’t flush real well.”
I swallow a gag as I squeeze myself into a bathroom the size of a closet. The toilet doesn’t flush at all, and it’s close to overflowing. I don’t want to add to it, but what choice do I have?
As I come back around the shop, Rooster is standing right in my path to the car. My stomach quivers, then plunges.
This is it.
He takes a step toward me, blocking my way, and I don’t even have time to think about where exactly I’ll run, or remember whatever I learned in that one self-defense class I took in college, before he extends his hand.
“Can I get the key, please? I gotta piss,” he mumbles. “Hope you don’t mind, we went ahead and did the windows too.” Beyond Rooster’s shoulder the bald guy pulls a squeegee across my windshield.
“You okay?” he asks.
“Yeah, fine, fine.” Relief quickly spirals into embarrassment.
“Where you headin’？”
“Perote.”
“About a mile to the town line. Welcome.”
As promised, it’s only a minute’s drive before I see the sign PEROTE BULLOCK COUNTY. I snake through the desolate remnants of what was once probably a bustling main street, now deserted, lined with a general store, post office, the white church, the Black church, a diner, police station, library, and the city hall. The town is neither welcoming nor threatening, but it is depressing. Empty streets, boarded-up buildings, a stillness in the air, a reminder that entire towns, like people, can just wither and die. There’s a certain inevitably to it, the understanding that heydays come and go and life marches on elsewhere while this husk of a place sits abandoned like a dusty artifact. Not even a quaint nostalgia lingers; there’s only the sense of life, opportunity, and better days come and gone. There’s no cell service, though I had the good sense to print out directions before leaving Philly. I had a feeling it’d be spotty. The little icon in the corner of my phone shows zero bars. Going off the grid like this makes me twitchy, imagining all the calls, emails, and news I’ll miss in the next twenty-four hours. What if Scotty needs to reach me? Being completely unreachable almost feels like missing a limb. There’s nothing I can do about it though, and there’s a kind of exhilarating freedom in that.