The Return of Buddy Bush Read online

  THE RETURN OF BUDDY BUSH

  Also by Shelia P. Moses

  The Legend of Buddy Bush

  A National Book Award finalist

  A Coretta Scott King Author Honor recipient

  I, Dred Scott: A Fictional Slave Narrative Based on the Life and Legal Precedent of Dred Scott

  Margaret K. McElderry Books

  Margaret K. McElderry Books

  An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division

  1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York 10020

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2006 by Shelia P. Moses

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  The text for this book is set in Fairfield Light.

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Moses, Shelia P.

  The return of Buddy Bush / Shelia P. Moses.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  Summary: Following her grandfather’s death in rural North Carolina in 1947, twelve-year-old Pattie Mae learns more about her family after reading her grandmother’s collection of obituaries and traveling to Harlem, New York, to find her uncle Buddy, who has escaped from the Ku Klux Klan.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-689-87431-4

  ISBN-10: 0-689-87431-6 (hardcover)

  eISBN 13: 978-1-439-11637-1

  [1. Family—Fiction. 2. African Americans—Fiction. 3. Race relations—Fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.M8475Ob 2006

  [Fic]—dc22

  2004020503

  I dedicate this book to my hero and high school principal, Mr. William Spencer Creecy Jr., who departed from us on August 5, 2005.

  And to my four oldest siblings, Barbara, Daniel, Johnny, and Scarlett

  If you call upon your ancestor’s names, they shall hear you. Therefore, they will never die.

  CONTENTS

  1 The Obituaries

  2 The Milkman

  3 The Packing

  4 Headed North

  5 June Bug

  6 Harlem, Lord, Harlem

  7 The Walk

  8 South of Baltimore

  9 The Gravediggers

  10 Back South

  11 The Courthouse

  12 The Storm

  Author’s Note

  Photographs

  1

  The Obituaries

  Lord have mercy. My grandpa is dead. Dead and gone. Braxton Jones was his name. Today we had his funeral at Chapel Hill Baptist Church, right here in Rich Square. It was a long, sad funeral. Folks did some hollering and crying and I thought his best friend, Mr. Charlie, was going to have a nervous breakdown right there in the church. He was just hurt. His wife, Miss Doleebuck, never made a sound as she held Mr. Charlie’s hand tight. So tight that his hand turned red. Red as a beet.

  My grandma, Babe Jones, did some crying. But not out loud. She cried inside with her proud self. Now my ma, Mer Sheals, just cried all she wanted to. Out loud! She was loud like the thunder and lightning outside the church window. It rained so hard the day they buried my grandpa. The ground was wet like my big sister Barjean’s face. I believe she did the most crying. Her and my big brother Coy who drove down from Harlem together in his new light blue Cadillac. Blue just like the one that my uncle Buddy Bush used to drive when he moved back down here from Harlem five years ago in 1942. Back down to Rehobeth Road where Grandma said he belonged. I bet she ain’t saying that mess now. Don’t nobody with good sense be saying it now. Everybody in Rich Square knows that Uncle Buddy should have stayed North. North of Baltimore, where colored men belong, so they can be men.

  Grandma ain’t saying nothing now because, you see, my uncle Buddy was not at the funeral. He ain’t been around for a month. That is why Grandpa is dead. This ain’t got nothing to do with the tumor on Grandpa’s brain that the new colored doctor told us would kill him before the cotton bloom. See, the white folks killed Grandpa. No, they did not shoot him. They did not stab him. They did not try to hang him like they tried to hang my uncle Buddy. Grandpa died from a broken heart about my uncle Buddy and what the white folks did to him. Yep, the white folks worried Grandpa right to his grave because they ran Uncle Buddy off. Well, they didn’t run him away. Uncle Buddy ran away on his own to stay alive. Had he stayed in these parts, he would be dead too. Dead as Grandpa. It’s a shame and a disgrace how white folks treated my uncle. He ain’t never done nothing to nobody but had a little white liquor every now and then. Ain’t no law against that. But you know what? The white folks got him anyway.

  All Uncle Buddy did was take me to the picture show one night in June after we were done eating catfish at Grandma’s house just like we do every Friday night. We had such a nice drive into town. We ate ice cream while we waited for his date Miss Nora to get off work at the sewing factory right across the street from Myers Theater. What happened to Uncle Buddy that night was a shame ’fore God. What happened to our lives next was worse.

  See, this white woman that passed Uncle Buddy on the sidewalk that night said he tried to rape her. I said she was a lie then and I say she is a lie now. Look-a-here, I saw the whole dag-gon thing and Uncle Buddy ain’t tried to rape her nowhere. What really happened was Uncle Buddy did not do what Grandpa been telling him to do ever since he moved back to Rehobeth Road. Grandpa told him when you see white folks coming, just move over and let them pass. Uncle Buddy said, “To hell with them white folks.’ He said he would not move if they paid him.

  He should have moved that night. He stood up so the white lady would walk past him, but he didn’t move off of the sidewalk for her. So she went to the sheriff and told him her big lie and they arrested my uncle for nothing. Off they went to the jailhouse with Uncle Buddy. Me, they grabbed up like a rag doll and took me home to my folks on Jones Property.

  A few weeks later, while Uncle Buddy was awaiting his trial, the Klan broke him out of jail and tried to hang him. Uncle Buddy is so much smarter than them white folks, because he jumped out of the boot of their car and hid in the swamp where the colored Masons found him and took him North. I tell you the other thing he did, he made it all the way north to Harlem. Well, that’s where we think he is.

  That was sure good for Uncle Buddy, but all the stress on my poor grandpa was just too much and that is why he’s dead and I am sitting on the floor putting Grandpa’s obituary in a wooden chest—the chest that Grandpa carved thirty years ago out of an old oak tree that fell after a tornado came through Rich Square in the middle of the night.

  I ain’t never gone in this chest before. Grandma said can’t nobody on Jones Property go in this chest until you are twelve years old. On Rehobeth Road, everything happens when you twelve. You get baptized, you get your hair pressed for the very first time, and some girls even get their period. But if you are a Jones, you get to go in the old oak chest and put the obituary away after a Jones funeral.

  So last year when my cousin June Bug drowned, Grandma would not let me put his obituary in the chest because I was only eleven back then. But Ma put it in right here. His cousin Willies, on his daddy’s side, obituary is here too. They both drowned on the same day and we had their funerals on the same day too.

  Now here are both their dead folks’ papers. Right on top. That’s a sad sight. Under them two are so many obituaries that it would take me all
day to count them. This is something else. I don’t believe a person has died on Rehobeth Road, or all of Rich Square for that matter, that Grandma didn’t save their obituary.

  I can’t believe that Grandma has saved all of those papers. It must be two hundred or more. Yep, I bet it’s two hundred in here. Grandma even got the obituary from the twins, Big One and Little One’s funeral. They was twelve when they got killed in a car accident coming from a stickball game. Grandma got Mary Lou’s dead folks’ paper too. That woman died because she was too fat. Four hundred pounds too fat.

  I know I better close the chest up and get back out in the sitting room with all the folks who came to the funeral to say good-bye to Grandpa, I know my best friend, Chick-A-Boo, want me to come back in there with her. She been with me all evening. But she can’t come in this room. This room and this chest are for folks with Jones blood only. So she is stuck in there with the gossiping folks from Rehobeth Road. Just listen at them. They just sitting around talking and eating up all the good cakes and pies that folks cooked for us. There ain’t going to be a thing left when Toe Worm leave. Poor thing. We call him Toe Worm because his toes are so curled up that he don’t hardly wear shoes. His real name is Pen Paul. Heck, I think I would rather be called Toe Worm. Whatever we call him, it don’t stop Toe Worm from eating folks out of house and home. He done eat two helpings of food. Now he’s working on Grandmas church friend Miss Thelma’s lemon pie. Toe Worm is Miss Thelma’s nephew on his ma side of the family.

  I put the obituaries back in the chest and close it tight, just like it was when Grandma sent me in here.

  Look at these folks just sitting around talking about Grandpa and how nice the funeral was. “Who in the world wrote the obituary? It was some kind of nice,’ Miss Ethel Mae say in between eating her third piece of chicken. She don’t need to eat another piece because she is as big as a house already.

  Ma rolls her eyes at Miss Ethel Mae before she open her mouth. “Ethel Mae, you know good and well I wrote that. You ask the same question after every funeral, like you don’t know that when coloreds in Rich Square die, they folks come and get me to write they obituary.”

  Miss Ethel Mae just rolls her eyes back at Ma and bites her chicken again. Ma better leave that big woman alone. All she got to do is sit on Ma, just like she sat on top of Miss Cathy when Miss Cathy was running her mouth at Miss Ethel Mae in the cotton field last year. If she does, I can’t help Ma, because Miss Ethel Mae might sit on me, too. Ma said that only crazy folks fight all the time. I say that folks with good sense better keep they mouth closed. Tight!

  You know, I really don’t have time for all this grown folks’ mess. I want them to take their tails home so that I can go back in that room and count some of them obituaries. Maybe I will take one from Grandpa’s funeral and give it to Uncle Buddy when I see him. Lord knows when that will be.

  While Ma and Miss Ethel Mae still rolling they eyes at each other I go on into the kitchen where Grandma is and wouldn’t you know she is sitting in Grandpa’s chair, next to the woodstove. I left Chick-A-Boo again, because she and her Ma should have enough sense to go home. I love her, but I am tired and I want to just be with people that got Jones blood.

  “Grandma Babe, are you all right?”

  “Child, Grandma is going to be fine. I just miss Braxton some kind of bad. I have lived with that man most of my life. I gave him five children and we buried two. And Buddy, he out there somewhere on the run for something he did not do. With all of that, Grandma is still all right.”

  Miss Doleebuck sitting in the kitchen too and she looking at me like I better go on about my twelve-year-old business. That’s fine too, because I want her to leave Jones Property and go home. She been here all evening and I am tired. Most of all I want to get back in that chest before I go to sleep.

  Finally, one by one, the folks leave Jones Property and head home. Mr. Charlie, Miss Doleebuck, and their children are the last to leave. Mr. Charlie and Miss Doleebuck got another boy up North somewhere, but he don’t never come South of Baltimore. I know he’s there, because I overheard Grandpa say so one night when I was testing a new mason jar up against the bedroom wall.

  The other thing I know is that boy of theirs, Park Lee, ain’t got good sense because he talk to himself all the time and he don’t ever stop playing with that green yo-yo of his. Now, that would be fine if he wasn’t thirty years old.

  Anyway, they all gone now and I am glad. Chick-A-Boo is sad because she has to leave me. But I am happy to see her go. Miss Nora is leaving too. She is so upset about Grandpa dying and Uncle Buddy running off, but she said she will check on us from time to time. She still calls herself Uncle Buddy’s girlfriend. If I was Miss Nora, I would get me a new boyfriend, just in case Uncle Buddy can’t come back to these parts.

  I take a peep in the kitchen again.

  Grandma and Ma in there cleaning up. The women folks that were here earlier did some cleaning up for us after the funeral, but that ain’t good enough for these women folks. Not the Jones women. They want the floors to be like dishes, clean enough to eat off of. While they scrubbing the walls, this is a good time for me to go back and look in the chest and to take a copy of Grandpa’s obituary for Uncle Buddy. A good time for me to read about all them dead folks. Dead folks who use to live on Rehobeth Road and in Rich Square.

  2

  The Milkman

  M a and Grandma still in the kitchen wiping every corner.

  The cups.

  The plates.

  The stove.

  The floors.

  Lord, they just wiping.

  Ma is crying.

  She need to clean the mirrors, too. Grandma covered every mirror in the house last week when Grandpa died. They were covered all week until we got home from the funeral. Grandma took all the covers off except the one in my back bedroom where my cousin, Collie, been sleeping. I guess she will uncover that mirror tonight. Covering the mirrors is a part of dying on Rehobeth Road. That’s what the colored folks do around here. They believe it’s bad luck to look at yourself when somebody dies. Uncle Buddy said that ain’t so. But Uncle Buddy also said that he don’t have to move off the sidewalk for the white folks and look where that got him with his hardheaded self.

  Let me tell you how hardheaded Uncle Buddy really is. Ma said after his folks died and Grandma and Grandpa took him in he would sit in the kitchen every day and watch Grandma cook. One day when he was about my age, he said the stove did not look hot enough to cook the biscuits. Grandma told him to go about his business and the stove was fine. Guess what he did. He said, “No, it ain’t hot,” and touched the stove with his bare hand. Grandma and Grandpa tore his behind up. Ma said Uncle Buddy had a sore hand and a sore behind for a week. He’s just hardheaded.

  I love myself some Uncle Buddy, but I do have to talk to him about not believing in some of the stuff that the old folks on Rehobeth Road believe in. First Uncle Buddy said, “The young are strong, but the old know the way.” Then he do not listen when he should. I ain’t going to turn on Uncle Buddy for Grandma, but I just know Grandma can tell you some good stuff when she ain’t fussing her little gray head off, and Grandpa ain’t never told us nothing wrong. Never! You just got to listen and don’t get mad. So mad that you get in trouble for not listening. Because Uncle Buddy did not listen, we here without our men folks. And Coy can’t stay down here because Uncle Buddy got a hard head. Besides, Coy is going to marry that girl name Mary this November. She up in Harlem planning the wedding while Coy down here getting fussed at by the controlling women. Right now he and BarJean gone down Rehobeth Road, to the house where me and Ma live, to spend the night. The old slave house. Uncle Buddy use to live in the slave house too.

  Ma sisters, Aunt Louise and Aunt Rosie, so broke down from their trip down from Harlem and the funeral that they fast asleep in the room where Ma sleep when we stay here. Until they leave, me and Ma staying in the little bedroom off of the kitchen, because Collie sleeping in my room. Ma say they city
folks and they need their own room so they can do as they please. Ma say they lazy and we got work to do. We do not have time to tiptoe around in the bedroom while they sleep late. She said we’ll be fine in the other room until they leave. I do not care where they sleep; right now, I’m looking in the chest again. The dead folks’ chest.

  I stick my hand down in the chest to the very bottom. I’m almost scared to look at what I pull out. But I’m looking. This obituary is sixty years old. It is for a lady named Nicey Lewis. That would be Grandma’s stepmomma. My grandma told me that her blood momma, Mae Fannie, died when she was born. Her daddy, George Lewis, had to raise her by himself for a little while. Grandma said that she did not even have her ma’s breast milk to drink, just milk from the cow.

  Grandma said she was about two when her papa (my great-granddaddy), George Lewis, married this kind lady named Nicey Tann. That was her maiden name. Grandma said she was about ten before she realized that Grandma Nicey was not her real momma. It ain’t nothing her kinfolks told her. They from Rich Square and everything is a secret around here until you grown. Even when you grown, I think you get a piece of news here and a piece of news there. That is why the mason jar is so important in my life. I ain’t asking nothing. I will ease drop with my mason jar up against the walls until I get the truth.

  Now, this is the truth. I ease dropped and learned about my grandma one day when she was talking to Miss Doleebuck. Grandma did not have much schooling because she had to stay home and work in the fields. But on the days when it was too cold to work, Grandma would walk to the schoolhouse up in town for a few hours. She said one day she was teasing a girl at school named Betty Sue about her half-pressed hair when Betty Sue just upped and got real mad and told Grandma all about herself.

  “You think you is something special, don’t you, Babe Lewis. Let me tell you how special you ain’t. You don’t even have a real momma. My momma said that your momma is dead and that lady you live with ain’t your momma. Now how you like that, with your bow legs?”