Chapter Four
I first heard about what happened to Lulabelle late the next afternoon, on June 20th, when the Ransom Daily Record arrived on my grandmother’s concrete doorstep. I sat in the metal chair on the porch in the hot, late afternoon sun and unfolded the paper, waving to the four elderly women who passed by, walking down the middle of the street in their bonnets. My grandmother always laughed when she saw them out for their daily walk, secretly envying them their freedom from tubes and oxygen tanks.
On the front page of the Daily Record, on the bottom left-hand side of the page, was this article:
Girl, 16, Shot at Town Parade
June 19: Lulabelle Mackenzie, 16, of 210 Maple Avenue, was shot and killed yesterday by an unknown man as she
stood on North Beaton Street waiting for a local parade to pass by.
A student at Ransom High School, Miss Mackenzie excelled in field hockey and was described by friends as popular.
No arrests have been made in connection with the shooting, according to Sheriff James Martin, but he has several likely suspects.
And that was all it said.
I glanced at the rest of the paper, reading the baseball scores and the TV listings before folding it in thirds and looking out across the street and over the low, concrete buildings, where the sun had begun its slow descent. My mind jumped back to Lulabelle Mackenzie. Why would someone want to shoot a high school girl?
I’d never known Ransom to be a crime-ridden town, so I got up from my chair and opened the front door of my grandmother’s apartment. I put the paper on the coffee table and walked through the doorway to her bedroom, where she lay, head propped on a pillow, snoring loudly, oxygen tube snugly in her nostrils, her old skin looking leathery and papery at the same time. I went quietly back in the living room and sat on the couch to read a book.
Half an hour later she was up, standing in the doorway, bracing herself against its side with a bony arm. “What you doin’, baby?” she asked with a smile.
“Just reading,” I replied, hardly looking up.
She shuffled her slippers into the kitchen, where she had a cigarette by the window. I put down my book and stood in the doorway between living room and kitchen, watching her as she leaned on the sink and looked out her window at the clothesline and the parched, yellow white grass.
“What you want for dinner, baby?” She exhaled the words in a puff of smoke. “How about one of those ham and cheese sandwiches?” This had long been a joke between us. I could eat a ham and cheese sandwich twice a day every day.
“Same old thing again.” She chuckled and stubbed out her cigarette in the sink drain. She rinsed it out with tap water and walked into her bedroom, sitting sideways on the edge of her bed.
“You got any plans for tonight?” she asked me.
“No, not really. I may take a drive and go for a jog in a little while, but it’s still too hot.”
“Sho’ is,” she said.
She took the newspaper from the night table where I left it for her and scanned the front page. Her eyes found the short article at the bottom.
“Look at this! Colored girl got herself shot. Did you see this?” she asked me.
“Yeah. Didn’t say much about what happened, though.”
“Shoot,” she spat. “Still havin’ that stupid Juneteenth parade.” She laughed. “I thought they would’ve given that up years ago. Imagine those ignorant colored folks celebrating how stupid they were!”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“You know about Juneteenth, don’t you?”
“Just a little.” Then she told me the story again, along the lines of what the man in the bookstore had told me.
“The niggers were so happy to work on the farms, for the most part, that they never bothered to find out they were free.”
“But how could they? Didn’t the masters keep it from them?”
“Maybe they tried, but all I ever heard was that both sides liked things just the way they were. Colored folks have a way of finding things out, and ain’t no amount of whites gonna keep it from them.”
I laughed.
“For instance, take Coralee.”
Coralee was a maid who had come to help my grandmother with the cleaning and cooking since she got sick. She was a grandmother herself, as round as she was tall, and as strong as a horse.
“Coralee knows everything that goes on in this town and in two towns around. She talks to everyone and everyone talks to her. I don’t believe for a minute that news like that could be kept from all the slaves in the state of Texas for two whole years unless most of them didn’t want to hear it.”
“But why did it come through when it did?”
“The way I always heard it was that the war finally ended and we lost, so there was no more keepin’ secrets. There weren’t a lot of young men left to run things, and the colored folks decided they could do better if they were free. Some fool hit on Juneteenth, but I imagine they all knew already.”
“So why the parade?”
“The ignorant folks over there will do anything for a day off from work, even if it makes them look like fools.”
I thought about this for a minute and smiled. Two different stories about Juneteenth already! I’d have to get Coralee alone sometime and ask her about it.
“Why don’t you take a ride down North Beaton while it’s still light and see where she got shot? Jimmy
Martin can use all the help he can get.”
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