Lawyer Tate’s legal eyes studied me for a moment, then he said, “Hold on to that thinking, Cassie . . . and remember . . . our time will come. Our time will come.” He then turned abruptly to his son. “Okay, Henry, date’s over. You and Brenda come with me. We’ll drop Brenda off. Moe,” he said, turning back, “you come by my office when you get a chance. Robert, talk to your sister. I’ll see you and your lovely wife at church . . . and, Cassie,” he continued, glancing over at me, “maybe when Moe comes to see me, you need to come with him. Robert, you come too. I think we all need to talk. And one more thing, Miss Cassie Logan, you stay out of trouble.” With all orders given, he and Henry and Brenda got into his Lincoln and drove away.
We watched as they left, then Stacey said, “Moe, you get your car and we’ll see you at the house. Cassie, you ride with me. Car’s parked up the street. I want to talk to you.”
I sighed, looked at Moe, and went with Stacey. I knew I was in for it.
“So, what were you thinking?” Stacey demanded to know as we drove toward home. “Or did you think?”
I looked out the window, not wanting to talk about it. “It’s been a hard day, Stacey.”
“It could’ve been a lot harder. You could be sitting in jail right now.”
“I know.”
“And all for a movie you didn’t even get to see.”
I turned to him. “What do you want me to say? Maybe I just didn’t think about all that. It was the principle of the thing!”
“Cassie, you know as well as I do that principle will land your behind in jail, and no, you did not think. You certainly didn’t think about Moe.”
I was silent as Stacey glanced over at me.
“Forget yourself and your principle for a moment. What if Moe had been arrested? What good would principle have served then?”
“Moe didn’t have to go in with me,” I protested sullenly. “I didn’t ask him.”
“Oh, come on now, Cassie,” Stacey said, exasperated with me. He knew me like a book. “You know better than that! Moe would never have let you go in that theater alone, and he would never leave you, you know that too. You made up your mind about this thing and you just didn’t care about the consequences.”
I took his chastising, but then defended lamely, “Like I said, it was the principle of the thing.”
Stacey scoffed that off. “The principle. If Lawyer Tate hadn’t shown up to talk to those white people, Moe could have been arrested. You need to think, Cassie, before you go taking a stand about principle. How many times Papa and Mama tell us that?” Stacey again looked at me. “Your principle could have landed Moe back in Mississippi. Your principle could have gotten Moe killed.”
I met Stacey’s eyes in the dark and knew there were no further words to say. He was right, and that’s all there was to that. He was right about everything. We drove the rest of the way home in silence. Like the night, the streets were beginning to quiet, and in silence I thought about the city of Toledo without its signs, but segregated anyway. I thought about Toledo with all its opportunities, but segregated anyway. At least down home in Mississippi and throughout the South, folks were direct and honest about what was expected. Everybody knew exactly where a body stood. There was no pretense to equality. The signs were everywhere. Whites Only. Colored Not Allowed. We had a place and they had a place. Everybody had a place, and everybody knew where and what that place was. Whites Only. Colored Not Allowed. But here in Toledo, there were no signs. There did not have to be. It was simply understood.
Whites Only. Colored Not Allowed.
LAYOFFS
(1946–1947)
Moe Turner was Stacey’s best friend, and they had been through a lot together. At the age of fourteen, the two of them had run off to the Louisiana cane fields looking for work. They had gone not out of rebellion, but because both the Turners and our family, like just about every family around, were struggling with their crops, with their debt. Our family in particular, one of the few black families in the community who owned land, was faced with losing that land. With no money coming in, Stacey and Moe had taken it upon themselves to get some money by going off on their own. They were gone for months and both Moe’s widowed father and all our family had searched for them, worried about them, and prayed for them. In the end, we had found them, sick and frail in a Louisiana jail.
Both had come home that time, but that was not the case when, a few years later, Moe took a crowbar and slammed it into three white boys, three white boys in Mississippi. He bloodied them, injuring them severely, then he had fled the county and Mississippi and gone up to Memphis with the help of Stacey and a white boy named Jeremy Simms. The year Moe fled was 1941, just before the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the country’s entry into World War II. I remember thinking that at least Moe didn’t have to worry about having to be a soldier. The government and the state of Mississippi didn’t know where to find him.
“Moe,” said Attorney Tate, crossing his long legs as he pushed slightly away from his desk, which was between us, “I asked you to come meet with me because I have a story to tell you, a story that might be of interest to you. It’s about Mississippi.”
Moe looked quizzically at the attorney, then quickly at Stacey and me, and again at Attorney Tate. “Interest to me?”
Attorney Tate nodded. “And I asked Robert and Cassie to come with you because I think they have a part in it.”
Both Stacey and I kept our eyes straight ahead, focused on Attorney Tate, but my heart began to race, for I feared where this might be going.
“As you know, I have contact with the police department and also with a number of attorneys in this area, including the district attorney’s office. Well, recently one of these people contacted me as a representative of the Negro community and asked me if I knew a young man by the name of Moe Turner who might live here. . . .”
His voice trailed off for a moment as his eyes studied us. I kept my eyes directly on him. I felt movement from Moe, who sat next to me on the office couch. Lawyer Tate’s eyes took note. “Of course, I told this person truthfully that I was not aware of any gentleman by that name, but I did ask why he was inquiring. I was told that it had come to his attention that a man named Moe Turner from Mississippi might be in the area and that this young man was wanted by the law in Mississippi.” Again Lawyer Tate paused. Again he set his gaze on each of us. Then he added, “Wanted for a brutal assault on three white men.”
Moe sighed, and I looked at him. In Moe’s face I saw the same look of fear as five years ago, when he realized what he had done and what he was about to face. Attorney Tate kept his eyes on Moe, but Moe’s eyes were downcast and he didn’t speak.