During Naptime
McArdle stood under the gaze of Christ and looked at the books behind the glass case. It was as she had said: the paper was crumbling and yellowed, but the book jackets were largely intact. The Bible in Portuguese. The Quijotein two volumes in Portuguese, about a thousand pages. Collected Works of Shakespeare in Portuguese. A Portuguese dictionary. A Portuguese/English dictionary. An English/Portuguese dictionary.
Geography of Brazil in Portuguese. Fundamentals of Latin. Dom Casmurro, in Portuguese. Vidas secas,[1] by Graciliano Ramos, in Portuguese. The Pain and the Promise of the Civil Rights Movement in Tallahassee, Florida. McArdle had read that one when he got curious twenty years earlier. Green Eggs and Spam and Lord of the Flies. Read those too. Green Eggs and Spam! What an interesting lady!
McArdle couldn’t remember if he had read Vidas secas in college. Miss Jasmine said not to touch the books, so he googled on his phone and learned it was a Modernist short novel published in 1938, a year after the lynchings and a year before publication of The Grapes of Wrath. The author had been a member of Brazil’s communist party and had spent time in jail related to his politics.
Vidas secas is about the struggle of uneducated family farmhands who raise goats and cows. From drought to drought and farm to farm they are nomadic in Brazil’s Northeast, and they are portrayed as close to the earth with limited language abilities to express their predicaments.
A main character is their dog Whale, who saves their lives by catching a fat guinea pig for the family to eat when they are starving. They roast it on a stick.
Miss Jasmine named her dog after the dog in the novel, thought McArdle.
As McArdle soaked in this information from his phone, he heard a light knock on the door. He went to look and could see Larry through the glass panes of the door. He opened the door and stood in the frame. Larry was a head taller than McArdle.
“May I come in?” Larry said. “To get my sandwiches.”
“Let you in? You threw a damn tomato at me.”
“You are a white man in a bad black neighborhood. I got to keep up appearances. So, I threw a tomato at you. And it’s not polite to say damn to a stranger.”
“And the sandwiches?”
“She makes them for me every day. Miss Jasmine does. She knows I’m hungry; she’s a nice lady. It’s black welfare. I don’t got no job. I depend on her sandwiches and she lets me stay on the couch. Going on nineteen years now.”
“Miss Jasmine, huh? Well, I suppose if you are her welfare project then come on in and get your damn sandwiches.”
“I told you it ain’t polite to say damn,” said Larry as he walked past McArdle toward the kitchen.
“Ain’t ain’t a word,” said McArdle. “And maybe you shouldn’t use double-negatives.”
“Oh, c’mon, man. Miss Jasmine uses them all the time. And she’s literate.”
“She called you a jackass.”
Larry smiled, sat down at the table, and started eating. “Maybe I am a jackass. Are you gonna stand there like a damn fool or are you gonna sit down?”
“I thought you just told me it ain’t polite to say damn,” McArdle said as he sat down.
“Ain’t ain’t a word,” said Larry as he continued to eat. Then he looked at McArdle and said, “You came to ask her about the lynchings, didn’t you?”
“That’s right.”
“Well, you’re not the first and probably not the last. At least until she kicks the bucket. Don’t tell her I said that. But I don’t think she’s told anybody much yet. I don’t think she likes to talk about it. She did lose her mind for thirteen years, you know.”
“She told me she was dissociative. That’s not the same as losing her mind. Or if she did lose her mind, she got it back before we were born. She even missed World War II is what she told me. So, what do you know about the lynchings, Larry?”
“How do you know my name was Larry?”
“’Cause Miss Jasmine told me, jackass. What do you know?”
“Don’t call me jackass. Only Miss Jasmine gets to call me that. I know that two teenage boys were killed. Not even old enough to vote. Not that people would have let them vote. They’d just be voting for white people anyway. The papers said the boys stabbed a policeman. Then they were abducted from the jail and shot. That’s the version that was in the paper, and what white people repeated. But in the black community? Nobody believes that they really stabbed a police officer.”
“How do you know all that? Not much is written about it.”
“That’s true, but people talked about in the black community and then it was spread down by word of mouth. Most of the people who knew anything have died, and that’s why people come to see Miss Jasmine. If anybody is left who remembers, it’s her. She’s the last person born before 1920. People who try to interview her are surprised by her acuity. They all get a good sandwich, but she doesn’t tell them much. She’s told me and Kenneth a bit over time, like she grew up in the sheriff’s house from six years old until the lynchings.”
“Acuity?”
“That’s right, it’s a word. You can look it up.”
“Thanks. I know what acuity means.”
“Must be a professor. Me, I’m a librarian.”
“So, who do black people think did it?”
“It’s not important which individuals literally did it. What’s important is that the whole white community knew about it. It’s like the same bad play performed over and over. Except it ain’t a play—it’s real. It’s like a ritual, a religion. We like to think that in 2020 that religion is now gone, and no more rituals, please.”
“What do you know about Sheriff Ortega?”
“I know he was the sheriff for a long time, I think starting in 1920 for about thirty years. Then he became the police chief. Go figure.
“I also know he couldn’t find the murderers even though he probably knew every person in town and sold them eggs. I know that Miss Jasmine and her mom were the sheriff’s housekeepers, and that the sheriff taught Miss Jasmine Portuguese. That’s the kind of shit you can’t make up.”
“You know, Larry, some people think shit is an impolite word.”
“Aw, shit, it just depends on who’s listening. I wouldn’t say it around Miss Jasmine, even though she says it herself from time to time. Sometimes she says to me, ‘Now, Larry, you ain’t worth a shit.’ Why, does the word offend you?”
“Can’t say that it does,” said McArdle.
“Well then, we agree on something,” said Larry as he took the last bite of his sandwich. “We can say shit when she ain’t around.
“I saw you looking at her books, you know, when I was standing out on the porch.”
“Is that what you saw?”
“That’s right. I also saw Jesus with his twelve disciples, plus you. That makes fourteen white men. Fourteen is not an unlucky number.”
“No, I guess it ain’t.”
[1] In Portuguese and Spanish, book titles capitalize only the first word, so Vidas secas; not Vidas Secas.