Free And Do Remember Me by Marita Golden

owns a gun can use it. They was scared of my daddy cause a man with a gun’s got something to protect.”
    He couldn’t bear another death. The words had streamed from his subconscious, been released out of memory—all in a frenzy. Lincoln had sat down in front of his battered portable typewriter an hour after Jessie told him they found the bodies of Goodman, Schwerner and Chaney and had not stopped, eaten or slept since.
    He was writing and so was healed. Scrambled between the lines rumbling into existence, transforming him and all they tried to render, was Jessie. Jessie, who had gone to jail and come out free. Jessie, who was in flight from something too awful to name. Her studied, awesome elusiveness bound him to her. If he had his way, she would become the mama he lost at three, the sister he never had, the family he longed to be a part of, the adopted father who died. He had told her everything, even as she hoarded her own past, sealed it against scrutiny. Her silence was a lock he couldn’t open, with force or love. But it didn’t matter who she was, he told himself then, or what she was running from. Now she was here. Now she was his.
    And he had told her about being six and knowing God hated him, else why was love a torn, shredded hand-me-down, thrust at him now and then out of guilt or obligation, never just because. And he told her about being adopted and still feeling like he didn’t know his name, about going one day to the bank with J. R. Sturgis and hearing him say yessir to the man behind the big desk, yessir, his hat in his hand, a wide nigger smile splitting his dignity in two, yessir and not holding J. R. Sturgis’s hand when they left the bank because the man he knew had walked into that room but he was sure he had not come out. He even told her about the look Mrs. Sturgis reserved just for him, her eyes narrowed like darts that just missed his throat. And he’d told her how sorrow and sadness and grief made you free. Tasting them, there was nothing else to learn. You couldn’t be surprised ever again.
    Poems flowed inside him like the rivers Langston Hughes had known—the Congo, the Nile, the Euphrates. A play lurked in the corners too, one populated by his and Jessie’s ghosts, by the corpses they had stumbled over to find each other. Bones would be reincarnated through speech. Ashes would turn suddenly into flesh. He couldn’t bear another death. He would keep on writing until it was safe to stop.
    S HE HAD PRAYED for those three men like she had once prayed her daddy would leave her alone. So, as she had feared all along, there really was no God.
    ——
    T HE PLAY DRAMATIZED the life of eighty-five-year-old Mattie Lee. In the one-character drama, Mattie Lee recounted her life as a sharecropper: the births and deaths of children, the two husbands she outlived. The play read, to Jessie, like a long poem, except the poetry sounded like Negroes this time. When she finished reading, Lincoln asked, “What do you think?”
    “Why, Lincoln, I think it’s the nicest thing I ever read. What you gonna do with it?”
    “We’re gonna put it on. Present it. I wrote this for you. I want you to play the part of Mattie Lee.”
    “I can’t act,” Jessie protested nervously.
    “Sure you can.”
    “Oh no, Lincoln, no, I can’t do that,” she said, rising quickly from the bed. “I’d be afraid, standing in front of a whole bunch of people. I could never remember all those words.”
    “I’ll help you. Direct you.”
    Holding up her hands in protest, Jessie insisted, “Lincoln, I can’t, I just can’t.”
    He walked over to Jessie and held her. “You said you were too scared to join the movement,” Lincoln reminded her, moving in on Jessie and capturing her in his arms before she could back away.
    “That’s not the same thing as acting. Nobody’s looking at me all the time, like when you’re acting.”
    “You just think they’re not. But they are. Look, read some of this out loud for