Free And Do Remember Me by Marita Golden Page A

me, won’t you? I wrote it but I’ve never really heard how it sounds.”
    Jessie picked up the manuscript, scanning the paper, looking at the words as though for the first time. And then she began to read aloud, slowly, clearly, her voice trembling now and then at the knowledge of how assured and inevitable was the fusion of her voice and Lincoln’s words. Eventually, she stood to act out the stage directions requiring Mattie Lee to kneel, lean over, lift imaginary bales of cotton and nurse a sick child.
    When she read the last line, Jessie handed the play back to Lincoln and said, “I like it Lincoln, I like it a lot, but there’s some things in there that don’t sound like things a woman would say. I know you’re a good writer and you used your imagination and all but there’s a few parts where it just don’t sound real.”
    “Well, tell me, Jessie,” Lincoln said, moving to sit beside her on the bed, trying to capture and hold her mood of cooperation, “tell me where it don’t sound real.”
    A CTING WAS JUST like daydreaming, except you were living other people’s dreams, Jessie thought. There were moments when she hated Lincoln during the tense, exultant days of preparation for the staging of the play. Beneath his demanding eye she read and then memorized the script. They had spent several days reworking some of the dialogue, making it sound “real.” And when it all sounded right, Lincoln took Jessie by the hand and shepherded her inside the skin of Mattie Lee.
    “Think about your mama, your grandmama, all the women you know,” he’d urged her as she had moved from just reciting the words to living them. “Let them talk to you. Go back to your front porch, your backyard, the kitchen, wherever you can to track down these women.”
    And so Jessie approached it like a game. Mattie Lee became a skeleton she had to clothe, a phantom she had to find. But all roads, Jessie learned, led back to herself. Back to her memories, and her pain. Lincoln and Jessie fought and made up repeatedly as they gave birth and life to Mattie Lee. They spent eight- to ten-hour days in the basement where Freedom School classes had been held, locked, Jessie sometimes felt, in a prisonmade of words. Once in exasperation, she screamed, “Being in jail was better than this,” and threw the script at Lincoln. If Jessie told Lincoln she couldn’t create an emotion or a certain feeling for the old woman, he refused to accept her excuse. When Mattie Lee had to cry, Lincoln shouted at Jessie, reducing her to tears within seconds, then swooped her up in his arms, propped her into position and coaxed Mattie Lee’s words out of her. When Mattie Lee had to get mad, he taunted Jessie, wondered out loud if she was as good as he’d thought she was. And, as Jessie charged across the room to pummel him with her fists, Lincoln freeze-framed her actions, shouting, “Now, Jessie, now, let Mattie Lee use your anger.”
    Jessie fell into bed at night, drained, her sleep vacant and deep.
    When she made her debut, on the stage of George Washington Carver High School, after the curtain went up, it took her ten minutes to move her feet onto the stage. The makeup Lincoln had applied and the wig she wore, all to make her appear to be eighty-five years old, felt like glue enveloping her head. So blinded was Jessie by the stage lights that she couldn’t even see the audience. Her voice veered between inaudible whispers and shouts that echoed up to the balcony of the auditorium, which was filled to capacity. Yet in the seventy-five minutes of the play Jessie risked everything. No one had ever asked her to surrender this much. No one had ever lavished her with such faith. When she stood on the stage, basking in the heartfelt applause of her Freedom School students, the women she had been jailed with, people from the Freedom House and townspeople, Jessie didn’t know if she would ever forgive Lincoln for pushing her this far, or how she could ever thank