I used to be married to a lawyer. She started her own law office right across the street from where I was a slave to the practice of insurance defense. We bought a house two blocks away a year before we were married, and subsequently were often invited to church by the Baptists and the ladies in the Garden Club. We never went. We would walk together to work in the morning. We would walk home together in the evenings. Sometimes we would sneak home and made love during lunch, if the tides were right and she was in the mood. Those raw moments of passion where you come back to work and your hair is matted to your head in the front, birds nest in the back, and you have to lie and say you were napping but your secretary just smiles and knows better. I was happy.
Michelle’s office was on the ground floor of the old Masonic Temple, not a temple in the traditional sense, but rather a three story red brick number built around the turn of the century. Some jackass in the 1940’s elected to stucco the outside in grey concrete and cover all the windows. A communist Moscow feel. Or like the buildings in downtown Jackson. The only way you could tell it was the Masonic temple was due to a faint stencil on the upper right side – a compass with a right angle ruler underneath and an eye in the center, always starting back at you. Inside was faux wood lining on all walls, buckling around the baseboards where the inner brick had crumbled over the years and was creating a pile of masonry behind the walls. There was no air conditioning and no hot water. On Thursday nights when the sole green light underneath the outside awning came on and all the pickup trucks were there, you could hear the men creaking up the back steps, going to do whatever it is that Masons do. They had a piano and bells. In May, seven people came to see Michelle at this office. Two males and five females. All black. Said they wanted to make a claim on an estate. That their father, Willie B. Johnson, had died a few months ago and they were the rightful heirs to his money. They claimed to all be his children. This posed a problem, because Willie B. Johnson had never been married. In Mississippi, the children of a union are presumed to be the rightful heirs. But when there is no union, in the figurative sense at least, well, the court requires more assurance. “How long has your father been dead?”
“About two months.” Several answered at once. They looked around, nervous at being in such a formal place. They didn’t look her in the eye. None would sit down. One of the children they brought crawled around on the floor and picked at the bulge in the wall near the corner. Another had a full diaper.
“Do you know if an autopsy was done?” Michelle asked the oldest one, a Ms. O’Hara.
“Say what?”
“Nevermind. Do you know what he died from?”
“The Lord said it was his time.”
Not if his kids wanted his money. Money is always the hardest part of taking a case. You have to make a judgment about how much it is worth. If you get your retainer up front, well, it doesn’t really matter if your clients get a goose egg at the end of the day. You got paid. But ethics require inquiry into these subjects, and some take estates on contingency. Crap shoot. What if the estate turns out only to be a doublewide and a beat up Chevrolet? Often the case. And you don’t need that if your life. Especially with seven new heirs.
“Do you know what size of an estate your father had?”
“He had a habitat house and a real clean ’95 Coop de Ville with rims.”
“Any other assets? Bank accounts, real property, stocks, anything like that? ”
Ms. O’Hara looked down. Black folks don’t like talking money with white people. And understandably so. Three centuries of mistrust, lying, stealing from each other every chance they get – just to get even or get ahead – and I’m talking about the whites and the blacks here - has never made for, um, unified business relations. We’re not like the Italians or Jews. Or the Asians. There has never been any common cause to bring us together. No sense of family. No mutual struggle. No war. No genocide or internment camps. Not even mutual poverty here in the Delta has created a flag for both colors to rally around. It’s simple. The rich whites have the money which separates them from the blacks. They don’t even have to think about that world. And as for the poor whites, well many of them believe, without ever saying it, that they may be poor, but at least they ain’t black.
After some thought about disclosure and risking trust, Ms. O’Hara answered Michelle’s question.
“About fifteen years ago, our father worked on the Pearson plantation as a cotton ginner. He was a very strong man, our father Lord bless him, and his job was to lift the hundred pound bales of cotton and throw them into the gin to get the seeds and stalks out. One day, he was throwing bales, and as he threw one, his shirt sleeve got caught on some of the bailing wire. Pulled his arm into the blades. The machine cut it off to his elbow before he was able to yank it back out.”
I watched the faces of the others in reaction to this story. Six were looking at the floor, some shaking their heads in memory of their father’s lost arm. The babies were beginning to pull books off the bottom two shelves. The room was starting to stink like diaper. Ms. O’Hara continued.
“They put our father in the bed of a pickup and drove him in to Cleveland, arm wrapped in an old towel or something. Bleeding everywhere. Boss told him to sit in the back rather than the cab so they could wash it all out with a water hose later. Like he did after deer hunting. He said he didn’t want nigger blood on his floormats. Cause I talked to Roosevelt one time, you know Roosevelt who used to work out there? They call him Left Eye, and Roosevelt told me that the boss said it just like that.” Michelle glanced at me quickly for help. I turned away and became interested in one of her certificates on the wall. It was her rainmaking if she wanted it.
“While he was there, one of the nurses at the hospital suggested he call a lawyer and see if he could get him some money for his arm. So she looked in the yellow pages for him, called up one of these lawyers for people who get hurt, and that lawyer came to see him at the hospital that very day. Three months later, he got him a check right at $40,000. I think the lawyer got some of the money for fees and all, but yeah, $40,000. And he didn’t even have to go to court! I know he still got some of that money somewheres.”
“Where is he buried?”
“Symonds.”
“Do you know where his grave is?”
“Ain’t but about fifteen twenty out there. His is the new one.”
“If you want to claim heirship in this estate, we are going to have to move the court to get a DNA sample.”
“How you do that?”
So Michelle hit her with it.
“We have to exhume him and extract a piece of tissue.”
“He wadn’t buried with no tissues.”
“Ma’m, we’re going to have to get something from him to test to see if all of you are really blood kin.”
“You mean dig him up?”
“Yes. I mean dig him up.”
All of them looked at each other and didn’t say a thing. They could tell Michelle wasn’t joking. She never joked. I hated that about her. Yet while the idea of digging up their father clearly bothered these folks, it wasn’t enough to prevent all of them coming back the next day. To sign “papers.”
On May 27th, 2007, at 9:33 am, Quanticia Cooper, Ketomesha Dye, Shaniya Johnson, Zyandria Fairfield, Jasmine O’Hara, Martavious Coffey, and Derrick Carter all moved the Chancery Court of the Second Judicial District of Bolivar County, by and through their attorney, to reopen the estate of Willie B. Johnson as claimants and rightful heirs. They paid Michelle’s retainer, signed the necessary contractual paperwork, and I swabbed each of their mouths with a q-tip. The q-tips were placed in separate ziplock bags, each marked with masking tape around the center and initialed as well as the names on the outside of the bag in permanent marker. Michelle put the sacks of q-tips in her mini-fridge, next to her apples and yogurt.
It was mid-June before we dug him up. We had to fight with the alleged rightful heir to his entire estate, some old crackhead woman Mr. Johnson was living with when he died. Inez Johnson (unmarried - no relation), with her prune face and bony shoulders, head wrapped in a colorful stocking, sat in the subtropical temperature of the chambers. Her street name was “Peaches”.
On that Thursday, we explained to the Judge that seven claimants have come forward on the estate and we were moving to exhume the body. Once it was explained what that term meant and what we intended to do, Inez was not supportive of this proposition. Doing the African wail and crying out to her god with hands in the hair, she fell out in her chair and had to be fanned by family members. Once they managed to get a pinch of snuff in her upper lip and whispered a psalm for strength, Peaches rallied and went on and on to the judge about how Willie’s soul will never rest if these other lawyers try to dig him up. And, of course, Peaches quoted the requisite scripture.
“Judge, you just don’t understand. You can’t dig up this man. The Lord say in Ecclesiastes 12:7 ‘then shall the dust return to the earth as it was; and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it.’”
Chancellor Willard leaned back in his chair and smiled above his glasses. He was a silver-haired southern gentleman if any existed. Deep baritone voice, 6’5 with his boots on, and had a wingspan so wide that when he did closing arguments, it looked like he could pick up an entire jury and hold them to his chest. And, as most southern judges who have to stand for election every four years, Willard was also a God-fearing man, thus well-versed himself. He responded in kind.
“Miss, I do understand. I don’t like the idea of digging up a resting body any more than you do. But, if these are in fact his children, then they have a right to their share of his estate. Remember, the Lord also says in Luke 20:36, ‘Neither can they die any more: for they are equal unto the angels; and are the children of God.’ Willie is gone from this world. He can die no more.”
Peaches was stone-faced.
“Ms. Johnson, before I went to law school, I worked in a funeral home. I was alone with bodies of the deceased until late in the night, surrounded by them. And it made me scared. Sometimes, when the ambulance would bring a body in to the home, it would still have air in its lungs. You’d be sitting there, in the middle of the night, couple hours after that body was brought it, putting makeup on a lady’s face, and that air would escape out of those lungs and make a deep moan. Just uuuuuuhhhh. Like that. The first time that happened to me, and I dropped what I was doing and tore outta there like the place was on fire and my rear end was catchin’. You hear me now? I told my boss I thought some of them folks were still alive they way they sounded and all. He said to me he said, ‘Son, the dead can never hurt you, but they’ll sure make you hurt yourself.’ Do you understand what I mean?
Peaches didn’t.
“For the benefit of the possible heirs of Mr. Willie B. Johnson, the motion is granted.”
Symonds is near the center of Bolivar County, just north of number 8 highway. Population about two hundred. Eighty-seven percent black. Fifty percent of children live with their grandparents. The men with their brown paper sacks and hats turned back stand on the corner of Goon’s Grocery, one of the many old dilapidated chinamen stores scattered throughout these small Delta towns, reminders of how the imported Chinese said hell with this sharecropping shit. On our way out to Symonds, we had picked up the pathologist from Bolivar County Medical Center, Dr. Wahida Jalal. She was of some type of middle-eastern descent. Maybe a Pakistani or Lebanese. Short woman, with long wild raven hair and smoky eyes behind her glasses. Aqua scrubs that fit nicely on her hips. Deep red lipstick, a box of rubber gloves, flashlight and a clipboard.
The three of us took the twenty minute drive and met Michelle’s clients standing in the sun by the backhoe at the only graveyard. They had brought extended family. The Mt. Vernon Pleasant Hill Cemetery was like most other black graveyards I had been to – the assorted plots all pockmarked where the poor had been buried in pine boxes and the ground sunk in as they decayed. Like a big green waffle surrounded with a wrought iron fence.
Mr. Johnson’s grave was the nicest in the yard, and as Ms. O’Hara mentioned, the most recent. A few weeds had grown on the top of the dirt pile. Plastic roses and wreathes left by loved ones were still there, though weathered by the June sun. Someone had even left a commemorative photo of Johnson in his three-piece lavender church suit. The polished granite headstone read:
William Baruch Johnson
April 1, 1944 – February 15, 2007
His true wealth was in his generous heart.
And what endless wealth he did have.
The diesel engine of the backhoe roared, and black smoke puffed from the exhaust. I walked under a shade tree and wiped my face with my pocket handkerchief, already sweating through my suit. The air was heavy and fragrant. No wind. The sound of the machinery drew the people from their houses. Just small herds of them coming out into the graveyard from behind abandoned buildings or farm equipment. First the women and children in front. The men came separately behind them. Less men than anything. All keeping their distance from Michelle and me. Watching. Wondering why these two white people were here, dressed in suits with some piece of paper in hand and digging in their graveyard. What do they want to take now? Cars with bad shocks and audibly worn fan belts slowed down on the gravel road that ran along the front of the cemetery as little children crawling in the backseat like ants pressed their noses to their windows. Caprice Classics and Crown Vics. A couple of Cadillacs. Dust swirling around all of them. Some parked and just sat. I could hear the thump of their music. The occasional bottle would turn up. Some smoked. And watched.
It took about fifteen minutes to get down to the vault. The backhoe left a deep scrape across the top from one of the teeth in the bucket. Some locals we hired cleaned around the edges with shovels, ran tow straps through the handles in the sides, and lifted it up. Shirtless Africans. Sweaty. Cussing. Arms made of rebar and wire veins. Struggling to raise the dead. The vault came to ground level, covered in mud on all sides, and finally rested somewhat unsteadily to the left on a mound of fresh black dirt. Per our instruction, the locals popped open the six steel clasps around the edges, and lifted the top of the vault off to reveal the coffin. The herds inched in closer, whispering to each other momentarily Then they stepped back out of respect or superstition.
Willie’s coffin was nickel and chrome, with hints of light blue. The edges and center were exquisitely ornamented in ivy and fleur de lis.
Dr. Jalal went to work, straddling over the head of the coffin and beginning to unlatch the left side. Her black hair brushed over the nickel and chrome, the tips dancing and swirling over the top making a design in the dust as a paintbrush would. She worked to get the latch free. Sweat glistened in the small of her well tanned back. She flipped her hair over her ear and shot a glance for assistance to the nearest worker leaned up against a shovel. He shook his head at the ground and took a step back.
“Here.”
I took off my coat, handed it to Michelle, and rolled up the sleeves on my white shirt. I popped open the right side while the good doctor worked on the left, and together we removed the lid of the coffin. Michelle walked back over to the shade tree.
For being almost four months dead, Willie didn’t look that bad. His skin had stretched tight, revealing a permanent smile. No teeth. Only gums. The eyeballs had fallen in, making his closed lids flat. The casket was lined in crushed purple velvet. Matched Willie’s church suit.
“Shit.” The doctor stopped what she was doing and sprang right up, still straddling Willie.
“What’s the matter?”
She searched the ground around the lid, near her box of rubber gloves and flashlight. She looked under the lit of the casket on the ground.
“I forgot my tools.”
“Forgot your tools?”
“Yeah. Shit.” She put her hands on her hips and looked into the crowd.
What do you want to do?”
“You got a pair of pliers?”
“A what?”
“Pliers? Does anyone here have a pair of pliers?”
I heard a shovel hit the ground behind me. I turned. An old man was walking back to his Datsun. He rummaged in the toolbox, found what he was looking for, and slowly walked back to the scene with a pair of vice grips.
“Dere go ma’m.” He handed them to the doctor, and retreated a few steps back to his people. Putting his hands in the pockets of his dirty overalls, he waited. The doctor snapped on two pairs of rubber gloves, and straddled the coffin again. Gently placing one hand under the back of Willie’s neck and the other on his forehead, she tilted his face to the sky. The smile was even bigger as his skin pulled tight. With her thumb and index finger, she spread open his mouth. He didn’t have any teeth.
“Grab that flashlight and shine it in here.”
I brushed the dirt off the light and clicked it on.
“Right down here. Yeah. To the back of his throat. I think I see a molar.”
Willie’s tongue had disintegrated, closing his esophagus and trachea. In the dim light, I could see two grey molars remained, one on each side of his lower jaw. The one on the left had a golden filling. The doctor adjusted the vice grips, narrowed them down, and slid the device to the back of his throat. After a moment, feeling skin on metal until the metal hit tooth, she locked them down and wiggled. Pushed. Pulled. A drop of sweat dripped down the tip of her nose as she worked. It fell on Willie’s face and rolled down what was left of his cheek.
With a quick snap of the wrist and a small pop, the vice grips came free. The gold filling shined in the sun as she held it in the air. A bit of flesh dangled from the roots.
The doctor also forgot to bring plastic bags.
“Here, take a glove and open up the bottom. I’ll drop it in a finger. No, no, blow it up first so it will fall straight to the bottom.”
I took the rubber glove, held the base to my mouth and inflated it like a balloon. Stretching out the open end, Dr. Jalal neatly placed the tooth inside. It rolled into the middle finger.
“Tie up the end of this and don’t let too much air in. I’ve got to fix his head.”
And with that, she leaned down over the casket for the last time, placing one hand under his neck, the other on the forehead, and leaned the head front and center back to its original position. Jalal pinched his mouth back shut, stripped off her gloves, and wiped her sweaty palms on the hips of her scrubs.
“All done. You can put him back now.”
We put the silver lid over Willie and clamped down the sides. The Africans did the rest of the work, reclosing the scarred vault and gently lowering the body back into the earth with the tow straps. The diesel engine roared again, and we walked to our car. Once Michelle heard the backhoe, she left her safe spot under the tree and joined us.
No one else was leaving. Not her clients. Not Peaches. Not the locals. All just stood silently, watching the machine rebury their dead. I felt like I should say something. That the show was over, or that he was finally resting, just something to ease the tension of what we had just done. I stopped and turned back to them, but as I did Michelle slid her fingers into mine and looked up at me. I realized for the first time in awhile that she was there. Her eyes were deep and green, and they smiled at me. She could tell I was nervous. That I wanted to make it better. It’s ok. Just let them be. So I continued on to the car, Willie’s tooth in one hand, my friend in the other.
I sat the rubber glove on my lap and started the Corolla.
“So, doctor, will you be sending this to the lab?”
“Nah. Just stick it in a Fed Ex envelope and mail it to that address I gave you in New Orleans.”
“You serious? I mean, don’t I have to write biohazard or something on the outside of it?”
“Nope. It’s just a tooth. It’s not gonna hurt anybody. I do it like that all the time. These folks don’t have a clue what they are delivering.”
And that was it. We dropped off Dr. Jalal at the hospital, paid her and thanked her, and headed to Michelle’s office. I got a flat mailing envelope and slid the tooth-filled rubber glove inside along with the seven plastic bags of q-tips. Michelle typed a quick cover letter, enclosed a check for the requisite testing fee, and we dropped it at the corner mailbox on our walk home.
In October, as the leaves were beginning to turn red and hickory smoke and football were in the air, Michelle got a package from New Orleans. Complete with the test results, a small grey molar with a golden filling rattled in the bottom. I picked it up and shook it like a prize in a cereal box. She didn’t laugh.
