Read Let the Circle Be Unbroken for Free Online Page A

she said.
    “Mama, I gotta go! T.J. gonna need me. Maybe there’s something I can say. Maybe tell ’em ’bout him comin’ here that night—”
    “You think these people are going to believe anything you have to say? T.J.’s going to trial before an all-white jury anda white judge in a town and a state and a country ruled by white folks. For you to get up there and say anything will just make it worse.”
    Stacey’s look was defiant. “I seen him that night . . . ’fore them men come. Could tell ’em what T.J. said. Tell how beat up he was.”
    “Now just calm down here a minute,” Papa said. “You’ve done a lotta learning and a lotta growing the last few years, and I figure you know by now things ain’t fair in this life for hardly nobody, and for a black person there ain’t hardly no such thing. Now we done all we could for T.J. the night of the fire, but I tell you, son, there ain’t nothing else we can do. He’s in the hands of the law now and that law like jus’ ’bout everything else in this country is made for the white folks. You get up there talking ’bout being with T.J. that night, maybe them white folks in town might just get to thinkin’ you was one of them boys broke in that store with T.J.”
    Stacey looked uneasy. “T.J., he’ll—he’ll tell ’em it wasn’t me—that it was them Simmses.”
    Papa waited a moment, his eyes hard on Stacey. “And you think the jury’s gonna believe that?”
    Stacey was silent. He glanced at the pond, then back at Papa and Mama. His eyes changed. The realization had hit him.
    It had hit me too. I felt a surging feeling of panic at the thought of Stacey’s facing the same ordeal as T.J. After all, Stacey had been with T.J. the night Jim Lee Barnett had been killed, and he had helped him. We all had.
    He didn’t say anything else. Turning away, he gathered several more sticks of firewood and, in silence, put them on the wagon.
    After supper we sat before the fire in Mama and Papa’s room as we did each evening, attending to our evening tasks: the boys and I at our table by the window, attempting to study; Big Ma sewing; Mama reading; Papa mending the sole of Christopher-John’s shoe; and Mr. Morrison carving a piece of wood which had not yet taken on a shape of its own. Sounds of the fire popping and of Mr. Morrison’s knife scraping against the wood blended with Big Ma’s soft humming, lending a quiet peace.
    As the evening wore on, we heard a car on the road and we all looked up. Mr. Morrison, sitting near the front window, stood and pushed the curtain back. The boys and I peered out into the darkness with him, watching as a faint light coming from the east illuminated the road, growing brighter as it neared. Finally, the car slowed and turned up the drive. Mr. Morrison waited a moment until the driver stepped out, then said, “It’s Wade Jamison.”
    For longer than was necessary and with his car headlights still on, Mr. Jamison poked around his front seat as if arranging his briefcase, a procedure he always followed whenever he came at night so that we could see who it was. When Papa called out to him, he turned out his lights and came up the rock path to the porch, leaving the briefcase behind. He shook Papa’s hand and, taking off his hat, greeted the rest of us.
    Since the night of the fire, we had not seen Mr. Jamison very much; we had heard he had had troubles of his own. His defense of T.J. that night had caused his unpopularity in the white community to grow even further, and the week following the lynching attempt his office had been burned, then his dog poisoned. It was said, too, that threats had been made against both him and his wife. But Mr. Jamison himself had never mentioned the threats to us. What he had said,however, was that his family was old-line Mississippi and not even Beelzebub himself was going to run him out or change his way of thinking. I believed him, too.
    Mama offered him one of the rockers and he sat down