The Waters We Bring

Chapter One: “The Dream”

1950s; Wynnewood, An Arkansas Delta Town

War was declared. The woods near weevil-infested cotton boll fields were blazing, but farmhands were calling for more kerosene. Rebekkah Bishop ran to the shed where Grandmother had gallons waiting. With a can in each hand, the girl raced back to fuel a fire that was already raging.

“Careful, Bekkah!” Grandmother cautioned, making sure she was heard. “Give that extra kerosene to your father. Keep away from the flames!”

The Bishops were Delta farmers fighting a boll weevil scourge of biblical proportions. Fire was torching hibernating weevils. Grandmother had her doubts that setting fire to the woods would be enough.

At nightfall, red embers smoldered in the dark.

Southern life for the Bishops flowed through generations of proud people who cherished peace but never shied away from a righteous war. Two warfare instances were epic: this battle against the boll weevil invasion and the feud ignited with insular Old South fools who were not beneficiaries of good breeding. The weevils were a plague, and the fools laboring to eclipse human decency were an even bigger plague.

A Bishop Bible, passed from one farming generation to the next, carried a front-page inscription from Noah and Delilah Bishop, written in the 1800s. “Baptized in the Arkansas River, we rose: washed clean of fear that overwhelmed Spirit; endowed with Power to manifest Spirit’s ascendancy; and bestowed with Discernment to know when we must, with all agency, deliver Grace. Now, we carry within a spiritual river, and the waters we bring are of humble godliness.”

The 1950s generations living in Wynnewood were descendants of African and American Indigenous Peoples. Heading the Arkansas Delta household were Jasper and Eunice Bishop. Because they were good neighbors and friends in times of need, they were loved by most who knew them. Whenever their farm yielded a richness of crops–including corn, tomatoes, soybeans and rice–they shared freely with the poor. As entrepreneurs, the savvy agrarians earned windfall profits in local markets and restaurants during times of prosperity. Unfortunately, as life would have it, the family also faced adversity.

Rebbekah Bishop, fourteen years old and the middle child of the family, enjoyed the quiet prayers of her parents when they thought the children were asleep. Gentle crying, now and then cadencing the prayers, could be heard just above the creaking rhythms of the wooden walls being stirred by breezes from Lake Conway. Tears came with boll weevils and crop loss bereavement. Rebekkah once asked her maternal grandmother about the crying.

“Nothing to be worried about,” Grandmother assured. “Tears cleanse the spirit and water its strength. Amen.”

When prayers or tears were done, soft singing was a soothing lullaby. The song Rebekkah heard most and adored was “I Am a Poor Wayfaring Stranger.” As the family drifted into dreams, she sang herself to sleep.

I am a poor wayfaring stranger

I'm travellin' through this world with woe

Yet there's no sickness, toil, nor danger

In that bright land to which I go

“Wayfaring Stranger” was also like a mystical mantra. It calmed her when inexplicable angst took over, though the last lines of lyrics were more about her deceased twin brother than herself.

The young girl believed that she needed to be cleansed. She thought about the kind of cleansing that Grandmother talked about when burdens were lifted and the spirit was set free, but freedom from encumbrance was not likely to be experienced soon.

Rebekkah was too busy being serious about life and the abundance of problems crammed into it. You see, she had lost her twin brother at birth. Some wounds heal slowly, and others never do. She felt guilty for surviving. However, Rebekkah did feel strong, though the last time she cried, she was thirteen. Her collie, Blaze, had died fighting off wolves near the hen and brooder houses, but he saved the chickens. The family had a funeral for him and buried their beloved a few yards from the henhouse.

In honor of the hero’s homegoing, Rebekkah sang “I Am a Poor Wayfaring Stranger.” Mama accompanied on an old banjo. The rest of the family harmonized the chorus.

The Bishops survived many funerals, as families do, and the pestilence. Recovery from the weevil infestation of the cotton bolls took masterful survival skills. The long-snouted weevils were beetles and formally known as Anthonomus grandis, but a more fitting name might have been those demon beetles from hell.

The family finally escaped the vermin invasion by using insecticides that nobody could pronounce. Escape had not been by fire. Not wanting to risk that kind of hell again, the Bishops sold the cotton boll fields, a third of the land, to a gentleman farmer. He was Old South with class, a man of honor. The sale gave the family a chance to recoup a miniscule amount of financial losses and focus on livestock and produce. It also gave the Bishops time to concentrate on The Dream: Make sure all family members now and in the future had roofs over their heads, food on the table, and plenty of land where they could stretch out and know they were home.

Home, bought and paid for, was not something many people of color had–or impoverished people claiming or not claiming color had–there in the Arkansas Delta. The Bishops were Delta landowners. Their lineage included free and enslaved people documented as fighting for freedom.

The land was a gift to a great-grandfather in the early 1900s. He had saved a little boy from drowning in a lake. Great-grandfather had been fishing; the six-year-old had slipped away from a nanny. It turned out that the child was the only male scion of the richest man in the state.

When the grateful father, Charles Waldon, asked how he could repay Clayton Bishop, the latter answered candidly, “Land and lots of it. My people have been farmers for generations, and I have three sons and two daughters.”

Ask and thou shalt receive one hundred acres.

Generations of Bishops thrived for decades. Land and the megarich benefactor who became a friend for life gave the family access to power and local leadership that otherwise would have been closed to them.

Sadly, when the weevils took a toll on the Bishop’s prosperity, it was for a span of years. When it was finally over, the family found itself cash poor with decimated cotton plants on fields they eventually sold, and the produce acreage they kept had to be revitalized.

During desolate times, the Bishops were fortunate to possess subsistence resources, but life was a struggle. Nonetheless, they still put meat on the table once a week for Sunday dinners and invited guests. The Waldons frequently enjoyed Ms. Eunice’s Southern Fried Chicken and Dutch caramel apple pie. Farmhands who labored to help the Bishops restore crop land were frequent guests, too.

Through good times and bad, Delta residents shared a bane they could not sell off or spray away: Klansmen. When the grown men running ‘round in sheets were wise, they left the Bishops alone, in part because of the Waldons. Southerners have eternal memories locked in with DNA. Charles Waldon’s great-grandchildren, who supped at the table of the Bishops, were still grateful for the saving of their family lineage, and their unconditional allegiance to the Bishops in all matters was public knowledge.

The Bishops also had the wisdom to store caches of weapons in hidden armories. Defense was a serious business. Keeping firepower in case of Klan trouble was as important as early Americans staying armed for battles with the Brits. Even the Bishop children were taught to fight and bear arms, though their parents hoped to keep them far from danger.

Learning about violence and witnessing it were two separate things. Rebekkah gained frontline insights on dangers the Klan could bring.

She was at a slumber party one summer evening with Beatrice Cole. Beatrice’s father, Wallace Cole, was a newspaper reporter who had just published an article about the dangerous legacy of the local Klansmen.

Around ten that night when Beatrice, Rebekkah, and two other girls were laughing and throwing popcorn at each other on the living room floor, a fire bomb exploded through the room’s picture window. Screaming, the girls started running from corner to corner, trying to hide from fire throwers.

“Stay back, girls!” Beatrice’s parents yelled, then ran to the kitchen. Dad grabbed the fire extinguisher; Mom filled a pot with water. They rushed back and doused curtain and carpet flames, leaving acrid smoke.

The next horror came when the terrified children and adults had time to look out the window. An angry, sheeted mob bearing torches and guns made threatening demands.

“Come on out here, Wallace Cole! Don’t make us come in there. Keep your wife and children safe.”

Samantha Cole screamed to her husband, “No, Wallace! You can’t leave the house. They’ll kill you!”

Beatrice was freaking out, “No, Daddy!” She tried to run to him, but Rebekkah grabbed her and held on tight.

Mr. Cole was resigned to sacrificing himself for his wife and the children. “I have to go out there,” he lamented, “and keep all of you safe. This is my fault.”

Slowly, he opened the door and put his hands up. Rebekkah saw his back. His white shirt was drenched with sweat. The women folk waited for Mr. Cole to be grabbed or shot. That’s when Rebekkah heard a shotgun report, then her father’s voice.

“Papa!” Rebekkah ran to the smoldering window.

“Stay back, Bekkah!” he yelled from outside.

Papa was not wearing a sheet. Nothing hid his identity, but the twenty or so men with him were wearing bandanas over their faces. All of them were pointing rifles at the Klansmen who were outnumbered two to one.

Rebekkah’s father fired another shot into the air. “Okay, cowards!” He called to men hiding under sheets. “You’ve done enough damage. Go on back home now!”

A mean voice Rebekkah recognized–Obadiah Grisby, Sr.–snarled, “Get out of here, Jasper Bishop! This is not your fight. Cole started this mess with his damn article.”

Mr. Cole lowered his hands. His voice boomed loud and clear. “All I did was tell the truth about grown white men running ‘round in gowns terrorizing black people. We’re just human beings, trying to live and raise families in peace.”

Mr. Grisby started to raise his shotgun. A shell exploded right at his feet. Grisby jumped higher than Rebekkah thought a man could, and his companions scampered into the night.

Defeated and embarrassed, Grisby mewled a weak warning before he took off like a dog with its limp tail dangling between its legs.

“Bishop, Cole, this ain’t over!” Then Grisby was gone.

Rebekkah would never forget that night. Before morning, the sleepover guest teens were escorted home, and the Cole family was escorted to the train station. Beatrice and Rebekkah never saw each other again. The local Klansmen laid low.

The Secret

That feeling Rebekkah tried to hide, deep down, never left. The truth was, Rebekkah always felt second best. It was her secret.

Her sister Elena, sixteen years old, was a beauty who looked like a Vogue fashion model. Even after slopping hogs, she appeared country chic in basic black. Rebekkah was a tomboy. She favored denim overalls, and those were often smeared with Lord knows what.

Baby brother Joshua was a six-year-old, change-of-life baby. Jasper and Eunice Bishop treated him like a miracle, especially since they lost the son before him. The doting parents allowed Joshua to routinely whimper out of doing the dirty chores, which was everything on a farm. Rebekkah was rewarded for working as hard as any man, and the calluses on her hands were badges. She was trying to replace the dead twin son, Reuben.

The two perfect children, Elena and Joshua, had lustrous black hair and soft sun-kissed skin like Mama. Rebekkah thought of her brown-black hair as dull, and she kept it corralled in twin braids, except on Sundays when Mama made her braids look like a work of art. She thought her skin looked like rough leather. That was fine with her, eventually. She saw Papa every time she looked in the mirror. His weathered face was honorable. He worked from before the sun rose to after it set. When Rebekkah was not in school, she toiled right beside her father in the yard and fields.

Grandmother, who lived there with her oldest daughter’s family, routinely reminded her bloodline that they carried the visage of noble African and Indigenous People ancestors. She was a gifted griot. Grandmother made history and heritage live.

Despite history and family pride, Rebekkah was sure that she was a second best, a runner-up in life, not only because she felt responsible for her twin brother’s death at birth; not because the other siblings were often the heroes in suppertime table tales; and not because last week she barely escaped being raped by the lowlife offspring of Obadiah Grisby, Sr.

Nowadays, Rebekkah’s feeling of being an unclean runner-up had been inflated by her newborn hatred for Obadiah, Jr. The hate was clawing her gut since escaping the lowlife in nearby woods where she thought she had killed him. Hatred had knotted in her stomach and grown roots. Somewhere deep down inside her, it was getting powerfully strong… and it waited.

Surely, hate was not part of the cleanliness that Grandmother preached.

As it turned out, Obadiah was not dead; but more on that later. Rebekkah was able to stop fearing that she would shame her family when the cops followed murder clues to her doorstep. For whatever reason, he was not filing charges.

Ashamed he failed to rape a teenage girl, she wondered, or scared I’ll be the one to file charges?

Rebekkah would not even consider burdening her family with the new secret that was now part of an aggregate; but every day, her rage bubbled closer to the surface. When she sowed seeds for the small family garden behind the kitchen, for the baby corn or tomatoes, she found herself stabbing the earth with a rusty shovel. Thank goodness, Papa never let her near the tractor.

When the family’s only rooster, who thought it owned the farmyard, pecked her shin and made it bleed, Rebekkah kicked him so hard, he shot through the air like the Fourth of July fireworks set off in the Wynnewood town square. He crowed his woundedness all the way up into the air and all the way down, landing on the henhouse roof. The rooster’s cackling brought everyone running. It would have been a financial disaster if they lost the farm’s only rooster.

Rebekkah was not repentant. In fact, she was proud that when the cock was conscious and trying to strut again, he limped.

The family nursed the crippled rooster back to health. After that incident, they often said to Rebekkah, “Bless your heart, child. Your temper will get the best of you, one day.”

In the South, when somebody said, “Bless your heart,” the words were either a benediction or a curse. Rebekkah was sure that this time, it was a curse.

Grandmother noticed a change in Rebekkah, but left time for her middle grandchild to come to her and unburden the secret she was carrying. Another person who noticed was Rebekkah’s best friend, Dawn.

Dawn Flannigan was one of those beautiful people too, like Elena and Joshua, but her hair was the blonde of her Irish ancestors. She was the daughter of the gentleman farmer who bought the Bishop’s cotton land. The Flannigans lived on a neighboring farm.

Rebekkah and Dawn often met up at Ballard’s Country Store, where both liked to buy humongous sour pickles from a barrel and pour grape Kool-Aid on them.

One Saturday afternoon, Dawn surprised Rebekkah with a visit. She brought pickles and the tangy powder they loved. As they colored their lips and tongues, Dawn had a question.

“Rebekkah, are you gonna tell me what’s bothering you, or how you got those bruises you try to keep covered?”

Rebekkah’s shirt sleeves and collar had shifted and revealed bruises when the girls climbed an elm tree together. Between pickle bites, she finally answered with a coldness that made Dawn shiver on a hot day.

“Dawn, there’s some things about me … it’s best you never, ever know.”

The Fight

Nobody in the family knew. Rebekkah’s fight was in the Ouachita Woods about a mile away from home. It was before she maimed the rooster. One wet spring evening, after a storm, she foraged for mushrooms among tall oaks. She was alone, loving the time to herself. Everybody in the family knew that Rebekkah was a lone wolf. She could take care of herself.

The independent teenage girl, who was used to working like a man beside her father, took deep breaths, there in the woods. The world smelled fresh. This was one place she could relax and be herself, she thought.

The full moon was skirted by drifting clouds in the gray-blue sky. They seemed to be marking time before drowning the earth again. Small animals scampered in the shadows. Rebekkah was so relaxed that she failed to realize she was being stalked.

Obadiah Grisby, Jr. was a nasty piece of work. His family had Old Money but no class. The Grisby wealth sprung from tobacco plantations, now lost, thanks to Daddy’s gambling. The Grisbys never got over losing their land baron status and their control over the bounty of employees–treated like servants–who actually did all the work.

Now, the Grisby family fights were poor substitutions for tobacco profits, and the curse-spewings would have made the region’s Southern Baptists, Presbyterians, and Catholics blush.

That night, Obadiah, Jr. was also seeking refuge in the woods.

A sudden stillness alerted Rebekkah: she was not alone. Dead in her tracks, the girl halted. Searching the darkness, all she saw was a family of rabbits and a deer.

She finished gathering mushrooms. Rebekkah closed her wicker basket and turned to speed home, striding along a jagged trail. A twig snapped behind her. The fourteen-year-old girl halted again, telescoping into the moonlit darkness, then she heard him.

“Good evening, Miss Rebekkah.”

Startled, she dropped her basket. Twenty-year-old Obadiah lurched out of the shadows into the moonlight, tall and lanky. He smirked, picked up the basket, and proffered it like a dangling carrot. She took what was hers.

“Obadiah, since when do you call me ‘Miss?’” Rebekkah asked. “We’ve known each other for years, and this is the first time you’ve given me a courtesy title.”

“Well,” he winked, “there’s a first time for everything.”

He circled the adolescent tomboy, smiling … looking her up and down … inching closer.

Rebekkah smelled cheap whiskey on his breath. His face was as pale as the moon, and his blonde hair hang limp. She wondered if he was sick. A rumor floated around town: Obadiah, Jr. was sent to one of those lock-up hospital wards in the capital city, Little Rock. He was an alcoholic and had been drunk-driving. Jr. smashed up the family’s Ford pickup when he ran a red light on Main Street, then swerved to miss the widow Beacham walking on her way to Sunday school.

Now, he loomed there in the woods with Rebekkah. He took a small, brown paper bag out of a pocket in his jumpsuit. With ritualistic slowness, he peeled back the paper and unscrewed a bottle inside the bag. Obadiah, Jr. put the bottle to his lips and gulped. The belch afterwards carried a stench. He offered Rebekkah a swig; she recoiled.

“No thanks, Obadiah.” With alacrity, her long legs were cutting a quick path from danger, she hoped. Something primal alerts potential prey when a predator is about to pounce.

Obadiah pursued, enjoying the game while guzzling whiskey. “What’s wrong, little Miss?” His words slurred. “You too good to drink with me?”

There in the dark thick of woods, Obadiah launched like a snake. The predator savored the look of shock on the girl’s proud face. He coiled around Rebekkah, squeezing so hard, she could barely breathe.

Rebekkah felt trapped in the middle of a nightmare.

Obadiah’s body was hard. His huge hands were strong. He grabbed her long braids in one and yanked her head back so hard, it hurt. She heard the bagged bottle thud to the ground, soon joined by a basket of spilled mushrooms. He clamped a dirty hand over her mouth, then swiped it away just long enough to kiss her. The violation and stink of his breath made her want to vomit.

Rebekkah tried hard not to be terrified, but she was. Yes, she was strong, but Obadiah was stronger … and obviously evil. She never imagined in a million years that she would be raped, until now.

“Are you still a virgin?” Obadiah jeered. His right hand jabbed between her legs, massaging hard where it didn’t belong. Bile rose in her throat, and tears threatened to rim her red eyes.

Obadiah grew frustrated with the obstruction of coarse denim between Rebekkah’s legs. He was having trouble finding her zipper, but she heard one open. He replaced the hand between her legs with a kind of hardness she had never felt. Rebekkah thanked God she was wearing pants and they were still zipped.

Obadiah seemed confused about whether he should find a zipper, buttons, or no opening between the legs of her overalls. His fingers fumbled. She wondered how long it would be before he just yanked on her shoulder straps and stripped the overalls down to her ankles, or completely off.

Rebekkah mentally talked to God. Please. Don’t let me die out here … or get raped! I can’t believe you’ll let that happen. God, when you took my brother Reuben, you left me here for a reason. Why? I don’t know, but I’m here. And I’m not going out like this… not without a fight.

Fearing she might lose consciousness, Rebekkah knew she had to act fast. His right hand, smelling like booze–sweat–piss, covered her mouth.

Like a pipe vise in the farm’s shed, her teeth–strong and sharp–clamped down. In seconds, she tasted the filth of blood.

“Damn-n-n!” Obadiah roared like a wounded lion and cuffed his bloody hand. Rebekkah hoped she bit off a huge chunk of flesh, at the very least.

Words and spit spewed: “Damn you, Rebekkah Bishop!” The drunk boy, pale before, was now as red as his bleeding hand. “We were just gonna have fun. But now, I gotta kill you!”

An enraged, wounded animal is the most dangerous of animals.

Obadiah knocked the girl to the ground, but he had to struggle to keep her there. Rebekkah fought like a lioness.

“Get the hell off me, Obadiah!” she screamed. “I’d rather die than let you rape me.”

“It’ll be both, little girl!”

Blind with lust and rage, Obadiah never saw the huge rock near one of her hands. She gripped that rock as if her life depended on it.

Rebekkah was quick. She bludgeoned him twice.

“Shhh-ittt!” he howled the first time. Obadiah was not conscious after the second. Blood gushed everywhere.

Rebekkah leaped to her feet; her overalls were intact. She stomped him everywhere she could, especially his balls. Her hard boots were steel-toed. Then, grabbing the basket to whisk off proof that she was ever there, Rebekkah fled from death. The girl prayed she’d be forgiven for killing a man.

For a minute, she wondered if anybody heard the yelling and screaming; but she knew: Outside the core of that thicket, nobody heard anything.

Maybe no one will ever know that I’m a murderer.

Rebekkah ran, heart racing wild. Thoughts crashed her mind with lightning speed. A voice pounded her aching head with a biblical commandment.

Thou shalt not kill! Thou shalt not kill! It was Grandmother’s voice.

She kept running ... running about a mile ... all the way home until she reached the back steps and kitchen door. Slowly, she turned the knob.

Heart pounding, Rebekkah eased the door open and shut, thankful it did not squeak. She checked the door for blood, and she found there smeared reminders of her hell time with Obadiah. Quietly, she grabbed a kitchen towel, wet it with water and soap, then wiped everything she touched.

Quiet, she mentally scolded herself. Quiet.

Rebekkah heard the family laughing in the living room. Contrasted with her fresh horror, it was like a moment straight out of that new Rod Serling show, The Twilight Zone. She peeped through the interior kitchen door, slightly open, and made sure she knew where everyone was.

Elena was prepping for a school spelling bee. Mama, Papa, and even Joshua were feeding her words. Grandmother was rocking in her favorite chair, watching over her bloodline.

She wished Rebekkah were here to enjoy this, but she trusted that her middle grandchild would be back soon. All of the Bishops believed that the young tomboy who could take care of herself was simply off enjoying an evening stroll and would be back soon. They were not worried.

Rebekkah continued to watch her family from behind the kitchen door. She heard Papa give Elena the next word: “Brachycephalic.”

“Brachycephalic,” Elena repeated. “B-r-a-c-h-y-c-e-p-h-a-l-i-c.”

Cheers filled the brightly lit living room with pale yellow walls.

Like a quiet, little mouse, Rebekkah scurried up the back stairs to the second floor, taking the bloody towel and basket with her. Quickly, she undressed, then prepared and crawled into a hot tub of soapy water. She tried to scrub away the stench and feel of evil.

I still smell him, she thought, but I can’t stay in this tub any longer. I’ve got to get downstairs before they start worrying.

Finally, Rebekkah emerged in the living room, freshly scrubbed, feigning grace. The family had new stories and glowing smiles to share about Elena’s latest triumph and their part in it.

Rebekkah did something unexpected. She hugged Elena and held her startled sister until Elena hugged back. After the family’s shock wore off, Mama delightedly asked, “Who wants ice cream?”

As simple as that, Rebekkah created a new rhythm with the people she loved most in the world. Maybe, it was time to stop feeling like a second best; but the young girl realized that deep down inside her, a hatred had taken root and might keep her from ever feeling like one of the best. Her mantra, “Wayfaring Stranger,” had a new challenge.

What none of the Bishops knew at the time was that Rebekkah Bishop had a new enemy, Obadiah Grisby, Jr. This belligerent, poor excuse for a human being would recover from near fatal injuries suffered at the hands of a girl. Of course, he would never, ever reveal who brought him close to death. Instead, his rage over being defeated by a tomboy would fester like a pus boil.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Notes

Wynnewood is a fictional town. The Arkansas Delta is nonfictional, and it contains fifteen counties. The Delta is celebrated for cotton fields and a rich musical heritage defined by deep blues and gospel roots.

Song Reference

“I Am a Poor Wayfaring Stranger” AKA “Wayfaring Stranger,” at the link, is performed by Rhiannon Giddens.

This Traditional song, traced back to the 1700s, is in Public Domain and originated in the Appalachian Mountains. It has a large number of variations. https://www.pdinfo.com/search-pd-songs.php.

Thank You!

Vocal Curators and Creators: Thank you for inspiration! I extend special shout-outs to Novel Allen, Catherine Dorian, Dharrsheena Raja Segarran, Lacy Loar-Gruenler, and Lamar Wiggins.