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Before he left, Sheriff asked to look in on the babies. Something was tugging at him. He’d been caught up in George Wilson’s grand aspirations and perhaps too in the deluded ones of his bootlegging tenant. He shared with the two men an affinity for gin and his belief that a workingman should have it if he wanted it. But unlike them he was a veteran and a servant of the law, with a soldier’s eye and a detective’s nose. He’d sniffed out a German spy in the pisser at a whorehouse in Paris, France. He’d identified the Wiregrass Killer in a barbershop, when the man was inside with half his face covered in cream and Sheriff was in the road, twenty yards away, on his horse. Now he smelled a skunk and he wanted to see it with his own eyes.
It was something about that maid. Her empty eyes. The way she froze up when they talked about the dead man, and again when they talked about the babies. And where was the daughter? If Sheriff had more than peanuts to bet, he’d put his money on that colored girl being mother to the dead man’s child. Two Negroes doing as Negroes did, carrying on in the woods. Who knew how the Jesups got tangled up in it, but what other explanation was there? Sheriff was a humble man but he’d been through as much school as church and he wasn’t one to believe in miraculous wombs.
The white one was asleep. The colored one was awake. The boy. His eyes skated toward the light of the doorway. Then the daughter emerged from the darkness of the room, crossing from her chair to the cradle, shielding the light with her wrist. Before she did, he got a good look at her pretty, outraged face. “I beg your pardon,” said Sheriff, holding his hat to his heart. He stood between the door and the cradle for close to a minute, the light falling over the boy. What he saw was a colored baby with his white mother’s face. She lifted him and held him to her shoulder, and Sheriff put his hat back on. He shook his head and gave a little laugh. Ain’t a Fritz behind every pisser door, he reminded himself.
Back in the kitchen, to Jesup, he said again, “I beg your pardon.”
“Damn shame, ain’t it,” said Jesup. “Neither one of em’s gone know its daddy.”
That was how it came to be that Juke Jesup went free. Sheriff left him with a handshake and a warning. “I don’t care how friendly Wilson been to you. He ain’t gone let his boy take the fall so easy. You best walk with the sun at your back and keep your shadow in front of you.”
It was the day that belonged to the Lord. If you hung your wash on a Sunday, everyone in church would know it, and you might have your sins prayed for. When the first reporter showed up that afternoon, before Genus’s body was even cold, Juke sent him away, saying, “Let the dead have a day’s rest.”
But Monday morning, the knocks came quick—a reporter from the Florence Messenger, the Albany Herald, the Valdosta Daily Times. They all ran a photograph of the gourd tree, a short length of rope hanging from a beam. They seemed disappointed that there was no picture of Genus hanging. There was no picture of Genus at all. In the front-page article in the Messenger, they spelled his name “Genius.”
FLORENCE, Ga., Jul. 7—At approximately 12:30 A.M., Genius Jackson, a Negro youth of unknown origins, was allegedly killed by George Frederick “Freddie” Wilson III, 19, on the property of his grandfather George Frederick Wilson, known as the crossroads farm, near the intersection of String Wilson and Twelve-Mile Roads. Although the deceased’s body suffered multiple gunshot wounds, an autopsy revealed the cause of death to be a fracture of the cervical spine.
According to witness John “Juke” Jesup, the sharecropper who hired Jackson as a wage hand, Jackson was hanged from a gourd tree in retaliation for the rape of his daughter, Elma Jesup, 18, Wilson’s fiancée. Wilson, who worked as foreman under his grandfather’s supervision at the Florence Cotton Mill, was last seen in his green Chevrolet truck traveling southbound on Valentine Road. He is said to be wearing a pair of shoes made of alligator leather, which belonged to the deceased.
Elma looked for the word “lynch” but didn’t find it. A lynching, she knew, would imply that the man had died at the hands of persons unknown. Somehow all those persons unknown had managed to pin it on Freddie Wilson, and though Elma felt no more love for him and now felt not even pity—he’d had it coming forty ways from Sunday—what she did feel was bewilderment, fury, and finally relief, that her father had managed to get off without a scratch, clean as a newborn. The reporters sat with Juke in the rockers on the porch, on the scattered pine stumps, drinking coffee and eating corn pone with chitlins and talking till the sun went down. He told stories about growing up on the farm as a boy with String Wilson, the story about the skunk they’d caught in a rabbit trap, the story about String carrying a potato in his trouser pocket for a week because Juke told him it would turn into a rock. There were stories of Juke’s heroics—the one about saving String when he’d fallen down that well, and saving the drunk who’d wrecked his tractor in the creek (it had crushed the man’s legs like twigs—that was why you’d never catch Juke Jesup on a tractor). He’d saved a dog too just a few months back, from the burning shell of a car—it was how his arm came to be burned, he said. The bitch of a hound had run oft. Some kind of grateful! When the next reporter came, he told the stories again. He could tell stories, Juke could. He could talk the hind legs off a donkey. And the reporters could listen. They were paid to listen. If they left with their pockets a little heavier, weighed down with jars of gin, it was just to make sure they listened right. None of the stories made it into the paper, and except for a quote here and there—“I reckon God saw that judgment was made”—Juke stayed out of the papers too. It was a tragedy, the papers said, a shame. But what could be done in a case like this?
Only one paper, the Macon Testament, printed an editorial. It was also the only paper that used the word “lynch.” It was one of those big-city dailies. On Tuesday morning, after delivering her eggs, Elma was seen reading it at the crossroads store, hiding behind a tower of condensed milk.
For three years, it seemed Reason had come to Georgia. The Klansman had been evicted from the Governor’s mansion, and lynching with him. Then, in January, Irwin County brought Georgia back to that dark era. Now that her record has been broken, why not trample on it? The tragedy in Irwin County will go down in history as truly barbaric, but at least the sheriff had a confession. Here we have nothing, no evidence but a bruised ego and brute justice.
“Miss Elma? You all right, honey?”
Mud Turner peeked around the tower of cans. Elma pressed the paper to her chest. Mud thought she was holding it funny, like her arm was broke.
“Of course. I’ll be taking my flour, if you don’t mind.”
At the checkers table on the porch of the store, Jeb Simmons and his son Jeb Junior sat hunched over the Testament. Elma looked like she was in a hurry, but Jeb got up to help lift her wagon down the step. “Don’t worry, Miss Elma,” he said. “Don’t nobody care for no city rag.”
“Don’t nobody care for no opinionating,” said Jeb Junior. They called him Drink. That was what he liked to do.
“That reporter show up round here, we’ll send him home directly.”
But he’d already shown up. He was the reporter who’d shown up on Sunday. And not just a reporter—Q. L. Boothby, the editor and publisher himself. He was an important man in Macon. Head of the hospital board, the Masons, and a member, it was said, of the Commission on Interracial Cooperation. (“Nigger-lover club,” it was said.) He came back to the big house again on Tuesday afternoon, after the editorial was out, and Juke, who’d brought home the paper himself and made Elma read it aloud, was ready, with Jeb and Drink and five or six other men, men who’d been there on Saturday night and men who wished they’d been. Q. L. Boothby didn’t make it to the porch. Elma had watched from the window as he backed down the steps, his hands half-raised in surrender, then got in his car and drove back to Macon.
They hadn’t bought the Testament since Ocilla. If they had a nickel to spend, they spent it on the Messenger, whose editor had money in the mill, whose regular order of gin was as big as any in the county. But the end of January, a thousand folks in the next county had mobbed a colored man for raping and killing a teenage white girl. They said he cut out her eye with a knife and left her on the road to die, and when they found him, they tore him limb from limb, joint by joint, pulling out his teeth with pliers, before they strung him from a tree and burned him. Elma’s father had sent her to the store for all the papers the next day, and he’d had her read him every word. He couldn’t read but a handful of words himself, and never took to his daughter teaching him, or his wife before her. When Elma was done, he said, “To think I was just there on Tuesday. I coulda caught me quite a sight.”
It was said that the chief of police kept the man’s skull on his desk as an ashtray. One of the little girls from Creek Baptist claimed she had visited his office with her friend, the police chief’s granddaughter, and he had let her hold it. She claimed she had a piece of it in her pocket, and all the children gathered round to see it, but it was just a pig knuckle in wax paper, and everyone was disappointed.
It wasn’t a nod, Elma told herself. She had not nodded. She had lowered her head, then lifted it to find her father’s eye, then lowered it again. Lowered, lifted, lowered. A hesitation of the chin, no more. She had not given her permission. Her permission was not required. What was she to do to stop fifty men from carrying out what they were bent on carrying out?
Freddie would have done it anyway, with or without Juke’s help, with or without Elma’s blessing—that was the way her daddy put it. Weren’t no stopping him, he said again and again, weren’t no stopping him, until she came to believe it as he seemed to. “You ain’t done no wrong,” he said, and that was all—they were not to speak of it. He didn’t mean that he, her father, was to blame. He meant to absolve both of them. There was no one to blame, because there had been no wrong. All the blame there was, and there wasn’t much, he tagged on Freddie. Elma didn’t know whether that had been his aim all along or whether he’d been lucky enough for Freddie to accept the blame before Juke could offer it. She didn’t know if, in private, her father saved any blame for himself, if he prayed to God outside of a church pew, if the body that swung in her nightmares swung in his too. She supposed she wouldn’t ever know. Genus was buried in the ground and her father was out in the field like it was any day of the week, for though it was July and laying-by time, there was ragweed to cuss at.
Elma moved from room to room, sweeping the floors clean, across the breezeway, her elbows tucked to her sides. If she kept her head down, her chin lowered, if she didn’t look out the kitchen window, her eyes would not catch on the gourd tree. The gourd tree would not be there. And if she didn’t sing, no one could hear her. No one could say, What are you doing, Elma Jesup, singing like you don’t have a care in the world?
In the first days, there was only brief mention of the babies, and usually the press got it wrong. One paper left out Winna; another said they were mulatto twins. It was only after one paper reported that the two babies born to Elma Jesup were of decidedly different complexions that the other papers sent their reporters back, and Juke came in from the fields to invite them inside. Now that their attention was off Genus Jackson, he didn’t mind being in the papers. The babies he almost seemed to be proud of. “Ain’t no use hiding them,” he said to Elma. “Might as well grab us ahold a some fame.” Besides, it was good for business. The reporters came thick as field mice, with their folding cameras and notepads, standing shoulder to shoulder on the porch steps, wanting to take a look at the twins. They aimed their cameras over the edge of the cradle. They left with more gin, paying Juke directly now, having gotten a taste for it. This would piss George Wilson off something good, but what did it matter now? Juke had already pissed George Wilson’s pants off.
In the weeklies Juke brought home from the crossroads store, Wilson and Winnafred were the same inky gray, bound in blankets, sleeping. But the headlines spelled it out. The one in the Atlanta paper said, GEMINI TWINS BORN TO COTTON CO. WOMAN. Elma read the articles to Juke. After a while she got tired of the papers and made up stories. “There ain’t nothing about us in this one. It’s just about the price of corn.” Then Juke wanted to know more—what was it about the price of corn? “It’s fine,” Elma said. “It’s holding steady.”
She swore off the papers, but in a few days she was dashing down to the crossroads store to read them again, searching for some mention of the children. She couldn’t tolerate the thought of them being talked about behind her back. It was like hearing her name whispered in church and not being able to tell who’d said it.
First of August, Elma flinched at the word “lynch” in a headline in the Testament. She hadn’t been expecting it. It was the babies she was looking for. But it wasn’t about Genus Jackson. She looked closer. An elderly Negro politician who owned forty acres in Montgomery County, sixty miles from Florence, had been flogged over the head by a mob of masked men. The men had come to his door late at night and roused him from his bed, where he had been asleep with his grandson. They put him, barely conscious, in the back of a truck, drove him to Toombs County, and left him by the side of the road. At dawn a white farmer on his way to Vidalia with a load of tobacco found the Negro in his bloody pajamas, and the Negro offered him seven dollars to be driven home, where he died of a cerebral hemorrhage.
There was outrage in Montgomery County. The Negro was an important man. A delegate to the National Republican Convention. Secretary and treasurer of the Widows and Orphans Department of the Negro Masonic Lodge, with an office and a secretary. Recently he had run for chairman of the Montgomery County Republican Committee, and before he was elected he accused his lily-white opponents of fraud. He implied, some said, that they were poor white trash. “That’s all right,” one observer reported them saying at the convention. “We’ll see you later about that.”
It was the second official lynching of the year, the article stated, though a July incident in Cotton County was still under scrutiny.
Elma did not read the article to her father. She didn’t even bring home the paper, just read it standing next to the tower of cans, folded it up, and buried it back in its pile. Maybe now, she thought, the reporters would be busy in Montgomery County. She stepped out onto the porch of the store. The Coca-Cola thermometer read 96 degrees, and Elma’s collar was damp with sweat, but now her neck went cold and she shivered. She had not seen Genus’s body but now in her mind she saw the old man in Montgomery County, on the side of the road in his nightclothes, saw him there on the Twelve-Mile Straight in front of the crossroads store like a dog dead in a ditch.
“Can I help you with that wagon?” asked Drink Simmons, half standing up from his table.
“No, thank you.”
“You look right peaked, Miss Elma.”
“I’m all right, thank you kindly.”
“You hear any word from that fiancé of yours?”
“What are you asking after?”
“I never took Freddie for yellow.” Drink shrugged. “I wouldn’t up and leave my woman nor my younguns, even if the law was hot on my behind.”
Elma bumped her wagon down the steps and into the sun, and now her body flashed hot. She would not think about the man in Montgomery. It was easier to be mad. “Don’t you and your daddy have some squirrels to shoot, Drink?”
The people of Cotton County were distracted from Genus Jackson, and it was the twins who seized their attention. Through August, as the corn grew high in the fields and the next truckload of pickers showed up, people came to see the babies. They came from church and town and neighboring farms, bearing booties and blankets, biscuits and pies. Mary Minrath, the home supervisor who last fall had been sent from town to help with the canning, brought the peach cobbler that had taken honorable mention at the Cotton County fair. Bette Hazelton, the bank manager’s wife, brought a box of secondhand clothes she’d collected from the congregation at Florence Baptist. Camilla Rawls, the doctor’s wife and the president of the local chapter of the WCTU, brought two golden-edged, pocket-size Bibles. “Every child of God needs his own.” Even the chain gang that made its way down the road left a gift stuffed in the mailbox, a bouquet of blue hound’s tongue picked from the shoulder of the Straight. They came by cart and by foot and by automobile, Hoover wagons and two-wheeled jigs, feigning errands to the crossroads store, delivering news. Some clucked and cooed; some shook their heads. All of them prayed over the cradle. “Haven’t seen you in church, Elma,” said Josie Byrd, whose daddy owned the biggest peanut farm in the county. She was leaving for Emory, for nursing school, and she wore a new pair of leather shoes, white with white laces, so clean they hurt Elma’s eyes. “They got Mary Collier in your place in the choir, and pretty as she is, she sings like a gopher frog.”
Elma said she’d be back in church when she was ready, when the twins were old enough to travel. And the women left with a knowing nod, sometimes a hand on Elma’s shoulder. “If I didn’t see them with my own eyes,” Josie’s mother whispered to Josie on their way out the door, “I’d say those babies came from two different wombs.”
A week after delivering the cobbler, Mrs. Minrath returned in her starched apron, her leather ledger at her side, saying, “Those tomatoes in your garden aren’t going to can themselves.”
Elma said she wouldn’t be needing any help this year, thank you kindly. “We got our hands full with the babies.”
Mrs. Minrath pursed her flat lips. “Then it would seem you could use all the extra hands you could get. Especially in times like these. And without any womankind around.”
“I got my Nan. She’s a plumb miraculous canner. We been canning since we was tall as the hem on your dress, Mrs. Minrath. Even without a book to write it all down in.”
Mrs. Minrath looked around Elma and into the house, where Nan was holding Wilson. She shook her head. “Poor children,” she said, and turned and walked down the steps.
People came to help, and Elma sent them away. It was true that she lost some tomatoes—her father let her tend the garden, but alone she couldn’t pick them fast enough. She canned what she could, and the peaches and berries too, and pickled the peppers and carrots, sweating over the stove. She ate the cobblers and biscuits and pies, hating every bite, but she was hungry, and so were the babies, and they were delicious, those wicked, wicked pies. She fed the chickens and the guineas and the hogs and the mules, trapping a high-pitched hum in her mouth, and milked the cows, April and June, Anna and Margaret, and separated the cream from their milk, saving the skim for the hogs. “It’s all they want us for, ain’t it, girls,” she said to the cows, tugging the full, furred mounds of their teats. “Milk, milk, and more milk.” When she was held up feeding the babies and couldn’t get out to the barn until dawn, their udders were engorged as globes, veined with rivers of ducts. “Ain’t it the worst, girls,” she said. When she was held up with her chores and forgot to feed the babies, her own milk would mess the front of her dress, and then there was no ignoring it. And then she’d pull the shutters and sit back in the rocker and settle a baby into her lap, or two if she could manage, closing her eyes and letting the ache ease, and then there was nothing in the world but the babies, no visitors, no reporters, only their billy goat mews and the buttermilk smell of their warm heads.
One sunny morning at the height of summer, a truck pulled up in the dirt driveway and a woman with knee-high boots climbed out of it. Her short hair was yellow as a cornfield. Elma stood barefoot on the porch, fiddling with the pins that held up the great pile of her hair, as the woman made her way up the driveway and reached to shake her hand. Elma feared she was from the home demonstration club or the WCTU, on a mission to save her vegetables or her soul. The woman said, “I’m here to see the Gemini twins.”
Elma let her hand fall, loose as a dishrag. “They’re not Gemini,” she said. “They’re just regular.”
She was a dog breeder on her way to Florida, come all the way from Atlanta. Out of the wooden truck bed, where a dozen dogs yapped, she scooped up two Labrador puppies, one the color of butterscotch, the other oily black as a crow. “They’re called Castor and Pollux,” she said. “Every child needs its own dog.”
Her father came in from the field and thanked her and the dogs jumped on him and he laughed. What was there to laugh about? Elma watched their pink tongues lapping at her father’s hands. This was their reward for killing Genus. Dogs.
“We can’t keep them,” Elma said to the woman. “We got enough to look after with the babies.”
“Course we can,” said her father. “Dogs look after theyselves.”
And he made Elma take the woman into her room, where the babies now shared a larger crib that Juke had built. The woman leaned over the sleeping twins but didn’t pray. “Would you look at that,” she said.
“Please don’t touch the babies,” said Elma. “They’re still fragile. They were born small.”
“They look strong,” said the woman. “Especially this boy here. That’s hybrid vigor.”
Elma joined the woman at the crib, pulling the quilt to Wilson’s chin.
“Most people don’t believe a woman can have two babies from two fathers at the same time. They think it’s witchcraft, don’t they? Or just tales from Bible times?”
Elma felt a sudden pressure in her chest, like a blush, or a rush of milk.
“With dogs in the wild, it happens all the time. You take any bitch in heat, they’s as good a chance as not that every mutt in the litter’s gone have a different daddy.”
“That so?” said Elma, head cocked. One of her pins sprung out of her hair and she bent to pick it up, then took it between her lips, chewing it over.
“Your babies will be fine,” the woman said. “Black or white, they’re fixing to be strong.”
Of course, Wilson wasn’t true black. Nor was he red like Isaac’s child Esau, though under his skullcap was a rusty shock of hair, like the bronze wool used to scrub the pans. When he had grown into his skin, he was a warm, loamy brown, the color of the earth tilled for seed—sand and silt and clay mixed together. And when his eyes finally settled, when he could stare back at the faces that loomed over the crib and hold them in focus, they were a pale gray-green. You didn’t have to look twice, some said, to see those eyes were Elma’s.
Winnafred, though—already she was called Winna Jean, or just Winna—took after her father. When her skin cooled from the pink of infancy, she was white as a gourd, with Freddie’s sun-bleached hair, even before she’d seen the sun. It wasn’t until years later, when the twins spent their days running between the house and the fields and the barn, that their freckles came out, like stars appearing in the night sky. If you wanted to believe they weren’t twins—and at some point, everyone did, even the twins themselves, as often as they wanted to believe that they were—their freckles were there, finally, to connect them, Castor and Pollux joined in their immortal constellation.
When they were still babies, Elma dressed them head to toe, even indoors, even in summer. She wanted to protect them, to hide them, to make them more the same. You couldn’t blame her. After all, Juke said to the visitors, she’d been expecting only one. When she was pregnant, singing “All the Pretty Horses” to the baby kicking in her belly, she’d sewn six identical guano sack dresses, stitching them together with hay bale twine. When two babies came instead, she dressed both of them in the sacks. If she could have, she would have stitched the babies together at the waist, like Siamese twins. Sometimes it seemed she wanted to believe Wilson and Winna were one child, or that she needed others to believe it. It didn’t matter how the babies came to be. Babies were babies. Even Juke believed that.
“Course I love them both the same,” Elma told the women from church, the reporters who tracked white clay across the floor. She followed them with a broom. “All children live in the kingdom of God, don’t they?”
And they nodded with certainty, saying “Amen” and “Praise His name.”
But they were thinking of all the things she might have done with that baby, all the doorsteps she might have left him on in the middle of the night. The colored school. The colored church. In a basket on the creek. She could see the scheming in their eyes, the stories they were writing in their heads. Just like they wondered what had happened between Elma and Genus Jackson in the cotton house or creek or cornfield, a cornfield she hadn’t even been in, but they were following her there.
In some of their eyes, doubt. They had seen their share of mulatto babies. The Jesups were as liable as any country family to have some black blood along their line, black blood that decided to rear up and show itself. (The white Youngs who owned the tobacco plantation and the black Youngs who owned the juke joint? “You think they ain’t kin?” a white farmer, drunk enough, might be heard to say to his wife. This was raised as a diversion, because that white farmer might himself have a favorite colored girl in town, or in a shack, and likely as not his wife knew the girl’s name.)
It wasn’t a miracle, some thought, just a disgrace.
But mostly people believed. Folks in Cotton County were believers. They believed in Jesus foremost, and every holy cow and sheep in the barn he was born in. They believed in the Promised Land. It was far away, the Promised Land, on the other side of the world, but they believed that Jesus meant for them to be here, in Georgia, in the land of cotton, their own Promised Land, hard as times were. Jesus and Mary and Joseph were their people, country people suffering under the sun, and the people of Cotton County would be redeemed. They believed in Redemption, that their losses on battlefields, their losses in cotton fields, would be remembered and repaid in the Kingdom of Heaven. They believed in the Commandments. They believed in work, and rising early, and the crops in the field, and the rain that nourished them, never did they believe in the rain more, now that there wasn’t enough of it. They believed in progress, in automobiles and airplanes, and a few of them in the tractors that sat like jungle beasts in their barns. They believed in Charles Lindbergh. They believed in Ty Cobb. They did not believe in Herbert Hoover, but they prayed for him. They believed in prayer, and praise, and warm meals, in the kindness of strangers. They believed in their neighbors. They believed in Georgia, its clays and creeks, in the heavenly mists that drifted over the fields in the morning. They believed in ghosts—for what was the Almighty but the Holy Ghost?—and they believed in miracles. They believed in an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. Getting caught not believing was like getting caught with your hand in the collection plate. “Any faithless fool tells you your babies ain’t kin,” Juke said to Elma, “you tell them the only sin the Lord don’t pardon is the sin of nonbelieving.”
So they believed that the babies were twins. Because if they didn’t believe, then they didn’t believe Genus Jackson was one of the daddies. They’d have to believe that the daddy was someone else. They’d have to believe that a mob of white men killed a black man for no reason. And they couldn’t believe that.
Except the black folks. They knew what their white neighbors were capable of. They believed in the same things the white folks believed in, except they didn’t believe in the white folks. (Some of them didn’t believe in Georgia. Some of them believed the only Promised Land lay north.)
Except they didn’t believe in outsiders, either. Neither the white folks nor the black folks believed in outsiders. None of the folks, black or white, knew Genus Jackson. If they had, maybe one of them would have been seen crying on a porch, or writing a letter to Walter White, or taking up a collection for a funeral.
So even Ezra and Long John and Al believed the story that was told. They sat on their stools at Young’s and talked it over. Ezra said, “Boy done come to the wrong town.”
Long John said, “Never did like that hunchback boy.”
Al, who was the oldest, who had sons of his own, said, “He all right. He just a poor child of the Lord. Poor child done fell for the wrong white girl.”
He’d been lucky while he was alive, Ezra said, he’d been treated too good, put up in that shack without paying a penny. Besides, the boss gave them a pint of liquor every harvest, and his daughter, at Christmas, she made them pies.
FOUR (#ulink_fa525339-8f6c-5928-8163-8c0a9419aa75)
THERE WERE FOURTEEN BOOKS IN THE BIG HOUSE. THE THREE Bibles, including the babies’. The family Bible, marked with the birthdays and deaths of Jessa as well as Ketty, was kept on the mantel, where it collected the yellow light of the fire, and from which Elma read a passage aloud at the table each night. There was a book of fairy tales by the brothers Grimm. A book of poems by Edgar Allan Poe, a gift from Elma’s schoolteacher, Miss Armistead. The Farmers’ Almanac (each January the old edition went out to the privy). And a children’s encyclopedia, in eight illustrated volumes, called The Book of Knowledge, which Juke had bought for Elma’s birthday from the rolling store when it was a good year for cotton. If Nan hid a volume of the encyclopedia inside her corn-shuck mattress, nobody missed it, least of all Juke.
In a house full of secrets, one of the first was between Nan and Elma. The winter Nan was six and Elma was ten, their throats began to ache in the middle of the night. Juke looked in Nan’s mouth and saw her throat was coated with what looked like gray putty. He thought it was a clump of clay she’d eaten. Then he looked in Elma’s mouth and saw hers was the same. The next morning he drove them into town, to Dr. Rawls’s office, and the doctor said it wasn’t dirt but diphtheria. Juke carried Elma into her exam room, then carried them both into the colored room so Elma could talk for Nan. “She’s got the chills.”
“How do you know?” asked the doctor.
Elma shrugged. “She told me.”
They had their own way of talking, even then, their own system of signs. Elma knew how to watch Nan and guess what she meant, like a game of charades. Elma guessed, and Nan nodded. It was that first time when they were quarantined in a shack behind the house that Elma taught her to read. She’d put on a bonnet, because that’s what her schoolteacher Miss Armistead wore, and if Elma couldn’t be a farmer like her daddy, she wanted to be a schoolteacher. Nan would trace the letters in her tablet with a pencil, repeating each one in her head. No one bothered with them there. Nan’s mother, Ketty, who couldn’t read herself, passed them their meals through the window, and when spring came and Juke looked again into their mouths and declared them cured, he burned the shack to the ground, the tablet with it, but the letters stayed in Nan’s head. They were three months in the shack, and three months Elma was out of school.
So while Elma read Juke the morning news, or a letter from his people in Carolina, Nan played as dumb as he was. She had no tongue to prove herself, and in this her silence kept her safe. She hung the wash. She shook the dirt from the peanuts. She cooked and canned and patched the holes in Juke’s overalls where his knees had worn through. She waited for her father to return. She waited and she waited. She looked out at the road and listened for the automobile he would arrive in. In the daylight, it mattered little that she could read and Juke couldn’t, but there were certain nights when it helped to know she could open The Book of Knowledge and go away for a while, get lost in Antarctica, or in Paris, France, or Baltimore, Maryland, the place her father lived, a place that seemed just as magical and just as far as the pyramids. In this way the words on the page paved a gentle road to sleep. She’d nibble on the white clay she kept on a pantry shelf in an old coffee tin her mother had used for the same purpose. Ketty said it was natural, just as chewing cured tobacco leaves was natural—it was God’s own bounty and it made a day go down easier.
It was on those nights, the nights when Juke came for her, that having no tongue was a mixed blessing. If she’d had a tongue, she could have said no. But would a word have stopped him? Was it better to have no tongue if a tongue was no protection?
The first time he took her to the still was the night they buried her mother. It was just for the gin then. Juke said she was ready for a man’s drink. The log cabin was off to the west of the house, beyond the corn, just up the bank from the creek and not fifty feet from the road, but hidden from sight by long-skirted pines and thick-waisted oaks and the Spanish moss that looked to Nan like witch’s hair. She had heard Elma say before that her daddy was out at the still—some nights he even slept there—but she couldn’t imagine what it was for, or what it looked like, only knew that she washed his tumblers and that they weren’t for tea. She had seen the cabin only once, when a trail of blackberry bushes brought her there, like bread crumbs to a gingerbread house.
That night, he sat her down on an old stool made from a pine stump. The cabin was dark, lit only with a candle; Elma was in the big house, asleep. The air was musty, close; it smelled of a sweetness she’d never smelled before. He offered her a sip from his mason jar, and the sweetness filled her nose and her mouth, burning all the way up to her eyes, which filled with tears. The gin dribbled down her chin, as sometimes happened. Juke laughed a not unkind laugh. She did too, and the sound was big in her ears.
The second time, he showed her how the still worked, let her touch the cooking pot, the thumper keg, the condenser that was cool to the touch. He let her play on the barrels. She hopped from one to another like a cat. He watched her while he whittled away on a piece of pine. He carved her a little wooden cat. “You just a curious little cat, ain’t you?”
The third time, he had her sit on the mattress, this one filled with Spanish moss, which he slept on when he had a big batch going. Under the mattress he kept a twelve-gauge shotgun, which he took out and stroked with a square of wash leather in the light of the candle. “Know who gave me this gun?” he said.
Nan shook her head.
“Your daddy.”
She wanted to reach out and touch it, but she didn’t. It was an object she’d seen a thousand times, as plain as his tin of tobacco, but now it shone with a new brightness.
“You remember your daddy?”
Again she shook her head. She did remember him, she thought she did. She sometimes dreamt of the tickle of his mustache and the smell of his corncob pipe. But it was easier to say no.
“Damn shame he left,” he said, shaking his head. “Ain’t no man who can leave a child. I wouldn’t never leave you like that.” He reached under her and slipped the gun back under the mattress. “Even Elma never been out here,” he said. “Even Elma I don’t ’low to have no man’s drink.” And it was true she felt a little special—her momma dead, her daddy gone, and the boss man paying her attention—even as she held her nightdress tight around her hips. The gin pumped warm through her heart.
The fourth time, he told her to lie down, weren’t she tired from that gin and the late hour? He told her to close her eyes. He told her to put out her hand. She did as she was told. In her palm he placed what felt like a marble, and when she opened her eyes she saw that it was a pearl. “It belonged to your momma. Must have lost it while she was cleaning the big house.” He wanted Nan to have it, for luck. It was smooth and white with a bluish sheen, like the skin that formed at the top of a bucket of milk, a tiny hole pierced through either side. Nan held it in her hand until she was back in her own room, and then she hid it too, in her corn-shuck mattress.
The fifth time, he lay down beside her. He stroked her braids, which had gone wiry. Such pretty hair, he said, but weren’t she lonesome, no momma to tend them?
And like that.
