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When her body had become a woman’s, he told her it was word from the Lord that she was ready to know a man, like the Bible called for. But it meant he had to pull away and do his business on her chest or belly or on the wool blanket, which she washed in the laundry come Tuesday. “I’m too old and you too young to raise no youngun,” he said, almost merry.
She never fell asleep there in the cabin, always waited for him to get up and go outside to make water, then went ahead of him back to the house, where she could sleep on the other side of the wall from Elma. Later, on her own mattress in the little room off the kitchen, she tried to settle her eyes on a book, the gin cooling in her veins. She supposed she could have run from him. She could smash a jar and cut him with it. She could take his shotgun from under the mattress and shoot him with it. In her room, when he came for her, she could make a ruckus, waking Elma. On nights he was rough and quick, when he had no kind words for her, or no words at all, she wrote a letter to Elma in her head. Telling.
But what could Elma have done, even with a tongue? What power did she have to stop her father?
It would be worse, Nan decided, if Elma knew. Worse than the shame of being under him was the shame of being under him inside Elma’s head.
She wouldn’t wait for her father to return any longer. She would go to Baltimore and she would find him. She would look up his name in the phone book. Sterling Smith.
Some nights, when Juke came to her room, it was to tell her that she was wanted to deliver a baby. Then her heart pounded with relief. Suddenly she was awake. She hurried to dress and take her mother’s satchel—her birthing bag, she’d called it—and go outside, where another man’s truck or wagon sat in the driveway. Usually it was a wagon, and the driver was colored, and the wagon was headed for the Youngs’ farm or the Fourth Ward or Rocky Bottom, the ragged country beyond the Fourth Ward where Negro croppers tried to make the ground yield. Juke watched from the porch as she rode away, and though she had a long, uncertain night ahead of her, for a few hours she could escape.
“You ain’t no granny woman,” one father told her, sizing her up. “You ain’t no more than a granddaughter.” Most mothers she didn’t meet before the labor, and by the time a father discovered how young she was, it was too late to find someone else. But before long her silence relaxed them, loosened their mouths. Nobody talked as much as a man driving home to his wife in labor in the middle of the night. They talked about cotton and corn, about their families waiting, whether the mother had had an easy pregnancy or a hard one. One man recounted an entire baseball game between the Chattanooga Black Lookouts and the Atlanta Black Crackers, a game narrated to him by his cousin, who had been there.
A mother in labor, though, didn’t like to be talked to. There wasn’t much Nan needed to say that she couldn’t say with her hands. A wave to tell her to push, a different wave to tell her to stop pushing. A hand on the forehead, or a hand in hers, for comfort. Quick, steady hands. “You look just like Ketty,” the mother might say, and the words gave Nan courage. Each time the baby came, Nan loved it. She bathed it and bundled it and held it as long as the mother would allow. The next morning, after the sun had risen, after Nan had been made a cup of coffee, after the brothers and sisters had tumbled naked out of their bed to see the baby, after the afterbirth had been planted in the field to ensure a good crop the next year, the father would drive her home. On the way back, he talked less. His nerves had calmed. He was tired. Maybe he was thinking about next year’s crop, whether there would be enough to feed the new child. They were poor folks, every one of them, log walls lined with newspaper and pasteboard boxes, no clean towels but fertilizer sacks. Sometimes they paid Nan in hen eggs or gourds, once with braided brown bread the mother had made herself, in the early waves of labor, once with a handful of caramel milk-roll candies, seeing how young she was. Once she tasted them, Nan might have liked to be paid in caramel milk rolls every time. (Some folks thought she couldn’t taste at all, but she could taste fine; she could taste with the stub of her tongue what it took another person a whole tongue to taste.) Ketty’d had a tongue for bartering, but even with a tongue Nan might have only accepted what was offered. What right had she to what little a family had? One mother of six offered Nan the baby itself, and Nan had stood there and rocked that baby, a girl, and imagined taking her home, a baby that looked to her like family, better than any doll baby, and then handed the child back to the mother, hoping she would never know how pitiful her parents’ love was.
But there was a kind of peace in those Rocky Bottom cabins, miles from any crossroads store. A body could farm what little land he had a right to, or have as many children as she liked, and be left alone with their seeds and their rags. So many children they were giving them away, so what was one more mouth to feed? It would be easy enough for her to stay. They were her people out in those cabins. She could earn her keep. She’d saved half her earnings from her deliveries, which she squirreled away in the inside pocket of her satchel. If she got two coins, she put one in the satchel and gave Juke the other. If she got four, she gave him two. It wouldn’t be long before she had enough to put together and make something with. Before her mother had died, she’d told her, “You stronger than folks think. You got a strong mind and strong hands. You be ready to go out into the world soon enough.”
But then there was Elma. She was her people too. If she told Elma, maybe Elma would come along with her. The idea made Nan dizzy with hope. Leaving would be easier, less lonely, with Elma. It would be safer. Even grown men, whole families, the ones who were streaming north on the trains to Washington, D.C., to Philadelphia and Harlem, had to leave under cover of night. She heard about them on her calls, folks who were pulling up their roots and planting themselves in the snowy cities where you could walk down the sidewalk without having to step off when a white person came along. You had to be careful. If you were a sharecropper, you had to find a way to get out of town before word got out, or the planter would find a way to make you stay. George Wilson might send his grandson out for you, or the sheriff. Even her father had had to ride a freight train, the story went, when he left for the North.
There was one family that lived in a shotgun shack in the Fourth Ward, just over the tracks. The mother was expecting her third child. Ketty had delivered the first two, and Nan expected to be called for the next, but they never called. After enough months had passed, Nan concluded that the mother had lost the baby, but later she learned from the family next door that they had up and left for a place called Scranton, Pennsylvania, where the mother had people, and the neighbors had been as surprised as Nan. The father, a diabetic who had worked in the picker room at the mill, had complained to Freddie Wilson, the foreman, that his feet grew numb when he was on them for too long, and Freddie had told him that he should be grateful for the work and do it without complaint, and that if he didn’t want to stand he could kneel on the floor and clean it, every square foot of the mill. So the man had waxed the floors, scrubbing on his hands and knees where the white women stood spinning, and though he kept his eyes on the floor, Freddie would say, laughing at himself, “You looking up that girl’s dress?” and whack him with the straw end of his broom. When he was done cleaning the floor, Freddie made him lick it. “Taste clean?” And then, because twelve hours had passed and his next shift was coming on, Freddie sent him back to the picker room. And not long after, before anyone knew to say good-bye, the man had taken his family out of Florence. He sent a letter to the neighbor saying he was working in a printing factory, where the hours were just as long but where at least he could operate his machine sitting down. The neighbor told Nan that the third child was born in a hospital, and they named him Zane.
She wondered what it would be like, leaving. If Elma went along, they’d be in separate cars, Elma in the white car and Nan in the colored, and then she might be no safer than if she’d escaped herself, the two of them traveling along in their separate compartments, as they were now. But she’d be among her own on the train. She’d be safe there. But they were strangers. How would she get by—how would she communicate with the passengers, with the conductor, without Elma? How would she get what she needed when she got to wherever she was going? She could write what she needed on a piece of paper. When she was safely out of the South, she could do that, couldn’t she? The thought made her fingers itch. It was exhilarating and it was terrifying, the thought of making her way in the world without Elma. She would hand over a piece of paper to a stranger, and the stranger would look at her in confusion and disgust. Or the stranger would nod in understanding.
But she was far ahead of herself. She had not even brought herself to write the words to Elma, telling her why she wanted to go. And if she did, maybe Elma wouldn’t believe her. Maybe Elma wouldn’t come with her after all. Why would she come with her? What made her think Elma would choose her over her own blood?
There was a white man who’d owned the land that neighbored the Youngs’ tobacco farm, and he bred mules. When Nan’s mother was young, she’d learned a thing or two from him about the ways of animals, the ways horses and donkeys were the same and the ways they were different. Those mules were the reason, Ketty liked to say, she became a midwife. Nan had long known that mules were beloved in the country for their tough hooves, their good health, their endurance, though they could be stubborn; Juke often said Elma was stubborn as a mule. But it wasn’t stubbornness, Ketty told Nan: a mule had a sense of self-preservation. She made two proud fists and struck her chest with them. When a horse was startled or scared, she said, it would flee; a donkey, on the other hand, would freeze. Mules were like both of their parents, sometimes running, sometimes staying; that was what made folks think they were stubborn. They’re just confused, said Ketty. They couldn’t overcome their own nature.
That was Nan. She was like a mule, she thought, fleeing and freezing. Her father had fled the farm; her mother had stayed. And now Nan’s head was confused, so much did she want to stay and so much did she want to go.
Not long after Juke started bringing her out to the still, she brought the kitchen scissors out to Elma on the back porch. She ran a hand over her head, scalping herself with her palm.
“You want it gone?” Elma asked. “All of it?”
Nan nodded.
“Oh, honey, I ain’t been too good with your plaits, have I?”
And Elma cut it off right there on the porch, Nan sitting on the step below her and closing her eyes to keep from crying. She wanted to cry because of the careful kindness of Elma’s hands, and because she remembered sitting between her mother’s knees like this, the sun on her eyelids. It was the confused longing she sometimes felt when Juke rubbed the stubble of his cheek on hers—she could almost remember her father’s cheek. When Elma was done, she seemed more relieved than Nan. “You look pretty as a statue, honey.”
Juke was not angry, as Nan had expected him to be, nor did he ignore her, as she’d hoped. The next time he led her to the cabin, he was as sweet as he’d ever been. He stroked her little breasts and her belly. He kissed the nape of her bare neck. He talked, as he sometimes did, as though she were the only person in the world with ears, about Jessa, about String, about cotton and corn and the fish in the creek. “I ain’t ever told no one this one,” he said. That night, as she sometimes did, she felt the rush of love in her body, and kept her pleasure a secret from him, and for a while that was enough.
From time to time Nan was asked to perform other acts, ungodly ones, and all she could do was shake her head. She was but a girl, no doctor, no medicine woman, though she knew between the herbs that healed and harmed. “We bring babies into the world,” her mother had taught her. “We don’t bring them out.”
One evening just after nightfall, before Nan had settled into sleep, it was Elma who came for her. Juke must have been brewing at the still. A colored boy was parked in an automobile out front, and a white girl sat in the back. Nan stood under the eye of the moon in the driveway, her bare feet cold on the dirt. “You the midwife?” the boy said. “We come to call on you.” When she didn’t come closer—how did the two of them end up together in such a fine car?—he said, “You can make a baby go away?” Through the open window of the car, he held a ten-dollar bill. The girl sat with her hands crossed over her belly, staring into her lap. Nan could smell the leather of the seat, the freshly printed paper, and her knees trembled. With ten dollars, she wouldn’t need to find another cropper shack to earn her keep on. With ten dollars, she could buy a ticket on a train.
“You hearing me, girl? You as dumb as they say?”
In the road, Jeb Simmons’s truck slowed, the headlights sweeping over them like eyes. The boy squinted in the glare, and when the truck had passed, Nan snatched that ten-dollar bill from his hand and marched back into the house. Maybe he thought she was coming back with her bag. But she shrugged at Elma, went into her room, and buttoned the door, heart slamming. She took volume I of The Book of Knowledge out from under her mattress and pressed the bill between its pages, then closed it and hid it again. If the boy was fool enough to follow her into a white man’s house, she’d ring the dinner bell, and Juke would hear her.
But the boy didn’t follow. What could he do? For all he knew, Juke Jesup was in that house. He didn’t want trouble. She never saw that boy again.
When she finally heard the car drive away, she took out her satchel and counted the money. With the ten-dollar bill, she had eighteen dollars and fifteen cents. That was enough, she thought, for a train ticket to Baltimore, where her father lived. If she was going to run, this was the time. If she was bold enough to steal ten dollars, she’d be bold enough to board a train. Alone—she didn’t need Elma.
First she had to get a ride. The mail truck was known to carry folks into town—Elma did it from time to time when her father needed yeast from the Piggly Wiggly, more than the crossroads store carried—but Mr. Horace, the mailman, would carry no Negro. She could walk, but the walk was long—six miles—and she worried Juke would be after her in his truck, even if she walked along the creek with her feet in the water. It wasn’t safe. Even the dogcatcher had been known to round up loose-foot Negroes, to turn them straight over to the jailhouse, or worse.
But there was a mother of four out in Rocky Bottom, just beyond the Fourth Ward. She was due in August. Her husband had borrowed a truck to drive out to the farm and tell Nan to be ready.
She would be ready. After the baby was delivered she would refuse the ride back to the farm. She’d walk the short distance into town, walk to the train station. At the ticket window she would write down the word “Baltimore.” She would buy a ticket for the colored car. She moved the ten-dollar bill to the pocket in her satchel, along with a dress, a wax sack of white dirt, three caramel milk rolls she’d saved, a sharpened pencil, her mother’s pearl, and volume I of The Book of Knowledge, her favorite, which featured a one-paragraph entry on Baltimore, Maryland, and a picture of the city, the buildings stacked like wedding cakes with pastel-postcard frosting. She had a picture in her mind of walking past those buildings with her father. They were holding hands, taking up the whole of the sidewalk, and then there was snow falling very beautifully and she would be wearing mittens and her father would wrap his scarf around her neck.
She would not pack the wooden cat Juke had carved for her. She would not write a letter to Elma, apologizing for taking the book, for leaving her behind. She would not explain why she was leaving. Why explain now? She was leaving so she would not have to explain.
August came and went. The corn hung heavy in the fields. The baby didn’t come, and didn’t come. And then one morning late in the summer, a new field hand came. Nan stood at the well as she watched Juke open the tar paper shack for him. Inside, the man—or was he a boy?—opened the shutters and hung the rag rug out the window, and with the window framing his face his eyes alighted on hers. It was like spotting a kingbird on a branch outside the kitchen window, that sudden flash of its yellow breast. She knew it would fly off, she knew his eyes would look away, but for a moment the wings beat in her chest. On his head was a woven corn-shuck hat, the silk fibers glowing gold as he leaned his head out into the sun. He lifted the hat, then lifted his hand. She hesitated, then lifted hers in return. And just as she did with a birthing mother, she felt that her hands were all she needed, that they were better than any word.
The baby came, a girl, on a rare rainy night early in September. She took her time but then came quick. In fact, by the time Nan arrived at the house, the nine-year-old daughter and the landlord, who owned the truck, had already delivered her. The mother sat there stunned and smiling, the baby right as rain. It was not what Nan had planned. When the father offered to drive her home, she nodded. She told herself it was because of the trains, which weren’t running at that hour of the night. But she asked him to let her off down the road a ways, so the truck wouldn’t wake the big house, and instead she went to Genus Jackson’s shack.
She had been too young when her father left that shack to know about the proper ways of love, and at times, when Juke talked mean and she felt lonely, she wondered whether her father had loved them at all. Why hadn’t he come back like he said he would? She didn’t know that Sterling and Ketty had spent years trying to conceive her in the bed Genus Jackson slept on, or that they kept at it in that bed even after she slept in it beside them, no louder than a bee pollinating a flower.
She’d known since she was small how a baby came into the world, knew the bloody blossom between a woman’s legs, but it wasn’t until she was nine years old that she learned how they were made. Her mother had always told her that the Lord planted babies in their mothers, just like He grew the cotton and the trees. But one morning Ketty woke her early to take her to a call in Rocky Bottom. The house was down a long dirt road no wider than the wagon, and in the field outside an old man leaned on a double-foot plow behind an older swayback mule. They could hear the mother before they were in the house. Ketty liked to keep Nan close, but she must have sensed trouble—she sent her out to the yard to play with some girls her age. They must have been the woman’s daughters or nieces. Nan did not like to play with the children at the houses she visited because they didn’t understand that she couldn’t speak; their faces were ugly with confusion and then ugly with meanness, and always she was subjected to some inferior role in their game: the maid; the monkey in the middle; once, the dog. But these children were friendly and curious, and the littlest one had legs that weren’t full grown, they were like the legs of a rag doll, and her sisters or cousins had to carry her around and set her down on a rock or a stump. Her name was Ketty Lee, for Ketty, Nan understood, had delivered her. The fact made Nan proud. She spent the day running the acres with those girls, playing hide and go seek and picking flowers along the road and plaiting them in their hair.
When her mother appeared in the yard with her satchel, she did not speak to Nan, and she did not speak to her on the ride home, and spoke to the man driving them only to say that she was sorry. It wasn’t until they were back on the farm that she told Nan both the mother and baby had died. She told Nan this to explain her own silence and to dispense with it. Did Nan know that a mule could be born to a stallion and a jenny? That was what a girl donkey was called, and its baby mule was a hinny. Usually it was the other way around—a jack and a mare, since a little donkey could climb up on a big horse just fine, little men climbed up on big women all the time, because women with wide hips, birthing hips, they could push out a baby with ease, that was what was prized. Ketty kept talking, waving her dishrag; Nan sat at the kitchen table, her head full of questions. Well, at times a big male horse was allowed to climb up behind a little donkey, for that happened as well of course, a woman was wanted no matter her size, big or small, black or white, a man could climb on top of you and have his way, and the stronger the stallion was, the easier way he had. But the jenny? She was smaller than a horse; she did not have an easy way. She kept the baby inside her a month longer than a horse did—a full year—and in that month, the mule grew big. Sometimes, too big to foal.
That was what had happened to the mother in Rocky Bottom. Her hips were too narrow to let the baby’s shoulders through. And the baby had died inside her, and then the mother had died, and there was nothing Ketty could do.
“It was a white man’s child,” she added. “As far as the talk can tell.” Ketty was washing the table now, though it wasn’t dirty. “Could be the Lord didn’t see the child fit for this world.”
Nan thought her mother was scrubbing out her helplessness, her guilty feelings. It was the same look she had when she spoke about Jessa. But it was Nan who felt the guilt fall on her like a bucket over the head. All day long she had played with those girls, laughing, teasing, closing her eyes against the sun while they plaited her hair. It was as though her careless happiness were to blame. She remembered little Ketty Lee, and wondered if her legs had fallen limp from her mother’s womb. Was it something Ketty had done, something that looked like the devil’s work but was really God’s will, like cutting out Nan’s tongue?
She couldn’t ask Ketty the questions she wanted to ask. What was she trying to tell her? Was she warning her about childbirth, or the ways of men, or the ways of white folks? How did a man climb up on a woman? Were Nan’s hips, so narrow, so unlike her mother’s soft ones, wide enough for a baby? Would she be wanted?
And then Genus came to the farm, and he was the answer to the questions she couldn’t ask. Her mother had not explained the feeling that a man climbing upon you induced, did not mention that what she had mistaken for a rush of love with Juke was sometimes accompanied by the feeling in the chest of spotting a kingbird on a branch.
Most nights for two weeks she visited Genus in the tar paper shack, and on those nights, Juke didn’t come for her. Some nights, Genus led her down to the creek. Her secret made her bold, kept her out later, longer. Afterward they lay on their backs side by side on the shore, their skin drying in the night air. She had learned not to eat dirt with most folks around but she scooped up a handful of cool white clay and put it in her mouth. Genus laughed and did the same. He hadn’t eaten dirt before. He said it tasted like rain and she thought yes. He took another handful and smeared it on her cheek. She laughed. He smeared some on her neck and on her belly and he licked it off and she laughed some more.
He talked as much as Juke did, but his words let her breathe; he didn’t talk at her but up into the sky, at the stars. He reckoned he was from Georgia, but down about the Florida line. He reckoned he was eighteen, maybe nineteen. His father had died when he was small. His mother sent him and his sisters to live with an aunt and uncle after that, and he never did know his birthday. Never did learn to read or write. He’d gone to work in one neighbor’s cotton field, then another neighbor’s corn. He’d seen a white man have his way with a molly mule. On a boxcar, he’d seen a black man kill a white man. The white man had kicked the black man between the legs. Later, while the white man slept, the black man sliced his throat with the jagged lid of a tin can, then kicked his body off the train. He’d seen another man dead in a cornfield, this one black. He’d worked in a canning factory for a time, but standing still was worse than moving on his feet. He needed the fresh air, the sun on his neck. He had a rotten gut. It was inclined to kill him someday, he said. Pain like the devil, day and night, though he’d never seen a doctor. He tapped a spot under his left nipple. Nan put her hand there, lay her fingers in the grooves between his ribs, and under her thumb she could feel the faint rumble of his heartbeat. He reached across her and cupped her head behind her ear, his thumb tracing the hair at her temple, and she remembered the girls from Rocky Bottom, the joy she had felt with the sun and their hands in her hair, and again came the stab of shame for her own happiness. “Maybe it ain’t my gut,” he said. “Maybe I got a rotten heart.” He said Nan was the only thing that made the pain pass for a time. Before Nan, he’d never been with a woman. “Ain’t never told that to no soul,” he said, his hand over hers, hers over his ribs. “Suppose you fine at keeping secrets.”
Would she have told him about Juke if she could? Would she explain why she was expected at the big house, why, when Genus said, “Less stay out like this all night,” she had to slip her hand out from under his and leave him? Part of her heart wanted him to know, of course. So he could save her. So he could take her away. But the other part was glad she didn’t have to. She didn’t want him to know that she was spoiled, that Juke had fouled her already. She wanted to believe, as Genus did, that she belonged to him as much as he did to her.
The next night that Juke came for her, he came early, when Nan was still in her bed. She followed him out to the still. Afterward, while he made water in the woods, she took a pint of gin from the shelf above the mattress, hid it under her nightdress, and waddled back to the big house with the jar between her thighs. She hid it under the mattress, beside the book. The following night, she brought it to Genus’s cabin.
“You take this from the boss?” he whispered.
She put a finger to his lips.
“You wanting to have us a fine time?” It was dark in the cabin, but she could feel the smile in his voice.
She shook her head. She wouldn’t be having any. She was soured on the taste. She tapped the spot under his heart, the rotten part. She held the jar there. He lowered his head and nodded. He understood. It was to help with the pain. He said, “I’m much obliged to you.”
On the night the seed was planted, Juke was waiting for her on her mattress in the pantry when she returned from the creek. Her nightdress clung to her wet skin and her hair was pearled with water.
She took a step back into the breezeway. Her first fear was the gin—had he noticed it was missing, one jar among so many jars? Or the book—had he discovered it under the mattress? Then she feared Elma would hear. Or did she want her to hear? She could have walked across the breezeway and slipped into bed beside Elma, and then everything would have been different. He would have left her alone, gone back to his bed. But instead she stepped into her own little room, thinking she could quiet him, thinking she knew how to quiet him. She closed the pantry door softly behind her. His face was dead as a stone, and she knew then that he knew. He was drinking, the tumbler nearly empty.
“Where you been, girl?”
The tongue is the worst curse, her mother had told her. Ketty’s grandmother had been beaten by her master for running from his bed, but worse? Worse was the shame of lying. Worse was having to look at his white face and say, “I like it” and “I love you.” There was dignity in silence, Ketty said, in keeping your truth inside.
“Cat got your tongue, kitty cat?” He kept his voice low. He sat up in her bed, placed the tumbler on the floor, and wrapped his hand around her thigh. “You been swimming at this hour?”
She mimed washing, rubbing soap through her hair.
“Washing?” He yanked up her nightdress, plunged his face between her legs, and sniffed. “You ain’t washed good enough.” Then he yanked her down to the bed, rolled her onto her back, and pinned her against the wall. “I seen you knock on that nigger’s door,” he whispered. His breath was flaming with drink. “You think y’all are here to skinny-dip? That how you repay me for the food on your plate? The roof over your head?”
Nan shook her head.
“You ain’t live in that slave shack no more. You ain’t no slave. You live in my house now. You know how many folks’d like to sleep in this here big house? That how you repay me, run back to that shack?” He was slurring. “Don’t let me see you with him again. You hearing me? I see you within ten feet of that door, I’ll kill him dead.”
She might have stroked his cheek to calm him, she might have kissed him, but he was holding her down, one arm to the bed, one arm to the wall. She wished her nipples didn’t show through her wet nightdress. She wished her rabbit heart weren’t beating so quickly. Surely he could feel it in her wrists. You could take away the tongue, she thought, you could put out a person’s eyes, but still the pulse betrayed your fear.
Across the breezeway, through one board-and-batten wall and then another—thick walls built by George Wilson and two hired Negroes whose names he did not know and painted some years ago a milky blue, now fading—Elma sat up in her bed. She had been sleeping, or had been trying to. She had been trying to scare away the image of Nan and Genus in the creek, but every time she closed her eyes, it floated into her mind again like a ghost. When she thought she heard a thump against the kitchen wall, she thought it must be Nan returning from the creek, and then when she heard another, she thought it must be Genus in there with her, and though it was beyond her belief—that Nan and Genus would be so bold in her father’s house—it was not beyond her imagination. Once the idea was in her head, it wouldn’t turn her loose. She sat up in bed, remembering suddenly the night a few weeks back when a man had come to the house looking for Nan to deliver a baby. Elma had looked all around the house and the yard, but she couldn’t find her. The man had left in a huff and a panic. And though Nan had been at the still with Juke, it seemed clear to Elma now that she’d been with Genus, and humiliation knocked her flat on her back. She stuffed her pillow over her face, to drown out the noise and to muffle the sound of her own tears.
What was happening in Nan’s room was beyond Elma’s imagination. She would have sooner imagined that the noises came from the wall itself, the house coming to life, growing a mouth, giving voice to its ghosts. That was the way Nan felt suddenly—that the walls that had protected her had now betrayed her with their thickness, not keeping her safe but trapping her. This was not her home. Home was the tar paper shack Genus Jackson lived in, before he lived there, before he slept in the bed she used to share with her mother. She thought herself back there now, walked herself from the cabin down to the shack. She wished herself all the way back, the taste of tobacco and clay on her mother’s lips, the smell of her father’s pipe, the warmth of the grits cooking on the woodstove in the morning. She would even wish away Genus, though her heart seized like a fist when she thought of his name—Genus, who was settling into that bed now, oblivious as Elma. She wished he’d never set foot on the farm.
There was no wool blanket. It was back in the cabin. Here in her room, Juke did not pull away. She could feel his seed seeping into her, thick as egg yolk. Through the mattress, she could feel the shape of The Book of Knowledge under her back. She kept her eyes on the pantry shelves beyond him, the okra she’d pickled, the sorghum syrup, the cornmeal, the salt.
Afterward, he cried. “Don’t do me like that again, honey,” he said. “Don’t make me do that again.” There was no uglier sight in the world, Nan thought, than a naked white man crying.
FIVE (#ulink_b069878c-3674-5fac-8195-fda4d7bb1e46)
BEFORE SHE GOT IN THE FAMILY WAY, ELMA HAD BEEN SET ON going to the teacher’s college in Statesboro. It was where two girls from her class said they were going. Elma had the grades. She just didn’t have the money. The fall of her last year in school, she tried to get work at the Piggly Wiggly, at the theater, at the crossroads store. She even put up a notice on the bulletin board at church: ELMA JESUP. MOTHER’S HELPER AND HOUSEGIRL. CLEANING. COOKING. SEWING. Nobody hired her. Every week she checked the board to be sure the note was still there. Then one Sunday, on that same bulletin board, another notice caught her eye: the Florence chapter of the Georgia Woman’s Christian Temperance Union was offering a college scholarship to “a young lady of good character.”
Elma liked school. She just didn’t like the people there. Boys had always liked her because they liked her daddy’s liquor. They thought they might come out to the farm and get into his stash and get under her dress. They called her Red. Clever! They said, “You wanna go have a pull from my bottle, Red?” They pawed her braids. “You watch them town boys,” her father told her. Freddie was the only one he didn’t mind. The girls weren’t particular about her because the boys were, and because they thought she was white trash and a drunk, and because already they were following their mothers to the WCTU meetings at the Hotel Chanticleer. In fact Elma had never had a drink—“Ain’t for womenfolk,” her daddy said—and that was fine by her, she didn’t like the way it smelled on a man’s breath and made a man loose and rough and mean.
There was no reason, she thought, she shouldn’t have that scholarship. She’d get out of Florence and become a schoolteacher, and if it meant joining the WCTU, she’d do it. She told her father the dollar was for her graduation cap and gown, and though he grumbled about it, and had to collect it in coins, he gave it to her. She asked Josie Byrd if she could go with her to a meeting after school, and Josie Byrd said certainly, it would be grand, and loaned her a felt hat that looked like a bathing cap. Only later did Elma discover that for every new member you brought in, your name was entered in a raffle for a year’s supply of Octagon toilet soap.
The women at the Hotel Chanticleer all wore rhinestone broaches and white ribbons and strands of evening pearls down to their navels. They poured Elma tea and piled her plate with shortbread cookies and said, “How do you do?” She knew Tabitha Quick and Carlotta Rawls and of course she knew Parthenia Wilson, she had opened her legs to Parthenia Wilson’s grandson in the bed of his truck the day before, but by the time she was shaking Mary Minrath’s hand, she understood they were pretending they didn’t know her, that they were forgetting that she was Juke Jesup’s daughter. They were meeting her for the first time. And maybe they were! Maybe she would be reborn, fatherless, in the WCTU! Elma understood this was because they wanted her dollar, and they wanted her to sign, at the end of the meeting, their abstinence pledge. And yet she let them court her. She let them compliment the felt hat that wasn’t hers. She told them what soap she washed her hair with and let them stroke it. She answered questions about her favorite subject in school, her favorite church hymn, her favorite meal to make for supper. Is this what they did in women’s clubs? Eventually they began to speak in a code. They referred to each other as “Comrade” and “Sister”; they spoke with reverence of their “Foremothers”; they spoke with disappointment of “unfortunate girls.” They spoke about Hoover (well, the white-ribboners believed in Hoover) and about “rum and ruin” and “the flag of booze.” They spoke with growing concern about how they might bring Christ to the country, to the Negroes and halvers, the heathens and drunkards. Tabitha Quick said Georgia was in such a state of debauchery that if God didn’t intervene, “Black heels will be on white necks.”
Elma didn’t understand. She thought of black necks. But this was before the lynchings had started up again. “White necks?” she whispered to Josie.
Josie tried to shush her. Elma did not seem to be the only woman ruffled by the phrase. Josie whispered back, “They mean the Negroes will take over town. The ones at the saloon.”
“Young’s, I believe it’s called,” said Tabitha Quick.
“Not the Robert Youngs,” someone clarified.
“They belong in the county camp,” said another.
“Let’s not pretend it’s just the blacks. White heels on white necks too.”
“Perhaps one white heel in particular,” said Mary Minrath under her breath.
“Perhaps one redneck in particular,” said another woman, more loudly.
“Might as well be a black heel,” said Mary Minrath.
“Enough,” Tabitha Quick said, standing up to pour more tea.
“She could be useful,” said Mary Minrath, and only then did Elma understand they were talking about her, and about her father.
Parthenia Wilson was quiet. She fanned herself with her newspaper. It was her silence that infuriated Elma. Elma shat in the same privy Parthenia Wilson had once shat in. She didn’t want to be reinvented by her; she wanted, even then, to be recognized.
Someone said, “We don’t mean to make you feel unwelcome, honey.”
Another said, “We couldn’t be more pleased to have you.”
Elma put down her tea. She didn’t know what to say. Was she to defend her father? What was it they hated about him? Was it just that he was a bootlegger? Or that he was friendly with Negroes?
She thought of the way her father protected the still. She was not to visit it. She did not care to visit it, she had no fascination with it, only a fear of it and a fear that it would be taken away. Her fear was her father’s, that the still might be destroyed and him with it. Sometimes when a car came for Nan in the middle of the night and he was one kind of drunk, he’d come running from the cabin with his shotgun, mumbling about “guvment men.” For all her shame about her father’s work, she knew that, without it, they’d be as poor as any of the croppers on the Straight, as poor even as the Negroes in Rocky Bottom.
She didn’t want to betray her father. But she wanted that scholarship.
She looked around the hotel lobby, the circle of women with their tea saucers in their laps, all of them waiting for her to speak. They were not looking at her like she was a young lady of good character. They were looking at her like she was an unfortunate girl. The scholarship, she knew, was not hers. She did not know that it had already been promised to Josie Byrd.
Parthenia Wilson had said nothing, but she was the target Elma settled on. “Takes more than one white neck to bootleg,” Elma said. “Takes a rich white neck, from what I hear.”
Parthenia Wilson paused her fanning for a moment.
Elma looked at her and said, “Your grandson don’t care what color neck I got. He just cares about necking.”
Parthenia Wilson opened the newspaper she was holding and appeared to begin to read it. She did not remove the newspaper from in front of her face for the rest of the meeting.
Elma might have been excused if it had not been considered impolite. Besides, they wanted her dollar. She didn’t give it to them. She didn’t sign the abstinence pledge. They spent the rest of the meeting organizing a meal train for Bette Hazleton, who was suffering from pleurisy.
After the meeting, Josie Byrd’s mother carried her back to the farm in their Ford. She saw Mrs. Byrd scanning the farm for the cabin, her eyes moving right past the stand of pines along the road. Juke asked her where she’d been, and she told him. She couldn’t lie. She gave him back his coins. “It’s low, Daddy,” she said. “Folks look on us like we’re low.” She waited for the whip of his temper, but he was the right kind of drunk—merry—and he said, “That still is the reason you ain’t eating hog hearts.”
So Elma did not become a schoolteacher. She did not go to the teacher’s college in Statesboro because she didn’t have the money and because already, sitting in the lobby of the Hotel Chanticleer, she was pregnant. Her father pulled her out of school that winter. Soon her belly would start to grow. Her father kept her home from town, from church, made sure she couldn’t be seen from the road. Folks in town went up in arms about a baby born without a ring on the momma’s finger. Didn’t matter if the ring was made of corn silk, long as it was a ring. It had happened to a girl at the mill last year and the other spinners had made sure George Wilson found out. He sent her back to Marietta with her baby on the train she’d come in on. Elma thought that girl was lucky, to be sent away from all those judging eyes. She had come back six months later with a baby and a husband. No telling if the husband was the father of the baby, but that hardly mattered.
Freddie had said he was saving for a ring, but Freddie had all the money he needed. He stopped coming around the farm so much, and then he stopped coming around at all. Before she stopped going to church, before she was stuck on the farm, folks told Elma he was laying out all night in the mill village, where he was sometimes seen on a porch with this girl or in his truck with that one, having a big time. She wondered if it was what she’d said to Parthenia Wilson in the Hotel Chanticleer, or if Freddie would have dropped her anyway, if his grandmother’s disapproval was a handy excuse. She couldn’t let it go; she wrote him a letter. Is it your grandmother who don’t want you tied down? she asked. And if she don’t want you tied down, is it tied down at all, or tied down to me? She didn’t expect a response, was disappointed but not surprised when day after day the postman brought none. He had probably never gotten the letter, she told herself. His grandmother had surely intercepted it.
When her father was yet another kind of drunk—very drunk, tired, weepy—he’d tell Elma her mother would be proud she’d gotten so far in school, even if she didn’t finish. Elma’s mother, Jessa, hadn’t gotten past the fifth grade before she came to town to work in the mill, and Juke hadn’t gone at all, had been sent into the field at six years old with a ham biscuit, a bull-tongue plow, and a john mule named Lefty. After the babies came, he told Elma that her mother would be proud she was such a good momma herself, and though Elma mostly wore a serious face, like a white stone mask, some color rose high in her cheeks then. Jessa had lost her chance to be a mother, and when Juke watched Elma soothe a crying baby on her shoulder, he looked as pleased and loving and haunted as if he were watching his dead wife herself. And though the baby would be calm by then, he would cross the room and take it in his own arms, rocking it, humming a song only it could hear, saying, “Come on and give Granddaddy some sugar,” saying, “Come on and hug my neck.” Sometimes he came in from the field and went straight for Wilson’s crib, lifting him up to study his face.
At times, Elma missed the notion of a husband. When she was lying awake at night, nursing a baby, she thought it would be nice if there were a grown body sleeping next to her, if she could reach over and touch a man’s bare back. But it wasn’t Freddie she wanted there. Just because her pride was hurt didn’t mean she was sad he was gone. Sometimes it was Genus’s long, slim back she imagined, when she couldn’t keep the picture from her mind, but then she saw him disappear into the woods in his union suit, the same suit he was hanged in, and then her mind reared up and trotted away like a horse with a snake on its heels.
One morning in that blazing and interminable month of August, when Elma arrived with her wagon at the crossroads store, a man she didn’t recognize offered to help her carry the eggs inside. No one else was about—not Jeb Simmons nor his son Drink, no one playing checkers on the porch. Or had she seen the man before? The sun was in her eyes. She could manage fine, thank you, but he wouldn’t hear of it. She held the door open for him while he carried in the crate, placing it on the shop counter, behind which Mud Turner eyed her, cigarette hanging from his mouth.
Overhead, a ceiling fan spun. Elma stood with the man just inside the door. “Must be nice to step off the farm,” he said to her, and that was when she placed him—the sharp-edged suit, the neat mustache. He took off his hat and introduced himself: Q. L. Boothby, the editor of the Testament. He’d driven down from Macon that morning. Wasn’t it a fine morning? But already so hot. “A good morning for a Coca-Cola, Miss Jesup. What do you say?”
Behind the counter, Mud raised an eyebrow. The last time Elma had had a soda was with Freddie, at Pearsall’s drugstore in Florence. Winter, before she was showing, before he’d stopped calling on her. They’d just seen Anna Christie at the theater next door, Elma’s first talkie, and her heart was still pounding with the thrill. Ordering her soda, she tried to imitate Greta Garbo’s voice—“Gimme a vhiskey, ginger ale on the side. And don’t be stingy, baby.” Freddie laughed. Excepting the colored one, there were no saloons to order a drink from in Florence, just the cotton mill, where it was mostly the men who drank from mason jars on their porches. Elma’s father wouldn’t let her set foot in the mill village, but here she was, out on the town with her fiancé, Freddie Wilson, whose family owned the biggest business in town, the whole glittering evening, her whole life, before her, and who cared how Freddie got his money, it was the way her father got his money too, and it was buying her a movie and a soda. The bubbles fizzed in her belly. Or was that her baby, kicking already?
Elma tasted that ginger ale now, cool and sweet, the tinkle of the ice cubes as she stirred them with her straw. She looked at Q. L. Boothby, his hat still in his hands. He was as finely dressed a man as she had seen, his black Oxfords shiny as a piano, a blood red handkerchief flaming from his breast pocket.
