The other ones, they came to us in July, by rowboat, deep in the dark. They found Mama’s by midnight.
It was a family who came first. A mother and father, the mother’s dress torn, her children balling the cloth of her skirts in their fists. They would not let go for anything—that’s what I remember most—their tiny fists tight on muddied homespun, the mother holding the top of her dress to her chest, to keep herself decent. The father had a hat clamped to his head, the brim sticky with blood from his own brow. He wouldn’t take it off while his children were in the room. Mama had to wait while the mother distracted them.
When Mama took off the hat, the father closed his eyes. He did not cry out, because he did not want to scare his children. Then he said, “They’ve gone crazy. The whites in Manhattan have gone crazy. They took Gold Street and Pearl Street, and then they made it all the way to Forty-Second. They’re burning our churches. They are shouting that they won’t fight for niggers, not ever. They surrounded our orphanage, so we were told.
“We were hiding in the house, till we heard that. That’s when we picked up the babies and ran. One of ’em threw a bottle at my head, but we kept running.
“The white men were looking for anyone colored they could find. The white women were reaching out, trying to catch any colored child who ran by. When they caught one, they’d dash ’em against the stones in the street and cheer.
“On our way to the dock, we saw three men hanging from lampposts. The whites were hoisting up a fourth when we reached the wharf.
“We paid all we have in the world to an oysterman for his boat to take us across. We knew not to stay downtown, because there were too many whites there, and we were not sure who was friendly and who would attack. We slept under some pilings, or tried to, and when night fell, we walked to you. We knew it would be safe. Mr. Culver told us to come to you for our wounds. Said this one too deep for him.”
Mama only nodded. She had learned, since Ben Daisy, you let them talk. She called me over after the man’s head was bandaged.
“With luck, there should be more coming,” Mama said. I looked at the man, blood drying on his closed eyelids. So this is luck, I thought. Mama said, “We have to be ready.”
She told me to run to the houses of as many women as I could think of. To find as many of them as I could. I did. I ran down our dirt road and to the main drag, past the church. To Miss Annie, the schoolteacher, and to the choir director and her sister, Miss Nora and Miss Greene, and to Reverend Harland’s daughter, Miss Dinah, to the women who lived on the other side of the churchyard, and even to Miss Hannah. To her door I ran, and said, “Come with me, sister, if you can.”
I brought them all to the crossroads, where Mama and Lenore were waiting with the cart. Mama had her doctor’s bag, and Lenore had lined the cart bed with blankets. Together, we made the long trip to the waterfront. Mama had Miss Hannah sit with her on the driver’s bench. I walked steadily beside them, and I saw Mama, every so often, lean over and whisper in Miss Hannah’s ear that it would be all right. We all knew Miss Hannah hadn’t been downtown since Ben was lost, but she was determined now. Miss Hannah gripped Mama’s arm, and Mama said, “There will be so many of them. You’ll only have their want to think about.” Mama had Miss Hannah hold a blanket over her other arm, to keep her hands from shaking.
But when we got to the waterfront, the whole stretch was empty. There were no boats. “Where are they all?” Miss Dinah said, and only the waves slapping the bottom of the wharf answered her. By then, it was just after dawn. The water before us was first a long line of silver and then a sudden wall of cloud and fog. The smoke from all the fires the whites had set was rolling over to us, across that wide expanse of river, and it mixed with the muggy July dawn until one swirling mass of white and gray sat on top of the water.
I had never seen smoke mix with fog like that before, how it hovered like a curtain between this world and maybe the next, from light to dark, from heaven to hell, from sleep to consciousness. That was where the woman in the water lived even now—I knew it. I knew it in my bones. And I felt how foolishly I had spent the last year, looking for her in common well water, when she was here all along. While I stood with the women on the dock as they tried to see what was coming to them through the veil, I prayed to her, that woman,
Let ’em through, let ’em through, LET ’EM THROUGH.
I heard the tiniest drop of a wave, the sound a fish makes when it turns over on the surface of the water and falls back to its home. Was that her? Was that her byword? I thought it was. I knew it was, because the next thing I saw, finally, was something nosing its way through the clouds.
It was a long boat, with four rowers—two at the bow, two at the stern—followed by two more. As they got closer, I could see that the rowers had kerchiefs wrapped around their mouths, to keep from breathing in the smoke as they worked, and their hats pulled down over their eyes, to keep them from stinging in the wind. Between the rowers, on the boats, were tens of children. What was most eerie about it all was that the only sound was the water slapping the oars. Even the babies were silent.
But then the first boat docked, and the women all around me took in a deep breath, and they began to sing.
Deep river,
my
home
is
over
Jordan
Deep
river,
my
home
is
over
Jordan
By the time we got to the chorus, a baby in one of the boats began to cry, a big robust yell, as if he was trying to harmonize with us. And the women all around me broke out in whoops. “That’s it,” Miss Annie called out. “Keep it up.” And then the other babies began to cry, as well, and I have never seen a group of women happier to hear a bunch of infants bawling at five in the morning.
We got the children out of the boats. A girl my age, her face streaked with soot, her arms covered in scratches, her skirts dark with something damp, held a fat baby in her arms. When she clambered off the boat and up onto the dock, she looked at me, looked in my eyes, came straight toward me, and handed the baby off before crouching down to sit, lowering her head to enter the peace of the fabric stretched between her knees. Mama saw her, saw the stain on her skirt, and went to her first, shielding her with her body so the others couldn’t see or hear what she was asking.
I carried that baby all the way back to our house. She was not yet a year old, by the look of her. Still too young to walk. She lay against my chest. I could feel her spittle pool on the front of my dress. She was so heavy, and with every step, I could feel her chest rise and fall. It unnerved me. I tried to match her rhythm, to breathe along with her, but her heart was beating too fast. Still, despite all this, she would look around, keep her eyes wide open, staring at something in the tree branches above us—part of the past, or the present, or maybe the future, that I could not see. I kept praying to the woman in the water, even as every step took me farther from her. Don’t take this one with you. Keep her here with us. Let her spirit leave the water and come with me to land.
The baby was still in my arms at noon, when we had gotten some of the survivors to our houses, some of them to the church.
“You can put the baby down,” Mama told me.
I looked up at her. “I can’t,” I said. By which I meant if I gave up the weight of that baby, the whole weight of what had happened across the river—the fire and the hangings and the beatings and the white women dashing babies’ brains and whatever had been done to that girl from the boat who had handed me the baby, that had made her hold her dress between her thighs—all of that weight would take the baby’s place, and I knew I was not strong enough to hold it. Not yet. Not then. Even if I made a million prayers to the woman in the water, I knew it wouldn’t help.
And Mama, my mama, she looked at me and she understood. She said, “This is the hardest part of our work.” She said, “Keep the baby close if you n
eed to. But you can’t carry her all the time.” And she had me sit in the nicer armchair in the parlor while the women of our town crowded into the room.
They had gathered there, all sweating in the full heat of the day, their apron fronts and pinafores damp, their voices merging together into a new song, this one made up of just the question they asked one another in the room over and over again:
What to do?
“Look at that baby’s skin,” Miss Dinah said, gazing at the girl in my arms. “Covered in rashes, even worse than the singe from the burns.”
“And that little boy who rode with me in the cart, his feet were too tore up to walk.” Miss Hannah said this, in a hollow voice, looking straight ahead, back to being stuck in between this world and the one with her brother in the water.
“That one,” Miss Clara said, pointing to the baby still slumped in my arms, “her father left her with the orphanage when he went to go and try to join the war. They told him she’d be well cared for. What’s he going to come back to now?” Miss Clara was the youngest member of the women’s club at church. There, she was given to making righteous statements that made the other women shuffle and shift, embarrassed by her blunt holiness.
“One of the girls said the white people went around and marked every colored person’s home in Manhattan,” Miss Annie said. “With red chalk, they marked it. They marked the homes of our white friends, too. So they knew who to burn.” As she spoke, she fanned herself with her hand in quick, sharp strokes, trying to shift the weight of humidity with the palm of a hand.
“What terrors,” Miss Dinah said. “Can you imagine? I mean, can you imagine, your very own neighbor marking your house to attack? Can you imagine all those people you pass in the street every day, planning for your demise?” Miss Dinah leaned forward and said, in a gruff, low voice that I suppose was meant to be that of a terror, “Mark ’em all and burn ’em down.” I’d heard Miss Dinah try on this voice before, at church meetings when she was describing certain devils, and it had always raised a laugh. But not now. The accent only curdled in the hot air.
“Surely, the governor can stop it,” Miss Clara said uncertainly. “He’ll send troops to make it stop.”
Mama looked at Miss Clara, with her high, smooth neck and clear brown skin. “You understand less than I thought you did if you think he’d lift a finger.”
Miss Clara blinked, and her cheeks darkened.
“One of the men says”—Miss Annie leaned forward, eager to stop the sadness and share what she knew—“the mayor begged the governor for help, but the governor plans to come and cheer the rioters on.”
“He’d do it,” Mama murmured.
“How can you be so hopeless?” Miss Clara said.
Miss Annie sat back in her chair again. “It is not being hopeless. We have to plan for the worst of what white folks do. Because they always choose the worst. They do what they do, and—”
“We do what we can,” Mama said. She took a sip of water from her tin cup.
“I hope the governor burns,” I said, from my seat at the corner.
I had thought Mama would nod in agreement. Some of the other women did. I saw Miss Clara and Miss Annie smile when I said it. But Mama looked at me sharply. “It’s a sin to wish such a thing on another person,” she said. “Even on him.”
I thought of the woman under the water, who I was sure had the vengeance in her to do something horrible like that, and I directed my thoughts to her. Burn him up. Drowning’s too good for him.
Mama stood up. “To work,” she said. Even then, our household had more than the households of the other women—more jars of preserves, more salt pork, more cloth, more firewood. And so we spent the afternoon taking stock of the pantry and of the root cellar, dividing what we had to feed everyone, which household should take from the extra barrel of salted cod and which needed more blankets.
We did not know it then, but this is how we would spend the rest of the war. All of us in that room there became a sisterhood. We called ourselves the Ladies’ Intelligence Society—it had started as a kind of joke, when the few men in town asked the women where they were going, why they spent so much time at Dr. Sampson’s house. I was a mascot of sorts—the doctor’s girl, who was always in the room.
We were hell-bent on plotting. How could we get information from Kings County to Ohio, to Maryland, to Virginia, to the West, about the children left in the destroyed orphanage? How could we find their parents? It was from hours of those meetings that we found the father of the baby I’d carried off the boat, got word to him, were able to send her to relatives in Massachusetts. She was no longer in my arms, but I could still feel the weight of her there, pressing. Whenever I did, I’d fold my arms over my chest and pray again, to the woman in the water. Keep her safe. Keep them safe. Keep us safe.
“After the war” became everyone’s refrain. We read of men dying every day, even as a few of those made their way off the battlefield, their eyes wide with horror. Whenever the war ended, if it ended, whoever won, we knew there would be colored people in need of aid. And what could we do, from the safety and comfort of our town that the whites had overlooked? What would help them best?
“A school,” Miss Annie said. The women all nodded; that was a given. “Homes,” Miss Dinah added. But it was Mama who cleared her throat and said, “A hospital.” She looked around the room. “For colored people,” she said. “We cannot live in freedom if we are not well.”
There was a moment of silence as the women turned the idea around, and Mama, very carefully would not look at Miss Hannah, who was crying now. But Miss Annie, Miss Clara, and Miss Dinah nodded, and it was decided then that this was what their efforts would go toward. A hospital, for whoever made it out alive, to become whole again.
It was hard planning, oftentimes hours of talking with no clear answers. But when the women got going, the whole room began to vibrate. Sometimes, it seemed that the white walls themselves flushed when the women raised their voices. How strange it was to sit around them, at their feet or in the corner, and hear them shout, these same women who all week long told me and the other colored girls in town to speak softly, to keep our heads down and our backs straight, to train our eyes to overlook the insults the world outside of town heaped at our feet. Those women told girls like me to ignore the present-day horrors around us, to look only toward the future, toward another place that did not exist yet.
But here, in the room, I could imagine that I was already there. The women would begin the meeting sitting upright, but by the end, they would be sprawled. Leaning against seats, arms crossed over stools, sipping water, laughing, shouting back and forth.
You knew a meeting was getting work done when Miss Dinah began her sharp, piercing giggle. It was uncontrollable, a little hysterical, and did not necessarily prompt the other women to join in. It was more like the whistle of a teakettle; it told you pressure was high, waters were rolling to a boil, that something was happening, and that whatever it was, it was as wondrous and yet as deceptively common as water transforming into air.
I have never in my life felt anything as powerful as whatever force was in that room while those women talked, and I began to believe that it was the talking itself that did it, that perhaps women’s voices in harmony were like some sort of flintstone sparking, or like the hot burst of air that comes through a window, billowing the curtains, before rain. Sometimes, I imagined the whole room lifting up from their talk—lifting up and spinning out, out, into the future times to come, when everyone would be truly free. The time I thought we were all planning for.
To bring them back down, when a workday was done, they would turn to some sort of amusement. It had to be something calming, something sober. “We need to rest a little in order to keep going,” was what Miss Annie always said.
They decided on trading compliments. They’d write them down on slips of paper, unsigned but addressed to the lady they wished to compliment, and then put them in an old flour tin Mama had. At th
e end of the meeting, they’d draw the slips out one at a time and read the ode, and then the fun began in guessing the author.
Everyone saved their praise by pasting the compliments into little books they stitched together and then passing them around to be signed by every lady present—a record of attendance. They made bindings out of the rags they had around, stuffed into the bottom of their sewing baskets. ‘Friendship albums,’ they called them. Everyone’s album started neat and clean and pretty, of course, but it was every woman’s goal to have a ruined one, a book with worn pages and extra leaves stuffed in, one bursting at the seams, because that showed how loved you were.
Mama was jealous of the other women. Sometimes, at the end of a meeting, I caught her fingering the pages of her own album, looking from hers to theirs. Hers were always a bit neater, a bit cleaner, and much thinner. Even after all she’d done for the orphans, even as the group conspired about how to make her a hospital, even after all that work, Mama would lift the other women’s heavier books and sign them, smiling, while only a few of them signed hers. Ben Daisy still stood dripping over her, a rebuke.
I suppose I should have been angry at the other women on behalf of Mama. If I was a loyal daughter, I would have felt that. But at the end of every meeting, I looked at Mama’s thin book and only felt sorry for her, not mad at them. Is everything at least forgiven underwater? is what I would have asked the woman in the water if I could have, but I did not really want to know the answer.
I did not know what to do with a vanquished Mama. I saw her hurt, but I still thought she could overcome it. She never spoke of it, so to me, it was another thing to add to the load she carried. “Everyone has their own burden, Libertie,” she was fond of telling me whenever I complained about my inability to do arithmetic or when another girl was mean or petty. So I thought she could solve this setback, that it was temporary, that it was something Mama could fix with her cleverness.
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