Call Your Daughter Home

by Deb Spera

  A stunning tour de force following three fierce, unforgettable Southern women in the years leading up to the Great Depression

  It’s 1924 South Carolina and the region is still recovering from the infamous boll weevil infestation that devastated the land and the economy. Gertrude, a mother of four, must make an unconscionable decision to save her daughters from starvation or die at the hands of an abusive husband. Retta is navigating a harsh world as a first-generation freed slave, still employed by the Coles, influential plantation proprietors who once owned her family. Annie is the matriarch of the Coles family and must come to terms with the terrible truth that has ripped her family apart.

  These three women seemingly have nothing in common, yet as they unite to stand up to the terrible injustices that have long plagued the small town, they find strength in the bond that ties women together. Told in the pitch-perfect voices of Gertrude, Retta and Annie, Call Your Daughter Home is an audacious, timeless story about the power of family, deep-buried secrets and the ferocity of motherhood.

  Praise for Call Your Daughter Home

  “A mesmerizing Southern tale, Call Your Daughter Home follows three women intertwined in struggle, unlikely friendship and, ultimately, redemption. Authentic, gripping, a page-turner, yet also a novel filled with language that begs to be savored. This book kept me up late and stayed with me long after I closed the final page.”

  —LISA WINGATE, bestselling author of Before We Were Yours

  “Deb Spera is a master of voice, a master of deep-diving access to the roiling depths of human identity. These three women, in their fierce struggle for values and self, speak to those struggles in all of us, men and women both. Call Your Daughter Home is an exhilarating and important book.”

  —ROBERT OLEN BUTLER, Pulitzer Prize–winning author

  “Call Your Daughter Home is a stunning and welcome addition to Southern literature. Set in South Carolina during the 20s, it tells a powerful story of women, family, class, and race.”

  —CHRIS OFFUTT, author of Country Dark

  “Deb Spera is an amazing talent, and a powerful female voice. She channels the women in this gripping novel like someone who has lived inside them. I cannot recommend it strongly enough.”

  —MARK BOWDEN, bestselling author of Black Hawk Down

  “A ferociously moving story of motherhood and justice, relayed through a trio of radiantly unforgettable voices. Deb Spera is a conjurer of the first rank.”

  —JONATHAN MILES, bestselling author of Anatomy of a Miracle

  “Call Your Daughter Home is a bold and mesmerizing debut set in a time and place lost to history; a world rescued now by Deb Spera, a talented storyteller. With lush language, Spera illuminates a powerful story of women, of motherhood and survival.”

  —NATASHIA DEÓN, author of Grace

  Deb Spera was born in Louisville, Kentucky, and lives in Los Angeles. She owns her own television company, One-Two Punch Productions, and has executive produced such shows as Criminal Minds and Army Wives. Her work has been published in Sixfold, Garden & Gun and LA Yoga Journal. Call Your Daughter Home is her first novel.

  DebSpera.com

  Call Your Daughter Home

  Deb Spera

  For Mamaw

  Contents

  Part I

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Part II

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Part III

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Part IV

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Part V

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  In The After

  A Bit of Background

  Acknowledgments

  I

  1

  Mrs. Gertrude Pardee

  It’s easier to kill a man than a gator, but it takes the same kind of wait. You got to watch for the weakness, and take your shot to the back of the head. This gator I’m watching is watching me, too. She smells the last of my menstrual blood so she’s half in, half out of the water, laid up on the ridge of dry land that is our footpath through the swamp and out to the main road. I’m propped against an old cypress. We’re a pair. I’m sick with pain. The hours of wait have made me stiff, but it don’t matter. None of that matters. All that counts is this ridge laid out like a rope between us. This big ole thing’s got her back to the nest my girl Alma spotted earlier today. She’s a ten-foot mama, big enough to feed us through fall. Got two shells in this gun, but only one chance for a kill.

  When we come to Reevesville, I was hoping to get Alvin straight, but it looks like he’s going to run me crazy. Ever since the boll weevils took our crop he ain’t done nothing but drink for nigh on a year. We left everything we had in Branchville, including two of our four daughters, and come over here to his daddy’s sawmill for work. I hoped steady work and some food in our bellies might set him right, but he ain’t right. Maybe he never will be. First, he closed the mill at one o’clock yesterday and didn’t come home ’til late last light. Then he found the letter from my brother, Berns, telling me of a job over in Branchville. He hates Berns for taking care of what he can’t. He whaled on me, and warned me to stay put. He’s still mad from the last time I went to see my brother for help. Now my eye is swoll shut, I can’t see out of it and the only letter I’ve had for a month giving me the news about my two oldest children is burned and gone.

  Alvin laid in the bed all morning until his daddy come over here and raised hell. Now he’s gone off to work, sick with drink, and we’re left with nothing but the sound of our own bellies. I’ve about worked myself to death here, and it ain’t done any good. I’m the woman of a house that don’t exist.

  Alvin’s daddy blames me. He don’t say it, but I can tell. He won’t so much as look at me when Alvin’s drinking, which is all the time. My body is the battleground for my husband’s affliction. I heard Alvin’s daddy say to him on more than one occasion that he ought to have a boy so he has somebody to help him. Looking at Alvin, I can’t make sense of what his daddy tells him. Now Alvin’s saying out loud if we had a boy we could have saved what little we had in Branchville. Says it’s my fault he’s got cause to prowl.

  We got four girls; two are reaching their courting years. That could be a good thing, but I don’t know who will have them—they got no dowry. I worry for the trouble that’s sure to come sniffing. My first baby, Edna, she’s fifteen, won’t think nothing of talking to anybody who’ll look her in the eye. She’ll come to the devil’s own end. My second child, Lily, is thirteen and thinks she’s got grit, but she don’t. She’ll follow you the whole way home hitting you as you go, then beg to be let in the back door for fear of the night. My two youngest, Alma and Mary, are ten and six.

 
By the time I was Lily’s age, my mama was addled, talking out of her head regular by then, but every once in a while a fit would pass, and she would remember to mother me.

  “Gertie,” she told me once, “when you are married and with child, I hope all the happiness in the world for you, but I hope you know and understand the duties of a wife, because a woman can make or ruin a man. It takes both working together, but the woman is the main one when it comes to making a happy home.”

  Alvin rode up on a horse to take me away before I ever laid eyes on him. My daddy arranged for him to marry me. Alvin’s a big man, rough from the start, but he was churchgoing, and Daddy said he worked hard. The day I left home, just two weeks before my fourteenth birthday, Mama was sitting at the table wringing her hands muttering about a hurricane. There weren’t nothing but rain clouds that day, but she wouldn’t let it go. A girl wants her mother when she leaves home, but mine couldn’t see me no more. I took a satchel of what I could carry, one nightgown and another dress, two aprons and some undergarments. Once that was full, I took a quilt that me and Mama done together—it was mostly mine because of the cottonseeds in the squares, Mama’s blankets had nary a seed in them—and laid a cast-iron skillet and some pots and linens I’d been saving for my wedding day down in the middle. I tied the blanket up around my neck and laid the satchel over my shoulder. I took my old rag doll off the peg on the wall of the room me and Berns slept in and laid it in Mama’s arms.

  “Take care of the baby,” I told her. It was the only thing that could get her to stop going on about the storm. She kissed and rocked that doll. I wished the whole time it was me instead.

  The cicadas are screaming this morning like a warning, but I don’t need them to tell me how hot it is. August don’t ever let up. It ain’t even seven yet, and I got sweat coming through my dress. This thing’s so old and stretched out, it don’t stick to nothing but wet. I got the last of the clean rags pushed up in what’s left of my underdrawers for my menstrual cycle. I got to get Alma and Mary to Branchville if they mean to survive. Mary, the littlest, is sick. Her skin’s so pale I can see the veins running underneath like tiny creeks. The child’s had no food for two days and now I fear what the day will bring. I give them a bit of snuff to ward off the hunger, and wipe them down best I can from the pump outside. They are both bone thin, I know. We’re all weak from hunger, and I don’t see how the tide will change before I lose one, or both, of them.

  I aim to see my brother about the contents of his letter, and maybe he and his wife can take Mary and Alma for a bit while I sort things out. I’ve got to try. Mary can sew some, and clean. She don’t take much from a plate, and Alma can shoot a gun and gut a hog. She knows her times tables, too. I taught her, though arithmetic ain’t handy these days when there ain’t nothing to count. Zero is zero, no way around that—still, that’s a real good thing for a little child of ten to know.

  I fetch the shotgun for our travel but leave the vomit and waste Alvin made in the night. Flying creatures slip through the torn screen door covering the mess. Outside is no better. Polk Swamp has no mercy. I’ve pulled leeches as big as baby garter snakes off my girls, and their feet got ulcers on them from the constant wet. The swamp is a beastly place. It’s ripe with things nobody wants to know.

  This shotgun was my mama’s, a Fox Sterlingworth, side by side, double barrel. Her daddy gave it to her, and when my daddy died, Berns walked it to me when Alvin wouldn’t let me out of the house for the funeral. Berns saw to it the funeral wagon was pulled down the dirt road in front of the house where we used to live so I could pay my respects from inside the screen door. After the burying, he come back, and Alvin let him in when he saw he had that gun. Berns laid it on the table and told me it come from Mama’s side of the family, so it was only right it go to the daughter. Alvin took possession of it and wanted to sell it, but I told him it was good for hunting. This gun has put food in our bellies. I intend to carry it on our walk today. Times is desperate hard, any fool will kill you on the road for a nickel. That much is fact.

  We set out before the half hour and cut through swamp, where trees give us shelter from the hot. I know the way through to Branchville. Takes longer than going along the train track, but we need protection from the heat of the day. Blackflies feed on us like it’s suppertime. Oh, what it would be to feed like that! Alma keeps her eyes to the edge, looking for snakes or something to catch.

  “Mama, look,” she calls out to me from the path ahead. I follow her finger point, and spy the biggest gator nest I ever seen. I look quick for the mama, but she ain’t in sight. She’s got to be big if I was to judge from the size of her nest.

  “Lord, Alma, that’s a bigun, ain’t it?”

  She smiles, proud she’s seen it. Mary tugs at her sister and asks, “What is it? I want to see.”

  Alma pulls Mary close and points ’til the child spies what her sister found, then Mary turns to me in a fright, but I keep walking.

  “Gators don’t hunt ’til night—we’re safe,” I tell her, and together we move past the ridge and through the vines.

  Alma scampers on ahead to show she knows the way. She’s fast. I seen her catch a squirrel by the tail, then snap its neck before it could turn and bite. She’s always been spry, but her quickness is fading from need. She’s run from the grasp of her daddy’s mean-spirited hands more times than I can say. One day I fear he will pick up the shotgun and be done with her. If he does kill us, it will be on my soul. These two children will rest in hell for the sins of their mother, because I’ve yet to baptize them.

  My daddy taught me to hunt. It’s mostly about the wait. So I am hunkered down, waiting. This gator’s eye ain’t left mine. Daddy hunted gator regular and taught me how they nest. Gators lay their eggs on shore and cover them with sticks, leaves and whatnot. After a gator lays her eggs, she stays close by to hunt and eat, waiting for the call of her young. Daddy once told me when the young is ready inside the eggs, they cry out until the mama comes and breaks them free. Then she carries the babies one by one to the water and stays with them for nigh on six months. No other reptile does that. After that time, if the babies don’t leave for other water, she’ll kill them so’s not to compete for food. I seen big nests in my life, but this one looks to have upward of seventy-five, maybe a hundred eggs. I’m not partial to gator. It grows in the mouth before you can get it chewed enough to swallow. We ate it many a night, but gator ain’t no easy prey.

  Coming into town I see faces older than what the truth is. Some carry cardboard suitcases on their way by foot to the train station. Likely they think things are better up north—maybe that’s right. If I had me money and no mouths to feed, I’d try. You always got to try. I hope to see nobody I know, so we stay to the edge of town and cut around the woods to my brother’s place. This curse on my face is best left unseen. Branchville likes to talk, and my older girls who live here with my brother don’t need any more dirt slung upon them by the sharp tongues of those who think they’ve been deemed by God to lay judgment.

  Mary is wilting from fever, but we press on. I carry her while Alma holds the gun and sing to them the song my mama used to sing to me: “Go tell Aunt Rhody, go tell Aunt Rhody, go tell Aunt Rhody the old gray goose is dead.”

  Mary’s a little bit. Don’t weigh more than a four-year-old. She lays her head on my shoulder and sleeps while I sing, “The one she’s been saving, the one she’s been saving, the one she’s been saving to make a feather bed.”

  Alma holds on to my dress while we walk along through tall weeds.

  “The goslings are mourning, the goslings are mourning, the goslings are mourning because their mother’s dead.”

  The pain in my eye bounces to the beat of my heart and shoots through my head and shoulders like some kind of wild fire. I fear he broke a bone—I can’t see out of this eye. I can read Alvin pretty good after all these years, but he had his back to me so I didn’t see his fist when he
swung around and knocked me backward. He stood over me swaying before he took a match to my letter, vomited all over the floor, then fell to the bed.

  He wasn’t always so mean. Alvin never was no stranger to hardship, none of us is, but once the boll weevils come in 1921, it broke him. They took everything in sight. All around us the world disappeared in the haze of black on everything. I went to bed every night and woke up every morning to the sound of boll weevils chewing through all we had. They come like a wave in the ocean, laid their eggs and come back to kill off the next planting season. Got to be so bad, they took root in the flour and we had to eat them in our biscuits for fear of having nothing.

  In the early days Alvin made enough money to see to it we was fed, but that changed when he started to drink regular. At first it was only a bottle here or there, but quicker than I knew, if I didn’t steal from his pocket, every last cent was spent on drink. Alcohol made my husband feel bigger, but he couldn’t see that all it did was make him jagged. For a time I exchanged goods with my neighbors: a jar of tomatoes, a dish towel or apron I sewed from old rags, what I could put together that might have some value to somebody. But then some old boy at church said, “Poor Alvin, he is given a hard row to hoe with a woman who don’t know her place. He is an unlucky dog.”

  That’s when he started in on me. Got so bad nobody would trade with me no more, like I was some kind of leper. We stayed away from church, and I learned to keep my eyes to the ground. Finally I did what had to be done. I walked all the way to Alvin’s daddy’s place in St. George and told him his boy was sick with drink, that he had four children that were hungry. I told him how it was. Now Alvin’s daddy won’t look me in the eye because he had to be made to see by a woman. No man likes that.

  When I come through the woods I see my brother and my girls picking what cotton is left to harvest for the season. There’s dots of white fluff surrounded by black thorns across a wide field scorched by sun. They got burlap sacks slung ’round their shoulders, and I see the hunch in their backs and the blood on their hands well before they raise their eyes to see me.