Swimming Between Worlds
Page 35
After the revival, Mama doubled up on the “extras” for the slave quarters: scraps of cloth for quilting, pots of molasses, and old blankets cut into pieces for newborns. She sent money to a Reverend Humphrey Posey in north Georgia, who had built an Indian church. She held devotionals for the household in the sewing room on Sunday afternoons. Uncle Eli and Mittie Ann and Carl professed Jesus as Lord. But not Papa.
Emma found it harder and harder to escape that sense of foreboding, that dark other world she had first sensed when Hannah’s dress slipped off her shoulder. Papa’s not being saved made it like a shadow in the house, like the black line she had drawn on her skin, there even when it was washed off.
December came wet and unseasonably warm, causing hay to rot in the barns. Emma sensed an ill mood in her father. On Christmas Eve, she and Catherine were to recite “Nativity,” but as Emma entered the dining room, her mother instructed her directly to take a seat.
“Let us say grace,” she said.
Emma prayed for clear skies and cold, only briefly pondering letter paper and a box of pencils. “Amen,” she said, opening her napkin. Mama rang the bell and Mittie Ann came in to serve. Emma forgot about the bad weather and kept her eye on the wishbone. Papa began to talk.
“It’s happened,” he said.
“What’s that, Charles?”
Emma sat up, alert to Mama using Papa’s first name.
“Our friend Mr. Joel Early is going through with it.”
Her mother said nothing. Mittie Ann was holding the chicken platter and didn’t move.
“He’s freeing his slaves, giving every last one a hundred dollars in silver, and sending them back to Africa.”
Emma thought her mother’s lips trembled. “Mr. Early was always odd,” she said, “from the first day I knew him. Girls, look you don’t dip your sleeve into the gravy boat.”
“He’s arranged passage from Norfolk,” Papa went on. “Even giving them a new set of clothes.” Her father dug into the rice as if it needed discipline. The platter of chicken hadn’t moved, and Mittie Ann, who should be moving it, was standing like a stone.
Mr. Early was wealthier than Emma’s father. He owned a new coach driven by a fine-looking Negro in a red vest. Suddenly she imagined the Negro gone, Mr. Early’s coach flailing downhill, the horse wild, the whole world coming apart.
“Let Early go with them; I hope they all drown,” Papa said, pounding his fist on the table.
No one looked at anyone.
“Let us keep our own dignity,” Mama said finally. “Pass the chicken, Mittie Ann. It’s getting cold.”
“You wouldn’t want to go to Africa, would you, girl?” Papa said, looking at the colored woman.
“No sir,” Mittie Ann said.
Emma wished the woman had said it stronger, to make her believe. When the chicken finally arrived, she took a wing and left the wishbone, though she could imagine that tender white meat between her teeth, the coat of flour fried to a sweet crisp. In her mind floated lines from the poem she and Catherine did not recite.
But peaceful was the night
When the Prince of light
His reign of peace upon the earth began.
Elaine Neil Orr is Professor of English at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, where she teaches world literature and creative writing. She also serves on the faculty of the low-residency MFA in Writing program at Spalding University in Louisville. Author of A Different Sun, two scholarly books, and the memoir Gods of Noonday: A White Girl’s African Life, she has been a featured speaker and writer-in-residence at numerous universities and conferences and is a frequent fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She grew up in Nigeria. Visit her online at www.elaineneilorr.com.
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