Chasing the North Star

by Robert Morgan

  A woman with her hair tied up in a yellow rag and a butcher knife in her hand took a chicken from the crate and laid its head on a log. With one whack she chopped the chicken’s head off, but didn’t turn the hen loose as the body jerked and the wings flapped and fluttered.

  The woman with the yellow turban held the chicken high and let the blood from the neck drip into her mouth. Then she held the bleeding body so others could drink. When she came to Jonah, he opened his mouth, and several drops of black blood dripped between his lips. The blood was salty and rich. He’d never tasted anything so strong. It was the finest sauce and the finest gravy he’d ever tasted. It was better than communion wine at church.

  Jonah licked his lips and laughed. The fat girl licked her lips and giggled also.

  “Who let you have a party out here?” Jonah said.

  “Ain’t nobody let us have a jubilee,” she said. “Nobody but ourselves.”

  “You’re not afraid to be caught?”

  The woman began dancing again. She held her elbows out on either side and snapped her fingers. She twisted and looked him in the eye, grinned, and said, “Boy, you don’t know nothing.”

  “Reckon I don’t,” he said and grinned back.

  “Time you learned a thing, or two,” she said. Jonah would not have guessed anyone so fat could move so fast or so deftly. She must have danced a lot to be that quick and sure. Her skin gleamed in the firelight.

  “Nobody ever make your little colonel happy?” she said and turned so he could see her left side. He wasn’t sure what she meant until he saw her looking at his member.

  “What?” he said.

  “I thought not,” she said and laughed. She pushed herself up against him and then backed away. The firelight made her skin look the color of honey, dark clover honey.

  “Ain’t no good less your little colonel be happy,” she said and looked him in the eye.

  Jonah felt something stir way down in his belly. It was a force pushing out and upward. The force started in the ground and came up through the soles of his feet and up through his legs and into his groin. The beat of the drum and blood of the chicken summoned a fountain out of the ground and into his loins.

  “Let me show you something,” the woman said. She took him by the hand and led him to the edge of the clearing, and just as they reached the trees she broke away and started running. He hesitated only a second and then ran after her. She dodged around a tree and stumbled. She squealed and jumped over a log and fell to the ground.

  It was so dark in the woods he could hardly see her. “Come here, boy,” she said, and when he stepped closer she took his hand and pulled him down on top of her. She was the softest cushion he’d ever touched. Her breasts and shoulders were like a cloud of warm vapors, and he floated on their comfort.

  She took his spigot in her hand and guided it into a place that was warm and wet. He pushed hard into her and she said, “Whoa there, boy, easy does it. Don’t make your little colonel sing out before he time.” And she laughed and he laughed.

  The fat woman rolled a little to the side and then back. She rolled a little farther and then back. “We make that little colonel sing for his supper,” she said.

  As she turned, it seemed her breasts were pillows.

  Jonah had never felt anything as right or as comforting. It was as if he’d spent all his life crawling on his hands and knees to this place. He no longer felt the sores on his back or the blisters on his hands.

  WHEN JONAH WOKE THERE was just light enough to see the trees overhead. Birds were loud in the woods below. The leaves beside him were empty. He sat up and saw the fat woman was gone. He stood and walked down to the clearing and found ashes and burned logs where the fire had been. The tub of beer was gone. He was naked and leaves stuck to the dried sweat and pine resin on his body.

  If his clothes were truly gone Jonah knew he was in deep trouble. For where could he go without clothes? How could he ever get anywhere to steal clothes or buy clothes if he was naked? A naked Negro would be arrested on sight. Jonah looked around the clearing and finally found his shirt wadded up in the dirt under the bushes. He dusted the fabric off and put it on. Then he searched under the trees and brush for his overalls. Panic began to wash away the sweet memory of the night before.

  And then he saw his overalls half covered with needles under a pine tree. He brushed them off and felt in the pockets. The money was gone and the knife was gone. But the box of matches was still there in his right pocket. He’d lost all the money Mama had saved.

  Six

  Angel

  The first time I ever heard the word jubilee must be when I was young and Mama went off and left me in the middle of the night. I woke up in the dark and saw Mama standing in the moonlight coming through the window, wrapping a cloth around her head. “Where you going?” I said.

  “Shhhh,” Mama said. “Don’t wake the little ones.” Then Mama whispered she was going to jubilee, but she’d be back. She said if I didn’t lie down and go to sleep again she’d whip me with a hickory stick come morning. I lay down and closed my eyes, and smelled the rose petals Mama gathered by the hedge in front of the big house. She’d crushed the petals between her hands and rubbed them over her neck and shoulders and breasts.

  There was a murmuring outside when Mama went out the door, and then I heard footsteps and laughing and people walking away from the quarters. I lay in the dark thinking about the name jubilee and what it meant. It must be special because Mama seemed excited, fixing herself up in the middle of the night like she was going to a revival meeting. When I opened my eyes, the moonlight was streaming down from the window. Moving slowly so as to not wake my brothers and sisters, I climbed off the cot and stood in the pool of light. The moonlight seemed to be calling to me, “Come out and see the world now. Night is the time to play and be happy.”

  When I opened the door and stepped outside, I saw that it was true. That moonlight made the ground clean, coating everything with blue velvet and blue frost.

  I held out my hands to the moon and the moon said, “Look at what can be.” I looked at the pine woods and the mountains beyond the woods, and they were blue and silky all the way to where stars reached down to the ridge beyond the river. I felt like I could walk on that carpet of blue light all the way to the edge of heaven.

  “This is the way things will be,” the moon whispered, as I sat down with my back against the cabin.

  I must have gone to sleep sitting on the ground, for the next thing I knew Mama was shaking me and it was dark and the moon had gone down. “What you doing out here?” Mama hissed as she pushed me inside; I was so sleepy and surprised I didn’t answer. I could tell Mama was hot and covered with sweat, like she had been running or dancing, the way I’d seen her do at the revival meeting. Her turban had come undone and she’d tied it around her shoulders. She smelled sweet like rotten fruit, the way the master smelled when he’d been drinking brandy.

  “I’ll whip you in the morning,” Mama said. “I’ll teach you to mind me.” Mama got a dipper of water from the bucket in the corner and drank it and then lay down on her cot.

  The worst thing about a whipping was having to wait for it. Mama knew that and I knew that. And I guess Master Thomas knew it, too, for he whipped one of the help from time to time when they didn’t mind him. But that was a bigger thing, an awful thing, to see a man whipped with a blacksnake whip till his back was cut and he was bleeding down to his feet.

  Mama might say as a warning, “I’m going to cut the blood out of you,” but she never did it. She knew the worst part of punishment was the anticipation. The next morning after we ate mush with molasses and I washed up the bowls, Mama said, “You know what I need. Go get me that hickory.”

  It was a relief to finally go and get it over with.

  “Better be a good switch or I whip you twice,” Mama said.

  Sad as it was to have to go after my own switch, there was a kind of dignity to it. All I had to do was get the hickory a
nd bear the whipping and cry a little to make Mama feel I was sorry, and then it would be all right again. I couldn’t stand for Mama to be mad at me. If Mama was mad at me, then the whole world seemed twisted to the side and empty.

  After I brought her the switch, Mama made me go outside. I had to stand in the yard where everybody could see the whipping. She made me hold her left hand with my left hand and she whipped me on my legs and on my butt. The hickory stung my skin like a hot wire.

  “How many times do I have to tell you to mind me?” Mama said as she swung the switch.

  “I do mind,” I said.

  “Don’t you sass me,” Mama said and swung harder.

  “I mind you, I mind you,” I said and started to cry.

  “You sass me, I cut the blood out of you,” Mama said. She was so busy whipping me and my eyes were so full of tears, neither of us saw the master standing nearby, watching. His sleeves were rolled up like he was on the way to the field. When the crops needed tending, the master sometimes worked right alongside the help.

  “Don’t whip that girl—she didn’t mean to do nothing wrong,” Master Thomas said.

  Mama stepped back and dropped the hickory to her side.

  “Angel’s too pretty to whip,” Master Thomas said. “Her skin’s too perfect and her face too pretty. What has she done?”

  “She don’t mind me,” Mama said. “She sassed me.”

  The master put his hand on my shoulder and looked into my eyes. I shivered at his touch, yet I was pleased by it at the same time. I could feel the power in his hand, which is not the power of muscles and calluses.

  “Angel don’t mean to be bad,” Master Thomas said. “Besides, she’s almost a young woman.” He looked me in the eyes and smiled and I tried to smile back through my tears.

  “Would you like to work in the big house?” the master said. “I think you’re grown up enough to work in the big house. Would you like that?”

  I nodded, forgetting the sting on my legs.

  That was how I came to live in the master’s house, before I was grown up. Mama didn’t say anything; she washed me up and had me put on my clean dress. Other women in the quarters gave me looks, and Jessie Mae who was a little older than me, said, “If Master want to fiddle with you, you better let him.” But I didn’t answer her.

  I didn’t look back at the folks watching me as I went into the big house, by the back door of course. Sally the cook said I would sleep in a little room in the attic. The room was hot in summer, but I could lie in the breeze from the window. She said I would have a new dress and a new petticoat, too.

  Mrs. Thomas was an invalid, and stayed in her room on the second floor. She stayed in bed most days or sat in a chair by the fireplace and read her Bible or some other book. Her room always smelled like medicine. The mistress made me feel backward and shy, like I didn’t belong there. She wore a cap tied around her head, and her face was as pale as paper. She patted me on the head, but looked hard into my eyes.

  “Angel, you have come to help us out,” she said.

  “Yes’m,” I said.

  “This house needs all the help we can get,” she said. Then she asked me if I prayed and I said, “Yes, ma’am, I pray at the meeting Brother Evan has down in the quarters.”

  “Do you pray to be a good girl?” the mistress said.

  Then she sent me up to my room in the attic, a place no bigger than a closet with a cot and a scratched-up chest of drawers and a tiny mirror on the wall. But there was a blue dress lying on the cot and I knew it was there for me. It was a fine old dress the mistress might have worn. Now it had been cut down for me. And I looked out the tiny window; I had a view to the front yard and its row of boxwoods and the cornfields beyond the white gate, and the blue mountains across the French Broad River rising up into the clouds. And when I lifted the window, the breeze came across the fields and yard and whispered on my face and neck like it was talking to me in a low voice. I couldn’t even see the quarters and hogpens from my window, only the sweet-smelling fields and mountains climbing on top of each other beyond the river.

  What we had to eat in the quarters was grits and mush and sometimes maybe pinto beans and fatback, except when the garden Mama made each year came in. And then we had roastnears and green beans and fat tomatoes and new spuds and, later, sweet potatoes and collard greens. And after the hogs were killed, we got a little tenderloin and ribs, and for Christmas, some sausage.

  But when I came down to the kitchen in the big house, Sally told me to carry a tray up to Mrs. Thomas. On it was coffee and white bread and honey, a piece of beef and a bowl of soup that smelled spicy and a slice of fluffy cake with white icing. It was the prettiest food I’d ever seen. I knew I wouldn’t get to eat any of that stuff. When I got back to the kitchen they’d make me eat mush and soup beans, and maybe greens with a little fatback, like I always had.

  But then Sally cleaned off a little table at the side of the pantry and told me to sit down there, and she brought me some of the same vittles I had taken to the mistress. I’d never seen such a feast, and I couldn’t believe she meant that was for me. I thought any second she would tell me to take it up to the master. But she didn’t.

  “Master he say feed you real good,” Sally say.

  And that was the beginning of my being fleshy. Every morning, noon, and night Sally gave me the best food. I ate as well as the master and mistress.

  So they fed me real good and treated me real good at the big house. Except I had to work at fetching things and cleaning some, and Mrs. Thomas told me to learn to sew, to let Arrie the housemaid teach me to sew. But I was no good at sewing, and got the stitches wrong and the seams all wrong, and the mistress got mad at me. She kept a walking stick beside her bed and she would hit me with that stick when I did something wrong. “Angel, you’re lazy as a sow,” she said and whacked me with that stick unless I stood back out of her reach.

  “Sorry, ma’am,” I said.

  “Don’t know how we can afford to feed you,” she said.

  Mostly I tried to stay out of the reach of that stick. I sometimes stood behind a chair, until her temper went away. And sometimes after she hit me she insisted on praying with me. I had to kneel beside her and hold her hand while she prayed. I reckon she was ashamed of getting mad, but that didn’t mean she wouldn’t do it again.

  NOW I KNEW THERE would be more to my coming to the big house than just eating plenty and carrying trays and emptying chamber pots. And though Mama hadn’t said anything about it, she knew why I was sent for. I’d been living in the big house all summer and all fall, and the master was on a trip to Charleston for most of that time.

  But in the late fall, when it began to cool off and the nights took on a chill, Master Thomas came back. He saw me in the hall and said, “Angel, you look like an angel,” and he laughed. “You have rounded out.”

  He touched my shoulder, and I said, “Yes, sir.”

  “Come down to my room tonight,” he said.

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  After I ate my supper in the kitchen and helped Sally gather up the dishes and pots and pans, and then dried them after she washed them, I took a pan of warm water up to my room and washed myself all over. Nobody told me to do that, but I knew it was what I should do. Then, after the house got quiet, I took a candle and walked down the stairs to the master’s room.

  He was sitting at a table reading a book, and when I came into the room, he turned toward me with a smile. “You are a pretty girl, Angel,” he said.

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  “We must be friends,” he said.

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  The master told me to pull my shift over my head, and I did it. He told me to come sit in his lap, and I did. He ran his fingers all over me, over my shoulders and the back of my head. He ran his fingers over my chest and over my nipples like I was some precious thing he just wanted to touch, like I was a mystery he wanted to figure out. Now Jessie Mae had told me the master would want
to play with me, but I didn’t expect him to be so slow and easy.

  He rubbed my skin like he was spreading oil or butter on fine leather. His fingers whispered on my legs, rubbing me like he was polishing up a fine saddle. Nobody had ever touched me like that before.

  “I want you to be happy,” he said. “That’s why I brought you up to the big house.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  “I want you to have fine things,” he said. He laid me on the bed, but he didn’t ask me to do anything but lie there. What he did didn’t feel too bad and it didn’t feel too good, but just like something that happens to a young girl. And while I lay there with him on top of me, I thought about how he ran his fingers over my skin, and the look in his eyes. And I realized I had a value I didn’t know about before, nothing huge, but a little bit of power was better than no power. And I began to think about what I could do, because my power and my value were in the softness of my skin and the shape of my shoulders and new breasts and the roundness of my butt.

  When the master finished he rolled off me and lay there for a time holding on to me and breathing hard. By and by the master told me to go back to my own room. I got out of bed and found my shift and the candlestick and let myself out of the room and climbed the stairs in the dark. I cleaned myself and then sat by the attic window, looking at the moon over the mountains. I sat with my elbows on the window sill and realized I was not worried so bad anymore. For the first time in my life I saw I was not helpless, for I had something that people wanted.

  After that when the master told me to come to him, I washed myself and slipped into his room after the house got dark. Sometimes he just wanted me to lie beside him and hold him, and sometimes he wanted to kiss me all over. Other times he wanted me to lie at his feet. The hardest thing, though, was when he told me he wanted me to whip him.