“I know this story already. You met him, he was an asshole, and he slammed the door in your face.”
He lifted a finger. “But, Ailey, you haven’t heard the rest!”
“Fine. But please make this quick.”
“I will try. Now, Rob-Boy and I were standing there like the presumptuous young fools we were. Then, across the hall, another door opened and Dr. Du Bois’s friend and assistant, Miss Jessie Fauset, came out.”
I looked up from the board. “I know her!”
“Ailey, she’s been dead over twenty years. You can’t possibly know her.”
“I meant Nana gave me one of her books to read.”
“Really? From what your mother tells me, I had no idea the lady had such good taste. Which book?”
“Plum Bun.”
“Ah! That’s my favorite one! So back to my story. Miss Fauset invited us inside her room and a young lady was sitting there. She was a history major at Spelman College—very precocious; only sixteen—and had walked over to meet the great scholar. She didn’t say whether Dr. Du Bois had rebuffed her, too, but I suspected as much.
“Miss Fauset was taking tea. She’d already poured a cup for the young lady, and she left and came back with two other chairs and invited Rob-Boy and me to stay. After some wonderful conversation and some excellent cookies, we took our leave and began walking to the side street where Rob-Boy had parked. Yet across the yard, I heard the young lady calling, ‘Mr. Freeman! Mr. Freeman!’ I’d left my hat in Miss Fauset’s room, and the young lady was waving it high.
“The three of us walked to the car, and Robert drove her back over to Spelman’s campus. It was only a couple of blocks away, but already, we both were smitten with her. She’d memorized that entire page on double consciousness from The Souls of Black Folk! But I was more charming than Rob-Boy, if I do say so myself. I lied and told her I was a junior at Routledge and twenty, when I was a freshman and a year younger than she was. I found the nerve to ask permission to write her, and she consented. It was a three-year, long-distance relationship with no visits. After my third letter, I confessed my age. I was so afraid, but I didn’t want to lie anymore. She was very angry with me for several months, but somehow we worked it out. After graduation, we enrolled in graduate school up in the City at Mecca University. We truly were kids, but we knew what we wanted. And we married.”
“The young lady was Aunt Olivia?”
“Correct. Olivia Ellen Hargrace. The best woman in the world, after my mother. And that’s why I took her last name.”
“Okay . . . but what does any of this have to do with David?”
“Well, Olivia forgave me, in my youthful foolishness. Do you think you could do that with David James?”
“Why are you being so nosy? Did he say something to you?”
“Ailey, I can neither confirm nor deny that.”
“But you’re my uncle, not his! And I thought we were best buddies!”
“Wait a minute. Don’t get your pressure up. Let me explain.”
“I gotta go. Take me back to the farm—”
“No, no, please listen. Give me a chance.”
I sighed. Leaned back on the sofa and folded my arms. “Fine, Uncle Root.”
“Thank you. Now, you are indeed correct. Despite the difference in our ages, you are my closest and dearest friend. I adore you to the moon and back, but I’m a man of honor, Ailey Pearl. And just as I would never betray your confidences, I cannot betray Brother David’s. I can tell you, however, that he has never said anything negative about you. Whenever he speaks your name, it is always with sincere reverence and affection. I hope that reassures you.”
“Whatever. I don’t care what he has to say anyway.”
“I’m sure you don’t.” He looked at the chessboard. “Lord, child, that’s checkmate again! You have to learn to protect your queen! Let’s start over and see if I can school you before I take you back to the country.”
“But, Uncle Root—”
He held up a hand. “No, sugarfoot. Your granny’s preserves can wait. Mastering chess cannot.”
Song
Why Women Are Strong
Back when her name had been “Beauty,” Aggie’s grandmother had told her men were stronger than women, save one exception: women’s times of bleeding. Helen had said in the moon house women bled and watched the fire. They talked together. They sang together and told stories. To men, this place was a curse. Blood was a curse. A smelly stain on the thighs of the weak. Yet women knew the power of dark jewels. That the moon house was not for the cursed and the weak but for the strong and the blessed.
Helen explained, their power was why women had to stay away from men during their bleedings. Though Helen had been a Christian, the old Creek lore had been passed down to her and she knew a story of a great Creek warrior. This warrior had ridden his horse so fast, to regard him was like trying to catch lightning. His clan had been powerful and undefeated, and the men that they conquered in battle, they had insulted by comparing them to women.
The warrior was very careful about who cooked and served his food, too, and came within his reach. He had several wives that he insisted live far apart, so that they would not bleed together; thus, he was never in the range of a woman “on her moon.” Yet one evening, a young maiden from an enemy village sneaked into this warrior’s village. This maiden was in her bleeding time, and instead of sleeping and living in a moon house, she was freely walking about. Thus, when she walked around the undefeated warrior’s hut, she touched the walls. At the cooking pit in front of his hut, she waited until the other women’s backs were turned and stirred the pots. That night, when the warrior called for a woman to warm him, the maiden volunteered. As the maiden and warrior kissed, she whispered that she had a surprise for him. When she disrobed and he saw the blood on her thighs, he yelled and reached for his knife. The warrior easily killed the maiden, but by then, it was too late.
The next time the warrior rode into battle, his clan was defeated, and the time after that, the warrior was killed.
How Aggie Was Brought to the Moon House
One day, as Aggie was headed to the fields with her chopping hoe, Carson Franklin stopped her. He was the son of Aidan, the white man who had moved his family to the shadow of the mound many years before. Carson still lived on that same land on which his own sons still could not make cotton grow.
Carson was the overseer, in charge of the Quarters-folks working in the field. He told Aggie he needed her to walk with him to the moon house. And Aggie was afraid, as she had heard from women in the Quarters that Carson had dragged them to the moon house and attempted to ravish them, but he proved incapable. And when Carson was unable to rouse himself with these slave women, he beat them instead.
Ordinarily, the moon house was unused: it was off-limits to the Negresses on the farm. Aggie had seen them abashed as their bleeding began. They ran from the fields with red stains on their skirts. These embarrassing moments had happened to Aggie as well. This farm was not like the place where her mother and father and grandparents had lived, where bleeding women, including Aggie and Kiné, were allowed their privacy and sacred space. As a tiny girl, Aggie had stayed at this small cabin with Kiné, until she was old enough to leave her mother’s breast and be cared for by Helen. When Aggie had entered the cabin because of her own blood, Kiné and she had stayed there together again. It had been a precious time, just the two of them.
The day Carson told her to follow him, Aggie walked behind him at a distance, praying that he would not try to hurt her. They walked across the fields and deeper into the woods. When they came upon the moon house, Aggie tensed, but Carson seemed nervous as he told her go on inside. Go on, now. Then he walked away.
When Aggie knocked on the door, Lady answered and, with blushes and shy words, told Aggie she had begun her first bleeding time. She was fourteen—this was the era when girls did not bleed as early as they would in future times. Aggie had never spoken to the girl with whom she w
as expected to keep company. The first interval that Aggie stayed in the moon house with her, there was silence between them, as she and the girl shared the tasks of cooking simple stews from the supplies that had been left for them in the yard. Thankfully, Lady did not expect Aggie to attend to washing her soiled undergarments: she shook her head bashfully when asked. And Aggie was grateful for the break from field work. She didn’t ask Lady how she had been chosen to keep her company.
By the fourth set of days together in the moon house, there was greater ease. And something else: Aggie’s own cycle had synced with Lady’s. That month, she followed the girl behind the cabin to the space where the two special buckets were. She waited for Lady to finish washing her women’s rags, to spill the pink water to the ground, and then stick her hands in the other bucket to wash herself clean with clear water. Then Aggie held out her hands for both buckets, so that she could fill them with water for her own washing. She and Lady exchanged a smile. That evening, they told stories to each other, tales of animals that talked. Lady gave a small “Ah!” when Aggie confided that her father had been the son of two Creek mestizos. When Lady confided that her father and mother were mestizos, Aggie remembered Pop George’s words: she did not want to anger this girl and feel the whip’s fire. And so Aggie did not say, not only was Lady’s father part Creek, he was part Negro, too.
That month, after Aggie took her final, cleansing bath and returned to the field, Carson Franklin told her she no longer would work in the cotton. Now she would work alongside Pop George, looking after the children who had not yet lost their front milk teeth. Within a year, Aggie and Pop George would share their own two-room cabin, which sat a hundred steps from the larger cabin of their master, and Aggie would treat the man as her father. Some of the Quarters-folks began to refer to Aggie as a “yard nigger,” but after Pop George scolded them, they stopped. After all, Aggie tended to their children and loved them as her own—see how she gave the children hugs and kisses? Won’t nothing to be mad at Aggie ’bout, Pop George said. And the Quarters-folks deferred to him, as he was their elder. They were kind to Aggie, and in time, they came to respect her greatly.
The Kitchen House
Two years had passed since Aggie had come to the farm, and as with each cotton harvest before it, changes were made at Wood Place.
Samuel Pinchard charged his overseer with finding Quarters-men to cut down remaining trees on the new portions of land he had acquired. He had bought farms bordering Wood Place from yeoman farmers, those who had cleared some of their land on their own already to plant crops, but who hadn’t been able to make their land profitable. Samuel gave them pennies on the dollar for each acre.
Samuel was planning to build a grand structure with the trees the Quarters-men cut down, what he would call his “big house,” even as, like other slaveholders, he would stand aside while the Quarters-men did the building. In the future, Samuel would talk about the house he had “built,” as though he had labored alongside those dark men, straining his own muscles. It was slow-going work for the Quarters-men, transporting the pine trees, cutting the trees into planks, and sanding the planks smooth. Samuel wanted his big house to be perfect. That would take some time, but in the interval he had the men build a kitchen structure two dozen feet away from the future back of the big house. The kitchen needed to be close enough that his own food still would be warm when brought to him, but far enough away so that if the kitchen caught fire—as many kitchens did in those days—the flames would not spread to the big house.
Yet there was no cook except Lady, not yet, and no children for Lady, either. In the moon house, she confided to Aggie that her husband did not sleep in the double-rope bed Micco had given them as a wedding gift. Samuel either slept on a pallet in their cabin’s front room, or elsewhere on one of his nighttime journeys.
The year of the building, Samuel walked around his property, smiling and waving at the Quarters-folks. They smiled back and dipped their heads submissively, though they did not like him: he was a white man and the owner of slaves. Nor did they trust him. And when his mood changed, the Quarters-folks told each other, see there? For on those days, Samuel’s face would register great misery. He would straddle his horse and ride off. In a day or two, he would return in a jocular mood. He brought rock candy and passed it out to the children. He thanked the Quarters-folks for their labor, and Aggie began watching him for signs of drink. She remembered similar behavior with her father, when Paul would dive into his cups. She was afraid that Samuel might sell the plantation or gamble it away. And then the family that she had cobbled together—Pop George, the children, and all the Quarters-folks—would be lost again, and misery would descend.
And besides Aggie’s own selfish interests, she worried about the others of her community. There were now thirty-two Negroes on Wood Place, and there was at least one baby born each year. The welcoming of new life should have been a joy, but the enslaved mothers were anxious. Though Aggie had not birthed her own children, she worried, too, about those children that she and Pop George tended and loved. At each new year, for January first was the time of settling debts. If Samuel Pinchard was reckless, this would be the time of selling slaves. Families would be split up. Children might be sold from their parents, as had happened when Kiné was sent over the water.
In June of Aggie’s second year at Wood Place, the kitchen house was finished, and in July, a trader’s wagon pulled up to the farm. He was not the same trader who had brought Aggie to Wood Place; word had traveled that this trader was now dead.
It was not January, so who was Samuel planning to sell? And why? Aggie’s mind flipped through the Quarters-folks but could not locate whom Samuel might discard. Then she saw a woman hop down from the back of the wagon. Samuel appeared in the yard, counted over money to the trader, and cheerfully waved the Negress into the new kitchen house.
The next morning, Pop George told Aggie that the woman’s name was Tut, and she had been purchased as the cook. Not only that, the woman required a child to work as her kitchen help. At midday, Carson Franklin was quiet. Usually he stalked the fields, calling out to those folks he didn’t feel were spry enough in their labors. He carried a whip coiled by his hip but did not use it. Samuel had instructed him never to whip the Quarters-folks; Carson could slap them with an open hand, though not strike with a fist. Carson liked to yell at the folks. Don’t waste no sunlight, he would shout. However, this day, he walked from the fields with Mamie, a very thin, lovely girl who had been purchased the previous new year.
Mamie was an odd child: in the evenings, after her labor had been through in the cotton fields, she would walk to a particularly large pecan tree, sit underneath the tree, and conduct conversations. However, Mamie’s sweet nature and her beauty had brought her acceptance in the Quarters, even with her strange ways. Such a child needed care, not ridicule. Though she was old enough to work the field, Aggie in particular had shown the child special treatment. They both were motherless and shared a terrible kinship.
When Aggie and Pop George saw the overseer with Mamie, they sat up in their chairs. They exchanged glances, but thankfully, Carson was not walking in the direction of the woods where the moon house was located. Instead, he walked Mamie toward the kitchen house. That evening, when her young charges were back at their parents’ cabins, Aggie headed to the kitchen house and peeked through the new glass windows. She saw Mamie sitting at the pine table, peeling potatoes. She returned to Pop George and reported what she had seen. This is how everyone in the Quarters found out that Mamie was the new cook’s assistant.
Within a matter of days, there was a disturbance: screams tearing through the night from the kitchen house. Aggie would not hear these screams, as it was her woman’s interval and Lady and she were in the moon house. Yet upon her return, Pop George reported that Mamie insisted a monster had come into the kitchen house. The monster covered her mouth in the night, trying to steal her breath. However, when Aggie consulted the new cook that Samuel had purchased
—the woman named Tut—the woman was unconcerned. She insisted Mamie was only having nightmares.
Thus, Aggie forgot the child’s stories of monsters, aided by the fact that she had fallen love with a man of the fields.
The Courting of Aggie
When Aggie first met Midas, she was not impressed. Though he had the pretty dark-dark color of Aggie’s mother, he was short and skinny, with an abundance of hair that wasn’t groomed frequently, so that it congregated in rowdy clumps.
Aggie ignored Midas when he waved at her during his midday break, when she and the children pushed the babies out to the fields in a wheelbarrow so their mothers could nurse them. In the evenings, Midas sat in the back of the group of children and listened to Pop George’s stories. Midas seemed to enjoy the tales more than the children and laughed and clapped his hands. On Sundays after supper, Midas was forward: he walked to the cabin door to pay his respects to Aggie. He smiled, even when Aggie told him she didn’t have no time for him. When she shut the door in his face, Pop George would chide, why ain’t she let the boy have a few words? Midas won’t tryna hurt nobody, but Aggie would suck her teeth and move to tend to her pot of greens. Pop George worked around her, though, for, after a few weeks of rebuffs, the next time Midas showed, Pop George called a welcome from inside the cabin. Come on in, he hailed Midas. Don’t be standing in the door, like he won’t raised right.
Aggie continued to frown at Midas when he stopped by the cabin, but she began to look forward to seeing him. From eavesdropping on his talks with Pop George, one Sunday evening, she learned that Midas’s mother had been stolen over the water. Though Midas had been sold away from her at the age of ten or eleven—he didn’t rightly know his age—he remembered that his mother had wanted hot peppers with every meal, even breakfast, and Aggie hid a smile, for Pop George could never get enough of hot and spicy meals. And Midas knew from his mother’s stories that her father had been a man whose job it was to remember the history of a single family in their village, going back for hundreds of years. Midas didn’t know what that kind of man was called, until Pop George chimed in, saying, over in Africa, they called that a “griot.” And such a man shole was mighty and great. As Aggie sat there, listening to Midas and Pop George talk, she remembered that her mother’s grandfather had been called a “marabout,” which Kiné had told her was somebody who had power of Spirit. More than a preacher. A man who knew about medicines and roots and plants and things in the air that couldn’t be seen, but still existed. An important man. A man with power, and now she knew that one of Midas’s folks had been important and powerful, too.
The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois Page 19