“What?”
“The door, gal. You hear?”
“I hear it.”
“Well?”
“What?”
“You want me to get it or don’t you?”
“Get it.”
“I asked you that before and then you go off and act like you don’t hear me say what I just got through saying.”
The man prepared to knock at the door a third time, but then he heard the soft even voice of the midwife and his wife’s light reply followed by laughter chasing their quick-spoken words, as if they were sitting around a worn deck of cards and not a newborn child. He let his hand drop as he heard a delicate rustling. The door creaked open.
“Well?” he said.
“A baby girl,” said the midwife.
“Oh.”
“Black as tar.” Her lips opened wide then. Toothless. He saw nothing but her brown gums. What he’d heard before hadn’t been laughter but harsh cackling. “And she like to kill it, too, going still like she did when I told her she got to push.” The husband nodded. “You know what the first thing she told me?” the midwife continued. “First thing out of her mouth?” She stuck her pinkie in her ear, pulled it out, and cleaned the wax refuse with her thumbnail. “‘I didn’t want no gal, neither.’ Ain’t that something?” Both the midwife and the husband looked at the young woman in the bed.
The wife stared back at her husband and said to the midwife, “You get on out that door and get it off me.”
“Why come? It’s yours.”
“You heard me, get out the door and get it off.” The midwife, leaving the door ajar, shuffled back to the bed and scooped the child in her arms.
“Now what?”
“Take it, and you and him get on out.” The woman turned away from them, lifting her knees higher still, trying to move away from the afterbirth that grew cold between her legs. “And you pay her with what we got.” She contemplated the wall while she spoke to her husband.
The midwife stooped and picked up the basket she had brought with her. “I guess you can clean yourself up?” she asked, but the woman said nothing. “Sally in Our Alley” played its tune in her head while she fixed her eyes on the banjo case that sat in the corner. She heard the bedroom door bang shut and the slow onset of murmured voices in the front room. In the midst of the husband’s bargaining (No, planting seed during cotton season is too much, he said, how about putting sheet metal on the hole on your roof?) came the old woman’s swift glare surveying the small house, the uneven table, the bottom broke out of chairs (No, I don’t think you can manage my roof). Absorbed in the wife’s unhappiness (no minstrel show awaited them, the child was too dark for black-face; no one would ever ask where they got the girl because the answer was obvious), they forgot to name her. When husband and wife remembered three weeks later, the wife thought long and said finally, “Just don’t name her at all.”
But the man didn’t take her at her word and gave his wife names to ponder: Mary Beth, Ruth Ann. He looked for something to light up her face, watching for something to dawn in her and say, Yes, that’s right, I like that. Eve just went to the well; Ester went to boss for seed; You better get Abigail some kind of dress. The child thought her flux of names was due to the growth of her feet and the surge of her height until her father told her different, and then she too watched and waited.
Neither of them had to wait for long. Perhaps they should have known, if not the child then at least the father, who woke in the night to hear his wife muttering, “Two dollars for the seed—yes, Lord—two dollars for that seed and boss man charge us five and a quarter; then to rent out them supplies is well nigh ten dollars a year, and Lord know we could hitch out to Athens and get it used for half that.” He must have noticed and wondered at the new attention his wife gave to hemming, how she went out of her way to take in extra work. Yes, he must have known, since when she finally told him in the middle of the night, her hand clawed around his shoulder shaking him fiercely awake, he didn’t seem surprised at all, just concerned. I can see what she fixing to say fore she do. Now here she come, lying to me like I been blind all these weeks and can’t see a thing. Still, she shook him while she whispered hoarsely, “Hey, man, get on up. I got to talk. You hear? I got to talk.”
He rose to his knees and caught her about the waist. “What is it now?”
She began, not realizing that she spoke as if they had been talking all along. Her voice was stripped of all charm; she was desperate, even though she didn’t have to be since the husband had already been wondering where she kept that bag of tightly hemmed camisoles, unlaced bloomers, and the only pair of shoes they owned. “I been thinking. We gone to owe boss man fifty-two dollars at the end of this season, and I know that tween the two of us we only gone make forty-six. That’s if I take in some sewing and all that.”
“You woke me on up to tell me how much we owe boss man?”
“You listen. I reckon we been at this for damn near ten years.” She paused, breathing heavily. “Well?”
“Well, what?”
“Ain’t that right? Ain’t we been here nigh ten years?”
“I reckon so.”
“I know it. I know it.” Her eyes lit, as if she had caught him admitting something he shouldn’t have. “And fore then, your people had this same shake of land and boss man passed on to you all they owed him.”
“You think I don’t know that?”
“I know you do. You just listen.” She shook him again, hard, on the arm. “With all that past money and the money we owe boss man too—well, that’s well nigh one hundred and thirteen dollars. You know that, man?”
“Well, I reckon; I ain’t thought on it that much, but that seem bout right.”
“Now, how is we suppose to get out from under that kind of money?” She pulled back from him, her eyes triumphant, since they both knew that one hundred thirteen dollars might as well have been three thousand. They never could pay off boss man. Her hand moved from his arm to his lap. Both remembered that their daughter lay in the front room, unaware that her mother dreamed of numbers that smelled like money.
For a moment they said nothing, each waiting for the other to bare grievous teeth. But then he whispered, “I never wanted no baby in the first place.”
“Well, you got your way, cause she sho ain’t no baby no more.”
“Still—”
“You shut it.” She stood up abruptly. “I can’t take it like this no more.” She stopped again as if an idea had come upon her mid-flight, but the husband knew better. He saw a staged pause. “New Orleans or San Francisco. Get to see Billy Birch and Mr. Cotton, you know. Maybe … we could start there, and get a boat to some island. You think on it. If it’s a no, I’ll leave you too.” He almost smiled, since this was what he’d expected as soon as she woke him.
“You can’t leave me. Where you gone go without me?”
“What you trying to say? You ain’t coming?”
“We got a baby girl.”
“You done looked at her? She ain’t no baby, bout as tall as me.” She walked away from her husband, her bare feet soundless as she paced, though he heard the soft whisk of her dress. He realized she might as well be talking about a shirt she owned, too frayed for wear and now useless.
“And?”
“And what? This all you want? Living like this, with grease brown paper for windows? This all you want? That’s all?”
“You know it ain’t.”
“Well, that’s all she can give us. Can’t crawl from up under the debt we’s in cause the boss man done fixed the books. That’s all she give us.” She stopped in front of her husband.
“I don’t want no black tar-baby girl. Didn’t even want no girl, and look what I got. I wanted a son to play banjo for the shows in Missouri. Why I got to take with me something I didn’t want in the first place?” Both the husband and wife had raised their voices, and their daughter, tall but slight on the thin pallet in the front room, had shivered awake and trembl
ed when she heard her mother. “I’m telling you now. First space I see, I’m gone.”
And she was. Vanished in the middle of the night through the front door, that bag he knew all along was stuffed with camisoles and their only pair of shoes clutched at her side. Soon the husband left too. Except before he disappeared he tried to explain his upcoming absence. In the same way the wife was gripped with the thought of ever-rising debt, the husband was blinded by his own explanations. The week before his departure, he spoke to his daughter with words knotted up in question marks, rubbing her shoulders and head gently. In the middle of telling her that he had to go find her mother, his child peppered in, “When y’all coming back?” and “Why can’t I come?” although she had heard her mother’s whispering that not only was she too black, she wasn’t even the right sex. The father nodded mindlessly at his daughter’s fear, dreaming all the while of black men carrying parasols to shade themselves from the sun, their hands sticky and sweet from overripe cantaloupe. The girl saw her father’s faraway gaze as he spoke to her, so when he crept though the window a week later she knew he wasn’t coming back either.
Orphaned, she went from tenant to tenant on the farm, tall enough to see the way old Negro women held their mouths when they spoke about her mother. Though they did not realize it, they hated her, this child who helped gather cabbage and tomatoes in their small gardens and ran errands and gossip from house to house. They watched her suspiciously as she stooped to pick up stray things, noting the way her long legs gaped wide despite the fact she wore a dress. “Trouble just waiting on her,” they murmured, watching her too-easy laughter, her draping arms as she caressed their children. “Look at her taking my baby and kissing her up under the neck. Don’t tell me I’m living to see it.”
Anyone that carefree after not only the mother but also the father left her was a child that trouble would snatch up as soon as it stopped by. All the women thought it was just a matter of time before the mother’s haughty slyness would visit the child. But they let her stay in their homes for two years, her name changing as she moved from house to house. She was bestowed with the names of dead daughters and sons, lost husbands, cherished wives who had died in childbirth, till finally, despite her age, they put her out of their homes and their lives, for fear that, when the habits of the mother showed themselves in the child, their own children would become infected by proximity. So she became a roaming hand for picking cotton, until she turned seventeen and Sweets found her.
He was a drifter, a twenty-year-old man with no luggage or steady job. By 1914, he had traveled from Tennessee to as far as Oklahoma and Arizona, claiming to anyone within arm’s reach that he had taught the great Bill Pickett everything he knew. “Bulldogging? Who you think taught Dusky Demon that little trick? I let him take credit. Myself, I didn’t want to be bothered.” Every grandmother within throwing distance knew he was no good. But with no people of her own, who could have told that to a seventeen-year-old girl?
She heard him first, whistling lightly in the full-grown corn; the sound, practiced and swift, pricked her ear and she stood up, spreading her arms through the tall stalks to get a better look. Then she saw him, walking slowly toward her, his jacket tucked under his arm, and the corn seemed to move out of his way: some idle, callous, free black man. With no one’s apron to hide behind, no low whisper full of caution, she liked his soft laughter and easy way. And Sweets did what none of them had ever thought to do—he asked her name. He strolled closer and she dropped the basket she carried, swaying at his nearness. When he stood only a pace away, the jacket still under his arm, he sang her hello. Her laughter made him bolder and he took her hand, rubbing her thumb. “Who is you?”
She thought and thought, unsure of what to say, waiting for him to see the blank space of her dilemma and put in the name of an old lover.
“Girl, you hear me? What’s your name?”
She looked past his shoulder, almost panting, Lord, Lord, Lord, waiting for an answer that would not break her heart or her back. Then she heard it. Like a ripe peach ready to drop, the name fell into her lap, beautiful and free of soft spots. The sound of her name almost made her knees buckle. “Liberty, my name Liberty.”
They left the tenant farm soon after. Liberty didn’t belong to anyone, so there was no one to ask whether he could take her away; those old black mothers and grandmothers were glad to see her go, knowing that trouble had finally caught up with her. And that name (she told everyone in one day—every house, every field hand knew her name), the name that mocked them all and their predicament, was too much to bear. “She gone tell the wrong fella that name and get knocked out.” But Liberty didn’t hear their worry or their scorn, already in love with her Sweets, her honeyed man. Those old women were right about trouble catching up with her but wrong about the timing. It would take more than two decades to arrive, creeping up on her so softly she wouldn’t notice it at all.
* * *
Eleven years after she had left Georgia with Sweets, Liberty stood in the open doorway of her house trying to step around her anger. She explained to her six-year-old daughter, last night’s fight with Sweets had really begun as they journeyed to Lafayette County. “I reckon we was deep in wander fore I know Sweets ain’t got no place in particular we had to get to. Sometime I think I never should of left with him in the first place, cause Lord know I can do bad enough by myself. Yes, well, I reckon I don’t need no help with that. We was traveling in a circle of twenty tents, and every day we move to a different place. No old mamas with they set mouths looking at how I stoop to catch something. There we was moving long with the railroad, all them men hacking down anything in they way. We move from town to town—Augusta, Montgomery, Jackson, Beaumont—following the rails we make. Your daddy level the roadbed in front of the rails, working the job from sun up till sun dark; then he get at gambling his whole week pay with dice.
“Your mama now ain’t like your mama then. I wasn’t no mama at all, then. Two years pass, and I didn’t say a word, cause that son-of-a-bitch daddy—” She winced slightly. “Well, I reckon I still was loving that low laugh of his and them soft hands. And maybe we could of stayed that way—you know, chasing the railroad.”
She stopped for a moment and caught her breath. Images floated in front of her, of eating cold beans out of tin pails hunched and aching over their food. Liberty swallowed hard at the memory. She remembered learning how to cook, how to take care of the ailing, and how to read in those five years. One of the wives, Sue Ann Johnson—the only one who still took her hospitality toward the end, despite Sweets stealing away her husband’s weekly pay—spent every free moment spoon-feeding Liberty the New Testament: The kingdom of heaven is like unto leaven which a woman took, and hid in three measures of meal, till the whole was leavened. And when Liberty asked why three, why put a number into anything like a measure of meal, Sue Ann snorted at her ignorance and replied, “Cause everything bout three. We live in threes: Mama, Daddy, babies. Even Jesus live in three: God, Son, Holy Ghost. You see? Might get passed over two times, but third time you might have a shot at whatever you hankering after. That ain’t no mistake either, cause three is a blessed number, blessed by God. Three blessed, charmed, and whole. See? You can’t even talk about three without giving three words to it.” Liberty had let that advice settle on her, suddenly envious that Sue Ann had both husband and baby boy. Sue Ann resumed the lesson, but Liberty only half listened, now worried about the twoness of her and Sweets. Just one more and we’d be whole.
Liberty resumed her story. “Five years sweep on by and, well, I didn’t even know it, cause in a way we was always in the same place. All them men working on one thing, stirring up everything within a hand’s reach. Like we move in a cloud, and we go into town, and folk whispering they knew we was coming cause they saw the cloud miles off. I spose I was might proud that we was the ones caused all that commotion. See, your daddy … well, I loved your daddy for as long as anybody could of loved him, buying ribbons and tying them
on anything I thought his eyes would get a notion to fall on. But love like that bound to wear out, and sure nough it did.
“Sweets was gambling, but I didn’t know how much, cause your mama was innocent back then. Just like you is now, but I didn’t have no mama like me to set me right. Any mama worth they salt would of seen Sweets coming through that corn and told him to get on. But I didn’t have no mama like you got. Then Sweets was doing that dice, and I didn’t see a thing—too busy trying to keep house and tying ribbons on anything I laid my hands on. Yes, Lord, I sure was innocent. Didn’t see nothing till it was right up on me. All them men stop looking me in the face, wouldn’t take my hospitality. I thought it was the other womens put them up to it. But it wasn’t. It was Sweets. He was whopping all of them so bad they took it out on me. Sweets got so he was climbing out of the tent at night, gathering them all up and making them play.
“We was just out of Texas and I wanted to settle down, and here I was trying to slide up soft to Sweets and make him stay where we was. Well, he must of seen me coming, cause I only had to ask him one time. I didn’t even get half way into what I was saying fore he say yes. There I was trying to push at him.” Liberty suddenly mimicked her younger self. “‘What’s gone happen when these here tracks run out? You think they gone hand you some kind of job just cause you kept with them since Georgia?’
“I spose we got off that rail just in time. All that money swollen in Sweets’s pocket and them men looking at him, knowing they got goosed. Only so long you can get away with that. I was having you then, and we jumped off the rail and bought this land with all that money Sweets got off them men.”
She paused again and lifted her hand to her forehead. “I spose even then I was innocent. Cause when I look back, it’s a wonder I didn’t know. All that money like a rock in his pants, and it never went down. We was buying everything I could think of. Here I was, making sure we got all the windows the way I want and the floor laid down just so and I never wondered where Sweets got all that money from. Like he had it in a trunk somewhere I didn’t know about. Cause after we left the rail, I never did see him do no more gambling. He went off to get supplies and come back drunk and singing, but I didn’t mind, cause he always come back with them supplies.”
Knee-Deep in Wonder Page 2