by Daniel Black
“Momma hit me, then I fell out in the chicken coop.” Emma Jean began to disrobe.
“You sho smell like it!” Pearlie screeched, and resumed stroking Gracie’s hair.
“Leave her alone,” Gracie admonished sympathetically, staring into Emma Jean’s transparent eyes.
“I wunnit pickin’ on her! I was jes’ sayin’ that she smell like—”
“Shut up, Pearlie!” Gracie leapt up. “Just shut up. You don’t know what happened so just shut your big, fat mouth.”
“What’s wrong with you?” Pearlie asked, unable to explain Gracie’s newfound compassion.
“Ain’t nothin’ wrong with me. You just ain’t gotta be so mean. That’s all.”
Pearlie frowned.
“It don’t make no sense to laugh at Emma Jean. You know Momma don’t like her.”
Pearlie shrugged and walked out. Emma Jean stood naked in the middle of the room and wept with her face buried in her palms.
“Don’t cry, Emma,” Gracie soothed, patting her shoulder. “It’s gonna be all right. I’ll take care o’ you. Just try to stay out o’ Momma’s way.”
“But I ain’t done nothin’ wrong!” Emma Jean protested. “All I done was ask Momma for a birthday party and she hit me with the skillet.”
Gracie blinked slowly. “Don’t ask Momma for nothin’. Just do whatever she say.”
Together, the sisters wiped Emma Jean’s face, hands, and feet with moist washcloths. Gracie noticed the fresh wound, circling from Emma Jean’s forehead around to her right temple. In years to come, Emma Jean would try to hide the C-shaped mark with strands of straightened hair, only to be disappointed that it never quite reached far enough. When people inquired as to the origin of the scar, she would say, “It’s my birthmark.” Most left it at that although they knew better. What child had ever been born with a rough, raised keloid blemish like that? Yet, not wishing to pry, they let Emma Jean construct whatever truth she needed.
Sliding a clean cotton sack dress over her little sister’s head, Gracie said, “Don’t say nothin’ else ’bout yo’ birthday. You can have a party when you get grown if you want to.”
“But what’s so wrong about havin’ a party now? I ain’t neva had no party befo’.”
“I said forgit about it! You ain’t gon’ do nothin’ but make Momma madder, and this time ain’t no tellin’ what she might do to you. Jes’ be quiet.”
“Okay,” Emma Jean said as the image of the pretty lemon cake dissolved in her head.
Chapter 3
The Peaces lived in a rather large A-framed house in the backwoods of Swamp Creek. No one ever stumbled upon their dwelling because it would’ve been impossible to do so. From Highway 64, you’d turn right onto Fishlake Road and follow its winding trail, past shacks and shotgun houses, until the main road ended. That’s as far as most ever went. Yet, those seeking the Peaces, Tysons, and Redfields made a ninety-degree turn onto a dirt path mules and wagons had carved out, and continued on, several hundred yards, passing first the Tysons’, then the Redfields’, until suddenly, far in the distance, the Peace home appeared.
Gus and Chester Jr. built it months before Gus proposed to Emma Jean. He’d marry somebody, he assumed, and they’d need a place to live. Hopefully, she’d like it, but if she didn’t, she’d simply have to get used to it, he told Chester. Gus said that a man’s job was to provide a dwelling place for his wife; whether she liked it or not was her problem. Yet Gus hoped she would, and in fact she did. The full-length porch, stretching the width of the house, attracted her most as she imagined children, hopefully girls, leaping from it and into the yard, screaming and playing tag on hot summer afternoons. She envisioned herself in a porch rocker, on rainy days, mending holey socks while humming church songs to the rhythm of the downpour. She’d always wanted a porch. A porch invited people’s company, and that’s what she longed for.
The rest of the house was fine with her. There were two bedrooms, a wash area, a sizeable kitchen, and a huge living room. When Emma Jean walked in, she gasped at the enormity of the living space and mentally began to decorate it. If she had a boy in the midst of her daughters, he’d sleep on the sofa. Boys didn’t mind that kind of thing, she told Gus.
Emma Jean’s only insistence was that the house remain immaculate. She hated clutter and filth even more than Mae Helen had. Or maybe because Mae Helen had. For fifteen years, her Saturday morning chores included cleaning up behind her mother and sisters, and she would kill a man—children, too!—if they thought she was going to do more of that. Of course she would clean, she told Gus, but she wasn’t a maid and didn’t intend to feel like one. He nodded, but offered no assurances.
Gus inherited the twenty-acre lot on which the house sat the day Chester Sr. died. He left Chester Jr. thirty acres north of the Jordan. Gus’s land was deeper in the woods and he preferred it that way. Once the house was complete, a hundred yards off the wagon path, he combed the nearby forest for wild ferns, flowers, and other greenery, which he then uprooted and transplanted to his own front yard. The result was a lush, colorful oasis the likes of which Emma Jean had never seen. Each spring, when the rains came and Gus escaped to the Jordan, ferns burst forth and flowers of every color bloomed and peppered the lawn. Gus was meticulous in its maintenance, beating Authorly severely whenever he mowed across something he thought was a weed. People complimented Emma Jean on her horticultural skills, and she accepted the praise, for both her own and Gus’s sakes.
Gus liked that his picturesque lawn contrasted with what he called the ugliness of the adjoining cotton field. As a child, he promised Chester Sr. that none of his children would ever pick cotton a day in their lives. If he had to work like a mule to provide for his family, that’s exactly what he’d do. And it’s exactly what he did. Kissing white folks’ asses by picking their cotton was simply out of the question. So when he inherited the twenty acres and his boys started coming, he taught them how to work and, with their assistance, he kept his promise.
Wilson Peace, Gus’s grandfather, had done the same thing. He refused to slave for white folks, and, even in the winter of 1907, when his family practically starved to death, he forbade any of them to bring white money into his house. That’s the winter Chester Sr. resolved not to emulate his father. His hunger had been far greater than his pride, so the day he turned eighteen, Chester Sr. started chopping cotton for whites, and stopped a day shy of his seventy-eighth birthday only because his legs gave out. Gus reverenced his grandfather’s pride and sought nothing more desperately than to replicate it. Chester Sr. warned that pride comes before a great fall, but Gus said he was willing to fall if it meant he didn’t have to submit his labor to whites. Wilson smiled. It wasn’t that Gus didn’t admire his father; Gus loved Chester Sr. and respected the fact that they always ate. Gus simply hated that whites called his daddy “boy” and treated him like shit. So Gus explained his defiance as the only way he knew to keep white folks from destroying another generation of Peaces.
To keep his family together, Wilson’s father took his master’s surname when slavery ended. Baxter Pace owned some three hundred slaves in South Carolina and sold one of Wilson’s uncles to a plantation somewhere in Louisiana. Hoping to find his brother one day, Wilson kept the Pace name at first in hopes that, wherever he was in the world, his brother might search him out. Yet once slavery ended and Wilson’s father made his way to Arkansas—where folks said money was growing on trees—he dropped the hope of ever seeing his brother again and added an E to “Pace,” thus naming himself what he desired most—Peace.
Henrietta emerged from the master bedroom, feigning a smile. “It’s a girl.”
“Yeah!” the brothers cheered. Their boisterous applause almost deafened Gus, who nodded and sighed with relief.
“What’s her name?” Authorly asked.
“She ain’t got no name yet,” Gus said. “Hell, she just got here. Yo’ momma gon’ think of a name pretty soon.”
Not meaning to contradict Gus
yet afraid the least omission might cost her, Henrietta said, “Her name’s Perfect. That’s what yo’ momma said.”
“Perfect,” the boys repeated in chorus.
What kinda name is that, Gus thought, and grimaced as he retrieved the family Bible. Sol leaned over his right shoulder, spelling the name seven or eight times before Gus had it correct:
Perfect Peace, May 17, 1940.
“Who she look like? Can we see her? Can we hold her?” Mister’s questions came faster than Henrietta could answer.
“No!” she snapped. The boys’ faces went blank. “I mean, not quite yet. It was a tough birth and yo’ momma needs a little time to recover. Just give her a little while.” Henrietta paused to collect herself. “Your mother’s tired now and the baby’s sleeping. He—I mean she’s really pretty though. Perfect—just like your mother calls her.” Henrietta hadn’t planned to say that, but in the midst of forced deceit, she didn’t know what else to say. She turned abruptly and reentered the bedroom.
“I can’t do this, Emma Jean. I can’t.”
Emma Jean nodded. “Of course you can. And you will. It’s already done. I have a beautiful baby girl and that’s the end of it.”
“This ain’t gon’ work. There’s no way.” Henrietta’s strength dissolved like sugar in hot water. She sank onto the edge of the bed.
“Listen,” Emma Jean murmured, grabbing Henrietta’s arm. “Just call her a girl and be done with it! There’s nothin’ to think about, nothin’ to rationalize, nothin’ to justify, nothin’ to pray about, and nothin’ to do except love her the way she is.”
“That’s the whole problem! The way she is ain’t right ’cause she ain’t no she!”
“Of course she is. She’s jes’ a little different from most other little girls, but she’ll never know that if don’t nobody tell her.”
Henrietta stared at Emma Jean, perplexed.
“I knew God wouldn’t let me down. After raisin’ all these boys, He owed me a girl.”
Henrietta stood. “Don’t bring God into this, Emma Jean!”
“What chu mean? God’s the One Who made this possible. And I thank Him for it.”
“You know what?” Henrietta tossed her hands into the air. “Do what you want. But when you go befo’ God on Judgment Day—”
“I’ll meet you there!”
Emma Jean was out of her mind, Henrietta decided, so once again, she turned to leave.
“If you ever tell anybody about this, you’ll be sorry. I promise you that. You and that daughter of yours.”
Henrietta seethed with anger.
“Oh, don’t worry.” Emma Jean shrugged. “Don’t nobody know the truth but me. Well, me and the person who told me. But I ain’t gon’ tell. I understand why you did what you did. I really do. A woman does strange thangs sometimes.”
“It ain’t the same thing, Emma Jean, and you know it!”
“Oh, sure it is! Since you didn’t have no children of yo’ own, although you had done delivered everybody else’s, you thought you’d just take one.”
Henrietta swiveled and faced Emma Jean. “That ain’t what happened.”
“No? Sure it is. Louise died anyway, right? Or maybe I’m wrong. But I know enough to know you did somethin’ you didn’t have no business doin’.”
Henrietta slid to the floor and relinquished the fight. “Who told you, Emma Jean?”
“That’s some more o’ my business. It don’t make no difference noway. Just know that you ain’t the only one who know.”
“I was takin’ care o’ my sister. That’s all,” Henrietta said, dazed. “She never wanted no babies, but that preacher husband insisted. After she went into labor, it lasted four days, and she was so exhausted I thought she was gon’ fall out dead. But then the water broke and the baby came. In the middle o’ pushin’ with what little strength she had left, Louise stopped breathin’. I thought she was jes’ so tired she quit pushin’, but after the baby came, I realized somethin’ was wrong ’cause don’t care how tired a mother is, she wanna see her baby when it come out.
“I washed the baby girl and wrapped her real tight in one o’ Louise’s little blankets. Then I stood over Louise and patted her cheeks and arms and everything, but she didn’t respond. Her eyes was wide open like she had done seen a ghost, but her body didn’t have no life. I started cryin’ and askin’ God to bring her back ’cause she didn’t want no babies noway, but she just laid there and never did move. Preacher was in the kitchen, smokin’ his pipe real proud, and when I seen him and thought about what he had done done to my sister, I knew what to do. It was what Louise woulda wanted. She had done told him she couldn’t have no babies”—Henrietta clenched her teeth—“but, no, that wasn’t good enough for him. He needed somebody to carry his name, and it was her duty to provide it. That’s what a wife’s s’pose to do, he told her. I heard him say it. And since Louise didn’t want to be no bad wife, she at least had to try.”
Henrietta stared through the window at the woods in the distance. “One Sunday morning, right as we wuz walkin’ into church, Louise whispered and told me she was late. I asked her if she was pregnant, but she didn’t say nothin’. ’Bout halfway through service, she tiptoed out back, lookin’ real sick. I snuck out there and saw Louise throwin’ up all over the ground. I knowed she was pregnant.
“So when Louise was strugglin’ in childbirth, and Preacher Man was sittin’ up there with his chest stuck out like he had done done somethin’ grand, I knowed I had to fight for Louise ’cause she couldn’t fight for herself.”
“So you told Preacher Man the baby died?”
“I told him that both of them died. But I took the baby and raised it myself. What was he gon’ do with a little girl all by hisself? What a man know ’bout raisin’ a girl?”
Emma Jean nodded and mumbled, “Right, right. But what happened to your baby? You was pregnant, too. Y’all shoulda delivered ’round ’bout the same time, if I remember right.”
Henrietta ignored the question. “He didn’t deserve no baby, the way he had done treated my sister. And he didn’t want no girl noway. Louise didn’t mean nothin’ to him ’til she got pregnant, and then all he was concerned about was the baby. He had done already named it ’fo she had it. I knowed in my heart he was gon’ throw my sister and that child away if it was a girl, so when it came, I told him that Louise died and the baby girl died, too.”
“And nobody knows that Trish is really Louise’s daughter.” Emma Jean snickered.
Henrietta rose. “Trish is my daughter. I raised her.”
“You right about that! If a woman raise a girl, that’s shonuff her daughter. But how did you get the baby outta the house without Preacher Man knowin’?”
Henrietta’s head dropped as she remembered. “I bundled her up in a sheet and set her outside the window on the ground. She never mumbled a sound. When I left, I went ’round de house and put her in my medicine bag and took her home. I kept what part o’ my sister I could keep.”
“Oh! That’s why you disappeared for a while. You needed folks to believe you had gone off and delivered yo’ own child. I see! Wow. You good, girl, ’cause they believed it. I believed it, too. ’Til I learned better.”
Emma Jean’s assumptions weren’t correct—she was so very wrong!—but Henrietta refused to tell her more than she already knew.
“Trish deserved somebody who wuz gon’ love her.”
“And that somebody wuz you, right?”
“Yes, it was.”
“Of course it was. You knew what you could do and you knew what the child needed. A woman always knows.”
“She was my baby sister, Emma Jean. She was all I had.”
“I understand. That’s why yo’ secret is safe with me. Now, you gotta help me out, too.”
“What you doin’ ain’t nothin’ like what I did, and you know it!”
“What’s the difference?”
Henrietta couldn’t explain the difference, but she felt it in her heart. “It
just ain’t the same.”
“So what you did was right?”
“I ain’t sayin’ it was right. I’m just sayin’ I thought it was right.”
“Okay. And I think this is right.”
“No you don’t! Ain’t no way you think twistin up dat boy’s mind is right!”
Emma Jean smiled. “What’s right changes from one minute to the next. You ever noticed that?”
Henrietta wanted to disagree, but couldn’t.
“So yo’ job now is to keep yo’ mouth shut about my business. Like I did for you.”
Henrietta reached for the doorknob. “God gon’ make you pay for this, Emma Jean. You mark my word. He gon’ git you sooner or later.”
“Then He gon’ git all of us.”
Stumbling through the screen door, Henrietta leaned against the nearest porch pillar and covered her mouth as if she might vomit. She couldn’t crumble right there, she thought, not in the middle of Emma Jean’s territory. She’d never give her the satisfaction. No, she needed to get home, to be surrounded by things familiar, to examine herself and see how she’d let Emma Jean do this to her. Emma Jean Peace . . . of all people. Black, ugly, insignificant Emma Jean Peace. Who would’ve thought? And who had told her? Who else could’ve known? Henrietta hadn’t told anyone. And of course Emma Jean hadn’t been there, had she? No, she couldn’t’ve been. And since God wasn’t in the habit of telling other people’s business, Henrietta couldn’t figure out how Emma Jean had somehow become Swamp Creek’s omniscient one.
She cleared her throat and extracted from her bag a handkerchief with which she dabbed her sweating forehead. Yes, she needed to get home. Her feet felt like concrete cinder blocks, dragging beneath her as she staggered down the front steps and into the weeded lane. On an ordinary day, she was a relatively pretty woman, tall and slender as bamboo stalks. Her head seemed a bit large in proportion to her body, but her eyes, nose, and mouth sat in perfect proximity, causing people to nod subconsciously when they beheld her. Her shape was unimpressive though. Even when she tried to stick out her ass, it simply wouldn’t protrude, so she accepted that it would be flat forever. Her once-perky breasts, which never filled a C cup, were now shrunken and limp like deflated, miniature balloons. Standing five foot ten, she towered over her girlfriends and stared awkwardly at men. Her short natural, which she wore long before it became fashionable, sat atop her head like a black crescent moon. Yet, even with these foibles, everyone agreed that she was definitely prettier than her other two sisters. On an ordinary day.