by Laird Hunt
“Well now, Miss Zinnia, what brings you and Prosper to Indianapolis?” she said, taking a seat near us.
“I hardly know,” I said.
That evening before we slept, I told Prosper that I was worn out and would need to recuperate for a few days before continuing on our way. He said he understood and wondered what I thought about him taking a trip ahead up into Clinton County for us. He wouldn’t do any talking beyond asking directions, beyond finding our path, if it could be found. That way, when I was ready, we could head straight for Mr. Lucious Wilson’s door. It was something he could do and do easily for me, he said. He is a very good boy, is my Prosper. He is my dearest heart on this earth. There isn’t anyone else I would have let share my errand, and I told him so.
“What is your errand, Aunt Zinnia?”
I shrugged, and he shrugged and smiled, and I promised I would tell him—as I now am telling you, you and the one other who I now think needs to read this—soon enough.
While he was gone the next whole day and a half, I lay on the bed Lilly Fairbanks had let me have the use of and looked the past in its eye. It peered in at me through the window and down at me from the ceiling, and more than once it crawled right up and sat down hard on my chest. They say once you’ve had the shackle on you it never comes off. I know one of our flock on the South Side can’t look at his legs without seeing chains. I could feel it as I lay there—around my neck, around my ankle, around my arm. There is being whipped and then there is being whipped when you are tied to an oak tree in the noonday sun. Who can you tell that to? Who has the ears to hear it? I save it for my prayers. There are a good number of us now in the County Home. Our church takes food to them each month.
I never cry, but I cried a little as I lay on Lilly Fairbanks’s clean sheets with the past sitting on my chest, its black eyes peering down at me. I suppose I thought I would like to just leave it behind and go home to my own room in Prosper’s house in Chicago. Maybe Ginestra Lancaster was dead now. Maybe it was too late. I could return to my church and Prosper could go back to his work and the past could go back to mostly ignoring me. But there I was and there it was. I neither blinked nor turned away from it. Where could I have looked?
As we sat waiting for nightfall, Cleome calmed herself down out of a coughing fit then said it was her turn to tell me a story. She said she could not remember if Alcofibras or some other had first told it to her. Or, in truth, if anyone had told it to her at all. It was long ago, at the beginning of everything, and in those early days all the people were just skulls. They had no arms, no legs, no bodies, no skin, no eyes. They were skulls with little candle flames burning inside of them, and to get around they had to hop. They were always angry, these skulls, and they were jealous of the animals that walked the earth with their paws and green eyes and long teeth and handsome fur. Whenever they could they would kill an animal and steal its fur and take its eyes and walk through the world clothed in something besides bone and with something to see with that wasn’t candle flame.
One day the lord of fire, who ruled over that world, went out for a walk and saw a group of these skulls stalk and kill and skin a beautiful lion. He watched them fight over the skin and the eyes and the legs and the claws. They fought so hard that everything was torn to bits and all that was left was a bloody mess. He was saddened by this sight and walked on. A little farther along he saw a group of skulls stalk and kill and skin a beautiful deer. He watched them fight over the skin and the eyes and the legs and the hooves. He was saddened by this sight and shook his head and walked on. All of that day and all of that night he watched skulls stalk and kill and destroy, and what they didn’t destroy they paraded around in. Sometime during the middle of that night, he came upon a group of the skulls huddled quietly together in a pile, their little candle flames gently lighting the night. He was so struck by the difference between these skulls and the ones he had seen before that he asked them why they, too, weren’t fighting over a carcass, why they were sitting so quietly with their candles burning so bright. “Shhh,” they said to him, “There’s an elephant coming. We mean to have its tusks.”
The lord of fire was so disgusted by all these skulls that he sent out a cold wind to blow out their candles. When all the candles of the world had been blown out, he gathered up the skulls and built fine bodies around them and wrapped skin around the bodies and gave them all eyes and mouths and ears. “You are the people I meant,” he said, considering them as they rose and began to walk about. Then he went back to his palace to sleep. While he slept the people put on clothes and built themselves houses and ploughed the fields and harvested their grains. It was while they were working, and while the lord of fire was sleeping, dreaming his dreams of fire, that in some of their skulls, some of the candle flames came flickering back.
It took Cleome quite some time to tell me this story, and when she had finished her eyes were closed and she was so quiet I thought she must have dozed. It was closing in on dusk, and I knew we both needed the rest, so I wrapped my arms tight around her and closed my eyes too. It wasn’t more than a few seconds later though that she said, “I saw those candle flames burning in his eyes. That’s how he could see his way to us in the dark. You think there are some can see in the dark up there in the North too? Some to come heavy boot down the hallway toward you?”
After Prosper had returned and I had had my rest, we hired another wagon and rode up from Indianapolis to Clinton County so that I could return to Ginny Lancaster what all those years before she had given me. Lilly Fairbanks and her husband told us, as they had told Prosper some days before, that we should not go up to Clinton County, where they were as likely to put a rope to colored people as help them on their errands, no matter how light-skinned they might be, but I said that I must go, and Prosper said that if I was going he was going, and that at any rate he’d already been up there and had only been treated to a few ill-colored words. After we had ridden away I asked him if it was true that he hadn’t been too badly treated, and he said it was true, although that might have been because he was on a good horse and had tried to look like he was on somebody else’s business, which he was. He said he knew that some of them had seen what he was, there were always some, but no one had tried to stop him, no one had interfered.
It took us until the middle of the afternoon to reach the fine house of Lucious Wilson, deep in the green cornfields of Clinton County, Indiana, and this time, when we had reached our destination, I found I did not need to stay in the cart, but walked straight up to the front door and knocked. My knock was answered by a small white woman in her middle years, who smiled up at me. I had been prepared for her to shut the door in my face or to tell me that the servants’ entrance was around the side or to treat me or Prosper poorly in some other way, but she did not. In fact, she turned her smile over to Prosper, who had stayed with the wagon. She even gave him a wave.
“I am here to speak to Mr. Lucious Wilson,” I said. “I do beg your and his pardon for any trouble.”
“No trouble at all,” she said. “Will you come in?”
It was as fine a home on the inside as it had looked on the outside. The floors had been stained and swept clean and there were no cobwebs in the corners. Books lined the walls, and there was a long curl to the banister that led up the stairs. The woman offered me a comfortable chair in the parlor, but I stood in the entrance hall with my travel hat in my hand. While I waited, I looked at a piece of stitchwork made by someone who had known her business. The stitchwork had a silver frame and a border of flowers. In the middle of it, curled around a sleeping child, was the Lord’s Prayer.
“You will sit with me as we speak,” said Mr. Lucious Wilson when he came. There wasn’t any question to it, so I followed him into the parlor and sat. His daughter, for that was who the woman was, brought us cool blackberry tea, then went out the front door and carried a glass of it to Prosper and told him to take his cart over near the shed where the horses could stand out of the sun.
Lucious Wilson was every bit as old as I was and had some trouble with his breath. When he had caught it, he said, “I saw that fellow the other day and thought he was white, now I can see that he is not.”
“My nephew.”
“I expect I would have to see you stand together.”
“There is a resemblance. Some have said he takes a good deal after me.”
“You look like you’ve been on the road a spell.”
“Yes sir, I have.”
“And where have you come from?”
“Chicago.”
“Went there once. Long ago. Before the big buildings. What I wanted to ask you was where you come from.”
“Below the river,” I said. It was the simplest way to say it.
“Kentucky,” he said.
I nodded. We sat quietly. The house had many a modest creak. We breathed and listened to them. Or I listened to them. After a time, he spoke.
“You were down there with our Sue, weren’t you?”
“Sue, sir?”
“Ginny. Ginestra Lancaster. Down there with her.”
Lucious Wilson shuddered just the tiniest bit as he said this. I did not shudder, not even that small amount, nor did I answer, but thought of the stitchwork in the entrance hall. I had the Lord’s Prayer on my own wall in Prosper’s house in Bronzeville. We said the Lord’s Prayer every Sunday at my church. The Lord’s Prayer, I had always found, could never be used up. All I ever had to do was lay my eyes or mind on it to feel refreshed. With the Lord’s Prayer, I was stronger than it all.
“Isn’t that what this is? Isn’t that who you and that nephew of yours looks like a white boy are?” he said.
There wasn’t anything mean in his voice, only a harshness because of the breath that was leaving him, which was the same breath that was leaving me, that is leaving all of us on this earth.
“A place in Charlotte County. By a stream. The owner, Linus Lancaster, was a pig farmer. There were several of us to start. Then just a few. We called it Paradise,” I said.
“Paradise?”
“A greensward out of the old days. I have something to return to her, something she gave me down there. I got my use out of it and have never touched it since. There’s more on the coil. I should have left the whole and not just part of it with her in the long ago.”
He squinted his eyes, raised a long white eyebrow. I reached into my bag and pulled it out, held it up.
He cleared his throat, took a breath, nodded.
“You know that is her needlework you have been looking at over on the wall yonder,” he said.
“Miss Ginny’s?”
“Sue’s. She hasn’t been called Ginestra Lancaster in fifty years.”
“Sue’s,” I said.
“Would you say it with me?”
“Yes sir.”
So we bowed our heads and said the Lord’s great prayer together, then he stood and told me where she lived.
Cleome’s time came as we were crossing a ditch next to a barley field gone badly to seed. It flung her down onto the hard dirt and would not let her rise. They had told me there would be a woman who could help us at the crossing place, but it was still some miles away and I did not dare leave.
She smiled, did my younger sister Cleome, in between her screams. She said the rocks were still falling out of her pockets, that she felt lighter each minute, that everything now was soft and sweet. She pushed and she pushed. “Pray with me,” she said near the end. I put my face against hers and I did. “Sing to me,” she said. I gathered her into my arms and sang. There was a song she wanted from her girlhood. A song from our mother. “Yes,” she said as I sang it. She was as brave in that ditch as anything that ever walked through this world.
I left the child in the pool of blood it had made and went on to the crossing place. When I got there, they said they thought it was two of us. I said it was three, maybe more, maybe all of Kentucky. When I said this, I turned on my heel and ran all the way back to that ditch. The child lay untouched. I cut the cord, wrapped him up, then covered my sister with rocks. Then I realized what I had done and pulled every one of those rocks off of her and hid her in some brush. I sat there beside that brush a long time until the baby in my arms began to cry. At the crossing place they looked us up and down for a long time. “Where is the mother?” they asked me.
“I made us run,” I said. “I got us lost.”
The little house Lucious Wilson had given to Ginny Lancaster sat one mile away from his big one at the end of a stand of shagbark hickory and giant white oak. There was a fine field behind it and a few brave flowers poking up out of a black bed on the front lawn. This time I had Prosper get out of the wagon with me and come to the front door. I stood there looking at its fresh yellow paint for a long time without knocking then took the spool with its few last lengths of purple thread out of my bag and set it down on the porch. It didn’t look like much. Any kind of a wind would have blown it out into the field.
“All right,” I said.
“All right, Aunt Zinnia,” said Prosper.
We were almost to the cart when the door behind us opened.
I could not see her at first, there in the gloom.
All those years, all those miles.
“Please,” she said. “Come back. Come in.”
A woman gave me a blanket for the child, said he looked strong, asked me if I planned to keep him.
“Keep him?” I said. “He is my nephew. He is my own.”
They put oar to water at dusktime, took us out across the darkening waters. The child cried but a little as we went toward the lights on the far bank. I named him when we were halfway home.
THE STONECUTTER’S TALE
(BY THE RIVER, BY THE WORLD)
1930
but for every trifle are they set upon me
I HAVE TWO VOICES. One I use when I am at home and one I use when I am anywhere else. I sat down in the booth and used the second one. The waitress brought me a cup of coffee. When she set it down in front of me, I used the voice again and asked for a slice of pie.
“You want whipped cream with that, hon?” she asked me.
I shook my head.
She brought me a glass of ice water with the pie. There was a fan turning noisily on the ceiling. She had sweated the armpits out of her uniform. She looked tired. Too worn out for the job. Her uniform too snug.
“Come far?” she asked me.
“Illinois,” I said.
“All that way?”
I nodded.
“First time?”
“No,” I said. “I’ve been down here before. Came on a visit with my aunt. It has been awhile though.”
I had spent the morning on the Ohio in a rented boat I had barely been able to steer. Twice I had run aground on sandbars. I am too old to pole heavy boats off sandbars, but I had done it each time. Aunt Z told me, before she died, that if I ever went looking, I should keep an eye out for a lone, brown bluff on the far side of the water. I had seen it long after I had lost hope.
“There’s a house down by the river. A big white house with a green roof. How do I get there?” I asked the waitress when she came over with the coffeepot.
“Why do you want to go there?” the waitress said.
“It’s where I’m bound,” I said.
She looked at me, raised her eyebrow. I counted three fat droplets of sweat hanging from its curling tines. One of them dropped as I watched. She wiped the others away. I knew she couldn’t tell, hadn’t seen it yet, but it was in the room with us now, was ambling along the line of booths toward us, would come and sit down beside me, would curl my straight hair and darken my light skin. When I was young I had my smile and my fresh, unlined young face to send it away when I had to, but those days are long gone. Still, I had my traveling voice, my Main Street voice.
“This pie is delicious,” I said.
“I baked it myself,” she said.
“I might have guessed. I might just have guessed.”
I ate my pie, drank my coffee, got my directions. I was waving good-bye when I stepped out the front door and only narrowly avoided colliding with a man and a woman dressed in old horse blankets and wearing feathers in their hair. They nodded at me and I nodded back, then I watched them cross the street and disappear into a stand of trees beyond a filling station just like they had never been.
The house sat on a rise above the river. I left my tools in the car and walked down a narrow lane from the road. The front door opened before I had crossed the scraggly lawn. A woman in her later years stood before me. She had on a clean blue dress. She looked up at me through heavy spectacles.
“Can I do for you?” she said.
“I am a reporter for the Chicago Sun, and I am writing an article on places where slaves were given help. I understand this was one.”
I had spent time memorizing this speech during the drive down. I have never been a reporter for the Chicago Sun or for any other paper, but I did once, briefly, before I took up my trade, think of becoming one.
“I don’t know anything about that,” she said.
“I’m very sorry to hear it.”
“We don’t keep with coloreds here.”
“I understand.”
“Who told you about this place? They been talking in town?”
I shook my head. The house was in bad shape but didn’t look old enough to have been standing for better than seventy years. One or two of the outbuildings, possibly.
“Is there someone else I might speak to? Someone who might direct me?”
“I’m it,” she said. “Last one standing.”
“I know how that feels.”
“Do you?”