The Amethyst Heart

by Penelope J. Stokes

  How could he explain this to Pearl? Would she think that she, and their son, and their life together weren’t enough for him? And how could he tell her that he had a feeling he wasn’t supposed to leave when he could not give her—or himself, for that matter—a single reason to stay?

  Pearl stroked little Abraham’s downy head and looked beyond him to Silas. Something was wrong; she could tell as certainly as if he had said it out loud. And she suspected she might know what it was: They would not be leaving Mississippi.

  In many ways, she was torn by the idea of staying. On the one hand, she wanted her son to be raised in a place where equality and acceptance were a way of life. But where was that place? Were the slaves who had fled north any better off? She had read a newspaper or two that told stories of the horrible overcrowding in the cities, the living conditions that were often no better—and sometimes worse—than slave quarters. Freed slaves who expected a better life must be terribly disappointed. They had no skills and could do only the most menial jobs. Thousands were unemployed and near starvation. They might be liberated, but they were still on the lowest rung of society’s ladder. What kind of equality was that?

  On the other hand, if she and Silas stayed here, what purpose would their lives serve? What influences would shape the kind of man little Abraham would become? What would happen if—?

  She stopped suddenly and smiled inwardly at her own foolishness. No matter what the logic of the situation, there was only one real question to be considered:

  What was God calling them to do?

  They had been ready to go, ready to risk everything. But in the final moments their path had been blocked by an unforeseen event—the untimely arrival of this baby she held in her arms.

  Was the Lord trying to tell them something? And if so, what?

  She looked up into her husband’s face and saw a wistful, faraway expression. She had known him long enough and loved him well enough to know what it meant. God was speaking to him, too.

  When Pearl spoke, Silas had a hard time drawing himself out of his reverie to hear her words. “I’m sorry. What did you say?”

  “I said, is it possible we’re not supposed to leave?”

  He shook his head to clear it. “Not leave? But I thought you wanted to go as soon as—”

  “I did,” she interrupted. “Or at least I thought I did.”

  His heart did a little flip. “Go on.”

  She smiled. “You need a purpose, a mission in life. We both do. And I’m not sure quite how I know this, but I have a feeling that our purpose is here, not somewhere up north.”

  As soon as she had said the words, a sense of relief rushed over Silas like an enormous wave. For a minute he couldn’t catch his breath. And in that moment he became fully aware of the truth. He had no idea why, or how, or what form it would take, but he knew that for some reason he couldn’t fathom, he and his wife and child were to stay put. The purpose would be revealed in time.

  He grinned at Pearl and reached out to take little Abe’s flailing fist. “I love you,” he whispered.

  “And I love you,” she responded. “I guess we’ll find out eventually what this is all about.”

  “I guess so. But for now, it’s sufficient to know what we’re not supposed to do. The rest will fall in place soon enough.”

  “Pearl! Come quick!”

  Pearl took the pan of potatoes off the stove, scooped up Abe, and followed Silas’s voice to the front porch. The sun was setting, and in the distance she could see the silhouettes of three figures on the road, backlit by the colors of dusk.

  “Who does that look like?” Silas asked.

  Pearl squinted. “It’s hard to make out in this light. A man—a big man. A girl, maybe, or a small woman. A little child.” Her eyes widened and she clutched Abe closer to her breast. “It can’t be!”

  “I think it is. Stay here.” Silas took off running down the road, and Pearl watched as he stopped, then ran ahead a little farther, enveloped the male figure in a hug, and leaned down to kiss the girl on the cheek. He turned back and waved in her direction, and tears formed a lump in Pearl’s throat.

  Booker, Celie, and Enoch had come home.

  Pearl hurried to set three more plates at the table, and they all sat down in the dining room. Dinner was simple—cornbread, black-eyed peas, and potatoes—but there was enough to go around, and everybody seemed to be enjoying it.

  Booker shook his head. “Lawd, you jus’ wouldn’t believe it. Two, three families in a house no bigger than our old cabin. Chinks in the walls you could put a hand through. I reckon we do better down here, where we belong.”

  “’Sides,” Celie murmured, rocking little Abe against her bosom, “we jus’ couldn’t stand not seein’ what become of this child.”

  “Oh,” Booker said suddenly. “I near forgot.” He reached into his pocket. “Reckon I oughta return this to you.”

  He pulled out the heart-shaped brooch, and the deep color of the amethyst captured the light and sent back rays of warm purple.

  Pearl’s breath caught in her throat, and her pulse quickened. “I thought for sure you had sold it!”

  “Wouldn’t rightly do that unless I had to,” he responded quietly. He pushed the brooch in her direction. “It belongs with you, Miss Pearl. With you and Massah Doctor and young Abraham.”

  “There was one time we thought a bit about selling it,” Celie added, “but we got by all right. I told Booker that unless it was a matter of life or death, you had to have your heart back.”

  Pearl put a hand on Celie’s arm and felt a warm rush of love rise up within her. She had no idea what Booker would do to earn a living or how they would all get by, but their family—at least part of it—was together again.

  “With it or without it,” she murmured, “I do have my heart back.”

  And for now, that was enough.

  17

  The Birth of Hope

  Summer 1899

  Silas leaned back in the rocking chair and shaded his eyes. Heat shimmered from the cotton rows, and on the edge of the nearest field a muscular, well-built young man leaned over to inspect the crop. Enoch had grown into a handsome, intelligent, responsible adult. He looked up, saw Silas, smiled, and waved. When Silas waved back, his hand jerked unsteadily, a palsied tremor.

  He dropped his hands into his lap and stared at them. Spotted, ancient hands that shook when they moved. When had he grown so frail? He hadn’t remembered the process at all. It was as if one day he awoke to find himself in the body of an old, old man.

  It was the cancer. He knew it, although he didn’t want to admit it. He might hold out a year, but not much more than that. His time was coming, and he wasn’t ready.

  Oh, he had accomplished plenty with his life. He had built a wonderful home, lived for years basking in the love of a good woman, and done what the Good Lord placed in his hands to do. He had brought a number of folks into the world, and helped others to go out gently. He had given more than forty years in the service of healing—fulfilling years, happy years. He had fought the good fight, had run his race well. He just hadn’t anticipated having regrets when he got to the end.

  Correction. One regret.

  His son, Abraham.

  Silas closed his eyes and heaved a weary sigh.

  He must have dozed. When he opened his eyes, he saw Enoch’s smiling brown face gazing down at him. “Thought I’d come get a cold drink,” he said. “It’s pretty hot out there.”

  “Sit down.” Silas motioned to a chair and called over his shoulder, “Pearl, could you bring us some lemonade?”

  In a moment the screen door opened and Pearl came out bearing a tray with a pitcher and several glasses. She was thin and stooped, and walked with a little shuffle, but to Silas she was still the most beautiful woman on the face of the earth. A prize. A gift. His Pearl.

  His eyes wandered to Enoch, and he remembered that night, so long ago, when Booker had lifted his infant son to the heavens and named him “
The One Who Walks with God.” If only Booker had lived long enough to see how his boy had turned out. He would have been proud. Enoch Warren carried himself with dignity and faith, a man of conviction, a free man who bowed his head to no one but the Almighty.

  Years before, shortly after Booker and Celie returned to Rivermont, Silas had managed to purchase part of the old plantation acreage, and Booker had run the place. They had hired freed slaves to work the land, raising cotton and corn and soybeans. Under Booker’s direction, the farm had quickly become a paying proposition, and now Celie lived in a fine house of her own just beyond what used to be the slave quarters. When Booker died, Enoch returned from the Negro college up north with an agricultural degree and took over. Bright and ambitious and a genius when it came to numbers, the young man had expanded their holdings and made quite a name for himself.

  And Abe was green with jealousy.

  “You treat him better than you do me,” Silas’s son had accused him more than once. “Sometimes I think you wish he was your son instead.”

  The criticism, Silas had to admit, had some basis in truth. The two families had been together so long that Silas did consider Enoch as one of his own. But there was more to it than that—much more. The truth was, Abraham had turned out to be a bitter disappointment. Self-absorbed and irresponsible, Silas’s only son would have run the place into the ground inside a year had he been given the chance. Any money he made, he spent—frivolously, without regard to the future. Abe seemed to think that the world owed him a living, and he was more than content to live off the proceeds of other people’s labors. He was the Prodigal, while Enoch was the faithful Elder Brother.

  It had caused him great pain to do so, but Silas had determined long ago to let Abe live with the consequences of his actions. Maybe the boy would learn a lesson or two in the process; maybe seeing Enoch’s success would motivate him to be more responsible.

  It hadn’t worked. Abraham simply grew more arrogant, more convinced that he never got what he deserved. He expected the fatted calf every day of his life, without once considering that for the Prodigal, repentance came before restoration.

  Silas couldn’t for the life of him figure out where Abe came by his haughtiness, his contempt for hard work and diligence, his presumption that the world should be handed to him on a silver platter. Certainly he and Pearl held different values, values they had tried to teach their son and live out before him. But almost from the beginning, the boy had rejected their principles of living. He wanted a life of ease and wealth rather than hard-earned respect and spiritual fulfillment.

  And ironically, it seemed as if he was finally about to get it.

  After years of sowing his wild oats as a handsome and available bachelor, Abe had finally set his sights on one girl—a young woman for whom Silas could feel nothing but disdain. A girl named Patricia—Pansy, they called her—the spoiled, wealthy daughter of Bick Littleton. Bick ran a huge spread called Nine Willows, on the far north end of the county, a plantation that had changed little since the end of the war. To be sure, Bick’s Negroes were no longer slaves, but they might as well have been. He kept them on the land as sharecroppers, paying them so small a percentage that all of them were perpetually in debt for the most basic necessities of life. Bick was still a master, climbing to ever-increasing wealth on the backs of his workers.

  Silas despised Bick’s way of life, but to be fair, he couldn’t hold Pansy responsible for what her father did. He could only blame Pansy for her own faults—and she had many. She was one of those brainless, sickly sweet Southern belles with a high, tittering laugh and such a penchant for fainting that she carried smelling salts wherever she went. Pansy fawned on Abe as if he were divine, and of course Abe, in Pearl’s words, “ate it up with a spoon.” They were made for each other, but Silas suspected it wasn’t exactly a match conceived in heaven.

  “Papa Silas, are you listening?”

  Silas smiled slightly and returned his attention to Enoch. At least he had one son who made him proud, even though it wasn’t the child of his own body.

  “I got the figures worked out,” Enoch went on. “With the kind of crop we’ve got this summer, we’ll be able to put in two more forty-acre sections of cotton next year. But we’ll need extra help. I got an idea, though it’ll cost us a little money up front.”

  Silas waved a hand. “Go on.”

  “I been talking to some of the sharecroppers over to Nine Willows. They want to come work for us, but they’re deep in debt to Littleton and figure they’ll never get above water. They know when we have a good year, we share profits with the fieldworkers. I’ve been thinking that maybe we pay off their debts to Littleton, and then give them a chance to earn it back—not from their wages, ’cause they’ll need that to live, but from any bonuses that might be coming their way. That way they get out of debt, start working for themselves, and get to keep their dignity—and we get the help we need.”

  Silas nodded and slanted a glance at Pearl, who was beaming. “It’s just the kind of plan Pearl and I might have come up with a few years ago,” he said. “Let’s do it.”

  “I thought you’d go for it.” Enoch nodded, then frowned. “But there’s one hitch.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Mister Bick isn’t going to be too happy about it. We’ll be taking some of his best hands.”

  “It’s a free country,” Silas said. “Finally.”

  Enoch grinned and stood up with his clipboard under one arm. “I’ll get on over there, then, and take care of it. You think this might put a damper on the little romance Abe’s got going with Pansy?”

  Silas rocked back in his chair and lifted his glass of lemonade in a shaky salute. “We can always hope, son. We can always hope.”

  For the first time in weeks, Abe appeared at the dinner table and sat in silence as Pearl and Silas carried on a guarded conversation about the weather, the crop, and the prospects for the future. Neither mentioned Enoch’s name or his plan to buy out some of Bick Littleton’s best field-workers, but it probably wouldn’t have registered anyway. Their son obviously had something on his mind—something that had nothing to do with the current cotton and soybean markets.

  Finally, over Pearl’s fresh peach turnovers, he broke the suspense. “I need to talk to you about something.”

  Silas put down his fork and rested his hand over Pearl’s. This sounded important, and a serious conversation coming from their son always made Silas nervous. What kind of trouble was the boy in this time? Gambling? A girl?

  They didn’t have long to wait.

  “It’s about Pansy,” Abraham said with a sigh.

  “Are things not going well between the two of you?” Pearl asked. Silas thought he heard a tiny glimmer of hopefulness in her voice.

  “Actually, they’re going very well. Sorry to disappoint you.”

  Silas bristled. “Son, there’s no cause to talk to your mother in that tone of voice.”

  “I know how she feels about Pansy,” Abe countered. “I know how you both feel. But it doesn’t matter. We’re going to be married, and that’s all there is to it.”

  Silas watched as Pearl tried to put on an expression appropriate for a doting mother who has just received the news that her son is betrothed. “Well, congratulations, Abraham,” she managed at last. “Of course we’re happy for you.”

  “Happy that I’m finally settling down?” he muttered. “Or happy that I’ll be out from underfoot? We will, as you might expect, be living at Nine Willows—Bick is planning to build a house for us.” He looked around the dining room. “A much finer house than this, although I don’t suppose that would impress the two of you.”

  Silas narrowed his eyes. “What would impress me,” he responded, “is showing a little respect for your parents. We’ve worked hard to bring you up right, and even though you obviously do not share our values, we try to be supportive.”

  “Your values? You mean giving everything away—mostly to those nigras—withou
t a thought to leaving anything behind as an inheritance?”

  Ah, Silas thought. The inheritance again. Ever since he found out about his father’s cancer, Abraham had been pressing them about the future, asking repeatedly if all their papers were in order. As their only son, he clearly expected to inherit all the land his father owned. He didn’t know—and wouldn’t, until the time came—that the farming business and most of the property, except for the house itself and the oak grove, had already been transferred to Enoch’s name. It was only fair. Enoch had worked hard for it and deserved it. Abe would only squander it. But now was not the time for that issue to be raised.

  “Please,” Pearl interjected, “can’t we have a civil discussion without arguing?”

  Abe sighed. “All right. Let’s call a truce.”

  Pearl leaned forward. “Have you set a date? Next spring, perhaps? Nine Willows would be lovely in April, with everything blooming—”

  “Right away,” Abe interrupted. “Next Saturday.”

  Pearl nearly choked on her turnover. “So soon? Son, we can’t get a wedding together in that short a time. Surely Pansy’s mother would agree. Does she know about this?”

  Abe nodded. “She does. So does Bick.”

  “But if you waited until spring, the house Mr. Littleton is building might be ready—”

  “We’ll live in the big house temporarily. It’s all settled, Mother.”

  Silas watched the play of emotions that ran across his son’s countenance. He was getting what he wanted—a wealthy wife, marriage into a prominent family, a father-in-law who would support him. But he didn’t seem happy about it. He seemed—nervous, somehow. Fidgety. He was hiding something, and Silas was pretty sure he knew what it was.

  “When’s the baby due?” he asked softly.

  Pearl squeezed his fingers until they turned white. “Silas! How could you even suggest such a thing?”