The one most distasteful was the one he tried to avoid: Sewing Annie. But she dominated the funeral proceedings. She was central to the mourning. That ugly, old amulet! His silly wife had wailed in sympathy with the old woman. She’d said how she imagined Sewing Annie’s heart to be broken to lose her precious Gabriel.
He was happy for the chance to sneer at his wife’s idiocy. “ ’Tis clear you know nothing of these niggers. That old thing will never give over to grief. She will never be like your sister-in-law. She’ll never lie abed sniveling for something that can’t be changed! She will miss her Gabriel to lean on, but she’ll not pine for him.” By his account the true cost of war had been just this: gone the fecund loins and the happy women. All that was left were the silly and the weak and the worthless slaves free to do as they wished!
Annie was the first one who turned to leave the cemetery, staying only to witness the first dirt to be thrown. This privilege she gave to Gabriel’s own girl, Naomi, the oldest and strongest of them. The girl did rise up firmly and toss a hand of dirt for each of them: Mary, then Gabriel. At this signal Annie turned to walk away and the obedient girls followed. They wore pleated black sashes across their bodices as though they were widows. Annie regretted the exhaustion of her long-preserved black cloth, but she used the last virginal clod of it on these banners and the drapes for the funeral bunting.
Ah, and the funeral dress did live again! The rescued remains of Widow Campbell’s mourning dress were brought forth. Annie had been a bigger-sized woman once, too, when last she wore this. Now the garment hung from her.
Annie led them a parade—promenaded from the graveyard without turning her head to note what she passed. Daniel Joshua caught her elbow and tried to guide her, or keep her steady, but his ballast was not needed, for she was firm. She continued on the thoroughfare straight to the front shop window. She stopped and seemed to eye the door, then eye the window. She saw Ridley seated inside the shop and looked at him impertinently. He returned the look and stayed in his seat. She remained looking through the window at him defiantly—contrary to all accepted custom. She saw him sitting—low in the chair—in some measure collapsed. The girls stood behind her, well hidden from view, though they’d not been told to do so. Daniel Joshua was prudent and quiet and smaller in stature in his mourning dress and made himself invisible behind Annie. She turned her head as if considering entering through the front door—as if taking her own counsel on the issue. She watched Ridley’s face awhile through the picture glass, but gave up the menace. She turned about and walked to the back of the store. She walked into her precinct and took possession there.
In his state of drunk and resignation, Ridley was easily turned away from the things that Annie coveted—the belongings in the shop that were Gabriel’s. He put his hand to a store of linens and quilts and coverlets and his gesture stung her.
“No!” Annie hollered at him because she’d lost all care for caution. She marched about the room pointing and designating which things belonged to the Coatses. The master was so completely affronted that he could not speak. Nothing more important could be lost to her than Gabriel. He was all and all was gone. No more need for caution or care.
And the task was accomplished, for Ridley was put back on his heels and flinched at the vehemence in Annie’s voice.
“Don’t touch!” she screamed. It stopped him. For the first time some word or movement of hers had stopped this man. The words were simple, emphatic, but they were momentous in her mouth. For the first time a flame of true anger came forth and she braced for a quick, paralyzing reprimand. Annie put her hands on her hips and opened her chest to him, facing for a blow and wanting to take it full on and at once—to be struck and die on the spot.
Ridley’s face was dumb. His eyes were puzzled rather than flashing angry. He looked hard at her as if straining to be certain it was Annie who had spoken. She started to belch and snort with stamping her feet, and hot tears came out of her eyes, for it was with great strength that she held from striking him. Ridley’s look continued incredulous. He thought he saw froth at her lips. The sight caused him to waver—to pull back his hand. Annie bared her teeth at him and he noted chaff in her hair and that her skirt was soiled and frayed at the hem where it dragged the ground. A puzzling Annie! Just come from the funeral and disheveled. Ridley retreated from her. He left her to her piles of things touched by Gabriel.
“A good thing gone and wasted, your Gabriel,” Jonathan Ridley said from the door. “A good effort made and then no fruit. Go off, old woman,” he said to her, who was a girl under him the first time he put his full manliness in her mouth. Was he so old now that he did not remember this?
What had been between them came back into her mind in a spit. It was a bestial picture! Him a rigid dowel and rocking her cheeks and pounding her throat—him letting his slop down her throat and over her face.
“If you use your teeth, I will throttle you,” he had seethed, though his eyes were bright-flecked. These eyes had danced a tarantella in dark-blue passion as he had plunged himself down her throat.
Slumped and wallowing now, Ridley sneered again, “Take what you want and go off. A pity you pinned all of your hopes on this pup. Now you are old to start again. ’Twould be a kindness to give you the quilts and bed linens and such. ’Tis your boon, old gal,” he slung at her. His stomach rested on what used to be his heroic thighs, and Annie thought to kick him or lunge at him and cut his gut open. But she did not. A bone of caution broke through all else. The dog backed off and she, the bitch, crawled forward to take her advantage. She took the linen treasures.
“Waste no water on it. Swab yourself and think no more of it,” Knitting Annie had said to her. Because she had followed and watched, the old woman knew the young girl had come to no especial harm from Ridley. She had escaped the fate of another such one with sad little milk teeth that had collapsed and died with his knob in her mouth—choked to death in the midst of the master’s pleasure.
Annie credited her stand as her one act of defiance of Jonathan Ridley. But she’d defied him first when she went to Bell with love and permanence. This was the thing he’d robbed the women of—the slave women on his place—a hearth fire and their own children ringing it. Ridley split and splintered children in his speculations and caprice, even children he’d fathered. Annie stole that from him—her Gabriel. Bell was lost, but she’d kept Gabriel beside herself and trained him up some measure. This had been her first defiance.
Annie looked at Ridley’s lazy belly now and she remembered him otherwise. He’d been a strong and demanding stallion once. His dangling bits and pieces had some beauty in those youthful days. He was slyly admired by some of his concubines on the place. Vain of his attentions, they competed to brag on him and his endowments and his stamina.
He had done the other for Annie first, too. On one night when she was a girl—a night of big hilarity at the end of putting up a crop of beans—all hands were singing and dancing. She stood at the edge of the crowd of laughers and singers, for she was reticent. She had never been raucously gay and capricious. She was wedded to the solitary work at Knitting Annie’s side. She kept away from the circles of big fun. Ridley came behind her and grabbed and clamped on her upper arm. He drew her away from the others and smashed his fist into her chin and stunned her. When she dropped he hoisted her to his shoulder and took her into the loom house. There he lashed her to the spinning mule and had her upon the wheel.
“It’s done. It’s done now and done. Forget about it,” Knitting Annie had said again, and dismissed her from the tale. “Shut your mouth and forget it.”
It was all fruit that Annie took from the shop. She was barred from taking the looms; spinning wheels; spindles; knitting needles, excepting the ones sewn among the linens; and the sewing needles, excepting those secreted in the children’s clothes.
Annie nearly lost composure again when the sheriff came to seize the water barrels. Jonathan Ridley did not come to the battle over these casks,
for he knew that Annie wanted to take him on again—to froth at him angrily. Aches and pains and their remedy had made him soft and averse to quarreling. He conspired to rob her of the chance to see him vexed and thwarted over the barrels. So he delegated the duty to a sheriff. When the sheriff arrived, Annie only rolled her eyes and thumped one of the casks as it passed out of the yard.
She stood before the cheval glass on her last circuit of the shop. At first the oval threw back an image of Gabriel bright and proud in his soldier’s uniform. But her mind cleared and she saw her true self. Annie peered upon her self’s image and saw a disheveled woman standing amidst piled linens and suits preparing to pack all into trunks.
She would go with Pearl and Hannah to Philadelphia to live with Sis Ellen and her girl, Delia. Then all would go south together to teach. Naomi, determined to pull away from her grandmother, had claimed Ruth and planned to return to their studies at Hampton Institute. These two eldest girls were buoyed by Naomi’s dream of the both of them becoming model women of the race.
Here were all of these that Gabriel made!
The most pregnant time of worry was over, yet their real tribulation had come amidst a sliver of calm. The cruelest part being the shock of it.
Stand the Storm
Oh! stand the storm, it won’t be long.
We’ll anchor by and by.
Stand the storm, it won’t be long
We’ll anchor by and by.
My ship is on the ocean
We’ll anchor by and by.
My ship is on the ocean
We’ll anchor by and by.
She’s making for the kingdom
We’ll anchor by and by.
She’s making for the kingdom
We’ll anchor by and by.
My ship is on the ocean
We’ll anchor by and by.
My ship is on the ocean
We’ll anchor by and by.
I’ve a mother in the kingdom
We’ll anchor by and by.
I’ve a mother in the kingdom
We’ll anchor by and by.
My ship is on the ocean
We’ll anchor by and by.
My ship is on the ocean
We’ll anchor by and by.
IN MEMORIAM
EDNA HIGGINS PAYNE CLARKE
1916–2003
LUISE HIGGINS JETER
1918–2007
About the Author
BREENA CLARKE grew up in Washington, DC, and was educated at Webster College and Howard University. Her one previous novel, River, Cross My Heart, was a selection of Oprah’s Book Club. She lives in New Jersey.
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