“Daddy wants to put Jerseybell down,” Mary said. “Daddy never gives up on anything, but he’s giving up on her.”
“She’s suffering.”
“Daddy said he’ll wait until morning.” Mary gave me a hopeful look. “She might be better by then. Don’t you think so too, Mama?”
“No. I don’t.”
I was sorry as soon as I said it. My mother never would have said such a thing to me. Next to Isaac, Mama was the most hopeful person I knew. At bedtime she believed in finding one good thing to say about that day. Each morning she always said to be on the lookout for a happy surprise. There was bound to be at least one in each day, maybe more.
Once, when I was a little girl still in braids, the preacher’s sermon hadn’t sat well with me. I couldn’t work out how Jesus fed the multitudes with a handful of bread and just a few little baskets of fish. I said so to Mama. “That’s too many people and not enough food.”
She gave me a stern look. “It was a miracle,” she said, “something you can’t explain, can’t even try. But all the same, Jesus worked a miracle, He surely did. There were witnesses. And you know what that means, don’t you?”
I didn’t.
“Means honest folks have to work hard and keep their eyes forward. When a miracle slips up on them, that way they’re ready to grab hold.” Mama lifted her chin. “I should know. I was born a slave, but I’m not one now.”
I studied Jerseybell. I didn’t look for a miracle tonight.
“Mama?”
“What, honey?”
“You think Jerseybell knows how bad off she is?”
“I expect so.”
“Think if she does die, not that I think she will, but if she does, think she’ll go to heaven? She’s been awfully good. Especially for a cow.”
I thought about that, trying to remember what the Bible said about animals and heaven, but nothing came to mind. I recalled, though, a passage, or maybe it was a poem, about all animals great and small. I wasn’t sure if it was from the Bible, and I didn’t want to say the wrong thing about heaven. Then I thought of Johnny and my Isaac Two and Baby Henry.
I said, “I expect there’s folks up there wanting butter on their bread and cream in their coffee. There’s babies in heaven without their mamas, and they’d be needing their milk. It wouldn’t be much of a heaven, seems to me, without cows.”
“There’s big herds of cattle in heaven,” Mary said. “That’s what I think. And green pastures ’cause it rains every day but only at night.” She slapped the back of her neck, then looked at her fingers. There was a smear of blood from a mosquito. She said, “When we’re real sick, you sing to us.”
I agreed.
“You sing and rock us and we get better.”
Eight years ago I sang lullabies to Baby Henry as I held him to my bosom. But that hadn’t kept him from passing out of this world not long after his birth.
“Mama, singing would help Jerseybell.”
“Honey.”
“Could you sing to her? I know it’d make her feel better.”
“I’m not going to sing to a cow.”
“But it’s Jerseybell.”
Jerseybell was Mary’s friend. There were a handful of girls at school, and Louise Johnston was Mary’s good friend there. But school was only for five months, and if the winter was hard, weeks at a time were missed. There were children scattered all over the Badlands, but even if they were just two or three miles apart, children old enough to walk that far had chores at home that couldn’t be missed.
I knew what it was like to have friends. A handful of children lived on the sugarcane plantation in Louisiana, and in Chicago there were girls my age all up and down the street. We used to have good times. If we weren’t skipping rope or playing hopscotch, we were giggling over the least little thing. No wonder Mary had had fun with Franklin, Mrs. Fills the Pipe’s nephew. It’d been months since she had been with children other than her brother and sisters.
I said, “You got a particular song in mind for Jerseybell?”
“‘ Michael Row the Boat Ashore.’
I blinked back my surprise. “All right then.”
Mary’s eyes smiled. She pulled down her bandanna, batted away some flies, and cleared her throat. When she sang, her voice was just above a whisper. I followed along, rusty and a little off-key.
My brothers and sisters are all aboard, Hallelu . . . jah.
My brothers and sisters are all aboard, Hallelu . . . jah.
Michael row the boat ashore, Hallelu . . . jah!
It had been a long spell since I’d last heard singing. I used to sing when I did my housework, but not that summer. Isaac used to whistle tunes; ragtime was his favorite. Once he spent a week practicing nothing but “Maple Leaf Rag” until he got it to suit him. “My Castle on the Nile” and “Congo Love Song” were two of my favorites, and when I told him that once, he whistled those songs just to please me. During our first summer in the Badlands, Isaac whistled while we built our barn and dugout. When pointy shoots of winter wheat broke the soil that first spring, Isaac whistled. When in April I told him he was going to be a father by early fall, he whistled as he sanded and polished the old cradle he had found at the Interior store. Then the babies came, one after another, and Isaac sent them to sleep each night with sweet whistled lullabies.
Michael row the boat ashore, Hallelu . . . jah!
Isaac didn’t whistle tunes anymore, and Johnny didn’t play the piano. My throat choked, taking my breath. I shook as an ache from deep within gripped my heart.
“Mama! What’s wrong? You sick?”
I couldn’t hold back the tears.
“I’ll go get Daddy.”
I shook my head no.
“Please, Mama. We’ll make Jerseybell better. Sing. That makes everything better. Sing with me.”
The river is deep and the river is wide, Hallelu . . . jah.
Milk and honey on the other side, Hallelu . . . jah.
Michael row the boat ashore, Hallelu . . . jah!
Mary’s voice filled the barn. The music was so tender, and in my mind I saw the words drift out the barn door and float over the Badlands like a fine linen bedsheet, set loose and free. I began to say the words.
Jordan’s river is chilly and cold, Hallelu . . . jah.
Chills the body but not the soul, Hallelu . . . jah.
My tears easing up, we sang for Jerseybell. We sang for each other, and we sang for ourselves, the music comforting like a visit with an old friend. We sang the songs from my childhood when going to church was handy.
What a friend we have in Jesus,
all our sins and griefs to bear.
What a privilege to carry
everything to God in prayer.
Other songs came from the sugarcane fields of Louisiana.
I looked over Jordan, what did I see
Comin’ for to carry me home?
A band of angels comin’ after me
Comin’ for to carry me home.
I was the wife of a rancher and I had my own house, a wood house. But I wanted to leave. I was looking over Jordan. I wanted to go home, where everything was bound to be better. My people sang about it. Maybe they wanted to go back across the ocean to where they had come from. Or maybe they looked to heaven. Same thing, I thought, once homesickness takes root. A person wanted to be anywhere but where she was.
Swing low, sweet chariot,
Comin’ for to carry me home.
Mary and I rested our voices while Jerseybell’s breath came hard and raspy. Somewhere in the barn, crickets made their own kind of music and field mice rustled in the scattered straw.
“Mama, these songs are sad.”
“Well. They’re slave songs mostly. Nothing to be happy about when you’re a slave.”
“Oh.”
“But Mary, lots of music’s fun; lots of it cheers you up. You know that from school.”
“Miss Elliott doesn’t like us being overly happy.”
“And she’s right about that. School’s hard work. But there’s lots of music that perks you right up.”
“Like which ones?”
“I don’t know, honey. Lots of them.” I looked over toward the open doorway. It was dark, long past bedtime. Getting up in the morning would be harder than usual. But there was something about the eager look on Mary’s face that made me want to please her. I blew out some air. “All right,” I said. “One more, this time a toe-tapping song.”
Mary smiled.
“Let’s see if I can remember some of the dance tunes that were popular.”
“Dance tunes? You danced?”
“Of course I danced. Back when I was a girl. I never was all that good—it was Johnny what could dance. All the women, even the old married ones, waited in line for him. Course, he didn’t do all that much dancing; he was mostly at the piano.”
“Oh.” Mary ducked her head. “Mama?” she said, not looking at me.
“What?”
“Daddy let me read the letter. He said I was old enough to know.”
Isaac should’ve told me. And then I thought that he did this so Mary would think bad of big cities. He wanted her scared of places like East St. Louis. And Chicago.
Mary said, “Why’d they hurt him that way?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Some people carry hate, looks like. They don’t need a reason to hurt somebody; they see their chance and they take it.”
“I don’t like it.”
“I know it.”
All at once, I recalled what Mrs. Fills the Pipe had said about soldiers—buffalo soldiers—and what they had done to her and her people. I thought about the Indian squaw with the little boy and how Isaac had run them off. I took a ragged breath. “You’ve got Uncle Johnny’s eyelashes,” I said to Mary. “His eyes, too.”
“I do?”
“That’s right, and you can count your lucky stars.”
Mary felt her eyelashes with her fingertips and then batted her eyes a few times. I smiled to myself. She said, “Was Uncle Johnny handsome?”
“Well,” I said, doing my best to remember the particulars of his face. It had been fourteen years. “I wouldn’t say handsome, not exactly, not like your daddy. His nose was squashed and pushed over to one side from the time he broke it falling out of a tree. That was in Louisiana—we didn’t have trees in Chicago. His nose being that way set his looks off a little.
“Johnny was dark, dark as you and me, and when he was a boy, he was skinny like he was hungry, but he wasn’t—we most always had enough. He was slow to fill out. But his eyes were something—deep and dark and fringed with those long lashes. I always envied him his lashes. He was smart too. He could do numbers in his head without hardly thinking. When he was a boy, he wanted to be a teacher, said he’d make his students do figures all day long. But then music took ahold of him and that was all he wanted to do, play and write music.”
“And Uncle Johnny played dance songs?”
“For a while he played on Sundays at church, but Preacher Bisbee made him quit, said his playing had too many flourishes, said he turned hymns into saloon music. Shamed Mama something awful.”
“What were the dances like?”
“They were a good time, something to look forward to. We had what we called the Second Street Social Club. Most everybody in the neighborhood belonged, and a few times a year we had dances at the grammar school. We got all dressed up in our Sunday best and the women served refreshments—punch and cake and such things. I liked the waltzes; it was pretty music. Most everybody could do a waltz, even if you weren’t very good. Mr. Brandon—he lived next door—he played the fiddle, except he called it a violin. If he wasn’t clear-headed enough, Johnny played the piano. But if Johnny got a chance to dance, he loved doing the cakewalk.”
“What’s that?”
“It was the rage; even white people danced it. Johnny was such a show-off, strutting his partners around, doing that high-stepping dance.” I pictured that for a moment and wondered if folks were still dancing it.
“But for me,” I said, “my favorite music of all was the blues. Maybe because of Mr. Brandon. He mostly played that fiddle of his at the dances, but once in awhile he’d get out his cornet and play the blues. I could sit forever and listen to his cornet.” Seeing Mary’s raised eyebrows, I said, “That’s a kind of horn, and with the right man handling it, it brought out a hurt you didn’t even know was there.”
“Does he still live by Grandma?”
“Grandma doesn’t live in the same place anymore.” I paused. “Don’t know what’s happened to Mr. Brandon. Hard to believe he’d still be living in that old falling-down shack. Every snow-storm that blew through, Mama just knew it’d come down on top of him, bury him alive. It was a disgrace how his landlord didn’t keep it up. But maybe that was Mr. Brandon’s doing. He used all his money for whiskey. Least that’s what Dad always said. There was talk that when he was a young man he went off to Europe somewhere to learn music and that he even played in an orchestra there. I don’t see how; he was a fair-skinned man, but he couldn’t pass—anybody could see he was a Negro. But he’s the one what taught Johnny the piano. He had an old upright in that rickety house of his, and Johnny took lessons every Saturday morning. Evenings Johnny studied his sheet music at the kitchen table, reading the notes, his fingers running up and down the table just like he was playing.”
“But what about you? Didn’t you get lessons?”
“I tried a few times, but I didn’t have it in me. All I really wanted to do was sit and listen. That’s what I did when Johnny was taking his lessons. I sat on the floor next to the piano. I’d put my hand on the back of it where it stuck out from the wall. Johnny’d play and I’d feel the music, listening all at the same time.” I smiled. “Mr. Brandon’s floor slanted good, I’ll tell you what. One end of the piano leaned against the wall. Johnny used to joke that he couldn’t play a piano unless it ran downhill. Mama wouldn’t let us go to Mr. Brandon’s if there was a storm; she was that afraid of his roof.”
I rested the back of my head against the railing post, hearing once again the piano chords and the keyboard exercises. “Classical music, that’s what Mr. Brandon made Johnny learn. People like Schumann and Chopin. Mr. Brandon talked about those people like he had grown up with them.”
“Gosh.”
“Isn’t it something that I’ve remembered those names? Germans, I think, or maybe they’re Frenchmen.”
“They’re the ones that are fighting now,” Mary said. “Why’re they doing that?”
“I don’t know, honey. They’d be better off playing the piano.” That’d quit all the killing, I thought. That’d keep Al McKee, our neighbor, from thinking he had to go over there and straighten them out.
“Anyway,” I said, “on summer nights in Chicago, when it was too hot to sleep, Mr. Brandon, a little tipsy, would come out on his front stoop and play that fiddle of his. His music pulled us to him; we couldn’t help ourselves no matter how tired we were. We’d get out of our sticky, hot beds, make ourselves decent, and go outside. That man made us forget who we were.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that we’d forget what we’d done that day and what was waiting for us the next. We’d forget about the slaughterhouses or about cooking and cleaning up after other people. Mr. Brandon lifted our spirits. He got our feet tapping and our hearts pounding until someone would let out a whoop, grab themselves a girl, spin her around, and before you knew it, we had ourselves a dance. A dance on a city dirt road. Trains came through; we couldn’t hear a note, but we just kept on dancing, keeping time in our heads until the trains were gone and the music came back.”
“And you danced?”
“My, yes.”
“But just with Daddy?”
“Oh no, honey, this was before I even knew your daddy.”
“Oh,” Mary said, sounding shocked. Then her voice took a lonesome turn. “Wish I could’ve seen y
ou dancing.”
“Those were good times.”
Mary swatted at Jerseybell’s nose. A knot of flies flew out.
A low feeling came over me. A young girl like Mary should know something about dancing. She should have socials and dances to go to, and she should know what it was like to have friends what lived a door or two down the street. But with Isaac working the gold mine in Lead, I’d need Mary at home. She wouldn’t be going to school.
I was a few months short of fourteen when I quit school. I did it so Johnny could keep going. Mama had backed me on this, and Dad hadn’t fussed all that much. He didn’t see that a girl needed much schooling, and even if he never said it, Dad was proud that Johnny was smart. He might have said that he wanted Johnny in the slaughterhouse, but Dad paid for piano lessons and he let Johnny earn a high-school diploma.
Mary was smart enough to be a teacher. Or a nurse like Mrs. Fills the Pipe’s daughter. Isaac’s father had started a nursing school for Negroes. That was where Mary should go. It was her grandfather’s school; it was where Mary belonged. I pictured her in a starched white uniform. I imagined sick people turning to Mary as she walked through a hospital ward. They’d call her Nurse DuPree.
It wasn’t right that she’d have to quit school this winter. I tapped my foot. It was wrong what Isaac was doing to us, leaving for the winter. I tapped harder, willing Mr. Brandon’s fiddle music to find its way to me in a barn buried in the heart of the Badlands.
“What’re you doing, Mama?”
“Listening.”
“To what?”
“Fiddle music.” I cocked my head and put my hand behind my ear. “Hear?”
Puzzled, Mary drew her eyebrows together. I sang.
Get out the way for old Dan Tucker
He’s too late to get his supper.
She grinned, her fingers keeping time on Jerseybell’s flank.
Supper’s over, dishes washed,
Nothin’ left but a piece of squash.
“Sing it again, Mama. Please?”
“Only if you’ll dance.”
The Personal History of Rachel DuPree Page 18