“Fine then. Miss Stokes say she’ll take you—I guess that means you going.”
Ivoe knew from Sunday school that pride was not a virtue, so she smiled down at her second pair of new shoes in a year. They were white and shiny smooth with one strap over the ankle and a sparkling silver buckle.
Finally, her own news worthy of a headline: “Letter to President Wins Girl Austin Trip!”
Slivers of light through the heat-soaked outhouse shone on the smeared purple clot. Ivoe hissed through clenched teeth at confirmation of the ache drawing her abdomen into fitful spasms. She bundled her skirt in one hand to clean the mess. Usually a morning like this found her in the grove—a quilt pallet under a tree, the sun dappling shadows on the pages of a good book or the newspaper. But the day ahead and its ruckus left no time for the novel that had vexed her all week.
At seventeen, she was well practiced at drawing out a book long after its last page. Conversations with the characters in her head helped her hammer out opinions on why the heroine had chosen the wrong lover, or the hero deserved his victory. None of that was possible with The Clansman, whose pages shone a light on a dark memory lurking in the back of her mind for years. She remembered how heavy the house felt back when Mister James and Junior were found dead—how quiet Papa and Momma had been and especially Timbo, who all of a sudden turned manly, coming and going at odd but regular hours. Miss Stokes had given the agonizing read as a graduation present, so she had pressed on with a troubled mind and particular longing to know Reverend Thomas Dixon Jr.—to shake him till his eyes popped from his head. For writing such degrading drivel, he deserved worse. Dixon’s Negro characters were shiftless and depraved, when anyone could see that her people had been holding up the sky while white folks walked through the world for a very long time.
Her veil had been lifted. Papa and Momma deserved a prize for shrouding the shameful truth of their lives. Borrowed copies of the Colored American and the teacher’s recent gift helped Ivoe to see what had been hidden during childhood. Negro life was the worst. Certainly no cause for celebration. She slammed the outhouse door and frowned at the day ahead.
Juneteenth was the high point of summer in Little Tunis—plenty of jugging and jawing about slavery, freedom, and how far they had come. A bunch of hollering up a creek and whistling down a well, if you asked her. The view from their porch was enough to put doubt in anybody’s heart. Freedom didn’t look any better than this? Up the road in Starkville, now that was another story. The county seat of Burleson County was now home to the largest cotton gin in East Texas. The Enterprise boasted that Starkville had ten times as many cotton gins as Snook, yielding a daily output of two hundred bales, but in the drive for profit Ivoe knew of many colored families left behind or lost to poverty. At a sharecropper’s graveside Reverend Greenwood would say, “Up the road he was a cotton picker but down here in Little Tunis he was a friend.” Adolescence had shown her that a funeral could be a classroom. She learned what a cry meant: family members left behind cried from exhaustion, the increased labor already felt. Sometimes their cries sounded like a wish to trade places with the one in the ground. Scared to death of the future, some wept for tomorrow.
Those who told Earl Stark exactly what they thought of his contracts (impossible rents valued in dollars but figured in cotton like so: one bale of cotton a day, six bales a week, for three rented acres) watched their belongings get tossed into the road, their cabins axed to the ground. Little Tunis homes were fewer, down from forty—when Ivoe was Irabelle’s age—to twenty-two.
Juneteenth my foot, Ivoe thought.
The screen door banged shut.
“Somebody think she on vacation,” Momma said. “Cooking’s almost out the way. Still got three pies to bake so I need for you to bring some coal home from Papa’s shed. Make sure you take your sister with you.”
Ivoe rolled her eyes. Irabelle’s name was never mentioned without nagging duty. She had not minded so much until the Starkville Lyceum granted admission to colored people for two hours on Saturdays, a day most worked, but where on occasion she had seen as many as two brown faces. With no borrowing privileges, Ivoe cherished her time at the lyceum, but it was impossible to get any decent amount of reading done with a seven-year-old.
“Don’t you roll your eyes at me. I told your sister she could go see where Papa works today. Timbo took you when you was about her age. Make sure she know the rules before she go in there, you hear? And hurry on back—he ain’t gonna be there too much longer ’cause I need him to come finish this brisket . . .” Momma’s voice trailed off as she drew up a hand to shield her gaze from the sun. “ . . . I ain’t got enough to do?” she said as Susan Stark’s carriage pulled into the yard.
“Ivoe, that sure is a long face for Juneteenth. Lemon, when do you plan on getting a telephone so I don’t have to come all the way down here?”
“Well now, Miss Susan, I can think of one solution that don’t have me buying something I can’t afford and won’t put you out neither.”
“It’s just that I hate to bother you—and on y’all’s holiday too,” Miss Susan began, holding out a bag. “I brought some of my best things that require mending. Minnie can’t sew worth a lick. Get around to them when you can, no hurry. Of course, I’ll pay you for your time.”
Ivoe shot her mother a hateful glance when she accepted the bag.
Miss Susan drew a hand under her bonnet, dabbed at the corners of her forehead so that when Ivoe brushed past and bumped her arm, the bonnet fell to the floor.
“Momma, I’m gone.”
Ivoe paused to consider their route. The shortest way, by Deadman’s Creek, would take them through the marsh, but at least she wouldn’t have to look at people she had gone to school with, standing shoulder to shoulder with cotton and corn stalks on a day so hot thinking was hard to do. Her time to get away from the Bottoms couldn’t come quick enough. She was tired of seeing people drudge, get sick, and die. (Sometimes, as with Mister James and Junior, they were struck down for no reason.) Tired of yearning for the woman she wanted to become, someone who moved through life with self-designed purpose. Conversations with Miss Stokes had helped her uncover her inner world as a source of solace when the outer world presented contradiction and strife. Their chats had emboldened her imagination and helped her to carve a plan. The obvious means to secure the ticket to her future was education. Miss Stokes believed education served those in pursuit of an original life, one that truly suits, so Wiley College and Prairie View State College—known for teacher training and home economics—would never do. Even a life like that of Miss Stokes, whose energy and ability she admired, was not the life for her. The two-year course at Willetson Collegiate and Normal Institute offered commercial courses in typing, shorthand, bookkeeping, and, of particular interest to Ivoe, printing. If she worked hard enough, one day she might operate a press at a newspaper as far north as Chicago, as far east as Boston.
“Why we come this way?” Irabelle asked no sooner than she spotted something jutting out from the underbrush. Momma was learning her to whipstitch. After she washed the dingy gore and made it sparkly white again, she could make a jam for Dollbaby. She had soaked the green husk of Dollbaby’s face in coffee grounds until she was as dark as Papa, then used honey to glue on corn silk for hair. But no matter how careful she was, by day’s end Dollbaby was baldheaded. The least she could do was make a dress for her, Irabelle thought, slapping the cloth against her skinny leg to remove the dirt.
Suddenly, Ivoe lunged at her.
“Stop messing with things that don’t belong to you,” Ivoe snapped in such a way Irabelle knew better than to challenge it. Instead she took off running because nothing burned up Ivoe more than having to chase her.
Ivoe tossed the hood to the ground and took off after her sister. Hearing a woman’s wail, the two stopped. Soon there were other voices, which they followed beyond the cypress trees to a gang of bla
ck-skinned women swinging axes under the glaring sun. Their axes dropped against the chopping block in harmony. Falling wood chips syncopated the voices singing, Let your hammer ring! Let your hammer ring! “You better watch-a my timber!” a voice boomed. Let your hammer ring!
For Irabelle the day was full of excitement: her first visit to Papa’s shed, where he disappeared for too many hours, coming home like a boo-hag or something that terrified little children when they got out of hand. The picnic promised all kinds of sweets. And now, the sawing, piling, chopping women whose voices made her want to dance.
“Sure is some pretty singing. Why you sing like that?” Irabelle asked, though she meant how do you sing like that.
“Got to—make the time go by more faster.”
“Takes you away from here,” someone grumbled, raising her ax to the wood in perfect measure.
“What y’all doing?”
“Minding their business,” Ivoe said.
“Earl Stark building his own private railroad to haul cotton over to Brazos County. We got to scatter this timber so the mens can lay new rail. Without piling, them tracks just gonna sink ’cause this here swampland.”
Soiled cotton would serve Earl Stark right, Ivoe thought, gently pulling her sister away. “Come on, Irabelle. Don’t have no business in a smith’s cabin no way,” she said when they were back on course.
“It ain’t your business nohow.”
“It is my business when Momma takes my time away from me to carry a certain black-eyed squint someplace she don’t belong.”
“I can stand more trouble than anybody your size.”
“Girl, do you remember the rules?” Ivoe said, half exasperated, half tickled. “Last thing Papa need is for you to rub against something and hurt your fool self.”
“Number one, all tools are sharp and will cut. Number two, all work pieces can burn. Number three . . .”
Lemon pulled down the oven door to cool the pound cake.
“That Miss Susan leaving when I come?” May-Belle said.
“Yeah. She had dresses to mend. Talking about Minnie can’t sew worth a lick.”
“Well, she knowed that when she give her your place. They having troubles?”
“Is eggs poultry?”
May-Belle laughed as Lemon wiped her hands on her apron and picked up the letter. Eight days ago when the package arrived from Willetson Collegiate and Normal Institute, Ivoe had skimmed the letter, letting it drift to the ground while she took off like a bolt of lightning out the door for Miss Stokes.
Lemon carried the letter out to the yard, where she sat against her favorite tree and read it over until she knew it by heart. No orders were filled that day; she was too excited by the catalog she now showed to May-Belle, who sat picking greens. “My head ain’t big enough to wrap around all what’s here. No telling what Ivoe fixing to do. Don’t look for her to be no schoolteacher. Too flighty to sit in a room of books like a librarian. Ain’t got the stomach for sickness, or the heart for the way being sick changes a person. Can’t be no nurse. Listen, May-Belle. Listen at this.” Lemon read from the catalog, all bright and singsongy, “‘Students should dress for health and comfort and not for show. Special dresses for special occasions are not necessary. This institution does not wish to encourage expensive dressing.’ But that still leave . . . What this list say? One sheet, pillow slip, dresses—at least four—one skirt, underwear, two nightgowns, an apron, shirtwaist, towels, and handkerchiefs.”
“What we can’t make you’ll get one way or another,” May-Belle said.
A picture she’d seen a thousand times flashed before Lemon: Ivoe in the kitchen reading, sometimes putting the book or newspaper aside to stare out the window. God only knew what the child thought about. Sometimes the tomatoes needed stewing, or Lemon needed to get to the table to cut something up, but she just hated to bother her. Not that Ivoe took up much room, long and skinny like she was. Just seemed like her thinking needed all that space. She didn’t care what it took; Ivoe would show up to Willetson with everything on that list. But damn if she knew how. “Already sent a money order down to Austin so they can hold a spot for her. The scholarship nearabouts covers it all. Ssth. May-Belle, I tell you, if I had known that nearabouts would leave so much to come up with I might’ve told that girl to fix her mind on cleaning houses or something. That bill what come here liked to made me faint. I showed it to Ennis. He give it right back to me. He say, ‘Ivoe can wait awhile—she ain’t got to go just yet.’ Say Ivoe already got more schooling than most folks in Little Tunis. Well now, May-Belle, don’t tune up your face. He right about that.”
“What what other folks got and what Ivoe need got to do with each other? If it ain’t up to you and her papa to see to it that she get what she need, who it up to?”
“I know you right. It’s not like she don’t deserve it. Times I thought I’d forget how the child looked—face always stuck in a book. Folks been good enough to pay up front for orders because they know Ivoe be leaving soon. Running out of room out there just planting for the orders let alone planting for us. Ennis say it ain’t right to make the whole family suffer for Ivoe’s schooling.”
“What did you say to him?”
“I told him we don’t all the time have to agree but on this here he got to stand with me on the side of right. It’d be wrong not to let that girl go. Just don’t seem right, though, Ennis’s money carrying us the short distance it do.”
“Life ain’t nothing but a peck of trouble to a pint a joy,” May-Belle began. “If you can handle your garden and my little plot, seem like you’d have plenty then.”
Lemon sifted sugar into a wooden bowl holding soft butter and vanilla and started to whisk. “I appreciate it. Won’t be no peace around here until that school bill’s paid. Owing peoples ain’t never sat right with me. Can’t rest good when I do. Them devilish taxes got me feeling like some big bear after me. Ennis the same way, excepting when he owe a man he commence to acting ornery. A person can’t do or say nothing right around him. I asked him once why he got to gripe so. He say, ‘A dollar’s no different than a shackle. Owe one, you in the other.’ Well, with your garden and mine too I can feed my family. That fix the future. But what about the present? Ivoe ain’t got but two dresses. One ain’t fit to wear out the yard—poor thing been darned and mended to death. You love your children more than they can ever know. I mean, they can’t never best you in the loving department. But they sure can make you proud.”
“You stop carrying on about how she gonna get everything. Look how far we done come,” May-Belle said, pointing to the letter. “Look how far we done come.”
May-Belle’s memory stretched back fifty-five years when she arrived in the Brazos River Valley with her husband, Bukhari; his second wife, Iraj; and twenty-eight bondswomen and men who survived the hellish passage from the Kebbi River to America aboard the Clotilde. Starkville was nothing but a seed in the spring of 1859 when Alfred Stark was contracted four leagues and a labor of land (17,890 acres), which promised plentiful corn and cotton, in exchange for bringing sixty German and Moravian families from South Carolina and thirty-one Arabized Africans from Alabama.
In Alabama, Stark paid no mind to Bukhari’s true name. He studied the scars—three lines from forehead to chin on each side of the face—looked at the ledger, and called him Booker. Took a lot of calling for Bukhari to step forward. Stark clamped the pliers he would never be seen without on Bukhari’s bottom lip and pulled until his eyes welled. When they arrived in the bottomlands, many more bondspeople lived in small shacks along the river, but they spoke in the same tongue as the white men lashing them. Sunup to sundown confusion—dangerous fear, fights in the cotton fields whenever the Clotilde Muslims ceased work to pray. (Her first learned English words had been “Pick up your sack.”)
Stark hired Booker out to the Snook foundry, where he could fetch more fitting metal than he would p
icking cotton. Booker was the only town bondsman Stark had. After the drowning of the twenty-eight, after some time had passed, he took white-folk-decent to him: “This ain’t Hausaland and I ain’t none too keen on friending no Muslim. Things be all right if you act right . . . same holds for your women, Iraj and Mehriban . . . Don’t let me hear you talking that talk.” Stark let him keep a dollar or two of his own money and fixed it so Booker’s women worked in the big house and picked cotton only half a day during harvest.
Her name was still Mehriban the first year. Alone with the trees, studying their bark, tasting the leaves, she watched trade ships up from the Gulf unload dry goods in exchange for cotton until Bukhari arrived with the portion of his love meant for her. He gave a different part to Iraj, whose only child she birthed their first December in Little Tunis. The Kebbawa called a girl born at night Leila, but this one was the color of a lemon.
Word carried on the wind in April 1865 that Negroes were free. One of Stark’s bondswomen took the rumor to heart and tried to set fire to the cotton field. They had a way of dealing with the wild ones. They were all marched to the creek that swallowed the twenty-eight in 1860 to watch a white man drown her.
The truth came again on the nineteenth of June—high cotton time. Everybody had to work the fields. Iraj, Mehriban, and four-year-old Lemon were the first to lay down their sacks and watch Pete, who’d brought the freedom word, jumping through the field. Iraj took Lemon’s hand and headed for the blacksmith shop, where she found Booker at the bellows, wiping sweat from his face, the blue black of a ripe plum and just as smooth. Her words fell like drupes from a sugarberry tree. “Ashhadu anna Muhammadan rasul-ul-lah . . . Bukhari. We are all free.” At the same time, the cook untied her apron, laid it on the counter, and vowed to find her mother somewhere in Georgia. Iraj agreed to cook for the Starks so long as Lemon received tutoring with the Starks’ only child, Earl. Bukhari struck a deal with Mr. Stark. He promised his best smithing if Stark allowed him to earn the house he lived in and the little bit of land Iraj made pretty with flowers and vegetables. He wanted the same amount of land and the hut by the river for his second wife, Mehriban. Stark agreed but his trouble was far from over.
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