“How?” Bira asked as she walked into the room.
“Yes, Papa, how?” Anger still clouded Minnelsa’s face.
And before the Blacksmith could answer, the first cock crowed.
* * *
“No, sir, I guess it is not much to ask of a man.” Peter spoke barely above a whisper. Perhaps a lot to ask of Minnelsa, to ask of any woman but Peter was far too shaken over what he had just learned to know that he was being hailed a hero by the same family that, had they known the awful truth, might have him tarred and feathered.
“It’s simple.” The Blacksmith was sitting across from him in his big chair. It was not yet nine a.m. as the Piano Man was handed a brandy. The Blacksmith took a swig of the liquid then became animated as he verbalized his plan.
“I know you intend to marry Minnelsa and I know you haven’t asked because you’ve been considering the appropriate time, our grief withstanding.
“Still, the solution is simple. You will marry Minnelsa in less then three weeks during the mid year break and take your honeymoon in Alabama. While there you will be offered a teaching position, I do have some influence owning several houses near the institute, and you will decide to stay. June will be with our relatives not far away. Once she has the baby you can come back here anytime you want as long as you consider the child as yours. And of course Minnelsa’s.”
The Blacksmith was proud of himself, the Piano Man could tell. He swallowed the whole of his brandy before he said: “It just means that you and Minnelsa will have to put off having children of your own until after June’s baby is born.” He looked at the Piano Man to see if he was following him. “It also means you will own fifty acres of property there and fifty acres of land here. The land that would have gone to June’s husband.” The Blacksmith’s eyes went cold as he said this.
The Piano Man swallowed his brandy. It went down with a burn he had never experienced before. He was not sure he could go through with this.
“Sir, I haven’t proposed to Minnelsa.”
The Blacksmith frowned.
The Piano Man stuttered. “Please understand that it has been my intention but I have no money sir, no home. I live in a rooming house. At present I have no transportation. Someone has to take me wherever I want to go.”
“All that can be provided for you and my daughter, Peter.”
“Fine, sir. But I think it is a lot to ask a woman to put off having her own children because. . . well, sir, may I ask why not give the baby up for adoption?”
“They may not do this in Europe, but here we take care of our own.” He looked at the man he wanted to be his son-in-law. “This situation is fine with Minnelsa. She wants to do this. She will make you a good wife, Peter, you know that.”
The Blacksmith leaned back in his chair holding the empty brandy snifter. “You have been courting my daughter, so I must ask your intentions.”
The Piano Man looked down at his hands. He was sure it was his child. He should run away, he should hide he knew. But to leave here now would change his path forever. He was not ready to leave Minnelsa, the land or the money.
“My intentions towards Minnelsa have always been honorable, sir. She is a wonderful woman. She would make anybody a fine wife. I am not sure I deserve her. . .”
The Blacksmith laughed. “Humble is nice, my son. But not necessary at this point.” He bent closer to the Piano Man’s face and said, quite sincerely: “I have a lot at stake here. A lot. My youngest daughter is in the family way with no husband. She refuses to give the name of the boy and she has reminded me that all these years I have said my eldest daughter would marry first. It is proper, it is right. June may be the most beautiful of my daughters, but she is the most useless. Look what a position she has put me in. I have to approach you at the beginning of your career here to take on a wife and a baby-a baby that isn’t even yours.”
The Piano Man swallowed hard.
“If this is too much for you, I can understand it. It’s just that I can make life easier for you. Easier all the way around. I have the money and the influence to do it. All you have to do is ask my daughter to marry you.” The Blacksmith smiled. “It isn’t like you weren’t going to, am I right?”
The Piano Man nodded. He found words that came out. “I was just waiting for the right time. Since Willie’s death, sir.”
“Admirable.” The Blacksmith slapped him on the back. It was not hard enough to sting, but it made the Piano Man painfully aware of the older man’s strength.
“Now,” the Blacksmith said walking to the door, “is the right time.” He left the room and returned Minnelsa.
She stood there like a lamb to the slaughter, nervous and scared. But not as scared as the Piano Man.
“Peter, Minnelsa, I’ll leave you two alone.”
With that the Blacksmith left the room for them to decide the future.
Part Two
CHAPTER TEN
When Bira prepared to take her youngest daughter to the small sleepy Alabama town near the Georgia border, June had not cared at all what happened to her. She sensed she still had control of her body. On the train she felt and looked normal, she felt no pains and she wasn’t big. For this her mother was thankful.
The trip down to Tyson was the first time June had ever truly been alone with her mother. They sat in the colored car on the train and Bira talked more than she ever had in June’s memory.
But she had said nothing in the wagon on the way to the station.
The wagon. June was so angry. Her father was one of the richest black men in Atlanta, maybe even the richest with all that land he had horded, but he still refused to buy an automobile. Said a horse and buggy were fine. “Besides,” the Blacksmith had told her the last time she had brought up the subject, long before her brother’s death, long before her pregnancy, “a colored man with an automobile? Pretentious, very pretentious. White folks start following you and getting into your business. Looking like the common man can also be a key to success.”
So in the wagon the Blacksmith had been the only one to speak.
June sat between her parents with nothing to say. Their shame was written in their silence. Whenever she would go to grab her belly feeling that the jostling of the wagon was contributing to the nausea, her mother would rub it soothingly. The same way she had when she had had all those things as a child, the fever, the measles and eating the two hundred pecans with her brother. Mama was there in silent support.
“Your mother has to come back tomorrow. She will get you settled in with Miss Fannie and Aunt Ella and come right back here. We have a wedding to get together, no thanks to you.”
Do you hate me, Papa? She looked at him, holding the glare as long as she could, tears coming to her eyes because her father would not turn his eyes away from the houses and buildings and offices they were passing to see the face of his lost and lonely baby daughter. Did you really love me best, Papa, as Fawn had said in her anger one night not long ago? Was it you that let me always have my way like a spoiled baby? Did you ever try to love me or did you hate me because I wasn’t a son? Look at me, Papa. See me. I have disappointed you and I’m sorry. But I never even knew you loved me. Never.
“You can write home, but nothing about the. . . the . . . After the wedding and a reasonable length of time Minnelsa will come with her husband to discuss when you should begin living with them in Tuskegee.”
She turned to her mother who gave her best tender ‘I love you smile’ but said not a word. “Your mother will come down in the last month and not until then. Don’t ask for her before then.”
Bira squeezed her hand and June tried but failed to let go a smile. Instead she squeezed her mother’s hand back.
She could hear the whistles blowing and the wagons of baggage and goods moving in and out. The Blacksmith pulled his wagon under a tree and removed his hat. He pulled his gold pocket watch out of his suit vest to check the time. He shifted his bulk in the seat. Fortunately with Bira and June both being small ther
e was no problem of room.
At last he turned to her. His face she hadn’t seen this close since the night her brother had collapsed on the floor eight days before his death. The Blacksmith seemed very old. Whatever strength there was in his body was not showing in his face. He was an old man and if he had been speaking to her, he would have told her she had made him older.
“You could tell us who the father is.”
“I told you Papa, it doesn’t matter.”
“This man is married?”
“Papa, you have asked me this a million times. I have nothing to say. I have made a mistake. I have. . .”
“You have ruined a family. You have ruined your life.” He stopped for only a second as if each breath he took to speak contained torturous words.
“You have destroyed what it took years to build. A tramp, a slut. . .”
“William,” Bira whispered to calm him.
“This is not how you were raised. This is not the way your life was supposed to be.” An automobile buzzed by and he stilled his huge voice.
“You can’t make me give this baby to Minnelsa.”
“Then you’ll live in Alabama in the poor house. You’ll work on a farm. You’ll raise it like the trash you are, like the bastard this baby is. I will give you nothing, you will have nothing and you will be nothing. No man will ever want you for anything more than filling your belly with more bastard children.”
“William, that’s enough.” He looked at Bira. At the soft aging face and the kind coal black eyes. “We need to go.”
June had said nothing more. But her head was spinning for hours with her father’s words. You will be nothing.
As she settled into her seat on the train for the eight hour trip, she watched her parents gently embrace on the platform. If the Piano Man had been hers to love, hers to marry, he would do more than merely hug her before the long trip. His embrace would have been endless. His kiss would have been everlasting.
Now she was alone. She was, as her father put it, nothing.
People could not look at her and see the pregnancy fulfilling the nine month mission. She wore the pale yellow dress of a young woman. Her arms covered in short sleeves and her hands gloved in white. Her shoes were freshly polished on stocking feet even though most of the colored women in the car wore dresses a few sizes too big and work shoes encrusted with mud from days spent in the field. June did not own a pair of work shoes. She had never had to work a day in her life. Sitting in the seat as the train departed and her mother fidgeted with the food basket and the large purse she carried, she wondered whether she would have made the decision to keep this baby for herself if she had realized she would have to learn to work in the fields of Alabama. Would she look like the woman to the left of her mother, sagging breasts, frazzled hair and clothes so plain June could swear the dress was once a tablecloth.
June looked around the car at the women, even those with fine hats and smiling faces. There weren’t many women without children. And there weren’t many pretty women. None of them were young like her. If they were they had aged before their time.
“The sun, the fields will do that to you,” Bira said as if reading her mind.
“What, Mama?” she asked shocked by the words coming from her usually silent mother’s sweet face.
“The sun ages you. Takes away your beauty. And you are beautiful.” She removed her hat carefully, taking the pin out of it and placing it in her lap as she smoothed her black hair tightened in a bun. The hat was terribly out of fashion, but June knew her mother cared little for clothes except to please her husband.
Everything for her father. Bira smiled at her daughter. “You will think one of these days very soon,” she looked slyly at the girl’s belly hidden beneath the chic dress, “that you may never be beautiful again. But it will pass. I promise you, beauty will return. But you may never be young again.”
“Mama, why are you telling me all this?”
Bira smiled. “Because you are a woman. You need to know.”
The silence that had been between them for two weeks passed as they pulled from the station and into the Atlanta countryside. Children, darkened from happily playing in the sun, ran alongside the tracks. Out of school because they couldn’t go or didn’t care to go. Or maybe because their parents were not well off enough to care that education could make a difference. Their parents, the parents that spent nights when they could afford it at places like Emma’s, looked on her and her kind as stuck up red bone Negroes who thought they were white. June never thought she was white. That was the main thing her father and mother taught them.
“Mama, who are Miss Fannie and Aunt Ella?” she finally asked when the train was far away from the children and familiar territory. “Are they any relations to us? I don’t ever remember them coming to visit. . .”
“They’re kin in a way. But they were always my friends.”
“Old women.” June frowned and leaned back. Suddenly she realized she was going into a long period of seclusion away from the fancy free life she had lived months before.
But Bira was laughing. June was caught off guard. Mama hardly ever laughed. Life was too serious in the Blacksmith’s house for laughter. There were smiles and pleasantries, but now Bira was laughing.
“Not much older then me, June. Not extremely old women, but knowledgeable women.” Then she whispered. “You will be glad to be with them when the time comes.”
June liked her mother’s fresh smile and her mother’s new laugh. “You look pretty, Mama.” Her voice was soft and generous.
Bira turned to her and a tear fell. June hadn’t meant to make her mother cry but she was so beautiful, even for an old, no older, woman.
“Mama, why did you marry papa. Does he make you happy? I’ve never seen you laugh like you’re doing now.”
Bira sighed and wiped the tear away with the back of her hand. She looked at it for a moment, still a whole, a single droplet that soon would burst with the simple movement of her hand or the jostling of the train. The tear exploded into a tiny river and she said: “With you I have never had enough time. It was always your brother who needed me more. And you needed him. Do you realize, my beautiful daughter, that we have never been alone? Maybe that is why I have never had time to tell you about the wonderful man your father is.”
There was movement in the aisle and June looked up to see a grandly appointed woman, overdressed, June knew from the dressmakers’ talk that she learned at the seamstress shop she and her sisters frequented.
“Bira Brown,” the woman said loudly and everyone turned to look. “I don’t believe it. Why, I haven’t seen you in years!”
Bira pulled back a moment straining to recognize the face, instead of reaching into her purse for her glasses. “Well I declare. Sally Mae Hammer.”
“Sally Mae Hammer Babcock now Bira. I married Winston Babcock ten years ago.”
“Has it been that long?” Bira said looking at the large woman who was leaning over her.
“Been that long, Bira. Been far too long. And don’t tell me this is your baby girl, June.”
“Yes’m,” June said politely wishing the old biddy would go away and leave her to her little time with her mother.
“My god you have grown. But it’s been over ten years and. . .” The woman stared at her for a second. “Why you’re the spitting image of your mother the first time I ever saw her. Weren’t you fifteen back when William first brung you to let me fix up your hair and clothes?”
Bira nodded as the woman kept talking. “Why, I always knew your daddy would get him a pretty woman with those big eyes and that handsome face and all them big muscles.” The woman sat down on the arm of the seat across from Bira. The passenger sitting there stared at Sally Mae Hammer Babcock as if she were out of her mind, putting that big behind on her like she was a seat.
“But when he brought your mother into my shop, why I thought she was a little doll. Dressed in them Indian clothes and hair so far down her back it tou
ched her behind. Baby June, you should have seen how all the heads turned when he told me to get her fitted into proper clothes cause he was gonna marry her. Broke many a heart that day, Bira, you sho’ did. William Brown was the prize catch.”
Bira blushed. “I always considered myself lucky.”
“Do you mind, lady?” the tired woman said to Sally Mae and pushed her off the arm of the seat.
“Sorry.” Sally Mae rose slowly. “How is William anyway? And your other girls and William the second?”
Bira lowered her head and June spoke up, her tone filled with resentment. “My brother died not long ago.”
“Oh, Bira, I am so sorry.” She put one of her huge hands to her full chest and the other on Bira’s shoulder. “My heart goes out to you. Buried my son Jonah in the war. I truly feel your pain.”
Bira instantly changed the subject. “Well, Minnelsa is getting married.”
“Well!” Sally Mae’s demeanor brightened. “It’s about time. I know you are glad. Got the five prettiest daughters in the south and ain’t no man good enough for any of them by William’s standards.”
“Now, Sally Mae,” Bira grinned. “You not still mad because Fawn didn’t want to keep company with your other son, Bryan.”
Sally Mae frowned and her red lips turned down. “That’s Byron, Bira. I was glad that she told him she wasn’t interested. Besides he married a nice gal. Up in Washington DC now so I can’t complain. Got me four grandbabies. But I always had a feeling that William had something to do with Fawn not liking my boy. I mean, he was a Morehouse Man and. . .”
“Fawn was not ready for marriage then, Sally Mae.” Bira’s words were a firm cut off for the conversation. Sally cleared her throat and started to talk about something else when Bira interjected: “So where are you headed?”
“Livingston, Georgia, back home to my new husband. He won’t set foot in Alabama so I had to give up the shop and move there with him. Was worth it, a good man is hard to mind. I was up in Washington visiting Byron and his wife and children. Had to get away from that small town. So tiny. Not like Atlanta. At least you can breathe in Atlanta.”
The Wilful Daughter Page 15