Throughout the meal June and her mother were introduced to neighbors of Aunt Ella and Miss Fannie, people who worked the fields for them and for the white men, people who were sharecroppers. There were also people who lived on her father’s property, the property that he might give the Piano Man when he married Minnelsa.
Millie forced herself into a seat next to June, Michael sat at the opposite end of the table with the menfolk, most of them staring at the fair June and wondering what man in his right mind would up and die leaving a beautiful woman like that lonely.
“She’s barely more than a girl,” a toothless older man said as he sucked on a leathery piece of pig skin. “Needs someone with experience to show her the ropes.”
“Better not let Mattie hear you say that,” another man whispered, not looking up from the ear of corn he was chomping on faster than he could talk. “Lessen you wants to be left without getting no more experience for a long time.”
The men all laughed in agreement.
“Shoot,” somebody added, “better not let William Brown hear you think that. He treats them daughters of his like they lily white dolls. I hear the reason this one ran away cause he got some rule about the oldest daughter gots to get married first ‘fore anybody else does.”
“Maybe this one had to get married.” There were a few yeses and um hums. “Maybe William Brown had that boy killed. He got enough money.”
Michael took all of this in as he watched June. She was like nothing else he had ever seen, even if she was in the family way. From time to time he had to remember to close his mouth when he looked at her or his food would have fallen out.
Her hair was soft, he could tell from where he sat, and she smelled better than girls that worked in the field. He had noticed her feet when she walked with Millie. Tiny feet and they didn’t look flat. Not in those shoes. She had small lady like feet. Would be nice if he could have a woman like that one day. Would be nice.
June liked the boy. He was handsome and he gave her something to think about other than the baby growing inside her belly. But catching him eyeing her from time to time made her aware that soon she would be big and swollen, like the cocoa colored woman sitting on the other side of her mother that ate heartily of the meat and yams before. “The baby just loves these yams,” she told Bira and June. “I been eating them since I first got in the family way. Never cared much for them before, but now I got to have them two, three times a day.”
“Well,” Cora told her, “if that baby’s anything like most, it’s gonna hate yams when it gets out. Gonna holler every time you try to put one near its mouth. I know. Millie still hates turnip greens and Michael just started eating yams last year.”
“When you eat for two,” Miss Fannie said sipping iced tea, “you got to eat what the other one wants. Gots to get that baby big and healthy so it will come out screaming and kicking to be born.” Most of this she addressed to June who was busy studying life around the table.
There were at least two fat babies being fed by their mothers. Women got up and served their men without even stopping to find out what they wanted or if they wanted more. They just knew from years of practice what to feed them, what to give them. Young men rolled their eyes at women their age and nodded some sort of code that had to do with the pies and cakes on the table under the tree with the cold drinks, water and tea. She watched as one boy went over and the girl standing there, not smiling, not sighing poured him something to drink when he stuck out his glass. No one else seemed to be looking when he touched her hand and she didn’t move. They stood there a moment, as if time was waiting on them, and just gave each other innocent glances before he went back to eating and she took a glass of iced tea to her mother.
An old lady with close cut white hair sat quietly watching all and fanning herself while refusing to eat the mashed up food they put before her. People came and touched her and kissed her and she would mumble: “How you feeling, baby?” or “Ain’t you sweet?” to each one. She was finally introduced to June simply as Big Mama, grandmother to several of the adults at the table. June thought it a strange title for such a small person.
Finally the old lady said, just loud enough for June and her mother to hear: “You gonna be happy here, little Bira. Ain’t gon be like before. You gonna be happy here, wait and see.”
Bira gave June a reassuring squeeze and the girl realized that she was seeing what she missed in her own house. The dishes and the cups and glasses on the table were a hodgepodge of leftovers from white folks’ kitchen and broken sets in cheap stores. The table cloth was gingham checked not lace and nobody had a napkin, most people were using the back of their hands. Here, out in the country amidst big trees and even bigger sky, these people were happy. Many of them wore shoes that might have been as old as she was. Their dresses were dated and looked more like gunny sacks. Their hair did not sport the latest fashion, and some had teeth missing. She wished that her father and mother had bought some of this happiness with them when they left almost thirty-five years ago.
She might learn how to be happy here.
June couldn’t sleep after such a huge dinner, although she felt the need to rest, and Bira and Cora and Ella and Fannie insisted a million times. On the porch while the men sat around the remains of the fire and whispered whatever it was that men whispered when they were alone, the women sat mending clothes, braiding hair and talking in the sunset. June never felt such peace. She almost forgot she was. . .
“Holly looks good and far along,” Cora said as she mended a pair of Michael’s work pants. “Guess Toby’s pleased with that.”
“Pleased?” Mattie laughed as she corn-rowed the short hair of a fidgety little girl. “He’d be pleased if the baby looks like her instead of him.”
“Toby not ugly,” a meek, skinny woman named Sara said.
“Never said he was,” countered Mattie. “But we all know the horse got out of that barn before it was hitched. It would just be a blessing if the colt looked more like the mare than any one of them stallions that used to sniff around her in the field.” The women all nodded in agreement, Bira smiling the most and the brightest. She looked so comfortable here. She never sat on the porch with her lady friends at home, June thought. They went into the house to have tea. June wondered how many women really called her mother their friend. Most of the women at the church were jealous of the Blacksmith’s wife in her tailor-made clothes and ageless face.
“Where’s the car?” Bira asked. “Don’t want to miss the train in the morning.”
“Won’t miss it,” Ella replied. “Young Emmett done gone off with Sabrina.” The women all hummed and awed. “Naw, it’s just for a ride.”
“I bet it’s just for a ride,” said Fannie. “Way I heard it told, Sabrina likes them buggy rides.” The women agreed. “Likes it when the driver hits it from side to side.”
“Now, Fannie, they in a car. Automobiles ain’t like buggies.” Bira laughed and the other women laughed with her. June was lost. What were they talking about? She didn’t want to appear ignorant, so she just listened hoping that she would understand the conversation soon enough.
Fannie grinned. “Now maybe that’s true but the driver didn’t change. Horse or car, they go around the curves the same, go over bumps the same and they start out the same: moving very slowly but speeding up till they gets where they want to go. Come to think of it, I’d like to go for a buggy ride myself. Been a long time since someone asked me to,” she cleared her throat, “go for a ride.”
“Now that’s not true,” Ella stretched her long neck. “Wasn’t it Big Jim from Overtown, you know work at the mill, that asked you out last Sunday? For a ride?”she cleared her throat before she added: “In his wagon?”
The women looked at Fannie and Fannie rubbed her chubby legs, touched her snow white hair and nodded a bit proudly. “Well, now yes, but I turned him down.”
Mattie looked at her: “Are you a fool, woman? Don’t you like the way that man’s wagon is built?”
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“Built fine,” Fannie said. “Built real fine, especially as old as he, I mean old as that wagon is. But. . .”
“But what?” Mattie seemed peeved. “Wagon like that must be good on them sharp turns.”
“It might be, but I don’t think the driver knows what to do with it myself. He’s so busy polishing and shining it up and showing it off, it don’t ever do nothing.”
“You got a point there,” Ella added. “I once went on a buggy ride with a man, I ain’t mentioning no names, and it was the most God awful experience. He kept whipping that horse and getting nowhere. So I told him to quit and let me leave so he could put that sucker back in the barn.”
June let out a giggle and the women looked at her. At first she thought they might be upset, but then they all smiled and surrounded her with laughter. She had finally caught on to the conversation. A conversation that a child could hear but you needed to be a grown up to understand. The fidgety little girl getting her hair braided said to Mattie: “Grandma, when will I get old enough for a buggy ride?”
Mattie gave the girl a thought-filled answer: “Well, when you know how to tell a mare from a stallion and can hook the horse and cart all by yourself and not fall down while doing it, or fall out the buggy, that’s when. Until then you can stick to walking. Sometimes it’s more fun.”
She winked at June who smiled understandingly. The little girl didn’t seem to understand or care. She just wanted an answer and got one.
The night went by too quickly for June who got sleepy long before her mother. In dreamy silence Bira walked her up to her room.
As June slipped on her lacy nightgown, she realized in a few months this would be too tight, her belly sticking far out in front of her. Bira brushed her hair and June started to cry. Bira simply kissed her and kept brushing the long dark locks.
June turned to her mother and hugged her. Suddenly she was afraid of being left alone. “Please, Mama, I know I made a mess of things. But please, please don’t leave me.”
“I have to go back, June. There’s Minnelsa’s wedding and the rest of your sisters. And your father needs me.”
“He doesn’t need anybody. He’s got his property and money and. . .”
“June,” Bira chastised, “he’s your father and he’s a good man. He would have made the boy marry you that did this to you. He would do anything. . .”
“To keep the family name clean.”
Bira pulled away from her and walked to the dresser putting down the hairbrush. “Tell me something, June,” she muttered in so soft a voice June swore it wasn’t her mother but some angry spirit confronting her. “Did you do this on purpose? Did you go out and lay with some man just to try to destroy our family?”
Bira didn’t look like the calm sweet woman June had always known. Not the mother she remembered from the train, from the house on Beckwith Street or even from downstairs on the porch. This Bira was very different. She was angry.
“Mama, I.. . .” June didn’t know what to say.
“I know I never told you anything about being a woman, about women and men and what they do. I was hoping you’d have a husband that would teach you. But your father. . .” Bira looked to heaven for the words. None came.
“Your father had a certain way he wanted things done. He read a book about a rich family once. The children all married the people the parents chose and lived on the family’s property and raised their children. It was like a small town he said, full of one’s own relatives. Not like him not knowing where his father’s kin was because of slavery or my mother’s kin because she was an Indian. Everybody on one piece of land all together.
“He wanted our family to have that. He wanted us to be all together and do things properly. The oldest daughter was to marry first and the father would find the proper suitor. There was to be a dowry. That’s why your father accumulated so much land. He wanted you all to have good husbands and a good life. He decided what he put together was the best way.”
Bira leaned on the big chair against the window as if weakened by the explanation she was giving. “But as you know, Minnelsa fell in love with the wrong boy. Wrong according to what your father wanted. She fell in love with a boy whose father had lots of money problems. The boy even had a son that he hadn’t told Minnelsa about.”
Bira looked out the window. “The boy’s father wanted William to stay out of the lives of the young people, let them decide. But your father insisted on making sure that Minnelsa knew. That didn’t daunt the boy at all. He claimed he still wanted to marry your sister and she wanted him. So your father said fine, you can marry my daughter but there will be no dowry. No land and no big wedding. He said I will not give my daughter away to any man who is deceitful and has another child to support.
“Your father said this right in front Minnelsa. She was heartbroken that in all these years John Wood had told her nothing of this child he sired. She left him at the door, wouldn’t even talk to him. The boy decided that it would be best if he went away and he signed up for the army. The rest you know.”
Bira sighed and June could feel her mother’s anguish across the room. “She grieved for that boy so. And when he died. . . Well, it was a long time before another man came to our door.”
She turned back to June. “I never agreed with your father’s desire to do things this way. But after I saw all the hurt that Minnelsa suffered, and thought about all she would have suffered had she stayed with the boy, I left everything alone. I let your father be.
“I thought, maybe William is right. Maybe there should be some order. We are colored people with land and money and five daughters to marry off. There are a lot of men who would gladly marry you and your sisters just to take you off of our hands, so to speak. But we don’t want that for you. We want you to have a true happy loving life. And I know it is hard for you to see things our way, especially now. That is why I have to know: did you get yourself in the family way on purpose?”
June swallowed. Bira was standing over her, her tiny body shaking in anger. “No Mama. I would never do anything like that. I loved him. I really just loved him.” She cried because she could never say that the Piano Man was the wrong man for her sister without destroying Minnelsa’s life again. She didn’t want to see her oldest sister hurt again. Her mother hugged her then tucked her in like a small child.
“Mama,” she asked as Bira turned to put out the lamp and leave her to sleep, “Mama, is Peter the right man for Minnelsa? Are you and papa sure?”
Bira kissed her baby’s soft hands. “He’s good for her, June. She hasn’t been happy in a long time and look at her now. But that’s not for you to worry about. You have a baby coming and you must do all you can to take care of yourself. Just rest. Everything will work out fine.”
“But Mama. . .”
“You’ll like it here. And it won’t be so long. You’ll see. It won’t be long at all.”
CHAPTER TWELVE
On the Saturday before the wedding, William Brown had taken leave of his lovely wife and busy daughters as they raced through last minute preparations and had gone and done something he seldom did anymore: he went to look at his land. He had to pick out the fifty acres he was to give the Piano Man. That was his job as father of the bride. He knew that Bira was making sure that Minnelsa’s household would have nice things, things that they had all grown accustomed to. That was her job as the mother of the bride. That was how the Blacksmith wanted it.
The things he bought for his home he got for Bira. She had never asked for them but he wanted her to have the best. Not just the best for a colored woman whose husband made a little money, but the best that money could buy. The best for any woman of any color. Always the best for his Bira.
As he looked at the land he remembered that wanting the best for Bira had started with a porcelain wash bowl his mother had given them when they left Alabama. It was something Bira had admired; a white bowl with no cracks or chips like the ones she was used to. There were birds painted and fire
d (he learned that term later as he read more and more books) in trees around the bowl that wouldn’t fade with washing. The rim was trimmed in gold. He wasn’t sure where or how his mother had come to get this bowl but whenever Bira was with him she touched it, fingered it and called it: “Beautiful, just beautiful.”
So when he left Alabama he vowed to do two things: buy the land that Bira had once called home and give her lots of beautiful things.
The first piece of land he bought was that track of land in Alabama. As he stood admiring the pine tree on the property in Atlanta he was thinking about giving to the Piano Man, he recalled how he had acquired the land of Bira’s former home.
He laughed out loud as he leaned against a big pine tree and then, embarrassed by his unusual outburst, turned to see if anyone was around to hear.
He had Fannie go tell the owner, a white man so broke he was dying to sell, that she knew somebody in Atlanta that wanted to buy that land. Somebody who had seen it and admired it. She talked about the property like it was something straight out of heaven and the owner was proud that somebody wanted what he had. The “Mr. Brown of Atlanta” who wanted to buy it was not available to come to purchase the land himself. He could do it through Fannie, who had worked with him before, or he could get a lawyer, but that would take more time and money.
Greed, of course, got the best of the owner and he never questioned the race of the intended buyer. He just told Fannie that a lawyer wasn’t necessary between friends. Fannie had laughed. She had saved his butt many times by buying old family treasures when he and his wife and four sons didn’t have enough money for food. Besides no one in Alabama wanted to believe a colored man was rich enough or smart enough to arrange such a purchase of land.
The Wilful Daughter Page 18