Could she sing? (Was it nice to hear when she did?) Was she pretty? Was she a good friend? Could she have been a loving mother? A faithful wife? Have I got a sister and does she favor me? If my mother knew me would she like me?
In Lillian Garner’s house, exempted from the field work that broke her hip and the exhaustion that drugged her mind; in Lillian Garner’s house where nobody knocked her down (or up), she listened to the whitewoman humming at her work; watched her face light up when Mr. Garner came in and thought, It’s better here, but I’m not. The Garners, it seemed to her, ran a special kind of slavery, treating them like paid labor, listening to what they said, teaching what they wanted known. And he didn’t stud his boys. Never brought them to her cabin with directions to “lay down with her,” like they did in Carolina, or rented their sex out on other farms. It surprised and pleased her, but worried her too. Would he pick women for them or what did he think was going to happen when those boys ran smack into their nature? Some danger he was courting and he surely knew it. In fact, his order for them not to leave Sweet Home, except in his company, was not so much because of the law, but the danger of men-bred slaves on the loose.
Baby Suggs talked as little as she could get away with because what was there to say that the roots of her tongue could manage? So the whitewoman, finding her new slave excellent if silent help, hummed to herself while she worked.
When Mr. Garner agreed to the arrangements with Halle, and when Halle looked like it meant more to him that she go free than anything in the world, she let herself be taken ’cross the river. Of the two hard things—standing on her feet till she dropped or leaving her last and probably only living child—she chose the hard thing that made him happy, and never put to him the question she put to herself: What for? What does a sixty-odd-year-old slavewoman who walks like a three-legged dog need freedom for? And when she stepped foot on free ground she could not believe that Halle knew what she didn’t; that Halle, who had never drawn one free breath, knew that there was nothing like it in this world. It scared her.
Something’s the matter. What’s the matter? What’s the matter? she asked herself. She didn’t know what she looked like and was not curious. But suddenly she saw her hands and thought with a clarity as simple as it was dazzling, “These hands belong to me. These my hands.” Next she felt a knocking in her chest and discovered something else new: her own heartbeat. Had it been there all along? This pounding thing? She felt like a fool and began to laugh out loud. Mr. Garner looked over his shoulder at her with wide brown eyes and smiled himself. “What’s funny, Jenny?”
She couldn’t stop laughing. “My heart’s beating,” she said.
And it was true.
Mr. Garner laughed. “Nothing to be scared of, Jenny. Just keep your same ways, you’ll be all right.”
She covered her mouth to keep from laughing too loud.
“These people I’m taking you to will give you what help you need. Name of Bodwin. A brother and a sister. Scots. I been knowing them for twenty years or more.”
Baby Suggs thought it was a good time to ask him something she had long wanted to know.
“Mr. Garner,” she said, “why you all call me Jenny?”
“’Cause that what’s on your sales ticket, gal. Ain’t that your name? What you call yourself?”
“Nothing,” she said. “I don’t call myself nothing.”
Mr. Garner went red with laughter. “When I took you out of Carolina, Whitlow called you Jenny and Jenny Whitlow is what his bill said. Didn’t he call you Jenny?”
“No, sir. If he did I didn’t hear it.”
“What did you answer to?”
“Anything, but Suggs is what my husband name.”
“You got married, Jenny? I didn’t know it.”
“Manner of speaking.”
“You know where he is, this husband?”
“No, sir.”
“Is that Halle’s daddy?”
“No, sir.”
“Why you call him Suggs, then? His bill of sale says Whitlow too, just like yours.”
“Suggs is my name, sir. From my husband. He didn’t call me Jenny.”
“What he call you?”
“Baby.”
“Well,” said Mr. Garner, going pink again, “if I was you I’d stick to Jenny Whitlow. Mrs. Baby Suggs ain’t no name for a freed Negro.”
Maybe not, she thought, but Baby Suggs was all she had left of the “husband” she claimed. A serious, melancholy man who taught her how to make shoes. The two of them made a pact: whichever one got a chance to run would take it; together if possible, alone if not, and no looking back. He got his chance, and since she never heard otherwise she believed he made it. Now how could he find or hear tell of her if she was calling herself some bill-of-sale name?
She couldn’t get over the city. More people than Carolina and enough whitefolks to stop the breath. Two-story buildings everywhere, and walkways made of perfectly cut slats of wood. Roads wide as Garner’s whole house.
“This is a city of water,” said Mr. Garner. “Everything travels by water and what the rivers can’t carry the canals take. A queen of a city, Jenny. Everything you ever dreamed of, they make it right here. Iron stoves, buttons, ships, shirts, hairbrushes, paint, steam engines, books. A sewer system make your eyes bug out. Oh, this is a city, all right. If you have to live in a city—this is it.”
The Bodwins lived right in the center of a street full of houses and trees. Mr. Garner leaped out and tied his horse to a solid iron post.
“Here we are.”
Baby picked up her bundle and with great difficulty, caused by her hip and the hours of sitting in a wagon, climbed down. Mr. Garner was up the walk and on the porch before she touched ground, but she got a peep at a Negro girl’s face at the open door before she followed a path to the back of the house. She waited what seemed a long time before this same girl opened the kitchen door and offered her a seat by the window.
“Can I get you anything to eat, ma’am?” the girl asked.
“No, darling. I’d look favorable on some water though.” The girl went to the sink and pumped a cupful of water. She placed it in Baby Suggs’ hand. “I’m Janey, ma’am.”
Baby, marveling at the sink, drank every drop of water although it tasted like a serious medicine. “Suggs,” she said, blotting her lips with the back of her hand. “Baby Suggs.”
“Glad to meet you, Mrs. Suggs. You going to be staying here?”
“I don’t know where I’ll be. Mr. Garner—that’s him what brought me here—he say he arrange something for me.” And then, “I’m free, you know.”
Janey smiled. “Yes, ma’am.”
“Your people live around here?”
“Yes, ma’am. All us live out on Bluestone.”
“We scattered,” said Baby Suggs, “but maybe not for long.”
Great God, she thought, where do I start? Get somebody to write old Whitlow. See who took Patty and Rosa Lee. Somebody name Dunn got Ardelia and went West, she heard. No point in trying for Tyree or John. They cut thirty years ago and, if she searched too hard and they were hiding, finding them would do them more harm than good. Nancy and Famous died in a ship off the Virginia coast before it set sail for Savannah. That much she knew. The overseer at Whitlow’s place brought her the news, more from a wish to have his way with her than from the kindness of his heart. The captain waited three weeks in port, to get a full cargo before setting off. Of the slaves in the hold who didn’t make it, he said, two were Whitlow pickaninnies name of…
But she knew their names. She knew, and covered her ears with her fists to keep from hearing them come from his mouth.
Janey heated some milk and poured it in a bowl next to a plate of cornbread. After some coaxing, Baby Suggs came to the table and sat down. She crumbled the bread into the hot milk and discovered she was hungrier than she had ever been in her life and that was saying something.
“They going to miss this?”
“No,�
�� said Janey. “Eat all you want; it’s ours.”
“Anybody else live here?”
“Just me. Mr. Woodruff, he does the outside chores. He comes by two, three days a week.”
“Just you two?”
“Yes, ma’am. I do the cooking and washing.”
“Maybe your people know of somebody looking for help.”
“I be sure to ask, but I know they take women at the slaughterhouse.”
“Doing what?”
“I don’t know.”
“Something men don’t want to do, I reckon.”
“My cousin say you get all the meat you want, plus twenty-five cents the hour. She make summer sausage.”
Baby Suggs lifted her hand to the top of her head. Money? Money? They would pay her money every single day? Money?
“Where is this here slaughterhouse?” she asked.
Before Janey could answer, the Bodwins came in to the kitchen with a grinning Mr. Garner behind. Undeniably brother and sister, both dressed in gray with faces too young for their snow-white hair.
“Did you give her anything to eat, Janey?” asked the brother.
“Yes, sir.”
“Keep your seat, Jenny,” said the sister, and that good news got better.
When they asked what work she could do, instead of reeling off the hundreds of tasks she had performed, she asked about the slaughterhouse. She was too old for that, they said.
“She’s the best cobbler you ever see,” said Mr. Garner.
“Cobbler?” Sister Bodwin raised her black thick eyebrows. “Who taught you that?”
“Was a slave taught me,” said Baby Suggs.
“New boots, or just repair?”
“New, old, anything.”
“Well,” said Brother Bodwin, “that’ll be something, but you’ll need more.”
“What about taking in wash?” asked Sister Bodwin.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Two cents a pound.”
“Yes, ma’am. But where’s the in?”
“What?”
“You said ‘take in wash.’ Where is the ‘in’? Where I’m going to be.”
“Oh, just listen to this, Jenny,” said Mr. Garner. “These two angels got a house for you. Place they own out a ways.”
It had belonged to their grandparents before they moved in town. Recently it had been rented out to a whole parcel of Negroes, who had left the state. It was too big a house for Jenny alone, they said (two rooms upstairs, two down), but it was the best and the only thing they could do. In return for laundry, some seamstress work, a little canning and so on (oh shoes, too), they would permit her to stay there. Provided she was clean. The past parcel of colored wasn’t. Baby Suggs agreed to the situation, sorry to see the money go but excited about a house with steps—never mind she couldn’t climb them. Mr. Garner told the Bodwins that she was a right fine cook as well as a fine cobbler and showed his belly and the sample on his feet. Everybody laughed.
“Anything you need, let us know,” said the sister. “We don’t hold with slavery, even Garner’s kind.”
“Tell em, Jenny. You live any better on any place before mine?”
“No, sir,” she said. “No place.”
“How long was you at Sweet Home?”
“Ten year, I believe.”
“Ever go hungry?”
“No, sir.”
“Cold?”
“No, sir.”
“Anybody lay a hand on you?”
“No, sir.”
“Did I let Halle buy you or not?”
“Yes, sir, you did,” she said, thinking, But you got my boy and I’m all broke down. You be renting him out to pay for me way after I’m gone to Glory.
Woodruff, they said, would carry her out there, they said, and all three disappeared through the kitchen door.
“I have to fix the supper now,” said Janey.
“I’ll help,” said Baby Suggs. “You too short to reach the fire.”
It was dark when Woodruff clicked the horse into a trot. He was a young man with a heavy beard and a burned place on his jaw the beard did not hide.
“You born up here?” Baby Suggs asked him.
“No, ma’am. Virginia. Been here a couple years.”
“I see.”
“You going to a nice house. Big too. A preacher and his family was in there. Eighteen children.”
“Have mercy. Where they go?”
“Took off to Illinois. Bishop Allen gave him a congregation up there. Big.”
“What churches around here? I ain’t set foot in one in ten years.”
“How come?”
“Wasn’t none. I dislike the place I was before this last one, but I did get to church every Sunday some kind of way. I bet the Lord done forgot who I am by now.”
“Go see Reverend Pike, ma’am. He’ll reacquaint you.”
“I won’t need him for that. I can make my own acquaintance. What I need him for is to reacquaint me with my children. He can read and write, I reckon?”
“Sure.”
“Good, ’cause I got a lot of digging up to do.” But the news they dug up was so pitiful she quit. After two years of messages written by the preacher’s hand, two years of washing, sewing, canning, cobbling, gardening, and sitting in churches, all she found out was that the Whitlow place was gone and that you couldn’t write to “a man named Dunn” if all you knew was that he went West. The good news, however, was that Halle got married and had a baby coming. She fixed on that and her own brand of preaching, having made up her mind about what to do with the heart that started beating the minute she crossed the Ohio River. And it worked out, worked out just fine, until she got proud and let herself be overwhelmed by the sight of her daughter-in-law and Halle’s children—one of whom was born on the way—and have a celebration of blackberries that put Christmas to shame. Now she stood in the garden smelling disapproval, feeling a dark and coming thing, and seeing high-topped shoes that she didn’t like the look of at all. At all.
WHEN THE four horsemen came—schoolteacher, one nephew, one slave catcher and a sheriff—the house on Bluestone Road was so quiet they thought they were too late. Three of them dismounted, one stayed in the saddle, his rifle ready, his eyes trained away from the house to the left and to the right, because likely as not the fugitive would make a dash for it. Although sometimes, you could never tell, you’d find them folded up tight somewhere: beneath floorboards, in a pantry—once in a chimney. Even then care was taken, because the quietest ones, the ones you pulled from a press, a hayloft, or, that once, from a chimney, would go along nicely for two or three seconds. Caught red-handed, so to speak, they would seem to recognize the futility of outsmarting a whiteman and the hopelessness of outrunning a rifle. Smile even, like a child caught dead with his hand in the jelly jar, and when you reached for the rope to tie him, well, even then you couldn’t tell. The very nigger with his head hanging and a little jelly-jar smile on his face could all of a sudden roar, like a bull or some such, and commence to do disbelievable things. Grab the rifle at its mouth; throw himself at the one holding it—anything. So you had to keep back a pace, leave the tying to another. Otherwise you ended up killing what you were paid to bring back alive. Unlike a snake or a bear, a dead nigger could not be skinned for profit and was not worth his own dead weight in coin.
Six or seven Negroes were walking up the road toward the house: two boys from the slave catcher’s left and some women from his right. He motioned them still with his rifle and they stood where they were. The nephew came back from peeping inside the house, and after touching his lips for silence, pointed his thumb to say that what they were looking for was round back. The slave catcher dismounted then and joined the others. Schoolteacher and the nephew moved to the left of the house; himself and the sheriff to the right. A crazy old nigger was standing in the woodpile with an ax. You could tell he was crazy right off because he was grunting—making low, cat noises like. About twelve yards beyond that nigger was ano
ther one—a woman with a flower in her hat. Crazy too, probably, because she too was standing stock-still—but fanning her hands as though pushing cobwebs out of her way. Both, however, were staring at the same place—a shed. Nephew walked over to the old nigger boy and took the ax from him. Then all four started toward the shed.
Inside, two boys bled in the sawdust and dirt at the feet of a nigger woman holding a blood-soaked child to her chest with one hand and an infant by the heels in the other. She did not look at them; she simply swung the baby toward the wall planks, missed and tried to connect a second time, when out of nowhere—in the ticking time the men spent staring at what there was to stare at—the old nigger boy, still mewing, ran through the door behind them and snatched the baby from the arc of its mother’s swing.
Right off it was clear, to schoolteacher especially, that there was nothing there to claim. The three (now four—because she’d had the one coming when she cut) pickaninnies they had hoped were alive and well enough to take back to Kentucky, take back and raise properly to do the work Sweet Home desperately needed, were not. Two were lying open-eyed in sawdust; a third pumped blood down the dress of the main one—the woman schoolteacher bragged about, the one he said made fine ink, damn good soup, pressed his collars the way he liked besides having at least ten breeding years left. But now she’d gone wild, due to the mishandling of the nephew who’d overbeat her and made her cut and run. Schoolteacher had chastised that nephew, telling him to think—just think—what would his own horse do if you beat it beyond the point of education. Or Chipper, or Samson. Suppose you beat the hounds past that point thataway. Never again could you trust them in the woods or anywhere else. You’d be feeding them maybe, holding out a piece of rabbit in your hand, and the animal would revert—bite your hand clean off. So he punished that nephew by not letting him come on the hunt. Made him stay there, feed stock, feed himself, feed Lillian, tend crops. See how he liked it; see what happened when you overbeat creatures God had given you the responsibility of—the trouble it was, and the loss. The whole lot was lost now. Five. He could claim the baby struggling in the arms of the mewing old man, but who’d tend her? Because the woman—something was wrong with her. She was looking at him now, and if his other nephew could see that look he would learn the lesson for sure: you just can’t mishandle creatures and expect success.
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