The Abolitionist's Daughter

by Diane C. McPhail

  “Belinda, it is only a palmetto fan—”

  “I know. And it shouldn’t matter, but it does. It makes me think of Pa when he was all the time trying to get religion. All those tent meetings in the heat! And those old fans going back and forth, back and forth. It’s enough to make a girl crazy!”

  “How could a revival be—?”

  “Well, it was. You haven’t ever had to go to the likes of these. But I have. Pa wanting to get born again, so he could be different. And him dragging me with him every time. I reckon he hoped if I could get born again, maybe he could, too. But that didn’t work. I did not need to get born again. I needed to get over being born the first time and get on with the living part.” Belinda closed her fan again.

  A loosened feather from the fan quivered onto Emily’s lap. The blue-black iridescence of it shifted as Emily pulled it through her fingers.

  Belinda paused. “I hated those meetings, everybody hollering and shouting and the preacher bellowing on about hell.” Belinda half rose, then sat again. “I went down front with Pa, more than once. If he went, I went. I certainly did not stay on that bench all by myself. Scared to death sitting there in that forest of folks, waving those fans, all whipped up by the Holy Ghost. Now, isn’t that enough to scare a girl? If you don’t have hell, you have the ghost. No other choices.”

  Emily laughed out loud, head thrown back. Belinda too.

  “Well, Pa did not get saved, at least not from himself. And neither did I. If being born the first time doesn’t work quite right, there is not much chance for the second time or the third or the tenth. My pa loves to talk about me being born, but Mama, she does not. Mama will walk right out of the house when he starts in, even if it is black dark and the moon not up. You know about me being born?”

  Emily shook her head. Belinda tucked a perverse loop of curls behind her ear.

  “Mama must have been so scared when I got born, what with baby Lillie dead just weeks before from the croup, so I don’t blame her all that much. I don’t guess Pa was scared. I don’t know rightly what he was. Are you sure I never told you this?”

  “No, Belinda, you never told me.” She took Belinda’s hand, so small and thin and slightly rough.

  “I was born too soon and Mama gave me up for dead. She could not bear it. So, she just went straight out to grief. I was her newborn grief. But Pa, he wrapped me in hot towels. Put his steaming whiskey mouth on mine and blew. For hours, to hear him tell it. Of course, I don’t remember that.” Belinda laughed and folded her fan. “But Pa has told me so many times, it seems like I do. He went desperate, I reckon, for me to live. Without it, he said once, life wouldn’t mean much anymore. Without it, I was dead. And I am not. I am here alive with Will.”

  “Yes, you are here with Will. And me.” Emily rubbed her thumb across the top of Belinda’s hand.

  “Pa doesn’t go to meetings anymore. I reckon he gave up, figured he’d settle for hell. He doesn’t need to die to be in hell. I’m not right sure there is one, anyway.”

  “Do you talk to him, Belinda?”

  “Sometimes he talks to Charles and Hammond, but he and Mama hardly say a word. He sleeps out in the shed. If I’m around, which isn’t much, and the weather is dropping, I take a quilt out to lay over him. Most times, there is one already there, tucked in careful-like. And I know Mama has beat me to it.”

  Belinda stopped, looked around. She waved her fan, the feathers fluttering in front of her face. “It sure is hot today,” Belinda said. “Did that come off my fan?” She pointed to the feather Emily still held.

  “We can get some thread and put it back,” Emily said.

  “No, here, I’ll get Will to do it. That will make him happy. He likes to do for me. At least I think he does. Sometimes he’s cross with me, but then that farm is very hard on him.” Belinda tucked the feather into the pocket of her skirt. “Sure is hot today.”

  CHAPTER 11

  After the early months of sickness, Jessie’s tiny body began to round. Ginny noted it, as she had noted the sickness that Jessie struggled to hide. Ginny had an eye for life. After dinner one day, when the dishes were washed and the kitchen cleaned, she spoke.

  “Your man taken note on this yet?”

  “On what?” Jessie said.

  “That baby you carrying?”

  “No, he ain’t.” Jessie bent over some unnecessary task, chipping at an imaginary spot with her broken thumbnail.

  “Why you keeping this from your man, Jessie? He done been through hell. He could do with a little good news about now.”

  Jessie looked up, her expression hard, her eyes glittering. Ginny studied her face. Ginny’s embrace was awkward, her tall, lean form bending over the diminutive woman as over a child.

  “He gone know it soon enough. Best you tell him now. You don’t have to tell him the size of it, if you don’t want. But he a man, Jessie. He a black diamond of a man.”

  “He don’t need no more to carry, Ginny.”

  “Ain’t you carrying that empty sleeve with him every day? Ain’t you carrying it together, just like you buried that arm together?”

  Jessie nodded.

  “You hoping he’ll believe it’s his?”

  Jessie shook her head. Ginny held her at arm’s length.

  “It ain’t like he won’t carry this then. How you think that man gone feel when he find out you trying to carry this heavy load without him? Won’t be long now ’fore he see it for himself, honey. He gone be all right with that? Mayhap he noticed already. You thinking you can spare him?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Then, I expect you best get over that and tell him now. Every day he ain’t helping you carry this gone be a day he regret.”

  Jessie raised her chin and looked away.

  “I’ll be at your cabin after supper,” Ginny said. “Your childrens gone spend the night with Ginny. Now get that broom and go to work on the porch before I has to go tell the judge he done wasted his money on you.”

  * * *

  From the parlor door, Emily watched Belinda remove the vase from its shelf. She held it close to her face, as she did everything, refusing to wear spectacles except in secret. Emily had glimpsed her with them only a handful of times at school and suspected her failure to wear them in class contributed to Belinda’s struggle with her marks. For several minutes, Emily did not speak.

  “It was my mother’s,” she said, finally.

  Startled, Belinda fumbled the vase back into place. Below it, Emily could see the carved face of the fox peaking from the intricate design of wooden leaves on the shelf bracket.

  “My father brought it to her from New Orleans, before they were married.”

  “It is beautiful,” Belinda said. She scooped up the green silk ruffles of her skirt. “You must cherish it. Well, of course, you would. I don’t know why I said that.”

  “I do cherish it, Belinda. I have so little of her.” Emily reached up, tracing the outline of a glass rose with her fingertip. “Sometimes, I try to remember things, but I know it’s mostly just imagination on my part: some expression on her face, her hand picking up a hairbrush, the way she might have threaded a needle. Sometimes my father mentions things, how she loved to paint and sew. But the larger things are only stories of her. Stories that I make into a memory of sorts, memories of stories. Imagination. But then things slide away. Her face is just a tintype. Her expression never changes and her eyes don’t blink.”

  “I can’t imagine. Well, actually, I guess I can imagine. Of course, I can. Anyone can imagine anything they want, but it would only be, like you say, imagination. Although I do have a vivid imagination. Oh, Emily, it would be like trying to imagine how turnips taste if you’d never had a bite of them.”

  “Yes, something like that, I suppose.” Emily laughed.

  “You never mention it, Emily. Her death, I mean. Were you there?”

  “No—I mean, yes. Ginny tells me I was, but I don’t remember.” Emily fingered the gold locket that held a sn
ip of her mother’s hair. “I can’t think about it, Belinda. But sometimes, it just comes on me.”

  She halted, opening the locket, fingered her mother’s hair, and snapped the locket shut. “Sometimes I imagine myself there, but it goes into a kind of blankness. It’s red and it’s dark and it has no horizon. It makes me so afraid. It’s something I smell. I’m afraid I will go there and not ever come back.”

  “Oh, Emily,” Belinda said, her hand flapping uselessly in the air between them, “there I go again. I do not understand myself. Really, I don’t. How things go popping out of my mouth the way they do. I should be ashamed.”

  “No, Belinda.” Emily laid her hand on the wide plaid of Belinda’s empress sleeve. “Please, it’s not your fault. It’s me. Don’t fret.”

  Belinda turned away. “All right, I won’t,” she said. “But that is just awful. And what about Will? Was he there?”

  Emily stared at Belinda, almost through her. She sighed and rubbed the back of her hand across her forehead.

  “No,” she said. “He was away at school. We never discuss it. I see it in him, though, and Jeremiah. Especially Jeremiah—the way he gets sometimes and can’t be still, as if there is no ground to hold him up.”

  “You talking about me?” Jeremiah whipped into the room like a horse in a brushfire.

  “Belinda was admiring Mama’s vase.”

  “And how exactly did my name come into that?”

  “I was telling Belinda how differently each of us miss her.”

  “Well, I don’t miss her. She was gone when I got here. And I don’t give a whit for vases and such,” he said, jerking it from the shelf. “She ain’t in that vase. She ain’t anywhere, as I know of.”

  Jeremiah thrust the vase back onto the shelf, its gilt edge protruding from the rim. He leaned against the wall, arms crossed, one foot propped atop the wide baseboard. As he shifted, his arm shot out for balance. The back of his hand made contact with the vase. It shifted. Jeremiah caught his balance. The vase plummeted in a blur of green and rose and gold. Belinda reached for it, but it was beyond her. Emily watched the pieces fly apart. She saw each piece glide up and out as it hit, saw how whatever space it once contained no longer existed.

  Emily picked up a shard of glass. On it remained one almost-intact rose. She studied it, holding it up to the light. She put it in Jeremiah’s hand and closed his palm around the jagged sliver.

  “No,” Emily said, “she wasn’t in the vase.”

  * * *

  Jessie’s baby girl was born in the early days of December 1859. An almost-Christmas baby, she was light as milk coffee, red-faced from crying, with a full head of dark kinky hair, frosted at the ends with a coppery glow. Ginny handed the baby, cut free and cleaned, to her mother. She watched as Jessie studied this strange child who had entered the world through her body.

  “Where’s Nathan?” Jessie said.

  “Outside.”

  “You best show him this baby, Ginny.” Jessie’s voice was tired and defeated.

  Ginny wrapped the child and walked onto the stoop. Nathan stood with his back to the cabin. He did not turn around. She stood watching until she sensed a bit of give to his shoulders. She crossed in front of him, laid the baby in his elbow, and pulled back a corner of the swaddling. Nathan’s eyes went narrow. He stared at the pale, bundled face for endless minutes. The baby opened her eyes and blinked, searching for something beyond him. Nathan did not raise his face, but Ginny saw the grimace, the constricted jaw.

  “You got yourself a daughter, Nathan,” Ginny said, “if you want her.”

  Nathan handed the baby back, leaped from the porch, and ran. Ginny watched him go. The darkness swallowed him.

  Inside the cabin, Jessie slept. Ginny fixed a little sugar tit, pulled her chair to the hearth, and rocked the baby, crooning. Jessie did not wake.

  The hours dragged into morning and then past noon, the sun high overhead, its light unrelenting, before Nathan reappeared. He stood in the door with his head bowed before walking quietly across the room. He reached out his arm for the baby and folded her into the crook of his arm. He lifted his stump to caress the little face.

  “Look like this gal wearing a halo,” Nathan said, his soft voice breaking.

  Awake now, Jessie studied Nathan’s face. He came across to the bed, leaned down to his wife, nestling the infant into her arms. He dragged his fingers across the blanket covering Jessie, up her cheek, her forehead. He laced his fingers through the thick crown of her hair and kissed her full on the mouth.

  “Yep,” he said, “got her a little halo, just like her mama.”

  The baby’s curled fists flailed against her tiny lips. Mouth wide, she burrowed after her mother’s scent, rooting insistently. Jessie opened her shift and gave her small breast to the child.

  “What name she gone have?” Nathan poked at the fire.

  “You say, Nathan,” Jessie said.

  “All right.” He hesitated, scratching his beard. “Knew a white slave from down Louisiana once named Aimee. Said it meant she was loved. This gal gone be Aimee.”

  Jessie nuzzled the baby’s open palm.

  “Aimee,” she whispered. “She gone be loved.”

  CHAPTER 12

  Winter passed and the infant green of approaching spring colored the earth. As she opened the dining room window to the breeze, Emily felt the baby kick. She pressed her hand against the protruding knob on her abdomen, where a little foot pressed against the limits of her skin. A horse approached at the edge of the field where the dark earth was softened by the emerging cotton. Emily smiled to see Will, out surveying the fields on his old bay with Belinda mounted behind him. Charles was walking up from the office for the noon meal. He raised his hand and shouted out to them.

  “You two come sit a piece. And stay to dinner.” Charles waved them in. “Ginny’s cooking up a feast. And Emily will be glad of the company.”

  Indeed she was, so restless in the late confinement of her pregnancy. While the men stood talking below the porch, she held her arms open to Belinda.

  “Will,” Charles said, “come see something I’ve got in my head to do in the drying shed.” The men sauntered off across the yard, their voices retreating with them.

  Belinda hung her bonnet aside on the hall tree and Emily, who had been reading the news, set the paper on the table between their chairs. The headlines read: RESIST ANTISLAVERY AGGRESSION, MISSISSIPPI LEGISLATURE URGES STATES. Belinda held the paper close to her face, squinted, then flipped it over and tossed it away. It landed on the floor between them.

  “I declare, I can’t abide these terrible headlines,” Belinda said. “It’s our very way of life at stake here, don’t you agree? Well, of course, you do. Well, maybe you don’t, actually. I forget your father’s views. But of course, we will prevail. I declare, all this talk of war is more than I can bear. Will says not to worry, but I do.” She ran her finger along the edge of the marble-topped table. “I worry about most everything, really. What if the smokehouse burnt down or the rain won’t come when it should, or it comes in a deluge when it oughtn’t, which seems to be the case these days. Will says it’s silly to worry so, but I don’t seem able to help myself.”

  “Well, Belinda. This talk of secession is disturbing, I grant you. It is a genuine worry for all of us. Though surely the legislature will be wise enough not to go through with such a drastic measure.” Through the window, Emily saw the men striding back from the shed. “And, of course, terrible things can happen, regardless. But there are such good things, too. Think about fresh eggs, washed and piled in a basket. Or sunlight through the clothes on the line. Think how sweet Will is to you. And your house that Papa built you. It’s such a fine house and you have made it fairly radiant, you and Will. With happiness, I guess you’d say.”

  Emily could make out the men’s voices as they drew nearer.

  “Now, that was a bitter draft, brother,” she heard Will say.

  “Warm your insides, won’t it? Make
the afternoon go fair.” Charles slapped his brother-in-law on the back with a hearty laugh as the men mounted the steps.

  Something in Emily hardened. The thought of Charles with whiskey in the shed at noon stunned her. Charles was rarely bad to drink, but when he did, and even when he didn’t, images of her drunken father-in-law flooded Emily’s mind. Surely Charles would never come to anything like that, she thought. Certainly not Will. It was not for Will she feared. But an unreasonable fear seized her, nonetheless, more terrible by far and more pervasive than Belinda’s imaginary smokehouse blaze.

  “Well, ladies, I declare,” Charles said, kissing Emily on the cheek. She smelled the whiskey on his breath. “I believe we’re in for something special here.” Charles smiled at Jessie as she set a steaming bowl of chicken and dumplings on the sideboard. He picked up a piece of fried okra, held it between his teeth for a moment to cool, and slapped Will on the shoulder again as they made their way to the table.

  Conversation focused on the weather and how it would or wouldn’t work to the benefit of the crops. The bitter conflict over slavery lay unmentioned, like the deadly undertows in the Mississippi River. The meal was comforting and restful in the middle of the day. No one seemed to note at what point Will grew pale and his attention waned. It was Emily, not Belinda, who noticed first.

  “Will, are you all right?” Emily half rose from her chair, but Will motioned her back down.

  “Just feeling a bit poorly, Emily. It’ll pass.”

  It did not pass. Will tried to rise, but stumbled, his fingers spread across his chest. Charles pushed his chair back and rushed to Will, holding him up. Belinda stood by, her hands waving helpless around her.

  “I seem to have taken sick,” Will said. He smiled at Emily. “Don’t blame your dinner now.”

  “Might have been that nip you gave me in the shed,” Will said, as Charles guided him to the parlor sofa, helped him lie down, and unbuttoned his shirt.