by Eden Royce
Maybe Mama was being so hard on me because Gran was gone. We didn’t have someone who stayed at home all the time to make sure we were safe when Mama was at work anymore. This whole time, I was thinking of how much I missed Gran that I wasn’t thinking of how Mama must feel.
How would I feel? On top of working every day, running a farm, and raising me and Jay all on her own, Mama had so much to do. She had to deal with the sadness of losing her own mother, and worrying about Deputy Collins, who could come to the house at any moment and take everyone she loved away. I was scared sometimes, and I didn’t have to do everything Mama did. I bet she was scared too.
I waited there in the corn, expecting Mama or Jay to come looking for me and tell me to come back home. But neither one of them did. So after a while I got up slowly and walked through the tall stalks until I got to two posts pounded deep into the ground. The posts were about to my knee and as far apart as my arms when they were flung out wide. A long piece of wood lay on the ground next to the posts.
A smile twisted my mouth, a sweet and sad one, like remembering summertime during the winter. I pulled the board up, releasing boll weevils, pill bugs, and a small spider from their homes. It was damp and dark on one side, where it had been on the ground for who knows how long, and dry and beginning to crack on the upside that had been facing the sun. I placed one end of it on top of a post, then lifted the other end to the opposite post, connecting the two. I tested it with my hands, placing my weight on it little by little to see if it held.
When I felt like it was safe, I sat in the middle of the board, and it wobbled in a way that felt like bouncing. I jumped up a little in my seat and bounced on the board a bit more. It was lightweight and joggled easily, making me laugh out loud.
Jay and I had used this joggling board when we were little kids, spending hours on it in the blazing sun. We’d try and joggle the other higher, or joggle them off the board altogether. After a day in the sun, we’d go inside and compare our suntan marks, our upper arms and just above our knees. Mama would laugh and rub cocoa butter on our skin to keep it from drying out. Back then, there had been no corn; this field had been all covered by deep, thick, soft grass, and we had a few pigs that roamed this area, along with a clutch of chickens near the house. When one of us fell off the board, we would roll in the sweet-smelling grass, and one of the pigs would come over to investigate where the kukuing was coming from. They would snuffle and snort softly, rooting through the grass until they smelled us, and we would gather mud from the marsh bank and rub their skin with it to keep them from getting burned up under the sun.
I had forgotten this joggling board and I wondered now what had made me and Jay stop playing on it. It couldn’t be that we thought we were too grown-up for it. Even now, I was having fun. We used to share our secrets here, and talk without anyone hearing us. It was more private, away from the sharp ears in the house. I struggled to remember the last time we’d used it. We’d come out here every day; it was always special because Daddy had made it for us—
Oh. Now I remembered.
When Jay and me were about six years old, Daddy had chopped the posts and used his big sledge to pound them into the ground nice and sturdy. He had also taken care to find just the right kind of board to go between them. When he took us out to it with Mama covering Jay’s eyes and him covering mine, we had squealed like our little pigs and spent the rest of the day climbing on it and falling off into the fluffy grass over and over. It had been magic. And not the kind Doc made. This one was with hearts and light.
Then something had happened. One day, Daddy was there, and the next, he was gone. I put my head in my hands, trying to remember what had happened. I didn’t remember any fights with him and Mama. No hard whispers in the night after they thought me and Jay were sleeping. We asked what happened to him. At first, Mama pressed her lips together and stalked off, not saying anything. But I saw her eyes were shiny with tears. We kept asking, and finally she said, “If I had anything to say about your father, I would say it, but I don’t. End of story.”
For what seemed like years, Jay and I would pray for him to come home. From wherever he was, we didn’t care. If he would, we would all forgive him, even Mama. I prayed so hard, so often, my knees hurt from kneeling. Soon they turned dark, getting an extra covering of deep brown, like the color of the dark wood floor they rubbed against.
We were sitting outside the window one day, playing something—cards or jacks or marbles—and Jay said, “I wish Daddy was here.”
He hadn’t meant anything by it, nothing against Mama, but she didn’t hear it that way. She leaned out of the window above us and said, “Wish in one hand, and spit in the other. See which one fills up first.” Then she slammed the window shut.
The next day, things started moving fast. Mama sold our pigs, leaving the chickens as our only animals. When I asked if I could keep one piglet, just one, she pretended I hadn’t said anything to her at all. With some of that money, she paid men to come and clear the land and dig rows for planting. When the rows were done, Mama sent the men on their way and planted the seeds herself. She didn’t even want me and Jay helping her. I don’t remember playing that day. I only watched Mama walk the rows that looked like my plaits and cover them with moist, black soil. It wasn’t long after that Doc and Gran came to stay with us. And soon life got back to normal. Or close to.
Sometimes I wondered where Daddy was. But more often, I wondered what happened between him and Mama that made her want to erase him from her mind. In a few months, the corn grew long, hiding that whole field that used to be for our pigs. We would still go back there, wading through the young stalks, but as the corn grew higher and taller and stronger, it covered over all of those memories. Me and Jay made other hideaway spots, found other games to play, and soon we forgot about it.
As for Mama, she got upset easier now. Her laugh didn’t happen as much. Her smile when she gave us our cake was the first one I’d seen in a long time. It made me sad. It made me want to try harder to make her happy. I made a promise to help her more, do more around the house. Maybe even bring her some of the wildflowers that grew along the road.
There must have been a reason, a really good reason, Daddy was gone, but Mama’s mouth was shut up tighter than an oyster. We might never know, but whatever it was hurt Mama badly. Probably even worse than what I was feeling right then. Gran used to say hurt wasn’t like a splinter that might work itself out after a while, it was a boil that had to be lanced—the hurt had to leak out before it could heal up. According to Doc, a swig of moonshine would help too, but I wasn’t old enough for that yet.
The stalks of corn swung high and low, back and forth, like someone too big to squeeze down the rows was forcing them apart. There was the crunching of footsteps, the shuffling of drying husks. Someone was coming. I touched my bracelet to make sure I still had some protection with me.
But it was only Doc. His face appeared between some stalks, the top of the corn looking like it was growing out of his ear. I somehow couldn’t smile, even though I wanted to. “Did Mama send you to talk to me?”
He shook his head. “But that tells me there’s something to talk about.”
I shrugged my shoulders and kicked my feet. I was too tall for the joggling board now, unless I held my feet up high.
He sat at my feet, stretching his bare ones out and lying back on the dirt. He moved his hat, a beat-up straw one with part of the brim missing, in front of his face. I waited for him to try and get me to talk. But he didn’t. Doc lay up there with his rough, dark-skinned feet pointing at me while he folded and braided corn husks into the shape of a rose. When it slumped, he grunted and tossed it to the side. “Hmph. Easier with palmetto leaves. They’re sturdier.”
I’d seen both Doc and Mama weave strips of palmetto leaves and sea grasses into baskets and other shapes: flowers, crosses, and such. It was one of the things Mama did when our farm wasn’t making as much money. While it was cold, baskets of all shapes and
sizes, some with handles, some not, piled up in all the rooms in our house. When summertime hit and all the tourists came, Mama would head downtown and sell them in the market for good money.
Doc could lie there until nightfall if he had a mind to. I felt like I was hungry, but I knew it was the empty feeling in my chest and not my stomach.
“I told Mama I didn’t want to go to school no more,” I said, finally. “Anymore,” I corrected myself.
“And?”
“She got angry and said I was going no matter what.”
“Know why she said that?”
I shook my head no.
He took a pouch out of his pocket and laid it on the ground. “Tote disya,” he said.
“W’ymekso?” I said without thinking. Why did he want me to carry his tobacco pouch? He never let me near it before.
“Do you know why you understood what I asked you to do?”
“No, why?”
“The same reason your ma is so adamant that you go to school.” He sat up and removed the hat from his eyes, shoving it back off his face to look at me in mine. “Know how much teasing your ma and I got when we were your age? Even before that? When we started school, long time ago way back, neither one of us spoke what they called the King’s English. We spoke Gullah, like your gran, and like you did just now. Everybody, including the teachers, laughed at us for sounding ignorant. They wanted to put us in a special class for slower children because they thought we couldn’t learn.”
“Did they?” I was shocked that back then teachers treated my mama and my uncle like they were stupid for speaking the language they learned first. “But you sound perfect when you talk either one.”
“That’s because your Ma and I made a decision together. We were going to learn how to speak what they called ‘normal’ English. Even if we had to do it with kids younger than us who didn’t understand so well. We studied and we learned and no one ever saw us without a book or a pad and pencil. It was hard, but we did it. And once we started talking the way all those teachers said we were supposed to, know what happened?”
“Nobody teased you anymore?”
He laughed. “No! They teased us because we were poor. And I was skinny. And our skin was dark.”
“The girls at school . . . they tease me about root,” I said while I spun the bracelet on my wrist around and around. “Like there’s something wrong with it.”
“I’m not surprised. All skin folk ain’t kinfolk. Ever heard that?”
I shook my head.
“It means just because someone is a Negro like you, it doesn’t mean they agree with everything you say or do.” Doc sat up straighter. “There are some of us who want to forget about our history and our past. Pretend we were not enslaved people who had to struggle to live. It makes them feel safer.”
“But we aren’t safe from Deputy Collins.”
“You’re right. But those people think if they act how Collins and other white people believe they should, they’ll be safe from them.”
“So Lettie—she’s the girl at school—thinks I’m low-class because I believe in something that’s from our history?”
“Pretty much,” Doc said, lighting his pipe. “Thing is, Jezebel, people will find a way to make you feel bad about yourself if you let them. But it diminishes you. What does diminish mean?”
“To get smaller.”
“Right. And that isn’t what you want, is it?”
“No. But why are people like that?” I watched the smoke from Doc’s pipe curl in the air. “Why can’t we all try and understand each other?”
“You have a lot of strong people in this family, alive and not. Reach out to them. Learn your history and be proud of it. Become the best person you can be and don’t spend any time thinking or worrying on the rest. It’ll come.”
“That wasn’t what I was upset about.”
He got up to his feet, slowly and without making any groaning noises like Gran used to. “Wasn’t it?”
Then he left me there, wandering off sideways through the corn instead of down the rows, alternately whistling and humming a song I didn’t know.
I pulled four ears off the stalks and shucked them before I headed back to the house. It was past dinnertime; the sun was dipping in the sky. When I got home, the yard was bustling with chickens getting ready to roost down for the evening and there was nobody sitting on the porch. I climbed up the three steps and into the house. Dinner was cleared off the table and all the counters had been wiped down.
As I searched for a place to sit my burden, I looked up and saw Mama leaning on the doorjamb to her room. We both stood there for a minute—her eyes wanting answers, mine all given up on ever getting them. I held on to my skirt, weighed down with ripe corn.
“A girl at school made fun of me for working root,” I said. “But that wasn’t all. She also called me . . . a bastard.”
Mama let out a curse I’d never heard her say. I stayed still, ready for anything: a whipping for staying out, a tongue-lashing for missing dinner, getting my mouth washed out with soap for saying a bad word.
But none of it came. Mama lifted the ears of corn from my skirt and looked at them all over. “You did a good job on these,” she said, wrapping the corn in a clean kitchen towel before putting it in the icebox.
Then she went to her room, and I heard her open and close a few drawers in her dresser. On the way back to the kitchen, she stopped at the door of our room and called Jay. He came out, frowning and scratching his belly.
“Sit, you two.”
Jay stared at Mama for a minute, then glanced over at me. We both sat at the kitchen table and waited while Mama paced. Even the breeze stopped blowing, like it was also wondering what was going to happen next.
Mama sighed deep and long. She looked up to the ceiling, then back at us. “Jay, did you know this girl at school was calling your sister names?”
He looked at me, then back at Mama, and shook his head.
“Do you kids know what that word means?” She didn’t wait for us to answer. That meant she was all fired up. “It means your father wasn’t married to your mother when you were born. That’s it. Understand? It doesn’t mean you’re better or worse than anyone else. The only thing that makes you a good or a bad person is how you treat others.”
“But why would she say that to me?” I asked.
“To hurt you, Jez. But don’t ask me why she wants to hurt you. I don’t know.” Mama sat at the table, between me and Jay. “Maybe she thinks you’re different. Maybe she’s jealous of you.”
“I don’t have anything to be jealous of,” I said. “Lettie has fancy clothes and lots of friends. I don’t have those things.”
Mama smiled. “You have a lot more than you think. You just have to see it and value it. Believe you’re important.” Then she took an envelope out of her apron pocket and held it up. “In here is a piece of paper. If you need to look at it for proof you aren’t . . . that word, then you can.” The chair scraped as Mama stood up. “It’s your choice. Bring it back when you’re done.” She left me and Jay sitting at the kitchen table.
“What should I do?” I asked.
Jay shook his head. “You have to choose. Wasn’t me got called that name. You gotta think of how much knowing matters to you.”
I thought of Doc’s words as I turned the envelope over and over in my hands. People will find a way to make you feel bad about yourself if you let them. I was letting what the girls said make me feel bad. Even though they didn’t know me at all. Even though they didn’t even try to get to know me, either. No one except Susie, at least.
How I was born didn’t matter. What mattered was what I did now.
I got up from the table and headed toward Mama’s room to return the envelope. I wasn’t going to open it. I didn’t need to. As I stood, Jay grinned and gave me a thumbs-up.
“Mama?” I raised my hand to knock on her door, but it swung open before I could. Then she grabbed me up in a huge hug.
“I’m proud of you, Jezebel,” she said.
I hugged her back. No matter what Lettie said or Deputy Collins did, I knew we would always be a family and help each other. It didn’t matter where we lived or what we wore or what we ate, we were Turners and we were family.
My stomach rumbled, and Mama chuckled softly. “It’s getting late, but would you like your dinner? I kept it warm in the oven.”
“Yes, please!”
Mama put a big bowl of Frogmore stew in front of me. For the first time in ages, I attacked my dinner almost as hard as Jay usually did. Frogmore stew didn’t have frogs in it, but it did have crab and shrimp cooked in a rich tomato broth with corn and potatoes. It was one of my favorite things that Mama cooked.
She sat with me while I ate dinner and I told her about the poems Miss Watson read to us.
“I’m so glad you’re getting to learn about these artists, Jez.” Mama took off her apron.
I finished the last of my stew. “We’re learning about writers, not painters.”
“Not only painters are artists. If a person is creating something with the work of their mind and hands, they are an artist, Jez.”
“So is Doc an artist?” I asked.
Mama thought about that. “I guess he is. Now wash your bowl and get ready for bed.”
Once I was tucked under the covers, I talked to Dinah about what I’d learned. Before long, though, Jay shushed me and said he wanted to get some sleep before tomorrow.
“Why?” I asked. “You never have trouble sleeping.”
Jay groaned and pulled the sheet over his head. When I started talking to Dinah again, I kept my voice quiet. Soon I heard him snoring.