Up comes Lazarus. The bed is wet with sweat and dew, and the fireflies have begun flickering in unison with the locusts in the live oaks. Two skinny feet hit the wood floor and pull the man’s body straight up and stretching. He’s been three days prostrate with fever and agony, but now the demons are released—just in time to make the long-load by week’s end. Cotton trucks are barely half full, and a storm is brewing in the Gulf and headed toward the local coastline. Every worker knows the crop’s got to get picked and loaded and hauled to Memphis ahead of it. Tension rises and lingers.
“Supper’s settin’ on the table, Lazarus. Ain’t no need stallin’—it ain’t goin’ come to you.” Marva Lee smiles relief that her Lazarus is still among the living, what with folks laid low by the fever epidemic. She is strong like Lazarus, borne of pioneer stock. But her husband does not know she is three months with child. Fieldwork doesn’t set aside time for having babies. They come when they come—then right back to the fields. Marva Lee’s seen it all her life: babies spilling from the bellies of young girls under a tree, sometimes mid-field. Just a fact of life in the Delta.
“Bess in harness?” Lazarus asks. “Bet she wonderin’ where I been so long. That mule ain’t leavin’ the station without me.” The sickness still hangs in the man’s eyes, his aura.
“It ain’t mornin’, Lazarus,” Marva Lee smiles. “It’s nearly night time. Can’t you hear the locusts arguin’? You been gone three days.” She places a cup of hot coffee in his hand and nudges him toward the table. “You got to get your strength back ’fore you get old Bess ready for haulin’. Besides, she need a rest, too. That poor old mule ain’t been on her feet since you went down.”
Lazarus works his way mechanically through a heaping plate of smokehouse ham and biscuits and redeye gravy, then makes his way back to his damp bedding and drifts into darkness again.
Come morning, up he rises with great resolve and coddles old Bess along her familiar tracks to the waiting fields. Even before the sun breaks the tree line, voices call and the fields wave with bodies stooped and groaning in unison up the furrows, like the slow rise of a tide. A cloudless September has turned the prickly plants brittle and bloodstained. There is no singing, just the steady sway of bodies hell-bent on making the long load before the storm makes landfall and snatches their payload from the Delta soil.
“Mindy down!” a voice suddenly calls. “Mindy painin’ with her baby!”
Lazarus drops his cotton sack and hurdles six rows to where two old women already have the girl splayed on a white apron, prodding her belly. Blood issues from her groin, and the young woman is unconscious. The baby is early.
“Fetch me some water!” Miss Lotrece yells toward the wagons. “Gonna need a good knife for this one,” she says to Lazarus. “Baby ain’t comin’ on its own. We got to take it.”
“We got to move her in the shade,” Marva Lee urges, but Miss Lotrece says there ain’t time; she’d lose them both if they tried.
“Everybody stand ’round,” the old woman says. “Ya’ll goin’ make a shade for this poor child. She ain’t goin’ make it out here in the sun. Stand close and lean in.”
Lazarus lights a kitchen match to sterilize his knife blade. Panic rises when Miss Lotrece makes the first cut, opening the birth canal. Folks flinch and groan. The old woman senses no stirring, no sign of life within. It’s the girl’s first child and she isn’t but fifteen herself. Coming early, and with a ragged birth, doesn’t offer much hope. The old woman gently squeezes the child’s stomach from breastbone to navel. She repeats the compressions in brief intervals, with the gnarled and ancient hands that have pulled new life from wombs some thirty years now.
“Child done turned on me,” the woman says. “Baby trying to come out bottom-first. Got to work it now. Slow and easy. Got to turn this child the way God meant it to come.”
Women create a breeze for the old woman and the child by fanning their aprons. The sun seems to have stalled in the morning sky, taking direct aim at the angels of mercy gathered round the girl and her bastard baby. From the ache of empathy, a stir of voices slowly rise—weak at first, then round with fullness. It’s Minn, it’s Minn, it’s Minn, oh Lord, standin’ in the need of prayer. It’s Minn, it’s Minn, it’s Minn, oh Lord, standin’ in the need of prayer. Onlookers join the low, soulful plea for divine intervention. Little else can be done now.
“God guide my hands, guide my hands, Oh Lord,” Lotrece whispers as she works the girl’s womb to submission. The girl still draws breath, but weak and shallow. “We got to turn her on her side,” the old woman announces. “Got to get the baby turned round fast.”
Lazarus and another man gently lift the girl’s limp body and place her on her right side, braced by two women who drop to their knees. The old woman draws a deep breath and gently chants, It’s me, it’s me, it’s me, oh Lord … standin’ in the need of prayer. It’s me, it’s me, it’s me, oh Lord, standin’ in the need of prayer.” Other voices soon blend and rise again.
Marva Lee holds back, as if observing the event from some distant place. Her mind swirls with images of spreading trees and stately halls of learning. She pictures Lazarus walking beside her, proud and handsome, on courtly lawns and winding paths. It is their dream, their destiny to escape the legacy of sharecropping. Of this, she is sure. Her Lazarus will graduate from Southern, and they will take their rightful place in the changing world around them. It is the dawn of a new era for Negroes, and they will advance themselves beyond any dreams their parents or grandparents or any of their kin could ever believe possible. From the toil of four years in the hot fields, they will have saved enough money to make it so.
“Hand me that knife again, Marva Lee,”
Marva Lee is lost to her heady dreams, her alternate reality.
“Hurry up, girl! Hand me that knife,” Lotrece yells at Marva Lee.
“Oh. Yessum.” Marva Lee reaches for the knife, but Lazarus has already passed it to the woman.
“Girl, you got to help me.” Lotrece says to Marva Lee. “You got to hold this rag tight in place to stop the bleedin. You got that, chile?”
“Yessum,” Marva Lee says, stooping beside the girl’s body now. Heady visions of that better world suddenly evaporate. Where moments before, she was bathed in beauty and hope, her mind is now awash with blood and dirt and the despair of reality.
“Now give me your apron, girl, and stand back. I got the child turned and ready.”
Marva Lee removes her apron and takes her place again in the circle of women.
“Prop her legs up, Lazarus. Push her feet into the dirt to keep them up. I got to get at this chile ’fore they both gone.”
With that, the woman reaches into the opening, guided by God’s own hands, and pulls life from the dark vacuum. She presses her parted lips to the newborn’s mouth and gently blows breath into its frail chest. No sound, no response. She repeats several times, gently pressing on its tiny chest in between breaths until at last a faint cry breaks the hot silence.
“She goin’ be alright,” the woman announces. “She goin’ be jus’ fine.”
But the mother—a child herself—lies motionless, life slowly draining from the brutal tears in her tiny uterus. She will not live to fulfill her own dreams of attending nursing school, advancing her family beyond sharecropper row.
“Lazarus, you and Colby get Miss Mindy in the wagon and take her home. Her mama and daddy workin’ the cane fields down south, so we got to send for them. I’ll be along directly with the baby.”
“Miss Lotrece! She talkin’,” Nelsy says. “She alive. She sayin’: ‘Hand me my baby’. Mindy ain’t dead.”
“Tear me a piece of your dress, girl,” the woman tells Nelsy. “Hurry up, chile!”
She carefully winds the material into a ball and presses it into the child’s cavity to stop further blood flow. “I’ll keep this pressed good and tight, Lazarus, while you and Jacob tote her to the truck. Y’all walk slow and easy. And Nelsy, you go double that old blanket up on the truck bed to lay this chile down. Hurry!”
Bodies move slowly in the Delta heat. Once settled into the truck bed, Nelsy places Mindy’s head in her lap and cradles the silent baby in her arms. It is rugged ride back home—Mindy’s frail body oozing life the entire way.
“Y’all O.K. back there, Miss Nelsy?” Lazarus asks. “Miss Mindy O.K.?”
“She fine, Lazarus. Jus’ restin’ is all. Poor chile don’t know she in the world.”
Lazarus brings the wagon to a halt under the shade of a great pin oak next to Miss Mindy’s parents’ shack in sharecropper row. Bitter dust swirls and chokes as the two struggle to get the girl and her baby settled in the hot house.
“She ain’t breathin’, Lazarus,” Nelsy whispers. “Miss Mindy done gone and died on me.”
Lazarus places his ear to the girl’s chest. He shakes her body, calls her name repeatedly. “Get me some water, Miss Nelsy! We got to wake this chile.” He calls her name again and again, tells her she’s got a brand new baby girl, whispers to her with soft, soothing reassurance. But it will not do.
Marva Lee takes the news with great anger, her young friend’s dreams stolen away by one careless act. Her mission to help her family rise from the hot fields and poverty has died with her—a reminder to Marva Lee how delicate the line between desire and determination.
A pall now hovers over sharecropper’s row and the cotton fields, but there is no time set aside for grieving come picking season. The approaching storm has stirred itself into a hurricane in the warm Gulf waters and is bearing down quickly now on the Mississippi shoreline.
Next morning, Lazarus announces to the other workers: “We got three days at the most to get these fields picked and loaded and on that train. Miss Mindy’s done gone, but she’s got a fine baby girl to take her place in the world. Mindy in a better place now.”
But the sadness hangs painfully. The hot, still air belies the true condition of things to come. Bodies and hands return to their work, moving quickly through the rows.
Miss Lotrece chants, stirring the others to song.
Sometimes I feel like a motherless child,
Sometimes I feel like a motherless child,
Sometimes I feel like a motherless child,
Long way from my home …
Marva Lee does not sing. She moves methodically, her mind once again swimming with images of college lawns and stately halls of learning, of Lazarus marching on graduation day—of a life planets away from the cotton fields of Mississippi. She thinks, too, of the child she carries, a condition she has not shared with Lazarus, and how it will affect their lives, their shared dreams.
By nightfall, clearly half the field had been picked, sacked, and loaded on the wagons and trucks—by sweat and backbone and the stench of twelve hours laboring in the Delta sun. They will make the deadline for sure, Miss Lotrece announces. No one knows more about the matter than Miss Lotrece—forty-five years in the harsh fields makes a soul wise.
“We got to pay respects to Miss Mindy and her family,” Miss Lotrece reminds everyone. “You young womenfolk with babies got to help nurse that child, now her mama done gone. Nelsy can’t breast nurse it by herself—she got a baby at home like some of you.”
The young women lower their heads in resignation. It is not the first time some of them have served as surrogate mother to an orphaned child in the Quarters. They know their duty.
“Y’all be here at sunup in the mornin’, and let’s see if we can’t finish all the pickin’ tomorrow,” Lazarus says loudly, which earns a round of “Amens.”
Marva Lee remains quiet on the wagon ride home, her mind a twist of chaos too tired to consider anything but sweet Mindy and the responsibility she carries in her own womb, and how it will guide and direct their lives, preempt their plans, their dreams. She cannot clear her mind of how she was forced to witness the young girl’s dreams float quietly away from her lifeless body.
A warm wind pushes in during the night, stirring branches and underbrush to discontent. Somewhere in the dark, and miles yet from the flat Delta cotton fields, the menacing storm brews in the warm Gulf waters. Marva Lee struggles with equal restlessness to accept the cruel inevitability of ruined chance—escape from the fields.
She rocks nervously in the blackness of the night, while Lazarus sleeps deeply with sweet contentment of making the long-load on time. The porch boards creak quietly under her rocker, echoing the pain of dashed hopes. The winds stir and ebb, taunting her, reminding her that the very house she and Lazarus share may be lifted and strewn to hell and hereafter by the coming storm. It is too much.
Marva Lee rocks angrily now, the rocker inching across the porch by involuntary movement—explained only by a repeated pattern of motion—until alas the blackness of night and the porch’s edge intersect.
Lazarus rises straight up in the night. Marva Lee is not in bed beside him. “Marva Lee! Where are you?” he calls, sure that she is in the outhouse behind the shack. No answer. He calls several more times.
The winds have increased, and branches now shake the house with sharp screeches. The first glint of daylight peaks through the window by the time Lazarus pulls on his overalls and shoes. Still no response from Marva Lee. Nor is she in the outhouse. “Marva Lee!” Lazarus calls frantically, now afraid she had been taken in the night.
There at the bottom of the steep front steps he finds her body, amid the broken bones of her tired old rocker. She lies motionless and contorted. Blood oozes from her midsection. Lazarus flinches with reminiscence of poor Miss Mindy and her troubled pregnancy.
He works carefully freeing his wife from the rocker pieces, checking her limbs for fractures. Her breath now comes in quick, deep gasps, as she rouses to the sound of Lazarus calling her name—at first echoing as if thrown from a deep chamber, then clear and loud.
“You all right, baby?” Lazarus asks. “You hurt anywhere?”
Marva Lee’s eyes widen and stare. “I’m fine, Lazarus.”
“Looks like you done fell down the steps in this old rocker, baby. I done told you it needs repair.”
“I’m okay, Lazarus—just a little bruised is all.” She struggles to sit up. It is then she notices the nightgown soaked in blood. Her blood.
“We got to get you inside and see where that blood comin’ from, Marva Lee.”
The woman’s eyes softly close. She is lost to the sudden realization, the consequence of her fall. “I’ll be fine, Lazarus. I know where the blood comin’ from. It’s my lady’s time is all.”
Lazarus helps her to her feet and holds her close. “Marva Lee, I thought I done lost you.”
“I told you wasn’t nothin’ goin’ keep us from our dream, Lazarus. We goin’ to that college, baby, just like we been plannin’. And then we ain’t never comin’ back to these fields of misery.”