Fannie opened the front door of her house and screamed in soprano: “Caroline, Tilla, y’all come on in; time for supper.”
Although she didn’t see her daughters, she suspected they’d heard her; they knew what time supper was usually served on church Sunday.
“Pony Hawkins,” she yelled to her husband who sat in the living room reading the paper, “The front door is a bit loose. I want it fixed today.”
Tilla rushed in and sat at the maplewood kitchen table, exhausted from playing tag with a few colored and white girls. She wore a white pinafore that covered her mauve-colored dress, which she’d worn to church earlier in the day.
The smell of warm corn pone, cow peas, and poke greens wafted in the air, igniting Tilla’s olfactory nerves. She sniffed a few times to taste the air. With a fork in one hand and a knife in the other, she leaned back in the chair and swung her legs back and forth, ready to eat.
Fannie hovered over the stove, stirring the cowpeas on a coal stove. Tilla dropped her fork on the table. Fannie turned to Tilla and looked at her with reproving eyes. Tilla quickly averted her eyes and looked down. But she recovered quickly as Fannie turned around to resume stirring the cow peas.
“Ma, I hope I can cook like you someday. You can cook anything and make it taste real good. Pa said you cook like Grandma Jane.”
A smile grew on Fannie’s face. Her daughter knew when to turn on the charm with words and eyes that were as bright as the noonday sun. Tilla was a popular eleven-year-old girl, who possessed an effervescent personality that attracted children and adults alike. Her smooth skin was a shade darker than her quadroon father’s pale skin. She’d inherited high cheekbones and straight auburn hair from her mother, Frances, or Fannie as she was called, who was a Griffe, a commixture of Creek Indian and Negro ancestry. The census counted them as mulatto, but there was no mistaking that they were Negro for all intents and purposes. They identified as Negro and attended the one community venue that established their identity—the Negro church.
Fannie put down the wooden ladle and turned around to look at Tilla. As she wiped her hands on her green-and-white checked apron, she said, “Honey, supper’s almost ready; be ready in ten minutes. Where’s your sister? She know what time we eat on Sunday.”
The Hawkins family had strived to live the respectable life their church taught them. Every Sunday after church, they put aside their chores. And as usual on church Sunday, Fannie had covered the dining table with her favorite damask tablecloth and put her finest china on top. For years, as best they could, the Hawkins family had made a habit of eating a meal together on their day off from work, Fannie from the usual household chores, and Pony from his carpentry business.
To spice up things a tad, Fannie and Pony’s family and friends often joined the Hawkinses for dinner. Tilla liked listening to grown folk conversation, especially talk about slavery. She enjoyed listening to Taz, a colored man who frequented all the groggeries in town. Although Pony had told him to avoid drinking before eating dinner with the family, Taz didn’t always abide. But because he made Tilla laugh, and sometimes Caroline, Pony excused Taz’s slip. When worked up, Taz regaled the Hawkins family with tales of how he survived plantation life as a slave. He’d show them a dance he did for the slave master’s family: He’d suddenly fall to the floor and get up limping, a way of getting out of his back-breaking slave work. He’d tell the Hawkins family that the slave master never caught on to him because he was careful to execute his plan at the right moment.
Pony slipped into a groggery every once in a while; one of them is where he met Taz. He didn’t go there for the firewater that contributed to the general liveliness in the inn, but for fellowship with the men he knew. After witnessing his father’s pitiful descent into alcoholism, he didn’t need the church to tell him he had to be abstemious. He was a businessman, and he thought it helped his business if he mixed with the people periodically.
But today it would be just the four of them eating together on church Sunday.
“I saw her last at Troublesome Creek,” Tilla said. “That’s been some time.”
The Hawkinses lived in Mount Hope, a wisp of a town nestled in northeastern Alabama in between the slightly larger towns of Moulton and Russellville. The locals said Mount Hope got its name from the pioneer days when settlers, cutting through canebrake for days, stopped when they came upon a creek that was “swollen with rains,” which somebody named a troublesome problem. Some pioneers crossed the creek and set up their homes, and the others remained behind. The locals also said that this represented the first split of many for the Mount Hope community.
Despite its name, the creek held something for both the younger and older children. The babbling creek held the younger children’s attention, who were told that the creek contained the ghosts of dead Confederate soldiers. They liked to play by taking turns walking on an old, fallen bur oak log that stretched across the narrowest part of the creek, fearful of falling into the clutches of dead Confederate soldiers. Among the older children, it was the place to find other young people, to see and be seen. For those who wished not to be seen, there were always the many hollows that the older children occupied to explore the anatomy of the opposite sex. It was a place that did not respect a color line; it was as though the children didn’t care about the grown-up talk about race. There would be plenty of time for talk of race, but for now it would have to wait. It was a place where adults did not wander, and the children knew it. It was as if a gatekeeper checked everyone’s age at the gate, allowing only age-appropriate children to pass through.
Pony walked in from the front porch holding a folded newspaper. “Go get your sister,” he said, in a rich baritone voice. “Let’s not keep your mama waiting much longer.” He said this as much for Fannie’s benefit as his—he was hungry, too, all the more so after looking in the tall pot of poke greens.
Tilla didn’t look forward to a return trip to Troublesome Creek. She was knackered and hungry. She rose slowly from her chair and shuffled to the door.
“Wait, baby.” Fannie handed Tilla three corn pones. Tilla ate one and put the others in her pinafore pocket. “Now drink this.” She handed Tilla a mug of water.
Off Tilla went to look for her sister Caroline, who was three years older. Caroline was nearly a head taller than Tilla, and she’d inherited her mother’s Indian-brown skin and her frizzy jet black hair, perhaps from an ancestor down the line somewhere.
Tilla was gregarious and loquacious, but Caroline was introverted and diffident. Tilla liked people and studied them to find a way to make them bend her way, but Caroline avoided people, afraid they’d discover her odd behavior and recurrent and intrusive, obsessive and compulsive thoughts that often left her immured in her bedroom. She’d count the poplar floorboards in her bedroom every day to make sure the number stayed constant. If the number from the previous day was off, she’d count again until the number matched. But even when the number matched, she wouldn’t leave her room until her two pillows sat up against the headboard at the right height.
Pony and Fannie took Caroline’s diffidence as something she would grow out of. She just needed to meet more people, they thought. And because she was ripening into the age when boys would come calling, she’d eventually break out of her shell. They were never aware of her world that kept her isolated.
They told themselves that they loved Caroline and Tilla equally. But to Caroline, it was like suckling puppies maneuvering to latch onto one of their mother’s teats in order to sate their hunger, and Caroline got pushed aside.
Tilla and Caroline had settled into their chores, each taking on more responsibility with age. Tilla usually prepared the table for meals, washed the dishes, swept the floor, and did other sundry menial chores asked of her. Caroline usually scrubbed the floors, washed and ironed clothes, helped with the cooking, milked the cows, and sometimes wrung a chicken’s neck.
Caroline never complained about her chores, not so much because Fannie told her that Tilla would acquire some of her chores as Tilla got older, but because that was her nature. Complaining would invite questions, and questions meant more talking, which she wasn’t good at.
Pony couldn’t wait on his daughters to return before eating. Fannie set his plate in front of him as he sat down to eat. Fannie was every bit the cook as her mother, Jane. Pony had tasted Jane’s cooking as a young boy and fell in love with it. Without Jane, there’d be no Fannie in Pony’s life.
Pony first met Jane when he was a teenage farmhand. Jane smelled him before Pony had said his first word. Jane put the shirt she was washing back in her bucket of water, put down the washing board, and turned around on the bench to acknowledge who was behind her. “Hi, mister,” she said.
“It’s a bit cooler where you are,” the slender-framed boy said.
She nodded. “This here shade tree good to me,” she said, looking at the elm tree’s expansive branches that blocked out the sun.
“You been singing for some time now,” the skinny boy said. “I never heard songs like that.”
“They slave songs,” Jane said. She studied him to determine his age and color. She had seen many men like him: they’d have a hint of a colored person whether in the hair texture, skin color, the shape of the nose or lips. But often it was not enough to prevent them from passing as white. Sometimes folk like Jane just had a feeling what race such a person claimed.
The skinny boy nodded and offered his age: “I’m sixteen.”
“I reckon you be about nine when they say Lincoln said we free.” She paused. “Why you talking to me?” she asked gently.
“When I take a break from working on the barn to get water, I hear your songs, pretty as a nightingale. You pretty, too.”
Jane was middle-aged, but she accepted the compliment. “Mighty nice of you to say.”
“You sing all the time?”
“Sing when I’m happy, sing when I’m sad. Tell you the truth, not many happy days. Not much changed since the War ended.”
He shook his head, barely noticeably. Jane couldn’t tell if the shake was because she said too much or because that was his way of commiserating with her.
He used his shirt to wipe sweat from his brow. A new subject was called for. His eyes landed on hers. “I ain’t seen a colored person with your eyes.”
Her small cornflower-blue eyes contrasted with her reddish-brown skin, long, black feathery hair, and full lips. Though she had some features of the Creek, she was classified as a Negro, and had been a slave.
She smiled weakly, not sure whether a response was required.
“My name’s Pony. What’s yours?”
“Jane,” she said as she looked past him and saw a white man looking in their direction.
Pony turned around. “He’s another worker; he wants me to get back to work.”
“How you get that name?” she asked.
“Mother said I liked ponies as a little boy.”
Jane continued to study his features as his race confused her. He looked white but there was a hint of color in him, she thought. The gray eyes, curly brown hair, and slightly reddish skin confounded her.
“Why’re you looking at me like that?” he asked.
Her look turned sheepish. But she wanted to know. “Where’d you get that curly hair?”
He had seen the stares before and had heard it before. “My pa said his grandmother had colored blood.”
“Mr. Pony, I best return to work. I don’t want Mr. Childs or the missus after me.”
“Who?”
“Mr. Childs is the owner of all this land. That barn you building is for him. I stayed on with him here in Mount Hope after the War.”
“Bye, Miss Jane,” Pony said. He ran back to the task of helping build Mr. Childs’s barn.
Jane sat on the same bench the next day washing clothes, wearing the same long skirt and ratty blouse. And with his next break, Pony walked over to the singing chickadee.
She smelled him. “You back again,” Jane said.
Rivulets of sweat began to sting his eyes, causing him to use the tail of his musty cotton shirt to wipe his clammy face, hoping the already sweat-soaked shirt would work better to slow down the rivulets than his sweaty hands. “My pa told me the colored people are good people.”
Looking at Pony’s slender frame, Jane said, “Seem you can stand a good meal. Why don’t you stop by my home? Me and Fannie will cook a good meal for you.”
“Gee, thanks. I love to eat,” he said, rubbing his flat belly. “I’ll be there after we finish throwing up the barn.” He paused. “Tell me where you live.”
Jane told him, and he said, “Be there in a couple of hours.”
He paused, then asked: “Who’s Fannie?”
“She my fourteen-year-old daughter.”
“I see. You have a family?”
“Two grown boys; they done moved on. Got two girls at home with me. My husband died a few years back.”
Fannie had worn a long, gray dress that that hugged her slender frame at the waist. She and her younger sister had set the table.
“Come in,” Jane said, hearing a knock at the door.
“Good evening, Miss Jane,” Pony said. “I came with an empty stomach.”
Jane tilted her had back and laughed. “Good, we got plenty.”
Pony returned several more times for dinner, and with each visit he took more and more of a liking to Fannie.
Within in two years’ time, they were married; she was sixteen and he was eighteen. Jane had seen something in the skinny boy, and believed he’d do right for Fannie, so she happily assented to the marriage by signing her name with an X for approval on the marriage license.
k
As Tilla opened the front door to go to retrieve her sister, Pony told her to take Jughead with her for company. Jughead was Caroline’s find. Caroline adopted the black-and-white border collie when he walked up to her one day—a day she had had an accurate floorboard count—while she sat in a pasture under a Spanish moss tree, contemplating her hollow place in the world. As was the course, Jughead would lick her hands and face, then snuggle in her lap.
But Caroline later began to ignore Jughead as she developed recurrent and intrusive thoughts about harming him; ignoring him was her way of saving his life. As Caroline deprived Jughead of affection and attention, he soon found it in Tilla, who rubbed his belly and took him for walks.
Tilla yelled in a drawn-out voice: “Jughead, Jughead.” He finished his business against an old tree stump and sprinted in the direction of the waves that carried Tilla’s voice. He wagged his tail feverishly, ready to please.
They made it to Troublesome Creek thirty minutes later. Tilla saw a colored boy walking on the bur oak log that crossed the shoals of the creek. After a few steps on the log, he jumped in the air to prove he could land squarely on the log without falling into the water. Tilla stopped to watch, entranced. He did it again. He landed on the log, put his arms in the air, turned slightly to the spectators on land behind him, and cocked his head to the side as to say it was easy, nothing to it. As he turned to face forward, he failed to see the notch in the log. He lost his balance and fell in the warm water and went under.
After about forty seconds of being under water, the children’s faces sagged, wondering whether he had drowned. Suddenly, he burst through the water, his arms flailing, pretending to escape from hands of a Confederate soldier.
A little white girl shouted: “Andy, stop playing like that. It’s not funny.”
“C’mon, boy,” Tilla hollered. Jughead had held off long enough. Hunger pangs gnawed him, and he sniffed the corn pone in Tilla’s pinafore pocket. “Okay, boy, let’s share.” She broke off a piece and Jughead quickly snatched it from her open hand. “We gotta find Caroline so we can go home to eat.”
She asked the children who were congregated in a small group if they had seen Caroline. They didn’t recognize the name. Even Tilla’s description of her sister was of no help.
Tilla stumbled upon a colored girl who knew Caroline. She told Tilla that she had seen Caroline earlier at Troublesome Creek, but she had left.
“Did you talk to her?” Tilla asked.
“Yeah, I did. She looked sad. She mentioned something about ‘going away.’”
“Did she say where?”
The girl shook her head.
Tilla and Jughead continued to search for Caroline all around Troublesome Creek. Tilla walked in several hallows calling out Caroline’s name; the only thing Tilla heard was the echo of her own voice.
The sun begun to set and Tilla and Jughead headed home. Caroline was probably already at home, Tilla thought.
“Where’s Caroline?” Pony asked.
“Don’t know, Pa. I thought she’d be here. Me and Jughead didn’t see her.”
Fannie walked around town calling Caroline’s name every day for three weeks, hoping she’d hear her mother’s cry, like a cub animal recognizes her mother’s call. The search continued but was less frequent. But the pain was still present. She blamed herself for her daughter’s disappearance; she bottled her grief by withdrawing inside herself.
Pony feared that Fannie’s melancholy could lead to the disintegration of his family. He coveted an intact family, unlike his family that unraveled when he was young. His father Charles sympathized with the Southern poor coloreds and whites and yeoman farmers who forged an alliance with the Northern Republicans as a strike against the planter aristocracy they so resented. He put his hat in the political ring and ran for a seat in the Alabama legislature but took a drubbing at the polls. He just couldn’t overcome the scalawag label that his opponent pinned on him. Pony witnessed his father become a defeated man after the wretched political race. Charles drank himself into oblivion, eventually dying of a broken heart.