But before that, first thing Sunday morning, the day after Elma Jesup married Oliver Rawls, the day after Sterling Smith and Freddie Wilson appeared on the chain gang, Nancy Smith had nursed her son in the house at 52 Main Street. She wore her nightgown and her head rag—her hair was longer now, just full enough to plait and wrap—and a pair of bedroom slippers that had been left behind in Carlotta Rawls’s closet. The picture window in her new room, the back room, was south facing, and though over the distant fence she could see the busy chimneys of the neighboring street, she saw no other windows. The only other soul who could see her was the cardinal in the crape myrtle that stood in the backyard.
The morning sun poured through the window where Pollux, on the rag rug, and Winna, in the crib, still slept. Winna would have her own room in time, her own crib, but Nan had wanted both babies close that first night. She had woken twice, heart pounding, disoriented in the dark, and having located them in their crib like their constellations in the sky, she went back to bed, satisfied. More disorienting than the dark was the light she woke to. There were no roosters to announce the dawn, no cows to milk, and the only breakfast she had to make was her own. She was hungry, she realized. She walked now, nursing Wilson still, the neck of her nightgown pulled low, to the kitchen. It was cooler there, cold—she would have to build the fire back up—and when she opened the refrigerator, the cold drifted out at her like a wind. Wilson shivered. She closed the door. On the front of the door—the whitest white she had ever seen—was taped a doctor’s prescription sheet, where someone had written, Be strong and let your heart take courage, all you who put your hope in the Lord.
She opened the refrigerator again. Out poured the cold air. Wilson pulled off her breast. She wrapped him in his blanket and shivered, teaching him cold. The two of them stood thrilling in the draft for a moment, staring into the foggy eye of the Frigidaire.
There were milk bottles stacked in rows and a bundle of parsnips and a bottle of Heinz tomato ketchup. In a wire basket hanging from a shelf, hen eggs, a dozen at least, loose and cold, like river stones. She sat Wilson on the floor, his blanket puddled around him—they were black and white tiles, and the part of her that was still fourteen and not yet fifteen wanted to hopscotch the squares—and lifted her nightgown and put three eggs in it to carry. She walked the eggs to the stove. She hummed a song she made up as she walked. Wilson followed her with his eyes. He followed the song, his ears awake to the new sound. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d heard it herself. At the stove she set the eggs in a pan and looked around for wood. She looked for matches. She opened one of the oven doors. She opened the other. Then she tried pressing one of the dials below the stove. She gave it a pinch and a turn. She heard a click. In a moment, one of the ash gray spirals grew orange at the edges. She gave a joyful yelp. In a moment more, the burner glowed red. She clapped her hands. She hovered her hand over the electric flame, feeling its heat.
And then Wilson was clapping. Seven months old, sitting on the floor in his white cotton nightgown, he offered up his first applause.
Nan gave another gasp. She laughed. She clapped. She went to the baby and she knelt on the floor. And then she cried.
* * *
The day before, the day of the wedding, seemed far off now. From the place she’d hid with the twins, she could hear but not see the dogs barking, and then the gunshot, the music on the porch, and later, though she still didn’t dare to leave the pantry, the truck wrecking in the ditch at the crossroads. She had never been to a wedding before, and she wasn’t sure which parts of the ruckus were coming from the church. A long time seemed to pass before the knock came at the breezeway door. She seized up, gathered the babies onto her lap. The knocking continued. After a few minutes, a little voice hollered, “Miss Nan!” And worried that something had happened to Elma, who should have been home by now to feed Winna, Nan stood and went to the door and opened it.
It was little Lucy Cousins, wearing her Sunday clothes. Her shoes were muddy and her freckled face was red from running in the cold. “Miss Elma said to fetch you. Your daddy’s come home.”
Nan squeezed her eyes shut. The words were like too much sunlight. It was dark in the house, and it took a moment for her eyes to adjust.
She found shoes and her chore coat, bonnets and booties. She strapped the babies into the little red wagon with a quilt, leaving the sacks of flour there to brace them. She looked at her reflection in the diamond-shaped sliver of mirror hanging beside Elma’s chifforobe. She adjusted her head wrap. She hadn’t washed since Tuesday but there was no time now.
As she followed the little girl down the road, pulling the babies behind her, she paged through a book in her mind, a book of pictures she had conjured of her father, her father working in the steel mill, her father dropping a Buffalo nickel in an envelope, her father’s bristly mustache, which smelled like pipe tobacco and almond oil. She had long had a picture in her mind of his homecoming: he would come up the driveway in an automobile, a Pontiac or a Chevrolet, with a license plate that said maryland. The dogs would go out to greet him first and she’d step out onto the porch. He’d be wearing a Sunday suit and a wide-brimmed hat, which he’d tip up to get a better look at her, and then he’d take off the hat and hold it over his heart, and his eyes would see and see her. And then she would know. She would recognize him. She would recognize her own face in his.
But she knew that nothing happened the way you imagined it. That was how she knew it was real. The road was freshly paved, as though it had been laid down for this walk. It was smooth and still a little soft under her feet, the chalky smell of compressed rock still burning through the low-lying fog. Up ahead she could see a cluster of vehicles at the crossroads store. She could hear Pollux barking. Folks were milling about on the porch of the store, drinking Coca-Colas, playing checkers, as they sometimes did after church, but there were more of them than Nan had ever seen, spilling nearly into the road. Her heart was beating fast now. Parked among the cars and trucks was the sheriff’s motorcycle.
“Nan!”
Then there was Elma in her wedding dress, pushing through the crowd. She was wearing a worried face, but as she reached Nan she seemed to remember that she was happy. Nan felt the eyes of the crowd turn to her. It was as though the eyes of the crowd followed Elma’s eyes.
“You’re not gone believe it, Nan. Your daddy’s come home.” She reached for Nan’s hand. On Elma’s ring finger she felt the sharp weight of the jade ring. Elma pulled her closer and whispered in her ear that he was on the chain gang, that so was Freddie, that Freddie was why all the people were there. “It’s all right. You won’t be able to get close to him. But come on over and meet him.”
Elma led Nan, who led the twins in the wagon, through the eyes of the crowd. There was Mrs. Cousins and there was Mr. Simmons and there was Dr. Oliver, sitting at one of the tables to rest his leg. There at the corner of the store was Juke, talking to the sheriff. He was making a ruckus but he stopped as they passed. They all stopped. Fell quiet. They all parted for their little train—Elma, Nan, the wagon. And though she was still filled with fear, she felt the power, the protection, of the hand that led her. There was an awe in their eyes as they watched Elma go. She was the bride today, yes, but she had long been bride to the town. They had hailed her, they had followed her every word. They had believed her. This was what Nan saw. And she remembered the day that Elma had earned their deference.
Around the corner of the store, which had fallen into shade, the chain of men leaned against the east wall. Some were drinking Coca-Colas. Some were smoking cigarettes. They chatted quietly, as though waiting in line for a picture show. She scanned their faces. She didn’t recognize him. He could have been any of them.
“Warden,” Elma said to another man in uniform. “I got my chore girl here. That’s her daddy.” She pointed to a strong-shouldered man in the middle of the chain. “Uncle Sterling!” She waved. “Warden, could she stand and wave?”
The warden said nothing. Just stared. Nan hoped Juke was watching too. The man was leaning against the wall, smoking a cigarette someone had given him. A tin cup and a spoon hung from his belt; a handkerchief hung from his back pocket. When he saw her, he dropped the cigarette in the dirt and stomped it out and stood up straight. Nan stood up straight too. He was wearing a hat, not a wide-brimmed hat but a striped knit cap. He didn’t take it off. Just stared. His face was clean-shaven, his long sideburns silvered.
She was feeling brave. So she lifted her hand and waved.
He waved back.
“Hello, Nancy,” he said. “You a sight for sore eyes.”
* * *
She had mostly stopped crying, was holding Wilson on her hip and watching the water boil, water she had procured by turning a faucet in a cast-iron sink. She was reaching her hand toward the burner and then pulling it back, teaching him hot, when a sound filled the room. It was like the squawk of a monstrous crow. It came again. No, it wasn’t like a crow. It was unlike any sound she had heard before. Pollux came into the kitchen, tail up, barking, nails clicking on the tile floor. The sound came a third time, and she saw on the wall the black instrument rattling on its hook—yes, like a crow on a branch, struggling to open its wings. Haltingly, she moved toward it. It hung on the wall above the table. It rang again. It was ringing. She stopped some distance from it and listened to it ring, six times, seven. She put her free hand over her ear and looked at Wilson, whose eyes were wide. And she taught herself the word as she would teach him if she could—“telephone.”
* * *
She had not been at the crossroads when Juke had been hauled away. She had left first. Mac Burnside, the colored man Oliver had hired to move the furniture, had driven Nan and the twins and Pollux—for Pollux was more house dog than farm dog, Elma reasoned, and couldn’t be left alone, not without her mate—to Dr. Rawls’s house in town. They had almost reached town, the place where the still dirt Straight became Main Street, when the sirens came up behind them. It was the sheriff on his motorcycle, kicking up dust. Mac Burnside pulled over to the right, nearly to the ditch. The motorcycle passed them on the left. Behind it was a patrol car, the warden driving. All the times she had seen the lights of a siren in a rearview mirror, all the times she had heard that motorcycle come up behind a country wagon when she was out on a call, her heart backed up in her throat. But this time was different. In the backseat of the patrol car—she could see him as it passed—was Juke. She watched the car recede far ahead of them before Mac pulled back onto the road. In her dress pocket was a key to the front door of the doctor’s house, and she squeezed it.
Now she was inside the locked house and the telephone had stopped ringing. The kitchen was as quiet as it had been loud. It must have been a call for Oliver, or for Mrs. Rawls, someone who didn’t know she’d left for Savannah. It wouldn’t have been Elma or Oliver. They knew she couldn’t talk back. But maybe they had a message for her, and they thought if she lifted the receiver she might be able to listen. Maybe they’d been held up at the hotel.
But maybe it was her father. Maybe he had a message for her too. Or maybe he didn’t know—was it possible he didn’t know?—that she had no way of answering the phone.
The ringing had woken Winna. Nan brought her to the kitchen to feed her what milk she had left. Still the sunlight filled the room but the ringing phone had cut through the calm. She boiled the eggs and ate them and had enough left to feed to Pollux and to the babies. Wilson spit the egg out but Winna was licking the last bits off of Nan’s fingers when the phone rang again.
She didn’t sit around and wait for it to stop. She left Pollux to bark at it and gathered the babies and hurried them to the back room. She shut the door. She busied herself by changing their diapers. She hummed the same tune, more loudly, to cover the sound. When the ringing stopped, she felt her breath return to its normal pace. She pointed out the window to the cardinal in the crape myrtle. She tapped the glass. She found a brown-skinned cloth doll with black yarn braids—where had it come from?—and she danced it for Winna.
Another bird came to the branch. Nan looked up, seeing it out of the corner of her eye. Under its gray wings it hid a yellow belly. A kingbird. Wasn’t it? It stepped toward the cardinal. It spoke a few words of a song. The cardinal spoke back.
Furiously Nan thumped the glass, and both birds scattered.
* * *
When the knock came on the door—a heavy knock, the kind that was made with an iron knocker—she was ready for it. The dog bounded to the door and barked back at it. It wasn’t Oliver and Elma come home; that much Nan knew. Oliver wouldn’t knock at his own door. It was someone come to take her away, or to take the babies away, or both. She had had one night in the house, a few safe, sacred hours, and already she could feel her future self looking back on them with longing.
She was resigned to it. She wouldn’t hide anymore. She put the babies together in the crib and she closed the back-room door. She was in her nightgown still. At the door she took the chore coat where she had hung it and pulled it on. She took a broom from the closet. She was just a house girl with a broom. But if it was someone come to hurt her, she would have the broom and she would have the dog. And then the familiar fear came to her, the feeling of opening a door to the unknown, and she allowed herself, hand on the knob, to admit its source: that it was Juke at the door. That it was Juke’s voice on the phone, come to find her.
She dropped her hand from the knob. There was a small hole in the door, just above her eye level. A peephole. She stood on tiptoe and peered through it. On the other side was Sheriff Cleave, standing on the porch.
She was so relieved it was him—not Juke, turned loose from the jail—that she unlocked the door and opened it.
The morning was as mild as it had seemed from inside. Yesterday’s fog was a memory. Down the porch steps, in the little paved driveway, the sun glared off the motorcycle’s mirrors.
She held the dog by the collar, letting the man look both of them up and down. She remembered that, in the big house on the morning after Genus was killed, he had been polite. Now he said, “You the woman of the house?”
It was a joke. He was playing. Nan could only shake her head.
“Is the woman of the house home, child? Or Dr. Rawls?”
Again she shook her head.
“I know you ain’t got no voice to speak of. I seen you yestidy out at the crossroads store. And I remember you at the farm. You remember that day, girl?”
She nodded.
“You look like you seen a ghost that day.”
The sun was bright and she shielded her eyes from it. The door stood open and she stood just inside it, the dog sniffing the air but still now at her side.
“I been ringing you up all morning. I guess you ain’t know how to use no telephone.” He was all business now. It was no fun, she supposed, playing with a girl who could only shake her head and nod, who couldn’t even say, “Sir.” “Neighbor ring up the station, say she seen a colored girl up in the doctor’s house. Ain’t no one ever seen her in this part a town, she says. Ain’t no one else about, no woman of the house. No man.”
Nan held tight to the broom with her right hand. The left hand, the one shielding her eyes from the sun, grew heavy.
“You got them babies with you, child?”
Nan waited a moment before she nodded.
“Gemini twins.” He chuckled. “Mr. Juke’s over in the jailhouse. You know that?”
She shook her head. She didn’t know why.
“Oh, yes. He’s fixing to be there till Friday at least.” He whistled off into the yard. “Got him in some trouble. Related back to that night I been out to the farm. Ugly night. We getting to the bottom of it.” He looked back to her sharply. “I know you got no voice to speak of. But if we put you on the stand, if it come to that, if you were called to the stand, you’d have to indicate. Yes or no. You’d have to give an answer best you could. You’d be under oath, child.”
Nan stood frozen. She indicated nothing.
“Just ’cause you got no voice don’t mean you get out of answering.”
She gave a small nod to satisfy him.
“You can say a whole lot with yes or no. Like this. Less try. How many hours you gone be all alone here in this house?”
She paused. And then she shook her head.
“No, you ain’t answering? Or no hours?” He was smiling now, playing again.
“You know how to count? You know your numbers?”
She nodded. A maid didn’t read but she was expected to count to cook.
“All right then. No hours. Spect them newlyweds will be home from their honeymoon soon. Spect they had enough honeymooning. Don’t take long for some folks. Not even one hour.”
He was a short man. They stood eye to eye. She might be able to get the handle of the broomstick in the fleshy place under his chin.
“All right then.” He’d made up his mind about something. “Tell Dr. Rawls if he’s smart he won’t leave no strange colored girl alone in a house in the First Ward. This here is a courtesy call. Lucky I ain’t bringing you to the jailhouse. Folks ain’t take to outsiders this side a town.”
Nan took a step behind the door, ready to close it. For the first time, she noticed that the ferns, the grand ferns that stood on the pillars of the porch, had grown brittle and brown.
“Draw them curtains,” said the sheriff. “Lock that door.” He spit on the porch. “You ain’t never know who’ll come around here.”
* * *
But then Oliver and Elma came home, and mostly they were bright and busy days, their first days in the house, the three of them finding their patterns, their places. Nan showed Elma how to work the sink, the stove, where the electric light switches were, and Elma pretended that she knew it all, and Nan felt sorry for her, for having to dull her own delight. Nan bathed the twins every morning, and took a bath herself, the water rushing out of the faucet as hot as if she’d boiled it. Winna cut a new tooth on her new doll’s yarn braids, and Wilson clapped for her. Along the fence in the backyard, Pollux dug a dirt patch in the sunny grass. They took to calling her Polly. With Castor gone she didn’t seem to need her whole name anymore.
On Monday Oliver returned to work. At noon the girls came to listen for Polly’s bark, and then the wheels of the wheelchair on the back-porch ramp, and then they all sat down together for a meal Nan had made, and then again for supper. Nan did most of the cooking and the cleaning; she was happy to have no yard chores; she slept well. She slept in the bed in the back room where Irene Douglass had slept with her daughter, Daisy. Still the twins slept beside her in their crib, where she could get up and see them if they needed her, or she needed them. All night the quiet rush of traffic passed by. A light from the street reflected off the white fence and filled the room like the moon.
In the evenings, after the babies were asleep, Elma and Oliver sat in the front room, still bright with lamplight, and Elma read Carlotta Rawls’s old issues of McCall’s and Woman and Home and Oliver read the newspaper while the radio played. They listened to the news until the news got bad, and then Oliver changed the station to jazz, which Elma didn’t care for, and then he changed the station to fiddling. Nan hurried through the dishes and set up the ironing board between the kitchen and the front room so she could listen while she ironed. One night Oliver turned and turned the dial until he could find the voice of a man he said was the governor of New York, a man who spoke like Sara and Jim, but even taller, tighter—New Yawk, the man said, his name was Roosevelt, and he was talking that night about coming to the aid of crippled children, he was saying, “as some of you know, I walk around with a cane and with the aid of somebody’s arm myself.” Oliver’s newspaper was closed and he was sitting at the edge of the leather chair with his elbows on his knees, listening. This was what he’d been turning and turning the dial to find. “And so this great movement across the United States is spreading like wildfire,” said Roosevelt. “Down at Warm Springs, Georgia, where I go every spring and autumn, we have what is one of many active expressions of this idea. Down there we take care principally of children who have had infantile paralysis, and the treatment there is not a treatment of operation but is primarily a treatment of trying to restore the muscles through swimming and exercising in warm water.” At this Oliver reached over to touch Elma’s knee, wanting her to listen but not wanting to miss a word himself. She was looking at her magazine but now she half-lowered it and raised her eyebrows and nodded. “What we want to do is to get about,” Roosevelt said. “And what we want to do, most of us, is to consider ourselves normal members of the community.” Oliver took off his glasses and polished them on his shirt, as though clean lenses might help him to hear more clearly. “We who have been crippled are not in any way different from the people who are not crippled; we are the same kind of human beings.”
When Roosevelt was finished, Oliver sat stunned for a moment, and then he stood up with the aid of his cane, as though cured by the address, and began to praise Franklin—he called him Franklin—as though the governor could hear him through the radio. What he had done for children, for crippled people, the sick, Oliver said—well, it was brave and it was unprecedented. He began to talk about what the man had done at Warm Springs, a place Oliver had been three times, but never when the governor was there. By then Elma had returned to nodding at her magazine. Nan had the sense she had heard it before. He was talking, then, not to the radio and not to Elma but now to Nan, who stood ironing and listening. He began to sway unsteadily on his feet, and Nan knew it meant he was tired, and knew he did not want anyone to catch him. He found his balance on his own. By now he was looking at her with the same intensity with which he’d just listened to the radio, and she was looking at him. They both stood in the stillness of the silenced speech, missing the voice, wishing it would go on. Was she too a cripple? Was that what she was? They were both wondering it. The way the governor had talked, it was something she almost wanted to be, a word that would explain what she was missing, that would join her with others who were missing something too, others that included her and Oliver in one sentence, one breath. Nan coasted the iron back and forth, steadily, not wanting to stop.
Elma flipped the pages of her magazine. “I reckon he’s got fine things to say,” she said, “but I don’t like his voice. Sound like he being strangled.”
* * *
Elma spent the week going to town, to the dime store, to Pearsall’s, to the Piggly Wiggly. First place she went was the department store, Cantor’s, where she bought a buggy big enough for Winna and Wilson, so she wouldn’t have to carry them in the wagon. She pushed them back and forth to town, letting folks slow their cars to watch her on the sidewalk. She bought a pair of patent leather heels and a good spring coat, and three new dresses, and rouge and red lipstick, which she wore breakfast to supper. She walked the packages home if she could manage them with the buggy, or she had them delivered. For the babies she ordered two wooden high chairs. For Oliver she bought two new silk ties, one red and one blue. For Nan she bought caramel milk rolls and a children’s book called The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which Nan did not need to hide but hid anyway, and which she loved despite herself.
On Thursday afternoon Elma came home in a dark mood, struggling up the ramp with the buggy, Wilson fussing in it. In the parlor—Elma used the word “parlor”—she handed him to Nan and shook off her coat and each set about nursing her own child. There was a comfort in this that they didn’t need to acknowledge. They had settled into it, Elma on the sofa and Nan in the rocker they’d brought from home, the curtains drawn and the fire spitting.
“That’s it,” Elma said to Winna, “that’s all you’re getting from me, darling.” She was looking at Nan now. “This here’s the last milk I got for these babies. Both of them. I’m tired a rushing round to feed them, full a milk. They old enough now to drink cow’s milk. Lord knows we got enough bottles of it. Lord knows it was enough for me.”
They sat in silence. Nan was thinking of her mother running Elma out to the cows to suckle from their udders. That was how the story went. She was wondering how that could be the same woman who had cut out her tongue, keeping her from suckling.
“You can feed them if you want to. I ain’t gone stop you. You want to?”
Nan nodded. She didn’t want to stop nursing Wilson, not ever. She would feed Winna too if she had to. But Winna would eat anything. Winna didn’t need her.
“By all means. I ain’t gone stop you. Me, I’m done. I’m tired of being no milk machine. It’s fine for a farm. We in town now.”
Wilson was sitting in her lap, legs straddled around her belly, his hands around her breast like a jug.
“I was thinking. We can say you a wet nurse. If folks come by. Might be easier. In town it might be different. No one much knows you in this part a town. We can say you the wet nurse, you feed both my babies.”
Wilson gave a little bite—he had four teeth already—and Nan pulled back.
“I know—you had to be pregnant to be a wet nurse. We could change the story. We could say you had a baby that died.”
Nan stood now, pulling her dress closed, holding Wilson to her neck and burping him. She gave Elma a stern look.
“What you looking at me that way for? I don’t want it that way. I thought it would be easier for you.”
Elma took Winna off her and buttoned up her own dress. “Now, that’s all, darling.” She sighed. “I don’t know what I’m saying. Ain’t nobody stopping by. We been here five days and not one neighbor stopped by to say how do you do. Ain’t no one brung us a casserole. We seen more folks in the country!”
Elma put Winna down on the rug. Winna rolled onto her back and then her side and then hefted herself up on her forearms. She was set to crawl any day.
“I just come from the beauty shop down on Pearl Avenue. Estelle’s. The one with the parasols painted on the window? The umbrellas?” Elma stood with her arms crossed, looking toward the cloaked window and the street beyond it. “I come in there with the babies in the buggy, brand-new fine buggy, both of em asleep. Well, Wilson’s asleep and Winna’s just lying there quiet chewing her doll, ain’t doing nothing. Perfect babies. I wanted to get my hair done up in a bob. Not real short but just curled to look short? Like Carole Lombard?” She piled her hair up to show. “I figured I’d look fine tomorrow at the courthouse and it would keep through church on Sunday. You know what that lady told me?”
She waited for Nan’s silence.
“She says, ‘We don’t allow babies in this beauty shop.’”
She dropped her hair and it fell around her shoulders.
“I says, ‘These here are my babies, they are twins, they are quiet as can be, they’re sleeping in their buggy, I simply want to get my hair done up.’ Lady says, ‘No, ma’am, I’m sorry, there are no children allowed in this establishment.’ Says, ‘It’s policy. Leave em with the help.’ I say, ‘Let me speak to this Estelle, if you please.’ She says, ‘I am Estelle’! I say, ‘Well, Miss Estelle, if it’s your policy, you can change it, can’t you now.’ I say, ‘My name is Mrs. Elma Rawls and I am the wife of Dr. Oliver Rawls, and these are my children, and they won’t do none of your fine customers no harm.’ Now they’re all looking at us. There’s a whole herd a old ladies with their heads in them domes, looking on.” Elma took a deep breath. “And Estelle looks into the buggy like it’s a pit a rattlesnakes. She points to Winna and says, ‘This child can stay.’”
Nan felt Wilson’s warm breath on her neck. He had fallen asleep.
“I say again, ‘I am their mother.’ And she says—do you know what she says?” Here Elma’s voice choked. “She says, ‘You ought to be ashamed of yourself.’”
Nan closed her eyes for a moment.
“I says to her, ‘You ought to be ashamed of yourself!’ And push that buggy out the door. The door’s closing and I says, ‘This the ugliest beauty shop I ever seen! Y’all look like a herd a ugly cows!’”
Nan stood and rocked Wilson back and forth.
“I woke up Wilson hollering like that. I think neither one of em had a good enough nap. I’m sorry.”
Winna rolled onto her back again and kicked into the air. Elma stepped over her and crossed the room to Nan. She let Elma reach a hand over and pat Wilson’s back.
“I’m sorry, honey. I’m worried sick about tomorrow. I’m so worried I can’t eat. I ain’t eaten since yesterday.”
It was the closest they’d gotten to talking about the hearing. All week long they had fussed and fancied, carrying on like they had no cares. They were playing house while both of their daddies were in prison, Nan’s in chains and Elma’s in the jailhouse. Nan didn’t hold it against Elma, not that part. What else were they to do? She hadn’t eaten since yesterday, either. She might have put the leftovers in the Frigidaire, but she’d fed them to Polly instead.
That evening after supper, Nan went to slide her plate into the dog’s dish and Polly didn’t come.
Elma and Oliver called for her out the back door, out the front.
“Polly! Pollux!”
Along the back fence, the hole she’d worn in the grass was dug deep.
They piled in the car, all of them. Oliver wanted to drive through town first, but Elma wouldn’t let him holler out the window. She said it wasn’t proper. They tracked through all of the First Ward before Elma convinced him to go out to the farm. None of them wanted to do it. It was dark by then.
But Oliver turned the car around and they drove slowly and in silence, the headlights creeping along the road. A half mile before the crossroads, the tires bumped up to the paved road, and they all felt that they had crossed a body of water to an island, a narrow strip of land with wilderness on either side. Oliver and Elma lowered the windows and called out, “Polly! Pollux!”
None of them had wanted to return to the farm, but there it was, inching toward them in the headlights as Oliver turned into the drive. There were the porch steps and there was the barn, there was the shack. The farm had been abandoned for less than a week, but from the car they could see the weeds that needed hoeing. The girls stepped out of the car. Nan had grown up on this farm, under these stars. She was not afraid of the dark. And yet she went into the yard as one went into a burning house.
She knew how God liked to take some things in order to grant others. So she made a bargain with Him. He could keep Pollux if it meant she never had to set foot on this farm after this night. Then, in case that one wasn’t strong enough, she made another. God forgive her: He could keep her father a prisoner if He kept Juke too.
Elma called. Nan clapped. Oliver stayed with the babies in the car. The old pregnant sow came wriggling out from the under porch, her belly dragging over the ground, not like a dog smelling her master but like a pig looking for scraps. Still, Elma went to her and, Nan was surprised to see, knelt down to give her a rub under the chin. “You seen Pollux?” They moved past the well, into the garden, called hello to the cows and the mules in the barn, the chickens and guineas in the yard. Elma counted them with their lantern. There were two chickens missing, but the rest were there. They collected the fouled eggs to feed to the sow, but whatever neighbor George Wilson had hired to look after the animals was doing all right. Nan half-expected him to come out of the shack or the big house and spook them. Someone or something was different. She had the all-overs.
When they’d walked the north field and the west, they came around to the oaks down by the creek. Nan couldn’t see much but she could hear the creek trickling along. Elma was holding her hand and she held it tighter now. Nan could tell by the wiregrass at her ankles that they were on the path to the cabin. They had never been there together before, and her feet held fast to the ground. Elma pulled her. “Nan, come on!”
Castor and Pollux used to go down there in the summer and lay in the cool shade of the oaks. Maybe that was what she was feeling, Pollux down there in the dark. She closed her eyes and let Elma pull her through it. And then under her feet, even through her shoes, she could feel the path change. The dirt was furrowed. Elma must have felt it too. They knelt together and Elma held the lantern close to the ground. They were tire tracks. The tires of a tractor, or a truck. They ran their fingers over the dirt for a moment. Then they stood and made their way to the cabin.
The cabin door stood open to the night. The single window was shattered. Inside, the cabin was near empty. The barrels, the copper pots, the mattress, all of it was gone. On the dirt floor, two empty jars lay on their sides, glass eyes staring back at them. And in the stump where Nan had once sat, an ax stood.
Then came the sound of scrambling through the woods. The dog barked, making them start. It was coming from the creek. They tore out of the cabin, hand in hand, and out of the dark jumped Pollux, wet with creek water, and then they were wet too. “Polly, you dumb wet fool!” Elma got ahold of the dog around her neck and together they all bounded back toward the car. Nan couldn’t get in it fast enough. Polly jumped in the back with Nan, licking the babies, all of them panting.
Oliver said the dog was so wet she must have swum the whole way to the farm. “I wonder if she was looking for home, or for Castor,” he said, turning back onto the road.
Elma didn’t say anything about the still. Not yet. She looked toward the place where the empty cabin stood and said, “Or for my daddy.”
Nan, she looked west, where the black road led out to the pines, where her father was falling asleep in the county camp. She wondered if it was too late to take back her bargain. God had seen no use for Pollux after all.
“She’s confused,” Oliver said. “She don’t know where home is yet.”
* * *
Nan wasn’t set to go to the courthouse. Elma and Oliver would go, and Nan would stay home with the babies.
But Friday morning, Oliver opened the newspaper. On the front page of the Florence Messenger was a picture of the still. Sheriff Cleave and George Wilson were there, along with six or seven government men. They’d hauled out the equipment and posed it in front of the cabin. Most of them stood with a foot on a barrel, shotguns cocked across their laps, like hunters on a safari with their trophy kill. Sheriff Cleave managed to get his motorcycle in the picture. Looking at the picture, you wouldn’t know that the shotgun in George Wilson’s hands, a Winchester twelve gauge, had been retrieved from the cabin itself.
They all sat around at the kitchen table looking at the paper. Elma read it out loud, for even Oliver didn’t know that Nan could read it herself. She read it with her hand over her mouth, and every few sentences, she had to stop and take a breath, or ask Oliver what something meant. “What’s an arraignment?” “What’s bond?” Oliver said arraignment, bond—it didn’t matter. The country courts did things the way they wanted, all at once if they liked. Freddie Wilson got his own article on the same page; it said his bond would be set on the same day, that day, Friday. It was in that article, in a small paragraph at the bottom, that Elma read Sterling Smith’s name, and had to stop. She looked up at Nan. “It says your daddy’s gone be in court today.”
It was a fine morning, so they walked down to the courthouse together, Oliver on Elma’s arm, Nan pushing the buggy behind them, like a family out on a stroll.
Inside, they had to split up. Elma didn’t want to face the same thing she’d faced in the beauty shop, so she let both twins go with Nan in the back. The courtroom was the grandest room Nan had been in, grander than the movie theater with its colored balconies, the ceiling dripping with chandeliers. The ceiling made her dizzy, so she closed her eyes until the room filled with bodies, more bodies than she had accounted for. It was not a trial, as far as she could tell, as far as Oliver had told. But the room filled with bodies, white bodies, and then the bodies stood as the judge filed in. She stood with them. They sat. She stood long enough to see the back of the men’s heads at the front of the room: at one table, Juke; at the other, Freddie Wilson and her father. They all wore the same striped prison pants and denim work shirts. She couldn’t tell if their legs were in chains but she thought their hands were in cuffs in their laps. Other men’s heads were between and among them. Just before she sat, her father looked over his shoulder, toward the back of the room. She could not catch his eye. When she sat she couldn’t see any of them but the judge. She prayed the babies would stay quiet, so she might be as invisible to the bodies as they were to her. As far as she could tell, she and Wilson and her father were the only colored bodies in the room.
The judge’s head was as white and bald and pointed as an egg. He wore spectacles low on his nose. He said some words Nan didn’t understand. Then he called Juke to stand, and Juke stood at his table. Again she saw the back of his head. She could not see Oliver’s head or Elma’s.
The judge read from a piece of paper before him. “Juke Jesup, Cotton County has charged you with one count of murder in the death of Genus Jackson, one count of blackmail, one count of public intoxication, and seven counts of the manufacture of distilled spirits.”
A wave of voices rose and fell. The judge used his gavel.
Juke said, “Seven counts, Your Honor?”
“You have a right to a lawyer. Do you need a lawyer appointed you, Mr. Jesup?”
“No, sir. They gave me one, but I sent him on home.”
“You sent him home?”
“He weren’t but twelve or thirteen years old, Your Honor. He look like the ink still wet on his law degree. You gone give me a snot-nosed baby for a counselor, I reckon I can defend myself better, with a hand tied behind my back.”
“Is that right? How do you plead, then, Mr. Jesup?”
Juke cleared his throat. “Is it just guilty or innocent, Your Honor?”
“Yes, Mr. Jesup.”
“Then I plead innocent.”
“To all counts, Mr. Jesup?”
“Yes, sir. All counts.”
A voice called out, “Someone get that man some counsel.”
The judge followed the voice with his eyes. “Mr. Boothby, you got an objection to share with this court?”
A man in a front row stood. “Pardon me, Your Honor. I’d like to see the law carried out fairly. No one wants to see a trial of this magnitude miscarried because a country fellow goes undefended.”
“Do you wish to act as his counsel, Mr. Boothby? You already acting as judge and jury in that paper of yours.”
“I’m no lawyer, Your Honor.”
Sheriff Cleave stood and said, “Pardon me, Your Honor. The prisoner has been advised of his rights. He was appointed a lawyer.”
Mr. Boothby sat down and the sheriff followed.
“Juke Jesup,” said the judge, “get you another lawyer if you desire one before you return to this court for your trial. Date set of April 23, 1931.”
“Yes, sir. I don’t reckon I’ll need one. What I got to say I can say on my own.”
“Have you got something to say for yourself?”
“Yes, sir. I didn’t do none of those things. I ain’t a killing man. I wouldn’t kill no Negro. I wouldn’t hurt no baby, like that man say.” He pointed to Freddie. “I stand before you sober as a baby myself. I’m a lover of Negroes, sir. I feel I’m being persecuted for my love of Negroes.”
Another wave of voices. Again the judge used his gavel.
“I been talking to God about it, sir, and I find the only way about it is to tell the truth.”
“This is not a trial, you understand, Mr. Jesup. You’ll have your trial in due time, with a lawyer present.”
“Yes, sir. I can’t wait that long. I aim to tell you that I didn’t kill no Negro. I got no reason to. That Negro you say I killed, he weren’t the father to no baby.”
There was barely a murmur of voices. No one wanted to miss what was said.
“You’re referring to Genus Jackson,” said the judge.
“Yes, sir.”
“And the mulatto child.”
“That man didn’t rape my daughter, sir. He ain’t the father and my daughter ain’t the mother. He’s my child, sir. I stand before you and before God and say he’s my child. And the mother is my house girl, Nancy Smith.”
Nan closed her eyes. If she couldn’t see them, they couldn’t see her. If she held her breath, they couldn’t hear her.
“Mr. Jesup, you aim to tell me a man was killed and there was no rape?”
“I never said nothing about no rape myself, sir. My daughter never did neither.” Again he pointed at Freddie. “It was that son of a bitch who said it, and who done the killing.”
“You aim to tell me we’re sitting here in this courtroom because you was dallying with a housemaid?”
“I won’t say dallying, sir. My daughter, she took on caring for the child. The mother’s but a youngun herself, and can’t form words. She don’t got a full mind to care for no child alone. That’s my child.”
“Mr. Jesup, this is not a custody trial. This is a bond hearing. Do you know the meaning of ‘hearing’?”
“Yes, sir. I believe it’s my time to be heard out.”
“Mr. Jesup—”
“I just aim to lay it—”
“Mr. Jesup! The charges stand!” The judged knocked his gavel. “You got more on your shoulders now than when you walked into this courtroom. I advise you to hold your tongue until you have a lawyer to hold it for you. But I am obliged by Cotton County to set your bail, as specified, at two hundred dollars.”
Nan sat frozen. She would hold her breath until she saw Juke carried back to jail again.
Juke was quiet for a moment. Then he began to laugh. “Mr. Judge, you might as well go ahead and string me up. I won’t have two hundred dollars if I live two hundred years.”
Down in front, another man stood. Nan could see only the shoulders of his white suit and the back of his white head, but she knew it was George Wilson.
“Your Honor, I’ll post bond for Mr. Jesup.”
“Mr. Wilson?”
“I’ll post the two hundred dollars. He works a farm of mine, Your Honor. I need Mr. Jesup on the farm, where he can do some good. I been paying a pretty penny to have the land tended in his absence.”
“Mr. Wilson, you are entitled to do with your money what you please.”
From there, nothing much mattered. Nan listened to the rest of the hearing as she’d listen to a radio in a distant room.
“If you please, Your Honor, I aim to pay the bond on two other men in custody of the court.”
“Mr. Wilson, I like to finish one matter before I carry on to the next. But if the matter is related, I will hear it. Who are the men, Mr. Wilson?”
“My grandson, Frederick Wilson.”
The judge read from another paper. “George Frederick Wilson the Third, please stand.”
Freddie stood.
“Naturally you desire to see your kin free, Mr. Wilson. But Frederick Wilson has no bond. He was sought not on formal charges but merely on suspicion of accessory. As of today, February the twelfth, 1931, he has served his sentence of three months in Cotton County. The county holds no other charges against him.”
“He’s free to go, Your Honor?” George Wilson seemed as surprised as anyone else in the courtroom.
“For the time being. I release him into your custody. I advise you to keep a close eye on him.”
“Thank you, Your Honor.”
Freddie sat.
“The other man, Mr. Wilson?”
“The other man is Sterling Smith, Your Honor.”
“Sterling Smith, please stand.”
Sterling stood.
“What business do you have with this prisoner, Mr. Wilson?”
“He worked the same farm for me, Your Honor. He left the county some thirteen years ago owing me a debt. I aim to see it paid.”
“Thirteen years is a long time, Mr. Wilson.”
“A debt is a debt, Your Honor. I will post his bond, if you please.”
“You are entitled to do with your money what you please, Mr. Wilson. I will release him into your custody, not on a bond, but on a fine to recompense the expenses of the county. That amount is thirty dollars.”
“I will pay thirty dollars for him, Your Honor.”
“Very well. I advise you to keep a close eye on him. On the three of them.”
“I aim to, Your Honor.”
“Any other prisoners you’d like to take off the county’s hands, Mr. Wilson?”
“No, Your Honor.”
“Then God help you, sir, and God bless this court. This hearing is adjourned.”
* * *
She had stayed to see her father. Her hopes had been exceeded: he was free.
But before the judge had struck his gavel the final time, she had pushed the buggy down the aisle, into the long, endless, marble lobby, and out into the sun, holding her hat on her head to keep it from flying loose. She pushed the babies home and she locked the door behind her. Already the black telephone was ringing.