Pearl knew she was breaking her granddaddy’s heart, and wasn’t he, still, after all those years, trying to spit the taste of being a child in slavery out of his mouth, having suffered enough? But she knew in her heart it was her only choice, given her few givens.
Papa, her granddaddy, loved her as much, she believed, as he loved her grandmother, Mama, and he only wanted what he believed was best for her. But what he thought was best, she thought, was the second-worst thing in the world.
Papa knew when to plant and when to pluck; when to weep and laugh and mourn and when to hug. Papa knew how to talk to the white man. Papa knew about Farmer Moore. Papa said Farmer Moore had all of the qualities could be wanted in a husband. When the roll for heaven was called, Farmer Moore would be at the front of the line of the saved. Farmer Moore was stable as a rock wall and was as rooted as an oak in the colored community of Church Creek, Alabama. Farmer Moore worked his own land. He was a deacon in the church. He was a widower with a young daughter. Farmer Moore needed a wife.
Farmer Moore had seen Pearl at church and he thought favorably on her, Papa said. But being the decent, God-fearing man that Farmer Moore was, and being sensitive to the ways of the community, Farmer Moore had prayed on it and counseled with the preacher and the elder women of the congregation, and they had advised him that given his situation and the needs of the season, six months would be a decent period before he spoke to Papa regarding Pearl.
There was no question whether or not Pearl felt anything for Farmer Moore. She felt nothing for him, he who had been on earth almost twice her seventeen years. She thought what Papa and Farmer Moore thought of her was not as a person, but as an answer. Who could ride beside him in that fine buggy? Who could sit beside him in the front pew on Sunday mornings? Who could mother his young daughter? Who could cook his meals and wash his clothes and fill his bathtub and rub his feet and warm his bed? Who could be an extra pair of bleeding hands in the time to cast away stones and to plow and to pluck and to worry with him through the weighing in and the standing by at settling up?
The once-a-month preacher from Church Creek, who had offered guidance to Farmer Moore and to Papa and who had baptized her in the river when she was thirteen, hollered his warning against an afterlife of eternal agony in unforgiving hellfire against those who did not honor their Papa and Mama, and live long on the land given them, but how, she wondered in the pitch of the sweaty darkness of night, how could that not be better than where she was, doing what she had to do?
As Pearl saw it Lucifer got kicked out of heaven and his evil had landed on earth and took root, and cotton sprouted, and that was the birth of Hell on earth—and the next thing anybody knew Adam and Eve got kicked out of Eden.
Lord Jesus she wished that a snake would slither along and bite her, she hated picking cotton so! Even to think of it made her well up, made her tremble, near to nauseous. Starting at six years old, with Pa telling her to hush up that sniveling, gal. Gentle, but firm. You’ll get used to it. It ain’t that bad. But it was. Worse. Worse as worse could possibly be.
Razor-edged bolls pricking her stinging cuticles like peppered tips on the devil’s pitchfork, digging clean to the bone, her sin-red blood dripping like an angel’s tears. She hated, but couldn’t spit out, the saltiness of her blood as she tried in vain to suck away the hurt. You wouldn’t think a thing that small could cause that much pain.
Sharp as the little needles Mama used sewing stitch after little itty bitty stitch, sewing herself to near blindness in the kerosene light doing the handwork that white ladies just loved loved loved on their garments they strutted and bragged that their gal had made for them.
Many a Monday and Tuesday morning Pearl had a mind to just throw herself headfirst over into Mama’s boiling big black tub of wash water right over in with the white folks’ bloomers and drawers or fine cottons and linens, let somebody jab her down with the hickory stirring limb if she tied to rise up, till she just boiled away to grease.
Lord Jesus.
And, then too, there was the sun.
The always close, blinding, sweltering, blistering, strength-and soul-sapping sun, surrounding-close, the breath of the devil riding her back close, so she was trapped, choking, like during one of her lung-wrenching asthma attacks, trapped at the smoldering blueyellowred center of a burning lump of coal that would only burn itself, finally, to gray ash, like her mama had been; who while trying to teach her to tie her shoes, her dress tail was caught by licking, leaping flames in the fireplace, and who running down the road, a blazing ball, getting bigger, brighter, louder, maybe, hopefully, already dead when a white man in a wagon happened along and put out the flames with a blanket.
Lord Jesus!
The spirit had never touched her, not in church, not when she had been taken to the river and been baptized, not when they knelt at night and Papa prayed for the Lord their souls to keep, and not way over in the restlessness of those star-speckled deep country nights, yawning and sooty and bottomless and breathless black, her looking at a twinkling star then closing her eyes and wondering if her troubles would ever be over, then reopening them. She was never sure if the star she saw was the last one she’d wished on just before. She just knew she felt empty and small. Small and empty and about the size of one of the star pinpricks even as the country darkness expanded in her lungs and rose up into her throat in heaving asthma attacks.
Through those nights Pearl wept and sought support, but her dreams got taken hold of, and like Jacob she wrestled against thought and flesh and the powers of infallible light and erring darkness, until daybreak, to be awakened, exhausted, Papa shaking her in time to drag her slow self to the field.
If, as Papa and the preacher said, there was a God in heaven to help her have her way, then no child that ever suckled her nipple (or man either, for that matter) would be associated with picking cotton. Blaspheming or not, she prayed that to the memory of mama Aurelia.
One of the few things that sustained her was Beatrice.
Beatrice and Pearl were related. Cousins. Beatrice was a daughter of the son of Papa’s dead brother. Beatrice and Pearl pretended they were sisters. Pearl didn’t have a sister and all of Beatrice’s sisters were gone and married, so Papa would let her to visit Beatrice sometimes, depending on the season, for a week or so, even after Beatrice married James.
Pearl loved to go stay with them because James liked whiskey and she did too.
For one thing it helped cut the phlegm in her asthma.
Around there it was against the law to sell whiskey to a Negro in such an amount that he could have enough to sell it to other Negroes and cut into some white man’s profit, but James had a contact and he would go all the way to town on the mule and get it. They had what was called saloons in town but they wouldn’t sell to him but he got it from his contact and brought it home.
It was in a jug, a gallon jug. But James could get whiskey delivered too. That was where Reece came in. Reece didn’t care about drinking whiskey; Reece sold whiskey to make money. Reece would bring it to you, but you couldn’t let the police know what was going on. He would bring James a gallon for two dollars and he would bring Viola a quart for a quarter, pint for a dime.
Papa said what-ever happened first or good for us (us meaning coloreds, coloreds way out in the country, miles from Church Creek), Papa said, with what sounded like the wisdom of Solomon, Farmer Moore would play a key part in it—said it to Ma, but so Pearl could hear it over in the row she was working.
The preacher said lazy hands made a man poor, but diligent hands brought wealth. Papa would say Farmer Moore’s busy hands had made him prosperous, but Reece, if Papa had known of him, Reece, who during the day made it mostly by hiring himself out as a carpenter. He worked for white and for colored, whoever could pay him, as long as it wasn’t related to farm labor. If Papa had known of Reece who gloomed at night, slipping from one side of the line of the proper and the legal to the other, he would have disapproved of his serpentine ways. Papa would have said Reece’s hands were slothful, and because of that, Reece, in the end, would pay fourfold for the gains from his wickedness.
As Pearl saw it, Reece’s hands were only lazy in God’s, Papa’s, the preacher’s, and the white man’s eyes. Bringing whiskey wasn’t all Reece did you couldn’t let the police know about. Reece gambled. He played cards and cast dice and committed other breaches. He didn’t do it for fun, he did it for money. Reece, after the sun went down, was industrious as an ant or an owl or a bat. Reece told Pearl that his best money, his easy money, was made after dark, when God’s and Papa’s and the preacher’s and the white man’s eyes were shut and their hands were idle.
In turn Pearl told Reece, while they were sitting in the dark on a bottoms up tin tub in Beatrice and James’s yard, whispering—Reece thought it was so the other couple wouldn’t hear her, but it was so he had to lean close enough that he felt the humidity of her breath on his ear—It was way past time, she whispered, way, way past time that he dusted the Church Creek dust off his boots and went to where he could hone the razor’s edge of his knack for skirting accepted conventions on the strop of some big city—bigger than Church Creek, Acorn say, where he’d bragged he had friends and kinfolk, and by doing, increase his possibilities and profits. And when it came down to it the only way, she explained to him, that those sanctified and righteous back country hypocrites could or would appreciate how smart and resourceful he was, would be after he had left them behind in the thistles and thorns of Church Creek.
At sunset on their day of elopement, a Five & Ten-cent store ring on her finger, Pearl was standing beside Reece on Nobel Street, Acorn, Alabama, which looked like it was long as a country mile. Along both sides of the paved street there were buildings with businesses of every kind. They were two and three stories high, with awnings over their entrances. Parked in the wide street there were wagons and horse-drawn buggies, as fine or finer than any that would ever be driven by Farmer Moore, and there were automobiles. Acorn was something to see and somewhere to be seen if there ever was such a place.
And Pearl was in it.
And, Bless Jesus, there was not a cotton patch in sight.