I rode the mule toward the Moffits’ homestead as the fog parted and the sun broke through another morning, the last week of July bearing down, just as miserably baked as the fiery Fourth had been.
We saw it at the same time. Alarmed, Junia cantered, then teetered at the edge of the Moffits’ yard. The mule’s rear legs slid beneath her belly until she was nearly sitting. Thin, white foam gathered at the corners of Junia’s mouth, and her eyes were ringed white as she fought to sidestep away, anywhere other than facing the thing in front of her.
I couldn’t take my eyes off it as I struggled to control Junia and kicked her flanks. She rose stick-legged, straining her neck, ready to bolt. Keeping my eyes locked ahead, I seated myself firmly in the saddle, speaking gently to the trembling animal. Again, I kicked. When the beast high-stepped backward and sideways—every way but forward—I lifted my heels and brought them down hard. Junia burst into an awkward gallop, careering into the yard before skidding to another halt. I drew the reins in tighter. In front of me, a body swayed from the fat branch of a tree.
Angry cries sparked from the earth, and I dropped my gaze to the ground.
A baby lay in the dirt beside the large toppled can of Angeline’s Mother’s Lard. Swaddled in her mama’s housecoat, the child’s tiny arms quaked, fisted upward to the corpse, its eyes dead, body limp, rocking in a tight half-spin from a warm gust of wind.
The branch creaked, moaned under its heavy burden. A bloody sock slipped from a dangling methylene-blue foot and landed beside the wailing baby.
I dared another peek and looked up, then raised my hand in front of my blue-coloring face, comparing my darkened flesh to that of the hanging corpse.
Junia pawed the ground, turned her head, and blew hard.
I slid down and ran to the infant, picked the newborn up, and rushed toward the cabin. “Angeline, Angeline,” I called to her.
Inside, Angeline lay on the bed atop soiled sheets. On the floor, blood had spilled and a slime of afterbirth spread, seeped through the boards’ cracks. The air was raw, wrapped in iron, festering in the hot cabin.
Something had gone horribly ugly and wrong in the childbirth. A blood-specked hunting knife lay nearby on the floor, the baby’s shriveled life cord draped over it.
“Bluet—” Angeline said faintly, stretching a bloodstained hand to me.
“Oh, Angeline,” I cried, surprised she was alive.
“My babe…my ba-by,” she choked and sputtered.
“Right here.” I rushed and knelt down beside the bed, the scent of blood, old straw, and moldy sheets hitting my face.
“Give her to me. My Honey girl. She needs to feed—”
I placed the baby in the crook of her arm next to her breast. The child’s breathy cries quieted as she rooted for the nipple.
Angeline winced.
There was so much blood. Far too much. Blood that would stain—birthmark the pine floors forever red.
“When did you have her?” I asked.
“I’ve been birthing her since yesterday morn’. She jus’ came maybe an hour or so ago,” Angeline said, pinching her words. “But Willie got mad, Bluet, and took her. Took Honey from me.” She kissed the baby’s head, and her sob clung wet to Honey’s forehead. “Feared he was gonna hurt her…real bad. Said she smelled.”
“What? Why would her pa do that?” I looked out the dirty pane, wondering how I would tell her about Willie out there like that and the bad that would be stinking on him.
“Willie wouldn’t have her. Wouldn’t have our Honey.” Tears filled Angeline’s eyes. “He said he’d married hisself a white, not a colored. And folks would know’d he didn’t.”
“Colored… But that’s not true—”
“He didn’t want her. Me. Said he’d rather die than be scarred with us.”
Angeline pulled back the baby’s wrap, and I saw it. Saw what Willie wouldn’t have and wanted to hide. The baby weren’t entirely blue, but she wasn’t white neither. Honey’s skin was smattered with the sticky blood of her mama’s life, but you could see the soft blue running over her, faint like a coming-twilight blue, and the bruising-blue fingernails.
The baby kicked, and I saw the tiny toenails were the same.
“Willie has the Blue in him—it showed itself when he got sick,” Angeline said breathlessly. “I married myself a colored an’ didn’t know’d it.”
Doc’s words rushed back to me. Your parents carried the same recessive gene. Then Angeline’s long ago words. Willie used to have hisself kin planted up there in Hell-fer-Sartin. I did too…
Could it be?
She coughed. “Don’t matter none, and I tried to tell him so.”
I thought about Willie’s nails, the glimpses I’d seen. “I need to fetch Doc.”
Moaning, Angeline shook her head. “It’s hurting so bad. Hain’t time. I can feel it leaving me an’ the cold a’comin’.”
A red stain spread across the thin sheet below her legs, deepening in the thighs and bottom.
“I have to get the doc,” I said.
“Don’t leave me. Hain’t got time…” She grimaced and moaned. The baby jerked and gave a sharp cry, then stilled to nurse. “Bluet, you”—Angeline weakened—“you take Honey.”
I leaned away from her. “Take her?”
“There’s no one else. He’ll never come back for her. Weren’t no one but me and Willie. My kin’s dead, and Willie never had hisself a pa, and his ma left him with strangers when he was a babe.”
“Angeline, please let me get you help. You need a doc.” I looked around the tiny cabin for anything—herbs, something to help her. The home was empty except for the newspaper-coated walls that were fat with printed talk and Angeline’s writings. I pressed fingers to my knotted forehead and tried to think.
“Hain’t time now,” she wheezed as she raised herself up on a shaky elbow, clinging to the babe with her other arm. “Seen this with my ma when she birthed her last one. Keep her, Bluet,” she begged and then slumped back down.
I whipped out my hand to protect the baby’s head. “But I can’t—”
“She’s a Blue, and hain’t no one gonna love her. No one but you.” Angeline’s knowing eyes reminded me, hollow in the slanted light.
I touched the baby’s hand, my own eyes filling, my mind grappling with losses, the unbearable pain of loneliness. Nary a townsfolk, not one God-fearing soul, had welcomed me or mine into town, their churches, or homes in all my nineteen years on this earth. Instead, every hard Kentucky second they’d filled us with an emptiness from their hate and scorn. It was as if Blues weren’t allowed to breathe the very same air their loving God had given them, not worthy of the tiniest spoonful He’d given to the smallest forest critter. I was nothing in their world. A nothingness to them. And I looked into Angeline’s dying eyes and saw my truths, and the truths that would be her daughter’s. Know’d that without love, in the end, her babe would have no one, nothing, and would be fated to die alone in her own aching embrace. Nothing. The truths collapsed in my chest, crushing.
“Please, you’re all she has,” Angeline implored.
The baby twisted, and a weak cry slipped from her breath. I picked up her little hand, stroked the cupped blue fingers.
This child would suffer it all, and alone. Every hard hate. Every minute of damning solitude. Honey deserved love and more than the stingy spoonful that the white world would see fit to give her.
“Please, Bluet. Please promise you’ll be her ma.”
Ma? Her ma.
“Please help my baby.” Angeline rolled her head, sweat popping on her forehead. “Dear Jesus, help… Take this Blue for yours.”
“Shh, shh, don’t worry none,” I comforted. The child would bear the horrific load of being the last Blue now, the one hunted and harmed if I didn’t protect her. “I’ll take her, Angeline, and I will love Honey as much as you do. I promise.” The words spilled out from deep inside me, from that place deeper than thoughts, from the deepest pocket of my guarded heart and wounded soul. And I silently vowed to God to love this babe, keep her safe from the harm and hate me and my family, and their families, had suffered.
It stops with Honey. I closed my eyes and lifted a fierce declaration to God, to mankind.
Angeline pulled my hand to her mouth, kissed and pressed it to her pale, wet cheek.
I took her hand and kissed it back and placed a light palm on Honey. “Promise,” I said to her again.
Angeline’s breaths came harsh as she pointed a finger toward the magazine. “It—it…it got busted some when Willie had hisself a fit,” she said shakily, but still with that soft, shy smile.
I picked up her loan, the old copy of a Good Housekeeping magazine. The cover with a little brown-haired girl reading a book had been ripped off and left on the floor smeared with a bloody footprint. Willie’s. Beside it lay the corn-husk doll Angeline’d crafted, now torn and scattered in shreds.
“Reckon it’s nothing I can’t get bound,” I said, struggling to smile back.
“Read it for me?”
“Yes.”
“Read the page about the pretty mama and happy baby to Honey an’ me. Read that, Bluet.”
I opened it to where Angeline’d marked her page with scrap paper and saw the beautiful, stylish mother in a pretty spring dress and white heels. She sat in a finely crafted rocker and read to a plump, smiling baby garbed in a beautiful ruffled gown. The babe held an expensive dolly in matching clothes—a baby that would never know this harsh land, go hungry, perish from starvation, or lose a mother.
I read the title. “‘Having the Happy Baby.’”
Angeline murmured to Honey. “I want you to read everything when you grow’d some, know your letters same as me—same as your new mama taught me.” She looked up at me sweetly, kissed the baby again, and closed her eyes.
I ran the back of my hand lightly down her cheek and across her jawline, wanting to remember her for Honey. Angeline sighed softly, and I read aloud for five minutes, peeking over the top of the page to see her pale face lighted with pain, nestled beside Honey’s peaceful one, droplets of breast milk coating the sleeping babe’s mouth.
Though she was a Blue, Honey didn’t look any different than any other sleeping baby in her mama’s arms, but she would grow up and feel the world’s different eye on her color.
For another five minutes I read the article, my words faltering, choking with tears, scratching out strings of rushing sentences as I glimpsed the frail sixteen-year-old mama fading.
I paused when Angeline coughed again and said drowsily, “Me and Honey, we loves you to read to us.”
“I love reading to you,” I whispered. “I love you, Angeline.”
“Sure is pretty words, jus’ like Heaven.” She fumbled for my hand, wrapped hers over mine, and pressed both to her mouth, tucking our double fists closely under her chin. “I want you to read lots of books,” she murmured to the sleeping babe. “Books’ll learn you, Honey.”
I kept reading until her grasp went limp, and a few minutes beyond until my tongue couldn’t scrape off another word, and my soaking eyes dared to see her dead ones.
The magazine slid to the floor. A prayer hummed softly on my lips. Another, and another. The pleas to a God I’d abandoned now begged for Angeline’s revival, chewed across the newspaper-lined walls for her parting.
“God.” I struck a fist into an empty spot on the mattress, scattering straw. The bed swallowed my fury, rocking the mother and child. The baby startled, whisked out a cry, then settled.
I climbed into bed beside Angeline and the sleeping babe. Curling up next to their bodies, I cradled my arm across them both, and wept, howled—a dry howl, an empty riverbed droughted from heartache, hurts, and hardships—till the sobs rent the hollows, the deep rock caverns of my soul, and brought forth rivers of agony.