CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

A SMALL BRICK HOUSE nestled between two colored churches. I have never been there, but everyone says that it is the most hospitable and clean-looking house in the whole part of town. The white man from the colonization society had laughed when he said that last part, his generous stomach jiggling and threatening to burst his shirt. Yasmine hadn’t understood exactly what was so funny about that, but she surmised that it had something to do with the notion that a Negro home could actually be clean. If you can’t find it for some reason, just ask anyone over there for the Medger family, and they will direct you. But I don’t think you will have any problems, there or in the voyage back home.

They had been walking for some time, farther and farther away from the slave auction, until the whole affair became a tiny dot on the horizon and, she hoped, in their collective memory.

They passed the shipyards, where poor white men worked alongside poor, but free, black men. The smell of the wood, oakum, cotton, and putty was overpowering, as was the foul language the men spit at one another.

“You half-witted bitch,” a squat man with far too much hair yelled to his humongous counterpart. “I told you that treenail was bad! But like a nigger girl’s cunt, you just had to stink up this whole process because you thought you knew better than the rest of us, didn’t you, you goddamn piss-for-brains piece of shit.”

Yasmine couldn’t help it; she stood there gaping at the man with the indecent mouth.

“Mama, when we gonna eat?” Big George asked, yawning. Yasmine broke from her reverie and started walking again, Nolan in tow, fervently hoping that the boys had heard none of it. “I need me some food,” Big George said again, the incident at the slave auction, and his overpowering need to act, clearly gone from his mind.

Yasmine felt the few coins in her purse and sighed. She hoped they would be enough to buy them a few items for the journey to the other side and whatever they might need once they arrived. She knew, however, that it would not be nearly enough to feed all of them well in the interim.

“Dinner at the guesthouse,” she told him simply, and began to walk faster. The Medger family, while being blessed enough to be free, was obviously not blessed enough to avoid working for the likes of the men in the shipyard. She shook her head; the more she saw of this state, this country, its cities, countryside and plantations, the more convinced she became that there was, in fact, no place for them here. Coloreds were like fish out of water, and she would rather eat refuse than spend a lifetime trying to learn how to swim on land. She could see the logic of the white man at the podium that day last spring, talking about how coloreds and whites were two completely separate beings who could and should never try to live together.

And just like that, they turned the corner, almost running into the African Methodist Church and its colorful cloth sign that read, WELCOME, BRETHREN, ONE AND ALL! SERVICE A HALF HOUR AFTER DAWN AND DUSK, EACH DAY. Indeed, at this hour of the evening the small, square edifice was packed with bodies, some praying and singing up front, others standing quietly in the back. Across the way, a Baptist church also overflowed with the faithful and their music. Yasmine was about to conclude that the Baptist congregation was winning the musical and spiritual battle, when she noticed a modest brick structure wedged between the two churches. It had tiny windows that looked like the eyes of a badger within the entire face of the house, a long, thin chimney, and curiously, a bright red door. They had finally found it!

“Hurrumph,” Little George said beside her, and before she even had a moment to process, he had walked up to the door and knocked on it three times.

“Why you do that?” She grabbed his freshly-rapped knuckles, as if to take back the knocks.

Her son looked at her incredulously. “Ma, quit acting. I know you as hungry as we are.”

Yasmine sighed, exasperated. “That may be so, but it don’t—”

Just then, the door flew open, and a short, middle-aged black woman dressed in a well-worn gingham frock stood before them. She had a kind face and warm eyes. “Good evening,” she said evenly. “You must be the folks Edwin and them was telling us about?”

Yasmine nodded.

The woman beamed. “You all look tired and hungry, two things we can change right quick. Come in.”

The pungent fragrance of meat coaxed growls from all of their stomachs. Fresh cinnamon and apples made matters worse. Yasmine felt her face color, but the boys just stepped through the door without hesitation.

“We just sitting down to dinner,” the woman told them. She gestured to a long table in the next room, where a dozen or more people were gathered. Steaming plates of candied yam, gravy, pig’s feet, greens, and boiled beans lined both ends. Plates were half full of the delicious-looking food, and the table’s occupants were quickly packing on more. “Won’t you join us?”

Nolan nodded vigorously, and Big George licked his lips.

“Where they get all this food?” Little George hissed to Big George. Yasmine gave him a disapproving look.

Big George shrugged. “Probably get the churches to pony it up or something.”

“Actually we grow a lot of it in our garden. You wouldn’t know it looking at the house, but there is actually a long yard out back. We grow all sorts of things out there: corn, beans, collards. We even raise chickens and hogs,” the woman said, leading them to the table. She pulled up a few chairs from the corners.

“Amazing you all can get anything done with all that church noise coming from both directions,” said Big George. He sat down a little too quickly, and the delicate chair creaked loudly under his weight.

A graying older man at the head of the table, who Yasmine guessed was the patriarch, raised an eyebrow. She didn’t register clear disapproval in the movement, but she saw it in the eyes of the thin, brittle-looking woman beside him—probably his wife. No one lived between two very active churches like these unless they were involved in them in some essential way. Never speak freely in a house that ain’t yours. How many times had she told that to the boys? Sometimes she really didn’t recognize them. She decided that the best course of action would be to change the subject. But before she could get to it, Nolan said, “They let you grow your own food, even being slaves?”

This stopped everyone at the table. It was as if he had picked up the potatoes in their fine china serving bowl and had thrown them against the wall.

Yasmine bit her lip. She had definitely failed them as a mother.

“Ain’t no one here no slave, boy,” said a sinewy young man who was sandwiched between two young girls in pigtails. “Everyone here make their way with honest, hard work and regular wages. My parents been owning this house going on fifteen years now.”

Nolan’s eyes were getting bigger by the moment. “Own your house? But I never heard of no colored owning nothing!”

This dissipated the awkwardness at the table and made a few people chuckle. The massive heaping of food on plates resumed.

“Then you been sadly lacking in education, boy,” said a frail man of about forty in workmen’s overalls. “We all free peoples here.”

This did not faze Nolan in the least, even as Yasmine shoved him into the seat beside her. “Well, we all free people too, but we still got no choice but to work for Master Scott and take his wages. Mama always says how you can call a freedman a freedman, but if he work like a slave, and ain’t got the rights of a freedman, he no better than a slave.”

Yasmine’s breath caught in her windpipe, and she pinched Nolan under the table.

The patriarch at the end of the table raised the same eyebrow again, but this time directly at Yasmine. “That so, boy? Your mama does have some fascinating, if not wholly accurate, ideas.”

The intensity of his glance was too much for her, and she looked down at the tabletop.

“That why we going far across the water to the new land,” Nolan continued, undeterred. “Mama say we can really be free there.” He reached for a steaming-hot biscuit from the platter in front of him.

Mrs. Medger looked vaguely amused as she filled the boys’ plates. Some of the guests around the table nodded their agreement, while others frowned or shook their heads. Mr. Medger even hurrumphed.

“Well, we wish you all the best of luck,” said a young man to their right. “You got quite a journey ahead of you. And you all so brave to be taking it on like this.”

Yasmine nodded at his kindness. It seemed for a moment that the conversation was successfully redirected, as the only sound in the room was that of utensils clicking against plates and Lani fussing for Yasmine’s breast. Yasmine turned her around and faced her toward her plate, spooning small portions of meat in her mouth.

Then Mr. Medger broke the silence. “Either brave or foolhardy,” he said. “Hard to tell without more information.” He worked a tough piece of meat between his molars.

“That fellow we saw in Boston last month say this whole notion of sending coloreds back to Africa just another way for the white man to shore up his power,” said a young man, between bites of greens. He looked to a young woman with two long braids, to his right. “What his name again, Amelia?”

“Walker,” she said quietly. “David Walker.”

The young man snapped his fingers. “That’s it all right! David Walker.” He shook his head in admiration. “That’s a colored man knows how to talk, I tell you! White folks is scared of him for it too. Issuing him death threats left and right. Say he been ‘inciting the colored masses toward insurrection,’ or some other nonsense.” The young man laughed, and the girl beside him, who seemed much more reserved, cracked a smile.

“What’s inessection?” Nolan asked, his mouth full of potatoes.

No one paid him any mind, and the conversation took on a life of its own, bouncing from person to person, statement to statement, some of which frankly seemed wild in their implications to Yasmine. She had never seen anything like it: free and educated coloreds debating their futures. It filled her stomach with anxiety, but also something else she had never felt before and therefore could not yet describe. But whatever it was, it felt good, made her sit up and listen.

“That Walker fellow is dangerous, make no mistake about it,” said Mr. Medger. “Talking openly and in mixed company about equality between the races. White folks ain’t trying to hear ’bout that!”

Several women across from her, they looked like they could even be sisters, scrunched up their faces. “We been trying to only dare to say what white folks want to hear for how long now, and exactly how far has that got us?” said one of them. “Nowhere, no how. Most of us is still in chains, and those of us supposedly ‘free’ can’t get no fair wages, housing, treatment, or other kind of respect from these crackers.”

A general murmur of assent went around the table.

Yasmine noted that, between bites, her boys’ big eyes followed each speaker around the room. She began to relax in her chair as she realized that they were perhaps taking in their first actual political debate between educated coloreds with different views.

“I say bring on Walker,” the woman continued. “And God bless all of you’s prepared and ready to risk everything and try to make a new start across the water.” She gestured toward Yasmine, who felt herself smile. Just a bit. “But that ain’t for everybody. The heat, the sickness, the rocking boat on them rough waters all them weeks.”

Yasmine looked up and saw a small placard on the wall to her left. She wondered how she hadn’t seen it when they first sat down.

Not that we are sufficient of ourselves to think anything of ourselves; but our sufficiency is of God.

—2 Corinthians 3:5.

Father had taught her to read long ago, along with a little bit of writing. She had never had reason to want to write anything down before, but now, she wanted a quill, some ink, and paper to record it.

The woman next to her laughed. “You be spitting up bile the whole way there, Mildred. That the real reason you so against this whole colonizing Africa thing. Your weak stomach.”

And soon the laughter was spreading and growing louder around the table. Beside her, the boys were laughing outright, relieved to find release after the stresses of the past few days. Even Yasmine, who couldn’t remember the last time she laughed, felt something strange in her belly bubbling up.

Mildred waved her hand. “All right! All right! I’ll admit my constitution ain’t exactly suited to seafarin’.” Mildred glared at everyone, feigning annoyance. Anyone could see that she loved being at the center of things, even if it meant she was the butt of the joke. “You know what my constitution’s suited for? Keeping my black behind here. In my home. Away from diseased mosquitoes and angry savages.”

Cries of “Chile . . .” went up, and a few women lifted their hands, like they were in church.

Nolan looked like he was on the verge of saying something, but Yasmine shushed him. On her lap, Lani refused her mother’s hands feeding her and instead insisted on grabbing bits of potatoes and meat and gravy herself.

Two of the men leaned back in their chairs, shaking their heads in disagreement with Mildred.

Mildred went on. “Yes, home, where I was born to free folk and intend to stay that way as long as Jesus gives me bullets for that gun over there.” She gestured toward the corner of the room, where Yasmine saw a rifle standing up.

The two women beside her started clapping. “Preach, Sister!”

“They got more guns than we do. They always had more guns than we do, more bullets, more men to fire them. Then they got their laws, their money, their land. You know how many times coloreds stood up to them and done got themselves killed?”

Now it was Mildred’s turn to frown. She noisily sipped her water as the man’s assertions became more and more spirited.

“Look here, y’all remember my great-uncle Nestor, right?”

Nods all around.

“He was a good man,” said Mr. Medger.

“A fighting Christian,” said Mrs. Medger.

“Yeah, well, his fighting ways done got him strung up.”

Mrs. Medger gasped.

The man nodded. “Yeah! Posse of white men rode onto his farm one night, said they were sick of him ‘stealing’ their crops, inflating the prices and all. Said they saw him making eyes at their missus.”

Sucked teeth and shaking heads everywhere. They knew what was coming. It was all too familiar in its horror.

The man telling the story sighed. “Well, as many of our venerable politicians have uttered, no good can come of a smart nigger. And Uncle Nestor was too smart, see? And, just like David Walker, wasn’t about to lower himself to make those white boys feel better. No, he was going to be a man. His mother had bought his freedom right before she passed, and his father had saved every cent of his hard-earned money to buy him that plot of land, and by golly, he was gonna farm it and sell the produce and feed his family well and start a colored school and make his little store the smartest thing in two counties . . . And he did. By God, he did it all.” The pride in the man’s voice was unmistakable. As was his sorrow. “Until the white folks caught wind of what he was up to, all the success he was having with all of it, his flourishing farm, his beautiful wife and three little girls. They couldn’t take that, no. A nigger in their midst doing better, far better than they, who had started off with so much more? No.” The man’s voice became small, just a little louder than a whisper, so that everyone had to lean in in order to hear the bitter end that they knew was coming. “They came under cover of darkness, like they always do, and they strung up Nestor on a huge cross in the front of the farm, for everyone to see. Then they lit him up, like Fourth of July, and made his wife and chullin watch.”

Gasps. Hands over mouths. Yasmine felt sick. She wanted to tell their guests that she and the boys would be retiring so that they wouldn’t have to hear what came next. But she knew they needed to.

The man’s voice broke while he told the ending, which was as much a part of their history and life on this land as the pork and grits and greens they ate. “Then they raped his wife and sold his three daughters downriver. When they was done with his wife, they carved the baby she was carrying out her womb and hung them both beside him. They lit him up, but let her and the baby stay there just so, for everyone to see how they do niggers who get too uppity.

“I don’t know why the whole world over, there’s nothing like a black man standing up to turn white folks into monsters.”

The silence around the table was like the chains they had seen around the necks and ankles of the slaves at the auction block earlier—it bore them down. All of them except Lani, who had quietly crawled out of Yasmine’s lap, pulled herself up on the table, and stood on her own two feet for the first time, eyes wide at all she surveyed.