October 31, 1915
Dear Sweetie, my stubborn sister who sasses her Aunt Josephine,
I feel like I’m fifty years old. I didn’t know a person could feel so deep down tired. I may not take care of Miss Rose anymore, but six days a week I still cook, clean the house, go on house calls, and run the clinic for Doctor. He won’t hire anybody else to replace all the colored folk used to work here, he’s too afraid of somebody finding out Miss Rose never came back. Probably couldn’t find anyone anyway, there are no extra white girls looking for jobs out here. I put my foot down and tell him there are not enough hours in the day for me to go to the General Store too, so I give him a list of things we need and that’s his chore. He tease me saying I’m worse than Miss Rose with the orders and why can’t I just be sweet and agreeable. I wish for the day when I only have to answer to God and my medical schoolteachers. Doctor say the buildings at Howard University look like castles and the library is as big as one hundred houses. They have their own school song, Sweetie! I’ll be the loudest one in every room lifting my voice to sing it.
Sundays belong to me. Unless we have a bad case that needs tending to, on Sundays I get to go back to Little Delta, back to our home. Doctor say our Delta house wasn’t abandoned like the others because I’m still here, our things still here, and it’s mine until the Canucks arrive. The mill has been sold, so folks are hoping the new workers get here by first snow. I hope they get lost. If not, I can’t come to The Delta much longer.
I take our shortcut through the woods from Doctor’s. Every time I get to the clearing, right before the rows of houses peek through the trees, I gasp. You never seen a place so empty in your life. Like the houses themselves have died. No people anywhere, no smell of wood burning or cornbread baking, no fiddle playing or mamas calling. But then the maple trees don’t care—they’re still turning orange and red and yellow. The gardens keep growing, waiting to be tamed and harvested. Birds make nests on the rooftops and ground squirrels cover the yards with their burrow holes. It’s like a big graveyard. My voice the only one saying, We were here. This was our home.
I keep the inside of our house spotless, as much as the dust want to be sneaking in. Everything look just like when y’all left—two chairs next to the wood stove, one still with the rickety leg, the table in the middle of the room, decorated with a cup full of dried out lavender flowers in the center, the stools Uncle Henry made from the elm with the tree sickness. Our room still papered with the prettiest adverts from the Swift River Valley Register. Under the bed, a bottle of castor oil Robert hid so we wouldn’t have to line up for winter spoonfuls. I left up the string of cranberries we looped across the wall for Christmas, our last Christmas.
Our beds all neatly made. The rocks we heated to warm them up still there. I have a good laugh at our quilt. Me and you left that thing in tatters from all the back and forth yanking, calling each other a blanket hog. I find your marbles and Robert’s broken yo-yos everywhere. All our rooms put together are still smaller than one room in Doctor’s house. But I miss it, these walls feel like a tight hug to me.
I bring food from Doctor’s house so I don’t have to light a fire in the stove. I don’t want anyone to see the smoke and get an idea to come hassle me. I make thick slices of bread with bacon and duck fat. I pick tomatoes from the garden and they so good I eat them like apples. Strange to have any food in this house without one of y’all asking for a bite of something. I can see you and Robert standing in the doorway, covered in mill dust chanting we hungry, feed us, and then marching around the house till you got shushed. Barefoot and always getting splinters from the patch of floor near the wash basin. My first doctoring was pulling out wood slivers from little feet.
I fill up the basin from the well, but I can’t heat it, so I wash myself with icy water. Sometimes after I grease my legs I don’t put my clothes back on. I stay naked. I know I sound like a coo-coo bird but it makes me like feel I’m free. I can pass hours like that sitting in the chair, trying to find my thoughts. I might daydream that I’m a little girl again, and it’s one of those Saturdays where we would go meet Mama and Daddy at the edge of Little Delta after work and then walk home with all the mill people. By the time the light was gone, we were singin’ and teasin’ each other, couldn’t see nothin’. I can still feel the love-tug on my plaits. A finger poke from an imp of a cousin. An uncle scooping me up and carrying me on his back the rest of the way home. The light was blue and we were all the same black against it. It was like being hugged by a song in the dark. Did you feel that, too?
It’s not safe for me to stay at the house overnight, but before I head back to Doctor’s I go to our church. I sit in our usual place in the third row to the right. I sing. Loud. And don’t you dare poke fun at my voice, you just jealous of my talents. I sing His Eye Is On The Sparrow and Wade In The Water. I read my Bible out loud. And I pray for you children, for our uncles and aunties, for all of our people spread wide from Woodville to California, for Doctor and Miss Rose, and for Gerald. I pray that I know how to be right, to do right, without anyone to teach me, to show me. It ain’t nothing like Pastor Morgan would bring to us each Sunday morning but it’s something that keep me going.
You ever think about that last morning in church?
Spring was shoutin’ joy into the windows but the mood had a dagger in it. I remember the Spirit tossin’ the whole congregation this way and that. With every song, folks sang louder and cried harder. Everybody praying for strength to carry them through the long journey ahead but I was praying for God to help me tell you and Robert I can’t go with you. Uncle Henry and Aunt Josephine already knew they’d be taking you in, but I had to be the one to tell you. I couldn’t do it while we was all cooking and filling provisions baskets, packing wagons and feeding the animals. And not when I was mending your shoes or washing your little bodies for the last time, Robert with enough dirt behind his ears to grow a patch of corn. In my head I was saying goodbye to you, just for now, and also goodbye to the Clara who belonged to people. And then the white folks got word too soon and come from their celebratin’, drunk and raging hearted and then the fires come. You wouldn’t let go my hand and I nearly died. No, I did die. I breathed in the sooty air for punishment, rubbed char on my face and soiled my clothes, kept my eyes open so they would burn. I made myself watch the caravan till they were fireflies in the distance. At some point Doctor come for me, wrap me in a blanket and shield me from the kicks of men who had made my head a spittoon. And then I was alone with the only true horror of that night—the look on your face, my Sweetie. I can never be sorry enough.
In your last letter you ask me do I ever cry thinking about all what we lost? I do. I go to the river, to our spot where it gets shallow and the rocks are just the right smooth for swimming and washing without cutting up your feet. I cry and yell until my throat is gone. Yesterday I think I may have screamed the good sense out of my head, because something strange happened, Sweetie. Make me doubt my own mind. I was sitting on the rocks, not caring that I’m getting my dress wet, scaring away the fish and every living thing with my wailing, and I see a black man on the other side of the riverbank, like that was a natural thing. It wasn’t Gerald, it wasn’t any one of us. He was tall and dressed in fine clothes, like it was Sunday and he was headed to a big city church. Had on fancy trousers and a matching waistcoat, angel-white shirt and a tie. He don’t see me at first but when he do, he smile wide, like I was what he come for. He had a big gap in between his front teeth. Sweetie, sometimes I see Mama and Daddy like they still alive so I think this is someone come from the beyond to take me back with him. I scream. I put my face in my hands and when I look up again, he was gone.
See now, what with my naked wanderings in the house, Sunday sermons by myself and now a gap-toothed black ghost, you must think I done gone mad. I may be on my way. But for right now I swear it’s still me, your ole sister. Hoping you’re being nicer to Auntie Josephine.
November 21, 1915
Sweetie,
Our house is gone. The Canucks are here, they came by the dozens, on foot, by railway, automobile and wagon, and they moved into Little Delta, spreading all through the east side of town. For the first time in fifty years, a family who is not a Newberry is calling our place home. I’m not too sad about it, knew it was coming. Maybe I’m already a steel-hearted woman at eighteen. Or maybe after losing everybody, the house was just like the scab falling off the wound.
Doctor helped me get as much as we could fit into the wagon. I mostly took the things that still had the whiff of you all in it. Like the toolbox with Daddy’s initials carved in the side, Mama’s old head rag stained with beeswax and violet oil. Now I sleep underneath all of our old quilts, still with your smells, in my bed. I tucked a piece of the head rag in this letter for you. Inhale it, deep and long, and tell me what you remember.
Town is full of people speaking French. It’s like I woke up in another country. It seems like they’re laughing at us all the time and you can’t understand a word that comes out their mouth. In the store they point at what they want and then say Marcie. The regular Swift River white folks don’t like it one bit. Say wherever the Frenchies go they make a “Little Canada” so dirty and filled with sickness it’s not fit for a dog to live in, and that even colored people are more self-respecting. Say Canucks work for less money and then leave and bring it all back to Canada. The new mill Canucks turned our little church Catholic. Doctor say it’s the wrong kind of Christian where they want to eat Jesus and drink his blood. And their men will take any job, even the ones the girls do—spinners and doffers and twisters and even the drawing-in girls’ work.
Swift River white folks start to talk to me like I’m one of them or at least I’m not as bad as a Canuck. Make it easier for me to move around town on my own now. Doctor is sending me out by myself on some of the visits he used to make, and people don’t put up too much of a fuss once they see I know what I’m doing. If someone starts to hassle me on the streets a mister might come along and say, Leave her be, she’s our Negro. She’s good and hardworking.
Sweetie, I know white folks don’t see me, Clara Newberry, but they do see a person can help them, can save them, who knows things about their bodies that their husbands and wives and children could never guess at. They open their mouths and stick out their tongues, they show me their oozing, bumpy privates, their bellies swollen with secret children. They tell me about their fevers and broken bones and cook fire burns and the last time they made urine without bleeding. They trust me, depend on me even. I don’t know how I feel about it, seeing a white person turned inside out like that. Especially ones I remember from that night. I have to cut that part out my mind or I couldn’t make it through a day or this life.
Doctor mostly keep to his office now. He say he’s doing research all the time but I know he is sad. I think it’s the same as Miss Rose in bed with her heavy head, but him in an office chair instead. We don’t talk about Miss Rose.
With all of this extra work for me, I beg Doctor to take on a housemaid and a cook, say I can’t do it all no more. He finally say OK and he hire a Canuck girl. She look about fifteen and her name is Marion and she ain’t dirty like they say about the rest. She has pretty blond hair and blue eyes and a scared look on her face all the time. She don’t speak English, but she also don’t treat me like I am dirt on church clothes. She won’t look at me straight, but as long as she cuts the biscuits with a glass and polishes the banisters the way Doctor likes, I don’t care if our eyes ever meet.
The air is the cool of late fall about to turn. Feeling that air used to stir up a worry in me that we wouldn’t have enough clothes to stay warm for the coming winter. How was I going to make sure all of you children had coats and extra socks and boots with sturdy soles? Doctor give me Miss Rose’s long and heavy wool coat so I’m like a princess who never has to worry about the cold. But not worrying about the cold also makes me feel like I’m forgetting something. And then remembering makes me feel bad even though you’re warm and safe in Woodville and don’t need a coat or any shoes at all. I guess what I’m saying is the cool air make me feel awful. Does that make sense? Sometimes worries are a comfort, what connect you to another person. What make me feel like your big sister.
Just now a young white fella come running up to the door and say come to the mill, there’s a doffer dropped to the floor and now her baby is coming too soon. They just ask for me, don’t even ask for Doctor. I’ll write more when I get back.
Sweetie, how did I forget? The way that everything in that mill rush in and try to fill up your body. The smell in your nose, the heavy white air, the roar of the looms so loud they blocking out your own thoughts. As soon as I walk in my eyes burned and I scrambled to get a rag around my mouth before the dust get to my lungs. The men at their posts pointed me toward a corner, where a group of women bent over a young girl with no shoes and a medium sized belly. I guess seven months. Blood and waters trickled out from under her dress. Bloody footprints were all around her.
She was dirty like all of them folks work a full mill day. I had sterilized rags all ready in my bag, and got to clearing her face, her legs. I felt her stomach for the baby’s position, put my ear to her navel to listen to the bloods and pulse. The women stood around us like a shield blocking the men folk from seeing. I send a few of the nosy boys to get fabric to put underneath her, cushion her from the cold floor. She grab my hand and cry, hollering something in French I can’t understand. Her pains were close together so I knew the baby was coming fast.
And then I see him. First through the cracks in between the shield women, then right at the head of the girl, placing a reem of white fabric under her head. The gap-tooth black ghost is a real living man. He remember me as the wailing girl from the river! That day I scare him, too. He tell me he work for the new mill owner and will help me talk to the girl on the floor, take her French words and give them to me in English. That what he do for work! He call himself a translator. A translator is someone who know two languages. He take a word in one language and then speak it in another, so two strangers can understand each other. He speak English in a different way from us—he don’t sound like any colored man you ever met. He tell me exactly what the girl say and he tell her what I say. He nod when I say how to breathe and say Respiray and she look at us both like we the same voice, one voice together. He is calm, younger than he look from a distance, maybe twenty or so, but he rub his head and beard like an old man. He don’t even seem afraid as the blood and the waters come. His eyes tear up when the strong new baby girl got to yowling, no language yet to speak of where she come from. He call me Doctor and tell me I’m a wonder.
Sweetie, after all this time not seeing a colored man, when I catch a look at his skin near my skin it’s like a kind of a looking glass, shining against all of the white skin around us. Something in me open up. What blooms there—Daddy and Robert and Uncle Henry and belly laughing and ashy elbows and big hands that hold on to my hands with care, and care, and combing a tender-headed somebody to make four plaits (that’s you). He smell like wood smoke and apples. He is handsome, Sweetie, so very handsome. He stand straight, and his wide shoulders pull at his shirt and waistcoat. His shoes are shiny, like he never set foot outside. I’m wearing one of Miss Rose’s day dresses, it have flowers for buttons. We look like we dressed up to play a game called White Folks. Like God took two pretty black dolls and smashed them together—go now, make a life.