Anna’s belly continued to swell. Baby H was making itself known every day with ferocious kicks and punches to the inside of Anna’s gut. “H is gon’ be a boxer,” ten-year-old Cato said, resting his ear against his mother’s stomach.
“Nuh-uh,” Anna said. “There won’t be no violence in this house.” Five minutes later, Daly kicked Eurias in the shins, and Anna spanked him so hard he winced every time he sat down that day.
Agnes turned sixteen and took a job cleaning the Methodist church on Caroline Street, and Beulah relished her new role as oldest child in the house for the one hour of every evening before Agnes returned home from work.
“Timmy say he and Pastor John ain’t going nowhere,” Agnes reported one night. It was August 1850 and Baltimore had taken on a sticky heat. Agnes would come home every night with sweat licking at her upper lip, her neck, her forehead. Timmy was the pastor’s son, and every day Jo and the rest of the family were subjected to Agnes’s reports on what Timmy had thought, done, or said that day.
“So I guess that means you ain’t going nowhere neither?” Anna said with a smirk, and Agnes huffed out of the house. She said it was in search of some chocolate for the kids, but they all knew that Anna had struck a nerve.
Ma Aku laughed as the door slammed. “That child don’t know nothin’ ’bout love,” she said. Her laugh turned into a cough, and she had to bend forward to let the cough fall out.
Jo kissed Anna’s forehead and looked at Ma. “What d’you know ’bout love, Ma?” he asked, taking over the laugh where she left it.
Ma wagged her finger at him. “Don’t go askin’ me what I know an’ don’t know,” she said. “You ain’t the only one who ever touched or been touched by somebody.”
It was Anna’s turn to laugh, and Jo dropped the hand that he had been squeezing, feeling a bit betrayed. “Who, Ma?”
Ma shook her head, slowly. “Don’t matter.”
Two weeks later, Timmy came by the docks to ask Jo for Agnes’s hand in marriage.
“You know a trade, boy?” Jo asked.
“I’m gonna be a preacher like my daddy,” Timmy said.
Jo grunted. He’d been to a church only once since the day he and Ma Aku were kicked out for witchcraft, and that was the day of his own wedding. If Agnes married this preacher’s son, he’d have to go again for her wedding and then who knew how many more times.
The day they’d walked the five miles home from the Baptist church, after Jo had given Mirabel’s father the frog, Jo had cried and cried. Ma Aku had let him carry on for a few minutes, and then she snatched his ear up with her hand, dragged him into an alley, looked at him hard, and said, “Whatchu cryin’ fo’, boy?”
“Pastor say we was doin’ African witchcraft.” He wasn’t old enough to know what that meant, but he was old enough to know shame, and that day, he was full up to his ears with it.
Ma Aku spit behind her left shoulder, something she only did when truly disgusted. “Who tol’ you to cry fo’ that?” she asked, and he shrugged his shoulders, tried to keep his nose from running, for it seemed to make her more angry. “I tell you, if they had not chosen the white man’s god instead of the gods of the Asante, they could not say these things to me.”
Jo knew he was supposed to nod, and so he did. She continued. “The white man’s god is just like the white man. He thinks he is the only god, just like the white man thinks he is the only man. But the only reason he is god instead of Nyame or Chukwu or whoever is because we let him be. We do not fight him. We do not even question him. The white man told us he was the way, and we said yes, but when has the white man ever told us something was good for us and that thing was really good? They say you are an African witch, and so what? So what? Who told them what a witch was?”
Jo had finished crying, and Ma Aku scrubbed at the white salt stains along his cheek with the hem of her dress. She pulled him back into the street, dragging him along by the arm and muttering the whole time.
Timmy’s hands were trembling, and Jo watched them shake. He was a lanky, skinny boy with soft hands that had never been burned by hot pitch or callused by a caulking iron. Timmy came from a line of free folk: born and raised in Baltimore to parents who were also born and raised in Baltimore. “If that’s what Aggie wants,” Jo finally said.
The couple married the next month, on the morning the Fugitive Slave Act passed. Anna sewed Agnes’s dress in the night by candlelight. In the mornings, Jo would find her, bleary-eyed, blinking herself awake as she got ready to go to the Mathison house. Baby H was so big in her belly that she could no longer walk without waddling, her feet so swollen that when she shoved them into her work slippers they folded back out and over, like bread that had too much yeast and could not be contained by its pan.
The wedding was at Timmy’s father’s church, and all the female congregants had cooked a meal fit to feed a king, even though there were whispers about Timmy marrying a girl whose folks didn’t attend a church, not even the rival Methodist one across the street.
Beulah stood next to Agnes in a purple dress, and Timmy’s brother, John Jr., stood next to him. Timmy’s father, Pastor John, married them. He didn’t close the usual way, announcing the new Mr. and Mrs. and telling them to kiss, but instead had the congregation reach their hands out toward Timmy and Agnes while he said a blessing. And just as he spoke the words “And all God’s people said,” a little boy ran by the door of the church shouting, “The law passed! The law passed!”
And the answer, “Amen,” came muffled and insincere from some. From others, it didn’t come at all. A few began to squirm in their seats and one even left, getting up so quickly that the whole pew rocked, thrown, as it was, off-balance.
Agnes looked at Jo with a shadow of nervousness hanging behind her eyes, and he looked at her as steadily as he knew how. Then her fear melted away as the collective fear grew. Pastor John finished marrying the couple, and everyone ate the feast that Anna, Ma, and the rest of the women had prepared.
—
Within a couple of weeks, word came in that James Hamlet, a Baltimore runaway, had been kidnapped and convicted in New York City. The white folks wrote about it in the New York Herald and in the Baltimore Sun. He was the first, but everyone knew there would be more. People began moving up to Canada by the hundreds. Jo went to Fell’s Point one week, and what used to be a sea of black faces against the backdrop of the blue-green bay had turned into nothing. Mathison had made sure Jo’s whole family had their free papers together, but he knew others with papers too, and even they had fled.
Mathison spoke to Jo again. “I want to make certain you know what’s at stake here, Jo. If they catch you, they’ll take you to trial, but you won’t get any kind of say at all. It’ll be the white man’s word against no word at all. You all make sure you carry your papers at all times, understand?” Jo nodded.
There were rallies and protests throughout the North, and not just among the Negroes. White people were joining in like Jo had never seen them join in about anything before. The South had brought this fight to the Northern welcome mat, when many of them had wanted nothing to do with it. Now white people could be fined for giving a Negro a meal, or a job, or a place to stay, if the law said that Negro was a runaway. And how were they to know who was a runaway and who was not? It had created an impossible situation, and those who had been determined to stay on the fence found themselves without a fence at all.