In the mornings, before Jo and Anna went off to work, Jo made the children practice showing their papers. He would play the federal marshall, hands on his hips, walking up to each of them, even little Gracie, and saying, in a voice as stern as he could muster, “Where you goin’?” And they would reach into the pockets Anna had sewn onto their dresses and pants, and without any backtalk, always silently, thrust those papers into Jo’s hands.
When he’d first started doing this, the children would burst into laughter, thinking it was a game. They didn’t know about Jo’s fear of people in uniform, didn’t know what it was like to lie silent and barely breathing under the floorboards of a Quaker house, listening to the sound of a catcher’s bootheel stomp above you. Jo had worked hard so that his children wouldn’t have to inherit his fear, but now he wished they had just the tiniest morsel of it.
“You worry too much,” Anna said. “Ain’t nobody lookin’ for them kids. Ain’t nobody lookin’ for us neither.” The baby was due any day now, and Jo had noticed that his wife had become crankier than ever, snapping at him for the tiniest of things. She craved fish and lemons. She walked with her hands on her lower back, and she forgot things. The keys one day, the broom the next. Jo worried she would forget her papers next. He’d seen her leave them, rumpled and worn, on her side of the mattress one day when she went to the market, and he’d yelled at her for it. He’d yelled at her until she cried. Bad as he felt that day, he knew she would never forget again.
Then one day Anna didn’t come home. Jo ran to the room to see if she’d left her papers again, but he couldn’t find them anywhere, and he heard Anna’s sweet voice saying, “You worry too much. You worry too much,” in his ear. Beulah came home with the rest of the kids in tow, and Jo asked if they had seen their mother.
“Is Baby H comin’, Daddy?” Eurias asked.
“Maybe,” Jo said absently.
Then Ma Aku came home, her hands massaging the nape of her neck. It didn’t take long for her to survey the room.
“Where Anna? She said she was gonna get some sardines before comin’ home,” Ma said, but Jo was already halfway out the door.
He went to the grocer, the corner store, the fabric shop. He went to the fish market, the cobbler, the hospital. The shipyards, the museum, the bank.
“Anna? She ain’t been by today,” said one after the other.
Then, for the first time in his life, Jo knocked on a white man’s door at night. Mathison himself opened the door.
“She ain’t been home since mornin’,” Jo said, his throat catching on the words. It had been a long time since he’d cried, and he didn’t want to do it in front of a white man, no matter how the man had helped him.
“Go home to your kids, Kojo. I’ll start looking for her right now. You go home.”
Jo nodded, and in his dazed walk home, he began to think about what life would be like without his wife, the woman he had loved hard and long. Everyone had been keeping up with what was becoming known as the “Bloodhound Law.” They’d heard about the dogs, the kidnappings, the trials. They’d heard it all, but hadn’t they earned their freedom? The days of running through forests and living under floorboards. Wasn’t that the price they had paid? Jo didn’t want to accept what he was already starting to know in his heart. Anna and Baby H were gone.
—
Jo couldn’t stand by and wait for Mathison to look for Anna. Mathison may have had all the wealthy white connections a person could want, but Jo knew the black and the poor immigrant white people of Baltimore, and at night, after he had finished working on the ships, he went out to talk to them, trying to gather information.
But everywhere he went, the answer was the same. They had seen Anna that morning, the day before, three nights ago. The day she went missing, she’d been at Mathison’s until six o’clock. After that, nothing. No one had seen her.
Agnes’s new husband, Timmy, was a good artist. He drew up a picture of Anna from memory that looked as close to her as any Jo had ever seen. In the morning, Jo took the picture to Fell’s Point with him. He got on every last boat in the shipyard, showing people Anna’s face drawn in heavy charcoal.
“Sorry, Jo,” they all said.
He took the picture onto Alice with him, and even though all the other men already knew what she looked like, they humored him, studying the picture carefully before telling Jo what he already knew. They hadn’t seen her either.
Jo took to carrying the picture in his pocket while he worked. He lost himself in the sound of mallet hitting iron, that steady rhythm he knew so well. It soothed him. Then, one day, when he was getting the oakum ready, the picture slipped out of his pocket, and by the time Jo caught it, the bottom edges were soaked in pine tar. As he worked to get it off, the tar stuck to his fingers, and when he reached up to wipe sweat from his eye, his face shimmered with it.
“I gotta go,” Jo said to Poot, waving the picture frantically, hoping the wind would dry it.
“You can’t miss no more days, Jo,” Poot said. “They gon’ give yo job to one of them Irishmen and then what, huh? Who gon’ feed them kids, Jo?”
Jo was already running toward dry land.
By the time Jo got to the furniture store on Aliceanna Street, he was showing the picture to every person he passed. He didn’t know what he was thinking when he shoved it in the face of the white woman coming out of the store.
“Please, ma’am,” he said. “Have you seen my wife? I’m looking for my wife.”
The woman backed away from him slowly, her eyes widening with fear but never leaving his own, as though if she was to turn from him he would be free to attack her.
“You stay away from me,” the woman said, holding her hand out in front of her.
“I’m looking for my wife. Please, ma’am, just look at the picture. Have you seen my wife?”
She shook her head and the held-out hand too. She didn’t even glance at the picture once. “I’ve got children,” she said. “Please don’t hurt me.”
Was she even listening to a word he said? Suddenly, Jo felt two strong arms grab him from behind. “This nigger bothering you?” a voice asked.
“No, officer. Thank you, officer,” the woman said, breathing easier and then taking her leave.
The policeman swung Jo around to face him. Jo was so scared he couldn’t lift his eyes, so instead he lifted the picture. “Please, my wife, sir. She’s eight months pregnant and I ain’t seen her in days.”
“Your wife, huh?” the policeman said, snatching the picture from Jo’s hands. “Pretty nigger, ain’t she?”
Still Jo couldn’t look at him.
“Why don’t you let me take this picture with me?”
Jo shook his head. He’d almost lost the picture once that day and didn’t know what he would do if he lost it again. “Please, sir. It’s the only one I got.”
Then Jo heard the sound of paper tearing. He looked up to see Anna’s nose and ears and strands of hair, the shredded bits of paper flying off in the wind.
“I’m tired of all these runaway niggers thinking they’re above the law. If your wife was a runaway nigger, then she got what she deserved. What about you? You a runaway nigger? I can send you on to see your wife.”
Jo held the policeman’s gaze. His whole body felt like it was shaking. He couldn’t see it, but he could feel it inside him, an unstoppable quaking. “No, sir,” he said.
“Speak up,” the policeman said.
“No, sir. I was born free, right here in Baltimore.”
The policeman smirked. “Go home,” he said. The policeman turned and walked away, and the quaking that had been held somewhere inside Jo’s bones started to escape until he was sitting on the hard ground, trying to hold himself together.
—
“Tell him what you told me,” Mathison said. Jo was standing in Mathison’s parlor three weeks later. Ma Aku had fallen ill and could no longer go to work, but Jo still stopped by the Mathison house on his way home to see if the man had any news about Anna.
This day, Mathison was holding a scared Negro child by his shoulders. The boy could not have been much older than Daly, and if he was any more scared of being called in by a white man, his skin would have been gray instead of its cool tar black.