“You can’t leave yet,” he said. “Not yet.”
He slowly backed out of the doorway, watching to see if she would stay. When she didn’t move, he picked up his shovel, went out to a spot on the edge of their land, and started digging.
“What are you doing?” Abena asked. Unlucky was sweating. He moved so slowly, Abena took pity on him. She took the shovel and began to dig for him. “What are you looking for?” she asked.
Her father got down on his knees and started raking away the dirt with both of his hands, holding it awhile, then letting it sift through his fingers. When he stopped, all that was left in his palms was a black stone necklace.
Abena sank down beside him and looked at the necklace. It shimmered gold and was cool to the touch.
Her father huffed loudly, trying to catch his breath. “This belonged to my grandmother, your great-grandmother Effia. It was given to her by her own mother.”
“Effia,” Abena repeated. It was the first time she had heard the name of one of her ancestors, and she savored the taste of the name on her tongue. She wanted to say it again and again. Effia. Effia.
“My father was a slaver, a very wealthy man. When I decided to leave Fanteland, it was because I did not want to take part in the work my family had done. I wanted to work for myself. I see how these townspeople call me Unlucky, but every season I feel lucky to have this land, to do this honorable work, not the shameful work of my family. When the villagers here gave me this small bit of land, I was so happy that I buried this stone here to give thanks.
“I won’t stop you if you want to go, but please take this with you. May it serve you as well as it has served me.”
Abena put on the necklace and hugged her father. Her mother was in the doorframe, watching them out in the dirt. Abena got up and hugged her mother too.
The next morning Abena set out for Kumasi, and when she arrived at the missionary church there, she touched the stone at her neck and said thank you to her ancestors.
Part Two
H
IT TOOK THREE POLICEMEN to knock H down, four to put him in chains.
“I ain’t done nothing!” he shouted once they got him to the jail cell, but he was speaking only to the air they had left behind. He’d never seen people walk away so quickly, and he knew he had scared them.
H rattled the bars, certain that he could bend or break them if only he tried.
“Stop that ’fore they kill you,” his cellmate said.
H recognized the man from around town. Maybe he’d even sharecropped with him once on one of the county farms.
“Can’t nobody kill me,” H said. He was still pressing on the bars, and he could hear the metal start to give between his fingers. Then he could feel his cellmate’s hands on his shoulder. H turned around so quick, the other man didn’t have time to move or think before H had him lifted by the throat. H was over six feet tall, and he had the man so high up, his head brushed the top of the ceiling. If H lifted him any higher, he would have broken through. “Don’t you touch me again,” H said.
“You think dem white folks won’t kill you?” the man said, his words coming out small and slow.
“What I done?” H said. He lowered the man to the ground, and he fell to his knees, gasping up long sips of breath.
“Say you was studyin’ a white woman.”
“Who say?”
“The police. Heard ’em talkin’ ’bout what to say ’fore they went out to get you.”
H sat down next to the man. “Who they say I was talkin’ to?”
“Cora Hobbs.”
“I wasn’t studyin’ no Hobbs girl,” H said, his rage lit anew. If there were rumors about him and a white woman, he would have hoped it would be someone prettier than his old sharecropping boss’s daughter.
“Boy, look atcha,” his cellmate said, his gaze so spiteful now that H grew suddenly, inexplicably afraid of the smaller, older man. “Don’t matter if you was or wasn’t. All they gotta do is say you was. That’s all they gotta do. You think cuz you all big and muscled up, you safe? Naw, dem white folks can’t stand the sight of you. Walkin’ round free as can be. Don’t nobody want to see a black man look like you walkin’ proud as a peacock. Like you ain’t got a lick of fear in you.” He rested his head against the cell wall and closed his eyes for a second. “How old you was when the war ended?”
H tried to count back, but he’d never been very good at numbers, and the Civil War was so long ago that the numbers climbed higher than H could reach. “Not sure. ’Bout thirteen, I reckon,” he said.
“Mm-hmm. See, that’s what I thought. You was young. Slavery ain’t nothin’ but a dot in your eye, huh? If nobody tell you, I’ma tell you. War may be over but it ain’t ended.”
The man closed his eyes again. He let his head roll against the wall, this way, then that. He looked tired, and H wondered how long he’d been sitting in that cell.
“My name’s H,” he finally said, a peace offering.
“H ain’t no kind of name,” his cellmate said, never opening his eyes.
“It’s the only one I got,” H said.
Soon the man fell asleep. H listened to him snore, watched the rise and fall of his chest. The day the war ended, H had left his old master’s plantation and began to walk from Georgia to Alabama. He’d wanted new sights and sounds to go with his newfound freedom. He was so happy to be free. Everyone he knew was just happy to be free. But it didn’t last long.
H spent the next four days in the county jail. On the second day, the guards took his cellmate away. He didn’t know where. When they finally came for H, the guards wouldn’t tell him what the charge was, only that he had to pay the ten-dollar fine by the end of the night.
“I only got five dollars saved,” H said. It had taken him nearly ten years of sharecropping to put away that much.
“Maybe your family can help,” the chief deputy said, but he was already walking away, on to the next person.
“Ain’t got no family,” H said to no one. He had made the walk from Georgia to Alabama by himself. He was used to being alone, but Alabama had turned H’s loneliness into something like a physical presence. He could hold it when he went to bed at night. It was in the handle of his hoe, in the puffs of cotton that floated away.
He was eighteen when he met his woman, Ethe. By then he’d gotten so big that no one ever crossed him. He could walk into a room and watch it clear as men and women made way for him. But Ethe always stood her ground. She was the most solid woman he’d ever met, and his relationship with her was the longest he’d had a relationship with anyone at all. He would have asked her for her help now, but she hadn’t talked to him since the day he called her by another woman’s name. He had been wrong to cheat on her, wronger still to lie. He couldn’t call Ethe now, not with this shame hanging over him. He’d heard of black women coming to the jailhouse to look for their sons or husbands and being taken into a back room by the policemen, told that there were other ways to pay a fine. No, H thought, Ethe would be better off without him.
By sunrise the next morning, on a sweltering July day in 1880, H was chained to ten other men and sold by the state of Alabama to work the coal mines just outside of Birmingham.
—
“Next,” the pit boss shouted, and the chief deputy shoved H in front of him. H had been watching them check each of the ten men who’d been chained to him on the train ride there. H wasn’t even sure he could call some of them men. He saw a boy no older than twelve, shivering in the corner of the train. When they’d pushed that boy in front of the pit boss, he’d peed himself, tears running down his face all the while, until he looked like he himself would melt down into the puddle of wet at his feet. The boy was so young, he’d probably never seen a whip like the one the pit boss had laid out on his desk, only heard about them in the nightmarish stories his parents told.