Kind One

10.





I SLEPT EASY in that cold frame I came to rest in behind Lucious Wilson’s outhouse easier than I slept in any bed before or after, in company or alone. The dirt to it was soft, and as I lay there the nights I did I sunk enough to put me back into my hole in that shed in Kentucky. I dug out that hole with my fingers. They had gotten me used to putting myself down into the dirt during the daytime, and when they put me away at night I got to favoring the idea of a shallow hole to make my bed in. All those weeks and months previous, in Evansville and Indianapolis, I had been thinking about that hole. About where I had been dead and waiting for the pig sticker to put the final word to it. I found it again in that cold frame behind the outhouse.

Before she passed I told the old woman who found me and took me to Lucious Wilson about that. About that and about my husband’s piece of paradise and about my breakfasts with him. I told her about the pigs running wild and my hugging the oak tree and the shackle and watching Alcofibras at his turn. That old woman liked to sip fresh mint tea to settle her before sleeping, and as I talked she sat there and sipped it. Every now and again she would pick a mint leaf off her tongue. I told her about taking the strop to Zinnia and about taking the strop to Cleome. I told her I had not raised my voice against my husband when he was at Alcofibras. I told her I had tempted Linus Lancaster into taking me down to Kentucky to live in his fine house with him. That I had sat in his big lap and tickled his ear with a piece of timothy.

“Well, well, Sue,” she said. “The Lord has his ways and meanings for us all.”

“The water moved away from me. It wouldn’t have me,” I said.

“I know it. I know it.”

She had crop-colored eyes and a nice way of speaking. She died two days later when a horse kicked her in the head.

If it hadn’t, I could have told her that I had not stopped taking the strop to Cleome even after I saw her sick in the mornings nor when Zinnia told me why and begged me to give her Cleome’s and her own lickings both. Or that it was ten days and nights of stroppings and visits down the hall from the time I found that second photographic portrait in my husband’s drawer in the chifforobe, on the back of which had been written, in my husband’s own hand, “dearly departed and my two daughters,” to the night I pulled the pig sticker out of the moon-slathered sow Linus Lancaster had lately slaughtered and hung up by the barn and came up behind him as he sat to a late whiskey, singing with that voice of his, and gristled every speck of it into his neck.

I cannot account for that delay. There was a fury in me. It is there still.

A time as I was coming up north through the twilight, heading for the river with its ferryman, a rider with black teeth leaned down off his horse and asked me what I was running from.

“You’re looking at it,” I said.

I also cannot give a reason why I did not finish the second part of the chore I’d set myself that evening and apply that pig sticker to myself. Or why, having left it sit there in Linus Lancaster, I didn’t pack up my bag and run. I knew it wasn’t kisses I had coming.

You’d have thought I enjoyed that jaunt there in the shed. Was gobbling up my just desserts. Taking what was mine and earned. Giving it a hiss and a grin. Letting my fury out into the young days of Kentucky to turn a step and a bow with theirs.





Once in my deepest early days a boy got lost and fell into a pond, and when they found him he was just a blue coat and red pants floating facedown under ten inches of ice. My father went out with his axe to help get him out. All the men had axes and they made a kind of clock on the ice and took turns letting their axes fall. The axes fell one after the other around the clock, and pieces of ice flew up into the air and off to the sides and caught the sunlight coming down into the crater they were making. I was five. The boy had been my playmate. It looked like they were pulling him out of the eye of a jewel. When they had him out and were wrapping him on the bank, I walked over to the jewel crackling around the black water and just dropped myself in. It was my father who pulled me out. When he had me home and dry and hugged, he whipped me until I saw the same stars I’d seen around that jewel in the pond, and then he whipped me some more because when he asked me if I’d had enough licking, I started to smile.





Comes a day when everything you thought you had put behind you sets up its tent in the middle of what you were still hoping you could call tomorrow and yells out, “Right this way.”

Well, here I come.





CANDLE STORY

(WHERE THEY WENT)

1911 / 1861





But they’ll nor pinch,

Fright me with urchin-shows, pitch me i’ the mire,

Nor lead me, like a firebrand, in the dark





I WAS EIGHTEEN YEARS OLD in 1861. What I walked away from one late spring morning in Kentucky I vowed never to walk toward again. The long years went by and I kept my vow. Then this notion came upon me. It put a hand on my shoulder as I sat to my Sunday prayer. It put a hand on my shoulder and squeezed.

I carried it here. All the days and nights it took to make the journey. When I was eighteen and my sister was sixteen and we walked away together. Held hands and walked, the two of us, away across the stone bridge. There was a Klaxon as that hand squeezed my shoulder.

It must have been just outside the church. I started and sat up straight, caught Eunice Fairbanks’s eye and we both gave a laugh. That laugh covered up the feeling of that other thing well enough that it wasn’t until I was on my way out of the church that I thought of it again. The Reverend Washington was standing out on the street shaking hands, sending off his blessings. I told Prosper, my nephew, to wait and asked the Reverend if I could have a moment. We stood away from the traffic, leaned in close to each other against the noise. I told him it was the old days come to visit. He asked me if they wanted anything in particular. I told him that they did, that I had felt a call.

“Stay here with us, Granny,” he said. “You fought all the fight of this world. Stay right here. Let others fight now. Take your rest.”

The Reverend Washington is a fine young man. He tends to the poor and holds the hands of the sick. Once I saw him lift a car off a little white boy who had been thrown under it. They give trouble to some of the colored churches but not to ours. Prosper has been right to seek his counsel a number of times. I thanked him. He was born long after the old days. I asked him if he would pray a moment with me.





I went when Cleome had fallen deep into her sleep in the corner we had taken for ourselves in the barn. I saw one of the old sows, easing an itch on the oak tree, as I made my way and held my hand up to my head against the bats swooping all around. The candle I had brought did nothing in the bright moonlight. When I reached the shed, I set it on a ledge then went and looked at her. I could see fresh blood, black in the candlelight, seeping around her ankle where the iron cut. She was asleep.

I worked quietly, hooking the far end of the thread to the same bracket that held her chain, weaving the line up over two of the shiny roof beams. Then I took it over the nail stopper in the door and out into the moonlight. The sow was done and had flopped down into a pile by the tree. There were others of her kind around, you could hear them snoring off in the dark. I don’t know when they had stopped fearing bears and wolves, maybe they had all gotten too big to care about things with teeth, and certainly we never troubled them anymore. I took the thread three strong loops around the key as I stood next to the well and left it sitting on the edge. Then I walked my way backward all the way to the bracket, pulling on the line as I went to make sure it was strong. She stirred as I walked by so I had to kick her, make her think I was there for other reasons. It wasn’t hard to pretend. It was not pretend. She barely gave a murmur, though I had kicked her in the neck. I took my candle down off the ledge.

“I’ll see you again in the morning, Mother Ginny,” I said.

Cleome was sitting up when I got back.

“Couldn’t sleep?” she asked.

I nodded. I had her lie back down on the hay and I rubbed her legs. Presently, she was giving out her soft little snores. Sunlight came to wake us all soon enough.





I knew just where it was. After my talk with the Reverend Washington outside of the church, I went and stood in front of the drawer I’d set it in years before. Hidden behind a hairbrush and a pincushion. A bundle of needles. A square of orange cloth.

I am old but I am not yet tired, and I have gotten to live on all these years with Prosper in this place, I thought. I have risen from deep waters and I have kept on, I thought. Fifty years have gone by. I have my vow, I have my life, I thought.

I packed my travel bag, put on my travel hat, and walked out the door. Prosper caught up with me when I got to Michigan Avenue, said to find me he had just followed the trail of everyone I’d walked by like I was some kind of a ghost. I told Prosper that people could think what they wanted and that ghost or not, I was bound on business for Kentucky. Prosper looked at me, saw I meant it, took my bag, and said that if Kentucky was our destination we had best take the train. I asked him about his work at the stone yard. He said his work could wait: he had seen the look in my eye.

The train took us all of a rattle down to Louisville, Louisville of my first dreams. I did not shudder when we stepped off the platform. I did not shudder when our search for a wagon took us near where I had lived as a small girl. For years when the bad part of the past times have come to me, I have nodded my head, set my jaw, and looked them in the eye until they have left again. I did no different now that I had come to them. The wagon Prosper rented for us had a pallet in the back where I could recline. Part of the time as we rolled toward Charlotte County I lay on my back with my head on my traveling bag and looked up at the sky. Every now and then I would lift up and call out some direction to Prosper, but otherwise I just lay there. I was on my back, like a dead thing, when we rolled over the stone bridge.

“We’re here now, Aunt Zinnia, wherever that here is,” Prosper said.

“Paradise,” I said, sitting up, preparing to crack the yolk of my eyes over that world once more. “Paradise is what we called it.”

The barn and house and oak tree were gone. But the well was still there. And the shed. I climbed into the front of the wagon and Prosper went to knock on the door of the house that stood now where the barn had been. I kept my eyes on the well. There was no door on the front of the shed. A couple came out of the house with Prosper, like us but darker-skinned.

“How do?” said the man.

“You will have to forgive me,” I said as they came over. “Now that I am here I see that I will not be able to get down.”

“Aunt Z?” said Prosper.

“You want some cool tea, honey?” said the woman.

But I did not answer them; how could I answer them? For there I was again, standing over what lay shackled unto its misery in that shed. And there I sat, myself, with the shackle on my arm and a rat at my foot. And there leaned Cleome, her back wet from fresh whipping, the rain dripping onto her head through the holes in the roof. And there stood Alcofibras, the chain wrapped around his neck, refusing to sit even though he was kept there for two days. That shed where I had kicked and been kicked. I sat on the wagon and I sat inside of that shed but never moved. The thing at my feet moved. I kicked it. We’ll speak on this someday, I thought.

Still and all, I came to myself and made some apology then learned that the couple had indeed heard of a Ginestra Lancaster, that not two months before a white man down from Indiana had knocked on their door to ask if she had any people over this way. She was getting on in her years, was Ginestra Lancaster, and this man’s and her employer, Lucious Wilson, had sent him from Clinton County to see if he could give any shake to the family tree. The couple had never heard of any Lancasters and had had the farm in their family more than forty years. The man had left them with five dollars for their trouble.

“Clinton County, Indiana?” I said, although I had heard it well enough.

The woman nodded. I could see she really did want to give me a glass of her tea. I drank it sitting in the wagon, knowing the coolness to it had come up out of the well. The man said a word or two about the luck we’d had on our errand in coming to them so soon after the white man from Indiana, and the woman said that luck had nothing to do with it or anything else in the Lord’s domain.

“Aren’t I right, honey?” she said to me.

She was, but I didn’t answer. I was back in the shed. Only this time it was all of us in there at the same time. Rats and pigs and people. As we rode away I did not tell Prosper that he had been here before too, that he had floated in his first waters on this farm, that although his tiny feet had never touched its rocks and soils, he had been with us, both in the shed and out of it, when I and his mother had taken hands together and walked away.





She said it was like taking rocks out of her pockets and dropping them to the ground. Every day she would unload the rocks, one by one, and every morning, when she woke, they would be there again. We walked and the rocks fell from her hands. I wanted to know if it felt a little lighter at the start of each new day and she said it didn’t, but that the rocks were dropping all the same. We kept to the side lanes, went to the ditches when we heard horses, as Horace and Ulysses had told us we must when we left. The closer we got to Louisville the more there were men with whips and guns. Neither one of us had left the farm since we had arrived, but we made our way just the same. We had corn pone and salt pork to eat and water from the streams. We had a Bible, from our mother, which we had kept hidden away for years to read aloud to each other. We could both of us read; our mother had seen to that before her owner and ours had beaten her to death. I carried everything. I did not speak of purple thread. Cleome had the child and her rocks and her time was near.

When we got to Louisville we found Horace and Ulysses living in a basement, doing night work at the docks. Cleome said she couldn’t live in any basement. Horace and Ulysses were scared to have someone in her condition on their hands, and fretted considerably at first. Still, we waited one week with them in their hole.

As we waited, we talked and read the Bible and told each other stories about how we thought it would be up north. Horace and Ulysses said there was a war coming, that the whole world would be swept away, that we would all be struck down, but we hardly heard them. Our ears were either still back in Paradise or on up the road, but not there. Cleome sat quiet for long stretches. She had a piece of sewing work she would worry at while she sat. She had always been quick with her fingers, but now they were swollen. I rubbed her hands and her feet. She never complained, just said she wanted to get walking and dropping her rocks out of her pockets again. There were times, as I rubbed and her head lolled, and I looked at her belly, that I would give a shiver and hear heavy feet coming down the corridor, but that would pass.

I only went out once, to fetch a woman who had known my mother to look to Cleome. That woman worked in a house next to the one my mother had died in, that I had first been set to work in, that I had taken my first beatings in. After I had gotten her to agree to come, I stood for a while outside that house. It was an ugly thing with cracked boards and a bad roof. A hickory tree stood in front. It had gotten taller over the years. Cleome and I had climbed it one time and waved at our mother, who was sitting at her work by the fire. My mother’s name was Flora Keckley. She was soft with us. She worked every day of her life. He would come home in the evening, drunk or not. Some nights he brought presents, others his fists. I knew I shouldn’t be standing out on the street in broad daylight, but it took me some while to pull myself away from that ugly house with its hickory tree.

The woman came to our hole that night and said she didn’t like the look of Cleome at all. She said the child was carrying wrong and would have to be turned. She worked at this some time then gave up with a shrug.

“You need to stay still,” the woman said.

“She can’t,” I said.

She gave us two packets of herbs and made Cleome eat a paste she had ground up. Two days later we rode five miles out of town buried under cotton bales.

Cleome suffered a great deal during the ride, but she kept talking about letting those rocks drop away. The world had eaten all the sweetness out of her, but there she was lying under the bales, her face next to mine, smiling. The first thing we did when we were out of that cart and hidden in some bushes was pray. We had thirty miles to walk and only darkness to do our walking in.

“The Bible is a cheer when there is darkness about.”

Cleome said this and stood when night had fallen. We held hands, pointed our way forward, and walked.

It was on that first march, through woods wet with spiderwebs and mosses, that it took me to think that the one we had left shackled in Paradise had somehow come to walk behind us, that she was shuffling along just off past our eyes, that, just as we were to her, she was bound to us by unbreakable threads. I knew then that my trick to help her free had not worked, that she had sunk down in that shed after we left her there then risen to follow after us. But by daybreak, with Cleome smiling her smile in the gloaming, the shuffling behind us stopped and I knew it was just walking my face through too many spiderwebs in the dark that had turned my mind to ghosts.





I could not speak for some time after we left Paradise, just lay in the back of the cart like that dead thing and tried to remember what had always once seemed to me to be so beautiful about the old blue sky and its clouds. As a girl I had lain in the grasses of Paradise with daisies in my hair and looked up at the clouds. I had shut my eyes with those daisies in my hair and wished that my sister and me could live up amongst them. Lying in the back of the cart I could hear the breeze blowing across those grasses I lay in as a girl. With my eyes shut I could feel the daisies sweet and soft in my hair. I could not make the blue sky and the clouds above me look like anything except the witness to what should never have been allowed to happen. The witness that had just looked on and on and on.

When we got close to Louisville, and Prosper had stopped the horses under a tree to rest them, I told him that now he had been to the place where his mother and his aunt had faced their travails. He had been to a place of hurt and murder, to a place where we had suffered and handed out suffering, to a place I had never thought to see again.

“Who is Ginestra Lancaster?” Prosper asked.

There is a scar on my face that leads from my left temple to the bottom of my left cheek. It was not allowed to heal properly and even all these years later it looks raw. When he was a small boy, and one or the other of us was sad and looking for comfort, Prosper took the habit of tracing that scar, gently, with his finger, like it was the trail he needed to follow to get us where we needed to go. Sitting in that cart, under that tree, I took up his big hand and ran his long finger down that scar and said, “Ginestra Lancaster is the one who gave me that.”

Prosper sat silent with his finger on my cheek. There were frogs at work in some nearby pond and big black dragonflies haunted the trees. Prosper looked off into the green and blue and ran his finger up past my eye then back down again.

“And why are we looking for Ginestra Lancaster now?” he asked.

“Because I have something to return to her,” I said.

“Hate returns hate, Aunt Z,” said Prosper.

“Yes,” I said.

I took his hand and held my face against it for a long time.





It had been given to me to lead us the thirty miles to the crossing place. I was young and had my good young eyes, and there was no longer any shuffling along behind us, but on our second night I let us get lost. Cleome had asked to sit for a moment, so I had let her sit and both of us fell asleep the second we touched ground. When we woke I did not know how long we had slept, and fearing the light that might come at any minute hurried us off on our way. We had each of us had a dream while we slept, and I could see the trouble of it in Cleome’s eyes and feel the trouble of it in myself, and in this trouble and hurry I took us off on the wrong way.

How long we wandered as I tried to retrieve our lost path I don’t know. Clouds hung low and the wood was thick. Once I fell into a gully and tore my dress on a thorn slick. Cleome caught her hair on an oak branch. An owl came swooping by. Near sunrise it took me to run. I don’t know why it came upon me that we must. We ran and crossed a road and had just gotten over it safely to the other side when a cart came along. Cleome breathed loud beside me and had been struck by a cough. I told her to cover her mouth and lie low, and she smiled her little smile at me and did her best. I don’t know why I had felt we needed to run, what had frightened me. There were two white men sitting at the front of the cart, one of them looking sharp and holding a rifle. In the back of the cart sat another man with a rifle and beside him a white man wrapped in chains. Just as they were passing Cleome coughed loud, and all four of them turned their heads. It was only one of them who found my eyes in the grasses, the one dressed in chains. I did not move and I did not blink, and the man saw me and I saw him. It was Bennett Marsden, friend to our dead owner. His lips curled a little and his eyebrow went up, then he looked away and the cart rolled on.

I took us farther into the wood away from the road, and we waited the long day under an ash tree, Cleome coughing and smiling and speaking about her rocks. She said she was glad we had run through the dark woods, that the rocks had fallen away from her faster as we had. With the light I could figure where we were and where we needed to be and felt calmed by this knowledge. We had long had the habit of telling little stories to each other, sometimes about our lost brother Alcofibras, and the strange chance of seeing Bennett Marsden, who had known us all in the old days before Paradise, all wrapped up in chains made me think of him. So I told the story of how Alcofibras had one day, when he had been let to wander a little, come upon a fish that had tried to swallow a snake and was now floating dead with it still caught in its jaws. Alcofibras had gone down into the pond and pulled the snake out of the fish’s mouth, and the snake had woken and looked Alcofibras in the eye then had slithered off. “That’s us, slithering off now,” I told Cleome.

“Taken out of the fish’s mouth,” she said.

“Still alive.”

“Still alive, yes, but slithering off where? That’s what I’m trying to figure. And to what?”





We returned the cart and horses to their owner in Louisville then took the train to Indianapolis. Eunice Fairbanks’s daughter lives there with her husband in a nice little home and when we called at her door she invited us to stay with her. I was as pleased as Prosper was to accept the invitation. Lilly Fairbanks had been a student at the same time as Prosper in the classroom where I worked as a teacher’s assistant in Chicago for thirty years. She was as sweet and sharp as ever, and before we knew it we had our feet up and lemonade in our hands.

“Well now, Miss Zinnia, what brings you and Prosper to Indianapolis?” she said, taking a seat near us.

“I hardly know,” I said.

That evening before we slept, I told Prosper that I was worn out and would need to recuperate for a few days before continuing on our way. He said he understood and wondered what I thought about him taking a trip ahead up into Clinton County for us. He wouldn’t do any talking beyond asking directions, beyond finding our path, if it could be found. That way, when I was ready, we could head straight for Mr. Lucious Wilson’s door. It was something he could do and do easily for me, he said. He is a very good boy, is my Prosper. He is my dearest heart on this earth. There isn’t anyone else I would have let share my errand, and I told him so.

“What is your errand, Aunt Zinnia?”

I shrugged, and he shrugged and smiled, and I promised I would tell him—as I now am telling you, you and the one other who I now think needs to read this—soon enough.

While he was gone the next whole day and a half, I lay on the bed Lilly Fairbanks had let me have the use of and looked the past in its eye. It peered in at me through the window and down at me from the ceiling, and more than once it crawled right up and sat down hard on my chest. They say once you’ve had the shackle on you it never comes off. I know one of our flock on the South Side can’t look at his legs without seeing chains. I could feel it as I lay there—around my neck, around my ankle, around my arm. There is being whipped and then there is being whipped when you are tied to an oak tree in the noonday sun. Who can you tell that to? Who has the ears to hear it? I save it for my prayers. There are a good number of us now in the County Home. Our church takes food to them each month.

I never cry, but I cried a little as I lay on Lilly Fairbanks’s clean sheets with the past sitting on my chest, its black eyes peering down at me. I suppose I thought I would like to just leave it behind and go home to my own room in Prosper’s house in Chicago. Maybe Ginestra Lancaster was dead now. Maybe it was too late. I could return to my church and Prosper could go back to his work and the past could go back to mostly ignoring me. But there I was and there it was. I neither blinked nor turned away from it. Where could I have looked?





As we sat waiting for nightfall, Cleome calmed herself down out of a coughing fit then said it was her turn to tell me a story. She said she could not remember if Alcofibras or some other had first told it to her. Or, in truth, if anyone had told it to her at all. It was long ago, at the beginning of everything, and in those early days all the people were just skulls. They had no arms, no legs, no bodies, no skin, no eyes. They were skulls with little candle flames burning inside of them, and to get around they had to hop. They were always angry, these skulls, and they were jealous of the animals that walked the earth with their paws and green eyes and long teeth and handsome fur. Whenever they could they would kill an animal and steal its fur and take its eyes and walk through the world clothed in something besides bone and with something to see with that wasn’t candle flame.

One day the lord of fire, who ruled over that world, went out for a walk and saw a group of these skulls stalk and kill and skin a beautiful lion. He watched them fight over the skin and the eyes and the legs and the claws. They fought so hard that everything was torn to bits and all that was left was a bloody mess. He was saddened by this sight and walked on. A little farther along he saw a group of skulls stalk and kill and skin a beautiful deer. He watched them fight over the skin and the eyes and the legs and the hooves. He was saddened by this sight and shook his head and walked on. All of that day and all of that night he watched skulls stalk and kill and destroy, and what they didn’t destroy they paraded around in. Sometime during the middle of that night, he came upon a group of the skulls huddled quietly together in a pile, their little candle flames gently lighting the night. He was so struck by the difference between these skulls and the ones he had seen before that he asked them why they, too, weren’t fighting over a carcass, why they were sitting so quietly with their candles burning so bright. “Shhh,” they said to him, “There’s an elephant coming. We mean to have its tusks.”

The lord of fire was so disgusted by all these skulls that he sent out a cold wind to blow out their candles. When all the candles of the world had been blown out, he gathered up the skulls and built fine bodies around them and wrapped skin around the bodies and gave them all eyes and mouths and ears. “You are the people I meant,” he said, considering them as they rose and began to walk about. Then he went back to his palace to sleep. While he slept the people put on clothes and built themselves houses and ploughed the fields and harvested their grains. It was while they were working, and while the lord of fire was sleeping, dreaming his dreams of fire, that in some of their skulls, some of the candle flames came flickering back.

It took Cleome quite some time to tell me this story, and when she had finished her eyes were closed and she was so quiet I thought she must have dozed. It was closing in on dusk, and I knew we both needed the rest, so I wrapped my arms tight around her and closed my eyes too. It wasn’t more than a few seconds later though that she said, “I saw those candle flames burning in his eyes. That’s how he could see his way to us in the dark. You think there are some can see in the dark up there in the North too? Some to come heavy boot down the hallway toward you?”





After Prosper had returned and I had had my rest, we hired another wagon and rode up from Indianapolis to Clinton County so that I could return to Ginny Lancaster what all those years before she had given me. Lilly Fairbanks and her husband told us, as they had told Prosper some days before, that we should not go up to Clinton County, where they were as likely to put a rope to colored people as help them on their errands, no matter how light-skinned they might be, but I said that I must go, and Prosper said that if I was going he was going, and that at any rate he’d already been up there and had only been treated to a few ill-colored words. After we had ridden away I asked him if it was true that he hadn’t been too badly treated, and he said it was true, although that might have been because he was on a good horse and had tried to look like he was on somebody else’s business, which he was. He said he knew that some of them had seen what he was, there were always some, but no one had tried to stop him, no one had interfered.

It took us until the middle of the afternoon to reach the fine house of Lucious Wilson, deep in the green cornfields of Clinton County, Indiana, and this time, when we had reached our destination, I found I did not need to stay in the cart, but walked straight up to the front door and knocked. My knock was answered by a small white woman in her middle years, who smiled up at me. I had been prepared for her to shut the door in my face or to tell me that the servants’ entrance was around the side or to treat me or Prosper poorly in some other way, but she did not. In fact, she turned her smile over to Prosper, who had stayed with the wagon. She even gave him a wave.

“I am here to speak to Mr. Lucious Wilson,” I said. “I do beg your and his pardon for any trouble.”

“No trouble at all,” she said. “Will you come in?”

It was as fine a home on the inside as it had looked on the outside. The floors had been stained and swept clean and there were no cobwebs in the corners. Books lined the walls, and there was a long curl to the banister that led up the stairs. The woman offered me a comfortable chair in the parlor, but I stood in the entrance hall with my travel hat in my hand. While I waited, I looked at a piece of stitchwork made by someone who had known her business. The stitchwork had a silver frame and a border of flowers. In the middle of it, curled around a sleeping child, was the Lord’s Prayer.

“You will sit with me as we speak,” said Mr. Lucious Wilson when he came. There wasn’t any question to it, so I followed him into the parlor and sat. His daughter, for that was who the woman was, brought us cool blackberry tea, then went out the front door and carried a glass of it to Prosper and told him to take his cart over near the shed where the horses could stand out of the sun.

Lucious Wilson was every bit as old as I was and had some trouble with his breath. When he had caught it, he said, “I saw that fellow the other day and thought he was white, now I can see that he is not.”

“My nephew.”

“I expect I would have to see you stand together.”

“There is a resemblance. Some have said he takes a good deal after me.”

“You look like you’ve been on the road a spell.”

“Yes sir, I have.”

“And where have you come from?”

“Chicago.”

“Went there once. Long ago. Before the big buildings. What I wanted to ask you was where you come from.”

“Below the river,” I said. It was the simplest way to say it.

“Kentucky,” he said.

I nodded. We sat quietly. The house had many a modest creak. We breathed and listened to them. Or I listened to them. After a time, he spoke.

“You were down there with our Sue, weren’t you?”

“Sue, sir?”

“Ginny. Ginestra Lancaster. Down there with her.”

Lucious Wilson shuddered just the tiniest bit as he said this. I did not shudder, not even that small amount, nor did I answer, but thought of the stitchwork in the entrance hall. I had the Lord’s Prayer on my own wall in Prosper’s house in Bronzeville. We said the Lord’s Prayer every Sunday at my church. The Lord’s Prayer, I had always found, could never be used up. All I ever had to do was lay my eyes or mind on it to feel refreshed. With the Lord’s Prayer, I was stronger than it all.

“Isn’t that what this is? Isn’t that who you and that nephew of yours looks like a white boy are?” he said.

There wasn’t anything mean in his voice, only a harshness because of the breath that was leaving him, which was the same breath that was leaving me, that is leaving all of us on this earth.

“A place in Charlotte County. By a stream. The owner, Linus Lancaster, was a pig farmer. There were several of us to start. Then just a few. We called it Paradise,” I said.

“Paradise?”

“A greensward out of the old days. I have something to return to her, something she gave me down there. I got my use out of it and have never touched it since. There’s more on the coil. I should have left the whole and not just part of it with her in the long ago.”

He squinted his eyes, raised a long white eyebrow. I reached into my bag and pulled it out, held it up.

He cleared his throat, took a breath, nodded.

“You know that is her needlework you have been looking at over on the wall yonder,” he said.

“Miss Ginny’s?”

“Sue’s. She hasn’t been called Ginestra Lancaster in fifty years.”

“Sue’s,” I said.

“Would you say it with me?”

“Yes sir.”

So we bowed our heads and said the Lord’s great prayer together, then he stood and told me where she lived.





Cleome’s time came as we were crossing a ditch next to a barley field gone badly to seed. It flung her down onto the hard dirt and would not let her rise. They had told me there would be a woman who could help us at the crossing place, but it was still some miles away and I did not dare leave.

She smiled, did my younger sister Cleome, in between her screams. She said the rocks were still falling out of her pockets, that she felt lighter each minute, that everything now was soft and sweet. She pushed and she pushed. “Pray with me,” she said near the end. I put my face against hers and I did. “Sing to me,” she said. I gathered her into my arms and sang. There was a song she wanted from her girlhood. A song from our mother. “Yes,” she said as I sang it. She was as brave in that ditch as anything that ever walked through this world.

I left the child in the pool of blood it had made and went on to the crossing place. When I got there, they said they thought it was two of us. I said it was three, maybe more, maybe all of Kentucky. When I said this, I turned on my heel and ran all the way back to that ditch. The child lay untouched. I cut the cord, wrapped him up, then covered my sister with rocks. Then I realized what I had done and pulled every one of those rocks off of her and hid her in some brush. I sat there beside that brush a long time until the baby in my arms began to cry. At the crossing place they looked us up and down for a long time. “Where is the mother?” they asked me.

“I made us run,” I said. “I got us lost.”





The little house Lucious Wilson had given to Ginny Lancaster sat one mile away from his big one at the end of a stand of shagbark hickory and giant white oak. There was a fine field behind it and a few brave flowers poking up out of a black bed on the front lawn. This time I had Prosper get out of the wagon with me and come to the front door. I stood there looking at its fresh yellow paint for a long time without knocking then took the spool with its few last lengths of purple thread out of my bag and set it down on the porch. It didn’t look like much. Any kind of a wind would have blown it out into the field.

“All right,” I said.

“All right, Aunt Zinnia,” said Prosper.

We were almost to the cart when the door behind us opened.

I could not see her at first, there in the gloom.

All those years, all those miles.

“Please,” she said. “Come back. Come in.”





A woman gave me a blanket for the child, said he looked strong, asked me if I planned to keep him.

“Keep him?” I said. “He is my nephew. He is my own.”

They put oar to water at dusktime, took us out across the darkening waters. The child cried but a little as we went toward the lights on the far bank. I named him when we were halfway home.





THE STONECUTTER’S TALE

(BY THE RIVER, BY THE WORLD)

1930





but for every trifle are they set upon me





I HAVE TWO VOICES. One I use when I am at home and one I use when I am anywhere else. I sat down in the booth and used the second one. The waitress brought me a cup of coffee. When she set it down in front of me, I used the voice again and asked for a slice of pie.

“You want whipped cream with that, hon?” she asked me.

I shook my head.

She brought me a glass of ice water with the pie. There was a fan turning noisily on the ceiling. She had sweated the armpits out of her uniform. She looked tired. Too worn out for the job. Her uniform too snug.

“Come far?” she asked me.

“Illinois,” I said.

“All that way?”

I nodded.

“First time?”

“No,” I said. “I’ve been down here before. Came on a visit with my aunt. It has been awhile though.”

I had spent the morning on the Ohio in a rented boat I had barely been able to steer. Twice I had run aground on sandbars. I am too old to pole heavy boats off sandbars, but I had done it each time. Aunt Z told me, before she died, that if I ever went looking, I should keep an eye out for a lone, brown bluff on the far side of the water. I had seen it long after I had lost hope.

“There’s a house down by the river. A big white house with a green roof. How do I get there?” I asked the waitress when she came over with the coffeepot.

“Why do you want to go there?” the waitress said.

“It’s where I’m bound,” I said.

She looked at me, raised her eyebrow. I counted three fat droplets of sweat hanging from its curling tines. One of them dropped as I watched. She wiped the others away. I knew she couldn’t tell, hadn’t seen it yet, but it was in the room with us now, was ambling along the line of booths toward us, would come and sit down beside me, would curl my straight hair and darken my light skin. When I was young I had my smile and my fresh, unlined young face to send it away when I had to, but those days are long gone. Still, I had my traveling voice, my Main Street voice.

“This pie is delicious,” I said.

“I baked it myself,” she said.

“I might have guessed. I might just have guessed.”

I ate my pie, drank my coffee, got my directions. I was waving good-bye when I stepped out the front door and only narrowly avoided colliding with a man and a woman dressed in old horse blankets and wearing feathers in their hair. They nodded at me and I nodded back, then I watched them cross the street and disappear into a stand of trees beyond a filling station just like they had never been.

The house sat on a rise above the river. I left my tools in the car and walked down a narrow lane from the road. The front door opened before I had crossed the scraggly lawn. A woman in her later years stood before me. She had on a clean blue dress. She looked up at me through heavy spectacles.

“Can I do for you?” she said.

“I am a reporter for the Chicago Sun, and I am writing an article on places where slaves were given help. I understand this was one.”

I had spent time memorizing this speech during the drive down. I have never been a reporter for the Chicago Sun or for any other paper, but I did once, briefly, before I took up my trade, think of becoming one.

“I don’t know anything about that,” she said.

“I’m very sorry to hear it.”

“We don’t keep with coloreds here.”

“I understand.”

“Who told you about this place? They been talking in town?”

I shook my head. The house was in bad shape but didn’t look old enough to have been standing for better than seventy years. One or two of the outbuildings, possibly.

“Is there someone else I might speak to? Someone who might direct me?”

“I’m it,” she said. “Last one standing.”

“I know how that feels.”

“Do you?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Well, I’m sorry I couldn’t be any help to you.”

“And I’m sorry for having troubled your afternoon.”

“You have other places to visit for your newspaper article?”

“Just this one.”

I had turned and started across the lawn. I had begun to walk back to my car, to return from nothing to nothing, the air, the road, the long drive back, when she spoke.

“My parents were Christian people,” she said.

I stopped.

“They said the good Lord saw no color when he looked down at us.”

I had put my hat back on. I took it off again.

“No color at all.”

I nodded. She looked carefully at me.

“You don’t look anything like a reporter,” she said.

I nodded again.

She stood without moving for a long time, then she clicked her tongue and gave me a small, careful smile.

We crossed what had once possibly been a sorghum field, then followed a path down a gulley, through a notch between two hills and into a pretty stand of oak, willow, and birch. I took my hat off and held it against my chest when she pointed. Two or three dozen moss-dripping markers sat surrounded by the remnants of an iron fence. The markers were cross-shaped. Made of pink granite most of them.

“Some didn’t make it across the river. My parents buried every last one.”

I nodded. I’d heard about that.

“Who you looking for?” she said.

“Her name was Cleome.”

“No Cleomes here,” she said.

I was walking the markers, the woman stepping quietly behind me.

“I know every name. If they had one. Josiah, Eunice, Claremont, Osa, Letty, Brister, Dorcas, Jupiter, Pompey, Fanny, Turquoise, Lince.”

I turned. The woman had stopped. Was looking up at me.

“What’s your given name?”

I told her.

“We’ve met before.”

I shook my head, smiled. She did not.

“I used to ride the boat when they made the crossing. My daddy said we were doing Christian work. Told me to come along. You got your name on that boat. Your aunt called it out. We all heard it.”

“Yes ma’am,” I said.

“They burned my parents out during the war. Said they were helping other people’s property escape. They hung my daddy from a tree.”

“Yes ma’am.”

“My mother rebuilt. She lived to be a hundred.”

I nodded.

“That’s your mother there.”

I followed her arm to a marker at the back of the cemetery. She let me walk over alone. There was moss in the grooves but the inscription could still be read.

Mother of Prosper

1861

“My daddy went out and found her where she passed. Brought her here on the mule wagon. She got her Christian rights as best as they could be given.”

It took me a long time to be able to speak. I used my first voice when I did.

“Then I’m obliged to your father.”

“No,” she said. “No, you aren’t.”

“Then to you.”

“Not to me either.”

She started to walk back the way they had come, called over her shoulder as she was walking: “There’s room for her name on there. I know a stonecutter in town wouldn’t ask any questions.”

But I had already seen where I would make my first cut.