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The Twelve-Mile Straight
Eleanor Henderson


‘Eleanor Henderson is in possession of an enormous talent’ Ann Patchett‘A superb novel whose roots can be traced to Harper Lee and Carson McCullers‘ Oprah MagazineGenus Jackson was killed in Cotton County, Georgia, on a summer midnight in 1930, when the newborn twins were fast asleep.They lay head to toe in a cradle meant for one, Winnafred on one side and Wilson on the other.Only if you looked closely – and people did – could you see that the girl was pink as a piglet, and the boy was brown.In a house full of secrets, two babies – one light-skinned, the other dark – are born to Elma Jesup, a white sharecropper’s daughter. Accused of her rape, field hand Genus Jackson is lynched and dragged down the Twelve-Mile Straight, the road to the nearby town.Despite the prying eyes and curious whispers of the townspeople, Elma begins to raise her babies as best as she can, under the roof of her impulsive father, Juke, and with the help of Nan, the young black housekeeper who is as close to Elma as a sister. It soon becomes clear that the ties that bind all of them together are more intricate than any could have imagined. A web of lies begins to collapse around the family, destabilizing their precarious world and forcing all to reckon with the truth.























Copyright (#ulink_919b2a7f-171c-5bea-9794-d252431e14f7)


4th Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.4thEstate.co.uk (http://www.4thEstate.co.uk)

First published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2017

First published in the United States by Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers, in 2017

This eBook edition published in 2017

Copyright © 2017 by Eleanor Henderson

Eleanor Henderson asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum in Hyde Park, New York, for reprinted excerpts here (#litres_trial_promo) of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s November 28, 1930, Warm Springs, Georgia, radio address, http://www.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/_resources/images/msf/msf00416 (http://www.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/_resources/images/msf/msf00416).

This is a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it either are the work of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008158682

Ebook Edition © September 2017 ISBN: 9780008158712

Version: 2018-06-04




Dedication (#ulink_57dae26a-6f32-5b91-af6e-ed5c3cf79bb9)


For my father, Billy




Epigraph (#ulink_b593fd6c-57eb-59c3-8d18-1de26118ca34)


And the children struggled within her; and she said, If it be so,

why am I thus? And she went to inquire of the Lord.

And the Lord said unto her, Two nations are in thy womb.

—GENESIS 25:22–23


Contents

Cover (#u67fe94c3-ff4e-5e8d-b7b8-0c1e5dde54f0)

Title Page (#u76687869-ff41-5e65-8aa8-7657a117cf42)

Copyright (#ud1efc862-c13d-5612-801b-6b8d071240b1)

Dedication (#u75227946-bc94-56f2-be83-819be0d60bdb)

Epigraph (#u3909a6f1-77bd-5e01-a8b1-90debee7cee2)

Part I (#u278fdb75-f084-5d43-abb5-15461c61ce4f)

One (#u92f81eed-bbe1-5614-94d0-0817bf37876f)

Two (#u01f567f5-cea2-54fb-a238-b8a6caaf42e4)

Three (#udbfd02df-245c-5446-a43d-1db3cfad47e7)

Four (#u1a3be118-16be-50a0-a609-bca8ffa727a3)

Five (#u43b1344c-c487-59b0-84d1-f198e7c44208)

Six (#u17c32319-f8cc-5624-9ad0-5875ea227b78)

Seven (#u1f7f1781-accc-5868-acd1-27243510151c)

Eight (#u0c9d4670-719b-5218-8105-07e4d8e4f430)

Nine (#u6653f905-abae-5f88-a171-e8d7a6ea9868)

Ten (#ue6d9e088-c730-58ef-bbdf-9bb240d391a0)

Eleven (#litres_trial_promo)

Twelve (#litres_trial_promo)

Thirteen (#litres_trial_promo)

Fourteen (#litres_trial_promo)

Fifteen (#litres_trial_promo)

Sixteen (#litres_trial_promo)

Part II (#litres_trial_promo)

Seventeen (#litres_trial_promo)

Eighteen (#litres_trial_promo)

Nineteen (#litres_trial_promo)

Twenty (#litres_trial_promo)

Twenty-One (#litres_trial_promo)

Twenty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)

Twenty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)

Part III (#litres_trial_promo)

Twenty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)

Twenty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)

Twenty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)

Twenty-Seven (#litres_trial_promo)

Twenty-Eight (#litres_trial_promo)

Twenty-Nine (#litres_trial_promo)

Thirty (#litres_trial_promo)

Thirty-One (#litres_trial_promo)

Thirty-Two (#litres_trial_promo)

Thirty-Three (#litres_trial_promo)

Thirty-Four (#litres_trial_promo)

Thirty-Five (#litres_trial_promo)

Thirty-Six (#litres_trial_promo)

Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)

Acknowledgments (#litres_trial_promo)

Also by Eleanor Henderson (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)



I (#ulink_f7ae5134-6856-5233-99c4-d3bd3234d200)




ONE (#ulink_ca6937b1-5c54-5ad1-838a-178ab8b9d71c)







GENUS JACKSON WAS KILLED IN COTTON COUNTY, GEORGIA, on a summer midnight in 1930, when the newborn twins were fast asleep. They lay head to toe in a cradle meant for one, Winnafred on one side and Wilson on the other. In their overstuffed nest, with the delicate claws of their fingers intertwined and their eyelids trembling with blue veins, they looked like a pair of baby chicks, their white skullcaps like two halves of the single eggshell from which they’d hatched. Only if you looked closely—and people did—could you see that the girl was pink as a piglet, and the boy was brown.

“He’s just complected dark,” Elma had told her fiancé, Freddie Wilson, that afternoon, when he’d peeked into the cradle for the first time. “It’s my great-great-granddaddy’s Indian blood.”

“He don’t look like no Indian,” said Freddie, who was as freckled as Elma, with hair as pale and straight as straw.

It was Elma’s father, Juke—who’d nearly killed Freddie himself for failing to make her his proper wife—who first accused Genus Jackson. Nine months back was harvest. There were plenty of colored men who worked as Juke’s field hands in October, boys Juke picked up every morning in the Fourth Ward and piled in the bed of his Ford—civilized, God-fearing, Cotton County Negroes. But Genus was the one Juke had hired year-round, who’d moved into the tar paper shack behind their house after he showed up on the Twelve-Mile Straight looking for work, his clothes still black with the soot of the boxcar he’d leapt from. Juke had pitied him, folks said, for that was the kind of man Juke Jesup was. He’d give his last cow to the devil if the devil was hungry. He had a soft spot for colored folks, had liked to drink and dance with them since he was a boy—why else was he called Juke? So he kept Genus on even after he was discovered with a stolen pint of Juke’s gin, even after he was discovered last fall in the barn with Elma. He should have run him off the farm then. George Wilson, who was Freddie’s grandfather and the landlord, had told him as much. But instead Juke had given him another chance and a beating to remember. “You old enough to know better than to be found with no darky,” he told his daughter, who was eighteen.

Late on Saturday night, coming up on Sunday, Juke and Freddie and three other trucks full of men left the mill village, drove to the farm, and walked the twenty paces across the scrubgrass yard from the house to the shack. Genus was asleep on his cot when the men came in without knocking, hauled him up by the collar, and threw him out onto his knees. He was wearing shoes on his feet, a pair of alligator boots. What kind of man but a guilty one slept in his shoes? Juke had never liked those boots. He shouldn’t have trusted a man in those boots. The man took off down the dirt road like a swamp rabbit out of a briar patch, as though he’d already been running in his dreams.

A storm had passed that evening. That was the year drought had seized the state in its bone-dry jaws, but that night the Twelve-Mile Straight was pocked with puddles, the night air moist with the copper smell of rain on stone. Down the washboard road, into its white clay ditches, over the rabbit tobacco and wiregrass that grew along it, through the turkey oaks and hip-high cornfields, the men’s torches lit after Genus’s boot prints. At Tom Henry’s farm, Tom joined them with his rifle; at Mancie Neville’s, Mancie joined them with his hound. The Jesup girl’s been raped! Find your daughters! Lock your doors! The men hopped in and out of the beds of their pickups; their headlights crept along the road. The Sloane brothers came on their horses. Lettuce Jones came on foot, his wife in her nightdress behind him. It was no night for a woman, but hell if he was going to leave her home alone with a mad brute roaming the country. Someone had seen him in Mancie Neville’s peanuts; someone had heard him in Jeb Simmons’s barn. The whole McArdle family streamed out of their house, the boys clutching slingshots, the girls armed with shovels, the baby in its mother’s arms howling at the moon. Someone shut that kid up, a voice said through the dark, and the mother put the baby to her breast right there, another child’s hand in hers as she rushed them along the edge of the road, hissing into the night as though looking for a lost cat. It must have been an hour the hunt went on; some said it might have been three. It must have been a mile they spread out, or it might have been ten. But it was in the creek not a stone’s throw from Jesup’s barn where they found him, only his mouth above the surface, gulping water and air, and Lord if those weren’t baby Wilson’s lips.

He was so wet he might as well have been naked, his union suit slicked to his skin, when Juke and Freddie thrust him into the front room where Elma sat nursing the twins in her rocker, one curled in each arm, helpless to cover herself. Both straps of her overalls were undone, her shirt unbuttoned to the world. The other men stood behind him in the doorway, trailing out onto the porch. At the window just over her shoulder, two little boys pressed their faces to the glass, watching her through their dirty fingerprints.

“Go ahead,” Juke said to her. “Tell us what he done.”

Elma stopped rocking.

“Go ahead,” he said to Genus, wrestling his arms behind his back. “Tell us that ain’t your kin.”

Genus looked away from Elma’s white breasts.

“This girl and her child ain’t done no sin,” said Juke. “They’ll be spared by the Lord. But the Bible says when a man lies with a girl in the field, his neighbors must rise up and do what’s called for.”

Genus’s boots, still on his feet, squeaked with creek water. The only other sound in the room was the babies’ suckling.

“Boss,” Genus said, struggling to catch his breath, “I’d lie with your mule before I’d lie with that girl.”

Elma gasped, as though bitten by one of her babies. Freddie lunged after Genus, but Juke held him back. She looked from Genus to Freddie to her father, and just for a moment, her eyes filled with tears. Only then, lowering her eyes to the floor, did she offer the smallest of nods.

That was enough for Freddie and Juke. Some of the men waiting outside said they should send for Sheriff Cleave. Some of them didn’t. All of them followed Juke with their torches and guns as he ordered Genus onto his swayback mule. They held his hands behind his back while Freddie tied them with a short length of rope. The mule’s name was Mamie, and the colored man had been seen atop her back before, ambling up and down the Twelve-Mile Straight when the day’s work was done. Now Juke led Mamie and the mob through the yard, over the charred remains of another shack, to the edge of the field. There were plenty of trees to choose from. There were black gum and cottonwood, pecan and pine, oak trees trimmed with silver tinsel, weeping over the road. But it was the gourd tree they settled on—not a real tree at all but a post shooting up over the sorghum cane, four strong wooden beams crisscrossed at the top like the telephone poles in town. From the beams hung a dozen gourds, bleached white from the sun—birdhouses for the purple martins, who were said to keep the mosquitoes away. Elma had carved and dried and hung the gourds herself, close enough to each other to make a dull kind of music, like wind chimes, though there was no wind tonight.

“It’s all right, old girl,” Genus could be heard to say. “The Lord will take me. The Lord will have me.”

Freddie looped another rope over one of the crossbeams and the noose around Genus’s neck. Genus didn’t struggle, and Mamie didn’t have to wait for Juke’s tap. Spooked by the dark, or the crowd, she dashed out as soon as she was free of their hands. Genus dropped, his neck snapping like a chicken’s, his body falling limp. The martins shot out of the gourds, black as bats, and for a moment formed a single shadow above them.

From the tin in the chest pocket of his overalls, Juke took a grab of loose-leaf chaw and arranged it along his gums. He did this while cradling a shotgun, a Winchester twelve gauge, as easily as the mother on the road had held the baby to her breast. Genus swung in the July night, the moon near full above him. He was tall, and Mamie was not. The toes of his boots hovered but a foot from the ground.

Then one boot, heavy with water, dropped into the dirt. Freddie let go of his rifle and picked up the boot and inspected it. “That real alley-gator?” He slipped the other one off, carefully, as though not to wake a sleeping lover, and then he unlaced his own shoes. They fit the dead man snugly. The boots were loose on Freddie, but they looked fine. “Now we square!” he said, doing a little dance, and the people cheered.

The children threw the first stones. Then some drunk fool with a twenty-two started unloading bullets. It was Tom Henry, or it was Willie Cousins, or it was Willie Cousins’s cousin Bill, or it was all three shooting wildly, into the sky, into the empty sockets of the gourds, the post and the body receiving the bullets with the same soft thud. “Ain’t no nigger lover now, ain’t you, Juke?” The next day, and for weeks afterward, boys would come to the gourd tree to run their fingers over its scars, to collect the stray bullets at its feet.

“Enough!” Juke said now, spitting the tobacco into the dirt. He’d walked to the barn for his sickle and now he cut down Genus before he’d been dead ten minutes. “I can’t stand to see a man hang all night.”

That might have been the end of it, but Freddie thought folks in town should get a look at the body. Juke had gone back to the house by the time Freddie tied Genus’s bound wrists to the rear of his Chevrolet truck and drove back down the Twelve-Mile Straight, continued into Florence where the road became Main Street, then, at the far edge of town, left him in the middle of the street in the mill village. In fact, everyone had gone home by then. No men had jumped into the back of the truck, and no joyful shots were heard as the vehicle made its way into town; Mancie Neville’s hound had not chased the body down the road, tearing an ear from his head; the mill workers had not rushed from their homes to claim a finger; Tom Henry had not fallen from the truck and broken his left arm—if you asked him later, he’d tell you he’d fallen from his hayloft. If you asked folks the next morning, as the sheriff did, where they were at midnight, you’d learn that they were home in their beds, every last one of them, sleeping like babies.




TWO (#ulink_d349cbe5-36ec-503c-a371-78abe74ca310)







COTTON COUNTY WAS IN THE SOUTH-CENTRAL PART OF THE state, an anvil-shaped box at the edge of what they called the Wiregrass Region. There were acres and pale acres of sorghum and cotton and peanuts and corn, piney woods spotted with sandhills and cut through with the blades of rivers and swamps that made the sky seem even bigger, reflecting it like the back of a spoon. The rivers that ran north past the fall line ran rusty with red clay, but most of the clay in Cotton County was white as chalk. The Creek River was grand enough to power the Florence Cotton Mill in town, though six miles west, at the Wilson farm, it was no bigger than your biggest cow, tongue to tail. That year the drought had dried it to little more than a creek carved into the shoulder of the Twelve-Mile Straight, which ran alongside the river like a twin. It was known to most as the crossroads farm, since it was where the Straight crossed what was now called String Wilson Road. On the southeast corner of the crossroads sat the Creek Baptist Missionary Church, and catty-corner to it was the crossroads general store, where after church on a Sunday folks could be seen milling about on the porch, the Jesups among them. The Jesups had been the principal sharecropping family at the crossroads farm since the turn of the century, when the Wilsons built the mill and moved from the farm to the county seat, and the Jesups moved from the tar paper shack into the big house.

They called it the big house, but it wasn’t big. It was one of those single-story dogtrots you saw in the country in those days, built high off the ground, split in two, with the kitchen and front room on one side and the two bedrooms on the other. Down the middle of the house was a hallway open to the outdoors, so the breeze could come and go and keep the rooms cool. A front porch faced the creek and then, over a plank bridge, the road, and a back porch faced the outhouse and smokehouse and sugarhouse and barn, which had a little cotton house attached to it, and the garden and the shack, with stump-strewn fields to the north and to the west and the edge of the acres dense with pines along the road. There were four mules and four cows in the barn, and four or five hogs that preferred the cool clay refuge under the house. The hallway was so wide the house almost seemed to be two houses. But a single tin roof covered both halves. On windy autumn nights, pecans blasted the roof like rain.

Since the spring of 1912, when in a single week he lost his father to consumption and his wife, Jessa, to childbirth, the farm had been in Juke Jesup’s care. He returned from burying his father with his people in Carolina to find two hundred acres and a baby girl waiting for him. His mother had died the same way. Juke told Elma he’d have buried his own arm to have her resemble her mother, but it was Juke she favored.

It was Ketty, the colored maid, who delivered the baby. She’d been a granny midwife since she was old enough to tie a knot, and she’d lost mothers before—“Midwives is just delivering the Lord’s wishes,” she said. But she wore Jessa’s loss hard. She washed her friend and prayed over her and dressed her in her wedding gown and took care of the baby until Juke came home, carrying Elma out to the barn to suckle from the cows. She refused Maggie’s milk but loved Ida’s (it was just the two cows then); until Ida quit milking, it was only hers Elma would drink. Juke kept Ketty on to cook and clean and look after Elma while he worked the fields with Ketty’s man, Sterling. Ketty and Sterling lived in what used to be the Jesups’ shack, behind the big house, the two buildings strung together with the dull flags of their shared laundry. It was the shack Genus Jackson would live in years later.

Elma was four when Ketty had her own daughter, Nan, and five when Ketty cut out the baby’s tongue with her scalpel so she wouldn’t die like her great-grandmother and her grandmother and, when Nan was twelve years old, Ketty herself, cancer eating their tongues like a weevil through a cotton boll. The baby was old enough then to wean, and Elma helped the poor child learn to eat milky grits with a spoon. When Elma asked Juke what had become of Nan’s tongue, he told her, laughing, that Ketty had eaten it, for that’s what coloreds did—didn’t she see what unsavory parts they took of the pigs each winter? Ketty ate tobacco and Ketty ate dirt, so Elma believed her father. After she cut out her tongue, Ketty fed Nan dirt too, white clumps of clay she found between the road and the creek. She ate real food, but it took her a long while and she made a good mess. The white clay was creamy and it was free and it gave her something to chew.

Used to be George Wilson would pay Sterling and Juke the same, for their work was the same, but after the boll weevil came, they were glad if they broke even. If there was anything left, it went to Juke. When Nan was little more than a baby, Sterling left on a freight train, saying he was headed for the steel mill in Baltimore, that men were needed now that the country was taking up with the war, that he’d send for Nan and Ketty when he was settled. The war ended. He didn’t return. But he sent money when he could, and a Buffalo nickel every birthday. When Ketty died, he sent two, and Nan moved into the big house, into the pantry off the kitchen, and began doing the housework her mother used to do. Juke said, “No use having your pretty head get wet in the rain.” He would give her a nickel too when she was good, and with her mother gone she began to take over her midwife work, delivering the younger brothers and sisters of the babies Ketty had brought into the world. The money she earned that way came back to the big house, for they were meant to share. As for the shack, George Wilson came to allow Juke to put who he pleased in it, and to share how he pleased as well. And because he was the kind of man he was, Juke divided the fruits of their crops when there was fruit to divide. If he told the field hands he was overseer, and maybe he did from time to time, it was only because that was the closest word for what he was.

The girls grew up working side by side on the farm, Nan after her chores and Elma after school. (Why couldn’t Nan go to the colored school in town? Elma asked her father, and he said, What tongue’s she gone use to learn her letters?) At picking time, Elma stayed home from school to help. She picked and she chopped and she plowed and she tilled, riding in her father’s lap over the harrow while Clarence and Mamie pulled them, thrilling at the thrum of the disks spinning the earth beneath their feet. Nan did the listening—she was good at listening—and Elma did the talking and the telling and the singing. Elma sang on the porch and in the kitchen and in the fields, to the guineas and chickens and cows and mules, “Amazing Grace” and “Down in the Valley” and “Down by the Riverside.” She sang while she picked cotton and while she shelled peas, while she washed her hair in the creek and while she brushed it. She sang in church, though she didn’t need church to sing, or even to praise God, since God lived in the sky and in the trees, Ketty had liked to say, in the dirt and the seeds they scattered over it.

Elma worked so hard her daddy didn’t notice he had no sons. She was her father’s daughter because she couldn’t be anything else. She had the same mineral-red hair as Juke and the same glass-bottle-green eyes. She had the same widow’s peak over the same high, sunburnt forehead. She had the same swift, steady way of walking, picking up her feet as though the ground were hot through her shoes, and always straight, even when she wasn’t in the field, as though there were corn growing up to her elbows on either side. And she was tall, Elma was, near as tall as Juke. She wore three different dresses to school and to church, but on the farm she seemed mostly to wear her daddy’s old Sears, Roebuck overalls, the sleeves of her flannel shirt rolled to her elbows, a bird’s nest of a straw hat perched on her head, worn clean through at the crown. From the road, looking out across the acres with the sun in your eyes, used to be it was hard to tell whether the body in the field was father or daughter.

Nan wore dresses, though now she looked like a boy herself. She’d cut her hair short when she was thirteen, the way Negro men wore it, almost no hair at all. She was as skinny and dark as a shadow. That was the way Elma’s daddy put it. Elma’s daddy said Nan was so skinny because she ate so much dirt.

There were times, growing up, when Elma wished she were as dark as a shadow. She liked the way the sun warmed the skin of the men in the fields, their arms and necks and cheeks glowing the color of sorghum syrup by summer’s end. She hated her freckles, hated the way the sun turned her pink, how it burned her skin like paper. When she got a bad burn, Ketty mixed up a bowl of aloe and black tea and slathered her with it, which wasn’t so bad, because the inky jelly was cool on her skin and made it look darker, darker even than little Nan, whose skin was the woody brown of the paper-shell pecans that fell in the yard.

It gave her an idea. One morning when she was seven, when her father had gone to town, she found a jar of syrup in the pantry, made from their own sweet sorghum. She stripped down to her britches and painted herself with it, using the brush they used for basting. She covered every exposed inch, from her widow’s peak to her toes. When Ketty came into the kitchen carrying Nan on her hip, she let out a holler.

Elma said, “Look, Ketty! I’m Nan’s sister.”

The sorghum wasn’t as soothing as the aloe and black tea, nor was the kerosene that Ketty used to scrub it off. She poured it right into the water in the tub on the porch, and it stung worse than any sunburn. “You like playing around like a colored child, do you? Lucky your daddy ain’t here,” she said, holding Elma’s face and scrubbing her chin. “I won’t be telling him, and I suggest you don’t, either.”

“He won’t be mad, Ketty. He done the same thing hisself when he was a boy.” Elma told the story of when her father and his friend String, George Wilson’s son, had painted themselves with tar to play like colored folks. That was the first time George had told String not to play with Juke, but it wasn’t the last. It was true that it was Juke’s idea. He’d found the tar in a pail in the shed. It was the tar they used to paper the shack. The shack smelled of it, and as a child living there Juke had loved the smell and later he loved it because it smelled like that day with String, and now Elma loved it too.

Ketty shook her head and scrubbed some more and said, “You both crazier than a rat trapped in a tin shithouse. Ain’t enough kerosene on God’s earth for you fools.” Then, her voice softening, she said, “I reckon I should be glad this ain’t tar.” Ketty sent her to the creek to wash off the kerosene.

Now Ketty was gone, the only mother Elma knew. It was the three of them, Juke, Elma, and Nan, living in the big house, and though it all belonged to George Wilson—the house, the mules, the seeds in the ground—it was easy to think it was theirs, that they weren’t true sharecroppers, since other than the Wilsons the only ones they shared with were each other. They didn’t struggle the way of the other halvers-hands down the Straight, farmers with eight, ten, twelve mouths to feed, who wandered from county to county each harvest, who even before the hard times came were on hard times. The big house had glass in the windows and rugs on the floors. The Lord had blessed them.

(“Nigger lover think he mighty, three a them in that big house,” a neighbor might be heard to say. And then the wife would remind him, “You ain’t talk like that come slaying time, when you needed him to do for the hogs.” And the husband wouldn’t remind her, because she didn’t like to be reminded, how much he did like Juke Jesup’s gin.)

So the three of them worked the same fields, ate at the same table, shared the same Bible, Elma reading to Juke and Nan each night. And now that Nan slept in the big house—well, if they weren’t sisters, what were they?






Every Sunday morning since she was a girl (except for the winter ones, when she would heat water for the tub on the porch), Elma would follow the clay footpath through the pines behind the big house to bathe in the creek. A hundred years before, the Creek River had been called the Muskogee, for the people who had lived on its shores, but after the tribe was forced west and the land surveyed and mapped and distributed to whites, the town’s founder had renamed it the Creek, the tribe’s more civilized name, and a more suitable one for modern Florence. (It was the age when Georgia named her towns after the craggy city-states of ancient Europe—Athens, Sparta, Rome—though Florence was the name of the founder’s mother, who went by Flo.) That made the creek, when the river trickled into one, Creek Creek. George Wilson’s grandfather had been one of the men distributed two hundred acres of land along the road they called the Twelve-Mile Straight, for that was the age when they named a thing for what it was and no more. The Straight was straight, no kinks or curves, just a rise here or there, barely a hill.

Nobody called Creek Creek by its name. Some—the few Black Dutch left in the Indian village east of town—still called it the Muskogee. Most just called it the creek. Elma called it Lizard Creek, for the lizards that darted at her ankles and also because from the sandhill bank, it was shaped like a lizard looking over its shoulder, and the surface was as green and scaly as a lizard’s back. Sunday mornings she’d string up her clothes on the lowest branch of the catalpa tree—the overalls she’d stepped out of, and the clean dress she’d change into—slipping the branch through the sleeves like an arm, so the clothes hung from the tree side by side, two friends keeping her company while she bathed with a soap cake in the creek. It was the place where her father had taught her to fish, plucking a fat catalpa worm from a leaf and threading the hook through its leopard hide. In the fall, Elma and Nan would gather the catalpa’s pods from the bank, long as their arms and rattling with seeds, and they would make music with them and weave them into wreaths.

Nan did not go to church with the family (what did she need with the Lord, Juke said, when He had already withheld his blessings?), and so she did not go to the creek with Elma on Sundays. It wasn’t proper to bathe with coloreds, Juke said, though Elma had washed Nan in the tub when she was small, though they went to the privy together, and though Elma had shown Nan how to fold a rag when her bleeding came last year, just as Ketty had shown her. Nan bathed on Tuesdays, the day they did the wash, and Elma’s father bathed in town at the mill when he made deliveries, in a shower stall with heated water.

So late one September night in 1929, when Elma went to the privy and heard footsteps on the path to the creek, she thought it must be the new field hand. The footsteps were slow, careful. Branches snapped. Genus Jackson had lived in the tar paper shack for little more than a month. Other than the field hand they called Long John, he was as tall a man as she’d seen, but he made his way through the cotton field hunched over on his long, cornstalk legs, his back sickle shaped, his gait tight, as though hiding some pain in his gut. He’d said barely ten words since he’d come to the crossroads. He didn’t join in the songs while he picked. He kept his distance from Elma and Nan, from Ezra and Long John and Al and, when they were there, Al’s three sons. He hid his face under his hat. But the other day, when the gate to the chicken yard had come off its hinge, he’d helped her lift it back into place, and when he’d smiled she saw that one of his front teeth was missing, and when she looked again she saw that it wasn’t missing but gray as a fossil. He told her his name. He asked for hers, and nodding at the house, Nan’s. The tooth made him look like a little child and an old man at the same time. He was, she noticed, not much older than she was, which was seventeen. On his head was a corn-shuck hat and on his feet were a pair of boots made from what looked like alligator hide.

Now he walked without shoes, and without a lantern. There was a slice of moon to see by, and under its white glow, through the privy window, Elma watched him disappear in his union suit through the pines.

It was Saturday—maybe Sunday already. In a few hours, she would wake to do her milking and her feeding and then she would go down to the creek herself. And in fact the next morning, the cake of lye soap she’d left in the crook of the catalpa tree wasn’t yet dry. She had made it herself, with bits of cornmeal and lavender leaf, in the same tub where she washed the laundry and cooked the lard. She held the soap to her nose, then ran it roughly between her legs, then dried and dressed and went to church with her father.

That evening, after a day of picking, after supper, she knocked on the door of Genus Jackson’s shack with a slice of blackberry pie. He wasn’t there. She looked in the fields, in the yard, the barn. She found him in the hayloft. He tossed a bale of hay down the ladder and almost knocked her over with it, knocked the plate out of her hands instead, sent the fork flying. He raced down the ladder fast as he could in those boots, swearing under his breath. “Miss Elma! I could a crushed you flat!”

Under the bale, the pie was smashed to muck. Elma laughed, and then Genus laughed at her laughing, and then seeing the tooth’s dull shine made her stop laughing and filled her chest with an icy heat. She shook the hay from her apron. “Well, there goes one delicious slice of blackberry pie,” she said.

She could see he was pained by this. She wondered if he was sorry for her trouble or just hungry. He took breakfast and supper alone in his shack, and dinner with the other hands, under the cottonwood tree. Nan delivered it to him in a straw basket.

“I’m powerful sorry, miss,” he said. The barn cat appeared and began to lick the plate, and Elma let her. “And you just trying to do me a kindness.”

“What happened to your tooth?” she asked him, pointing to her own incisor. He touched the tooth. He had large hands and long fingers and fingernails the shape and color of the inside of an almond. She could smell the sweat on him, and her soap, lavender and lye.

“My auntie called it my shark tooth.”

“You were born with it?”

“Naw. I got kicked by a horse name of Baby.”

Elma laughed again. “Did it hurt?”

“Like the devil. She had the devil in her, that one. Horse the same color as the tooth. I reckon she didn’t want me to forget her.”

“It don’t look like that,” Elma said. “It’s pretty as a silver tooth.”

He smiled, showing it again.

“How come you walk bent over that way? Was that the devil horse too?”

“You ain’t afeared of asking questions, are you, miss?”

“My daddy says I got a loose tongue.”

“You ever carry a cotton bag over your shoulder?”

“Since I was a tot.”

“Well, you tall as I am, it’s inclined to bend you in half too.”

Then it was Genus’s tongue that got loose. He had questions for Elma, about the house, the farm, about Nan. With her mind Elma followed the sweat traveling down his temples. She traced the curve of his nostrils. They stayed out in the barn until the yard was in shadow.

“Stay here.” She held up a finger. “I’ll get you another slice of pie.”

But from the porch, Elma’s father saw her coming through the yard looking dazed, saw her smoothing her apron, pulling hay from her hair. He stood up from his chair. Where had she been? What was she doing in the barn? She was to bring no one no kind of pie, get in that house. And Elma went inside and Juke went to the barn, where he found Genus Jackson sitting on a hay bale, sweaty and satisfied, licking blackberry juice from the tines of a fork. When Juke returned to the house, he said to Elma, “Learned that boy not to come near you again. Don’t make me take the hoe to you too.”

He had never taken a hoe or a hand to her. She had not known him to take a hand to anyone. So she had said nothing. She had not protested. She had not explained. She did not know how bad a beating it had been. Later, when she suspected how bad, when she began to learn to protest, she would wonder why her father had kept Genus on the farm when he could have had a new man in the shack by dark. If only he had run him off the farm! But Genus woke up same as always and carried on, and so she did too. She believed she must have done wrong, that she had invited Genus’s punishment, and that she must be very careful.

The following Saturday, there was rain. They were all glad. Genus did not go down to the creek in the middle of the night, or Elma didn’t hear him.

But the Saturday after that, Elma heard his door open and close. She counted to one hundred, crept into the kitchen, and took the whole blackberry pie from the windowsill, where she’d left it to cool that afternoon. It would be her way of making amends for the hot water she’d put him in. There was no way to talk in the daytime, not with her father’s eyes on them. The moon was brighter tonight, near full, but her bare feet didn’t need it to find their way down the path. She knew which branches to move aside to avoid snapping, which roots and rocks to step over.

He was humming. She heard it as she came to the edge of the sandhill, before the land sloped down to the shore. Under the lowest-hanging turkey oak, she placed the pie on a flat rock and lay down, pressing her chest to the ground. She watched as Genus shed his union suit, took her soap from the catalpa, and waded into the water.

She had never seen a man the way the Lord intended. There had been men around her all her life, her father, Nan’s father, the landlord, the field hands from town, the last hired man who had lived in the shack—a scrappy, white-whiskered white man named Jeroboam who as far as Elma could tell didn’t bathe at all. She had seen nothing of them but their sunburnt backs. Now there was her beau Freddie Wilson, the landlord’s grandson, who liked to press his manhood upon her while he taught her to drive his Chevy. “Less go ride,” he’d say, and he’d sit her between his blue-jeaned legs, nearly in his lap, the jar of her daddy’s gin in his hand cool against her thigh through her dress, his left arm hanging a cigarette out the window, and he’d show her how to ease the engine into motion, how to work the pedals and turn the wheel without jerking the truck into next week. “That’s it, that’s it,” he’d say, his arms around hers on the wheel, the heat coming off his body like a sun-warmed shirt straight off the line, his pecker hard as a tree trunk against her tailbone. “Less go park in them trees,” he’d say, kissing behind her ear, his liquor breath thick as a swamp fog, and she’d say, “Freddie, quit,” and he’d say, “Gotdamn, Elma,” and she’d climb out of his reach and he’d drive her home. Goddamn, she allowed herself to say in her head. Goddamn if she didn’t like the way she felt in Freddie Wilson’s lap.

Under the moon, knee-deep in Lizard Creek, Genus Jackson stood humming. A slim brown branch hung between his legs. He lathered her soap between his hands. He washed his chest, his neck, under his arms. The cricket frogs called to each other from the bank. Gentle as a teapot, Genus poured a stream of piss into the water. She felt her body flush, the blood rushing between her legs.

It took all her will not to join him in his song, to join him in the water. But then what? She might spook him. He might call out. They might be heard. If her father found them, he’d take a hoe to both their hind sides. She looked at the pie, dark and dumb on its rock. What was she thinking, bringing a pie to a stranger in the middle of the night? Was he meant to eat it there, standing in the creek with his manhood hanging between them?

Besides, he would know that she’d followed him. What she needed was for him to come upon her. She lifted the pie, crawled out from under the branches, and tiptoed back up the path.

All week, at school, in the fields, in her bed, she counted the days to Saturday, when she would go down to the creek and wait for him. She imagined floating on her back in the creek, her hair swimming around her face like copper fish. Or she would sit on a rock on the bank, brushing it over her shoulder like a mermaid. Or she would be standing in the water where he had been, washing herself with her soap (that square of soap, the goose bumps of cornmeal, how they would brush against her skin), and he would come upon her. A vision. In her vision, she said, “Genus Jackson, have you been using my soap?”

Come Saturday, she listened to the sounds of the house settling down. As soon as she was sure her father was asleep, she slipped outside in her nightdress. It was October, and the clay path was cool under her feet. The light of day still paled the edge of the west field. The mules snuffed and snored in the barn.

Elma knew the sound of Mamie’s snoring, and of Archie’s shitting. She knew the sound a hog made just before it was slain, and the sound a stallion made when it was upon a jenny, and the sound the jenny made, which often as not was no sound at all. This was the sound she heard as she made her way down the path—the sound of one animal and the silence of another. The sound changed as she walked, a grunt, then a moan, and then nearly a hum. By the time Elma reached the end of the path, and the creek came into view, she did not want to look, but she did. She found her place on the sandhill under the skirt of the oak. It was so dark that at first the two silhouettes looked like round rocks in the creek. Then she made out the shoulders and heads above the water—the same shape, shorn of hair. If it hadn’t been for the sounds, Elma might have found beauty in their symmetry, two busts carved of black stone.

Above, a cloud drifted past the moon, and then the light caught the ripples of the creek and their open mouths, and both mouths now made a certain sound, a tongueless sound, one unlike any Elma had heard on the farm. The sound would stay in her ears for a long time, and later she would have to reckon that it was what the Lord intended, though at that moment it seemed that the two figures in the creek had invented it themselves.






The next Saturday, when Freddie Wilson directed Elma to drive his Chevy into the canopy of pines twelve miles west of town, she did. It was the place where the Straight dead-ended into scrubgrass, where no passing eyes could find them. Freddie looked as though he could hardly believe his luck, but he didn’t wait for her to change her mind. He shifted her off his lap and unbuckled his belt. Only if he would marry her, Elma said. Would he really marry her? Of course, he said. Of course what? she said, hand on his chest. He said, Of course I’ll marry you. And then Elma heard the sound again, though Freddie sounded more like a horse in a barn. Two months later, in the truck, when she told him her bleeding hadn’t come, he punched the window with his fist. It scared her so much she waited another month to tell her daddy, but her daddy wasn’t even mad, just nodded solemnly over his plate. He’s got to marry you now, he said. Long as he’ll do you right.

It wasn’t until she was far along, when the newspapers started using the word “Depression,” that Elma thought back to that fall and saw that the Crash had come then, not long after the night she first saw Genus Jackson disappear down the path to Lizard Creek. It was hard not to draw a line between the two, her following him, and what followed. Pregnant as a potbellied pig, she read the newspapers front to back—it was the one luxury her father allowed in those months—and she could feel the hot, inextinguishable flame of her badness, spreading beyond the horizon like fire on a field. Was it her watching, her wanting, that called the devil down to the creek? It seemed that way, even before the babies came. And after they did, and after Genus disappeared for good, it was hard not to feel that she’d caused the whole world to crash.




THREE (#ulink_a6b1d268-efaf-5aa1-ac92-5dc34e4ae310)







GENUS JACKSON HAD BEEN DEAD TWO HOURS WHEN A POWERFUL knock came at Sheriff Cleave’s door. He lived in the quarters below the jailhouse in the Third Ward, and he thought the ruckus was his fool guardsman, reporting a problem with a prisoner. Best he could recall the only one up there was Wolfie Brunswick, the raggedy-bearded drunk of a vet who was drying out in the bullpen. Last night Sheriff and the guard had rolled their chairs into the cell to play Georgia Skins with him, Sheriff and the guard drinking Cotton Gin in the office between hands, drinking it in the teacups that had belonged to Sheriff’s grandmother, clinking the cups daintily together, growing more and more boisterous, until they were drunker than the drunk himself and the drunk was beating them soundly, a fact that threw them into greater and greater hilarity, and more and more teacups of gin. They were playing for peanuts, real peanuts, and the dust of them was still caked in Sheriff’s teeth.

It wasn’t the fool guardsman at the door. It was George Wilson, a coat over his nightclothes, his silver head bare. Rarely had Sheriff seen him out of his pearl white suit. At the curb, his Buick idled. There was no driver waiting.

Sheriff, still in nightclothes himself, covered his own head with the hat hanging by the door. His first thought was the mill. A quarrel between two drunk lintheads on the graveyard shift. Maybe a quarrel with Wilson himself. There had been unrest in the mill village, you could say, doffers and spinners complaining of too many hours and too little pay, as folks were given to. Folks not showing up for their shifts, or showing up drunk. If they were drunk, they were drunk on Juke Jesup’s Cotton Gin, which Wilson ran himself, if “run” was the word for it, for it didn’t run far beyond the county, and mostly ran his own help into the ground. But he did not suggest this to George Wilson. It was Sheriff’s job to look away, and besides, Sheriff too was drunk on it. Years before, Sheriff’s father and Wilson’s brothers had all followed their fortunes north, and Sheriff and Wilson had stayed behind in the little county seat that no one beyond twenty miles could find on a map, and so their loyalty to each other was a tonic for their shame—that together they might make themselves worthy.

“It’s Jesup,” George Wilson said, standing at the door. So it wasn’t the mill—it was the gin. And then Sheriff thought of himself, of his own badge. Things had gone sour between Wilson and Jesup. Sour as they’d gone in the mill. Sheriff didn’t know why, but he could smell it. When Wilson said, “He’s gone and killed my man on the farm,” Sheriff had to hold himself up in the doorway. “He’ll say it’s Freddie, but it ain’t Freddie. Well, Freddie was there—I saw him with my own eyes when he come back to the mill—but he’s gone now.”

“Gone where?”

“Hell if I know. Gone.”

“Come in, George. Sit down.”

“No, thank you kindly. The man is still there. He’s there in the road at the mill, what’s left of him. Freddie cut him from his truck.”

“From his truck?”

“The men at the mill said he’d … he’d defiled Jesup’s daughter.” A thread of spit sprung from Wilson’s mouth and caught in his mustache. “That’s why he did it. I reckon Juke’s the one tied him to my grandson’s truck. But there’s a whole mess of them come out from the Straight.”

Sheriff had to look down at his feet. That a mob had gone through the county and lynched a man without so much as a courtesy whisper, that Sheriff had been having a tea party while it happened, that he hadn’t been given a chance to at least provide the necessary performance of peacekeeping—it was an embarrassment.

But maybe it was for the best, that his hands should be clean. The guardsman and the prisoner would vouch for him, when the papers came around.

He said, “What is it I can do for you, George?”

George Wilson tugged on his earlobe and sucked his square white teeth. “Quiet it down, honey, for pity’s sake.”

So Sheriff mounted his motorcycle and followed Wilson’s car back to the mill village. Through the bars of the bullpen, Wolfie Brunswick watched him buzz down the road like a tiny king, kicking up dust. He was no taller than a mule, Sheriff was, with a slick, mule-colored mustache, and a Homburg hat that looked ready to topple him. If he’d ever had a name other than Sheriff, a name his mother had singsonged over the cradle, it was long lost.

In the headlights of the motorbike, the men scattered over the mill village, back to their shacks. From George Wilson’s house Sheriff rang up the undertaker and waited for him to arrive and load the body into the Negro ambulance. On Monday, the local doctor would help arrange for the autopsy at the colored hospital in Americus. When no one claimed the body, it would be transported back to Florence and buried, what was left of it, in the cemetery behind the colored church, no marker but a dried gourd. By then Sheriff had gone knocking on doors throughout the village. Not one of the mill hands had seen it, they said, but all of them knew it was Freddie Wilson. “How do you know,” Sheriff asked them, “if you ain’t seen it?” And they all said that Freddie had it in him, that he was madder than a blind bull, that he was not the sort of man to be cuckold to no darky. The men didn’t say they’d had a grievance toward Freddie since he started as foreman, that he liked to knock them with his broom when they were too slow, and flick his cigarette butts in their looms, and put his hands under the dresses of their daughters and wives, and then disappear into the office and drink his grandfather’s gin and pass out on his leather couch. If Sheriff didn’t know better, he’d ask the lintheads if they had any prejudice against the Wilsons, or any allegiance to Juke Jesup, who when asked, when Wilson wasn’t looking, might sell a case or two straight to a thirsty mill hand for a song.

There was one more errand he had to make. It was still the middle of the night—that first July night—when Sheriff drove his motorcycle from the mill out to the crossroads farm, but there was a lamp on in a window of the big house. A colored maid answered Sheriff’s knock, no more than a girl, though at first, with her short hair, Sheriff took her for a boy. It was so dark in the doorway he collided with her as he stepped through it.

“Beg your pardon, child.” Sheriff took off his hat and placed it over his heart.

“Sheriff,” Juke said by way of a greeting, coming in from the breezeway carrying a lamp. He was still in the overalls he’d worn that day. He looked tired or drunk or both. He may have been in deep with George Wilson, he may have brewed the gin that flowed through the county, but up close Sheriff saw he was just a rednecked farmer, his sunburnt face lined with creeks and crags, spotted as a pine snake. He set his kerosene lamp down on the kitchen table. “I told that boy to mind his ire. They weren’t no stopping him. Lord knows I tried.”

Juke pulled out a chair. Sheriff sat while the girl made coffee. The daughter, poor child, was nowhere to be seen. Juke told him about the mill men who’d arrived in their cars, how he stayed indoors to protect his daughter from the mob, how the farmhand was swinging from the gourd tree before he knew what had happened. “Just younguns,” Juke said, shaking his head. “Younguns full of fire.”

“You saying Freddie led the whole thing?”

“Why else would he run? Other than he couldn’t abide being no father?”

Sheriff shrugged. “Spect you put the idea in his head.”

“The idea of stringing the man up, or the idea of running?”

“Both.”

“Freddie ain’t need no help. He got ideas of his own.”

Sheriff knew how these things happened. It might not have happened in Cotton County, but it happened in every county it touched. A hill of men, too many to count, too many to haul in, too many most times for a sheriff to do anything about except throw up his arms. But in all his years he’d never seen a mob finger one of its own.

“You sure you ain’t out there, helping em, after what the nigger done to your child? It was me, I might a done the same.”

Juke stood, walked to the pantry, and returned with a jar of gin, which he poured into Sheriff’s black coffee, then his own.

“I might a done it.” Up close, Sheriff could see that burns braided the man’s right arm from his knuckles to his elbow, his skin a mess of scar tissue, hairless and pink as a pecker. “All us sinners is capable, I reckon.”

Sheriff lifted his hands to the ceiling. “Spect we’ll have to wait till he come back and tell us.”

“If he come back.”

“If?” He thought Jesup was betting, figuring it out as he went. He was counting on those men covering for him, fingering Freddie, and he was probably right. “Where’s he gone go?”

“Where he ain’t a wanted man, I reckon.”

Sheriff laughed. “If you say so. Ain’t the law that wants him back much as his pawpaw.”

Then the house girl put a plate of corn pone on the table, each one cold and hard as a brick. Something was wrong with her. Her eyes were bloodshot, and they stared through the room as though they didn’t see anything in it. Sheriff thought she might be touched, or empty in the head, but then he remembered. “She the one can’t form words?” he asked Juke. All those years he’d allowed him and George Wilson to run their liquor and he’d never set foot in the big house. It was his job to look away.

“Show him,” said Juke, and the girl, still dead in the eyes, rolled her head back and opened her mouth to reveal the pink stub veined with scars, a blind slug in the cave of her mouth. “She’s the one delivered the twins. Her momma learned her good.” And from there he told the story he’d tell the neighbors that visited in the days after, the reporters, the other lawmen bearing the badges of curious county seats. Wilson came first, Juke said, and Winnafred minutes later, their cords braided like streamers on a maypole, sister nearly taking hold of brother’s heel, like Isaac’s children. They were so surprised to know there were two babies in there that they hadn’t noticed, at first, that one was darker than the other. Even Juke hadn’t been sure. Babies looked all kinds of ways when they were born. But there was no denying it. Freddie saw that the baby boy wasn’t his blood, and after that, well, it was a damn shame, all of it.

Before he left, Sheriff asked to look in on the babies. Something was tugging at him. He’d been caught up in George Wilson’s grand aspirations and perhaps too in the deluded ones of his bootlegging tenant. He shared with the two men an affinity for gin and his belief that a workingman should have it if he wanted it. But unlike them he was a veteran and a servant of the law, with a soldier’s eye and a detective’s nose. He’d sniffed out a German spy in the pisser at a whorehouse in Paris, France. He’d identified the Wiregrass Killer in a barbershop, when the man was inside with half his face covered in cream and Sheriff was in the road, twenty yards away, on his horse. Now he smelled a skunk and he wanted to see it with his own eyes.

It was something about that maid. Her empty eyes. The way she froze up when they talked about the dead man, and again when they talked about the babies. And where was the daughter? If Sheriff had more than peanuts to bet, he’d put his money on that colored girl being mother to the dead man’s child. Two Negroes doing as Negroes did, carrying on in the woods. Who knew how the Jesups got tangled up in it, but what other explanation was there? Sheriff was a humble man but he’d been through as much school as church and he wasn’t one to believe in miraculous wombs.

The white one was asleep. The colored one was awake. The boy. His eyes skated toward the light of the doorway. Then the daughter emerged from the darkness of the room, crossing from her chair to the cradle, shielding the light with her wrist. Before she did, he got a good look at her pretty, outraged face. “I beg your pardon,” said Sheriff, holding his hat to his heart. He stood between the door and the cradle for close to a minute, the light falling over the boy. What he saw was a colored baby with his white mother’s face. She lifted him and held him to her shoulder, and Sheriff put his hat back on. He shook his head and gave a little laugh. Ain’t a Fritz behind every pisser door, he reminded himself.

Back in the kitchen, to Jesup, he said again, “I beg your pardon.”

“Damn shame, ain’t it,” said Jesup. “Neither one of em’s gone know its daddy.”

That was how it came to be that Juke Jesup went free. Sheriff left him with a handshake and a warning. “I don’t care how friendly Wilson been to you. He ain’t gone let his boy take the fall so easy. You best walk with the sun at your back and keep your shadow in front of you.”






It was the day that belonged to the Lord. If you hung your wash on a Sunday, everyone in church would know it, and you might have your sins prayed for. When the first reporter showed up that afternoon, before Genus’s body was even cold, Juke sent him away, saying, “Let the dead have a day’s rest.”

But Monday morning, the knocks came quick—a reporter from the Florence Messenger, the Albany Herald, the Valdosta Daily Times. They all ran a photograph of the gourd tree, a short length of rope hanging from a beam. They seemed disappointed that there was no picture of Genus hanging. There was no picture of Genus at all. In the front-page article in the Messenger, they spelled his name “Genius.”

FLORENCE, Ga., Jul. 7—At approximately 12:30 A.M., Genius Jackson, a Negro youth of unknown origins, was allegedly killed by George Frederick “Freddie” Wilson III, 19, on the property of his grandfather George Frederick Wilson, known as the crossroads farm, near the intersection of String Wilson and Twelve-Mile Roads. Although the deceased’s body suffered multiple gunshot wounds, an autopsy revealed the cause of death to be a fracture of the cervical spine.

According to witness John “Juke” Jesup, the sharecropper who hired Jackson as a wage hand, Jackson was hanged from a gourd tree in retaliation for the rape of his daughter, Elma Jesup, 18, Wilson’s fiancée. Wilson, who worked as foreman under his grandfather’s supervision at the Florence Cotton Mill, was last seen in his green Chevrolet truck traveling southbound on Valentine Road. He is said to be wearing a pair of shoes made of alligator leather, which belonged to the deceased.

Elma looked for the word “lynch” but didn’t find it. A lynching, she knew, would imply that the man had died at the hands of persons unknown. Somehow all those persons unknown had managed to pin it on Freddie Wilson, and though Elma felt no more love for him and now felt not even pity—he’d had it coming forty ways from Sunday—what she did feel was bewilderment, fury, and finally relief, that her father had managed to get off without a scratch, clean as a newborn. The reporters sat with Juke in the rockers on the porch, on the scattered pine stumps, drinking coffee and eating corn pone with chitlins and talking till the sun went down. He told stories about growing up on the farm as a boy with String Wilson, the story about the skunk they’d caught in a rabbit trap, the story about String carrying a potato in his trouser pocket for a week because Juke told him it would turn into a rock. There were stories of Juke’s heroics—the one about saving String when he’d fallen down that well, and saving the drunk who’d wrecked his tractor in the creek (it had crushed the man’s legs like twigs—that was why you’d never catch Juke Jesup on a tractor). He’d saved a dog too just a few months back, from the burning shell of a car—it was how his arm came to be burned, he said. The bitch of a hound had run oft. Some kind of grateful! When the next reporter came, he told the stories again. He could tell stories, Juke could. He could talk the hind legs off a donkey. And the reporters could listen. They were paid to listen. If they left with their pockets a little heavier, weighed down with jars of gin, it was just to make sure they listened right. None of the stories made it into the paper, and except for a quote here and there—“I reckon God saw that judgment was made”—Juke stayed out of the papers too. It was a tragedy, the papers said, a shame. But what could be done in a case like this?

Only one paper, the Macon Testament, printed an editorial. It was also the only paper that used the word “lynch.” It was one of those big-city dailies. On Tuesday morning, after delivering her eggs, Elma was seen reading it at the crossroads store, hiding behind a tower of condensed milk.

For three years, it seemed Reason had come to Georgia. The Klansman had been evicted from the Governor’s mansion, and lynching with him. Then, in January, Irwin County brought Georgia back to that dark era. Now that her record has been broken, why not trample on it? The tragedy in Irwin County will go down in history as truly barbaric, but at least the sheriff had a confession. Here we have nothing, no evidence but a bruised ego and brute justice.

“Miss Elma? You all right, honey?”

Mud Turner peeked around the tower of cans. Elma pressed the paper to her chest. Mud thought she was holding it funny, like her arm was broke.

“Of course. I’ll be taking my flour, if you don’t mind.”

At the checkers table on the porch of the store, Jeb Simmons and his son Jeb Junior sat hunched over the Testament. Elma looked like she was in a hurry, but Jeb got up to help lift her wagon down the step. “Don’t worry, Miss Elma,” he said. “Don’t nobody care for no city rag.”

“Don’t nobody care for no opinionating,” said Jeb Junior. They called him Drink. That was what he liked to do.

“That reporter show up round here, we’ll send him home directly.”

But he’d already shown up. He was the reporter who’d shown up on Sunday. And not just a reporter—Q. L. Boothby, the editor and publisher himself. He was an important man in Macon. Head of the hospital board, the Masons, and a member, it was said, of the Commission on Interracial Cooperation. (“Nigger-lover club,” it was said.) He came back to the big house again on Tuesday afternoon, after the editorial was out, and Juke, who’d brought home the paper himself and made Elma read it aloud, was ready, with Jeb and Drink and five or six other men, men who’d been there on Saturday night and men who wished they’d been. Q. L. Boothby didn’t make it to the porch. Elma had watched from the window as he backed down the steps, his hands half-raised in surrender, then got in his car and drove back to Macon.

They hadn’t bought the Testament since Ocilla. If they had a nickel to spend, they spent it on the Messenger, whose editor had money in the mill, whose regular order of gin was as big as any in the county. But the end of January, a thousand folks in the next county had mobbed a colored man for raping and killing a teenage white girl. They said he cut out her eye with a knife and left her on the road to die, and when they found him, they tore him limb from limb, joint by joint, pulling out his teeth with pliers, before they strung him from a tree and burned him. Elma’s father had sent her to the store for all the papers the next day, and he’d had her read him every word. He couldn’t read but a handful of words himself, and never took to his daughter teaching him, or his wife before her. When Elma was done, he said, “To think I was just there on Tuesday. I coulda caught me quite a sight.”

It was said that the chief of police kept the man’s skull on his desk as an ashtray. One of the little girls from Creek Baptist claimed she had visited his office with her friend, the police chief’s granddaughter, and he had let her hold it. She claimed she had a piece of it in her pocket, and all the children gathered round to see it, but it was just a pig knuckle in wax paper, and everyone was disappointed.






It wasn’t a nod, Elma told herself. She had not nodded. She had lowered her head, then lifted it to find her father’s eye, then lowered it again. Lowered, lifted, lowered. A hesitation of the chin, no more. She had not given her permission. Her permission was not required. What was she to do to stop fifty men from carrying out what they were bent on carrying out?

Freddie would have done it anyway, with or without Juke’s help, with or without Elma’s blessing—that was the way her daddy put it. Weren’t no stopping him, he said again and again, weren’t no stopping him, until she came to believe it as he seemed to. “You ain’t done no wrong,” he said, and that was all—they were not to speak of it. He didn’t mean that he, her father, was to blame. He meant to absolve both of them. There was no one to blame, because there had been no wrong. All the blame there was, and there wasn’t much, he tagged on Freddie. Elma didn’t know whether that had been his aim all along or whether he’d been lucky enough for Freddie to accept the blame before Juke could offer it. She didn’t know if, in private, her father saved any blame for himself, if he prayed to God outside of a church pew, if the body that swung in her nightmares swung in his too. She supposed she wouldn’t ever know. Genus was buried in the ground and her father was out in the field like it was any day of the week, for though it was July and laying-by time, there was ragweed to cuss at.

Elma moved from room to room, sweeping the floors clean, across the breezeway, her elbows tucked to her sides. If she kept her head down, her chin lowered, if she didn’t look out the kitchen window, her eyes would not catch on the gourd tree. The gourd tree would not be there. And if she didn’t sing, no one could hear her. No one could say, What are you doing, Elma Jesup, singing like you don’t have a care in the world?






In the first days, there was only brief mention of the babies, and usually the press got it wrong. One paper left out Winna; another said they were mulatto twins. It was only after one paper reported that the two babies born to Elma Jesup were of decidedly different complexions that the other papers sent their reporters back, and Juke came in from the fields to invite them inside. Now that their attention was off Genus Jackson, he didn’t mind being in the papers. The babies he almost seemed to be proud of. “Ain’t no use hiding them,” he said to Elma. “Might as well grab us ahold a some fame.” Besides, it was good for business. The reporters came thick as field mice, with their folding cameras and notepads, standing shoulder to shoulder on the porch steps, wanting to take a look at the twins. They aimed their cameras over the edge of the cradle. They left with more gin, paying Juke directly now, having gotten a taste for it. This would piss George Wilson off something good, but what did it matter now? Juke had already pissed George Wilson’s pants off.

In the weeklies Juke brought home from the crossroads store, Wilson and Winnafred were the same inky gray, bound in blankets, sleeping. But the headlines spelled it out. The one in the Atlanta paper said, GEMINI TWINS BORN TO COTTON CO. WOMAN. Elma read the articles to Juke. After a while she got tired of the papers and made up stories. “There ain’t nothing about us in this one. It’s just about the price of corn.” Then Juke wanted to know more—what was it about the price of corn? “It’s fine,” Elma said. “It’s holding steady.”

She swore off the papers, but in a few days she was dashing down to the crossroads store to read them again, searching for some mention of the children. She couldn’t tolerate the thought of them being talked about behind her back. It was like hearing her name whispered in church and not being able to tell who’d said it.

First of August, Elma flinched at the word “lynch” in a headline in the Testament. She hadn’t been expecting it. It was the babies she was looking for. But it wasn’t about Genus Jackson. She looked closer. An elderly Negro politician who owned forty acres in Montgomery County, sixty miles from Florence, had been flogged over the head by a mob of masked men. The men had come to his door late at night and roused him from his bed, where he had been asleep with his grandson. They put him, barely conscious, in the back of a truck, drove him to Toombs County, and left him by the side of the road. At dawn a white farmer on his way to Vidalia with a load of tobacco found the Negro in his bloody pajamas, and the Negro offered him seven dollars to be driven home, where he died of a cerebral hemorrhage.

There was outrage in Montgomery County. The Negro was an important man. A delegate to the National Republican Convention. Secretary and treasurer of the Widows and Orphans Department of the Negro Masonic Lodge, with an office and a secretary. Recently he had run for chairman of the Montgomery County Republican Committee, and before he was elected he accused his lily-white opponents of fraud. He implied, some said, that they were poor white trash. “That’s all right,” one observer reported them saying at the convention. “We’ll see you later about that.”

It was the second official lynching of the year, the article stated, though a July incident in Cotton County was still under scrutiny.

Elma did not read the article to her father. She didn’t even bring home the paper, just read it standing next to the tower of cans, folded it up, and buried it back in its pile. Maybe now, she thought, the reporters would be busy in Montgomery County. She stepped out onto the porch of the store. The Coca-Cola thermometer read 96 degrees, and Elma’s collar was damp with sweat, but now her neck went cold and she shivered. She had not seen Genus’s body but now in her mind she saw the old man in Montgomery County, on the side of the road in his nightclothes, saw him there on the Twelve-Mile Straight in front of the crossroads store like a dog dead in a ditch.

“Can I help you with that wagon?” asked Drink Simmons, half standing up from his table.

“No, thank you.”

“You look right peaked, Miss Elma.”

“I’m all right, thank you kindly.”

“You hear any word from that fiancé of yours?”

“What are you asking after?”

“I never took Freddie for yellow.” Drink shrugged. “I wouldn’t up and leave my woman nor my younguns, even if the law was hot on my behind.”

Elma bumped her wagon down the steps and into the sun, and now her body flashed hot. She would not think about the man in Montgomery. It was easier to be mad. “Don’t you and your daddy have some squirrels to shoot, Drink?”






The people of Cotton County were distracted from Genus Jackson, and it was the twins who seized their attention. Through August, as the corn grew high in the fields and the next truckload of pickers showed up, people came to see the babies. They came from church and town and neighboring farms, bearing booties and blankets, biscuits and pies. Mary Minrath, the home supervisor who last fall had been sent from town to help with the canning, brought the peach cobbler that had taken honorable mention at the Cotton County fair. Bette Hazelton, the bank manager’s wife, brought a box of secondhand clothes she’d collected from the congregation at Florence Baptist. Camilla Rawls, the doctor’s wife and the president of the local chapter of the WCTU, brought two golden-edged, pocket-size Bibles. “Every child of God needs his own.” Even the chain gang that made its way down the road left a gift stuffed in the mailbox, a bouquet of blue hound’s tongue picked from the shoulder of the Straight. They came by cart and by foot and by automobile, Hoover wagons and two-wheeled jigs, feigning errands to the crossroads store, delivering news. Some clucked and cooed; some shook their heads. All of them prayed over the cradle. “Haven’t seen you in church, Elma,” said Josie Byrd, whose daddy owned the biggest peanut farm in the county. She was leaving for Emory, for nursing school, and she wore a new pair of leather shoes, white with white laces, so clean they hurt Elma’s eyes. “They got Mary Collier in your place in the choir, and pretty as she is, she sings like a gopher frog.”

Elma said she’d be back in church when she was ready, when the twins were old enough to travel. And the women left with a knowing nod, sometimes a hand on Elma’s shoulder. “If I didn’t see them with my own eyes,” Josie’s mother whispered to Josie on their way out the door, “I’d say those babies came from two different wombs.”

A week after delivering the cobbler, Mrs. Minrath returned in her starched apron, her leather ledger at her side, saying, “Those tomatoes in your garden aren’t going to can themselves.”

Elma said she wouldn’t be needing any help this year, thank you kindly. “We got our hands full with the babies.”

Mrs. Minrath pursed her flat lips. “Then it would seem you could use all the extra hands you could get. Especially in times like these. And without any womankind around.”

“I got my Nan. She’s a plumb miraculous canner. We been canning since we was tall as the hem on your dress, Mrs. Minrath. Even without a book to write it all down in.”

Mrs. Minrath looked around Elma and into the house, where Nan was holding Wilson. She shook her head. “Poor children,” she said, and turned and walked down the steps.

People came to help, and Elma sent them away. It was true that she lost some tomatoes—her father let her tend the garden, but alone she couldn’t pick them fast enough. She canned what she could, and the peaches and berries too, and pickled the peppers and carrots, sweating over the stove. She ate the cobblers and biscuits and pies, hating every bite, but she was hungry, and so were the babies, and they were delicious, those wicked, wicked pies. She fed the chickens and the guineas and the hogs and the mules, trapping a high-pitched hum in her mouth, and milked the cows, April and June, Anna and Margaret, and separated the cream from their milk, saving the skim for the hogs. “It’s all they want us for, ain’t it, girls,” she said to the cows, tugging the full, furred mounds of their teats. “Milk, milk, and more milk.” When she was held up feeding the babies and couldn’t get out to the barn until dawn, their udders were engorged as globes, veined with rivers of ducts. “Ain’t it the worst, girls,” she said. When she was held up with her chores and forgot to feed the babies, her own milk would mess the front of her dress, and then there was no ignoring it. And then she’d pull the shutters and sit back in the rocker and settle a baby into her lap, or two if she could manage, closing her eyes and letting the ache ease, and then there was nothing in the world but the babies, no visitors, no reporters, only their billy goat mews and the buttermilk smell of their warm heads.

One sunny morning at the height of summer, a truck pulled up in the dirt driveway and a woman with knee-high boots climbed out of it. Her short hair was yellow as a cornfield. Elma stood barefoot on the porch, fiddling with the pins that held up the great pile of her hair, as the woman made her way up the driveway and reached to shake her hand. Elma feared she was from the home demonstration club or the WCTU, on a mission to save her vegetables or her soul. The woman said, “I’m here to see the Gemini twins.”

Elma let her hand fall, loose as a dishrag. “They’re not Gemini,” she said. “They’re just regular.”

She was a dog breeder on her way to Florida, come all the way from Atlanta. Out of the wooden truck bed, where a dozen dogs yapped, she scooped up two Labrador puppies, one the color of butterscotch, the other oily black as a crow. “They’re called Castor and Pollux,” she said. “Every child needs its own dog.”

Her father came in from the field and thanked her and the dogs jumped on him and he laughed. What was there to laugh about? Elma watched their pink tongues lapping at her father’s hands. This was their reward for killing Genus. Dogs.

“We can’t keep them,” Elma said to the woman. “We got enough to look after with the babies.”

“Course we can,” said her father. “Dogs look after theyselves.”

And he made Elma take the woman into her room, where the babies now shared a larger crib that Juke had built. The woman leaned over the sleeping twins but didn’t pray. “Would you look at that,” she said.

“Please don’t touch the babies,” said Elma. “They’re still fragile. They were born small.”

“They look strong,” said the woman. “Especially this boy here. That’s hybrid vigor.”

Elma joined the woman at the crib, pulling the quilt to Wilson’s chin.

“Most people don’t believe a woman can have two babies from two fathers at the same time. They think it’s witchcraft, don’t they? Or just tales from Bible times?”

Elma felt a sudden pressure in her chest, like a blush, or a rush of milk.

“With dogs in the wild, it happens all the time. You take any bitch in heat, they’s as good a chance as not that every mutt in the litter’s gone have a different daddy.”

“That so?” said Elma, head cocked. One of her pins sprung out of her hair and she bent to pick it up, then took it between her lips, chewing it over.

“Your babies will be fine,” the woman said. “Black or white, they’re fixing to be strong.”






Of course, Wilson wasn’t true black. Nor was he red like Isaac’s child Esau, though under his skullcap was a rusty shock of hair, like the bronze wool used to scrub the pans. When he had grown into his skin, he was a warm, loamy brown, the color of the earth tilled for seed—sand and silt and clay mixed together. And when his eyes finally settled, when he could stare back at the faces that loomed over the crib and hold them in focus, they were a pale gray-green. You didn’t have to look twice, some said, to see those eyes were Elma’s.

Winnafred, though—already she was called Winna Jean, or just Winna—took after her father. When her skin cooled from the pink of infancy, she was white as a gourd, with Freddie’s sun-bleached hair, even before she’d seen the sun. It wasn’t until years later, when the twins spent their days running between the house and the fields and the barn, that their freckles came out, like stars appearing in the night sky. If you wanted to believe they weren’t twins—and at some point, everyone did, even the twins themselves, as often as they wanted to believe that they were—their freckles were there, finally, to connect them, Castor and Pollux joined in their immortal constellation.

When they were still babies, Elma dressed them head to toe, even indoors, even in summer. She wanted to protect them, to hide them, to make them more the same. You couldn’t blame her. After all, Juke said to the visitors, she’d been expecting only one. When she was pregnant, singing “All the Pretty Horses” to the baby kicking in her belly, she’d sewn six identical guano sack dresses, stitching them together with hay bale twine. When two babies came instead, she dressed both of them in the sacks. If she could have, she would have stitched the babies together at the waist, like Siamese twins. Sometimes it seemed she wanted to believe Wilson and Winna were one child, or that she needed others to believe it. It didn’t matter how the babies came to be. Babies were babies. Even Juke believed that.

“Course I love them both the same,” Elma told the women from church, the reporters who tracked white clay across the floor. She followed them with a broom. “All children live in the kingdom of God, don’t they?”

And they nodded with certainty, saying “Amen” and “Praise His name.”

But they were thinking of all the things she might have done with that baby, all the doorsteps she might have left him on in the middle of the night. The colored school. The colored church. In a basket on the creek. She could see the scheming in their eyes, the stories they were writing in their heads. Just like they wondered what had happened between Elma and Genus Jackson in the cotton house or creek or cornfield, a cornfield she hadn’t even been in, but they were following her there.

In some of their eyes, doubt. They had seen their share of mulatto babies. The Jesups were as liable as any country family to have some black blood along their line, black blood that decided to rear up and show itself. (The white Youngs who owned the tobacco plantation and the black Youngs who owned the juke joint? “You think they ain’t kin?” a white farmer, drunk enough, might be heard to say to his wife. This was raised as a diversion, because that white farmer might himself have a favorite colored girl in town, or in a shack, and likely as not his wife knew the girl’s name.)

It wasn’t a miracle, some thought, just a disgrace.






But mostly people believed. Folks in Cotton County were believers. They believed in Jesus foremost, and every holy cow and sheep in the barn he was born in. They believed in the Promised Land. It was far away, the Promised Land, on the other side of the world, but they believed that Jesus meant for them to be here, in Georgia, in the land of cotton, their own Promised Land, hard as times were. Jesus and Mary and Joseph were their people, country people suffering under the sun, and the people of Cotton County would be redeemed. They believed in Redemption, that their losses on battlefields, their losses in cotton fields, would be remembered and repaid in the Kingdom of Heaven. They believed in the Commandments. They believed in work, and rising early, and the crops in the field, and the rain that nourished them, never did they believe in the rain more, now that there wasn’t enough of it. They believed in progress, in automobiles and airplanes, and a few of them in the tractors that sat like jungle beasts in their barns. They believed in Charles Lindbergh. They believed in Ty Cobb. They did not believe in Herbert Hoover, but they prayed for him. They believed in prayer, and praise, and warm meals, in the kindness of strangers. They believed in their neighbors. They believed in Georgia, its clays and creeks, in the heavenly mists that drifted over the fields in the morning. They believed in ghosts—for what was the Almighty but the Holy Ghost?—and they believed in miracles. They believed in an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. Getting caught not believing was like getting caught with your hand in the collection plate. “Any faithless fool tells you your babies ain’t kin,” Juke said to Elma, “you tell them the only sin the Lord don’t pardon is the sin of nonbelieving.”

So they believed that the babies were twins. Because if they didn’t believe, then they didn’t believe Genus Jackson was one of the daddies. They’d have to believe that the daddy was someone else. They’d have to believe that a mob of white men killed a black man for no reason. And they couldn’t believe that.

Except the black folks. They knew what their white neighbors were capable of. They believed in the same things the white folks believed in, except they didn’t believe in the white folks. (Some of them didn’t believe in Georgia. Some of them believed the only Promised Land lay north.)

Except they didn’t believe in outsiders, either. Neither the white folks nor the black folks believed in outsiders. None of the folks, black or white, knew Genus Jackson. If they had, maybe one of them would have been seen crying on a porch, or writing a letter to Walter White, or taking up a collection for a funeral.

So even Ezra and Long John and Al believed the story that was told. They sat on their stools at Young’s and talked it over. Ezra said, “Boy done come to the wrong town.”

Long John said, “Never did like that hunchback boy.”

Al, who was the oldest, who had sons of his own, said, “He all right. He just a poor child of the Lord. Poor child done fell for the wrong white girl.”

He’d been lucky while he was alive, Ezra said, he’d been treated too good, put up in that shack without paying a penny. Besides, the boss gave them a pint of liquor every harvest, and his daughter, at Christmas, she made them pies.




FOUR (#ulink_fa525339-8f6c-5928-8163-8c0a9419aa75)







THERE WERE FOURTEEN BOOKS IN THE BIG HOUSE. THE THREE Bibles, including the babies’. The family Bible, marked with the birthdays and deaths of Jessa as well as Ketty, was kept on the mantel, where it collected the yellow light of the fire, and from which Elma read a passage aloud at the table each night. There was a book of fairy tales by the brothers Grimm. A book of poems by Edgar Allan Poe, a gift from Elma’s schoolteacher, Miss Armistead. The Farmers’ Almanac (each January the old edition went out to the privy). And a children’s encyclopedia, in eight illustrated volumes, called The Book of Knowledge, which Juke had bought for Elma’s birthday from the rolling store when it was a good year for cotton. If Nan hid a volume of the encyclopedia inside her corn-shuck mattress, nobody missed it, least of all Juke.

In a house full of secrets, one of the first was between Nan and Elma. The winter Nan was six and Elma was ten, their throats began to ache in the middle of the night. Juke looked in Nan’s mouth and saw her throat was coated with what looked like gray putty. He thought it was a clump of clay she’d eaten. Then he looked in Elma’s mouth and saw hers was the same. The next morning he drove them into town, to Dr. Rawls’s office, and the doctor said it wasn’t dirt but diphtheria. Juke carried Elma into her exam room, then carried them both into the colored room so Elma could talk for Nan. “She’s got the chills.”

“How do you know?” asked the doctor.

Elma shrugged. “She told me.”

They had their own way of talking, even then, their own system of signs. Elma knew how to watch Nan and guess what she meant, like a game of charades. Elma guessed, and Nan nodded. It was that first time when they were quarantined in a shack behind the house that Elma taught her to read. She’d put on a bonnet, because that’s what her schoolteacher Miss Armistead wore, and if Elma couldn’t be a farmer like her daddy, she wanted to be a schoolteacher. Nan would trace the letters in her tablet with a pencil, repeating each one in her head. No one bothered with them there. Nan’s mother, Ketty, who couldn’t read herself, passed them their meals through the window, and when spring came and Juke looked again into their mouths and declared them cured, he burned the shack to the ground, the tablet with it, but the letters stayed in Nan’s head. They were three months in the shack, and three months Elma was out of school.

So while Elma read Juke the morning news, or a letter from his people in Carolina, Nan played as dumb as he was. She had no tongue to prove herself, and in this her silence kept her safe. She hung the wash. She shook the dirt from the peanuts. She cooked and canned and patched the holes in Juke’s overalls where his knees had worn through. She waited for her father to return. She waited and she waited. She looked out at the road and listened for the automobile he would arrive in. In the daylight, it mattered little that she could read and Juke couldn’t, but there were certain nights when it helped to know she could open The Book of Knowledge and go away for a while, get lost in Antarctica, or in Paris, France, or Baltimore, Maryland, the place her father lived, a place that seemed just as magical and just as far as the pyramids. In this way the words on the page paved a gentle road to sleep. She’d nibble on the white clay she kept on a pantry shelf in an old coffee tin her mother had used for the same purpose. Ketty said it was natural, just as chewing cured tobacco leaves was natural—it was God’s own bounty and it made a day go down easier.

It was on those nights, the nights when Juke came for her, that having no tongue was a mixed blessing. If she’d had a tongue, she could have said no. But would a word have stopped him? Was it better to have no tongue if a tongue was no protection?

The first time he took her to the still was the night they buried her mother. It was just for the gin then. Juke said she was ready for a man’s drink. The log cabin was off to the west of the house, beyond the corn, just up the bank from the creek and not fifty feet from the road, but hidden from sight by long-skirted pines and thick-waisted oaks and the Spanish moss that looked to Nan like witch’s hair. She had heard Elma say before that her daddy was out at the still—some nights he even slept there—but she couldn’t imagine what it was for, or what it looked like, only knew that she washed his tumblers and that they weren’t for tea. She had seen the cabin only once, when a trail of blackberry bushes brought her there, like bread crumbs to a gingerbread house.

That night, he sat her down on an old stool made from a pine stump. The cabin was dark, lit only with a candle; Elma was in the big house, asleep. The air was musty, close; it smelled of a sweetness she’d never smelled before. He offered her a sip from his mason jar, and the sweetness filled her nose and her mouth, burning all the way up to her eyes, which filled with tears. The gin dribbled down her chin, as sometimes happened. Juke laughed a not unkind laugh. She did too, and the sound was big in her ears.

The second time, he showed her how the still worked, let her touch the cooking pot, the thumper keg, the condenser that was cool to the touch. He let her play on the barrels. She hopped from one to another like a cat. He watched her while he whittled away on a piece of pine. He carved her a little wooden cat. “You just a curious little cat, ain’t you?”

The third time, he had her sit on the mattress, this one filled with Spanish moss, which he slept on when he had a big batch going. Under the mattress he kept a twelve-gauge shotgun, which he took out and stroked with a square of wash leather in the light of the candle. “Know who gave me this gun?” he said.

Nan shook her head.

“Your daddy.”

She wanted to reach out and touch it, but she didn’t. It was an object she’d seen a thousand times, as plain as his tin of tobacco, but now it shone with a new brightness.

“You remember your daddy?”

Again she shook her head. She did remember him, she thought she did. She sometimes dreamt of the tickle of his mustache and the smell of his corncob pipe. But it was easier to say no.

“Damn shame he left,” he said, shaking his head. “Ain’t no man who can leave a child. I wouldn’t never leave you like that.” He reached under her and slipped the gun back under the mattress. “Even Elma never been out here,” he said. “Even Elma I don’t ’low to have no man’s drink.” And it was true she felt a little special—her momma dead, her daddy gone, and the boss man paying her attention—even as she held her nightdress tight around her hips. The gin pumped warm through her heart.

The fourth time, he told her to lie down, weren’t she tired from that gin and the late hour? He told her to close her eyes. He told her to put out her hand. She did as she was told. In her palm he placed what felt like a marble, and when she opened her eyes she saw that it was a pearl. “It belonged to your momma. Must have lost it while she was cleaning the big house.” He wanted Nan to have it, for luck. It was smooth and white with a bluish sheen, like the skin that formed at the top of a bucket of milk, a tiny hole pierced through either side. Nan held it in her hand until she was back in her own room, and then she hid it too, in her corn-shuck mattress.

The fifth time, he lay down beside her. He stroked her braids, which had gone wiry. Such pretty hair, he said, but weren’t she lonesome, no momma to tend them?

And like that.

When her body had become a woman’s, he told her it was word from the Lord that she was ready to know a man, like the Bible called for. But it meant he had to pull away and do his business on her chest or belly or on the wool blanket, which she washed in the laundry come Tuesday. “I’m too old and you too young to raise no youngun,” he said, almost merry.

She never fell asleep there in the cabin, always waited for him to get up and go outside to make water, then went ahead of him back to the house, where she could sleep on the other side of the wall from Elma. Later, on her own mattress in the little room off the kitchen, she tried to settle her eyes on a book, the gin cooling in her veins. She supposed she could have run from him. She could smash a jar and cut him with it. She could take his shotgun from under the mattress and shoot him with it. In her room, when he came for her, she could make a ruckus, waking Elma. On nights he was rough and quick, when he had no kind words for her, or no words at all, she wrote a letter to Elma in her head. Telling.

But what could Elma have done, even with a tongue? What power did she have to stop her father?

It would be worse, Nan decided, if Elma knew. Worse than the shame of being under him was the shame of being under him inside Elma’s head.

She wouldn’t wait for her father to return any longer. She would go to Baltimore and she would find him. She would look up his name in the phone book. Sterling Smith.






Some nights, when Juke came to her room, it was to tell her that she was wanted to deliver a baby. Then her heart pounded with relief. Suddenly she was awake. She hurried to dress and take her mother’s satchel—her birthing bag, she’d called it—and go outside, where another man’s truck or wagon sat in the driveway. Usually it was a wagon, and the driver was colored, and the wagon was headed for the Youngs’ farm or the Fourth Ward or Rocky Bottom, the ragged country beyond the Fourth Ward where Negro croppers tried to make the ground yield. Juke watched from the porch as she rode away, and though she had a long, uncertain night ahead of her, for a few hours she could escape.

“You ain’t no granny woman,” one father told her, sizing her up. “You ain’t no more than a granddaughter.” Most mothers she didn’t meet before the labor, and by the time a father discovered how young she was, it was too late to find someone else. But before long her silence relaxed them, loosened their mouths. Nobody talked as much as a man driving home to his wife in labor in the middle of the night. They talked about cotton and corn, about their families waiting, whether the mother had had an easy pregnancy or a hard one. One man recounted an entire baseball game between the Chattanooga Black Lookouts and the Atlanta Black Crackers, a game narrated to him by his cousin, who had been there.

A mother in labor, though, didn’t like to be talked to. There wasn’t much Nan needed to say that she couldn’t say with her hands. A wave to tell her to push, a different wave to tell her to stop pushing. A hand on the forehead, or a hand in hers, for comfort. Quick, steady hands. “You look just like Ketty,” the mother might say, and the words gave Nan courage. Each time the baby came, Nan loved it. She bathed it and bundled it and held it as long as the mother would allow. The next morning, after the sun had risen, after Nan had been made a cup of coffee, after the brothers and sisters had tumbled naked out of their bed to see the baby, after the afterbirth had been planted in the field to ensure a good crop the next year, the father would drive her home. On the way back, he talked less. His nerves had calmed. He was tired. Maybe he was thinking about next year’s crop, whether there would be enough to feed the new child. They were poor folks, every one of them, log walls lined with newspaper and pasteboard boxes, no clean towels but fertilizer sacks. Sometimes they paid Nan in hen eggs or gourds, once with braided brown bread the mother had made herself, in the early waves of labor, once with a handful of caramel milk-roll candies, seeing how young she was. Once she tasted them, Nan might have liked to be paid in caramel milk rolls every time. (Some folks thought she couldn’t taste at all, but she could taste fine; she could taste with the stub of her tongue what it took another person a whole tongue to taste.) Ketty’d had a tongue for bartering, but even with a tongue Nan might have only accepted what was offered. What right had she to what little a family had? One mother of six offered Nan the baby itself, and Nan had stood there and rocked that baby, a girl, and imagined taking her home, a baby that looked to her like family, better than any doll baby, and then handed the child back to the mother, hoping she would never know how pitiful her parents’ love was.

But there was a kind of peace in those Rocky Bottom cabins, miles from any crossroads store. A body could farm what little land he had a right to, or have as many children as she liked, and be left alone with their seeds and their rags. So many children they were giving them away, so what was one more mouth to feed? It would be easy enough for her to stay. They were her people out in those cabins. She could earn her keep. She’d saved half her earnings from her deliveries, which she squirreled away in the inside pocket of her satchel. If she got two coins, she put one in the satchel and gave Juke the other. If she got four, she gave him two. It wouldn’t be long before she had enough to put together and make something with. Before her mother had died, she’d told her, “You stronger than folks think. You got a strong mind and strong hands. You be ready to go out into the world soon enough.”

But then there was Elma. She was her people too. If she told Elma, maybe Elma would come along with her. The idea made Nan dizzy with hope. Leaving would be easier, less lonely, with Elma. It would be safer. Even grown men, whole families, the ones who were streaming north on the trains to Washington, D.C., to Philadelphia and Harlem, had to leave under cover of night. She heard about them on her calls, folks who were pulling up their roots and planting themselves in the snowy cities where you could walk down the sidewalk without having to step off when a white person came along. You had to be careful. If you were a sharecropper, you had to find a way to get out of town before word got out, or the planter would find a way to make you stay. George Wilson might send his grandson out for you, or the sheriff. Even her father had had to ride a freight train, the story went, when he left for the North.

There was one family that lived in a shotgun shack in the Fourth Ward, just over the tracks. The mother was expecting her third child. Ketty had delivered the first two, and Nan expected to be called for the next, but they never called. After enough months had passed, Nan concluded that the mother had lost the baby, but later she learned from the family next door that they had up and left for a place called Scranton, Pennsylvania, where the mother had people, and the neighbors had been as surprised as Nan. The father, a diabetic who had worked in the picker room at the mill, had complained to Freddie Wilson, the foreman, that his feet grew numb when he was on them for too long, and Freddie had told him that he should be grateful for the work and do it without complaint, and that if he didn’t want to stand he could kneel on the floor and clean it, every square foot of the mill. So the man had waxed the floors, scrubbing on his hands and knees where the white women stood spinning, and though he kept his eyes on the floor, Freddie would say, laughing at himself, “You looking up that girl’s dress?” and whack him with the straw end of his broom. When he was done cleaning the floor, Freddie made him lick it. “Taste clean?” And then, because twelve hours had passed and his next shift was coming on, Freddie sent him back to the picker room. And not long after, before anyone knew to say good-bye, the man had taken his family out of Florence. He sent a letter to the neighbor saying he was working in a printing factory, where the hours were just as long but where at least he could operate his machine sitting down. The neighbor told Nan that the third child was born in a hospital, and they named him Zane.

She wondered what it would be like, leaving. If Elma went along, they’d be in separate cars, Elma in the white car and Nan in the colored, and then she might be no safer than if she’d escaped herself, the two of them traveling along in their separate compartments, as they were now. But she’d be among her own on the train. She’d be safe there. But they were strangers. How would she get by—how would she communicate with the passengers, with the conductor, without Elma? How would she get what she needed when she got to wherever she was going? She could write what she needed on a piece of paper. When she was safely out of the South, she could do that, couldn’t she? The thought made her fingers itch. It was exhilarating and it was terrifying, the thought of making her way in the world without Elma. She would hand over a piece of paper to a stranger, and the stranger would look at her in confusion and disgust. Or the stranger would nod in understanding.

But she was far ahead of herself. She had not even brought herself to write the words to Elma, telling her why she wanted to go. And if she did, maybe Elma wouldn’t believe her. Maybe Elma wouldn’t come with her after all. Why would she come with her? What made her think Elma would choose her over her own blood?

There was a white man who’d owned the land that neighbored the Youngs’ tobacco farm, and he bred mules. When Nan’s mother was young, she’d learned a thing or two from him about the ways of animals, the ways horses and donkeys were the same and the ways they were different. Those mules were the reason, Ketty liked to say, she became a midwife. Nan had long known that mules were beloved in the country for their tough hooves, their good health, their endurance, though they could be stubborn; Juke often said Elma was stubborn as a mule. But it wasn’t stubbornness, Ketty told Nan: a mule had a sense of self-preservation. She made two proud fists and struck her chest with them. When a horse was startled or scared, she said, it would flee; a donkey, on the other hand, would freeze. Mules were like both of their parents, sometimes running, sometimes staying; that was what made folks think they were stubborn. They’re just confused, said Ketty. They couldn’t overcome their own nature.

That was Nan. She was like a mule, she thought, fleeing and freezing. Her father had fled the farm; her mother had stayed. And now Nan’s head was confused, so much did she want to stay and so much did she want to go.

Not long after Juke started bringing her out to the still, she brought the kitchen scissors out to Elma on the back porch. She ran a hand over her head, scalping herself with her palm.

“You want it gone?” Elma asked. “All of it?”

Nan nodded.

“Oh, honey, I ain’t been too good with your plaits, have I?”

And Elma cut it off right there on the porch, Nan sitting on the step below her and closing her eyes to keep from crying. She wanted to cry because of the careful kindness of Elma’s hands, and because she remembered sitting between her mother’s knees like this, the sun on her eyelids. It was the confused longing she sometimes felt when Juke rubbed the stubble of his cheek on hers—she could almost remember her father’s cheek. When Elma was done, she seemed more relieved than Nan. “You look pretty as a statue, honey.”

Juke was not angry, as Nan had expected him to be, nor did he ignore her, as she’d hoped. The next time he led her to the cabin, he was as sweet as he’d ever been. He stroked her little breasts and her belly. He kissed the nape of her bare neck. He talked, as he sometimes did, as though she were the only person in the world with ears, about Jessa, about String, about cotton and corn and the fish in the creek. “I ain’t ever told no one this one,” he said. That night, as she sometimes did, she felt the rush of love in her body, and kept her pleasure a secret from him, and for a while that was enough.






From time to time Nan was asked to perform other acts, ungodly ones, and all she could do was shake her head. She was but a girl, no doctor, no medicine woman, though she knew between the herbs that healed and harmed. “We bring babies into the world,” her mother had taught her. “We don’t bring them out.”

One evening just after nightfall, before Nan had settled into sleep, it was Elma who came for her. Juke must have been brewing at the still. A colored boy was parked in an automobile out front, and a white girl sat in the back. Nan stood under the eye of the moon in the driveway, her bare feet cold on the dirt. “You the midwife?” the boy said. “We come to call on you.” When she didn’t come closer—how did the two of them end up together in such a fine car?—he said, “You can make a baby go away?” Through the open window of the car, he held a ten-dollar bill. The girl sat with her hands crossed over her belly, staring into her lap. Nan could smell the leather of the seat, the freshly printed paper, and her knees trembled. With ten dollars, she wouldn’t need to find another cropper shack to earn her keep on. With ten dollars, she could buy a ticket on a train.

“You hearing me, girl? You as dumb as they say?”

In the road, Jeb Simmons’s truck slowed, the headlights sweeping over them like eyes. The boy squinted in the glare, and when the truck had passed, Nan snatched that ten-dollar bill from his hand and marched back into the house. Maybe he thought she was coming back with her bag. But she shrugged at Elma, went into her room, and buttoned the door, heart slamming. She took volume I of The Book of Knowledge out from under her mattress and pressed the bill between its pages, then closed it and hid it again. If the boy was fool enough to follow her into a white man’s house, she’d ring the dinner bell, and Juke would hear her.

But the boy didn’t follow. What could he do? For all he knew, Juke Jesup was in that house. He didn’t want trouble. She never saw that boy again.

When she finally heard the car drive away, she took out her satchel and counted the money. With the ten-dollar bill, she had eighteen dollars and fifteen cents. That was enough, she thought, for a train ticket to Baltimore, where her father lived. If she was going to run, this was the time. If she was bold enough to steal ten dollars, she’d be bold enough to board a train. Alone—she didn’t need Elma.

First she had to get a ride. The mail truck was known to carry folks into town—Elma did it from time to time when her father needed yeast from the Piggly Wiggly, more than the crossroads store carried—but Mr. Horace, the mailman, would carry no Negro. She could walk, but the walk was long—six miles—and she worried Juke would be after her in his truck, even if she walked along the creek with her feet in the water. It wasn’t safe. Even the dogcatcher had been known to round up loose-foot Negroes, to turn them straight over to the jailhouse, or worse.

But there was a mother of four out in Rocky Bottom, just beyond the Fourth Ward. She was due in August. Her husband had borrowed a truck to drive out to the farm and tell Nan to be ready.

She would be ready. After the baby was delivered she would refuse the ride back to the farm. She’d walk the short distance into town, walk to the train station. At the ticket window she would write down the word “Baltimore.” She would buy a ticket for the colored car. She moved the ten-dollar bill to the pocket in her satchel, along with a dress, a wax sack of white dirt, three caramel milk rolls she’d saved, a sharpened pencil, her mother’s pearl, and volume I of The Book of Knowledge, her favorite, which featured a one-paragraph entry on Baltimore, Maryland, and a picture of the city, the buildings stacked like wedding cakes with pastel-postcard frosting. She had a picture in her mind of walking past those buildings with her father. They were holding hands, taking up the whole of the sidewalk, and then there was snow falling very beautifully and she would be wearing mittens and her father would wrap his scarf around her neck.

She would not pack the wooden cat Juke had carved for her. She would not write a letter to Elma, apologizing for taking the book, for leaving her behind. She would not explain why she was leaving. Why explain now? She was leaving so she would not have to explain.

August came and went. The corn hung heavy in the fields. The baby didn’t come, and didn’t come. And then one morning late in the summer, a new field hand came. Nan stood at the well as she watched Juke open the tar paper shack for him. Inside, the man—or was he a boy?—opened the shutters and hung the rag rug out the window, and with the window framing his face his eyes alighted on hers. It was like spotting a kingbird on a branch outside the kitchen window, that sudden flash of its yellow breast. She knew it would fly off, she knew his eyes would look away, but for a moment the wings beat in her chest. On his head was a woven corn-shuck hat, the silk fibers glowing gold as he leaned his head out into the sun. He lifted the hat, then lifted his hand. She hesitated, then lifted hers in return. And just as she did with a birthing mother, she felt that her hands were all she needed, that they were better than any word.

The baby came, a girl, on a rare rainy night early in September. She took her time but then came quick. In fact, by the time Nan arrived at the house, the nine-year-old daughter and the landlord, who owned the truck, had already delivered her. The mother sat there stunned and smiling, the baby right as rain. It was not what Nan had planned. When the father offered to drive her home, she nodded. She told herself it was because of the trains, which weren’t running at that hour of the night. But she asked him to let her off down the road a ways, so the truck wouldn’t wake the big house, and instead she went to Genus Jackson’s shack.






She had been too young when her father left that shack to know about the proper ways of love, and at times, when Juke talked mean and she felt lonely, she wondered whether her father had loved them at all. Why hadn’t he come back like he said he would? She didn’t know that Sterling and Ketty had spent years trying to conceive her in the bed Genus Jackson slept on, or that they kept at it in that bed even after she slept in it beside them, no louder than a bee pollinating a flower.

She’d known since she was small how a baby came into the world, knew the bloody blossom between a woman’s legs, but it wasn’t until she was nine years old that she learned how they were made. Her mother had always told her that the Lord planted babies in their mothers, just like He grew the cotton and the trees. But one morning Ketty woke her early to take her to a call in Rocky Bottom. The house was down a long dirt road no wider than the wagon, and in the field outside an old man leaned on a double-foot plow behind an older swayback mule. They could hear the mother before they were in the house. Ketty liked to keep Nan close, but she must have sensed trouble—she sent her out to the yard to play with some girls her age. They must have been the woman’s daughters or nieces. Nan did not like to play with the children at the houses she visited because they didn’t understand that she couldn’t speak; their faces were ugly with confusion and then ugly with meanness, and always she was subjected to some inferior role in their game: the maid; the monkey in the middle; once, the dog. But these children were friendly and curious, and the littlest one had legs that weren’t full grown, they were like the legs of a rag doll, and her sisters or cousins had to carry her around and set her down on a rock or a stump. Her name was Ketty Lee, for Ketty, Nan understood, had delivered her. The fact made Nan proud. She spent the day running the acres with those girls, playing hide and go seek and picking flowers along the road and plaiting them in their hair.

When her mother appeared in the yard with her satchel, she did not speak to Nan, and she did not speak to her on the ride home, and spoke to the man driving them only to say that she was sorry. It wasn’t until they were back on the farm that she told Nan both the mother and baby had died. She told Nan this to explain her own silence and to dispense with it. Did Nan know that a mule could be born to a stallion and a jenny? That was what a girl donkey was called, and its baby mule was a hinny. Usually it was the other way around—a jack and a mare, since a little donkey could climb up on a big horse just fine, little men climbed up on big women all the time, because women with wide hips, birthing hips, they could push out a baby with ease, that was what was prized. Ketty kept talking, waving her dishrag; Nan sat at the kitchen table, her head full of questions. Well, at times a big male horse was allowed to climb up behind a little donkey, for that happened as well of course, a woman was wanted no matter her size, big or small, black or white, a man could climb on top of you and have his way, and the stronger the stallion was, the easier way he had. But the jenny? She was smaller than a horse; she did not have an easy way. She kept the baby inside her a month longer than a horse did—a full year—and in that month, the mule grew big. Sometimes, too big to foal.

That was what had happened to the mother in Rocky Bottom. Her hips were too narrow to let the baby’s shoulders through. And the baby had died inside her, and then the mother had died, and there was nothing Ketty could do.

“It was a white man’s child,” she added. “As far as the talk can tell.” Ketty was washing the table now, though it wasn’t dirty. “Could be the Lord didn’t see the child fit for this world.”

Nan thought her mother was scrubbing out her helplessness, her guilty feelings. It was the same look she had when she spoke about Jessa. But it was Nan who felt the guilt fall on her like a bucket over the head. All day long she had played with those girls, laughing, teasing, closing her eyes against the sun while they plaited her hair. It was as though her careless happiness were to blame. She remembered little Ketty Lee, and wondered if her legs had fallen limp from her mother’s womb. Was it something Ketty had done, something that looked like the devil’s work but was really God’s will, like cutting out Nan’s tongue?

She couldn’t ask Ketty the questions she wanted to ask. What was she trying to tell her? Was she warning her about childbirth, or the ways of men, or the ways of white folks? How did a man climb up on a woman? Were Nan’s hips, so narrow, so unlike her mother’s soft ones, wide enough for a baby? Would she be wanted?

And then Genus came to the farm, and he was the answer to the questions she couldn’t ask. Her mother had not explained the feeling that a man climbing upon you induced, did not mention that what she had mistaken for a rush of love with Juke was sometimes accompanied by the feeling in the chest of spotting a kingbird on a branch.

Most nights for two weeks she visited Genus in the tar paper shack, and on those nights, Juke didn’t come for her. Some nights, Genus led her down to the creek. Her secret made her bold, kept her out later, longer. Afterward they lay on their backs side by side on the shore, their skin drying in the night air. She had learned not to eat dirt with most folks around but she scooped up a handful of cool white clay and put it in her mouth. Genus laughed and did the same. He hadn’t eaten dirt before. He said it tasted like rain and she thought yes. He took another handful and smeared it on her cheek. She laughed. He smeared some on her neck and on her belly and he licked it off and she laughed some more.

He talked as much as Juke did, but his words let her breathe; he didn’t talk at her but up into the sky, at the stars. He reckoned he was from Georgia, but down about the Florida line. He reckoned he was eighteen, maybe nineteen. His father had died when he was small. His mother sent him and his sisters to live with an aunt and uncle after that, and he never did know his birthday. Never did learn to read or write. He’d gone to work in one neighbor’s cotton field, then another neighbor’s corn. He’d seen a white man have his way with a molly mule. On a boxcar, he’d seen a black man kill a white man. The white man had kicked the black man between the legs. Later, while the white man slept, the black man sliced his throat with the jagged lid of a tin can, then kicked his body off the train. He’d seen another man dead in a cornfield, this one black. He’d worked in a canning factory for a time, but standing still was worse than moving on his feet. He needed the fresh air, the sun on his neck. He had a rotten gut. It was inclined to kill him someday, he said. Pain like the devil, day and night, though he’d never seen a doctor. He tapped a spot under his left nipple. Nan put her hand there, lay her fingers in the grooves between his ribs, and under her thumb she could feel the faint rumble of his heartbeat. He reached across her and cupped her head behind her ear, his thumb tracing the hair at her temple, and she remembered the girls from Rocky Bottom, the joy she had felt with the sun and their hands in her hair, and again came the stab of shame for her own happiness. “Maybe it ain’t my gut,” he said. “Maybe I got a rotten heart.” He said Nan was the only thing that made the pain pass for a time. Before Nan, he’d never been with a woman. “Ain’t never told that to no soul,” he said, his hand over hers, hers over his ribs. “Suppose you fine at keeping secrets.”

Would she have told him about Juke if she could? Would she explain why she was expected at the big house, why, when Genus said, “Less stay out like this all night,” she had to slip her hand out from under his and leave him? Part of her heart wanted him to know, of course. So he could save her. So he could take her away. But the other part was glad she didn’t have to. She didn’t want him to know that she was spoiled, that Juke had fouled her already. She wanted to believe, as Genus did, that she belonged to him as much as he did to her.

The next night that Juke came for her, he came early, when Nan was still in her bed. She followed him out to the still. Afterward, while he made water in the woods, she took a pint of gin from the shelf above the mattress, hid it under her nightdress, and waddled back to the big house with the jar between her thighs. She hid it under the mattress, beside the book. The following night, she brought it to Genus’s cabin.

“You take this from the boss?” he whispered.

She put a finger to his lips.

“You wanting to have us a fine time?” It was dark in the cabin, but she could feel the smile in his voice.

She shook her head. She wouldn’t be having any. She was soured on the taste. She tapped the spot under his heart, the rotten part. She held the jar there. He lowered his head and nodded. He understood. It was to help with the pain. He said, “I’m much obliged to you.”






On the night the seed was planted, Juke was waiting for her on her mattress in the pantry when she returned from the creek. Her nightdress clung to her wet skin and her hair was pearled with water.

She took a step back into the breezeway. Her first fear was the gin—had he noticed it was missing, one jar among so many jars? Or the book—had he discovered it under the mattress? Then she feared Elma would hear. Or did she want her to hear? She could have walked across the breezeway and slipped into bed beside Elma, and then everything would have been different. He would have left her alone, gone back to his bed. But instead she stepped into her own little room, thinking she could quiet him, thinking she knew how to quiet him. She closed the pantry door softly behind her. His face was dead as a stone, and she knew then that he knew. He was drinking, the tumbler nearly empty.

“Where you been, girl?”

The tongue is the worst curse, her mother had told her. Ketty’s grandmother had been beaten by her master for running from his bed, but worse? Worse was the shame of lying. Worse was having to look at his white face and say, “I like it” and “I love you.” There was dignity in silence, Ketty said, in keeping your truth inside.

“Cat got your tongue, kitty cat?” He kept his voice low. He sat up in her bed, placed the tumbler on the floor, and wrapped his hand around her thigh. “You been swimming at this hour?”

She mimed washing, rubbing soap through her hair.

“Washing?” He yanked up her nightdress, plunged his face between her legs, and sniffed. “You ain’t washed good enough.” Then he yanked her down to the bed, rolled her onto her back, and pinned her against the wall. “I seen you knock on that nigger’s door,” he whispered. His breath was flaming with drink. “You think y’all are here to skinny-dip? That how you repay me for the food on your plate? The roof over your head?”

Nan shook her head.

“You ain’t live in that slave shack no more. You ain’t no slave. You live in my house now. You know how many folks’d like to sleep in this here big house? That how you repay me, run back to that shack?” He was slurring. “Don’t let me see you with him again. You hearing me? I see you within ten feet of that door, I’ll kill him dead.”

She might have stroked his cheek to calm him, she might have kissed him, but he was holding her down, one arm to the bed, one arm to the wall. She wished her nipples didn’t show through her wet nightdress. She wished her rabbit heart weren’t beating so quickly. Surely he could feel it in her wrists. You could take away the tongue, she thought, you could put out a person’s eyes, but still the pulse betrayed your fear.

Across the breezeway, through one board-and-batten wall and then another—thick walls built by George Wilson and two hired Negroes whose names he did not know and painted some years ago a milky blue, now fading—Elma sat up in her bed. She had been sleeping, or had been trying to. She had been trying to scare away the image of Nan and Genus in the creek, but every time she closed her eyes, it floated into her mind again like a ghost. When she thought she heard a thump against the kitchen wall, she thought it must be Nan returning from the creek, and then when she heard another, she thought it must be Genus in there with her, and though it was beyond her belief—that Nan and Genus would be so bold in her father’s house—it was not beyond her imagination. Once the idea was in her head, it wouldn’t turn her loose. She sat up in bed, remembering suddenly the night a few weeks back when a man had come to the house looking for Nan to deliver a baby. Elma had looked all around the house and the yard, but she couldn’t find her. The man had left in a huff and a panic. And though Nan had been at the still with Juke, it seemed clear to Elma now that she’d been with Genus, and humiliation knocked her flat on her back. She stuffed her pillow over her face, to drown out the noise and to muffle the sound of her own tears.

What was happening in Nan’s room was beyond Elma’s imagination. She would have sooner imagined that the noises came from the wall itself, the house coming to life, growing a mouth, giving voice to its ghosts. That was the way Nan felt suddenly—that the walls that had protected her had now betrayed her with their thickness, not keeping her safe but trapping her. This was not her home. Home was the tar paper shack Genus Jackson lived in, before he lived there, before he slept in the bed she used to share with her mother. She thought herself back there now, walked herself from the cabin down to the shack. She wished herself all the way back, the taste of tobacco and clay on her mother’s lips, the smell of her father’s pipe, the warmth of the grits cooking on the woodstove in the morning. She would even wish away Genus, though her heart seized like a fist when she thought of his name—Genus, who was settling into that bed now, oblivious as Elma. She wished he’d never set foot on the farm.

There was no wool blanket. It was back in the cabin. Here in her room, Juke did not pull away. She could feel his seed seeping into her, thick as egg yolk. Through the mattress, she could feel the shape of The Book of Knowledge under her back. She kept her eyes on the pantry shelves beyond him, the okra she’d pickled, the sorghum syrup, the cornmeal, the salt.

Afterward, he cried. “Don’t do me like that again, honey,” he said. “Don’t make me do that again.” There was no uglier sight in the world, Nan thought, than a naked white man crying.




FIVE (#ulink_b069878c-3674-5fac-8195-fda4d7bb1e46)







BEFORE SHE GOT IN THE FAMILY WAY, ELMA HAD BEEN SET ON going to the teacher’s college in Statesboro. It was where two girls from her class said they were going. Elma had the grades. She just didn’t have the money. The fall of her last year in school, she tried to get work at the Piggly Wiggly, at the theater, at the crossroads store. She even put up a notice on the bulletin board at church: ELMA JESUP. MOTHER’S HELPER AND HOUSEGIRL. CLEANING. COOKING. SEWING. Nobody hired her. Every week she checked the board to be sure the note was still there. Then one Sunday, on that same bulletin board, another notice caught her eye: the Florence chapter of the Georgia Woman’s Christian Temperance Union was offering a college scholarship to “a young lady of good character.”

Elma liked school. She just didn’t like the people there. Boys had always liked her because they liked her daddy’s liquor. They thought they might come out to the farm and get into his stash and get under her dress. They called her Red. Clever! They said, “You wanna go have a pull from my bottle, Red?” They pawed her braids. “You watch them town boys,” her father told her. Freddie was the only one he didn’t mind. The girls weren’t particular about her because the boys were, and because they thought she was white trash and a drunk, and because already they were following their mothers to the WCTU meetings at the Hotel Chanticleer. In fact Elma had never had a drink—“Ain’t for womenfolk,” her daddy said—and that was fine by her, she didn’t like the way it smelled on a man’s breath and made a man loose and rough and mean.

There was no reason, she thought, she shouldn’t have that scholarship. She’d get out of Florence and become a schoolteacher, and if it meant joining the WCTU, she’d do it. She told her father the dollar was for her graduation cap and gown, and though he grumbled about it, and had to collect it in coins, he gave it to her. She asked Josie Byrd if she could go with her to a meeting after school, and Josie Byrd said certainly, it would be grand, and loaned her a felt hat that looked like a bathing cap. Only later did Elma discover that for every new member you brought in, your name was entered in a raffle for a year’s supply of Octagon toilet soap.

The women at the Hotel Chanticleer all wore rhinestone broaches and white ribbons and strands of evening pearls down to their navels. They poured Elma tea and piled her plate with shortbread cookies and said, “How do you do?” She knew Tabitha Quick and Carlotta Rawls and of course she knew Parthenia Wilson, she had opened her legs to Parthenia Wilson’s grandson in the bed of his truck the day before, but by the time she was shaking Mary Minrath’s hand, she understood they were pretending they didn’t know her, that they were forgetting that she was Juke Jesup’s daughter. They were meeting her for the first time. And maybe they were! Maybe she would be reborn, fatherless, in the WCTU! Elma understood this was because they wanted her dollar, and they wanted her to sign, at the end of the meeting, their abstinence pledge. And yet she let them court her. She let them compliment the felt hat that wasn’t hers. She told them what soap she washed her hair with and let them stroke it. She answered questions about her favorite subject in school, her favorite church hymn, her favorite meal to make for supper. Is this what they did in women’s clubs? Eventually they began to speak in a code. They referred to each other as “Comrade” and “Sister”; they spoke with reverence of their “Foremothers”; they spoke with disappointment of “unfortunate girls.” They spoke about Hoover (well, the white-ribboners believed in Hoover) and about “rum and ruin” and “the flag of booze.” They spoke with growing concern about how they might bring Christ to the country, to the Negroes and halvers, the heathens and drunkards. Tabitha Quick said Georgia was in such a state of debauchery that if God didn’t intervene, “Black heels will be on white necks.”

Elma didn’t understand. She thought of black necks. But this was before the lynchings had started up again. “White necks?” she whispered to Josie.

Josie tried to shush her. Elma did not seem to be the only woman ruffled by the phrase. Josie whispered back, “They mean the Negroes will take over town. The ones at the saloon.”

“Young’s, I believe it’s called,” said Tabitha Quick.

“Not the Robert Youngs,” someone clarified.

“They belong in the county camp,” said another.

“Let’s not pretend it’s just the blacks. White heels on white necks too.”

“Perhaps one white heel in particular,” said Mary Minrath under her breath.

“Perhaps one redneck in particular,” said another woman, more loudly.

“Might as well be a black heel,” said Mary Minrath.

“Enough,” Tabitha Quick said, standing up to pour more tea.

“She could be useful,” said Mary Minrath, and only then did Elma understand they were talking about her, and about her father.

Parthenia Wilson was quiet. She fanned herself with her newspaper. It was her silence that infuriated Elma. Elma shat in the same privy Parthenia Wilson had once shat in. She didn’t want to be reinvented by her; she wanted, even then, to be recognized.

Someone said, “We don’t mean to make you feel unwelcome, honey.”

Another said, “We couldn’t be more pleased to have you.”

Elma put down her tea. She didn’t know what to say. Was she to defend her father? What was it they hated about him? Was it just that he was a bootlegger? Or that he was friendly with Negroes?

She thought of the way her father protected the still. She was not to visit it. She did not care to visit it, she had no fascination with it, only a fear of it and a fear that it would be taken away. Her fear was her father’s, that the still might be destroyed and him with it. Sometimes when a car came for Nan in the middle of the night and he was one kind of drunk, he’d come running from the cabin with his shotgun, mumbling about “guvment men.” For all her shame about her father’s work, she knew that, without it, they’d be as poor as any of the croppers on the Straight, as poor even as the Negroes in Rocky Bottom.

She didn’t want to betray her father. But she wanted that scholarship.

She looked around the hotel lobby, the circle of women with their tea saucers in their laps, all of them waiting for her to speak. They were not looking at her like she was a young lady of good character. They were looking at her like she was an unfortunate girl. The scholarship, she knew, was not hers. She did not know that it had already been promised to Josie Byrd.

Parthenia Wilson had said nothing, but she was the target Elma settled on. “Takes more than one white neck to bootleg,” Elma said. “Takes a rich white neck, from what I hear.”

Parthenia Wilson paused her fanning for a moment.

Elma looked at her and said, “Your grandson don’t care what color neck I got. He just cares about necking.”

Parthenia Wilson opened the newspaper she was holding and appeared to begin to read it. She did not remove the newspaper from in front of her face for the rest of the meeting.

Elma might have been excused if it had not been considered impolite. Besides, they wanted her dollar. She didn’t give it to them. She didn’t sign the abstinence pledge. They spent the rest of the meeting organizing a meal train for Bette Hazleton, who was suffering from pleurisy.

After the meeting, Josie Byrd’s mother carried her back to the farm in their Ford. She saw Mrs. Byrd scanning the farm for the cabin, her eyes moving right past the stand of pines along the road. Juke asked her where she’d been, and she told him. She couldn’t lie. She gave him back his coins. “It’s low, Daddy,” she said. “Folks look on us like we’re low.” She waited for the whip of his temper, but he was the right kind of drunk—merry—and he said, “That still is the reason you ain’t eating hog hearts.”

So Elma did not become a schoolteacher. She did not go to the teacher’s college in Statesboro because she didn’t have the money and because already, sitting in the lobby of the Hotel Chanticleer, she was pregnant. Her father pulled her out of school that winter. Soon her belly would start to grow. Her father kept her home from town, from church, made sure she couldn’t be seen from the road. Folks in town went up in arms about a baby born without a ring on the momma’s finger. Didn’t matter if the ring was made of corn silk, long as it was a ring. It had happened to a girl at the mill last year and the other spinners had made sure George Wilson found out. He sent her back to Marietta with her baby on the train she’d come in on. Elma thought that girl was lucky, to be sent away from all those judging eyes. She had come back six months later with a baby and a husband. No telling if the husband was the father of the baby, but that hardly mattered.

Freddie had said he was saving for a ring, but Freddie had all the money he needed. He stopped coming around the farm so much, and then he stopped coming around at all. Before she stopped going to church, before she was stuck on the farm, folks told Elma he was laying out all night in the mill village, where he was sometimes seen on a porch with this girl or in his truck with that one, having a big time. She wondered if it was what she’d said to Parthenia Wilson in the Hotel Chanticleer, or if Freddie would have dropped her anyway, if his grandmother’s disapproval was a handy excuse. She couldn’t let it go; she wrote him a letter. Is it your grandmother who don’t want you tied down? she asked. And if she don’t want you tied down, is it tied down at all, or tied down to me? She didn’t expect a response, was disappointed but not surprised when day after day the postman brought none. He had probably never gotten the letter, she told herself. His grandmother had surely intercepted it.

When her father was yet another kind of drunk—very drunk, tired, weepy—he’d tell Elma her mother would be proud she’d gotten so far in school, even if she didn’t finish. Elma’s mother, Jessa, hadn’t gotten past the fifth grade before she came to town to work in the mill, and Juke hadn’t gone at all, had been sent into the field at six years old with a ham biscuit, a bull-tongue plow, and a john mule named Lefty. After the babies came, he told Elma that her mother would be proud she was such a good momma herself, and though Elma mostly wore a serious face, like a white stone mask, some color rose high in her cheeks then. Jessa had lost her chance to be a mother, and when Juke watched Elma soothe a crying baby on her shoulder, he looked as pleased and loving and haunted as if he were watching his dead wife herself. And though the baby would be calm by then, he would cross the room and take it in his own arms, rocking it, humming a song only it could hear, saying, “Come on and give Granddaddy some sugar,” saying, “Come on and hug my neck.” Sometimes he came in from the field and went straight for Wilson’s crib, lifting him up to study his face.

At times, Elma missed the notion of a husband. When she was lying awake at night, nursing a baby, she thought it would be nice if there were a grown body sleeping next to her, if she could reach over and touch a man’s bare back. But it wasn’t Freddie she wanted there. Just because her pride was hurt didn’t mean she was sad he was gone. Sometimes it was Genus’s long, slim back she imagined, when she couldn’t keep the picture from her mind, but then she saw him disappear into the woods in his union suit, the same suit he was hanged in, and then her mind reared up and trotted away like a horse with a snake on its heels.






One morning in that blazing and interminable month of August, when Elma arrived with her wagon at the crossroads store, a man she didn’t recognize offered to help her carry the eggs inside. No one else was about—not Jeb Simmons nor his son Drink, no one playing checkers on the porch. Or had she seen the man before? The sun was in her eyes. She could manage fine, thank you, but he wouldn’t hear of it. She held the door open for him while he carried in the crate, placing it on the shop counter, behind which Mud Turner eyed her, cigarette hanging from his mouth.

Overhead, a ceiling fan spun. Elma stood with the man just inside the door. “Must be nice to step off the farm,” he said to her, and that was when she placed him—the sharp-edged suit, the neat mustache. He took off his hat and introduced himself: Q. L. Boothby, the editor of the Testament. He’d driven down from Macon that morning. Wasn’t it a fine morning? But already so hot. “A good morning for a Coca-Cola, Miss Jesup. What do you say?”

Behind the counter, Mud raised an eyebrow. The last time Elma had had a soda was with Freddie, at Pearsall’s drugstore in Florence. Winter, before she was showing, before he’d stopped calling on her. They’d just seen Anna Christie at the theater next door, Elma’s first talkie, and her heart was still pounding with the thrill. Ordering her soda, she tried to imitate Greta Garbo’s voice—“Gimme a vhiskey, ginger ale on the side. And don’t be stingy, baby.” Freddie laughed. Excepting the colored one, there were no saloons to order a drink from in Florence, just the cotton mill, where it was mostly the men who drank from mason jars on their porches. Elma’s father wouldn’t let her set foot in the mill village, but here she was, out on the town with her fiancé, Freddie Wilson, whose family owned the biggest business in town, the whole glittering evening, her whole life, before her, and who cared how Freddie got his money, it was the way her father got his money too, and it was buying her a movie and a soda. The bubbles fizzed in her belly. Or was that her baby, kicking already?

Elma tasted that ginger ale now, cool and sweet, the tinkle of the ice cubes as she stirred them with her straw. She looked at Q. L. Boothby, his hat still in his hands. He was as finely dressed a man as she had seen, his black Oxfords shiny as a piano, a blood red handkerchief flaming from his breast pocket.

She said, “Sir, you don’t scare off easy, do you?”

He said, “I won’t take much of your time.”

From Mud he bought two bottles of Coca-Cola and carried them to the checkers table on the porch. Elma might have learned her lesson about daydreaming, but for a moment she imagined that they were on a date. That they were somewhere else and she was someone else and the man across from her was her fiancé. She thought a fiancé might be better than a husband. The promise of a mate, without the burden of one. The beginning without the end.

“How are the babies?” Mr. Boothby asked.

Elma twisted the cap off her Coke and watched its breath escape from the bottle. She’d had no more sleep than a mule the night before. Winna Jean had been up crying half the night, and she’d only sleep at Elma’s breast, with Elma propped straight up in bed. And Wilson had a case of the runs so bad that Nan had to cut more diapers out of an old sack apron and double them up, and slather lard on his poor red behind. It was best that Elma should be so tired, that she should sleepwalk through those nights. Then there wasn’t enough sleep between them to worry about which baby which of them cared for, or whether Elma should feel grateful or guilty or bitter that there were two of them to care for the babies, and two babies instead of one. Elma said, “The babies are fine.”

“Appears to me you must be plumb tired of all the attention those babies bring. Sweet as they are.”

Elma took a cautious sip of her soda. Yes, it did taste just as sweet as Heaven. He was warming her up, breaking her down, but it did feel good to sit on a porch and talk to a stranger. “I only want to keep them safe. All types of people coming in, it agg’avates em.”

Mr. Boothby held up his hands, as if to show they were empty. “I understand, I understand. I’ve got children of my own.”

Here Elma’s fantasy paled a little. Now she pictured Mrs. Boothby. Did she have an electric kitchen up in Macon, with a Frigidaire and an electric stove?

“I have no interest in your babies, Miss Jesup, miraculous or not. I’m a newspaperman. We call our publication the Testament, and we do pride ourselves on seeking the truth.” Mr. Boothby lowered his voice when he said, “It’s the Negro Mr. Jackson I have an interest in.”

Elma folded her hands in her lap to hide their shaking. Bill Cousins passed by on his way into the store, tipping his hat and saying, “Morning,” his eyes taking them in. Elma felt her heart speed up. No one, of course, would believe Mr. Boothby was a friendly acquaintance, let alone a suitor, but if Bill Cousins recognized the man in the suit, he didn’t say so. If he did, he might incite a mob against Elma herself. She might be burned at the stake for talking to a big-city reporter, even if they didn’t know his politics. There were things no one wanted known by the outside, and no one knew that better than Elma. When the door had closed behind Bill, she said, “Well, I’m sorry to tell you, Mr. Boothby, but the Negro Mr. Jackson died a few weeks back. Figure you would have read about it in that paper of yours.”

Mr. Boothby smiled. “You don’t say. How did he die?”

“I didn’t see it myself.”

“How did your father say he died?”

Elma paused. “He was swung up.”

“So your father was there.”

“Didn’t have to be there. There was a picture in your paper with the rope hanging from the gourd tree. It’s all accounted for.”

“And who is responsible for hanging the man? What do the accounts say?”

“Sir, don’t you have a Roosevelt to cover?”

Mr. Boothby cocked his head. “Pardon?”

“Your friend up in Warm Springs. The one you’re building the polio hospital with. Sounds awful important. It’s about alls your paper is like to talk about.”

Mr. Boothby laughed. “Well, you do keep up with the Testament, don’t you? I’m mighty pleased.”

Elma sipped her soda, then guzzled it. She could feel her defense dissolving, and she allowed herself not to care. Talking about it was better than not talking about it—it was the not talking about it, the silence her father had enforced, that was so heavy. “Freddie Wilson swung him up. He even traded shoes with him. But he ain’t my fiancé no more. I don’t know where he is, and I don’t care to know. He ain’t worth a milk bucket under a bull.”

Mr. Boothby smiled. He withdrew a pipe from a pocket inside his jacket and lit it. He had no notebook, no pen. “That’s what the autopsy confirmed. I know the man who performed it. I can attest to its accuracy. It would be one thing if the man were shot dead first, then hanged without protest. What I can’t seem to understand, but which everyone else in the state of Georgia seems to understand just fine, is how one man managed to hang another live man all by himself.”

Elma was beginning to sweat. Even in the shade of the porch, the morning heat crept into her collar, under the braid pinned to the nape of her neck. Her mind stuck on the phrase from the paper, “Cervical spine.” She said, “Freddie, he had a gun. A rifle. Maybe he trained it on him.” She shrugged. “Like I say, I didn’t see it.”

“Appears to me, it’s hard to hang a man while holding a rifle to his head. If it were me, I’d put up a fight. Give him a kick with my alligator boots. What’s more likely is there were others who helped Freddie. Maybe many others.”

If Elma stepped down from the porch and looked over her right shoulder, she could see her father’s cotton coming up. No flowers yet—just green. She could stand up and walk home. If she called out, her father might even hear her voice.

“What I’m saying,” Mr. Boothby went on, “is that your fiancé may be taking the fall for his associates.”

“Associates? All Freddie associated with were drunks.”

“He worked for your father, Freddie did.”

“He was foreman at the mill. Freddie said farmwork was for coloreds. He was coming up under his grandfather.” That was all Freddie talked about, taking over the mill when his grandfather retired. This is all fixing to be ours, he’d say, parked on the hill overlooking the mill village.

“I’m not talking about farmwork,” said Mr. Boothby. “Or millwork, for that matter.”

Elma blinked out at the road. She wondered if Mr. Boothby had ever had a drink in his life, and if such a man was worthy of pity or admiration. A pickup passed, a green Chevy like Freddie’s, and for a moment she held her breath. Then she saw it had Alabama plates. “I don’t know about Macon,” she said, “but in Cotton County, that’s about the only kind of work we do.”

“Oh, I know about your industries here. What do you know about George Wilson? He owns the cotton and the cotton mill, does he? And the mill isn’t all he runs, what I hear. How’s he find time for it all, is what I wonder.”

“He’s got brothers up near Atlanta who help with the business. And Freddie helps him. Helped him.”

“With what part?”

“I wouldn’t know. I don’t spend much time at the mill. The village is full of riffraff.”

“Was Freddie part of the riffraff?”

Elma snorted a soda bubble. “Yes, sir.”

“How so?”

“He liked to carry on. Tear his truck around the village. Get into fistfights. Once he got shinnied up and shot the headlights out of his own grandfather’s Ford, and blamed it on some poor fool. Went and got him fired quick as you can say Wilson. He was the king of riffraff. He liked to call himself King Cotton, fancied himself royalty, fixing to take on the family business. But he couldn’t even take on a wife and child.”

“Why not?”

“Don’t ask me! Ask him! He had nine months to put his pants on, same as any daddy. His family’s got enough houses to put us in, that’s for sure. All we’d need was one.” Six months along, her father had carried her over to the Wilsons’ house, where Freddie had been raised up by his grandparents in his father’s old bedroom. Elma’s father had made her wait on the porch in front of the parlor window, her full figure framed like a picture. She saw Mr. Wilson, then his wife, heard Freddie’s voice deep within the house, and then the curtain was drawn and a colored girl brought her a lemonade, sour and full of seeds. After five minutes her father came through the door, jammed his cap on his head, and got in the truck. He didn’t say a word. By the time they turned onto the road, Elma knew that Freddie would not be marrying her. Her baby would not have a Christmas stocking on the Wilsons’ mantel.

She had given up on a reply from Freddie, but there it was in the mailbox a few days later, her name in his loopy, second-grade cursive: Dear Elma. It was both, he admitted: his grandmother didn’t want him tied down, and didn’t want him tied down to her. She don’t care for country people, was the way he put it, and she was almost grateful for his gentleness. He apologized not for dropping her but that her father had been sent away from the house. I did want to marry you, he wrote. That was all, and at least there was that.

“Least my own father took up for the babies,” she told Mr. Boothby. “Gave them a roof. I’d rather be in his house than any of those linthead shacks at the mill.” Of course her father’s house too was owned by the Wilsons, the house and the fields and the food they put in their bellies. They owned their shit and the outhouse they shit in. And a Wilson did not marry his property. He would just as soon marry a Negro in a cabin. That afternoon when her father had driven her to their house, the Wilsons didn’t yet know Winnafred, didn’t yet know that she was said to tumble around with a Negro for the nine dark months inside Elma’s belly. But even before she was born, they had disowned her.

Mr. Boothby placed his pipe on the table between them. “I’m mighty sorry for the trouble you’ve been through.”

“I’m not the one in trouble. Now it’s Freddie. What’s he the king of now?”

“Well, I’d ask him if the law could find him. And his grandfather isn’t keen to talk to the papers. Nor none of the folks at the mill.”

“Can’t blame him entirely. Both his parents died when he was a tot. His daddy was a war hero. Freddie was always toting that shotgun around like a soldier.”

“And his mother?”

Elma told about how after his daddy died she went crazy with sadness and was sent to the lunatic asylum in Milledgeville. When she was little and acted up, her father would tell her, “Straighten out, or I’ll send you to Milledgeville.”

“The sanitarium,” Mr. Boothby clarified.

“She died of tuberculosis.” Freddie’d been ten years old and hardly knew his mother, had visited her only a handful of times. Elma thought his grandmother had made Freddie frightened of her. Parthenia Wilson had warned String not to marry a girl from the shop floor. It was one thing to play around under their skirts, another to set up house with them. All those hours standing at their machines made their minds weak, she said. She’d not give Freddie the same blessing. It was she who’d sent String’s widow away.

Mr. Boothby shook his head. “Pitiful place,” he muttered. He looked as though he was going to push further, then stopped. He drained his Coca-Cola and stood. Elma was filled with a funny combination of relief and regret. It was the feeling she had after getting a crying baby to sleep—even though she finally had some peace, she always felt a little lonesome.

“I have just one more question.” Mr. Boothby lowered his voice, looking down at Elma through the round lenses of his glasses. “You’ll have to excuse my directness. I don’t ask out of prurient curiosity, mind you. I ask because I’m after the truth. Miss Jesup, did that Negro do what they say he did?”

An automobile passed. Elma watched the dust rise behind it and then settle, listened to the rumble of the engine disappear. She would not answer. She would not nod.

“If he did, your fiancé might be handed a short sentence. Knowing the way they uphold the law in this state, he might even go free. I just want to see the proper people held accountable.”

Mr. Boothby stepped away from the table, and then Elma felt his shadow at her side, and his hand on her shoulder. “God bless you,” he said, and then his hand was gone, and then his shadow was gone. Elma sat at the table for a few minutes, then left her half-finished soda and led her wagon home, forgetting to bring a sack of flour in exchange for the eggs.






The next day, there was no mention of Genus Jackson or the twins in the Testament. But there was mention, in the three weeks that followed, of four more lynchings in Georgia. On September 8, a Negro accused of killing the chief of police was shot in his bullpen at the McIntosh County jail. The prisoner’s blood was said to drip through into a white woman’s cell below. On September 25 in Thomas County, a Negro accused of strangling a nine-year-old white girl on the roadside was seized by a mob at the county stockade, filled with bullets, and dragged behind a car from Magnolia Park to the courthouse. Some said the man had once raped a Negro woman, though his only convicted crime in the county was theft and concealment of stolen goods, for painting a black mule white. Three days later, in the same county, a Negro who had testified in court against two white men accused of raping a Negro woman was killed by four white men who came to his door. The men had been disguised by the women in their family with makeup and dark glasses. And on October 1, up in the Piedmont, another Negro accused of killing another chief of police was taken from his cell at the Bartow County jail, brought to the county fairgrounds, and swung up by the neck from an electric-light pole. The Negro’s brother, also held in the jail, hadn’t heard the mob come in the middle of the night, and didn’t learn of his death until the next morning, when his brother’s shoes were brought to his cell. After the last one—six lynchings, not counting Genus—Q. L. Boothby wrote in an editorial that an epidemic had returned. “The devil has settled in Georgia, and if we don’t exorcise him, I fear he’s here to stay.”

All of these things were in the paper, but Elma didn’t read them. She was forbidden from going back to the crossroads store. The day after she sat with Q. L. Boothby, when Juke stopped at the store for his chewing tobacco, Mud Turner wasted no time telling him about the Macon reporter. From then on, her father delivered the eggs instead.

She didn’t know that, in the years that followed, when folks said, with admiration for a fellow’s cleverness, “He could paint a black mule white,” they were referring to a Negro dragged through the streets behind an automobile, not three months after Genus Jackson was dragged down the Twelve-Mile Straight.

After she returned from the crossroads store, exhausted, overheated, Elma found both babies napping. She lay down on her bed in her clothes, didn’t even take off her shoes, and with the crook of her arm laid over her eyes, fell into sleep. She dreamt of Freddie’s truck, a row of tin cans tied to the back of it after their wedding, the two of them driving down the Twelve-Mile Straight, man and wife, and then tied to the truck was Genus, and the cans and his body were dragged down the road together, tangled, clanging, the sound the sound of her wickedness, for there was Elma in the passenger seat.

She shot up in bed, fist to her heart. The clanging went on. Was she still sleeping? She stood and walked to the window, following the sound, and as she crossed the room she allowed herself to hope that she had dreamt it all, that none of it was real.

No—she was awake. It was the gourds in the wind, rattling like skulls.




SIX (#ulink_adef77fa-e9c2-56b2-be96-401b1def62cd)







GEORGIA WAS BORN DRY,” THE WHITE-RIBBONERS LIKED TO say. “The pity of it is, she did not stay that way.” The colony of England’s poor and persecuted, every schoolchild knew well, was the first state to try Prohibition. It lasted only seven years. By the time it came around again, in 1908, most of the counties, including Cotton, had already voted themselves dry, but that fact didn’t stop Reverend Quick’s wife, the choral director and a prominent member of the Florence chapter of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, from singing every Sunday, to the tune of “Dixie”:

From Georgia Land so fair and bright

King Alcohol has taken flight,

Praise the Lord! Praise the Lord!

Praise the Lord! Georgia Land!

Juke Jesup had before then become well acquainted with King Alcohol. He was eleven and still called John when he took his first sip of moonshine under the railroad trestle behind the cotton mill, then spit it in the river. “Taste like turpentine,” he said, but he went back the next afternoon and took another sip and didn’t spit it out. String Wilson’s older cousins, who visited each summer from the piney woods of north Georgia, had built a crude still in a shed behind the mill. Down by the railroad, they liked to get String and Juke drunk, then spin them in circles and watch them fall to the ground, laughing. Once String landed in the fire pit and nearly burned his left leg off. Juke had to drag him into the river. Another time, the cousins dared String to cross the mill dam and he slipped and fell twelve feet into the water and nearly smashed his head like a watermelon on the rocks below. Then Juke had to drag him out of the river. String was always getting into trouble. It wasn’t his fault; he was too good-natured, too game, too skinny—that was why he was called String. He liked to let folks spin him around. He grew up helping his father in the mill, then, like Juke, married a spinner and had himself a baby. When the war started he got it in his mind to go across the waters and fight, and he came back to Georgia in a coffin made of such fine mahogany that Juke couldn’t help but run his hands over it. String did love to whittle a piece of wood.

It was the same year the boll weevil came to Cotton County. No one knew where it came from. For all Juke knew it had stowed away in String’s coffin and traveled all the way from Europe. Juke remembered the first time he’d seen one, on the pink petal of a cotton flower, common as a cockroach, but with a snout as long as its legs. He’d plucked it off and crushed it between his fingers. That was May. By June, the field was full of them, the grubs eating through the bolls the moment they hatched. In September, String’s father, George Wilson, drove his automobile out to the farm. He snapped a boll of cotton and cupped it in his palm, studying the pod of seeds that never grew. “It ain’t your fault, honey,” George said. “It ain’t no one’s fault.” They stood out there until the sun went down, Juke in his straw hat, George in his white suit and bowler, looking over the ruined field. That year they lost nearly all the crop.

After her son died, Parthenia Wilson never missed a day of church; her husband never went back. String’s widow threw herself off the mill dam and broke her leg and smashed up her face and was sent to the sanitarium, and Freddie, seven years old, moved into the mill house with his grandparents. The old copper still on the river rusted over, until Juke, coming by each evening to sit with George, remembering what String’s cousins had taught him, got it running again. In the upstairs office of the cotton mill, George and Juke drank peach brandy, talking about String and about the farm where, as boys, the two had played. Juke said, “You weren’t too keen on me painting him with tar,” and George laughed and said he didn’t remember. “You ain’t remember? You said he weren’t to play with me no more.” George waved his hand. Back then, he said, the world was no bigger than the farm. On a farm, you played with who was there. On the phonograph, George played the same song, dragging the needle back to the beginning as soon as it ended. They’ll never want to see a rake or plow, and who the deuce can parleyvous a cow? How ya gonna keep ’em down on the farm after they’ve seen Paree?

George’s son was dead; Juke’s wife and his father, a sharecropper on the Wilsons’ land long before Juke was born, were dead too. Liquor had a way of making tender feelings duller and sharper at the same time. After a long day plowing, a farmer liked to enjoy a whiskey as much as anyone. Those who were vets liked gin. They’d gotten a taste for it in Europe. George and Juke got a taste for it too. George taught Juke to care more about the liquid in his glass than how fast it got him pissed, and Juke could play fancy as George Wilson. He imagined String in a bar in France, where the gin flowed freely, a pretty girl on the bar stool next to him. For the mash he tried barley, then red wheat, then rye, alternating the cover crops winter after winter; he planted a grove of juniper trees. In the west hundred, which had been cotton, he planted peanuts and corn and the sorghum cane that went into the gin. “Diversify, son,” said George. “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. That’s the key to staying ahead of nature.” In with the berries Juke tried everything he could find on the farm—rabbit tobacco, blackberries, tea leaves, pecan paper shells, then on one inspired summer morning settled on the silky white petals of a cotton flower. He brought a jar from that batch to George and George smacked his lips like an English lord and said, “By God, it tastes clean as a cotton field.” The cotton might have closed its fists to Juke but he’d take of it what he could. That was the kind of goddamn ingenuity only a poor man was capable of, but Juke Jesup, goddamn if he would be a poor man one more day.

Sheriff Cleave shut down the still within a few years, claiming it belonged to an unknown group of mill workers; the Messenger ran a photograph of him hacking into it with an ax. But it was Parthenia Wilson, not the law, they needed to divert, along with Camilla Rawls, the doctor’s wife, and Tabitha Quick, the reverend’s wife, and their whole bonneted mob of the WCTU. The operation had outgrown the shed, anyway. In the wooded acres in the southwest corner of the crossroads farm, just up the bank of the creek, Juke Jesup built a log cabin with a new copper still so shiny he could see his face in it, and one night in 1921 the first cases of Cotton Gin, as it came to be known, were driven into the mill yard in Juke’s brand-new Model T truck. George Wilson was there to receive the shipment, which was warehoused in an upstairs storage room of the mill, just inside the office. George never called it a partnership, but that’s what it was, with agreements like any other. Juke carried out the production. George handled the business. Farmers drove their cotton into the yard and left with their truck beds full of gin, the cases clothed in the mill’s cotton seconds. Just keep it out of the hands of the mill folks, George warned. They had to be in the right mind to work.

That first year, while the boll weevil grubs still wormed their way through the fields of Georgia and the price of cotton dropped from forty-two cents to ten, Juke and George made four times as much on King Alcohol as they did on King Cotton. Enough to give Sheriff a case on the first of every month.






When the Wilsons left the farm and moved into town to the mill, Juke’s father said they needed some womankind about, so he married a girl he’d met at a camp meeting in Coffee County, a dark-haired, thin-lipped creature closer to Juke’s age than his father’s who liked to clean Juke’s pecker in the washbasin. Tug, tug, tug, the same dazed satisfaction with which she milked a cow, and when to Juke’s astonishment he yielded into the water his own milk, “There you go,” she’d say, “all clean.” Sometimes she seemed almost to laugh over him, a joke between her and herself, and Juke wanted to be in on the joke. “You bigger than your daddy,” she said once, “but he ain’t no bigger than a boy’s,” and all at once in his chest came a feeling as unstoppable as the one between his legs—as much pride as hate, hate for her and her ugly thin-lipped mouth, hate for his small-peckered father, hate for himself for the way his body went limp and helpless under her hand.

Each month, on certain afternoons, he was sent down to the creek to fish—“Go catch supper”—while his father and stepmother thrashed about in their bed like a couple of trout in a pail. When the red rags appeared over the ledge of the outhouse, it meant his father would disappear into the woods and shoot squirrels. From this game his stepmother would produce a stony kind of stew, which the family would consume in penitent silence, the stew thinning to a squirrel-colored broth, until the next time Juke was sent to the creek, and then it was fish cakes for supper, battered with hope, crispy. After the meal, she drank primrose tea, and then at last the tea did its work. Juke was to be a brother. For a time there was bacon and cobbler and warm beaten biscuits from their own wheat—it was the year they grew wheat—and fish fry and fish cakes and fish stew, for Juke was sent down to the creek every day, for hours. He began to take his baths there. His stepmother told him he was old enough to wash himself. He took off his shoes and rolled up his pants legs and waded in and pretended String was still there with him. Their feet knew every stone in the creek. The sun was warm. The fish were small but they were plentiful. They filled the bucket. Juke carried it down the road back to the farm, where one afternoon he returned to a red rag hanging over the outhouse ledge, the bloodiest yet. In church, the neighbors offered a prayer for the Jesup family’s loss.

Not long after that, on a Sunday morning, Juke’s stepmother packed her things. His father didn’t try to stop her—she could take her worthless womb back to Coffee County—but first he sent Juke out to the creek for another hour and took the stepmother, whose name was Jenny, to their narrow bed. Juke could hear her screams from there. If anyone else heard, they pretended they didn’t. When Juke came back his father told him to go in the house, it was his turn in the bed with her. Juke was about twelve by then and he reckoned it was. He had not had to tell his father about the washbasin—his father seemed to know that she should be punished, and in this knowledge Juke was assured of the righteous order of things.

So the ghosts Juke lived with were many, and they still inhabited the big house when Elma was born into it and Jessa joined the ghosts. Juke would not remarry. A mother was a mother; she couldn’t be swapped out for a suitable substitute. “Go forth and multiply,” the Reverend Quick reminded him. “Have you some sons.” But childbearing was the bloodiest business Juke had known, bloodier than the slaying of hogs, which didn’t profess to be anything but slaying. His father had survived on the farm with one child; so would Juke.

This was a gift, Elma was meant to know, a sacrificial offering dangled by her father so often it became like a dark, shiny fruit. She was inclined to reach for it and snap it off the branch. What was so wicked about a stepmother? A momma to plait her hair like Ketty did Nan’s, to let down her hem, scrub behind her ears? In church, she busied herself by fancying all the ladies who might make her daddy a good wife. Each family took up a whole pew, eight sandy heads, ten, a dozen. No one got lonesome in a family like that. Elma and Juke knew what it was to be the only child in a house, to roll over in bed without knocking into someone else. They knew the power of ghosts, and imaginary friends, and real ones. They knew how easy it was to fashion a sibling, even when the sibling slept under another roof, with a family of its own, even if it was a family hired and not born by blood.

Good night, my sister, my brother, they thought, from under the other roof. Tomorrow we will meet at the creek.




SEVEN (#ulink_601781ee-b2e9-5df3-a3db-5646efd8e2fb)







MANFORD RAWLS’S OFFICE WAS ON MAIN STREET, NEXT DOOR to Pearsall’s Drugs and down the street from his home. It was the only doctor’s office in town. There, between the hours of eight and four, he gave shots, set breaks, dispensed medicine, depressed the spotted tongues of children with his wooden stick. He was a stubborn old white man, no traveling country doctor. If you went into labor in the middle of the night, you fetched a midwife. If you caught a fever in the evening, you waited until morning. One night when Nan was nine, returning home from delivering a baby with her mother, a man flagged down the truck they were in, his flannel shirt a bloody belt around his waist. His stomach had been cut with the glass of a broken bottle, and Nan watched as Ketty took out her satchel and sewed up the wound with a needle and thread, the man lying on the green corn husks in the bed of the truck. He was a colored man; the driver was too. The driver, who two hours before had become a father, left the man with a jar of Jesup’s Cotton Gin on Dr. Rawls’s step, where he slept until the morning, and even then the doctor made him wait until he saw a white woman with a rash on her legs.

But when Dr. Rawls learned about the twins, when word had reached him that their mother had no intention of parading them into town, he made an exception to his hours. On a Friday evening, he drove his beady black Plymouth out to the farm. The puppies heard the engine and went tearing out to see who it was. He was a white-mustached man who’d begun to stoop, the pale, shaven flesh of his neck wrinkled as a rooster’s comb. He wore a black suit and a black Homburg hat and carried a black satchel, listing to the left with its weight, his right ear listening toward the sky for some signal.

“Babies need to be seen,” said the doctor, coming through the breezeway to the back porch, where he lifted a towel from the rocker that had not been offered him and seated himself in it. Nan and Elma were giving the twins their weekly bath, both babies squeezed into the aluminum tub, their skin soapy blue in the last hour of sunlight. The day was cool and crisp, the first day that felt like fall. Nan had been enjoying the evening, her hands in the warm water, the babies splashing. The doctor looked at them admiringly, as though they were a pair of his own prize pigs.

Juke sat on the top porch step, his shaving bowl between his bare feet on the step below, a tumbler of gin at his hip. His left cheek was smooth, his right still bristly with red and silver and gold. When Dr. Rawls took a seat, Juke shuttled the glass to the third step. He turned and tipped his straw hat, but he didn’t take it off, and he didn’t stand up. “Doctor.”

“Mr. Jesup.”

“These younguns got a sickness I need to know about?”

The doctor lifted Wilson out of the water, slipped him straight out of Nan’s hands like a fish. Nan and Elma were still crouched behind the tub, and Nan moved to stand up, but Elma yanked her down by the hand that wasn’t holding Winna in the bath, then slipped it into hers. The doctor settled Wilson onto the towel on his lap. “I’m just here for some preventive care. Standard practice.”

Juke slipped his straight razor into the bowl of water and leveled it against his right cheekbone, scraping it down to the wedge of his jaw. You could hear the blade on his skin, rough as a rake over stony soil. He was not going to offer the doctor coffee. He was not going to tell any stories. “Is it standard practice to call on a patient after supper?”

“In exceptional cases it is.”

“Don’t make no exception for us, please. These babies are as standard as they come. They got ten fingers and ten toes, same as anybody.”

The doctor was combing through Wilson’s hair with his fingers, inspecting his scalp, and Nan had to squeeze Elma’s hand to keep from leaping up again. “Miss Jesup,” the doctor said, not looking up, “you want your children to be healthy, don’t you?”

“Course I do.” Elma let go of Nan’s hand, scooped up Winna Jean, and wrapped her in a towel. “That’s why I keep them at home, so they won’t catch nothing.”

“They’s plenty a child can catch on a farm, even out here in the country air.” From his satchel he removed his stethoscope and fit the disk to the boy’s chest. “You folks don’t need me to remind you.” He turned his head and, for the first time since he’d arrived, met Nan’s eyes. “Tetanus. Smallpox. Diphtheria.” She remembered the first time he’d pressed that cold stethoscope to her skin, and the first time he’d pressed his tongue depressor to her bottom lip. When she opened her mouth and he saw there was nothing to depress, he jumped back as if she’d bitten him.

“They’re preventable diseases now,” the doctor said. “Medicine has come a long way.” In the doctor’s lap, Wilson stared transfixed at the shiny faces of his glasses. The doctor took a loaded syringe from his bag and sank it into the naked baby’s thigh, as casually as he might stick a cooked turkey. Wilson opened his mouth and released a cry.

Nan released a cry too. She shot up from the porch floor and clapped her hand over her mouth. It was the kind of cry she tried to keep inside, a lonesome, ugly cry, like an animal in pain. It had been so long since she’d made the sound that it sounded alien to her own ears. The others looked at her, eyes wide. She didn’t care. Without Elma to hold her back, she rushed to Wilson and took him in her arms.

“Doctor!” Elma said, and Nan was grateful for her voice. “What in Heaven!”

Wilson howled. Nan bounced him. Then Winna Jean, in Elma’s arms, began to howl too. Then, suddenly at Nan’s feet, Castor and Pollux joined them.

Now Juke did stand up. He took the final step up to the porch. He wasn’t a tall man, but his legs and scarred arms were ropy, and he had a way of making himself appear bigger, of filling a doorway with the wings of his shoulders. The skin at his open collar, already pink with sweat, went a shade redder, and his jaw, still wet, went stiff.

“Doctor, this mother would kindly like a warning. As a courtesy.”

The emptied syringe still dangled between the doctor’s fingers, his thumb on the depressor. Juke palmed the razor.

“Of course,” said the doctor. He dropped Juke’s glance and looked out at the fields, maybe looking at Genus Jackson’s shack, maybe looking for the still, maybe for the quarantine shack that had been burned when Nan and Elma were small. The babies had quieted a bit, the puppies with them. They lay down at Nan’s feet. The doctor said, “I reckon you grown folks are due for shots as well.”

“Ain’t no need for shots for no grown folks,” said Juke.

“A man’s impervious to no illness.” The doctor opened his case, displayed more glass vials. “I can do it here. No need to make the trip into town.”

“Put them shots away. Ain’t no one stuck me yet and I don’t intend to change that. You can stick the babies, but then you’ll be on your way.”

The doctor looked as if he might push further, but he replaced the vials in his bag. “You know something,” said the doctor. “All my years in medicine, I’ve never seen twins with separate paternity. I know some doctors who would be mighty interested in this case. It’s a rarity, I’ll tell you that. Something to be proud of.” He sat with his legs crossed at the knee, the creases of his pants legs sharp.

“Proud?” It looked to Nan like a smile curling the corner of Juke’s mouth. “I ain’t ashamed of my grandchildren, make no mistake. But I ain’t proud for one minute of their ‘paternity.’ Neither way.”

Dr. Rawls gave an ambiguous tilt of his head. He still seemed to be waiting for some sound from above. “The Lord works in mysterious ways.”

“I reckon He does,” said Juke.

Juke looked on as Dr. Rawls gave Winna her three shots and Wilson the last two, and in the middle of the howling, the baby boy, like a fountain cherub, sent an arc of urine across the doctor’s creased pants legs. Elma rushed over with another towel, but the doctor laughed. “Well, aren’t you just full of piss and vinegar?” Elma laughed a relieved and joyful laugh. Wilson laughed too, which made Juke laugh in turn. Nan made no sound at all. She stood with her hands behind her back, clasping each of her elbows to give her hands something to hold. What sound was there for the joylessness she felt then? Relief, yes, that the doctor was leaving, that he’d discovered nothing, but disappointment too, that he was leaving, that he’d discovered nothing.

The doctor bounced Wilson on his knee. “That’s a good quality, son. You keep pissing and spitting, you hear? You’re gone need to in this life.” The doctor blotted his pants with his handkerchief, kissed the top of Wilson’s head, and handed the baby back to Nan.

“I’ll send a bill.”






After the doctor’s black car disappeared down the road, though, after Juke downed the rest of his gin and stuffed his gums with tobacco, he took Wilson from her again. He wrapped him tight in his towel and rocked him back and forth. He wasn’t laughing anymore. “Seems I told you not to open that door to nobody,” he said to Elma.

“He ain’t nobody. He’s Dr. Rawls. And he walked straight to the porch himself!”

“He ain’t to set foot in this house again, you hearing me? He ain’t to set foot on the porch.”

“I thought you said we got nothing to hide. He ain’t the police. He ain’t the papers.”

“I ain’t ascaired of the police or the papers.”

“But you ascaired of an old man?” Elma put a little smile on her face to show she was teasing.

Juke shifted Wilson in his arms and gave her a serious look. “That old man knows people. George Wilson, for one. People in Atlanta. All the way to Washington. He’s an old man with a ticket to Heaven—he ain’t got nothing to lose. He’s been sniffing around here before and I don’t need him sniffing around again.”

“You don’t want him knowing you’re a shiner or you don’t want him knowing you’re daddy to a Negro?”

Juke was looking out to the field. Perhaps he was listening for a passing car, for other listening ears. Nan waited for him to reply. She thought he might strike one of them, or both. Then she saw him remember not to. When he spoke, his voice was low. “Neither one his business, and I reckon they ain’t yourn, either.”

“One of them is,” said Elma. “You made it my business.”

“Quiet. We don’t talk of it. Even in this house, on this porch, we don’t talk of it. You hearing?” He cupped a hand over Wilson’s ear. It was true—they did not talk of it, had not talked of it since the day Wilson was born. “And you,” he said, turning to Nan, “alls you gotta do is keep quiet, and you ain’t even do that?” He spit his chaw over the porch railing, shaking his head, and returned Wilson to her arms. “Put a diaper on this child.”

They retired to their side of the house, Nan to hers. There was no window in the pantry where she slept. For that she was glad. She could sit on her pallet and nurse Wilson without any eyes on her but his.

Juke would have liked both babies to stay all night in Elma’s room, and for Elma to tend to them when they cried. “You can feed him just as easy,” he’d said to Elma when the babies were a few weeks old.

“You worried we gone have midnight visitors, Daddy?” Nan thought Elma suspected what she did—that the only midnight visitor Nan might have was Juke himself, that he wanted to be able to come to her room again, without Elma or the babies getting in the way. He had not come to her room since the babies were born, and she had Elma to thank for that. “I ain’t agreed to be no wet nurse,” she told him. “He don’t like my milk none anyway.”

During the day, when folks might be about—the neighbors, the hands, visitors dropping in—they had to be careful. Nan couldn’t pay Wilson undue attention. If folks came by, sometimes Juke would make Elma suckle Wilson right there on the porch, just to show, though it was true he didn’t take well to her breast. Mostly he turned his head and cried. Folks turned their heads too. So did Nan.

But mostly it was all right. She liked it best when she and Elma cooked together in the kitchen, the babies lying on their bellies on the rag rug at their feet—didn’t matter then whose baby was whose. Didn’t matter if Elma said “your baby” or “my baby” or “the twins”—they were the babies, and they didn’t care what they were called. If Nan had her hands in a pie crust, Elma changed Wilson’s diaper. If Elma was out in the garden, and Winna woke from a nap crying, Nan didn’t think twice before she put her own nipple in the girl’s mouth to calm her. (Well, maybe she thought twice, but rarely three times.) Winna liked Nan’s milk as much as her own mother’s. It was Wilson who was particular, though when Nan was out on a call all day and night, and he was hungry enough, he relented.

When the babies were just a few weeks old, she had left Wilson with Elma to go on a call in Rocky Bottom. The woman—she was more like a girl, Nan’s age, with no children yet—was just seven months along, and Nan knew before the baby was out that it would be born dead. “It ain’t been moving,” the girl said. “Used to hiccup. Ain’t hiccupped in two weeks.” Afterward, after she had delivered the baby, the girl had been shocked and silent, and there was little Nan could do except wrap the baby in a blanket. It was a boy no bigger than a swamp rabbit, and covered in a pelt of rabbit fur. But four days later, after the girl’s milk had started to come in, her mother and father drove her out to the farm to ask Nan what to do. “She’s swolled up awful,” the mother said, and the girl, still in the wagon, sat up straight to show her. It was a trip of perhaps nine miles, a long way to come, Nan thought, for such a question. But then the mother looked around her toward the big house. “I hear the girl got twins up in there. She could use the help of a wet nurse, I expect. The boy really colored?” Nan shook her head firmly. “Can’t you ask her?” the mother went on. “We wouldn’t ask for much.” But Nan refused, and Juke did not come out, and Elma did not come out, and she knew that the family would come no closer to the house. And though she had sent away the poor girl with her poor bloated breasts, still she had nightmares of the family returning to take Wilson, not just to nurse him but to keep him, to replace the swamp rabbit baby, who had been buried, the mother told her, in an apple crate. He wouldn’t take it, Nan wanted to tell her. He wouldn’t drink from you.

Tonight, even Nan’s milk didn’t calm him. He was fussing, ornery from his shots. Or was he cutting a tooth already? When did they start to come in? She wished she could ask the doctor, for she knew nothing about how babies grew after they came into the world. Everything she knew she had learned with her own eyes, watching Winna and Wilson. They were as unalike as any two babies ever were, and their skin was the least of it. Were they foolish to think that the world would believe they were twins, or was it just that every two babies were as unalike as these, with their own faces, their own fingers and toes, some webbed with dirt, like eraser dust, some instead flecked with the white dust of snake skin?

Without putting down the baby, she stood and stepped over her pallet to the pantry shelves, where she found a jar of sorghum syrup. Still holding him, she unscrewed the cap and dipped in a finger and pressed it against his gums. He closed his mouth and sucked. She knew nothing about babies, but she knew Wilson. She knew he was hers, as much as she was his.

She lay down on the pallet, Wilson pressed against her side, her finger still in his mouth. His eyes were glassy with tears but still now, his nostrils caked with dried mucus, like flakes of pastry crust. He smelled of pastry crust, of honey wax and vinegar. She put her own nose inside the tiny bud of his ear, where he had a heartbeat, steady and distant. He was her companion now. He had replaced Juke in her bed. For this she loved him, despite herself. She hadn’t asked for it, she hadn’t expected it, but it wasn’t to be denied, the surge of milk so strong she felt the blood in her veins run faster. Here it came, swift and certain, like the full bucket at the well after you gave it a few strong tugs. If that wasn’t love, what was it?

His eyelids were fluttering closed, fighting sleep, like a trapped moth’s wings. She lifted her gown and dabbed another bit of syrup on her nipple. Slowly, she slipped her finger out of the baby’s warm mouth and slipped her nipple in. He took to it blindly, his eyelids resting now. And then the love filled her chest and she was helpless against it. A sleeping child was easier to love than a waking one, she’d learned. Or maybe it was that, with his green eyes closed, it was easier to pretend he belonged to Genus.

Would she have loved the baby more if Genus were his father? Or was this the only way, that God took something for every gift He granted? He had taken her mother home but had made Nan a mother. He’d taken Genus, but He’d freed her from Juke. Would she go back, and agree to spend her life under Juke, if it meant Genus would still walk the earth?

Yes, she told herself, yes. She’d spend a thousand lifetimes on her back. She’d walk herself backward out of his shack, out of his life, to see him again framed in the window in his corn-shuck hat, shaking the rug, the moment before his eyes discovered hers. She would watch him from a distance. That would be enough.




EIGHT (#ulink_dcf75544-6951-52c6-be87-c5779fe4c716)







THE TWINS WERE BOTH BORN IN THE BIG HOUSE, EACH CHILD IN its own time. Before they were twins, though, before they called them the twins—to others, as well as to themselves—they were two babies growing on separate vines. As spring came to Georgia, Elma thought of the baby that way, marveled at the tomato plants (planted on Good Friday, the luckiest day to start a garden), the green fruits first as small and hard as acorns, then growing heavier, hanging lower; she weighed them with one palm and held the other to her belly, which was growing too, as firm and round as fruit. After she left school, she dressed in Juke’s overalls and walked the garden—it was as far afield as he would allow her—pulling june bugs from the leaves and waiting for Freddie to come to his senses. No one knew she was carrying, or at least no one said they knew. Her daddy told folks she was needed on the farm and no one blinked an eye. Freddie would pull up any day now in his lizard green truck. He wouldn’t make a big show about it. They’d sit on the porch and drink sweet tea, and the ring would be in his pocket.

She was five months along when she discovered her belly wasn’t the only one growing. Nan and Elma were working hip to hip in the kitchen. Nan was frying eggs. Elma was soaking black-eyed peas. Nan lifted her apron to wipe her brow, and below it was a small mound, unmistakable. Nan dropped the apron, and still, there it was. Nan was so skinny, it was hard to see how Elma hadn’t noticed it before.

But Elma’s mind did something then. It hopped over Nan’s belly and trotted off. Already it was becoming good and fast at trotting, her mind. It ignored the racing of her heart. She drained the beans, then realized the beans needed more soaking, and then she stumbled out to the well to fetch more water, walking as she did with her arms straight at her sides. Genus was out by the shed, chopping wood for the cookstove, the slow, steady sound of his ax chipping too close to her ears, and Elma’s heart sped up again and her hands shook and she spilled half the bucket down her legs, but still she kept her mind far away, at the edge of the fields.

Juke, he’d noticed first. Out at the still one night, he’d passed his hand over Nan’s belly and felt the mound—round where before it had been so flat it was nearly concave. He pulled away from her, sat up on the mattress. He asked her if she was with child.

Nan looked to the wall. Sometimes it was awful convenient, her having no tongue.

“You can’t answer, but you can nod. You good at that.” He put his finger under her chin and turned her face to his. “Answer me. Alls you gotta do is nod or shake your head.”

He waited for her to respond, thinking already of what to do. He knew people. He knew everyone. But Nan was the only one in the county who handled woman’s matters. What was she to do, take care of it herself? Word was Dr. Rawls took care of that kind of thing, if the pay was high enough. But he wouldn’t lower himself to ask the doctor for help, even if he told him it was a field hand’s child.

He felt her body relax. She nodded. But there was something in her nod—a different kind of fear—and now it was Juke’s body that tensed.

“It’s mine, ain’t it?”

Did he want it to be his?

“Answer me, girl.”

It would be better, of course, if it wasn’t his, if the baby was colored. That it would have a proper mother and father. He was nearly forty years old and he had never to his knowledge given any woman but Jessa a child.

She raised her shoulders and looked to the wall again. Juke dropped his hand. He could see it was true, that she didn’t know. How could she know? And how could he have been prepared for the rage and disappointment, that the child might be another man’s?

He did what his body knew how to do. He finished having his way with her, thinking, This will be the last time. He had only let go inside her once. Maybe that had been enough. But now he did it again, laying claim to what was his, because what harm could it do?

When he was done, he lay back and reached for his chaw and, naked, crossed his legs at the ankles. He told Nan about the colored woman whose tit he’d suckled on as an infant, having no mother himself. “Maybe that’s how come I got a taste for darkies,” he said. (It was a joke known across the county. “Ain’t Jesup’s fault he a nigger lover,” white folks might be heard to say. “He been drinking nigger juice since he was a boy.”)

By the time Elma’s mind came around, calmed down, it was evening. She took another look at Nan at the supper table, her belly sitting in her lap, the same size as Elma’s. What a fool she had been, daydreaming about Genus, following him at night, when here he had been making love to Nan. She had tried for months to unremember that vision of them in the creek, but here was the proof. And then she did something else that surprised her. She said, right there, laying the gravy on her daddy’s potatoes, “Looks like I ain’t the only one expecting.” She said it cheerfully, teasingly, as though she was gossiping about someone else at church. If she said it with a smile in her voice, then she wouldn’t feel the snap of her heart like a twig, for in her mind, Nan was carrying Genus’s child and now they would both be on the farm for good, together, a family, and Elma would be both a spinster and a whore.

Juke nodded over his potatoes. “I reckon you’re right.”

“Nan? Is it true?”

Nan looked from Elma to Juke, then nodded at the table.

“I seen my mistake now,” said Juke. “You shoulda been sent to church. Your momma and daddy would be right disappointed.”

“Ain’t your fault, Daddy. Her momma didn’t send her to church, either.”

“She ain’t hired to go to church,” Juke said. Then to Nan, “You ain’t hired to go to church. You ain’t hired to get into trouble neither.”

“Daddy, don’t say ‘hired.’” Elma sighed a laugh. “Look at me. I been to church, and I’m in the same shoes, ain’t I?”

“You in those shoes ’cause Freddie Wilson’s all hat and no cattle. Tell me why I shouldn’t run him out of town tomorrow.”

“’Cause you still holding out he’ll marry me, Daddy.” And that was what he wanted—for his grandchild to be a Wilson. She didn’t add that part.

“It’s the only right thing,” he said.

“You saying Nan and Genus oughta get married?” Elma stuffed her mouth with potatoes. Why had she gone and said that?

Juke looked sideways at Nan. She had not touched her food. “I got one who can’t talk, one who can’t stop talking.” It was not the first time he’d said it. “You don’t need to make up for her tongue.” He chewed for a while, thinking, muttering. “Hell of a time … two more mouths to feed.” The cuckoo clock above the mantel ticked.

Juke nodded his head toward Genus’s shack. “Is he the man?”

Another moment, and then another nod. She could make her face look like a child’s when she wanted to.

“Tell me why I shouldn’t run him off this farm.” His voice was lower now, as though Genus might hear him.

“Daddy—”

“Quit mouthing! How do I know that nigger ain’t had his way with you too?”

“Daddy!”

Juke shoveled in a forkful of ham. With his mouth full, he said, “Reverend Quick will marry them. He’s married niggers before. Reckon it’s only right. Niggers belong with niggers.” He pushed his plate away and leaned back in his chair. After supper, Elma knew, he would pour himself a tall drink and take it out to the back porch. Elma and Nan would be left to clear the table, and at least then there would be the comfort of silence, no sounds but the familiar ones of china and silver.

But now Nan still sat with her head hanging. Juke said, “Reckon you going back to that shack. Reckon you shouldn’t never have left it.”




NINE (#ulink_4124493e-fa01-5f07-ba65-c62507664d05)







THE COUPLE ARRIVED IN SEPTEMBER IN A BEAT-UP MODEL T WITH a license plate from New York, the colossal silver lily of a phonograph player blooming from the back window. The puppies barked alongside it as it made its way up the dusty driveway. For a few clenched heartbeats, as they stepped out of the car, Elma was sure they were there to see the twins. The story had reached across the telegraph lines all the way to New York City, and here they were to take their picture, to record them on their gramophone. She had the bone-tensing fear that they might take the babies too. When they asked for Juke, said they’d heard in Florence that he might be looking for hired help on the Wilson farm, Elma felt her heart relax, and then cool into a flat, dull stone. Her pride was hurt, just a little. Their names were Sara and Jim.

They sat on the back porch, admiring the babies on Elma’s lap, while they waited for Juke to come in from the field. Nan poured them iced tea, and the man said, “You folks do like it sweet, don’t you?” Elma’s heart stuttered when the woman asked if Wilson was Nan’s, but she kept her voice steady. “No, ma’am,” she said. “They’re both mine.”

Juke took them in on the spot, even though they were outsiders to Florence, even though he had enough willing hands in town. “Can’t pay you a penny,” he said, “but I can give you three meals and a roof.” He took them in, Elma suspected, because they were young and white and new to town—they’d come all the way from New York, almost as far as Canada, where no one had ever heard of the Gemini twins or Genus Jackson. “New Yawk!” Juke said, putting on his best radio voice. “Y’all talk just as straight as a skyscraper, ain’t you?”

“Not the city,” Jim corrected him. “We’re from Buffalo.”

Juke shrugged. “At’s a city, ain’t it? What you kids doing down this way? Don’t you know everyone here’s running north?”

They’d been up and down the coast between Buffalo and Georgia and beyond—all the way down to Indian River, Florida, where they’d worked in the citrus groves that summer. They still had a crate of grapefruit in the backseat of their car, along with a basket of wool from a Vermont sheep farm and bolts of fabric from a garment factory in New York City. Because her father asked her to, Elma helped them carry their things to the tar paper shack behind the big house. Genus had left nearly nothing behind, and what he did have Juke had ordered that they burn. The shack had been swept clean. Now boxes and suitcases filled the room, overflowing with books and trinkets and clothing, a banjo, a guitar, the phonograph, fabric in orange and purple and periwinkle blue, a bolt of lemon yellow spilling from the bed to the floor. The couple moved busily about, saying how comfortable the cot was and what a pretty view, as though they were moving into a fancy new hotel. Elma watched from the doorway, arms folded.

“You must have loved growing up here,” Sara said to Elma. She dug into the peel of a grapefruit and scalped it with her fingernails. She had fast, small hands, calloused and strong, her bare arms golden brown from the sun. Her face was square, with broad cheekbones and coffee bean eyes, and she wore her black hair in a braid down the length of her back. She handed Elma a wedge of the fruit. She had no idea who’d lived in this shack, did she? Elma didn’t know whether to be disgusted or relieved.

Elma pressed it tentatively to her lips, tasting the bitter and the sweet. She nodded at Sara’s question—was it a question?—filling her mouth with a brave bite now so she wouldn’t have to speak.

“Isn’t it a marvel?” Sara said. “Here it’s peaches, right? You grow any Georgia peaches on this farm?”

Elma shook her head. “Just cotton, mostly. Some peanuts and corn.”

“Jim, we got to get our hands on some Georgia peaches.”

“If you say so,” Jim said, putting on a twang. He held out a palm and Sara deposited a piece of grapefruit in it. He lifted his fedora in thanks, and under it Elma saw that his head was nearly bald. “You’re a Georgia peach now, ain’t you?”

“You better watch out,” Sara said. “Before you know it I’ll be cooking you grits.”

Jim popped the fruit in his mouth, picked up the banjo, and with one foot propped up on the bed, began to pluck out a love song about a Georgia peach who cooked him grits. He made up the words as he played, rhyming “grits” with “shits.” His voice filled the room, blew out the open windows. Out in the yard, Castor and Pollux began to howl, and he sang louder, so loud that Elma felt his voice thrumming through her bare feet, the twang that sounded as though he had a mouth full of scrap metal. It was Sara he was singing about, but it was Elma’s voice, wasn’t it, that he was making fun of. “She can’t cook worth a fart, but she’s stolen my heart, my sweet Georgia peach!”

Sara rolled her eyes, hiding her smile. She’d heard songs like it before. “Baby, that was delightful. You’re a regular Irving Berlin.”

“Who’s Irving Berlin?” Elma asked. Her mouth still burned with the grapefruit, with the acid shame of never having eaten grapefruit before. She wanted more, but she didn’t want to ask.

“Elma,” Sara said, taking both her shoulders in her hands, looking her deep in the eyes, “we’re going to teach you a thing or two.”

“Or three or four,” sang Jim on his banjo. “Or maybe more.”






When the doctor’s bill came, it came on a Sunday morning, when Dr. Rawls knew Juke would be in church. A colored boy on a borrowed bicycle pedaled barefoot all the way from Florence. He made sure Elma was the one to open it before she scurried back into the kitchen. Inside the envelope, tucked behind the bill, was a letter typed on onionskin paper. Nan stood with Wilson on her hip, watching her read it. It took a moment for Elma to see that it wasn’t Manford Rawls’s name on the letterhead but Dr. Oliver Rawls, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia.

“Atlanta,” Elma whispered, as though it were the name of a holy city. She thought of Josie Byrd’s spotless white shoes, the knee-high boots of the yellow-haired dog breeder.

Oliver Rawls was the youngest son of Manford Rawls. Elma remembered him vaguely. He was ahead of her in school, far enough that he was graduating from high school when she’d been learning arithmetic. Mostly she remembered his limp, first on crutches, then on a cane. A head of dark curls, and round eyeglasses like his father’s. Now he was a doctor like his father, a hematologist. He studied blood. He had heard about the twins from his father—“an exceptional case indeed.” Would Mrs. Jesup—he said Mrs.—consider bringing the children to his laboratory in Atlanta for a few tests? Nothing invasive—just some blood work. “Our blood reveals more about ourselves than you can imagine.”

Elma was leaning against the stove. When she’d finished reading the letter aloud, she dropped it to her side. “Blood work,” she spat. She felt sick. Then she raised the letter and read it once more, to herself. “No one’s gone stick those babies again,” she said, “not if I have any say.” But she kept her eyes on the page. “Some big-city scientist thinks he’s putting his hands on my babies?” She looked up, remembering Nan, remembering her father wasn’t in the room. “Our babies,” she said quietly.

Then her eyes found the note at the bottom of the page. “PS,” she read aloud. “I understand travel may be difficult. My father is willing to carry you to Atlanta, and I am willing to compensate you for your trouble.”

Elma lowered the letter again, this time creasing it a little in her fist. “Some big-city scientist thinks he can buy me like a hog?” She produced a laugh. “I’m fixing to burn this with the rest of the trash,” she said, but she put the letter in the pocket of her apron and kept it there, and spent the rest of the day singing a tune inside her closed mouth.






Sara and Jim were good hands. Juke taught them how to take the peanuts out of the ground, to thresh and stack them, to bale the hay. He taught them how to top and strip and cut the sorghum, and Nan and Elma helped to mill and cook and bottle it. When the cotton wanted picking, Sara and Jim made a game of it, racing to see how fast they could fill their bags, the way Elma and Nan had done when they were small. Their hats bobbed along the west field, Jim’s voice filling the air with songs of rabbit-tail cotton and candy-cloud cotton, cotton soft as a baby’s cheek. The other pickers stayed along the road, taking their midday meal under the lacy shade of the cottonwood tree, while Sara and Jim ate at the big house. They’d come back for harvest because they needed the work, Ezra and Long John and Al, and because Juke had been good to them. (Al’s wife had begged him not to return to the farm, and Al had said, “He all right. He won’t do me no harm,” and his wife said, “Just don’t be coming back to town dragged by no truck,” and kept all three sons at home and said if they even looked at a white girl she’d kill them herself.) They kept their eyes on the ground, away from Elma, away from Juke, away from the gourd tree, and they didn’t come near the house. At the cotton house, when it was time to weigh in at the end of the day, they didn’t meet the young couple’s eyes, but Jim tipped his hat as though he didn’t notice, and whistled, impressed, at the biggest pull. Usually it was Long John, but on a day when Long John didn’t come, it was Jim himself who picked two hundred and eighty pounds, more even than Juke, who was not shown up but proud. “They teach you to pick cotton in New Yawk, Jimbo?”

For supper there were boiled peanuts and greens and salt pork and beaten biscuits soaked in syrup, and Jim and Sara remarked over every bite, falling over themselves, and even Nan couldn’t hide how pleased she was. After the meal, the men would throw horseshoes in the scrubgrass yard while the women washed the dishes. Then Sara would bounce a baby on her knee while Jim played his banjo or guitar on the front porch, “Travelin’ Blues” and “Buffalo Blues” and “Boll Weevil,” and they’d all listen, shelling field peas while the sun went down. After a while, the music eased even Elma. The voice Jim used was his own. He sang and the dogs howled after him. When they howled too long, Juke threw the pea jackets at them, and they ate them up. One evening a chain gang limped up the Straight, their sweat-soaked handkerchiefs hanging like bright tails from their back pockets, and as they leveled the ditches Jim played them “Birmingham Jail,” and they sang along, and then, wanting to give them something brighter, he played “Ain’t Misbehavin’,” and they sang and danced too, even the shotgun guard Lloyd Crow, who was known to enjoy a pint of gin with Sheriff Cleave now and then, clapping his hands along to the music before moving the men on. Jim and Sara talked of their travels—speakeasies and soup kitchens, revivals and picture shows, the camps along the flooded Mississippi. Many nights they’d slept in their car at the edge of shantytowns, giving shelter to those who needed it. At marked houses, they begged for food; at farms they worked for milk and eggs; they stayed put until they had enough to buy or trade for gasoline; then they kept going. For a while Jim had run rum in Philadelphia, but he got into some trouble and they went south. They’d been traveling for three years. Now they were twenty-three, and Sara wanted a baby.

“I can’t stand it one more minute,” she said, taking Winna Jean into her lap. “I’ve got to have one.”

“Another mouth to feed,” Jim said. “No, thank you.”

Sara blew a raspberry on Winna’s cheek. “Babies eat nothing but momma’s milk. Look at this momma! She’s got two and they’re still fat as can be.”

“They don’t drink milk forever, darling.”

“Well, by the time they’re through, times will be better.”

Juke laughed from his rocking chair, sending shreds of tobacco flying from his mouth. “Maybe in New York they will. In Georgia, times is always lean.”

“We never have missed a meal,” said Elma, not looking up from the peas.

Juke said, “They’re a blessing, no matter how lean the times.”






Harvest went on. In the evening, there was celebration, but in the daylight hours, the fields had a way of keeping your mind on the ground. The seeds grew, no matter what was happening in the big house. They managed to keep the weevil away, but that year there were army worms. If you sat dead quiet on the porch, you could hear the shush of their chewing through the fields. Juke used all of Elma’s good flour to make an arsenic paste, and early one morning while the dew was still on the cotton he and Jim crept into the field and lay the poison down. Then when you sat on the porch the only sounds were the cricket frogs and your own lonesome breath.

For a time it seemed that a new season had come. The floorboards were cool in the morning. The gnats were gone. In the yard, the guineas squawked; the one Elma had named Herbert did his rain dance. All year long they’d prayed for rain along with him, but at picking time, they prayed it stayed away, at least until they’d plucked all the cotton from the fields. The second week of October, though, brought a steady storm, not strong enough to lay the cotton flat, but long enough to keep them indoors for three days. When the rain stopped, they’d have to rush to empty the west field of cotton, if it wasn’t ruined already. For now, there was nothing to do but stay indoors. While Winna and Wilson took their morning nap and Nan started on the churning, Elma packed a basket with hoecakes and dashed through the rain to Sara and Jim’s shack. Juke and Jim were out at the still, and Sara was sewing something she held behind her back while she opened the door.

“I brought dinner,” said Elma, shaking the rain out of her hair.

“Aren’t you sweet,” Sara said. She held up her sewing: a doll. “You caught me. It’s for Winna Jean.”

Elma took it from her. “Ain’t you sweet!” She couldn’t help it. It was no guano sack rag baby. It was made with what looked like flax cloth, and it was wearing a yellow rose-print dress with a flax cloth apron and black felt Mary Jane shoes.

“It’s not finished,” Sara said, taking it back. “She’s got to have button eyes.”

“She’s pretty as a picture,” Elma said.

“Well, I’ll tell you the secret. It’s the cotton she’s stuffed with. Finest cotton in all of Georgia, from what I hear.”

“Oh, yes! I bet it is.”

“Your daddy won’t mind I took some?”

Elma waved her hand. “Daddy’s got so much cotton he won’t miss a doll’s worth.”

“But it’s not his, exactly, is it?” Sara placed the doll against her pillow and sat down beside it on the cot, and Elma put the basket on the table.

“Might as well be. It’s George Wilson’s field, but he ain’t set foot in it but once a season.”

Sara nodded knowingly. “He doesn’t want to get dung on his trousers.”

“Fine by me. Better than coming over every day to complain about this or that. The Cousins, down the road? They don’t have barely a minute of peace. They all live in shacks, a whole mess of kin on that farm. The planter, he’s brother to one of the wives, he’s always out on the porch of his house pointing his finger, saying do this or do that, and in what order. He once made little Lucy Cousins take out all the stitches in his socks and put them back again. Least Mr. Wilson stays out of the way.”

She didn’t say that he’d stayed away for some time, that he and her daddy had fallen out. When the weevil came and so much cotton was lost, when he seemed to be one of only a few landowners with any money left, George Wilson had bought up farm after farm. Before long, he didn’t have time for the crossroads. When there was business to be done, Juke had gone into town, to visit with him at the mill. And then the babies were born, and Genus was killed, and as far as Elma could tell, her father stopped going to the mill at all. She had seen nothing of the Wilsons.

“You like that,” said Sara. “For people to stay out of your way.”

“Not you!”

“Well, maybe that’s because I haven’t asked you about the twins yet.”

Elma sat down in one of the wooden chairs. Then, remembering for the first time where she was, she stood up again. She could still smell the smoky char of the fire that had nearly burned the shack down. “What about them?”

“How they look so different. I mean—”

“I know they look different,” Elma said sharply. She busied her hands in the basket. Then, more gently, feeling her tongue go loose, she said, “I didn’t ask for two babies.” She had thought that sentence hour after hour, it had lived silent in her head, and there it was now, out on the table. She laid the hoecakes side by side. They were heavy as rocks, made with the low-grade flour left in the back of the pantry, and Elma wished she’d made something else instead. “They have two different daddies, is how come. They’re twins, grown up inside me at the same time, but they ain’t all the way kin.”

“That’s something,” Sara said, wide-eyed.

“Alls I’ll say,” Elma said, but she’d already said more than she ever had, even more than she’d said to the newspaperman—when had she ever had a real friend to talk to, who could talk back!—“Alls I’ll say is one of the daddies is Freddie Wilson. The landlord’s his granddaddy. More like a daddy.”

“The one that owns the farm?”

“He ain’t no more than a dog. Freddie, that is. Granddaddy too, I reckon. Folks look down they noses at the baby for his skin, well! The Wilsons ain’t no better! They don’t even take up for they own.”

“You sure these Wilsons don’t have mulatto blood, and that’s how come Wilson’s dark? It’s the uppity white folks, the ones with the slaves in the family—”

“Oh, no!” Elma shook her head. “Not the Wilsons. They’re pure as cotton. No. No. They’re two daddies. That’s alls I’ll say. Nature has its own ideas, I reckon.”

“I reckon it does,” Sara said, trying on the word.

“You think a mare ever thought she could mate with a donkey?”

Sara considered it. “I reckon she mates with whoever she pleases.”

“Well, the first mare that gave birth to a mule ought to have been as surprised as me. But you think she’d have loved him any more if he’d been a horse?”

“I reckon not.”

“They’re both gone now, the daddies. One is dead and one might as well be.” Elma fingered the envelope in the pocket of her apron. “That’s alls I’m like to say about that.”

Sara crossed the room and touched her hand to Elma’s shoulder. “Thank you for the lunch.” She took a hoecake from the table. They both took bites. The rain tapped against the tar paper roof.

“You ain’t spent much time near livestock,” Elma asked her, “have you?”

“Can’t say I have.”

“A mare don’t mate with whoever she pleases. She mates with whatever ass is penned in with her.”

Sara laughed. Before she could stop herself, Elma asked, “How do you keep from getting caught?”

“Do what?”

“From getting pregnant.”

Sara didn’t flinch. “You ain’t spent much time near Catholics, have you?”

“Can’t say I have.”

“You know your time of the month, don’t you?”

“I don’t bleed anymore, not while my milk is in.”

“Well, you count it. Just before or just after your time is the safest. It’s the time in the middle you worry about.”

Elma nodded, though she didn’t quite understand.

“Good thing about my time of the month is that it’s my time, not Jim’s. He might be the one getting caught, come Christmas.”

Now Elma laughed. She smoothed her apron. “A letter came from Atlanta.” She slipped it out of her pocket. “Some doctor at Emory University wants to study on the babies.”

“Study on them? What for?” Sara reached for the letter and lowered herself into a chair.

“He wants to see how come twins can have two daddies, I guess. I ain’t gone let him, though.”

“Why not?” Sara didn’t look up from the letter.

Elma sat on her hands. Could doctors really tell if two babies were twins? Could they even tell if they were brother and sister? She said, “I don’t want my babies poked and prodded. I don’t want them in a medical journal. They ain’t specimens!”

“But he says he’ll pay. Times are hard!”

“How do I know he’ll pay? How do I know I won’t get there and they’ll take the babies away?”

Sara snorted. “Elma, Emory University is a respectable institution. They’re not going to take your babies. Tell them your terms.”

Elma shivered at the word. Her “terms.” Yes, she had set terms before—she had set terms with her father. That was the word for it, wasn’t it?

“Tell them what you demand in order to cooperate with their study. Atlanta’s all the go! Have you ever been?”

Elma shook her head.

“Well, it’s bigger than a bread basket, let me tell you. The men aren’t bad to look at, either. Oh, you’re going to love it! You can take our electric!”

“I don’t know how to drive. Well, I know a little.”

“I’ll teach you!”

“Sara, I can’t. I’m much obliged, but I can’t leave. Daddy would never let me, for one.”

“He sure keeps you down on the farm, doesn’t he?”

Elma took another bite. For a moment a dry cake of panic lodged in her throat. What did Sara know about her father? About Nan? Was Elma the last person to know what was happening in her own house?

“I don’t mean nothing by it,” Sara said.

Elma could see that she didn’t. She swallowed. The rain was lightening up on the roof. She had a flash of herself, like a remembered dream, flying through Atlanta on a streetcar, holding her hat tight to her head. If her father could leave the farm, if her father could go to the city and be someone else, why couldn’t she? She had told him her terms before. She would set her own terms now.

She said, “How’d you get your hands on that electric, anyway?”

Sara smiled around a mouthful. “You can get your hands on just about anything if you’re clever enough.”

“You stole it?”

“It’s on loan from my uncle up in Buffalo. He used to like to kiss me with his tongue. I figure he had it coming. First he lost the car, then he lost everything else in the crash.”

Now the hoecake sat like a stone in Elma’s stomach. To Nan, her father used to call himself that, an uncle, just like she’d called Nan’s father Uncle Sterling. “Come on and hug Uncle Juke’s neck. Come on and give Uncle Juke some sugar.” Then he stopped. Was that when it had started up, with Nan?

Her mind fell upon something. She closed her eyes and followed the branches of the tree. If her daddy was Wilson’s daddy, then Wilson was not Winna’s brother but her uncle. The only person he was brother to was Elma.

So if the doctors discovered the babies were kin, well, that was because they were.

Sara was still talking about the car. “Wasn’t all I took. All that good cloth doesn’t come cheap.”

Elma sat up. “You stole that too?”

“Do you know how much the dress factory pays? I prefer to call it ‘souvenir harvesting.’”

“Harvesting!” Elma swatted Sara’s arm. “Well, lucky for us, we got nothing for you to harvest. Nothing but a handful of cotton.”

“Just watch out. I might take me a souvenir baby.”

Elma laughed. Her ears listened for the babies, but all she heard was rain. She knew she should go to them, but she felt frozen in place. Nan was there. Her father wasn’t. Let Nan listen for them. That was what Nan wanted, wasn’t it? Same as Elma. To be mothers to their children. To share them, even! But to be mothers with their whole selves, not to be split into fractions. She allowed herself to imagine it: Nan and Elma living in the big house with Wilson and Winna. Her father gone from the farm. Not gone from the world, like Genus. Just disappeared, like Freddie. Gone! Sara would be there too. In the shack, making dolls for the babies. After doing the doctor’s study in Atlanta, maybe they’d have a little money to live on.

Then, still laughing, she felt the air go out of her lungs. She looked sideways at Sara, thinking how strange it was that you never really knew anyone, that no matter how much your heart warmed to a stranger, she’d always be a stranger to you. She caught her breath. She was dizzy with fear and envy, certain of some unavoidable loss. It wasn’t just her children she feared losing. Harvest was nearly over. Sara and Jim never stayed anywhere long. Soon they’d be gone, their automobile with them.

After their meal, when the rain had quieted to a lazy drizzle, Sara and Elma raised the windows and hung their heads outside. The guineas had come out again, honking nervously through the yard, through the coal black ash of the old shack they liked to nest in. High above the sorghum, a purple martin emerged from a gourd. “That’s a funny scarecrow,” Sara said, pointing. “Instead of scaring the birds away, it gives them shelter.”

“We like those birds,” said Elma. “They catch the skeeters.”

“I’ll tell you something, Elma. They do no such thing.”

Elma studied the gourd tree. Someone—her father?—had removed the length of rope, or it had been blown down in the storm. Looking at it with Sara beside her, it was almost just a gourd tree. “Maybe it’s an old wives’ tale.”

“You Southerners have peculiar ways of keeping some in and others out.”

A lock of Elma’s hair had fallen. She took a pin from her bun and then stabbed it back. “Do we now.”

“It would be one thing,” said Sara, “if it worked.”




TEN (#ulink_7b97e92b-70e1-56b8-984b-4031c5b4cea5)







NINE TIMES OUT OF TEN IT WAS WOMEN WHO GOT HIM INTO trouble. He had red blood coursing through him like any man.

But the day Juke met the girl who would be his wife, it was String he had his mind set on seeing. He’d been sent by his daddy to the feed and seed in town, and he took their john mule, Lefty. They had a barn full of mules then, mostly spritely young mollys who could plow in their sleep, but Lefty was the only john, and Juke’s favorite. He was near big as a horse and spotted black on white clear through his mane. He’d been George Wilson’s favorite too. It had been George who’d finally taught him to turn right.

It was 1901, just after the Wilsons had built the mill and moved from the farm into town. George Wilson and his brothers had inherited a hill of money from an uncle in the railroad business. In a few years George had grown bored of planting, of buying up land all over Cotton County. He got it into his head to buy rights to the Creek River at the edge of town, where the river and the Straight and the new railroad converged. He borrowed more money from his brothers in north Georgia, one in the turpentine business, another in sawmills. He found builders and then mill hands in the same way, by riding his horse from farm to farm. He needed Juke and Juke’s father at the crossroads farm, but he pulled whole families from cropper cabins five counties around. On the train from Marietta, George’s brother sent cars full of farmers’ daughters in search of work. He sent the sheriff around to the Fourth Quarter to find loose-foot Negroes. The sheriff offered them the chain gang or the picker room. They chose the picker room. All of Florence was mighty proud of that mill.

Juke wanted to see it himself. So, after fetching the three sacks of corn seed, he tied the mule and its cart to a gum tree by the road and walked down to the river to wait for String to walk home from school. It was springtime, the wiregrass along the river wild with cornflower. Juke kicked off his shoes to chase tadpoles. When String came along the railroad and saw him, he let out a yelp of joy. “What in Hades you doing out here?”

The Wilsons’ new house was the biggest house Juke had ever gotten close to, with a porch that wrapped around three sides. From the front porch you could see the cotton mill straight down the hill, three stories of bricks and as long as a freight train. The Creek River rushed rapid out of the woods there, feeding into the new dam that formed a pond at the head of the mill. To the east you could see the three-acre garden Parthenia Wilson had planted for the mill families, and Lefty, still tied to the tree by the Straight. To the west you could see the mill village, where the mill families lived, just a dozen clapboard bungalows then and more rising before Juke’s eyes, houses no bigger than the shacks on the farm, the spaces between them no bigger than each house. And the Wilsons owned all of it. At ten years old, John Jesup—he was not yet called Juke—had traveled no farther than Macon, hopping the freight train with String and his cousins, and that city, with its smokestacks and street trolleys and brick-paved block after block, had left him feeling nauseous with longing and homesickness and the penny candy String’s cousins had stolen from the sweets shop, though they had plenty of pennies in their pockets. There was so much to see he’d had to close his eyes.

That was how Juke felt on the porch of String Wilson’s new house. He wanted, and he didn’t want to want.

String seemed to know not to invite Juke inside. He left his school satchel on the porch and snuck Juke into the mill through the picker room in the basement, where colored men were opening bales, standing up to their knees in clouds of cotton. They paid the boys no mind.

“Looks like they in Heaven,” Juke said to String as they passed through.

String laughed. “This here Heaven is the onliest place you’ll find darkies in the mill. We won’t hire them for nothing more.” Up a narrow staircase, they came to the shop floor, the biggest room Juke had ever been in. A wall of windows, tall as silos, stretched from his elbow all the way up to the ceiling, and down the room, laid out like pews, was row after row of spinning machines, a girl standing at each one. “Look like church,” said Juke.

String laughed again. “If there was only girls.”

“That’s the church for me,” said Juke. “Bout as hot as church too.” He took off his cap and fanned himself with it.

“We hire girls for spinners, mostly. Ain’t nothing to it.” String kept his voice low, and over the sound of the machines, Juke hardly heard him. “Most of the work boys do in the spinning room is sweeping.”

“You sound like you the boss already, tombout all this hiring you doing.”

“My daddy’s learning me on the floor.” String fetched a couple of push brooms hanging from the wall and handed one to Juke. “You know how to sweep?”

“I live on your daddy’s farm, don’t I?”

“Just push it around while we walk about, and Mr. Richard won’t give us no trouble.”

Juke put his cap back on his head and did so, following String down the line of machines. The women were studying so hard on their work that they barely raised their heads at the boys. They were too young to be called women, too tall to be called girls. The spinners all wore their hair in the same high, heavy pile, like a round loaf of bread on top of each of their heads, and their hair was dusted with the flour that was cotton lint, cotton everywhere, down their dresses, in the air, catching in Juke’s broom, so much cotton that he felt he might sneeze, and then he did.

As he passed a girl at her machine, she looked up at him. This one was a girl, no bigger than Juke. She wore her yellow hair like a girl’s, in a braid down her back, with a red satin bow hanging limp at the end of it. She wore a calico dress to her chin and a dirty apron and no shoes on her dirty feet. “God bless you,” she said to Juke, and then returned her eyes to her work.

“Thank you kindly,” said Juke, leaning on his broom. Like him, the girl had freckles, and he went near cross-eyed staring at them. “Ain’t you hot in here,” he asked, “standing at that machine all day?”

“Reckon we all hot,” said the girl, not looking up.

“Y’all oughta open the window and let in some air.”

“Daddy won’t let them,” String cut in. “When the breeze comes in it musses up the threads.”

“That so?” said Juke. He took his cap off again and wiped his brow with it. Already he was damp with sweat. “How old are you?” he asked, yelling over the whirr of her machine.

The girl said she was twelve, and though Juke was ten he said he was too. He hadn’t thought to ask the girl her name, but as they pushed their brooms into the weaving room, String told Juke it was Jessa. She’d come to the mill on the train from up near Atlanta, and she had no family but the one she boarded with in the mill village. “And she ain’t no twelve years old,” String said, “no more than we are. Twelve’s the youngest we’re supposed to hire.”

He left only with her name. Jessa, Jessa, Jessa. The sun was setting over the mill village when Juke emerged from the mill. The mill hands, finishing the second shift, were making their way to their porches. Juke didn’t yet know if he loved the mill or hated it. His stomach was empty and he hoped String would ask him to stay for supper but he didn’t. Juke’s eyes adjusted to the dusk, the open air. He’d forgotten the mule, he’d forgotten its name, he’d nearly forgotten his own legs and how to use them. He was both relieved and panicked to see him there—Lefty—like a baby shocked to tears when its mother returns to a room. “Good boy, Lefty. There you are. Did you think I left you, Lefty boy?” There was Lefty, there was the cart, but inside it were only two bags of corn—one, two—and Juke had bought three. That much he knew.

His daddy whipped him good, of course. It was darker than pitch when Juke and Lefty finally returned to the farm, and his daddy came out of the house and hauled Juke down from the mule. Juke tried to explain, but his daddy ripped a branch from the chinaberry tree and right there under it by the light of his lantern switched his behind. Juke’s father was angry about the stolen seed, but he was angrier that Juke had gone to the mill. “That ain’t the place for you,” he said, panting, after Juke was good and whipped. “Ain’t this house enough?” He couldn’t feel his behind but he could feel the wet warmth on his legs and hoped he hadn’t messed himself. He was relieved to see it was blood.

Come August, Juke took Lefty to the mill once more. His sore behind had healed; enough time had passed that he was willing to risk another one. This time he didn’t see String, who was out riding freight cars with his cousins. But he took what he’d come for, a cart full of corn, sickled down from the garden in broad daylight, not near as much corn grown from a sack of seed, but it would have to do. Juke Jesup had a long memory, long as the shadows laid across the Twelve-Mile Straight on the ride home. He closed his eyes, feeling the sun press against his lids, remembering the tremor of the train as it made its way from Macon to Florence, the stolen butterscotch on his tongue, the taste of the city’s sickly sweetness.




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