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