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,