Stunned, Sarah nodded, her lips falling apart as she gazed up at Moses. Was this some sort of trick? Did he plan to take her by force after she fell asleep?
But in his eyes, she saw the answer was no. And she also knew, beyond a doubt, that Jesus had answered her prayer and given her a good man, after all. She hoped she could grow to love Moses the way she thought he must love her, even though she couldn’t quite explain to herself why in the world he did. Had she ever shown him a single proper kindness?
“You s-sorry you married me?” Sarah asked in a small voice, feeling unworthy of Moses.
Moses grinned. “Course not, li’l gal,” he said. “I know you mine, even if’n you don’ know it yo’ own self yet.”
Sarah Breedlove McWilliams finally allowed herself to smile.
Chapter Seven
1885
Once Sarah decided she was ready to be touched, Moses could hardly touch her enough. Her body, which until then had served only as a tool to enable her to accomplish her endless array of tasks, became something entirely new beneath her husband’s fingertips. After a year and a half of sleeping apart, Sarah had overcome her childlike timidness one night and slipped inside the blanket beside her sleeping husband, nestling her curves against him. In part, she’d gone to Moses because she’d heard Lou’s voice in her head, warning her that a man would always seek elsewhere what he didn’t get at home, and Moses had made it no secret that he occasionally visited a saloon or two that had reputations as brothels. But more than that, Sarah was drawn to the dark smoothness of Moses’ skin, the mystery of his lanky muscles that had grown taut and solid since he’d begun doing more heavy lifting, and that unnameable glow she felt from him that had ultimately sparked slowly and steadily within her. She’d wanted to feel him lock his arms around her. That night, for the first time, she’d needed his touch.
Methodically, with the same patience he’d demonstrated during the time they’d slept apart, Moses ran his fingertips across Sarah’s skin and followed their inflamed trail with his warm, broad mouth. His hands, made so rough from the extra work he’d been able to find at the coal yard, never felt rough because he used such a feathery touch. And when he thrust himself inside her, his eyes squeezed tight, Sarah felt a completeness that was bigger than herself, at once ecstatic, comforting, and even frightening. This feeling had been absent so long, how could she bear it if she lost it again?
By the time she was seventeen, Sarah felt she was thriving with Moses. The life she had with him was by no means easy, but it felt good, better than anything she had felt since her parents died. Selling fried fish together—with Sarah’s tasty preparation and Moses’ loud, spirited calls—they earned nearly half as much on the weekends as they did at their regular jobs the other five days of the week. They’d moved into a bigger house on Main Street farther from the railroad tracks, just as Moses had promised; this one also had only two rooms and a kitchen out back, but the rooms were bigger, allowing for a wardrobe and the rough pine bed frame and headboard Moses built himself to give Sarah a proper bed for the first time in her life.
Their new house was only two streets from Lou’s, so Sarah’s sister visited much more often. Sarah cherished the evenings when Moses wasn’t too tired to pick up his banjo and pluck out cheerful melodies for her, Lou, and little Willie; no sooner than he’d been able to stand up on his own, her nephew had stomped his tiny feet on the floorboards and tried to dance. “Look like he tryin’ to do the cakewalk!” Moses said. All the while, Sarah marveled at how he could get his long fingers to move so quickly and with such precision on the cheerful instrument. Moses sang for Willie, too, although his voice cracked when he held a note.
Those were the good times, although there were plenty of bad times, too. Sarah’s husband was as opinionated as she was, and they argued freely when their viewpoints clashed, although Sarah had long since figured out that Moses would never raise his hand to her the way Lou had predicted. The worst times, to Sarah, were when Moses found himself out of work. During those times, he sank into brooding silences that could last for days, when he would barely acknowledge Sarah when she spoke to him. He vanished for days at a time in his search for employment, which led Sarah to screaming fits when he returned because his absences terrified her. He avoided answering Sarah’s questions unless he could give her the good news that he’d found someone doing some hiring for weeks or months at a time, whether it was at the railroad yard, helping to build roads, driving wagonloads of cargo to neighboring towns as a teamster, or on a distant plantation picking cotton. The work always showed up as if by a miracle because Moses could do so many things, but it could never be relied upon. Sarah and Moses were always just a step ahead of their landlord, struggling to pay their more expensive rent.
Moses told Sarah he’d thought about applying to be a Pullman porter, but he didn’t want to spend so much time away from home. “Not with this baby comin’,” he said, nuzzling his chin into Sarah’s protruding belly. “I hear some o’ them porters talkin’ ’bout how they don’t git no time for sleep, and gotta run ’round after them trains so fast they hardly git home. They young’uns don’t hardly know who they is when they come in the door. My son gon’ know me.”
Sarah was expecting her child at any time; she spent at least a couple of hours a day lying on her back because she ached so much from the extra weight, and her feet felt like swollen sausages. “How you know this a son?” she said playfully. She stroked Moses’s short-trimmed hair, envying him for the way his hair felt so woolly and soft beneath her hand.
“Course it’s a son! I tol’ you I speck six big ol’ boys.”
“An’ one girl,” Sarah reminded him.
“I don’t ’member sayin’ nothin’ ’bout that. One purty gal in the house is ’nuff for me.” Then Moses’ face grew somber as his mind wandered. “My sons ain’t gon’ live like we is. This town gon’ make room for colored folks to make a good wage jus’ like white folks do.”
“Unh-hnh.” Sarah knew Moses was headed toward another of his political rants, and his defiant talk always made her uneasy. She was afraid her husband was setting himself up for useless rage and disappointment, like so many men and women she’d known who ranted for a time and then slowly accepted their lot.
“Slav’ry been dead an’ gone since sixty-five. Here we is all these years later—I mean, been twenty years, Sarah—an’ white folks still actin’ like we slaves, like we s’posed to do what they say do. An’ niggers still moanin’ ’bout they forty acres, waitin’ on the gov’ment. Ain’t nobody gittin’ no forty acres, an’ niggers best look to how they gon’ get it theyselves. They best learn to speak up an’ make some fuss.” As he spoke, growing more impassioned, the two days’ worth of whiskers on his chin tickled Sarah’s belly.
Sarah sighed. In the past few months, two or three of Moses’s friends had begun stopping by the house after suppertime to sit at the table and complain to Moses about Vicksburg politics. Unfair arrests for vagrancy. All-white hiring policies for hotel porters and railroad mail agents. The beatings of Negro leaders. The lack of Negroes in elected office. Sometimes Sarah heard their angry voices at the table late into the night, long after she’d gone to bed. Their complaints only filled her with hopelessness. White folks had always been running the country, so what could a few Negroes do about it now? It might be a hundred years before Negroes had anything at all, Sarah thought, and they might not have anything even then.
Moses stopped talking, rubbing circles around Sarah’s navel, as if he’d heard her thoughts. “You think I’m jus’ blowin’ wind, huh?” he said. “You think I oughta be happy with what crumbs the buckras toss out? An’ speck no diff’rent for that young’un you carryin’?”
“I ain’t said that. I jus’ don’t like talkin’ ’bout it.” In truth, she wanted to tell Moses she was afraid he might end up in jail, or worse, for spouting his ideas so loudly.
“Don’ nobody wanna talk ’bout it!” Moses said. “But tell you what, if yo
u don’ talk ’bout it, it ain’t never gon’ change. Niggers sayin’, ‘Aw, we jus’ got to work hard an’ we be fine,’ but that ain’t true, Sarah. Look how hard we both workin’, me drivin’ to an’ from Natchez an’ you still over there washin’ when that baby’s ’bout to fall out. When you ever seen a white lady big as you out workin’?” At that, his voice trembled with emotion. “Work ain’t nothin’ ’less you makin’ some money. You can work your whole life choppin’ down trees, an’ then you ain’t got nothin’ to show but a empty field of grass an’ stumps. You gotta build sump’n, too. See, like I keep sayin’, them washerwomen down in Atlanta had the right idea in eighty-one. Thousands of ’em done went on strike so’s they could get a u-ni-form wage—that mean they all gits the same pay, what they thinks they worth. An’ I know Miss Brown colored, but she ain’t payin’ y’all ’cept as much as it suit her, too. She keepin’ most o’ that money to herself.”
Sarah winced every time Moses criticized Miss Brown, who had saved her and Louvenia from almost certain homelessness when they first came to Vicksburg. But it was true that in seven years, they had received only one large increase in pay. Moses insisted they would both be better off finding clients on their own. “She pay us what she can,” Sarah said.
“Lemme axe you sump’n, Sarah: Why you keep talkin’ ’bout goin’ to college?”
“To learn things.”
“What for?”
By now Sarah was irritated. She sighed hotly. “So’s I can teach, maybe. Or …”
“Or what?”
“I dunno. Sump’n.”
“Why you wanna teach, then?”
Sarah tried to turn away from him, but her stomach bulged in her way. “Moses, jus’ hush, please. I don’ feel like all these questions… .”
“Well, you best axe yo’self, Sarah. I’ll tell you why: Seem to me you don’ wanna be standin’ up all day no mo’, stoopin’ over them tubs washin’ white folks’ clothes. Or maybe you wanna teach these little colored young’uns so’s they can go be lawyers an’ doctors an’ such.”
At that, Sarah laughed softly and shook her head.
“Why you laughin’?” Moses asked, genuinely angry. “See? You don’t wanna talk ’bout it cuz you can’t even see it. But they is colored lawyers an’ doctors, too, the kind what went to school. How you think they got there? Cuz they said, ‘Aw, shucks, I’ma jus’ take what the white man gon’ give me’? Or you think they had to raise Cain?”
Moses’s words lanced into Sarah. In a flash, she remembered the night Mr. William Powell whipped her after she tried to defy his order not to go to school. She’d been so heartsick, she’d never been able to face her old teacher, Miss Dunn; she’d just stopped coming to class without a word of explanation, praying she would never come across her teacher on the streets of Vicksburg to remind her of her dream. Should she have tried to find a way to fight? But how?
Sarah blinked rapidly. “You know what happen when folks want too much, Moses?” she said softly, stroking his hair again. “When they pine for sump’n in they heart they can’t git?”
She was going to say, They die just a li’l bit, deep down where can’t nobody see but them, but she suddenly bucked when she was startled by a cramping pain in her belly. At first she thought the pain had been brought on by the memory of her heartbreak, but as she cradled her middle and felt warm moisture seeping between her legs, she knew her baby was coming instead.
While Sarah half sat despite her fatigue, she watched with alarm as the midwife slipped her fingers underneath a bloody cord wound around her baby’s neck like a snake. The sight of that cord, and her baby’s reddening, gasping face, nearly stopped Sarah’s heart. But Nana Mae’s fingers were well practiced, and she flung the life-threatening umbilical cord away from the baby’s neck with ease with her gnarled, leathery fingers. Immediately the baby began to wail with lungs full of air.
“There we go …” the old woman said, smiling. Only then did she glance toward the baby’s swollen genitals, in the same instant Sarah did. “Y’all gots yo’selves a baby girl!”
Disbelief flooded Sarah. She had just given birth to her very own child? But despite her joy at having a healthy baby, Sarah felt a twinge of disappointment as she thought about Moses. He wanted a son so badly! She hoped Moses would love this child as she knew she would, as the most precious gift God had ever laid in her hands. “Can … I hold her?” Sarah whispered.
But Nana Mae was busily at work, tying a string around the umbilical cord still threading its way from Sarah’s insides to the child’s belly, cutting it with a small knife close to the baby, and fixing a deft knot at the end of the cord that was left. As she watched Nana Mae at work, Sarah was so exhausted after the five-hour labor that she nearly dozed until she felt something else oozing from her legs. Her body gave a small spasm, startling her. “Nana Mae, what’s that—”
“You ain’t never seen no baby birthed before?” Nana Mae said, and Sarah shook her head, watching Nana Mae catch the bloody, runny mess in a sack. Sarah had not witnessed her nephew’s birth because Mr. William Powell had sent her to the kitchen to cook while Louvenia was in labor. Nana Mae, who was Miss Brown’s aunt, had delivered Willie, too. “This here ain’t nothin’ but yo’ afterbirth. I’m glad it come out quick. Sometime it take all night, an’ I just sets here an’ waits.” Putting the sack aside, Nana Mae lifted the baby, who was by now wrapped in a small towel, and laid the tiny bundle on Sarah’s breast. “You take hold o’ this here girl o’ yourn. I gots to go outside an’ bury this sack, o’ it’s bad luck—an’ you gon’ git mighty sick.”
“Tell Moses … to come,” Sarah said weakly, gazing at the wondrous infant in her arms. The baby’s eyes were screwed tightly closed, and her nose wasn’t even as big as a marble. Her thin black hair, which was still damp, looked like fine wisps of smoke.
As soon as Moses stood over her, Sarah knew she needn’t have any worries about him loving his daughter. He gently picked up the baby and paced the room with her, cradling her in his long, thin arms. “Lookie, lookie …” Moses whispered in a voice so soft that Sarah could barely hear him, bringing his face down close to the baby’s. “Lookie what we got.”
“What you think we gon’ name her, Moses?” Sarah asked. She felt herself gaining back at least a bit of her strength as she watched her husband and new daughter. Nana Mae had told her she would come back and rub her female parts with sugar to help her heal faster, but Sarah doubted she could be back on her feet anytime soon. Through the birthing process, Nana Mae had told her she’d been bearing down just fine, much better than most first-time mothers, but Sarah ached like she never had in her life.
“We ain’t gon’ name her nothin’, not yet,” Moses said. “In a month’s time, that’s what my mama say. First thing, after seven days, we cut off the rest o’ that cord; next thing, a month from today, we do the takin’-up cer’mony an’ give the baby a name. We can think on it ’til then.”
“A month!” Sarah said. Louvenia had named her son right away, by the next morning. Mr. William Powell had ignored most of Nana Mae’s instructions, telling her she was too countrified and superstitious. Niggerish was the word he’d used, and Nana Mae had just shaken her head with disgust.
“You want her to die?” Moses said, looking at Sarah earnestly.
Willie didn’t die ’cause of gittin’ his name early, Sarah thought in that ornery voice in her head that liked to argue, but she kept that thought to herself. In fact, she felt a gladness in her heart when she realized how much Moses wanted to give their daughter the best start. They didn’t have any money for beautiful clothes or a fancy nursery room like rich white folks did, but they could give their daughter good luck. Maybe it didn’t mean anything to Mr. William Powell, Sarah decided, but it meant something to her.
A dozen people came to the taking-up ceremony, the most people Sarah and Moses had ever hosted in their home. Lou and Miss Brown came, and Nana Mae, and all of Moses’s family, even some of his cousins Sara
h had never met before, all of them traveling more than twenty miles by wagon and horseback in the hot July sun to come see the new baby receive her name. Their guests stood close to each other and filled up every corner of the front room. Nana Mae had dressed the baby in a soft white flour-sack with holes cut out for her arms, which were already growing slightly plump from her mother’s milk. The baby was fully alert as she gazed in wide-eyed silence at the new people in her home. All of her limbs wriggled, as if in anticipation.
The taking-up ceremony was one of the few times Moses had allowed Sarah to walk much at all since the baby’s birth, and she felt as if she’d become a new person. Following his mother’s advice, Moses had not swept their room nor cleaned the sheets or pillows on their bed since the baby’s birth. He’d also advised Sarah not to comb her hair during that month (“My mama say it’ll all fall out if you do!”), so she’d been grateful Louvenia came early on the taking-up day to help her work through all of her matted tangles and fix her hair so it would look neat. Sarah was also wearing a new calico dress Moses had bought her as a surprise, which was slightly big on her but delighted her anyway. On that day, with so much attention on her and her child, Sarah felt like a queen with her princess in her arms.
“Some o’ y’all may ain’t come to no proper takin’-up ’fore today,” Nana Mae said, gazing squarely at Lou, “since these coloreds is comin’ to the towns an’ tryin’ to forgit the ways that’s been since they grandmama’s time an befo’ that. Tryin’ to be white, way I see it.”
Lou, holding tightly to three-year-old Willie’s hand, bit her lip sheepishly. Moses’ mother, a stout woman with striking rows of gray cornrow braids and a stern face, said Amen loudly enough for the whole house to hear. Everyone in the room was dripping with perspiration, and the open windows, as usual, were little help in the heat. But the guests fanned themselves with any items they could find, listening in a respectful hush.