And he didn’t return his youngest daughter’s hug when she stumbled outside, climbed wailing onto his lap, and wrapped her arms around him so tightly he had to strain to breathe. As if she thought she could pull him away from Yellow Jack’s hands all by herself.
Chapter Three
Every night before she went to sleep, Sarah tried to strike a new pact with Jesus. Sooner or later, she was convinced, she would find the right way to make him happy. If she gathered firewood. If she swept up both the floor inside the cabin and the front porch. If she churned butter in Mama’s churn, even though it was such terribly hard work that it made her arms ache for days. If she pulled weeds for six hours straight, maybe even seven, without resting for food, water, or play. If she prayed for a full hour until she went to sleep. If she washed clothes all day Saturday and again on Sunday. If she tried very hard not to get cross with Louvenia, even if her sister cuffed her or cursed her first, or if Louvenia refused to get out of bed the whole day. If she said a blessing every time she ate even a bite.
One day, she knew, Jesus would be happy with her. One morning she would wake up from the bad dream he was giving her and Mama and Papa would be back.
In fact, every morning she lay very still before opening her eyes and reminded Jesus of all the things she had done to please him. How she hadn’t eaten the taffy Missus Anna gave her so many weeks ago because she was waiting for Mama and Papa to come back. How she had not used His name in vain. How she had not mussed her clothes or stepped on any ants or clapped her hands to take the life of a single mosquito. Clutching Mama’s Bible-book tightly to her chest, Sarah would whisper, “Please, Jesus? Please? Ain’t I done good?”
Then she would wait, listening for sounds that would tell her if her wish had come true. Many mornings, in fact, she was sure she heard the sounds: Mama’s feet whispering across the floor near the cookstove, or Papa’s whistling breathing while he slept and then a grunt as he rolled over on his side. Those mornings, she would wait as long as she could, her heart thumping against her naked breast, holding her breath and wishing so hard that her forehead pulled tightly across her skull. Then she would sit up and open her eyes to see if it was real this time, or simply in her head like so many mornings before. Chile, yo’ head sho’ tells some stories. Seem like you anywhere but in dis room, Mama used to say.
Or was she saying it right now? Was she really hearing Mama’s voice this time?
Sarah felt a stinging kick to the soft of her hip. When she opened her eyes, Louvenia was standing over her, not Mama. Louvenia’s plaits were wild in the air because she hadn’t combed them out in so long. There was a crust on her face, running from her right eye all the way to her nose. And her dress was filthy; she hadn’t washed it, or herself, in as long as Sarah could remember. Louvenia was making no efforts to please Jesus at all, Sarah thought.
As if she’d heard her thinking the words, Louvenia suddenly swooped down with her arm and snatched the Bible-book from Sarah’s hands. “Hush all that prayin’! They ain’t comin’ back,” Louvenia said. She rarely spoke now, but when she did, her voice always startled Sarah because it sounded so much older. “This book ain’t gon’ help you, neither.”
Sarah sat up, but she didn’t grab at the book out of anger even though she wanted to so badly that her muscles twitched. Jesus might see, and that would ruin a whole day’s promises. “Give it back, Lou,” she said as calmly as she could.
Instead of answering, Louvenia whirled around and broke into a run. She forgot all about Jesus and promises and goodness as she watched her sister running off with Mama’s book. “Give it back!” she shrieked, and this time it was her own voice that startled her, so loud and big that she was sure she would wake people for miles. “Gimme M-Mama’s book!”
But neither running nor screaming helped, because Louvenia was fleeing from her so fast that she seemed to be flying, even when she stumbled and nearly lost her balance. Sarah heard her sister sobbing, and she sobbed, too, realizing she couldn’t catch her no matter how fast she ran. Louvenia was growing smaller and smaller as she ran ahead, disappearing in the shadows of trees. Finally Sarah fell and tumbled to the ground, scraping her knee against a rock until it bled, and she could only watch her sister’s retreating form as she ran along the creek, her dress flying behind her. Louvenia had gone crazy, Alex had said. Maybe he was right.
Sobbing so hard she could barely breathe, Sarah made her way back to the cabin, where it seemed like Mama and Papa should be waiting. She surveyed the things that belonged to her parents: Papa’s rocker on the porch, Mama’s churn and rusty washtubs out front, Papa’s plows leaning against the side of the cabin. Not even realizing why she was doing it, Sarah crawled behind the wagon wheel leaning against the house, smelling the sweet, dry earth, and felt around for Papa’s jug. Wasn’t it still here? She couldn’t see anything but dried-out corncobs, stones, a big ham bone, and a bent spoon. No jug. Papa must have moved it. But where?
“Papa!” Sarah screamed, momentarily daring to believe that if goodness and promises didn’t work, then maybe Jesus would send her parents back when He saw how angry she was.
But there was no answer except the hound’s far-off barking. Papa’s hound had run off after they didn’t have anything left to feed him. He was half wild anyway, Alex had said, but Sarah found herself wishing the dog would come loping up to her now to lick her face. No one came; not Papa, not Mama, not the hound.
Sarah’s chest heaved and her entire frame shivered with sobs. She climbed up the porch to go inside the cabin, which was so empty it felt profane. Her eyes roved quickly around the room, looking for … something. Mr. Long had hired some Negro men to come burn the bodies up, and they’d taken Mama’s and Papa’s clothes to burn, too. They had to burn out the fever, they said, or else someone else could catch it. Nothing was left but shrunken bodies charred beyond recognition, which Alex had dug a hole for and buried. Then Missy Laura and the other croppers had come out, lit a fire near the buried bodies, and sung sad songs all night. But it wasn’t the same. Sarah had seen funerals before, and a burned body wasn’t the same as watching someone put at peace under the ground. A burned body meant they were just … gone.
Her parents were gone, Sarah realized as she stood in the middle of the empty cabin. Jesus wasn’t going to send them back, no matter what she promised or how hard she worked. And Alex was gone, too, over to Vicksburg because he said they couldn’t make enough wages cropping without Mama and Papa. Mama would have been very worried about Alex over in Vicksburg, what with all the foolishness she said was going on. But he’d left anyway, and he’d visited only once so far, on Sunday, bringing them fifty cents, and he’d left at dawn on Monday morning, like he’d never been back. Sarah gasped for air as her sobs pummeled her insides.
Then something on the shelf above the cookstove caught Sarah’s eye: Behind Mama’s near-empty jars of flour and meal and rice, there was a picture she’d seen Mama admiring before. Feeling a tiny sense of relief from her sobs, Sarah dragged a chair to the shelf, stood up on it, and reached for the photograph as carefully as she could, so she wouldn’t tip over.
It was Papa. He was younger than Sarah had seen him look before, maybe in his twenties, and he didn’t have his beard, but Sarah could tell it was him from his eyes, which were twinkling with life even though his face had no smile. Ole Marse Long had let Papa pose for that photograph before the war, when his whole family sat for portraits, and Mama had been busy washing clothes that day. Mama had said many times she wished she had a picture of her face, too. She said she had nearly forgotten what her own mammy and pappy looked like, and she wanted to leave something for her children to remember her by.
Sarah hadn’t understood how important remembering was, until now.
She climbed down from the chair, her sobs nearly gone, and slid the precious photograph of Papa under her pallet. She might not ever get Mama’s Bible-book back from Louvenia, she knew. Louvenia might give it back to her if Sarah told her about th
e reading promise she’d made to Mama, but she also might not. Louvenia was so contrary! Besides, her sister had been acting half crazy since Mama and Papa died, and Papa said crazy folks would do anything. She’d thrown the book in the creek, maybe, just to show God how mad she was.
So Sarah made a new vow, not to Jesus, but to herself: She would keep Papa’s photograph, always. And this time she didn’t make the vow as a bargain to try to bring Papa back, either. This time she figured if she kept that vow, no matter how much time passed, her father wouldn’t really be gone at all.
Sarah never did see the Bible-book again, but Louvenia’s “crazy” spell seemed to pass just in time for her to fall silently industrious so that she and Sarah could somehow make do on their own. Food was the constant struggle, since Mama’s garden had begun to fail without her expert touch. Within a month, the food their neighbors had brought for them after the funeral had dwindled to nearly nothing except some salt pork and a sack of black-eyed peas. In the beginning, Missus Anna stopped by the first Sunday of every month with a pail of milk and a treat, like a jar of sweet-tasting marmalade or a delicious candy she called peanut brittle. Sarah looked forward to those baskets from Missus Anna more than she’d ever remembered anticipating even Christmas, but they stopped after a while.
Sarah and Louvenia rarely ate even chicken anymore, since the chickens had become more valuable than ever for their eggs. Louvenia let some of the eggs hatch so they’d have more chickens, but it took time for the chicks to get big enough to be much use either as food or as laying hens. When three of the growing chicks vanished, probably killed by the wild hound who hunted nearby, Sarah cried about it all night. Seem like we can’t git nothin’, she thought bitterly, and that thought flung her into a dark hopelessness for days.
Delta, Louisiana, was not a friendly place for two young girls trying to survive on their own. It was a very small town with most of the colored folks scattered throughout the farmlands, and they were struggling too much to consider taking in two more children. Most of their neighbors, like Missy Laura, were too poor to be of any help except occasional visits to hold their hands for prayers and to tell them God would provide. There was a man-size hole in their roof after the summer rains for nearly three months, until Alex saved up enough money and fixed it with two of his Vicksburg friends during one of his visits. Alex had found work on a dock, and Sarah noticed that he’d bought himself shiny black boots and a pair of denim blue jeans.
Meanwhile, Louvenia became very earnest about her sewing, using the money she got from Alex, the hens’ eggs, and the washing to buy material for winter clothes. Sarah helped her, counting out coins on the table by lamplight at the end of the day, trying to guess how many they would need to buy what. Many times their guesses fell short of the prices at the store and they had to leave with less than they’d wanted. When Louvenia realized she would not have enough material to make coats for both Sarah and herself, she just went to work on Sarah’s. “What ’bout chu?” Sarah asked her, realizing that the coat’s sleeves were too short for her sister. At that, Louvenia just shrugged.
For Sarah, there was no more time for games of any sort during the workdays. The endless cotton fields saw to that.
The cotton began blooming in dots of white by the middle of August, and picking began in September. Sarah thought longingly of the time when she’d been so small that Mama let her ride on her sack while she picked, and she didn’t have to do any work, dozing to the rhythm of Mama’s movement up and down the rows. This was the first time Sarah would be expected to work as hard as any other grown-up cropper, just like Louvenia. With a sack around her shoulder that dragged the ground, Sarah went with her sister to their field at dawn, where the downy white cotton plants they’d planted in spring had opened up in a sea.
We gon’ pick all this cotton? Sarah asked herself in amazement, since the task looked as fruitless as trying to collect snowflakes. Yet she started at one end of a neat row of plants and slowly worked her way to the other side, her hands yanking to pull off the cotton bolls while the sun bullied her from above. She knew she had to pick the soft cotton free of the clinging bolls and throw only the cotton in her sack; that was the most important thing, Papa used to tell her. She cried out and sucked on her fingers when the bolls pricked her, but she couldn’t pause long because she knew she had to fill her sack. Papa told her he’d been whipped as a boy when his oberseer saw him tossing bolls in the sack with his cotton. Sarah also remembered figures Papa had told her, that every acre of a cotton field grew about one bale’s worth of cotton, and that he said he could pick two hundred pounds of cotton in a day. The more cotton she and Louvenia picked, she knew, the more they could catch up on their lost wages so they wouldn’t have any debts to Missus Anna they couldn’t pay. If they couldn’t pay their debts, they couldn’t stay in their house. There were no games to make of that.
It seemed to Sarah that as soon as she and Louvenia dragged their feet home at night and surrendered to their pallets, morning was already glowing outside and it was time to go back to the fields. She never felt rested, and her muscles ached. She was so sore from reaching for the plants that it hurt to stand up straight.
And even on days they weren’t picking, they had to work just as hard on the washing. The night before washing day, they walked to collect the dirty clothes from two nearby white families who paid them fifty cents each week to do their wash. By the time they got the clothes and returned to their cabin, it was after dark, so they ate whatever food they could find for a hurried supper and went to bed. If any of the clothes looked particularly dirty, they soaked them overnight. Then, in the morning, they dragged the clothes, two washtubs, and as much firewood as they could carry to the river. They filled the tubs with water from the river until they could barely carry them even between the two of them—one tub was for washing, one for rinsing—and began their work. They had to boil the clothes, wring them out, rinse them, and wring them out again. Then they brought the damp clothes home and hung them on the line outside their cabin, hoping it wouldn’t rain overnight.
All along the riverbank, other Negro women like Missy Laura were there washing, too. Often the women were singing, but Louvenia and Sarah rarely sang along, their brows knitted with concentration as they scrubbed and beat out the dirty spots in the laundry so their customers wouldn’t complain. Any complaints, no dollar. Sometimes Sarah rubbed fabric against the washboard so hard that it felt like it was grating her hand, and she especially hated the hot job of tending the clothes in the tub of boiling water they used to clean the huge bedsheets and tablecloths. She also hated the stink of lye soap, which stayed on her hands and arms for hours after all the washing was done.
Sarah missed the naps she used to take. She missed sitting in the shade watching the riverboats pass with all their majesty. Now, when riverboats went past on washing day, Sarah glanced at them for only the barest moment, watching their paddles churning the water white and the steam hissing from their long smokestacks. They were no longer magical; they were an annoyance. The boats made her angry now; she envied the people she could see on board whose lives on a Saturday afternoon afforded them the luxury of a boat ride. She envied that they could go anywhere they chose, when she could go nowhere at all.
Then, mysteriously, as if God had heard Sarah’s complaints, one day the river simply went away. In April of 1876, in the midst of rainstorms, the Mississippi River flooded over portions of Missus Anna’s lands and retreated from its bank as if it had been sucked out of sight. When Sarah, Louvenia, and their neighbors emerged the next morning, they all stood in huddles staring up and down the sandy, deserted landscape with fear and wonder in their eyes. The river had left behind only ridges and deep puddles in the damp ground, hills of sandy soil and dead fish whose scales glinted in the sunlight. No more steamboats, no more washing place, no more fishing.
No river.
“Where’d it go, Lou? Where’d it go?” Sarah asked her sister in a panic, tugging on Lou’s ar
m. Louvenia shook her head, unable to speak. During that first impossible instant, as she surveyed the land that had been a riverbed only the day before, Sarah’s young heart once again tasted the lonely realization of how small and fragile her life was, how little she could control the world around her. I wanna leave this place, Sarah thought fiercely, clinging to her sister. If even the river’s done left, how come we can’t, too?
Sarah realized later that the mighty Mississippi River had simply changed its course, flowing a few miles away. But her desire to go somewhere else, anywhere else, remained firm.
A little more than two years after her parents died, Sarah thought her wish was about to be granted. Alex came to visit them, clean-shaven, wearing a fresh Sunday shirt and pants with suspenders. Sarah thought maybe he’d met a girl and was getting married, but he said he’d decided there wasn’t enough steady work in Vicksburg. Life had changed dramatically since the previous year’s flood, he said, since Vicksburg had been cut off from river traffic, too.
“Durn river’s lef’ Vicksburg high an’ dry,” Alex said. “Them wharfs where people was workin’ ain’t nowhere near a drop o’ water. You should see ’em now, ’bout a mile an’ a half inland when the water use to come right up on ’em. They done built a new pier, but there’s so much mud the wagons is gettin’ stuck. So them boats is passin’ us on by, an’ all them crews an’ travelin’ folks is goin’ someplace else. I ain’t never seen it so quiet at the hotel I work at, Chamber’s. Time was, the place was full of folks. The boss man say he can’t keep all us porters on when he got so many empty rooms.”