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