The Black Rose (16 page)

“Don’ nobody wanna talk ’bout it!” Moses said. “But tell you what, if you 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 Sarah 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.

“Well, I’se so glad we’s got chillen who ain’t scared o’ the old ways,” Nana Mae went on, turning toward Sarah and Moses. “Now Sarah, you take this here thimble and hold it in one hand. Take that chile o’ yourn in t’other. Then you walk with that chile to ev’ry corner o’ this here place—an’ that means some of y’all gots to
move
,” she added pointedly, bringing ripples of laughter from the guests. “Then you’s gon’ walk right through that front door an’ come back.”

And so, with her heart pounding steadily from the importance of the moment, Sarah held her daughter to her breast with one arm and the water-filled thimble Nana Mae had given her in the other hand, making her way through her house: first through the bedroom where she and the child had spent so much time in her first month of life, then easing her way past the witnesses in the front room until she had left no corner untouched. After that, following Nana Mae’s instructions, she took the baby outside to the sunny front porch and walked back inside.

A room of smiling faces was waiting for her when she walked back over the threshold. Sarah’s eyes caught Moses’, and he was beaming at her.

“Well, then,” Nana Mae went on, “you can take a sip o’ that thimble for luck, then give it to the baby. Make sure she drink it, now!”

Sarah took a very small sip of the tepid water—there was barely enough for one sip, never mind one for her and one for the baby—and then she tilted the thimble carefully toward her daughter’s mouth, pouring the dribbles of water into a corner. Much to her relief, the baby drank it eagerly. “What y’all namin’ this chile?” Nana Mae said.

Sarah and Moses had considered so many names—Minerva after Sarah’s mother, Grace after his, and even Louvenia for her sister—but instead they’d agreed on a name Moses had heard a stranger call her child in town, and Sarah had liked it immediately when he mentioned it to her. It was the prettiest name she’d ever heard.

“Lelia,” Sarah said, and she was even more certain of their choice when she heard how beautifully the name flowed from her tongue. “Lelia McWilliams.”

After that, there were hugs and clapping, and Sarah thought the taking-up ceremony was finished. The table was full of food that Miss Brown and Moses’ family had brought, and her stomach was growling fiercely. But Moses gently took baby Lelia from Sarah’s hands. “I got one mo’ thing, Nana Mae. My mama taught me this one,” he said. “Come on outside, y’all.”

Sarah was confused, but she followed her husband to the side of the two-story house where they lived; she and Moses had the bottom floor, and there were stairs running from the ground to their upstairs neighbor’s door. When Sarah saw that Moses was about to climb the rickety steps, she touched his elbow. There was no railing, and it had always looked like a precarious climb to her. “Where you goin’?” she asked, alarmed.

“Just up these here stairs,” he said. “Don’t you fret, Sarah.”

Shading her eyes from the bright late-afternoon sunlight, Sarah stood in the huddle at the bottom of the stairs and watched Moses carefully climb one step after the other until he stood at the landing twenty feet above them. He grinned, cradling Lelia in his arms, close to his chest. Watching him standing so high, Sarah realized that her husband was truly like a giant. She was also terrified he might drop their child in his giddiness.

“See where we at?” Moses called down to them. “This the highest-up place we got!”

“What you doin’ up there, Moses?” Sarah called back.

Nana Mae chuckled. “Don’t git cross with ’im, now,” she said. “You carry the baby up to the highest place, that mean she gon’ be rich one day.”

Rich! Her fears forgotten, Sarah’s face broke into a grin. Moses’ mother patted Sarah on the back, then hugged her close with one arm; the woman was so excited, Sarah thought she might do a dance. The others, too, laughed and clapped gleefully. The very mention of wealth so close to them, when they had so little themselves, visibly raised everyone’s spirits.