The Black Rose (7 page)

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 the 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 arm. 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.”

Sarah had also heard Missus Anna complain about how Delta had been cut off from the river, leaving the former river town hidden behind a sandbar and wildly growing young willow trees. To Sarah and Lou, the change meant they had to struggle to fill their tubs with water from the shallow bathing creek not far from their cabin, which seemed shallower all the time, or else beg a ride on Missy Laura’s mule-drawn wagon to travel several miles to the river.

“So I’m leavin’ today,” Alex announced brightly. “Goin’ west like Papa wanted to.”

“We goin’ out west?” Sarah shrieked, no longer the least concerned with the Mississippi River and its fickle course. She was so full of joy, she thought she might faint.

Alex’s buoyant face deflated. “ ’Til I got a good job, don’t make no sense me tryin’ to feed y’all,” he said. “Shoot, I may need to come back. We can’t be givin’ up this house.”

At first the disappointment threatened to drown Sarah—even small disappointments still drove her to tears much more often now than when her parents had been living, since she couldn’t help thinking that any setback might not have happened if Mama and Papa had been there—but she swallowed back the bitter taste in her throat and clung to her brother’s sleeve. He had grown so much taller, he was probably taller than Papa by now. “But you gon’ send after us when you gots a good job? You promise, Alex?”

“I’ma do my best, Li’l Bit,” Alex said, but it didn’t gladden her to hear her brother call her by her favorite pet name because he did it so rarely, and only when he was trying to convince her not to argue with him. Even when he
did
make promises, he couldn’t always be held to them. He’d promised them new shoes last spring, and they were still waiting for their shoes in the fall. Sarah’s shoes pinched her growing toes so badly that she usually went without them, preferring to chafe her bare soles on rocks and soil.

“Don’t be callin’ her Li’l Bit,” Louvenia said to Alex, annoyed. “She ain’t little no mo’. ’Sides, that’s Papa’s name. An’ you ain’t Papa, cuz Papa woulda took us all.”

At that, Alex looked hurt. Quickly he swiped at his brow and turned his eyes away. “If Papa woulda took us, wouldn’t none of us be here now, would we?” His voice was low, but the words were like a gunshot.

Louvenia snorted,
humph
, sounding like Mama. “Sound like you think you a man jus’ cuz you big like one,” she said. “If you goin’, then git. You ain’t gon’ stand here in Papa’s house talkin’ bad ’bout him.”

“I didn’ mean nothin’ by that, Lou… . When you gots young’uns an’ such, you gotta be where you
know
you gots work, even if it ain’t much. But I got a chance to look roun’ an’ see what else a colored man kin make o’ hisself, not jus’ haulin’ an’ pickin’. I might even go out to them Dakota lands an’ find me some gold like the white folks, since them Injuns that kilt that Gen’ral Custer done give up. Folks gittin’ rich out there! Papa couldn’t do that, see? I promise I’ll send y’all money through Missus Anna,” Alex said. “Now … do I git a hug good-bye?”

Louvenia cast him an evil look, then she walked to him to give him a weak hug. Many times Louvenia had complained to Sarah that Alex had so much more freedom than she did because he was a man. Men didn’t have to be careful and stick close to home the same way women did, she said. Louvenia’s envy was naked in her jutting lower lip as she hugged her brother good-bye, and Sarah could guess what her sister was thinking:
Maybe a colored man can make something of himself, but what about a colored girl?

Sarah hugged her brother tightly, even though tears gleamed in her eyes. To her, Alex smelled like the river, sweat, and the promise of a new life far away, hidden from her. In all the time since their parents had died, Sarah was no closer to fulfilling her promise to Mama to learn how to read. She hadn’t had time to learn even a single new letter of the alphabet; and even if she had the time, where would she learn it? She didn’t know any colored children who went to school. But maybe if she went out west …