The Wilful Daughter (21 page)

“
Bira Brown,” the woman said loudly and everyone turned to look. “I don’t believe it. Why, I haven’t seen you in years!”

Bira pulled back a moment straining to recognize the face, instead of reaching into her purse for her glasses. “Well I declare. Sally Mae Hammer.”

“
Sally Mae Hammer Babcock now Bira. I married Winston Babcock ten years ago.”

“
Has it been that long?” Bira said looking at the large woman who was leaning over her.

“
Been that long, Bira. Been far too long. And don’t tell me this is your baby girl, June.”

“
Yes’m,” June said politely wishing the old biddy would go away and leave her to her little time with her mother.

“
My god you have grown. But it’s been over ten years and. . .” The woman stared at her for a second. “Why you’re the spitting image of your mother the first time I ever saw her. Weren’t you fifteen back when William first brung you to let me fix up your hair and clothes?”

Bira nodded as the woman kept talking. “Why, I always knew your daddy would get him a pretty woman with those big eyes and that handsome face and all them big muscles.” The woman sat down on the arm of the seat across from Bira. The passenger sitting there stared at Sally Mae Hammer Babcock as if she were out of her mind, putting that big behind on her like she was a seat.

“
But when he brought your mother into my shop, why I thought she was a little doll. Dressed in them Indian clothes and hair so far down her back it touched her behind. Baby June, you should have seen how all the heads turned when he told me to get her fitted into proper clothes cause he was gonna marry her. Broke many a heart that day, Bira, you sho’ did. William Brown was the prize catch.”

Bira blushed. “I always considered myself lucky.”

“
Do you mind, lady?” the tired woman said to Sally Mae and pushed her off the arm of the seat.

“
Sorry.” Sally Mae rose slowly. “How is William anyway? And your other girls and William the second?”

Bira lowered her head and June spoke up, her tone filled with resentment. “My brother died not long ago.”

“
Oh, Bira, I am so sorry.” She put one of her huge hands to her full chest and the other on Bira’s shoulder. “My heart goes out to you. Buried my son Jonah in the war. I truly feel your pain.”

Bira instantly changed the subject. “Well, Minnelsa is getting married.”

“
Well!” Sally Mae’s demeanor brightened. “It’s about time. I know you are glad. Got the five prettiest daughters in the south and ain’t no man good enough for any of them by William’s standards.”

“
Now, Sally Mae,” Bira grinned. “You not still mad because Fawn didn’t want to keep company with your other son, Bryan.”

Sally Mae frowned and her red lips turned down. “That’s Byron, Bira. I was glad that she told him she wasn’t interested. Besides he married a nice gal. Up in Washington DC now so I can’t complain. Got me four grandbabies. But I always had a feeling that William had something to do with Fawn not liking my boy. I mean, he was a Morehouse Man and. . .”

“
Fawn was not ready for marriage then, Sally Mae.” Bira’s words were a firm cut off for the conversation. Sally cleared her throat and started to talk about something else when Bira interjected: “So where are you headed?”

“
Livingston, Georgia, back home to my new husband. He won’t set foot in Alabama so I had to give up the shop and move there with him. Was worth it, a good man is hard to mind. I was up in Washington visiting Byron and his wife and children. Had to get away from that small town. So tiny. Not like Atlanta. At least you can breathe in Atlanta.”

And Sally Mae Hammer Babcock went on and on standing the 45 minutes to Livingston talking about tens years’ worth of her life since she had last seen Bira. When she grabbed her bags and got off the train, Bira and June waved good bye with joy, giggling like school girls as the train pulled away.

“
Your father never courted her,” Bira laughed to June. “He said her jaw was always flapping and her tail was always wagging. The man she married would have to be half deaf anyway cause she was always so loud and long-winded.” They both laughed. “But she could sew anything you wanted. Worked for lots of white people over in Alabama, that’s how she got started. Then the colored that had money wanted her to make dresses tailored like the finest clothes from big cities for them. So she opened a shop in Birmingham. Had four girls working for her.

“
She had been married three years when I first met her. Your father took me to her to make my wedding dress.”

“
What ever happened to it, Mama?”

Bira looked straight ahead as she said: “The white folks burned it, burned everything the night your father and I left Alabama.”

Now that was one story June knew far too well. She had heard other people tell it, exaggerate on it and make it sound like a miracle that her parents had escaped. But simply put, as her father had reminded them all from time to time, the Blacksmith had quit his job working for a white smithy after years of work for him. William Brown wanted to open his own shop. He wanted something of his own.

The whites who knew this told William not attempt to go out on his own. “White men’s orders,” he would say. No one would come to him to do their work. Trouble was lots of people would have come, for those he originally serviced knew that William was the one who did the fastest and the best work.

With only one warning, William went with his pretty bride to look at a suitable sight for a blacksmith shop. By the time he got back to their home, the tiny wooden structure was burnt to the ground and almost everything in it, except the few pieces Bira could save from her past. William went to his mother and told her what happened. It was she who told him to leave town and he did without looking back. She died two years later, but they didn’t return to Alabama for ten years after that.

“
Miss Fannie and Aunt Ella came to visit a lot before you were born. Your daddy bought them a house when Minnelsa was about ten. They took care of his mama before she died. Besides, they always loved him like a brother.”

They watched the countryside for a while, pine trees that flew by on the wings of green grass, dogwood trees with bright blossoms and flowers and plants June had never seen before. She had her mother all to herself for the first time in her life. No Willie about, although she missed him terribly. No sisters to ask questions or to need attention. No demanding father. Bira Brown sat next to her giving her undivided attention.

Bira touched her baby girl’s head and then, for the first time in a very long time, kissed her forehead. “Did we not love you enough?”

“
Oh, Mama,” June started to cry and buried her face in her mother’s shoulder, tears staining the beautiful cream colored dress Bira wore.

“
I’m not blaming you, girl. I’m just asking. If you needed love and didn’t get enough, why didn’t you tell us? Why didn’t you tell me?”

June raised her head and found her face so close to her mother she could smell the essence of perfume that the Blacksmith insisted his wife wear, even though she did not care for it. She wanted to speak, to tell her mother everything, the whole story. To tell her how she had fallen in love with this man, this Piano Man that she had met on one of her many trips to freedom that she took into the woods to Emma’s place. But she held her tongue.

“
I’m sorry life has been so hard for you, June. I didn’t want it to be that way. Not for you, not for any of my daughters,” Bira whispered into her ear. “But you must realize, and I can say this to you since you have become a woman on your own, I can’t say this yet to your sisters, that you were not an after-thought. Your father and I would not have you think we were trying to have a boy, a perfectly healthy boy, when Willie was not. You, more than any of my children were born out of love.” She touched the belly of her daughter gently. June shrank away slightly, feeling funny, wondering if the eyes of the other colored on the train were staring at her.

“
Was this baby made in love?” Bira spoke in June’s ear so that no one would ever know, not even the wind, she spoke so soft.

June nodded. Whether the Piano Man had loved her or not she was unsure. She would never be sure for he only had to touch her to make her want to be all to him. She loved him. The first and last man she would ever love.

“
Good.” Bira touched her and straightening up her head relaxed against the aged leather of the train seat. “Love, no matter what your father may tell you, is very important.

“
I told you my father was a colored man, my mother a Blackfoot Indian. I’ve told you how my family was killed by the white robes. What I didn’t tell you was my father found my mother half dead and pregnant with the child of her white assailant. He took her in and cared for her until the baby was born. My papa had a nice little piece of land in Tyson, Alabama.

“
The baby was born high yeller and sickly. But by then my father and mother had fallen in love and he treated the baby as his own. Child was named Emmett and died in its first year. I have heard that maybe my mother neglected it because of how it was conceived: not in love but by the lust of some white man who decided my mother was fair game because she was an Indian. Maybe the child had the same thing your brother Willie had, but much worse. Almost from the day he was born he couldn’t move from his waist down. Never kicked like a normal baby, just cried and cried.

“
Then I was born, out of true love my mother told me. Not the kind of love that you die for, but the kind of love you live for. See, my mother wanted to die until my father found her. Without saying why is this woman lying half dying under a bush, he took her to his home and fed her and nursed her and gave her something to live for.

“
Course she didn’t know him at first but she grew to trust him and to like him. One day, she told me, she was just sitting there and wondering: how could one human being be so unselfish, so kind, as to know another man’s child was growing in your belly, not because you loved him, but because the man had taken you from your village and beaten and raped you over and over for months and then, when the pregnancy started to show, left you to die in the wilderness. If he was so kind as to love without question, then he deserved to be loved.”

“
Was your mother happy with your father?”

“
They were the happiest people I had ever seen. I had six brothers and sisters. We lived on papa’s stretch of land like kings. The love of my mama helped him to work hard. We had no shoes sometimes, hand me down clothes all the time but our father taught us to read and write at night because he needed us to work the fields during the day. We didn’t mind. There was so much happiness there, so much love. My mama and the babies would care for the house and the older children would work in the fields. At the end of the day, papa, who in some ways reminds me of your father, big arms and hands and muscles, he would come home and pick up the three babies. I had twin baby sisters and a bad little brother, he’d kiss them and squeeze them and then he’d do the same to my mother. Only it was different. You could see when they touched, when they kissed, they had a love that they wanted to live for.

“
Twelve years of happiness. I say twelve,” Bira was smiling, “because I can only remember back to when I was three and my first memory was of my father throwing me high into the air, so high I thought I would kiss the top of the trees.” Bira’s face was one huge grin. “I remember him hugging me when he caught me because my new brother was born and my father said he loved me even more because now there was two of me.”

Bira grew silent and all June could hear was the sound of the train as it clacked over the tracks. Something sad had filled her mother’s soul. She had never known her mother very well. She had always looked at her mother as her father’s slave. But then, June thought, she had no idea what happened behind the doors when the Blacksmith took his wife to bed. She didn’t want to think about it, but wondered: was there as much passion between them as there had been the first night she had laid on the grass with the Piano Man?

The mother turned to her daughter and touched her face. Her hands were so soft, her eyes so much like the grandmother June had never known.

“
I was just thinking of how . . .”

“
How your family died?” June said sweetly and Bira nodded. She hadn’t talked about it much but it was the only part of her mother’s history that she knew.

“
When I went back to the shell of my parents’ house, I found the dress my mother had worn the day she married my father, buried beneath what was left of the cabin with the deed to the land and a few coins. When I was a little girl, mama told me that when I got married I could wear it. So she buried it in an old strong box under the cabin. I guess that’s why it survived the fire.

“
Miss Fannie told me to keep all of those things, but I guess grief had other ideas. I figured I was supposed to die like the rest of my family. So I took to wearing that dress and sitting in a corner and not eating. One day some white men came into the store and asked how much for the Indian girl. Miss Fannie laughed and told them I was her niece and a little touched in the head so they’d leave me alone. They went away laughing and she believed that was the end of that.

“
One night I woke up screaming in my little cot in the store. A white man was. . .” Bira tried to be delicate, “on me. I don’t know who drove him away but they said I screamed for days. Still I wouldn’t take off my mama’s dress. That’s how your father found me.”