The Twelve-Mile Straight. Eleanor Henderson

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СКАЧАТЬ said. But she wore Jessa’s loss hard. She washed her friend and prayed over her and dressed her in her wedding gown and took care of the baby until Juke came home, carrying Elma out to the barn to suckle from the cows. She refused Maggie’s milk but loved Ida’s (it was just the two cows then); until Ida quit milking, it was only hers Elma would drink. Juke kept Ketty on to cook and clean and look after Elma while he worked the fields with Ketty’s man, Sterling. Ketty and Sterling lived in what used to be the Jesups’ shack, behind the big house, the two buildings strung together with the dull flags of their shared laundry. It was the shack Genus Jackson would live in years later.

      Elma was four when Ketty had her own daughter, Nan, and five when Ketty cut out the baby’s tongue with her scalpel so she wouldn’t die like her great-grandmother and her grandmother and, when Nan was twelve years old, Ketty herself, cancer eating their tongues like a weevil through a cotton boll. The baby was old enough then to wean, and Elma helped the poor child learn to eat milky grits with a spoon. When Elma asked Juke what had become of Nan’s tongue, he told her, laughing, that Ketty had eaten it, for that’s what coloreds did—didn’t she see what unsavory parts they took of the pigs each winter? Ketty ate tobacco and Ketty ate dirt, so Elma believed her father. After she cut out her tongue, Ketty fed Nan dirt too, white clumps of clay she found between the road and the creek. She ate real food, but it took her a long while and she made a good mess. The white clay was creamy and it was free and it gave her something to chew.

      Used to be George Wilson would pay Sterling and Juke the same, for their work was the same, but after the boll weevil came, they were glad if they broke even. If there was anything left, it went to Juke. When Nan was little more than a baby, Sterling left on a freight train, saying he was headed for the steel mill in Baltimore, that men were needed now that the country was taking up with the war, that he’d send for Nan and Ketty when he was settled. The war ended. He didn’t return. But he sent money when he could, and a Buffalo nickel every birthday. When Ketty died, he sent two, and Nan moved into the big house, into the pantry off the kitchen, and began doing the housework her mother used to do. Juke said, “No use having your pretty head get wet in the rain.” He would give her a nickel too when she was good, and with her mother gone she began to take over her midwife work, delivering the younger brothers and sisters of the babies Ketty had brought into the world. The money she earned that way came back to the big house, for they were meant to share. As for the shack, George Wilson came to allow Juke to put who he pleased in it, and to share how he pleased as well. And because he was the kind of man he was, Juke divided the fruits of their crops when there was fruit to divide. If he told the field hands he was overseer, and maybe he did from time to time, it was only because that was the closest word for what he was.

      The girls grew up working side by side on the farm, Nan after her chores and Elma after school. (Why couldn’t Nan go to the colored school in town? Elma asked her father, and he said, What tongue’s she gone use to learn her letters?) At picking time, Elma stayed home from school to help. She picked and she chopped and she plowed and she tilled, riding in her father’s lap over the harrow while Clarence and Mamie pulled them, thrilling at the thrum of the disks spinning the earth beneath their feet. Nan did the listening—she was good at listening—and Elma did the talking and the telling and the singing. Elma sang on the porch and in the kitchen and in the fields, to the guineas and chickens and cows and mules, “Amazing Grace” and “Down in the Valley” and “Down by the Riverside.” She sang while she picked cotton and while she shelled peas, while she washed her hair in the creek and while she brushed it. She sang in church, though she didn’t need church to sing, or even to praise God, since God lived in the sky and in the trees, Ketty had liked to say, in the dirt and the seeds they scattered over it.

      Elma worked so hard her daddy didn’t notice he had no sons. She was her father’s daughter because she couldn’t be anything else. She had the same mineral-red hair as Juke and the same glass-bottle-green eyes. She had the same widow’s peak over the same high, sunburnt forehead. She had the same swift, steady way of walking, picking up her feet as though the ground were hot through her shoes, and always straight, even when she wasn’t in the field, as though there were corn growing up to her elbows on either side. And she was tall, Elma was, near as tall as Juke. She wore three different dresses to school and to church, but on the farm she seemed mostly to wear her daddy’s old Sears, Roebuck overalls, the sleeves of her flannel shirt rolled to her elbows, a bird’s nest of a straw hat perched on her head, worn clean through at the crown. From the road, looking out across the acres with the sun in your eyes, used to be it was hard to tell whether the body in the field was father or daughter.

      Nan wore dresses, though now she looked like a boy herself. She’d cut her hair short when she was thirteen, the way Negro men wore it, almost no hair at all. She was as skinny and dark as a shadow. That was the way Elma’s daddy put it. Elma’s daddy said Nan was so skinny because she ate so much dirt.

      There were times, growing up, when Elma wished she were as dark as a shadow. She liked the way the sun warmed the skin of the men in the fields, their arms and necks and cheeks glowing the color of sorghum syrup by summer’s end. She hated her freckles, hated the way the sun turned her pink, how it burned her skin like paper. When she got a bad burn, Ketty mixed up a bowl of aloe and black tea and slathered her with it, which wasn’t so bad, because the inky jelly was cool on her skin and made it look darker, darker even than little Nan, whose skin was the woody brown of the paper-shell pecans that fell in the yard.

      It gave her an idea. One morning when she was seven, when her father had gone to town, she found a jar of syrup in the pantry, made from their own sweet sorghum. She stripped down to her britches and painted herself with it, using the brush they used for basting. She covered every exposed inch, from her widow’s peak to her toes. When Ketty came into the kitchen carrying Nan on her hip, she let out a holler.

      Elma said, “Look, Ketty! I’m Nan’s sister.”

      The sorghum wasn’t as soothing as the aloe and black tea, nor was the kerosene that Ketty used to scrub it off. She poured it right into the water in the tub on the porch, and it stung worse than any sunburn. “You like playing around like a colored child, do you? Lucky your daddy ain’t here,” she said, holding Elma’s face and scrubbing her chin. “I won’t be telling him, and I suggest you don’t, either.”

      “He won’t be mad, Ketty. He done the same thing hisself when he was a boy.” Elma told the story of when her father and his friend String, George Wilson’s son, had painted themselves with tar to play like colored folks. That was the first time George had told String not to play with Juke, but it wasn’t the last. It was true that it was Juke’s idea. He’d found the tar in a pail in the shed. It was the tar they used to paper the shack. The shack smelled of it, and as a child living there Juke had loved the smell and later he loved it because it smelled like that day with String, and now Elma loved it too.

      Ketty shook her head and scrubbed some more and said, “You both crazier than a rat trapped in a tin shithouse. Ain’t enough kerosene on God’s earth for you fools.” Then, her voice softening, she said, “I reckon I should be glad this ain’t tar.” Ketty sent her to the creek to wash off the kerosene.

      Now Ketty was gone, the only mother Elma knew. It was the three of them, Juke, Elma, and Nan, living in the big house, and though it all belonged to George Wilson—the house, the mules, the seeds in the ground—it was easy to think it was theirs, that they weren’t true sharecroppers, since other than the Wilsons the only ones they shared with were each other. They didn’t struggle the way of the other halvers-hands down the Straight, farmers with eight, ten, twelve mouths to feed, who wandered from county to county each harvest, who even before the hard times came were on hard times. The big house had glass in the windows and rugs on the floors. The Lord had blessed them.

      (“Nigger lover think he mighty, three a them in that big house,” a neighbor might be heard to say. And then the wife would remind him, “You ain’t talk like that come slaying time, when you needed him to СКАЧАТЬ