All Aunt Hagar's Children

TAPESTRY

Were it not for the sleeping car porter, she might well have grown old there. And then—for her people were people of long lives—she would have grown older still. The case could be made that Anne Perry would have married Lucas Turner, for though she had gone off him after Lucas told her she was not as beautiful as she made herself out to be, she was fast maturing and was coming, day by day, to sour on Ned Murray, who told her endlessly how pretty she was. Ned promised that he would marry her and hang the moon and the planets and star-jewels around her pretty neck. (“I’ll wring your damn neck!” Ned was to say to the woman he would marry within two years. “I’ll wring it all to hell and back again.”) “Oh, Ned,” Anne’s mother found her saying late one Saturday morning, smiling into the mirror at her face. A face with a past of few tears that mattered. The same mirror her father used to shave. “Oh, my sweet Ned.” “Anne, honey, I needs to confess to you that many’s the woman in the world done been bamboozled by nothin,” her mother said, straightening her bonnet without once looking into the mirror. Anne’s mother opened the back door, took the one step down into the yard, turned and then stood, one foot still in the doorway and one foot in the yard. She held out her open hand, palm up, and slowly raised it until the hand seemed to be floating. “I needs to confess to you, honey, thas the weight of pretty.”

So, yes, were it not for the sleeping car porter, Lucas Turner, the second son of Maize and Ozell, would have become Anne’s husband. Lucas would have come back and said to her words that would have been as close to an apology as a young man like him could manage. “You is beautiful, and I shouldna said you whatn’t. But sometimes you make it hard….” Lucas’s father, Ozell, had been a deaf-mute all his days, so many people just naturally thought his nine children would not be able to manage so much as a “hey” or a “linger here.” Lucas would have made Anne Perry a good husband. He wouldn’t have told her every day how much he loved her or how beautiful she was, but on those rare days when he could force himself to get that out, she would know he meant it with his whole heart, and just maybe his saying it would have carried her up the mountain until the next time he said it. And Lucas would never have hurt her, was not raised that way. The world could not say that about Ned. And if Lucas had, in some insane moment, deviated from a sound upbringing, his father would have thrashed him to know he could bring something like that into the world. Then Anne’s father would have torn him asunder and cast his parts to the winds.

Yes, were it not for the sleeping car porter, Lucas Turner it would have been. He had large hands, strong hands to work the acres his father would have passed on to him, wordless. Her own practical father would have perhaps bought them many more acres, maybe even a piece of that haunted but fertile section of land owned by the white man Hooper Andrews, a generous soul who woke up one cold morning and found that during a night of sound sleep all his perfect teeth had fallen out and were lying in a special, bloodless pile on his pillow. God, people said, did more mysterious things in Mississippi than he did anywhere else on Earth. The land from Lucas’s father and the land bought from Andrews might have been enough for Anne and Lucas Turner to make a good life—some little of this, a whole lot of that, enough of a living raising crops so that they could put more and more distance between themselves and the legacy of slavery. The children would have helped to do that, too. They would not have had less than five children, given the kind of people they came from. The first boy would have been called Roger, named for Lucas’s grandfather, who had been lynched, just the opening act of the entertainment for an Independence Day celebration. Just before the white people’s picnic and five hours before the fireworks, which had been imported cheap that year from New Orleans.

The first girl might have been named Maize, after Lucas’s mama, but Anne would have wanted to honor her father’s mother, Clemie, the one who taught her how to make tapestries, that long and arduous process of creating something giant and wonderful enough to put up in a church or a palace, or even on a family’s wall to replace the wallpaper of magazine and newspaper covers. “Anybody can crochet,” Clemie said to the ten-year-old Anne and her older sister on the day of the first lesson, spreading out on the kitchen table a large thick cloth and spools of yarn. The blue river of one spool especially caught and held Anne’s eye. That blue and the other colors would ultimately not be enough to hold her sister, who would eventually lose herself to crocheting. “Well,” Clemie sighed to Anne the day the sister wandered over into crocheting, “a body can be happy there. I been there. It ain’t so bad. But me and you will have to settle for somethin that will stay round for a hundred years. Maybe even a thousand. You think you gon like that? You think you gon like that many years?” Anne nodded sure, her hands resting on the table’s edge—one hundred, two hundred, three hundred. It didn’t matter, as long as she could keep touching that blue. And the green, the green was nice, too, lush and warm as a thick blanket of grass after a hard day’s work. And the yellow so hypnotically bright, as if John Henry had taken the sun and whipped it up in a cake-making bowl and laid it out in streams of gold across the table end to end.

Some of Anne and Lucas’s children would have been farmers and married other farmers, but there would have been others who would go off to St. Louis or Chicago or Detroit. And many of their farming grandchildren would have followed their relatives north. Anne and Lucas would grow old seeing their world thinning out. A house where some child or grand of theirs first lived as a married soul would come to stand empty or be inhabited by other people—good folks maybe, but nevertheless unrelated to the Turners; and so she would tell Lucas as they went about in their wagon, then in their car, to take another route because while that married child was fine and happy in St. Louis, that didn’t help her inconsolable heart traveling down a bumpy Mississippi road. During the summers and some holidays, their world would repopulate again with children and grands and great-grands coming home in big cars and with presents and the city ways of people who lived in places where saying no to white people was an every-other-day thing. Back home, back in Mississippi, the grands especially might not even know how to act. “It’s a free country” didn’t translate in Mississippi. There was a strain in both Anne and Lucas that would have produced a teenage grandson with a hat cocked Chicago-style who would have had to cut short his two-month summer vacation after three days. Or end up at the bottom of the river, anchored there with a seventy-pound cotton gin fan tied to his neck with barbed wire.

Lucas would have died first, for that was just the way his people were. A heart attack as he stepped out of the field to get a drink of water. And then, way later on, it would be Anne’s peaceful turn, far into the night after a good meal and after some grandchild or great-grandchild had read something to her from a schoolbook or from the Bible, and after one more dream about Lucas going off to the fields and never returning. All her kin would come back to bury her, from Chicago, St. Louis, Washington, New York, the county next door. To praise her good name at a funeral preached at Everlasting Light Baptist Church, where the funerals of her parents had been preached, where they would have had the funeral of one or more of her own children, dead of whooping cough or dead of falling down a well or dead of just not having been born with enough life. “We’re jealous of God this mornin,” the preacher would begin at her funeral, “cause He’s sittin with our Anne and we won’t be able to sit and talk with her again until nine and a half minutes after we step through them Pearly Gates. We’re jealous of You this mornin, yes, but we must thank You for all the livelong days we had with her, O Lord. We’re thankful for every single minute, but still we can’t help but be jealous this mornin….” So Anne Perry Turner’s life would have come to an end. And God would lick the tip of His forefinger and turn the page. Ashes to ashes. Dust to Mississippi dust.

But Anne Perry had a cousin, a sleeping car porter, and he came to the October homecoming at Everlasting Light with his friend, another sleeping car porter, George Carter. Anne’s cousin had set off a year before to make a new life in Chicago, but on the train just before St. Louis, a man in a gray suit and purple tie and wearing tiny black-and-white, two-tone shoes told him about Washington, D.C. “They treat colored people like kings and queens in Washington, cause thas where the president lives. Would they treat colored people anything but good in a city where the president hangs his hat and pets his dog and snores beside Mrs. President every night? Now would they?” Being who he was, Anne’s cousin took too long in answering, so the man in the gray suit gave him the words, “No. Course not. They wouldn’t do such a thing to us.” Anne’s cousin got off the train in St. Louis and exchanged the rest of his ticket to Chicago for one going to Washington, where he didn’t know a soul. The cousin never once wondered why—if D.C. was the Promised Land, “a place where,” as the purple tie man had said, “men dying in the desert dreamed of”—why the man on the train, as he himself had confessed, had never actually seen the city but had lived all his life in Gary, Indiana.

Anne’s cousin and George Carter were good friends, lived on the same floor in a house on Corcoran Street, N.W., and though George was born and raised in Washington, he usually had the humility of a patient farmer who had worked his whole life behind a mule. He had seen New York and Chicago and Philadelphia and he knew that while his D.C. was fine for him, it did not rise up and command the sky the way other places did. Anne’s cousin—returning home for the first time since leaving—and George got off the train the first day of the Everlasting Light homecoming and got a ride the few miles to the church after they bought just about all the soft drinks at a little store near the train station. “I don’t wanna go home with just the presents in my suitcase,” the cousin told George, informing him that at such gatherings everyone brought something for everyone else to share. “They call these sodas up in Washington,” the cousin bragged to his great-aunt at the homecoming, “and we drink em all day long.” The aunt was blind and nearly toothless and she took two slow sips of the orange soda George had handed her. “Taste just like the soft drink they got over to the white man’s sto,” she said.

The cousin came in his blue wool suit, and George had on his brown wool suit. The suits were too warm for Mississippi in October, but the young men got points for looking good, even as the sweat rained down their faces through the long day, their coats resting on their arms or over their shoulders most of the time so people could see their pants matched up real nice with the coats. The cousin introduced George to just about everyone at the homecoming, which was held to the right of the church. The cemetery was over to the left, where Anne’s dead were resting.

At about three that afternoon, the cousin got around to introducing George to Anne, who was not impressed for many reasons, but partly because she had Neddy around and Lucas wasn’t too far away. Her mother’s remark about pretty weighing nothing had been one month before, not yet long enough for Anne to know that Neddy might not be the one. There was even someone named Hayfield just waiting to come onstage. And Washington, unlike St. Louis or Chicago, was a universe away. Too far for a young woman still used to adoring her face to have dreams about. George, with his fancy wool suit, was sweating from doing no more than saying, Hi you doin, Hi yall doin this afternoon, not a sign of a man used to hard work. Anne thought as she took him in with one hurried glance, If he sweats with just this much work, how much work could he ever manage behind a plow? Years and years later, George Carter, speaking into a cassette-recording machine, would say to the grandson named for him that he wanted to walk away, walk all the way back to the train station, because in her eyes he had seen how limited his life on the rails had been.

As Anne shook his hand and told him welcome to Picayune, she spied Ned over his shoulder saying something to Clarice Tilman. At one point Clarice threw her head back and laughed to the sky. “Hope you have a good time here, Mr. Carter,” Anne said without thinking, still shaking his hand. Clarice wasn’t a fast girl; she was a good girl from a good family, raised to know right from wrong. She had some lemonade in one hand and after she laughed, she drank a long time from her mason jar, not seeming to care that Ned had to wait for her to finish before he could say something else that would make her laugh. And wait he did. Anne did a quick look around to see where Lucas was, but she could not find him in the crowd of people standing and sitting. She couldn’t find Hayfield, either. George said after she pulled her hand from his, “It’s a hot day but I think I’m gonna make it.” Anne, with her mind elsewhere, did not hear him. She had already seen how perfect the day was, if a mind was in a state to enjoy it. Years and years later, she would describe for her grandson, talking into the cassette-recording machine, the dress Clarice was wearing, the way her free hand hung limply out in front of her, the way her other hand went halfway around the mason jar. “Yesterday is a hundred years ago,” she would say to him, “but the look and the pattern and the color of that dress, they’re with me right now. I could paint it in extreme detail like I just saw it this mornin.”

George stayed with the cousin’s family that weekend. The young men had planned to catch the train to Jackson on Tuesday morning to get their new assignments. On Sunday morning George went to church with the family and saw Anne again. She waved at him after the service, a dark spirit in a long blue dress, and then disappeared on a road with some friends, with Lucas a few steps ahead of them. “I was afraid,” George would tell his grandson and the recording machine, “afraid that God was tellin me somethin and I might not be smart anough to read the signs right.” He had on the same wool suit and the weather punished him even more than it had the day before and he was still somewhat hobbled by what he had first seen in Anne’s eyes. “I got separated from her cousin, my buddy, and just followed her and that crowd on up the road, hopin I wouldn’t get lost.”

When she happened to turn and see him walking alone, she came back and let him know he was going the long way to her cousin’s place. He told her he figured that sooner or later the road would double back, and he’d be where he needed to be. The roads may work that way in Washington, D.C., she said, but by the time the roads in Mississippi double back, you could be in another state or in the river.

“Can I walk a ways with you?” he asked nearly half a mile from the church, wringing out his handkerchief again.

She shrugged. “Ain’t that what you doin now?” He wasn’t Neddy- or Lucas-handsome either. Too light as well. Dark had a way of touching the heart. Light, she had decided at seventeen and a half, only shook hands.

“Yes,” he said, “but I’m doin it without none a your permission.”

The rains came early that afternoon and he stayed at her place. Unlike other women up and down his railroad lines, she had surprisingly little interest in Washington, and he kept digging deep, trying to come up with some detail he felt would make him seem a man of the world. Women liked men of the world. They talked on the porch sitting on cane-bottom chairs, her mother sewing at one end of the porch, three of her brothers sitting on the floor in the middle, playing Old Maid with cards their father had bought in Jackson. The rain never letting up. At one point she turned her face and managed to cover her yawn with four fingers before asking where his people came from. She had not learned that colored people could actually be born in Washington. And when he could say no more than that his parents came from some forgotten place in North Carolina, her face saddened as if, in the end, she was talking to an orphan. He saw that look, because, unlike the one with the yawn, she failed to hide her face in time. Orphans are to be helped and not so much pitied, her father had taught her, but most of all try to make them feel like human beings. Remember, you your own self got a mother and father.

It might be that her father knew that his second daughter was destined for some place else, beyond where he could walk in a day or two to see her if all other transportation failed. He stayed away until George had left early that evening, did not even make it to supper, something that had not happened within the children’s memory. Everyone else in Anne’s household was fascinated by the fact that George lived in Washington, especially her mother, who wanted to know if he had ever met the president, whether colored people did not have to step into the gutter when a white person approached.

Anne was quiet most of the meal, and George figured correctly that she was bored with him. She was quite aware that he was trying too hard. She liked confidence to just roll off a man. Maybe, he thought just before the peach cobbler, it would have been different if he had been from Chicago or New York. Then he could have had something to poem about to her. But after the cobbler and before the coffee, he let it all pass, stopped trying to say something to impress her. Anne’s mother placed a cup of coffee before him, and he thanked her. He turned to Anne while his coffee cooled and asked why she chose to work on something like a tapestry that took so many months, even years, when she could do a crochet and be done in a few days or weeks. On the way to the kitchen table he had seen the tapestry she was working on folded up in a corner of the parlor and had asked what it was. She had started it three weeks before. A winter scene that came almost entirely from her imagination, because snow had been rare in her life. It would be nine years before the work was completed. “I seen women turn out them crochets left and right in lil no time,” he said. “My tapestry ain’t a race, Mr. Carter.” She had completed only three other tapestries in her lifetime, and the first of those had been with her grandmother’s help. “I hope thas always the case,” George said. “Them other women, they was mostly doin it to make a livin.” “Well,” Anne said, looking from her mother to her brother named after their father, “I do it cause I can’t help myself.” Her cousin came for George before sunset, having been told by someone who had heard it from someone else where he could be found. It was still raining, but the cousin had brought some clothes that George could wear to save his wool suit. Go-to-work-in-the-field clothes. On the porch, preparing to leave, he surprised himself and everyone else and asked Anne if he might see her tomorrow. She turned to look momentarily at her mother, who nodded, and then Anne shrugged for the fifth time that day and said to him, “Why not?” He was twenty-two, and she was a few months from being eighteen. The year was 1932.

Her father returned about seven and found her at the kitchen table with the new tapestry. She was inspecting a trail in the snow that a brown bunny had made on its way back home. Only one detail among dozens. So much white thread, so little gray. Because she had known next to no snow, she was working only from half-remembered pictures in books and from what her mind told her a snow world looked like. Her father stood in the doorway and said nothing, leaning against the doorjamb, his arms folded. When he spoke, she was startled and said, “Oh, I didn’t see you standin there, Daddy,” and he said, “No, I don’t spose you did.”

He came to her and sat at his place at the head of the table. He had even avoided George all the day of the homecoming. “Whas this one gonna be?” he said, picking up one edge of the cloth with one hand. She had made a few light pencil markings on it, but aside from the bunny heading home, it was a large and empty thing. The new calluses on her father’s hand snagged on the material. He dropped the edge and watched it swing just a bit, then come to rest.

“I’m gonna try makin this snow scene work,” she said. They could hear her mother and her five younger brothers in the parlor, laughing, talking about every little piddling thing, for they did not yet know that the world had changed just that quickly. His oldest daughter, the one who crocheted, had married a man from the Chatsworth family and settled with him within a short wagon’s ride of where he now sat. Fifteen minutes if he could get ahold of someone’s Ford and the roads weren’t flooded. Not more than four hours if he had to walk. More than a day if he had to crawl.

He rose to leave. “You might have a time of it since you ain’t seen much snow.” He thought she had seen a snowstorm once when she was seven, but the snow he was thinking of had been in his mother’s childhood, not Anne’s.

“I’ll just imagine it.”

“You have a good evenin,” her father said and stepped toward the door.

“You, too.” Anne used her left forefinger to trace the pale gray trail the bunny had made. She came to the bunny and her finger hopped over him. Two inches from him she decided that that was where his home should be. The line he had made behind him was seven inches. Her eyes went back to the beginning of the trail and she realized for the first time that the work would not be complete without a diving hawk, a bird of prey more dominant than anything else in the sunless sky. A hawk with its talons exposed, glinting so that the killer might be portrayed in all its murderous and beautiful glory. Her right forefinger went up near the top of the tapestry, and when she knew where the hawk would be, she looked momentarily out the window into the yard, toward the east and beyond, and then she called out, “Daddy?”

“Yeah?” Her father stopped two feet beyond the kitchen.

“Want me to fix you somethin to eat?”

“No, baby,” he said without turning around, “I done had all my meals for today.”

The rains did not let up and the train to take the cousin and George to Jackson could not make its way to Picayune. Anne saw him every day that week, the two sitting on the porch in the late afternoon and evening. By Tuesday he knew his way on his own to her place, and by Thursday, unlike the other days, a tad of her was looking forward to seeing him in the borrowed field work clothes, coming along the road from the left full of purpose and then stepping over the dog and his two duck companions lying in the mud at the entrance to her place. She didn’t stand on the porch with her arms around the post, the way she had months and months ago, before Lucas Turner told her she was not as beautiful as she thought she was. More than anything, being with George gave her something to do with her afternoon and evening time. “The heart can be cruel, the heart can be wicked, the heart can give joy,” Anne was to tell her grandson and the recording machine years later, “but it is always an instrument we can never understand.” Neddy had already wandered over to Clarice’s way. Lucas Turner’s mother had asked him that Wednesday why he wasn’t putting down time with Anne, and he told her what his heart had told him that morning when he woke at four: “We ain’t twirlin like that anymore.”

The rains eased to drizzle on Friday and George woke on Saturday morning in the guest bed several miles from Anne and knew the train was coming. All that metal, all that motion, the power of a million mules just to sweep him up and take him away. Even before he got out of bed he wondered if he would be happy as a farmer, for he had supped with her family the evening before and had felt her father’s eyes peering into him the whole time. The eyes had not been charitable to a man who might take Anne away. So maybe he could live on with her as a farmer, for he knew now, less than a week of being in Mississippi, that he was capable of loving her that much. His grandfather had been a farmer, so perhaps farming was in his blood, a dormant something waiting for the soil to shake and awaken it. Could the blood that allowed farming in North Carolina permit him to make a life in Mississippi, with a woman who at that very moment did not even care if he came or went? But as he trembled to put on the work clothes and then looked out the window at the land that seemed to breathe as it went on forever, he knew how homesick he would be for Washington, where there was someone he knew around every corner. He looked down at his friend, Anne’s sleeping cousin, and George knew that that homesickness might have the power to kill him in Mississippi.

The train came for them that Wednesday and he told Anne on Tuesday that he would be back to see her as soon as he could. “I will write,” he added. Already, in that short time, she was not the young woman who had been talking to herself while standing before the mirror, but she was also not a woman who felt very much for him. “I won’t expect any letter from you till I got it in my hands,” she said. That hurt him somewhat, because it told him that she was capable of life without him, and clinging women were all he had ever known. He wanted her standing on the porch each day, waiting for the letter, dying just a little bit when it didn’t arrive. “I will write, and you can count on it,” he said. She said, “I’ll write you back. Soon as I get your letter in my hands. But not before.” They were again on the porch, and as if to emphasize what she had said, she raised her hands in front of her and looked at them. He reached to take them but she only took one of his and shook it, like two strangers meeting on a downtown street as the world flowed on about them. When sufficient time had passed, she withdrew her hand. They were alone on the porch. They had, of course, never kissed and they would not kiss for the first time until three weeks before they married more than a year later. In 1933. There were to be five more visits, including the month he took time off from the railroad and helped in her father’s fields. The railroad people telegraphed him two days before that month was up: “Remember: Our calendar has but 30 days in Sept.”

The wedding was held in late October, when George and the cousin managed to get one week off. It was a large ceremony, held just to the right of the church, Everlasting Light. After the harvest, after the homecoming. Neddy and Clarice, doomed to marry, stood together on the steps that led up into the side of the church. Lucas was in Jackson that day. A young woman, Mona, sat in the crowd witnessing the wedding and thinking of Lucas, even as he, sitting in a lawyer’s office three blocks from the Capitol with his father, was thinking of her. “Our babies may not be able to hear or speak,” Lucas had told her earlier that month. “You got more to worry about,” Mona said in reply. “We all crazy in my family. Cut your throat cause you burnt the biscuits crazy. You any good with the cookin, Lucas?” The first thing Anne and George did as newlyweds was go around to the other side of the church and stand for a few seconds at the graves of her people, ending at last at the place where her grandmother Clemie was sleeping. The tapestry teacher. Each night of the next few days, as they waited for the first train on their long journey to Washington, George slept downstairs, and she slept upstairs in the bed she had been in since she was seven years old. The rings on Anne’s and George’s fingers did not matter to her father, and they did not matter to her mother. When she returned a year and a half later with her first child in her arms, only then did her parents make a new place, one bed, for her and the husband.

In all the excitement of her new life, she had not worked on the new tapestry very much, and in packing for Washington, she was to forget it because it had been in a corner of the house she did not visit very much anymore. She completed two others in Washington in those first years, including a scene of Corcoran Street covered with snow and the children of that street village on sleds and throwing snowballs and her mother and father standing and watching it all, though they were never to see Washington in winter. The snow tapestry in Mississippi with the diving hawk ended up on a shelf in a closet on the second floor until one day her father came upon it six years after her marriage. He mailed it to her, noting in a letter he had his youngest son write, “You forgot this a long time ago.” She would have by then grown into something else in Washington and had barely enough left of Mississippi in her to finish the snow scene. It took three more years, but it looked nothing like the world she had first imagined in Picayune. She unstitched it until the brown bunny was gone, though the hawk stayed, still dominant, still glorious. Not diving, not intent this time on ending the life of something, but just sailing past. A tourist. None of her descendants were ever to become tapestry women.

Just before the train with the newly married couple left Mississippi, it stopped at a patch of a place so small no one had bothered to give it a name. The entire train was full, and that first cabin, which got most of the smoke and soot from the engine, had only colored people. George, the sleeping car porter, would work most of the trip to Washington. Anne, settling into being Mrs. Carter, got to know many of her neighbors in her cabin. No one in that first leg of the trip, save her and George, was destined for lives in Washington; the other future Washingtonians would be picked up along the way—farther north in Mississippi and then in places east, especially St. Louis.

At that patch of nowhere in Mississippi, three colored people got off, and a pregnant Negro woman and a white man got on. They were married, though none of the Negroes knew that. Instantly, there arose in their hearts a disdain for the white man and a you-po-put-upon-thang attitude for the woman, who was some seven or eight months in the family way. They waited for the white man to leave, perhaps to go to one of the cars for whites, or, more likely, to leave the train altogether. After all, he had had his pleasure. But he followed the woman to a seat two down and across from Anne. He stored two suitcases above the seat. When she was seated, he helped the woman take off her shawl and folded it and made a pillow for her head, then he knelt, unhooked her shoes, and began to massage her stockinged feet. The Negroes could see that they were not yet thirty. The train’s engine snorted right and left, shimmied, and then started up. In five blinks of Anne’s eyes, it was on its way. The seat of the Negro woman accompanied by the white man was facing Anne, who saw the woman with her head still leaning back, her eyes closed as the man worked her feet in his hands. The Negroes around the couple, some standing, some sitting, were silent and they, all but the smallest children, looked at one another. Maybe he was not really white. He took a pair of yellow slippers from his coat pocket and put them on the woman’s feet. He stood and took off his hat and nodded to just about every Negro head in the car, and then he removed his coat. The man took the seat at the window beside the woman and disappeared from Anne’s view. The Negro woman’s head was still back and she opened her eyes before long and smiled at the older couple in the seats facing hers and the white man’s, then she looked at the white man and smiled. The oldest person in the car—the woman of the couple facing the Negro woman and the white man—asked them in a voice many heard, “Yall goin far?” The pregnant woman nodded and smiled some more. “Yes, ma’am.” They knew he was white when the conductor came in twenty minutes later and said in a loud voice, in a voice white people had for each other when they knew one was making a mistake in the presence of Negroes, “You sure this where you want to be?” “I’m sure,” the white man said. Many of the adults in that car would live to see the first man on the moon, and a good bunch of those would never believe it had happened. That scene with the white man and the Negro woman was far more incredible; but those who believed would do so because the scene on the train had come to them unfiltered, without the use of some camera operated by the space people out to try to trick their eyes.

Well after St. Louis, the car’s population became more or less stable, with most of the people there going on to Washington, including the pregnant woman and the white man. The Negroes started calling him “Mr. Feet,” and he never took offense. Anne continued to see little of her working husband, but she was content and busied herself with getting to know her fellow passengers. In the end, she became as at home with them as the people around Picayune. “My Picayune people,” she thought at one point after finishing a piece of sweet potato pie from a man five seats down, “my Picayune folks who never even saw Picayune.” They shared food, they shared stories about home, about Southern places that would be the foundation of their lives in the North. None of them could know that the cohesion born and nurtured in the South would be but memory in less than two generations. The one thing that Anne told her grandson and his recording machine about the trip was the story of the child who got on with her parents not long after they left Missouri. This honey-colored child of one year, she said, going up and down the aisle in her diaper as if she were at home, stopping at nearly every seat and conversing in her gibberish as she rested her hands on someone’s thigh or knee. “People talked to her like every word of hers made sense. And she talked back the same way. She was my child, she was that woman over there’s child. She was that man down there’s child, that man that fiddled to her goin up and down the aisle. I’ve always wondered what happened to her. We could talk to her or pick her up when she fell and we could know things would turn out good for us where we was goin.” All the people in that car would have said two generations was a long time. It was, and yet it was not.

Somewhere in Tennessee, after a somewhat quiet afternoon, she remembered the snow scene tapestry and longed to work on it to give her restless hands something to do. She had not seen her husband in many, many hours, and not knowing any better, full of the peace and joy she had gotten from being in the cabin, she ventured out beyond her own car, out there to where the white people were, thinking she might see George for a second. Let him know she was thinking of him. She knew she could never sit beyond her own place, but she did not think there was any harm in just finding her husband and giving him a little “Hi you doin?” It was in the third car of white diners that she saw the back of George. He was standing before the conductor, the same man who had asked if the white man from Mississippi wanted to come and be with them. George’s head was not down, but it was not raised either. The conductor was talking somewhat loud to her husband. Certainly loud enough to disturb the digestion of the closest diners. His words were very harsh. The conductor was taller than George, and when he saw Anne, he indicated with his raised chin that there was one more thing George should attend to.

George turned slowly and his eyes widened to see his wife. He had already been shamed before all the white people, and now here was his wife. He was quickly before Anne and took her painfully by the shoulder and practically pulled her along back to the front car. He forced her down into her seat and shouted, “When I put you in a seat, I mean for you to stay there!”

“Now, George, wait here a minute—”

“I mean for you to stay where I put you!” He went back to work.

The car was silent, and they all felt for her because she was family. Why would he treat our Anne that way?

The experience was so completely humiliating that Anne wanted first only to cry. But she, her father’s child, began to encase herself so that everything around her disappeared and she started making her way back to Mississippi. She stayed to herself for many hours, hearing and seeing nothing about her though her eyes remained open. George did not come back to her and that made it easier for her. People tried speaking to her, but she did not respond. She began to see that very foolish girl, saying foolish things into the mirror. That foolish girl had fooled herself into marriage and had been knocked straight on her way to her new home, even before she had consummated the marriage.

Along toward evening, as the car went on with its life, she felt that not a single person had anything in common with her. It was just before nine o’clock that she, with the clearest mind yet, knew that the marriage was in tatters and should never have happened. Whatever little bit of it there was at that moment would be dead before they reached Washington. It was better to know that now, before they had become a proper man and wife, better to have such a large mistake over and done with at nineteen than to carry it through in misery on into twenty-five, to thirty, to thirty-five. She had seen that with other women, but that would not be her: I could not help myself. Lord knows. Jesus, why did You turn Your back on me? Why did You make me old at forty with this man? There had been something in George’s voice that she could not forgive. Her heart was breaking, but that was in the nature of hearts, she told herself as the car quieted for the night. It was also in their nature to heal for however long it took, six months, a year, two years. After consulting with the Picayune stationmaster four days before she left, Anne’s father had given her $50 and her mother had sewn the money into the hem of her dress on a day when George was away from the house. “This will bring you home from wherever you are if you ain’t abidin mongst angels,” her mother said before breaking the thread with her teeth and finalizing the deed with a solid knot in the thread.

So she decided that at the next stop, wherever they were, she would buy a ticket back to Picayune, Mississippi. There was not anything George could say that would change her mind. This the weight of pretty. I’m going home, and that one thought eased her heart. This the weight of me goin back home.

As the evening went on, she saw her life after the next stop: Once the train dropped her off in Picayune, she would have a six-or-so-mile trip to her parents’ place, to her home. If the weather was bad, she knew she would not have a problem getting a ride on somebody’s buggy or wagon or in a car. White or black, they knew her father, a good man, a no-nonsense man, and no one would deny his daughter and she would reach home unmolested. But she had a feeling that God would have perfect weather when she returned, so she would leave her suitcase and trunk at the train station to be retrieved later, and then she would walk the miles. Besides, her heart would be broken and she would feel that the walk would do her good.

Her train rounded a corner and swayed and the people swayed with it.

In Picayune, she would take off her new shoes just beyond the station. She had lived barefoot most of her life in Picayune, and so that is what she would return to. The town of Picayune was a small place and the walk through it would take less than thirty minutes, depending on whom she would see along the way. The speckled dog that always lounged outside Moss’s general store would walk beside her as always to the edge of town. Then it would turn back, afraid of leaving the known world.

It would be morning, and she would say “Good mornin” to all, white and black, as she went down the main street. And everyone would say “Good mornin” back. The newlywed come home so soon, they would whisper. What could be the matter? What did he do to our po Anne? Found a good girl just to lose her to his foolishness. She would not hang her head, for that was not how her people were. Outside of the town, with the dog gone, she would not see humans again until another half mile unless someone was on the road. At that half mile would be the farm of the Petersons, a white family of nine children. She had known quite well the third oldest girl. If someone there happened to see her pass, they might offer her a drink. That third oldest girl was dead now, died bringing her first child into the world, but the family would remember that Anne had been a friend. “Sit a spell and have a little somethin, Anne. Get out that sun. Linger here, child. Home can wait.” And if her heart would allow it, she would do just that.

Thin smoke wafted through her train and the adults held their breath; the children didn’t know enough to do that.

Unless a body was on the road outside Picayune, she would not see people again until she was a little more than a mile from the Petersons. The road would have turned just after their farm at nearly 90 degrees. The Elbow Road is what people for years had been calling it. “I meet you at the turn in the Elbow Road.” “Bless her heart. She had that baby right there on Elbow Road.” Just beyond the road was Patches’ Creek, the swimming hole for Negroes. Some of her best memories were of Sundays after church when the family piled into her father’s wagon with two baskets of food and went to Patches’ Creek. The Negroes liked to call such Sundays “vacation.” “You comin on vacation?” “He just up and died after his vacation. No sign of nothin bad. Just happy all durin his vacation.” “The nerve of that little hussy shamin herself and her family right out there in front of everyone. Spoiled my vacation.” Patches’ Creek was on land owned by a woman, Deborah Kerrshaw, who fancied herself the richest Negro in Mississippi. She would die not knowing there were five undertakers and one insurance company founder who were richer. She never charged anyone to swim in her creek.

After the creek, the winding road went on for some two miles with only farmland on either side. Especially now, with the crops gone from the fields, it would be lonely there because the nearest house was just about invisible and the cows and mules and horses sunning in the fields usually kept to themselves, never bothered to come out to the fence unless they knew a person. That nearest house could only be reached by leaving the road and heading away for nearly half a mile. But people used the road all the time. She had first seen four-year-old Neddy on that road, playing tag with two white boys, one of them being the descendant of one of the men who had lynched Lucas Turner’s grandfather. Lucas had taken her hand in his for only the second time on that road. And she had trembled even more than with the first time. If hunger took hold and she had not eaten at the Petersons or stopped for something at the Kerrshaw place, she would have to turn off the road and knock at a Negro door. The earth and its ground and its trees would have nothing to offer her because they were preparing for winter. But she would be welcome at any house.

The lights of her train dimmed and the adults pulled the children closer as the smoke cleared from the cabin.

Then, after the fields, the road would straighten as it neared Everlasting Light Baptist Church. If she had eaten, she would tarry at the cemetery, if only to tell her grandmother what had happened. Linger here. The time among the graves might tell her that there could yet be a life with Hayfield. Some land. Children. He could be taught to tell better jokes. She would know more and would take even more time before marrying. No matter how much he might plead with her. “We got time,” she might say. And if he was any kind of man, then he would wait. And if he didn’t, if she never married another living soul, then well…So be it. She had one aunt, near the center of the cemetery, who had never married. At eighty-two, to win a bet with a grown nephew she had raised from an infant, the aunt of slight build had done seventy-nine push-ups, four more than she needed to win the bet. Then she had stood and wiped her hands clean of dirt and waited for her nephew to count out the dollar he owed. “I’s short one quarter, Auntie.” “I don’t care. I wants my money by tomorrow mornin or you’ll have to find another home that ain’t Picayune.” Po thang, some had said of her aunt. Never married. Po thang. But Anne, mapping her journey in her train car, realized there were worse things in life than never having a man inside her.

She knew that the time at the cemetery would strengthen her somehow. And so if she met people on the final leg home, that would be good. But if she didn’t, she would make it anyway. The stand of pecan trees that signaled the approach of the short road leading to her home would make her just about invisible to anyone on the porch until she was at the mouth of the path to the house. Coming from that side was different than coming from the other side, the way George had come to her those times from her cousin’s place. Everyone could be seen coming from that side.

Her train began an awful shaking. She knew that when she had passed the last pecan tree, the person waiting on the porch would be her father. She felt that every second of her life had been leading to a dead marriage and a father who would come out to her without her taking even one step back onto their property, back onto where she had first known life. The dog and his duck companions would not rouse because she was old news. In some twenty-three long steps her father would be in front of her, having used the last two to step over the dog and the ducks. It would be about three in the afternoon. He was not really a man of touching, but if she wanted, she—now tired from her longest walk home—would be able to cry and fall into his arms, her wedding ring back there at the train station in the suitcase. But, no, she would wait to cry. With her mother. He would look down past the trees and ask, “How far back you leave your things?” “The train station.” Her mother would now be on her way from the house. Running. Her father would ask, “Anything you need amongst them things that can’t wait for now?” “No, I can wait, Daddy.” “Tomorrow then. I get Billy to go get em tomorrow.” Then she would be home.

The train did not stop for a very long time, after she had leaned her head against the window and fallen asleep about midnight. She was awakened a short time after the train left that station by a gentle shaking of her shoulder. She came to in a car of sleeping people. George was beside her. The train was all but dark. “Whatcha want from me, George?” There was no grogginess in her voice, only resolve. “Sayin I’m sorry.” “I want only to sleep now. I’m goin back home. I have a home to go back to.” “I know that, Anne. I know that bout you.” “Then let me be.” “Take my pology. I couldn’t mean anything more.” “I take your pology. Now let me sleep.” He was silent and she leaned her head back against the window. She had made her decision and everything was easy now. But as she neared the house of sleep, she sat up and said, “Your next woman down the line should not be treated like a child, George. Take that little piece of somethin and make somethin of your life with a nice woman, George. Try and do that. It won’t be hard. But me, I ain’t your child. I got only one father and he’s waitin for me in Mississippi.” “I know that, Anne. I know that. I’ll get you a ticket for home.” “I brought my own money, George.” He had had more words, but her last ones silenced him because they had such utter finality. I brought my own money. I will count off the days until I have a little peace, he thought. She returned to sleep and he sat and listened to the silence that was her sleeping. He was tempted to return to work even though he was free until morning, but he was now paralyzed by her words. Anne had thought they were far from Washington. She did not realize that they were way beyond the middle of Virginia. George stayed at her side. He did not know what else to do. Another man, someone with a living marriage and a wife still loving, would have stayed there, if only to wake his wife from some trifle of a nightmare, a little reassurance to her as they built the foundation of their life together. But that was a sweet chore he would no longer have. About two hours before dawn, George, after nearly a day and five hours mostly on his feet, went to sleep. Immediately, he began grinding—“gritting” as Anne’s mother called it—his teeth. More than an hour before dawn, Anne woke to find his head leaning softly on her shoulder. He could control many things about himself while awake, but sleep set him adrift. She pushed him away, back fully into his seat. His teeth began gritting again and he commenced talking almost in whispers in his sleep. “I’ll do it,” he said, “I’ll clean every barn before I sleep, master. No need for that thing. No need for that again. I’ll do it. I told yall I’d do it all.”

The sounds of the other sleepers now came to her as well, and there were many who were also talking in their sleep. Men and women speaking whole thoughts. A shout or two. A plea. Even the white man was talking as he slept, but not the Negro woman who was his wife. She, like all the children in the car, was dreaming in silence while the others talked. Sang. One sermon. Why, Anne wondered, had the previous nights been quiet? Why now, when the journey for many was nearing its end?

George began a gentle struggling, a man at the beginning of a job that would take far longer than he was telling the man in his nightmare. Anne turned and listened to him. “I’ll spic it and then I’ll span it, master,” he moaned. She shivered as she listened to him and the others in the car. “Close eyes, wait by side of mule, child, and angel come down for us like promise,” the man across from Anne whispered. She shivered again, the way she had as a small girl when her oldest brother told her and their siblings ghost stories way deep in the night forest. “You done done it and you know you done done it,” a woman far behind her hissed. “Why crucify me with them lies?” It was, in its way, like being on a train with talking dead people. So many times, her oldest brother had had to pick her up and carry her, shivering and crying, out of the night forest. “Please, don’t tell Mama,” he would say of scaring his siblings with his ghost stories. But she and her siblings had always gone into the dark of the forest of their own free will. “Don’t tell Papa.” “Master, please…,” George said. She took his head and laid it in her lap. She closed her eyes but she did not return to sleep. That was over. A little more than a half hour before dawn, she reached up and touched the window with all the fingers of one hand, and the entire train seemed to stop its shaking and rattling. “There,” she said as if the train could hear, as if it had granted some final wish. “There…” To get to where she was now in Virginia, it had taken three trains. She wondered how many it would take to return home, to arrive at a life without George.

Anne was not at all a morbid person, but it occurred to her quite simply that wherever it was she would die, it would not be in Mississippi. Within seconds of that thought, the train entered Washington, where she was to come to her end more than sixty-eight years later, a mother to seven living and two dead, a grandmother to twenty-one living and three dead, a great-grandmother to twelve, a great-great-grandmother to twins. George’s teeth ceased their gritting and Anne brushed the back of her hand against his cheek. The train slowed. “Mama, I’m a long way from home,” Anne whispered into the darkness and confusion. “Papa, I’m a long way from home.”