When she came back in, she said, “You shouldn’t encourage them to misbehave.” Mother St. John lifted her hem a bit and stepped over the man.
“Oh, Mother. They’re fine boys you have there. I hope you didn’t punish them badly.”
“I sent them off to search for that turkey, the one that trotted away. Should be easy enough in the snow, I hope.” She knelt next to the man’s head and pulled an envelope from her apron. She pulled back his lip. “He stinks terrible,” she said. She tapped a good dose of the envelope’s contents into his mouth.
“Don’t kill him,” advised Father Paul.
“He’s big,” she said. “He can take this whole bit.” And she tapped out the last of the dust onto his tongue. “That should hold you for a while longer, mister,” she said. The man tried to open his eyes, but he was too groggy. The lids fluttered and closed again. He smacked his lips and turned over to sleep once more.
“He should sleep like Lazarus now,” said Mother St. John. Then she produced the document she’d made for Eliza and showed it to the priest. He took it, brought it close to his eyes, and read:
The said executor, Thomas Freelord, does hereby remove Wilhelmina Christmas, complexion black, height 5 feet, weight quite slight humble servant since birth to wife, Christine, to her own recognizance on said day, April 26, 1835, this day emancipated along with whatever future children she may bear. Signed, Thomas Freelord, April 26, 1835, Biloxi, Mississippi. Signed, Wilhelmina Christmas, April 26, 1835, Biloxi, Mississippi.
He raised his eyes and looked at her.
“You know what this makes you?” he questioned her.
“Yes,” she said. “I do.” Her lips whitened. “Will it do?”
“Freelord?” said the priest.
She shrugged. Mother St. John seemed particularly proud of that surname. She’d chosen it as an adaptation of her favorite gift of the Holy Spirit, Fear of the Lord, and after knowing Eliza only a little while, could ascertain that it was the gift the woman most needed, what with her brazen character and bold person.
“Christmas?”
“Eliza wanted it.”
She gestured to the document. “What do you think?” she asked.
“Certainly,” said Father Paul. “I’m sure it’s fine. In truth I haven’t seen many of these so I’m not sure what to look for, but it certainly has an officiated air.” He handed it back to her. “You did a fine job, Mother, as always.”
Mother St. John exhaled and wiped her hands down her apron. “They’re out in the barn with Big Waters and your ox.”
Eliza hacked up something that resembled a small frog and spat it onto the barn floor.
Father Paul covered his mouth. “She’s not well?” he said to Mother St. John.
“No,” said Mother St. John, “but she can’t stay here.”
Eliza slit-eyed the priest and her brows gathered like two angry grackles squaring off. Father Paul sat down and kicked the snow off his boots. He smiled broadly at Eliza.
“What’s he want?” Eliza asked Mother St. John.
“He’s your ride,” she said. “He’s here to help.”
Davis looked up at his mother’s face. “Where’s his ears?” he asked.
Eliza went to Davis and stood in front of him. Davis peeked around her skirt. Father Paul removed his black hat and said, “Good day, ladies. Good day, little one.” He knelt to greet the boy. “I can still hear, despite my ears,” he said. “See here?” he said, pointing to them. “The Indians got me.”
Eliza crossed her arms.
“My apologies,” said Father Paul. He touched the wrinkled buds that used to be his ears and then scratched his head. “I believed little boys to be interested in Indians.”
Mother St. John shoved the paper at the priest.
“All right then,” said Father Paul. He stood and took the paper. “Yes.” He folded it and tucked it inside his coat. “In case we’re stopped, though I doubt that’ll happen. Those men don’t usually interfere with the comings and goings of the religious.”
Eliza reached out her hand. “I’ll keep hold of that,” she said. Father Paul handed the paper to her. She took it, smoothed it. And for the first time since Mother St. John had met her, Eliza allowed her lips to rise into a smile. “Looks mighty good,” she said. “President himself could have written it.” She folded it carefully. Then she pointed out the window and turned her attention to the priest. “The ox cart, then?” she said.
“It’s a comfortable ride, if slow,” he said.
17
Eliza’s Hurt
A FEW HOURS LATER, Davis lay asleep in Eliza’s lap as she tried to sit still in the cart, which bumped and staggered over the road. Her legs tingled, but she dared not move lest she wake her child, who she knew deserved a good strong doze. She rested her head uncomfortably against the wall of the cart. The priest told her they were headed to a brothel, where her journey would begin. Eliza found herself in a strange mind.
She felt like laughing. Or giggling at least. These people, the nun, the priest, even the squaw, were silly in their righteousness. Eliza’s humor lurched up and came out a cough. All those white folks were always thinking they were doing the Negroes so much good. Making themselves feel good was more like it.
Eliza looked over the edge of the cart. Since the day he’d left, Eliza had the feeling that at some moment, Jim Christmas would round a corner, emerge from behind a tree, or step down off some porch and that she’d see him and love him again. She had never quit expecting him. And he seemed somehow closer than ever. The pull of him seemed strung right through the snow and ice crystals in the air. Every sharp, tiny contact with the snowflakes falling from the trees seemed a kiss from Jim Christmas.
Until her move north, she hadn’t considered seeking him. She had been content to wait for his return to her. But the move changed everything. Before, she’d have never considered running away from the Winstons. But here, so many talked of escape, abolition, and freedom. Here, Eliza was suddenly barraged by white folks and free blacks intent on freeing her from her terrible bondage. That’s what they always said, “terrible bondage.” She endured their righteous talk about freedom, but she couldn’t conceive that such a thing would honestly be possible or even desirable. Who would take care of her? Where would she live? How would she get food? As it was with the Winstons, every night she knew that she had a clean bed to sleep in. Every day she knew she’d have three meals. For practicality’s sake, Eliza was comfortable in her position with them. Especially with a child to care for, Eliza relied upon the Winstons to help her. She didn’t worry about them selling him off. Really, they weren’t that kind. They had only a handful of slaves. Eliza knew that the buying and selling of children happened. She’d seen it. Her mother had endured it. But that was mostly on the big plantations. No, her state wasn’t that bad. Eliza knew plenty of poor white folks and free black folks who had lives much more difficult than her own.
But once she got here, she suddenly became aware that this was her chance to go looking for Jim. And especially when the cough set in, she knew she’d have to find him. She gave up comfort and protection for uncertainty, for the hope that she could find Jim Christmas and see him and know what happened to him before she was gone from this earth. It roiled like hot broth in her gut. She wanted so badly to look upon him one last time. No, it wasn’t freedom she was chasing. It was love. Eliza wanted Jim Christmas more than anything. She wanted to know if he had abandoned her or if he’d been sent away. In her heart of hearts, she couldn’t believe that he had left her. Not after the things he had said to her! Not after the way he’d touched her! Even if he had, thought Eliza, if she could just find him and show him the fine son that they’d made together, that he’d be proud, that he’d love her again, and keep all the promises he had made.
Things hadn’t gone exactly as planned, of course. Weeks ago, when she’d gone into town to get Davis’s hair cut at the black barber, a free man who vacillated between offers to buy her
from the Winstons if she would agree to marry him and attempts to grope her hips and buttocks, he’d tried to impress her by telling her that he’d arranged for several slaves to escape by going to the woman of the ugly habits. She’d been too busy fending off his advances to ask for clarification, so she gleaned that he had meant the nun, but now realized that rather than referring to the nun, he must have been talking about the women at the brothel. Now Eliza smiled at her own mistake. It was a story that would make Jim Christmas curl over with laughter, she knew. He would laugh in the way that made him wheeze and sneeze and need a slap on the back. That image made her smile and cry at the same time. She felt very close to an end and a beginning.
She breathed in deeply, and with the smell of hay and animal manure and wood came a swell of sorrow and relief from her belly, and she leaned into her son and cried full on now. She coughed and tasted the ever more familiar taste of blood on her tongue. She was running short on time, she knew. If Jim Christmas could just see the boy. If she could just see Jim Christmas one last time.
The cart had four wooden wheels and no springs nor anything else to dampen the bumps. Besides Eliza and her son, the cart held split wood, some paint, tools, and bundles of twine. Oak trees could grow from acorn to the moon in the time it took the ox to walk half a mile. The ox took many rests, stalling in the middle of the path, then lying down under the weight of his yoke. The beast would not move until plied by Father Paul with a treat of some sort—a scratch behind the ear, a bit of sugar, some kind words.
“Comfortable back there?” asked the priest.
Eliza didn’t respond. She put all her energy into holding her boy and realized that a thing that had once been so easy, supporting her son’s weight, now demanded every bit of her strength and endurance. She adjusted her legs to help prop up her elbow on which the boy’s head rested. He moaned and adjusted his position.
The cough had started months ago as an itch in her neck. Now her lungs felt full, furry, and warm, and they would allow only shallow breaths. She was waning. Though she didn’t really believe it helped, she prayed to God to watch over her until she was able to find Jim, to get Davis settled somehow, somewhere. The wagon lurched on over the frozen road and rolled through the woods.
Eliza opened her mouth and inhaled as wholly as she could. She could feel herself separated into two incongruous but nevertheless simultaneous experiences, life and death. Her body was dying, her chest and heart quickening, panicking, attempting to live. But her mind, slowed in pristine clarity, was calm. An airy sense of existing in two worlds fell over her. She peered over the cart and focused on the place where the wheel encountered the snowy road, at the exact moment of impact, when it hit the snow and either dashed it into the air or drove it into the ground. She listened to it. The sound was like hot milk hitting the pail or an ax hitting a rotten tree or a butchering knife hitting the breastbone of a quail. It was the sound Davis made in the seconds after he’d come rushing out of her, when she’d twisted her finger into his mouth and cleared his throat and he gasped to life. She delivered him into this being, this living, this earth. Now he breathed in sleep on her lap. She had made him. She had made it possible for him take in that air. If she had not cleared the mucus and blood from his newborn neck, he’d not be here, on this untethered and nonsensical and impossible journey. How had she known how to do that? Who had told her to clear his throat, to get him inhaling? No one. But she had done it. And then he knew what to do. And he was of her. Though he was heavy and burdensome, she worried little about him. He, without her, would be fine. He was of her. His mettle was hers. Another dying mother might have left him safe in the care of the Winstons. Another might have searched high and low for a suitable woman to replace her. Another might have settled him in with the nun and squaw. Not her. Together they were taking their last chance at finding Jim. What would come, would come.
Then she concentrated on the trees, which should have been dormant in winter, but as she watched they folded their limbs across their trunks, the thin branches and pine needles dangling like the sleeves of robes. Then they offered up a song in chorus. They hummed for her in a way that made her throat vibrate, a thing she had not experienced since Jim Christmas put his lips to her neck and moaned sweet, slow-burning, pretty words.
The road to the brothel was crude but well used. At first, when she’d heard someone approach on the road, she’d quickly covered Davis and herself with an Indian blanket. Now, at the end of her journey, she was too weary to do so. And no one looked twice at the priest’s cargo anyway. Eliza had been in this area long enough to know that it wasn’t entirely rare to see Negroes here. Some fur traders used black accomplices to make deals with the Indians, who trusted black skins more than white skins. Railroad companies hired black surveyors because they were cheaper and worked harder than white surveyors. At Fort Snelling, Southern generals, who’d been commissioned to prepare the green troops, brought their slaves to keep up their houses and take care of their horses. Steamboats with Southerners and their servants, escaping the malaria of the Southern summer, came frequently.
Always, Eliza searched the faces of these men, looking for Jim Christmas. She wondered what happened to him. She wondered if he wound up as a king in Haiti, as he claimed he would. Or whether he’d gone to Chicago. Or New York. Or Canada. Until the end, she’d look everywhere.
Now, in the back of a frozen ox cart in the cold North, she compared this day to those in the warm Mississippi air. When they were at the Winstons together, Jim Christmas would laze his big body alongside the corn furrows she dug in the garden and then follow her into the cooking shed, where she baked the cakes and tarts. He’d filch dill from the garden to gnaw and pinch berries from the tops of the tarts to suck, all the while bragging from day-smile to day-sigh, and from one end of her chores to the other, about his connections in Haiti and the high life he planned on making for himself once he bought his freedom, only half a year away. While she beat the rugs, he’d comment about the dry, hot weather there and how it was perfect air for ladies with lovely hair like hers, which was so sensitive to humidity. Had it been ridiculous to believe that he really cared about whether her hair poofed up like a wasps’ nest? Now she reached up under her headscarf to touch that same hair that Jim Christmas had found so beautiful and found it greasy and matted.
In those Mississippi days, while she darned the socks, he’d remark about the colorful and cheery dresses the women wore in Haiti and how especially lovely they looked on ladies with ankles as dainty as hers. While she squeezed lemons along the windowsills to murder the army of ants incessantly attacking her pies and tarts, he’d talk of the charming pink flamingoes sleeping on one leg and the creeping green iguanas changing colors throughout the day. When she tried to sneak looks at books, he’d talk of the schools in dire need of good teachers in Haiti. He’d say that in Haiti, all the children were taught to read. At the end of the day, when she got ready to rest her head, he’d talk of the little hummingbirds that lived in flowers bigger than any magnolia she’d ever seen. When he started talking about blacks who ruled their own destinies and about how she could live like a queen there, she finally gave herself over to him.
Those were the glorious moments, ones that would not be gone from her head, ones in which she forgave him all his faults. She remembered how he’d sneak her to the small rapids and lay her down on a soft blanket and how his long, skin-and-bones frame, his elbows like sharp gravel-road turns, his knees like pulley wheels, his foot bones like strings would urge against her, and even now her body quaked, and she wondered, she hoped that it might mean she’d live. Does a dying body want for carnal pleasures? He had been just a bit bigger around the middle than she was, and she was hardly nothing herself, a fence post. When he lay on her, his hips and ribs ground into hers. They had too little flesh to soften the crash of their bodies. In a collision of joints and bone, they joined their desperation and love. It was a hard and necessary union.
Within four months Eliza
was pregnant. On a morning when a fierce kick from inside her womb woke her, she’d risen to light the kitchen fire. There Mrs. Winston had been waiting for her, told her that Jim Christmas had paid the Winstons what he owed them and gone off without her.
Eliza remembered the sudden sensation of her heart dropping to her toes and her eyes not seeing quite right. She remembered panting and feeling sick. Mrs. Winston noted wryly that Eliza looked upset. Eliza responded with the obligatory “No, ma’am,” and absentmindedly ran her hand over her belly. Mrs. Winston said she’d known it, said she’d suspected all along that Eliza was a filthy, dirty girl.
The following spring, on the day when the petite roses blossomed, Eliza crept into her room and squatted over a basin in the corner and delivered the baby out of her body. She called him Davis, after King David in the Bible, who loved Bathsheba, the beautiful wife of Uriah.
Eliza supposed then it had been ridiculous to ever believe a word Jim Christmas had said. But believing Mrs. Winston was no easier. She preached Christian living and the Bible constantly, but took praise for pies made by Eliza when her husband gushed over the flavor, charged Eliza for a plate that she herself had chipped. Eliza grew to wonder if the Winstons had gotten rid of Jim Christmas and then lied to her about it. She sometimes thought that maybe he was out there somewhere, trying to get back to her, return to his boy; perhaps he had a pouch full of money to sail them all to Haiti.
Whenever she thought about Haiti, she imagined a colorful world with pink birds and orange fruits and warm winds and crystal waters where little children swim, and she felt something close to happy.
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