by Terry Bisson
But this year was different, and even though Yasmin looked for them, her own tears wouldn’t come.
Harriet was at the Center, Pearl said—working on Sunday, was that what socialism was all about, come on in? Not that Harriet would ever even consider going to church; she was like her Daddy that way, God Rest His Soul, sit down. This was the week for the Mars landing, and Pearl found it hard to listen to on the radio until they had their feet on the ground, if ground was what they called it there, even though she wished them well, and prayed for them every night. God didn’t care what planet you were on; have some iced tea. Or even if you weren’t on one at all. Sugar? So Pearl hoped Yasmin didn’t mind if the radio was off.
Yasmin didn’t mind. She sat at the kitchen table and sipped that unchanging-as-the-mountains sweet Virginia iced tea that she had never been able to bring herself to tell Pearl she couldn’t stand, listening to Pearl talk while she rolled out pie dough for the social at the church. What would God and Jesus do without their pies? Yasmin wondered. They would neither of them ever have to find out. War, slavery, revolution, civil war, socialist reconstruction, nothing slacked the flow of chess, apple, pecan, and banana cream pies from the Appalachians. Pearl gave Yasmin the bowl to lick as if to remind her that, even at thirty-six, her boy’s girl was still a kid to her.
Yasmin loved the tiny little woman with her seamed glowing face, tiny mahogany hands ghosted with flour, white hair like a veil, tied up; loved her in that way women never get to love their own mothers because there is not enough unsaid, and too much said, between them.
Still. She decided not to tell Pearl her news. She would tell Harriet first. That was only fair.
The house felt stuffy and, as always, too filled with junk. Walking through the tiny rooms, Yasmin found the usual holograms of Douglass, Tubman, and Jesus oppressive; the familiar P.A.S.A. cosmonaut photo, with Leon mugging at the end of the row, had finally stopped tearing at her heart and now only tugged at it like a child pulling a sleeve.
She clicked on the vid, and, at the sight of stars, as quickly clicked it off.
She decided to get her gifts out of the car.
Back in the kitchen, she helped Pearl tidy up and explained that she was only staying for the night. She had to leave first thing in the morning to take her great-grandfather’s papers to Harper’s Ferry, as specified in his will. Yes, she would be back to watch the Mars landing. Promise. Meanwhile, this was for Pearl. And she gave her ring-mother a helping basket from Arusha, showing her how it would grow or shrink, shaping itself to fit whatever was put into it.
“Wait till Katie Dee sees this,” Pearl said. “She’s deaf as a post, but she loves baskets.”
“I didn’t forget her. I brought her a scarf,” Yasmin said, realizing even as she said it that it was scarves, not baskets that her ring-mother loved. Why did she always get the little things backward? “But wait till you see what I brought Harriet.” She patted the flat little box on the table, not even aware that she was listening for them until she heard the clatter of feet on the porch, shouted goodbyes, and Harriet burst through the door. Twelve last summer, still all legs and hands and feet. Bearing in her face like an undimmed ancient treasure her daddy’s God-damn big brown eyes.
On the Fourth of July, 1859, I was with old Deihl, winding up the Boonesborough Pike north of the Potomac, carrying a load of cedar posts to a cattleman in trade for a horse that was said to be lamed, but healed, but testy. Deihl owned a livery stable and speculated in “bad” horses. It was just before dawn on the Fourth of July. It wasn’t our Independence Day then, great-grandson, like it is now, it was only theirs; but even “colored” boys like firecrackers, and I was busy figuring where I could get a few later that day. Old Deihl was snoring on the wagon seat as we passed a line of men in single file walking south, toward Harper’s Ferry. They were all wrapped in cloaks, unusual for even a cool July morning, under which I caught—for a twelve-year-old misses nothing—the gleam of guns. At first I thought they were slave catchers with which the Shenandoah was well supplied in those days, but several were Africans like myself; also, there was something strange about a crew so big. I counted thirty. In the back walked an old man in a slightly comical peaked hat with ear flaps, stranger still on a July morn; and beside him, in a long wool scarf, a n’African woman carrying a tow sack by the neck like a chicken, only swinging slow and heavy, as if it had gold inside. All of the men in file looked away nervously as they passed, except one, who smiled shyly and saluted me with two fingers. It’s that little sad salute that I remember, after these fifty years. Though he seemed like a man to me then, at twelve, he was probably only a boy himself, maybe seventeen. He was white; I figure he was one of those who died, maybe gentle Coppoc or wild young Will Leeman; and I think he knew in his heart, for I am convinced boys know these things better than men, that he was marching off to die, and marching anyway—for what did he salute in me that morning, a skinny n’African kid on a jolting wagon seat: a brotherly soul? I was and still am at sixty-two. Maybe he was saying goodbye to all the things boys love: the things the rest of us take a whole lifetime saying goodbye to. But he went resolutely on, as they all did. Old Kate, Deihl’s fifty-dollar wagon mule (he’d bought her for five) plodded steadily on up the pike, laying a rich, plunderous mule fart every hundred steps. Deihl snored on, put to sleep by them, as always. I’ve often thought that if I could have figured out a way to bottle mule farts and sell them back in the hills to old men, I could have stayed out of medicine altogether (and made several doctors I could mention happy, as well as myself but that’s another story). The woman, of course, was Tubman, with her big Allen & Thurber’s .41 revolver, the very one that’s in the Independence Museum in Charleston today. The old man was Brown in his Kansas war hat, given to him by a chief of the Ottawas, I forget his name. The rifles were all Sharps, as the Virginia militia was to find out the hard way. For though they were outnumbered, Brown’s men had better weapons than any of the enemy they were to face over the next few years. At least in the beginning . . .
How do you tell your ring-mother you’re pregnant? Especially when her son’s been dead five years. Especially when his name happens to be on the damn vid every day. Especially when you’re not married again. And don’t want to be. And she’s a Jubilation Baptist. And.
Yasmin would worry about it later, on the way back south to Nova Africa, after Harper’s Ferry.
After telling Harriet.
They sat up not very late, the three of them, and talked of very little. Pearl was so uncurious about Africa that Yasmin wondered if she suspected something had happened there. Harriet went on and on about school. She had come to spend the usual month in Virginia with her granny; she had ended up starting school when her mother had been delayed two extra months in Dar es Salaam.
Yasmin’s fingers were hungry to braid her daughter’s hair, but Harriet had cut it almost too short, in the Merican style. So instead, she gave her her present. Excitedly, Harriet unwrapped the box and opened it. An icy little silver fog came out. Inside the box, nestled in sky blue moss, was a pair of slippers, as soft and formless as tiny gray clouds, but with thick cream-colored soles.
Pearl oohed and aahed, but Harriet looked puzzled.
“They’re called living shoes,” Yasmin said. “They’re like the basket, only they change color and everything, and they never wear out. It’s a new thing. They’ll fit perfectly after a few days.”
“Like yours?”
“No, these are just regular shoes.” Yasmin held up one foot, clothed in a golden brown African high-top of soft leather that shimmered like oil on water. “Yours are special, honey. The living shoes are something new, just developed; you can’t even buy them yet. The Olduvai team helped get this pair from Kili especially for you. To apologize for keeping me over.”
Harriet thought this over. So are they from you or them? she wondered. She picked up one slipper; it was warm and cold at the same time, and felt creepy. They looked like house slippers
.
Why couldn’t her mother have brought her beautiful shoes, like her own?
“The only thing is, they’re like earrings,” Yasmin said, kneeling down to slip the shoe on her daughter’s foot. “Once you put them on, you have to leave them on for a week.”
“A week?”
After Harriet went to bed, Yasmin sat up, brooding. “Don’t be discouraged,” Pearl said. “The child has missed you. Plus, even though she doesn’t say it, all this Mars business troubles her too. Be patient with her.
Now come over here, child, and let me fix your hair.”
Harriet got up early so that she could walk to school with her friends one last time. It felt funny to want and not want something at the same time. She wanted to get home to Nova Africa, but she would miss her friends here in the U.S. She waited with the girls on the street in front of the school, hoping the bell would ring, hoping it wouldn’t. The new shoes looked like house slippers with thick soles.
“Harriet, did you hurt your foot?” Betty Ann asked.
“My mother brought me these from Africa,” Harriet said. “They’re living shoes, so I can’t take them off for a week. They’re like earrings.”
“They look nice,” Lila said, trying to be nice.
“They don’t look like earrings to me,” Elizabeth said.
“They gave my granny shoes like that in the hospital,” said Betty Ann. “And then she died.”
“Oh, wow,” the girls all said. Harriet’s mother pulled up to the curb in her long university car, too early. The girls were used to the little inertial hummers, and the university’s Egyptian sedan was twenty feet long. Its great hydrogen engine rumbled impressively. Harriet didn’t tell them they were driving it because her mother was afraid to fly.
Yasmin watched from the car while the girls traded hugs and whispers and promises-to-write and shell rings—all but Harriet and one other, white girls; all in the current (apparently worldwide) teenage uniform of madras and rows of earrings in the Indian fashion. No boys yet. If Yasmin remembered correctly, they lurked in the background at this age, in clumps, indistinguishable like trees.
The precious living shoes she had brought her daughter looked shapeless and drab next to the cheap, bright, folded-over hightops the Merican girls were wearing. Yasmin watched as Harriet tried to hide her feet. Well, what did they know about shoes out here in the boondocks?
“What’s this?” Harriet said, opening the car door and eyeing the doctor’s bag on the front seat.
“This is your great-great-grandfather,” Yasmin said. “Let’s put him in the back seat. He won’t mind. He’s only twelve, anyway.”
It was good to hear the child laugh. On the way down the Valley, Yasmin suggested to Harriet that after dropping off her great-great-grandfather’s papers at the museum in Harper’s Ferry, maybe they should spend the night. “It’ll give us some time to hang out together before we head back to Charleston, and work, and school. I can tell you all about Africa.”
Harriet liked that idea. She reached back and opened the bag. It had a funny pill smell.
“I knew great-granddaddy fought with Brown,” she said. “I didn’t know there were any secrets.”
“Brown and Tubman,” Yasmin corrected. Why was it always just Brown? “And it was great-great. And he didn’t actually fight with them. And I didn’t say secret papers. The story is the same one you’ve heard all your life in bits and pieces. He just wanted the original to be in the museum. This is the actual paper that he wrote fifty years ago, in 1909. It’s like a little piece of himself he wanted buried there.”
“Creepy.” Harriet closed the bag.
“Oh, Harriet! Anyway, I couldn’t take it on the Fourth, since the dig wasn’t finished yet, and—what with one thing and another, I was held up in Dar . . .
There it was. Yasmin smiled secretly, feeling the little fire in her belly. At this stage it came and went at its own pleasure, but when it came it was very nice. “ . . . so we’re going now,” she finished. “You and I.”
“There was a big celebration on the Fourth,” Harriet said. “I watched it on vid.”
“Aren’t you going to ask me about Africa?” Yasmin said, searching for a way to begin to tell her the good news. How do you tell your daughter you’re pregnant? Especially when her father’s never been buried? Especially when . . .
“Why didn’t you ask me?” Harriet said.
“Ask you what?”
“Ask me to go. I could have taken the papers to Harper’s Ferry. Then they would have been there for the Fourth.”
Yasmin was embarrassed. It had never occurred to her.
“I’m his relative too. I was here the whole time.”
The Martin Delaney motored past, but Yasmin didn’t race it this time. The high whine of the differential plasma motors sounded complaining, not joyful. She searched her belly, but the little fire was gone.
The airship looked like an ice cream sandwich, with the iceblue superconductor honeycomb, trailing mist, sandwiched between the dark cargo hull below and the excursion decks above. While Harriet watched, the honeycomb blinked rapidly: the ship was making a course correction, and it existed and didn’t almost simultaneously for a few seconds. Then all was steady again. Weighing slightly less than nothing, and with slightly more than infinite mass, it sailed northward as unperturbed as a planet in its orbit.
Harriet waved two fingers enviously as the ship glided away. From up there the world was beautiful. There was nothing to see from the ground but catfish ponds and wheat fields and country towns, one after another, as interesting as fence posts.
She punched on the radio, double-clicking on the news, then double-clicking again on Mars. Until her mother gave her that look.
“It’s not that I’m not interested, honey,” Yasmin said. “We’ll be back at your grandmother’s to watch the landing. I don’t want her watching it alone. I just don’t want to exactly hear the play-by-play until then, you understand?”
“Sure.”
Two hours later, they were in Charles Town. Yasmin turned east at the courthouse toward Harper’s Ferry. The road ran straight between well-kept farms, some still private. The wheat was still waiting for the international combine teams, working their way north from Nova Africa; but a few local hydrogen-powered corn pickers were out, their unmuffled internal-combustion engines rattling and snorting. Yasmin saw a green-gabled house at least a hundred years old and started to point it out to Harriet, thinking it was the very one in the story in the doctor’s bag in the backseat, Green Gables. But no, hadn’t that one burned? Besides, Harriet was asleep.
The shoes did look plain. There was something you were supposed to do with living shoes, to train them, but Yasmin couldn’t remember what it was. She sighed. Her reunion with her daughter was not off to a very good start. Oh well, things could only get better. Ahead, the Blue Ridge, blue only from the east, was red and gold. Neatly tucked under it at the gap was Harper’s Ferry, where the Independence War began.
By noon I had unloaded the fence posts while Deihl dickered and spat in Low German with the owner, and we started back with the new horse tied to the wagon; he was indeed a skittery character. His name was Caesar, which I spelled in my mind, “Sees Her,” for I had not yet formed that acquaintance with the classics which was to enrich my later years, and will I hope yours as well, great grandson. The owner, a breakaway Amish, said he had bought the horse lamed from two Tidewater gentlemen passing through; it made a Southern horse nervous, he joked, to live so close to the Mason-Dixon line, which ran, he said, at the very bottom of the field in which we stood. He pointed out the fence row. Sees Her munched hay out of the wagon bed as we headed back South, and Deihl unwrapped the sausage biscuits Mama had sent with us. Deihl was stingy with words, but he shared a pull of cider from the jug he kept under the seat; he was no respecter of youth in the matter of drink, but who was in those days? I lay out in the back of the wagon with my head under the seat out of the sun and went to sleep. Deihl
went to sleep driving, and unless I miss my guess Kate went to sleep pulling, which mules can do. I was dreaming of soldiers, perhaps influenced by the little band I’d seen before dawn; or perhaps my second wife was right when she said I had the second sight; or perhaps the Amish was right and Sees Her smelled abolition; certainly he was to live the rest of his life surrounded by the smell: the horse woke me up whickering nervously. I sat up and heard popping that I thought at first was Fourth of July firecrackers. We were on the Maryland side of the Potomac, near Sandy Hook. The railroad bridge to the west was burning, or at least smoking mightily. A train was stopped on the Virginia side, leaking steam, and men with rifles were swarming all over it. Every once in a while one of them let off a shot toward the sky. A soldier watching from the riverbank rode into town with us. Deihl didn’t waste words asking what had happened because he knew we’d be told with no prompting. The town had been attacked by an army of a hundred abolitionists, the soldier said. He’d been sent with a detachment from Charles Town to guard the railroad bridge, but too late. The mayor, who was pretty universally liked, was dead, and so was a free black man named Hayward, who worked for the railroad. The soldier thought it was a great irony that a free “nigger” had been shot, since the attackers were “abs.” The papers were to make much of this also: but since almost half the population of the Ferry was n’African, and almost half of that free, or what passed for free in those days, I don’t know how it could have been otherwise. George Washington’s grandson and a score of other Virginians had been killed, the soldier said. He had a chaw the size of a goiter and spat into the wagon straw, and I kept expecting Deihl to straighten him out, but he didn’t. Coming past the end of the railroad bridge, we saw that the tracks had been spiked and two of the bridge pilings knocked over by a blast. The railroad workers were standing around looking either puzzled or disgusted, and one of them joined us for a ride across the wagon bridge into the town. He’d been drinking freely. He spat into the hay too, and still Deihl said nothing. I remember watching him spit uncorrected and thinking: what’s this world coming to? Sees Her was tossing his head and whickering, but Kate was steady. In the town the hotel and several other buildings were still smoldering. There was a wild, scary smoke smell: the smell all of us in Virginia were to come in the next few years to recognize as the smell of war. There was no fighting, but armed men were all over the streets looking fierce, bored, and uneasy at the same time. I felt my black face shining provocatively and would have not hidden it, but damped its blackness down if I could. The railroad men and the soldier both said “Kansas Brown” was behind the raid, as if this name had deep significance. White folks made much of Brown, though I had never heard his name, nor had any of the slaves until that day, when he became more famous among us than Moses at one stroke, and not as “Kansas” or “Osawatomie” Brown but as Shenandoah Brown. The railroad man told how the hotel had been torched and in the confusion Brown and his men had retreated across the Shenandoah into the Loudon Heights, which is what we called the Blue Ridge there. They had fast-firing breech-loading Sharps rifles. Once in the laurel thickets, who would follow them? “Not the Virginny milisshy,” the soldier said, laughing. “They’re at the tavern a-soaking their wounds in gov’mint whiskey.” I will attempt no more dialect. The railroad man seemed to take the soldier’s words for an insult and sulked and spat, wordless from there on. The soldier’s cut was not altogether true, anyway, I found out later: four of the “Virginias” had been killed in the fighting before falling back, all upon one another. I felt a deep, harmonious excitement stealing over me, though I did not at that time truly understand the events or what they meant. Who did, Merican or n’African?
