The Orphan Mother

by Robert Hicks

  “Why?”

  “Because they deserve to die.”

  “So now you the Lord? You decide who lives and dies?”

  “I did it for you.”

  She stood up, pulled away from him. “Don’t you dare say that to me,” she hissed. “I never once asked you to hurt no one. I just asked you for names.”

  “You’re so sad. Any man who put that on you, who cut that hole in you, he don’t deserve to live.”

  “Don’t you dare say you did it for me.”

  “I did it because it need to happen. You deserved justice, and you ain’t gone get it from no court fulla white men who don’t even know you exist.”

  “You gone stop killing them men.”

  “I already stopped.”

  “Liar. Can’t trust a killer. Say you will! You ain’t going to lose no more of your broken little soul, hear? Not on my account. That’s over. You stop.”

  More silence.

  “Say you will.”

  “I will.”

  “They ain’t the reason my boy dead, anyway. They just the weapon, the dumb and ignorant weapons. Are you too stupid to know that? Or maybe you just like them.”

  It was quiet. What Mariah had said was true. It wasn’t any one man who killed Theopolis—it was the hatred of the world they lived in that killed him. He could’ve been any Negro standing there and they would’ve killed him just the same. All this time she held tight to her anger because it gave her purpose. She didn’t have any time for tears, not until she had her justice. But now, sitting here in silence beside Tole, she had to face a hostile truth that the kind of justice she had imagined would no longer be possible. Tole felt the shame burn him.

  “I thought it would be easier if there was somebody to blame,” she said. “As long as I was hunting those men, I wouldn’t have to face myself. I’m embarrassed to admit this, but I was happy when I heard it was Elijah Dixon. I finally had somebody to hate. But the truth is, he didn’t kill my boy. He just a greedy man like all the rest of ’em. My whole life, I was a slave. My reason for getting out of bed in the morning was to serve somebody else. I didn’t have no purpose of my own. There was no me. Not ever. And when I had Theopolis, that changed. I was a mother. I was still a slave, sure, but not to him. To him, I was Mama. When he was young, he didn’t understand all this bullshit. The politics. He didn’t know white men could trade me like I was cash. I wasn’t a she, I was just an it. Theopolis didn’t see me as a thing. He saw me as his mother. And all of a sudden, I had a different purpose for getting up in the morning.”

  Tole nodded. “I understand.”

  “I figured you might. And I figure you’ll understand this, too. When that purpose gets ripped away, the only purpose you have left is justice. That’s the reason I get up now. It’s to find the men who killed my boy and bring them to justice. But what happens when there ain’t nobody left to go after? What happens when there’s nobody to blame, Mr. Tole?”

  Mariah remembered Carrie’s words: Some of us turn and face them, look them in the eye. And when you finally turn around, you’ll realize they’re not here to haunt you, my dear.

  “Someone was in charge,” Mariah said.

  “Maybe.”

  “You know who?” she asked.

  “I know who.”

  “Well then.” She glared at him. “What’s the name? I want you to tell me.”

  Tole wiped his shining forehead with his sleeve.

  Mariah stood over him with her arms crossed. It all gets so complicated and twisted up so easily, she thought. She wanted to stab him and kiss him; she wanted to run away from him; she wanted him to disappear, and she wanted him to stay.

  “You know the name. Why you afraid of giving it to me?”

  “Because if I say it out loud it’ll just make everything harder for you.”

  “Harder for me? Harder than it is right now?” She laughed. “Can’t imagine that.” She stared at him. “Why don’t you just come out and say it’s Elijah Dixon?”

  He stared back at her. “How you know that?”

  “’Course I knew. I’ve known for days. The justice of the peace, the city magistrate, done ordered the death of my son, even if he didn’t mean my son to die.”

  “Why you pretend you didn’t know?”

  “Wanted to see what you knew, didn’t I?”

  “Are you going to tell the Army boys at the tribunal?”

  “Sure am.”

  “He’ll be sitting there. He’ll be sitting there with them.”

  “So he’ll be sitting there. He can hear it right from my mouth.”

  “You think they’ll believe you?”

  “I don’t rightly know. But I have to try, don’t I? I have to try. That’s what my son was doing. He was speaking out, he was trying to get a better world for us Negroes. I have to do it, too. I have to believe that the Army men will listen.”

  He watched her, saying nothing. “White men always protect they own,” he said finally. “They ain’t gonna help niggers like us.”

  “The whole world’s changed!” she hissed. “We ain’t slaves no more. We free. We can know and say the truth and not care what white people do.”

  “You always got to care. There ain’t no not wondering and worrying about what a white man will do, not for the Negro.”

  She stared at him blankly.

  “And you know this, because you didn’t go hear him speak. You was scared for him, and you didn’t think he could make it, a poor black cobbler boy playing at being a white politician. And that was the terrible truth.”

  He could see the pain in her face. She had wanted the painful truth.

  “Them Army men won’t listen to you. They won’t protect you.”

  “No more killing, you hear me? You promise me no more killing. I’m not going to have Dixon’s death on my conscience. Not with him having five babies at home.”

  At last he nodded. “I promise. I will not kill Mr. Elijah Dixon. But I ain’t putting my trust in any white men either.”

  “What you mean?”

  “Means I have some other plans for Elijah Dixon. Means that you can tell all you want at the tribunal, but I’m not going to put my trust in them. No ma’am.”

  “What plans?”

  “Can’t tell you,” he said. “You and I gone to take our roads, see who gets to justice first.”

  He stood up, stared at her in the darkness for a moment, and then turned and headed down the long road back to Franklin.

  She watched his back as he hiked out of the yard toward the woods. He marched with a purpose, like he had something to do. She cursed his back, pleaded with him to stop. She fiddled with the bunch of goldenrod in her hand. Finally she leaned out and tossed that bouquet over the rail of the porch as hard as she could, as if she might with a mighty heave bring down the man disappearing behind the ash trees.

  Chapter 36

  Mariah

  August 6, 1867

  The morning of the tribunal, Mariah Reddick stood out on the porch of her small house that used to be the slave quarters and now was the house she was living in, and she noticed things she had never noticed. She could see pollen where she had never seen pollen before, and the shades of green in the woods were infinite. The vegetative green of leaves and vines was a texture as much as it was a color. Turkey tracks across the mud at the foot of her stoop were larger than she had imagined, and surprisingly symmetrical. Off in the woods—her sight had no end, apparently—ferns appeared wedged among the unlikeliest of wet rocks, in places that seemed to contain no soil. The ferns slowly unspooled their delicate fronds, and Mariah believed there might still be mysteries, which meant there was hope.

  She could sense the various qualities of air—scent, temperature, weight, humidity, movement—and could catalog those slight adjustments. This day smelled different than others, the air lay on her arms and cheeks differently. She thought she noticed the distinct, dense quality of endings. Things would come to an end today, and she shivered.<
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  She thought there were some things, like testifying before the tribunal, that a person did because they had to be done, without regard for whether they were important or not, and that most things aren’t as important as they seem. Some things you did because it would humiliate Elijah Dixon. Her testimony would do that, she hoped, if nothing else.

  She walked out her cabin door and down the steps, following the path until she got to the town road. She tried to rehearse what she would say to these white men. What was a tribunal, anyway? All she knew of tribunals was from the Bible, and a line from Matthew kept circling her head: While he was sitting on the judgment seat, his wife sent him a message, saying, “Have nothing to do with that righteous Man; for last night I suffered greatly in a dream because of Him.”

  Those tribunalists would do the same—why would they want to listen to a freedwoman? They would of course have nothing to do with her. They were all white.

  When she passed the big house she hardly looked over to see it, though it had been her home for twenty-seven years. She thought for a moment of visiting Theopolis’s grave, but pushed it from her mind. Was she headed to town for Theopolis, or for something else? Maybe something else, or maybe for no good reason at all. But she wouldn’t make Theopolis responsible for it, whatever the reason was, and so she kept on down the road and only looked up the hill toward the obelisks that marked the family cemetery. No sign of Miss Carrie. She knew she’d be already up and picking out a black shawl for the day and wondering what fool’s errand delayed Colonel McGavock another day, another month, and whether he was still actually alive. Perhaps today Carrie would look in the mirror, or up at the portrait of her dead children that hung beyond her bed, and choose a black veil, too.

  Mariah went to town and toward the tribunal because she could. It was complicated, but it was also that simple. If she were free, this was something she could do. A free person needs no other reason than that. She was putting the world, and that freedom, to the test.

  The sun came out and ducked behind clouds again, over and over. Sometimes it warmed her face. The path became the road, and the road was rutted with roots that she descended like steps. Juncos tittered in the underbrush, and tiny insects floated up in the columns of light that broke through the oak and hickory. Every step became easier, and the road widened. Past the last set of white oaks, the territory opened up ahead of her. The roots plunged deep into the ground and the macadamized road went smooth. Little fields—barely more than clearings—gave way to larger fields. The hills were no longer deep and dark, having been mowed and harvested by farmers. The trees, where there were any at all, were now planted in orderly windbreaks. Mariah took to the center of the road and swung her arms. She smelled smoke and saw it drifting up in every direction from cooking fires, and as she walked along she imagined the men in their dungarees combing out their long beards and the women worrying their chickens. Morning in the fields.

  Mariah walked closer to town and could feel the sun on the back of her neck. When she put her hand to her neck, it felt moist. Carts began to pass her on their way into town, carrying every manner of goods for trade. She imagined the town was itself alive and awake and calling forth for tribute to be brought to its altar. The closer she got, the more people and horses and carts she could see pouring into the town. It required their presence. The town now loomed above her, up the hill and past the old Cunningham place and its smokehouse.

  She would spend the rest of her life in that town. That knowledge came to her in a rush. She knew it as if it had been augured in the flights of sparrows over her head. She paused in the middle of the road at the foot of Academy Hill, right at the edge of town, and then moved off to the side of the road where there was a post she could lean on. She looked around half expecting an angel to be on hand to explain the meaning of the prophecy that had just taken her.

  She closed her eyes. Some places are just meant to be the last stop, the final place of arrival. What she had left to do in this life would be done in this town. She realized she had lost the ability to imagine, in any vivid way, the world outside. It appeared to her that there could be no going on into that wider world. The drama of this town would occupy her forever.

  She did not feel anchored to the town by Theopolis and his grave behind her, but she could feel how she had become entwined in the story of Franklin, and it in hers. She hadn’t the energy to extricate herself. She would be married again and she would grow old there. It was just a feeling, but it was strong. She saw herself living back in her house in town, but every day walking the cemetery with Carrie. She would talk about the death of her son with that woman who had also lost children. In this there was no distinction between them. Carrie described herself as a widow, but Mariah thought of herself as orphaned: orphaned from both her elders and her own child, alone, the last possible orphan in her line. The orphan mother.

  She started up the hill again and felt light. There was relief in revealed knowledge, she thought, and though this knowledge had come to her in a vision, it already seemed inevitable and substantial. It had weight. Just then she heard the squeak of the trap’s seat and the rattle of the rig and knew what she would see when she turned around. There was no trap that sounded like that one. Or, rather, there was no trap she had heard so often that every creak and scrape of it was familiar to her.

  “Tried to sneak off, did you?” Carrie called. Mariah turned. She wore no veil, and no black either. She wore a plain green day dress with white piping and pockets. With her brown napped boots and round yellow straw hat, Carrie looked like a flower. She looked like she was headed to a carnival, or parading for Mardi Gras. Mariah hardly recognized her.

  “I know where you’re going, and I’m taking you there, Mariah,” Carrie McGavock said. “I mean it.” She brought the horse to a stop and looked down from the gleaming leather bench. Everything shone, every buckle and bit and knob. Mariah wondered why she hadn’t noticed the trap being polished.

  “Walking suits me.”

  “Now get up in this cart next to me. I will not have it otherwise.” Carrie McGavock, even when she was young and certain of everything and bossy, had never spoken to Mariah that way. She had never demanded she do a thing. She had only ever suggested things, though even those suggestions were not suggestions as white people understood them. But Carrie had never taken this tone, which sounded for all the world like the sound of her father, master of plantations. Mariah studied Carrie’s face and decided she was being tested.

  “Don’t take no orders no more.”

  “That was not an order, just the invitation of someone trying to look out for you.”

  “Going to that courthouse on my own legs, to do my business. Ain’t your business.”

  “All by yourself.”

  “Got to.”

  Carrie shrugged her shoulders. Then, after thinking for a second, she leaned over until her face was on Mariah’s level. “No one does anything by themselves. Or, what I mean is, no one ever finishes anything by themselves. No one succeeds.”

  “Don’t believe that.”

  “It’s been my experience.”

  “Your experiences ain’t mine.”

  “No, they aren’t.” While they talked, Carrie pulled the trap to the side of the road. Two other carts passed them by, one full of green rye and the other loaded with barrels. The white men driving them looked over, but Carrie fixed their attention back on the road with a glare. The sun kept coming up over the trees, and Mariah could feel the beads of sweat on her spine.

  Carrie continued. “But you’ve had experience of the world. You have some idea how it works, for good and bad.”

  “Yes.” Mariah began to suspect she knew where this conversation was headed.

  “And you think they’re just going to let you march yourself into that courthouse and say your piece? Like you were anyone else?”

  “If they stop me, they stop me, but I’m going to try.”

  Fierce eyes from Carrie. “So you just want to
try? You just want to get seen trying? Oh, that’s going to accomplish everything. Mariah tried. And who will give a damn about the fact that you tried? Not one soul. You might as well have stayed in bed.”

  “I done more in this life than you ever did. More than just tried.” The words were out of Mariah’s mouth before she could choke them back, and when they hung in the air between them she was glad they were out. “I cleaned up your children and your house, I carried your things halfway across the country, I washed your dead babies and dressed them and laid them in their coffins, I wiped the blood up from all them hundreds of dying boys you laid out on the floors, I listened to you for most of the minutes of my life.”

  Carrie leaned back, no longer fierce. “You did.”

  “I done plenty.”

  “You did that, too.”

  “And I’ll do this just the same.”

  “No you won’t. You know the world. You know they won’t hear you. Talk all you want—that won’t change.”

  Carrie was right, as Tole had been: they would not hear her. A poor black woman, recently someone else’s property: she didn’t have a voice yet. And if she did, they wouldn’t have the ears to hear it.

  Mariah did not know how to reply. Carrie irritated her, angered her even. She wanted to pull her down by her well-fixed braided bun and let her see what it was like down on the ground. The feeling passed. What would happen when she arrived at the courthouse? They would let her in, that was true. They would acknowledge that she could sit there. They would know her name, or they’d at least pretend to know it. But what else?

  “You sure you couldn’t use me?” Carrie asked.

  “How could I use you?”

  “Let me arrive with you. Let me walk in with you. Like I’m someone who would not stand for having you be insulted and ignored. Like a friend.”

  “You already said we ain’t friends.”

  “Not yet, and anyway they don’t know that. If you were with me, if we went in together, they would have to hear you. They would have to pay attention. You know this. This is the truth of the world. You should take advantage of this fact.”