“It’s still coming down hard and you’re on your way to Bible study.”
“Ain’t raining nothing like what it was.”
“All I’m saying is church is important to you, and you don’t let a little rain hold you back.”
“You’d be a sight better off if you tended to your soul with the git up and git you use on your mind.”
“Let’s not go into that now. You know we don’t agree on these things.”
But it was too late. They were bickering about his refusal to go to church.
I felt bad I had set them off. It didn’t take much. They were always at odds with each other, with Mama making peace. But before she could break up this argument, Daddy stalked off to his room in a huff, and Boo Nanny slammed the door on her way to Bible study.
Mama dried her hands, put away the dish towel, and asked me to come with her to the parlor.
“I wish they wouldn’t quarrel. I don’t think they like each other,” I said.
“Don’t fret so hard, honey. The honest-to-God real reason they quarrel is they’s too much alike. Both stubborn as they come. Won’t give an inch. Does it make you sad?”
I nodded. I felt I had to side with one, but was loyal to both.
“Don’t be all tore up about this. To see you like this pure hurts me to the bone. Come here and sit beside me.” I crawled next to her and leaned against her shoulder. She drew me closer. “The thing to keep in your head is they both loves you to pieces.”
“But which one’s right?”
“Right ain’t got nothing to do with it, baby. Different. If you had yourself a box of candy, would you refuse a lemon drop ’cause it ain’t the same as licorice? No, you got a sweet tooth, so you take both. Now, your daddy’s the smartest man I know, but for all his book learning, he couldn’t tell the difference between a buzzard and a crow. He’s a modern man, always looking ahead. Boo Nanny favors the old ways, the stories and cures and superstitions from slave days, passed down from Africa by mouth ’cause folks couldn’t write.”
“If she thinks the stories are so important, why won’t she talk about growing up as a slave?”
“Too much sadness and heartache. She doesn’t want you to worry yourself with something that’s past.”
“Do you remember what it was like?”
“I was a little tiny baby.”
“But I want to know.”
“I know, honey, I know. I’ve tried till I’m blue in the face to get her to tell me about my daddy—your granddaddy—but all she’ll say is he was sold south before I was born—in the month of August.”
She explained that when the war ended, Boo Nanny left the plantation with only the clothes on her back, a rag for a blanket, and a hungry three-year-old to feed. She had no job, no property, no belongings. She didn’t even have a last name.
“When she got freed up, she chose August as her last name,” Mama said. “Most folks went with the last name of their master, but she wouldn’t have any of it. She wanted me to remember my daddy, so she put him in our name. Naming’s a powerful thing.”
I felt the warmth of her arm on my back.
She continued: “That’s all I got left of my daddy. No memories, only a name to remind me of the month he left. You be glad you got yourself a real live daddy who loves you to pieces.”
I felt sad, thinking of Mama growing up without a daddy.
“So don’t you forget—you got August blood in you, the same way you got Thomas blood. Both are good, but different. So when your daddy and Boo Nanny quarrel, I want you to think: I’m the luckiest boy alive. ’Cause I got myself two ways of looking at a thing, not just one.”
SEVEN
Once a month, Mama only worked a half day on Saturday and met me and Boo Nanny downtown to shop at the open-air market. Black farmers had stalls at the market, something Daddy said happened in our city but not in other cities.
One early October day, we arranged to meet on a corner across from the streetcar stop, several blocks from the market. Mama worked at one of the big gingerbread mansions along Third Street, less than half a mile away, and she was walking from work.
I was the first one there. The air smelled of fish and manure. It hadn’t rained for quite some time, and the waste from the horses and mules had gotten packed into the spaces around the cobbles. While I waited, I looked in the window of the millinery shop at the fancy hats with swooping feathers stuck in the bands. Boo Nanny came up beside me and looked at the display. “Ladies keep buying them hats, we ain’t gone have no birds left.”
The streetcar approached, spewing white and blue chips of light as the wire skipped over the joints above. With grinding brakes, it stopped and let out the passengers. A white woman with gray hair stepped down. I noticed her because she was wearing a hat with so many feathers, she might as well have shot a snowy egret and stuck it on her head.
The bird killer bunched up her skirt in one hand so it wouldn’t sweep the dirty street, then crossed over on the arm of a finely dressed older gentleman who also accompanied a woman Mama’s age. They appeared to be headed for the millinery shop. As they passed us, the man stopped and said, “Why, I do believe it’s Mammy Jo. Is that you, Josephine?”
“Hello, Colonel. I reckon it be me, all right.” The colonel was a tall man with lots of white hair and a huge forehead. He must be smart. Daddy always said that my high forehead was a sign of intelligence.
“Why, it’s been”—he did a quick calculation—“thirty-three years!”
“Eighteen sixty-five,” I said, showing off my ability to do the math in my head. The older woman gave me a sour look and snapped open her parasol. She wore a white dress and white gloves, as if she were an ancient bride. Her powdered face was so pale, it faded into the white background of her dress, like the sky after you look directly into the sun.
At that moment, Mama caught up to our group. “And this must be your daughter. Your lovely daughter. Sadie, is it?” He gazed at her a long time. Mama looked down and shifted back and forth on her feet as if pushing organ pedals.
The colonel’s wife tugged at his elbow and said, “Richard, we need to go.”
“In a minute, dear.”
The colonel turned to the younger woman with him and said, “When Sadie was a baby and you were four, you used to wheel her around in your wicker baby carriage and pretend to be a mother. One time, the carriage got stuck on the root of a tree. You tried and tried to get it over the bump. You were such a smart thing, I couldn’t believe you couldn’t figure out how to do it.”
The colonel kept staring at Mama. I had always been taught not to stare. I guess the colonel hadn’t had three adults nagging him about good manners.
“It’s late. We must go.” The wife put a gloved hand on the colonel’s arm. “I insist.”
He turned to me and said, “I can see you’re a smart boy.” He reached into his pocket and handed me a nickel. “Go get yourself a lemon phosphate.”
I couldn’t believe my good fortune. “Thank you, sir,” I said, clutching the coin in my fist.
But Boo Nanny pried the coin from my hand and returned it to the colonel. “Thank you, but he don’t be needing nothing sweet.”
After we had parted company, Mama’s features were twisted and her eyes narrow. She insisted on going straight home without stopping at the market. I wondered if she was mad at me. I was the one who deserved to be hopping mad. I turned to Boo Nanny. “Why did you tell the colonel I didn’t need anything sweet?” I pouted.
“Don’t you be showing me that bottom lip.”
“But I’m thirsty.” I could all but taste the sweetness in my mouth. The only time I got lemon phosphates was when Lewis’s father treated.
“The day I accepts charity from the likes of Colonel Allman be the day sweet Jesus turns hisself brown,” she said.
The walk home was hot, dusty, and silent. When we got to the kitchen, Mama turned to Boo Nanny and said, “It’s true, isn’t it?”
Boo Nanny, who w
as always quick with a comeback, seemed to be without words.
“How could you? Why didn’t you tell me? Mama, what you be thinking?”
“They’s things in this world you better off not knowing.”
“You told me my daddy was sold south.”
Boo Nanny straightened her head, the only part of her she could straighten. “My husband was sold south.”
“Your husband. What about my daddy?”
“What do it matter? The past be past.”
“You lied to me.” She ran to her room and slammed the door.
“What’s wrong with Mama?” I asked Boo Nanny. Mama never took to her bed in the middle of the day.
“She’s had herself a powerful shock.”
“What kind of shock?”
“You’s too young to be asking such questions.”
I knew it had to do with the colonel. “Who was that white man we met downtown?”
“He be the owner of the plantation where I worked.” Then she said, as if an afterthought, “He be the owner of me.” She put her hands on either side of my face and pulled it level with hers. “Ain’t nobody gone claim me or you as they property ever again.”
Boo Nanny went to her room and closed the door. I stood in the kitchen, unsure of what to do. I felt completely alone. I didn’t realize how much I was used to having noise around me—the happy sounds of scrubbing, chopping, rustling newspaper. Now all was silent.
After a short while, I knocked on Mama’s door. When she didn’t answer, I opened it. I rarely went into my parents’ room, and now it felt strange. The windows were open, and the wind lifted the lace curtains. Mama had taken off her shoes and lay facedown on the bedspread, fully dressed, with her face in the pillow and a hand gripping one of the rungs of the white iron bed, as if she were trying to get out of jail.
I stood over her, close, without touching, to see if she would move. Her skirt was bunched up around her like an unopened parasol. The stockings on her feet were bumpy with darning.
“Leave me be. I needs a rest.” Her voice was muffled from the pillow but thick with sniffles.
I wanted to make her laugh or at least smile. I tried to remember what made her happy. On her birthday, when I made her something pretty from the forest, she smiled. When I told jokes Lewis told me, she never laughed, mainly because I messed them up.
Then I had an idea. I had my very own copy of Treasure Island that Daddy had given me for Christmas. I loved to lose myself in the world of adventure.
“Can I read you a story?” I said.
Without moving her head, she groped the air with her hand. When she found my arm, she squeezed. I took that to mean yes.
I got the book from my room and turned to the first page. I knew how the story turned out, for I had read it several times—twice on my own, and once to Boo Nanny—but still I couldn’t wait to get into the tale again.
Mama lay quietly, still facedown, as I read aloud. Every so often, she shifted. Once, she was so still I thought she had fallen asleep, and I closed the book, keeping my finger in the place, but a muffled voice said, “Don’t stop.” And I didn’t, until I heard Daddy come in the back door. Then I marked my place and went to meet him.
“Something’s bad wrong with Mama. You better go see quick,” I said.
He looked startled and went straight to their room. I heard their muffled voices, low and familiar, but I couldn’t make out what they were saying.
He stayed a long time. Finally he came out and quietly closed the door. He looked upset.
“Is Mama going to be all right?” I said.
“She’s a strong woman. She’ll get over it.”
“Get over what? Does she have the flu?”
“No, she’s got sickness of the heart. You know how, when you eat something that doesn’t agree with you, your stomach hurts? Well, it’s the same with the heart.”
I was alarmed. Mr. Howe down the street had had heart problems and took to his bed and never got up.
“We need to be extra nice to her for the next few days. Since the womenfolk are down, I guess I’ll have to rustle up something to eat. I think I can manage breakfast.”
Everything else was upside down, so why not breakfast for supper?
Daddy said he could handle any dish that had one ingredient, but he was kidding himself. He burned the bacon. When he cracked the eggs into the bacon grease, bits of the shell broke off into the pan. Our supper that night was gritty eggs and black bacon, but it tasted good to me.
The next day was Sunday, but neither Mama nor Boo Nanny went to church. They barely talked to each other. In the afternoon, when Boo Nanny left to visit neighbors, Mama asked me to come to the parlor. I felt a lecture coming on and wondered what I had done wrong. The night before had been a night of tears and silence, and a mysterious illness that felled the womenfolk but left the men standing. Life was still not back to normal, and things you thought you could count on, you couldn’t.
Mama sat down on one end of the horsehair sofa. “Come sit on your mama’s lap like you used to,” she said.
I wasn’t a baby anymore. On the other hand, I wanted to be nice to Mama because she was so sad. I sat close to her—but not in her lap—and put my head against her shoulder.
It was a hot Indian summer evening, and the whip-poor-wills called to one another across the vacant lot. She put her arm around me and said, “I never told you why we named you Moses.”
Mama was not a storyteller—she left that to Boo Nanny. But as she told me the story of how I got my name, I realized I had underestimated her. I listened closely because I knew, deep down, that this was the kind of story you only told once.
Boo Nanny was raised on a coastal turpentine plantation, Mama said. Pinefield was mostly longleaf pine forest and cypress swamp, with salt marsh in a broad band near the ocean. The river by the house fed into the Cape Fear and provided easy transportation to the Wilmington port for the barrels of pitch, tar, and turpentine produced on the plantation.
The Pinefield slaves were known for being highly skilled. There were chippers, pullers, and dippers to get the turpentine from the trees, coopers and carpenters to make barrels, and a wood chopper to fuel the turpentine still. In addition, there were the house slaves—maids, cooks, a laundress, a seamstress, nursemaids, and personal servants.
Boo Nanny—known as Mammy Jo to the Allman family—worked as a laundress and cook.
Three years before Mama was born, and a year before the War Between the States began, Boo Nanny gave birth to a son named Henry. He was a dark baby, like his daddy, who was a field hand.
Boo Nanny kept Henry in a sweetgrass basket beside her in the kitchen, which was a separate building a dozen yards from the Big House. Henry was a chubby, happy baby and rarely cried.
In early October, when he was two and a half months old, a hurricane hit the coast. The old-timers could tell by the way the hens ruffled their feathers and the livestock acted skittish that a storm was coming.
The Big House was built with its back to the ocean. The first- and second-floor porches that spanned the front of the house looked over the river and the vast longleaf pine forests.
Rain beat against the windows, and a frightful wind shook the house. Boo Nanny was putting away laundry in Mistress’s room when Colonel Allman came in and told his wife that he needed all the house servants to help collect the turpentine equipment. He had recently made a huge investment in a European method of collecting the sap, using clay jars instead of the more common chop boxes carved into the base of the trees.
“You’d put your human stock at risk to protect some crazy European system? That’s insanity,” she said.
“I can’t afford to lose the new equipment.”
“I knew that newfangled system was a mistake.”
“What’s done is done. I need all hands, except Josephine.”
“Why spare her?”
“She has a new baby.”
“I’ll take care of it,” Mistress said.
Colonel Allman sent the men to the edge of the swamp to lash down the big log rafts used to transport the turpentine. They also had to secure the barrels, the distillery, the kiln, and the condensing vats. Boo Nanny was sent with the headman to gather the clay jars that collected the sap as it dripped from gashes in the pine trunks.
She and the other house slaves started out, hand in hand, across the field, but the wind was so strong it scattered them apart. The rain angled down and stung her back like a thrashing with a sweet-gum switch.
Great swirls of wind whipped the treetops. The gushing rain was as powerful as a waterfall. Above the sound came the occasional crash as the wind wrenched the weaker limbs from the trees.
Boo Nanny ran from tree to tree, throwing her arms around the trunks to steady herself in the wind. With her cheek against the trunk, sticky where the chippers had stripped away the bark to let the sap run out, she embraced the tree like a dance partner. When she felt safe, she reached for the clay jar and put it in a handcart under a tarp. She worked in the lonesome darkness, for though others were nearby, she could not see or hear them. Whenever she called out, the wind took her voice and wrapped it into its howl.
After she had worked for several hours in the false night of the storm, light returned to the sky, the rain was spent, the winds died down, and an eerie stillness fell over the forest. The birds and animals kept to themselves, and the only sound was the dripping of water from the trees. She could see, down the wide aisle between the pines, the other slaves working. She looked about at the wreckage of the storm and marveled that she had survived. Soaking wet, her skin numb from the beating rain, she rested her back against a tree and closed her eyes, but the headman, knowing more about storms than she did, moved her forward, saying the wind was only resting and would return, and there were acres and acres of trees remaining.
She didn’t believe him, but before long the monster came back, as furious as before.
They worked well into the night. The rain was still falling hard when they returned to the Big House and discovered that the worst was not over. The hurricane had hit at high tide on the day of the full moon. The tidal river, already filled to its highest point, could not hold the rain and swelled over its banks, flooding the barn and the Big House.
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