Jam on the Vine (9780802191571)

by Barnett, Lashonda

  Over the years, to make up the difference between all that she gave the Starks and what she could give to her family, Lemon lined her shoes with folded scraps of paper filled with sugar and spices from the Starks’ pantry. On the journey home, she delighted in what special foods she would prepare for Ennis and the children on her day off. At times when there was barely enough money for chicken feed, it awed the family when a cake appeared. “Timothy, Ivoe, what I tell you?” Ennis liked to say. “Momma is some magician. And a good-looking one at that.” Now in the deep apricot haze of Texas twilight, Lemon looked around her garden for some evidence of her magic. As she took the porch steps, worry sank its teeth in and gnawed away at the things she thought she knew for sure, like her ability to provide for her children and the fact that one day they would bury her and not the other way around. She opened the door so preoccupied she did not notice her husband sitting at the kitchen table.

  “Well howdy-do to you too,” Ennis said. “Fever broke. And he’s keeping the tea down. May-Belle say he be wanting to eat something soon.”

  Lemon sat her bag aside and kissed Ennis on the crown of his head. “She gone?”

  “Yeah, she gone.” Ennis cleared his throat. “Ivoe, come on in here. What with delivering two babies, seeing about Timbo, and all that fighting, I reckon May-Belle was good and tired. Ain’t that right, Ivoe?”

  Ivoe felt her father’s eyes all over her as she handed her mother a bunch of wilted buttercups picked on the way home.

  “Fighting? Who been fighting?” Lemon said.

  During her father’s retelling of that afternoon, Ivoe set a place at the table and served her mother the supper she and Ennis had fixed together.

  “Well, maybe that’ll do it,” Lemon said.

  Ennis eyed his wife curiously. “Do what?”

  “Liff da curse—” Lemon mumbled through a mouthful of cornbread. “Lift the curse that got this one here thinking she ain’t no better than her shoes. I just hate lifting her own curse meant bringing a curse downside the heads of those other fool children.” Lemon’s deep laugh made Ennis chuckle at Ivoe, who commenced a little jig around the table, waving her fists in the air like a champion pugilist.

  “Now ain’t that just the fairy from the Christmas tree?” Ennis chided. “Fighting and dancing in the same day. Go on and get in that bed you hate to cut loose when morning come.”

  The stinging worry about how they were going to make ends meet kept Lemon awake. After the children had gone to sleep, she emptied her bag of belongings once kept at the Starks’. The news of her firing didn’t upset Ennis but she knew he missed the money already. He went over a list of white folks who came to his workshop. “You think you wanna work for any of them?” She didn’t want to work for anybody ever again but she told him she would think about it. Presently, the quiet of the cabin brought to mind forgotten advice from her mother: “Sometimes you got to go to the water—be with it a while—to quiet the waters in you.” When was the last time she’d taken a late-night swim in the creek? It was too dark out for a trip alone. Where had Ennis slipped off to?

  Lemon got out of bed and dragged the long washtub in from the back porch. While the water boiled, she pulled her braids apart, freeing the coarse hair that framed her face like a crinkly mane. She added the last drops of rose geranium oil to her bath and leaned back, raking her fingers against her scalp. An image of Timbo flashed in her mind, sweat popping out on his forehead while he hunkered over his food. Let him keep on eating like that, she thought, sliding deeper into the tub just as Ennis touched her head.

  “Your sweetness come to greet me out in the yard,” the raspy voice whispered. “Thought I was gonna have to fight wild dogs off the porch to get to you. Or get Ivoe up to fight them for me.”

  Lemon leaned her head against her husband’s thigh. “Where you run off to?”

  “Had to tend to some business. I’m back now. What you want with me?”

  They moved against each other, tilting three of the bed’s legs an inch above the ground so that the shorter fourth leg collided with the earth. During their lovemaking Lemon often talked to Allah, a feverish, rapid talk that marked the ardent thrust of her hips. Ennis met the sweat that rained on him, craning his neck to suck the salt off her breast or lower lip, even in the middle of a sentence like now: “—this man.” Bump. “Thank you.” His rough hands fastened on her hips reminded her that she was not the only strong one in their family. “—so good to me.” Bump. His breath quickened in his chest and he held it until the moment her eyes emptied of worry and duty and filled with a light that nearly broke his heart. “This here—” Bump. “—is—” Her mind filled with green tomatoes in profusion on all her vines. He saw a shower of golden embers against a blanket of bright white heat. Then they both gave up the world.

  .

  Every day except Sunday Ennis walked a mile to the small shack where he had learned to smith alongside Booker Kebby, Lemon’s father. He hauled in bushels of coal and buckets of water for the slack tub; picked up the tools and scraps of iron left on the floor; and cleaned out the forge. Covered in fine black dust and itching from it, he sat down at the bellows and waited for the iron to turn hot. Usually, he thought of Lemon. How he found her crouched among a tangle of vines and looked past the glow of her sun-kissed skin, the fullness of her breasts, to her way with the fruit. He thought that anyone who handled tomatoes like you’d handle a baby must know how to love. And love is what he desperately wanted.

  Day one he wanted to tell Booker that without touching her he had already climbed so far deep inside his daughter’s love wasn’t no way no kind of light would ever reach him unless she made it so. He bided his time. The day Booker grabbed his arm and pointed to the two numbers bubbled on the skin of his shoulder, he knew he had a chance.

  “When you was a boy, why Stark bring you down here, have me put this on you? What you do?” Booker said. Ennis explained that after delivering something to Iraj in the kitchen, he had come upon a glass of water on a table on the porch. Thinking of the two-mile walk ahead of him, he tried to resist but he couldn’t. “Stark must’ve seen me from somewhere in the house,” he told Booker, truthfully. “He said any man what drink from another man’s glass couldn’t be trusted and deserved punishment.”

  The story of the first woman who should have loved Ennis was a mystery. No one knew who his mother was or where she had gone. Each of the stories passed on to him could have been true: his mother was suspected of well poisoning and drowned herself in the creek to avoid being hanged or worse; after being caught in the cotton fields with a box of matches she was sold; she had run away to Mississippi. Ennis claimed the latter because he liked the idea of a mother deciding her own fate, but in reality all he could remember of his life began in the last cabin on the road with all of Little Tunis’s male orphans. Old Man Williams lived there, tending to boys from the five-year-old Ennis to the sixteen-year-old Joseph. Sometimes babies were given to Paw Paw until stable young parents came forward looking to grow their families. Older boys, who shucked corn at Riley’s, had simply shown up and put themselves in his charge. Though he was blind, Paw Paw knew all of his boys by touch. At night, after his tales of ghostdogs and haints, he called each boy before him. Mindful of the things a child requires, he was sure to touch them, to ask what good they had given the day and if they had eaten enough. A boy’s absence from one of Paw Paw’s accountings brought trouble to everyone. Once, Ennis, always big for his age, approached Paw Paw as himself, then again later, when Timothy’s name was called. Before Ennis could turn away Paw Paw gripped his head. He ran his fingers over Ennis’s face a second and third time, as if reading a garbled message. He sensed the boys looking to each other for who should tell the truth and drove his walking stick into the ground with a fierce clap. Ennis watched the oak staff shimmy and wondered if Paw Paw could drive him into the ground like that. Timothy had run off, Ennis said. When Paw Paw retur
ned with the boy two days later he gave Ennis the only whipping he ever got—for pretending to be somebody else.

  Recalling his son’s namesake brought Ennis a worry list as long as the Brazos and just as crooked. He shifted on his work stool and raised the anvil to the forge. Who could he talk to about a little extra work? He needed to go see Riley, let the man know Timbo would be right back on the job soon as he could. Anybody who missed too much work during harvest was bound to be let go. Another leather string, a little sewing, might hold Ivoe’s shoes together one more month. But the way she was growing up so tall, come winter she would need a new coat. In the race between what he could give his family and what they needed, need always won. Truth like that stared you down. More than hurt you, it numbed you—even to a hungry flame. Ennis cussed and stumbled backward to the slack tub, his right arm bubbling with blisters.

  .

  Lemon stepped down from her porch to the garden. She lifted a listless vine, cast an anxious eye over her parched vegetables, and sighed. Two weeks and not a drop of rain. This autumn bore no resemblance to other harvests she’d known. Ivoe spent more time at the creek than at school; the slightest motion of Ennis’s hand made him wince; and the little money Timbo made barely kept them in soap and flour. She wearied at the thought of hiring herself out. After a day tending house and caring for Ennis, leftover energy was given to her garden, the place she always worried a wrong thing into rightness. She was on her hands and knees, smoothing a milky-brown mass over the earth, when a pair of fancy shoes appeared near her trowel. She raised her head and squinted up at the visitor.

  “Miss Susan, this here ground’s real sensitive. Now it know what to make of feet but it don’t know nothing about shoes. You keep standing there, we fixing to go without okra this fall.”

  Susan lifted her skirt and took a few quick dancelike steps sideways, landing her on the narrow gravel path that separated the large patch of greens from the runner beans.

  “Lemon, what do you have in that bucket?”

  “Manure and a little soda water. May-Belle puts it on her vegetables and they come out looking right pretty, tasting good too.” Lemon stood and wiped her hands on her apron. “Now. What can I do for you?”

  “My Earl sent me here after some of your tomato jam. The other morning Minnie served it and he plum had a fit. Didn’t have to tell him where it came from. He remembered your momma Iraj’s jam from childhood. Used to be the day just couldn’t start unless he had some slathered on his biscuits. No doubt about it, he said, this came from Lemon. He’s got a real hankering—sent me here to get all I could from you.”

  White folks sure had some funny ways. And no shame at all. “Well, I got some in the house,” Lemon said, tugging on the sides of her floppy straw hat as she walked cautiously down a row intended for radishes.

  Susan followed Lemon past the leafy red sage that surrounded the small cabin. She glanced admiringly on the yard, a pleasing jungle of hues, and thought, Colored people sure are at home in nature.

  Lemon reached for the jars, taking care to put her words right: “Now, Miss Susan, much as I wish I could—well, I can’t just give these to you.”

  Susan extended a closed, gloved fist. “Lemon, you know better than to think I wouldn’t offer you something.”

  Lemon looked at the gold coin. “That’s mighty generous. Mighty generous indeed.” Two and a half dollars would cover new shoes for Ivoe and leave a little extra for seeds. When the carriage drove off, she counted the tomatoes on her vines.

  “Plenty. Just need some more jars and a wagon.”

  The Sunday Ivoe returned from Old Elam Baptist Church with three orders, Lemon knew her family would be all right. Folding eggs into cornmeal, she leaned her head a little to the side and listened, trying not to smile. Above the noise of the whisk she could hear jubilation in the child’s voice.

  “Beulah Brown wants three jars of chowchow. And Mamie Johnson say with your tree looking like it do she know you must have some mighty fine fig jam. Reverend Greenwood told me to tell you just ’cause you don’t show your face at church, he won’t hold it against you. He said put him down for two jars of tomato jam. He even gave me the money.”

  The whisk stopped. “How he know how much to give you?”

  Ivoe’s eyes flashed the way a child’s does when she is about to reveal a long-kept, happy secret.

  “First he gave me a dime. He said you probably wouldn’t charge no more than a nickel for each jar. But I told him a dime would only get him one jar not two.”

  “A dime, Ivoe?” She would never have thought to ask for so much.

  Ivoe hesitated. Her mother always said—in the voice she used when she wasn’t keen on something—that the folks at Old Elam were more hat than saddle. “But he gave me a quarter and told me he’ll be looking for his jams next Sunday. Momma, just think of all the customers you could get if you came to church.”

  Ssth. And get carried away with that foolishness? Lemon thought as her whisk started up again. Clapping and stomping and praying to the blue-eyed savior on the wall? Booker and Iraj taught her better than that. Years ago in the Bottoms—before the incident at the river with the twenty-eight—for practicing Arabic and passing on the Qur’an’s lessons sometimes your tongue was cut out. Booker Kebby had been determined she would pray in the tongue of her ancestors. Her father taught her the same salats learned by his father at the madrasa. In Alabama, before they were sold to Mr. Stark, word on a raid of the women’s quarters for contraband made her mother and May-Belle hide their Fula mothers’ misbaha in the only place a woman could hide anything. After all of that she should give up Islam? Give it up—for the gospel according to whom?

  Lemon handed Ivoe a basket. “I seen rivers run less than that mouth of yours. You fixing to stand there all day or help with some of this work?” Soon it would be time to teach her how to bring a crop from a seed. “Let me get started on Beulah’s chowchow. Fetch me some peppers. Might as well bring in some tomatoes too. Miss Susan be back around here before you know it.”

  Ivoe had half a mind to leave the best tomatoes on the vine. She was put out with Miss Susan for firing Momma. Now newspapers were impossible to come by. She missed how the paper gave her new words to learn. Recently, her teacher had brought a great book that required the effort of the biggest boys in class to carry. On a walnut stand in the back of the schoolhouse the American Dictionary lay open to the middle. Ivoe’s hand was the first to shoot up whenever Miss Stokes read from One Thousand and One Nights and came upon a word they didn’t know. Flip-flopping in broken shoes was worth the chance to look a new word up. She was excited and comforted by the feel of the dictionary’s thin pages, soft and cool to the touch. Often reprimanded for sulkiness when another pupil interrupted her searches, today her irascibility had been rewarded. Miss Stokes said if granted permission from her parents she could remain after school to have extra time with the dictionary.

  Time with the dictionary was on Ivoe’s mind as she crouched by the crawling vine, gently twisting, heeding Momma’s clue: ripeness was found in color not softness. When she saw a tomato whose redness at the bottom matched the red around the stem, she gave the fruit a gentle tug. She chose the peppers with equal care because a task well done was sure to put her in Momma’s good grace, where she needed to be.

  .

  Lemon emptied a cup on the kitchen table, stacking coins in neat piles as she counted. In a month she had paid off the wagon and bought new boots for the four of them. Sometimes she treated herself to rose water or picked up something special for Ennis. Still, it would never be enough. She returned the cup to its secret place and left the cabin.

  Bright orange and light yellow leaves barreling down from the sweet gum trees and the trace of corn dust, where a combine had just harvested the field, often soothed Lemon, but during troubled times it was her habit to think of her mother and father. Before their deaths, she and Ma
y-Belle had joined her parents and a Starkville merchant family for Friday prayers. Her new ritual, when May-Belle was called away, was to pray alone in her garden—Surah 2:115: “Wherever you turn, there is Allah’s face.” The invitation to attend jumu’ah in the back of Mr. Al-Halif’s seed store, where a small room was devoted as a makeshift mosque, had come early that week when the shopkeeper stopped her on a jam delivery.

  “You and May-Belle are the only Muslims in the Bottoms but we are all Arabized coloreds in a country of Christians . . . We must worship together.”

  Abbud Al-Halif landed on the Texas coast just before the Civil War with other Syrian and Turkish Muslims and a shipload of camels to tend for the army. “Camel transportation between Texas and the western frontier failed . . . And no Reconstruction for the masses of Syrians out of work after the war,” he had explained to Lemon. He had been lucky, striking out for Central East Texas with his wife in 1875 when a man decided to build a bridge across the Brazos, connecting Burleson and Bryan Counties. He built Pitt’s Bridge with other immigrants, mostly Italian, living in a tent on a peat bog. He tended cattle for the Starks. Doing “godless work,” until he eked out enough savings to open a store on Main Street.

  The red-and-white cover of Joseph Breck & Sons Garden, Field, and Flower Seeds caught Lemon’s eye. She lingered the longest in its pages, which promised everything from perfect petunias to giant goosefoot. Pages and pages of seeds from as far away as Asia, a gardener and truck farmer’s dream. She studied the photographs, enticed by potherbs from the Balkans, and wished she could send away for some. It soothed her mind a little to thumb through the nursery catalogs while waiting for Mr. Al-Halif to conclude his business. As he locked the door behind the last customer, Lemon spoke in a tremulous voice.