And Sally Mae Hammer Babcock went on and on standing the 45 minutes to Livingston talking about tens years’ worth of her life since she had last seen Bira. When she grabbed her bags and got off the train, Bira and June waved good bye with joy, giggling like school girls as the train pulled away.
“Your father never courted her,” Bira laughed to June. “He said her jaw was always flapping and her tail was always wagging. The man she married would have to be half deaf anyway cause she was always so loud and long-winded.” They both laughed. “But she could sew anything you wanted. Worked for lots of white people over in Alabama, that’s how she got started. Then the colored that had money wanted her to make dresses tailored like the finest clothes from big cities for them. So she opened a shop in Birmingham. Had four girls working for her.
“She had been married three years when I first met her. Your father took me to her to make my wedding dress.”
“What ever happened to it, Mama?”
Bira looked straight ahead as she said: “The white folks burned it, burned everything the night your father and I left Alabama.”
Now that was one story June knew far too well. She had heard other people tell it, exaggerate on it and make it sound like a miracle that her parents had escaped. But simply put, as her father had reminded them all from time to time, the Blacksmith had quit his job working for a white smithy after years of work for him. William Brown wanted to open his own shop. He wanted something of his own.
The whites who knew this told William not attempt to go out on his own. “White men’s orders,” he would say. No one would come to him to do their work. Trouble was lots of people would have come, for those he originally serviced knew that William was the one who did the fastest and the best work.
With only one warning, William went with his pretty bride to look at a suitable sight for a blacksmith shop. By the time he got back to their home, the tiny wooden structure was burnt to the ground and almost everything in it, except the few pieces Bira could save from her past. William went to his mother and told her what happened. It was she who told him to leave town and he did without looking back. She died two years later, but they didn’t return to Alabama for ten years after that.
“Miss Fannie and Aunt Ella came to visit a lot before you were born. Your daddy bought them a house when Minnelsa was about ten. They took care of his mama before she died. Besides, they always loved him like a brother.”
They watched the countryside for a while, pine trees that flew by on the wings of green grass, dogwood trees with bright blossoms and flowers and plants June had never seen before. She had her mother all to herself for the first time in her life. No Willie about, although she missed him terribly. No sisters to ask questions or to need attention. No demanding father. Bira Brown sat next to her giving her undivided attention.
Bira touched her baby girl’s head and then, for the first time in a very long time, kissed her forehead. “Did we not love you enough?”
“Oh, Mama,” June started to cry and buried her face in her mother’s shoulder, tears staining the beautiful cream colored dress Bira wore.
“I’m not blaming you, girl. I’m just asking. If you needed love and didn’t get enough, why didn’t you tell us? Why didn’t you tell me?”
June raised her head and found her face so close to her mother she could smell the essence of perfume that the Blacksmith insisted his wife wear, even though she did not care for it. She wanted to speak, to tell her mother everything, the whole story. To tell her how she had fallen in love with this man, this Piano Man that she had met on one of her many trips to freedom that she took into the woods to Emma’s place. But she held her tongue.
“I’m sorry life has been so hard for you, June. I didn’t want it to be that way. Not for you, not for any of my daughters,” Bira whispered into her ear. “But you must realize, and I can say this to you since you have become a woman on your own, I can’t say this yet to your sisters, that you were not an after-thought. Your father and I would not have you think we were trying to have a boy, a perfectly healthy boy, when Willie was not. You, more than any of my children were born out of love.” She touched the belly of her daughter gently. June shrank away slightly, feeling funny, wondering if the eyes of the other colored on the train were staring at her.
“Was this baby made in love?” Bira spoke in June’s ear so that no one would ever know, not even the wind, she spoke so soft.
June nodded. Whether the Piano Man had loved her or not she was unsure. She would never be sure for he only had to touch her to make her want to be all to him. She loved him. The first and last man she would ever love.
“Good.” Bira touched her and straightening up her head relaxed against the aged leather of the train seat. “Love, no matter what your father may tell you, is very important.
“I told you my father was a colored man, my mother a Blackfoot Indian. I’ve told you how my family was killed by the white robes. What I didn’t tell you was my father found my mother half dead and pregnant with the child of her white assailant. He took her in and cared for her until the baby was born. My papa had a nice little piece of land in Tyson, Alabama.
“The baby was born high yeller and sickly. But by then my father and mother had fallen in love and he treated the baby as his own. Child was named Emmett and died in its first year. I have heard that maybe my mother neglected it because of how it was conceived: not in love but by the lust of some white man who decided my mother was fair game because she was an Indian. Maybe the child had the same thing your brother Willie had, but much worse. Almost from the day he was born he couldn’t move from his waist down. Never kicked like a normal baby, just cried and cried.
“Then I was born, out of true love my mother told me. Not the kind of love that you die for, but the kind of love you live for. See, my mother wanted to die until my father found her. Without saying why is this woman lying half dying under a bush, he took her to his home and fed her and nursed her and gave her something to live for.
“Course she didn’t know him at first but she grew to trust him and to like him. One day, she told me, she was just sitting there and wondering: how could one human being be so unselfish, so kind, as to know another man’s child was growing in your belly, not because you loved him, but because the man had taken you from your village and beaten and raped you over and over for months and then, when the pregnancy started to show, left you to die in the wilderness. If he was so kind as to love without question, then he deserved to be loved.”
“Was your mother happy with your father?”
“They were the happiest people I had ever seen. I had six brothers and sisters. We lived on papa’s stretch of land like kings. The love of my mama helped him to work hard. We had no shoes sometimes, hand me down clothes all the time but our father taught us to read and write at night because he needed us to work the fields during the day. We didn’t mind. There was so much happiness there, so much love. My mama and the babies would care for the house and the older children would work in the fields. At the end of the day, papa, who in some ways reminds me of your father, big arms and hands and muscles, he would come home and pick up the three babies. I had twin baby sisters and a bad little brother, he’d kiss them and squeeze them and then he’d do the same to my mother. Only it was different. You could see when they touched, when they kissed, they had a love that they wanted to live for.
“Twelve years of happiness. I say twelve,” Bira was smiling, “because I can only remember back to when I was three and my first memory was of my father throwing me high into the air, so high I thought I would kiss the top of the trees.” Bira’s face was one huge grin. “I remember him hugging me when he caught me because my new brother was born and my father said he loved me even more because now there was two of me.”
Bira grew silent and all June could hear was the sound of the train as it clacked over the tracks. Something sad had filled her mother’s soul. She had never known her mother very well. She had always looke
d at her mother as her father’s slave. But then, June thought, she had no idea what happened behind the doors when the Blacksmith took his wife to bed. She didn’t want to think about it, but wondered: was there as much passion between them as there had been the first night she had laid on the grass with the Piano Man?
The mother turned to her daughter and touched her face. Her hands were so soft, her eyes so much like the grandmother June had never known.
“I was just thinking of how . . .”
“How your family died?” June said sweetly and Bira nodded. She hadn’t talked about it much but it was the only part of her mother’s history that she knew.
“When I went back to the shell of my parents’ house, I found the dress my mother had worn the day she married my father, buried beneath what was left of the cabin with the deed to the land and a few coins. When I was a little girl, mama told me that when I got married I could wear it. So she buried it in an old strong box under the cabin. I guess that’s why it survived the fire.
“Miss Fannie told me to keep all of those things, but I guess grief had other ideas. I figured I was supposed to die like the rest of my family. So I took to wearing that dress and sitting in a corner and not eating. One day some white men came into the store and asked how much for the Indian girl. Miss Fannie laughed and told them I was her niece and a little touched in the head so they’d leave me alone. They went away laughing and she believed that was the end of that.
“One night I woke up screaming in my little cot in the store. A white man was. . .” Bira tried to be delicate, “on me. I don’t know who drove him away but they said I screamed for days. Still I wouldn’t take off my mama’s dress. That’s how your father found me.”
Suddenly Bira’s face brightened and she turned to her daughter letting her hand go and confiding in her the deepest secret in her soul.
“You know I had been thinking for weeks, why doesn’t God just let me die, when this big monster of a man with this handsome boyish face walks into the store. Maybe he had been there before, I didn’t know. I didn’t even know what day it was, I was so lost. But Miss Fannie will tell you that for the first time in three weeks, I looked up and saw the face of another human being. And recognized that that human being was alive and not there to disturb me. He looked at me, my straggly hair, dirt on my face and he asked Miss Fannie was I the girl. I was fifteen, your father barely eighteen, but with more manners and more manly than any one I had ever known.
“Miss Fannie told him: ‘She needs some water,’ and he got the colored water bucket and dipper and brought it over to me.
“I watched his every move.”
June was delighted with the story. “Did you, Mama? Did you like him that much?”
“Oh yes.” Bira gave a girlish giggle that June didn’t know her mother had in her. “I watched him like a hawk. As he got the water and the pail and as he knelt down beside me. When he asked me to drink, I did without question.”
“Your eyes met, Mama, and you knew?”
“Yes girl, our eyes met and I knew. I wasn’t sure what I knew, but something stirred in me and I knew I was dirty, I needed washing. I knew that I didn’t have to die if I didn’t want to. I knew that he was not going to let me if he had a choice.”
“So you were in love with papa,” June smiled.
“Almost at first sight, as they say. But I didn’t want him to see me like that so I ran out of the general store and down to this pond as fast as my legs could carry me. Only thing was he followed me.”
June giggled as she followed her mother’s story. “I told him I was dirty and he said he would make sure he got me cleaned up. I told him my family had been killed and he said he knew. I told him my mother was an Indian and he said he didn’t care. I told him about the night the white man came and he didn’t care. I told him I had nothing to live for and he told me he wanted me, needed me, to live.”
Again she touched June’s face. “I never asked your father why he loved me or how he knew he loved me. We never had time for that. We had to learn about each other. When he found out I could read, he had me teach him. We read to each other every night before we went to bed in those years before Minnelsa was born. He told me he wanted his own shop and I worked with him to make his dream come true. That’s why we had to leave Alabama. He wanted to set up shop there, although he never talks about it but that’s where we are going. Miss Fannie and Aunt Ella live near there.”
* * *
The train made another stop and June watched the people get off. Soon Bira had fallen into a deep sleep probably, June thought, thinking of her first moments with her father. June didn’t understand her father but she understood, she thought, the power of love.
The train lurched forward and for the first time in weeks June was hungry. No, she was starving, ravenous. Without disturbing her mother she gently removed the picnic basket from overhead and pulled out the chicken and potato salad her mother had made along with some biscuits. She ate like a condemned man until Bira awoke and watched her with sleep filled eyes. “They’ll feed you, child. They’ll feed you and love you and never ask any questions. That’s just how they treated me.”
June felt her stomach settle for the first time in weeks, the food traveling to a place where it was relaxed and comfortable. “Save some for me, Baby June.” She hadn’t called her that in years. “I’m a bit hungry myself.”
By the time the train crossed the Alabama border, June had eaten enough food for two good sized farmhands. Her mother ate a bite or two. But Bira was watching each bush, each tree to see if it recalled her. “I left here so unannounced, so unhappy.”
“Are you unhappy with me Mama?” June’s voice shook with nervousness.
“No, sweetheart.” Bira hugged her daughter close to her. “At first I was disappointed, very disappointed. I wondered how you could have all we gave you and then destroy yourself the way you did. But as your father continued to bellow and scream I begin to realize that perhaps what we thought was love, giving you the best home, clothes and the best education that money could buy, was not the love you needed. You and all your sisters, and especially your brother,” Bira sighed. “I miss him and regret that I didn’t know what to do about him, all of you deserve more love than you can get from us.”
June was not sure what her mother was saying. Love had been the key word. Love like she wanted to have for the man that fathered her child. Love that she had for her sister, letting her sister marry that man knowing what he had done to her and to himself. Love, she thought, then yawned and slept.
As the train came to their stop June realized she was hungry again but said nothing to her mother who had packed up the wicker basket and settled back into her seat reading a book. Everyone in her family seemed to read a lot. June didn’t mind sometimes. Willie used to read to her, and she to him. Then they’d discuss the book and talk about how life would be if they were the characters. She hadn’t read for pleasure since he died. She found no joy in it.
Now she wondered what was she supposed to do in this little Alabama town until the baby was born. The things she had been taught by her sisters, only because her mother was so busy, the knitting, the sewing, the crocheting, the cooking, she regretted having never excelled at them. She had no talent at painting like Willie, and could not play an instrument like Rosa. She could sing but she didn’t think it likely that they would let a pregnant unmarried woman sing in the church choir.
That’s when she remembered the lie she had to tell. The lie that she had to live with forever so as to satisfy her father. Here in Tyson, Alabama to Miss Fannie and Aunt Ella she was a young widow. They knew the truth but that’s how they would introduce her. Supposedly she had run away from home and eloped but on the way back after a month of living in the poor house in the Carolinas her husband died while working in a saw mill. Her father had thought of this lie so as to satisfy the curiosity of the people in his old hometown. He had even given her a ring that he had once found as a boy, kept it as g
ood luck around his neck till he meet Bira, then put it into a box of past treasures when he proposed and bought his wife a gold band. June was now Mrs. Jackson, and she looked at her lackluster ring.
It should have been bright and new. It should have been from the Piano Man. But this was her fate and she was tired of crying about it. In her dismay she simply whispered: “Oh Willie, I wish you were here.”
The train stopped and June was suddenly afraid. This was the last time she would see her mother for many months and she had just really gotten to know her. She would be left in the company of strangers, distant related southern women whose names she had seldom heard until two weeks ago. Fear gripped her insides and swelled along with the dizzying feeling that she was starving. She swooned and fainted into the seat.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
June awoke in the back seat of a huge car her head on her mother’s shoulders and facing a cocoa brown woman with shocking white hair.
“My, my, but you scared us, Little Bit,” a voice said from the front seat. The voice was piqued and soft and so dainty June thought this must be how a doll would sound if it could talk.
She moved and Bira suggested: “Slowly dear, things take time.” She gave her mother a tiny smile and looked at the white haired woman. She smiled at her too. Not because she had suddenly lost her fear but because this woman reminded her of what a chocolate cake with white icing looked like. The voice from in front was that of the driver. All she could see was a hat with lots of feathers sticking out.
“Give her some water, Ella. Help her settle down.”
Aunt Ella, white hair and piecing brown eyes, spoke back. “Don’t think a woman in her condition having been on a wobbling train and then fainting for a spell needs to wake up to plain water. She needs something with salt in it.”
The Wilful Daughter Page 16
