I left the child in the pool of blood it had made and went on to the crossing place. When I got there, they said they thought it was two of us. I said it was three, maybe more, maybe all of Kentucky. When I said this, I turned on my heel and ran all the way back to that ditch. The child lay untouched. I cut the cord, wrapped him up, then covered my sister with rocks. Then I realized what I had done and pulled every one of those rocks off of her and hid her in some brush. I sat there beside that brush a long time until the baby in my arms began to cry. At the crossing place they looked us up and down for a long time. “Where is the mother?” they asked me.
“I made us run,” I said. “I got us lost.”
The little house Lucious Wilson had given to Ginny Lancaster sat one mile away from his big one at the end of a stand of shagbark hickory and giant white oak. There was a fine field behind it and a few brave flowers poking up out of a black bed on the front lawn. This time I had Prosper get out of the wagon with me and come to the front door. I stood there looking at its fresh yellow paint for a long time without knocking then took the spool with its few last lengths of purple thread out of my bag and set it down on the porch. It didn’t look like much. Any kind of a wind would have blown it out into the field.
“All right,” I said.
“All right, Aunt Zinnia,” said Prosper.
We were almost to the cart when the door behind us opened.
I could not see her at first, there in the gloom.
All those years, all those miles.
“Please,” she said. “Come back. Come in.”
A woman gave me a blanket for the child, said he looked strong, asked me if I planned to keep him.
“Keep him?” I said. “He is my nephew. He is my own.”
They put oar to water at dusktime, took us out across the darkening waters. The child cried but a little as we went toward the lights on the far bank. I named him when we were halfway home.
THE STONECUTTER’S TALE (BY THE RIVER, BY THE WORLD). 1930
but for every trifle are they set upon me
I HAVE TWO VOICES. One I use when I am at home and one I use when I am anywhere else. I sat down in the booth and used the second one. The waitress brought me a cup of coffee. When she set it down in front of me, I used the voice again and asked for a slice of pie.
“You want whipped cream with that, hon?” she asked me.
I shook my head.
She brought me a glass of ice water with the pie. There was a fan turning noisily on the ceiling. She had sweated the armpits out of her uniform. She looked tired. Too worn out for the job. Her uniform too snug.
“Come far?” she asked me.
“Illinois,” I said.
“All that way?”
I nodded.
“First time?”
“No,” I said. “I’ve been down here before. Came on a visit with my aunt. It has been awhile though.”
I had spent the morning on the Ohio in a rented boat I had barely been able to steer. Twice I had run aground on sandbars. I am too old to pole heavy boats off sandbars, but I had done it each time. Aunt Z told me, before she died, that if I ever went looking, I should keep an eye out for a lone, brown bluff on the far side of the water. I had seen it long after I had lost hope.
“There’s a house down by the river. A big white house with a green roof. How do I get there?” I asked the waitress when she came over with the coffeepot.
“Why do you want to go there?” the waitress said.
“It’s where I’m bound,” I said.
She looked at me, raised her eyebrow. I counted three fat droplets of sweat hanging from its curling tines. One of them dropped as I watched. She wiped the others away. I knew she couldn’t tell, hadn’t seen it yet, but it was in the room with us now, was ambling along the line of booths toward us, would come and sit down beside me, would curl my straight hair and darken my light skin. When I was young I had my smile and my fresh, unlined young face to send it away when I had to, but those days are long gone. Still, I had my traveling voice, my Main Street voice.
“This pie is delicious,” I said.
“I baked it myself,” she said.
“I might have guessed. I might just have guessed.”
I ate my pie, drank my coffee, got my directions. I was waving good-bye when I stepped out the front door and only narrowly avoided colliding with a man and a woman dressed in old horse blankets and wearing feathers in their hair. They nodded at me and I nodded back, then I watched them cross the street and disappear into a stand of trees beyond a filling station just like they had never been.
The house sat on a rise above the river. I left my tools in the car and walked down a narrow lane from the road. The front door opened before I had crossed the scraggly lawn. A woman in her later years stood before me. She had on a clean blue dress. She looked up at me through heavy spectacles.
“Can I do for you?” she said.
“I am a reporter for the Chicago Sun, and I am writing an article on places where slaves were given help. I understand this was one.”
I had spent time memorizing this speech during the drive down. I have never been a reporter for the Chicago Sun or for any other paper, but I did once, briefly, before I took up my trade, think of becoming one.
“I don’t know anything about that,” she said.
“I’m very sorry to hear it.”
“We don’t keep with coloreds here.”
“I understand.”
“Who told you about this place? They been talking in town?”
I shook my head. The house was in bad shape but didn’t look old enough to have been standing for better than seventy years. One or two of the outbuildings, possibly.
“Is there someone else I might speak to? Someone who might direct me?”
“I’m it,” she said. “Last one standing.”
“I know how that feels.”
“Do you?”
“Yes, I do.”
“Well, I’m sorry I couldn’t be any help to you.”
“And I’m sorry for having troubled your afternoon.”
“You have other places to visit for your newspaper article?”
“Just this one.”
I had turned and started across the lawn. I had begun to walk back to my car, to return from nothing to nothing, the air, the road, the long drive back, when she spoke.
“My parents were Christian people,” she said.
I stopped.
“They said the good Lord saw no color when he looked down at us.”
I had put my hat back on. I took it off again.
“No color at all.”
I nodded. She looked carefully at me.
“You don’t look anything like a reporter,” she said.
I nodded again.
She stood without moving for a long time, then she clicked her tongue and gave me a small, careful smile.
We crossed what had once possibly been a sorghum field, then followed a path down a gulley, through a notch between two hills and into a pretty stand of oak, willow, and birch. I took my hat off and held it against my chest when she pointed. Two or three dozen moss-dripping markers sat surrounded by the remnants of an iron fence. The markers were cross-shaped. Made of pink granite most of them.
“Some didn’t make it across the river. My parents buried every last one.”
I nodded. I’d heard about that.
“Who you looking for?” she said.
“Her name was Cleome.”
“No Cleomes here,” she said.
I was walking the markers, the woman stepping quietly behind me.
“I know every name. If they had one. Josiah, Eunice, Claremont, Osa, Letty, Brister, Dorcas, Jupiter, Pompey, Fanny, Turquoise, Lince.”