AUTHOR’S NOTE
My agent, Jeff Kleinman, asked me the question that I had been dreading anyone asking. He asked in light of the slaughter of the innocents in Charleston, in light of the events in Ferguson, in light of all the rest that swirls around us these days, how could I, a very white man living in the first quarter of the twenty-first century, justify writing a novel about the plight of a mixed-race woman living in the second half of the nineteenth century?
It’s a tough question. I will not try to rattle off some dubious credentials about growing up around black people, as if somehow their “blackness” rubbed off on me. The truth is, while the world I grew up in was painfully unequal for those around me, it was hardly separate. Yet, I make no claim to somehow understanding anyone by proximity.
In truth, I realized, Jeff asked me two questions. The first question is “Why now?” — how, at this point in history, can I even attempt to address the life of this woman in the world we live in? My answer to this is simple. I can think of no better time than today to speak about race and history. Despite all the politically correct attempts by those around us to mask what we see every day, the issue of “race” is always with us. It has been so since the first slaves arrived at Jamestown, and perhaps it will be with us for years to come.
Events in the past few years, however — what happened in Charleston and Ferguson and all the other places of late — has focused me as never before. I believe that we are, all of us, called to examine the human condition — our condition — and race remains there, front and center. So that, Jeff, is why this story needs to be told now.
As far as the second part of the question — as to how I, a white man, can attempt to speak for a black woman — well, that’s a bit harder. When my first novel, The Widow of the South, came out, again and again women would confront me, asking me how I could possibly understand what a mother could go through, losing a child. After all, I was not only not a woman, but had never had a child, let alone lost one.
In the end, all I could say to them was that I had not tried to understand what it was to be a woman so much as I had tried to understand what it was to be human. I was writing about human loss.
There are several qualities required to be a good storyteller. I have never claimed to possess an abundance of many of them, but whatever else I may lack, no one can claim I wasn’t given the empathy gene. I say “gene” for, like my dad, it seems to be more than just sentimentality. Even as a child, I was struck by the sadness of those around me and wondered why they were sad.
So, how can I dare write and speak for a black woman? The answer is that I didn’t. I have tried, once again, to understand a human being, with the same hopes and dreams, the same responses to sorrow and loss, that all humans have, whatever their circumstances.
I remain fascinated with the themes of transformation and redemption — the kind of transformation, and redemption, that I imagine a former slave named Mariah Reddick might have possessed.
CHAPTER 1 — MARIAH
July 2, 1867
That morning, just as the world stirred in a light breeze, there had been a difficult birth. The new mother gasped in pain, but at bedside Mariah listened beyond that, she listened to the air around her, trying to breathe so slow and light that she could hear only the blood in her head. She heard the rest of the world clearly, the sounds of cutlery on plates in the nearby fancy house and the rattle of feet far off out on the street. When a baby was on its way, right when it was about to enter her world, Mariah became vigilant, her senses more powerful. She was the guard at the gates, the lioness with her nose in the wind and her teeth bared. It’s a hard, hard world, child. You will need help. And then she heard the servants whispering in the kitchen by the woodstove. She heard, out in the street:
Won’t be no nigger speeches here, you mark my words. They’ll lose the gumption, you’ll see. They’ll run away. They don’t know what’s coming.
One of the maids — Emma May, whom the family had brought from Nashville — whispered to one of the kitchen boys, Go run and get Dr. Cliffe.
She would have the whole thing finished by the time Dr. Cliffe staggered down the street. She took stock one more time: the sounds spun around her, none of them threatening. The way was clear and safe, the signs were right. Come on, child, come into the world.
She didn’t believe in spirits, but whatever it was that charged the air between Mariah, mother, and baby — what the old souls had called haints — spoke. Now Mariah felt the threat, which she wanted to deny but couldn’t. This one isn’t like the rest. There’s something wrong. The life has flowed from her, the blood has gone.
In all things but this, Mariah had left talk of haints and powers behind. That was old business, her mama’s wisdom and tradition. Her mama had never known freedom.
Believe this, though: better get that baby out right now or it dead.
The top of the baby’s head had appeared. She slid her long fingers on either side of the child’s head, guiding and not pulling.
“Missus, here it comes. You got to help me now.”
Evangeline, the magistrate Elijah Dixon’s much younger wife, all of twenty-seven years old, had her eyes closed and would only shake her head. Mariah slapped her hard on her thigh, twice, and Evangeline struggled and clenched and wailed. The voices got louder but Mariah couldn’t make out the words. The top of the baby’s head had gone a deep, deep purple.
“Missus!”
Evangeline pushed. Mariah inserted her fingers between the baby’s neck and the cord she knew must be drawing closed around its throat. The baby slipped a little farther out. Mariah could see the cord wrapped and knotted like a snake, and when she stretched it away from the child she thought she saw the purple fade. She coaxed the baby on, just a little farther, until the whole head had emerged.
“It coming, missus!”
She heard a voice behind her. Dr. Cliffe. How did he get here so fast? “The cord!” he shouted. “Step aside!”
Mariah knew what needed to be done and would not move away. Where was her knife? Too late for that now. She got her teeth on the cord just at the side of the child’s neck. She felt the baby’s cheek on hers, smooth and soft. Afterward she would think of this as the true moment of the child’s birth, when she bent down and felt him on her skin, barely alive but whole and true and human, his soft and crumpled ear folded up against her own. A woman could live her whole life and never be so close to a child, not even one’s own. Not like that.
She bit hard and through, freeing the cord, and the baby began to slide fast into her hands. Dr. Cliffe tried to push her aside and she cursed him like she’d curse a mule. The child wasn’t breathing, so she put him up to her shoulder and began to coax the breath from him, squeezing, patting, and humming.
I don’t have a lick of magic and I don’t need it.
The child was breathing and starting to pink up by the time Dr. Cliffe finally managed to get the baby from her, ready to pry and prod with his shiny new tools in the black satchel. The room had seemed so dark and empty before, just Mariah and mother and her baby, but now the doctor and some of the other children had crowded in. Not the husband, though, Mariah noted. He hadn’t attended the other births either.
Mariah went to the mother, took that pale, gray face scattered with freckles in her hands, and whispered, You’ve got a boy. When she returned to the foot of the bed to assist the doctor with the towels and the rest of it, he glared.
The child lived because of her. It had been fate that had tried to kill him, and Mariah had taken fate in her own hands and run it off. She decided who would live and die. How did the doctor not understand that? That baby wasn’t the first, not nearly, among those who owed their lives to her. She could still feel the child against her face, and that first flush of blood that had ever so slightly warmed her cheek.
CHAPTER 3 — MARIAH
July 6, 1867
Mariah awoke and lay in bed to listen to the branches of the poplar brushing the side of her little house. She worked too hard for too little — even if the money now was hers, and didn’t just go to the McGavocks as it had when she’d been a slave. She took on every birth she could, but Dr. Cliffe had managed to cut into her business recently with his promises of scientific reproduction and rational birth. He gave lectures. She’d been to one, “Progress of the New Man,” down at the public room of the Masonic Hall. The point of this lecture, from what she had understood, was to reveal the existence of things called germs, little critters too small to see, which caused every manner of illness, including stillbirth, and which could only be battled by advanced sterilization procedures that the doctor, coincidentally, had learned. Well, she’d been doing just fine without his invisible germs, and she could see her handiwork walking down the street tailing after their mothers.
Once she’d cleaned up and eaten a cold biscuit, Mariah went and stood on her porch a couple of feet above the muddy thoroughfare of Cameron Street: the queen of all she surveyed, she leaned on her front porch rail like she had herself prepared a few remarks to share with the gathered mosquitoes, the flies, the white men rattling past behind their mule teams. Pillowy bolls of the Middle Tennessee sky floated above a wide expanse of blue.
Franklin was a town that some time before had lost a limb or two, or some fingers and toes, and had not yet fully recovered. It still limped; it could still feel its phantom limbs. What had not been forgotten had been pulled down or plowed under. Carter’s cotton gin had been destroyed under the rush of the rebel army only to rise up again afterward; hundreds were buried where they dropped, right where the foundations had been. The entrenchments that had arced in front of Franklin’s south side had been filled in, but the soil’s settling had left long and shallow concavities, twisting here and there through town like the trail of a great snake.
People, soldiers and not, had disappeared, no word from them again. Quite a few of the Negroes had lit out for other places north. White families left, too, having lost a business or a father, back to Mama’s old home place where they crowded into too few rooms and fought over the family land. Others, like the fancy German carpenter and furniture maker, Lotz and his family, had tried to stay, but eventually fled for some new life in the West.
In some parts of town, houses still stood empty. The quiet on some streets could be unnerving. An empty dwelling always seemed on the verge of being filled again, each window just a moment away from being lit by lamplight. And each day that a house’s eyes remained dark and dead, its people snatched up and delivered to new places, was a shock; a rebuke to those who stayed. And why did they stay? Habit, greed, faith, philosophy, poverty — who could know?
There had been no black blocks before the war because there had been very few black cabins. But now little neighborhoods had grown up around those few freemen’s houses that had existed before the war. Blood Bucket was the best known of these, and white people had made way for it by moving across town as quickly as they were able. New houses and shacks grew up on the white west side of town, while black men and women moved into the old ones on the east side.
The new houses on the west side were lined out and straight-cornered, elegant and monumental, building geometrically to angled peaks that looked out over the town. These Greek Revivals appeared, suddenly, but the metamorphosed shacks and shotguns of the Bucket just seemed to grow. This seemed right to Mariah; it seemed beautiful.
Mariah had brought Franklin into the world, in a manner of speaking. Not the physical town, but a goodly number of those who dwelt in it, especially the young.
There they were right over there, across the way in the courthouse square, white boys and girls trying to climb over the new platform built that morning for the political meeting. The colored carpenters shooed them away. She had birthed all those children, she had caught them coming out, she had been the first person they’d ever seen. She was thefirst to bathe them, the first to whisper to them, the first to look them in the eye before handing them off to their mothers. She believed this was the hidden beginning of their memories. Even if they couldn’t explain to themselves why they were so respectful and a little afraid of the colored woman with the gray eyes, it was no puzzle to the woman herself.
Inside, she stoked the fire and poured water for coffee. Her fire and her coffee. Her pot. Her house. She hoped she never got used to saying those words and meaning them, knowing they were hers in a fundamental and absolute way, that they were better than gifts. They were not loans made by her mistress, but hers that she could burn to the ground if she felt like it. She could paint a face on the side of her house, she could sit up on the peak of the roof and spend the day singing to the sparrows. Why not? She could. This could make some people very angry, she knew. Would she rattle her freedom at them, sing it from that rooftop? She wouldn’t, because she had never actually stopped being the wise woman, the responsible woman, the sock darner and fever tender. She couldn’t sweep back time, however much she wished it.
An hour later Mariah’s own flesh and blood, her son, sat on a hard gray slatted chair next to her, talking low and amused about politics, which she let him do. He was a cobbler by trade, set up his own shop a few streets away, but already he was thinking beyond owning his shop. Now he was thinking of owning the whole world, Mariah sometimes thought. As if slavery were something that a stroke of a pen could just wipe away, and the whole world could open up before you.
Mariah kept two potted plants on the railing of her small porch, on either side of the steps to the street. She kept two chairs on the porch, facing the street on opposite sides of the front door. Mariah always sat on the left, and any visitor would sit on the right. Her chair had worn down some on the back legs, and there was the slightest black mark on the clapboard wall just behind. Mariah liked to lean back on the chair and rest against the wall. She liked to lean just past the moment of balance, constantly testing that balance. Sometimes she rocked forward, and other times she eased back. When she was balanced she thought it felt like flying. Or at least floating.
Theopolis once told her that she looked like an old man when she rocked like that with her legs spread wide. Her son leaned forward in his chair, elbows on his knees, hands clasped in front of him, staring at whatever happened to be going by on the porch floor, often ants. Or he looked out down the street squinty-eyed like he could see from there to Perdition.
“You’ll come then, Mama?”
“If you going to make a fool of yourself, I suppose I’ll be there to watch it.”
“Who do you think is going to run, Mama, if it’s not me?”
“Some other not my son. But you go on, you do what best.”
“Good thing I don’t listen to you.”
Her Theopolis was damned modern, thinking he was going to put himself in charge of that House of Representatives in Nashville, even just a little bit.
This terrified her.
Theopolis would be giving a speech today. In public, in the town square, alongside a man running for the U.S. Congress and other bigwigs. But how could she try to talk her son out of something as honorable as giving a speech?
Quit thinking like a slave.
She vowed she would not say anything more to Theopolis about it.
“If you listened to me you’d be in that San Francisco by now, you’d have already took your mama out there where I be a comfortable lady looking out that ocean. But here I am.”
“You wouldn’t leave this place.”
“Might consider it, you don’t know.”
Theopolis snorted and drank his coffee.
Theopolis had told her it gave him comfort to think that he, a Negro, might soon be sitting in the legislature with his feet up on the rail and voting according to his own instincts and philosophies. I have instincts and philosophies, Mama. You do, too. He would have his own polished spittoon when he sat in that beautiful chamber. He would sit and spit alongside his heroes in the state’s Reconstruction government.
Governor Brownlow, for instance — Theopolis had last year traveled clear to Nashville to see him, and could recite whole chunks of the speech the governor gave. Someday Governor Brownlow himself might turn to Representative Theopolis Reddick and ask him what he thought of a new law, or some problem that needed fixing. Governor Brownlow would ask him for his vote. Governor Brownlow would reach out with his big, important hand and shake Theopolis’s. This is what he had told his mother, and it was these very words that terrified her. Not the words, but the fact that he believed them.
It would all start today, whatever she thought. These big, important white men and Theopolis, her son, with his instincts and philosophies, would stand onstage trying to win votes side by side.
Theopolis loved his mama. He loved her so much he came to see her every morning for his coffee, but he did not fear her like she would have liked. If he had feared her, he wouldn’t be giving any speeches that afternoon right there, across the way, where the white men with their bricked-in faces would be watching.
His love for her, which when he was a boy she had felt powerfully every time he had slotted his hand into hers, couldn’t compete now. Who was she, his mama, but a foolish woman who could hardly read and write, who needed to be reminded she had her own ideas about politics? Who was she next to those men, whose words he hung on like they were all that mattered in the world? No, he would go and he would speak and she would stand by, as always, afraid of what would happen when he raised his voice.
No one could say that Mariah acted like a slave: she held her head up and met every white man’s gaze with a clear, gray-eyed stare. But no matter how she acted, she knew one thing:
Negro folk did not speak.
They raised their voices in a chorus only to praise the Lord and pray for a better time to come. They did not stand before white folk and try to change their minds, try to understand them, try to make the white folk see them.
And now, this afternoon, Theopolis would be seen.
She smelled liquor and tobacco smoke and biscuits, and thought all three had never smelled so sweet or so definite, so full of things she’d never noticed before. Even the dogs seemed to know that something was imminent, for they trotted along barking at nearly everything they saw and nipping each other’s necks distractedly.
“What about Mrs. McGavock, Mama? She’ll want to come. She’ll be there, I’ll bet.”
“She got better things to do.”
“What’s better than to be in the middle of change? Nothing, that’s what.”
“Miss Carrie has her dead folk to tend to. And Mr. John’s away, traveling.”
“That ain’t more important than today. I’d think they’d want to come hear me speak.”
“Don’t be a sassy boy.”
The whole town seemed jittery — even the air and the leaves dancing on it. Mariah’s neighbors plied the wood sidewalks to and fro, from the academy to the Presbyterian church to the courthouse and back again, everyone buzzing. The Colored League Negroes swaggered, boots clattering on the paving stones, stopping each other with a clap on the back, bending their heads together, joining their voices in an excited hum. Upon meeting or parting they would give a spirited chant for the Republican governor — “Huzzah for Brownlow!” It all seemed very unnatural to Mariah.
The Conservatives buzzed with a different energy, dark and angry, coiled up like snakes preparing to strike. Their eyes followed the Leaguers around town as if they were tracking them. They spoke in whispers. Some had been angry for a long time. Some were planters made poor and small by Reconstruction, their punishment for opposing the Republicans and fighting for the Confederacy. They had watched their land and slaves disappear, their houses deteriorate. Mariah could feel their anger stalking the streets, bristling against the eager anticipation of the League men.
You couldn’t not feel it. The day was breaking open, and it was everywhere — the anger and excitement both. It would be good to be out of town this morning. Mariah thought about going up to Carnton since Miss Carrie had sent her another note, another request to return. It was time to end that nonsense. She would never go back for good like Miss Carrie wanted. She even shivered at the idea of going back just for the morning, but she never refused Miss Carrie. That would have to change. She strengthened her resolve. It was time, finally, to sever the ties.
The farrier’s hammer clanked clearly, ringing out agreement, as if Mariah were standing right next to the anvil and not four blocks away.
Theopolis got up to go, straightening his black trousers and tucking in his best white shirt, which Mariah knew would be a filthy mess by the end of the day. The boy has good intentions, she thought, he just needs a lick more common sense. Theopolis had been soiling his shirts since he was a boy, though, and Mariah supposed she would be disappointed if he ever stopped.
“I don’t want to sass you, Mama. I just want you to come see me speak. It ain’t going to happen every day.”
“I’ll come if you quit talking about it.”
He smiled and kissed her on her forehead. Mariah smoothed the back of his shirt as he walked away from her, down the steps, and off up the street.
A breath of windblown dandelion fluff came to rest on his hair, white against dark, as if anointing him.
Later, she wished she had at least got up, followed him off the porch, and pulled him close enough to brush the stray fluff away, or told him he was a good man, or told him she loved him more than any child she had ever brought into the world.
Excerpted from THE ORPHAN MOTHER by Robert Hicks published by Grand Central Publishing. Copyright © 2016 Robert Hicks.
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