1
Liberty Township, Highland County, Ohio
MAY 1870
I sit in the sun. Old bones like the sun. Nicholas say, “Momma Grace, you’re going to fry up to a crisp, you keep on settin’ there!”
I tell him, “Let me fry!”
The sun feel good, only thing takes the ache in my joints away is its warmth. It spread across the backs of my hands like butter.
Frances whips out of the door, marching over to where I set. Oh, Lordy, that woman. Moves so fast, like she a soldier on a march.
“Momma Grace! You didn’t eat your breakfast. You going to waste away, you don’t eat.” She frowns.
I can’t see her too good but I know Fanny, and I know she frowning. Shame to mess up a pretty face like that. But her worry is out of love.
“Not much hungry, Fanny,” I tell her. “Old as I am, I wastin’ ’way anyhow.”
I chuckle—I like that little joke.
Nicholas grumbles. No sense of humor in that boy.
“Momma Grace, you need to eat.”
I shake my head, rub my knees. Oh, that sun do feel good on my bones.
Put me in the mind of a story I heard . . . long time gone now. Whose story that? ’Bout Zekiel out in the desert, think that where he was, with bones. Dry. He connect them . . . dry bones. Zekiel he . . . I did wonder what that boy doin’ out the middle a nowhere with . . .
“Momma Grace?”
“I do eat, Nicky. Just enough.”
He and Fanny eye each other, I feel it. I know what they thinkin’. What can you do with this woman? Set in her mind. And her mind wanderin’. I smile to myself, lean back on the little pillow Calico made up for my chair. Feel like I’m on a feather bed sittin’ up. That gal of mine is a wonder. She can make anything, do anything. How I get such a child?
The sun warm. I think I’ll just take me a—
Admiral bark like his head gonna come off. Somebody comin’. That fool dog. Nothing that hound like more than work his mouth. Then he growl. Oh. Somebody white comin’. I do not know why Nicky trained that animal to growl only at white folks . . . Well, yes, I do. Nicky use the same name for all his dogs. This only the fourth . . . fifth? Anyway, that hound comes from a long line of dogs named “Admiral” and they all was taught to bark at white folks. Can’t see this man well, better wait till he get closer up. I can hear his voice. Oh, now he comin’ closer. Nicky must have grabbed Admiral’s collar. My one eye good but the other one, I see only shadows. There’s voices, words going back and forth, but not conversation. This is business, I tell by the tone. What’s he saying?
What’s the family name?
How many are you?
And who are you?
A census-taker man, I ’member the one came through afore the war, years, decades ago. This Ohio good about counting up its people. That man could not get his head wrapped around me and the children. Seemed to him I had one colored child and one white one and he was trying to figure how that happened. I told him to look in any field at the cow and bull. Better n’ that, ask your momma.
This man’s voice is high and thin, reedy-like. ’Minds me of the Kaintuckian. His voice used to hit my ear all wrong, too, sent a chill down my back. Well, he gone now. Nicky speaks, his voice deep and booming, the voice he uses for white folk, polite but not deferential. He wasn’t raised to be deferential. I chuckle again. At least Nicky is trying to be polite. Fanny? I feel her simmerin’. Just imagine her face, skin pulled close to her cheekbones, her dark eyes ’bout to skewer that man. That gal has a short fuse, she’s done with this nonsense already, I can hear it. I see the ’numerator now, he nothing out the ordinary. Just another white man dressed in brown and gray clothes.
The man licks his finger and turns to the next page. There’s a breeze and it catches the paper and plays with it. As head of household, Nicholas answers the man just like his mother taught him. “Always answer polite, like you were raised. But that’s all. You’re a free man just like him.” Calico has told him this since he could talk. Good thing he listened to her. I’ve answered many white men in years and years, too, some polite-like and some not.
“There’s me, Nicholas. I am forty-five—”
“Where are you from?” the white man interrupts. I hear Fanny take a breath. She’s standing just behind me so I can’t see her face but I know it looks like thunder ’bout to roar.
“Ohio.”
The man writes deliberately, forming each letter as if he were just learning it.
“Color?”
What kind of question is that?
“Mulatto,” my grandson answers. What kind of answer is that? He’s not . . . just light that’s all. He marks off the other family one by one. The man is writing furiously, trying to keep up. “My wife, Frances, about forty-two years old, from Virginia. She’s mulatto. Our oldest, Samuel, is out on his own, then there’s Shelton, he’s out at work. Apprentice to . . .” I hear the pride in his voice. The world turn ’round on those boys. Shelton’s training to be a blacksmith. But Nicky will have to be careful. Pride is something white folks don’t like to hear from us.
“Your wife from Old Virginia?” the man asks.
Is there a new one?
“Yes. But all of our children were born here in Ohio.”
In my head, I hear my grandson say, And all of us are mulatto except . . .
Zekiel he connected them dry bones.
I close my eyes and let the sun warm my eyelids. Sun. Warmth. I remember . . . there was a place where I was warm every day and liked to feel the sun on my skin. Now I feel the ’numerator’s stare. He has to count me, too, but I know what he thinking. He thinking I’m no count. And I don’t talk much anymore, already said most of what I came to this earth to say to the people I wanted to say it to.
My grandson answers for me.
“She’s my grandma. Maryam Priscilla Grace. P-r—”
“I know how to spell it,” the man barks.
I feel Fanny’s fingers dig into my shoulder.
Hold your temper, gal.
“How old is she? She looks old.”
“A hundred and twelve. Born in 1758. Or ’68. I’m not certain, neither is she. She is pretty old. At least ninety.”
“Can’t you ask her?”
Nicky tells the man that I don’t talk much. A few moments pass and I know that he’s making a gesture that means I’m a little squirrely in the head now. Not that he believes it, he just does that so that folks leave me alone. I decide to snore a little bit. Behind me, Fanny snorts.
“Momma Grace . . . she’s . . . blind,” Nicky continues.
Maybe. But I do see.
“And where’s she from?”
“Virginia.”
My backbone twitch.
No, I’m not! But I am speaking only to myself. But yes I am from Virginia, lived there many years. But no I’m not. Not from there. That Virginia is like Ohio, home but not home. Only my lives there . . . and the lives I lost, made it familiar, the crops I planted, the babies I helped into the world, the earth where . . . seeds and sins . . .
Virginia is familiar and I know it. But it’s not . . . where I’m from.
Fanny interrupts.
“Excuse me, sir, but do you want to know where Momma Grace is from? Or where she was born?”
I hear that pride again. Fanny can read and write and figure. She teaches school. She a force, Fanny is.
“Does it matter?” the man asks. He sounds annoyed and I know . . . I can feel what he thinks of me. I know what he sees: an older-than-time colored woman of unreliable sight and no value, probably invalid and not worth two cents much less $1,500, what Nash got when he sold me to McCulloch. He clears his throat. “Officially,” he tells Fanny, “it says ‘birthplace.’”
“All right then,” she says, minding not to unsettle the man by sounding too grand. “Momma Grace was born in Africa.”
The word strikes me in the face, as if Fanny had slapped me. I near stood up.
Africa.
I never heard that word until I came . . . here. And since then, I’ve been from so many other places, names strange to me, living lives that I’ve near forgotten. But won’t. Can’t.
Tennessee. A stop.
Old Virginia, they say there’s another one now.
Jamaica, I remember the smell of it. I remember the first place I stood on hard earth after days at sea . . . that wide beautiful dark horrible deadly sea where bones float along the waves and the finned fish follow. The key. Looks so much like . . .
South Carolina and that island, where the Igbos walked into the sea.
Norfolk.
And now this here, this Ohio and a swollen fast running dirt-brown river. I’ve been so many places to be from and then, there the place that Frances said. Africa.
Not what I remembered it called. A peculiar word, hard to form the sound with my mouth. Not what I called it by when I . . . was . . . there in the before time.
“What’d you say, Momma Grace?” Nicky asks. “Sometimes, she mumbles a bit,” he says to the census-taker man.
I opened my mouth but nothing come out, open my eyes, and blink. The sun strong fore it move on to light the other side of the world. The world where I am from. I see it, the place I left and have a name for. The thought of it closes my throat. The smells . . . sounds of birds calling, birds that don’t fly here. It’s been years, decades, several lifetimes, I wonder if it’s there anymore. In the time after I stumbled off that big boat, I knew many from . . . there. Some like me with words I knew as close as my mother’s heart. And there were others. I had learned some of their words from the markets, their faces brown but different from my own. Many had strange ways, some bowed to bad-tempered gods. They sang different story songs of places and doings from across an ocean of water and sand. Then I knew many, people like me, brought away from . . . there.
What happened after all the people were carried away? Did the land sink beneath the waves of the dark brown blue waters? Or was it deserted now? A wasteland like the blue people spoke of in their tales, sand like waves, no trees, no water? No people?
Had they all . . . had we all been brought here?
It was called many names by us, each saying something different yet meaning the same place. But no one from there ever used that word. Africa.
No one.
And now, I had lived so long that I wondered if I was the only one left in this place, this America, who remembered it.
Was I the last one?
“Where you from, Grandma?” the man yelled.
And I don’t like anyone to call me “grandma.” That not my name.
Through her teeth, Fanny said, “Momma Grace can hear just fine.”
“Edo,” I said to the man. “I am from Edo.”
I close my eyes and let the hot sun kiss my eyelids.
2
Man Killer
ABOUT 1758
I walked through a door of no return with two things, my life and my name. Since that time, I have lived many lives, slipping them on and off like shawls, some made of rough wool, others of cloth light as Chinese silk. I been called many names, and answered to them though none was mine. They were shawls of a kind, given to me by others who thought they should belong to me.
My true name, I keep close to my heart.
I never speak it.
It is the name my parents give me in the before time. Few people in this place ever heard it and they are dead now, gone to the land of shadows and whispers. In that time, when I was a child, my parents called me by many endearments but not by my birth name. My sisters and brothers called me by other names, too, some kind and teasing, some not. I did not like it then. Now? I think they did me a blessing. My true name did not fall lightly from others’ lips and so it has remained mine. No one here can spell it. I cannot spell it myself. It has been many years since I heard it spoken. Its obscurity has become my strength.
My girlhood is like a story one hears at night when the work is done, while the children sleep, with embers glowing on the hearth the only source of light. It don’t sound exactly real and if I heard the story told, I would think it belong to someone else. A story about a girl from some far’way place, not me. A girl whose name means “little bird.”
My father had three families over his lifetime, including the time that I know about, three wives, ten daughters, and six sons. But unlike many men in our village, he kept one woman at a time.
“What would I do with two wives?” I’d heard him ask, a wry smile on his face and subtle laughter emerging from his throat. “What man can make two women happy at the same time? What man can make one woman happy at any time?” Those listening joined him in levity.
His first wife was a girl not much older than I was when I left or so went the story that my sisters told. Then, Father was barely a man. They were happy together until her lungs weakened and she died. Father’s second wife, my mother’s sister, bore daughters and sons one year after the other until her womb gave out and she, too, died. Women do not live long in our country.
Father’s second wife died so long ago that few in our village could remember what she looked like. But my father said that she had been beautiful, graceful, and compliant and that her daughters, my sisters Ayana, Te’zirah, and Jerie, were much like her—or so they reminded me near every day.
When my mother came to our father’s bed, she brought wit, a resilient spirit, and a strong back to the marriage along with a sizable dowry. Tradition bound my father to her legally but it was her beauty and intelligence that bound her to his heart. She was a wise woman called, and trained since childhood in the ways of healing, midwifery, and divination. Some of our people said that she was a sorceress, others called her worse names. My mother never gave a thought to sour words. “You can get much done, my little bird,” she reminded me often, “if you care little for what others say about you.”
My mother was delivered of twins from her first childbed, a boy and a girl. This double birth was a powerful omen. The girl was born first, big and feisty; she screamed at the top of her lungs the moment she emerged, kicked and squirmed in the midwife’s arms, impatient to eat. My mother, exhausted from pushing out the child, could not nurse her until the second baby was born. Smoke and incense filled the birthing house with an intoxicating haze. The swirling fumes were no accident—they had been chosen and blended beforehand by my mother. She used the tools of her craft on herself. The smoke sharpened a laboring woman’s focus while the dense spicy incense calmed anxiety and helped breathing.
Mother sat upright on a mountain of blankets, her legs thrown open, head back, eyes closed. Her body dripped with sweat and her reddish mahogany skin stretched across her huge belly as she grunted to push the child out. She clenched a smooth wooden handle between her teeth and held onto thick hemp ropes to steady her body. While the maid bathed her forehead, the chief midwife checked the opening flower of the birth portal as it expanded and contracted.
“Slowly, slowly, listen to the sound of my voice.”
“Maysha, slow, slow . . .” The women’s voices melted into one chorus of encouragement and comfort. My great-auntie, one of the women in attendance on that day, said that my mother let out a scream that sounded like a warrior’s battle cry just before she pushed her babies into the world.
My mother said that she remembered nothing about the ordeal except the murmurs of the midwife’s voice using the words chanted by midwives since time began, and this was how it should be. These were the same words that my mother used when she attended at births, and the thick dense haze created by the incense, ground from a spice that came from an island in the east, was a tool of her art. The smoke swirled around, hissing and slithering like snakes moving through the sands at night.
When the second baby finally slid out, the women went silent. No one moved. All held their breath. The head midwife grabbed up the boy and manipulated his body firmly with her hands. The cord of life was wrapped around his neck, and his little face was flattened and wrinkled and had a bluish cast to it. One of the women shouted, “He has a footprint on his face! The other child has stomped him to death in the womb!”
The little boy was put to Mother’s breast but would not or could not suck. The girl baby, bad tempered and loud, her fists clenched tightly, her legs tucked up into her body, latched onto the nipple with such ferocity that the new mother gasped. Her breasts, grown huge and tight with pregnancy, gushed, and the baby girl gulped greedily.
The boy died. The spirit that he did not use returned to the land of shadows. Our father was sad but rejoiced in the birth of his fourth healthy daughter. My mother rocked and cuddled the surviving child and sang to her. The women carried back to their homes dark words about the fat female baby who nursed well and belched loudly and the puny little boy who had been too weak to nurse at all.
I was eight years old before I heard the story of my birth, before I learned why some of the people shifted their eyes away from me, fingering their amulets whenever they saw me pass. They called me “Man Killer.”
3
Little Bird
All these daughters! My father could not credit it. Three came before me, the children of my aunt, Father’s second bride, tall, slender, beautiful girls with faces that even the royal sculptors coveted as models for their work, especially my sister Jerie, who was so beautiful that the queen mother was said to be jealous. Or so I heard once eavesdropping on her women as they relieved themselves near the mangroves near the river. That wife was said to have been the perfect woman, sweet in spirit, obedient in demeanor, and lovely in face and body. Her name . . . if I ever knew it, I have forgotten. She died in childbed before I was born and took her child with her. But she left behind Ewua, my oldest brother, and a trio of daughters, whose laughter, gossiping, and words filled my childhood with wonder and dread. My beautiful and terrifying sisters. From them I learned to dress myself, eat properly, make offerings, do chores, and braid hair. From them, too, I think, I learned to be resilient. It was Jerie taught me that, Jerie who tormented and teased me past the point of tears. Jerie who taught me how to survive.
The sixth child of my father, the fourth daughter and buried in the middle of such a group, I grew up loved but overlooked. One of many, never a special one. I was not seated on an Iyoba’s throne (so my sisters reminded me over and over), nor was I at the center of any world, Benin City, Edo, or anywhere. I was barely walking good when I learned this.
I remember, dimly, a day when I had burrowed myself onto my mother’s lap, reached for her breast, and began to suck. She thumped me on the cheek and pushed me away. They say I screamed as if my arm had been cut off.
“No!” Mother said sternly. “No more. You are too big now. Go with Te’zirah, she will give you a drink. Go!”
I fled, screaming, tears spilling out of my eyes. After that my mother’s belly grew large and round and not too much after that, a baby, another boy, sucked greedily at her breasts. I was no longer the treasured, spoiled baby girl. Yet another boy followed and another. I was shooed away to the back wall of Mother’s house, ignored, teased, and forgotten. Even my name, unusual that it was (or so Father told me) became like an unneeded robe left behind. Mother called out the names of each one of my sisters, even my younger brother, before calling for me by name.
The middle child gets lost, never the treasured eldest, especially if a son, or the baby, who can be cuddled and indulged because he or she may be the last. At six or seven, I decided that I did not want to be called by my little brother’s name. That I no longer wanted to be the “forgotten one,” that I would figure out a way to make my mother, to make everyone, remember my name. That I would discover how to make them see me. And so I became a master of mimicry, repeating what others said, using exactly their words, language, inflections, and gestures. I told their stories.
It was the best life I could have chosen for myself. It was a game where I was the player who always won. Small enough to fold myself almost in half, I listened, watched with purpose, and, without realizing it, sharpened the tools that would support my craft. The cacophony of voices, animal sounds, and commerce on market day were nothing to me, my ears were sharp and sliced through the din to pick out every word uttered by the complaining Yoruba woman who kept the large chickens. The laughter that wrapped itself around the washing songs of the Igbo women did not keep me from catching the musicality of their speech. I repeated them to myself until I could say or sing them without thinking. The turbaned ones’ speech worried my tongue. I knew a few words but could not say them.
Eavesdropping is as natural as breathing for a neglected little girl. She is small enough to hide behind this or under that, slim enough to flatten her body against a wall to become a breathing shadow, and—which may be the most important—a little girl who is the fourth or fifth daughter (who can remember which?), the sixth or seventh child (out of ten) born to a man who has had three wives, is of no interest, of no count at all. She can go anywhere. She is a nonperson; even her dowry is insignificant. She passes in and out of a circle or a house and is invisible. She is both present and not present.
And so she hears and she listens. She figures out the words of the Mende woman whom Idie owns as a slave. She has learned the proper greeting of the strange pink-faced men her father calls “the Portugee” who make trade with the king. She has learned the words of insult of the Akan, a greeting from the Ife women who trade pleasant words with her mother, a word or two of the guttural Arabic overheard from a man squatting with discomfort in the tall grasses. My mother says he is of the blue people, returning from pilgrimage at Timbuktu.
And this made my sisters laugh and my mother smile. My brothers, who would not admit that they were in awe, still teased me, acting as if they were the oba or warriors and held authority over me. But even they began to take me aside, talk to me, ask me questions and listen to my advice. “How do you say this?” “What does that word mean?” They listened to my stories, the ones I told from eavesdropping on the Dahomian women in the markets, the brass people, the Fon craftsmen.
Mother giggles and covers her mouth with her hand. My brother Ogu in her arms suckles contentedly. Too much, I think. Mother looks thin.
“Little Bird, you are a naughty girl,” Mother teases me, still giggling from the story I have just told. “The turbaned one is a priest, it is not good to make such a joke. His god will be angry.”
But she is still smiling.
Jerie smacks me on the top of my head.
“Ow!” I yell, pushing her away.
“You are such a baby,” she scolds, “it was just a tap.”
I glare at her. It was harder than a tap I think.
“It will be your fault if he sends a curse on us, ...
We hope you are enjoying the book so far. To continue reading...
Copyright © 2024 All Rights Reserved
Please log in to recommend or discuss...
