The Twelve-Mile Straight

She wondered what it would be like, leaving. If Elma went along, they’d be in separate cars, Elma in the white car and Nan in the colored, and then she might be no safer than if she’d escaped herself, the two of them traveling along in their separate compartments, as they were now. But she’d be among her own on the train. She’d be safe there. But they were strangers. How would she get by—how would she communicate with the passengers, with the conductor, without Elma? How would she get what she needed when she got to wherever she was going? She could write what she needed on a piece of paper. When she was safely out of the South, she could do that, couldn’t she? The thought made her fingers itch. It was exhilarating and it was terrifying, the thought of making her way in the world without Elma. She would hand over a piece of paper to a stranger, and the stranger would look at her in confusion and disgust. Or the stranger would nod in understanding.

But she was far ahead of herself. She had not even brought herself to write the words to Elma, telling her why she wanted to go. And if she did, maybe Elma wouldn’t believe her. Maybe Elma wouldn’t come with her after all. Why would she come with her? What made her think Elma would choose her over her own blood?

There was a white man who’d owned the land that neighbored the Youngs’ tobacco farm, and he bred mules. When Nan’s mother was young, she’d learned a thing or two from him about the ways of animals, the ways horses and donkeys were the same and the ways they were different. Those mules were the reason, Ketty liked to say, she became a midwife. Nan had long known that mules were beloved in the country for their tough hooves, their good health, their endurance, though they could be stubborn; Juke often said Elma was stubborn as a mule. But it wasn’t stubbornness, Ketty told Nan: a mule had a sense of self-preservation. She made two proud fists and struck her chest with them. When a horse was startled or scared, she said, it would flee; a donkey, on the other hand, would freeze. Mules were like both of their parents, sometimes running, sometimes staying; that was what made folks think they were stubborn. They’re just confused, said Ketty. They couldn’t overcome their own nature.

That was Nan. She was like a mule, she thought, fleeing and freezing. Her father had fled the farm; her mother had stayed. And now Nan’s head was confused, so much did she want to stay and so much did she want to go.

Not long after Juke started bringing her out to the still, she brought the kitchen scissors out to Elma on the back porch. She ran a hand over her head, scalping herself with her palm.

“You want it gone?” Elma asked. “All of it?”

Nan nodded.

“Oh, honey, I ain’t been too good with your plaits, have I?”

And Elma cut it off right there on the porch, Nan sitting on the step below her and closing her eyes to keep from crying. She wanted to cry because of the careful kindness of Elma’s hands, and because she remembered sitting between her mother’s knees like this, the sun on her eyelids. It was the confused longing she sometimes felt when Juke rubbed the stubble of his cheek on hers—she could almost remember her father’s cheek. When Elma was done, she seemed more relieved than Nan. “You look pretty as a statue, honey.”

Juke was not angry, as Nan had expected him to be, nor did he ignore her, as she’d hoped. The next time he led her to the cabin, he was as sweet as he’d ever been. He stroked her little breasts and her belly. He kissed the nape of her bare neck. He talked, as he sometimes did, as though she were the only person in the world with ears, about Jessa, about String, about cotton and corn and the fish in the creek. “I ain’t ever told no one this one,” he said. That night, as she sometimes did, she felt the rush of love in her body, and kept her pleasure a secret from him, and for a while that was enough.

From time to time Nan was asked to perform other acts, ungodly ones, and all she could do was shake her head. She was but a girl, no doctor, no medicine woman, though she knew between the herbs that healed and harmed. “We bring babies into the world,” her mother had taught her. “We don’t bring them out.”

One evening just after nightfall, before Nan had settled into sleep, it was Elma who came for her. Juke must have been brewing at the still. A colored boy was parked in an automobile out front, and a white girl sat in the back. Nan stood under the eye of the moon in the driveway, her bare feet cold on the dirt. “You the midwife?” the boy said. “We come to call on you.” When she didn’t come closer—how did the two of them end up together in such a fine car?—he said, “You can make a baby go away?” Through the open window of the car, he held a ten-dollar bill. The girl sat with her hands crossed over her belly, staring into her lap. Nan could smell the leather of the seat, the freshly printed paper, and her knees trembled. With ten dollars, she wouldn’t need to find another cropper shack to earn her keep on. With ten dollars, she could buy a ticket on a train.

“You hearing me, girl? You as dumb as they say?”

In the road, Jeb Simmons’s truck slowed, the headlights sweeping over them like eyes. The boy squinted in the glare, and when the truck had passed, Nan snatched that ten-dollar bill from his hand and marched back into the house. Maybe he thought she was coming back with her bag. But she shrugged at Elma, went into her room, and buttoned the door, heart slamming. She took volume I of The Book of Knowledge out from under her mattress and pressed the bill between its pages, then closed it and hid it again. If the boy was fool enough to follow her into a white man’s house, she’d ring the dinner bell, and Juke would hear her.

But the boy didn’t follow. What could he do? For all he knew, Juke Jesup was in that house. He didn’t want trouble. She never saw that boy again.

When she finally heard the car drive away, she took out her satchel and counted the money. With the ten-dollar bill, she had eighteen dollars and fifteen cents. That was enough, she thought, for a train ticket to Baltimore, where her father lived. If she was going to run, this was the time. If she was bold enough to steal ten dollars, she’d be bold enough to board a train. Alone—she didn’t need Elma.

First she had to get a ride. The mail truck was known to carry folks into town—Elma did it from time to time when her father needed yeast from the Piggly Wiggly, more than the crossroads store carried—but Mr. Horace, the mailman, would carry no Negro. She could walk, but the walk was long—six miles—and she worried Juke would be after her in his truck, even if she walked along the creek with her feet in the water. It wasn’t safe. Even the dogcatcher had been known to round up loose-foot Negroes, to turn them straight over to the jailhouse, or worse.

But there was a mother of four out in Rocky Bottom, just beyond the Fourth Ward. She was due in August. Her husband had borrowed a truck to drive out to the farm and tell Nan to be ready.

She would be ready. After the baby was delivered she would refuse the ride back to the farm. She’d walk the short distance into town, walk to the train station. At the ticket window she would write down the word “Baltimore.” She would buy a ticket for the colored car. She moved the ten-dollar bill to the pocket in her satchel, along with a dress, a wax sack of white dirt, three caramel milk rolls she’d saved, a sharpened pencil, her mother’s pearl, and volume I of The Book of Knowledge, her favorite, which featured a one-paragraph entry on Baltimore, Maryland, and a picture of the city, the buildings stacked like wedding cakes with pastel-postcard frosting. She had a picture in her mind of walking past those buildings with her father. They were holding hands, taking up the whole of the sidewalk, and then there was snow falling very beautifully and she would be wearing mittens and her father would wrap his scarf around her neck.

She would not pack the wooden cat Juke had carved for her. She would not write a letter to Elma, apologizing for taking the book, for leaving her behind. She would not explain why she was leaving. Why explain now? She was leaving so she would not have to explain.

August came and went. The corn hung heavy in the fields. The baby didn’t come, and didn’t come. And then one morning late in the summer, a new field hand came. Nan stood at the well as she watched Juke open the tar paper shack for him. Inside, the man—or was he a boy?—opened the shutters and hung the rag rug out the window, and with the window framing his face his eyes alighted on hers. It was like spotting a kingbird on a branch outside the kitchen window, that sudden flash of its yellow breast. She knew it would fly off, she knew his eyes would look away, but for a moment the wings beat in her chest. On his head was a woven corn-shuck hat, the silk fibers glowing gold as he leaned his head out into the sun. He lifted the hat, then lifted his hand. She hesitated, then lifted hers in return. And just as she did with a birthing mother, she felt that her hands were all she needed, that they were better than any word.

The baby came, a girl, on a rare rainy night early in September. She took her time but then came quick. In fact, by the time Nan arrived at the house, the nine-year-old daughter and the landlord, who owned the truck, had already delivered her. The mother sat there stunned and smiling, the baby right as rain. It was not what Nan had planned. When the father offered to drive her home, she nodded. She told herself it was because of the trains, which weren’t running at that hour of the night. But she asked him to let her off down the road a ways, so the truck wouldn’t wake the big house, and instead she went to Genus Jackson’s shack.

She had been too young when her father left that shack to know about the proper ways of love, and at times, when Juke talked mean and she felt lonely, she wondered whether her father had loved them at all. Why hadn’t he come back like he said he would? She didn’t know that Sterling and Ketty had spent years trying to conceive her in the bed Genus Jackson slept on, or that they kept at it in that bed even after she slept in it beside them, no louder than a bee pollinating a flower.

She’d known since she was small how a baby came into the world, knew the bloody blossom between a woman’s legs, but it wasn’t until she was nine years old that she learned how they were made. Her mother had always told her that the Lord planted babies in their mothers, just like He grew the cotton and the trees. But one morning Ketty woke her early to take her to a call in Rocky Bottom. The house was down a long dirt road no wider than the wagon, and in the field outside an old man leaned on a double-foot plow behind an older swayback mule. They could hear the mother before they were in the house. Ketty liked to keep Nan close, but she must have sensed trouble—she sent her out to the yard to play with some girls her age. They must have been the woman’s daughters or nieces. Nan did not like to play with the children at the houses she visited because they didn’t understand that she couldn’t speak; their faces were ugly with confusion and then ugly with meanness, and always she was subjected to some inferior role in their game: the maid; the monkey in the middle; once, the dog. But these children were friendly and curious, and the littlest one had legs that weren’t full grown, they were like the legs of a rag doll, and her sisters or cousins had to carry her around and set her down on a rock or a stump. Her name was Ketty Lee, for Ketty, Nan understood, had delivered her. The fact made Nan proud. She spent the day running the acres with those girls, playing hide and go seek and picking flowers along the road and plaiting them in their hair.

When her mother appeared in the yard with her satchel, she did not speak to Nan, and she did not speak to her on the ride home, and spoke to the man driving them only to say that she was sorry. It wasn’t until they were back on the farm that she told Nan both the mother and baby had died. She told Nan this to explain her own silence and to dispense with it. Did Nan know that a mule could be born to a stallion and a jenny? That was what a girl donkey was called, and its baby mule was a hinny. Usually it was the other way around—a jack and a mare, since a little donkey could climb up on a big horse just fine, little men climbed up on big women all the time, because women with wide hips, birthing hips, they could push out a baby with ease, that was what was prized. Ketty kept talking, waving her dishrag; Nan sat at the kitchen table, her head full of questions. Well, at times a big male horse was allowed to climb up behind a little donkey, for that happened as well of course, a woman was wanted no matter her size, big or small, black or white, a man could climb on top of you and have his way, and the stronger the stallion was, the easier way he had. But the jenny? She was smaller than a horse; she did not have an easy way. She kept the baby inside her a month longer than a horse did—a full year—and in that month, the mule grew big. Sometimes, too big to foal.

That was what had happened to the mother in Rocky Bottom. Her hips were too narrow to let the baby’s shoulders through. And the baby had died inside her, and then the mother had died, and there was nothing Ketty could do.

“It was a white man’s child,” she added. “As far as the talk can tell.” Ketty was washing the table now, though it wasn’t dirty. “Could be the Lord didn’t see the child fit for this world.”

Nan thought her mother was scrubbing out her helplessness, her guilty feelings. It was the same look she had when she spoke about Jessa. But it was Nan who felt the guilt fall on her like a bucket over the head. All day long she had played with those girls, laughing, teasing, closing her eyes against the sun while they plaited her hair. It was as though her careless happiness were to blame. She remembered little Ketty Lee, and wondered if her legs had fallen limp from her mother’s womb. Was it something Ketty had done, something that looked like the devil’s work but was really God’s will, like cutting out Nan’s tongue?

She couldn’t ask Ketty the questions she wanted to ask. What was she trying to tell her? Was she warning her about childbirth, or the ways of men, or the ways of white folks? How did a man climb up on a woman? Were Nan’s hips, so narrow, so unlike her mother’s soft ones, wide enough for a baby? Would she be wanted?

And then Genus came to the farm, and he was the answer to the questions she couldn’t ask. Her mother had not explained the feeling that a man climbing upon you induced, did not mention that what she had mistaken for a rush of love with Juke was sometimes accompanied by the feeling in the chest of spotting a kingbird on a branch.

Most nights for two weeks she visited Genus in the tar paper shack, and on those nights, Juke didn’t come for her. Some nights, Genus led her down to the creek. Her secret made her bold, kept her out later, longer. Afterward they lay on their backs side by side on the shore, their skin drying in the night air. She had learned not to eat dirt with most folks around but she scooped up a handful of cool white clay and put it in her mouth. Genus laughed and did the same. He hadn’t eaten dirt before. He said it tasted like rain and she thought yes. He took another handful and smeared it on her cheek. She laughed. He smeared some on her neck and on her belly and he licked it off and she laughed some more.

He talked as much as Juke did, but his words let her breathe; he didn’t talk at her but up into the sky, at the stars. He reckoned he was from Georgia, but down about the Florida line. He reckoned he was eighteen, maybe nineteen. His father had died when he was small. His mother sent him and his sisters to live with an aunt and uncle after that, and he never did know his birthday. Never did learn to read or write. He’d gone to work in one neighbor’s cotton field, then another neighbor’s corn. He’d seen a white man have his way with a molly mule. On a boxcar, he’d seen a black man kill a white man. The white man had kicked the black man between the legs. Later, while the white man slept, the black man sliced his throat with the jagged lid of a tin can, then kicked his body off the train. He’d seen another man dead in a cornfield, this one black. He’d worked in a canning factory for a time, but standing still was worse than moving on his feet. He needed the fresh air, the sun on his neck. He had a rotten gut. It was inclined to kill him someday, he said. Pain like the devil, day and night, though he’d never seen a doctor. He tapped a spot under his left nipple. Nan put her hand there, lay her fingers in the grooves between his ribs, and under her thumb she could feel the faint rumble of his heartbeat. He reached across her and cupped her head behind her ear, his thumb tracing the hair at her temple, and she remembered the girls from Rocky Bottom, the joy she had felt with the sun and their hands in her hair, and again came the stab of shame for her own happiness. “Maybe it ain’t my gut,” he said. “Maybe I got a rotten heart.” He said Nan was the only thing that made the pain pass for a time. Before Nan, he’d never been with a woman. “Ain’t never told that to no soul,” he said, his hand over hers, hers over his ribs. “Suppose you fine at keeping secrets.”

Would she have told him about Juke if she could? Would she explain why she was expected at the big house, why, when Genus said, “Less stay out like this all night,” she had to slip her hand out from under his and leave him? Part of her heart wanted him to know, of course. So he could save her. So he could take her away. But the other part was glad she didn’t have to. She didn’t want him to know that she was spoiled, that Juke had fouled her already. She wanted to believe, as Genus did, that she belonged to him as much as he did to her.

The next night that Juke came for her, he came early, when Nan was still in her bed. She followed him out to the still. Afterward, while he made water in the woods, she took a pint of gin from the shelf above the mattress, hid it under her nightdress, and waddled back to the big house with the jar between her thighs. She hid it under the mattress, beside the book. The following night, she brought it to Genus’s cabin.

“You take this from the boss?” he whispered.

She put a finger to his lips.

“You wanting to have us a fine time?” It was dark in the cabin, but she could feel the smile in his voice.

She shook her head. She wouldn’t be having any. She was soured on the taste. She tapped the spot under his heart, the rotten part. She held the jar there. He lowered his head and nodded. He understood. It was to help with the pain. He said, “I’m much obliged to you.”

On the night the seed was planted, Juke was waiting for her on her mattress in the pantry when she returned from the creek. Her nightdress clung to her wet skin and her hair was pearled with water.

She took a step back into the breezeway. Her first fear was the gin—had he noticed it was missing, one jar among so many jars? Or the book—had he discovered it under the mattress? Then she feared Elma would hear. Or did she want her to hear? She could have walked across the breezeway and slipped into bed beside Elma, and then everything would have been different. He would have left her alone, gone back to his bed. But instead she stepped into her own little room, thinking she could quiet him, thinking she knew how to quiet him. She closed the pantry door softly behind her. His face was dead as a stone, and she knew then that he knew. He was drinking, the tumbler nearly empty.

“Where you been, girl?”

The tongue is the worst curse, her mother had told her. Ketty’s grandmother had been beaten by her master for running from his bed, but worse? Worse was the shame of lying. Worse was having to look at his white face and say, “I like it” and “I love you.” There was dignity in silence, Ketty said, in keeping your truth inside.

“Cat got your tongue, kitty cat?” He kept his voice low. He sat up in her bed, placed the tumbler on the floor, and wrapped his hand around her thigh. “You been swimming at this hour?”

She mimed washing, rubbing soap through her hair.

“Washing?” He yanked up her nightdress, plunged his face between her legs, and sniffed. “You ain’t washed good enough.” Then he yanked her down to the bed, rolled her onto her back, and pinned her against the wall. “I seen you knock on that nigger’s door,” he whispered. His breath was flaming with drink. “You think y’all are here to skinny-dip? That how you repay me for the food on your plate? The roof over your head?”

Nan shook her head.

“You ain’t live in that slave shack no more. You ain’t no slave. You live in my house now. You know how many folks’d like to sleep in this here big house? That how you repay me, run back to that shack?” He was slurring. “Don’t let me see you with him again. You hearing me? I see you within ten feet of that door, I’ll kill him dead.”

She might have stroked his cheek to calm him, she might have kissed him, but he was holding her down, one arm to the bed, one arm to the wall. She wished her nipples didn’t show through her wet nightdress. She wished her rabbit heart weren’t beating so quickly. Surely he could feel it in her wrists. You could take away the tongue, she thought, you could put out a person’s eyes, but still the pulse betrayed your fear.

Across the breezeway, through one board-and-batten wall and then another—thick walls built by George Wilson and two hired Negroes whose names he did not know and painted some years ago a milky blue, now fading—Elma sat up in her bed. She had been sleeping, or had been trying to. She had been trying to scare away the image of Nan and Genus in the creek, but every time she closed her eyes, it floated into her mind again like a ghost. When she thought she heard a thump against the kitchen wall, she thought it must be Nan returning from the creek, and then when she heard another, she thought it must be Genus in there with her, and though it was beyond her belief—that Nan and Genus would be so bold in her father’s house—it was not beyond her imagination. Once the idea was in her head, it wouldn’t turn her loose. She sat up in bed, remembering suddenly the night a few weeks back when a man had come to the house looking for Nan to deliver a baby. Elma had looked all around the house and the yard, but she couldn’t find her. The man had left in a huff and a panic. And though Nan had been at the still with Juke, it seemed clear to Elma now that she’d been with Genus, and humiliation knocked her flat on her back. She stuffed her pillow over her face, to drown out the noise and to muffle the sound of her own tears.

What was happening in Nan’s room was beyond Elma’s imagination. She would have sooner imagined that the noises came from the wall itself, the house coming to life, growing a mouth, giving voice to its ghosts. That was the way Nan felt suddenly—that the walls that had protected her had now betrayed her with their thickness, not keeping her safe but trapping her. This was not her home. Home was the tar paper shack Genus Jackson lived in, before he lived there, before he slept in the bed she used to share with her mother. She thought herself back there now, walked herself from the cabin down to the shack. She wished herself all the way back, the taste of tobacco and clay on her mother’s lips, the smell of her father’s pipe, the warmth of the grits cooking on the woodstove in the morning. She would even wish away Genus, though her heart seized like a fist when she thought of his name—Genus, who was settling into that bed now, oblivious as Elma. She wished he’d never set foot on the farm.

There was no wool blanket. It was back in the cabin. Here in her room, Juke did not pull away. She could feel his seed seeping into her, thick as egg yolk. Through the mattress, she could feel the shape of The Book of Knowledge under her back. She kept her eyes on the pantry shelves beyond him, the okra she’d pickled, the sorghum syrup, the cornmeal, the salt.