Homegoing (16 page)

There were rallies and protests throughout the North, and not just among the Negroes. White people were joining in like Jo had never seen them join in about anything before. The South had brought this fight to the Northern welcome mat, when many of them had wanted nothing to do with it. Now white people could be fined for giving a Negro a meal, or a job, or a place to stay, if the law said that Negro was a runaway. And how were they to know who was a runaway and who was not? It had created an impossible situation, and those who had been determined to stay on the fence found themselves without a fence at all.

In the mornings, before Jo and Anna went off to work, Jo made the children practice showing their papers. He would play the federal marshall, hands on his hips, walking up to each of them, even little Gracie, and saying, in a voice as stern as he could muster, “Where you goin’?” And they would reach into the pockets Anna had sewn onto their dresses and pants, and without any backtalk, always silently, thrust those papers into Jo’s hands.

When he’d first started doing this, the children would burst into laughter, thinking it was a game. They didn’t know about Jo’s fear of people in uniform, didn’t know what it was like to lie silent and barely breathing under the floorboards of a Quaker house, listening to the sound of a catcher’s bootheel stomp above you. Jo had worked hard so that his children wouldn’t have to inherit his fear, but now he wished they had just the tiniest morsel of it.

“You worry too much,” Anna said. “Ain’t nobody lookin’ for them kids. Ain’t nobody lookin’ for us neither.” The baby was due any day now, and Jo had noticed that his wife had become crankier than ever, snapping at him for the tiniest of things. She craved fish and lemons. She walked with her hands on her lower back, and she forgot things. The keys one day, the broom the next. Jo worried she would forget her papers next. He’d seen her leave them, rumpled and worn, on her side of the mattress one day when she went to the market, and he’d yelled at her for it. He’d yelled at her until she cried. Bad as he felt that day, he knew she would never forget again.

Then one day Anna didn’t come home. Jo ran to the room to see if she’d left her papers again, but he couldn’t find them anywhere, and he heard Anna’s sweet voice saying, “You worry too much. You worry too much,” in his ear. Beulah came home with the rest of the kids in tow, and Jo asked if they had seen their mother.

“Is Baby H comin’, Daddy?” Eurias asked.

“Maybe,” Jo said absently.

Then Ma Aku came home, her hands massaging the nape of her neck. It didn’t take long for her to survey the room.

“Where Anna? She said she was gonna get some sardines before comin’ home,” Ma said, but Jo was already halfway out the door.

He went to the grocer, the corner store, the fabric shop. He went to the fish market, the cobbler, the hospital. The shipyards, the museum, the bank.

“Anna? She ain’t been by today,” said one after the other.

Then, for the first time in his life, Jo knocked on a white man’s door at night. Mathison himself opened the door.

“She ain’t been home since mornin’,” Jo said, his throat catching on the words. It had been a long time since he’d cried, and he didn’t want to do it in front of a white man, no matter how the man had helped him.

“Go home to your kids, Kojo. I’ll start looking for her right now. You go home.”

Jo nodded, and in his dazed walk home, he began to think about what life would be like without his wife, the woman he had loved hard and long. Everyone had been keeping up with what was becoming known as the “Bloodhound Law.” They’d heard about the dogs, the kidnappings, the trials. They’d heard it all, but hadn’t they earned their freedom? The days of running through forests and living under floorboards. Wasn’t that the price they had paid? Jo didn’t want to accept what he was already starting to know in his heart. Anna and Baby H were gone.

Jo couldn’t stand by and wait for Mathison to look for
Anna. Mathison may have had all the wealthy white connections a person could want, but Jo knew the black and the poor immigrant white people of Baltimore, and at night, after he had finished working on the ships, he went out to talk to them, trying to gather information.

But everywhere he went, the answer was the same. They had seen Anna that morning, the day before, three nights ago. The day she went missing, she’d been at Mathison’s until six o’clock. After that, nothing. No one had seen her.

Agnes’s new husband, Timmy, was a good artist. He drew up a picture of Anna from memory that looked as close to her as any Jo had ever seen. In the morning, Jo took the picture to Fell’s Point with him. He got on every last boat in the shipyard, showing people Anna’s face drawn in heavy charcoal.

“Sorry, Jo,” they all said.

He took the picture onto
Alice
with him, and even though all the other men already knew what she looked like, they humored him, studying the picture carefully before telling Jo what he already knew. They hadn’t seen her either.

Jo took to carrying the picture in his pocket while he worked. He lost himself in the sound of mallet hitting iron, that steady rhythm he knew so well. It soothed him. Then, one day, when he was getting the oakum ready, the picture slipped out of his pocket, and by the time Jo caught it, the bottom edges were soaked in pine tar. As he worked to get it off, the tar stuck to his fingers, and when he reached up to wipe sweat from his eye, his face shimmered with it.

“I gotta go,” Jo said to Poot, waving the picture frantically, hoping the wind would dry it.

“You can’t miss no more days, Jo,” Poot said. “They gon’ give yo job to one of them Irishmen and then what, huh? Who gon’ feed them kids, Jo?”

Jo was already running toward dry land.

By the time Jo got to the furniture store on Aliceanna Street, he was showing the picture to every person he passed. He didn’t know what he was thinking when he shoved it in the face of the white woman coming out of the store.

“Please, ma’am,” he said. “Have you seen my wife? I’m looking for my wife.”

The woman backed away from him slowly, her eyes widening with fear but never leaving his own, as though if she was to turn from him he would be free to attack her.

“You stay away from me,” the woman said, holding her hand out in front of her.

“I’m looking for my wife. Please, ma’am, just look at the picture. Have you seen my wife?”

She shook her head and the held-out hand too. She didn’t even glance at the picture once. “I’ve got children,” she said. “Please don’t hurt me.”

Was she even listening to a word he said? Suddenly, Jo felt two strong arms grab him from behind. “This nigger bothering you?” a voice asked.

“No, officer. Thank you, officer,” the woman said, breathing easier and then taking her leave.

The policeman swung Jo around to face him. Jo was so scared he couldn’t lift his eyes, so instead he lifted the picture. “Please, my wife, sir. She’s eight months pregnant and I ain’t seen her in days.”

“Your wife, huh?” the policeman said, snatching the picture from Jo’s hands. “Pretty nigger, ain’t she?”

Still Jo couldn’t look at him.

“Why don’t you let me take this picture with me?”

Jo shook his head. He’d almost lost the picture once that day and didn’t know what he would do if he lost it again. “Please, sir. It’s the only one I got.”

Then Jo heard the sound of paper tearing. He looked up to see Anna’s nose and ears and strands of hair, the shredded bits of paper flying off in the wind.

“I’m tired of all these runaway niggers thinking they’re above the law. If your wife was a runaway nigger, then she got what she deserved. What about you? You a runaway nigger? I can send you on to see your wife.”

Jo held the policeman’s gaze. His whole body felt like it was shaking. He couldn’t see it, but he could feel it inside him, an unstoppable quaking. “No, sir,” he said.

“Speak up,” the policeman said.

“No, sir. I was born free, right here in Baltimore.”

The policeman smirked. “Go home,” he said. The policeman turned and walked away, and the quaking that had been held somewhere inside Jo’s bones started to escape until he was sitting on the hard ground, trying to hold himself together.

“Tell him what you told me,” Mathison said. Jo was standing
in Mathison’s parlor three weeks later. Ma Aku had fallen ill and could no longer go to work, but Jo still stopped by the Mathison house on his way home to see if the man had any news about Anna.

This day, Mathison was holding a scared Negro child by his shoulders. The boy could not have been much older than Daly, and if he was any more scared of being called in by a white man, his skin would have been gray instead of its cool tar black.

He stood, hands trembling, and looked up at Jo. “I saws a white man takes a pregnant woman into his carriage. Says she too pregnant to walk home, so he takes her.”

Jo bent down until his eyes were level with the shaking child’s. He grabbed the boy’s chin in his hand and made him look at him, and he searched the boy’s eyes for what seemed like days, three whole weeks to be exact, searching for Anna.

“They sold her,” Jo said to Mathison, standing back up.

“Now, we don’t know that, Jo. Could be that they had to rush medical care. Anna was rightfully free, and she was pregnant,” Mathison answered, but his voice was uncertain. They had checked every hospital, every midwife, even the witch doctors. No one had seen Anna or Baby H.

“They sold her and the baby too,” Jo said, and before he or Mathison could stop or thank him, the child pulled away and ran out of the Mathison house quicker than a flash. He would likely tell his friends all about it, being in the grand home of a white man who had been asking questions about a Negro woman. He would make himself sound better in them. He would say he stood tall and spoke firmly, that the man shook his hand after and offered him a quarter.

“We’ll keep looking, Jo,” Mathison said, observing the empty space the boy had left behind. “This isn’t over. We’ll find her. I’ll go to court if I have to, Jo. I promise you that.”

Jo couldn’t hear him anymore. The wind was coming in through the door the child had left ajar. It was moving around the big white pillars that held up the house, curving around them, bending until it fit into the thin space of Jo’s ear canal. It was there to tell him that fall had come to Baltimore and that he would have to spend it alone, taking care of his ailing Ma and his seven children without his Anna.

When he went home, the kids were all waiting. Agnes had come over with Timmy. The girl was pregnant, Jo could just tell, but he knew that she was scared to tell him, to hurt him or the three-week-old memory of her mother, scared her small piece of joy was almost shameful.

“Jo?” Ma Aku called. Jo had given her the bedroom once her pain had started worsening.

He went to her. She was lying on her back, staring up at the ceiling, her hands folded over her chest. She turned her head toward him and spoke in Twi, something she used to do often when he was a child but had stopped almost completely since he married Anna.

“She’s gone?” Ma asked, and Jo nodded. She sighed. “You will make it through this, Jo. Nyame did not make weak Asantes, and that is what you are, no matter what man here, white or black, wishes to erase that part of you. Your mother came from strong, powerful people. People who do not break.”

“You’re my mother,” Jo said, and Ma Aku, with great effort, turned her whole body toward him and opened her arms. Jo crawled into bed with her and cried as he rested his head on her bosom, as he had not done since he was a young child. Back then, he used to cry for Sam and Ness. The only thing that would pacify him was stories about them, even if the stories were unpleasant. So Ma Aku would tell him that Sam hardly spoke, but when he did it was loving and wise, and that Ness had some of the most gruesome whip scars she had ever seen. Jo used to worry that his family line had been cut off, lost forever. He would never truly know who his people were, and who their people were before them, and if there were stories to be heard about where he had come from, he would never hear them. When he felt this way, Ma Aku would hold him against her, and instead of stories about family she would tell him stories about nations. The Fantes of the Coast, the Asantes of the Inland, the Akans.

When he lay against this woman now, he knew that he belonged to someone, and that had once been enough for him.

Ten years passed. Ma Aku passed with them. Agnes had three
children, Beulah was pregnant, and Cato and Felicity were married. Eurias and Gracie, the youngest of the bunch, both found live-in work as soon as they could. They said it was to help take off some of the burden, but Jo knew the truth. His children could not stand to be around him anymore, and, though he hated to admit it, he could not stand to be around them.

The problem was Anna. The fact that he saw her everywhere in Baltimore, at every shop, on every road. He would sometimes see ample buttocks coming around a corner and follow them for blocks on end. He’d gotten slapped once doing this. It was winter, and the woman, so light her skin looked like cream with just a drop of coffee, had turned a corner and waited for him there. Slapped him so quick, he didn’t even notice who had done it until she turned back around and he’d seen that generous swish of her hips.

He went to New York. It didn’t matter that he had become one of the best ship caulkers the Chesapeake Bay area had ever seen; he couldn’t look at a boat again. He couldn’t pick up a chisel or smell oakum or hemp or tar without thinking about the life he had once had, the woman and the children he had once had, and the thought was too much.

In New York he did whatever work he could do. Mostly carpentry, plumbing when he could get it, though he was often underpaid. He rented a bedroom from an elderly Negro woman who cooked his meals and did his laundry, unbidden. Most nights he spent at the all-black bar.

He came in one blustery December day and sat down in his usual spot, running his hand over the smooth wood of the bar. The workmanship was impeccable, and he’d always suspected that some Negro had done it, perhaps during his first days of freedom in New York, so happy that he was able to do something for himself rather than for someone else that he put his whole heart into it.