Homegoing (24 page)

The wailing women were behind the men. “Evil woman!” some of them cried. “Wicked one,” said others.

Asamoah was behind the wailing women, hopping with his stick, trying to keep up.

Then they were tying her to the burning tree. Akua found her voice.

“Please, brothers. Tell me what is going on!”

Antwi Agyei, an elder, began to bellow. “She wants to know what is going on?” he cried to the men who had gathered.

They wrapped the rope around Akua’s wrists. Her burns screamed and then she.

Antwi Agyei continued. “What kind of evil does not know itself?” he asked, and the crowd stomped its many feet against the hard earth.

They slung the rope around Akua’s waist.

“We have known her as the Crazy Woman, and now she has shown herself to us. Wicked woman. Evil woman. Raised by white men, she can die like one too.”

Asamoah pushed his way to the front of the crowd. “Please,” he said.

“You’re on her side? The woman who killed your children?” Antwi Agyei screamed. His anger was echoed in the yells of the crowd, in the stomping feet and beating hands, the undulating tongues.

Akua could not think. The woman who killed her children? The woman who killed her children? She was asleep. She must still be asleep.

Asamoah began to weep. He looked Akua in the eyes, and with her own she begged him questions.

“Yaw is still alive. I grabbed him before he died, but I could only carry one,” he said, looking at Akua still, but speaking to the crowd. “My son will need her. You cannot take her from me.”

He looked at Antwi Agyei and then to the people of Edweso. The ones who had been sleeping were now awake, had filtered in to join the others waiting to see the evil woman burn.

“Have I not lost enough flesh?” Asamoah asked them.

Before long, they cut Akua down. They left her and Asamoah to get themselves back to the hut. Nana Serwah and the doctor were tending to Yaw’s wounds. The baby was screaming, the sound seeming to come from somewhere outside of himself. They would not tell her where they had put Abee and Ama Serwah. They would not say anything at all.

IT WAS A
SATURDAY, FALL.
Willie stood in the back of the church, holding her songbook open with one hand so that she could clap the beat against her leg with the other. Sister Bertha and Sister Dora were the soprano and alto leads, generous, big-bosomed women who believed the Rapture was coming any day now.

“Willie, what you need to do is let yourself sing, girl,” Sister Bertha said. Willie had come in straight from cleaning a house. She’d rushed to remove her apron as she walked in, but, though she didn’t know it, a smear of chicken grease still lined her forehead.

Carson was sitting in the audience. Bored, Willie figured. He kept asking her about school, but she couldn’t let him go until baby Josephine got old enough to go. He narrowed his eyes at her when she told him, and sometimes she dreamed about sending him down south to stay with her sister, Hazel. Maybe she wouldn’t mind a child with that much hate floating around in his eyes. But Willie knew she could never actually do it. In her letters down home, she wrote about how things were going well, how Robert was getting on nicely. Hazel would write back that she would come visit soon, but Willie knew she never would. The South was hers. She wanted no part of the North.

“Yes, what you need to do is let the Lord take that cross you carryin’,” Sister Dora said.

Willie smiled. She hummed the alto line.

“You ready to go?” she asked Carson when she got offstage.

“Been ready,” he said.

She and Carson left the church. It was a cold fall day, a crisp wind coming toward them from the river. There were a few cars on the street, and Willie saw a rich, mahogany-colored woman walk by in a raccoon coat that looked as soft as a cloud. On Lenox, every other marquee said that Duke Ellington would be playing there: Thursday, Friday, Saturday.

“Let’s walk a little longer,” Willie said, and Carson shrugged, but he took his hands out of his pockets and his step picked up, so she could see that she had finally said the right thing.

They stopped to let some cars pass, and Willie looked up to see six little children looking down at her from an apartment building window. It was a pyramid of children, the oldest, tallest, lining the back row, the youngest in front. Willie reached her hand up and waved, but then a woman snatched them away and closed the curtains. She and Carson crossed the street. It seemed like there were hundreds of people out in Harlem that day. Thousands, even. The sidewalks were sinking with the weight, some literally cracking beneath them. Willie saw a man the color of milky tea singing on the street. Beside him a tree-bark woman clapped her hands and bounced her head. Harlem felt like a big black band with so many heavy instruments, the city stage was collapsing.

They turned south on Seventh, past the barbershop that Willie swept from time to time to earn a few cents, past several bars and one ice cream parlor. Wille reached into her purse and felt around until her hand hit metal. She tossed a nickel to Carson, and the boy smiled at her for what seemed like the first time in years. The sweetness of the smile was bitter too, for it reminded Willie of the days of his endless crying. The days when there was no one in the world except for the two of them, and she was not enough for him. She was barely enough for herself. He raced in to buy a cone, and when he came back out with it, the two of them kept walking.

If Willie could have taken Seventh Avenue south all the way back down to Pratt City, she probably would have. Carson licked his ice cream cone delicately, sculpting that round shape with his own tongue. He would lick all the way around, and then look at it carefully, lick again. She couldn’t remember the last time she had seen him so happy, and how easy it was to make him that way. All it took was a nickel and a walk. If they walked forever, maybe she would start to get happy too. She might be able to forget how she’d wound up in Harlem, away from Pratt City, away from home.

Willie wasn’t coal black. She’d seen enough coal in her lifetime
to know that for sure. But the day Robert Clifton came with his father to the union meeting to hear Willie sing, all she could think was that he was the whitest black boy she had ever seen, and because she thought that, her own skin had started to look to her more and more like the thing her father brought home from the mines, under his fingernails and dusting his clothes, every single day.

Willie had been singing the national anthem at union meetings for the past year and a half. Her father, H, was the union leader, so it hadn’t been very hard to convince him to let her sing.

The day Robert came in, Willie was in the back room of the church, practicing her scales.

“You ready?” her daddy asked. Before Willie had begged to sing, there was no anthem sung at union meetings.

Willie nodded and went out to the sanctuary, where all the union members were waiting. She was young, but she already knew that she was the best singer in Pratt City, maybe even in all of Birmingham. Everyone, women and children alike, came to the meetings just to hear that old world-weary voice come out of her ten-year-old body.

“Please stand for the anthem,” H said to the crowd, and they did. Willie’s father teared up the first time she’d sung it. Afterward, Willie could hear a man say, “Look at old Two-Shovel. Getting soft, ain’t he?”

Now Willie sang the anthem, and the crowd watched, beaming. She imagined that the sound came from a cave at the very bottom of her gut, that like her father and all the men in front of her, she was a miner reaching deep down inside of her to pull something valuable out. When she finished, everyone in the room stood and clapped and whistled, and that was how she knew she had reached the rock at the bottom of the cave. Afterward, the miners went on with their meeting and Willie sat in her father’s lap, bored, wishing she could sing again.

“Willie, you sang awfully pretty tonight,” a man said after the meeting ended. Willie was standing with her little sister, Hazel, outside of the church, watching the people walk home while H closed up. Willie didn’t recognize the man. He was new, an ex-con who’d worked the railroads before coming to work as a free man in the mines. “I’d like you to meet my son, Robert,” the man said. “He’s shy, but boy does he love to hear you sing.”

Robert stepped out from behind his father.

“You go on and play for a bit,” the man said, pushing Robert forward a little before walking on home.

His father was the color of coffee, but Robert was the color of cream. Willie was used to seeing white and black together in Pratt City, but she’d never seen both things in one family, both in one person.

“You got a nice voice,” Robert said. He looked at the ground as he spoke, and kicked up a bit of dust. “I been coming to hear you sing.”

“Thanks,” Willie said. Finally, Robert looked at her and smiled, relieved, it seemed, to have spoken. Willie was startled by his eyes.

“Why your eyes look like that?” Willie asked while Hazel hid behind her leg, eyeing Robert from behind the bend of Willie’s knee.

“Like what?” Robert asked.

Willie searched for the word, but realized there wasn’t one word to describe it. His eyes looked like a lot of things. Like the clear puddles that stood over the mud that she and Hazel liked to jump in, or like the shimmering body of a golden ant she had once seen carrying a blade of grass across a hill. His eyes were changing before hers, and she didn’t know how to tell him this, so instead she just shrugged.

“You a white man?” Hazel asked, and Willie pushed her.

“No. Mama say we got a lot of white in our blood, though. Sometimes it take a while to show up.”

“That ain’t right,” Hazel said, shaking her head.

“Yo daddy’s old as dirt. That ain’t right neither,” Robert said, and before Willie knew what she was doing, she pushed him. He stumbled, fell down onto his butt, and looked up at Willie with surprise in his brown, green, gold eyes, but she didn’t care. Her daddy was one of the best miners Birmingham had ever seen. He was the light of Willie’s life, and she was his. He told her all the time how he waited and waited and waited to have her, and when she’d come, he’d been so happy his big coal heart had melted.

Robert stood back up and dusted himself off.

“Ooh,” Hazel said, turning toward Willie, never missing an opportunity to shame her. “I’m telling Mama on you!”

“No,” Robert said. “That’s all right.” He looked at Willie. “That’s all right.”

The push had broken some kind of barrier between them, and from that day on, Robert and Willie were as close as any two people could be. By the time they hit sixteen they were dating, and by eighteen they were married, and by twenty they had a child. The people of Pratt City spoke about them in one breath, their names one name: RobertnWillie.

The month after Carson was born, Willie’s father died, and the month after that her mother followed. Miners weren’t meant to live long. Willie had friends whose fathers had died when those friends were still swimming in their mothers’ bellies, but knowing this didn’t lessen the hurt.

She was inconsolable those first few days. She didn’t want to look at Carson, didn’t want to hold him. Robert would take her up in his arms at night, kissing her never-ending tears while the baby slept. “I love you, Willie,” he’d whisper, and somehow that love hurt too, made her cry even harder, because she didn’t want to believe that anything good could still be in the world when her parents had left it.

Willie sang lead in the funeral procession, the weeping and wailing of all the mourners carrying sound down into the very mines themselves. She had never known sadness like that before, nor had she known the fullness of hundreds of people gathering to send her parents off. When she started the song, her voice quivered. It shook something in her.

“I shall wear a crown,” Willie sang, her voice booming, bouncing from the bottom of the pit and coming back up to meet them all as they walked around the mines. Soon they passed the old potter’s field where hundreds of nameless, faceless men and boys were buried, and Willie was glad that, at least, her father had died free. At least that.

“I shall wear a crown,” Willie sang again, holding Carson in her arms. His mewling cry was her accompaniment, his heartbeat her metronome. As she sang, she saw the notes float out of her mouth like little butterflies, carrying some of her sadness away, and she knew, finally, that she would survive it.

Soon Pratt City started to feel like a speck of dust
in Willie’s eye. She couldn’t be free of it. She could tell that Robert was itching to leave too. He had always been a little delicate for coal mining. At least that’s what the bosses thought every time he got a mind to go ask them for a job, which was about once a year since his thirteenth birthday. Instead, he worked as a clerk in the Pratt City store.

Then, after Carson was born, the store suddenly didn’t seem like enough for Robert. He could spend whole weeks complaining about it.

“There ain’t no honor in it,” Robert said to Willie one night. She was seated stomach to stomach with little Carson while he tried to snatch the light that was reflecting off her earrings. “There’s honor in mining,” Robert said.

Willie had always thought that her husband would die in the mines if ever he got a chance to go down. Her father had stopped working in the mines years and years before he died. He was twice the size of Robert, ten times as strong. Yet, still, he almost never stopped coughing, and sometimes when he coughed a string of black mucus would escape his mouth, his face would contort, and his eyes bulge out, so that it looked to Willie as though some invisible man were behind him, hands wrapped around the large trunk of his thick neck, choking him. Though she loved Robert more than she had ever thought it possible to love, when she looked at him she did not see a man who could handle hands around his neck. She never told him this.

Robert began to pace the room. The clock on the wall was five minutes behind, and the click of the second hand sounded to Willie like a man clapping off beat at a church revival. Awful, but sure.

“We should move. Go north, somewhere I can learn a new trade. Ain’t nothing in Pratt City for us now that your folks are gone.”

“New York,” Willie said, just as soon as she had thought it. “Harlem.” The word hit her like a memory. Though she had never been there, she could sense its presence in her life. A premonition. A forward memory.

“New York, huh?” Robert said with a smile. He took Carson into his arms and the boy cried out, startled, missing the light.

“You could find some kinda work. I could sing.”

“You gon’ sing, huh?” He dangled his finger in front of Carson’s eyes, and they followed him. This way, then that. “Whatchu think about that, Sonny? Mama singing?” Robert brought the dangling finger down to Carson’s soft belly and tickled. The baby screamed with laughter.

“I think he likes that idea, Mama,” Robert said, laughing too.

Everyone knew someone who was headed north, and everyone knew
someone who was already there. Willie and Robert knew Joe Turner back when he was just Lil Joe, Joecy’s smart boy in Pratt City. Now he worked as a schoolteacher in Harlem. He took them into his place on West 134th Street.

For as long as she lived, Willie would never forget the feeling of being in Harlem for the first time. Pratt City was a mining town and everything about it was focused on what lay beneath the ground. Harlem was about the sky. The buildings were taller than any Willie had ever seen before, and there were more of them, tense, shoulder to shoulder. The first inhale of Harlem air was clean, no coal dust traveling in through the nose to hit the back of the throat, to taste. Just breathing felt exciting.

“First thing we gotta do is get me somewhere to sing, Lil Joe. I heard these ladies on the street corner, and I know I’m better than them. I just know it.” They had brought in the last of their three suitcases and were finally settling into the small apartment. Joe hadn’t been able to afford it on his own, and said that he was all too happy to have old friends to share it with.