The Wilful Daughter (51 page)

Peter tried to come near her, to cover her mouth, but in her drunkenness she crawled away.

“
He even hand picked husbands for his daughters. Would have gotten a whore for his son if he had lived. Once he gets over your betrayal, I guess he’ll be able to tell people what to think when he wakes up one morning and finds that you have left his daughter and her newborn baby and run off to parts unknown.”

The Piano Man found her and grabbed her. “Shut up. I’m not going anywhere.”

She slurred her words. “Don’t bother to lie to me. I found all the papers in your chest.”

He sighed: “All right. I’m not going anywhere yet. And I’d never leave Ophelia.”

She smiled a devilish drunken smile that neither of the others could see in the dark. She stood and rubbed his face because he was so near her and, how many years had it been since she had touched him in the dark? “Oh, how sweet. You’d leave Minnelsa and her baby but you wouldn’t leave ours? You wouldn’t leave our Ophelia. Is that what you saying, my sweet Piano Man?”

“
Yes,” he said firmly hoping to get her to stop and go away, she kissed his mouth with hard driven passion and he smelled the alcohol on her breathe.

The innocence that had called to him before was gone. He pushed her away. “You’re drunk and you need to get some sleep.”

“
That’s all I do around here is sleep. Sleep my life away.” She danced towards him a mixture of intoxication and seduction. “I’ll sleep if you come sleep with me.”

Her hand landed on his chest and a feeling stirred in him. But not the same as years before. Now she was drunk. Now she knew about his plans.

“
June, I have a wife,” he whispered and pushed her away again.

She tried to speak softly like him. “I should have been your wife. I did everything that you asked me to and things you didn’t. I lay down in the dirt with you and had your child. I should have been your wife.”

He heard the moan first, then the fall. Had someone been nearby the whole time?

Peter was the first one at her side for he was not under the influence of liquor. When he discovered who it was his heart sank. “Minnelsa, how long have you. . .”

As she tried to get up without him touching her she slipped again in the puddle that surrounded her. Her water had broken.

When he touched her again, she searched the dark until she found his face, and then taking aim like a well trained blind woman she slapped him as hard as she could then screamed to greet the forthcoming pain.

The screams of a woman in labor broke the silence of the night.

June stepped back from the porch in the dark. She stumbled to the back of the house and up the back stairs like a criminal. Without aid of coffee or a good night’s sleep, without the aid of cold water thrown on her face, June had sobered up. She heard the cries of her sister and wished that none of what she had said had ever left her mouth.

This was all her fault. Just like everything else, this was her fault.

No, no not really. She clung to her sheets as she pretended to be asleep. She was not going to take the blame for this. “This is the Blacksmith’s fault. Always trying to be something he couldn’t be. If he had let Minnelsa marry years ago when she wanted, she would have had her brood of kids by now. And the Piano Man would have been mine.”

Because of the Blacksmith and his rules, she had to share him.

Because of the Blacksmith her sister was screaming out in pain, wanting to kill the man who got her this way, not because she was this way, but because he had done the same thing to her sister.

Minnelsa screamed again and June covered her ears. This is the Blacksmith’s fault she thought. But they will say it’s all mine.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

They said she screamed like a banshee.

They said everyone in the neighborhood awoke to hear the Blacksmith’s oldest daughter’s cries of pain.

Some said the pains were hard and long because she was too old to be giving birth. Some said the screaming meant she was going to die, that she could not stand the labor she was to go through.

Others wished she would just shut up. They had not hollered so loud and so long, calling on God himself to save them. They had endured with no fancy doctor coming to their door. They had survived without their mama and four sisters surrounding them. She needed to be quiet. She needed to act like a woman. Women had babies and having babies brought pain.

She needed to hush and stop acting like a child, they thought in the dark, for they were all afraid to turn on the lights. Her screams were like none they had ever heard. Long screams, loud wails that carried across the neighborhood the Blacksmith had built. They were all afraid the world was going to end the way she was carrying on. Somebody said: “She seemed to be giving birth to the devil himself. Like the child was ripping her insides apart. That’s how loud and how long she screamed.”

Without exaggeration Minnelsa Brown Jenkins did scream. But it wasn’t the pain that caused her to holler out. She could have survived without wailing had it just been the physical pain. Each time she closed her eyes she saw her sister lying in the cool green grass with the Piano Man. She would close her eyes to escape the pain, she would try to breath through it and she would see them clearly, in her mind’s eye-naked like heathens on the green grass, their bodies covered with dark dirt and the red Georgia mud that was as hard to wash away as their indiscretion.

With each scream she felt him enter her as he had entered her sister, penetrate her as he had penetrated her sister. Impregnate her as he had impregnated her sister.

The Blacksmith’s daughters, his fine upstanding daughters. His beautiful, perfect, white looking, long haired, marry-them-for-their-money, daughters.

“
We are whores.” Her voice echoed like thunder and the whole house shook. “He has made us whores.”

Bira tried to calm her to wipe the unusual amount of sweat away. “Quiet baby, it will be over soon. Don’t just grit your teeth. Breathe through the pain,” she said and the midwife who had come at Bira’s call, even though the Blacksmith had called for the doctor, suggested giving her something to bite down on.

“
Try this,” Bira told her writhing, seething daughter. “Bite down on this.” In her hand was one of the family’s sterling silver dinner knives.

Minnelsa laughed. She laughed far too loud but her breathing seemed calm. Bira figured the pain had passed. She was resting in between.

But Minnelsa was not resting. She was laughing at the knife, laughing at the wealth of the family. Her father, the big black man, the man who bought and sold land and changed lives from his small Blacksmith’s shop, had acquired everything he could to make his family one of the most important colored families in Atlanta. Had she not been presented at the Mason’s ball when she was sixteen? Had she not worn a dress of the finest white silk when she was 18 when the colored chapter of the Blacksmith’s local Union presented the most important young ladies in Atlanta? Had her picture not made the paper? All because of the Blacksmith, because she was his daughter.

Was she not pregnant now by the father of her sister’s child just like any common colored woman on the street-because of her father?

“
He has made us all whores,” she said again, but this time she was not shouting. “I don’t deserve this,” she cried into her mother’s arms.

“
None of us deserve this pain. But it brings with it joy. The joy of bringing a baby into this world.”

“
The sin of Eve is why we go through this,” the mid wife added. “It’s in the bible that we suffer the pains of childbirth. . .”

“
Shush!” Bira’s small voice was harsh. “Believe what you want but not in my house and not tonight.”

The midwife recoiled remembering that Bira, although a supposed Christian, found fault with many things in the bible. The midwife was sure she had been born a heathen.

The pain came again and Minnelsa tore from her mothers arms. “Get it out of me! I don’t want it. Get it out!”

Bira, Fawn and the midwife held her down. “Stop her,” the midwife cried above Minnelsa’s shouts. “We gotta tie her down or she’ll hurt the baby.”

“
It has to die. I don’t want it. I don’t want him. It has to die,” she screamed. “Both of them, all of them, made us whores.”

The vulgarity didn’t upset the midwife. She had heard worse from women in labor. But she had no idea what Minnelsa meant. Why would this sweet married woman believe that she was a whore and who was the “he” that had made them one? She whispered a prayer under her breath as she remembered stories about the devil sleeping with women, getting them with child and the labor being so hard because of the horns and scales and the vengeance of the lord.

And with a heathen mother like Bira? The midwife said nothing but she would tomorrow tell all who would listen: “That Minnelsa must have slept with the devil. I ain’t never seen a woman in such great pain. Wouldn’t nothing take it away. And the things she said!”

Outside the room the Blacksmith and his son-in-law sat in the parlor waiting. Sweat poured from the Piano Man as he listened to his wife.

He had made them all whores. Yes, he had. It had not been intentional. The flesh was weak. His flesh was weak. And June, what man could have resisted her five years ago when she offered herself to him and never asked for anything in return?

“
They all say things like that,” the Blacksmith told the Piano Man. “It’s the pain. They say it is so horrible it would kill the strongest man.” He himself was having a hard time believing, however all that was coming out of the mouth of his sweet innocent Minnelsa. Was she delirious? Calling the lord’s name in vain? Constantly saying he has made us all whores? Who was she talking about? How could something like that enter her mind?

She screamed again and the shout rang across the parlor and out the door: “Let it die. Get it out of me!”

The Piano Man jumped up. It had come to this. Fear swept through him as the Blacksmith rose to his feet and grabbed him by the shoulders: “She doesn’t mean it, son. It’s the pain talking. When it’s all over she won’t even remember she said it. It’s the pain.”

But the screams were upsetting the Blacksmith. It had been a long time since Bira had given birth. That was his last experience. Five daughters and one son was enough for a family. He was glad Bira would never take her body through that again.

He remembered sitting by her bedside the days after June was born. He had not wanted Bira to go through so much pain so he talked to his tiny darling wife while Minnelsa had played with her baby sister and cared for her. Bira slept and he cried. He was sorry that this should happen to the woman he loved. “It will be fine,” he told his son-in-law. “Minnelsa is strong like her mother. It will take a while but she will be fine.”

This was not what concerned the Piano Man. He had made them all whores. And the Blacksmith had helped.

Inside her room June had sobered more with each scream. Each time Minnelsa called out (to God or the devil, June wasn’t sure which one) June cringed and made herself small into the corner of her bed praying for it to be over.

But she knew, thanks to a slip of her drunken tongue, it would never be over.

She cried silently for there was enough noise around her. She hadn’t meant to come home and cause hurt, cause pain. She had come home because she had been in pain. Every man that had kissed her, every man that had found his way between her legs had been the Piano Man. She could not forget him, not forget the nights they spent together.

She had loved him enough to have his child, enough to let his child live. Now her sister hated him enough to make his child die.

Yes, even in her room at the back of the house she could hear them telling Minnelsa that she was going to hurt the baby with her thrashing about. And each time Minnelsa screamed that she wanted it out, now, dead or alive. Over and over June knew what she meant when her sister cried: “Get him out of me.”

Yes, he had made them all whores.

But so had their father.

The Blacksmith had sold them for a price. You must come here, young man, to court my daughters with wealth, education and fame. You must have ambitions beyond the cotton field or clerking in a white man’s store. You must earn these fine women I have made of my own strong body and that of my beautiful delicate wife. Come and I will give you land that will make you and your wives as important as the white men I have sought to emulate.

So the men came and sought the daughters. Some had been good, most had lied. None of them loved the Blacksmith’s daughters. They loved the package they came in.

The Blacksmith, their father, sold them each to the highest bidder. The ones with the most education, class, prestige titles, talent, even money.

He had made them all whores.

The intensity of the screams increased with each hour, and with each hour, the Piano Man regretted having ever come to Atlanta to seek his fortune.

The Blacksmith handed him a crystal glass of port (for some reason the bottle of brandy was almost gone. He asked himself had he taken to drinking that much lately?) and he downed it in one gulp. “Easy boy,” the blacksmith said pouring him another. “This may be a long night.”