Jesse had missed whatever prompted his cousin’s comment, but that phrase would always make him think of his nana. “Forty acres and a mule,” she’d shout out in those moments when the distant past grew sharper in focus than the everyday world around her. “That’s what they promised us, forty acres and a mule.” Then she’d laugh, as if she found humor in her own youthful naiveté.
The buckra cursed William Tecumseh Sherman as the Yankee devil who’d burned a swath through the South, torching everything right up to Savannah’s back door, then giving the city to his president as a Christmas present. To the newly freed people like Nana Tuesday, Sherman’s Special Field Orders, No. 15 must have made him seem like the second coming of Christ himself. Old No. 15 granted the freedmen ownership of a good bit of the South Carolina coast. Other promises granted them the Sea Islands from Seabrook to Cumberland.
Even today, nearly seventy years later, the white folk around here still cursed Sherman for his fiery march, but the promises Sherman made to Jesse’s people barely lasted a full trip around the sun. No. 15 was overturned before Lincoln was cold in his grave, and any land that hadn’t been purchased outright by the former slaves was returned to the hands of their erstwhile masters. Nana had spent pretty near her whole darned life in Yamacraw, the area just south of the river and west of West Broad Street, but the only land she’d ever owned was the dirt left on her shoes by Yamacraw’s dusty lanes.
Now, the rich whites were nibbling away at the Sea Islands, or in some cases trying to swallow them whole like that Coffin fellow did twenty years back with Sapelo. Just stepped in and bought up every inch the black folk there couldn’t prove they owned. Even built his mansion over the foundation of the old slave master Spalding’s house. Jesse had to wonder if it was possible to build your home on the same foundation without fostering the same ambition in your heart.
The sound of Betty clicking her tongue caught his attention. “Cups and spoons and broken plates,” she started in again, shaking her head as she surveyed his family. “These people done brought half the kitchen out here. She getting buried, not setting up house. She ain’t got no more use for these things where she done gone.”
“It’s my people’s way.”
“Well, y’all people got some mighty funny ways,” she said, as if she were a disapproving stranger, not a woman who’d made her home among them for a dozen years.
Jesse’s family didn’t keep up too much with the old ways, at least not here on the mainland. They seemed to have two separate ways of living, two distinct languages, the one bound to the “sweet” water of the mainland, the other seeming to spring from the salt water that cocooned the islands. In their everyday lives, they were so careful, so intent on avoiding behavior that might draw the white man’s attention, or worse, his ire. But they were so much freer on rare visits to Daufuskie or St. Helena, and their speech buzzed with words remembered from tongues spoken clean on the other side of the ocean. Jesse had enjoyed explaining his family’s customs to Betty early on in their marriage, but he had realized he would never be able to surmount her contempt for their traditions. Now he repeated the same tired explanation he’d given her many times over the years. “These things were special to Nana. Things she used. Bits and pieces of her life. They’re memorials, nothing more. You know that.”
“What I know is that it don’t matter one whit what people put on your grave if you weren’t right with Jesus when you died. It’s too late for that old gal now. This here heat is proof enough of where she went. We need to finish putting her in the ground and get on with things.”
“Well you just let Jesus be her judge and mind your own self,” snapped his auntie Martha, who usually pretended to be deaf when in Betty’s presence.
Betty’s eyes flashed, and she rocked back and forth in a show of defiance, but she must have realized she’d been pressing her luck. She held her tongue.
“Amen, sister,” young Reverend Jones shouted out, picking up on Martha’s words, though Jesse felt sure he’d been too deep into his own preaching to have heard Betty’s. “That’s right, Jesus, He is Sister Tuesday’s judge, just as He is the judge of us all.” A smirk formed on Betty’s lips, and in spite of himself, Jesse couldn’t help but return it. Had she been a living spectator to the proceedings, Nana Tuesday would have without a doubt hurled some sharp words at this man of God. While she would have allowed him to call her “Mother Tuesday,” as most of the folk, black and white, around here did, such a young man would get a mouthful for treating her like a little sister.
“Thank you, Pastor,” Jesse’s mama said, placing her hand on his shoulder. Pastor Jones looked at her, Bible still held high, seeming to deliberate whether or not he should shrug her off and carry on. “I do so appreciate you coming out today,” May added in a sincere tone. Jesse knew his mama, though, and despite her calm demeanor, he knew she’d heard enough. The preacher had been given more than enough time to speak of wheat and chaff and wise virgins with well-trimmed wicks. The look on her face was the one she used when placating anyone in authority—usually the buckra, but occasionally one of their own. “We need to be getting the babies and the old folk out of the sun before one of them falls ill.”
The young man searched her face for a moment, then acquiesced. “Thank you, sister,” he said, taking a step back from the head of the grave.
Jesse’s mama smiled again at the preacher. “You go on, now,” she said, dismissing him in no uncertain terms. “We can handle it from here.” Jones lingered for a moment, as if considering whether he should listen, then nodded and walked away from the grave, passing by Jesse and his family on his way to the cemetery gate. He hesitated a moment when he reached Jesse’s daughter
s, who watched the young pastor with listless trepidation. Opal shifted Jilo, balancing the baby on her hip. Jones reached out to pat Poppy’s head, but then stopped dead at the sight of Jilo, doll-like in her starched white cap and gown. The pastor pulled his hand back slowly and hurried on toward the gate. Silence fell over the group until he was well beyond the boundary.
“Opal,” his mother called. Jesse’s eyes darted to his daughter.
“Yes’m.” The girl startled and straightened to attention at the sound of her nana’s voice.
“You bring your sister on up here,” Jesse’s mama instructed. “Bring Jilo to me.”
Jesse felt Betty tensing beside him. “You stay right where you are, girl,” Betty said, wagging her finger at Opal, who seemed nearly split in two by her desire to please both her nana and her mama at the same time. “What you need my Jilo for?” Betty took a few steps forward. Jesse couldn’t help but notice that she had moved toward his mother, ready for confrontation, rather than toward her baby, ready to protect.
He knew there was no need to protect Jilo from anything that was going to happen here, so while Betty geared herself up for a shouting matching with his mama, he stepped back and approached the girls. “Let me have her,” he said with a nod to Opal. Her face relaxed in gratitude as she handed the baby over.
Jesse took Jilo in both hands and shifted her into the crook of his arm. He leaned his head over to plant a kiss on her round cheek, then reached out and ran his thumb over Opal’s cheek as well. Over the sound of their mama’s indignant shouting, Jesse winked and said, “Your daddy has the best girls in the whole wide world; you know that, don’t you?” A smile curved on Opal’s lips, and she blinked once before nodding her response.
“And you, my little flower?” he said, turning toward Poppy, who scurried up to him and hugged his leg. He patted her head. “I love my girls,” he said. “All three of them.” When Poppy released him and slid back next to Opal, he closed his eyes for a moment before turning to face the scene unfolding behind him.
“And I,” Betty said, waving her finger in his mama’s face, “am not gonna have my babies take part in any of the old woman’s Hoodoo. You hear me?”
“Jilo,” his mama replied in her calmest voice, even though the angry set of her mouth and the crease that lined the center of her forehead told Jesse she was anything but relaxed, “is the last born. You want to be good and clear of the old woman”–her head rocked in indignation–“then we need to pass Jilo over the coffin.”
Jesse had almost reached his mother’s side when Betty caught sight of him. She pushed roughly past the mourners who didn’t have the sense to part between them like the Red Sea at the wave of Moses’s staff. “Gimme the girl.”
Jesse took a step backward and placed his hand over the back of Jilo’s little capped head. “It’s our way.”
“It may be your way, but it ain’t my way, and she’s my child.” Betty now stood within spitting distance of him, her chest and shoulders heaving. She flung out her arms, grasping at the linen of Jilo’s gown.
There was no way he was relinquishing the girl to those clenched and angry hands. “She’s my child, too.” For a moment, Betty’s face froze. Then her eyes narrowed, and she tilted her head. Her lips parted, readying to speak the truth that his cousins had been whispering behind his back, the truth his gut already knew. The truth that his own heart told him was the greatest lie of all. But then she stopped. Her tongue darted out of her mouth and licked her lips instead.
She gestured with a wide wave of her arm that included him, his mother, the casket, and the baby. “All right, y’all heathens go right on ahead. Y’all do what you need to do.” She spun around and stomped off, heading toward the gate.