Chasing the North Star by Robert Morgan Page A

money was gone and the knife was gone. But the box of matches was still there in his right pocket. He’d lost all the money Mama had saved.

Six
    Angel
    The first time I ever heard the word
jubilee
must be when I was young and Mama went off and left me in the middle of the night. I woke up in the dark and saw Mama standing in the moonlight coming through the window, wrapping a cloth around her head. “Where you going?” I said.
    â€œShhhh,” Mama said. “Don’t wake the little ones.” Then Mama whispered she was going to jubilee, but she’d be back. She said if I didn’t lie down and go to sleep again she’d whip me with a hickory stick come morning. I lay down and closed my eyes, and smelled the rose petals Mama gathered by the hedge in front of the big house. She’d crushed the petals between her hands and rubbed them over her neck and shoulders and breasts.
    There was a murmuring outside when Mama went out the door, and then I heard footsteps and laughing and people walking away from the quarters. I lay in the dark thinking about the name
jubilee
and what it meant. It must be special because Mama seemed excited, fixing herself up in the middle of the night like she was going to a revival meeting. When I opened my eyes, the moonlight was streaming down from the window. Moving slowly so as to not wake my brothers and sisters, I climbed off the cot and stood in the pool of light. The moonlight seemed to be calling to me, “Come out and see the world now. Night is the time to play and be happy.”
    When I opened the door and stepped outside, I saw that it was true. That moonlight made the ground clean, coating everything with blue velvet and blue frost.
    I held out my hands to the moon and the moon said, “Look at what can be.” I looked at the pine woods and the mountains beyond the woods, and they were blue and silky all the way to where stars reached down to the ridge beyond the river. I felt like I could walk on that carpet of blue light all the way to the edge of heaven.
    â€œThis is the way things will be,” the moon whispered, as I sat down with my back against the cabin.
    I must have gone to sleep sitting on the ground, for the next thing I knew Mama was shaking me and it was dark and the moon had gone down. “What you doing out here?” Mama hissed as she pushed me inside; I was so sleepy and surprised I didn’t answer. I could tell Mama was hot and covered with sweat, like she had been running or dancing, the way I’d seen her do at the revival meeting. Her turban had come undone and she’d tied it around her shoulders. She smelled sweet like rotten fruit, the way the master smelled when he’d been drinking brandy.
    â€œI’ll whip you in the morning,” Mama said. “I’ll teach you to mind me.” Mama got a dipper of water from the bucket in the corner and drank it and then lay down on her cot.
    The worst thing about a whipping was having to wait for it. Mama knew that and I knew that. And I guess Master Thomas knew it, too, for he whipped one of the help from time to time when they didn’t mind him. But that was a bigger thing, an awful thing, to see a man whipped with a blacksnake whip till his back was cut and he was bleeding down to his feet.
    Mama might say as a warning, “I’m going to cut the blood out of you,” but she never did it. She knew the worst part of punishment was the anticipation. The next morning after we ate mush with molasses and I washed up the bowls, Mama said, “You know what I need. Go get me that hickory.”
    It was a relief to finally go and get it over with.
    â€œBetter be a good switch or I whip you twice,” Mama said.
    Sad as it was to have to go after my own switch, there was a kind of dignity to it. All I had to do was get the hickory and bear the whipping and cry a little to make Mama feel I was sorry, and then it would be all right again. I