The Orphan Mother by Robert Hicks Page A

husband. He put his little arm around her waist, reaching about halfway. She had tried to leave him behind, but he insisted and set about preparing himself. He washed his face and cleaned his shoes, and when she leaned over him the top of his head smelled like cooking fires and sunlight. They were two alone, the last of their kind, and she had loved him. Right then, she had wanted him beside her at all times, forever, underfoot or no.
    Now she was the very last of the Reddicks, their little family. I am the only one left to make things right . I am the last one before we all disappear from the face of the earth.
    “Hey April.”
    “Yes darling.”
    “What do you know about that man, Tole?”
    “Not much, though he come in pretty often.”
    “You find out anything about him, you be kind and let me know.”
    “Mariah Reddick is sweet on a man!” April cackled, the romantic notion getting the best of her.
    But when Mariah looked over at May, she was squinting at her in that way that she had, which meant, I know something going on, Sister Mariah, and it gone get you in trouble .
    Mariah sat for a time with these people she had known most of her life, letting their warmth and sincerity wash over her and trying to shut out their anger.
    “I so sorry ’bout your boy passing. He was real special. Those damned Conservatives gonna pay for what they did to him, you hear?”
    “Decent man, your boy was. More decent bones in his body than every one of those white devils put together.”
    “Fine cobbler. Nobody made shoes as fine as he did. Even them that got their hands on him, they was wearing his shoes. They knew his was fine.”
    They surrounded her, the former property of Frank Colby and Jim Vaughan and Jasper Morton, field hands and grooms and stable boys, laundresses and seamstresses and cooks and ragpickers, and they talked and they laughed and they remembered.
    “Special man,” Pleasant repeated. She was the former maid of Logan Neely, who’d owned her mother, and owned her and her brothers, when they were born.
    “You younger than he was,” Mariah told her. “What you know about how special he was? You just repeating what the others sayin’.”
    “I old enough to know a decent man.”
    “I remember the morning you was born. I was the one pulled you outta your mama. You were stubborn as a damn mule...You woulda thought we was pulling you away from Eden, the way you didn’t wanna come out. Musta been something about her belly that made you wanna stay. Maybe it was Eden. And when you came out, you were the fattest baby I ever seen.”
    “I wasn’t no fat baby.”
    “Oh you was. You was so fat. Meaty legs and full cheeks like corncakes. And a big ol’ belly. And you was precious.”
    “All babies precious.”
    A round of nods and agreement.
    Then Mariah said, “Spent damn near my whole life here. And I reckon I brought most of these folks into this world in some way or another, same way I did you. And now somebody take my own child out the world, and I wonder what I been doing all this time, filling up the world with people.”
    Mariah paused, thinking, I made up my own lullabies and I sang ’em in the softest voice I could muster until he’d stop kickin’. And I pushed him out in a tub of blood and bathwater, and he came into this world with a full head of hair, and he looked just like me. I never thought I was much to look at, but damned if he wasn’t the most beautiful baby I’d ever seen. And I didn’t feel like no nigger when I held him.
    What they took, what they always took from Negroes, was knowledge. They were scared what we would do with it , Mariah thought. And we was too tired and beaten and…hell, we was scared too. Scared to get knowledge, to know why things are as they are . If there was anything that made her feel like a nigger, it was that state of unknowing. It was one of the ways the Negro had been walked upon for so many years. Don’t tell the Negro nothing and after a while the