“I guess you’ve heard that Asia is to marry Sleeper Clarke,” she says.
“It’s good news,” Joe Hall says. “Mighty good news. Fine man. She’ll be living in Philadelphia then.”
“She will.”
“Do you think she would look in on our Pinkney and our Mary Ellen? I expect they’re in Philadelphia now. Ann and me, we’d sure like to know how they get on. I don’t have an address,” Joe says.
“Of course she will.” This is a lie. Rosalie can’t imagine how Asia would find the two Halls if they’re in hiding. But perhaps they’re not. Perhaps they count on Aunty Rogers and her husband not tracking them down.
Outside there’s a sudden battle, dogs against pigs, by the sound of it, barking and squealing, and several men shouting for it all to stop. The noise moves down the street at a run.
Across from her, Joe Hall has closed his eyes. He sits, swaying slightly, as if he’s gone to sleep while upright at the table, his two hands wrapped around his cup. Since his eyes are closed, Rosalie feels free to examine him closely. The sun is falling hard on him, deepening every line on his face, and there is a mass of those lines, a map of years and worries. One of his front teeth has gone yellow. He’s still a big man, but his chest has caved in and his shoulders curved. Rosalie used to ask him how old he was. That’s something I never did know, he’d say.
She’s known him all the years of her life. His was one of the first faces she’d ever seen, looking down as she lay in the wicker cradle he’d made for her. In that time before memory, his face was already there.
It occurs to Rosalie that someday she’ll see him for the last time and that this could be that very day. What will his grave marker look like? It won’t even have a birth date.
Rosalie will be proved prescient in all of this. He’ll die two years later, neither the date of birth nor death on his stone. He’ll never again see his son and his daughter, the children who fled.
“Do you think there’ll be war, Miss Rose?” He’s opened his eyes again and his fingers now tap on the scarred surface of the table. A song of some sort. She remembers one that he taught her when she was a little girl:
They put John on an island
Hallelujah
They put him there to starve him
Hallelujah
But the angels came and fed him
Hallelujah
They fed him on the bread of heaven
Hallelujah
“No. I don’t think there’ll be war,” Rosalie answers. She doesn’t explain herself, but the truth is that she can easily imagine white men who will fight and die to keep their slaves. She knows these men. Joe Hall knows them, too. They live all around the farm in Bel Air. They went to school with John. John is one of them.
But she can’t think of a single white man she knows who would fight and die to free the slaves. The ones who believe in slavery have so much more conviction than the ones who don’t.
“We surely miss our girl, our boy. They can’t come home; we can’t get there. Change is hard,” says Joe. “But change is life.”
And death, Rosalie thinks. Death is a mighty big change, too.
x
Rosalie has suffered a shock. She’s come to her bedroom and closed the door, hoping to be given some privacy. She’s combing through her wet and tangled hair with more vigor and less care than usual. It’s as if she wants it to hurt.
Moments ago, she and Mother and Asia were all in the kitchen together, washing their hair. They use rainwater, which they collect in basins and save for the weeks between washings. It’s a major undertaking and the boys, if any are around, are shooed from the house for the duration so the women can proceed in their undergarments. Today is warm and the upstairs bedroom actually hot. Rosalie is in no hurry to put her skirts back on and she wants the tangles gone from her hair before it dries.
Asia was talking, as usual, not even stopping when Mother poured a pitcher of water over her head. Rosalie was toweling the ends of her own hair when she heard Asia say something that began, “When we’re all in Philadelphia . . .”
All, she had said. We all. All of us. Rosalie was so surprised she missed the rest of the sentence.
“Are we all going to Philadelphia?” she’d asked.
Mother rubbed the rainwater through Asia’s hair. “We wouldn’t keep this big house just for the two of us. The boys are hardly here now and when Asia goes . . .”
The minute Mother says this, Rosalie sees how inevitable the move is. And yet it hadn’t occurred to her. Her eyes had suddenly filled so she’d left the kitchen as inconspicuously as she could and come upstairs to be alone and cry. But somewhere on the stairs, the tears had vanished without falling, her eyes parched and stinging instead.
She’s never loved Baltimore, but this is where her life is. She has friends—the Cole sisters, Nelly Morgan, Kate Greene—and she gets together with them every couple of weeks to gossip and sew shirts and aprons for charity. Maybe she doesn’t really care for Nelly, but she likes the Cole sisters.
She’s lived with Asia, they’ve shared a bedroom, for the whole of Asia’s life, but always under Mother’s roof. In Philadelphia, Rosalie will be a permanent guest in Asia’s house, an intruder on the young couple. Efforts will be made to make her feel welcome and Asia will make sure that she sees those efforts. Rosalie will feel a constant pressure to be both out of the way and useful. She will never feel that the house is hers.
Rosalie knows better than to imagine she’ll be given a room of her own. She’ll be sharing with Mother now, the widow and the spinster. She can see how it all will go.
But she can also see that nothing else makes sense. Unhappy as she is, she can’t come up with a single argument in favor of the expense of remaining in Baltimore.
A timid knock on the door, and Mother enters. Water has dripped down the front of her chemise, soaked into the shelf of cloth over her heavy breasts. Her graying hair is wrapped in a large white rag. “I guess we took you by surprise,” she says. “I didn’t mean to. I thought it was obvious.”
“It is,” Rosalie says. “I don’t know why I was surprised.”
“Philadelphia is a wonderful town. Sleeper says he’d much rather live there than here. So much to do!”
“I’m sure I’ll get used to it.” Rosalie can’t say out loud, not to anyone, but certainly not to Mother, how much she dreads the daily witness of Asia ruling her little kingdom. It puts her in mind of those novels in which the younger married sister leapfrogs in status over the older unmarried one.
Sleeper’s visits have been hard enough. You can’t enter a room without seeing the two spring apart, Asia’s face flushed, hair in disarray. But probably once Asia is married that will stop. Mother and Father had a baby every two years like clockwork, and yet there had been no canoodling for Rosalie to interrupt.
Mother takes the comb from Rosalie’s hand and stands behind her. Her pale face floats in the pocked mirror above Rosalie’s own. Rosalie’s hair is thick and combing it out requires patience. Mother’s being much gentler than Rosalie, untangling the knots at the ends first, only making the long strokes from the scalp when there is nothing left to snag on. “You know I’ll always take you with me, wherever I go,” Mother says. “You know that you’ll never be left alone and uncared for as long as I’m alive.”