“What?”
“If you let all that being mad turn you into something else, like a different girl from when you come here. That girl? She special.”
“How do you know?”
Fanny made me turn around to face her. “Tell me about your mama and your daddy.”
“Nothing to say. My mama was . . .” Suddenly I couldn’t say the word. I hadn’t known the meaning of it before—the true meaning of it—until I’d come to the Holloway Plantation. Slave. Nigger. Not human. Less than nothing. “Like us,” I said finally.
“Your papa didn’t treat her that way.”
“How you know?”
“I know you.”
I shifted on the pallet.
“My baby gonna be birthed right here on this pallet. Where were you born? Where’d your mama die?”
“In the big house.”
“Yeah, that’s what I figured. Your feet never touched the dirt in the coloreds’ quarters. How’d he raise you?”
“In the house. With his wife and daughter.”
“Uh-huh. Bet his missus pitched a fit about that. And the first words out of your mouth when I asked who you were—you just going on about being his daughter and talking about his land. Why you know all that?”
“He told me. He wanted me to know . . .” I stopped. Tears slid from the corners of my eyes.
“What did he want you to know, Jeannette?”
“That he loved me. That he loved my mama.”
“That’s right.”
“But my mama didn’t have a choice. She didn’t get to love who she wanted to. What does that make me?”
Fanny placed a cool hand on my forehead. “You can’t know your mama’s mind,” she said. “Only what you know—your daddy’s love. Now you can go round here feeling bad like I seen you doing, or you can walk like you loved. Nobody can touch that—not even Everett. I know my mama, God rest her soul, loved me. I think about her, how she wouldn’t want me to suffer no matter how bad things are. That’s what gets me through when Everett is on top of me. It’s what’s keeping me going now—thinking about how I can protect my baby and let him or her know they loved. That’s all I can do.”
“It makes me mad, Fanny. Feel the anger like a wild animal on me, like Everett always on top of me, even though he’s on you.”
“If you were my child, I’d say you mad because you can’t talk. Got everything bottled up in you like an old jar of canned collards rotting because it never got opened.”
I put a hand to my eyes and felt the tears running down my face. “I miss Papa.”
She put her arms around me. “He still here. You his girl.”
I thought about what Dorinda had once said, how I looked just like him, like he had spat me out.
“What would you do, Jeannette? I mean, if you were him right now, what you be doin’？”
“I’d be working hard and planning—making lots of plans.”
“For what?”
“Making sure his family was safe, protected.”
“Huh,” Fanny said. “Sounds like he doing something else too.”
“What’s that?”
“Lovin’。 Sounds like a man spending more time doing that than being mad.”
“I don’t know what he had to be mad at.”
“But you do know what he had to love. Just act like that for a while. See where it take you.”
So that was what I did—I went about being a little Jean Bébinn. I walked upright and looked after what I loved—Fanny. I’d never been close to anyone having a baby, so I didn’t know how to look after her other than to take care of whatever she needed. If she was hungry, I’d find her something to eat. If she got tired and thirsty while we were working, I’d make her sit down where she couldn’t be seen, and I’d find her some water, even if I had to sneak it from the pitcher near Missus’s bed. I rubbed Fanny’s back at night when the baby grew heavy in her belly. I was able to do this because Boss Everett stopped bothering her, just like Fanny said he would.
Did I feel any better? A little. Maybe it was like not looking so much at what was bad and not feeling worse because of it. But I liked looking after Fanny.
Then one morning in August I woke up thinking it had been about two years since Papa had died and two years since I’d come to Holloway’s. I was telling Fanny about it and helping her up from the pallet on the floor when I heard a strange pop. Fanny looked at me, her eyes huge and bright. She lifted her shift, and there was water leaking from between her legs, gushing like a waterfall. She sank back down on the pallet.
“It’s the baby,” she said. “It’s time.”
I didn’t respond. I just ran and kept running. I got to the big house, threw open the back door, and found Aunt Nancy Lynne and Corinne starting breakfast.
I was breathless but managed to say, “Fanny’s having her baby.”
Aunt Nancy Lynne ducked into her sewing space and brought out some cloths. She went over to one of the big iron pots on the hearth.
“Here,” she called to me. “Help me tote this.” She swung up the metal handle and handed me a square of cloth so I wouldn’t burn my hand. “Corinne, you know what to do.”
“Yes, Aunt Nancy Lynne.”
Aunt Nancy Lynne held the other side of the handle, and we made our way back down to the lane. I wanted to run, but the pot was heavy, and I could see by her steady concentration that Aunt Nancy Lynne didn’t want to lose a drop of the water in it.
When we got there, Fanny was lying on her side, facing the wall and moaning. We put the pot on the grate.
“Build up the fire,” Aunt Nancy Lynne said. “And bring some water for her to drink.”
She put the cloths on the table and pulled a chair over to sit near Fanny. “Don’t you worry, honey. We’re here.” She rubbed her back. “Just let yourself do what you need to do.”
Aunt Nancy Lynne looked over her shoulder at me. “You ever seen a woman give birth?”
I shook my head.
“It’s gonna be loud. She gon’ be in a whole lot of pain. Don’t be scared, now. You can’t help me if you scared.”
“I won’t be scared.”
But it wasn’t the noise that affected me. Fanny’s screams seemed to be a piece of all the screaming I’d heard since coming to Holloway’s. It was seeing Fanny in pain, her eyes wide and wild with it, that broke me. Sometimes she would even lock her gaze on me like I could make it go away. And of course, I couldn’t. Then there was the duration of the labor. Six hours later the baby still wasn’t there. Aunt Nancy Lynne wasn’t worried, so I wasn’t either. I was just tired. But Fanny was doing all the work. No way I was more tired than her.
It must have been just after noon when the crazy white woman arrived. I first heard her in the lane yelling, “Where is she? Where is she?”
The door burst open and banged against the wall.
Fanny was writhing in the middle of a pain, and the white woman laughed like she had lost her mind.
“Does it hurt, bitch?” she said.
She pushed me aside and stood over Fanny and Aunt Nancy Lynne.