“I hope God splits you open like the whore you are!”
“Missus Everett, this ain’t no place for you,” Aunt Nancy Lynne said. She had to raise her voice to be heard over the woman’s screams and Fanny’s cries.
But the woman didn’t stop. She ranted on, calling Fanny a bitch and her baby a bastard. Then she spit on Fanny.
That was it for me. I couldn’t stand it, couldn’t let her treat Fanny that way. So I did what Papa had done for my mama. I got between them and started moving toward the door, forcing Missus Everett out. She tried to get around me. I put my hands on her waist and pushed. Her focus, once we reached the door, shifted from Fanny to me.
“How dare you put your filthy nigger hands on me!”
I pushed her again, and we fell out the door and into the lane. She slapped at me, but I didn’t fight back. I let her. Then she pinched my left ear between her fingers and dragged me out into the yard. She grabbed a whip, but I don’t think she’d ever used one in her life, because her first lash at me jumped back, and she cut her own face. She kept trying, screaming, “How dare you?” all the while, and I wanted to laugh because it sounded like she was screaming at the whip for cutting her. She must be drunk, I figured. I didn’t care. At least she wasn’t bothering Fanny anymore. She managed to strike me on the arm I had raised to protect myself. The sleeve of my dress tore. She landed another lash on my shoulder.
My skin felt like I’d touched hot coals. I looked at Missus Everett and saw the purple welt bleeding on her chin and realized I could hate this woman, but what would I be hating? I saw a soul so sad and furious she didn’t know herself. And I was no more to her than a spider she wanted to crush underfoot. I’d have to work hard, make numerous changes in my brain, to create hate for such a pitiful person. What would I have to mold myself into to conjure such hate? Fanny had been right. I wouldn’t be myself if I did it.
Boss Everett must have recognized his wife’s wails. He came out and stopped her. He scolded her for whipping a house slave, which redirected her anger onto him. While they fought, I ran back to Fanny.
“Sweet Jesus.”
Aunt Nancy Lynne’s hands were moving fast, and I went to help. Fanny was moaning and crying. Blood—I saw an ocean of blood. Aunt Nancy Lynne knelt in it, her lap covered with it. The entire pallet was soaked. I knelt next to her.
“Get me some more of those rags. Dip them in that hot water.”
I got up and did what she asked, and when I brought the pile of cloths, I saw what Aunt Nancy Lynne held in her hands. It had the shape of a baby, curled up like a flower bud that wasn’t open yet. She put the dark and quiet bud on Fanny’s chest and put a cloth over it. Fanny was crying. The blood was still coming, flowing hard like from a broken levee.
“Talk to her,” Aunt Nancy Lynne said. She tried to stanch the flow of blood with the cloths. “Keep talkin’ to her.”
I put one hand on the baby and my other hand on Fanny’s head. Her lips were dry and cracked as she murmured a stream of words.
“He a boy, ain’t he?”
“Yeah, yeah,” I said, but I couldn’t tell. The baby was too crouched up for me to see its privates. “What’s his name?”
“Jeremiah.”
“Jeremiah. That’s a beautiful name, Fanny,” I said. “Real nice.”
Her teeth started chattering and making a loud clicking sound as they clashed together. Then Fanny’s whole body shook violently.
“Fanny! Fanny!”
She looked down at the baby.
“I gotta . . .” She gasped for air. “I gotta . . . go take care of him.”
“Don’t leave me, Fanny,” I whispered. I was crying, too, and I held her tighter and tried to stop her shaking.
“I’m . . . all . . . right,” she said. “God’s with us. Listen . . . Jeannette, listen.”
“What is it? Listen to what?”
“You hear my baby laughing? Listen to him laughing.”
She smiled then, and her body relaxed. The shaking stopped. Her eyes closed, and she didn’t move again.
“No!” I sobbed and sobbed and kept kneeling there in her blood and holding on to Fanny and her dead baby. I wanted the ground to open and swallow us all, right there. Nothing mattered.
Aunt Nancy Lynne put her arms around me. “Come on, now. Help me clean them up.”
“Why?” I wailed. “They’re dead.”
“’Cause it’s the last thing you can do for her.” She pulled on me. “Come on now. You don’t want her going into the ground looking like this, like some animal Boss Everett slaughtered.”
Mucus streamed from my nose, and I couldn’t see for the tears. I stood, and she handed me one of the clean cloths. I wiped my face. I was still crying, but I was able to move and to help. We took the baby and unfolded its crouching form enough to see Fanny had been right—it was a boy.
Some of what Aunt Nancy Lynne had brought from the big house wasn’t rags but clothing. She’d brought my housekeeping dress and hers too. When we were done, we washed our hands and put on the clean clothes. After I had settled some, I realized the lash wounds I’d gotten from Missus Everett still burned.
“Come on now,” she said, but I sat at the table awhile longer. I didn’t want to leave Fanny.
“You done good. Come on.”
We walked down the lane back to the big house. I said, “I won’t go back there again. I’m not sleeping where she died.”
“All right, honey. Don’t think about it now.”
It wasn’t just the shack. I couldn’t stand where I was. Fanny’s death had crushed me. I felt reckless. If Aunt Nancy Lynne hadn’t been walking me back to the big house, I would have kept on walking down the road and then God knows where. I didn’t care how or where I’d end up. I was leaving there. But Aunt Nancy Lynne had me by the arm. She brought me into the kitchen and sat me down with a bowl of green beans in front of me. I was supposed to snap off the ends, but I just sat there. When night fell, she put me on the pallet where I used to sleep for the night work. I kept on staying there and never went back to where I lived with Fanny.
I was heartsick after that. Nothing felt good. The sound of laughter was like cold water poured all over my soul. I know that’s selfish, but that’s how I felt.
“I know you thinking of running off,” Aunt Nancy Lynne said. “You should wait.”
“Wait for what?”
“To make a plan. You run out of here without a plan, you liable to end up back here like Monty and Laney. Back here in a day. You don’t know a real whippin’。 You’ll know it if they catch you, though.”
I shrugged and said nothing, but I waited. I didn’t see how anything might change or what kind of plan would get me away from Holloway’s without getting caught.
A few weeks later, when we were sewing, Aunt Nancy Lynne said, “Can you wait a year, maybe two?”
Two years seemed so far away. “Why?”
“Because you need to grow up a little.”
“I can handle myself!”
“No, that’s not what I mean. I mean you need to get a little bigger, look like a woman and not a little girl.”