“Mama, I don’t want to leave you and Papa. My home.” I swiped at my eyes with the cuff of her scratchy wool coat.
“You’re not safe here.” She wrapped a knit scarf around my neck.
“I want to stay and wait for you and Papa to come back after the hearing. I’m nearly grown, almost seventeen—”
“It’s too dangerous, Honey Mary-Angeline,” she said, including my middle names she and Papa christened me with years ago when one of the saddlebag preachers stopped at our small cabin hidden near the forest. Mama asked what name I’d like to take and I had said Mary, for her middle name, Cussy Mary Lovett, the distinguished Book Woman of these ol’ hills who’d worked for the Kentucky Pack Horse Library Project when I was little. Then I asked if I could have two, and added Angeline for my first mama.
Angeline and my first papa, Willie Moffit, had been Blues, too, but neither of them knew it, Mama had told me later. Angeline died in ’36, right after she birthed me. Mama never said much about my first papa, only that an accident caused his demise. By the time I turned six, I had lost most of the methemoglobinemia, the gene disorder that the ol’ doc over in Troublesome Creek said me and Mama and the Moffits had.
Doc explained that Mama’s parents, the Carters, like other clans ’round the country, were all kin to themselves, same as the royalty in Europe. Only difference, we didn’t have us a family tree like most folk. Instead, we’d gotten twisty vines that knotted, wrapped, and wound around each other. And although my hands and feet still turned a bruising blue whenever I got scared or excited, only those parts of me took on the strange color.
I was grateful I could easily hide the affliction. Affliction. A hard word for me to swallow, but it wasn’t nothing compared to hearing how Mama had been treated. How the law ripped her and Papa apart on their wedding day, calling them immoral and sinners and worse. Mama said I was only three months old when the Troublesome Creek sheriff had beaten and arrested Papa and threatened to lock Mama up, too, and throw me into the Home of the Idiots on that October day in ’36.
Lifting my palms, I watched the tint of a robin’s-egg blue rise and spread with a darker tinge outlining them. Nothing as dark as Mama’s color that covered every inch of her. I thought of the fright, scorn, and horror that would appear in others’ eyes when they glimpsed Mama’s ink-blue skin. The embarrassment, shame, and sadness leaching into Mama’s.
Once, when I was six years old, we were buying apples inside a store in Tennessee when the man behind the counter called Mama an ugly name and ordered us out. When I saw the hurt pooling in Mama’s eyes, a blinding fury like no other rose inside me. Unable to tamp it down, I threw my apple at the shopkeeper. He snatched up a thick wooden broom. Mama apologized to the angry man and scolded me as she rushed us out the door, shielding my small frame while taking the brunt of the shopkeeper’s battering strikes and raging curses.
Mama received eight stitches on her scalp. After that, I learned to keep quiet and lower my head—learned what a Blue had to do to stay safe.
I looked over at the lawman’s automobile, my stomach stitched in knots. Mama’s hands trembled as she reached into my coat pocket, pulled out a pair of gloves, and handed them to me. She’d been knitting these to hide my blue skin and to keep me, the last of our kind, hidden from the rest of the world. Papa, wanting to contribute, had stitched me black leather ones to switch out. They were my armor, a shield against folk who hunted the Blues.
“Can I go to Tennessee and visit Papa’s kin instead?”
“Great Uncle Emmet’s place is bursting at the seams. There’s fourteen in the home and they can’t squeeze in another soul. I’m sorry, Honey, there’s no one else.”
She flipped down the thick collar on the coat and straightened it. “I packed your brown journal. You be sure to keep writing those pretty poems of yours.”
I nodded, feeling the tremble on my chin. The journal was my favorite and what I wrote down all my poetry in.