Homegoing (15 page)

“Is Ma all right?” he asked, grabbing her hands in his and shaking them until they finally stilled.

“Yes.”

“Then what is it?”

“I don’t know,” she said.

He looked at her hard but could see that she was telling the truth. She was nervous because Mathison had never asked to see Jo before, not in the seven years that she and Ma had been cleaning house for him, and she didn’t know what it could mean that he was asking her now.

They walked the few miles to the Mathison house so quickly that the contents of Jo’s toolbox rattled uncomfortably against the box walls. Jo was walking a little ahead of Anna, and he could hear the patter of her small feet struggling to stay in step with his long legs.

When they reached the house, Ma Aku was waiting on the porch, her cough their only welcome from her. She and Anna led Jo into the parlor, where Mathison and a handful of other white men were sitting on the plush white couches, the cushions so full they looked like small hills, or the backs of elephants.

“Kojo!” Mathison said, standing to shake his hand. He’d heard Ma Aku call Jo that once, and had asked them what it meant. When Ma had explained it was the Asante name for a boy born on Monday, he’d clapped his hands together as though hearing a good song, and insisted on calling Jo by his full name every time he saw him. “Taking away your name is the first step,” he’d said somberly. So somberly that Jo hadn’t felt it wise to ask what he was thinking—the first step to what?

“Mr. Mathison.”

“Please, have a seat,” Mr. Mathison said, pointing to an empty white chair. Jo suddenly felt nervous. His trousers were covered in dry pitch, so black it looked like hundreds of holes lined them. Jo worried the pitch would stain the chair, making it so that Anna and Ma Aku would have more work to do the next day when they came in. If they came in at all.

“I’m so sorry to bring you all the way over here, but my colleagues have informed me of some very troubling news.”

A fatter white man cleared his throat, and Jo watched the jiggle of his neck as he spoke. “We’ve been hearing about a new law being drafted by the South and the Free-Soilers, and if it was to pass, law enforcement would be required to arrest any alleged runaway slave in the North and send them back south, no matter how long ago they escaped.”

The men were all watching him, waiting for him to react, and so he nodded.

“My concern is for you and your mother,” Mr. Mathison said, and Jo looked over to the door where Anna had been standing just moments ago. She was probably back to the cleaning by now, worried about whatever it was Mathison had to say to Jo. “As runaways, you might have more trouble than Anna and the children, who are free in their own right.”

Jo nodded. He couldn’t imagine who would be looking for him or Ma Aku after all of these years. Jo didn’t even know the name or the face of his own old master. All Ma could remember was that Ness had called him the Devil.

“You should get your family further north,” Mr. Mathison said. “New York, Canada, even. If this thing passes, there’s no telling what kind of chaos it’ll cause.”

“Are they gon’ fire me?” Anna asked. They were sitting on
their mattress later that night, after the children had all gone to sleep, and Jo was finally able to explain to her what Mathison had called him over for.

“No, they just want to warn us, is all.”

“But your ma’s old master died. Ruthie tol’ us, remember?”

Jo remembered. Anna’s cousin Ruthie had sent word from one plantation to another to a safe house and finally to Ma Aku that the man who had owned her had died. And they had all breathed easier that night.

“Mr. Mathison say that don’t matter. His people can still get her if they want to.”

“What about me and the kids?”

Jo shrugged. Anna’s master had fathered her, then set her and her mother free. She had real free papers, not forged ones like Jo and Ma Aku. The kids had all been born right there in Baltimore, free. No one would be looking for them. “Just me and Ma that gotta worry. Don’t you think about this none.”

As for Ma Aku, Jo knew she would never leave Baltimore. Unless she could go back to the Gold Coast, there would be no new countries for her—not Canada, not even Paradise if it existed on Earth. Once the woman had decided to get free, she had also decided to stay free. When he was a child, Jo would often marvel at the knife Ma Aku always kept tucked inside her wrapper, which she’d been keeping inside her wrapper since her days as an Asante slave, then an American slave, then, finally, free. The older Jo got, the more he understood about the woman he called Ma. The more he understood that sometimes staying free required unimaginable sacrifice.

In the other room, Beulah started whimpering in her sleep. The child had night terrors. They came at unpredictable intervals: one month here, two days there. Some days they were so bad she would wake herself up to the sound of her own screams or she’d have scratches along her arms from where she’d fought invisible battles. Other days she slept still as death, tears streaming down her face, and the next day, when asked what she’d dreamed about, she always shrugged and said, “Nothing.”

This day, Jo looked out and saw the girl’s little legs start to move: a bend at the knee, an outward kick, repeat. Beulah was running. Maybe this was where it started, Jo thought. Maybe Beulah was seeing something more clearly on the nights she had these dreams, a little black child fighting in her sleep against an opponent she couldn’t name come morning because in the light that opponent just looked like the world around her. Intangible evil. Unspeakable unfairness. Beulah ran in her sleep, ran like she’d stolen something, when really she had done nothing other than expect the peace, the clarity, that came with dreaming. Yes, Jo thought, this was where it started, but when, where, did it end?

Jo decided to keep his family in Baltimore. Anna was too
pregnant to haul up from the city to which they were all rooted, and Baltimore still felt safe. People kept whispering about the law. A few families even made moves, packing up and heading north for fear that the law would pass. Ol’ Bess who sold the flowers on North Street went. So did Everett, John, and Dothan, who worked on
Alice.

“Damn shame,” Poot said the day three Irishmen walked onto the boat to replace them.

“You ever think ’bout leavin’, Poot?” Jo asked.

Poot snorted. “They gon’ bury me in Baltimore, Jo. One way or another. They gon’ throw my body down into the Chesapeake Bay.”

Jo knew he meant it. Poot always said that Baltimore was a great city to be a black man in. There were black porters and teachers, preachers and hucksters. A free man didn’t have to be a servant or a coach driver. He could make something with his own hands. He could fix something, sell something. He could build something up from the ground, then send it out to sea. Poot had taken up caulking when he was only a teenager, and he often joked that the only thing he liked better than holding a mallet was holding a woman. He was married but he had no children, no son to teach his trade to. The ships were his pride. He would never leave Baltimore.

And for the most part, everyone else in Baltimore stayed put too. They were tired of running and used to waiting. And so they waited to see what would come.

Anna’s belly continued to swell. Baby H was making itself known every day with ferocious kicks and punches to the inside of Anna’s gut. “H is gon’ be a boxer,” ten-year-old Cato said, resting his ear against his mother’s stomach.

“Nuh-uh,” Anna said. “There won’t be no violence in
this
house.” Five minutes later, Daly kicked Eurias in the shins, and Anna spanked him so hard he winced every time he sat down that day.

Agnes turned sixteen and took a job cleaning the Methodist church on Caroline Street, and Beulah relished her new role as oldest child in the house for the one hour of every evening before Agnes returned home from work.

“Timmy say he and Pastor John ain’t going nowhere,” Agnes reported one night. It was August 1850 and Baltimore had taken on a sticky heat. Agnes would come home every night with sweat licking at her upper lip, her neck, her forehead. Timmy was the pastor’s son, and every day Jo and the rest of the family were subjected to Agnes’s reports on what Timmy had thought, done, or said that day.

“So I guess that means you ain’t going nowhere neither?” Anna said with a smirk, and Agnes huffed out of the house. She said it was in search of some chocolate for the kids, but they all knew that Anna had struck a nerve.

Ma Aku laughed as the door slammed. “That child don’t know nothin’ ’bout love,” she said. Her laugh turned into a cough, and she had to bend forward to let the cough fall out.

Jo kissed Anna’s forehead and looked at Ma. “What d’you know ’bout love, Ma?” he asked, taking over the laugh where she left it.

Ma wagged her finger at him. “Don’t go askin’ me what I know an’ don’t know,” she said. “You ain’t the only one who ever touched or been touched by somebody.”

It was Anna’s turn to laugh, and Jo dropped the hand that he had been squeezing, feeling a bit betrayed. “Who, Ma?”

Ma shook her head, slowly. “Don’t matter.”

Two weeks later, Timmy came by the docks to ask Jo for Agnes’s hand in marriage.

“You know a trade, boy?” Jo asked.

“I’m gonna be a preacher like my daddy,” Timmy said.

Jo grunted. He’d been to a church only once since the day he and Ma Aku were kicked out for witchcraft, and that was the day of his own wedding. If Agnes married this preacher’s son, he’d have to go again for her wedding and then who knew how many more times.

The day they’d walked the five miles home from the Baptist church, after Jo had given Mirabel’s father the frog, Jo had cried and cried. Ma Aku had let him carry on for a few minutes, and then she snatched his ear up with her hand, dragged him into an alley, looked at him hard, and said, “Whatchu cryin’ fo’, boy?”

“Pastor say we was doin’ African witchcraft.” He wasn’t old enough to know what that meant, but he was old enough to know shame, and that day, he was full up to his ears with it.

Ma Aku spit behind her left shoulder, something she only did when truly disgusted. “Who tol’ you to cry fo’ that?” she asked, and he shrugged his shoulders, tried to keep his nose from running, for it seemed to make her more angry. “I tell you, if they had not chosen the white man’s god instead of the gods of the Asante, they could not say these things to me.”

Jo knew he was supposed to nod, and so he did. She continued. “The white man’s god is just like the white man. He thinks he is the only god, just like the white man thinks he is the only man. But the only reason he is god instead of Nyame or Chukwu or whoever is because we
let
him be. We do not fight him. We do not even question him. The white man told us he was the way, and we said yes, but when has the white man ever told us something was good for us and that thing was really good? They say you are an African witch, and so what? So what? Who told them what a witch was?”

Jo had finished crying, and Ma Aku scrubbed at the white salt stains along his cheek with the hem of her dress. She pulled him back into the street, dragging him along by the arm and muttering the whole time.

Timmy’s hands were trembling, and Jo watched them shake. He was a lanky, skinny boy with soft hands that had never been burned by hot pitch or callused by a caulking iron. Timmy came from a line of free folk: born and raised in Baltimore to parents who were also born and raised in Baltimore. “If that’s what Aggie wants,” Jo finally said.

The couple married the next month, on the morning the Fugitive Slave Act passed. Anna sewed Agnes’s dress in the night by candlelight. In the mornings, Jo would find her, bleary-eyed, blinking herself awake as she got ready to go to the Mathison house. Baby H was so big in her belly that she could no longer walk without waddling, her feet so swollen that when she shoved them into her work slippers they folded back out and over, like bread that had too much yeast and could not be contained by its pan.

The wedding was at Timmy’s father’s church, and all the female congregants had cooked a meal fit to feed a king, even though there were whispers about Timmy marrying a girl whose folks didn’t attend a church, not even the rival Methodist one across the street.

Beulah stood next to Agnes in a purple dress, and Timmy’s brother, John Jr., stood next to him. Timmy’s father, Pastor John, married them. He didn’t close the usual way, announcing the new Mr. and Mrs. and telling them to kiss, but instead had the congregation reach their hands out toward Timmy and Agnes while he said a blessing. And just as he spoke the words “And all God’s people said,” a little boy ran by the door of the church shouting, “The law passed! The law passed!”

And the answer, “Amen,” came muffled and insincere from some. From others, it didn’t come at all. A few began to squirm in their seats and one even left, getting up so quickly that the whole pew rocked, thrown, as it was, off-balance.

Agnes looked at Jo with a shadow of nervousness hanging behind her eyes, and he looked at her as steadily as he knew how. Then her fear melted away as the collective fear grew. Pastor John finished marrying the couple, and everyone ate the feast that Anna, Ma, and the rest of the women had prepared.

Within a couple of weeks, word came in that James Hamlet,
a Baltimore runaway, had been kidnapped and convicted in New York City. The white folks wrote about it in the
New York Herald
and in the Baltimore
Sun.
He was the first, but everyone knew there would be more. People began moving up to Canada by the hundreds. Jo went to Fell’s Point one week, and what used to be a sea of black faces against the backdrop of the blue-green bay had turned into nothing. Mathison had made sure Jo’s whole family had their free papers together, but he knew others with papers too, and even they had fled.

Mathison spoke to Jo again. “I want to make certain you know what’s at stake here, Jo. If they catch you, they’ll take you to trial, but you won’t get any kind of say at all. It’ll be the white man’s word against no word at all. You all make sure you carry your papers at all times, understand?” Jo nodded.