The Wilful Daughter (2 page)

But they hated him too.

William Brown had done everything he had ever wanted, things they said couldn’t be done by a big black man with a half Indian wife in the south. Some thought he was dumb, there are those with the theory that the bigger the man the smaller the brain. But Brown could swing a hammer with those large arms and huge hands and then figure out how much you owed him to the penny in his head, no paper, no pencil just more brains than should have been given to one man. It wasn’t supposed to be that way for the son of a son of a slave, but there it was. The common man, the Blacksmith, a colored man breaking all the rules. That alone was enough to make most people hate him.

The Blacksmith had his rules too. Rules that had to be obeyed by his daughters and by the gents, when there were some, that called on them. Education was the top of his list. The Blacksmith himself had never seen the inside of a school and yet each of his daughters finished secondary school and went on to college. He read a book almost every night, devouring each novel, each history, each volume of whatever he had read as if it were life sustaining nourishment. Not many people knew where he had learned to read. They knew that from the day he was ten and as tall and as wide as a fully grown man, he had been in the fields and then at the forge. No white man in his right mind was going to teach a big buck like that to read when he could be out working the muscles in his arms that God gave him to use.

And, besides all that, most of the people wanted to know when did he have the time making barrels of money swinging that hammer from dawn to dusk to put stock in what he read in the paper?

Perhaps because of his own menial upbringing, he would allow no field hand near his daughter. His first measure of a man was by his hands. One shake and William Brown could feel the size (too large, too small, too rough, or too smooth) and tell where you had spent most of your life.

He valued education, but for the most part he found teachers and professors did not make enough, unless they employed their knowledge outside the classroom to more lucrative ventures. As for ministers, well, he was a Christian and his faith was strong, but he did not favor them much. Outside the pulpit he found them to have the morals of a snake and any young one that came near his daughter was just itching for trouble. He believed that men of God should be like Catholic priests: chaste, wifeless and childless. Their minds dedicated only to the works of the Lord.

The few colored businessmen that lived in the small polite society of high yeller coloreds in Atlanta, the ones who owned property and had skin tones lighter than brown paper bags he deemed worse than carpetbaggers. They would not associate with anyone his dark brown color except him. And their reasoning was simple logic to them: how can a colored man make it in the white man’s world if he looks and associates with those who look like his African ancestors? The Blacksmith had fair daughters who could pass for white and he had more land and money than any of them. Didn’t he want to better himself, meet with them once a week for tea and talk about the colored man’s burden of the underclass, the darkies? No, he had once told those uppity fools. He was one of the laboring darkies. And didn’t most of them owe back taxes, money to white folks and money to him? He didn’t need these light skinned people with a few acres of land and a good education and no love of their fellow man.

So the daughters from time to time had few if no callers at the large breezy house.

Most people thought his daughters hated him too.

Now if you walked into the Blacksmith’s house at any time of the day or night you would find that only two people in the world loved the Blacksmith unconditionally. His wife Bira whose life she felt she owed to him and the one person in the world that the Blacksmith could seldom admit he loved his crippled son. The boy was barely nineteen and had never worked or walked a day in his life. Because of this boy the Blacksmith would never have someone to carry on his work to carry on his name. Sometimes when he looked at his son’s withered limbs he longed for the boy’s death. Not because he didn’t love him but because the boy suffered terribly in the winter from the cold, longed to be able to run with the others in the spring, and in the morning when he dragged himself to the breakfast table to eat with his father and his sisters he wished that he could climb into the wagon and go to the shop with him. He had said once, as a child: “Papa, can I go with you today and watch you work?”

The Blacksmith, not wanting to hurt the boy’s feelings but wanting him to understand the situation, told him, firmly: “Son, it don’t make any sense for you to take that hard, bumpy ride with me to the shop. Shouldn’t waste your time watching what you can’t do, what you can’t be. Son, you stay here with your mother and paint some more of your pictures for the house. We need you to do that.”

Despite this reaction, William Brown the Second showed his father no malice. He painted his paintings: house, people, trees, flowers. He cut the wood and made his own frames. His father would always smile at what his son had made but would never say it was wonderful that he was talented. He just wished the boy would understand that he didn’t expect half a man when he was born.

The blacksmith shop was to be named Brown and Son. On the day the boy came into the world William Brown had the sign made. But the doctors forbade Brother to even go out in the coolest of weather for fear of a chill, and in the warmest of weather in fear of the extreme southern heat. And although the boy painted lovely pictures and read as much as he could, it had never dawned on William Brown that his son was gifted in the art of finance. Having inherited his father’s talent for numbers the son’s talents could get him a job in the office of some local merchant, legs or no legs. It was Brother who kept the record of household expenses -Bira said the numbers hurt her eyes. Once a week he went over all accounts with his father. For this job the Blacksmith overpaid his son. The boy knew better than to ask if he could try to go to school or get some other work because William Brown, the big and powerful blacksmith that white men respected and colored men feared, seldom allowed the boy out of the house. Instead he made sure the boy was happy reading everything that he wanted and painting the most wonderful pictures. For this the boy loved him and sided with him in almost everything. This was his only chance, he saw through his father’s eyes, to be a man.

On any day save Sunday you could hear the beating against the anvil at least a mile away. If you came near the shop you saw him, this big black hulk of a man, covered with sweat, smelling of metal and dust, muscled arms, and large calloused hands banging out things that most folks had to look at and wonder how. For thirty five years he had remained there in his shop working for white people for a lot, black people sometimes for free. Hammering out on that anvil a tune that nobody else could play. And if it stopped for a long time mid day you knew one of the Blacksmith’s daughters had brought him lunch or he was making a deal with someone about buying some land.

The Blacksmith had learned from the Indians that nobody was supposed to own the land. That it belonged to all and in a sense he agreed. But he had to live in the white man’s world, he told them, not the Indian world and he had to get as much land as he could get. “A man is the land he owns. Land is what a man is,” he had learned in his youth from a mother who never owned any.

When he and his wife had left Alabama those years ago the first thing he did after getting settled in a little shack at the edge of the colored community was to scout out a piece of land. A piece of land big enough for a house and a shop. He had saved his money and wanted to move as quickly as he could on building a house for his precious Bira.

But the price of land overwhelmed the Blacksmith. He couldn’t afford more than a half acre, and that half acre was something no one else wanted. Couldn’t farm it, wasn’t big enough to have a big family spread.

The Blacksmith, being practical, decided to slow down. He went to his wife and asked her if she would mind putting off having children for a year, maybe two at the most. She agreed to it. He asked her, nervously because he wasn’t sure if it was appropriate and frankly because he knew that beating around the bush made no sense, if she knew of ways to not have babies for a while. She smiled sweetly and told him yes.

For two and a half years the Blacksmith worked on that half acre where nothing could grow. He built a one bedroom house on it. Six days a week he worked coming home each night to good cooking and meals from his wife’s loving hands. With his consent Bira took in washing from the line men and porters and other colored people that didn’t have time to do their own. It made them feel important.

This was the only money that was used for food and clothes. The rest of the money, the money he earned went into saving for land. William and Bira Brown worked like slaves to accomplish their dream - having their own land and a home one day.

Two and a half years later he found the perfect piece of land. All sorts of fruit trees grew on it. Had only one house and it was as dilapidated as it was old. The colored man who owned it sold to Brown quickly, afraid since he was up there in years and didn’t have a family to look after him, that “they” would take it away from him. Brown understood. The man was alone. And alone and colored in the south on any piece of land was dangerous. Might wake up dead one of these mornings and “they” would say, to anyone who asked, that “they” owned it.

He brought Bira to see it. To see the bushes and trees and fields of wild berries.

“
Children should play here,” she said happily. “Lots of children.”

“
Yes, Bira,” he smiled. “We have our land and it is time.”

But what she said next surprised him. “Other people’s children, William. This place needs families, lots of families.”

And that’s what gave the Blacksmith the idea.

He asked the old man to stay on the land and allow the Blacksmith to look after him. It was his right. He built his shop there, then his house. He put a dirt road right down the middle of the property, a road coming in from the main one. After all this was done he subdivided the land.

William Brown had people come and look at what he had done. In the heart of Atlanta, he designed a little colored town.

At one end of the property were the church and the reverends house. At the other end was the mortician. In between were the living- houses, a shop and a general store. It was the late 1800’s and nobody could believe that he, a colored man, was doing this.

He rented the land and saved the money he got from the rents to buy more land.

At the end of three years his first child was born and he decided that she would always have land. He set aside fifty acres for her husband to receive on the day she would be wed. Then he decided he would set it aside for all his children. Fifty acres, a hundred if he could, but at least 50. And money, a nice fat dowry. Money for the children’s families to have a nice house built and some nice furniture. Money for the children’s education, for their clothes, for doctors. Money maybe to travel places. If a man married into a family like this, a family of land and wealth where everything was taken care of, the future provided for, the love of family about him, surely he would want to stay with that family and keep the land in that family forever. No need to move north and suffer in the cruel cold.

Now some folks heard about this and said the Blacksmith was trying to be white. By the time his baby daughter got grown he would have lost that land to taxes, to “them” or drunk it all away. Others heard about the dowry the Blacksmith set aside for his daughters and didn’t laugh for they wanted to dream with him. He worked as hard as ten men, and they couldn’t. But they could put aside a little every week so that when their boy got older he could go to Morehouse. Or their daughter could go to the Carolinas and go to Bennett College.

The Blacksmith made them see there was a future for them if they followed some of the white folks’ ways. Those that rented land from him and understood what he was saying asked if they could build their own houses, bigger nicer houses for their families. The Blacksmith felt proud that he had encouraged them to think like him, so he said yes. After the houses were built, and they had saved some more money they asked if he would sell them the land.

At first he didn’t want to sell. This was his land, his idea. But Bira told him that he had lots of land and could get more.

“
Sell them the land they live on,” she told him as they sat on their porch and looked out at the world he had created. “Sell them the fig trees and the honeysuckle bushes and the ponds and the dogwood trees. Then they will feel like neighbors, like friends.”

The young, proud Blacksmith had responded: “How are they going to be my friend when we don’t have anything in common?”

Bira gave him a loving look. “You’ll have something in common. You’ll be colored men with land.”

By the time Fawn was born, he had donated some land to the church, moved his shop away from his home and sold every other piece of property on the block. He had neighbors and friends because of this. He had neighbors and friends because of Bira.

And he bought land, always more land.

But with the land and the money one question remained on everyone’s lips: where were the husbands for his daughters?

CHAPTER TWO

No matter what the rest of the country said, something good had to come out of the South. Especially out of Atlanta. After all, God had blessed her with rich soil, bright blue skies, sweet smelling dogwoods, peach and pecan trees forever in bloom and big fir pines that blanketed the land like a spread of emerald jam. Out of these mornings, every morning except Sunday, you could hear the whistle of the 6:55 from the North, traveling all night stopping in Atlanta with passengers disembarking from the white and colored cars with sleep still fresh in their eyes. Over at Morris Brown College the first morning bell signaled the start of a new day in an area of town where life was hard, the work harder, but the desire to survive greater than both. And if you were still, if you could get above the sound of your neighbor’s kettle screaming to be rescued from the heat, the bacon or the fatback frying in that black iron skillet that lived on your mother’s stove, or arguing with the woman next to you telling her to get up and get you some coffee, you might hear the Blacksmith hit the first lick on his anvil, cracking the steel into the crack of dawn.