11928. That spring month it rained almost all the time. From inside, from the windows and doors of my small house, I watched it come down and could not then believe that there could be some place where the rain was worse. I did not learn until months later, when I read of it in paragraphs of a newspaper itself already weeks old, that in other parts of the South there had been tremendous flooding and lives had been lost and that homes and livestock and people had gone floating down rivers that had not been there the day before.

2In the beginning, where I once lived, the rainfall had been so heavy and forceful that small children walking in it would become breathless and begin to cry. And those of us who were much older also had a hard time. That month the old never went beyond their front steps, and they continually talked in whispers and with Bibles clutched in their bony, now weak hands of Noah and how the rainy air could pull the “breathing apparatus” up and out of one’s body.

3Those days when the rain was not so heavy, my mother, face greased and with a starched green bonnet sitting prettily on her head, would go rushing off in the buggy to various farms that surrounded ours. Clinging to either side of her would be my brother and sister, Tom and Cecilia. Watching them ride off with hands dug deep into the back pockets of his overalls, my father would say to himself, “I won’t ever understand why a woman gonna tempt death in a mud drownin’ or pneumonia just to drink somebody else’s coffee, listenin’ to things done and dead long before any of us was thought about.”

4Much later they would return safe. My sister and brother would bounce about the room with pieces of horehound candy in their mouths or some small wooden toy in their hands that they had been given, talking excitedly of the snakes and toads they had seen moving and jumping aimlessly in the mud or of some piece of land that had been washed away. My mother, face dotted with beads of water and her bonnet drooping, would rush in, clearing her throat, shaking her clothes and the patched black parasol, ready to share old stories now hollow, as my father so well knew, from having been dragged out and told and still told again. There was fresh news as well, the kind of news that went on, it seemed, in spite of the rain.

5And throughout that month my father, who never complained out loud though we all knew that each day the world was watered delayed his plowing and planting, would stand quietly at the window, watching as if in absolute disbelief that any God could be so cruel in preventing him from doing what was his life and his pleasure. After a few hours of standing his legs would become tired, and he would pull a chair to the window, sit and continue watching. The days when there was no vigil and when he was not repairing something with his meager tools would find him going through the two hulklike trunks upstairs. The four of us downstairs would watch the ceiling and listen. Metallic, wooden and glass objects would come out of the trunks and for several minutes roll or lay on the floor while he, we knew, inspected each of them for some meaning he had once known but had now lost, childhood things, things he had accumulated in the first years of marriage.

6Once everything was back into its place, he would roam the two upstairs rooms, the floorboards creaking with his movements. He would then come downstairs and sit near his wife, whispering to her about the low prices his tobacco had fetched that past winter, and ask us, his children, the most trivial of questions. In his way he became the house, its peace, its rumbling, its cutting uneasiness. And so we found ourselves silently rejoicing whenever he sat in a corner, with the orange flame of the oil lamp flickering, and read newspapers that were all of two months old, oblivious to my mother’s pleadings that the poor light would be the ruination of his eyes.

7When there was no rain, the land lay like a beaten and exhausted warrior. The sky, threatening, stood mournfully gray, even as all the world itself was the ugliest of grays. Sometimes huge clouds would rush across the sky as if promising clearance and the sun. But while we found some hope in those rainless days, my father never did. On those days everything beyond the walls of our house had the cleanest and sweetest smell, the kind of smell we could be persuaded to believe would last forever. The grass struggled to come up. At night the sky was the brightest of oranges. Inside the dampness of the air made it stuffy and uncomfortable.

8Playing in the mud, when they did not go with my mother, my sister and brother would build morose mud structures on the ground that grew my father’s tobacco, structures that never held together. I busied myself with reading and cooking, with whatever would help me to avoid my restless father.

9That month, as well, I discovered that I, unmarried and therefore doomed, was pregnant. I learned this alone through a combination of mentally regurgitating years of womantalk overheard on still, mosquito-filled summer evenings and by discovering for myself the mystery that had all too soon become me.

10I was 15 in a time that seems part of an entirely different life, of an entirely different woman; I readily and happily accepted the pregnancy, not allowing the morality of it all to bother me. I accepted it as a special challenge, a way of asserting and finalizing the new person I thought and felt I was becoming. The idea of being a mother captivated me, held me. I imagined the changes the child would make in my life, anticipating the responsibilities. In my head I bounced the child, I nursed it, I played with it. I settled into the wonder, defining what that wonder was to be.

11The morning of the Sunday that began the second week of that month, I lay in bed trying to construct some way in which I could tell my parents about the child. The dampness of the room caused the sheets to cling to my arms and legs. For only a few moments I thought of the boy whose name I was already beginning not to remember. He and his family had moved to Richmond only three weeks before. The memories of the four times I lay with him were becoming a small, steadily dissolving mound in my head, as were the memories of such things as the way he talked or the awkward way he swam or childish things we said to each other. I could not imagine myself his wife—a boy not yet man who, however, understood the rules of our relationship long before I knew the game had begun.

12Feeling old, I sat on the side of the bed. Everything—my sister’s old doll, the faintly moving curtains, the small, brown ceramic dog my father had won for me at a fair, the chair covered with clothes—all had a look of forlornness. I felt my stomach, partly expecting it to be large and ripe. It was not raining, but everything was cast in near darkness; a slight wind touched the fragile, drooping leaves of the trees that stood just beyond my father’s fields.

13My father would want everything I had to say to be terse, to the point. He would not want me to try to explain.

14I dressed, made the beds and went downstairs. I did not eat. I sat near the fire reading my father’s newspapers and few tattered books. I knew I would have nothing to say that day or for the next few days. It did not rain that Sunday, nor did it rain the Monday and Tuesday that followed. The rain came again on Wednesday and did not stop until Friday, the day after I told my parents.

15My mother did not cry, though I had believed that she would.

16“Who was it? Isaiah’s boy? That who it was? Him? And he gone?” my father asked that day, knowing before he finished who the boy was.

17“Yes, sir,” I answered softly.

18We sat in the kitchen. I stared into a corner past my father who sat with his hands in his lap, sideways in the chair, not looking at me.

19“Regina, why you gonna go and bring this on us?” my mother whispered.

20“What in hell we gonna do with a baby. You gotta keep up yo’ schoolin’,” my father said. “You aint old enough to take care nobody ’cept yo’self and now I wonder ’bout that. We can’t take care nobody else and that’s that. Yo’ mother got her own babies. You should be gettin’ yo’ schoolin’.” He got up and stood by the window. “The daddy’s took off, leavin’ everything on us, like some dog runnin’ from a chicken carcass he done ravaged.”

21“Regina, are you sure, honey? How can you be sure? How can you know?” my mother asked.

22“I’m sure, Momma. The time done gone. I’m sure.”

23The rain tapped unevenly against the window. The sound of a bell came drifting up through the bottom, and I wondered how any sound could travel through the rain. And for a few moments I imagined bell sounds coming through the watery air, hopping from raindrop to raindrop until they reached our house and settled into our ears. Then I was aware of my father speaking.

24“We can’t have a child, ’specially the child of a child. And that’s all there is to it. You shoulda knowed betta, girl. You shoulda knowed betta. There aint no use talkin’ ’bout the sin of all this. That’s come and gone. You’ll have to take on the worriation of that.” He continued to stare out the window as if he were speaking to someone standing in the yard.

25“Poppa,” I said, “I can raise it. I can do things. I can do whatever I have to do. I can work in somebody’s house, Poppa.”

26I do not even know if he heard me. My mother looked at me as though she had suddenly discovered me. She rested her hands on a piece of cloth she was forever crocheting. I wished Tom or Cecilia would come downstairs, refreshed from their nap, ready to create a few moments of childish chaos.

27“Girl, I got no more words for you. You shoulda knowed. We got too many troubles now,” my father said.

28I could not see what troubles a child could create. I felt there was enough room, enough food.

29“We got to see Miz Jackson come Saturday. See how she could help,” he said finally.

30“Amos,” my mother cried and stood up. “Amos, no.” He turned to look at her, face empty of everything. “Amos.” He turned back to the window for several seconds then sat in his chair and became very still. My mother stood behind my chair and gently pulled my head to her body. Except for the rain and the crackle of the fire, the quiet had returned again. I listened to the sounds of my mother’s body, feeling very tired and uncertain. Her hand, soft in spite of the callouses, made light strokes on my hair and on my cheek.

31I then understood the meaning of going to Mrs. Jackson. Fear and anger gathered in my stomach. I had become accustomed to the idea of having the child. Now my father proposed to change that, to keep me a child. I had not anticipated the difficulty of persuading him to allow me to keep the baby. I was totally unprepared for his saying no.

32I stood up quickly. “Listen!” I said anxiously, “I’m gonna have this baby, no matter what you say. I’m gonna have it!” From somewhere I could see myself speaking, shouting at him for the first time. “I’m gonna. I’m gonna! You can’t do this. You just can’t. . . .”

33“Regina, please,” my mother pleaded. I shrugged off her hands.

34“Poppa!” I shouted, “You hear me now. You listen. I’m gonna have my baby.” If he had turned to face me, I knew he would be turning to yield, that I would have won. But I began to realize that the longer he stayed frozen in his chair, the less my chances were. “I aint goin’ to Miz Jackson,” I screamed. “I’m gonna have my baby! You hear me?”

35I took myself from my mother and wiped my face with my dress. My father did not stir. I went to the stairs.

36“Regina,” my mother called after me, “don’t go up. Please. We can talk. Supper will be on the table soon. You need to eat. Stay.”

37I could sense that my mother was—as much as she could be—on my side. She was hurt at my leaving, and I would have stayed had not I believed that leaving would hurt my father more.

38I went upstairs ignoring my sleeping brother and sister. For a long while I sat on the side of my bed and listened to the rain. Dull shadows hourly changed places about the room until the darkness of the evening came. I lay down, my head a huge block of worrisome thoughts. Later after my brother and sister had gone downstairs, I took off my clothes and lay facing the wall. I did not go to sleep for a long, long time.

39Mrs. Amelia Jackson had been a midwife for more than sixty years. She was a quiet, dark woman who had achieved a great amount of respect. For many years we had been told by the old who were younger than she about the stories she always told, the stories she had brought out of slavery. We had also been told that when the twentieth century came in, she had put away the stories and had not spoken of them again.

40When she was seen riding her buggy alone all knew she was going to a delivery or some emergency that a family could not afford to take to the white doctor in South Boston, Virginia. At other times she could be seen in the buggy crowded with several of her grandchildren, a brood she had inherited after the death of her widowed daughter. Her second husband, standing over her daughter’s grave, had begged her not to take the children, to leave them to “them people at the home.”

41Mrs. Jackson was stern but far from cruel and could not abide a spoiled or unmannerly child. Those of us who played at her place with her grandchildren often saw her moving about the house or yard. She was always doing one thing or another, limping terribly and watching us the whole while as though we were forever in danger of being devoured by that indescribable something that thrived on the bones of children. I had always felt safe at her place.

42She lived more than half a mile south of us, past the group of chestnut trees by whose changes I measured the coming and going of the seasons. That Saturday evening it was drizzling, and the air was cooler than usual. My father and I rode off in the buggy. The hooves of the horse moved soundlessly over the muddy road. Except for school I had not been beyond our farm in many weeks. I was saddened that I should now be going out for the purpose of dealing with my pregnancy.

43My father rode the buggy up to the back of the house, got out and knocked on the door. It opened, and we were let in by Mattie, one of my old friends and one of Mrs. Jackson’s older grandchildren. We exchanged greetings then she returned to a pile of dishes and pans. I was relieved that there was no one else in the kitchen except Mrs. Jackson, who sat at the table sewing and drinking a cup of coffee.

44“Evenin’, Miz Jackson. Hope you been fine,” my father said in a pleasant voice I was not used to. I greeted her and stood near the door.

45“Evenin’. I been fine, Amos. Regina. I hope this weather aint been keepin’ y’all down.” She looked up at us and laid the piece of cloth she was sewing on the table.

46“It’s been really terrible,” my father said looking at Mattie.

47“Mattie,” Mrs. Jackson said watching my father, “them dishes aint gonna get no mo’ cleana and no mo’ put away than they be right now.” Mattie walked away without a word, winking at me and unrolling the sleeves of her dress. From another room I could hear the laughter of children.

48“Miz Jackson,” my father said taking a chair that faced her, “my daughter is in trouble; in the family way. No husband. We can’t take care no baby. My girl needs her schoolin’. I want her to finish school. I come to you to see what you can do.”

49“She don’t look like she ready to go to bed, Amos,” she said seriously glancing at me. “When her time comes, I’ll be ready to help her. You knowed that without having to come out in all this mess.”

50My father shifted in his chair. “I want her to get her schoolin’. My wife aint all that well enough to take care of a baby. We just aint all that able, Miz Jackson. I come to you for help. I have a few dollars. And I’m willin’ to give you a cow if that’s what it takes.”

51“Amos,” she stopped and thought for a moment staring absently into her coffee. “Amos,” she began again slowly, “I’m way pass 80, and I’m tryin’ harder than anybody on this earth knows to not put any bad marks in that Man’s book. When I go before Him, I don’t want that kind of thing in front of my name. And I guess if no ’count was bein’ kept, I still wouldn’t do it. I don’t know, but maybe I done wrong somewhere if you can even come to ask me to do it.”

52“Miz Jackson, I need yo’ help. Please ma’am. I can pay you what little I can. More later if need be. And there’s the cow with many good years left in her yet. I aint askin’ much. . .”

53“But this is much.”

54“. . . Of anybody. My girl needs her schoolin’, her education. We can’t take no baby. I can give you the money.”

55Mrs. Jackson seemed uneasy now. I wanted to sit down but felt my opportunity had passed when I did not sit with my father. Listening to the noise from elsewhere in the house, I longed to be in that room, oblivious, full of play, lost in childish naiveté. My back ached, and I leaned against the wall with my hands behind me feeling the coolness and wooden roughness of the wall.

56“Amos, if I was after that kind of thing, that money would be good just for one day. Tomorrow I’d be afta some mo’ or somethin’ else. I’d do what you want just ’cause it’d help me get through. But that I can’t do. Not for money, not for anything for anybody. And that you shouda knowed too. I don’t think I would do it if He told me. And sayin’ that might be a bad mark by itself.”

57My father stood up and buttoned his coat. “Well,” he said coldly like a man who had somewhere to be by morning and had spent precious hours in a waystation, “I won’t waste no mo’ of yo’ time.”

58He went to the door and opened it. I felt the cool air and tiny dewlike drops of rain rush in. There was now a tiny suggestion of hope that we would return home and I would be allowed to wait out my days.

59Mrs. Jackson limped to the door and put her hand on my shoulder. My father was already in the buggy, reins in his hands.

60“You take care of yo’self, child,” she spoke gently to me, her hand reminding me of a dead squirrel. “Amos,” she called to my father, “you be careful in this weather.” There was no response. She looked at me. “You take care of yo’self, no matter what.”

61I had hoped that she, who seemed to exert so much influence, would have been more forceful, an advocate for my position, and would have asked or rather told my father to allow me to have the baby. I searched her face of sagging, dark brown skin and saw nothing beyond what she had already said. It may well have been then that I began, without knowing until long after she was dead, to see her as a part, however small, however helpless, of the humiliation I was later to feel.

62“Yessum, I will,” I said. “Good night.” I got in the buggy, and we rode on without words, with only the sound of the horse.

63The rain fell silently. Before we were halfway home, we were already drenched.

64Nothing was said to me for several days about the pregnancy or about Mrs. Jackson’s refusal. A small intimation of hope began to grow, and almost in spite of myself I began to sail away on it. In my mind the baby continued to acquire a more solid identity, a certainty, a mischievous child, a self-assured adult.

65The rain continued lightly until that Monday—now the third week of that month—when it stopped, and massive, bright clouds appeared announcing a kind of salvation for the people and land that could take no more rain. As a celebration my father played the Victrola all day.

66The house was full of disembodied spiritual singers and impressive bands that played to an imaginary ballroom of tireless dancers. And he went about preparing himself for the planting that was to come, inspecting his seed and sparse equipment, walking through the fields for the first time in many months. He scrutinized the dirt, tasting bits of it, all the while ignoring the noncommittal clouds.

67Late that Tuesday afternoon my mother came to sit beside me at the kitchen table. “We have to go see Ida tomorrow,” she said calmly.

68“Momma, don’t.”

69“We got to. We just got to go.”

70In some conspiracy, they had betrayed what hope I had had. I thought of protesting again, of barricading myself in my room. I thought of moving to South Boston, finding a job, living. . ., but I had no power and I did not protest. I closed the book I was reading and stared malevolently at her.

71“Please, don’t do that. Please, don’t be that way,” she said. She began to cry. “Please, honey. Don’t be like that. We don’t know what else to do.”

72Just a little more than two years before that month, the new minister of St. Peter’s Baptist Church had come to our community bringing four children and his wife, a woman who was now bedridden and unable to walk. This man, Reverend Williamson, was a tall, light-skinned man of forty, graying and full of a cunning speciousness that no one had detected until he had entrenched himself in that church and in that house behind the church, the house that went with his position.

73In our more idle moments those of us who were young would mock him and his wild preaching, a performance that involved his arms and head swinging, fingers pointing, sweat flooding his face, voice bellowing so loud that all who lived within a fourth of a mile bragged that they could stay home and listen to services.

74Reverend Williamson, insensitive and a “heathen in God’s clothing,” was the most disliked man anyone had come across. Before long most of the parishioners wanted him to give up his post and the house, but he stayed on and would not be moved. More than four years later he died, killed by a shotgun blast by someone waiting for him one dark, cloudy night as he made his way from Ida’s place. By then most everyone was traveling to South Boston for services.

75Since the autumn before, Ida had been keeping company with this man. It was rumored, whispered, that she was the cause of the preacher’s wife’s illness. People, counting on their fingers, would cite the fact that the wife had been able to walk and was well before her husband began seeing Ida. Ida was also a midwife, but because of her reputation and her age, she had not the respect or the business that Mrs. Jackson had. Ida had three sons, two of whom were in the army and sent her money regularly. The third worked for a white man just outside of South Boston, and he came home often, bringing things he had stolen from the white man’s house. Her husband, a carpenter, had died having drunk a bottle of bad whiskey. And of that there were rumors as well.

76It was early evening when Momma and I walked into Ida’s house, a large cabin like all of our houses. An old and scarred organ dominated one corner, and in front of it lay a small white dog. The upper part of the walls were covered with the front pages of picture magazines, making the room seem colorful and artificially bright. The constant rain and the horsehair furniture had given the room a musty, stifling odor. None of us sat. It was apparent that Ida received few visitors.

77“Ida,” my mother began, “I want to ask yo’ help. I know you gonna think this strange to come here out of the blue, and I aint been here in God knows when; rain’s been such a mess. But I didn’t have nobody else to turn to. I can pay you $35, and we can give you a cow if need.”

78“Help? Help for what? Money for what?” Ida asked looking from Momma back to me.

79“My daughter here, Regina,” my mother said, “she done took a bad step. She done got herself in trouble. My husband and me, we don’t want her to have the baby. We need yo’ help; we need you to help her. We can pay as much as we can, Ida.”

80Ida sat down on the sofa with her hands in her lap.

81“Mamie, who told you I do this kinda thing?” she asked my mother.

82“Nobody. Nobody told me, Ida. We went to Miz Jackson, but she won’t do it; she won’t help.”

83“And you figured I would bein’ that I couldn’t help but take her leavins,” Ida said leaning back on the sofa and putting her hands on the back.

84“Momma, let’s go,” I said suddenly frightened. She continued talking as though she had not heard me.

85“Ida, there was nobody else to come to but you. That’s why I came. I didn’t think no such thing what you thinkin’. I just need yo’ help.”

86Ida said nothing for a long time. Her head leaned against the wall covering a picture of a stout woman in a big orange hat riding a bicycle. I stood behind my mother and we both watched Ida intently.

87Looking at me, Ida said, “I don’t want yo’ money. Yo’ cow neitha. I will do just what I can. Don’t want nothin’.” She waited to see what we would have to say. Then she stood up slowly, in control.

88“How far you gone?” she asked me. She would not talk to my mother again.

89“’Bout four months. Maybe five. I’m not that sure.” I had hoped that any amount of time beyond two months would be too much, that we would be rejected, and I would be able to go home.

90She went into one of the back rooms returning with a small bundle covered with newspaper. She opened it and showed me the contents. There was a handful of light green leaves, and mixed in with the leaves was a collection of red dots. The smell of the leaves and dots escaped and it was pervasive. I could not distinguish the musty odor of the room from the same smell that came from the bundle.

91“You just put a pinch of this in yo’ food every meal until you come back here on Saturday. Saturday ’bout two or so. Afternoon.” She spoke without emotion, and I suddenly thought that must be the voice of a midwife.

92I took the bundle obediently and put the paper around it again.

93“Remember,” she said, “Saturday afternoon. You betta bring something to sleep in too. And no food after Friday night. None.”

94I nodded my head, and we left without any more words. I did not cry that day, Thursday, but wept those times I was not asleep on Friday when I stayed in bed all day. There was a light rain that Friday and Saturday and still lighter rain that Sunday and the following Monday.

95The Victrola was not played, and my sister and brother were so quiet that I at first thought they had been sent to my uncle. My mother crocheted while my father worked in the barn. The ground would be drying very quickly, and he was anxious to begin plowing.

96That Saturday morning I put a nightgown in a bag, leaving the beds unmade. Momma and I left saying nothing to my father and the children who were puttering in the barn. The drizzle was so light and sparse that it was almost invisible. The world, its spring awakening having been delayed by the rain, was becoming greener even as we watched, and as we passed, I noticed how full and bright the trees and their leaves had become. It had been only a few weeks before when I could look through their nakedness and desolation to the farm on the other side. Now very little could be seen of the farm. And I knew that the man there, like my father, was preparing himself for the ritual and for the things it was to produce.

97On that bed in one of the back rooms of Ida’s house, I was never certain of anything, not life or death, not feeling or nonfeeling, not when the beginning began nor when the end arrived. I lay there, aware of Ida and my mother and of my body and water sounds and of heat and drowning sweat. The blood pounded in my head, rushing like trains over the ground. Sometime late that afternoon or the next morning I heard a dog. And I will never be sure if it was Idas’s dog standing on my pillow barking in my ear or if it was some dog far away baying at the moon. I was also aware of being in Reverend Williamson’s robes, standing in church and everyone—the preacher, my parents, people—watching me. They stood at the front welcoming me, beckoning me to the front. I made my way down the aisle to the front, and the people to either side of the aisle were pointing at me. They began to push me. The curtains of Ida’s room opened then they closed. Hands touched, the hands of Ida and Mamie. I tried to count them: two here, one here, four here. And there was this dry feeling, so dry feeling, like years and years of death. So I thought this always: this, this is a kind of birth. Everyone knows that. It is a kind, it is a kind. . . .

98My mother was gone when I woke early that morning just before the light of the day came up over the ground and claimed the earth. I watched the sky, the slowly moving clouds and the gentle rain. A silhouette sat in a chair near the window. Gradually, the room became lighter until all the shadows disappeared and the silhouette became Ida.

99“You might be very sore, pained, for a long time. I don’t know for how long but that will pass,” she said as though we had been conversing all along. “You might have to be patient about the pain.”

100I nodded and then looked down to see the blanketed outline of my body. I looked up again and rested my eyes on a lamp on a small table at the foot of the bed, the flame rising and falling.

101“You hungry?” she asked. I simply shook my head. She sat holding a cup of what must have been coffee.

102“You lucky,” she said, as if I had become a queen. “Some of us suffer through those mistakes not just for them nine months but for them years that follow. We aint neva helped. We learn to make our own way. We grow strong ’cause of that, but it’s like some tree that’s been given one good chop and neva cut down all the way. It still stands strong, yet there’s somethin’ ugly that grows out where the chop was. And that place is what everybody sees. You lucky.” She set the cup on the table. “Yo’ mother talks ’bout school and education, and that’s important, even though they mean somethin’ else altogether.”

103I thought of the baby, of how I had imagined it would be. I felt sorrowful and greatly ashamed. I could not remember ever feeling so alone and uncertain. I did not want to leave that bed or that room. I would have liked for someone to come and nail the room shut forever.

104“Everybody feels different about different matters, whether it bes death, a lost man or a baby or seeing old age make a pallet in yo’ front yard,” she said softly. “I know tellin’ you all this gonna pass away one day, don’t do nothin’ for the pain right now. You might even be hatin’ me.”

105She rose from the chair and looked out the window. “The preacher,” she said to herself, “be preaching’ now. I’ll be out here if you need somethin’,” she said as she left the room.

106I went to sleep. When I woke, my mother was there. She asked if I felt strong enough to go home. I said nothing but sat on the side of the bed and stared down at my feet. I did not want to leave, not because I had any fondness for Ida or her house but because I felt too ashamed to leave the room. My mother helped me with my clothes, and though I wanted to, I did not tell her not to touch me. She draped me in two blankets, and we walked into the front room.

107Ida sat on the sofa, bare feet, hair uncombed. “Stay off yo’ feet for a few days,” she said in that midwife voice. “If there’s anything I can do, send for me, Mamie.”

108“Thank you, Ida. You. . .,” she hesitated, “you sure you don’t want the money?”

109“No,” she answered standing. “No money at all.”

110They helped me into the buggy. Ida said goodbye and went back into the house. I fixed my eyes on the slow-moving mare, saying no words and ignoring the words of my mother.

111In the next few days after the ground had dried sufficiently, my father began plowing and fertilizing the fields. I watched from the window of my bedroom. His concentration was intense, and for long hours he moved up and down the land, behind the mule and the plow he had received from his father, spreading fertilizer, oblivious to everything but the furrow before him. Infrequently, when his muscles ached, he would bend over several times, stretch his arms and twist his head from side to side.

112When the plowing was done almost a week later, my parents and my sister and brother began seeding the land. I continued to watch from my window, at first with great detachment. They seemed like a quaint, museum painting. I felt separated from them, seeing them sweating, moving up and down the rows, seed bags around their necks while blackbirds flew above them as the rich brown earth stretched out around them all the way to the clump of trees now green and billowy.

113One evening more than a month after the time at Ida’s, my father came up with my supper. He smelled of the earth. That was his summer smell. I sat on the bed while he stood fingering things on the dresser drawers. He picked up the small brown ceramic dog.

114“You ’member when I won this for you at the fair? You really wanted it. You was six, beggin’ me to get that dog. Paid a nickel for three chances and won it on the second try.”

115“You can take it if you want it,” I said nonchalantly.

116He put the dog down and looked at me with great pain. “No, it always be yo’s. Always. You know that. I won it for you.” He petted the dog’s head and then stopped quickly suddenly aware of what he was doing. He had the look of someone caught doing something not of his nature. “I wanted you to have it; ’sides what would I do with it?”

117“I don’t want it no mo’. You can take it,” I repeated. I had gotten good at tormenting my father and, to a lesser extent, my mother. Still they came to my room; he in the afternoon and evening and she in the morning and at night. For many years the dog had been an important possession, and now I was ready to give it away or destroy it, just to see how much it would hurt him.

118“You know you had her take my baby,” I reminded him.

119He looked at me with that same pained look and left the room. Listening to the sound of him going down the steps, I finished eating.

120When the summer was almost over, I began to go downstairs to do in silence the work I had always done. I had been ready to come down long before, but my parents had insisted that I remain in my room to rest. I had decided that I would not argue with them again.

121The land was good to my father that year. The tobacco grew a dark, pleasing green, and the corn came up tall and self-assured. For several years following the land continued to be generous. But the tobacco he hauled into South Boston each winter to sell brought less and less money, and this reduced the variety of crops he could plant. Returning from that town, he would bring stories of what “that there Depression” was doing to his world. Around him many of his neighbors were being persuaded to sell to wealthy white landowners; they told his neighbors to go North where, in spite of The Depression, there were jobs and plenty. My father never considered selling or moving. He would not leave, he would say, until the ground overnight became cement.

122One snow-falling day more than six years after that month I climbed onto a soot-filled train that took me to Washington. That day my parents and I did not embrace, did not say goodbye and did not promise to keep in touch. We simply parted. I would write, but only to my brother and sister.

123 

1241943. “Listen, if you aint willin’ to see, to admit to yo’ own emptiness, there’s no lessons to be learnt while you’re young,” my aunt said to me almost three weeks after my mother had died. “My grandfather told me that,” she continued. He was twenty-six when he lost his right eye in a fight with a white man. Until he was well up in age he just regretted not killin’ that white man. Then when he got old, he just regretted not walkin’ away before it all got started.”

125Holding my first baby in my lap, I sat in Washington in a stuffed chair that smelled and felt like the one that stood in a lonely corner of Ida’s front room. Examining my aunt’s face, I saw how much she resembled my mother—the set of the jaws, the patient look of the eyes. I rocked my baby and slowly discovered that I had never known my mother’s face until I saw it in the face of her older sister. I had been crying intermittently since her death for a loss and for a sin for which there was now no proper person to confess to.

126“My grandfather, yo’ great grandfather, told me that, and even to this day I can’t remember much else that man told me. I can still see him like he was that mornin’, sittin’ in that ugly rockin’ chair of his that he made, starin’ at me with that one eye, talkin’ to me ’bout lessons and bein’ young—to me, who was young that day and already wise, talkin’ like he expected me to hold on to what he said like it was a piece of gold or somethin’. But it all takes time, like the light of some star that takes years and years to get to you.” She leaned back in that ugly rocking chair and rubbed her hands full of arthritis and pain.

127 

1281974. In three weeks I will be 61. My children have children, and my hair has been gray a long time. I have become patient. Now that there is time, I try to remember when it was that I started to become slower, when my skin became drier, when men stopped watching, when all that is my insides rebelled and were no longer obedient or quiet. Now when there is time, I grasp the small things I ignored long ago. I am thankful, above all other things, that my husband and I still love each other.

129Some mornings I sit in a tiny park on Massachusetts Avenue in Southeast, reading. Yesterday I stuffed as many old letters from my brother as I could in my pocketbook and sat reading his chronicles of that place I cannot help but call home.

130Today he wrote that my father is ill, a further complication of the two strokes he has already suffered. I carry with me the image of the last time I saw him, one year of so ago, almost completely paralyzed, sitting on the porch of that house, watching my brother tend the fields that he once struggled with, able only to watch and nothing more. He enjoys sitting with the transistor radio blaring, the same radio I gave him for Christmas 1970. Far down within me I feel a sense of joy at seeing him in that sad state.

131Since my mother’s death, I have always been apprehensive about returning home. Now there is a warm anticipation and fear. I ask myself if I am strong enough to talk with him as I had before that spring month; but perhaps we are far too old for that. There are what Mrs. Jackson once called “time walls, and time walls are the biggest things in these parts.” But tomorrow I will go home and stay for as long as I am able.

132My brother’s letter reminded me of Mrs. Jackson and her death some five years after my mother’s. I had always seen her, Ida, and my parents at the center of that one horror. When I visited her gravesite, when many of the people in that place could no longer remember her name, I was no longer certain of what I felt. I knew only that it was not hate. Perhaps I had reserved all of that for my father. Perhaps too I now felt for the first time more powerful than he, belonging to myself alone, and with that there was probably no more need to hate him.

133The letter reminded me also of the one my brother sent 15 years before. Ida, he had written, had gone insane. There were days when she would stand naked on her porch and talk to the multitudes of people who were not there. She would dance and sing for them. She would arrange the seating order so that all could see her and see her well. Every so often the young boys would come by and whistle and applaud. But them she was beyond seeing. On other days she would sit in a corner and pull her hair out and scream about the children who wanted to kill her. The people of that community tolerated her for a while because it was, after all, only Ida; but their toleration eventually waned and Ida was not funny anymore.

134One day two of her sons arrived to take her to Petersburg. My brother said no more about her, knowing that a Virginian would know Petersburg as the place where they took the insane. As children we played on hills and looked down to where we thought Petersburg to be, imagining it as a town populated exclusively with the insane, without doctors or nurses or keepers to watch over them. Then in our minds it was an ugly place, and the people who had lost their minds roamed the streets, ate what they wanted of the garbage, slept with crickets and Junebugs, and what is more, they had no future. I read the letter many times. I pitied Ida and tried to find reasons for her insanity. I wanted to cry, but as with such things as that—with all of us—I could not. Finally, I thought of how Petersburg, for me, had lost its wild and sad nature, had become a place I could somewhat accept. It grew buildings and nurses and keepers and took on a more pleasant reality. Still I could not help but continue to see the insane walking as I had always imagined them, strolling with eternal, mocking smiles and with plastic sunflowers in their dirty hands, walking into trees and into one another because their eyes could not tell them the truth.

 

Edward P. Jones on the Story (May 2024)

135My mother died January 1, 1975. Lung cancer. As best I could, I had been taking care of her, no job, no girlfriend, nothing except caring for someone who had been the center of my whole life. So, with her death, I had nothing to tether me to Washington, D.C., where I had been born and raised.

136The parents of a college roommate offered to house me in their place in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The mother of that college roommate turned out to be not a particularly nice person, over all. I was new to being an orphan (I was 24 years old). Do not ever become an orphan, especially in West Philadelphia.

137While in “Philly,” in a nice second-floor room of that roommate’s parents’ home, I began to think of the story that would become “Harvest.” I do not know where it came from, certainly nothing my mother would have ever shared with me. It might have been born out of grief and an effort to recreate in my imagination the Southern world that had produced my mother.

138I wrote the story in a matter of weeks, certainly no more than a month. Over the years, I had read short stories in Essence magazine and thought almost all of them were bad, horrible writing, so I decided to submit “Harvest” to Essence, using that Philadelphia address. I didn’t own a typewriter and I don’t believe the people in that Philadelphia house owned one. I don’t recall how I got the story typed up, because I certainly wouldn’t have sent it off in long-hand writing.

139I was in Philadelphia from January to June, when I returned to Washington. From that June 1975 to September 1976, I stayed with friends of my mother, but I was also homeless for some time, staying in a mission house with dozens of other homeless men.

140I heard nothing from the people in Philadelphia until they forwarded a notice from Essence that not only had it accepted “Harvest,” but the story was coming out that next month. Apparently, Essence had been writing to me in Philly all along but those people never bothered to send me the earlier notices.

141I was paid $400, a grand sum back then, but I would have been happy with far less. For about a month I could walk into any Peoples drug store and see that issue of the magazine on the stands. I could see it and so could the world.