The Black Rose (15 page)

It was a long walk to where Moses lived south of the railroad, near Cherry Street, and he carried Sarah’s meager belongings in a sack on his back: her folded-up dresses, her Bible from Lou, her photograph of Papa, the five dollars Lou had snatched, and the wooden bowls and quilt Miss Brown and the ladies had given them as wedding gifts. He whistled all the while he walked, gently tugging her hand. Sarah could feel Moses’ pulsebeats in his long, clammy fingers. Or was that her own heart racing? Moses tried to begin conversations with her about how nice Miss Brown’s house was, but Sarah was unable to so much as grunt back at him, so he gave up on talking to her. They walked most of the way in silence, and Sarah felt as though she was moving farther and farther away from everything she knew.

The houses near the railroad were built close together, and they were in poorer condition than the ones where Mr. William Powell lived. Many of the houses had tin roofs, wooden walls with large spaces between the planks, chickens in the yards, and goats tied to wooden posts. There were no sidewalks or gas lamps to light the streets, so it was very dark by the time Moses pointed to a little house at the end of the row of shacks.

“I know this look like catfish row out here, but there it go,” Moses said, sounding slightly dispirited. “Mine ain’t nothing like Miss Brown’s, but it got two rooms, a cookhouse an’ outhouse in back, an’ it keep warm in wintertime.”

The house was built of brick, at least, Sarah noticed, but it also had a tin roof, and the patch in front was overgrown with weeds and wild grass nearly four feet high. Moses had chickens in front of his house, too, behind a wooden fence. Gazing at the house that was now her home, Sarah felt nothing at all. A strange numbness had spread inside of her, which grew as she heard the rumbling of an approaching train and its deafening whistle on the nearby tracks. The noise drove all the thoughts out of her head.

Inside, the front room was small, crammed with a rocking chair, a fireplace, and a pinewood table and two chairs that looked homemade, but sturdy. There was also a small braided rug on the hardwood floor that was very faded, but added a comfortable touch. A well-kept banjo stood against the wall in the corner. There were two windows in the front room, but no curtains. The more Sarah studied the room, the more it reminded her of her family’s little cabin in Delta. Feeling nostalgic, Sarah sighed a small sigh.

“I figger on gittin’ better work ’fore too long,” Moses said, mistaking her sigh for displeasure. “We gon’ move to a better street then, not right up on the train yard. I know them big boys is loud comin’ through, but you gits used to it.”

Next Moses showed Sarah the back room, which was much smaller still, with only room enough for his sleeping-mattress on the floor and a wooden bureau against the wall. This room had no window, so he had to bring in a lamp so she could see. As soon as he followed her inside the doorway of the small room, Sarah felt trapped. The neatly pulled blankets on the bed looked ominous to her.

“This where we gon’ sleep,” he said, his voice rumbling a bit in his throat.

Sarah didn’t answer. Without realizing it, she’d hugged her sack in front of her.

Moses’ hands went to Sarah’s shoulders, and he began to rub them. Sarah’s entire body felt as if it had turned to rock, and her head tensed back. After a moment, Moses pulled his hands away. She could feel the warmth of his body behind her, but he didn’t move to touch her.

Moses sighed, and she smelled his breath wash over her. “How old you said you was, Sarah Breedlove McWilliams?” he asked her. Her new name sounded like a lie to her ears.

“Fo’teen,” Sarah said, a whisper. It was the first word she’d spoken to him since she’d become his wife.

“Fo’teen, fo’teen …” Moses murmured. “Well … there’s all kinds o’ fo’teen. Some girls ready to marry when they’s twelve, an’ some still ain’t ready when they twenty. Ain’t that right?”

Not turning to look at him, Sarah slowly nodded. She felt herself bracing for him to touch her shoulders again.

“I know you ain’t axe me, but you wanna hear sum’pin I think?” Moses said.

Sarah didn’t move or speak in response.

“To my mind, the kinda fo’teen you is ain’t ready for no husband.” Was he going to send her back to Mr. William Powell’s? Sarah turned around to look at Moses, and she saw that his features were gentle, free of anger. His eyes bored into hers. “Naw, you ain’t heard me wrong,” he said. Very slowly, he raised his fingertips to her chin and rubbed her skin with his thumb. But when he lifted those same fingers toward her hair, Sarah felt herself angling her head away. She was ashamed of her dry, coarse hair, which she’d covered the best she could under the lacy veil Miss Brown had made her. She also couldn’t bear the thought of Moses touching her that way.

“Lemme tell you what I’m thinkin’ ’bout,” Moses went on, moving his fingers back to her chin. “We legal-wed now, an’ you belong to me, and can’t no man whip on you no mo’ ’less he ready to die. That what you wanted, right?”

Sarah nodded, but she felt her eyes stinging. Maybe it wasn’t fair that she’d married Moses for that reason, since his eyes plainly told her he wanted much more from her.

“So … you gon’ live here, an’ you gon’ cook fo’ me an’ wash my clothes, an’ you gon’ work at the laundry fo’ Miss Brown ’til I gits better wages. An’ I only got this one little room what to sleep in, so we gon’ both sleep in here. I’ma let you sleep in my bed tonight, an’ I’ma fix myself a spot in the corner, yonder,” he said, pointing to a bare spot next to the bureau. “Come mornin’, I’ll fix sump’n diff’rent so’s we both got ’nuff room. You’ll sleep on yo’ side, I’ll sleep on mine. An’ I’ll tell you why: You ain’t ready fo’ no husband yet, an’ I seed that from the start. You still too much a child. But I’m a man, see, an’ I can’t be sleepin’ close to you ’cept to think like you a woman. So we ain’t gon’ sleep close, not to start. An’ you keep yo’self covered up, cuz I can’t be lookin’ at no woman’s body I can’t touch. You hear?”

Stunned, Sarah nodded, her lips falling apart as she gazed up at Moses. Was this some sort of trick? Did he plan to take her by force after she fell asleep?

But in his eyes, she saw the answer was no. And she also knew, beyond a doubt, that Jesus had answered her prayer and given her a good man, after all. She hoped she could grow to love Moses the way she thought he must love her, even though she couldn’t quite explain to herself why in the world he did. Had she ever shown him a single proper kindness?

“You s-sorry you married me?” Sarah asked in a small voice, feeling unworthy of Moses.

Moses grinned. “Course not, li’l gal,” he said. “I know you mine, even if’n you don’ know it yo’ own self yet.”

Sarah Breedlove McWilliams finally allowed herself to smile.

Chapter Seven

1885

Once Sarah decided she was ready to be touched, Moses could hardly touch her enough. Her body, which until then had served only as a tool to enable her to accomplish her endless array of tasks, became something entirely new beneath her husband’s fingertips. After a year and a half of sleeping apart, Sarah had overcome her childlike timidness one night and slipped inside the blanket beside her sleeping husband, nestling her curves against him. In part, she’d gone to Moses because she’d heard Lou’s voice in her head, warning her that a man would always seek elsewhere what he didn’t get at home, and Moses had made it no secret that he occasionally visited a saloon or two that had reputations as brothels. But more than that, Sarah was drawn to the dark smoothness of Moses’ skin, the mystery of his lanky muscles that had grown taut and solid since he’d begun doing more heavy lifting, and that unnameable glow she felt from him that had ultimately sparked slowly and steadily within her. She’d wanted to feel him lock his arms around her. That night, for the first time, she’d
needed
his touch.

Methodically, with the same patience he’d demonstrated during the time they’d slept apart, Moses ran his fingertips across Sarah’s skin and followed their inflamed trail with his warm, broad mouth. His hands, made so rough from the extra work he’d been able to find at the coal yard, never felt rough because he used such a feathery touch. And when he thrust himself inside her, his eyes squeezed tight, Sarah felt a completeness that was bigger than herself, at once ecstatic, comforting, and even frightening. This feeling had been absent so long, how could she bear it if she lost it again?

By the time she was seventeen, Sarah felt she was thriving with Moses. The life she had with him was by no means easy, but it felt good, better than anything she had felt since her parents died. Selling fried fish together—with Sarah’s tasty preparation and Moses’ loud, spirited calls—they earned nearly half as much on the weekends as they did at their regular jobs the other five days of the week. They’d moved into a bigger house on Main Street farther from the railroad tracks, just as Moses had promised; this one also had only two rooms and a kitchen out back, but the rooms were bigger, allowing for a wardrobe and the rough pine bed frame and headboard Moses built himself to give Sarah a proper bed for the first time in her life.

Their new house was only two streets from Lou’s, so Sarah’s sister visited much more often. Sarah cherished the evenings when Moses wasn’t too tired to pick up his banjo and pluck out cheerful melodies for her, Lou, and little Willie; no sooner than he’d been able to stand up on his own, her nephew had stomped his tiny feet on the floorboards and tried to dance. “Look like he tryin’ to do the cakewalk!” Moses said. All the while, Sarah marveled at how he could get his long fingers to move so quickly and with such precision on the cheerful instrument. Moses sang for Willie, too, although his voice cracked when he held a note.

Those were the good times, although there were plenty of bad times, too. Sarah’s husband was as opinionated as she was, and they argued freely when their viewpoints clashed, although Sarah had long since figured out that Moses would never raise his hand to her the way Lou had predicted. The worst times, to Sarah, were when Moses found himself out of work. During those times, he sank into brooding silences that could last for days, when he would barely acknowledge Sarah when she spoke to him. He vanished for days at a time in his search for employment, which led Sarah to screaming fits when he returned because his absences terrified her. He avoided answering Sarah’s questions unless he could give her the good news that he’d found someone doing some hiring for weeks or months at a time, whether it was at the railroad yard, helping to build roads, driving wagonloads of cargo to neighboring towns as a teamster, or on a distant plantation picking cotton. The work always showed up as if by a miracle because Moses could do so many things, but it could never be relied upon. Sarah and Moses were always just a step ahead of their landlord, struggling to pay their more expensive rent.

Moses told Sarah he’d thought about applying to be a Pullman porter, but he didn’t want to spend so much time away from home. “Not with this baby comin’,” he said, nuzzling his chin into Sarah’s protruding belly. “I hear some o’ them porters talkin’ ’bout how they don’t git no time for sleep, and gotta run ’round after them trains so fast they hardly git home. They young’uns don’t hardly know who they is when they come in the door. My son gon’ know
me
.”

Sarah was expecting her child at any time; she spent at least a couple of hours a day lying on her back because she ached so much from the extra weight, and her feet felt like swollen sausages. “How you know this a son?” she said playfully. She stroked Moses’s short-trimmed hair, envying him for the way his hair felt so woolly and soft beneath her hand.

“Course it’s a son! I tol’ you I speck six big ol’ boys.”

“An’ one girl,” Sarah reminded him.

“I don’t ’member sayin’ nothin’ ’bout that. One purty gal in the house is ’nuff for me.” Then Moses’ face grew somber as his mind wandered. “My sons ain’t gon’ live like we is. This town gon’ make room for colored folks to make a good wage jus’ like white folks do.”

“Unh-hnh.” Sarah knew Moses was headed toward another of his political rants, and his defiant talk always made her uneasy. She was afraid her husband was setting himself up for useless rage and disappointment, like so many men and women she’d known who ranted for a time and then slowly accepted their lot.

“Slav’ry been dead an’ gone since sixty-five. Here we is all these years later—I mean, been
twenty
years, Sarah—an’ white folks still actin’ like we slaves, like we s’posed to do what they say do. An’ niggers still moanin’ ’bout they forty acres, waitin’ on the gov’ment. Ain’t nobody gittin’ no forty acres, an’ niggers best look to how they gon’ get it
theyselves
. They best learn to speak up an’ make some fuss.” As he spoke, growing more impassioned, the two days’ worth of whiskers on his chin tickled Sarah’s belly.

Sarah sighed. In the past few months, two or three of Moses’s friends had begun stopping by the house after suppertime to sit at the table and complain to Moses about Vicksburg politics. Unfair arrests for vagrancy. All-white hiring policies for hotel porters and railroad mail agents. The beatings of Negro leaders. The lack of Negroes in elected office. Sometimes Sarah heard their angry voices at the table late into the night, long after she’d gone to bed. Their complaints only filled her with hopelessness. White folks had always been running the country, so what could a few Negroes do about it now? It might be a hundred years before Negroes had anything at all, Sarah thought, and they might not have anything even then.

Moses stopped talking, rubbing circles around Sarah’s navel, as if he’d heard her thoughts. “You think I’m jus’ blowin’ wind, huh?” he said. “You think I oughta be happy with what crumbs the buckras toss out? An’ speck no diff’rent for that young’un you carryin’?”

“I ain’t said that. I jus’ don’t like talkin’ ’bout it.” In truth, she wanted to tell Moses she was afraid he might end up in jail, or worse, for spouting his ideas so loudly.