The Twelve-Mile Straight. Eleanor Henderson
wasn’t a miracle, some thought, just a disgrace.
But mostly people believed. Folks in Cotton County were believers. They believed in Jesus foremost, and every holy cow and sheep in the barn he was born in. They believed in the Promised Land. It was far away, the Promised Land, on the other side of the world, but they believed that Jesus meant for them to be here, in Georgia, in the land of cotton, their own Promised Land, hard as times were. Jesus and Mary and Joseph were their people, country people suffering under the sun, and the people of Cotton County would be redeemed. They believed in Redemption, that their losses on battlefields, their losses in cotton fields, would be remembered and repaid in the Kingdom of Heaven. They believed in the Commandments. They believed in work, and rising early, and the crops in the field, and the rain that nourished them, never did they believe in the rain more, now that there wasn’t enough of it. They believed in progress, in automobiles and airplanes, and a few of them in the tractors that sat like jungle beasts in their barns. They believed in Charles Lindbergh. They believed in Ty Cobb. They did not believe in Herbert Hoover, but they prayed for him. They believed in prayer, and praise, and warm meals, in the kindness of strangers. They believed in their neighbors. They believed in Georgia, its clays and creeks, in the heavenly mists that drifted over the fields in the morning. They believed in ghosts—for what was the Almighty but the Holy Ghost?—and they believed in miracles. They believed in an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. Getting caught not believing was like getting caught with your hand in the collection plate. “Any faithless fool tells you your babies ain’t kin,” Juke said to Elma, “you tell them the only sin the Lord don’t pardon is the sin of nonbelieving.”
So they believed that the babies were twins. Because if they didn’t believe, then they didn’t believe Genus Jackson was one of the daddies. They’d have to believe that the daddy was someone else. They’d have to believe that a mob of white men killed a black man for no reason. And they couldn’t believe that.
Except the black folks. They knew what their white neighbors were capable of. They believed in the same things the white folks believed in, except they didn’t believe in the white folks. (Some of them didn’t believe in Georgia. Some of them believed the only Promised Land lay north.)
Except they didn’t believe in outsiders, either. Neither the white folks nor the black folks believed in outsiders. None of the folks, black or white, knew Genus Jackson. If they had, maybe one of them would have been seen crying on a porch, or writing a letter to Walter White, or taking up a collection for a funeral.
So even Ezra and Long John and Al believed the story that was told. They sat on their stools at Young’s and talked it over. Ezra said, “Boy done come to the wrong town.”
Long John said, “Never did like that hunchback boy.”
Al, who was the oldest, who had sons of his own, said, “He all right. He just a poor child of the Lord. Poor child done fell for the wrong white girl.”
He’d been lucky while he was alive, Ezra said, he’d been treated too good, put up in that shack without paying a penny. Besides, the boss gave them a pint of liquor every harvest, and his daughter, at Christmas, she made them pies.
THERE WERE FOURTEEN BOOKS IN THE BIG HOUSE. THE THREE Bibles, including the babies’. The family Bible, marked with the birthdays and deaths of Jessa as well as Ketty, was kept on the mantel, where it collected the yellow light of the fire, and from which Elma read a passage aloud at the table each night. There was a book of fairy tales by the brothers Grimm. A book of poems by Edgar Allan Poe, a gift from Elma’s schoolteacher, Miss Armistead. The Farmers’ Almanac (each January the old edition went out to the privy). And a children’s encyclopedia, in eight illustrated volumes, called The Book of Knowledge, which Juke had bought for Elma’s birthday from the rolling store when it was a good year for cotton. If Nan hid a volume of the encyclopedia inside her corn-shuck mattress, nobody missed it, least of all Juke.
In a house full of secrets, one of the first was between Nan and Elma. The winter Nan was six and Elma was ten, their throats began to ache in the middle of the night. Juke looked in Nan’s mouth and saw her throat was coated with what looked like gray putty. He thought it was a clump of clay she’d eaten. Then he looked in Elma’s mouth and saw hers was the same. The next morning he drove them into town, to Dr. Rawls’s office, and the doctor said it wasn’t dirt but diphtheria. Juke carried Elma into her exam room, then carried them both into the colored room so Elma could talk for Nan. “She’s got the chills.”
“How do you know?” asked the doctor.
Elma shrugged. “She told me.”
They had their own way of talking, even then, their own system of signs. Elma knew how to watch Nan and guess what she meant, like a game of charades. Elma guessed, and Nan nodded. It was that first time when they were quarantined in a shack behind the house that Elma taught her to read. She’d put on a bonnet, because that’s what her schoolteacher Miss Armistead wore, and if Elma couldn’t be a farmer like her daddy, she wanted to be a schoolteacher. Nan would trace the letters in her tablet with a pencil, repeating each one in her head. No one bothered with them there. Nan’s mother, Ketty, who couldn’t read herself, passed them their meals through the window, and when spring came and Juke looked again into their mouths and declared them cured, he burned the shack to the ground, the tablet with it, but the letters stayed in Nan’s head. They were three months in the shack, and three months Elma was out of school.
So while Elma read Juke the morning news, or a letter from his people in Carolina, Nan played as dumb as he was. She had no tongue to prove herself, and in this her silence kept her safe. She hung the wash. She shook the dirt from the peanuts. She cooked and canned and patched the holes in Juke’s overalls where his knees had worn through. She waited for her father to return. She waited and she waited. She looked out at the road and listened for the automobile he would arrive in. In the daylight, it mattered little that she could read and Juke couldn’t, but there were certain nights when it helped to know she could open The Book of Knowledge and go away for a while, get lost in Antarctica, or in Paris, France, or Baltimore, Maryland, the place her father lived, a place that seemed just as magical and just as far as the pyramids. In this way the words on the page paved a gentle road to sleep. She’d nibble on the white clay she kept on a pantry shelf in an old coffee tin her mother had used for the same purpose. Ketty said it was natural, just as chewing cured tobacco leaves was natural—it was God’s own bounty and it made a day go down easier.
It was on those nights, the nights when Juke came for her, that having no tongue was a mixed blessing. If she’d had a tongue, she could have said no. But would a word have stopped him? Was it better to have no tongue if a tongue was no protection?
The first time he took her to the still was the night they buried her mother. It was just for the gin then. Juke said she was ready for a man’s drink. The log cabin was off to the west of the house, beyond the corn, just up the bank from the creek and not fifty feet from the road, but hidden from sight by long-skirted pines and thick-waisted oaks and the Spanish moss that looked to Nan like witch’s hair. She had heard Elma say before that her daddy was out at the still—some nights he even slept there—but she couldn’t imagine what it was for, or what it looked like, only knew that she washed his tumblers and that they weren’t for tea. She had seen the cabin only once, when a trail of blackberry bushes brought her there, like bread crumbs to a gingerbread house.
That night, he sat her down on an old stool made from a pine stump. The cabin was dark, lit only with a candle; Elma was in the big house, asleep. The air was musty, close; it smelled of a sweetness she’d never smelled before. He offered her a sip from his mason jar, and the sweetness filled her nose and her mouth, burning