The Twelve-Mile Straight. Eleanor Henderson
without having to step off when a white person came along. You had to be careful. If you were a sharecropper, you had to find a way to get out of town before word got out, or the planter would find a way to make you stay. George Wilson might send his grandson out for you, or the sheriff. Even her father had had to ride a freight train, the story went, when he left for the North.
There was one family that lived in a shotgun shack in the Fourth Ward, just over the tracks. The mother was expecting her third child. Ketty had delivered the first two, and Nan expected to be called for the next, but they never called. After enough months had passed, Nan concluded that the mother had lost the baby, but later she learned from the family next door that they had up and left for a place called Scranton, Pennsylvania, where the mother had people, and the neighbors had been as surprised as Nan. The father, a diabetic who had worked in the picker room at the mill, had complained to Freddie Wilson, the foreman, that his feet grew numb when he was on them for too long, and Freddie had told him that he should be grateful for the work and do it without complaint, and that if he didn’t want to stand he could kneel on the floor and clean it, every square foot of the mill. So the man had waxed the floors, scrubbing on his hands and knees where the white women stood spinning, and though he kept his eyes on the floor, Freddie would say, laughing at himself, “You looking up that girl’s dress?” and whack him with the straw end of his broom. When he was done cleaning the floor, Freddie made him lick it. “Taste clean?” And then, because twelve hours had passed and his next shift was coming on, Freddie sent him back to the picker room. And not long after, before anyone knew to say good-bye, the man had taken his family out of Florence. He sent a letter to the neighbor saying he was working in a printing factory, where the hours were just as long but where at least he could operate his machine sitting down. The neighbor told Nan that the third child was born in a hospital, and they named him Zane.
She wondered what it would be like, leaving. If Elma went along, they’d be in separate cars, Elma in the white car and Nan in the colored, and then she might be no safer than if she’d escaped herself, the two of them traveling along in their separate compartments, as they were now. But she’d be among her own on the train. She’d be safe there. But they were strangers. How would she get by—how would she communicate with the passengers, with the conductor, without Elma? How would she get what she needed when she got to wherever she was going? She could write what she needed on a piece of paper. When she was safely out of the South, she could do that, couldn’t she? The thought made her fingers itch. It was exhilarating and it was terrifying, the thought of making her way in the world without Elma. She would hand over a piece of paper to a stranger, and the stranger would look at her in confusion and disgust. Or the stranger would nod in understanding.
But she was far ahead of herself. She had not even brought herself to write the words to Elma, telling her why she wanted to go. And if she did, maybe Elma wouldn’t believe her. Maybe Elma wouldn’t come with her after all. Why would she come with her? What made her think Elma would choose her over her own blood?
There was a white man who’d owned the land that neighbored the Youngs’ tobacco farm, and he bred mules. When Nan’s mother was young, she’d learned a thing or two from him about the ways of animals, the ways horses and donkeys were the same and the ways they were different. Those mules were the reason, Ketty liked to say, she became a midwife. Nan had long known that mules were beloved in the country for their tough hooves, their good health, their endurance, though they could be stubborn; Juke often said Elma was stubborn as a mule. But it wasn’t stubbornness, Ketty told Nan: a mule had a sense of self-preservation. She made two proud fists and struck her chest with them. When a horse was startled or scared, she said, it would flee; a donkey, on the other hand, would freeze. Mules were like both of their parents, sometimes running, sometimes staying; that was what made folks think they were stubborn. They’re just confused, said Ketty. They couldn’t overcome their own nature.
That was Nan. She was like a mule, she thought, fleeing and freezing. Her father had fled the farm; her mother had stayed. And now Nan’s head was confused, so much did she want to stay and so much did she want to go.
Not long after Juke started bringing her out to the still, she brought the kitchen scissors out to Elma on the back porch. She ran a hand over her head, scalping herself with her palm.
“You want it gone?” Elma asked. “All of it?”
Nan nodded.
“Oh, honey, I ain’t been too good with your plaits, have I?”
And Elma cut it off right there on the porch, Nan sitting on the step below her and closing her eyes to keep from crying. She wanted to cry because of the careful kindness of Elma’s hands, and because she remembered sitting between her mother’s knees like this, the sun on her eyelids. It was the confused longing she sometimes felt when Juke rubbed the stubble of his cheek on hers—she could almost remember her father’s cheek. When Elma was done, she seemed more relieved than Nan. “You look pretty as a statue, honey.”
Juke was not angry, as Nan had expected him to be, nor did he ignore her, as she’d hoped. The next time he led her to the cabin, he was as sweet as he’d ever been. He stroked her little breasts and her belly. He kissed the nape of her bare neck. He talked, as he sometimes did, as though she were the only person in the world with ears, about Jessa, about String, about cotton and corn and the fish in the creek. “I ain’t ever told no one this one,” he said. That night, as she sometimes did, she felt the rush of love in her body, and kept her pleasure a secret from him, and for a while that was enough.
From time to time Nan was asked to perform other acts, ungodly ones, and all she could do was shake her head. She was but a girl, no doctor, no medicine woman, though she knew between the herbs that healed and harmed. “We bring babies into the world,” her mother had taught her. “We don’t bring them out.”
One evening just after nightfall, before Nan had settled into sleep, it was Elma who came for her. Juke must have been brewing at the still. A colored boy was parked in an automobile out front, and a white girl sat in the back. Nan stood under the eye of the moon in the driveway, her bare feet cold on the dirt. “You the midwife?” the boy said. “We come to call on you.” When she didn’t come closer—how did the two of them end up together in such a fine car?—he said, “You can make a baby go away?” Through the open window of the car, he held a ten-dollar bill. The girl sat with her hands crossed over her belly, staring into her lap. Nan could smell the leather of the seat, the freshly printed paper, and her knees trembled. With ten dollars, she wouldn’t need to find another cropper shack to earn her keep on. With ten dollars, she could buy a ticket on a train.
“You hearing me, girl? You as dumb as they say?”
In the road, Jeb Simmons’s truck slowed, the headlights sweeping over them like eyes. The boy squinted in the glare, and when the truck had passed, Nan snatched that ten-dollar bill from his hand and marched back into the house. Maybe he thought she was coming back with her bag. But she shrugged at Elma, went into her room, and buttoned the door, heart slamming. She took volume I of The Book of Knowledge out from under her mattress and pressed the bill between its pages, then closed it and hid it again. If the boy was fool enough to follow her into a white man’s house, she’d ring the dinner bell, and Juke would hear her.
But the boy didn’t follow. What could he do? For all he knew, Juke Jesup was in that house. He didn’t want trouble. She never saw that boy again.
When she finally heard the car drive away, she took out her satchel and counted the money. With the ten-dollar bill, she had eighteen dollars and fifteen cents. That was enough, she thought, for a train ticket to Baltimore, where her father lived. If she was going to run, this was the time. If she was bold enough to steal ten dollars, she’d be bold enough to board a train. Alone—she didn’t need Elma.
First she had to get a ride. The mail truck was known to carry folks into town—Elma did it from time to time when her father needed yeast from the Piggly Wiggly, more than the crossroads store carried—but Mr. Horace, the mailman, would carry no Negro. She could walk, but the walk was long—six miles—and