Black April

The cool spring dusk fell drowsy and soft over Sandy Island, all but blotting out a log cabin that nestled under great moss-hung oaks close to the river’s edge. The small drab weather-stained house would scarcely have shown except for the fire that burned inside, sending a bright glow through its wide-open door and showers of sparks up its short stick-and-clay chimney.

A gaunt, elderly black man strode hastily toward it along the path leading up from the river and went inside, but in a few minutes he came to stand in the doorway, his bulk well-nigh filling it as one broad shoulder leaned dejectedly against the lintel. When a moan came from inside, his brawny hands clenched and buckled in a foolish helpless way, and a frown knitted his forehead as he cast a glance at the old black woman who pattered back and forth from the hearth to the bed in the corner with a cupful of root-tea or a bit of hot grease in a spoon or a pinch of salt in the palm of her hand.

Once in a while she called to him that everything was going well. To-morrow this same girl would laugh at all these groans and tears. Birthing a child is tough work. He must have patience. Long patience. Nobody can hurry a slow-coming child.

The fire crackled and leaped higher, lighting the dirt-daubed cracks of the walls, shining under the bed where it played over the freshly sharpened point of a plow-share. A share ground and filed and put under a bed is the best thing in the world to cut birth-pains, but this one lagged with its work. Its clean edge glittered bright enough, yet as time dragged on the pains lingered and the expected child tarried with its coming.

The moon must be to blame. This new moon was right for planting seed but wrong for birthing. Swift labor comes with a waning moon, not a growing one.

The man heaved a deep sigh and looked out into the gathering twilight. The slender young moon was dropping fast. This birthing ought to get over. When the river’s tide turned, life could go out mighty quickly. Ebb tide is a dangerous time for sick people.

Old Granny was too slow. Too easy-going. When this same girl was born sixteen years ago, or was it seventeen, Granny had a long race with Death and lost, yet here she was poking around with her roots and teas, trifling away the time.

“Granny,” he stopped to clear the huskiness out of his throat, “better make haste. De tide’ll soon turn. Ebb tide ain’ to be trusted, you know.”

A wry smile shriveled Granny’s face. “You’s too short-patienced, Breeze. Dis is a long-patienced task. It takes time. You better go cut one more turn o’ fat lightwood an’ fetch em in. De fire is got to keep up shine to-night.”

A pitiful moan from the corner stopped her talk, and, with an echoing grunt, the man stepped down into the yard.

Granny’s shaking head bobbed faster as she watched him hurry to the wood-pile and pick up the ax. Her trembling hands drew her shawl closer around her bent shoulders. Lord, how time does change people, she muttered to herself. Breeze was no mild fellow in his youth. No. He was a wild scamp. But when his own girl got in trouble, he r’ared around and wanted to kill the man that fooled her. As if she wasn’t to blame too. A good thing the girl had sense enough to keep her mouth shut. Nobody could make her say who the father of her child was. She was a shut-mouthed creature. But spoiled to death. Rotten spoiled. No wonder. Here she was, disgracing her father’s house, after he had raised her nice as could be, but he hadn’t a hard word for her. Not one. If he hadn’t humored her all her life to everything heart could wish, she’d get to work and finish this birthing before dark, instead of keeping people fretted with worry-ation all day and now, more than likely, half the night. But as long as her soft-hearted old father took her part, Granny was helpless, and her scolding did no good.

The sturdy ax-cuts that rang out gave Granny an idea. That ax was sharp and clean. The plow-share was hampered with rust. Why wouldn’t the ax cut the birth-pains far better? Hurrying back to the door she quavered out shrilly, “Bring me dat ax, Breeze! Hurry wid em.”

He came with it, but halted at the door. He had ground that ax only this morning. Its edge was awful keen. This was no time to be risking anything. Granny had better be careful.

Granny stretched her old neck forward and her forehead furrowed with a frown as she said sharply that as long as she’d been catching children, if she couldn’t rule an ax, she’d better quit right now and go home! She couldn’t stand for people to meddle with her when she was doing her best. What did a man know about birthing? Put the ax beside the share. Together they’d fetch the child like a lamb a-jumping!

When steel jangled against steel under the bed, Granny ordered sharply, “Now you git out de door till I call you. You ought to be glad for de pain to suffer dis gal. I’m so shame of how e done, I can’ hold my head up. I hope to Gawd you’ll lick em till e can’ stand up, soon as e gits out dis bed. I never did hear no ’oman make sich a racket! E ought not to much as crack e teeth! I wish e was my gal. I’d show em how to be runnin’ round a-gittin’ chillen, stead o’ gittin’ a nice settled man fo’ a husband.” Granny eyed the girl, then her unhappy old father, severely, but her talk was to no purpose, for old Breeze’s eyes were bloodshot with pity, his very soul distressed.

“You’s wrong, Granny. I used to t’ink like you, but I know better now. If de gal’ll git thu dis safe, I wouldn’ hold no hard feelin’s ’gainst em. Never in dis world.” He leaned over the bed and gave the girl’s shoulder a gentle pat, but Granny hurried him away. This was no time for petting and being soft. Some hard work waited to be done. The sooner the girl got at it, the sooner it would be finished.

“Quit you’ crazy talk an’ go on out de door! Don’ come back in dis room, not less I call you.”

Granny spoke so sharply, he obeyed humbly, without another word.

The breath of the earth was thick in the air, a good clean smell that went clear to the marrow of the man’s bones. God made the first man out of dust, and all men go back to it in the end. The earth had been sleeping, resting through the winter, but now, with the turn of the year, it had roused, and it offered life to all that were fit and strong. The corn crop, planted on the last young moon when the dogwood blooms were the size of squirrel ears, was up to a stand wherever the crows let it alone. Pesky devils! They watched every blade that peeped through the ground and plucked it out with the mother grain, cawing right in the face of the scare-crow that stood up in the field to scare them, although its head, made out of a pot, and its stuffed crocus sack body were ugly enough to scare a man. To-morrow he’d hide and call them. He could fool them close enough to shoot them. It was a pity to waste shells on birds unfit for man or beast to eat and with too little grease on their bones to add a drop to the soap pot, but there’d soon be another mouth to feed here.

To-morrow, he must plant the cotton while the young moon waxed strong. There was much to do. He needed help. Maybe this child being born would be a boy-child, a help for his old age. A sorrowful woman will bear a boy-child, nine times out of ten, and God knows, that girl had been sorrowful. When she helped him plant the corn, she had dropped a tear in mighty nigh every hill along with the seed. No wonder it grew fast.

Soon as the moon waned, the root crops, potatoes, pindars, chufas, turnips, must be planted. Field plants have no sense. If you plant crops that fruit above the ground on a waning moon, they get all mixed up and bear nothing but heavy roots, and root crops planted on a waxing moon will go all to rank tops no matter how you try to stop them. Plants have to be helped along or they waste time and labor, just the same as children you undertake to raise. That poor little girl was started off wrong.

She was born on a moon so wrong that her mammy died in her birthing. He had done his best to raise the little motherless creature right, but he made a bad mistake when he let her go to Blue Brook without him last summer. She went to meet his kin and to attend the revival meeting. She was full of life and raven for pleasure. He couldn’t refuse her when she asked to go. But he hadn’t made her understand that those Blue Brook men were wicked devils. He knew it. He had been one of them himself. Poor little girl, she knew it now! Now when it was too late for anybody to help her out of her trouble.

Years ago, over thirty of them, he had left Blue Brook and come to Sandy Island on account of a girl. She had named her child April because it was born this very month. Afterward, she had married and forgotten him. Now she was dead, but her child, April, was the finest man on Blue Brook. Barely middle-aged, April was already the plantation foreman, ruling the other farm-hands, telling them what to do, what not to do, and raising the best crops in years. April had made a name for himself. Everybody who came from Blue Brook had something to say about him, either of his kindness or of his meanness, his long patience or his quick temper, his open-handedness or his close-fistedness. On Blue Brook, April was a man among men.

He had seen him, a tall, lean, black, broad-shouldered fellow, so much like himself that it was a wonder everybody didn’t know that he was April’s daddy. But they didn’t. For April’s mother had been as close-mouthed as the girl lying yonder on the bed. She never did tell who fooled her and made her have sin. She died without telling.

Some day he’d like to tell April himself. But after all, what was the use? April had taken the name of his mother’s lawful husband and he loved the man who had raised him as well as an own father could have done. Why upset them?

Granny’s shambling steps inside the cabin took his thoughts back to the girl there. If the child was born on this rising tide, it would more than likely be a boy-child. April would be a good name for him too. April was a lucky month to be born in; it was a lucky name too. If the child came a girl, Katy, the name of April’s mother, would be a good name for it.

The spring air wafted clouds of fragrance from the underwoods bordering the forest. Crab-apple thickets and white haw trees were in full bloom. Yellow jasmine smothered whole tree-tops. Cherokee roses starry with blossoms sprawled over rail fences and rotting stumps, piercing through all other scents with their delicate perfume.

Sandy Island looked just so, smelled just so, on that April night when he came here so many years ago. He thought then that he’d go back some day and fetch Katy here to stay with him. But the years had tricked him, fooled him. They had rolled by so fast he’d lost track of them, and of Katy and her boy, April. Now, he was almost an old man, and Katy was up yonder in Heaven. His own lawful wife and his other boy, his yard son, were up there too. Had Katy told them about April? Or would she stay shut-mouthed for ever and ever?

As he wondered and pondered about the ways of people in Heaven, the river, gorged by a high spring tide, slowly flooded the rice-fields encircling the island. The black water lapped softly as it rippled over the broken dikes and passed through the rotted flood-gates, hiding the new green shoots of the marsh grass and uprooting the tall faded blades, that had stood through the winter on the boggy mud flats.

Frogs chanted. Marsh-hens chattered. Wood ducks piped and splashed. Ganits flew in long lines toward the sunset, squawking hoarsely and flapping the air with blue and white wings. Partridges whistled. Doves mourned. Where were the groans from the bed in the corner? Maybe all was over at last.

Granny stood in the door beckoning him to come. Her harshness was all gone. She hobbled down the steps and came tottering to meet him, then laying a bony hand on his shoulder she whispered that the ax was too sharp. It had cut the pains off altogether. They had ceased too soon and she couldn’t get them started again. She had tried every tea she knew. Every root. Every ointment. Every charm. She was at her row’s end. This moon was all wrong for birthing. A young moon makes things go contrarywise. The child should have waited a week longer to start coming. And two weeks would have been still better.

The girl had dozed off in spite of everything. He must come and try to rouse her up. Girls behave so crazy these days. They do like nobody ever had birthed a child before them. She was fretted half to death the way this girl carried on. He must come and make her behave. If she had been a nice decent girl, all this would never have been.

The girl’s eyes opened and looked up at him, and he leaned low over the bed to hear her whispered words. She spoke with worn-out tired breath, begging him to go and get help from somewhere. She hated to die in sin, and leave him, but she couldn’t hold out much longer. Death already had her feet cold as ice, it was creeping up to her knees. Couldn’t he take the boat and go across the river to Blue Brook? Wasn’t somebody there who could come to help her?

He studied. Certainly there was. Maum Hannah, his own first cousin, had a string of charm beads their old grandmother had brought all the way from Africa when she came on a slave ship. They and the charm words that ruled them were left in Maum Hannah’s hands. Ever since he was a boy, living on Blue Brook, he had heard people say that those beads had never failed to help a woman birth a child safely. No matter how it came, head foremost, foot foremost, or hand foremost, it was all the same when those charm beads got to working.

He’d go fetch Maum Hannah. She’d come. Old as she was, she’d risk the booming river if her beads were needed to help a child come into the world.

His boat was a dug-out and narrow for two people in a river running backward in a flood-tide, but she’d come. He felt sure of it. Barefooted, bareheaded, without a coat, he ran down the steep slope to the black water’s edge, and soon the sharp bow of his boat, driven by one short paddle, sliced through the current. Swift wheeling circles of water marked every steady dip it made. Hugging the willow banks, the boat hurried on, then cut straight across the river. Thank God, the high-running tide made the rice-fields a clear sheet of water. The boat could take a bee line to Blue Brook without bothering about how the channel ran beyond the river. The landing aimed for was on a deep, clear blue creek, which gave the plantation its name, Blue Brook. The man’s knees were shaking as he stepped out of the boat and dragged it higher up on the bank to wait until he came back with Maum Hannah and the beads. Up the path he trotted, to the Quarters where the long low houses made blurs of darkness under tall black trees. The thick-leaved branches rose against the sky, where the fires of sunset had lately died and the moon had gone to its bed.

Rattly wagons hurried over the roads. Cattle bellowed. Children shouted. Dogs barked. An ax rang sharply and a clear voice sent up a song. “Bye an’ bye, when de mawnin’ comes!” How trustful it sounded. He tried to hum the tune, but fear gnawed at his heart and beat drums in his ears and throat and breast.

He was born and reared on Blue Brook. He knew every path and road on it. Every field and ditch and thicket. Every moss-hung oak. He had lived right yonder in the foreman’s house with his grandfather, the plantation foreman. The foreman now was his son! His blood kin. A proud fellow, that April! Lord, how April strutted and gave himself airs!

The darkness melted everything into one. The whiteness of the Big House was dim.

Fences, cabins, trees, earth were being swallowed up by the night.

Maum Hannah’s cabin was the last in those two long rows of houses, and firelight shining out from her wide-open door sent a glow clear across her yard. She was at home. It wouldn’t take long to get her and the charm beads into the boat, then back across the river.

Black people were gathered in the doorways, most of them his kin with whom he’d like to stop and talk, but there was no time for one extra word, even with April, the foreman. Dogs ran up to him, sniffed, recognized that he was of the same blood as their masters, and went back to lie down.