Nine

The next morning, I awakened with the first light through the glassless windows.  I had dreamt that a lion came and took away my child, tore him from my arms and carried him like a rag doll in his jaws.  The lion growled as he walked away, and then he turned back and smiled at me with Uncle’s crooked teeth.

As I let my eyes adjust to the morning light, I lay back on my sleeping blankets.  The house was quiet.  The air outside didn’t move and the tree branches didn’t rustle.  The birds were silent.  The baby inside me was still.

I got up from my bed and saw the dark stain.  I moved across the room and into the kitchen, avoiding the tangles of blankets where the other women laid.  My belly cramped and tightened, doubling me over.  I put water on to start the breakfast grits, and I boiled more water for coffee.

My child didn’t move from its ball in my stomach.  I had fallen hard last night, and my bedclothes were bloody.  I made grits for the fieldhands and started breakfast for the master and his family.  The fieldhands would be up soon from the bunkhouses and they would surely be hungry as late as they were up last night.

After the grits were eaten and the dishes from the dining room were washed, we started the washing in big buckets out front of the house.  I had the soapy bucket and the old granny had the clear water to rinse the wash.  All the kids were running in the yard before it got too hot outside.  Momma took the clothes from Granny and shook them to hang them out to dry.  I told Granny about the blood, and she told me just to wait.

When all the washing was hung out, I went back out to the yard to slaughter a chicken for Master’s lunch.  The sight of the chicken’s head on the ground brought sour bile into my mouth, and the pains in my belly came again, sharp and lower this time.  It was too early because my belly wasn’t as swollen as the ladies I had seen walking around town at home, but the pains began to come quickly together.  I worked quickly to finish pulling the feathers off the chicken.  A sharp pain felled me to the ground.  I threw the chicken aside and grabbed my belly.  The pain jolted me from my center and down both my legs.

I shouted for the women.  They helped me back inside, and I could see the heavy bleeding now. Then we could see the crown of the baby’s head.  When the baby boy was born, he looked sickly, and his swollen belly was tight and purple-skinned like a fat, round plum.  He didn’t cry or take a breath.  The afterbirth passed quickly.

I lay back on the bedclothes, tearless.  Then once more, I felt my belly tighten and more blood and fluid passed.  Cramps came quickly again, just as before when the baby boy passed.

“You have another baby,” said the wise old woman.

My belly tightened minute after minute, and soon the baby girl passed.  She was quiet, and her translucent blue skin stretched tight across her chest.  She fit into the palms of my two hands, and I felt her heart beat fast under my fingers.  I put my hand on my belly and felt its fleshy emptiness.  The infants were half the size of the swaddled infant I had fed the day before.

I laid there in the bedclothes and held the boy and girl in my arms.  My tears fell onto the babies.  The old woman cut free the cords that tied those babies to this miserable earth.  I held them both and cried until the girl took her last breath.  Momma took the babies from me, bathed them, and swaddled them up so they wouldn’t be cold in the grave. 

That night, I dreamt I was back on the ship, pitching endlessly in the everlasting dark.  Enveloped in sea air and rotted fish, I was sick to my stomach.  I held my mother’s hand tightly while she lay next to me mumbling incoherently.

When morning came, we dug a hole and buried my babies, those two souls created in bondage, out behind the house.  I rested in the house another day and then returned to my work in the cotton fields.