Homegoing(40)

Jo jumped off the boat and looked behind him at the beautiful Chesapeake Bay, at the large, imposing ships that lined the Fell’s Point shipyards. He loved the look of those boats, loved that his hands helped build and maintain them, but Ma Aku always said it was bad juju, him and all the other freed Negroes working on ships. She said there was something evil about them building up the things that had brought them to America in the first place, the very things that had tried to drag them under.



Jo walked down Market Street and bought some pigs’ feet from Jim at the corner store near the museum. As he was leaving, a horse broke free from its buggy and ran wild, nearly trampling an old white woman who had been lifting her skirt, just about to step into the street.

“You all right, ma’am?” Jo asked, running over to her and offering his arm.

She looked dazed for a second, but then she smiled at Jo. “Fine, thank you,” she said.

He continued on. Anna would still be cleaning house with Ma Aku. He knew he should go over there and help the two women, what with Anna being pregnant again and Ma Aku being so old the never-ending coughs and aches had set in, but it had been too long since he’d let himself enjoy Baltimore, the cool sea breeze, the Negroes, some slave but some free as can be, who worked and lived and played around him. Jo had been a slave once. He was only a baby then, and yet every time he saw a slave in Baltimore, he felt like he remembered. Every time Jo saw a slave in Baltimore, he saw himself, saw what his life would have been like had Ma Aku not taken him to freedom. His free papers named him Kojo Freeman. Free man. Half the ex-slaves in Baltimore had the name. Tell a lie long enough and it will turn to truth.

Jo only knew the South from the stories Ma Aku told him, same way he knew his mother and father, Ness and Sam. As stories and nothing more. He didn’t miss what he didn’t know, what he couldn’t feel in his hands or his heart. Baltimore was tangible. It wasn’t endless crops and whippings. It was the port, the ironworks, the railroads. It was the pigs’ feet Kojo was eating, the smiles of his seven children with number eight on the way. It was Anna, who’d married him when she was just sixteen and he nineteen, and had worked every day of the nineteen years since.

Thinking of Anna again, Jo decided to swing by the Mathison house, where she and Ma were cleaning that day. He bought a flower from Ol’ Bess on the corner of North and Sixteenth and, holding it, he felt like he could finally forget the thought of the police on his ship.

“Why, if it ain’t my husband, Jo, comin’ up the walk,” Anna said when she saw him. She was sweeping the porch with what looked like a new broom. The handle was a handsome brown, only a few shades darker than her own skin, and the bristles all stood at attention. Ma Aku always liked to tell them that in the Gold Coast brooms had no handles. The body was the handle, and it moved and bent much easier than a stick ever could.



“Brought you somethin’,” Jo said, handing her the flower. She took it and breathed it in and smiled. The stalk hit her stomach just where her belly started to strain against her dress. Jo put his hand there and rubbed.

“Where’s Ma?” he asked.

“Inside doin’ the kitchen.”

Jo kissed his wife and took the broom from her hands. “You go on and help her now,” he said, giving her butt a squeeze and a push as he sent her inside. It was the butt that had done it nineteen years ago, was still doing it now. He’d seen it coming around Strawberry Alley and had followed it four whole blocks. It was mesmerizing, the way it moved, independent of the rest of her body, as though operating under the influence of another brain entirely, one cheek knocking into the other cheek so that that cheek had to swing out before knocking back.

When he was seven years old, Jo had asked Ma Aku what a man was supposed to do when he liked a woman, and she had laughed. His ma had never been like the other mothers. She was a little strange, a little off, still dreaming of the country she’d been ripped from years and years before. She could often be found looking out at the water, looking as if she would jump in, try to find her way home.

“Why, Kojo, in the Gold Coast, they say if you like a woman you have to go to her father with an offering.” Back then, Jo had been in love with a girl named Mirabel, and in church the next Sunday, he’d brought her father a frog that he’d caught by the water the night before, and Ma Aku had laughed and laughed and laughed, until the pastor and the father said she was teaching Jo the ways of old African witchcraft and kicked them out of the congregation.

With Anna, Jo simply followed the sway of her butt, until it stopped still. He’d gone up to her and seen her face. Her sweet caramel skin and black, black hair, as dark and long as a horse tail, always worn in a single braid. He’d told her his name was Jo, and asked if he could walk with her a ways. She’d said yes, and they walked the whole length of Baltimore. It wasn’t until months later that Jo learned Anna had gotten in trouble with her mother that night, having skipped out on all the chores she had promised to do.



The Mathisons were an old white family. Mr. Mathison’s father’s house had once been a stop on the Underground Railroad, and he’d taught his son to always lend a helpful hand. Mrs. Mathison was the one with the family money, and when the two had gotten together they’d bought a large house and employed Anna, Ma Aku, and a host of other black folk from in and around Baltimore.

The house was two stories and ten rooms. It took hours to clean, and the Mathisons liked it spotless. Kojo took up some of the work that day, and while washing the windows in the drawing room he could hear Mathison and the other abolitionists talking.