Homegoing(41)

“If California joins the Union as a free state, President Taylor will have his hands full with Southern secessionists,” Mathison said.

“And Maryland will be caught in the middle,” another voice said.

“That’s why we’ve got to do all we can to make sure more slaves are emancipated right here in Baltimore.”

They could go on for hours talking this way. In the beginning, Jo had liked to listen to them. It had given him hope, seeing all those powerful white people take up for him and his, but the more years went on, the more he knew that even kindhearted people like the ones in the Mathison house could only do so much.

When they finished cleaning the house, Jo, Anna, and Ma Aku headed back toward their little apartment on Twenty-Fourth Street.

“My back—oh, my back,” Ma said, clutching at the body part that had been paining her for years now. She turned to Jo and in Twi said, “Haven’t we grown tired?” It was an old, worn expression for an old and worn feeling. Jo nodded and gave the woman his hand to help her up the stairs.

Inside, the kids were playing. Agnes, Beulah, Cato, Daly, Eurias, Felicity, and Gracie. It seemed like he and Anna were going to have one child for every letter of the alphabet. They would teach their children to read those letters, grow them up to be the kind of people who could teach those letters to other people. Now everyone in the house called the new baby “H,” as a placeholder until it came out and brought its name along with it.



Being a good father felt like a debt Jo owed to his parents, who couldn’t get free. He used to spend many nights trying to conjure up an image of his own father. Was he brave? Tall? Kind? Smart? Was he a good and fair man? What kind of father would he have been if he’d ever gotten the chance to be a father, free?

Now Jo spent most nights with his ear against his wife’s barely there stomach, trying to get to know Baby H a little before it arrived. He had made a promise to Anna that he would be there for them, the way his own father had not been able to be there for him. And Anna, who had never wanted her own father to be there for her, knowing the kind of man he was and the kind of trouble his presence would have brought, had just smiled and patted his back.

But Jo meant what he had said. He studied his children, the few hours of every night that he got to see them before they went to bed or every morning before he went off to the docks. Agnes was the helper. He’d never known a kinder, gentler spirit. Not Anna and certainly not his world-weary mother. Beulah was a beauty, but she didn’t know it yet. Cato was soft for a boy, and Jo tried every day to put a little grit into him. Daly was a fighter and Eurias was too often his target. Felicity was so shy she wouldn’t tell you her own name if you asked her, and Gracie was a round ball of love. His life with them, with Anna and Ma and the kids, was all that he had ever wanted on those days he’d spent as a lonely child, going from safe house to safe house, job to job, trying to help the woman he called mother do the mothering work she hadn’t asked for but never complained about.

Ma Aku started coughing, and Agnes came over right away to help her into the bed. The apartment had two rooms: one for Jo and Anna, separated by a curtain, and one for everyone and everything else. Ma Aku went down onto the mattress with a heavy sigh, and within minutes she was coughing and snoring in equal measure.

Gracie, the baby, was pawing at the leg of Jo’s trousers. “Daddy, Daddy!”

Jo swooped down and picked her up in one arm as easily as if she were the toolbox he’d left on the boat. Pretty soon, she’d be too big for babying. Probably just in time for the new baby to come.



Soon, Agnes and Anna had gotten all the little kids to sleep, and Agnes was finally sleeping herself. Jo was sitting in the bedroom with the curtain drawn when Anna came in, rubbing the belly that was so small it was little more than a feeling.

“Police came by the boat today. Said somebody had robbed her,” Jo said. Anna was taking off her clothes and folding them, then placing them on the chair that sat beside their mattress. She would wear the same ones tomorrow. She hadn’t had time to do the wash that week, and she hadn’t had the money to do it the week before. All she could do was hope that the children didn’t smell when they went off to the Christian school.

“Did it scare you?” she asked, and Jo stood, quick as a flash, and grabbed her into his arms, pulling her down onto the mattress with him.

“Ain’t nothing scare me, woman,” he said while she laughed and thrashed, pretending to fight him off.

They kissed, and whatever clothes Anna hadn’t gotten to, Jo made quick work of removing. He tasted her and could feel more than hear the pleasure it sent through her body like a current, the way she stifled her moans so the kids wouldn’t wake up, an expert at this after many nights and seven children. They worked quickly and quietly together, hoping the dark would mask their motions if one of the children happened to be peering through the curtain, unable to sleep. Jo grabbed onto Anna’s butt with both of his hungry hands. As long as he lived, it would always be a pleasure and a gift to fill his hands with the weight of her flesh.

—

The next morning, Jo went back to work on Alice. Poot came by to split his breakfast with Jo: a little cornbread and some fish.

“Did they come around?” Jo asked. Earlier that morning he had gotten the oakum ready for the deck, soaking the hemp in pine tar. He’d twisted it like rope, laying it down in the seams between the planks. Jo had been working with the same tools since he first started caulking. His very own iron and mallet. He loved the sound those two tools made together when he laid the oakum into the seams, tapping the iron gently to coerce the oakum to stay, the seam to fill, the boat to keep from leaking.