Homegoing(46)

“Please, ma’am,” he said. “Have you seen my wife? I’m looking for my wife.”

The woman backed away from him slowly, her eyes widening with fear but never leaving his own, as though if she was to turn from him he would be free to attack her.

“You stay away from me,” the woman said, holding her hand out in front of her.



“I’m looking for my wife. Please, ma’am, just look at the picture. Have you seen my wife?”

She shook her head and the held-out hand too. She didn’t even glance at the picture once. “I’ve got children,” she said. “Please don’t hurt me.”

Was she even listening to a word he said? Suddenly, Jo felt two strong arms grab him from behind. “This nigger bothering you?” a voice asked.

“No, officer. Thank you, officer,” the woman said, breathing easier and then taking her leave.

The policeman swung Jo around to face him. Jo was so scared he couldn’t lift his eyes, so instead he lifted the picture. “Please, my wife, sir. She’s eight months pregnant and I ain’t seen her in days.”

“Your wife, huh?” the policeman said, snatching the picture from Jo’s hands. “Pretty nigger, ain’t she?”

Still Jo couldn’t look at him.

“Why don’t you let me take this picture with me?”

Jo shook his head. He’d almost lost the picture once that day and didn’t know what he would do if he lost it again. “Please, sir. It’s the only one I got.”

Then Jo heard the sound of paper tearing. He looked up to see Anna’s nose and ears and strands of hair, the shredded bits of paper flying off in the wind.

“I’m tired of all these runaway niggers thinking they’re above the law. If your wife was a runaway nigger, then she got what she deserved. What about you? You a runaway nigger? I can send you on to see your wife.”

Jo held the policeman’s gaze. His whole body felt like it was shaking. He couldn’t see it, but he could feel it inside him, an unstoppable quaking. “No, sir,” he said.

“Speak up,” the policeman said.

“No, sir. I was born free, right here in Baltimore.”

The policeman smirked. “Go home,” he said. The policeman turned and walked away, and the quaking that had been held somewhere inside Jo’s bones started to escape until he was sitting on the hard ground, trying to hold himself together.

—



“Tell him what you told me,” Mathison said. Jo was standing in Mathison’s parlor three weeks later. Ma Aku had fallen ill and could no longer go to work, but Jo still stopped by the Mathison house on his way home to see if the man had any news about Anna.

This day, Mathison was holding a scared Negro child by his shoulders. The boy could not have been much older than Daly, and if he was any more scared of being called in by a white man, his skin would have been gray instead of its cool tar black.

He stood, hands trembling, and looked up at Jo. “I saws a white man takes a pregnant woman into his carriage. Says she too pregnant to walk home, so he takes her.”

Jo bent down until his eyes were level with the shaking child’s. He grabbed the boy’s chin in his hand and made him look at him, and he searched the boy’s eyes for what seemed like days, three whole weeks to be exact, searching for Anna.

“They sold her,” Jo said to Mathison, standing back up.

“Now, we don’t know that, Jo. Could be that they had to rush medical care. Anna was rightfully free, and she was pregnant,” Mathison answered, but his voice was uncertain. They had checked every hospital, every midwife, even the witch doctors. No one had seen Anna or Baby H.

“They sold her and the baby too,” Jo said, and before he or Mathison could stop or thank him, the child pulled away and ran out of the Mathison house quicker than a flash. He would likely tell his friends all about it, being in the grand home of a white man who had been asking questions about a Negro woman. He would make himself sound better in them. He would say he stood tall and spoke firmly, that the man shook his hand after and offered him a quarter.

“We’ll keep looking, Jo,” Mathison said, observing the empty space the boy had left behind. “This isn’t over. We’ll find her. I’ll go to court if I have to, Jo. I promise you that.”

Jo couldn’t hear him anymore. The wind was coming in through the door the child had left ajar. It was moving around the big white pillars that held up the house, curving around them, bending until it fit into the thin space of Jo’s ear canal. It was there to tell him that fall had come to Baltimore and that he would have to spend it alone, taking care of his ailing Ma and his seven children without his Anna.



When he went home, the kids were all waiting. Agnes had come over with Timmy. The girl was pregnant, Jo could just tell, but he knew that she was scared to tell him, to hurt him or the three-week-old memory of her mother, scared her small piece of joy was almost shameful.

“Jo?” Ma Aku called. Jo had given her the bedroom once her pain had started worsening.

He went to her. She was lying on her back, staring up at the ceiling, her hands folded over her chest. She turned her head toward him and spoke in Twi, something she used to do often when he was a child but had stopped almost completely since he married Anna.