The Wilful Daughter Read online

  On any day save Sunday you could hear the beating against the anvil at least a mile away. If you came near the shop you saw him, this big black hulk of a man, covered with sweat, smelling of metal and dust, muscled arms, and large calloused hands banging out things that most folks had to look at and wonder how. For thirty five years he had remained there in his shop working for white people for a lot, black people sometimes for free. Hammering out on that anvil a tune that nobody else could play. And if it stopped for a long time mid day you knew one of the Blacksmith’s daughters had brought him lunch or he was making a deal with someone about buying some land.

  The Blacksmith had learned from the Indians that nobody was supposed to own the land. That it belonged to all and in a sense he agreed. But he had to live in the white man’s world, he told them, not the Indian world and he had to get as much land as he could get. “A man is the land he owns. Land is what a man is,” he had learned in his youth from a mother who never owned any.

  When he and his wife had left Alabama those years ago the first thing he did after getting settled in a little shack at the edge of the colored community was to scout out a piece of land. A piece of land big enough for a house and a shop. He had saved his money and wanted to move as quickly as he could on building a house for his precious Bira.

  But the price of land overwhelmed the Blacksmith. He couldn’t afford more than a half acre, and that half acre was something no one else wanted. Couldn’t farm it, wasn’t big enough to have a big family spread.

  The Blacksmith, being practical, decided to slow down. He went to his wife and asked her if she would mind putting off having children for a year, maybe two at the most. She agreed to it. He asked her, nervously because he wasn’t sure if it was appropriate and frankly because he knew that beating around the bush made no sense, if she knew of ways to not have babies for a while. She smiled sweetly and told him yes.

  For two and a half years the Blacksmith worked on that half acre where nothing could grow. He built a one bedroom house on it. Six days a week he worked coming home each night to good cooking and meals from his wife’s loving hands. With his consent Bira took in washing from the line men and porters and other colored people that didn’t have time to do their own. It made them feel important.

  This was the only money that was used for food and clothes. The rest of the money, the money he earned went into saving for land. William and Bira Brown worked like slaves to accomplish their dream - having their own land and a home one day.

  Two and a half years later he found the perfect piece of land. All sorts of fruit trees grew on it. Had only one house and it was as dilapidated as it was old. The colored man who owned it sold to Brown quickly, afraid since he was up there in years and didn’t have a family to look after him, that “they” would take it away from him. Brown understood. The man was alone. And alone and colored in the south on any piece of land was dangerous. Might wake up dead one of these mornings and “they” would say, to anyone who asked, that “they” owned it.

  He brought Bira to see it. To see the bushes and trees and fields of wild berries.

  “Children should play here,” she said happily. “Lots of children.”

  “Yes, Bira,” he smiled. “We have our land and it is time.”

  But what she said next surprised him. “Other people’s children, William. This place needs families, lots of families.”

  And that’s what gave the Blacksmith the idea.

  He asked the old man to stay on the land and allow the Blacksmith to look after him. It was his right. He built his shop there, then his house. He put a dirt road right down the middle of the property, a road coming in from the main one. After all this was done he subdivided the land.

  William Brown had people come and look at what he had done. In the heart of Atlanta, he designed a little colored town.

  At one end of the property were the church and the reverends house. At the other end was the mortician. In between were the living- houses, a shop and a general store. It was the late 1800’s and nobody could believe that he, a colored man, was doing this.

  He rented the land and saved the money he got from the rents to buy more land.

  At the end of three years his first child was born and he decided that she would always have land. He set aside fifty acres for her husband to receive on the day she would be wed. Then he decided he would set it aside for all his children. Fifty acres, a hundred if he could, but at least 50. And money, a nice fat dowry. Money for the children’s families to have a nice house built and some nice furniture. Money for the children’s education, for their clothes, for doctors. Money maybe to travel places. If a man married into a family like this, a family of land and wealth where everything was taken care of, the future provided for, the love of family about him, surely he would want to stay with that family and keep the land in that family forever. No need to move north and suffer in the cruel cold.

  Now some folks heard about this and said the Blacksmith was trying to be white. By the time his baby daughter got grown he would have lost that land to taxes, to “them” or drunk it all away. Others heard about the dowry the Blacksmith set aside for his daughters and didn’t laugh for they wanted to dream with him. He worked as hard as ten men, and they couldn’t. But they could put aside a little every week so that when their boy got older he could go to Morehouse. Or their daughter could go to the Carolinas and go to Bennett College.

  The Blacksmith made them see there was a future for them if they followed some of the white folks’ ways. Those that rented land from him and understood what he was saying asked if they could build their own houses, bigger nicer houses for their families. The Blacksmith felt proud that he had encouraged them to think like him, so he said yes. After the houses were built, and they had saved some more money they asked if he would sell them the land.

  At first he didn’t want to sell. This was his land, his idea. But Bira told him that he had lots of land and could get more.

  “Sell them the land they live on,” she told him as they sat on their porch and looked out at the world he had created. “Sell them the fig trees and the honeysuckle bushes and the ponds and the dogwood trees. Then they will feel like neighbors, like friends.”

  The young, proud Blacksmith had responded: “How are they going to be my friend when we don’t have anything in common?”

  Bira gave him a loving look. “You’ll have something in common. You’ll be colored men with land.”

  By the time Fawn was born, he had donated some land to the church, moved his shop away from his home and sold every other piece of property on the block. He had neighbors and friends because of this. He had neighbors and friends because of Bira.

  And he bought land, always more land.

  But with the land and the money one question remained on everyone’s lips: where were the husbands for his daughters?

  CHAPTER TWO

  No matter what the rest of the country said, something good had to come out of the South. Especially out of Atlanta. After all, God had blessed her with rich soil, bright blue skies, sweet smelling dogwoods, peach and pecan trees forever in bloom and big fir pines that blanketed the land like a spread of emerald jam. Out of these mornings, every morning except Sunday, you could hear the whistle of the 6:55 from the North, traveling all night stopping in Atlanta with passengers disembarking from the white and colored cars with sleep still fresh in their eyes. Over at Morris Brown College the first morning bell signaled the start of a new day in an area of town where life was hard, the work harder, but the desire to survive greater than both. And if you were still, if you could get above the sound of your neighbor’s kettle screaming to be rescued from the heat, the bacon or the fatback frying in that black iron skillet that lived on your mother’s stove, or arguing with the woman next to you telling her to get up and get you some coffee, you might hear the Blacksmith hit the first lick on his anvil, cracking the steel into the crack of dawn.

  He had everything many of them want
ed: the body of an ancient warrior bathed in eternal youth, the strength of an angry God forging the creation of man, a quiet un-domineering wife who never questioned him, and five of the most beautiful daughters many people had ever seen.

  There was jealousy. Always there would be jealousy. You lay in the bed in the morning next to your fine woman whose coffee tasted like yesterday’s dishwater and whose cooking set like lead in your belly. The Blacksmith’s wife was the best cook in Atlanta. When she cut peaches from her tree and made cobbler she made at least five. For once it hit the oven and the smell hit the air of Atlanta everyone she knew thought of some excuse to come visit, come borrow, come return something long gone. They hummed didn’t that pie smell good followed by why sure you’d have a little piece. Just a taste. After all they couldn’t be rude.

  Your children, while pretty to you and their mama, didn’t turn heads for beauty. But you saw the jealousy in your wife’s eyes as she stood on the street next to you as the Brown girls passed. You’d tip your hat and she’d shove you in the ribs.

  “Just being polite,” you would say to her.

  “Oh hush up,” she’d sneer back at you as all eyes fell on Minnelsa’s tall curvy figure, her hair shining and black as if kissed by the sun while rolled into a thick bun. Or on Rosa’s tiny waist, cinched even tinier by the whale bone corset that everyone knew was the best money could buy. Then you looked down at their dainty feet and realized your children had no shoes and these women were wearing brand new ones. Realized your kids wore hand-me-downs. Realized that you were jealous. And like every man in town, you thought of unlacing one of those fine expensive corsets and untying the ribbons in their silky hair and spreading that black fire across the bed as you spread their legs apart.

  You were jealous alright. But these were the Blacksmith’s daughters. And like everyone else you remember the day when a man smelling of hard work, of sweat, manure and days of labor in the fields came to town and filled himself with too much of that “ice water” the old men made in their barns and sold in their wagons. He was standing rather drunk and proud on the corner of Sweet Auburn Avenue when young Miss Jewel passed on her way to the dress shop. Seeing this fine figure of a woman he smiled and tipped his hat when she passed him.

  “How do, miss,” he said not bothering to shield her from the scent of his breathe. This stranger told you that this woman would want him. After all, he said all the ladies back home did.

  But when Miss Jewel in her starched white dress just smiled politely and kept going, he got insulted.

  So he followed her, even when you warned him not to. You remember the gleam in his eyes as he looked her up and down like she was some farm animal. You remember the frightened look on her face when he touched her shoulder, then wrapped his arm around her waist. “I know what you got on under there. Come with me so I can loosen you up.”

  The fist that hit him came out of nowhere. The Blacksmith stood over him and with a look of fury on his face snarled: “This is a lady, you drunken scum. You don’t touch ladies without their permission. Without my permission.”

  From then on everyone knew what no one ever said. You didn’t want no scum touching your daughters but you could safely say no one would ever touch the Blacksmith’s daughters.

  Still at dawn you wished for the Blacksmith’s daughter next to you in bed, for his strength to forge through the day, for his wife to cook your meals and cater to you when you came home. At dawn you got out of your bed so that one day you might be the Blacksmith, and maybe you might have that daughter.

  Into this dawn came the Piano Man. Fresh from the colored cars of the 6:55 from the North, trying to pull himself together from the long ride from New York. With the other colored men, men dressed in faded old clothes and too big shoes, he followed the porter to a space behind the station to relieve himself, seeing how there were no “colored” lavatories on the train and he had refused to be rushed out into a field in the cold of night to take care of his business every time they stopped. Smiling, relaxed and now refreshed, he adjusted himself grabbing his bags and his portfolio of music.

  Finally, he was in the South. He looked around him at the train yard. Colored on one side and whites on another. Porters carrying bags for white passengers, colored passengers carrying their bags themselves. He knew they didn’t fault the porters from the looks on their faces. It was money, it was business. He guessed the whites could tip more, the coloreds probably not at all.

  From the rail yard he found the street where those from the train were getting into horse drawn carriages, and a few automobiles. He saw a colored woman that had been on the train with him climb up next to a man in overalls and hold her weather beaten valise in her lap. The back of the wagon was full of baskets of produce. He knew these people would be off to market before they made it home.

  Across the street a frail white woman complained of the long ride, the smells and the heat then swooned into the arms of her husband. The older woman next to her fanned her insisting that they hurry the car homeward.

  He grinned at everything he saw. The Piano Man was in the South.

  He had been the Piano Man most of his life. The ivory keys were like extensions of his long, strong, brown fingers. He could hear anything and immediately he could play it. Back in New York, where his mother had been the servant of a very wealthy white spinster, he had sat at the piano with the old woman amazing her with the sounds he played from what he heard on the street and on the Victrola. She paid an amazed white man to teach him to read the notes off the page, this black boy that astounded her friends by playing everything in the universe when they came to call. He entertained the white woman, and she loved him, buying him fancy clothes and paying for his education until he was too old to be just any entertainment at their teas and was a refreshing masculine distraction. The old woman died and the others tried to suggest his presence in their circle was needed. But he needed them no longer, his mother long dead, he remained in Europe with the few pennies she had left him, only to find that the treatment might have been kinder but the feeling was the same.

  Now standing on the sidewalk in the South, looking out of place in his suit and vest and tie, his shoes shined and wiped clean of the red clay with a rag he kept in his pocket, his scent not totally clean but fresher than the field hands and workers that had surrounded him on the train, he needed a place to stay.

  A porter passed him walking away from the station with a carpetbag in hand. “Excuse me, sir.” The Piano Man said. The porter turned, surprised that the eloquent voice came from one of his own. He stopped and sized up the Piano Man before he gave an indignant “Yes?”

  “Sorry to bother you, sir. . .”

  The porter looked intrigued. When was the last time a colored man called him sir?

  “But I’m new here and in need of lodging.” The porter stared waiting for the dapperly dressed man to say something he could understand. “I’m looking for a place to stay. I was hoping you might point me in the right direction.”

  “Why sure,” the porter replied happily now that he understood. “Your first time here?” he asked the dapper man that he remembered seeing on the train from New York.

  The Piano Man nodded.

  “You from New York?”

  The Piano Man nodded again. It was going to take him time to get used to these people, this accent. So he listened to the man talk on and on as they walked towards the sound of a clock that was ringing 7:15, a walk that ended in front of a rooming house in the colored section of town near the colleges when the clock tower rang 8 am.

  That had been yesterday, and what a long day it had been. The porter, whose name was Jim something or other had left him at the rooming house and promised to be back that afternoon to show him around. But afternoon turned into evening and Jim something or other showed up with his brother Roy. Two men looking for a good time and hoping that the new man from the north would be willing to pay. Roy owned a large wagon and after a few deliveries the three men took the
rig into the woods for a night the Piano Man would not soon forget.

  Now he smelled coffee, fresh ground strong coffee. And he smelled meat. But he didn’t open his eyes. Just his nose, then his mind. Meat. Too early in the morning for meat. But the smell meant he was home. Home to the place his mother had told him to go if ever he felt truly lost in the world. To the south, where his people had not grown cold like in the north, the air was fresh with scents you didn’t get in New York City, and family meant not just parents and children, but aunts, uncles, cousins, anybody that had a limb on that tree. The Piano Man was home.

  He knew it was too early for him to get up. The cock had just crowed and off in the distance he had heard a ringing, a constant ringing that he had been told was the Blacksmith at work. So early, too early. These country people up at the crack of dawn. Working in the fields, in the kitchens. Up so early they had to go to bed at sundown. On Fridays, when the eagle flew, they had to come to places like Emma’s in the woods. According to his mother, with the exception of church socials, funerals and hog killings, where else could they be.