No Daughter of the South Read Online Free

that even that wasn’t all mine.
    After we made love, she’d made me put on a t-shirt to sleep in. Sometimes during the night, Rachel would slip into bed between us. Then I’d wake up, the early morning light would be bathing my lover, and Rachel would be nursing. I’d give Rachel a dirty look that was meant to say, “Why don’t you give us a break, kid?” She seemed to understand, because she’d nestle even closer to Sammy and suck harder. What was I to do, just lie there full of jealousy towards a baby? Anyway, there was usually that ammonia smell in bed which I had learned was a bad omen. In the end, I was a woman who knew she’d be beaten. That’s when I’d get up and make coffee.
    So we had never slept late together. Never. We hadn’t had any luscious mornings in bed with some sleepy, good-morning sex, and then breakfast in bed, and more sex, and maybe a nap. I don’t know, maybe I thought that if I pulled off this quest for her, she’d think she owed me a weekend away together.
    Her ‘big favor’ had become a quest for me. Something I had to do. Should I have questioned myself more closely about my motives, made sure what it was I hoped to obtain before I left? Hell, yes, but then I would have been someone else if I thought before jumping into an act of love, wouldn’t I?
    When Sammy realized I was planning to head off for Port Mullet right away, she insisted she hadn’t meant for me to make a special trip of it. What she had in mind, she said, was for me to work it in to my next visit to my folks. She hadn’t yet grasped how rare my family visits were, mainly because I never spoke of them. But now that I had agreed to do it, I wanted to get going. The distance might give me time to ask what I was doing with a family woman when I was allergic to families.
    Besides, something occurred to me. Sammy, who overflowed with self-sufficiency, mental health, and clear thinking had this one chink to her carefully constructed life—her unresolved feelings about her father. She wasn’t in the habit of asking favors of anyone, but she’d asked this of me. My growing need for Sammy was making me nervous. Well, now she needed me. It might be my only chance to even up the score.
    Before I left, Sammy told me the little she did know about her father, Elijah Wilson. She had never seen him; he drowned before she was born. At the time of his death, Sammy’s mother was living near Port Mullet. Not in it, of course. No blacks lived in Port Mullet back then. Her mother lived out somewhere in the unincorporated part of the county. After Sammy’s father died, her mother went back to Alabama to live with her own father, Sammy’s grandfather.
    As a child in Port Mullet, I didn’t even know black people lived anywhere in the county. Only the few well-off families had their “colored help.” It never occurred to me to wonder where they lived.
    It wasn’t until I was in the sixth grade that someone announced that the colored school was closing and the children were coming to our school. Until then, I hadn’t ever heard of the colored school. By that time some folks were beginning to say “negro,” while for others saying “colored” was already making a point not to say nigger, so a lot of people didn’t see the need to make any further effort. I wished my own parents had stuck with “colored,” because “negro,” in their Florida woods accent, came out “negra”, perilously close to the epithet to be avoided.
    When I asked where all those children I hadn’t even known about had been all this time, I was told they had had their own school, Booker T. Washington School, over by where they lived. Out in the quarters, they said, you know, Piney Woods Road.
    The following September, a handful of scared black children showed up. Two of them were in my class. None of their teachers came, though, and I remember wondering what had happened to them.
    Sammy grew up in the red clay hills of Alabama. She claims she