A Different Sun: A Novel of Africa (4 page)

A bird flew by and she sat up. Once more she reached for the silty bottom and repainted her arms.

In the field heading home, she kept to the shady edge, biding her time. She came around a tree and right there was Uncle Eli, squatted on his heels.

“Just this minute was a copperhead where you standing,” he said. She pulled at her muddied skirt and stepped sideways.

“Gone now,” he said.

He had a piece of wood in his hands. He was always carving—rabbits, deer, even turtles. “You trying to get yourself in trouble?” he said.

“What are you making?” she said.

“You watch,” he said. He breathed onto the wood, and then he rubbed it with a wad of leaves. He smoothed it against his trousers, a kind of cluck and sigh and then the dull
whap
as he struck the wood against his palm and turned it.

“Why do you breathe on it?” she said.

“Put me into it,” he said.

“Can I see?” she said, squatting. He pressed it into her hand. Then the wedge seemed full of heat. She ran its smooth sides against her face, to put herself in it too and for a moment, Emma saw that Uncle Eli was a buffalo, like the one in her animal picture book, dense and dark, his eyes all-seeing.

“Now you dream on going home,” he said, his voice woolly and his hand on her head.

Emma saw no need to dream where she already was; she dreamed of some other place, like Africa. As she closed her eyes, everything went blue.

* * *

T
HE ONLY PENALTY
for the dress was that Emma had to wash it. She did so in the yard. She thought her papa seemed sorry.

The next day she asked again for paper. Two weeks later she came into the library to find a brown package tied with twine and beside it a new pen and a pot of ink. Emma felt she was being guided by Jesus or fixing to marry. She sat down and opened the package. The paper was cool in her hand and smelled like the clean underside of a pillow. She opened the ink pot and dipped her pen to write the sentences she had already imagined.
My name is Emma Davis. I will soon be nine years old. Today I have determined to make an account of myself. I already know a great deal and have seen many things. There is a gentleman in my yard who came from Africa.

She heard someone in the hallway and covered her writing with a blotter. A few minutes later, she carried the page upstairs and opened her bureau drawer. “This is mine,” she whispered, looking into the frame of air. She placed the page facedown, the smooth creamy side up.

· 2 ·

Calling

M
OST GIRLS ENDED
their studies when they turned twelve. Catherine had, giving her attention to social rounds. At thirteen, Emma read Latin and French in the library every morning, writing out words she found particularly useful or lovely:
numen, meminisse, sesquialter.
She also made it her business to read the farmer’s almanac and when she came across them, a set of pamphlets urging crop rotation “that rich Georgia soil not be laid to ruin like that of North Carolina.” In her mind, Emma had ascended to a place of significance in the family. She was the smarter daughter and the chosen one. It was she, not Catherine, her father took to Savannah to meet an important businessman. Papa allowed her to hold his gold watch, attached to her wrist by a silk ribbon, all through the journey. Furthermore, she felt a difference within her, born of that awareness of a second world close by, like a beast against the door. In this way, it seemed God had set her apart toward some important purpose. She persuaded her father to let her ride in a proper saddle and gained a fuller view of the plantation and the people who worked it. No longer were they the quiet group in their modest clothes gathered to receive Christmas “extras.” These were folks who worked hard in the field, beginning in the morning at a pace they could keep to from sunup to sundown. One day she saw a little fellow completely naked, carrying a hoe as large as he was. She felt stabbed in the heart. It was cotton that brought in the money. But growing and picking it was the hardest labor. “Your land is going to get tired if you don’t diversify,” she said to her papa, not daring to argue on behalf of the people.

“What do you propose?” he said, appearing both humored and perplexed.

* * *

M
ITTIE
A
NN WAS
back in the house, and it fell to her to assist Emma with her new corset. Sometimes she took hold of Emma’s elbows and tugged at them as if to wake her. Emma knew the woman held her accountable. She must try to make amends. “Wouldn’t it be good if Papa grew less cotton and we started a horse farm?” she said.

“How’s that?” Mittie Ann said.

“The work would be lighter.”

“Not lighter, just less of it. Master gonna sell some of us.”

“What do you mean?”

“Your papa figure the cost of every slave, believe you me. He got less work, gonna sell some folks off, including children. My Carl a strong man; might sell him first.”

“What can I do then?”

“Think of something else.”

“Like what?”

“Put in peanuts or soybean, corn. Don’t turn to tobacco. It nearly as bad as cotton.”

Emma blinked.

“You surprise I know so much. Who you think knows?” Mittie Ann said, straightening Emma’s sleeves with a good jerk, then leaning to retrieve the slop jar.

“Leave that be,” Emma said. “I’ll do it.”

Later in the day she chanced to look out a window to see Mittie Ann and Carl sitting on low stools in front of the cabin. She had him holding his hands in front of him while she respooled her yarn around them. Likely, she had pulled one garment out in order to knit another. Carl leaned toward Mittie Ann and whispered something, his hand on her shoulder. They laughed softly. It was troubling and mysterious to see them in such a state of ease and happiness.

Emma’s father agreed to putting forty acres in corn. On a late July afternoon, their crop coming in, father and daughter rode together to the mill. Two hours later, Emma left before her papa, discouraged. The black men looked ragged as ever. Two boys not eight years old were employed in conveying sacks of ground meal. Their eyes spoke such sorrow, Emma wondered what they had seen. She raced the horse back home by way of the old road. Her bodice and underclothes were soaked when she left the horse with Carl. Upstairs, she lay down on the bed in the hallway. A breeze came through, and she pulled a shawl over her shoulders. She dozed and woke again, feeling worse, a dull kind of weight in her abdomen.
I rode too hard
, she told herself, and turned over. In her dream, her father was walking down a long path away from her. Once or twice, he turned to look back. The day was fading. She called to him but he didn’t hear, and her legs were too heavy to bear her forward.

When she woke, Emma could see through the large window at the end of the hall the pine spires bent by wind. A girl came to fill the tub. “I want Mittie Ann,” Emma said. When she got down to her drawers, they were stained a dark red like rust, though there was one bright spot, pink-red as a camellia.

“I’m calling your mama,” Mittie Ann said.

“I want you to help me,” Emma said.

“Help yourself,” Mittie Ann said, more brazen than ever. So Emma did her own bathing and washed her hair.

“I’ll brush it out,” Mittie Ann said.

Emma tried to work up her courage.
It wasn’t my fault about your father
, she wanted to explain, but she could not say it because it would be a lie. It was her fault, her family’s fault, and she could not soften it.

* * *

W
ITH WOMANHOOD UPON
her, Emma turned for a season to her sister and mother. Maybe she could be like other girls after all. She spent more time on her piano and sewing.

“See, Emma,” Catherine said, showing her how to adorn her hair more becomingly. “You can be quite lovely.” Such a gentle sentence; Emma thought she had never loved her sister more. After a ladies’ tea at Aunt Lou’s, her mother said something just as kind. “You stand so well, Emma. I’ve never seen a young woman with a more graceful carriage.” She felt lifted up.

They rode home in the buggy, singing in rounds. Nearing the house, Emma spotted Uncle Eli at the edge of the yard. He seemed to be waiting for them. As soon as she could, she headed out to see him.

“Where you been?” he said.

“To tea.”

“What happen there?”

“Why, we talked,” she said.

“What about your book?” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“Your own work.” He tapped his head with his fingertips as if to indicate her mind. She brooded as he pulled sweet potatoes from the ash.

On an evening of a day so hot even Georgia rhododendron wilted, Emma overheard her parents in the sewing room.

“She spends too much time reading. She hasn’t got your beauty to count on.” Her father’s voice. It was hard to say if she loved him more or less for hearing it. But she felt a gulf open between them, canyon deep and sheer as rock.

In the dining room, she bent to look into the mirror of the sideboard. She began by focusing on her long forehead, moist from the heat. She turned her face to the side to study one angle. Slowly she turned to the other side, avoiding her own eyes. At last she faced forward, beholding an oval face and a receding chin. A sound of china cups rang from the butler’s pantry. Regardless of what Catherine and her mother said, Emma was plain and she would never become prettier. Her eyes might have saved her if her hair were darker and if she had longer lashes.

At the dinner table she told her parents she had decided to go away to school; she said it like picking fruit hanging low from a tree. They looked at one another. Her father cleared his throat. Her mother said, “You seem very sure.”

“I’ll go to Georgia Female College in Madison. It’s only ten miles away.”

“You can’t be a common schoolteacher,” her father said.

Emma decided to pursue exactly what her father said she must not. Mittie Ann helped her pack, and once, for a moment, out of the corner of her eye, as the woman was laying out her gloves, Emma saw her pat them.
She’s in favor
, she thought,
even if she doesn’t forgive me
.

Uncle Eli was standing on his porch when she went to say good-bye, a cloth hat on his head.

“I’ll write to you,” she said. “I have all my papers in a basket, my book as you say.” She smiled.

“I finna see you anyway,” he said. “I been watching you all this time.”

* * *

T
HE FIRST YEAR
was disappointing. Lessons went toward the color of fabric for lining one’s bonnets and where to turn one’s eyes in the company of young men one might wish to marry. The answers were pink and downward. The second year, Emma studied the New Testament with Rev. Miles. “What does Jesus mean?” he said. “Blessed are the merciful.”

None of the other girls answered.

“He must mean, those who are kind to others will find God’s favor,” Emma said.

“Do you believe good works will bring you favor with God?” Rev. Miles said.

“I don’t know,” she said. “Surely God wishes us to be kind.”

“Look up
mercy
in your dictionary,” he said.

“Charity,” Emma said, seized with the answer. “Charity is love. Blessed are those who love.”

“Amen,” Rev. Miles said.

Emma felt a thrill. One other girl gave her competition in the classroom, but Emma thought she was edging her out.

She almost liked Rev. Miles. In the evenings, with a bit of imaginative flourish, Emma was sure she liked him. But in the day, the fantasy was punctured. His hands were shapely but not strong. His chest dipped a little beneath his coat. She was sorry because she believed their minds might agree. Emma was even sorrier when Catherine’s engagement was announced and she had to anticipate going home for the ceremony without a beau. She longed for a companion, someone who would be a confidant. In the middle of the night, she walked out along the flagstones in the courtyard, seeking Jesus.
Be merciful to me
,
she prayed.

In the last year of her studies, Emma attended a lecture on Ann Judson. Ann and her husband, Adoniram, had left Massachusetts to be missionaries to Burma. But Mr. Judson was taken prisoner and set in shackles for months because of war with England. It had fallen to Mrs. Judson to walk from palace to prison among the Burmese, ministering to her husband and petitioning for his release. Emma thought of Ann Judson’s booted feet finding purchase on the Burmese hills. She could imagine the missionary’s gloved hands patting the heads of youngsters. She could even see her standing in front of a lifted gun, looking straight into the eyes of a would-be assassin. Emma saw herself in Burma, only her unremarkable features had become defined.

Later that night, Isaiah 6:8 came to her as a proclamation. She was lighting a candle in her room when the verse blazed before her:

Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, Whom shall I send? And who will go for us? And I said, Here am I. Send me.

· 3 ·

A House Waiting

E
MMA MEANT TO
write at length about her sense of calling, but an emotional breathlessness overtook her. Recording a promise to God seemed very grave. She imagined a path of stone. At last, she wrote a few sentences.
As far back as I can remember, I have felt something amiss, whether in myself or in the world. I am no more perfect today than I was yesterday. But as God calls, I follow.

In May 1849, she found herself packing for home. She was seventeen years old. Soon she would discern her next step. But the return was harder than she had expected. The porch behind Uncle Eli’s cabin still held his baskets, but now they sat unattended. Emma had a sudden vision of that long-ago morning, her father answering the door to Uncle Eli. The old man’s words, “I’ll take it.” The white panels in the dining room felt icy to her touch. At church one Sunday she heard of a mission with the Cherokee in Arkansas. She approached Rev. Howell to ask if she might begin a Sunday school for the colored children. “I need practice,” she said. She would call it the Pilgrims School.

The first Sunday, she found the children already in attendance, sitting so close on the single bench that she thought they might all fall if someone sneezed. No one would even look at her.
What a poor vessel I am
, she thought. The following Sunday, she found a broken chalkboard and a mite of chalk left in the room. She picked it up automatically.
J-E-S-U-S
, she wrote,
L-O-V-E-S
. She was about to write
Y-O-U
, when she chanced to glance at her pupils. They were gazing at the slate with great hunger. In an instant she remembered that Georgia law prohibited Negroes from knowing their letters. Her brain struggled against her dilemma. Hot as it was, she felt chilled. She laid the slate in her lap. “You,” she said. “You.”

That evening, her only beau called, a freckled second cousin. Emma tried to entertain him with poetry, but he had no capacity for hearing it. In moments of great guilt, she wondered if she was meant to stay here in Greensboro, to suffer for her family, to take on humility. Humility, perhaps, but not abasement. She dismissed the beau.

Before supper one evening, she sat in a window alcove, finishing a bit of smocking.

Her father passed by. “I haven’t seen Tommy of late,” he said.

“I’m not courting him,” she said.

“You’re wasting your time with those pickaninnies,” he said. “I don’t know a man around here who wants as a wife a teacher of coloreds.”

“I enjoy teaching them,” she said, making a knot. “Our slaves might at least look forward to heaven if we instructed them in scripture.” She broke the thread with her teeth. At the dinner table, her mother spoke of Catherine, who was expecting a second child. Emma felt the walls of the room closing in. “I hope to be a missionary,” she said. It seemed the muscles tightened in her father’s face, and she was glad of it. “I can at least teach children to read and write.”

“Well I’ll be,” he said, like a man who has been told there is no more use for cotton. “I thought you’d take over from me and your mama if marriage doesn’t suit you. Everything we have is yours.” He rubbed his hands up and down his whiskers. She watched the roll of his midsection rise and fall with his breath. Fleetingly she caught an image of her hair fading through the years as she slipped her feet night after night under the sheets of her girlhood bed.

“No,” she said, and had the presence of mind to add, “How can I accept any more from you?” She leaned into the dense element of her rebellion and felt lighter for it.

She went regularly to her bureau drawer to read her girlhood thoughts. “I’m studying myself,” she said one night when it dawned on her what she was doing.

One evening she sat in the library, several sheets of paper stacked in front of her, candles lit, casting pools of light. Her needle was prepared with heavy thread. With a ruler, she had drawn a line down the middle of the top page. She pressed the needle through the stack at the very center. It seemed she might be piercing her skin. Dimly she desired this press against her own skin. She worked from the center out in both directions. When she was finished, she would fold the sewn pages together. In just this way she made her first journal.

She wrote bits of self-instruction.
Jesus was thirty before he began his ministry.
She wrote wonderments.
For some reason, an old slave knows more about me than I do myself. His name is Eli. I have always been drawn to him.
She recorded her longing.
If only someone might join me.
One night she filled an entire page with one repeated question.
What am I to do?
Her bureau drawer became a library of herself.

Still weeks passed and months and no definite plan revealed itself; she was not drawn to the Cherokee in Arkansas. Two Septembers came and went and Emma turned twenty. On her birthday, she called on Uncle Eli. A look of knowing came across his face as she approached.

“It’s the white bird what come to visit,” he said. “How your book coming?”

“I’m not getting anywhere,” she said.

“Why you put mud on your dress that day?”

“I can’t remember.”

“Yes you can.”

About the time robins were flocking to dogwood trees for red berries, Rev. Howell announced that the first Baptist missionary to Africa would visit their congregation in November. This news was conveyed at the end of the Sunday morning service. Emma had heard of Rev. Henry Bowman and even read his reports in the Baptist paper. But she had not quite believed in him as someone who could show up in her yard. The news of his near visit put a storm in her brain. It was so loud, she almost missed the missionary’s letter as Rev. Howell read from it. She caught the tag end—
When I look round on these thousands of people ever ready to listen to the gospel, who can wonder if I should think that neither tribulation nor distress, nor persecution, nor famine, must be allowed to lead one away from this work of the Master who has said: “Go and lo I am with you!”

Africa. That bright blue mass on her father’s globe. She could almost taste it, like the sea, and Emma surged in her conviction. Yes. Rev. Bowman could tell her all about it. Perhaps a single woman could volunteer. If the church sent female missionaries to Arkansas, why not Africa? What if she traveled as Rev. Bowman’s secretary?

She was angry and then amused to hear her friends talk after the service. Sarah Martin declared that all the folks who had accompanied Rev. Bowman on his first tour had died or gone blind. Ruth Ferguson reported that her parents were doubtful about whether niggers went to heaven. Rebecca McAlister went on to no end about how she would like to marry the missionary and go overseas.

“He was a Texas Ranger!” she said, “I’ve heard he came back to Georgia looking for a bride.”

The comment caught Emma off guard and she nearly dropped her Testament.

Rebecca was just beginning the social rounds, and Emma knew she spent an hour each night wrapping her hair in paper and two hours in the morning arranging it. She could hardly control her glee, imagining this vain girl in Africa.

The night the missionary was to preach, Emma wore an austere gray wool. At the last minute, she set a silver pin at her throat, and avoided her mother in the sewing room, who complained earlier of a headache and expressed misgivings about Emma’s going back out in the cold. She arrived early on the pretense of setting out hymnals and was finishing her task when she heard the church door open. In the vestibule, she found a man shaking out his frock coat. Apparently he had forgotten his hat, as his hair was damp. In a moment, he pulled a white handkerchief from his pocket and wiped the floor where it had been wetted. Then he stood and looked at her, and Emma thought for a moment of an angel, though the gentleman in front of her looked nothing like one. His hair and complexion were dark, but he seemed somehow otherworldly. Then she saw it was the missionary’s eyes. They were blue and in the queerest way appeared to move independently of one another, as if he weren’t quite in agreement with himself or with the world. She was so captured by his intensity that she couldn’t speak. When she started to curtsy, the man seemed to think she was falling and held his hands out. “Careful,” he said, his voice a golden glow pouring through her. Right then Rev. Howell bustled in. Other members of the congregation pressed around, and Emma found her seat in the sanctuary.

All through Rev. Bowman’s preaching, he held out his handsome hands. “Won’t you help me carry the message to those lost souls that Jesus is the stalwart night watchman, ever ready to show them the path from darkness to light?” he said. A series of tiny fires seemed ignited in Emma’s chest. When she thought the reverend’s eyes lingered on her, she wrenched her handkerchief into a tight ball. Then she saw the missionary looking at old Mrs. Thornton in the same way, and Rebecca McAlister too, who was looking up at him with a smile on her face.
I will study him
, Emma thought to herself,
just like anything else
. She could not deny his eyes. His lips were almost too pretty. But his nose flared toward the nostrils, and his firm jawline conveyed a power that spoke to her depths. The hollow of his tanned cheek was like a moment of sadness in the late afternoon. When he sat down at the end of his preaching he looked like someone who has failed at his endeavor; yet when they stood to sing a final hymn, she could hear his voice above the rest. She was overtaken. Here was a true man, like no other she had known, intelligent and handsome, compassionate and brave.

Emma was not surprised to see Rebecca making conversation with the missionary during the reception. She glanced once more at Henry Bowman, bitterness in her throat. But his eyes
were
fixed on her, over Rebecca’s head. Emma started across the room, the same feeling in her legs she had as a child in a foot race. “I am Emma Davis. We met before the service. I believe you have touched us all,” she said.

Rebecca stepped back and Emma pulled her skirts around to face Rev. Bowman.

“You, Miss Davis, at least seemed to be listening,” he said. Her heart expanded. He had set her apart from the rest.

“How could anyone not be touched by the plight of people in such faraway lands who have never heard of our Savior?” Standing next to the missionary, Emma saw they were the same height. Now that his hair had dried, it would not stay set but curled about his ears and the back of his neck, making him look young. Yet he appeared suddenly gloomy, facing in another direction, and she wondered how to take her leave.

“Of course, many are interested only in their own welfare,” Rev. Bowman said, still looking off.

Emma was at a loss. It seemed premature to ask whether a woman might go to Africa, to ask after her own interest. Yet she could not let go of the conversation. “I will pray for your mission in Africa. I feel so for the children.” She raised a hand to her face and covered her chin, suddenly self-conscious.

“Have you ever considered the mission field?” he said, looking back rather abruptly, his eyes again seeming at odds with each other. But then they softened as he looked on her. His lips parted as if he were pondering something.

“I have been called to some service,” she said, her eyes moving to his jaw, the beginning of his neck. What would it be like to touch him there?

“I spent years running from God,” he said. “The price was steep.”

He seemed to have embarrassed himself with this confession because he turned sharply and left her standing alone. She turned just as quickly, hoping to give the impression that the end to the conversation had been mutually struck.
I didn’t do anything so terrible
, she thought to herself. But she felt ashamed and naïve that she had indulged a romantic inclination.

At home, her mother was waiting for her upstairs. “Well? Did you meet the missionary?”

“I greeted him. We all did.”

“And that’s all?”

“That’s all.”

Her mother touched her cheek, and Emma wished for all the world to tell her everything. In her bedroom, she was stunned by her grief over a man she had known to think of for only two weeks. She slipped her praying hands between her legs and rocked in sorrow.

The next day, Emma came late to breakfast. A dullness seemed to cloak her, a feeling of dejection she had not known before. She drank tea and did not write or tend to her regular duties. Late in the day, a boy called at the back door, his skin dark to a mirroring. He carried a letter from Rev. Bowman addressed to Emma.
This must be how African children look
, Emma thought, her hands shaking as she pulled at the envelope. The reverend asked if he might call two days hence. As a pilaster against hope and disappointment, Emma kept focused on the child long after he had left. After all, Henry Bowman might wish only for her to create a church circle to raise funds for his cause. It was an agonizing thought.

At dinner, she sensed her parents’ skepticism when she mentioned the letter. “I wonder what it pays a man to be a missionary,” her father said, and then they ate for some minutes in silence. Her mother recommended that Emma serve pound cake to her guest. “I’ve heard that travelers from such ill countries come home gaunt,” she said.

Early the following morning, Emma saddled the new mare. It seemed like an eternity until the next day and she was too nervous to sit still. She carried her journal in a leather pouch hanging by the saddle horn. With the winter sun breaking through the trees, she cut down the hill, took the back way behind the neighbors’ houses, and let the horse find its crossing at the creek. A pair of mallards turned slow circles in a cove, the male showing his bright green head. Up the hill on the other side, she intercepted the road leading to the sawmill one way and the granary the other. She passed a teamster hauling wood, but the mare acted nicely. A cardinal winged by, red against the evergreens. She followed a path that ran to an old pottery works, now closed. But she felt oddly separate from the scene. The mare had slowed to a walk; it wandered into a field and grazed. She pulled her journal out to reread a recent entry:
What do I believe? The purpose of life is to manifest God’s love.
She had skipped a line and then:
What does God require?
Beneath this she had drawn a hard line before penning:
Preach the gospel to the poor, set at liberty them that are bruised.
Emma touched her face. It was an enigmatic verse. She closed the book and returned it to the pouch, pulled the reins to the right, turning in a circle, and surveyed the land of Georgia. The slopes of the hills were like the fine curves of the animal’s back that carried her.