Song of Solomon

face and said, “My baby girl.” She looked for another pair of eyes and told him also, “My baby girl.” Moving back down the aisle, she told each face turned toward her the same piece of news. “My baby girl. That’s my baby girl. My baby girl. My baby girl. My baby girl.”

Conversationally she spoke, identifying Hagar, selecting her away from everybody else in the world who had died. First she spoke to the ones who had the courage to look at her, shake their heads, and say, “Amen.” Then she spoke to those whose nerve failed them, whose glance would climb no higher than the long black fingers at her side. Toward them especially she leaned a little, telling in three words the full story of the stumped life in the coffin behind her. “My baby girl.” Words tossed like stones into a silent canyon.

Suddenly, like an elephant who has just found his anger and lifts his trunk over the heads of the little men who want his teeth or his hide or his flesh or his amazing strength, Pilate trumpeted for the sky itself to hear, “And she was loved!”

It startled one of the sympathetic winos in the vestibule and he dropped his bottle, spurting emerald glass and jungle-red wine everywhere.

Chapter 14

Perhaps it was because the sun had hit the rim of the horizon, but Susan Byrd’s house looked different. The cedar tree was a silvery gray and its bark crinkled all the way up. It looked to Milkman like the leg of an ancient elephant. And now he noticed that the ropes that held the swing were frayed and the picket fence that had looked so bright and perky before was really flaked, peeling, even leaning to the left. The blue steps leading to the porch were faded into a watery gray. In fact the whole house looked seedy.

He lifted his hand to knock on the door and noticed the doorbell. He rang it and Susan Byrd opened the door.

“Hello again,” he said.

“Well,” she said, “you’re as good as your word.”

“I’d like to talk to you some more, if you don’t mind. About Sing. May I come in?”

“Of course.” She stood back from the door and the odor of another batch of gingerbread wafted out. Again they sat in the living room—he in the gray wing-back chair, she on the sofa this time. Miss Long was nowhere in sight.

“I know you don’t know who Sing married or if she married, but I was wondering—”

“Of course I know who she married. That is if they did marry. She married Jake, that black boy her mother took care of.”

Milkman felt dizzy. Everybody kept changing right in front of him. “But yesterday you said nobody heard from her after she left.”

“Nobody did. But they knew who she left with!”

“Jake?”

“Jake. Black Jake. Black as coal.”

“Where—where did they live? Boston?”

“I don’t know where they ended up. North, I guess. We never heard.”

“I thought you said she went to a private school in Boston.”

She dismissed the whole notion with a wave of her hand. “I just said that in front of her, Grace. She talks so much, you know. Carries tales all over the county. It’s true she was supposed to go to some school, but she didn’t. She left on that double-team wagon with that black boy, Jake. A whole lot of slaves got together. Jake was driving. Can you imagine it? Riding off with a wagonload of slaves?”

“What was Jake’s last name? Can you tell me?”

She shrugged. “I don’t think he had one. He was one of those flying African children. They must all be dead a long time now.”

“Flying African children?”

“Urn hm, one of Solomon’s children. Or Shalimar. Papa said Heddy always called him Shalimar.”

“And Heddy was…”

“My grandmother. Sing’s mother and Papa’s too. An Indian woman. She was the one who took care of Jake when his father left them all. She found him and took him home and raised him. She didn’t have any boy children then. My father, Crowell, came later.” She leaned forward and whispered, “She didn’t have a husband, Heddy. I didn’t want to go into all of that with Grace. You can imagine what she’d do with that information.

You’re a stranger, so it doesn’t matter. But Grace…” Susan Byrd looked pleadingly at the ceiling. “This Jake was a baby she found, and he and Sing grew up together, and I guess rather than be packed off to some Quaker school, she ran away with him. You know colored people and Indians mixed a lot, but sometimes, well, some Indians didn’t like it—the marrying, I mean. But neither one of them knew their own father, Jake nor Sing. And my own father didn’t know his. Heddy never said. I don’t know to this day if he was white, red, or—well— what. Sing’s name was Singing Bird. And my father’s name was Crow at first. Later he changed it to Crowell Byrd. After he took off his buckskin.” She smiled.

“Why did you call Solomon a flying African?”

“Oh, that’s just some old folks’ lie they tell around here. Some of those Africans they brought over here as slaves could fly. A lot of them flew back to Africa. The one around here who did was this same Solomon, or Shalimar—I never knew which was right. He had a slew of children, all over the place. You may have noticed that everybody around here claims kin to him. Must be over forty families spread in these hills calling themselves Solomon something or other. I guess he must have been hot stuff.” She laughed. “But anyway, hot stuff or not, he disappeared and left everybody. Wife, everybody, including some twenty-one children. And they say they all saw him go. The wife saw him and the children saw him. They were all working in the fields. They used to try to grow cotton here. Can you imagine? In these hills? But cotton was king then. Everybody grew it until the land went bad. It was cotton even when I was a girl. Well, back to this Jake boy. He was supposed to be one of Solomon’s original