Perfect Peace (5 page)

Leaning against the cedar-post gate, Emma Jean panted and allowed her right hand to find the latch. She then entered the chicken yard and fainted, facedown, in the midst of miniature white feathers and moist chicken shit. Several hens approached her limp form, jerking their heads curiously as though trying to ascertain why a little girl would choose their space in which to lounge. Seconds later, a bold one pecked at her arm and startled enough consciousness in her so that she could rise, drag herself inside the coop, and collapse intentionally.

Within moments, her senses returned. Unsure of how long she had been incapacitated, she gathered eggs quickly and rushed back inside.

“You musta gone to a chicken coop five miles away,” Mae Helen reprimanded.

Emma Jean hung her head and lamented, “I’m sorry, Momma. It’s just that my head keeps swimmin’ ’round and—”

“Oh, shut up, chile!” Mae Helen spewed, snatching the basket of eggs. “Ain’t nothin’ wrong with you. I barely even touched you. But de next time you prance around dis house like you somethin’ you ain’t, I’ma really knock de shit out o’ you. Then yo’ head
will
be swimmin’.” Mae Helen placed the basket on the table. “Now go ask yo’ sistas what they want for breakfast.”

Gracie and Pearlie, four and six years Emma Jean’s senior, slept Saturday mornings until they rose naturally. “Pretty folks need plenty o’ sleep,” Mae Helen reminded Emma Jean constantly. It must be their golden hue, Emma Jean guessed, that granted them something her ashen blackness didn’t. Or maybe it was their silky hair, which Mae Helen combed tirelessly. When Emma Jean sat before her, Mae Helen grabbed the thick bush and said, “This is yo’ daddy’s nappy hair. My hair is nappy, but not like this. You need a mule and a plow for this briar patch!” Such rumbling continued until, ten minutes later, she had worked Emma Jean’s hair into four thick, ribbonless plaits. “That’ll do,” she always said, pushing the child away from her.

Sampson Hurt, one of Swamp Creek’s two heartthrobs, had fathered Pearlie and Gracie, much to Mae Helen’s boastful delight. Whether he was actually handsome or not was debatable, but his straight hair and golden skin tone were sufficient for black folks to think he was. Mae Helen offered herself to Sammy simply as a necessary sacrifice for a modicum of coexistent pleasure, and of course Sammy didn’t refuse. He never said he loved her—or even that he liked her—and Mae Helen never asked. His presence alone, especially inside her, allowed her to believe that someone at least
could
love her. So when Sammy disappeared without ever saying good-bye, she celebrated the two daughters and the precious memories he left behind.

Claude Lovejoy, Emma Jean’s daddy, was a shade yellower than Sammy. Mae Helen lay with him in hopes of being used, once again, by a man every other woman wanted. Yet when Emma Jean emerged with Mae Helen’s navy blue complexion, Mae Helen swore she’d never sleep with the son of a bitch again. She told him to pack his shit and get out and that Emma Jean would never carry the Lovejoy name. She would be a Hurt, like her sisters, so others would at least associate her with beauty. When Claude chuckled and told Mae Helen, “She looks jes’ like you!” Mae Helen said, “Fuck you, nigga. Get the hell outta my house.”

Claude left. Emma Jean would wonder, years later, if he had offered to take her with him.

Pearlie sat on the edge of the bed, brushing Gracie’s hair. Both sisters turned when Emma Jean entered.

“Ugh! Why you so dirty, girl?” Pearlie asked. Gracie pursed her lips sadly.

“Momma hit me, then I fell out in the chicken coop.” Emma Jean began to disrobe.

“You sho smell like it!” Pearlie screeched, and resumed stroking Gracie’s hair.

“Leave her alone,” Gracie admonished sympathetically, staring into Emma Jean’s transparent eyes.

“I wunnit pickin’ on her! I was jes’ sayin’ that she smell like—”

“Shut up, Pearlie!” Gracie leapt up. “Just shut up. You don’t know what happened so just shut your big, fat mouth.”

“What’s wrong with you?” Pearlie asked, unable to explain Gracie’s newfound compassion.

“Ain’t nothin’ wrong with me. You just ain’t gotta be so mean. That’s all.”

Pearlie frowned.

“It don’t make no sense to laugh at Emma Jean. You know Momma don’t like her.”

Pearlie shrugged and walked out. Emma Jean stood naked in the middle of the room and wept with her face buried in her palms.

“Don’t cry, Emma,” Gracie soothed, patting her shoulder. “It’s gonna be all right. I’ll take care o’ you. Just try to stay out o’ Momma’s way.”

“But I ain’t done nothin’ wrong!” Emma Jean protested. “All I done was ask Momma for a birthday party and she hit me with the skillet.”

Gracie blinked slowly. “Don’t ask Momma for nothin’. Just do whatever she say.”

Together, the sisters wiped Emma Jean’s face, hands, and feet with moist washcloths. Gracie noticed the fresh wound, circling from Emma Jean’s forehead around to her right temple. In years to come, Emma Jean would try to hide the C-shaped mark with strands of straightened hair, only to be disappointed that it never quite reached far enough. When people inquired as to the origin of the scar, she would say, “It’s my birthmark.” Most left it at that although they knew better. What child had ever been born with a rough, raised
keloid blemish like that? Yet, not wishing to pry, they let Emma Jean construct whatever truth she needed.

Sliding a clean cotton sack dress over her little sister’s head, Gracie said, “Don’t say nothin’ else ’bout yo’ birthday. You can have a party when you get grown if you want to.”

“But what’s so wrong about havin’ a party now? I ain’t neva had no party befo’.”

“I said forgit about it! You ain’t gon’ do nothin’ but make Momma madder, and this time ain’t no tellin’ what she might do to you. Jes’ be quiet.”

“Okay,” Emma Jean said as the image of the pretty lemon cake dissolved in her head.

The Peaces lived in a rather large A-framed house in the backwoods of Swamp Creek. No one ever stumbled upon their dwelling because it would’ve been impossible to do so. From Highway 64, you’d turn right onto Fishlake Road and follow its winding trail, past shacks and shotgun houses, until the main road ended. That’s as far as most ever went. Yet, those seeking the Peaces, Tysons, and Redfields made a ninety-degree turn onto a dirt path mules and wagons had carved out, and continued on, several hundred yards, passing first the Tysons’, then the Redfields’, until suddenly, far in the distance, the Peace home appeared.

Gus and Chester Jr. built it months before Gus proposed to Emma Jean. He’d marry somebody, he assumed, and they’d need a place to live. Hopefully, she’d like it, but if she didn’t, she’d simply have to get used to it, he told Chester. Gus said that a man’s job was to provide a dwelling place for his wife; whether she liked it or not was her problem. Yet Gus hoped she would, and in fact she did. The full-length porch, stretching the width of the house, attracted her most as she imagined children, hopefully girls, leaping from it and into the yard, screaming and playing tag on hot summer afternoons. She envisioned herself in a porch rocker, on rainy days, mending holey socks while humming church songs to the rhythm of the downpour. She’d always wanted a porch. A porch invited people’s company, and that’s what she longed for.

The rest of the house was fine with her. There were two bedrooms, a wash area, a sizeable kitchen, and a huge living room. When Emma Jean walked in, she gasped at the enormity of the living space and mentally began to decorate
it. If she had a boy in the midst of her daughters, he’d sleep on the sofa. Boys didn’t mind that kind of thing, she told Gus.

Emma Jean’s only insistence was that the house remain immaculate. She hated clutter and filth even more than Mae Helen had. Or maybe
because
Mae Helen had. For fifteen years, her Saturday morning chores included cleaning up behind her mother and sisters, and she would kill a man—children, too!—if they thought she was going to do more of that. Of course she would clean, she told Gus, but she wasn’t a maid and didn’t intend to feel like one. He nodded, but offered no assurances.

Gus inherited the twenty-acre lot on which the house sat the day Chester Sr. died. He left Chester Jr. thirty acres north of the Jordan. Gus’s land was deeper in the woods and he preferred it that way. Once the house was complete, a hundred yards off the wagon path, he combed the nearby forest for wild ferns, flowers, and other greenery, which he then uprooted and transplanted to his own front yard. The result was a lush, colorful oasis the likes of which Emma Jean had never seen. Each spring, when the rains came and Gus escaped to the Jordan, ferns burst forth and flowers of every color bloomed and peppered the lawn. Gus was meticulous in its maintenance, beating Authorly severely whenever he mowed across something he thought was a weed. People complimented Emma Jean on her horticultural skills, and she accepted the praise, for both her own and Gus’s sakes.

Gus liked that his picturesque lawn contrasted with what he called the ugliness of the adjoining cotton field. As a child, he promised Chester Sr. that none of his children would ever pick cotton a day in their lives. If he had to work like a mule to provide for his family, that’s exactly what he’d do. And it’s exactly what he did. Kissing white folks’ asses by picking their cotton was simply out of the question. So when he inherited the twenty acres and his boys started coming, he taught them how to work and, with their assistance, he kept his promise.

Wilson Peace, Gus’s grandfather, had done the same thing. He refused to slave for white folks, and, even in the winter of 1907, when his family practically starved to death, he forbade any of them to bring white money into his house. That’s the winter Chester Sr. resolved not to emulate his father. His hunger had been far greater than his pride, so the day he turned eighteen, Chester Sr. started chopping cotton for whites, and stopped a day shy of his seventy-eighth birthday only because his legs gave out. Gus reverenced his grandfather’s pride
and sought nothing more desperately than to replicate it. Chester Sr. warned that pride comes before a great fall, but Gus said he was willing to fall if it meant he didn’t have to submit his labor to whites. Wilson smiled. It wasn’t that Gus didn’t admire his father; Gus loved Chester Sr. and respected the fact that they always ate. Gus simply hated that whites called his daddy “boy” and treated him like shit. So Gus explained his defiance as the only way he knew to keep white folks from destroying another generation of Peaces.

To keep his family together, Wilson’s father took his master’s surname when slavery ended. Baxter Pace owned some three hundred slaves in South Carolina and sold one of Wilson’s uncles to a plantation somewhere in Louisiana. Hoping to find his brother one day, Wilson kept the Pace name at first in hopes that, wherever he was in the world, his brother might search him out. Yet once slavery ended and Wilson’s father made his way to Arkansas—where folks said money was growing on trees—he dropped the hope of ever seeing his brother again and added an
E
to “Pace,” thus naming himself what he desired most—Peace.

Henrietta emerged from the master bedroom, feigning a smile. “It’s a girl.”

“Yeah!” the brothers cheered. Their boisterous applause almost deafened Gus, who nodded and sighed with relief.

“What’s her name?” Authorly asked.

“She ain’t got no name yet,” Gus said. “Hell, she just got here. Yo’ momma gon’ think of a name pretty soon.”

Not meaning to contradict Gus yet afraid the least omission might cost her, Henrietta said, “Her name’s Perfect. That’s what yo’ momma said.”

“Perfect,” the boys repeated in chorus.

What kinda name is that
, Gus thought, and grimaced as he retrieved the family Bible. Sol leaned over his right shoulder, spelling the name seven or eight times before Gus had it correct:

Perfect Peace, May 17, 1940.

“Who she look like? Can we see her? Can we hold her?” Mister’s questions came faster than Henrietta could answer.

“No!” she snapped. The boys’ faces went blank. “I mean, not quite yet. It was a tough birth and yo’ momma needs a little time to recover. Just give her
a little while.” Henrietta paused to collect herself. “Your mother’s tired now and the baby’s sleeping. He—I mean she’s really pretty though. Perfect—just like your mother calls her.” Henrietta hadn’t planned to say that, but in the midst of forced deceit, she didn’t know what else to say. She turned abruptly and reentered the bedroom.