soft red cushion about it. And the milk he ordered his servant to bring was handed to her in a glass; and the sweetest, creamiest drink of milk it was that passed July’s lips upon that day when Thomas Kinsman first sat down earnestly before her.
His breath was faltering, his fingers fidgeting—with the curve of his nails, his marriage band, his cuff—and his head was bowed when he quietly told July that he believed he was her son. He had longed for this day, but feared it would never come, he said. He had thought her dead. But now he wondered if he was, at last, sitting before the woman who had given birth to him. And then, with nervous searching, he looked upon July’s face to seek a response, as he asked if she had once left her pickney upon a stone outside a Baptist manse. It was then that July leaned to one side upon the chair and, for his answer, regurgitated that rich milk to splatter into a pool of curds and whey upon the polished floor.
Yet still my beloved son, Thomas Kinsman, looked upon me kindly. Why, I have never truthfully understood.
But I have lived within my son’s household from that day to this. Our first home was within that house in Falmouth where Lillian, my son’s very young wife, did attend upon both her husband and me with the flurry of a fusspot. It was there that those three mischievous girls, Louise, Corinne and May, were born—and every day of our lives turned suddenly from peace into raucous mayhem.
But the town of Falmouth soon began to wither. For the sugar that fed and fattened that port lessened with every passing year. It slowly starved. So Thomas Kinsman moved us—his cherished family—to Kingston, where he opened a further printing business. And very profitable it is, too. But do not take my word upon it, go ask my son—he will joy to take you upon a tour of his fine works, if you so desire.
But for me, reader, my story is finally at an end. This long song has come full up to date. It is at last complete. So let me now place that final end dot . . .
Reader, alas my son is not yet finished with me. Must an old woman endure this? Thomas Kinsman is shaking his head once more. No, says he, surely this is not where my tale will end? What of the life lived by July upon those backlands at Amity? He wishes to know of those years betwixt July’s stolen pickney and her shuffling starving in upon that courtroom.
So I have just asked him, you wish me to describe how July walked to find those negroes upon the backlands? How she collapsed before them and was tenderly nursed back into this life? Must I show you the trouble that those free negroes had to endure? Should my reader feel the fear of the harassment from planters that came upon that place almost daily? Shall we put out those fires, rebuild the huts, chase mounted white men from out the crops? Would you care to face a loaded pistol with a machete and a hoe? Or perhaps I should enlighten my readers as to how long a little piece of land can last until, lifeless and exhausted, it produces nothing but thistle? Shall I let the earthquakes rattle and the floods pour? Or shall we just sit throughout a drought—parched and dusty as the desiccated earth? Or feel as a fist is pressed into a starving belly so it might be tricked into thinking it is full? Must I find pretty words to describe the yellow fever that took so many? Or perhaps your desire is simply to watch as a large pit is dug for the graves?
All this I asked my son and you know what Thomas Kinsman replied? ‘Yes, Mama, yes. We must know of all of this.’
But why must I dwell upon sorrow? July’s story will have only the happiest of endings and you must take my word upon it. Perhaps, I told my son, upon some other day there may come a person who would wish to tell the chronicle of those times anew. But I am an old-old woman. And, reader, I have not the ink.
AFTERWORD
I TRUST I WILL be forgiven for this further intrusion upon my mama’s story. Although that good woman’s tale is at a close, it has left me, her son, with