The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope - By Rhonda Riley Page 0,70

remember being like this. I never saw myself. I only saw you. Even when I looked in a mirror, I saw you.” He drew me to him and pressed his face against my big belly.

After a while, he got up and pulled the covers up tight around me. “Go back to sleep. No more nightmares. Let me think about this.” Despite the chilly night, he went outside and sat in one of the front-porch rockers. I listened to its rhythmic squeaking as I fell back asleep.

Hours later, I woke to the sound of the truck pulling away. I leapt up out of bed. My first thought was that he had left me because I was so afraid of having his baby. But the bedroom remained undisturbed. He hadn’t taken any clothes. The photograph still lay on the bed where we had left it. I found a note on the kitchen table: “I’ll be back in an hour, two at the most.—Love, Adam.” The morning’s milk sat in the ice-box. Outside, the chickens were happy, scratching in the coop.

Soon, he returned with a solution. I wouldn’t need to go to the hospital, he told me. A week later, we went to Pearl’s barbeque shack. He waited outside while Pearl took me into the back room to meet the midwife Adam had arranged the morning he went off alone. “This is Granny Paynes,” Pearl introduced us. “P-a-y-n-e-s,” she spelled it out after a quick glimpse at me, then left the two of us alone.

Granny Paynes was a thin, very old black woman, but she rose quickly and stood erect. She shooed two little boys out into the backyard and turned on a bare-bulb light that hung in the middle of the room. She sat down on the only chair, next to a gigantic old wood stove. She observed me a moment, expressionless. The room smelled of sweat, hickory, and sorghum syrup. The warmth and sweetness made me drowsy.

“Take off your coat and come over here.” She motioned and spat tobacco juice into a cup, then sat the cup back down next to the stove. Her deep voice sounded much younger than she appeared. “Stand up straight and lift up your shirt,” she said.

I complied.

“Now”—she looked up at me as her strong hands worked around my belly—“why you want a colored granny woman to help get your baby into this world instead of going to the hospital in Charlotte like all the other white women?”

I’d never had a colored person touch me that intimately, but her hands felt strong, sure, and, like her voice, young. “I’m scared of hospitals,” I told her. She had turned her head sideways, as if listening to my belly, as she studied my face. Her brown irises had a faint ring of pale blue around them.

“I’m scared of not waking up when they put me out. I don’t like hospitals,” I added.

“I hear you on that one.” She nodded. “It ain’t natural for a thing like that to happen and a body feel nothing a’tall. Your people know you here? Would your momma want you here?”

“No, ma’am. Nobody knows about this but my husband.” I stared straight ahead at the wall of the shed. Her hands were low on my belly, pressing up.

She stopped then, pulled my shirt down over my skirt, and straightened herself to eye level. One quick glance down at my wedding band. “I do not get rid of babies for people. Have you got yourself into trouble with a colored man?”

“No, oh, no,” I stammered. “I’m just scared, that’s all. I’m so scared. And they would make me go to the hospital. I know they would.” She studied my face again. She must have heard the truth of the fear in my voice. She patted my arm.

“Well.” She took a snuff tin out of her dress pocket and put a pinch in her cheek. “I have only brought along a few white babies—only when necessity made it so.”

“I’ve heard of you, Granny Paynes. Pearl tells us you . . .”

She raised a hand to shush me. “They was poor white women. You don’t look rich exactly, but your people could afford to take you to a white doctor, I know. My Rankin has done some work on your farm, years ago before you was living up there. I’ll come to you when your time has come, but, like I told your man, I want twice my normal birthing fee. If anything happens to you