with that pickaninny, I hope."
"Oh, we can, can we?" said Mama.
"Well I know I can't so you'd better."
"Well then maybe I'll just tell folks it's my own babe."
Papa didn't get mad. Just grinned, he did, and said, "Folks ain't going to believe that even if you dip that boy in cream three times a day."
He went outside and got Po Doggly to help him dig a grave.
"Passing this baby off as born around here ain't such a bad idea, said Mama. "That Black family that lives down in that boggy land - you remember two years back when some slaveowner tried to prove he used to own them? What's their name, Peggy?"
Peggy knew them far better than any other White folks in Hatrack River did; she watched over them the same as everyone else, knew all their children, knew all their names. "They call their name Berry," she said. "Like a noble house, they just keep that family name no matter what job each one of them does."
"Why couldn't we pass this baby off as theirs?"
"They're poor, Mama," said Peggy. "They can't feed another mouth."
"We could help with that," said Mama. "We have extra."
"Just think a minute, Mama, how that'd look. Suddenly the Berrys get them a light-colored baby like this, you know he's half-White just to look at him. And then Horace Guester starts bringing gifts down to the Berry house."
Mama's face went red. "What do you know about such things?" she demanded.
"Oh, for heaven's sake, Mama, I'm a torch. And you know people would start to talk, you know they would."
Mama looked at the Black girl lying there. "You got us into a whole lot of trouble, little girl."
The baby started fussing.
Mama stood up and walked to the window, as if she could see out into the night and find some answer writ on the sky. Then, abruptly, she headed for the door, opened it.
"Mama," said Peggy.
"There's more than one way to pluck a goose," said Mama.
Peggy saw what Mama had thought of. If they couldn't take the baby down to the Berry place, they could maybe keep the baby here at the roadhouse and say they were taking care of it for the Berrys cause they were so poor. As long as the Berry family went along with the tale, it would account for a half-Black baby showing up one day. And nobody'd think the baby was Horace's bastard - not if his wife brought it right into the house.
"You realize what you're asking them, don't you?" said Peggy; "Everybody's going to think somebody else has been plowing with Mr. Berry's heifer."
Mama looked so surprised Peggy almost laughed out loud.
"I didn't think Blacks cared about such things," she said.
Peggy shook her head. "Mama, the Berrys are just about the best Christians in Hatrack River. They have to be, to keep forgiving the way White folks treat them and their children."
Mama closed the door again and stood inside, leaning on it. "How do folks treat their children?"
It was a pertinent question, Peggy knew, and Mama had thought of it only just in time. It was one thing to look at that scrawny fussing little Black baby and say, I'm going to take care of this child and save his life. It was something else again to think of him being five and seven and ten and seventeen years old, a young buck living right there in the house.
"I don't think you have to fret about that," said Little Peggy, "not half so much as how you plan to treat this boy. Do you plan to raise him up to be your servant, a lowborn child in your big fine house? If that's so, then this girl died for nothing, she might as well have let them sell him south."
"I never hankered for no slave," said Mama. "Don't you go saying that I did."
"Well, what then? Are you going to rear him as your own son, and stand with him against all comers, the way you would if you'd ever borne a son of your own?"
Peggy watched as Mama thought of that, and suddenly she saw all kinds of new paths open up in Mama's heartfire. A son - that's what this half-White boy could be. And if folks around here looked cross-eyed at him on account of him not being all White, they'd have to reckon with Margaret Guester, they would, and it'd be a fearsome day for them, they'd have no terror at the