White. I’m Raymond and Otha’s mother. But you just call me Aunt Viola, because that is who I am to you. Any man working with Otha and Raymond is family to me.”
I followed Viola White—“Aunt Viola” would take some time with me—into the front parlor and found a crush of cousins and aunts. Raymond stood at the mantel talking with an older man. Mars, the proprietor of the bakery, rushed over and pulled me into a big scrum of family, rendering introductions and discoursing on the effects of that gingerbread.
“That boy try make like he cool, like he wasn’t caught,” Mars told his wife, Hannah. “But soon as he stick his face in the paper, I knew I had him.”
Hannah laughed and I, surprising myself, laughed too. Something was happening here. Walls were falling down, walls I had erected down on the Street. My silence, my watching, was a wall. There was love even on the Street, I tell you, some of the deepest and hardest I’d ever seen. But the Street was brutal and erratic. Passions transfigured into outrages and violence, even among us. But the demeanor that served me at Lockless seemed cruel and unnecessary among the Whites, so I found myself, awkwardly and haltingly, smiling, laughing, and, above all, talking.
After supper, we took coffee and tea in the back salon. There was a piano there, and one of the younger girls seated herself and began to play. What I remember more than any virtuosity was the gleaming pride in all the eyes of the White family at the talents of this child. And I remembered how I had talents, too, as a child, but that my own father wished them to be in Little May. I was an amusement, a source of laughter. Watching that little girl encouraged in her pursuits, rewarded in whatever genius she had—and we all had some—I saw all that had been taken from me, and all that was so regularly taken from the millions of colored children bred to the Task. But more than this I saw, for the first time, colored people in that true freedom that Mary Bronson longed for, that I hungered for walking through the city, that I had glimpsed under the Goose.
I had noticed, throughout conversation, the names “Lydia” and “Lambert,” and I knew from how they were spoken that these two were family still held down by the Task. After the young girl’s recital, I found Otha seated on the large porch, looking out past the road and into the lush green woods in the light of a summer’s twilight. I took a seat and said, “I want to thank you for having me here, Otha. It means a lot.”
Otha looked to me and smiled. “It’s nothing, Hiram. I’m glad you came. The work can be such a weight.”
“Your mother,” I said, looking back inside. “I gather she knows.”
“They all do. The babies only a little, of course. But how could they not know? They the reason we in the work to begin with.”
“Well, you’ve got a beautiful family,” I said.
At that he went quiet for a moment, and his gaze returned to those woods.
“Otha,” I asked, “Lambert and Lydia?”
“Lambert was my brother,” said Otha. “And Lydia is my wife. Lambert died while I was still down. And Lydia is still there, though I have not seen her in some years.”
“Children?”
“Yup. Two girls. One boy. You?”
I paused for a moment.
“Naw, just me.”
“Huh. Don’t know what I’d do without my young ones. Don’t know who I’d be. This whole thing, this Underground, starts with my babies.”
Otha stood and looked through the door inside. We could hear the gentle clanging of dishes, rumbling and somber talk broken by the occasional giggling of children. Then he walked to the side of the porch and seated himself there against the wooden railing.
“I’m not like them. Wasn’t raised up here,” he said. “My daddy is old and stooped now but he was something in his day. Born to the Task. But in his twenty-first year he walked up to his old master and told him straight—‘I’m grown now. And I shall sooner die as have the yoke.’ And the old master thought on it for a day, and when he next saw my pappy he had a rifle in one hand and Pappy’s papers in the other. And he told my pappy, just as straight as my pappy had told him, ‘Freedom is a yoke, boy. You’ll soon see.’