In Search of Satisfaction (30 page)

“My name is Yinyang Krupt! I live here.” Yin threw her hand back over her shoulder, pointing at the house. “I need you! I need your help! I am about to give birth and I have no one! Help me! Pleeeeeease, help me!”

Hosanna stood there helplessly, wondering what to do. She did not know anything about childbirth. “Tell me where to go.” She was breathless, “I’ll go find your midwife for you!”

Yin bent over with another pain. “I don’t have no damn midwife! I meant to go away to have my baby. But it’s coming too early! I didn’t have any chance to go! I need help now! Don’t want no midwife. I’ll pay you! Come in here and help me. Right now! Please, please, please.” Her voice broke as another pain took her body.

Hosanna turned her wagon into the gate entrance with a bewildered, tired sigh. “Well, you better get in the house. You don’t want to have it out here on the road. I think I know somebody who can help us.” She thought of Aunt Ellen and her rent.

“No!” Yin’s voice startled Hosanna, coming back so sharply. “No, no, no! I don’t want anybody from around here!”

“I’m from around here.” She led Yin to the house.

“I’ve never seen you. And, and you’re colored.”

Hosanna could not understand what Yin meant. She continued to support Yin while pulling the red wagon behind her.

Yin gasped, stopping her already slow walk. The back of her gown
was wet. “Listen, I don’t know what I was going to do, I thought I could do it alone. I’m frightened, scared. But you are here now. God must have sent you. Oh, listen to me, I’m going crazy. But I need a friend. We have to become friends right away, right now! I have to trust you. Are you kin to Miz Lal? Or Miz Mae, or Minna?”

“No, not as I know of.” They were getting closer to the house.

“Good. Minna cooks for the Befoes. I don’t want anyone, you hear me? ANYone to know about my baby until I am ready. You hear me?! I’ll pay you!” Yin was wildly distraught.

Hosanna was tired. “Lady, I got enough in my life now to worry about. I don’t need your problems, too!”

Yin nodded, “Okay, alright. Help me in the house, in to my room. I have put water on already.”

Hosanna helped her up the steps and into the house. “Lady, I haven’t said I can stay and do nothing for you. I’ll go get somebody. I want to go home.” Yin pointed upstairs, toward her bedroom. They kept moving.

When they reached the bedroom, Yin ran to a beautiful chest of drawers and snatched it open. She had placed fifty dollars there earlier, separate from where she hid her money in the house. “Here! Here is some money. Whoever you are, you need it. Ain’t you ever had any family who needed you?” Her anxiety made her revert to the speech of Josephus days.

Hosanna looked bewildered but remembered her mother’s childbirth tragedy. Yin pressed on. “Well, I need you. Now. As God is my witness, though why he should be I don’t know. I will pay you another fifty dollars when we are finished. Girl, I know that’s a lot of money! Take it!” She thrust the money into Hosanna’s hesitant hands. “Now … I already put the water on.” She bent and held her stomach as the next pain took her. Her voice was getting weaker, strained. “But, please, help me.” She screamed from the pain and fell onto her bed.

Yin had put out towels and sheets. When Hosanna returned, Yin raised her head and said, “I read everything I think we will need. There’s a knife and some scissors for the cord and some oil for to rub me with, down there. For the baby to come easier.” She pointed. Hosanna backed up and frowned. Yin screamed at her. “You can do it if you’re a woman!”

“I’m a child,” Hosanna almost whimpered.

“You colored, you’re a woman!”

“I’m a woman.” Hosanna’s voice was stronger.

Yin gasped and nearly screamed again from the last pain. The pains were coming quicker now, more often. She opened her legs wide and placed her hands on her belly, said, “Now, come on, my baby, I’m ready.” She gave Hosanna a small, pitiful smile. “You ready?” Hosanna nodded and began to like the able, young woman. She smiled back, “I’m ready.”

Yin sweated, swore, tossed and nearly squeezed Hosanna’s hands off. Hosanna sweated and cried from exhaustion and ran for more water, more everything Yin called for. She blanched and hesitated at rubbing the oil “down there,” but she did it. Hosanna marveled at the baby’s head showing. She admired Yin even more. Yin’s lips were bleeding from being bitten, but she kept her consciousness, her wits. Then the baby came out, slowly but steadily. Yin screamed, “I don’t want to tear myself! Gotdammit, I’m too young! More oil.”

Hosanna reached for the oil with bloody hands, screaming back at Yin, “I ain’t got no way to put it in there, and the baby’s almost here!”

“Ohhhhhhh, what is it?” Yin voice was now full of love.

“Can’t tell yet.”

“Don’t want no girl. Life too hard.” Then the last pain circled Yin’s body and the baby came in the midst of her last scream.

Hosanna laughed a little laugh, “Well, well … It’s a … boy!”

Still gasping, Yin asked, “What color is it?”

“Like coffee and cream.”

Yin collapsed in a spent silence, the sound of her panting the only sound in the room. Finally she raised up a little to say, “Get the knife … and the silk string there.”

Hosanna was staring at the little, wrinkled, red and coffee-with-cream colored baby.

Yin spoke more urgently, “The knife! What’s your name?”

“Hosanna.”

“Hosanna. Good. The knife.”

“This baby is … colored.”

Yin was concentrating on the task at hand. “What? What’s that got to do with it? Take the knife and cut the cord.”

That done, Yin leaned back, wiping her brow. “Take those towels there and that oil and bathe him, clean him up.” Hosanna observed,
“He a cute, little ole ugly thing. Just think, I have helped bring a baby into this world!”

Yin smiled weakly, looking at Hosanna. Then Hosanna turned to her smiling and they looked into each other’s eyes for a long moment over the baby’s head—one wondering who this woman was and what she was, and the other wondering if she had made a mistake in sharing her business. Yin shook her head, thinking, “There was nothing else I could do!”

Yin spoke first. “You have to be my friend now. You have to be a friend to my son. Our son.” Hosanna started to shake her head no. Yin continued, “He is your son, too, because you were the first person he saw. You helped him be born, you helped me, his mother. And he has no father … and … I have no friend. So he has no friend unless you agree to be our friend … and mean it.”

Hosanna spoke as she continued stroking the baby with the oil. “I have a friend in Washington, but … I don’t have a friend here.” She smiled a big smile. “I have a family here though. You have a family? Your mother and father?”

“They are dead. I have no friend.”

“Yes … I’ll be your friend.”

“And I will be your friend. Do you need a job?”

Hosanna’s exhaustion came down on her. She had been already tired and now the birth had taken several hours. She sighed. “Not right now, but …” she brightened, “I know someone who does and she is a very good person.”

Yin moaned, “Not Lal or Ma Mae, I hope. They talk so much and … I must keep my child a quiet secret for … awhile.”

Hosanna handed Yin her baby and stood up. “No, her name is Ellen. Aunt Ellen. And she needs a home and some money. And some help. But she is strong and good and kind.”

“Alright, I take your word.” Yin started to say something else but stopped herself. “Will you get her for me? Soon? Right now? I can’t get up. My body is starting to hurt again, but I can take care of that.”

Hosanna felt like crying. She wanted to go HOME. These were not her problems. Here she had been held up so much already. Everybody needed help and she was in the middle. It was getting really dark outside. Hosanna left her wagon and walked back to find Ellen who was
eating a yam baked in ashes, her head bowed, her feet wrapped in cool, wet, ragged towels. She looked surprised when she saw Hosanna. “What’s wrong, chile?”

Hosanna stumbled into the little, leaning house and sprawled on the floor. “I got you a job … and a home. You be making money and can see bout this here house of yours.”

“A job?”

“A job, Aunt Ellen.”

“A place to live? I got to live there?”

“And eat, Aunt Ellen. Listen, I’m tired. I ain’t been home yet! I came back out here for you cause I know you need it. Now … let’s go.” She struggled up from the floor as Aunt Ellen dried her feet and pulled her old dress over her head, saying, “I ain’t got nothin else to wear. Lord, it’s a shame to go in this. They won’t want me when they see me.”

“They’ll want you.”

“How could you find me a job when I been lookin all the time and everbody sayin I’m too old?”

“You just have to be a grandmother … or a Aunt Ellen. You ain’t too old for that. And you can use some of all that love you got in your heart right here at home, widout walking all the way to Pittsburgh. Lawd, all my good english I learned is gone to shit. I’m tired.”

Aunt Ellen was dressed with a bulging, tied handkerchief in her hand. “I’m ready now.”

Hosanna took Aunt Ellen to Yin, who was trying to feed the baby and kept falling asleep from exhaustion. The baby wanted to sleep, too. Yin was so happy to see Aunt Ellen, she cried and laughed at the same time. “I’ve got inside water. You take you a bath and wash that dress. Put my robe on, and then come get the baby. I’ve got to get some sleep and some food in me when I wake up.” There was a neatly wrapped package, tied. Yin pointed to it. “That has to go out to be burned, please.”

Hosanna was looking at the baby, “What you going to name the baby?”

Yin smiled, “Joseph Richard Befoe Krupt.”

And so the little baby, with frowning face and waving his tiny hands, was crowned with two names he would never, hopefully, understand.
Joseph was after his grandfather, Josephus. The other two were after a fortune.

Satan just smiled and went on because there was too much love and friendship in the room. He does not like those things at all. He had looked at the baby, though. It was going to be in a nice situation for problems. Then … Satan laughed at Yin.

t
he little house Hosanna was so desperately trying to get to was the house Bessel had lived in, Ruth had been born in, Joel had married into, all their children had been born in. The same house Hosanna had been taken from so many young, sad years ago still stood sheltering Luke, Lettie and Lovey and was the house Hosanna’s feet could not get to fast enough. The house sat back from the road. A few trees on the west side shielded it from the afternoon sun, while a garden kept for the purpose of feeding those that lived within grew around the house for an acre or so. Luke was a good gardener and Lovey, even on her knees, helped. Lettie worked there in her time off from the regular jobs she tried to keep to bring needed money into the house.

The family was happy being together and holding on to their parents’ land, but individually they were each sad.

Lettie did housecleaning and child-care work. From her early youth, and she was still young in years, she had worked with Luke to keep themselves a home and a family. Luke took over his father’s work at the Befoes as a gardener and horse-handler helper, even as young as he had been. He had tried hard to make his farm pay, but, little by little, they worked less land each year as the profits were too small and they did not
want to have to borrow from those who loaned and could never be completely paid back. Those who, in the end, took the land. So they did outside work and kept the taxes paid and bought little necessities as they could. There was no money to waste on anything they wanted. They could only have some of what they needed.

There was a school, built by the Befoes years ago. They said you could come there, colored or white, but they discouraged you if you were colored. Not just by sitting you in the back of the room, but by ignoring you. There were never enough books to go around. Old books the class no longer used, you could have. So some of the colored population, if they wanted to learn, took the books, if possible, and went home to try to teach themselves and their families. It was usually given up in a few years as the demand for money to survive became more important than a book or school.

No industry came into Yoville. The Befoes did not want it there. It would have meant jobs for the poor. Having no jobs gave the Befoes more control over the people there. Black, white and Indian. The Befoes provided most of the jobs. Cooks, cleaners and farm labor. They had their choice of all the help they needed themselves.

Lovey was willing to do anything to help her brother and sister, and tried, but her legs were useless and she had to walk on her knees. The flesh of her knees was hard and calloused from her efforts to work in the field. Even the rags she bound them with didn’t help much; they were always coming loose and were already mostly ragged from the beginning of their use. But she tried.

Lovey had tried to go to the school, which was just up and across the road from their house. She didn’t ask anyone, she wanted to surprise them. She got up, got dressed and started out on the first day of school. She was excited and happy, thinking, “Readin and writin! Somethin in my life. I know I can do it!” She was seven years old at the time. She dressed in her only good dress, handed down, already old. She had washed and ironed it on a cloth on the floor two weeks before. Her knee rags, too. She wrapped her knees in the clean cloths. She had no socks, but it was still kinda summer, she could go barefooted. Luke and Lettie were already gone. Her little soul was happy, her heart was light as she picked up her pencil—she had no tablet—and struggled down the steps to the ground.

There were light gray clouds in the sky when she left for school, a
great big smile on her face. She trudged to the road, shooing her friend, the dog Pap, to go back, to stay home. Pap curled his tail beneath him. He was not used to her leaving him behind. He sat and watched her make her slow way to the road and then across it.

The road was a little rocky, as country roads are where the colored people live, and the knee wraps began to unravel. She looked down at them, but her heart was too full to stop now. Across the road, she walked the quarter mile or so to the little school house where, she thought as she walked, “The whites maybe sit up front, but I could sit in the back. I want to go. I am goin!”