The Orphan Mother by Robert Hicks Page B

white man decided he could find use for a clever ex-slave, a dancing bear , who could read and write and speak well in front of crowds. That is not fair , she thought. She was not being fair to her own son, who might very well have had a plan that was beyond even her. Maybe she was the ignorant one. He was her son, but also a man and not only a reminder of her neglect when he was a baby, his days in the cabins going hungry in the company of women not his mother. He had known his father only barely, and then only when his father was dying. Theopolis was now a grown man. She loved him, she hated him. He was hers nevertheless, a boy and a man.
    She ran up the blocks and then up Main Street. The crowd grew denser on the wood sidewalk, so she weaved around carts and others walking down the middle of the street. They called out to her, You’re too late , but she wouldn’t turn. On this side of town it was black faces, but as she got closer to the square the faces turned white and red, eyes flashing. She was a block away when she realized that, yes, she had heard screams, and that under those screams were the loud, vibrating drone of shouts, curses, and feet stamping.
    In the square the bodies moved in every direction. The crowd pulsed and rotated at its center, and at its edges men flung themselves out of the storm, running in every direction. The center, which she glimpsed only briefly here and there as she pushed closer, appeared to be located at the front of the stage, a dark and pulsing thing.
    Time stretched out and she pushed through. Men stepped on her feet and she on theirs. She smelled them, they smelled of peat and coal. She fit herself between them, and as she got closer she began to push without regard for whom she was pushing or what the consequences would be. She nearly knocked over the magistrate Dixon, a big blowsy fancy man. He gaped at her. It felt a million years ago since she’d stood in his house and told him that he was a father again. What she cared about was finding her son and seeing that he was all right. She only wanted to see. Didn’t need to speak to him, didn’t need to touch him, he didn’t need to know she was there. She had to see it for herself and then she could disappear and Theopolis could have his life and she could have hers and she would be free again. She told herself this.
    She came closer to the center. Men began to recognize her and make way. They said things to her about what had happened, but she didn’t hear them, or refused to register the meaning. There was the preacher, standing in her way, both palms toward her, shaking his head, and then he was gone, yanked to the side by the carpenter whose words she did hear: S he should see this . Then she was through and stood at the center.
    The others had drawn in a rough circle around an empty space. Entirely men, they were black and they were white. They radiated puzzlement or anger or horror or fascination, and sometimes all these at once. Their faces burned her; she shied away. She looked down. At the far end of the circle from her, a white man lay dead upon his back, his arms neatly at his sides, a dark pool of blood growing quickly underneath his mangled head. And upon the trampled ground lay Theopolis, her only son, the body of her body, the flesh of her flesh, without whom she was merely something afloat in time.
    All things stopped, or seemed to. Dr. Cliffe knelt beside Theopolis, whose shirt had been ripped open. The doctor must have sensed life, because he pressed clean rags against the chest of her boy. He kept one hand on his chest, holding down a cloth, while he grabbed more rags from his bag with the other. The fabric kept the blood back for a moment, but soon it rose up through the bandages and seeped between the doctor’s fingers. Her boy’s chest rose and fell, but each time it became harder to see him move. Theopolis’s head lay back on the doctor’s coat. His eyes were open but he was not blinking. Blood ran