Free The Orphan Mother by Robert Hicks Page A

her hands, saying words she would never remember. What would justice look like when it was brought down on their heads? She shook her head. No, not these men and women, not April and May and the rest, they weren’t guilty. All mourners do look a little guilty about something, but not about that.
    These people also looked angry and hurt. Afraid. They had lost Theopolis, too, she thought. Not like she had, not like a mother, but they had lost him, too. Many of the Colored Leaguers were there, they who had marched with him and drummed with him, dreamed with him, talked with him and agreed with him about politics—and then had watched him die.
    They had all heard the whispers of the Conservatives, telling them they might be next. Telling them they should be next. These people weren’t killers, she thought, looking around. Some of them were puffed up with their anger, chests thrust out and chins raised as if they were preparing themselves for a fight. But most of them, with their hunched shoulders and their scared eyes, looked more like prey than anything, like mice standing in the shadow of a trap.
    Carrie detached herself from the other white folks on their mission of charity to the poor Negro funeral, and now she moved toward Mariah slowly, tentatively. Mariah wouldn’t look her in the eye, couldn’t stand to do it. What of the guilty , she wanted to shout at her. What about the white men? Was there any doubt that they had killed her boy? None. So what did justice look like on them? She didn’t know.
    Carrie stood beside her now, not saying anything, staring toward the grave. Mariah didn’t know what justice for Carrie’s kind was , and the thought of this made her tear up. Carrie offered a handkerchief, which Mariah took because she felt in a mood to take everything. Would a white man be beaten in his guilt? Would he be leaned against a post, back bare, and take his stripes from the leather? Would his rations be reduced, would he be made to sleep in a hole? Would he be sold as incorrigible? Would he be hanged?
    She dabbed her eyes with Carrie’s handkerchief, which smelled like rosehips. The mourners filed past her and began to leave, wandering down the little road to town, past the lines of the Confederate dead.
    For the first time she noticed George Tole, broad and impassive. Had it been only a few days ago that she’d met him at the Dixons’? She caught his eye for a moment before he turned away and followed the others. She remembered, after she’d met Dixon, that Theopolis had described the elaborate carvings and gewgaws that filled Tole’s little house. Mariah saw a black man who had kept his freedom his whole life, who might know what this kind of justice, the justice she imagined for the guilty, would look like. He had a hard face, dark. Such a man might know. Others might know, too; probably everyone else knew but Mariah Reddick. She felt so lost. Then Tole was gone down the road and Hooper and the gravediggers had begun to shovel in the dirt.
    Carrie gently tugged at her elbow. “We should go to the house, Mariah.” The house, Carnton, loomed open-eyed above them. “There’s food in the dining room.” Mariah had eschewed a funeral gathering. Now she wished she hadn’t as Carrie went on, “Please eat with me. Together.” This last clarification was, Mariah guessed, meant to be meaningful and gracious. She knew what that table would look like: set with the mismatched coin-silver and the worn-out Old Paris plates that Mariah had washed nearly every day of her previous life. Back then she had been fond of the McGavocks’ eccentric tableware that she had never been asked to eat on. Had she ever used it, though, she would have wondered why she couldn’t do so every day, and would have come to hate it. She knew herself well enough to know that. It occurred to her then that Carrie might have thought the same thing about introducing her slave to the china and, for her own reasons, had made sure it