Free The Wilful Daughter by Georgia Daniels Page B

the heavens, sighed, and stared sadly at the Blacksmith. “Is there anything you don’t know?”
    “ When were you going to tell her? When did you think it would be right to let the woman you claim to love all these years know that you sired a son when you were in school? The reason your father had to borrow money when your mother was ill, short of his bad business sense and the fire, was to pay to cover up your scandal, your disgrace. You have a son in a little Virginia town outside of Washington, DC. When were you going to tell my daughter about your bastard?”
    “ William!” Bira covered her mouth and not another word was spoken.
    Minnelsa reached for his hand and waited for John Wood to tell her it wasn’t so. But John didn’t speak. Except with his eyes. She walked slowly into the house and never spoke his name again.
    No one ever forgot how John had been treated by the Blacksmith. The boy had signed up for the army then died in the war. Minnelsa was too grief stricken to speak on it even with her sisters.
    The Blacksmith hammered into the afternoon. He had protected his daughter then. She knew so little of the world. They all did. Even he did not know as much as he wanted. But he knew more than them.
    Now there was a new music teacher at Morris Brown. The Blacksmith hammered and wondered if this man would be suitable for Minnelsa. He would find out. He had his ways.
     
    * * *
     
    “ Papa’s coming!” Willie called into the house in a childish singsong voice. Rosa got up from the piano to see if Fawn had finished the yams. Jewel made some fresh bread, something round and new with a French name, and popped it into the oven. Mama had done a fresh peach cobbler. The table was set with china plates edged in gold and hand painted roses. The sideboard held the coffee pot and tea service although the only liquid consumed in this house was served cold on hot days. In the middle of the table was an arrangement of yellow and red roses from the bushes on the side of the house where the parents and the sisters slept.
    The house was ready for the Blacksmith’s supper.
    He drove the wagon around back, as he always did, tying the horse in the small barn and giving him some hay. After dinner he would come and brush him down. He smelled of hard work, a smell he had abhorred all his life but learned to appreciate for it was the smell of his success.
    “ Boy, you stink!” the white man had told him in Macon County. “But that’s ’cause you work hard. Ain’t no finer smell than that of a hard working man. Ain’t no finer steel hammering man then you, William Brown, white or colored. I can’t do it but you should be paid better than any white man for his services-services which people stand in line for.”
    After all William Brown had been free and eighteen with no wife and children to support. He could leave any time he chose.
    He had been washing himself out back while his cousin stood by waiting for him. “That white man made me think, Tom.”
    “ Think what?” Tom was a young gigolo living off of a half-white widow woman.
    “ Thinking I should be in business for myself.” He was on the way to Atlanta for the weekend with Tom.
    “ William, the only business a young colored man can get in for hisself is the business I’m in.” William had laughed as Tom went on. “See, I got Maureen to really give me everything I need. Pleasing a woman is an art.”
    “ You mean pleasing her in ways that can’t be spoken of at the dinner table.”
    Proudly Tom nodded. “Yes. She told people I was her late husband’s nephew. I kinda bear a slight resemblance to him in shape and color. Especially since she gave me all his fine clothes.”
    But each night in Atlanta he slept in her bed. During the time that the Blacksmith stayed in her house with them that woman moaned and groaned in pleasure.
    William Brown realized his cousin was not a hard working man.
    When the woman’s light skinned relatives found out what was going