“I, Sojourner, desire to mother this child”

“Do you, Jackrabbit, desire this baby to be born?” and then “Do you, Connie, desire this baby to be born?”

She said softly, “I do. I, Connie, desire to mother this child.”

Barbarossa turned. The gawky teen‑age assistant she had met in the brooder was delivering the baby from the strange contracting canal while Barbarossa stood by to tie the cord and hold it squalling up, screaming and squirming. A small black girl whose skin gleamed waxy and bright.

“Do you, Sojourner, accept this child, Selma, to mother, to love, and then to let go?”

Sojourner held out her old black arms for the baby, nestling it to her. “I’ll mother you, love you, and let you go, Selma.”

“Do you, Jackrabbit, accept this child to mother, to love, and then to let go?”

Jackrabbit received the baby from Sojourner. “I’ll mother you, love you, and let you go, Selma.”

At last Connie held the baby and its small ruby‑red mouth closed around her nipple, sucking deep. Black, like Bee: she was sure she was given this baby from her time with Bee, a baby black and velvety with huge eyes to drink in the world.

She woke in the dark. The fire was dead and cold. Clouds covered the sky. She rubbed her legs till she felt less numb. Then she put on her dry shoes and straightened herself as well as she could and headed for the highway. In the dark she thrashed awkwardly through the brush and for a long time she couldn’t find the road, until she stumbled out almost in the path of a car.

Then she got oriented and began walking in the ditch. Here it was shallow and she did not feel well hidden.

“Birth! Birth! Birth!” Luciente seemed to sing in her ear. “That’s all you can dream about! Our dignity comes from work. Everyone raises the kids, haven’t you noticed? Romance, sex, birth, children–that’s what you fasten on. Yet that isn’t women’s business anymore. It’s everybody’s.”

With a heavy whoosh a diesel, unloaded and going too fast, careened down the road way out in the center. Smell of partly combusted fuel. She stumbled to her feet again.

“Take for instance Gray Fox. Last month that person was chairing the economic planning council of Massachusetts‑Connecticut‑Rhode Island. What Gray Fox normally does is fish‑farming out on the shelf. That’s per work, per center. But after a year on the economic council and ninemonth chairing it, Gray Fox may come to identify with that job. A job that affects the lives of many people. May come to feel that it’s part of the essence of Gray Fox to make big decisions while others look up to per. May come to feel that being Gray Fox involves being such a decider, such a big visible doer. So right now Gray Fox is on sixmonth sheepherding duty. After we’ve served in a way that seems important, we serve in a job usually done by young people waiting to begin an apprenticeship or crossers atoning a crime. When you are taking on a coordinating job, you say this pledge: ‘The need exists. I serve the need. After me the need will exist and the need will be served. Let me do well what has and will be done as well by others. Let me take on the role and then let it go.’”

A voice in her ears, good‑natured, chiding: Luciente as a fraction of her mind, as a voice of an alternate self, talking to her in the night Perhaps she was mad. Perhaps she was merely close to exhaustion and strung out on Thorazine and barbiturate withdrawal. She trudged on, wishing for a clock in the sky, a wristwatch. Wishing for a visible moon to mark time by. She did not even know if the moon would be waxing or waning; Luciente always knew those things. The moon seemed to hang over Mattapoisett the way the street lamps hung over El Barrio till the kids shot them out. The night was muggy. She heard thunder to the west and feared rain, but nothing happened.

All night she walked. The blisters on her feet opened and bled, and she kept walking. Most of the time she walked barefoot, carrying the pitiful shoes. Each time her foot touched the ground, dirt rubbed into raw meat. She kept on. She walked and walked. She kept on. She could not think anymore, could not worry. False dawn thinned the sky and then the sun rose behind low clouds. The sky turned pink and then yellow. She could not tell exactly where the sun stood behind the cloud wall. She kept trudging along.

Now she came into a built‑up area and she could not hide when cars passed. She put on the shoes and kept going. She passed stores and gas stations and small factories and a lumberyard, crossed railroad tracks, passed a VW dealer and a Dairy Queen. Nothing was open yet. At every closed gas station she tried the doors of the rest rooms, but they were all locked.

Finally she saw an open gas station and she walked very slowly until a car pulled in. Then she crossed to the office as if she came from the car and asked for the key to the ladies’ room. Inside she drank water and drank water, relieved her diarrhea, washed herself all over with paper towels. If only she had a comb! With her fingers and water she tried to make her hair passable. Her clothes looked exactly as if she had slept in them. In the mirror she hung sloppy and ashen. After a summer inside her skin was not dark, but she did not look white. That mattered in these towns. She shrugged. What could she do about it? She left the key in the john and slipped away around the back of the building.

She plodded on toward what she hoped was the center of the small city, finally passing the city limits sign. More traffic now. It was Monday morning, people driving to work. Her stomach gurgled its hunger. The first breakfast place she passed had only men in it, trucks parked outside, and she felt they would notice her too carefully.

She promised herself breakfast. Then she would sit. Her bleeding feet would stop being tortured. But she must choose a breakfast spot carefully. That was her bribe to her weary, aching body, giddy with hunger, rebellious at being fed nothing but weeds and rotten vegetables and blackberries. The next spot looked too suburban, too fancy. The next diner had a police car parked outside. The traffic got heavier. The clouds separated into long clots, a pale blue showing between them. She was limping along a sidewalk now, past a shopping plaza, the huge parking lot almost empty.

Now she walked through a neighborhood of factories and again the occasional diner had only male customers. No one else walked here. She felt conspicuous, prey bleeding into her flopping shoes, the sole peeling off the upper at each step. Dizzy. She could not remember a time when she had not felt dizzy, when her head had been normal, when some drug or the absence of some drug had not been ringing its changes on her blood and nerves. Now she trudged through a district of small houses with smaller backyards, houses no farther apart than the distance a person could reach, asbestos, wood siding, shingled, covered with aluminum. The kind of neighborhood where her sister Teresa lived in Chicago. Working class, but each of the families would say, like her own sister, struggling along with noses just above the water of taxes and debts and finance companies, that they were middle class because they were buying their own house.

The first time she had gone on welfare it had been bitter to swallow, bitter as vomit. Even after her second husband Eddie had walked out on her and Angelina and pulled his disappearing act, she had managed. She had given a neighbor twenty a week to keep Angelina shut up in her apartment all day with five other squalling kids, stuck in front of a TV set. She didn’t like it at all, but there was no public day care and the private centers cost too much.

She had worked in a box factory up in the Bronx for a while. Although she hated to ask him for help, she had gone to Luis and been treated to a lecture on what a failure she was as a woman, couldn’t hold on to her husband and only one daughter to show. But he had given her a job in his nursery business. The poisons they sprayed made her sick, but the worst part was the travel, three hours out of the days to New Jersey and back. She got home too tired to pick up Angelina and play with her.