Page from a Tennessee Journal (AmazonEncore Edition)

increasingly harder to follow her mother’s advice and “just lay there.” Many a night, especially now that Alex was only coming to her every other Friday, she wanted to put her arms around his neck and run her hands down his back. Sometimes she wanted to push him so deep inside her that he would have to fight to catch his breath for love of her. But if she did any of those things, he would think she was an easy woman just as her mother predicted. “It’s the way of a husband. Don’t act like you enjoy it. He’ll think you learned those things from some other man.” Eula oft en wondered what “those things” were and how did her mother know about them, anyway?
    “You are as strong as an ox, Tillie Thornton Jamison,” Fedora pronounced. “You will have this baby and keep Wiley George happy too. That’s just the way of it.” Fedora ended the discussion.
    “Well, I’m not like one of the colored women. I just can’t go dropping me a baby in the morning and go back to the field right after dinner.” Tillie shifted in her chair while Fedora gave her a “watch your mouth” look.
    Eula took the cooling pot of peaches to the table to Jenny who began ladling them into the washed-out Mason jars.
    “That puts me in mind of that colored wench on the Bredge place.” Belle’s choice of words always did border on the bawdy, and Eula wondered again why her younger brother had chosen a woman just a step away from white trash to marry. “I saw the wench at the store in Clarksville last planting time. She had these two springy-haired yella’ children with her and her belly swoll out to here, again.” To watch Belle’s hand draw pictures of the woman in the air, the observer would have believed the poor creature’s stomach was bigger than a bushel basket. “Now, she is as dark as dirt and her man is as black as midnight. Where did those yella’-skinned pickaninnies come from?” Belle shook her head for emphasis.
    “Well, if I was forced to say, I’d specify that it was between that white sharecropper Jim Bredge hired on three years back and that squatter family down by the railroad station.” The deliberate sound of Cora Lee clucking her tongue did not escape Eula’s ears.
    “Nobody’s forcing you to say nothin’, Cora Lee.” Belle poured the sealing wax over a jar of just-filled plums. “Besides, I don’t think it’s that white trash squatter family. That man’s got about eight of his own young ’uns crammed into that one-room shed already.”
    “That man’s almost sixty.” Tillie sat with her hand rubbing her belly.
    “Age just makes them all the more randy.” Jenny shot a look at Tillie that brought titters from Belle.
    “By my reckoning, I’d speculate on that sharecropper.” Belle swiped the outside of a Mason jar with a wet cloth. “Don’t he crop the forty acres right next to that nigger woman with her own high-yella kids?”
    Eula flinched when she heard Belle’s “nigger” epithet flung into the kitchen. Mother Thornton had taught her girls that a lady used that word only when strongly provoked. It was a term reserved for men. Only low-class white women uttered it away from the sanctity of their own homes. Coming out of the mouth of an in-law, the sound of it felt like fingers rubbing the wrong way against a blackboard.
    “Why do you all think it has to be shift less white trash? Hettie, on Papa’s side-forty, has two yellow-skinned girls already, and her husband is as black as that stove Aunt Eula’s standing at.” Tillie spoke with a “case closed” attitude so like Fedora’s. “I believe those women sell themselves when they get over to Clarksville.”
    “What do you know about a woman selling herself, missy?” Cora Lee asked. “If the truth be told, I’d say Jim Bredge hisself wasn’t out of the woods.”
    A sudden quiet, deep as a pond in January, wrapped itself over the kitchen. Only the sound of the bubbling fruit in the kettles broke the silence. Eula held her spoon suspended in midair, afraid to lay it against anything, lest the sound rock the room like a rifle shot. She was quite aware that Fedora had not uttered a word in over five minutes. With her back still to the women, Eula heard someone clear her throat.
    “Lord, here we are going on and on about babies. Eula please pay us no mind. We get to talkin’ silly sometimes.” The sound of Cora’s nervous giggling brought Eula up from the kettle.
    Before she turned toward the group, Eula set