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Chapter Ten

BABY MOSES

Vida stood among the fieldworkers who crowded the shade of the general store gallery, drinking her Orange Crush and glaring at the white woman as she veered her big fancy car sharply into the yard. She braked to a stop and Vida noticed she even sported white gloves and a hat as big-round as hubcap.

This was the kind of car her father might have driven, Vida thought, before the world got turned upside down, back when she herself wore starched petticoats and satin ribbons in her hair instead of the sweaty rags of a fieldworker.

This wasn’t the first Vida had seen of the woman. Several times over that summer, upon hearing the approach of the big engine Vida would look up from her row of cotton or behind her as she walked the road to see the woman barreling toward her, going eighty and blanketing everybody in a layer of dust. And always with the little bow-tied boys hanging out the windows, hands wagging in the wind. Once the woman flew by so fast Vida had to dive for the ditch. The woman carelessly tossed an empty pint of whiskey out her window, barely missing Vida’s head.

The white woman might have been drunk, but she never looked happy, not as happy as she should be, with her fancy car and fine clothes and two alive-and-well sons. Spoiled, Vida figured. All white women were. Never knowing when they had enough, and always wanting more. Usually somebody else’s. All the time flaunting their good fortune, speeding carelessly through life, making everybody else eat their dust.

As for Vida, she would be happy if she could just get back what white people had stolen from her. If He did that, she told God, she would never ask for another thing.

Her father used to promise Vida that nothing bad would happen to his Snowflake Baby. After all, Levi Snow had a reputation as the man who could read the mind of God. Yet now Vida often wondered—if her father had truly known how things were going to turn out, might he have done things differently? For instance, if he had known that his sermon that long-ago Sunday was to be his last, would he have perhaps preached on some other text?

If her father, the most revered colored preacher in Hopalachie County, a man favored by God with the largest of churches, had known that before that day was out he would be pleading for his life, he might have chosen to preach on Daniel in the lion’s den. Or Jesus being tempted in the desert. Or God’s taking everything away from Job for no other reason than to show Satan what a righteous man he was. A story that would move his people to see how the good and the upright suffer for their faith and need to be stood by in dangerous times. If he had, maybe his people would not have been deaf to his cries in his time of desolation. Perhaps then, someone would have been there when he himself needed saving.

But on that bright Sunday morning nearly six years ago, her father, the Reach Out Man, didn’t know any of this as the choir fell back breathless in their seats and he strode majestically up to the pulpit, on his way glancing down at the gold watch cupped in the palm of his hand and then slipping it back into its pocket. As if time was nobody’s business except his.

Vida remembered how her father towered over the congregation that day, how he searched every sweating face in the church, letting the tension mount as a hundred hand-held funeral fans flashed the face of Jesus back at him.

The rigid benches were jam-packed with field hands transformed for the day into baggy-suited deacons and white-clad mothers of the church and royally robed choristers. Fine white cotton gloves kept their secrets, disguising the field-wrecked hands of men as well as women.

Except for Vida, of course, who sat clutching her gloves, revealing smooth, delicate fingers that had never picked a boll of cotton in all her privileged life as the daughter of Reverend Snow.

Every eye was riveted upon Levi, watching for him to cut loose and tear up the pulpit. Every eye including Vida’s, who waited more anxiously than most.

Her father had promised her an answer that day. The awful night they drove out to the Senator’s, the night Billy Dean Brister shoved her father off the porch and threatened to kill her child, Levi told her that God would find a way to keep them safe.

What story would her father tell today? she wondered. What story could he possibly preach to put everything back in its place? She prayed he would be able to create a story with a happy ending, big enough to hold them all. With the right story she had heard her father turn losses into victories, slaves into masters, pain and suffering into glory.

What about her boy, wanted dead by a white man? How would her father weave Nate safely into their lives again?

Levi Snow’s silence weighed heavily on the congregation, and they began to stir.

“Tell it, brother!” a bald-headed deacon called out in a voice frail with age.

Hooking his thumbs up under his arms and rocking back and forth on his heels, Levi Snow stared up into the rafters and shook his head like he was conferencing with God himself about whether or not to go ahead and preach today. Reverend Snow nodded solemnly, as if the Lord had whispered something that the preacher couldn’t argue with, and then glared down again on the congregation.

He began, “Next to God’s love there is no love like a mother’s love.”

Heads nodded. A few said “Amen,” and others “That’s right.”

“The Lord said, even though a mother’s love is mighty, His is mightier. Isaiah say, even if a mother forgets the babe at her breast, God will never forget you. Ain’t that right?”

“That’s right!”

“But a mother ain’t likely to forget the babe at her breast, is she?”

“No, Lord!”

Then he looked down at his daughter and smiled, as if to put flesh and blood on his story.

Vida swelled with pride. Her father was bragging on her in front of the whole church. Putting her arm around the boy, she pulled him close. She should have known her father would find a way.

Levi Snow continued. “We like to hear about Moses and how he stood up to ol’ Pharaoh and said, ‘Let my people go.’ Ain’t that right?”

“That’s God’s truth!”

“About how he marched the slaves out of Egypt and split the Red Sea wide open and then led the people to the Promised Land. Yes, Lord! We all know the story about Moses. Moses indeed was a great man. God surely loved Moses.”

“Sure did!”

“But there was somebody else who loved Moses.”

Levi let this new information settle in between the benches before he sang out again. “Moses had a momma. How mighty was his mother’s love?”

“Tell it, preacher!”

“When Moses was a baby at his momma’s breast, the Pharaoh wanted to snatch him up and drown him in the River Nile. How mighty was his mother’s love?”

“Go on!”

“Did his momma forget about that baby at her breast?”

“No, Lord.”

“Did she want to keep her baby close at her breast? Like any momma would? Course she did. But. . .how mighty was his mother’s love?”

“How mighty?”

“The love she had for her baby was bigger than her own selfishness. She had a love so mighty she laid her baby in a basket and put him in the bulrushes and let the river take him. Now I ask you, how mighty was his mother’s love?” His eyes burned hot and bright. “How mighty, Lord?”

He dropped his gaze onto Vida, like the question was for her. Then he answered it himself in a loud crackling whisper, “Mighty enough to let him go.”

At first she wasn’t sure she had heard him right. Holding on to Nate, she kept her eyes glued on her father, struggling with the divine revelation.

Levi turned back to his congregation. “Next to God’s love. . .there is no love. . .like a mother’s love. Before Moses could grow up and tell the Pharaoh, ‘You got to let my people go,’ his momma had to pull her own child from her breast and say, ‘I got to let my baby go.’ Now, I ask you again. How mighty was his mother’s love?”

The shouting now was deafening, and some rose to their feet.

“Her love was mighty!” a deacon called at the top of his voice.

Levi looked down at his daughter again as if giving her this final chance to give her answer, and then he raised his arms over his head and sang out to the rafters, “Mighty enough to let that baby go!”

That day six years earlier, her father’s words had whipped up a roiling sea of emotion through the church. All around her, people were standing with their palms toward heaven, others rocking side to side on their benches and clapping their hands. Vida was caught up in a mighty current that promised to pull her and her son under.