The Wilful Daughter Read Free Page B

for their clothes, for doctors. Money maybe to travel places. If a man married into a family like this, a family of land and wealth where everything was taken care of, the future provided for, the love of family about him, surely he would want to stay with that family and keep the land in that family forever. No need to move north and suffer in the cruel cold.
    Now some folks heard about this and said the Blacksmith was trying to be white. By the time his baby daughter got grown he would have lost that land to taxes, to “them” or drunk it all away. Others heard about the dowry the Blacksmith set aside for his daughters and didn’t laugh for they wanted to dream with him. He worked as hard as ten men, and they couldn’t. But they could put aside a little every week so that when their boy got older he could go to Morehouse. Or their daughter could go to the Carolinas and go to Bennett College.
    The Blacksmith made them see there was a future for them if they followed some of the white folks’ ways. Those that rented land from him and understood what he was saying asked if they could build their own houses, bigger nicer houses for their families. The Blacksmith felt proud that he had encouraged them to think like him, so he said yes. After the houses were built, and they had saved some more money they asked if he would sell them the land.
    At first he didn’t want to sell. This was his land, his idea. But Bira told him that he had lots of land and could get more.
    “ Sell them the land they live on,” she told him as they sat on their porch and looked out at the world he had created. “Sell them the fig trees and the honeysuckle bushes and the ponds and the dogwood trees. Then they will feel like neighbors, like friends.”
    The young, proud Blacksmith had responded: “How are they going to be my friend when we don’t have anything in common?”
    Bira gave him a loving look. “You’ll have something in common. You’ll be colored men with land.”
    By the time Fawn was born, he had donated some land to the church, moved his shop away from his home and sold every other piece of property on the block. He had neighbors and friends because of this. He had neighbors and friends because of Bira.
    And he bought land, always more land.
    But with the land and the money one question remained on everyone’s lips: where were the husbands for his daughters?
     
     

CHAPTER TWO
     
    No matter what the rest of the country said, something good had to come out of the South. Especially out of Atlanta. After all, God had blessed her with rich soil, bright blue skies, sweet smelling dogwoods, peach and pecan trees forever in bloom and big fir pines that blanketed the land like a spread of emerald jam. Out of these mornings, every morning except Sunday, you could hear the whistle of the 6:55 from the North, traveling all night stopping in Atlanta with passengers disembarking from the white and colored cars with sleep still fresh in their eyes. Over at Morris Brown College the first morning bell signaled the start of a new day in an area of town where life was hard, the work harder, but the desire to survive greater than both. And if you were still, if you could get above the sound of your neighbor’s kettle screaming to be rescued from the heat, the bacon or the fatback frying in that black iron skillet that lived on your mother’s stove, or arguing with the woman next to you telling her to get up and get you some coffee, you might hear the Blacksmith hit the first lick on his anvil, cracking the steel into the crack of dawn.
    He had everything many of them wanted: the body of an ancient warrior bathed in eternal youth, the strength of an angry God forging the creation of man, a quiet un-domineering wife who never questioned him, and five of the most beautiful daughters many people had ever seen.
    There was jealousy. Always there would be jealousy. You lay in the bed in the morning next to your fine woman whose coffee tasted like