Then one day father and grandfather went east, to Washington, and got a commission from the government to come down here, to help with the freed negroes.
They came to Jefferson, all except father’s sisters.
Two of them got married, and the youngest one went to live with one of the others, and grandfather and father and Calvin and his mother came here and bought the house.
And then what they probably knew all the time was going to happen did happen, and father was alone until my mother came from New Hampshire.
They had never even seen one another before, not even a picture.
They got married the day she got here and two years later I was born and father named me Joanna after Calvin’s mother.
I don’t think he even wanted another son at all.
I can’t remember him very well.
The only time I can remember him as somebody, a person, was when he took me and showed me Calvin’s and grandpa’s graves.
It was a bright day, in the spring.
I remember. how I didn’t want to go, without even knowing where it was that we were going.
I didn’t want to go into the cedars.
I don’t know why I didn’t want to.
I couldn’t have known what was in there; I was just four then.
And even if I had known, that should not have frightened a child.
I think it was something about father, something that came from the cedar grove to me, through him.
A some thing that I felt that he had put on the cedar grove, and that when I went into it, the grove would put on me so that I would never be able to forget it.
I don’t know.
But he made me go in, and the two of us standing there, and he said,
‘Remember this.
Your grandfather and brother are lying there, murdered not by one white man but by the curse which God put on a whole race before your grandfather or your brother or me or you were even thought of.
A race doomed and cursed to be forever and ever a part of the white race’s doom and curse for its sins.
Remember that.
His doom and his curse.
Forever and ever.
Mine.
Your mother’s.
Yours, even though you are a child.
The curse of every white child that ever was born and that ever will be born.
None can escape it.’
And I said,
‘Not even me?’
And he said,
‘Not even you.
Least of all, you.’
I had seen and known negroes since I could remember.
I just looked at them as I did at rain, or furniture, or food or sleep.
But after that I seemed to see them for the first time not as people, but as a thing, a shadow in which I lived, we lived, all white people, all other people.
I thought of all the children coming forever and ever into the world, white, with the black shadow already falling upon them before they drew breath.
And I seemed to see the black shadow in the shape of a cross.
And it seemed like the white babies were struggling, even before they drew breath, to escape from the shadow that was not only upon them but beneath them too, flung out like their arms were flung out, as if they were nailed to the cross.
I saw all the little babies that would ever be in the world, the ones not yet even born—a long line of them with their arms spread, on the black crosses.
I couldn’t tell then whether I saw it or dreamed it.
But it was terrible to me.
I cried at night.
At last I told father, tried to tell him.
What I wanted to tell him was that I must escape, get away from under the shadow, or I would die.
‘You cannot,’ he said. ‘You must struggle, rise.
But in order to rise, you must raise the shadow with you.
But you can never lift it to your level.