Momma's Child ((New Short Story? Possibly?))

She was too graceful.

I remember how she hated to wear shoes. Every summer Sunday afternoon, when the sun threw every green thing into shades of yellow, and her fair skin would tan momentarily to a warm margerine-like color, she would deliberately slide off her heels, place them side-by-side on the porch, and walk with bare feet and a light dance in her step through the tall grass. It was a kind of magic, the way the breeze would play with her floral skirt.

I tried to pick out the cursive symbols in her walnut curls; I imagined that they wove sweet love poems to me.

She was like honey. And I called her Momma.

But Master and Mammy didn't permit me to call her that. So I kept it tucked behind my tongue, and played with it on the backs of my teeth, suckling the penny's worth of comfort that it gave me.

I wasn't allowed to see Momma, either. I had to hide behind the chicken-wire fencing beneath the porch just to watch her dance on Sunday evenings. I remember how the sun would cast its cage-like shadows across my face, and how I would poke at the boxes they made in the dirt around me, and I would gaze at those verses and beautiful words waving at me as she strolled; I would smile because I knew I was born from them. I didn't come from Momma's stomach, like all the other Negro children did from their Mammies - I came from her hair. I came from the soundless songs plucking at every strand.

My skin even retained their color.

And I knew she saw me there, underneath that porch. Sometimes, she would glance in the direction of my hiding place, my cage, and her lips would quirk slightly upwards before she returned to her attention to her hips. Her hazel eyes whispered to mine - they were just like hers. We were twins, joined by the umbilical chord cut haphazardly from our waists.

I longed to see if the inside of her arms were as warm and gentle as her smile, if they felt like butter, or the expensive lilac lotions she wore. I ached to see if there was love in her embrace for me.

But she wasn't allowed to touch me. She wasn't supposed to know that I existed anymore.

Master took care of that - he put me in a shack so small it was like a chicken-coup, but only with one mother hen to look out for us chicks. There were a lot of us pickaninnies there, who had no fathers and no mothers. But I knew where they came from. They were Master's rejected children, the ones he couldn't bare to look at because of the dirt of their handsom little bodies, or the features that too closely resembled those who broke their backs and minds for him inside the boiling sugar cane smelts.

He sold their mothers to his neighbors, and even though they were just beyond the fence, they never visited their babies like some slaves who were seperated from their kin did. I'm guessing that they just didn't want to remember the pain ripped inside of them from losing their precious bare-foot kingdom, with the lively-patterend cloths, and the grasses that went on forever, only to be engulfed by the biggest setting sun ever seen - just to find that their wombs couldn't be precious any longer, but cut wide and sold from greedy hand to greedy, bloody hand, until their breasts fell flat from their chests and age defiled the worry in their faces.

But I wasn't like them. I was Momma's child, and I knew it.

And she knew me.