came by the name of Mourning Free?” Jeremy tilted his head toward the barn.
Olivia smiled. “It isn’t really so long. His parents were slaves in Virginia and
ran north. His mother was with child, with him, but she walked all the way to Five Rocks – that’s the town in Pennsylvania that we come from – and the anti-slavery people took them in. His father chose Free as their new family name.”
“Fitting choice, I suppose.”
“Bit too fitting. The abolitionists tried to talk them out of it – said it was a dead giveaway that they were fugitive slaves. But they were set on it. Then Mourning’s father caught the influenza and died. That was just a few weeks
before his wife died birthing.”
She paused for a moment.
“The colored midwife they’d brought over from the next town picked up the
poor little baby …” Olivia paused and clasped her hands over her heart, looking
up at the sky, “held him to her breast and paced about moaning, ‘Oh, this
mourning child, this poor, poor mourning child.’ She said it over and over again
and it stuck. Everyone started calling him ‘that poor mourning child,’ and
Mourning was what got written in the church registry.”
Jeremy grinned. Olivia feared she may have gone too far; her audience could
have taken her to be making light of one of the saddest stories she’d ever heard.
And what about Mourning – how would he feel about her telling this story for
the entertainment of a stranger? She felt her face flush with shame.
“So he was born an orphan,” Jeremy said.
“Yes.”
“Who raised him up?”
She wished she could change the subject, but heard herself go on talking. “A
colored family took him in for a while, but he always pretty much took care of
himself. He worked everywhere in town and whoever he was working for gave
him a place to sleep and fed him. He used to help in my father’s store – did everything but wait on customers. My father didn’t think that even Five Rocks,
packed with Quakers though it may be, was quite prepared for a Negro store
clerk discussing corset sizes with white ladies.”
“No, one would assume not. So the two of you grew up together?”
“I couldn’t say that, but I’ve known Mourning all my life. I was the one who
taught him how to read and write,” she said.
“Come on,” Mourning called, emerging from the barn with a rope in his hand
and Dixby at his side. “Let’s go get supper.”
“Take an axe and your knives,” Jeremy called back and Mourning went to
fetch them. “And something to put the heart and liver in,” Jeremy added.
“I’ll get a pan,” Olivia said.
When she came back out of the cabin Jeremy was bare-chested, hanging his
pretty blue shirt on the wagon post. Mourning was quite a way ahead and Olivia
hurried along beside Jeremy, remembering a novel in which the young women
were constantly stumbling, providing the young men with an opportunity to
grasp their elbows. But what if she pretended too well and fell flat on her face?
Worse, what if Jeremy had no interest in holding onto her elbow?
