She noticed the weather before it turned. She knew somehow how to gentle a frightened animal, how to set a bird's broken wing, how to find water and read the sky. Elias began teaching her letters by the firelight, scratching them on a slate. It was a dangerous thing he was doing, and they both knew it.
Teaching an enslaved person to read was against the law in South Carolina, a crime that could bring a fine or worse. For the men who made the laws understood that letters were a kind of key, and that a person who could read might one day read a pass, a map, a newspaper, a route north. Elias did it anyway, in the shut kitchen with the curtains drawn, and Delphia bent over the work with a fierce concentration, her tongue between her teeth, her great hand clumsy around the little nub of chalk, forming the letters over and over until they came right. She learned fast, faster than Elias would have guessed, as if the ability had been in her all along, waiting.
And when she wrote her own name for the first time, Delphia, the letters large and careful, marching a little uphill across the slate. She stared at it for a long moment. Then she reached out and touched it lightly with one fingertip, as if to be sure it was real. Then she covered it with her hand as if it was something private and precious that the world might take.
“That's mine,” she said mostly to herself. “That's my own name, and I wrote it. Nobody wrote it for me. I wrote it.” And Elias, mending harness by the fire, had to look hard at his work for a while and say nothing at all.
It was Kato who finally broke the thing open on a bitter night in January, when the wind came down out of the north, rattled the loose panes, and drove them all close to the fire. He had been humming that tune again, the slow rolling wordless melody, and Delphia had gone still the way she always did. This time, Kato did not stop. He hummed it through to the end.
Then he set down the trace chain he was mending, looked at Delphia across the firelight with his old eyes wet and shining, and said, “That song. You know that song.” Delphia’s face did not move, but her hands tightened. “I don’t know any song,” she said. “You do,” Kato said gently. “You went still to it the first night you came here and every night since.”
“Your body knows it, even if your mind shut the door on it. That’s a cradle song, girl. That’s a song a woman sings to a baby on her knee. And I know it, and you know it, because I have heard it before, sung in this very county years ago by a woman named Juny, who could pick a bale of cotton with a child on her back and lift a fallen ox out of a ditch with her own two arms.”
He leaned forward. A woman built just exactly like you. The room had gone very quiet. Elias set his work down.
Delphia was staring at the old man now, and the guardedness on her face had cracked, and underneath it was something like fear. “You’re talking foolishness,” she whispered. “Old man’s foolishness.” “Maybe,” Kato said. “But answer me one thing and I’ll hush.”
That mark on your shoulder and the one back of your neck that you keep covered. Is it a burn? Round like a coin puckered in the middle. Delphia went absolutely rigid.
Her hand rose without her willing it to the back of her neck to the collar of her dress, and the answer was in the gesture before she found any words. Kato let out a breath that was half a sob. “Juny’s baby had a mark like that,” he said. “Born with a caul and a birthmark both. Back of the neck, round as a Spanish dollar.”
The old women said it meant the child was marked for something. Marked to be lost, some said. Marked to be found again, said others. He wiped his face with a shaking hand.
That baby was sold off this county when she was four years old. Sold away from her mama in a debt settlement, screaming and Juny screaming after the wagon. And the child's name, his voice broke. The child's name was Delphia.
Her mama had named her after Delilah in the Bible, and nobody ever heard of her again till a wagon come up my lane last summer with a giant girl on the seat going still to a cradle song. For a moment after Kato finished, no one in the kitchen moved. The fire popped. The wind found the loose pain and worried it.
Delphia sat with her great hands flat on her knees and her eyes fixed on nothing. And when she finally spoke, her voice came out cracked and small, a child's voice in a giant's body.
“I don’t remember her,” she said. “I want to. I’ve wanted to my whole life. There’s just a shape—a big warm shape, and hands, and that song. I always thought I dreamed it. I always thought I made her up because I needed her so bad.”
She looked up at Kato. “You’re telling me she was real? You’re telling me she was here in this county, and she…” Her voice failed. “She looked for me?”