Mathis - The Twelve Tribes of Hattie

ABOUT THE BOOK

A debut of extraordinary distinction: through the life of her unforgettable heroine, Hattie Shepherd, the author tells the story of the children of the Great Migration, a story of bitterness and love and the promise of a new North, built on the backs of Hatties children.

In 1923, seventeen-year-old Hattie Shepherd flees Georgia for Philadelphia, where, though her first two babies die because she cant afford medicine, she keeps nine children alive with old southern remedies and sheer love. Saddled with a husband who will bring her nothing but disappointment, she prepares her children for a world she knows will not be kind to them. Their trials are the trials on which the history of America was forged, a tribute to the resilience of the human spirit, and a force stronger than love or trouble, the determination to get by and get through. A searing portrait of an unforgettable family, an emotionally transfixing drama of human striving in the face of insurmountable adversity, and a ferocious vision of humanity at its most threadbare and elemental, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie introduces a writer of the very first order.

Published by Knopf, January 2013

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

AYANA MATHIS is a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop and is a recipient of the Michener-Copernicus Fellowship. The Twelve Tribes of Hattie is her first novel.

This is an uncorrected eBook file. Please do not quote for publication until you check your copy against the finished book.

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

Copyright 2013 by Ayana Mathis

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

www.aaknopf.com

Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
[to come]

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Front-of-jacket photograph TK
Jacket design by TK

Manufactured in the United States of America
First Edition

Dedication TK

Contents

All of you came to me and said, Let us send men ahead of us to explore the land for us and bring back a repost to us regarding the route by which we should go up and the cities we will come to.

The plan seemed good to me, and I slectged twelve of you, one from each tribe.

DEUTERONOMY 1:2223

As a girl!
She once opened
An umbrella in the house
And her mother cred
Youll ruin us!
But that was so
long ago.

RITA DOVE , Nightmare

Philadelphia and Jubilee

1925

P HILADELPHIA AND JUBILEE! August said when Hattie told him what she wanted to name their twins. You caint give them babies no crazy names like that!

Hatties mother, if she were still alive, would have agreed with August. She would have said Hattie had chosen vulgar names; low and showy she would have called them. But she was gone, and Hattie wanted to give her babies names that werent already chiseled on a headstone in the family plots in Georgia, so she gave them names of promise and of hope, reaching-forward names, not looking-back ones.

The twins were born in June, during Hattie and Augusts first summer as husband and wife. They had rented a house on Wayne Streetit was small, but it was in a good neighborhood and was, August said, just an in-the-meanwhile house. Until we buy a house of our own, Hattie said. Till we sign on that dotted line, August agreed.

At the end of June robins beset the trees and roofs of Wayne Street. The neighborhood rang with birdsong. The twittering lulled the twins to sleep and put Hattie in such high spirits that she giggled all of the time, even when August had to climb into the eaves to move a nest that blocked the drain pipe. It rained every morning, but the afternoons were bright and the grass in Hattie and Augusts tiny square of lawn was green as creation. The ladies of the neighborhood did their baking in the morning, and by noon the block smelled of the strawberry cakes they set on their windowsills to cool. The three of them, Hattie and her twins, dozed in the shade on the porch. The next summer Philadelphia and Jubilee would be walking; theyd totter around the porch like sweet bumbling old men.

HATTIE SHEPHERD LOOKED DOWN at her two babies in their Moses baskets. The twins were seven months old. They breathed easier sitting upright, so she had them propped with small pillows. Only just now had they quieted. The night had been bad. Pneumonia could be cured, though not easily. Better that than mumps or influenza or pleurisy. Better pneumonia than cholera or scarlet fever. Hattie sat on the bathroom floor and leaned against the toilet with her legs stretched in front of her. The window was opaque with steam that condensed into droplets and ran down the panes and over the white wooden frames to pool in the dip in the tile behind the toilet. Hattie had been running the hot water for hours. August was half the night in the basement loading coal into the hot water heater. He had not wanted to leave Hattie and the babies to go to work. Well, but a days work is a days pay, and the coal bin was running low. Hattie reassured him: the babies will be all right now the nights passed.

The doctor had come around the day before and advised the steam cure. Hed prescribed a small dosage of ipecac and cautioned against backward country remedies like hot mustard poultices, though vapor rub was acceptable. He diluted the ipecac with a clear, oily liquid, gave Hattie two small droppers, and showed her how to hold the babies tongues down with her finger so the medicine would flow into their throats. August paid three dollars for the visit and set to making mustard poultices the minute the doctor was out the door. Pneumonia.

A siren wailed so keenly Hattie thought it must have been in front of the house. She struggled up from her place on the floor to wipe a circle in the fogged bathroom window. Nothing but white row houses across the street, crammed together like teeth, and gray patches of ice on the sidewalk and the saplings nearly dead in the frozen squares of dirt allotted to them. Here and there a light shone in an upstairs windowsome of the neighborhood men worked the docks like August, some delivered milk or had postal routes; there were schoolteachers too and a slew of others about whom Hattie knew nothing. All over Philadelphia the people rose in the crackling cold to stoke the furnaces in their basements. They were united in these hardships.

A grainy dawn misted up from the bottom of the sky. Hattie closed her eyes and remembered the Georgia sunrises of her childhoodthese visions were forever tugging at her; her memories of Georgia grew more urgent and pressing with each day she lived in Philadelphia. Every morning of her girlhood the work horn would sound in the bluing dawn, over the fields and the houses and the black gum trees. From her bed Hattie watched the field hands dragging down the road in front of her house. Always the laggards passed after the first horn: pregnant women, the sick and lame, those too old for picking, those with babies strapped to their backs. The horn urged them forward like a lash. Solemn the road and solemn their faces; the breaking white fields waiting, the pickers spilling across those fields like locusts.