John Sayles - A Moment in the Sun

The white men come ahead, hooping and hollering as they run and Jubal gets a good one off, dead center on the man but then there is so much smoke from their rifles shooting you can’t see a thing. He digs the second round out, trying to stay calm, and loads it up. He is looking for a body through the smoke when Ernest and Tip fall beside him and he remembers he’s been tapped to die. He fires high into the smoke and tosses the rifle clear before dropping straight down holding his chest like he always done when Royal pretend to shoot him when they were boys playing blues and grays. The volunteers, not so many as there are Filipinos, stumble down the front of the ditch and each fires once at the men running away before they chase after. The smoke hangs over and then there is Colonel Funston on the Morgan prancing along the front of the ditch and then down into it, coming way too close and before he can think Jubal has jumped up and dove away from the hooves.

If he was dead his eyes should have been closed and he just get trompled, but it is too late now, the camera has seen him and remembered it. So now maybe he is a Filipino been wounded a little or faking and when Funston trots back at him with his pistol drawn he hops up and lights out for the trees. He runs a few feet and there is the pistol shot but he is not hit and he keeps running till he comes to where everybody has stopped around the chestnut tree and one of the volunteers points a rifle at him.

“Hands up, boy,” says the volunteer. “You been nabbed by Uncle Sam.”

They all laugh, the volunteers and the Filipinos, and then Mr. James shouts for them to come back. He is smiling and Mr. Harry is pulling the roll out of the camera, so maybe he didn’t mess up too bad.

“Excellent, gentlemen. Just excellent,” says Mr. James. “Stirring. And you,” he points to Jubal, “the terrified insurrectionist — that was in spired .”

This must mean good because Mr. Harry is taking the camera off the sticks and the one who does the cranking is writing something on a pad of paper, both of them smiling too.

“Now if our Filipinos will don their hats and reclaim their rifles, we will move on to the Capture of Trenches at Candaba .” He points up to the one playing Funston. “Captain Ditmar, be advised that in this film you will be required to fall from your mount. Quickly, gentlemen!”

Jubal climbs into the ditch to find his rifle. His heart is still racing. This time, if he is wounded, maybe he’ll remember to drag a leg.

He hopes it was only the stairs. Jessie breaking her water halfway to the fourth and calling in a panic until he and Yolanda could carry her up, and now writhing on the bed with a blood-tinged mucous plug on the floor. Placenta previa is the worst of the catalysts he can think of, the hemorrhaging so likely to carry the mother away during or after the delivery, but there is also eclampsia and endometritis and hydramnios— so many possibilities for preterm induction, and obstetrics never his strongest suit, if only for the lack of opportunity to practice. Only the wealthiest of colored women in Wilmington choose to engage a physician rather than one of the city’s half-dozen midwives, even in emergency situations.

The idea of attending his own daughter’s first parturition has never, until this moment, occurred to him.

Dr. Lunceford forces himself to concentrate on his preparations. Yolanda is trembling, cold as always, her own harrowing experiences no doubt weighing on her thoughts. And Jessie, his little Jessie, lies back on the pillows breathing deeply and studying his face for clues.

“It’s coming, isn’t it? It’s coming now.”

The arithmetic is not difficult. The one incident she confessed to, on the night of Junior’s final visit, then counting forward — it is twenty-eight weeks.

“We shall see,” he says to his daughter. “The vital thing is for you to remain as calm as possible while I see what we have here.”

“What can I do?” Yolanda asks, standing as far back as the room allows, terrified. She has never observed him in practice, Yolanda, has demurred even when close friends have asked her to be present at their own birthings.

“I need you to clean the stove, as thoroughly as possible.”

“The stove?”

“Just the warming compartment, the larger one.” He looks deeply into her eyes. “Please.”

It is an unlikely possibility, but he needs to spare her the sight of what may come next. Yolanda crosses quickly to Jessie, bends to embrace her and kiss her on both cheeks.

“You’re all right now, baby,” she says. “Your father knows what to do.” And then hurries into the kitchen.

It is near freezing in the room, Dr. Lunceford in his overcoat and Jessie with her top half weighed down under all of their blankets, little puffs of condensation from her mouth as she breathes irregularly now, the landlord untraceable whenever the radiators fail in the building. Jessie’s eyes are bulging slightly as she watches him. Blood pressure elevated. In Wilmington, even with the home births, there would be a curtain or a kind of tent structure blocking the woman’s view of his actions and his view of her face. Better to concentrate on the organs involved in the procedure and nothing else. But there is no time for that now, and he seats himself at the bottom of the bed to stare into the vagina of his only daughter, who he has not seen naked since she was four years old.

It helps that there is no footboard. Jessie is frightened, perspiring, the pains having come twice, some five minutes apart. She is barely dilated.

That was the problem for Yolanda the second time, with Jessie and what would have been her sister. Dr. Tinsley reaching for the dilator, eyes apologetic as he glanced to Dr. Lunceford, allowed in the room as a professional courtesy. Many physicians preferred to perform their accouchements forcés digitally, but at the Freedman’s Hospital they had the latest of instruments. It was shiny, polished steel, he remembers, four blades with a screw mechanism at the top. He remembers the tearing, remembers his wife’s screams, the chloroform ineffective in the dosage they regarded as safe, remembers the sister, never named, coming out first and then Jessie, identical except for her color, her faintest bloom of life.

“I want to hold them both,” Yolanda said, coming up from the morphine when her condition was stable, when the bleeding had finally been halted. “I must hold them.”

“The one has been buried,” he had to tell her. “Two days ago.”

There are so many things that can go wrong. A girl in her teens, first delivery, preterm — he tries not to imagine any of them. Let it present itself, he thinks, and I will choose whatever remedy is available.

“It hurts, Daddy,” Jessie says, tears streaming down her cheeks. “It hurts so much.”

She hasn’t called him Daddy for years. It is what common girls, white and colored, call their fathers, and Jessie has not been raised to be a common girl.

“I can’t give you anything yet, Jessie. It would interfere with what you’ve got to do.”

There is ether in hospitals, and even without his license he could obtain chloroform tablets and an inhaler, but he is convinced that as commonly employed such anesthetics are unsafe for both mother and fetus. The Twilight Sleep advocates to the contrary, a comatose mother is unlikely to experience normal contractions.

Jessie arches her body, clenching her fists and crying out. Yolanda appears in the doorway.

“Go,” says Dr. Lunceford, and she returns to her scouring.

He shifts the oil lamp closer and pushes the labia apart with his fingers. He has only an ancient Sims speculum in his bag that at the moment seems a device of torture rather than diagnostics. She is beginning to open.