The Twelve Tribes of Hattie

In 1922, 15-year-old Hattie, along with her mother and two sisters, fled the racial injustices of Georgia on a train heading north. Their journey coincided with a wave of black migration to the “New Jerusalem,” as the North was hailed. Now 17, married, and the mother of newborn twins, Hattie relishes life in her little house on Wayne Street in Philadelphia. It is “just an in-the-meanwhile” (3) rental home, as Hattie aspires to buy a house. She has given her babies “names of promise and of hope” (3)—Philadelphia and Jubilee—aware that her mother, who died the year before, would disapprove.

After seven months of thriving, the babies fall gravely ill with pneumonia. The doctor gives Hattie a bottle of medicine and recommends steam treatments to ease the twins’ breathing. For the next few days, Hattie secludes herself with her babies in the bathroom, frequently running hot bathwater to create clouds of steam.

Despite the humid air and drops of medicine, the twins deteriorate. Hattie goes out into the January chill to buy eucalyptus for the bathwater. When the kind shop-woman offers to “look in on” the twins, Hattie—“a silly girl too prideful to admit she needed looking in on”—declines, anxious to appear a capable woman, married with a husband “training as an electrician” (6).