Authors: Natashia Deon
“Sorry I'm late,” he tell Cynthia. “Had to finish helping Geraldine this morning. Was on the road back from Athens yesterday. I appreciate the extra money.”
“Just get to them keys and play something fast and loud,” she say. “Anything. And when you leave tonight, take this trifling whore with you. Ungrateful bitch!”
She staggers up her hallway, holding her face, still yelling, “Ungrateful! I don't care if I never see you again. In fact, don't you never come back here.”
Her door slams shut.
“What happened?” Jeremy say.
“Where you been?” I say.
“What happened to your hair?” he say.
“How you like my dress?” I turn around in it for him. “I knew you'd come back and I wanted you to see me pretty. Don't mind this ripped seam. I'll fix it.”
“Mimi, I'm leaving.”
“What?”
“This is my last day.”
I don't understand.
“They found gold in San Francisco. A bunch of us is headed up that way to try our luck. Get my head clear.”
“You leaving 'cause of me?”
“There's some things I need to sort out. I need money. And . . .”
“I've never seen San Francisco before,” I say.
“Mimi . . .”
“Ain't got much to pack. My brush. Some clothes. You use our money if Cynthia want you to pay for me . . .”
“Naomi . . .”
“A few pieces . . .” I say.
He grabs the sides of my shoulders. “You ain't comin.”
I shake my head. I don't understand. If it don't make sense, it's a lie.
“I can't take you with me,” he say.
“That's not true. You don't mean that.”
He slides his hands down from my arms to my hands and holds them together.
“We getting married,” I say. “Me and you fooling the world.”
“People will know,” he say, softly.
“We gon' have babies. A family. Our gamble, you remember that?”
“We can't hide our feelings . . .” he say.
“We're gonna make vows to God because we love each other. Jeremy, tell me you love me.”
“Dammit, Naomi!” he say, throwing my hands. “Are you dumb or something? Can't you see me suffering here? I'm going to California without you. Why can't you just be happy for me, wish me luck? Give me a sweet word to hold onto?”
“We both escape,” I say softly. I don't even recognize my own voice. “Both escape our suffering.”
He opens the door and goes to the porch like I ain't even here.
He turns around to me, looking at me like he don't know me, then lingers there. One last glance. He's gone.
What's happening here? I don't understand.
I just gave up my peace for him.
My protection.
All those chances at freedom I gave up for him. My bodyâto him, almost to Mr. Shepardâfor him. I left part of my soul in a gambling room and now I don't understand.
What's love supposed to cost? What's freedom cost? I've already paid it all.
And I don't understand.
Conyers, Georgia, 1847
I
BEEN WAITING AT
this door for two hours for Jeremy but he ain't come back yet. Every time I get ready to go, I tell myself he gon' show up again, see me missing and think I don't love him. So I'll keep sitting here on my knees, waiting. I know he still loves me.
He could forgive me.
After what he asked me to do with Mr. Shepard, he owe me. He can forgive my insult. It wouldn't be fair if he found me unforgivable after all we been through.
When I think of unforgivable I think of how I killed Massa. No, God could forgive me for that 'cause I had to protect myself. Unforgivable is cold-blooded murder, senseless and with no excuse. Like what they keep writing about what I did in the papers that keep coming: “Faunsdale Slaughterer.”
No, cold-blooded murderer is when somebody, for no reason, takes away everything a innocent man ever had and everything he was ever gone have. But what did I do to Jeremy? And who the hell's he anyway to make me earn forgiveness from him?
I could help him be better.
I could love him.
Lord knows, I do love him. I'd even forgive him for taking a life, cold-blooded, if he'd promised to love me again.
My sour stomach's making me sick and that's all right.
I want it that way.
I want Jeremy to see me sick for him, my knees black and blue for him, my eyes swollen for him. Want him to see me loving him the way he say he don't love me and regret it.
Throw-up's racing up my throat this time. I run out the door, shoot it all over the rail. “Jesus!” I cry and hollow out empty. The pain comes back again and I hang over the porch in the dark like somebody's washed and forgot clothes.
“Ungrateful!” I hear Cynthia say behind me.
I look over my shoulder, see her parading across the parlor with an armful of my things, talking to herself out loud, making sure I hear her, see her. “You're getting out of here tonight!” she say.
She kicks open the gambling parlor door, bumps around through the room, knocks open the side door, my things hurled from her arms: my fire poker, my clothes, my Bible, a jewelry box Bernadette gave me. They clatter when the heavy things hit the ground but I don't care. Most everything she got rid of was hers anyway.
A
LBERT EMERGES FROM
Cynthia's field coming my way. When he reach the bottom of this porch, he looks up at me. His expression is like he feel sorry but I don't need nobody feeling sorry for me, getting near me, except my man.
He takes a step up the porch and say, “Can I . . .” “I don't want to see you,” I say. “Not you! Not Cynthia! No part of this place. Get the hell away from me! And don't . . .”
A whoosh passes my ear and explodes a glass bottle on the porch, wetting the wood steps. Broken pieces fly and just miss Albert. My ankle burns and a thin red line appears there, just below the hem of my dress where my skin was slicedâthe separation cries blood.
I bend down and hold the place with my hand, see Cynthia standing inside drinking from a new bottle she got. She cocks it back to throw it. I leap from the porch! “Ungrateful bitch!” she say. “You better not come back nowhere on this property! Albert, get away from her!”
I take off running.
Keep running.
Running again.
I ain't got nowhere else to go.
Tallassee, Alabama
W
E SURRENDERED
.
April 1865 the Confederate States of America raised their white flags and gave up. Less than a week later, President Lincoln was murdered like it was done in trade.
“But slavery ain't illegal,” Slavedriver Nelson said. We can still keep slaves, he reckoned. “It'll take a constitutional amendment to take away my rights as an American citizen,” he said. And when he found out the proposal for the Thirteenth Amendment to end slavery was making its rounds in Congress last month, expected to be voted on and approved by the end of the year, he got on his new horse and just left, like most people. Slave and free. Nobody's stopping nobody, 'cause there's no extra food, no extra men, no extra ammunition, and no hope. Annie didn't want Nelson here in the first place.
George has been missing for months and Josey and Charles'll be disappearing from here soon, too. Go someplace where George could never find her. But she got Jackson's protection now.
For the last six months, Jackson's been keeping everybody here laughing, telling 'em his war stories. “We ducked down low like this. Me and Collins,” Jackson will start.
He'll lay on somebody's floor or in the dirt, depending on who he's talking to and where, then flatten his belly and aim his imaginary rifle. “They caught me once,” he'll say. “They weren't gon' catch me again. We wasn't going back without a fight. Northerners telling us they fighting for our freedom, then keeping us prisoner through the war. What kind of bullshit's that?”
Then he'll make a popping noise with his mouth, pretend-shooting trees and doors and people, then he'll drop his pretend rifle and scramble across the ground where he'll take the place of his victim and put one hand on his ass cheek, hollering like he was the one who got shot.
He'll get to carrying on and whining so that nobody can stop laughing. Josey's always the most tickled and loud, her laughing tears are showers no matter how many time she hears the story. Then, Jackson will run back to his place as the shooter and yell, “I don't want your freedom. I'm here to defend Dixie!”
The only laughter in all of Alabama comes from here on this plantation, a song because of Jackson.
The day he came back, the day them women tried to steal everything, Josey slept all day.
She only woke for a moment, drowsy-drunk, and Charles dressed her in clean bedclothes. Even the sizzle and pop of bacon fat from the stove didn't wake her the next morning, though the dead walls came alive, its wood pine oozed sap again. The fragrance cleaned the air and took away the dry cough Charles had carried for months. Jackson's a healer of the dead, the sick, the soul.
And it was like he and Charles were best friends from the start. Better, family. Jackson was some lost son and Charles the grateful father. And Jackson was a savior to Josey. Charles still cain't forgive hisself for not hearing nothin on the day those women came and tried to steal the washing. “You're a better man than me,” he told Jackson. But Jackson said, “Only man better than you is God. I've grown up watching you.”
“Don't burn it,” Jackson said, laughing a little, just before Josey woke up the second day. He was leaning back in his chair, biting an apple when Josey dragged the hanging sheet over, showing herself to the room. He almost fell over.
“Here she is!” Charles said when he saw her. He rushed Josey, put his arm around her. “Don't be shy now, baby. Say hi to your friend.” But she wouldn't speak that day. Only on the third day, when Jackson embarrassed her after he saw that she was still wearing the faded-to-pink bracelet he'd given her years before on her birthday, did she turn bright red and speak.
“I knew you loved me,” he said, and smiled.
Jackson had gotten all their clothes back from Feral that first day. “Couldn't say much for my shirt, though,” Charles said, laughing. Jackson had already tied what was left of it around his head.
“It's a blessing Jackson came when he did,” Charles told Josey. “I can get another shirt. Cain't get another you.”
Jackson brought with him all kinds of rations from war. Salt pork, sugar, flour. The bacon and coffee was already on. Charles drained the bacon grease on a clean rag next to the stove while I raced around the room, excited that Jackson had come home a hero. And for the first time my sprints caused the front door to open and they all looked at me. Not seeing. Jackson said, “Just the wind.”
His words gave me hope that day. Hope that I can have hands again. For George.
B
EFORE
J
ACKSON CAME
back, Richard left Annie with only doubt and questions and a rifle he won from the mill. He and Kathy took everything that wasn't tacked down, like they promised, except the gun cabinet, her gin, and the shutters falling off her empty house. But she's still holding on. Bedless. Without a place to set a dish, a place to eat. The emptiness inside her house is like poisoned air. The society ladies don't go around there no more. Not since word of divorce. And now that their world has surrendered, everybody's empty.
Hell is everywhere.
Annie will shuffle through her corridors mumbling and blaming herself for the things she did wrong. Like Josey. She cries in Josey's old pink-painted baby room, mumbles her regrets, the wrongs she didn't see. “I was so selfish,” she'll mumble, and, “My baby,” she'll say.
And now, she's lost everything.
Not Josey.
Not me.
Not today.
Brittle sycamore leaves cartwheel across the yard in celebration. One catches on the heel of Josey's bare foot, shifts, and gets swept away, chased over Josey's decorated broomstick.
The minister, maybe nineteen years old, and his wife and three childrenâthe youngest, a baby of a few weeksâwere just passing through on their way west. Whatever you could spare, they asked. We got plenty, Jackson said.
Jackson packed grains and nuts and canned beets, and Josey gave rest to the young mother, holding Baby Boy right, her hand behind his head. Josey swaddled him, bounced him. So natural with him. “We don't see many babies out in the community,” Josey told her. “Most mother's don't come out 'til the baby's months old. It's scary to have a baby in times like these.”
The minister asked Charles, “Why don't you come with us? We could use strong hands. Build a church. We need families. Bring your son-in-law, too.”
“Oh, they're not married,” Charles said, just as Jackson came up.
“Who's not married?” Jackson said.
Now, Josey's white dress mushrooms from a breeze. Her veil made of bed sheets whips her gold hair to the sky as she stands next to Jackson, hand in hand.
“With your permission,” Jackson had said to Charles. “I'd like to marry her.”
Charles had to choke back tears when he said, “It's her that has to say yes.”
And now, Charles seems both broken and proud next to Josey while the young minister reads from his Bible. When he finishes, Jackson lingers in front of Josey. She pulls him into her and kisses him like she did her pillow before her life restarted.
I'm covered in sky.
It passes over us in a baptism of colors: blues, whites, and the yellow sparkle of sunshine.
I want to stay here forever.