Their faces went long and they looked down at the table.
“Why me?” Laney asked, and threw her weight into one hip.
“’Cause he like you, and ’sides, you gonna have to bring him his meals, keep him clean, and—”
“I ain’t gonna wash that man’s dirty behind!”
Hop and Tenk laughed out loud and then clapped their hands over their mouths.
“You’ll do it,” Brother said, and the tone he took told Laney that that was that.
“Fine.”
* * *
January, and the ground cold and stiff, the sound of horse hooves, faint at first and then closer. The hounds send a signal, howling and already standing at the far end of the property, ears alert, tails at attention. Brother drops his hammer and takes a moment to blow warm breath into almost-frozen hands.
Laney comes to the door, and Brother nods her way before picking up his hammer again. There’s banging along with howling and hooves, clearer-sounding now, just around the bend.
Hop is the skittish one, and his hands won’t hold the nail in place. It falls and he pulls another one from his pocket and tries again. The point wobbles against the wood while his eyes watch for the horses and the wagon he’s sure they’re pulling. He feels the wheels cutting through the earth, slicing through the green that’s waiting for spring beneath it.
A small figure shoots out and across the land, so swift it’s almost unseen. If it wasn’t for the hounds, the turning wagon wheels, and Brother’s hammer, the day would be quiet enough to hear the screech of the hinges and the click of the lock.
They pretend not to notice, but Brother’s heart is galloping and Hop keeps dropping the nails. Both of their backs are to the road, hoping their coats hide the twitching of the skin there.
The hooves and wagon come to a halt, and now it’s just the snorting of the horses. Then, after a moment: “Hey, nigger.”
Brother takes a breath and turns his head slowly around; his body follows and Hop just grips the wood of the fence and wills himself not to faint.
Brother does not offer a smile, just the placid face of slavery. It is a look that is beaten, untaught, and unthreatening. “Yassa?”
The white man is short and stout and climbs down from his wagon with a puffed chest, keeping his distance so as not to have to look up at Brother.
“Who the owner of this property?”
“Massa Lessing,” Brother says, careful to keep the hammer still and stiff at his side.
The man smiles at the word “Massa.”
“He home?” the man asks, and looks up toward the house.
“Yassa,” Brother says, and then drops his head a little. “But he sickly.”
The man’s eyebrows climb.
“Is there a missus?”
Brother stumbles on this one, but he camouflages the hesitation with a cough and then a quick wipe to his nose with the back of his hand. “Nope. She passed last winter.”
The white man studies him. “Children?”
“No sir.”
“How many niggers?”
Brother is careful with this one. He can’t be too swift, seem too smart.
“Well, sir, it be me and Hop here.” Hop supposes he should turn around, but his neck won’t move so he just keeps his eyes trained on the nail. “Laney,” Brother continues, and uses his chin to point at the old woman who is slowly making her way up the hill and toward the house. “A girl,” Brother says, and then adds quickly just in case the stranger got any ideas, “she just a child.” He takes a moment and then says, “Tenk and Spin, they in the barn, and that be it.”
The white man watched Laney until she disappeared behind the house.
And then he grunted and spat into the dirt before looking off across the land and then back at Brother. “Y’all tell Lessing I’ll be back when life’s feeling a mite better.”
“Yassa.”
“Tell ’em Pinkerton come by to see him.”
“Yassa.”
Brother waited a few beats before he turned back to his work. He heard Pinkerton’s boots crunch against the ground, and then the sound abruptly ceased.
Brother’s heart pounded and he found himself gripping the hammer tighter than he ever thought possible. Hop heard the silence too and just went on ahead and threw his body weight against the fence; otherwise, he would have fainted straight away.
Brother waited another few beats and then turned back around, fully expecting to be looking down the barrel of a shotgun, but instead, he saw the man’s hand up and waving. Brother swallowed and turned his eyes toward the house.
Up in the window, behind the lace curtains, was a small figure in a white gown, waving back.
Brother’s throat closed up.
“He look frail,” the man said as he lowered his arm back down to his side. “What’s ailing him?”
Brother couldn’t answer; his throat was locked shut. His eyes were stuck too. His lips just flapped, but words floated from beside him: “Yellow fever.”
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” the man said, and hurriedly climbed up and onto the wagon and drove away.
After the hooves and wheels faded, leaving just the sounds from the fussing warblers and the now-and-again yelps from the
hounds, Brother and Hop exchanged astonished looks.
“Don’t know where that came from!” Hop laughed nervously and wiped away the sweat on his brow.
Brother dropped his hammer and started toward the house. Hop finally found the strength to turn around, but his might left him with one move and he found himself on his knees, his face resting on the cold ground, snorting loose dirt like a hog.
Brother passed Tenk and Spin, who were stepping out of hiding from behind a tree. Tenk set his mouth to say something and then snapped it shut when he saw the determination in Brother’s face.
Laney met him at the door, her eyes stern, but there was worry etched into the lines of her skin, and if she hadn’t moved, she was sure Brother would have knocked her out of his way.
Taking the steps two at a time and leaving small mounds of dirt on the green carpet runner, he found himself at Lessing’s bedroom door, his hand clutching the brass doorknob.
He shoved the door open and was greeted by scurrying sounds. Then his eyes fell on Lessing, who was propped upright in the bed, both hands bound above his head to the bed railing, eyes wide and staring, handkerchief balled and stuffed into his mouth.
To the right of him was another figure—small, white-haired, pale-faced, shrouded in a gown that was a dim gray in the leaving light.
Brother’s breath caught in his throat and he thought, like a man named Willie who would come months later,
Haint,
when he saw that the dressing gown had no feet poking out from under its hem and no hands dangling from the sleeves.
“Brother?” The voice was familiar and now the haint floated toward him, and he felt his feet move two paces backward.
“It was a good idea, right?”
Suce, dipped in flour maybe or dusted down with powder? Something sweet-smelling in the air. Oh yes, and there was the puff and the container wide open, lid resting beside it. Powder. And the dressing gown was three times her size which explained her missing limbs.
He laughed then. A thunderous laugh that let loose all of the tension he had been shouldering since the night he knocked Lessing down. He laughed until his sides hurt and then he grabbed Suce up by the waist and swung her through the air. “It was a very good idea,” he said.
* * *
Hop must have put a curse on himself because he fell sick, just three days after the white man came. Fever so high, Laney’s fingertips practically sizzled when she touched him. Brother carried him to the big house and laid him to rest in one of the many bedrooms. Hop had smiled at the gesture, but Brother was more concerned with keeping the rest of them well than with Hop’s comfort.
“He’s dying for sure,” Laney cried as she worried holes in the carpet, pacing night and day around his bed.
Then Tenk disappeared or up and left or was eaten by coyotes.
“White man got ’em,” Laney mumbled as her eyes swept the road.
“White men don’t take just one; they got to have it all, and we still here, ain’t we?” Brother said.
“Bad sign, no matter how you look at it,” Laney replied, and shuffled away.
Brother stayed quiet. He couldn’t deny that. It was a very bad sign.
Time came when Hop’s eyes turned yellow and he couldn’t take any food or water in. Laney boiled pots of water and filled the porcelain tub, spilling in the bubbling liquid, and Brother set Hop down inside of it.
Hop didn’t even have the strength to laugh, but he smiled himself silly. By the time the water went cold, he was dead.
* * *
So that’s the way it remained.
Just the four of them.
Lard running low, sugar just a memory, and Suce dusting herself white and waving from the window whenever someone came to inquire, which was almost never. Building the pigpen, over and over again.
Taking down one side and then putting it up again.
Sheets on the line, billowing in the air.
Normal.
___________________
Winter in Georgia sneaks in under the cover of night, blanketing the earth in a white frost that burns away beneath the rising sun, leaving behind a crisp coolness. Just the evergreens remain that way (green); all else turn orange and red and then brown before curling and floating down to earth and leaving only bare, crooked limbs that point toward the back of the departing season.
Tattered clothes are layered upon tattered clothes in an attempt to keep old bones warm; shoes are mended and kindling burns throughout the short winter days and deep into the blue-black nights.
It is the winter sky that is most beautiful of all during that time. Wide, high, and pale during the day, and at night the stars move a little closer to earth, burn a little brighter.
And the moon, a great big beautiful sphere, sometimes white like the soft flakes that drop from the sky and melt away on the young tongues of those who stop between chores to tilt their heads back and stretch their mouths wide open.
And sometimes the moon is yellow like the eyes of the old ones who have seen much and tell tales over campfires.
That sky made heaven a believable place, a place that could possibly one day welcome niggers, criminals, and ornery types of men—even one such as Willie.
___________________
It was just a name.
A name on a forgotten piece of newspaper:
MYANMAR
.
He couldn’t read, but had remembered the sound of it just in case he found it in him to leave the safety of the woods and back roads and stop someone, present the paper, and ask, “How many more miles?”
But he had searched and searched and hadn’t been able to find that bit of him that would allow him to travel in the day or walk the more heavily traveled thoroughfares, even though months earlier Argyle Elliott had told him he was a free man. “Man” is the word that made him smile. Free, he felt, was something still a long time coming.
That day, months earlier when Elliott came running in—hands just a-clapping, him kicking his feet up and doing that stupid jig that he did around the fire during Christmas—the menfolk just shook their heads. But Elliott had found a warm place in the hearts of the women and no matter what it was they were doing, they would stop, watch, ask, or fuss over him.
A man near forty, but standing no taller than a five-year-old. He was toothless and gray at the temples, but was swift on his feet and, as short as he was, he could jump a mile up into the air and talk louder than any tall man there.
“What you so happy ’bout?” Rosa asked, and folded her thick arms across her heavy breasts.
Elliott coming from midleap, came thudding down to earth, kicking up a cloud of dust. “We’s freeeeeeeeeeeeee!” he wailed, and started again stamping his feet, slapping his thighs, and chucking his shoulders up to the heavens.
“Free from what?” Rosa asked, laughing.
“Free from being enslaved. Free from the
yes Massas
and
no Massas
. Freeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!” Elliott did a spin on his heels.
“You a fool if there ever was one,” Willie remembered saying. Even though now it all felt like a dream. But it was true, ’cause he found himself replaying that day over and over in his mind, even as he walked those Alabama roads.
It wasn’t a dream, because every day he opened his eyes, he was right where he’d laid himself down and not back on the Miggs plantation with clucking chickens and fatback crackling in Rosa’s pan. He missed the fatback, though.
“Fool enough to know what I heard,” Elliott had said, and offered Willie a large toothless smile.
The women gathered, and even the men drew a little closer. There had been rumors, nothing else.
“Sumter come back—”
“Massa Miggs wit ’em?”
“Sumter say Massa Miggs fought the good fight, yes he did, but he took a bullet in the chest and died right there on the battlefield.”
The women clutched their chests and sucked the air out of the room. The men just grumbled.
“Missus a whole heap of sad. Sure ’nuff, wailing like the wind right about now.”
The women cocked their heads and listened. Sure enough, sorrow as light as a sun shower sailed through the air around them.
“You seen him, Sumter?”
“Yes ma’am. He come marching up the road, got the massa’s medals in one hand, jacket in the other.” Then Elliott’s eyes went moist, the women were sure of it. “He look direct at me and say,
President Lincoln say slavery is ’bolished
.”
“’Bolished?”
“That mean done wit. Over!” Elliott said, and stooped his body back into his jig pose.
“Wait,” Willie said just as Elliott was about to slap his palms together. “What the missus say?”
Elliott straightened his back, and a shade of annoyance darkened his face. He clenched his fists and pressed them against his round hips. “She say she
knew it was coming and now it’s here. So where’s my husband
?”
Everyone’s eyes bulged and they waited.
“And Sumter told her, and she fall down on her knees and begin to wail.”