Surveying the land, Vonnie felt his chest swell with pride. This was his, every inch of it. Every blade of grass, every weed and blooming wild rose.
He grinned.
His father had told him it would be this way. “You know,” Willie had said when Vonnie was just six years old, “this here will all be yours when I’m gone.”
Vonnie had eyed Willie as he swung the saddle onto the horse’s back. There were other sons, but Vonnie had an eye for things. A way with the pigs, knew how to handle the earth. He was the one who should get it; the others had fire in their eyes and North on their minds.
“All of it?” Vonnie had asked.
Willie nodded his head as he expertly pulled the strap tightly through the buckle of the saddle. “Everything that lives, breathes, and grows on this land will be yours,” he said as he checked the saddle’s sturdiness and then stood back and waited for Vonnie to hoist himself up. “And don’t you ever let no white man try and take it away from you, ya hear?”
He’d heard.
Heard it more than once. Heard it whispered, bellowed. It came as a demand, a threat. The story had always been scattered and confusing. Not one person wanting to tell it all or tell it straight.
But from what Vonnie and his siblings were able to put together over time, it was a story so unbelievable that they’d had to dismiss it as fable.
Slaves taking over a whole plantation, right in the middle of one of the most racist slave-holding states in the Union? “Puleeeeeeze,” Lou-Ann would always say whenever the story came up.
Vonnie scratched at his neck and walked on, the voices of his siblings ringing in his head.
“
And what was that mess about the last will and testament? The white men
?”
“Shot them dead on the front porch.”
“Nuh-uh, sliced their throats.”
“You a liar!”
“Not.”
“Mama never said that.”
Willie had told Vonnie.
Vonnie knew: stabbed and punctured. He looked up at the sky.
“Mama don’t say much. Brother told it one night from the bottom of a jar. I was real little, but I remember.”
Mama speaks to me. She trusts me. She tells me lots of things.
“Jar?”
“Filled with corn liquor.”
“Oh.”
“Anyway, bloodstains still there.”
Wasn’t no bloodstains, those washed away with the first rain, Vonnie mused.
“I ain’t going up to that house.”
“Haunted.”
“Evil.”
“And the will?”
“Never seen it.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“I do.”
Vonnie moved out to the edge of the rows of cotton, plucked a blossom, and examined it.
Their childhoods would have been lonely if there hadn’t been so many of them. Only faces they saw for many years were one another’s and those that stared back at them from looking glasses and the stream.
Papa, Spin, and Brother were the ones to go to town to buy provisions and sell the bales of cotton. Mama and Brother taught them their numbers and letters.
No one else came looking, asking questions?
Not that I ever heard.
When Mama had just five of us and was pregnant with the sixth, she looked up and a house was going up right across the road.
Our first neighbors.
Our first.
Then Brother got down.
Yeah, something started eating away at his toes.
And clear up his leg.
And clear down the other.
Died in his sleep.
Best way to go.
Spin got into some mess in town, didn’t he?
Something about a white woman.
I think it was a white man.
Ain’t it always?
Sure ’nuff.
Papa wouldn’t go and stand up for him.
Couldn’t. There would be questions.
That’s true.
What happened to him again?
Hung.
Lynched.
Gone.
Then things changed, right?
Yep.
We had neighbors.
More than one by then.
People stopping by to call.
I remember the first little girl I saw that wasn’t kin!
And then Papa died.
Saw the whip marks on his back when Mama washed his body down for burial
Me too.
Broke my heart.
Broke all of our hearts.
Papa was gone.
That part I know is true.
Good man.
Kind man.
Papa was gone.
And then things began to change again.
Mama said nowhere to go but forward.
Sure ’nuff.
Marriages and moving on.
Marriages and moving on.
One by one.
Sometimes in twos.
Mama said, Go on and spread that seed, I’ll be all right.
And she was.
And she is.
* * *
“Don’t you ever let no white man take this land from you!”
Vonnie had heard, and the words became part of him.
Everything that lives, breathes, and grows . . .
“You treat the land and what’s on it the right way, and God will reward you twofold,” Willie had said, holding up two long dark fingers.
* * *
Now, the sun just breaking the horizon, Vonnie moved slowly up and down the rows of cotton, carefully examining the stalks and the white puffed blooms they held and smiled, his mind clinging more to the new blossoms that slept comfortably inside of the house than the ones he fingered.
Willie had been right: God would reward him twofold.
___________________
It was the same every morning.
Suce walking through the house, swinging open bedroom doors, snatching at shutters, and tugging off blankets.
“Mornin’, time to get up now.”
Most times Dumpling was already awake, the smell of frying bacon and boiling grits getting her stomach going before her mind even stirred.
Beanie Moe was a hard one to rouse. It took Suce two or three visits and a swat on his behind before he would even open his eyes.
Lovey was the worst. She would suck her teeth and snatch the covers back over her head and mumble something Suce was sure was foul. “You ain’t too big for the switch,” Suce reminded her.
At the breakfast table, Lovey would sit with her arms folded across her chest and her face screwed up so tightly her eyes almost vanished, while Dumpling’s right hand gripped her fork and she watched like a starving pup as Beka or Helen moved from one child to the next, spooning grits, scrambled eggs, and smoked sausage onto their waiting plates.
Beanie Moe, forgetful of the rules, would shove a forkful of food into his mouth before the morning blessing had been said and now had a tender spot on the back of his head where Suce, Beka, or Helen had taken to popping him.
Lovey would take a few bites, push her plate away, and asked to be excused. “I’ll eat it,” Dumpling would sputter through a mouth already crammed tight with food.
“Pig!” Lovey would spit at her and storm from the room.
“I told you about that trash talk in this house,” Suce said.
It was hard for her, for all of them. Suce knew it; she’d lost her own mother young and still wept for missing her so much. She knew the children had had a different life in Phila-del-phia, but this was their life now, and they’d better try and get used to it.
“I’m done warning you; next time it’ll be me, that filthy mouth of yours, and the lye soap!”
___________________
Lovey had found a hiding place far up the hill alongside the skeletal remains of the big house. In that place, where wild honeysuckle clamored for space on the rotting beams and a young sap pushed its way through the decaying floorboards of what used to be the center hall. Birds made their nests on windowsills that stuck out like lips, and black squirrels scurried up and down the corroding stairway.
Lovey was not afraid of that place, dark and looming as it was. However, Dumpling and Beanie Moe found it to be spooky, and anyway, they warned Lovey as they started back down the hill, “Granny said we’re not to come up here.”
“I don’t care what she said,” Lovey slung back at them, and settled herself down on a tree stump.
She’d seen Lillie up there. She wouldn’t tell them that, though. If she told them, then she would have to share her, and she didn’t want to do that.
She’d seen Lillie sitting cross-legged on the hill, bathed in the blue full moonlight, dressed in red, smiling, throwing kisses down at her, beckoning her to come. And she did, stealing out of the house and running barefoot but sure through the late-night cool.
When Lovey reached the top of the hill, breathless, eager, Lillie was gone, but the scent of Evening in Paris was everywhere and so Lovey knew that she had not been dreaming.
Every night after that, Lovey went to the place, singing the bedtime lullabies Lillie had once sung to her, humming tunes that her mother had once swayed to in their Philadelphia parlor. Every night she went in search of her, peeking behind trees, lifting loose stones, calling out, “Lillie, Lillie girl!”
It wasn’t until the night she carried the red gloves along as an offering and laid them across the spot on the ground she’d first seen her mother resting on that Lillie finally came.
First as a glow of ruby and then a full woman, peeking around the sycamore tree like a small child.
Lillie, done up in a red silk dress with a blooming skirt that made rustling sounds like dried leaves. “Oooh,” she moaned as she stepped from behind the tree and looked lovingly down at the gloves.
“I know you miss them, Mama.” Lovey spoke in a quiet voice that was laced with excitement. She folded her hands and held them at her middle, unsure if she should step closer.
Lillie nodded her head yes.
Lovey saw that her mother was as beautiful as ever—hair gleaming and curled at the ends, pulled to one side and cascading over her right shoulder. Lovey quickly used her hands to smooth down her own hair. She rubbed at the cold in the corner of her eyes, licked at her parched lips. She wanted to look good for her mother. She wanted to look just like her mother.
“Go on, Mama. Pick ’em up,” Lovey urged, so eager to please, not caring one bit that Lillie hadn’t said how much she’d missed her.
Lillie just stared and then her eyes fluttered and set on Lovey. They were sad, brimming with tears.
“Can’t you, Mama?”
Lillie sadly shook her head no.
Lovey bent down and retrieved the gloves; she stroked the material and Lillie moaned softly. Lovey slipped one glove on and Lillie’s tears disappeared. The other now and Lillie flung her head back in ecstasy
Lovey understood. “I can wear them for you, Mama, huh?”
Lillie smiled.
Lovey was elated. “Anything else I can do for you, Mama?”
Lillie’s smile became menacing as she slowly turned her head, moving her gaze from Lovey and planting it squarely down on the saltbox.
* * *
So there, in that place wrapped in shadows, away from Wella’s babbling and Dumpling and Beanie Moe’s endless battles over food, away from Suce’s spite and threats, away from Beka’s and Helen’s comforting hugs and Vonnie’s cruel mouth, Lovey could have her mother again, could rock to the lullabies she sang to her, could feel her completely, could be her.
___________________
“Be careful with her, Vonnie,” Helen warned as she watched from the doorway. Vonnie had Wella by her hands, swinging her through the air. The child’s face would twist with terror and then glee with each round they took.
“What he doing?” Beka came up behind her. “Oh,” she gasped when she saw what was happening. “He’s certainly taken a liking to her.”
Helen wasn’t sure, but she thought she heard some malice in Beka’s voice and she turned to look her full in the face.
“What?” Beka said, her eyes innocent.
Nothing.
They stood watching until Wella hollered, “Stop!” and Vonnie reluctantly set the girl on the ground. The whole top part of Wella’s round body swayed and she raised her pudgy hands and pressed them against her head.
“See, now she’s dizzy,” Helen called, and started toward them.
Vonnie stood stiffly aside as Helen gathered Wella into her arms and took her back to the house. He seemed not to know what to do next and stood staring at the spot where Wella had been until Beka made a sound in her throat.
“You seen Lovey?” she said, needing to fill the emptiness between them.
Vonnie didn’t answer, but he turned his gaze up toward the house. Beka’s eyes followed, and she shook her head in dismay.
Vonnie looked back down at the ground and then suddenly said, “Tell Mama I went to town.”
He strode off, back straight, hat pulled low over his eyes, and climbed into his pickup truck and drove off.
* * *
No one would suspect him to be a middle-of-the-day type of man. Him—black-skinned, wide-brimmed hat, and heavy black boots. Everything about him screamed after sundown and before dawn. But there he was, climbing out of his pickup, just before noon.
Sawyer smiled as she watched him through the lace curtains of the window. Below her, the barbershop buzzed with conversation and the clicking sounds of scissors. In the next room, a man moaned loudly and the thumping sounds that had gone on for less than three minutes came to an abrupt end.