Grace Read online

  Massa brung that black man with him tonight, too. The one who started the knockin. I can feel him thumping Momma through the wall. It sets a pace in my chest like a drummer ’bout to lead a marching band. When I close my eyes, I imagine I see ’em, black boys dressed in raggedy clothes, holding fourth-hand instruments, ready to please the crowd.

  Knockin’s stopped.

  That means Momma’s through.

  Me and Hazel tiptoe fast to the split in the wall. Hazel always beat me to it cause she don’t never want me to see Momma after the knockin. Say it’s private. But I want the light from the other room to slide over my face, too, so I cheat and step back a little, just behind her.

  I can see Momma sitting on the edge of the bed wit no clothes on. That black man that was on top of her don’t have no clothes neither, just walking ’cross the room like he ain’t got no care in the world even though he black like us.

  He make the light disappear when he pass us.

  Massa Hilden’s in there, too, standing in the corner watching. He don’t never wear the jacket to that brown suit. His whole body’s swole up in the material, making it cinch tight around his waist like a blouse. A gap in his shirt spreads open where the button’s gone. It mouths silent words when his gut moves from breathing. The hair on his belly is poking through the gap, thick and coarse and tangled like a pile of wadded thread, brown and white. It loops and crisscrosses over his shiny pink belly fat.

  Cain’t see his silly shoes, though.

  Those make me laugh cause they long and skinny and ugly like the pillow bandages Hazel make for our monthly flow. He’s walking in ’em.

  On the back of his trousers, a lump sticks out above his butt where he keeps his pistol. Its off-white handle, the color of new teeth, is showing just above his waist and it keeps everybody in order, even white peoples. He always got it on him, can get downright dangerous when he’s drinking. Killed a white man a few years back. He tells people it was an accident but Hazel say he meant to. He shoot at a lot of people. Even my real daddy. It’s why Hazel knows my daddy was fast. Massa said my daddy wasted his time, wouldn’t sign the papers to buy that land, coulda sold it to somebody else so he shot at ’im. He called the law on Massa. Didn’t nothing happen, though.

  “Naomi, get back! You gon’ mess around and get us all killed,” Hazel whisper.

  “I just want to see his shoes, is all.”

  “Shhh . . .” she say, waving me away.

  I ease back a little. “They leavin? Momma ready for us now?”

  I hear Massa. “I need males. Nine months of waiting needs to pay off bigger for me. These girls ain’t pulling in nothing. No more girls, you hear me? Else they gon’ end up like you.”

  “Yes’sa, Massa Hilden,” Momma say. “God gon’ bless me wit a boy this time.”

  “And how’s Hazel?” he say. Hazel slides away from the wall slow like she don’t want to hear. She come toward me and I step aside, pretend I ain’t interested in getting in front of her to see Massa’s long baby feet.

  “She should be of age now,” he say.

  “No suh, no suh,” Momma say in a hurry. “She’s just a baby.”

  “You just make sure it’s a boy this time.”

  “Yes’sa, Massa Hilden. Yes’sa.”

  I tiptoe around Hazel fast so she cain’t catch me before I get to the wall but she don’t race me this time. I smash my face in front of the opening. Cain’t see nothin. I get on my knees and look through the bottom hole. All I see is Momma sad and Massa gone.

  Hazel’s on the other side of the room now, sitting close to the candlelight, flipping through the pages of her Bible. Massa’s mother gave the Bible to Hazel and two cousins. Said it would keep every one of us from being a heathen. But Hazel’s the only one she taught to read it. Just the first page before she died. The rest Hazel figured out on her own.

  “‘In the beginning,’” Hazel say with tears seeping through her lashes, “‘God created the heavens . . .’” Her voice cracks from the tears caught in her throat. The free ones roll down her face and drip on her page. She looks at me, whispers, “You see that poker near the fire where Momma is?”

  I turn back ’round on my knees to see through the hole again. “The one you found?” I say.

  “That’s it. You see the end? It’s sharp. I grind it myself. It’s strong now. It’s ready.”

  “Ready for what, Hazel?”

  The door slams shut in the other room and I jump up. “Come on, Hazel! Momma’s ready for us!”

  Hazel reach out to stop me even though she ain’t close enough to get me.

  I stop anyway. “But I want to see her, Hazel.”

  “Not now.”

  “I want to see her.”

  “Not now, Naomi!”

  I stomp my foot, twist up my arms.

  “Momma needs more time,” she say. “Not like before. She gotta try harder, make a baby. A boy baby for Massa Hilden. Get the most money.”

  “I know she wanna see us.”

  “Naomi, look . . . what Momma’s doin . . . what he make her do. Changes women. Makes ’em different.”

  “Somethin’s wrong wit Momma?”

  Hazel sighs the way she do when we daydreaming on the porch at night, when she’s telling me about her North. I go close to her, dress myself with her, slipping under her arm and resting there. “North,” she say, “is a place where we could belong to ourselves and to the people we choose, in love and kindness, and in the sharing of God’s good things.”

  “Let’s go North,” I tell Hazel to make her happy again. “Let’s find that star. Take Momma and go that way.”

  “Ain’t just a direction,” she say. I hold her hand up to the end of my corded braid and she takes it between her fingertips, unbraids it, and combs her fingers through. “The North Star don’t mean nothin to those who cain’t read it. Could mean south or east or west, just the same.”

  “That’s why I got you,” I say. Hazel’s my guide, my light in darkness, one of them stars that like a handful of little moons were shrunk to pebbles, then flung to the heavens where they sat.

  “Then I’ll teach you,” she say. She wraps her arms around me and pulls me into her softness. “One day, we gon’ go to Boston where it’s safe. We gon’ wear the pretty dresses Momma made us and drink sweet tea all day long.”

  2 / FLASH

  Faunsdale, Alabama, 1846

  SINCE ME AND Hazel had our birthday four months ago and I turned fifteen, I started to notice thangs. Like how every spring the musty smell of grass and dew warmed by the sun clogs my nose and makes me sneeze. And how the cotton fields throw small balls in the air and twirl ’em around in the wind. The boys trample ’em under their feet and the girls make doll babies with ’em. Sometimes I imagine the cotton pieces are alive ’cause of how they chase me.

  I notice how Mama Dean always sits in the same place in the middle of the quad next to that spinning wheel, talking to it. She look young even though her gray hair say she old. Been white since she was fifteen, she told me. Her skin is still smooth and it’s charcoal black—a color only God could paint and make look right.

  I been sitting with her for hours today, studying how she move with that machine, holding firm to that cotton, pacing it through its big wooden wheel when it zip and creak around.

  From far away, the wheel looks tacked in the sky on nothin. From here, though, I can see its two wooden hands reaching up from the bench, pinning the wheel between ’em, coaxing the cotton from Mama Dean’s man-sized hands. It slip through her fingers like webs sliding out of spiders. “Simply trial and error, Naomi. Would you like to try?”

  Mama Dean speaks better than us. She spent three generations in the Hilden household, teaching and cleaning and caring for Massa’s momma ’til she passed. His momma hired a doctor to come daily with vials of pain medication and had him stay to make sure she’d die of natural causes and not them.

  Massa stayed bitter about how the doctor’s visits subtracted from h
is inheritance.

  Then she died.

  That’s when Massa told Mama Dean that he needed the spare room to “organize his affairs.” She was slow, he said, and taking up space, he said, and he could use Violet in the house and the field, he said.

  So she’s with us now.

  “No, Mama Dean . . . all I do is tangle it right up.”

  “Your mother started off tangling things like you. Then she became the best. She could spin the most beautiful textures for you and your sisters’ dresses.”

  I look over at Momma sitting and rocking on the porch all blank-faced and quiet, the same place Hazel put her this morning. Hard to imagine her moving any other way. My mind ain’t like Hazel’s. She remember thangs from when she was two years old. I might have a pocketful of memories from before eight. That was about the time Momma stopped talking all together, the same time Hazel put the sixth and seventh marks on the wall—twin girls.

  Hazel say pain’s got a way of etching memories into people’s minds, even a child’s, and holds its place there for a lifetime. That’s why she remembers. She say her memories keep her guilty, blame her for not doing the thangs that only grown folks woulda known to do. She say she’s aged into her bad memories, helpless as the day she got ’em ’cause she still cain’t go inside ’em and fix nothin.

  “Naomi!” I hear from behind me. Hazel’s flying out of the woods, calling me and grinning, and calling again. I get up and smile, too, ’cause I know she got something good to say. Trailing behind her is her skinny, big-eyed beau, James. They holding hands even though he ain’t supposed to be here. They been sneaking through the woods together since last summer, going to secret meetings. I followed her one night and saw her meet eight negroes from the plantation down river where James come from. All of ’em was boys except the two piss yellow green-eyed girls and Hazel. All but Hazel was house negroes.

  They sat around the fire, real close and quiet, talking private. Hazel started off the group praying, reading the Bible and that was all right, I guess. But after then, they got to talking crazy, talking ’bout running North. But I don’t understand. What do house niggas got to run for? What they got to lose? They live in the big house, get treated good. Now they trying to trade an easy life and a kind master to starve. Worse, get kilt. “Freedom,” they said. “North,” they said. I keep my freedom in my mind.

  The more I listened to Hazel, though, I could see her almost fooled by ’em. They probably want to leave her somewhere, make her the ’scape donkey. She nodded her head with ’em saying her um hums, and thas rights. I knew she didn’t mean none of it, though. The only reason she go to them meetings is ’cause a James. He’s sweet.

  I’ve seen the way he is with her. When they’re walking, he’ll reach for her side to guide her this way or that, hardly touching her but she’s moved. If not direction, inside herself. Her hardened brick body becomes something looser. Frail. Like crumbling rock. No . . . sand. Like she’s made of drying wet sand and any brush could crumble her away. And that night I last followed ’em, he skipped his fingertips along the back of her hand, then around to her palm and through her fingers before settling into the spaces.

  She didn’t break apart, though.

  Only her gritty edges tumbled away. Changed her. One day, I want to be changed, too.

  When she get to me, I say, “Tell me, Hazel! Tell me!”

  “We gettin married!”

  We both scream and hug and Mama Dean claps her hands, then holds ’em to her mouth. I say, “You gon’ have to practice me now, Mama Dean. We goin to a weddin’!”

  I grab James and do a twirl and a jig wit him, do another dance on my own. Hazel puts her hands on my shoulders, trying to hold me in place. “Naomi?”

  “I’m just warmin’ up, Hazel!”

  “Naomi?” she say, pressing down harder on me. “We goin North. We gon’ run.”

  My stomach drops out of me.

  My feet stop directly.

  All I can think about is Berry and Francis who only made it as far as the creek, then didn’t. “Run?” I say.

  “They talkin ’bout war, Naomi. War to free us. The time to be a slave is over.”

  I don’t want to die.

  I unpin my hair and turn my back to Hazel so she see I want her to braid it, but she only runs her fingers through it once, then pats my head. “We all goin together,” she say. “You and Momma comin, too.”

  I start fixing Hazel’s hair real fast and put it how she like it so she forget about running.

  “Me and James’ll be like Abraham and Sarah in the Bible.”

  “You want your hair up or down?” I say. “It’s pretty up.”

  “You hear what I said, Naomi?”

  I want her to stop talking about war or leaving so I bend my arms in her face to get her hair good. It’s an accident that I’m smashing my arm in her mouth so she cain’t talk, but her mushed mouth keeps moving anyway.

  “It’s your wedding, Hazel. I’m gon’ make you the prettiest bride ever was.”

  She untangles herself from behind my arms and yells to Momma on the porch. “Momma! Me and James gon’ ask permission. We gettin married!”

  Momma don’t move.

  She never do.

  3 / FLASH

  Faunsdale, Alabama, 1846

  THE RAIN’S BEEN slapping the ground all day, soaking through the house, making our floors mud.

  Hazel put a fire on to keep us warm. I like to watch it burn yellow and orange and see-through—a halo of colors birthing light through the ruins like the rainbow after the flood. It reminds me that God’s still here.

  I been getting better at my reading since it’s been getting dark early. Hazel’s been practicing me for hours today and my butt bone hurt, but ever since she said, “Use the only part of your backside wit some meat on it,” I been tilted up on my thighs so this oak chair don’t hurt so much. If I was big and healthy like Hazel, I could sit any ole kinda way, but as it is, I got to sit crooked.

  The boys especially like her healthy. You’d think them boys could see right through her clothes the way they stare at her chest. She keeps her arms crossed when she outside so cain’t nobody see ’em. Peoples think she got a bad attitude because of it. Truth is, the only thing she ever hated was her big tits. I wouldn’t mind if I had ’em even though she say they sweat underneath. I’d be happy to wipe ’em dry all day long but I ain’t even got a bump yet.

  Hazel promised that my fat’s gon’ come after I get my period. I ain’t told her it come last month cause I’m gon’ surprise her. Just wake up one morning wit a big fat butt and big tits and Hazel gon’ say, “Why you wearin’ my britches?” And I’m gon’ say, “My ass too big for mine.” Then we both gon’ laugh.

  But today, I got just one fat leg.

  Yesterday, a wasp stung me on it when I was popping berries from that ole mulberry bush next to the pigpen. It hurt so bad and I cried so loud ’til I seen my leg getting big. By the time I got home, it was swolled up like an air-blown pig gut. I ran back to that ole bush and spent the rest of the night swatting at it so that wasp come back and get the other one. He didn’t come back, though. Now I got just one pretty leg. I been sitting wit it half off the chair, swinging it around so Hazel can see. But she ain’t said nothin, yet.

  Momma’s been pacing the room since she got back from the church gathering this morning with Massa’s nana and the other white folk. She allow Momma to go, stand outside the window and listen.

  Momma’s brushing the dust off the window shutters wit her fingernails. More like a scraping but we don’t stop her. Thas how she keep busy sometimes. It let me and Hazel keep to our reading. We take turns. It’s Hazel’s turn now. “‘Yay though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me.’”

  “Hazel?” I say. “God like art?”

  “What? No, art means are. You are with me.”

  “Well, why they talk like that? Thy
and though?”

  “That’s just how God talk. Let me finish.”

  “A’right.”

  “‘Thou preparest a table . . .’”

  “Hazel?”

  “What.”

  “You think God understands us then? We don’t talk like that.”

  “He understands all different kind a talk.”

  “What about Momma? She don’t talk. He understand her, too?”

  “I imagine he do. Now let me finish, then you can read.”

  I be quiet.

  She starts slow like she think I’m gon’ say something but I’m just gon’ listen this time. She say, “‘Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of my enemies.’”

  “Hazel? What ‘preparest’ mean?”

  “God’s expecting you. Always with you. Even when you don’t think He is. When your enemies are all around you.” She push the Bible to me. “Here, now you . . .”

  A hush covers our room. The rain quit beating, the bugs quit chirping, and Momma stopped scratching, all at once. The kind of off-quiet that make you pay attention and expect. Like the moment after lightning, waiting on thunder.

  Hazel turns ’round to the door, then back to me but not looking at me, listening for something. When it don’t come she taps her Bible, say, “Now you read.”

  A loud knock at the door stops me, scares me. I don’t know who that knock belongs to ’cause it’s hard and slow and nobody’s supposed to be out after dusk on a Sunday.

  Hazel listens to the door, using her whole body to hear it, watches, but don’t get up.

  Momma starts brushing the shutters again.

  “Hazel?” I whisper.

  She puts her hand over my mouth. When the knock starts again, she gets up quickly but I don’t want her to answer it.