by Jesmyn Ward
There are people: tiny and distinct. They fly and walk and float and run. They are alone. They are together. They wander the summits. They swim in the rivers and sea. They walk hand in hand in the parks, in the squares, disappear into the buildings. They are never silent. Ever present is their singing: they don’t move their mouths and yet it comes from them. Crooning in the yellow light. It comes from the black earth and the trees and the ever-lit sky. It comes from the water. It is the most beautiful song I have ever heard, but I can’t understand a word.
I am gasping when the vision passes. The dark underbelly of River’s house looms before me: creaking then silent. I look to my right and see a flash of the water, the rivers, the wilderness, the cities, the people. Then darkness. I look to my left and see that world again, and then it is gone. I claw at the air, but my hands strike nothing; they rend no doorways to that golden isle.
Absence. Isolation. I keen.
* * *
When I leave the crawl space as the sun rises, Leonie and Michael are slamming car doors and walking toward the house. The trees are still and silent in the blue dawn light, the air even wetter than the day before. The sun is a hint of shining light through the trees. The sound of the water is strongest now: that other place hovers at the edge of my vision. As they half walk, half stumble together, Leonie looks over her shoulder like someone walks there, on her right, behind her. I dart forward because I see a flash. For a breath, someone is there, someone with a face like Jojo’s, lanky and tall like Riv, someone with the same eyes as the saltwater woman who lays in the bed. And then, nothing. Only air. Leonie and Michael stop at the door, hug and murmur, while I circle the spot where I saw the flash. The air feels like needles.
“You need to sleep, sugar baby,” Michael says.
“I can’t. Not yet,” Leonie says.
“Just lay down with me.”
“I got something to do.”
“Really?”
“I’ll be back,” Leonie says. They kiss and I turn away. Something about the way Michael grips the back of her neck and Leonie palms his face seems desperate. So desperate and needy it demands privacy. He disappears into the house, and she walks down the side of the road. I cannot help but follow her. We walk single file under the overarching oaks, the cypress, the pines. The road is so old it’s almost been beat to gravel. Every so often, there is a house, silent and shut: in some, people speak in low voices, brew coffee, cook eggs. Rabbits and horses and goats graze for their morning feed: some of the horses come to the lips of their yards, raise their heads above their fences, and Leonie brushes their wet noses with her palm as she walks past. The houses come a little closer together. Leonie crosses the street and I see it: a graveyard. The headstones are half-ovals dug into the earth. Some have pictures on them, pictures of the dead once living. She stops in front of a grave nearer the front of the cemetery, where the newly dead are buried, and as she sinks to her knees in front of it, I see the boy I saw over Leonie’s shoulder this morning, but now he is etched into marble, and under the picture of his face, a name: Given Blaise Stone. Leonie pulls a cigarette from her pocket and lights it. The smell of it is soot and ash.
“You ain’t never here.”
Birds are awaking in the trees.
“Would you do it, Given?”
They rustle and turn.
“She’s giving up.”
They chirp and alight.
“Would you?”
The birds swoop over our heads. They chatter one to the other.
“Would you give her what she wants?”
Leonie is crying now. She ignores the tears, lets them fall from the blade of her chin to her chest. When they freckle the skin of her collarbone, only then does she wipe them off.
“Maybe I’m too selfish.”
A small gray bird lands at the edge of the plot. It needles the earth, twice, feeling for breakfast. Leonie sighs, and it catches and bubbles into a laugh.
“Of course you won’t come.”
She bends and picks up a stone embedded in the dirt above Given’s grave, and she untucks her shirt, holds the hem, and puts the rock into the pocket made by the hanging material. She stands and talks to the air, and the bird hops and flitters away.
“What did I expect?”
Leonie wanders among the headstones, bending and collecting rocks from all the graves, from those just beginning to gather on raw earth, to those at the center and back of the graveyard, where the stones are wind- and water-worn, the names shallow etchings. The birds wheel up in a great flock in the sky, away to find richer earth. When Leonie walks home, the basket made by the front of her shirt is heavy with rocks, and she cries. The long road is quiet. Her tears darken the stone. They are still wet when she walks into the house, past Jojo and Riv and Kayla, still asleep in the living room, into her mother’s room. The smell in that room is all salt: ocean and blood. She kneels and lets them tumble out and onto the floor, looks at the saltwater woman, who has startled awake, and says:
“Okay.”
The tears and the ocean and the blood could burn a hole through the nose. The saltwater woman, the woman Leonie crawls toward over the rocks as she says, “Mama, Mama,” looks at Leonie with so much understanding and forgiveness and love that I hear the song again; I know that singing. I have heard it from the golden place across the waters. A great mouth opens in me and wails; I am an empty stomach.
The scaly bird lands on the windowsill and caws.
Chapter 13
Jojo
Last night, Richie crawled under the house and sang. I listened to it rise up through the floor, and I couldn’t sleep. Pop turned his back to us as he slept and coughed, over and over again. Kayla woke to whimpering every half hour, and I shushed her over the sound of the singing. We all slept late, but Pop has risen by the time I get up from the sofa. Kayla throws her arm over where I slept, and I pull the sheet over her. It’s almost noon when I walk out to the yard, to see the boy crouched in the tree outside Mam’s window. Somewhere out in the back, I hear Pop’s axe swish and thud.
“Come on,” I whisper.
I don’t look up at the tree when I say it, don’t look at the boy inching down, dropping and making no noise, raising no dust. If he was a real boy, the bark would come off in little papery flakes, fall like dry rain. But it doesn’t. He stands next to me, curved at the shoulders. He knows I’m talking to him. I lead him across the sun-washed yard and back into the shadows of the woods, where Pop is. A sound like hammering pops and rings in the silence. And again. Pop is beating something. I mean to walk like him: head up, shoulders straight, back a plank, but I find my head down, back curled. All of me drooping. Whenever Pop done told me his and Richie’s story, he talked in circles. Telling me the beginning over and over again. Telling me the middle over and over again. Circling the end like a big black buzzard angles around dead animals, possums or armadillos or wild pigs or hit deer, bloating and turning sour in the Mississippi heat.
Pop’s banging apart one of the old pens: hitting a corner of it with a sledgehammer until it buckles and folds, already half buried in the dirt. I stop, and Richie walks two steps more and stops. I can’t decide whether he is eating the sun or shrugging it off; either way, it’s like his shadow is laid over his skin, a dark mask from head to toe, and it walks with him. His hair is the longest I’ve ever seen it, and it stands up from his head like parasitic moss. Pop swings the hammer down and it cracks, the splinters turned to shards. His sweat is a glaze.
“Termites got in it. Eating it hollow,” Pop says. “Won’t keep nothing in and nothing out once they done with it.”
“You need help?” I ask.
“Kick these boards together,” Pop says.
He swings the sledgehammer again, splinters the wood at the joints. I kick the logs to herd them to a pile: where my foot hits, dust rises. Termites spin and flutter through the air, swarming. Their white wings flashing. Pop swings again. Grunts.
“Pop?”
“
Yeah.”
“You never told me the end to that story.”
“What story?”
“About that boy, Richie.”
The hammer hits the dirt. Pop never misses. He sniffs and swings the sledgehammer like a golf club, testing its weight. Feeling the swing. A termite lands on my cheek and I swat it off, try not to frown, to keep my face smooth as Pop’s.
“What’s the last piece I told you?”
“You said he was sick. He’d just got whipped and he was hot and throwing up. You said he said he wanted to go home.”
Richie stands untouched by the termites. They waft away from him on an invisible wind. Find us, they say. I brush them away with my whole hand, but Pop flinches and flicks them with two fingers.
“That’s what I said,” Richie says, so low his voice could be the brush of my hand across my face, Pop’s finger along his eyebrow.
Pop nods.
“He tried to escape. Well, naw, he ain’t try. He did it.”
“He broke out?”
Pop swings. The wood cracks and crumbles.
“Yeah,” Pop says. He kicks at the wood, but there’s no force in it.
“So he went home?”
Pop shakes his head. Looks at me like he’s trying to figure out how tall I am, how big my hands, how long my feet. I can wear his shoes now: sometimes when he sends me on errands when it’s raining outside, I put on the boots he keeps just inside the back door at the bottom of the pantry. I look at him and raise my eyebrows. Tell him without saying it: I can hear this. I can listen.
“Was a gunman named Blue that did it. It was a baseball Sunday; there was visitors. Some good-time girls, some men’s wives came. But Blue ain’t never had nobody. Called him Blue because he was so dark he shined like a plum in the sun, on the line. But he wasn’t right in the head; that’s why none of the women would talk to him. Wouldn’t take no visits with him. So he caught one of the women inmates out by the outhouses, and dragged her off into a stand.” Pop stops, looks back at the house.
“What he do?” I say.
“He raped her,” Pop says. “She was a strong woman, hands near as callused as his from all the picking and sewing she did, but she wasn’t no match for him. Hit anybody in the head hard enough, it knock them out. Her face—you could barely recognize her. And maybe nothing would have happened to Blue for doing it if she hadn’t been the sergeant’s wife’s favorite. Always the one she called to hang wash and scrub floors or mind the kids. Blue had enough brains to know that. So he left her there, striped skirt up around her head, covering her bloody face, that fabric turning muddy and red. Left her breathing bubbles. To run. But before he could get away good, he found Richie. I don’t know where. Whether Richie was around the kitchens or the bathrooms or taking tools from one place to the next, but when Blue lit out, Richie was with him.”
“I found them,” Richie says. “He was climbing up off her. Big bloody hands. Was one of the strongest gunmen; he could outpick most everybody. He say to me: You want a face like hers, boy? I told him no. And he waved one of them big hands and said: Come. Part of me went because I didn’t want him to turn my face red like hers. And part of me went because I was sick of that place. Because I wanted to go.”
The woods around us are a great dark green tangle: oaks reaching low and wide, vines tangled around trunks and drooping from branches, poison sumac and swamp tupelo and cypress and magnolia growing up around us in a circular wall.
“You went after them?” I ask.
Richie’s leaning toward Pop so far that if he were alive, he’d have fell. His jaw works from side to side, his teeth grinding against each other.
“Yes.” Pop squeezes the hammer so hard his knuckles whiten, and then he lets his hands loose. He squeezes again, lets his hands loosen.
“Yes,” Richie says. “Yes.”
A crane cuts the air, gray and pink-kneed, overhead. It doesn’t squawk or call. It says nothing.
“What happen?”
Pop measures me again. I push my shoulders back, make sure my chin stays hard.
“Jojo?”
I nod.
“A man like Blue? Is a man like Hogjaw.”
Hogjaw: the big, brutal White man who worked with Pop and the dogs. Pop swings and another corner of the pen collapses.
“Got no regard for life. Any life.”
Richie opens and closes his mouth. Works his tongue between his teeth. It is as if he is eating air.
“I had to track them.”
Swallowing Pop’s words.
“Less mind was paid to the women on Sundays. Was five hours before anybody found her, realized Blue and Richie was missing, before the sergeant put it all together,” Pop says. “That’s enough time to run them fifteen miles to the edge of Parchman. To get back to the free world. The warden yelling at everybody, his clothes wet as if he’d went swimming in them. A White woman next! he said.”
“It was enough time,” Richie says. His voice grating and hollow as a frog’s croak. Starved for rain. “He ran so fast. Sometimes I had to follow him by sound. Him talking to hisself the whole time. Not hisself. His mama. Telling her he was coming home. That he wanted her to sing for him. Sing for your son, he said. Sing.”
The hammer whistles through the air. The termites writhe in their ruined home.
“I wasn’t fast enough. He came up on a girl fetching water from a spring. Knocked her down,” Pop says. “Ripped her dress clean down the front. She ran home, holding it like that. Little White girl with red hair. Told her daddy some crazy nigger attacked her.”
“I stopped him,” Richie says. “Hit him with a tree limb. Hard enough to get him off her. Hard enough to get me punched in the face.”
“Word was out by then. Richie and Blue had run long and far enough for the sun to set, and White folks was gathering. All the menfolk. Little boys younger than Richie in overalls hanging by one strap on the backs of pickups. What seemed like a thousand of them. Look like their faces had a red mist on them in the truck lights, but everything else about them look black in the dark: clothes, hair, eyes. I could see it on them: the way every damn one of them seemed to lean forward, eager as hounds to the hunt. And the laughing. They couldn’t stop. And I knew that when it came to the two of them, when it came to Blue and Richie, they wasn’t going to tell no difference. They was going to see two niggers, two beasts, who had touched a White woman.”
Richie has never been so still, so silent. His mouth frozen open. His eyes wide and black. He is balanced on his toes, and he could be made of stone. But every part of Pop moves: his hands as he speaks; his shoulders folding forward as softly as a flower wilting at the hottest part of the day. I’ve never seen them do that. His face, all the lines of his face, sliding against each other like the fault lines of the great fractured earth. What undergirds it: pain. The sledgehammer fallen.
“I ran them dogs past the fence, past the edge of Parchman, out into the Delta. Through the flat plain, the earth turned to scrub and balded from them black hands. All them black hands. The dirt black as them hands and crumbly. The way it gives under the foot, leaves clear tracks. I followed their tracks, and the dogs followed the smell, through the bristly stands of trees, over them deceitful fields, past the spring and the shacks to more fields, more shacks with White men and boys gathering and swarming. Moving like one thing. To kill.”
Pop ducks his head, wipes his sweat on his shoulder. He stomps his foot and it is like a horse’s, warning before it kicks.
“What happen?” I prod.
Pop doesn’t look up.
“Warden and sergeants was in cars on the road, following the dogs. Their baying. All them men roaming, had they dogs out, too, and it was a boy who stumble across Blue. He was up a tree in one of them stands to the west. I had to squint at the shouts that came up when they found him. They started firing off they rifles, and the warden and sergeants and trusty shooters rode that way. I heeled my dogs. Waited. Because they wasn’t pointed west. They was point
ed north, and I knew it was Richie they followed. Wasn’t five minutes passed before I saw the bonfire they lit, and I knew what was happening. I knew before I even heard Blue start screaming.”
Richie blinks. His fingers splayed like a bird’s wings. His blinks start slow, but as Pop talks, they get faster until they’re blurred like a hummingbird, and all I see are his eyes, his black eyes, with a thin scrim over them.
“One of the trusties told me later they was cutting pieces of him off. Fingers. Toes. Ears. Nose. And then they started skinning him. That’s when I followed the dogs, making them quiet, across that sky turning from blue to black, across them fields, to another stand of trees. And Richie hunched down at the base of one, cupping his black eye. Crying. Nose up, listening to Blue and the crowd.”
Richie makes fists, lets them go. Makes fists. Spreads his fingers to wings.
“They was going to do the same to him. Once they got done with Blue. They was going to come for that boy and cut him piece from piece till he was just some bloody, soft, screaming thing, and then they was going to string him up from a tree.”
Pop looks at me. Every piece of him aquiver.
“He wasn’t nothing but a boy, Jojo. They kill animals better than that.”
I nodded again. Richie is winding his arms around himself, hugging tighter and tighter, his arms and fingers growing incredibly long.
“I said: It’s going to be all right, Richie. He said: You going to help me? Riv, which way should I go? I heeled the dogs. Held out my hands to him, light side out. Moved slow. Soothed him. Said: We gone get you out of this. We gone get you away from here. Touched his arm: he was burning up. I’m going home, Riv? he asked. I squatted down next to him, the dogs steady yipping, and I looked at him. He had baby hair on the edge of his scalp, Jojo. Little fine hair he’d had since he sucked at his mama’s tit. Yes, Richie. I’m a take you home, I said. And then I took the shank I kept in my boot and I punched it one time into his neck. In the big vein on his right side. Held him till the blood stopped spurting. Him looking at me, mouth open. A child. Tears and snot all over his face. Shocked and scared, until he was still.”
