The Revisioners

by Margaret Wilkerson Sexton

  She points to her jewelry box, and I lean over toward her bureau and pass it to her. She lifts a diamond necklace from it.

  “You like this?” she asks.

  “Very much,” I say. My mama had found religion in her New Age church and since then she’d say we had different strains of ourselves in the universe, like there was me here sitting with Grandma Martha, but there was the other version of myself who had finished college in four years, not seven, who didn’t eat mint chocolate chip ice cream at night, who married the right man, or at least divorced King’s daddy sooner. There was the version of myself who knew how beautiful I was, how smart, how kind. A version of myself who didn’t need an alarm clock because she had ambition ringing through her bones, and that woman attended balls where she wore that diamond necklace.

  “It’s yours,” Grandma Martha says now.

  “No, no way in the world,” I say shaking my head. “I could never. That’s not what this is,” I add just to be clear.

  She stretches her cheeks in a quiet smile. “I was going to give it to you anyway. It will look so nice against your beautiful brown skin, and the other grandchildren, well, they don’t deserve the pot I piss in to be frank.”

  I laugh. “But Grandma Martha, I saw the photo of you at your husband’s, at Grandfather’s, swearing in,” I correct myself. “You wore it then and it was beautiful. You might want to remember it that way.”

  She shakes her head. “There will be a time coming real soon when I’ll be beneath the dirt and you’ll be above it, and there’s no jewelry in the world that’s going to spring me back up again, now is there?”

  I don’t know what to say to that. She talks like this sometimes and I don’t like it. I hadn’t grown up with her but I am getting used to leaning on her, more and more each year.

  “All right, Grandma.” I stand and kiss her cheek. “I’m just a floor away.”

  I turn down her lights.

  I check in on King on my way to my own room.

  He’s unpacking his shirts, hanging them in the closet, but he looks like he’s been crying.

  I pull him toward the bed and sit down beside him.

  “It’s going to be all right,” I say.

  “No, it’s not,” he says, twisting his dredlocks in a frenzy like he does when he’s concentrating or nervous, or sad. “I’m telling you, I have a bad feeling about this house. Didn’t you feel it when you walked in? It’s like walking into a refrigerator and shutting the door behind you.” He starts to whisper. “I have a bad feeling about her.” He nods in Grandma’s direction.

  “About your great-grandmother?” I ask. “She’s family.”

  “Not all kinfolk is skinfolk,” he says.

  I laugh at that. “Boy, it’s supposed to be the other way around.”

  “Nah, think about it, Mama.”

  “Look,” I say. “Give it a month? If you don’t like it after that, we can figure out our next steps.”

  He pauses.

  “Fine, Mama,” he says.

  He’s back to fiddling with his iPhone, and before I stand, sound bursts out. It’s that new Childish Gambino song he bumps. He doesn’t let me kiss him too long and then he’s laying his Nikes and Pumas out in the closet just so.

  “We’re going to be okay here,” I say, but he doesn’t hear me, and the lyrics follow me out his door.

  Too late

  You wanna make it right, but now it’s too late

  I set up the lamp I brought outside King’s room. It is a classic trophy lamp with a brass finish and a black shade. King would never say he’s afraid of the dark, but I know it soothes him to see an outline of the familiar when he wakes up before morning. I switch the light on, then go to my room, sink into my bed. The mattress is thicker and softer than what I’m used to. I’ve been running on adrenaline since I made the decision. Grandma had been looking for a companion for some time and I’d contacted Traveling Angels for her but then King’s school called; he had been in a fight. I’d driven straight over, and sure enough there he was with his eye already swelling, holding a blood-soaked napkin to his nose.

  “You should see the other kid,” he’d joked, but I’d gone off on him.

  “You know we don’t do that,” I said. “You know we don’t.”

  And he’d tried to explain. This boy from the ninth grade was messing with his friend Nathan. He didn’t have a choice but to defend him. Wasn’t I always telling him to stand up for what he believed in? Well, he believed in his friend.

  I’d told him I wasn’t raising a thug, but that night while he ate stuffed mirliton with garlic bread, his favorite, I watched him, my son whose newborn face I could still envision, and I wondered where I’d gone wrong. We had lived in a house when he was born. A modest one a few blocks south of Freret, and a policeman lived on one side of us, and a secretary lived on the other. Then King’s daddy left, and the rent inched up every month, first $30, then $100, and Mr. Jeff was a good man, but he couldn’t clone my paycheck. When it was time to move elsewhere, there was nowhere to go. Five years after Katrina, my neighborhood had bloomed. We had a white mayor and fancy restaurants that stretched a dozen blocks, but all I could afford was a redeveloped unit in what used to be the projects. With the neat lawns and fresh paint, you’d never know what the apartment had been, but the D-boys on the corner told on it, and I’d said to King that I wasn’t raising no thug, but I wondered at that moment if that wasn’t exactly who I was raising. I called Grandma and I told her she didn’t need to look anymore, that the companion would be me.

  Tonight I’m walking distance from where I’d been but it might as well be a world away. Except for the security van that passes on the hour, there’s little traffic, and the crickets and the occasional wind chime are the only breaks in silence. I’m still tipsy from my drink, and I hit up Spotify for Sam Smith, set up a song for repeat. It was Byron’s favorite, mine too, and I don’t miss him, as much as I miss the fullness I felt being part of a unit, the depth and the purpose.

  You say I’m crazy

  ’Cause you don’t think I know what you’ve done

  It doesn’t take long to fall asleep but I wake up soon after, my right foot shooting forward as if in the other world I’d been running. I close my eyes, and a thread of the scene is back. My legs were pumping through water, clear enough to drink, but it smelled like rot. There was the thunder of horses galloping behind me, and out of their mouths streamed sentences I couldn’t grasp. King was with me, but he was a grown man with a different face, and just before I opened my eyes, I heard a shot ring out, and someone scream.

  GRANDMA PULLED SOME STRINGS TO GET KING INTO HER neighborhood public school, and he’s nervous in the morning, wondering about his old friends, and barely eating the grits and eggs Binh prepared. I try to remind him of the positive ways the new school will be different, but he doesn’t say a word all the way through the carpool line.

  He had told me he was afraid he’d be the only black kid in his class, and his worry wasn’t far off. There are a few sprinkled into the larger student body. Their mothers roll up in Porsches and Benzes; I can see from the car windows that the women are wearing suits, and they smile at me but they are fast smiles. I am not their own. But I’m okay with that because there are STEM classes at this place that you don’t have to pay for, a jazz band, a student-run literary magazine. King writes poems at night and sometimes I see them scribbled out on the dresser. Baby-love ones, though he’s never had a girlfriend: you be my earth, and I’ll be your moon, and I’m not saying he’s Langston Hughes, but everybody’s got to start somewhere.

  It’s just a minimum day today, and King is buzzing when I pick him up. At dinner, he talks with his mouth full, but he’s so excited I allow it. There’s an assembly in the morning, he says, where kids give a speech about anything that’s bothering them. He got up and talked about moving to a new school.

  “Afterward all these kids walked up to me in the hallways and introduced themselves. At my old sc
hool, somebody would have called me a punk, but here they were so”—he pauses—“nice.”

  Grandma Martha is beaming.

  “And that’s just the beginning,” she says. “You’re going to meet so many friends at this new school. Fine kids who will be good influences for you.”

  His face suddenly turns, and he sets his fork down.

  “I had friends at my old school too,” he says.

  “Yes, yes, of course you did, but I’m just saying . . .” her voice trails off.

  “We’re both just so happy you had a good day,” I say, and he seems to relax.

  Spaghetti is one of his favorite foods, and he cleans the plate, then asks to be excused.

  I clear the table, then help Grandma upstairs. I hadn’t noticed her outfit when she was sitting, the same classic button-down shirt with starched white pants that she always chooses, but she’s spilled tomato sauce from dinner and didn’t bother to wipe it. Even now, the red juice is running down the pant crease. Then too, there is an odor that wafts up from her, the unmistakable scent of funk. I almost ask if she needs help cleaning, but I see her heading into her bathroom, and I let it go.

  KING IS SITTING ON THE EDGE OF HIS BED WHEN I WALK by his room. I go in and sit down next to him, rub the back of his neck like I’ve done since he was a baby at my breast. Sometimes he allows it, and sometimes he doesn’t. Today he sinks into me.

  “What is it?” I ask. “You seem like you got a little down back there.”

  “I don’t know. Just the way she said that thing about these kids being good influences. Like my friends weren’t good.”

  “I hear you. I noticed that too,” I say. “But you have to understand she didn’t mean it that way. She’s getting old and she can’t always find the right words, but trust me. If anybody knows those are good kids, it’s her.”

  He doesn’t say anything.

  “You miss your friends, don’t you, buddy?” I ask.

  He nods.

  “How ’bout this? I’m off this weekend. We could go back to the old neighborhood. I’ll call Senait, we’ll set up something with her and Nathan and Issa, sound good?”

  He nods.

  “I love you, Mom,” he says.

  “I love you more,” I say back.

  Midsentence I hear a crash from just beyond the door and I rush to the landing.

  Grandma is standing outside King’s bedroom. I gasp. I don’t mean to but I didn’t expect to see her there; not only that, her hair is never down the way it is now, and I see for the first time that it reaches her stomach. She has changed already, and her nightgown is pale and translucent; dark and light flashes of her naked body shine through. I look away.

  “What happened?” I ask, my eyes darting behind her.

  “Oh, this lamp just fell down. I swear I didn’t even touch it, just passed next to it, and it leapt to the floor.”

  “Oh,” I say. It’s my mother’s great-great-grandmother’s lamp, the only thing of Josephine’s that we own. I don’t need to examine it to see the brass is chipped.

  “I’m so sorry,” Grandma says. “I can have Juanita run out tomorrow and get you another one. I’ve seen this very thing in Nordstrom.”

  “No, Grandma, that’s all right. Don’t worry about it. You just surprised me is all. I’ll walk you back to bed.”

  Along the way to her room, she wants to discuss each picture we pass.

  “That one is my wedding day,” she says, pointing to a black-and-white eight-by-ten. “He got the jewel. All the boys in the county would wait for us by the farm entrance.”

  “Oh, and I see why,” I say back, not unlike the way I might respond to a toddler.

  We keep walking. When we reach the room, I watch her navigate to her bed, wait to hear her mattress creak under her. She must know I’m still there because she talks the whole while, her back to me, first about the weather and then as the bed shifts, so does the topic.

  “I hope you’re not thinking about leaving,” she says in a near whisper. I almost think I’ve misheard her.

  “Oh? Of course not, Grandma. We just got here. Where would I go?”

  She sighs. “People have their places. Their dreams. That I know. It always seems more pleasant in somebody else’s fields. But we’re good to you here, right?”

  It is an odd question, but I am still thinking about that lamp.

  “The very best, Grandma,” I say.

  “Good. I love you, Ava.”

  “I love you too, Grandma.”

  Josephine

  1924

  THERE WAS NO QUESTION I WOULD CHOOSE THE HAMPSHIRE—he was already seven hundred pounds, fat off sweet potatoes, milk, beets, and turnips. This last week though I’d cleaned him out with corn because it wasn’t every day your only son got married. There would have to be enough pork to feed the parish.

  At Wildwood, babies weren’t swaddled in white and dipped in water as soon as their color came in, and a man and his woman didn’t jump over a broom with their mother’s blessing. Once, an aunt who wasn’t really my mother’s sister fell hard for a man across the swamps. Tom, who didn’t like to be called Master, said yes, of course, and they slept in the same cabin that night. Besides that, no attention was paid, and though we settled Resurrection in the West Alexander Parish of Southeast Louisiana over thirty years ago, I still wake up every morning in disbelief. My gratitude is not close to wringing itself out, and out of thanksgiving, I make sure to do everything Tom, who made sure we called him by his first name, wouldn’t have done. I bore and raised three children but only one of them is with me now, a son, and for him to choose a bride. Don’t get me started.

  And the Hampshire is the richest swine. My husband and I started out as sharecroppers on the edge of a bluff that toed the line between Mr. Dennis’s farm and the Mississippi River marshes. At first we didn’t fare much better here than Wildwood. We’d wake every morning before the sun rose to ride the mule to work on a dirt road straight along the water’s edge. But Mr. Dennis was a gambling man, a man who swallowed whiskey straight, and it was only so long before what he had was ours, three hundred acres of cotton, corn, cane, hogs, and cattle. His workers became our workers but we didn’t think of them that way. We divided the acres into tracts and parceled them out. We became a community together: we built a church, inside that a school, then a gristmill, a cane mill, a cotton gin that ground corn too. And if we had shingles, everybody had shingles; the same went for our milk cows, and fields to garden. Now that I’m old, my people’s hands are my hands. I say that to say things have changed, and it won’t fall on me to aim the rifle right between the pig’s eyes; to hang it, slit its throat, wash it, skin it, gut it clean. I have someone to do that for me now but I’ll still make the decision, point to the black boar with the white belt around the middle, because it has to be the finest.

  The door swings open, and I know it is Jericho. With his long stride he runs the way other folk walk, the way I have started to hobble, hunchbacked, but I steady myself to receive him in my arms. He is a red boy, just like his daddy, and just like my husband, and his head, hair cut tight to his scalp, reaches my waist.

  “You smell like outside,” I say, examining his dusty blue overalls. There’s a hole in the knee I would have to patch up that evening.

  “I’ve been playing, Grandma.”

  “Hmph. Well, it’s a bath for you tonight.”

  He doesn’t say a word.

  “You know what I mean, don’t you?”

  He still doesn’t speak. Then, “What if I don’t want them to marry?”

  I tap him more than slap him, right on his shoulder.

  “Lord, deliver me. We’re grateful for Eliza,” I say like I’m reciting my morning psalm. “She’s kind to you, she knows her letters, she could probably learn you some better than that teacher we pay. She’ll take good care of Major and you too.”

  He pauses, sits down, takes off his wide-brimmed hat, and taps his fingers against the hickory table. I can smell t
he lilies in a jar in the center. I get up on instinct and I pour him some cool lemonade. I still find new mercy in the fact this house belongs to me; that the pine boards overlap to keep the rodents out; the windows swing all the way open. There’s three bedrooms, one so large I can fit two beds side by side; I have an icebox instead of ceramic barrels, and I won’t ever run out of sacks of flour or my shelves of preserved raspberries and canned tomatoes, not if I live for ten more years, which I won’t. I watch Jericho drinking like his lips are a miracle to behold. Surely my own children drank lemonade. Surely they ran in and called for me over any other, but I don’t remember it. I don’t.

  “Will she take care of me?” he sets his glass down. “I ain’t her child. Pretty soon she’ll start having her own and I’ll start smelling like fried skunk.”

  “What do you know about fried skunk?” I shake my head but I understand his meaning.

  “It’s from one of your stories,” he says, “the one about you escaping, when you were hiding in the swamps.”

  “Nah, we didn’t eat no skunks; rabbit, coons, squirrels, possum stew with sweet potatoes, but no skunks, young man. Anyway, that’s enough of that,” I say because it is one thing to dip into the past but to be hauled up and tossed back in it, don’t get me started. Otherwise I don’t know what to tell him. “You been praying like I taught you?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Add your worry to the list. I can tell you this: I asked for your daddy to find someone who would love him and love you and who would replace me when I’m gone.”

  “Don’t do that.”

  “Don’t do what? The only thing you can count on is the cycle of life. Anyway, she came in and I believe it’s God’s doing.”

  “How do you know though?”

  I pause. “I don’t. But I will say that I had a dream the night before he brought her home and there was a woman wearing yellow in it, walking through a tunnel waving, and when Eliza walked in, didn’t she have a daffodil in her hair?”