The Revisioners

by Margaret Wilkerson Sexton

  I take another bite. I am almost done with my share. If it was Link’s biscuits tasting like this, I’d have devoured half a dozen by now.

  “It’s not bad,” I say.

  She looks down at her lap, like a little child who was hoping for an orange and got a lemon.

  “It’s not bad at all,” I add. “In fact, they’re the best biscuits I ever tasted.”

  She just lights up at that, Christmas morning and birthday pie all rolled into one.

  “There’s something I been meaning to ask you,” she says.

  “What is it?” She catches me off guard though I can’t have the nerve to be surprised. White women don’t sniff around black women’s kitchens too long before they set their sights on something they can take, something they have got to have.

  “There’s a rumor going around about you. My husband’s the one who put me on it. He said you’re some kind of conjure woman, said everybody around these parts knows about it, said a lot of the people who come in and out here are coming for that reason.”

  I pause. It is the strangest thing—the moments that call me to miss my daughters can’t be timed. I had been close to them both, but it was the oldest whom I thought would be my forever child. I had to press her small body to mine the first time she used the outhouse, she was so afraid to try new things. She learned to beat the white women’s clothes with sticks, fold them, then carry them in wheelbarrows for me when she was three ’cause she didn’t want to leave my side. She slept with me every night after her father passed, and she would have stayed too, but her husband was itching for a way out of Jim Crow, and his brother was moving to Philadelphia, and what could I say? She writes me every week, and she is happy with her two children. I would have liked to hold them just once, but what else can I want for her?

  “Hmph. I could water my entire farm with the lies people tell,” I say.

  “It wouldn’t be the first time my husband got something wrong. Don’t tell him I said that.”

  “I won’t say a word,” I say, and we both laugh.

  “’Cause if he was right, I was going to ask you about the baby. If you could put one inside me.”

  Here we go.

  I don’t say a word, just stare back at her, transfer some of the discomfort she lit up in me right back over to her. Sure, used to be, there was a time when I could say yes. When I first got here, to bind my mother to me, I unfolded a picture of her from my breast pocket, laid it out over my prayer table, along with her pearl comb. I burned sage and dressed a blue candle in sweet oil. Wasn’t just that: people came from all over to relieve the weight of their hearts. Most times I didn’t say a word, just sat there, listened to them wail about their daughter’s face, snatched just before the war, and they couldn’t call it up any longer; or guilt, and the more of it there was, the worse things people did to snuff it out. The whole while I was writing out prayers on their behalf I was standing over a pot of my mother’s favorite, stewed gizzards; I was nurturing visions of her every morning, chanting her name like jewels on a necklace, but Link came back more than once with an empty hand, and the last time, the very last time I had her search, I burned all the sage, the cloth, the comb. I couldn’t bring myself to destroy her image, but it sits at the back of my dresser now, and I’m too carved out to pick it up.

  “But you said you don’t do that sort of thing,” the white woman repeats herself.

  “No indeed,” I say, and I don’t say another word more. For a little while we sit like that, her looking up, then back down at her lap, and me just staring straight at her like there’s a picture show across her face, and I’m more entertained than I’ve been in some time, wondering how long the silence can go.

  “Ooh, I’ve got to get supper,” I say after a while, but she still doesn’t leave. Since she’s there, I pass her the bowl of green beans, have her snap each one at both ends. It gets done quicker that way.

  While she snaps she tells me things, things I might have reserved for a friend: that she didn’t know her husband that well when they met, but that her mama said that he wore nice shoes, that his mama had all her teeth. The wedding had been half a celebration, a small cake and her daddy gave a toast, but there were only a few people there, her husband being from such a small family and her own people unable to pay for much more than potato salad and a chicken to fry.

  “I’m not saying my parents did me wrong, we made do,” she says. “We made do, but it’s nothing like it is here. All the corn and sweet potatoes and cabbage I could eat. My mama visits me and I long to see her, but it hurts too; everything she’s seeing, it’s good for me, but I can tell she’s shrinking. I thought I’d make her proud but I’ve noticed shame there too.”

  “No, girl,” I say, thinking of my own children. “Nothing about you is cause for shame. Kill a man, steal a child, now that’s shameful. Your mama is proud of you, she just wants more for herself, that’s all.”

  You can have both things. One doesn’t ride the other one out.

  That seems to hit her deep somewhere and stick; she thinks on it for a while.

  “What about you?” she asks. “You close with your daughters who are gone?”

  “Couldn’t be closer,” I say without thinking. “Even if they were here. They write me so much, I feel like I’m in the room with them sometimes. Send pictures too. I got grandchildren, three already and one on the way. One of them is named after me. Josephyne. Spelled with a y instead of an i. But it’s after me.”

  “You miss ’em though? The ones you don’t have with you?”

  I feel myself shaking inside some mornings so hard I can’t even hold my spoon steady, and having her name the wound brings heat to it, but I just sit there.

  “Sometimes,” I say, snapping away at those beans. When the last is broken, and there is no use for my hands, I set them against the table, one over the other to hold them back. “Sometimes it’s more than I can bear,” I have to say.

  The thing is, no matter how old you get, you still imagine them as your babies. I can still see the first one not five minutes after she was born, puckering her lips at me. She didn’t know what world she had landed in or how she got there, what her role in it would be, but she knew she needed to eat, and I was the one who could provide. I look up then. I can feel some water on my cheek, the tip of it.

  “You’ll see,” I say.

  She shrugs. “I’m beginning to lose hope.”

  “How long has it been?”

  “Two years.”

  I try not to let my concern show. Anyway I have seen worse. “And you’ve been having regular relations all that time?”

  She nods. “Every day almost. At this point we would need a miracle,” she laughs.

  “Well, don’t cut your eyes at a miracle; miracles are more everyday than people think. You know how your eyes work? How you set your mind on stepping out of bed and walking and your legs just follow suit?”

  She shrugs.

  “I don’t. What’s a miracle? Something you can’t explain coming to pass; something that doesn’t make sense existing anyway. So much of the day is miraculous. And if you notice one example, you’ll get pointed in the direction of another. The insides of them, that buzz, that fire, will fill you up inside and you can put your hand out and touch something commonplace and watch it bloom into something else that shouldn’t be. There’s the stuff of miracles swimming all inside you, all around you, you just haven’t reached in and grabbed it yet.”

  “That’s beautiful,” she says.

  “Okay.”

  She looks out the window. “There’s one,” she says, pointing.

  It’s a bluebird on a perch just outside my kitchen window, and she is grinning like an idiot.

  “Sure is,” I say. The moment has passed though. I believe everything I’ve just said, it is my ministry to teach it, but I feel like I’ve lost something sharing it with her. There was a cost to that truth, the buds of which didn’t form until I fled Wildwood, and if I hadn’t met Isaiah
, Lord knows what would have come of me. Before I looked across a planter’s field of cotton at him, I’d get still in the bottom of myself, and blocks of words would show up in my mind’s eye: The harder the harvest, the more robust the fruit. In the mornings, just before daybreak, with my eyes only half open, I’d see that woman that comes to me, young and supple still, and I wouldn’t be able to understand her words, but seeing her face would feel like my mother’s hand stretched over my heart. I’d wake up knowing no matter what the day held, I’d already passed through it.

  There were other things, and now the quieter I am, the more verdant my life, the more green and lush, and giving away my yield to this woman feels like taking it from my Maker, the opposite of gratitude, and a sure way to confuse the Source. She is still going on about the sun and the breeze when her face hardens.

  “Lord, that’s Vern,” she says. “I gotta go,” and she almost stumbles she scrambles out of my chair so fast. It is no matter. The beans are snapped. I’d smother some potatoes, and by the time I’d be done, maybe Jericho would be coming to eat dinner. But time wears on and he just isn’t there. And the longer I sit there, the longer I feel like I have been plucked clear of anything decent that was inside me and there is only one place to go to get stuffed back up.

  Link lives where the sharecroppers did, a quarter of a mile downhill from me, just the time it takes me to forget the empty way I felt sitting at that table in the white woman’s wake. It is still daylight, and the sun covers me on all sides. There are small clusters of unpainted houses along the way with wood frames and swinging windows, hog yards and vegetable gardens closed in by chicken wire. When I reach Link’s, I can feel the dampness under the sleeves of my dress, and I have to take out my handkerchief and wipe the beads gathering on my forehead.

  She is outside looking beyond her porch like she was expecting me, her door open behind her. I can glimpse two baby pictures of her son hanging on the nearest wall, surrounded by newspaper to seal the gaps in the rough-hewn boards.

  “Hey, you,” she calls out.

  I wave at her. “What you up to?”

  “Thinking of making pillowcases but ran out of cloth.”

  “We could see what the pastor’s wife is holding,” I say, and she stands, grips the rails on either side of her stairs, then, slower than I would on account of her toes missing, climbs down the four steps. When she reaches the bottom, we start the trek to church. Two boys to our right kneel to work on a car. Several feet ahead of us, my old neighbor rides a mule-drawn wagon weighed down by sacks of cotton. He looks back and waves.

  “Good afternoon, Josephine, Link.”

  “All right now,” we say back, our greetings merged.

  Link tells me about her crops: “Corn’s failing, fifteen bushels per acre. When last year it was twenty. It’s hard to fight the slugs these days, but I got more tomatoes than anything. If I can sell those, I’ll be all right.”

  “That’s nice,” I say, or maybe I don’t say it; maybe I just think it. Then we hear the toll of the bell sounding from the direction we’re moving in, and we pick up our speed. We don’t speak the whole way. The thing is the bell is almost never a surprise like it is now. Word creeps around that someone is sick and shut in and a few weeks later, the confirmation will sound from the church’s slight steeple, but we will have minded that progression, with pans of barbecue and jugs of milk and baskets of eggs. In this case, the clang hasn’t stopped and I don’t know what to expect.

  I rush up to the front steps, and Link is a lick behind me. When I see Aristide’s son, I almost yelp I’m so relieved.

  “Paul, you back?” I ask. I look closer at him. He is much smaller than he was when he left and he leans on a stick for balance.

  Link is on my heels, and when she sees him, she grabs him by the shoulder but he stares back at her in a daze.

  “When you got back?” she asks.

  He doesn’t answer her until she asks him again.

  “When you got back?”

  “A little bit ago,” he says. “Not too long ago,” he repeats.

  Link has a fire in her eyes I haven’t seen in a while. I look back and forth between her and Paul, my brow furrowing. And then it hits me, that Aristide’s boy with the limp had been taken up in the gangs around the same time her Henry had. I can see her determining how to ask the next question, wanting to hurl it at him but needing to be kind too, and when it comes down to it, she can’t hold it in.

  “And Henry?” she asks. “You seen him?”

  Paul shakes his head and looks away like he’s recalling something unpleasant to him. “Just in the beginning and then I was able to work out.” He looks away again.

  She covers her mouth and dips, and I grab her arm.

  I look at Paul and ask him with my eyes if there’s something more he knows, something he can tell just me alone, and I see behind them, a rot.

  “All right now, Link,” I say. “All right now. You all right, son?” I ask, and he nods. “Eating all right, and got money to spend?”

  He looks down at his feet. His hair is clumped in patches, and he has bumps at the edges of his scalp that rise in clusters.

  Aristide approaches.

  “Miss Josephine, I was gonna come around there and ask you if Paul could have some land to work. I was gon’ do it proper, but since I’m seeing you here, you got something for him? Maybe to get his mind right?”

  We got all the hands we could use. Major is running the farm now and he is strict about how much work is distributed. Besides, this boy looks like whatever they had him doing in that gang halved him and I would be getting the dimmest piece. Maybe that’s more reason to take him. I look at Link. She got about two seconds before she falls onto this ground.

  “Of course, son,” I say, “you come by tomorrow.” Then I bid the young man farewell and turn back to Link. We had intended to see about the cloth, but it is clear we won’t be going anywhere. She doesn’t say a word until we near my house. The tallest oak marks the cross between the road that leads to the workers’ row and the road to town. Mama always said any crossroad was a meeting between this world and the spirit one. That oak is where I come to clear my mind, and now the corn stalks in its path are moving so fast it’s like they were waiting on me. Maybe the movement calms Link down, maybe it stirs her up, but she is waving her arms and stamping her feet. Someone farther from us could think she was dancing.

  “If I had known it was going to hurt like this, I would never have had him,” she says.

  “It’s all right, one way or another, it’s going to be all right.” I rub her back.

  We stand like that for a while, her crying into her hands and me holding her.

  “Is it?” she asks when she’s cleaned her face. “Is it gon’ be all right hurting like this?”

  “It’s gon’ hurt for a while.”

  She pauses before she asks the next question. “There ain’t nothing you can do to speed it up?”

  I think for a minute. If it was anybody else, I’d tell them, Sprinkle salt all around the house; let it sit for seven days; then sweep it up and say a prayer over it before you haul it in the fire. And I would hope it would work, pray for that. But this is Link. And Henry is her son. I don’t believe in that stuff anymore. Good bit it did my mother. Good bit it did me. And even when it does work, that hurt doesn’t disappear with the salt, it just disperses, to the tips of your fingers, to the base of your heart, to the core of your stomach, and even the hardest woman can’t keep it down. Alcohol will surface it, or a sleepless night. Then one fast word from a child, or twisted look from a friend, and that rage is gnarled now, monstrous, unyielding.

  “I can sit with you tonight,” I say. Everything she’s feeling will be divided in half the longer I sit with her.

  She rests her face in her hands. “I couldn’t ask you that.”

  “As much as you seen me through,” I start.

  “Not really, you’re strong, Josephine,” she says.

  I p
ause. “On account of how much people seen me through,” I repeat.

  Josephine

  1855

  THE REVISIONERS MET EVERY SUNDAY AFTER MARKET, our feet cracked and peeling from bartering poultry, horseshoes, or wood bowls along the levee. At some plantations Mama would only nod at the slaves and at some she would hum a song—she didn’t speak the words but I knew them.

  It’s true they cannot catch me.

  There is a schooner out at sea.

  It’s true they cannot catch me.

  The people she sang for would appear in the swamp that night, three hundred yards past the point where the last cabin crossed with the sugarhouse. Eighteen of us gathered in the dark. We sat around an altar covered in blue cloth, milk and sugar, corn, jars of water, a pot of sage, melon seeds, and scraps of pork we snuck from supper. My mama would walk a circle counterclockwise around us, directing our prayers and lamentations.

  “They sold my baby over the river,” or “My husband took sick and it won’t be much longer,” or “My child in trouble and I got to throw up my hands,” until our grief was ripe for healing, and our hearts were clear to praise. The praise started with gratitude, gentle rumblings skirting over each other: the sun on our faces, healthy babies with gums shining, hope for the by and by, and then the tempo would rise, shouts would leap, and you couldn’t catch one blessing, it was so mingled with the one before it: full bellies some of the time, and someone’s mother died but she didn’t suffer, and a man who’s staying and a woman who said yes, and white folks being as good as they can be, and even if they showed themselves, who they really were, hope for the by and by, and Mama would stand up and start swinging her arms and switching her hips and slamming her feet down, and everyone surrounding her would follow suit. That was when the soil was fertile, that was when our minds could grow crops. Mama would remind us of all the stories we had heard about the women before us, many of whom made it rain without a cloud in the sky. Some of our fathers’ men only had to point a finger for corn to grow. That’s not what we were after, but then again it was too. My mama carved eighteen stones and only one of them had a star on it, and come summer, whoever picked that star would flee. It was our jobs to see they made it over.