The Revisioners

by Margaret Wilkerson Sexton

  There were twins three cabins down, and watching them was like watching those two. There was a conversation going on beneath the one I was observing, and I could understand that it was happening, but I couldn’t make out the meaning.

  Then he walked up behind her and started kneading the dough she held, though I had never seen a man put his hand in Mama’s food. I saw that their hands were almost the same color. I had come out somewhere in the middle of Mama and Daddy, who was nearly white on account of his father being Tom.

  Jupiter said my mother’s grandmother sent him. Then he started to hum a song I had never heard before. Mama’s eyes widened and she held on to the side of the round table where she worked. She said her grandmother had been dead more than twenty years; she said nobody knew that song but her and her mama, but her words came out on a slant.

  He paused for a while, and even when he spoke, he didn’t answer her. “I know what you’re doing down there by the swamps. I ain’t the only one who knows. Not the only one who wants to join either.”

  Mama’s head hung in her hands, her proud heavy hair that she braided at night with oil. I wanted to tell her what it was she always told me: don’t let anybody cause you to look down. On the outside for the white folks, sure, but inside where only you can see, be lording above them, be higher than they can set their minds to.

  She shook her head again. There were rules, she said, and there wasn’t no way people were going back on them. She wouldn’t let them even if they wanted to.

  He gripped her wrist, lowered his voice, but I could still hear him. “Every rule got a way inside it,” he said, “a way to twist it around.”

  Mama shook her head again. “Not these rules,” she said; “these rules too special, too important. If people started misremembering these rules, they’d get a mind to misremember others. The only thing standing between me and a whooped hide is these rules,” she repeated.

  If Daddy were here, he would have talked some sense into them both, would have said it would be worse than a whipped hide if they were caught. I knew because I listened to him talk to Mama, just the way I was listening to Mama and this new man now. I’d heard Mama remind Daddy that Master let them call him Tom. “He’s lenient about other things too,” I’d heard her say. But Daddy would always snap back in a final word, “I know that man better than anyone on account of his blood running inside me, and some days I wake up mad enough to kill. That’s from him, that’s from his bloodline, and I’m telling you as sure as I can say my own name, Tom or no Tom, he got the power and the inclination to snap your neck.”

  The door opened. I could see the leather tops of Daddy’s shoes before I saw him. He worked in the house, stood behind Tom while Vera served food. It was Carnival season and after a bite to eat, he would go right back to the big house to gather Tom and his brother and drive them down the levee road to the King’s Ball. Because of that, even with the heat bracing for summer, Daddy still wore his white gloves and his fancy vest, his livery coat trimmed with wool and lace. Watching him stand next to Jupiter and Mama I was ashamed of how white he was, how nearly straight his shoulder-length hair lay. He fought against his coloring his whole life, and the way he walked in the cabin that day like it maybe wasn’t even his home, I wondered if he picked Mama because she was the blackest woman on the plantation. He set his burlap sack on the table.

  “Who is you?” he asked the man, though I knew he knew. He had to know.

  “I’m Jupiter.”

  “And I’m Domingo.” Daddy lifted me as he said it. I wanted to turn his head away from them. As strong as he’d always been, I felt he needed protecting.

  “I carved a new doll, Daddy,” I said. He smiled at me but he stared in their direction. He didn’t talk for a long time, then he sat down, plopped me on his lap, and drummed his fingertips against the table.

  “What you want here?” he asked finally.

  “Just passing through, we got people in the same place, that’s all.”

  “He got people where my mama from,” my mama said at the same time.

  The man backed up toward the door. I felt triumphant watching him skitter off like a mosquito that had gotten shooed.

  “It’s nice when you run into home country people. Ain’t that right, Winnie?” the man asked from outside. I saw that same pigeon was waiting on the other side of the door.

  And Mama nodded, but she was back to kneading the dough, reaching for a skillet from the rack above her head, and we were back to our lives, I thought.

  THE NEXT WEEK, THE MISSUS WAS IN RARE FORM. TOM’S mother was coming but the visit didn’t comfort her, it frightened her, so much you’d hear her shrieking out orders from the moment she woke up, floating from room to room pointing at imaginary stains on the baseboards or spots on the sheets. There were wide halls in the center of the house and rooms on each side of them, and each one had to be dusted. The floors were hardwood and had to be polished until they shined.

  “She looks down on me ’cause I’ve only had one child,” she cried out while we worked.

  “One is plenty. Children ain’t no form of competition,” my mother assured her, but she went on like my mother hadn’t said a word at all.

  “She had ten of ’em and it shows, but she wants me to be like her, broad-hipped and flat-bosomed. Have you seen her with her shirt off, the way that one breast just hangs?”

  Hours later Mama still sat beside the missus, rubbing her slicked-back hair, massaging her shoulders while she wept.

  “Maybe if my husband was around, things would be different. It’s not your husband’s mama anymore. I spent so much time worrying about her and he left her just like he did me, wouldn’t even see her when she died.” Mentioning my grandmother, whom I never met, sent the missus into a fury, and she worked herself into a fit, chest heaving and wails erupting until she fell asleep, snot dripping into her mouth. Mama still had to sweep the floors from dinner and wash and dry the plates and silverware. I offered to help but she shooed me away.

  “This not child work,” she said, even though I could tell she was what she called bone-tired. “Sit down somewhere while you can,” she said. “Sit down somewhere for me.”

  It was many hours past nightfall when she finished and we were only a few feet from our quarters when we heard the sound. The faint outline of a song if I listened. Mama had been so tired before we left the big house, but now, she seemed to fill up with energy. I didn’t know where her new power came from: the grass swaying, the moon shining, but she gripped my hand in hers and she ran.

  Everybody was already in a circle when we reached the swamps, and Mama took her place in the center and started like she’d been there all along:

  We believe in one God

  Who is the Spirit of Life inside us

  We believe in the Soul that outlives

  The body and links us

  To all that came and all that follow

  We believe in the fulfillment of our destiny

  Through a cause beyond our imagination

  We believe that destiny is winding its way back to us

  Even now

  Then people threw in their woes. Earl said his knee was aching. Jessie said he was tired. Luther just lost his wife and he cried at the same time every day on the fields, while other men filled his bags. When it was Fred’s turn, he was quiet. Mama ignored it for a little while, then I caught her glance at Daddy, and she started.

  “What’s this, Fred? What’s wrong with you?”

  He shook his head.

  “Naw, what is it? Best a say it now so it don’t grow too heavy, liable to get so it’s too heavy for you to carry it by yourself.”

  He shook his head again but it was obvious Mama had started to twist whatever knot was inside him loose.

  “Just say it, Fred.” This from my daddy.

  Fred opened up his mouth, then closed it. Then he opened it again. “To hear the people tell it,” he said in a cool, soft voice, “you ain’t planning to draw this cycl
e.”

  Mama laughed but her mouth didn’t move; the sound seemed to slip through the crack of her lips. “How you suppose I’m not drawing? Why you suppose I’m here before the crack of dawn if I’m not drawing?”

  “Last year by this time we had already made a plan.” It was true. Last year was the first year Mama had allowed people to pick the stones. Daddy had chosen the one with the star, but Tom’s brother had gotten sick, and Daddy had had to drive Tom to see him through it.

  “I told you we had to wait longer this time ’cause of the trouble with the Travis plot.”

  She was talking about what happened a few months earlier. Fifty slaves schemed to set fire to their own plantation, but they were caught and arrested just a week before it was set to burn. Every last one of them was hung. Then their heads were speared on posts dotting the Mississippi River. I hadn’t seen it, but I’d heard people whisper that some of their eyes were closed, and some of them weren’t.

  “Nobody’s thinking about that anymore,” Fred said.

  “Any white person ever heard of it will be thinking about it for the rest of their lives, brother,” Mama said.

  Silence then. My mama was always doing that, inspiring silence.

  Fred seemed to change course. “Well, even if we do draw, ain’t no luck in it. I s’pose you just gon’ pick yourself or your husband again.”

  Daddy wasn’t but a person away from Fred, and he faked like he was going to strike him, and Fred flinched. The rest of the group laughed.

  I could see Mama shaking her head. She didn’t like discord; not just that, she forbade it. She said that’s what white people wanted, for us to take ourselves down. We already did their work for them in the fields and in the house, and then so many of us did their work for them in our own minds.

  “That ain’t what this about,” she said. “You know as well as I do don’t nobody pick but God. You don’t remember that, you might as well turn around and get out of here, ’cause you no good to us.”

  Fred didn’t say anything after that. His brother walked up, stood between him and my mama for some time, then without warning, Fred leaned his head back and belted out:

  My Lord calls me

  He calls me by the thunder

  The trumpet sound within my soul

  I ain’t got long to stay here

  And a quiet seemed to descend on us, a quiet outside us and a quiet inside us too. We all opened our mouths and joined him.

  My Lord calls me

  He calls me by the thunder

  The trumpet sound within my soul

  I ain’t got long to stay here

  It was like that the rest of the night. Someone would shout out the words to another song and the rest of the group would pick it up like there was one mouth moving for us all. I can’t say how long we worshiped there, but I know I fell asleep and woke up again many times. Each time I did, there was a different melody streaming around me, a different prayer moving my mama’s lips. The last time I woke, my daddy was carrying me, walking so light I couldn’t hear his feet fall on the grass. His heart was beating fast against my cheek, but I wasn’t scared.

  It wasn’t long before morning. That time, I woke up to talking. I assumed it was Mama and Daddy like always until I sat up and saw the back of Jupiter’s head, the tight beads of knaps that stretched down his neck. He and my mama were sitting at the table like those twins I mentioned, like they grew up together sitting at a table just like this one, and it only took another piece of wood to bind them back together again. He had heard about Fred, he said, willy-nilly Fred. Even before last night, Fred had been going around telling everybody that last year was his year but ol’ Domingo pulled and backed out. Mama didn’t correct Jupiter or even look at him with scorn.

  “Well, what do you think I should do then?” she asked. I had never heard my mama ask anybody for advice.

  Jupiter started humming, a real low grunt in his throat, and her shoulders relaxed; she leaned back. It was that same song she said only her mama knew.

  “See, you know how all of our people got a meaning?” he asked once he finished.

  She nodded.

  He said he had one too, that he was a wordsmith, that he could string words together that you’d never think belonged, but when you heard them you’d say aha, they are part of the same family. “That’s what you need me to do with Fred,” he kept on. “Convince him he don’t want to be a runaway, or maybe it’s that y’all are doomed to fail anyway, or maybe it’s that you plannin’ on pickin’ him, and he just needs patience, any one of those things I can have him believe as soundly as his own name. You let me draw and I’ll do that for him and anybody else need mending, you watch.”

  “Boy, you better go on somewhere,” Mama said.

  But then he started humming again. To me it sounded like the dog that took sick some years past with a lump in his chest the size of my fist, but Missus wouldn’t let us put him out of his misery. I tried to go into myself, envision that woman I could visit since I came back to life. I could see her more clearly than ever: she was a shade somewhere between me and my mama; she had a girl standing next to her who had to be her own daughter but her daughter was walking away from her, and I wanted to tell her to turn back, but that hum wouldn’t let my words through.

  I stood, walked right up to the table. They both looked up, but my mama’s eyes were hard on me, like she had been sleeping and I’d thrown a rock at her forehead to rouse her. It was harder on me than anything that had come before it, seeing that I was the burn and not the salve. But the humming stopped.

  Ava

  2017

  I GET A CALL IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT FROM AN unknown number. I silence it but it rings again. It’s a nurse from Ochsner. Am I Ava Jackson? My mother has been admitted. She was vomiting up blood, and the woman next door called the ambulance. I throw on clothes and hop in the car. My mother is on the eighth floor, and I try not to look in the other rooms as I search for hers, at the patients, their eyes closed and their mouths gaping.

  “You could have called me,” I say to her first thing, rubbing my hands together with the sanitizer I squirted on in the hallway. Even I know that the accusation is a shield against my sadness, my fear.

  Her neighbor is right next to her in an armchair she’s pulled up to the hospital bed. She stands when I walk in.

  “You could have called me,” I repeat.

  “I didn’t want to bother you over this little thing,” my mother says.

  “It’s not little, Mama,” I say back.

  Her neighbor gestures for me to meet her in the hallway.

  “I’m glad you were there, but she should have called me,” I say as I walk out.

  “She said you might be working,” the neighbor says at the door. She pauses. “Anyway, can you stay for a while?”

  “Of course,” I say.

  She seems like she’s about to say something, but she goes back into the room for her purse instead, whispers something to my mother then walks out, toward the elevator. She turns back.

  “She wasn’t herself,” she says finally. “When I got there, I stayed for a while because she wasn’t herself. She was saying the right stuff, she looked all right, but there was something about her that seemed shook, like it was a different person in her body. That more than the blood is what scared me.”

  Later, the doctor comes in and explains that blood vessels in my mother’s esophagus dilated and ruptured, that the gastroenterologist needs to band them to stop the bleeding. They escort us to the fourth floor for the procedure, my mother in a gurney. I wait in the lobby, then a few hours after she’s taken, my mother is brought back out. I hold her hand all the way to the elevator and back up to the eighth floor.

  “I’m here now, Mama,” I say. “I’m here now, and I’m never going to leave you again.”

  Back in the room, I call Grandma’s nurse to check on her sooner and text King to get a ride with one of the girls.

  When my mother finally do
es wake up, I’m standing over her.

  “Everything went great,” I say.

  It takes her a while to keep her eyes open long enough to respond.

  She shakes her head.

  “No,” I say, “you’re going to be just fine. They patched the vessels right up, and you’re going to be just fine.”

  “I’m not worried about that,” she says, shaking her head again. “That lady,” she says.

  “What lady?”

  “I’m more worried about you,” she says, and she spreads the sentence out, stopping after every two or three words, nodding off, then starting again. “And King,” she goes on.

  “I’m doing great, Mama,” I say. “King is too.”

  “Hmph,” she says. It seems like her eyes are watering. She turns to the side. “No, you’re not either.” She is facing the wall. “If you needed the money that bad, you could have just stayed with me,” she says.

  “No, Mama,” I repeat what I always say. “I don’t want to burden you. I don’t want to lean on you. It’s my time.”

  “It wouldn’t have been a burden,” she cuts me off. “You’re my child. It wouldn’t have been a burden, and it would have been better than what you got yourself into now. That lady—” she starts, then she nods off again.

  “You got along so great,” I say, but even as I hear myself say it, I know it isn’t true.

  “You always had issues with that side.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She looks at me like she shouldn’t have to spell it out. “You know what I mean. You don’t really know your daddy. You were always trying to get him to pay attention to you.”