After a while, we go back in and finish cleaning up. My mother’s sisters are in the kitchen drying dishes. The rest of the family is crowded in the living room, the older relatives on the sofas, the younger ones at their feet. My mother sits on an armchair in the corner of the room; she’s speaking quietly; I don’t hear everything she’s saying at first, but I can glean from the fragments that she’s talking about Josephine.
“I’ve been seeing her, you know,” she says. “Since I got out of the hospital.”
The room quiets. Here we go again.
“Most of the time she’s sitting at a round kitchen table,” she goes on. “Laughing, smiling. Other times, she’s younger, and she’s being chased. I believe she’s trying to tell me something.”
My mother looks over at me. I was just about to wipe down the counters, but I stop, the dishrag limp in my hand.
“To warn me about something,” my mother goes on. “About someone.”
Her eyes are locked with mine. I look away.
“It’s such a clear image,” she goes on, “visions you wouldn’t believe if I told you. A wide swamp, and deep inside it, patches of dry land. And then it’s like she’s on a levee, with men behind her. Two men riding two horses the same shade of brown.”
I tense up even more, hearing her stir up the dreams I’ve had, so much so some details come back to me that I hadn’t remembered seeing myself.
“The swamps, the men, the horses, the screams, the chase,” she repeats. “I never thought about how they made it out. You know, slavery. I never thought about how exactly they freed themselves. I guess I assumed they lived past its ending, and they were free that way, but now, well, now I don’t know what to think. The pictures, they’re so vivid, I can smell the dirty water, I can taste the rodents they fried, I can hear the horses at their feet. And well, now, now I’m starting to think she escaped.”
“That sounds like a movie,” one of my mother’s sisters cuts in from the kitchen.
I notice some of my cousins smirking. Some people think my mother is crazy when she talks like this, but I’m not one of them. I remember that drawer she kept with all of her clients’ wishes, with all of her own, and every single thing she’d written down had come to pass. For that reason, I tell King to put on his shoes. In true black party fashion, it takes forty minutes to kiss everybody and pack up plates. My mother asks several times why we don’t just spend the night, but I tell her I’m tired. Of course it’s not that. It’s one thing if she’s envisioning a house for King, a new car for me; we could use all that, but the warnings—well, shit, I have enough on my plate.
Josephine
1924
I WAIT FOR CHARLOTTE THE NEXT DAY. THE DAY AFTER that and the day after that too, but she doesn’t come. It’s been a week since my fallout with Major and Eliza, and I have stopped expecting them. I go days without seeing another face, and as much as I had feared loneliness, I find when it comes to pass, I have enough memories stored up on the inside to more than meet it. I fill my day. I spend more time with the Word. My favorite: Thus saith the Lord; Cursed be the man that trusteth in man, and maketh flesh his arm, and whose heart departeth from the Lord. For he shall be like the heath in the desert, and shall not see when good cometh; but shall inhabit the parched places in the wilderness, in a salt land and not inhabited. Blessed is the man that trusteth in the Lord, and whose hope the Lord is. For he shall be as a tree planted by the waters, and that spreadeth out her roots by the river, and shall not see when heat cometh, but her leaf shall be green; and shall not be careful in the year of drought, neither shall cease from yielding fruit.
I sit, travel into myself. There is that woman I always see. I try to avoid her, but as my eyes close, she is back more and more. She doesn’t look like me, her skin is firmer and her hair is longer, but when I think, it comes out in her mind, and when I am soothed, she is the one to smile.
I knit. I take my meals, then have a walk around the property. Isaiah would be so proud of all that had come from those first two acres. Much of it he had seen before he left us, but some of it he hadn’t. Sometimes I think I can sense him in the fields, stretching the tassels or carrying the pollen to the silks.
When I get back inside, it is time to start dinner, and it is lonely at first chopping seasoning for food no one else will taste, but I get used to that too, and I make a point of setting up the plate just so, the way I’d imagine Eliza doing it, even if it is for my eyes only.
When Jericho walks in, I feel like I am being jolted back into the living world.
“You scared me, stranger,” I say. “What happened? I get into it with Eliza, I get into it with all of y’all, huh?”
He doesn’t say anything, and I look up and see he has been crying.
“What is it?” I stand up as fast as my old bones allow.
“I told you it was going to happen.” He slumps into a chair across from me.
“You told me what, Jericho?” I am standing over him, my voice rising. “You told me what?” I repeat when he still doesn’t respond.
“She’s pregnant,” he says. “Eliza is pregnant. They’re going to have their own baby now and everybody’s going to forget about me.”
I try to control my own joy while I calm him. I would have thought I’d be reacting the same as he is, but I hadn’t known how hungry I was for another member of my bloodline to come through. I will never get my mama back, not on this earth, probably my daughters neither, and it is not like the new life fills the holes they left, but it moves my gaze so I focus on the high times, when Mama carried me in from the rain and my head rested on her shoulder. Or one night, when grace stopped me in my tracks, my daughter moved a stone from one hand to the other and demanded for hours that I guess which fist it was in.
“It’s going to be all right,” I say.
“No, it’s not. No, it’s not,” he repeats. “That’s why I haven’t come by. I didn’t want to talk to anybody, not even you.”
“It’s going to be all right, baby. You’re going to find it’s going to be different, and you’ll do well to not compare it to the past, but the thing is you’ll find it’s better too, better in ways you never would have expected,” and he nods but he is still crying, his head down on his forearm.
“As much as it’s theirs, it’s going to be yours too,” I say.
His eyes seem to light up at that. He is hearing me, at least some.
“You ever think about it that way?” I go on.
He shakes his head.
“As much as it’s their baby, it’s going to be yours too.”
AFTER I CALM JERICHO, I SET TO KNITTING: BOOTIES and bonnets, blankets and hats. My spirit tells me it is a girl and she’ll be born in winter; she’ll need wool sweaters, and why not stitch roses onto their pockets?
I tell everybody I see. When I take my walks, I pass out frozen cups for the workers, sit with Theron while he slurps the sugar and explain to him that Isaiah told me it was a girl, that there was a curly head of hair he pointed to in a dream, and I couldn’t see the face but he’d said, Just look at her. I don’t tell him the girl would make up for the daughters who have left me. I don’t feel the need to mention that part.
Whatever issue I take with Eliza flits off after that. I sit with her every day. Her own mother works, and she isn’t much of a caretaker, but Eliza has terrible nausea in the first months and can barely get out of bed. Corn patties settle her stomach best, and I stand over the stove frying batch after batch. At first we don’t say much to each other. I read my favorite pieces of the Bible, and she doesn’t object, but she doesn’t tell me to go on either. One day, out of frustration, I lay the book down.
“You’re going to have to talk to me,” I say. “If I’m going to be sitting here, you’re going to have to at least tell me a kind word. I know you’re mad about Major, about me giving Aristide’s son that job, but if you only knew what it was like for me and my husband, for Aristide, and I couldn’t look at myself in the mirror if I d
idn’t take care of his child. I couldn’t.”
She nods. Her head is shifted to the left and I see a tear drop down the side of her face. “It’s not that,” she says. “I know why you gave him that job.”
I hesitate. “So you’ve come around then?” I ask.
She shakes her head. “I always knew why. But I’m a wife now, and my mother says I have to stand by Major. Problem is he’s taken to heeding my brother’s advice. And my brother’s heard himself called fool so much, he responds to the word on the street.”
I laugh. “Then why you being like this?” I ask.
She shakes her head, looks away. “I hate the way I am now,” she says. “Dependent. If I need to piss, you gotta know about it.” She throws her hands up. “It’s just not what I’m used to, and I don’t know if I’m going to be able to abide it.”
“Well, you know you’re going to abide it,” I say. “That’s the only thing you do know.”
She doesn’t answer, just keeps talking, looking away. “My grandmother took a year to die. Every morning we got up, the preacher said it would be the last day, but it went on like that for a full year. Got so bad, the day she actually did pass, nobody believed it. We hired our neighbor to sit with her so we could go to a sorority dinner, and we got back and the breath had left her body. My neighbor met us at the door, took one look at us, said without any pity, “She’s gone.” She blamed us, see, for leaving somebody so sick and shut-in, but we didn’t know. We didn’t know. She had hung in for so long, and for that reason, we didn’t think another night would cost a thing.”
“Sometimes it be’s like that,” I say. “That lady shouldn’t have blamed you. Not something in our power to know. Everything is in his plan,” I say. “Everything is in his plan,” I repeat.
She nods. “I only say all that to say that I was the one to sit with her. I hadn’t started teaching yet, and I was the only one home. More days than not, she had waste leaving her body from both ends, and I was the one to clean her up. I’d sit there and wish every minute of the day that the Lord would go on and take her. I never told anybody that. I cried like a baby when it happened, but sometimes I wonder if I wasn’t the reason it did.”
I pick up her hand on instinct, squeeze it. “I just told you you ain’t got that power,” I say. “Now, I just told you that.”
She shakes her head. “Sitting here now just reminds me of it is all. Those days I wanted to rush past. I’m happy about this baby but I wonder if I deserve it, after what I did.”
I keep quiet for a while. Most of the time, the most powerful part is bearing witness.
Then, “Nobody can watch someone else suffer, not someone you love. You wishing her gone, it was the right thing to do,” I say.
She doesn’t respond, just looks away, then she looks back, and what she says surprises me in a way I’m rarely surprised these days.
“I was wondering if you would deliver this baby, if you’re able,” she says. “I was going to get a doctor but I trust you more than anyone, and I thought it might be more special this way. I know you don’t do it anymore, regular, at least.”
I pause before I respond, though there’s no way I’ll say anything but yes.
“It’s like falling asleep,” I say. “Any way you could forget how?”
She shakes her head.
“That’s how it is with me and babies.”
After that, she asks me to tell her stories about Major. And I reach back in my mind’s eye for as many visions as I can hold: he’d smear his face black with berries, crates of them; he loved to tell me about his dreams in the morning—always some monster was trying to attack him, but a streak of luck would save him, whales with no teeth or lions with no heart. I massage her feet until I see her eyes drift back, and I don’t let her stand to put the dishes in the sink or to wash, and I say a prayer over her every day before I leave because it is what I wished someone had done for me. My only daughters are miles away, and I’d never stand at the bottom of their bed and watch them give over to the force of life. Not ever, but I could do it now, and it wasn’t so much that I was pretending she was one of them, it wouldn’t have been possible. My own children were a sturdy brown, as wide-hipped and broad-shouldered as I am, but it was that I brought her into the fold of my heart reserved for only them, and when I look at her now, I see one of my own all of a sudden, and my life blends into hers. It has become my responsibility to see her through.
Jericho is coming around. I dull my excitement when I am with him. I dwell on the parts of my old stories that light him up, I make his favorite foods: long spaghetti noodles with cheese, turkey necks with rice and gravy. It will be a sister, I tell him, and you’ll have to protect her. When Eliza sees how much you love her, she’ll love you all the more; you’ll smell like rose water to her.
And Major—each time I look at him, all his incarnations spring up at me at once. I see him spitting up on me at church in his white Easter outfit, choking on a fish bone, and I thought I’d lost him. Or when he handed me the baby from his first wife, looking so much like his daddy when I gave Isaiah my own children, and all of those images skip over each other and meld together into this one moment, and it is too much, I tell you it is too much.
Crying wasn’t something I brought into this free world. When I stepped foot off that plantation, I said that it wouldn’t follow me. It was one way to divide the past from the present, but if I hadn’t drawn that line for myself, I’d have let loose now not only for joy but for the fullness of life, the breadth of it, the uncanny way it has of bringing everything back around, all the heartache you experienced served to you as something unrecognizable.
My spirit is so full that when the white woman comes back, I don’t catch myself, I don’t take a moment to just listen.
She is hesitant as ever at first. The mark around her eye has healed, but it is so fresh in my memory I still see it there as she lingers by the door.
“You know by now you ought to just come in,” I say.
She is still standing by the door.
“You gotta know by now to just walk in,” I repeat, and she moves, slowly, but she moves.
“How have you been, stranger?” I ask once she is seated. “Keeping yourself busy, huh?”
She nods. “I joined a new group,” she says. “A women’s organization. You’d be proud of me. I had to force myself to speak up so they’d hear my name during introductions, but before the meeting was out, I’d signed up to be treasurer.”
Oh, well, look at God.
“That’s great, sweetie,” I say.
“Yes, I thought about you. I thought, What would Josephine do? Then I thought, Josephine sure would be proud of me. It’s not a hard position; somebody’s child could probably do it, but the lady before me got pregnant and has three little ones already, and she needed a break. Can you imagine? Four little children?” She is quiet again. “Anyway, I went to school until the eighth grade, and I followed the old lady’s system pretty well. I think they’ll be pleased with my work, hope they’ll be.”
“I’m sure they’ll be rightly pleased, Charlotte,” I say. “I’m so proud of you,” I say again.
I almost don’t say the next thing, I know better than anyone not to, but I am concerned. “And Vern?” I ask. “Things going better with him?”
“It’s good to stay busy,” she says, not answering the question but answering it too. “He’s trying. I brought him in the group too, the same one I’m in, but the men’s branch, of course, and it helps his mood to be social. He has people to talk to, ways of reordering himself. He’s not as angry when he gets home, you know? Yes, I suppose things are better.”
That’s when I say in the same lilt I’d shared it with the others that my daughter-in-law is with child, and I can’t contain myself I am so fit to burst.
I still don’t catch myself until the silence. I look over at her. Everyone else had hit me with sound immediately; I hadn’t had a moment in between my joy and their own, but here it st
alls.
“Oh,” she says. And she grabs her own stomach, looking like she is taking sick.
She doesn’t say anything for a while, just runs her dirty-nailed fingers across my table cloth back and forth and back and forth.
“Did you have to help her?” she asks finally.
I shake my head. “She’s young, healthy. They only been married a few months. I’m sorry,” I say finally, “not for my blessing, God gave that to me, and I receive it, but I’m sorry for your pain, I am. You’re in an unfortunate position, and I’m sorry for you.”
She mutters something.
“What’s that?” I can’t hear it, and the high part of my mind tells me to let it pass, it wasn’t for me, but the other part rules me sometimes. “Say that again,” I say.
“I said, ‘not sorry enough to help it.’” She is louder this time. She has grown bolder in the last few weeks, and I remember her women’s group, that she had said she was treasurer. Some people can’t handle power; if it is placed over a bruised spirit, it corrodes it; when the landing is soft and whole, it is like plopping seeds in dirt. “I almost forgot. We have a meeting at two.” She looks down, then up again. “I just wanted to stop by and let you know about me.”
“Well, I’m glad you did, Charlotte. Don’t be a stranger now,” I say, and she gives me a hug before I can object, a quick tap more than anything, and then she gets up and walks off without saying a word. Her head is up, I notice. In all the time I’ve known her, she walked with her eyes on her shoes, but this time her head is up, and I can feel her skin, the sticky heat, against me long after she is gone.
And with the feel of the skin comes the rest of it.
Josephine
1855
I HADN’T SEEN MISS SALLY MUCH SINCE WE STOPPED THE bleeding. Every time I’d have a free minute away from folding the linens or minding the younger children, Missus would add a cover sheet to my pile or point at the dust on her bureau. She was getting bigger and she either needed to be repositioned or to have her feet lifted on the hour. The whole while I waited on her she’d complain, first about the heat, then when she’d get bored of that, she’d drift over to her mother, but all of that was just a circling over a known target and that target was Tom.
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