The Revisioners

by Margaret Wilkerson Sexton

  Major can smell it too. I can tell because he pretends it’s not there.

  “Nothing but a raccoon set through that trap,” he says.

  “You know well as I do wasn’t no raccoon,” I answer him.

  We are standing side by side in the rows his daddy dug up when he was just a boy, and just as sure as I can see Major now, a man with swollen arms and a hard chest talking down to me, I can see him climbing on his daddy’s back as Isaiah bent to sprinkle the seeds.

  “Rows ain’t as neat as Theron claimed is the thing. I could see how he thought that from the distance, but when you peer down at ’em real close you can see nothing but a raccoon scurried through there, maybe a rabbit. One or the other.”

  “And if it wasn’t no rabbit. If it wasn’t no raccoon, what would it be then? What would it mean for us?”

  “Eliza ain’t got but a few more weeks to be pregnant, Mama,” he says then. He is tired of me, his voice says, and if I wasn’t his mama, he’d be tired enough to throw me out.

  “What that got to do with the cost of beans?”

  “I don’t have the energy to do it all,” he says. “She a nervous wreck, this being her first time, and her mama ain’t the nurturing type. I’m all she got. We all she got, and we got to stay calm through this, or it’s going to take us out. We can’t go borrowing trouble. You hear me?”

  “I hear you, baby,” I say.

  “All right, Mama. I love you, you hear?” He takes my hand. It is not the way Jericho would do it. When he is a man he will still cradle my face and bury himself in me. You can know these things. But I’ll take it from Major, I’ll take it even though he doesn’t stay for dinner that night, and when I ask him if I can come to help with Eliza, he says she’s fine, that the two of them will manage just fine.

  A WEEK LATER THE PIG IS DEAD. NOT THE OTHER HAMPSHIRE but a good hog nonetheless, and they have taken all her good meat.

  I walk right over to Major’s.

  “We need to apologize,” I start before I even sit down.

  “Apologize to who, Mama?”

  “My neighbor. He the one killed that pig.”

  He nods. “And what you think we should say when we apologize? We sho’ is sorry fo’ tryin’ to be equal to youz, boss. We realizin’ mo’ and mo’ every day that all we is is a bunch of rascally—.”

  “Hush up,” I cut him off.

  Louis is next to him snickering in his hands.

  “Now, don’t get smart with me, boy,” I go on. “You not too old for me to backhand slap you. You know I’m not talking about doing all that,” I go on. “I’m talking about going over there in a respectful manner. You can catch more flies with honey than vinegar, you know that. Maybe I’ll address Charlotte first; I’ve spent some time with her. I might ask her what they want for that tree. Pay it and move on. No amount would be too much if we could move on.”

  He shakes his head. “I’m tired of being the bigger person with these people,” he says. “I’m tired, Mama.” I can see the weight of his exhaustion straining his spirit, and I feel guilty for bringing him in this world to bear it.

  I put my hand on his back. “What was it your daddy used to say?” I ask. “You got to give respect to get it.”

  “They killed that good pig and you talking to me about respect.”

  Eliza walks up to comfort him, but he turns away from her, toward me.

  “I’m sorry, Mama,” he says. “I’m just tired. I’m just so, so tired. I’m tired of carrying it. I want somebody else to carry it for a minute. It never lets up. It’s like somebody’s fingers pinching me on the inside of my chest, and it won’t ease up, it won’t let me feel like a man. It won’t never let me feel like a man. That’s all I want is to go somewhere with my child, and feel whole, all the way, but it won’t let me, but you got these white people out here not good enough to shine my shoes and they get to feel like there ain’t no limit to what the world owes them.” He pauses. “Jericho looks up to me, I can feel it. He always in my shadow and it should feel good but it wears on me ’cause I know one day he gon’ look at me the way I looked at Daddy the first time I saw him for who he really was. And I can’t bear it, Mama. I swear to God I can’t bear it.”

  I nod. It is a feeling I’ve grown accustomed to. When I was a young girl I feared it, what it would do to me to grip his shoulder, to hold him back and let a white boy pass in front of him, to discipline him only for him to watch a white woman call me girl. The feeling has run its course now. It is what it has to be. There is no use pretending otherwise.

  “What do you want me to do?” I ask.

  He shrugs, his head in his hands. “I don’t know, Mama,” he says, “but I won’t go to ’em, like we the ones did something wrong. I can’t handle the thought of you doing that either. Maybe one of ’em will be man enough to come to me.”

  Eliza is holding his hand and nodding so strong up and down that I say okay. Her brother is right beside him and he doesn’t say anything, but he doesn’t have to. His words are streaming out of Major’s mouth on their own accord.

  I fix their dinner. Afterward I get up to present my banana pudding, sponge cake stacked throughout. I spoon it, and Louis only has four bowls before he leaves for his own house. It is so late I decide to just sleep on Jericho’s bed, with him on the floor beside me. Tomorrow, I have to go see about a girl midway through her pregnancy, and Link had asked me to bake her an egg custard pie. I can taste the sweet filling, firm though, the butter in the crust as I drift off. When the smoke hits me I am elsewhere, but the sting overpowers me and I rise.

  I walk out to the sitting room with a glare pushing up against my vision.

  Major is already there, standing in the open doorway. I stop where I stand, and there they are, just like Link described. White hoods stop at their neck, and sheets billow over their bodies, but where they hold their torches to the sky, their shirt sleeves are visible. It is clear why she compared them to ghosts, an army of them, but they are real live men. Major is still at the door, facing all of them and I want to run to him, to stand beside him, or behind him, to shield Jericho and Eliza who have come up on the side of me, but I am frozen, gripping the top of the hard-backed chair in front of me like it is what needs protection. Major doesn’t look back.

  “Lord, deliver me,” I say, but no one hears me.

  “You got business here with me and my family?” Major asks.

  “Lower your voice, boy.” One of the men steps out front. His torch is the longest and he aims its fiery point at Major’s chest. He has big green eyes, watering through the hood, like he’s the one afraid. There are only ten of them, I see now. It seemed like fifty but it is ten.

  “You done messed with a good white man’s property, and I’m taking you to task for it.”

  “We apologized for that. We settled with the man himself. He said not to worry about it. Why are you?”

  It is like another man has swooped inside of Major. There is laughter from the group. I want to run to my son, tell him to apologize again, whatever he does to drop that knife from inside his throat that is casting his words out so sharp, but I can’t move yet.

  “You think you can just settle things with a white man, boy? That’s what you think?”

  Major is silent.

  “I’m here to tell you you can’t. I’m here to tell you you can’t make off with a good white man’s property without paying.” The white man looks back at the ghosts behind him. I look back at them too. There is one in particular who calls my gaze. It is the shoes I notice first, the ones Charlotte’s mama said were nice. There might have been a time when they were, but they are over-polished and dusted up now.

  That group Charlotte and her husband are in is the Klan.

  The men move upon the house in a rush, and I duck, make for Eliza and Jericho. I hear the glass in the windows shattering as I hobble over. Major runs to the back of the house and comes out cradling his daddy’s shotgun in one hand, loading the shells inside it with the other
. When he gets outside, the men are already out of range, but he racks the gun, pulls its trigger, and pumps it, and I hold Jericho’s ears as the shots ring out. I scream for Major to stop; those shots don’t signal safety for me, but he keeps on until he can’t anymore, and the men don’t come back. We sit amid the glass from the busted-out windows for hours, and they don’t come back.

  Finally we make moves toward sleeping. We all end up in Jericho’s room. I give Eliza the bed and huddle on the floor next to my grandson. Major just stands in the hallway. I expect him to object when Jericho asks me to tell him a story about Wildwood, but he doesn’t even seem to hear it; I am facing his back, and it seems straighter than I have ever seen it.

  Josephine

  1855

  A FEW DAYS AFTER DADDY DREW, HE STARTED STAYING out late. There was a group of men who did this, who stole whiskey and drank it from a gray jug in one of the single men’s cabins, but Daddy was not one of them, not until now. Mama didn’t say anything but I could tell she was not sleeping because every time I woke up I caught her staring back at me, her near-black eyes unflinching.

  One day he came in the cabin all loose in his limbs. The sun wasn’t up yet, but it was rising. Mama was already lighting the fire, and she turned to him fast, and said, “What’s gotten into you?”

  “I’ve been thinking,” he said.

  “Thinking about what?”

  He paused, removing first one shoe, then the other. “Fred said that they have people in the North who are fighting for slaves to be freed. Abolitionists they’re called. He said he heard Tom talking about it with his brother when they brought that old fool slave here. They’re making progress, Tom said. Tom said it like it was a bad thing, like something he’s worried about.”

  “Progress be slow sometimes,” Mama said. Then she sighed. “You can wait all you want but I’m going on that journey,” she told him.

  “You think you’re so brave, Winnie?”

  “I am brave.”

  “You think you’re so brave but another word for brave is stupid. You don’t think things through. You don’t think through how a ten-year-old girl’s going to fare out there in the swamps for weeks with no food and no water. You don’t think about how her life’s going to change if she’s caught.”

  “Don’t talk like that. You know it’s against the rules to talk like that.”

  He grabbed her hand. “I’m just saying we got it easy now. A master that lets us call him by name, as much food as we can eat, we can come and go on the weekends, I’m not in the fields, you not either—”

  “It’s not freedom.” She paused. “You said it yourself. Tom or no Tom, he got the power to snap our necks.” Then she added even though she didn’t need to: “Not everybody is related,” and the air between them seemed to wilt.

  “I know better than anybody it’s not freedom,” Daddy said after a while. “You don’t have to tell me. But hearing about those abolitionists, I wonder if we going about it the wrong way. Putting ourselves in danger. Putting our daughter in danger. Maybe it’s best to wait. Even if I die bound to this plantation, I’m starting to think Josie’s going to get out, her children for sure will. You talk so much about the ancestors’ spirits inside us. Then won’t her reaching elsewhere be the same as us getting there ourselves?”

  Meanwhile Jupiter just wouldn’t quit. When I got home the next evening he was there, and he had been there for some time, I could see because his cup of tea was almost empty. Mama got up to refill it.

  “You’re not going to get far going with him. You know it, I know it,” he said. He hadn’t even seen me come in, but Mama said with a nod in the other direction, “Go play.” I hustled into a corner. I had dolls that Miss Sally gave me and I pretended they were talking to each other. They were saying things like, “Would you like some jam with your bread?” and “What a pretty dress you’re wearing today!” But they were thinking, Who is this man in my house? What can I do to get him out?

  “He pulled twice,” Mama said. “Spirit must want him to go if he pulled twice.”

  “Could just be a coincidence. They say he lucky.”

  “I don’t believe in coincidences. The spirits want him to go if he pulled twice.”

  Jupiter stood up, then leaned over Mama’s shoulder. “Take me with you,” he whispered like he suddenly realized somebody else was in the room.

  “And leave Domingo? You must be out your mind.”

  “I didn’t say leave Domingo. Calm down, woman; instead of talking, listen sometimes. I didn’t say leave Domingo,” he repeated. “The three of us could go.”

  “You mean four?” She jutted her head in my direction, and I grimaced.

  “Of course four,” he said. “Just didn’t count her ’cause she’s a child, that’s all.”

  “Nobody’s coming between me and my family,” Mama said.

  He was smirking now, looking her up and down like he knew what was under her wide-swinging skirt and drawn-in blouse. “You don’t trust me, do you?”

  She raised her eyebrow.

  “You don’t remember how I handled ol’ Fred. He happier for you than he is for himself. And it’s not just Fred, it’s all of them who was willing to go against you. Not just them either. I’m reaching my point of maturity. The older I get, the better I am,” he said. “I done got so good I could change the thoughts in white people heads too. You remember them diamond earrings? People asked me how I knew where they were. But I didn’t. I just changed her mind about it. Whether they were there or not, I made her believe they were. And then she found them.”

  “Why you didn’t get her to think she had already whipped you then?” I asked from where I stood across the room.

  He turned toward me and smiled, an eerie pucker of his lips, then he reached for the door handle and looked back toward my mama.

  “You think on that. You imagine ol’ Domingo in front of a slave catcher and you think about him bumbling and carrying on. Then you imagine me.”

  When he was gone, Mama walked over and tried to hug me, but I pushed her away. That night, when Miss Sally invited me to stay the night I didn’t tell her Mama wanted to sleep with me like normal. I said okay, and I sprawled out on the floor beneath the foot of her bed like I imagined sisters would.

  “Josephine?” she asked. “Could you come up here with me just for tonight? It’s awful cold, and I hate sleeping alone.”

  I climbed in. It was almost as good as sleeping next to Mama, and I thought about her sliding into the empty pallet, Daddy still observing Tom’s late dinner. She would be missing me, that was for certain, and it filled me up almost to the point of shame.

  Miss Sally squeezed me, and I squeezed her back.

  “Can I tell you something?” she asked.

  I nodded. She moved her hand under her pillow and pulled something out. It was the coin.

  “I sleep with it every night. For safety.”

  I grinned. “That’s so nice,” I said. “I sleep with mine too. I thought it was just me.”

  “I need all the protection I can get,” she laughed. Then she quieted and said, “Also it reminds me of us and how we’re like sisters and I notice I haven’t had a bad dream once since I started.” She paused. “Mama says you’re the devil. Mama says you and your mama are that way, that it ain’t natural for a human to have so much power. She told me to stay away from you.” She whispered the next part. “But I won’t, I can’t and I won’t.”

  “Thank you, Miss Sally, that’s real nice,” I said. But I was scared all of a sudden knowing I was breaking a rule I didn’t even know existed.

  “But what do you want?” she asked.

  “What do I want from what?”

  “You always grant my wishes with your mind magic, but what do you want for yourself?”

  I shrugged. “I’m happy enough,” I said because I was, and also because I remembered what Mama said, that for everything a white person gave you they were going to take five things from you in return, and right no
w Miss Sally had given me peace when I was angry, security when I was afraid, and I wondered how she would get those things back. They were inside of me. Could she reach into my heart and grab them?

  “You can tell me,” she said. “Your most secret wish.”

  I shook my head.

  “Is it a boy?” she asked.

  I shook my head again, giggled some.

  “Is it more candy? Is it dresses?”

  I shook my head still. “We want to be free,” I said, regretting it as soon as it was out, but she only laughed.

  “Oh, Josephine, are you serious?” she asked. “You mustn’t say such things. You’re lucky you said it to me and not someone else; they might not understand your humor”—she paused—“or how naïve you can be.”

  I nodded. “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “It’s okay, but I just want you to promise to never repeat that again.”

  I nodded. “I promise.”

  “Besides, what would I do if you left me, Josephine? I wouldn’t have a life fit to live if you weren’t here.”

  I nodded again. I was angry that she laughed at me, but I was relieved too. I’d be forlorn without her and it was nice that she felt the same way. I thought of Mama. She was right and she was also wrong.

  THE MONDAY OF THE WEEK WE PLANNED TO LEAVE Wildwood, Mama found me in the kitchen cleaning up after Miss Sally’s breakfast and dragged me out to an oak tree just beyond the last rows of cane.

  “I talked to your daddy yesterday while you were out,” she said.

  “Um-hmm.”

  “We thought a lot about it,” she hesitated, “and we agree that we have a better chance if Jupiter comes with us.”

  “That sneak,” I shouted.

  “Shh.” She gripped my wrist. People were looking over.

  “It’s just for that reason,” she whispered. “Imagine if we get caught on the way. Jupiter can make a white man think we got a pass. Think we supposed to be somewhere we not. Imagine how much power that is.”

  I shook my head.

  “Daddy never would have agreed to that,” I said. “Jupiter probably got in his head too, same way he got in everybody else’s. You’re not afraid he’s going to get in yours, Mama?”