The Revisioners

by Margaret Wilkerson Sexton

  “No, I was just on my way back.” Charlotte waves her hand behind her to keep her friend from tracking forward, but the movement only catches the other woman’s attention and draws her out.

  “You sure, Charlotte? You’ve been gone a mighty long time, and with a room full of guests. Margaret was looking for the plates and couldn’t find them. I tried to search your cabinets but they are full of dust. Don’t you have a girl? If not, I have a recommendation.” She reaches the parlor and sees my face. “Oh.” She steps back. “Is this one bothering you, Charlotte?” she asks.

  “No, no.” Charlotte pushes the door back and I barely move my foot in time. I hear her through the wood. “She was just begging is all.”

  “Those people. Well that’s what our work is all about,” her friend says, and then their voices trail off. I turn around and look back over the fields that Isaiah mastered. Normally I feel majestic beholding it all, but today it is like it belongs to someone else, and I am on Wildwood again standing beyond the missus’ table, waiting for Miss Sally to finish eating so I can devour her scraps.

  THE BIG DAY IS GROWING CLOSER SO I START TO SLEEP AT Major’s house. He has to help Eliza put her shoes on these days. She takes all her meals in the bed, and she’s dropped so when the baby kicks she has to call for a bucket. Since the night those boys busted up their windows, she and Major are getting along better than ever.

  “Can I rub your feet, sweetie?” he’ll ask.

  And she’ll reply, all “Thank you so much, my king.”

  She is proud of him is the thing and I see how that fattens him up on the inside. He is walking around cracking jokes and singing, and I wonder if Eliza’s brother wasn’t right. The men haven’t been back. They had their say and Major had his, and it was harmless in the long run, but it has meant so much to Major to feel like a man.

  When I do go back home for fresh clothes, I make sure it is light out. It is Klan country now and I don’t want to be caught out after dark.

  I pack some blouses for myself. I’d been wearing Eliza’s pregnancy skirts, taking out the waistlines on her regular pants just as much for myself as for her. I am in the middle of folding my panties when I hear the knock. I assume it is Theron and open the door, but no. It is Charlotte staring back at me.

  She is all marked, much worse than the first time, around both eyes and her mouth. There are rings of bruises around her neck. I gasp and, when my hand leaves the frame of the door, she walks in.

  “I tried to tell him to stop, that night,” she says. “I wanted to tell you that when you came over, but the other ladies were there. That night you came, I brought it up again, after all the ladies left, and he did this.” She gestures over her body. “Told me to mind my own business. I’m so sorry about it, all of it. I told him to stop but he beat me for it, beat me worse than he ever has done. I hadn’t told him but I was pregnant that time.”

  “Still?” I ask.

  She shakes her head. “I lost it that night. Maybe I was going to lose it anyway.” She looks away at the window.

  “I’m sorry about that,” I say. “Nobody deserves that.”

  There is silence then. I can tell she expects more from me, applause maybe for what she has given up, taken on my behalf.

  “Well, I just came to apologize. I know you don’t think much of me now, but I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t explain it to you. I’m better than Vern, I’m better than what he did, and I just wanted to make sure I told you that.”

  She turns to walk away and I almost let her go, but there is a feeling in my chest like the urge to bear down and push, and it is impossible to let it pass.

  “That group you joined, that was the Klan, huh?” I ask.

  She turns back, nods slowly.

  She starts to say more, and I hold up my hand. I walk to the door and hold it open for her. “You ought to leave him,” I say.

  And she looks down at her shoes again and she walks out.

  I start out for the tree where I pray, and the reasons I had been before stretch themselves out before me like a bridge leading me to the exact spot where the grass stopped growing the year my daughter left. Sometimes I would come to just sit and as soon as I’d shut my eyes, it would feel like a plug was stretching from the crown of my head to the great world beyond. Angels would drift over me laughing in my ear. But that wasn’t all. There were the times I’d rush over heaving, and I’d swing and I’d punch and I’d scream it all out, all the indignities of being born black and a woman, and my cries would be met with pure silence, but my walk back would feel like floating on the top sheen of a river; my chest would feel like an empty channel. Now I don’t know what will come. I close my eyes, and the woman meets me right where I am. The one I see from time to time in my visions, and she is sitting across from me at a great table, a table that stretches near the length of the room. I look all around me and don’t recognize a thing, not the wood masks on the wall or the crystal vase almost blocking my view. The woman is beyond my imagination with her nails and teeth glistening and her hair in long gray knots, wrapped at the top with a scarf. She smiles at me.

  “I’ve been waiting on you to come, and show yourself to me,” she says.

  “Who are you?” I ask her.

  “Who are you?” she asks, almost like an echo, and I look up at her then because of the charm of her words, like a smooth rock being cradled all around in someone’s hands, and she catches me and smiles again. “I am you, and you are me, so whoever you are, that’s who I am too.” And she laughs for a long stretch of time. “I’ve been waiting for you,” she says again.

  I look around some more. The room, everything in it, is so polished. So new. There are photographs on every surface and rugs that snap your attention in oranges and golds. There’s a large square in the center of the room with moving pictures of people flashing across it. Reminds me of the shows people talked about in New Orleans, but in her own home. I want to touch it, but I still have the manners my mother molded into me.

  “You been waiting on me?” I ask.

  She nods again. “Every day. I’ve been watching you too. Seeing what you’re up to. You were a slave, weren’t you?”

  I raise my head. “More like they were enslavers, girl. We would have done anything to change things,” I say. “But that was just the way they were. Even still, my parents risked their lives. And nothing was the same after that.”

  As I speak, it is hard to ignore her clothes. Eliza couldn’t even imagine the silk, the way the shirt accentuates the breasts just so, and the sharp cut of the skirt. And she says she’s me. All this time, Mama was right.

  “I’m proud of you,” I say.

  She starts to smile but then her mouth closes up, her right eye waters. “Of me?” she asks. “Are you serious?”

  She stands, walks over to me; the closer she comes, the more I can smell her, the waft rising in my nostrils with every step. I don’t know if it’s flowers or hot vanilla; it is as fancy as Missus’ rose water was, but it smells good.

  I push my chair toward her. She holds her hands out to me, and I accept them.

  “I couldn’t be more proud of you,” she says. “We couldn’t repay it. We just couldn’t repay it all.”

  She reaches out to hug me but a voice juts in from beyond our table. I can’t see who it belongs to, but I hear it call to her, “Gladys.” She looks back, and I open my eyes.

  Josephine

  1855

  I DRIFTED OFF TO SLEEP, AND WHEN I WOKE, JUPITER was yelling to get out of the carriage. We stood at the edge of marshes and reeds that reached my shoulders. Daddy bent down to lift me, and we waded through the swamps for some time. Along the way, Jupiter slapped the water with sticks to ward off moccasin snakes and alligators, and Mama prayed under her breath. When we reached a patch of dry land, we climbed on top of it and felt the ground beneath us crackle, interwoven palm reeds and leaves. Four men leapt from nowhere we could see. They wore tattered cotton pants and shirts, and hats and coats
made from raccoon skins. They each held a gun to Jupiter’s chest.

  “The shining man sent us,” Jupiter said, and the men nodded and grunted, then dropped their guns to their sides, and motioned for us to follow. We hadn’t gone far before we came upon a row of huts lifted on stilts.

  “Where are they taking us?” my mama asked, and Daddy shushed her. We climbed up a ladder and followed the men to the cabin farthest off. The door was open, and newspapers sealed the walls, with blankets covering pallets of grass. There was a fire going, and we drifted toward the heat. A man a smooth shade of brown with straight gray hair to his shoulders sat with his legs folded. There was no question he was the shining one, not only because his face gleamed like someone had just slathered it in lard but because of the way the other men shifted around him, bowing when they walked in, and as fierce as they had seemed to us, their voices here lowered and softened. When the shining man saw Jupiter, he sang a tune I’d heard before.

  Ma lo we l’okun mo

  It took me some time to recognize the source but then it came to me. It was that same song Jupiter sang when he saw Mama. Jupiter and my mama looked at each other, and when the shining man finished, they sang a different verse right back at him.

  O gbe won lo

  Mama had dressed me in everything I owned but I was wet from the walk over, and I stood there shivering. The shining man directed my mother to cover me and he passed me a tin cup of water. I drank while they spoke. I was more tired than I had ever been before and while I slept, scraps of their conversation wove together like the branches that formed the walls around me.

  They hadn’t expected a child, the shining man said.

  They didn’t have children here, on account of what they were made to do.

  “We’re not staying long,” my mother said, but she was shushed again, this time by Jupiter.

  “She’s not like a normal child,” he said. “She’s quicker than most adults. She can mind herself. She can work.”

  “We don’t allow children here,” the shining man repeated, as if they hadn’t even spoken.

  My mother started to cry.

  “Just for a few days, then,” my daddy said. “Just a few days and we’ll be on our way.”

  The shining man seemed to consider that for a minute, then he nodded and said we could sleep in the cabin next to his. Daddy lifted me again and carried me over to it. There were two mats inside, and a pail of water, but no one drank from it. Jupiter collapsed onto one of the mats, and my parents did the same on another. I slept between them and as scared as I knew I should be, I felt safe.

  THERE WAS NO BELL TO WAKE US BUT WE WOKE AT DAWN just the same. Outside, some men were frying rabbit over a fire and they set chunks of meat on a tin plate for us. Jupiter devoured his but my daddy only had a bite. He gave the rest to my mother and me. It was tough, and as hungry as I was, I had to chew each bite so long I grew tired of eating.

  After that, we all went to work. The women tended their gardens of corn and squash, and the men ventured into the woods to cut trees or to hunt. I helped my mother spread seeds and rip weeds out, but there were twenty women there, and there was only so much to do. After lunch, we all gathered again in a circle. The prayers started out just like they had at Wildwood, gratitude for free air to breathe, a soft place to lay our heads in the night. And then Mama started chanting a song I hadn’t heard before, the men and the women surrounding her joining in:

  No more peck o’ corn for me

  No more peck o’ corn for me

  No more peck o’ corn for me

  Many thousand go

  They lifted their voices and clapped their hands. Some stomped their feet and swung in a circle. There were drums and rattles here, and people took turns playing and shaking them, their mouths to the sky.

  No more mistress’ call for me

  No more mistress’ call for me

  No more mistress’ call for me

  Many thousand go

  When it was over, I was able to walk around the camp. It was true that there were no other children. Mostly the men clung to one side, and the women clung to the other, but there was separation outside of that too. Jupiter traveled with the men who met us with guns and Daddy sat in silence with the shining man. I followed Jupiter. There were many trees in my path, mostly oak and yellow pine. Small cattle abounded, dashing away from me in wild spurts as I approached. I came to a creek a few yards from our cabin, where Jupiter and his crew of men sat fishing. I stayed far enough back that they couldn’t smell me or hear me breathing. They didn’t say much at first, just watched for the top of the water to ripple but after a while they started sharing stories about where they had come from, where they hoped to go.

  At first he thought he’d run alone, to Ohio, then Canada, Jupiter said. He knew people who had done it. No, they hadn’t gotten word to him, but he could feel in his spirit that they had reached the North. They were that close to him, and he had planned it out so that he would do the same. Then he met this woman.

  The other men grunted.

  Not like that, he said. He wouldn’t risk his life for that. It was more like she was his home, what it would feel like if he had ever known it, a far-off memory of what it could have been. And he had a responsibility to help her. If not her, her child.

  It soothed me to hear him talk like that, but the men weren’t impressed.

  That sounded nice, they said. Real nice, they repeated. But every week someone went back to the plantation for supplies. The thing was, when new people came, they took priority. Which one was it going to be? I expected Jupiter to offer up my daddy, that was the kind of man I had known him to be, but he said he would go. He smiled real big when he said it, his crazy, wide-eyed, out-of-his-mind smile. And the men patted him on the back and passed him something dark to drink.

  Later, after supper, my mother walked up behind him and slapped him on the arm. She took off toward the creek and he followed. I wasn’t too far behind them.

  “Don’t be stupid,” I heard her say when I neared her. “We just left the place and you going back.”

  “It’s different now, though. It’s my own agency. I’m going back as a free man.”

  “You ain’t free yet, fool. They find you, you be right back on that plantation, but this time with one less ear or leg.”

  He laughed like he did, head back and full-bodied. “You forget all your Revisioner talk now, huh? What you look like, wondering what’s going to become of me. Shouldn’t you be envisioning me walking back, not even running because there’s nobody on my tail? Shouldn’t you be envisioning my arms full of meat, clothes, guns?”

  My mama just shook her head.

  “Just let me do my work, woman,” he said.

  “Yeah, you do your work, all right,” she said, “but I’m telling you, whether you back or not, in two days, we leaving for that steamboat.”

  Daddy walked up then, smiling. He had had some of the dark drink himself.

  “What y’all arguing about?” he asked, pulling Mama to him. “Some people can’t even enjoy the fruit of their prayers.” He kissed her on the mouth.

  “Not yet,” she said. “Soon though.” She slid up to Daddy but she looked back at Jupiter with hate in the corner of her eyes. Or maybe it was fear.

  He was gone when I woke up the next morning. We didn’t do anything different on account of it. My mother picked weeds from okra and talked to the other ladies about the steamboat leaving for the North on the Mississippi. At night, the men sat around the fire and sharpened their knives and axes and hatchets and built their guns, then took them apart and built them again. They said if the man didn’t come back, we could expect the whites to come for us tomorrow. And they agreed they’d spend the night on the path we crossed upon arriving, and wait.

  Nobody mentioned Jupiter’s name, and I hadn’t liked him, but it didn’t feel right, that if he went, these people wouldn’t have been touched by him. My mama though was wringing her hands out like they were rags.
She was pacing, and my daddy walked up behind her and told her to calm down, woman, and then the second time, he said, “You making us all nervous over here, calm down.” But it didn’t make a difference, and by the time I settled in for bed, I assumed Jupiter was gone.

  Sometime after I went to sleep but before the sun rose, I heard a gunshot. I sat straight up and Mama let out a long bending wail. We hurried outside the cabin, my daddy holding Mama up, and there Jupiter was, standing right in front of us, the pigeon on his shoulder. He was laughing with the men, carrying even more guns, a chicken, shirts, some wool pants, and four pairs of leather boots. My mother didn’t approach him, she just stood right next to me shaking her head and smiling. We went back inside to bed, but my father didn’t come back to sleep with us. He stood by the door until I fell asleep and when Mama and I woke, he was still there, standing.

  Mama looked up at him and sighed.

  She got up and took out the bowl and the wooden spoon the other women had given us and she cracked three eggs and began to whip them. Like he had asked a question, she spoke.

  “It’s not like that.” She dragged more than walked to a small barrel and began sifting corn flour for bread. “He’s like a brother,” she went on. “You never had a brother, so you don’t know. When I talk to him I feel like I’m in my mama’s arms. I can barely remember it. I couldn’t pick out her face in a crowd, but I remember the feeling I’d have, and it is pure.”

  Daddy didn’t say anything. He moved in close to her and watched her fry bread over the skillet fire. Several times he’d open his mouth but then he’d close it again and when the bread was ready he ate every bite.

  We fell into a routine: gardening, cleaning, bathing, cooking, sitting with the men while they described their wives, the women they wanted to be their wives. During certain parts, Mama would lean over to me and cover my ears with her hard, peeling hands. Jupiter and my mama and daddy would talk about freedom, how it would taste, look, and sound, and that’s when the rest of the group would go quiet. Daddy asked them if they wanted to join us, and they shook their heads.