Some of them said it wasn’t worth it; some of them said they were happy where they were; one said his work started and ended here, that this was the part that called him. It wouldn’t work as well for us if they weren’t here, another one echoed. One day, maybe, they’d leave, but for now, they had to see people like us through.
The women knew the details about the steamboat, that it left New Orleans just when the sun was coming up, that we’d sneak on board, that we’d hide in the cargo for as many nights as it took to reach Cincinnati. I had gotten used to the camp though, even to the men with guns. More than that, I didn’t want to give up sleeping between my mama and daddy. I didn’t dare say it but I had even imagined staying there forever, and when I got older, sneaking off with Jupiter to pilfer some nights. I could say hi to Miss Sally. She was a heavy sleeper and she wouldn’t know me from a dream.
THE GOODBYES THE NEXT NIGHT WERE HARD AND FAST. The women passed us okra and greens, corn bread and fish and the men handed Jupiter a gun and my daddy a hatchet. It was a thirty-mile walk to the boat. The Mississippi River coursed by beside us, hemmed in by the levee we’d snuck across so many nights. Oaks and orange trees stood on the other side, plantations raised up behind them, distinct from Wildwood, but I could trace their outlines by what I knew. There would be the cabins, there would be the sugar mill, there would be the kitchen, there would be the fields, there would be the big house lording above it all. Most of the walk was flat land, but there were ditches too. When there weren’t wooden bridges to cross them, Mama and the men waded through water to their waists, and Daddy carried me on his shoulders.
We had been walking for most of the night before we stopped for water. I was kneeling beside the river when I heard a man’s voice behind us.
I didn’t need to turn around to know he was white.
“Where do you think you’re going?” he asked.
We didn’t move or answer.
“Where do you think you’re going?” he asked again.
This time, Jupiter turned and we all turned with him.
I could see the man startle when he saw Jupiter’s face.
“We’re just going for a walk,” Jupiter said. “Looking for a man to buy a gun from. You know anybody?”
My daddy’s grip on my hand tightened. I could feel him reach beneath his coat for his hatchet. My mother stood right behind me but I couldn’t feel her breathing. I had stopped breathing myself in that small moment. I didn’t understand why Jupiter would be so stupid. But the white man didn’t flinch.
“No, sir,” he said. “But the closer you get to New Orleans, the more likely you’ll be to find what you’re looking for.”
“That’s what we were thinking,” Jupiter said. “Well, we might as well be on our way then.”
“You have a good day, sir, you hear?” the white man said, and Jupiter lifted his hat, and bid him good day too.
When the man was out of sight, Daddy and Mama looked at each other in disbelief. Jupiter nodded, patting them on the backs. “I told you so,” he said more than once.
“You’re right, you did,” Daddy said back. “But if it hadn’t worked—” he started.
“But it did,” Jupiter said.
“It did,” Mama repeated.
And we started to walk again, faster this time, spurred on by the threat behind us, though it had passed.
By sunup we could glimpse the masts of the ships in the distance but we’d need another night to reach the dock so we made a camp where we stood. We ate vegetables the women had yanked out of the ground for my mother. There were raccoons and possums but Daddy said we shouldn’t start a fire. My daddy and Jupiter sat up talking. Mama carried stones with her and she’d shake them in her hands and toss them on the dirt, frown, scoop them up, and toss them down again. She did that three times before she clasped her hands together and closed her eyes. I couldn’t hear her prayer, only that the words ran together in a frightened plea.
Josephine
1924
THE BELL RINGS FOR ELIZA THAT MORNING, AND I CAN hear her before I reach her house. I know that scream from anywhere, and it calls up my own experience three times over with that winding ache that felt like it would wrench my own life from me. I quicken my pace. There is no time to think once I get there. I am boiling water and moving her between positions and it is the only peace I have had since that first crop was rooted out. Cyrile is there but she doesn’t know what to do and she heeds me when I tell her to pile the quilts over the mattress to save the bed and boil the shoestrings to tie the cord and make a salve from cow tallow, to help Eliza to her knees. When the baby is born, and I have placed her in her mother’s arms, Cyrile reaches for me, and I hold her while she sobs.
THEY LET JERICHO NAME HIS SISTER.
“Lucille,” he says.
“That’s some pretty, Jericho,” I say.
“Where’d you get it?” Major asks.
“Girl from my school.”
Major and I look at each other and laugh.
“You gone name my daughter after some girl you got a crush on at school, Jericho James?”
He shrugs.
“It’s pretty,” Eliza says. The little girl is the same coloring as her mama, but looks like Major. Looks like Isaiah, and I know he’s watching.
“Lucille Josephine. Some pretty.”
I ask them if they want me to go home. “No harm in it,” I say, if they want to start out as a family, but they reassure me they want me there, so I set to work: stewing the gizzards, tying the baby’s cord, stitching Eliza, wrapping her tight, changing the pads, washing the quilts. The baby is up every two hours, so I take her in the mornings. New spirits shouldn’t leave their own home for six weeks, but I figure I can make an exception for my farm, so I walk her to the fields her grandfather laid out, point out the potatoes, the tomatoes, the corn.
“You look at it from this angle and life is all the way good, baby girl,” I tell her. “You look at it from this angle and you can have anything your little heart can dream up. Anything,” I repeat, and the lie trips in my throat, but I repeat it anyway because maybe for her it will be true. Doesn’t make it any less true because I said it.
And like life is responding to me, saying, yes, he can make a new thing, one morning I am laundering at my own house and there’s a knock on the door. It is Link. A man stands next to her, and it takes me a full minute to recognize that it is her son, Henry. He is twenty pounds lighter, his cheeks sink in at their tops, and he doesn’t look at me full on in the face, but it is him. I wrap my arms around him and hold him to me for a long time.
BACK AT MAJOR’S, ELIZA’S MILK STILL ISN’T IN, SO I ASK Jericho to pull fennel from my fields.
“He’s doing his homework; I’ll go,” Major says. He is easier on the boy lately. Since the baby, Jericho has regressed, wanting to sleep at the bottom of my bed, throwing fits over tiny slights, but Major has overlooked it all, and I wonder if it is on account of how he was allowed to speak his mind to white folks without the world splitting; if he is starting to think there’s room for his son to have a mind too.
Eliza takes a nap after Major leaves, and when she wakes up he’s still not back.
I feed them dinner—no use waiting; the girl has to eat so the baby can eat—and I clear the plates, but still no Major. I am beginning to get nervous, so I go to Link’s. Henry is sitting in the living room with her, and she is buoyed up by his new presence.
“Go and stay with Eliza and the baby,” she tells me. “I’ll get Theron.” Another hour passes, though, and they are still gone.
Eliza is fit to be tied now, up pacing the room though I told her to sit down so her stitches won’t burst.
Jericho has gone to sleep and I am glad. When he wakes up his daddy will be back, and he won’t have known there was reason to worry. I tell Eliza to do the same.
“The baby is sleeping, you sleep. When you get up, he’ll be back,” I say.
She shakes her head. “I just don’t know
where else he would go.”
“Probably out looking for something nice for you, to surprise you,” I say.
“At this hour?” She looks up at me and I don’t have the presence of mind to respond. I am frazzled myself.
Finally I hear Link trudge up the stairs.
“Nothing,” she says, shaking her head. “Theron is still out there. Maybe he just went for a walk.”
“Probably,” I say, though none of us believe it now. I am thinking about the way he spoke to that hooded man who walked to the front, the gunshots blazing. The anticipation of new life, the joy of it, might have stunned me. There is no white man that would abide that. How could I have imagined otherwise? Link stands.
“I’m going to go back to my house,” she says. “Theron is still out there. He’ll turn up.”
I nod.
“Try to get some sleep,” she says, but it is not a real suggestion. Link has children. She knows I’ll be sitting up here as long as it takes.
I grip the arm of the porch chair while I wait.
Link isn’t gone more than a minute when I hear her scream. I stand up and Theron is on the other side of the gate.
“We found him on the farm,” I hear him tell her. Then he looks up and sees me. “Go back inside,” he says. He is walking toward me. Then he is on me, trying to carry me back in, but I push past him. I walk as fast as my old legs can carry me. I can hear Link and Theron behind me. Though I know, I am walking just in case. Just in case Major is at the farm plowing the fields or planting the seeds or uprooting the potatoes or simply observing the land as I have done so many times, in all its might.
As I walk, I am desperate for each moment before I reach Major to stay with me, to wrap me up inside it, to grip me beyond release. But I hurry too. I can’t reach him fast enough. I pass the workers’ log houses, the cane mill and the cotton gin, my oak tree and my hog pen. I am nearing the garden when I see him.
It takes me some time to understand it is him: his pants are soiled, his head swings sideways, the left side of his face is crushed, his eyes are wild, this baby that I carried inside me, and that I held to my breast, and I can see his most vulnerable moments splayed in front of me. The first time he fell on his head, he looked up at me and cried, the open-faced shock of a boy just learning about disappointment, just learning about hurt, and he had thought that I would keep him from it. And there was that expression again the first time I told him not to look a white man in the eye, but I failed him because I didn’t tell him enough, I didn’t tell him in a way that would stick to his bones, I didn’t repeat it, I didn’t. Whatever I didn’t do left a hole inside him that needed to be plugged, and this is what it came to, and the cry that leaves my soul is one that will never be quieted, and the agony of it fills me and will never be emptied.
Link and Theron are upon me, trying to lift me from Isaiah’s crops. It is the crops’ fault too I think, the fault of this farm, and I rip them out one by one, every single row I can touch, and when I am too tired to keep ripping, I collapse again, and I know Theron and Link are there though I can’t feel a thing.
The bell rings, for me this time, for my boy, and I remember Jericho. I stand up and walk. He must never see this. Just the chance that he might step outside and follow his instinct to this spot moves me forward. When I reach the house, Eliza is at the door with the baby, waiting for something good, and I want to be able to give it to her, but just the sight of me wrecks her. She falls down in the doorway, and Link goes for Lucille before she drops. Jericho is by the door, and I hurry over to him, I take him in my arms. I start to tell him what has happened, but he refuses me, shakes his head, rips himself from my arms, covers his ears.
Link walks up to me, the baby in her arms.
“We’re going to get through this,” she says. But we won’t. Not me, not now. I wonder about that woman though, the one with the long gray hair who has a child. I try her, back inside myself. She is there; so is her daughter; a boy is with them too. She is sitting with them all, and maybe they are waiting for me.
Josephine
1855
WHATEVER DANGER MAMA HAD GLIMPSED IN THE stones that morning seemed to have passed by night. She was in a good mood, joking about the white man we’d encountered, covering our path to the harbor with admonitions.
“You can make a tea out of sassafras or hen feathers, Josie. Castor oil for bowel movements. Animal fat for a salve. Those stones I toss, nothing special about them. Pick them off the ground and smooth them, burn sage and say a prayer, make them holy. Anything you can touch, you can make holy.”
When she finished, we went over our plan. Jupiter still carried the clothes he’d stolen from the plantation, and when we reached the city, we were to wash ourselves in the river and change into them, walk through the central square like the free people we were born to be, like the free people we were now. There was a man who checked tickets who would look the other way while we hid behind the cotton bales on the boat’s deck. He’d pass us food throughout the journey and he’d knock three times when it was safe to disembark.
“You’re going to be afraid, but whatever you do, don’t show it,” Jupiter said. “Imagine what it would be like to walk through that square on free legs; fix your eyes to the heavens and walk forward, one step at a time, but also like you’re already there, like you already made it and you’re looking back, showing somebody the route you took to get there.”
We stopped to eat the rest of the vegetables and corn patties, raw fish Jupiter had caught that we ripped apart in chunks.
“We’re almost there,” my daddy said while he ate. He was getting nervous, I could see that in the way his eyes wouldn’t settle on mine, and he kept looking toward the water in disbelief, like any minute he might glance up and realize he had imagined the whole journey.
“We’re not almost there. We are there. We’re not going there. We arrived. I told you that.” Jupiter spit out a bone behind him.
Daddy nodded. “You’re right, you’re right,” he said. “Let me ask you something. How’d you get that white man to believe you, not just that, to accept what you said?”
“Domingo,” Jupiter started.
Mama’s eyes drifted over toward him while he spoke.
“People carry messages on their faces. They speak their intentions toward you in that way. It’s how you know if a woman means you harm or good, if she’s going to let you have her; it’s how you know how much cane is going to be enough for the day without the overseer saying one word; it’s how we survive. I looked at that man this morning and I knew I could bend him; he had a story inside him that made it easy for me to make him see the world through my eyes.” Jupiter paused. “But not every white man is like that. You should know. If we get caught again, and I don’t start talking, run. That means there’s nothing I can do.” He looked away toward the river. “That means our power is going to come from running.”
AFTER WE ATE, WE COVERED ANOTHER MILE. WE COULD see the Cabildo and the cathedral’s three steeples. The women had warned us we would need to pass them to reach the dock. The square won’t be busy at night, they’d said, but come morning, you’ll find open brothels and bars, slave markets. You’ll want to pick the exact moment so you’re not tarrying too long in the light, but you don’t want to miss that boat when it leaves either.
Now it was time to change clothes.
We were covered in mud, our arms and legs cut from tree branches. The sun wasn’t quite up but it was rising. If we walked to the dock now, we’d have to wait in the open, hope we blended in with the firemen and deckhands. If we stayed here, we’d risk being found lurking.
“Not yet,” Jupiter said. “My spirit is telling me, not yet.”
Mama pulled me to her, sat me in her lap. She kissed me more than once, all over my face, and she rubbed my back up and down like she was trying to push something inside me I might absorb.
Jupiter looked at her with an odd expression on his face, like he was seeing something for th
e first time.
“That’s enough of that,” he said, and he pulled me off of her.
That was when we heard the dogs’ yelps. I looked up and saw in the distance two men on horseback followed by a band of hounds. Jupiter yanked me up by my neckline. Before I knew what had happened, we were running, Mommy and Daddy behind me, the men behind them. The dogs’ growls grew closer. There was a great gulf growing between me and Jupiter and Mama and Daddy. I wanted to tell him to wait for them. I wanted to tell him there wasn’t anywhere worth going if they wouldn’t be there beside me, but at every step, I felt the tap of his knee against my chest, and I wrapped my arms around his neck, slick with sweat. I alternated between looking ahead at the ships and my mama and daddy behind me, struggling to keep up. I had just turned back when a rope swung out and caught Daddy. I saw his leg buckle under him. Mama fell on top of him and moaned. Jupiter looked back, raised his left arm, and fired three shots into the air, then he lifted me higher, flying more than walking, sliding the gun into his pocket. I rammed my small fists into his chest, then I reached my hands out to my mama, cried for her too, but she stayed put beside Daddy.
“Go,” I heard her scream. “Go on now.”
“Those the slaves belong to Tom Dufrene,” one of the catchers said.
“Go on now,” my mother repeated, and I thought I heard her laugh.
Ava
2017
I LEAVE MARTHA’S FOR GOOD, AND I HEAD STRAIGHT FOR my mother’s. I’m inside, rehashing my escape, when her phone rings. I can hear from her side of the conversation that it’s Hazel.
“How far apart are they? Well, what’s wrong with his car? All right, all right, I’ll be there in an hour. Let me just get myself together.” And then before she hangs up, “You got this, girl, okay? You got this.”
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