Grace

by Natashia Deon

Charles shoulda been all them.

  But he wasn’t.

  When I first knew Charles, I never thought he’d be the kind of man who woulda made a good daddy. He never seemed like he needed nobody, especially a child. And his body never looked like it could care for one, neither. His hands too big to care for little baby thangs, his face too beastly to call a comfort, his arms too strong to hold something gentle. I’d reckon he’d crush her reaching for sugar. And he was alone when I first knew him. Alone is how he liked it. Safe. Never having to wonder what it would be to give hisself to somebody completely.

  But I was wrong.

  Wrong, ’cause he chose my baby, Josephine. Wrong, ’cause he once tried to choose me.

  I wish he woulda smelled sweet to me like a man looking for love or seemed soft like a man who could love me silly and forgive me for the thangs he didn’t know about me. I wish I woulda felt his sun on my cheeks, breathed in his cool air and noticed the difference, like stepping from the cool shade of the trees to the hot sun directly. I wish he woulda scorched goose bumps on my arms so I woulda thought of him regular.

  But he was just Charles. Another man, not a miracle.

  Momma used to say that when you meet the one God sent you, you’d recognize him at once ’cause we all got souls trapped in our bodies and our souls got memories of a better life before this one; memories that come to us in our dreams, even when we awake.

  I didn’t remember Charles that way. I mighta loved him if I did. The way Josey did.

  She saw through the deep folds and scars on his bald head from when he was set on fire. She saw through the wash of skin on his burned face—healed slick. His nose was flattened to a valley. And still, she managed to love the man I shoulda. A man that became like a mother to her. He’d shepherd his flock of one away from all the things that might hurt her.

  For him, couldn’t nobody care for her the right way, couldn’t nobody do it as good as he could: couldn’t feed her right, couldn’t hold her right, couldn’t watch her close enough.

  Everyone was to blame if she caught cold, so up until she was three years old, he wrapped her up at night hisself and worked hard in the day to get back before them gossiping women let her fall in the stream. And when he labored, he never looked no one in the eye, never gave nobody half a reason to whip him. Never spoke.

  By the time Josey was five, everybody could see that his love and Josey were the same thing. The pair of ’em was as wrong as a dog nursing a kitten. And if he knew it, he never said and everybody else was scared to tell him. So at seven years old, when Josey asked him if he was her momma, Charles said, “Love is just love.”

  They would talk like that. Honest-like. As if the world had no boundaries and the lush green of East Tallassee, Alabama, was all there was to it. It was the place that became home. The place that became home to me, too. Like a sister to me, Tallassee is—the dirt, the trees, the river, the hillsides. For Charles and Josey, it’s home, where the real world disappears beneath forests of perfectly placed vines. They flow through these woods like silken hair, running over treetops as if they were shoulders and along the ground where pink flowers sprout and get tucked behind her ear. Pretty.

  Charles and Josey would walk along her creek—Stone Creek—far enough away from cotton fields and mills, hands carrying whips. They could dream of a future here, even though people say negroes are dreamless.

  Stone Creek was just a man’s skip wide but Josey couldn’t make it across without Charles’s carry. She was five years old the first time she saw the past there—red beads and pottery. Tallassee would let the past seep in that way, through overflowed waters from the fast and wide Tallapoosa River, scooping buried things and rearranging ’em. Resurrected. Drag marks of black sand and brown mud led to where old things ended up—the storms’ treasure turning over lame in the swampy banks. Charles would lower Josey over the water so she could reach down and pick ’em up, the back of her dress knotted in his fist.

  “Creek Indians,” Charles told her. “Chased out.”

  Josey wondered why they’d gone and left such pretty things. And before she could ask the question, Charles would answer. “The Creek Indians lived here before the Spanish,” he told her. And he told her how the French came, then the English, then the English again, the second time with a dream to build a new nation.

  Men rode the Tallapoosa River almost three hundred miles from Georgia to Alabama. Then just above Tallassee, thirty miles upriver, they built a dam in Montgomery. They came for the water’s strength—the waterfalls. They could power a mill with ’em, wet a town. They carved up Tallassee like cuts of meat. Sold her with the promise that she was theirs.

  The river splits her in two so the men named one side of her East, and the other West. But she still see herself as one. Be silly to cut a person in half and call ’em now two peoples, treat ’em different. But they did. On her east side, bluffs hold groves of magnolias and oak trees like a fistful of flowers, and plantation houses. The west holds the mills and the workers.

  Tallassee didn’t say nothin when they split her up. Of course she didn’t. She’s a piece of land. A mute spirit. Any voice she may have had went when the last Indian tribes left. But you can feel her fury. Angry at how she was tricked over the years—slow and steady. If it was done to her quick, she might have noticed.

  These settlers weren’t forceful, at first. They were charming-like. Whispering sweetness in her ear as they passed through. Coming back more and more regular. Mapping things. Told her they were drawing pretty pictures of her. It’s how they do. Capture things on paper. Would catch the spirit, if they could. Would capture music, if they could. But some things you just got to be there to see. It’s why I thank God for making the spirit like running water. Even captured water will steam away. It’s what the Creek Indians believed Tallassee was—a spirit, uncatchable ’til she was caught.

  Maps is how they did it. They separated East and West Tallassee on their papers, marking squiggly lines that meant “Tallapoosa River.” And on the paper, two waterfalls—the power that would turn the water wheel and give life to the mill. A mill that first made cotton cloth. A mill that would last make bullets. Even the gray bedrock that the river tumbled over was drawn in, unmoving. Proof you can’t capture everything. ’Cause in real life, the waterfalls splash on the green moss blanketing rocks and spray red berries stuck on leaning branches. But that didn’t matter on paper. And what don’t matter, don’t survive. Nothing survives its usefulness to white folk.

  The Creek Indians were driven away (they got Africans and poor whites instead) and the waterfalls were made mules, and the river’s rocks were used to build stone buildings. Only gravel remained in the water, mostly unbothered. That, and the animals they couldn’t catch.

  “The past always got a way of coming back,” Charles told Josey, pointing at the beads in her hand. “And this land got a memory.” It’s why Charles thought the bridges went down over the Tallapoosa River regular.

  Tallassee would always start that happening the same way. She’d send the morning gusts first, high above the ground, rushing it through the treetops that covered the whole five-mile forest like a God-made roof. Even when heavy rains came, hardly a drop got through.

  The wind would rush like water above the town, uncatchable, bending trees south. The limbs would lean, layering a thick cover of roof over the world of folks and things underneath, not disturbed.

  I once watched a dried orange leaf hang from a branch by a single thread of shimmery web. While it stormed above, the leaf played in the calm space below, spinning, unaware of the darkening skies, nudged only into rocking by a bluebird seeking shelter. By the noon hour, it had been plucked away, stolen like everything else not rooted in the earth, then shoved into the wind-made tunnel that burrowed a pocket through Tallassee.

  “This is a day of reckoning,” a white man said, standing on the wet cliff above another fallen bridge. Another said, “You can’t contain this landscape. Can’t beat her back. Th
ese vines are relentless growing in.” But people must beat it back, and they do to live here. Those who been here long enough call Tallassee the green-skirted gypsy of the South. Full of illusions. She’d set clouds on her hilltops like floating pearls. Even on days when no weather would call for ’em and no storms were on their way, she’d put just one cloud above a cluster of three or four oaks, making it look like the nesting jaybirds were smoking.

  Good weather.

  “Fertile and stable ground,” visitors would say, while a torrent simmered beneath her trick of “perfect place to make a life and start a family.” The Creek Indians knew her better. A thousand years they respected her, the way Charles and Josey do.

  Those men shouldn’t have cut her up. Shouldn’t have tried to own her. Define her. Not with their caught pictures, their maps. The Creek Indians wouldn’t do it until they were forced to. The Creek landmarks became borders. Their asking her permission to stay became demands. Their maps, their boundaries, meant the end of the Indians’ world. It’s always how white men came to own things: “If you can define it, you can own it,” they’d say. “If you can define it, it can be fought for, killed for. A woman, a slave, a cow, dirt, an idea.” And it is what happened. Thousands lost their lives. The Creek Nation fought the new United States of America. The unshapeable spirit had been shaped into Tallassee’s pretty picture. And the lines of her cheekbones became battle lines. And it wouldn’t be the last time. There’s a civil war coming.

  “If you lucky,” Charles said, pulling a broken plate from the water, “when the past comes to greet you, all it want to say is, ‘I remember you,’ then smile from longing.”

  6 / FLASH

  Conyers, Georgia, 1846

  THE LAST THING I remember is Hazel telling me, “Run!” And I ran with all my soul, I did.

  Then walked some.

  Rested beside a stream and drank water. Ate some stale bread Hazel gave me. And when the bread was gone the second day, I used Hazel’s fire poker to kill again. But I prayed over that coon. Prayed over it with my Bible, started a fire the way Hazel taught me to. Roasted it, ate it, slept ’til daylight and ran again. ’Til nightfall, I did. Three more days this way. Three more days with Hazel’s voice in my head telling me, don’t stop. “Go north,” she said. So I kept on, under the cover of rainwet leaves and gray clouds.

  By nightfall on the fourth day, I found that North Star. But by then, I was too tired for it to matter. Had been climbing up and over and up and over, the backs of my arms were sore and my muscles were burnt to cinder.

  The rain had started again, was overflowing, making the ground a stream of cold. I was slipping over rocks, walking more than running, catching myself from falling. I tied big green leafs around my bleeding bare feet but still felt every grounded thistle like a blade.

  Rain kept pelting my face. Was soft tickles at first, then turned to hard pinpricks from hitting the same spot again and again.

  I stumbled into a road, soaking wet, turning myself this way and that way. The light of two buggy lamps showered me and the sign in the road next to me. It read: Conyers, Georgia.

  The buggy’s horses were coming my way, snorting, their hooves pounding. That’s when I threw myself off the road.

  Now, I don’t know how long I been in this room.

  Or how I got here.

  Or who put me in these dry clothes.

  Or why I feel full. I don’t remember eating after that second night.

  My whole body hurts and my eyes is swole shut. I cain’t see. Puss and blood is squeezing around ’em, pushing my eyeballs out, slicing pain behind ’em. Whoever got me here put piles of sheets on top of me making it hard to move.

  The sheets bend and make a space under my neck between my chest and chin like a roof’s peak, where hot is puffing out and blowing steam over my face. A wet rag is sagging down from my forehead to my mouth, almost dry from fever, rubbing the thin skin on my top lip raw.

  Shivers send my teeth chattering. My jaw is sore and my ear holes are plugged like they brimming wit water, muffling noises outside of me.

  My imaginings got me thinking that some man’s standing above me with a knife, ready to cut me up ’cause he know I cain’t move. For a hour, I been facing the spot where I think he is but he ain’t killed me yet.

  Throw-up’s racing to my mouth, bitter, ’cause I’m thinking ’bout Momma killed. I swallow it back down, breathe slow, keep it from coming again.

  Lord, I miss Hazel.

  THE SCENT OF a woman is on me like lavender and sugar. Must be a negro ’cause she clean. But somebody oughta tell her she wasting her time trying to save me ’cause I think God mean for me to die here.

  My eyelids is lighting up red so I reckon God’s coming for me now. I peel ’em open, peek through to see God, but it ain’t Him, just an open window above me burning my eyes with light and dust.

  I close ’em, don’t deserve to see the light no how, gon’ accept my punishment, stop getting better. Sleep.

  I BEEN UP a long time today.

  Tears for Momma and Hazel’s keeping my eyes from burning.

  The musk of tobacca smoke is in my hair. Must be what yellowed the wallpaper, turned its tiny pink flowers brown. I been catching a corner of the paper wit my fingernail, flicking it up and down, give me something to do ’til I die.

  I reckon I got in this room yesterday or the day before cause the moon outside the window ain’t changed much since the last time I seen it. The round of it looks like Mama Dean’s spinning wheel, hanging in the sky, stuck on nothin.

  The clouds are stretched across the moonlit sky like ready-to-spin cotton across a dark tabletop—pulled apart, kneaded back together, its different little pieces tangled into one. Mama Dean once told me, “We’re all like this spinning cotton. A God-made thang. Blended together the pieces are strong. Apart, the wind gets them, blows them away, makes them dirty before they have a chance to make something beautiful.” I reckon I’m like that cotton, blown-away dirty.

  I can move an arm now. Can almos’ touch the bed next to me. I ain’t on a bed, though. What I’m on is something hard but dressed like a bed, with a pillow under my head and these heavy covers. I reckon it’s a trunk cause I can feel a big latch on the side. It reminds me of the door knocker Hazel made for me. She’d carved a woodpecker from pine and put a string through its beak and a separate piece of wood so when you pulled the string, the bird would peck the wood. She said, “See, ain’t all knockin bad.”

  My neck’s sore from my jaw ache but I can move my head, can see the pattern on my sheets—more yellow flowers. I cross my eyes to fix ’em on the dry, gray stain below my chin. I take a big sniff of it but it don’t smell like nothin. It’s clean.

  Across the room, a white chair stands in front of a vanity, a shawl with red feathers hangs lazy down its middle. The vanity holds perfume bottles, two drankin glasses and a washbasin. Wax is sliding down a lit candlestick there, too. Its holder got a pattern etched in it like Hazel’s fire poker got. It brings my tears back ’cause I don’t know where I lost hers.

  I’ll wait. Let Him take me peaceful.

  THE KNOCKIN SOUND woke me up but it ain’t Momma and it ain’t this trunk.

  A white woman is on the bed in front of me with a man.

  There ain’t a wall, nothin between us.

  She’s on all fours, looking at the ceiling, grunting. Her face is a schoolteacher’s but her act is a slave.

  Her blonde hair is spiraled to her wrists and rocking back and forth. The naked man behind her is pushing, into her, cupping her tits with his hands now, rubbing her nipples with his fingertips. It’s making me shamed to see so I close my eyes.

  The man say, “Is she watching us, Cynthia?”

  “Frank, just finish.”

  “I’m just saying. If she was, it would be sorta nice.”

  “That would be extra.”

  THE DOOR ACROSS the room swings open and pushes a gust of wind over me, bringing men and their voices near to m
y bed. Their hot-whis-kied breaths rain moist on my cheek. I keep my eyes shut. Pretend I’m dead. Let their funk, spit, and sighs blanket me. I won’t move.

  “You sure she out of it?” one of ’em say. “I ain’t had one of these black whores in years.”

  “You think Cynthia mind?” another one say. “If we just . . .”

  “She’d be making money, wouldn’t she?”

  The blood’s pumping fast to my head now, my face is swelling, lips tight, eyelids sealing from swell, cain’t open ’em if I wanted.

  I hear a woman’s voice: “You think that black bitch is better than me? Hell, I’m good enough for the both of yous.”

  “That sho’ looks nice, Cynthia,” one say.

  My blood keeps rising. Everything go black.

  THIS MORNING, A woman’s humming a peaceful song and dancing nice with a little boy. He’s barely tall as her armpit, standing on her shoes.

  I ain’t never seen hair so red.

  She say, “I love you, Johnny.”

  I MUSTA BEEN sleeping good ’cause she changed my clothes and gave me a new pillow stuffed with mint.

  The boy’s gone.

  A man’s there in the boy’s place, sitting on the corner of the bed with his back turned to me. His red neck looks like not-done meat with white lines creased deep and jagged across it. His grayish hair is lined with a razor’s edge above his neck. I see him in the mirror smiling and when he laugh, his shoulders bounce. When he ain’t laughing, his teeth poke out his mouth like a egg halfway out a chicken. He covers his mouth with one hand to hide it, lets his buckteeth wet his palm. When he pulls his hand away, he stretches his lips over ’em to cover.

  The woman slouches in her chair, painting her makeup on. Her silk gown clings to her curves. The man was fixing to say something but took a deep breath instead.

  Finally, he gets up and goes to her, puts his hands on her shoulders, squeezes. “Cynthia, I wanna take you away from here. Give you the good life.”