“You had me, sir, Mr. George. Didn’t know if you was well or sleep or . . .”
George’s eyes draw closed, falling asleep, the musk of alcohol rises from under his clothes. “Are you saying I drink too much?” George say with his eyes still closed. “Are you my sister now, boy?” He calls Nelson “boy” even though Nelson’s an old man. Still, Nelson don’t flinch at it.
“Naw, sir, Mr. George.”
“Well then. I did it ’cause its funny. That’s funny, ain’t it, boy?”
Nelson say, “Maybelle can spook easy, is all. Didn’t want her running off.”
George falls off the side of his horse, sliding in an almost split. Nelson tries to catch him but it’s too late. George lie on the ground like he dead this time. Nelson goes to lift him. “Get away from me,” George say, brushing hisself off and pushing up to a stand. His knees give out again and Nelson reaches his hand out to him. George gags. Covers his mouth. Gags again like his tongue is pushed all the way down his throat. He throws up, keeps throwing up, spraying warm mud made of runny food, alcohol, and dirt on his shoes. “That’s what I get for eating second,” he say, dry heaving now.
Nelson gives him a mug of fresh water and a cloth that George runs around his face. He swallows a gulp of water, then swishes the next around and spits it. Behind him is a hay bale that’s twice as tall as he is. He leans back on it and catches his breath. “I bought my first horse when I was eight. A saddlebred mare, died just before I got sent away the first time. Broke my heart.” He reaches under his coat, pulls out a silver flask, puts it to his lips. A gust of wind sweeps his eye and pushes a tear out.
Nelson watches it roll down George’s cheek. Nelson say, “I know how hard it is to lose one, sir. I can tell you bonded with her, let her get you on the inside, made the magic happen.” Maybelle nudges Nelson with her nose, blows quick snorts. Nelson tugs her closer.
“When I look at my Maybelle,” Nelson say, “I know she could trample me at any second if she wanted, out muscle me, but on the road she let me control her every move. I’m her master. We understand each other. Me and Maybelle connected.” A low tone rolls from Maybelle’s belly. He trades her affection with a rub along her neck. “I love her more than I like most people.”
“You are one sick bastard,” George say. “It wasn’t the damn horse that broke me, it was getting sent away. And how in the hell could you love a goddamn horse?”
George bends down and picks up a small rock, hurls it at a squirrel in the road that was twitching to break a nut. When he misses, he throws his mug at it, too, tries to chase after the squirrel and sends it up a tree. George bends over gagging and breathing hard but no throw-up come this time. He looks over his shoulder, say, “I reckon if that squirrel rubbed your leg, you’d move it in your house, call it best friend.”
Nelson only mumbles under his breath, shimmies the saddle ’round Maybelle. Don’t talk to her this time. Don’t stroke her, either. Don’t show no care. He climbs up on her and just sits.
George shuffles hisself to the center of the road where he staggers back and forth in a circle, looking for something out in the field where Josey is. He say to Nelson, “Where’s that washed-out negro girl that’s supposed to be working?”
“You got a few that look like that, sir.”
“I mean, the one that looks like you.”
“Beg pardon?” Nelson say sharp. “Ain’t one drop of me nigger!” George don’t pay him no mind, staggering in a circle again, working on keeping his head the right way ’round.
Nelson say, “All of ’em out there working, sir. None missin. I flog the stragglers.”
“The children?”
“I do my job, Boss. Don’t need no nigger setting his mind to mischief, five or fifty-five. Let one get away wit something, they all start. I only got one whip.”
George reaches back to his horse and unlatches a large cloth bag. It falls to the ground from inattention, tumbling white shirts and woolen trousers to the dirt. He say to Nelson with a newfound joy in his tone, “I’m here to distribute the negroes’ clothes. Came from England on Monday’s shipment. Give ’em each two shirts and a pair of trousers for the year.”
George unlatches a pine hoop from the side of his horse. From the ground the hoop stands to his waist. He unties a matching pine stick, too. It’s about the length of three middle fingers high. He starts to the field with ’em.
“I wouldn’t go favorin’ none of ’em,” Nelson say. “They get jealous, making more work for me.”
George keeps in Josey’s direction, walking like an old man or like one leg is shorter than the other. He uses the hoop as a walking stick over the moist and uneven ground. I get beside him, follow him in.
He stops in front of Ada Mae and Josey. They get to looking busier than ever like they don’t see him. He slaps the hoop on Ada Mae’s closed bag ’til the bag blossoms open and shows its brown, dying weeds.
“Massa George?” Ada Mae say. “We was workin so fast, we didn’t see you come up.”
“That’s good work y’all doin there,” he say to Ada Mae, pretending not to notice Josey. He dabs his throw-up rag on his fo’head, clearing the sweat. He talks to the air around Josey. “I got this here wheel. It’s a game, see, a toy called a rolling hoop.” He taps the hoop on the ground in front of Josey with it. “You push it with this stick, make it go.”
Ada Mae sits up but Josey keeps her eyes low, working, and only say, “Yes, suh.”
“I was looking for some good worker to reward. Any idea who deserves it?”
“No, suh,” Josey say.
“Yes, suh,” Ada Mae say.
“Nobody?” he say to Josey, nudging her with the hoop, then dropping it down in front of her.
“Don’t think it be right for you to give it to me, suh,” Josey say. “We all work hard.”
George’s face flushes red and he grabs the hoop, “It wasn’t for you no how!”
“Yes’sa,” Josey say, keeping to her work, her head down.
“I got better things to do!” he yell. “You just remember that I’m the one who decides who gets and who don’t.”
“Yes’sa.”
“I own you!” he say and yanks Josey’s bag from her hand, dropkicks it across the field, spilling weeds. But his kick snatches his other leg from under him and he lands flat on his back, moaning in the dirt. He rolls over and grabs his hoop before hopping up to a stand. He tosses the hoop to Ada Mae and hobbles back across the field to the road.
“Look it, Josey!” Ada Mae say. “Look what I got.”
“I thought he was gon’ pass us,” Josey say, bitter, brushing dirt off her knees. “Where’d my bag go?”
Ada Mae squats down and rests her hoop on her thigh and reaches for a weed, pulling it careless, then slices her hand with it. She yelps and sucks the edge of her palm but Josey don’t ask if she’s all right. Instead she say, “Cain’t nothin good come from him favorin’ you, Ada Mae. Not all gifts is good gifts.”
Cotton castaways float up from Ada Mae’s bag and get pushed away by the moving silence of her breath.
12 / FLASH
Conyers, Georgia, 1847
I AIN’T ALLOWED IN the garden since what happened yesterday.
Cynthia say from now on I got to wake her up in the morning before I start my day’s chores, but, “Yours ain’t the first voice I want to hear in the morning,” she said. “So just tug on my toe before you go.”
She left for a date on Bernadette’s bed a little while ago. Said Bernadette ain’t making her money no way so I’ve been making the most of my time in here alone. I been sitting in front of Cynthia’s mirror, twirling her tiny pot of red lip stain. Stroked her small brush across its mouth.
One of the legs on this chair is missing a bottom piece, broken. It wobbles from side to side, like a gimp man dancing.
I read my Bible.
But, if I’m honest, I’m just laying my face on it, crossing my eyes to see the words. Candle wax is cooling in bum
py lines down the candle-holder. I scratch my nails down it, let its softness pack under my nails and push back the meat. I flick it out with my thumb and drop the clump back in the candle’s flame. It falls through it but don’t melt much. Just enough to stick and harden when it slides to the tabletop.
The flame stutters again when the door blows open. I sit up quick, pretend I’m reading.
It’s Albert, the negro. He say, “Sorry, didn’t know nobody was in here,” and starts closing the door back on hisself.
“It’s all right,” I say. “You can come in.” But he don’t come. He stay on the other side of the door speaking to me.
“Cynthia sent me to fix that chair. But I do it some other time.”
“Naw, come in,” I say. “I wasn’t doing nothin.”
He creeps the door back open and I slide off the chair and go to my trunk. When I sit, my thighs bulge and spread under my dress like rising pancake batter.
“It’s good to see you better,” he say.
He kneels next to the chair and rocks it back and forth checking which leg’s broke. Its wood shoe is split. He takes out some sort of grinder from his satchel, some binding glue, and a wood piece from his pocket.
I watch him while he busy hisself fixing it.
He got big ears.
They cupped like hands on the sides of his head. I don’t know why they like that ’cause he ain’t one to listen in on other people’s conversations. His wild reddish hair is so puffy and high, he must got some other blood mixed in him worser than I got. But his eyebrows is black. And thick. He got freckles, too.
Cynthia call him the “Scottish Banshee” on account of all the red. She said when she took him in a few years ago, she did it cause she felt sorry for him. He was a free slave who never made it north. She reckon he afraid to leave, afraid he’s gon’ get stopped, afraid some white fool gon’ ignore his papers and send him back to slavery anyway. Sometimes she say she never shoulda treated him so good in the first place ’cause now she cain’t get rid of him.
But he helpful to her.
He fix things, do all the blacksmithing around here, cleaning sometimes, too. Me and him ain’t never talked even though we both negro. White peoples don’t like to see black folks together no how. Always suspecting the worse like we plotting, or must be lovers drawn together by some black magic they don’t understand. So me and Albert keep our distance.
He reaches for his glue from the floor and smears some on his new piece of wood, then puts it on the broken leg.
“Thanks for saving me,” I say.
He don’t answer.
“Cynthia told me you did.”
He nods, holds the new foot in place.
“You do a lot of things ’round here,” I say. “You should know you appreciated, is all.”
He still don’t talk.
“Why you don’t cut your hair?” I say.
“’Cause it’s mine,” he say. “My hair’s my freedom. I can do what I want with it, when I want. I’m a free man.”
“If you free, why you here?”
“You ask too many questions that ain’t none of your business.”
“You slept wit Cynthia?”
He stops working. Rolls his head ’round his neck like he cracking it and just stare at me. He starts working again.
He’s funny.
Easy to bother.
I say, “A young man like you should be finding a wife and a home.”
“I’m thirty-seven years old,” he say, stopping again. “Ain’t been a young man a long time. What you? Sixteen, seventeen? I got at least twenty years on you, girl, so don’t fool yourself into thinking you know somethin.”
“I know you here,” I say. “But you say you ‘free.’ Been here five years and still do what you told, eat when you told to, sleep in the field. ‘Free.’”
“Child,” he say, smiling now, like I’m the one who said something funny. “How you know I ain’t saving my money, readying to go north? Buy some land, build a house, find a strong, feisty woman there and make her my wife.”
“I’ll help you find her so long as you take me north with you when you go.”
“Naw, the woman who’d marry me ain’t north,” he say, closing his glue pot. “I reckon she’s south already. Over the border in Mexico.”
“A Mexican?”
“A negro. Runaways and freed men been escaping south of Texas for years. Even the ones that go into Mexico as slaves is finding their freedom there. It ain’t like here.”
“You mean negroes ain’t slaves everywhere?”
“Not in Mexico. We got a kinship with Mexicans in Texas. They like us. A captive people, too, but on their own land. This country’s their homeland. They didn’t migrate here or been stolen and brought here like us. They been moved out, off their land, piece by piece. So they don’t allow slavery.”
“Freedom’s north. Everybody know that. You said Mexico’s south.”
“Freedom is wherever you find it.”
“Then mine’s north. Always been north. Always be north.”
“You don’t know everything,” he say. “There are men. Good men. Quakers from out east. God-fearing. Risking their lives to get negroes to Mexico. Got the burning in their hearts to do so, and the fearlessness of a child who’d defy his own hunger to free an animal being led to slaughter. They’re what you call zealous men. Doing God’s work.”
“And taking slaves to Mexico?”
Albert packs his stuff. “Like I said, you don’t know everything.”
The door shuts soft when he go. I sneak over to his fixed chair and sit in it. I go easy on it at first so I don’t mess up his work. I lean back in the chair to see if it’s still lame but it don’t clunk no more.
I bring my Bible back to me and start reading from it, catch my reflection in the mirror again, see my top lip disappear when I read the word “thee” or when I smile big.
I’m still flat-chested.
Hazel promised they was gon’ grow but they never did. If I knew back then that they never would, I woulda been stuffing my dress with stockings so Hazel wouldn’t feel bad that I weren’t a woman.
I still pretend that Hazel is sitting with me sometimes, talking to me, reading with me. I slide my Bible to myself again, imagine Hazel saying, “Now you read.”
“The Lord is my Shep . . . Shep . . . hard. Shep . . .”
“Shepherd,” Cynthia say coming in, slamming the door. She throws her money down next to me. “So you can speak.”
I get up quick and grab my Bible on the way back to my trunk. Cynthia pulls her bra straps down from her shoulders. She rolls down her britches and steps out of ’em, then throws ’em across the room to her pile of soiled things.
I clear my throat. “Thank you for what you did yesterday.”
“Um hum,” she say, taking off her dress. She slips her silky gown over her head. Lights a cigarette.
“You weren’t scared?” I say.
“Scared? They was the one’s who needed to be scared. Jonas was glad he wore his tight pants so his shit didn’t fall out near his ankles.”
She folds her dress and with her shoes makes a stack. I take ’em, when she finish. Carry her dress to the basket for washing and her shoes I put with the others. I say, “The way you used them guns . . .”
“Asshole charmers,” she say. “You heard of snake charmers? Snake charmers hypnotize snakes with flutes and shit. My guns do the same to assholes.”
She blows a stream of white.
“And they’re a good distraction,” she say. “Keeps ’em in a trance long enough for my girls to pick a pocket, shop, and be back with empty wallets by the time the game is through.”
“But you could kill yourself.”
“And?”
“You could be dead.”
“And by the time of my funeral, my girls would be best dressed. Now, if you finished with your concern, gon’ and get my bath water ready.”
“Naomi,” I say. “My name. It�
��s Naomi.”
“All right, Naomi . . . get yer ass up and fix my bath water.”
“Yes’m.”
I run across the hall to the bath where I already put her water. I pour flower oil in it ’cause she like that. I always bathe her and wash her hair. It’s nice hair.
I make sure it ain’t too cold, pour in a little more hot from my kettle, then cool from my pitcher. It’s just right. Five lit candles make the room yellow and warm. I give it one spray of perfume to clean the air and float a lily on top of the calm water.
Cynthia bursts through the door, drops her towel, and stomps in the bath, splashing water everywhere. Her cigarette bounces from her bottom lip, she say, “It’s always them little-dick mother fuckers that want me to make the most noise.”
She pushes herself forward in the water so a wave of warm flows back over her. She stops to take a drag of her cigarette, turns to me like she gon’ ask me something, but blows out smoke instead.
I mumble.
“Speak up!” she say.
“Christian?” I said. “You Christian?”
“Nope.”
“I mean . . . was you one? You seem to know the Bible and all. The verse about shepherds. I thought . . .”
“Ain’t one. Never been one. Ain’t gon’ be one now, so don’t try to sign me up. Here, wash my back.”
I don’t want to ask her no more questions.
“I want to show you something,” she say.
She’s still wet from the bath and wraps her towel around herself. The oils I put in her water are steaming off her, smelling like a face full of roses. “Where we going?” I say.
She kneels down next to the bathtub and reaches her arm under it, huffing. “Help me with this.”
I follow her around and get on my knees, too, look under the tub and see her fiddling with a copper latch laid on the floor. It looks like a door knocker but I don’t see no door.
She taps the knocker with her fingertips trying to lift it. It slips away. She tries again. It flips over this time. Thuds. “There,” she say. “Help me move this tub.”
“Be easier we get the water out first.”
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