“So you do sleep in a bed?” she say.
“Not at first. Before, I slept on her old trunk that she made look like a bed.”
“Well . . .” she say, blinking too much, making me feel like I said something wrong. “It doesn’t seem like you had it so bad after all.” She picks up her spoon again, runs it into her stew, pushes the meat to the sides of her bowl, stabs the meat with her spoon, and shimmies it in half. “Would take me all day to make this,” she say. “Never a thank you. She’d just keep reminding me of the stomach inside.” Soledad rolls her tortilla and dips it in the stew, bites the top of it. “Cynthia has a way of turning any good thing to nothing.”
That’s true.
“How was she when you left?”
I lift my shoulders. Don’t want to talk about Cynthia no more.
“Well, we shouldn’t be speaking of her anyway,” Soledad say.
“All right,” I say.
“Too much good food to waste, right?” Soledad spoons her stew, eats it, and taps her napkin to her lips. “Tell me,” she say, “do you have a boyfriend? Or someone?”
I nod. My heart hurts again. I say, “But he don’t love me no more.”
“Men are that way, aren’t they? Get what they want and go,” she say. “No matter. There will be others.”
“Yes’m.”
She flattens her napkin on her lap. “See,” she say. “I’m not all the bad that Cynthia makes me out to be, am I?”
I don’t say nothing. A couple people said Soledad was crazy and others said she was right to leave the brothel when she did. But I don’t know if you can be crazy and right at the same time. Or maybe we’re all a little crazy.
“She probably speaks horribly of me,” she say.
“No, ma’am.”
“She never has anything nice to say about anybody. But maybe you wouldn’t tell me what she’s said anyway.”
“I would. Honest. But she don’t talk about you.”
“Talk bad about me, you mean?”
“She don’t talk about you at all.”
She stops eating.
“I mean, she don’t talk much about nothing.”
“Nothing, huh?”
Soledad pushes herself away from the table. She’s back in the kitchen, clattering around in it.
I shouldn’t have said nothing. I need this place to stay. So I’m just gonna sit here and be quiet.
She comes back in tossing three steaming tortillas straight on the table, mostly dried out. They crumble into pieces and catch in the tablecloth. She sets a fresh bowl of soup on top of ’em, reckless, so some of it laps over the edge.
“I left them on too long,” she say, and sits back down, breaks the hot tortillas with her fingers. “You consider Cynthia your friend?”
“I don’t know,” I say.
“How close?” she say.
I lift my shoulders and keep eating.
Soledad drags my bowl from under me, leaves me holding my spoon above the table. “So what do you do for her?” she say.
“Do?”
“What do you do to earn your keep?”
“I clean.”
“Clean?” she say. “How much does she sell you for?”
“I never . . . I mean . . . I only clean.”
“Sounds to me like she’s a better friend to you than she was me.”
She slides my bowl back, picks up her spoon and taps the table with the wet end of it, making a moist spot on her tablecloth. I can feel her watching me. All of this talk is confusing. I feel like I keep saying the wrong thing.
She say, “I’m glad you and Cynthia are friends. Did she tell you her family owned slaves?”
“Yes’m.”
“Tell you her daddy beat ’em, killed ’em, sold ’em?”
“Yes’m.”
“So I guess y’all talk about a lot but nothing at all.”
She stands straight up and goes back to the kitchen.
I don’t look up but I can hear a drinking glass clunk on the countertop followed by the familiar ting of glass touching glass, then the gurgle of alcohol pouring in.
Soledad comes back to the table holding a drink. I can smell it’s gin. Cynthia’s favorite.
She say, “I’m sorry. I ask too many questions, don’t I?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Just making conversation, is all. But right now you need to eat and we’ve already promised not to waste a good meal on Cynthia.” She laughs a little, smiles at me. I do, too. Take some more of my soup. I can eat this every day even though it burns my throat from spicy. It’s good, though. Something maybe Hazel mighta made to kill a cold.
She say, “So where are you from? Your family?”
“All over,” I say, lying. Jeremy used to say that it’s easier to not have a beginning. That way new friends don’t judge you too fast. I want Soledad to be my friend.
“Of course they would be,” she say. “Keeping negro families together has its challenges, doesn’t it?”
I don’t say nothin.
“Did you hear about those murders in Faunsdale? Black people killed, in a horrible way. Their owner. Did you know them?”
“No.”
She say, “I heard Cynthia found you. You’d come from some place else. Had an infection or something. She nursed you to health. Probably just a rumor.”
I hold my spoon over my bowl. I don’t know if I should answer.
“Eat,” she say. “I’m just making conversation. Sometimes a good conversation makes a better meal. Wouldn’t you agree?”
“Yes’m,” I say, even though I thought we weren’t gon’ talk about Cynthia.
Soledad smiles and stirs her stew. We both eat in silence this time. I wish I had some good conversation to say. I feel like she wants something from me but I don’t know what it is.
After another ten minutes of slow eating and noticing how Soledad’s watching me still, she takes the last two gulps of her gin. She sets her glass down in front of herself and starts picking the tortilla crumbs from the table. Finally she say, “Why are you here, Naomi?”
“Ma’am?”
“Since everything’s so perfect between you and Cynthia—she trusts you with her son, you sleep in his bed, eat at her table, she nursed you to health, saved your life—what are you doing here? I think it’s more than ‘no place to go.’”
Escape is what I want to say but don’t. I’m afraid of my words. Afraid to ask her for what I need. To help me go south to escape Cynthia, and Jeremy . . . or . . . maybe west to find him.
“What have you heard about me?” she say.
“Nothin.”
“Nothing?”
“Just rumors, is all,” I say.
“Rumors?”
“Yes’m.”
“Thing about rumors is they can be true. Tell me what you’ve heard and I’ll tell you what’s true.”
The back of my neck’s getting hot.
“Go on,” she say. “Everybody should get a chance to clear their name. Isn’t that fair?”
“I heard you help people,” I say.
“People?”
“Negroes. You get them south.”
“Is that what you’ve heard?” she say.
“Yes’m.”
“Then when are you planning on going?”
My gut drops.
“I could arrange for you to get there,” she say. “Over the border through Texas. Is that why you’ve come? You want to start all over again somewhere else? Leave this behind. Take you and your friend Albert.”
I run my finger through the holes of her tablecloth.
She leans forward, “Is that who told you about me?”
I want to say, help me get away from here. Take me south. West. I don’t care. I look up at her to say something and notice how her brown eyes are fixed just above mine—somewhere on my forehead.
I know that look.
I’ve seen the look of the lie before—cain’t look me in the eye. Seen it too many times
. Jeremy.
“No,” I say in a hurry. “I have no reason to leave here. Albert, neither. Any negro who would is a fool.”
The expression on her face changes suddenly. “Indeed,” she say. “I’m not like my father. Freedom Fighter. Revolutionist . . . a fool.” She sits back in her seat, picks up her spoon, scoops her red broth. “It took me this long to finally have something in common with him,” she say. “The way he and I feel about Cynthia.”
She picks up a tortilla, hangs her wrist from the edge of her stew bowl. “Did Cynthia tell you she kidnapped me?”
I shake my head.
“I guess she didn’t tell you everything, after all.” She drops the bread in her stew, gets up and goes to the cabinet where her colorful dolls are. She lifts one out—the girl figurine—and comes back with it. She sets it on the table next to her bowl.
“I was young,” she said. “My father was a Freedom Fighter. Rescued slaves and took them to Mexico where they had a chance to be free. He took in everybody. Even Cynthia. Cared about other people more than he did me.
“Cynthia was a teenager when he found her, covered in blood, her father dead next to her. I was only seven when she came but it was the moment my memory started. I remember her presence from the beginning. Powerful and bold, she was. Almost a decade older than I. Unlike any woman I had ever seen before or since. Beautiful in a different way.
“I wanted to be her. Did everything I could to make her my friend but she didn’t want me around. For years, she shooed me away. Then one day, when I was fourteen, my mother asked me to choose the material for a dress. My coming-of-age celebration. And a celebration it would be. I decided that I’d be more beautiful than any girl who had ever become a woman. And I was.
“The night of, I went to my celebration in Cynthia’s dress, painted my face like hers, my hairstyle, hers. And I did a dance that my father will never forget. I was Cynthia.
“By the end of the week, my father had arranged for me to marry a farmer. An old man. My father wanted him to take me away, thought he could save me but it was already too late. I was already lost to her. So on my wedding day, I begged Cynthia not to let that old man take me.
“We ran off together, Cynthia and I. Took with us everything her dead father had left. She spent every penny of it to buy that brothel and to send me to a school for girls just east of here. See, she thought she could save me, too.”
Soledad slouches lazy in her chair. “She should have never taken me.” She lifts her tired eyes to me and say, “I don’t know what she sees in you.”
I don’t say nothin.
“We was lovers. She tell you?” Her breath wafts across the table, strong as onions but smells rotten, turned sour by the liquor. It makes me sick to my stomach.
“May I have some water?” I say.
“Cynthia could never love nobody but herself, Naomi. I don’t care how perfect you say you two are. Isn’t that what you’re saying?”
I shake my head.
“She saved your life! Took you in. Cared for you with her own son. Isn’t that perfect? Funny how somebody can do one wrong thing and suddenly all of the good they’ve ever done is wiped away that minute.” She stands up and pushes her chair in, takes her glass with her to the kitchen, and pours water from a pitcher into it. When she comes back, she sets it in front of me. I drink the water, taste her gin mixed in it.
“You look feverish,” she say, and sits across from me. “Puffy around the jowls.”
I cough in my water, put my glass down.
She eases back in her chair. “I finally got away from her,” she say. “I married Mr. Shepard. He’s a good man but you don’t always know everything about a person when you marry. You want another water?”
“No, thank you, ma’am.”
“Are you saved?”
“Saved, like being a Christian, saved? Yes, ma’am.”
“What scriptures do you know?”
“The Lord is my . . .”
“What does John 1:1 say?”
I can’t remember that verse.
“‘In the beginning was the Word,’” she say, “‘And the Word was with God, and the Word was God.’ Romans 6:23?”
I shake my head.
She leans into me and say, “‘For the wages of sin is death.’ Death is the punishment for sin, Naomi. You can’t be saved if you don’t know the Word.” She kneels to the floor and sweeps the fallen pieces of tortilla into her hand, starts praying from there. She stops and looks up at me, and say, “I don’t think I have a bed for you tonight, after all. Since you already have a place with Cynthia in your own bed, I think you should stay there.”
I slide the blanket from my shoulders. “Yes’m,” and get up for the door. When I get there, I turn around to thank her for the food but she’s already got eyes on me.
“Look at you,” she say. “Cynthia doesn’t love you any more than she does me.”
I reach for the knob.
“And, Naomi? No more messengers with orange stripes on their satchels will be coming to your door.”
I let myself out.
34 / JUNE-NOVEMBER 1865
Tallassee, Alabama
I STAYED BESIDE ’EM, Jackson and Josey, as their wagon rocked from side to side, bumping over weak stones making gravel. Charles had tied a yellow ribbon above the back wheels to mark a special day—their wedding made in freedom. It meant they could own their coming babies now. And each other, never parted.
Charles stood with his hand in the air behind them as their wagon rode away. His good-bye faded the further we got away from him, ’til finally he disappeared. Not because he left that spot, I imagine, but because our wheels kept churning. He probably stood there another two days a statue, perched on the edge of his empty nest.
Josey lowered herself down into her seat and hid on the wagon’s floor with her forehead laid on her arm like a child’s counting game while the trees seemed to walk toward us. Their shadows casted themselves across us, staining and restaining us gray with colored-in outlines of leaf bouquets.
We rolled over short hills separating the slaves’ quarters from the Graham plantation house. The house’s white face rose and its windows were like eyes watching us. The broken shutters hung off ’em like the saggy lids of an old man. We veered right at the bottom of the road and the trees around us thickened and our path thinned. This is the way to our new home. Two miles of road patterned after the scribble of an unsteady hand drawing a half circle. Less than a mile in a walking beeline.
Our final slow roll led us into the yard. A place Josey and I had been before, long ago with Ada Mae. The drowned dead garden and worn steps of the house were still there. No longer just the witch’s house. This was ours now.
Jackson started cutting a path out front of the house the morning after they’d first arrived a month ago. It’s wide enough now for no tree, no shadow, no nothing to come near Josey. It’s almost done.
“Another month or two and it’ll be finished for good,” Jackson told Josey and his momma. “A shortcut straight back to the old slaves’ quarters to Charles,” he said and then took them around back to show ’em the space. Stumps of half-cleared trees erased a space ten feet wide by twenty feet deep, leading into the woods.
“In case of fire or any trouble,” Jackson said. “Josey could go out this way. You, too, Momma.”
“Does that make me second?” Sissy said. “An afterthought?”
“Aw, Ma, I’m just talking. You and Josey or Josey and you . . .”
“Um hm,” she said.
Sissy was first, she’d been reminding him. First to wipe his nose, his butt, to put clothes on his back. Only yesterday, Sissy told him how she was first to come and see the fishpond he’d built above ground when he was eight years old. She reminded him how he had carried bricks home for months and stacked ’em into a jagged circle and packed the inside of it with mud. Eight-year-old Jackson told his Momma, “Mud is what’s on the bottom of any stream. It’ll stop the leaks!�
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The retelling of the story made Sissy laugh.
“‘You gon’ eat fish all year long,’” Sissy said. “Then he filled his pond with water and stocked it with a half dozen fish he caught and brung home alive. He was counting his fish eggs before they hatched. Before they were even laid. But by morning, the water was missing. Cats had eaten all but the heads of two, and the flies were settling on leftovers.”
Sissy laughed loudest about the leftovers, mocking Jackson, “Every Sunday’ll be a fish fry!” But Josey was still proud of him. Proud of Jackson’s trying. For building. Proud of how he wanted to make her happy. But now, to Sissy, it seemed he only wanted to make Josey happy. So she took more notice of the words he’d use and their ordering, and even who he’d first pass the bread to at supper. And now, Sissy sees these cut-down trees they never needed before Josey, and this path Jackson made.
“You an idiot, son, I swear it,” Sissy said. “You ain’t grown from the boy who tried to hold water in sand. Ain’t got the sense God gave you. Cain’t do shit right. What we need is light in this house. Some windows. I shouldn’t have to sit outside all the damn time. When you ready to do something for me, get yourself together, get some training, and help me—the one who raised you—then you let me know.”
Jackson bowed his head like a boy chastised, weak and ashamed of hisself in front of Josey. But Josey held his hand. Told him what he did was beautiful. Couldn’t nobody do it better. And she loved him for it. Would always love him. It’s why Jackson loves her, too. For who she’s not.
Not-Sissy.
Not a yeller, not a curser, and she don’t pinch him when she think he’s done wrong. Don’t talk down to him, call him lazy, ugly, or need to wash his ass that stink. Josey don’t make him feel bad about hisself, don’t argue, though she say what she need. And when she do disagree, she gives him understanding and words of encouragement. Love. Jackson thinks Josey’s touches are love alive.
So for her, Jackson was willing to cut down all the trees in Alabama. Was gonna reward her love with his love, and with his appreciation, and with whatever it took to make Josey’s sickness never come back. ’Cause sometimes, still, she has bad days.
The first week of their marriage, he found Josey standing half-naked and white on a mound of dirt and trampled tomato vines shouting at the top of her voice, “1:00 a.m. and all is well!” She was counting the time. It was 2:30 a.m. when he finally got her inside.
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