“You crazy! Stay away from me. Stay away!”
“I’m crazy? You crazy? You a liar! You didn’t do nothing.”
“You ain’t said nothing about that, Majority. You lied about that.”
“Yeah, but who running now bitch? Who out now bitch? You! ’cause of me.”
“We didn’t have that long. We didn’t have that long. Now. Now…”
But arguing cost breath. So they stopped. Majority was already so wicked ahead she tore the grass from under her feet to wipe her nose. Chi fights taught her that. No blood on the clothes. Just ain’t sexy, let alone the attention it bring.
They had left stockpiles of food in their rooms. There had been no recent rain, so no puddles or water to anticipate. It felt hot like noon. The extra clothes, pictures, and unicorn jewelry box Solemn stuffed into a pillowcase were left behind as well. Majority’s sketching would be soon ripped off the wall. All that was supposed to follow them into the freezer, and then out the door, into their new lives, or old lives back at home. With nothing but the clothes on their backs and shoes on their feet and a gold cross around Solemn’s neck, they had run out the back kitchen door. With no destination or plan, only something they imagined as freedom now turned nowhere to go and a need for new names. Had it all been different, so different, how they ran, they could have competed as athletes—in track, to scholarships, gold medals, money. Now they just swallowed heaves of fog and breath for their homes with no maps, no star, fables or lessons, no ground, no anchor, no compass. Solemn ran so long, so aimlessly, so hard, she collapsed. Every blue moon seemed to pass as she coughed her way up again. Majority caught up. She collapsed, too, half on Solemn’s back. She looked up for her elusive North Star, as she had done when she came to Mississippi already wanting to go home. All black. Nothing. The timber fields were behind now, at least. Had to be a road not too long now.
We ain’t stoppin’.
Majority gulped her breath. She began to drag Solemn by the feet, passed out from exhaustion and shock. She needed her. Solemn understood the night, already led them this far. So she pulled her, to rest but not to stop. Solemn might be pulling her next. But she sputtered awake, hacking and kicking. Awoke to a chalky expanse and connected to nothing but a new stranger hanging on to her by the feet. No one but her. Not her mama. Not even a lightning bug or a cricket or a mosquito. A jackrabbit shot close.
“Get up!” the stranger shouted. “Get up, now! Come on … there’s a road.”
So, they started again. Walking this time. Solemn did not recognize nowhere. But she walked feeling somewhere would eventually show up. Majority latched two fingers to the back of Solemn’s jeans. Solemn sped up, renewed and no longer so smothered by her wishes. She tolerated this girl child behind her, whom she had slept near and even once felt a creamy excitement for.
She walked. They would be caught. They could be murderers. Or she would be something to do with it, just like with her daddy. Or she would be blamed entirely. And she was to blame. She walked this way, now. It was just supposed to be a plan. No action. None of it, none of it, not a moment of her, had been planned. Except maybe her sight of that long white ark stopped ahead on the road. Solemn squinted so her eyes could draw back on a curtain of fog. She read: ANTIOCH’S.
* * *
Two girls appeared at an edge of I-55 North soon as one of the first of Hank Williams’s gospel songs began on the radio. A retrospective series. A remnant, along with the shotgun, of training with men alone. The driver was a woman, widow peaked.
Given the fog, she inched along tonight. To Indiana, today and tonight. When she saw those girls, she had been ready to stop—anyway. Had to toss cud. The figures crept, one behind the other, with the one in front having a slight limp and her thumb stuck up. It was pitch-black. If not for her dome headlights and her assurances of the vehicle, well …
She squinted. The hitchers were young. One black. She had only seen white hitchers in all the times she decided to not stop. Blacks knew better. On 55 North this evening, there was no rough traffic or even many travelers. She caught baby faces in her windshield. She passed them. Then, “Shit.” Up ahead on the road, she pulled over.
Her heart told her to make no time. But two young girls out in the middle of the night? Not one. Two? How terrible. They’d be picked up by lecherous men; one was a risk, but two were too good to pass up. The shotgun was in back of the trailer. Should she unlock the hatch to get it? Was she pessimistic? It wasn’t so late. Only a little before 10:00 p.m. And she had packed extra tuna sandwiches and took desserts from the last buffet.
While she thought about it, the two girls walked up and decided for her.
Solemn passed a stream of drooped eyes and lapping tongues extended behind the rig’s cabin. The cattle filled the night with wails and groans and the scent of earth turned over. The cows shook the trailer with their patient stomping. They pressed their faces against the tin gateposts. Their snouts dripped with liquid they shook away in streams.
“Howdy!” the truck lady yelled from her driver’s side let half-down. And she was black, too. “What y’all doing out here like this?”
“Lost,” Majority told the truck lady. “We not from ’round here.”
She ran around the front to the side of the truck. Solemn stood back, waiting to be asked. The truck lady looked friendly but skeptical. She had only rolled down the window, not yet opened the door.
“Where you from?”
“Chicago.”
“Well, what yas doing all way down here?”
“Family reunion. We came all way down here for it. Family left us.”
“God. What kinda family you got?”
“They all had to get back to work. We just wanted to stay longer. We was staying down at the motel…”
“Which motel?”
“That one, the one, the one, uh … up there.”
“Oh yes. Uh … the Eight Ball?”
“Yes ma’am, that’s it. We ran out of money before my mama and daddy could wire us some more. They wouldn’t let us stay.”
“Well, that’s no good.
“Hello,” the truck lady said to the dark girl stood back against the tableau of fog, stirred gravel, exhaust smoke, collection of mosquitoes.
Solemn shifted her feet, and waved. She wanted to ask how far to Bledsoe, which she should have known from the maps. Daddy. Akila. Landon. They showed them to her.
Majority continued to spin a tale, conditioned and pathological and degenerate.
“I can give you gas money, if we make it to a Western Union. Then, we can just get us a new hotel and catch the bus from there.”
“I’m gonna be in Indiana ’fore dawn,” she said. “Chicago right next door.”
It was as much an invitation as Majority needed to jump in. Solemn stood back, weak at her knees, doubtful if she could hoist herself up on the running board to slide in.
“Oh my God, thank you,” Majority told her. “Thank you so much. I just can’t believe, can’t believe you would give us a ride. We been walking so long.”
Majority slithered to the middle. She reached out her hand to help Solemn up.
The gift of the handshake was the sense it gave for the first time since the truth of it, so Solemn felt inside her body where she was, for real now: not in Bledsoe anymore.
And it had been damned near a year but just never registered. She made it. Out.
The lady roared her truck back into gear on 1-55 North. The giant trees of Solemn’s South extended soon into mythology, their branches and leaves outstretched toward her, her vision blurred and senses askew, and her lovely trees and their branches were waving, beckoning, wanting her to talk back, to bid proper good-bye. For the next two hundred miles to Nashville, according to signpost, Solemn would not turn ’round to remember them or to forget them, either, for recollection of a time a woman did and she turned to salt. Solemn had a different taste in her sixteen-year-old mouth: freshness and sweetness of life.
I’m like t
he cicada … I come back … Then, How come I was so ungrateful?
A man whose name she did not know sang out from the radio, about sweet baby Jesus and a house of gold.
ALSO BY KALISHA BUCKHANON
Upstate
Conception
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
KALISHA BUCKHANON is author of the novels Upstate and Conception. Her short stories have been widely published in many online and university print literary journals. Her articles and essays have appeared on several popular women’s blogs and cultural Web sites. Her writing awards include an American Library Association ALEX Award, Friends of American Writers Award, Illinois Arts Council Awards Fellowship, and a Terry McMillan Young Author Award. Kalisha’s work has received attention in major media outlets such as Essence, The Guardian, BBC-London, TV-One, People, Elle, Entertainment Weekly, and Marie Claire. She has an MFA from The New School in New York City, and her B.A. and M.A. in English are from the University of Chicago. She writes at her blog, Negression.com, and her Web site is at www.Kalisha.com. Or sign up for email updates here.
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CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Part One: Bledsoe
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Part Two: The Future
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Part Three: The North
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Also by Kalisha Buckhanon
About the Author
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
SOLEMN. Copyright © 2016 by Kalisha Buckhanon. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.stmartins.com
Cover design by Elsie Lyons
Cover photographs: silhouette of woman © Mohamad Itani/Arcangel Images; trailer © Cultura RMSeth K. Hughes; hair © Mimage Photography/Getty Images
The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.
ISBN 978-1-250-09159-8 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-250-09158-1 (e-book)
e-ISBN 9781250091581
Our e-books may be purchased in bulk for promotional, educational, or business use. Please contact the Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department at 1-800-221-7945, extension 5442, or by e-mail at [email protected].
First Edition: May 2016
Solemn Page 31