“I ain’t known you to not speak on something since you been here,” Sable says.
“Sure nice to have a celebration,” I say to get her mind off Lillian. “A baby and your boy coming back all in the same day.”
“You think Franklin’s in love with her?”
I don’t think no such thing. “Sure, why not?”
She’s cooking up some idea. I go back to the kitchen.
“She putting me out?” Lillian asks.
“Not if I can help it.”
I make her some tea to stop her from shivering. It’s late when he comes. Christian is bigger than Sable said. He looks just like her, acts like her too. He dotes on her. Can’t seem to get enough of her. He’s hugging and kissing on her, picking her up, twirling her around. She’s laughing and entertaining. The committee does the rest. Someone sets the table; someone piles it high with food. Someone else organizes a line: men first, then women. Someone keeps the punch flowing. There’s music and singing, dancing. While Sable eats, Christian tells stories about places he’s been. When that’s done, he sings with the band. Then he takes turns dancing with all the women. He’s got his mama’s knack for socializing.
The dancing is just getting good when Etta Mae and Justice show up. They work their way around the yard. Before long, Etta Mae’s got Lillian cornered in the kitchen and Justice got Franklin hemmed up in the backyard.
“There’s gonna be a wedding,” Sable says. Her voice is giddy and I’m about to ask her what’s in that jar she’s been sipping out of when Etta Mae asks the musicians to stop playing for a spell.
“Folks, we about to have a wedding,” Justice says, but he ain’t Justice no more. He’s the reverend.
Folks are whispering, we’re all wondering who’s getting married. Franklin’s standing with his hands in his pockets rocking back and forth on his heels like he’s wondering too. He’s surrounded by a group of men. I can’t tell if they’re holding him up or holding him in. Is he here for the wedding? Etta Mae’s leading Lillian by the arm. At least she’ll be up front, get to see the whole thing. Instead of sitting her down, Etta Mae delivers her up front to Franklin, only it looks like he’s stepping backward. They’re standing about as far away as they can from one another when the reverend says something over the air in between them. Before either of them can say a word, they married. Poor things, ain’t even near no river for a proper wedding. The men are slapping him on the back and pushing Franklin so before long he’s kissing Lillian full on the lips. Except for me, everyone’s clapping and cheering.
Sable’s grinning. They’ll take the front room so Lillian can be close to the outhouse. You and me got the whole second floor to ourselves.
You run yourself tired. Somebody takes you in to lie down. I’m setting in the grass thinking ’bout nothing much at all when Christian sets beside me.
“My mama says you used to be a slave. That right?” he asks.
I nod my head yes.
“Whereabouts?”
I tell him near as I know.
“Who your people?”
Something in his voice makes me want to make something up. Lay claim to kin with names I don’t know in places I can’t even imagine. I try to think of all the people I met these past few months. They were from all over. I can see their faces, hear the sounds of their voices, but the names of their people and the places they call home sound like one long moan. Snatches of my own life flick off my tongue. River, Fire, Farmer, Story, Freedom, Present. None of them sounds like much of a name. He’s watching my lips like he’s just waiting for a lie to drop out so he can scoop it up and eat it. I can’t help myself. “Walker,” I say.
“Sure ’nough?”
“I ought to go check on the baby.” I’m halfway up.
“Shame what they done to your sister.”
I know that I’m shaking cuz he’s helping me sit back down and his hand is holding tight to my arm.
“Like killing her once wasn’t enough,” he says.
I look around for Tempe. I know she’s nearby. I hope she can’t hear him. I don’t want to hear him neither but I can’t hear nothing but him. The band is still playing even though I can’t hear no more music. The choir’s still singing but ain’t no songs coming out of their mouths. There’s crickets aplenty but none of them chirping. The only thing there is is his voice. I want to call him a liar. But he’s talking about a band of farmers seeing the house all blazed up and running in to save Walker and instead finding Tempe bleeding to death with a hole in her chest and what looked like two men dead beside her. Between the fire and smoke, couldn’t make out what parts was Walker’s and what wasn’t so they mixed them both up and buried them. They figured she done it. Took hours to cool her body down enough to grab hold of.
“Truth is,” he’s saying, “she’s probably dead long before it but they don’t want to let her get away with killing two men so they string her up to a tree and hang her. Cut her down and scatter her body parts every which way. She’ll be forever tied to this Earth, wandering.”
I should have asked her what happened after I’d gone. She never seemed to want to talk about it. I’m laying in the grass now. My eyes are closed. I’m watching my sister burning when I feel my insides swell up. My whole body’s burning from the inside. I’m shaking. Feel like I need to be somewhere else. To do something.
He’s lying beside me just watching me cry without tears. When he gets tired of that he starts making things out of grass. Rips it up from the ground and makes little nooses for my fingers. He slides three of them on. “Seems you ought to be thanking me for setting you free.” He’s puckering up his lips for a kiss.
I open my eyes and see Tempe, her hands just about wrapped around Christian’s neck.
“Tempe!” I yell.
She drops her hands, puts them on her hips.
“Tempe what?” Christian asks.
She disappears.
“Tempe set me free,” I say.
“Nah,” he says. “If it wasn’t for my troop, y’all still be slaves.” He’s tilting his face close to mine, pointing to his mouth.
“And now, I gotta be thankful to you for giving me something that shoulda always been mine?”
“Fine, don’t thank me,” he says. He’s pretend-pouting. “You could at least be thankful I made your life easier.”
I laugh. Can’t even help myself. “This is easy? Why if you ain’t told me, I wouldn’t have recognized it for myself. I got four jobs,” I say. I hold up four fingers.
“Ought to be thankful you got one,” Sable interrupts.
“I’m thankful for every little penny I get. I scrub, cook, bake, mend,” I say. I don’t know how long she been standing there. I sit up.
“You get more jobs than anyone I know. Just can’t seem to keep them,” she says. She’s shaking her head at me.
Christian winks and slips away. He’s out by what’s left of the pig, singing with a group of men.
“Don’t know how you keep getting them and losing them, sometimes in the same day,” Lillian says. She plops down onto a nearby seat.
“Oh, I can tell you how,” Sable says, like somebody asks her. “She gets there when the sun comes up, talks to the wife. You got work you need help doing? She sings in that sing-song voice.”
“I don’t talk like that.” Nobody’s paying me no attention.
“You know how she do,” she continues. Lillian’s bobbing her head like they done solved a crime. “She gets to scrubbing with one hand, baking with the other, mopping with one foot, sewing with the other, and the lady of the house gets to thinking, damn, if she can do all that, what more can she do? Why, little Spring here shows her. She’s inside doing housework and outside harvesting potatoes ain’t even been planted yet. If she can do all that, the lady thinks, she can mind the kids.”
“Well, ain’t that right where sh
e messes up?” Lillian interrupts.
“Sure enough it is! So she there supervising the doing and the minding and the husband get home and they sit there talking about how good the wife is at supervising and minding and how tired she must be. His poor wife needs a rest, would Spring mind putting the kids to bed and telling them a story? Why’d he go and ask that for? Spring go on and bathe ’em and put them to bed and blow out the candles and she get to telling them a story. Them kids get to wailing, the parents come a-running. Mama, the oldest one says, Spring told a story about men in sheets coming round and snatching up folk, the boy cries. Then the girl, who’s always adding her two cents says, Mama, she said if we don’t go to sleep, we get snatched up and sold down south! That ain’t never gonna happen, the father say. Tell them ain’t no such thing as being sold away from your family, the mother says. Kids just a boohooing by then. The husband red-faced with his hand on his wife’s shoulder daring Spring to tell them that someone could come up in their house and steal their children and sell them off. Like such a thing is possible.”
“It happened to my mama,” I say. “Stole right from her family. Why couldn’t it happen again? It ain’t like everybody give up on slaving. Why it make sense for my folk to be stole but not them?”
“Your folk ain’t white,” Lillian says.
She says it like it’s logical. One and one is two. Black and black is slave. We done had this conversation a hundred times or more. She says it like I should know better.
“Now, Spring, get to humming ’stead of talking,” Sable says. “You know how that riles folks up. They get to telling her she’s ungrateful for not thanking them for giving her a job and that they aren’t paying her since she spoiled their family by bringing slave stories and besides, she don’t bake that good nohow!”
“Now that ain’t nothing but a lie,” I say. “I’m a darn good baker!”
They right, though. My mouth has cost me many a job. To hear them tell it, if I ain’t humming slave songs or hanging my head like an old dog, I’m working slower than I can, working faster than I should, ungrateful, dim-witted, and angry for no good reason. Most of the jobs I get, I get cuz I was a slave. People expect there ain’t nothing I can’t do, nothing I won’t do. More than a few times a supervisor or some other boss put his hand somewhere it didn’t belong. I ain’t say nothing about it, though. Just slipped a bit of ground tobacco in his tea or coffee, some ground leaves in a meat stew. Not enough to kill nobody, just enough to make them run to the pot and pray to God they’d make it. Sometimes they did, sometimes they didn’t. Depended on what they done and what I remembered from Mama’s old scrawlings. Her notes are more pictures than anything else. Most of them look like blueberry bushes or things that don’t grow here in the city. I don’t expect no harm to come from it but doing it makes me feel good for a little while. Makes me stop feeling like I’m burning up each time somebody ask me something they don’t want to know about anyway.
Most of the jobs I lost, I lost for telling the truth. A wife would corner me and ask while I was busy scrubbing out her dirty sheets, if I didn’t like it a little bit when the master showed me some attention. She’d giggle and ask if she should be worried about her husband, if she should trust me alone. It wasn’t nothing for a grown man to ask to see the scars he imagined ran up and down my back, to ask how the whip felt on my skin. They want to be close up to pain, until they are. When I get mad about them telling me all they think they know about my life, they call me angry. They say it like I ain’t got no cause at all to be upset, sad. Can’t hardly feel nothing without somebody telling me how I should feel instead. I can fall down a whole flight of stairs and won’t there be somebody at the bottom telling me I should be grateful to be alive?
If I’m tired of being accused of working too fast or too slow, of being called a whore cuz somebody’s husband done watched me walk away, I should work slower or faster and not be a temptation. If I’m sick from carrying loads of laundry and smashing rocks and planting crops, I’m a “lazy little ungrateful heifer lucky I can’t be whipped no more but who needs to be reminded of how good things are now.” And when I can’t seem to stay two steps ahead or just really want somebody who don’t want or need something from me to wrap their arms around me, I should smile, laugh, sing more and not look so sad sometimes because Lord knows I ain’t got nothing to be sad about. With all these people telling me how to feel, it’s a wonder I feel anything at all. But I feel everything all at once. Happy, sad, scared, lonely, disappointed, mad, lost. Who can I tell? Everybody’s so busy making up their minds about me, nobody wants to hear me tell them nothing different.
We clean up the backyard. Wrap the bones up to send to the butcher, put the tables in the cellar, blow out the lanterns. Everyone’s said their goodbyes. I know Sable’s in there pretending to be asleep so I don’t come take you home. So, I’m heading home empty-handed. I’m almost to the back door when Christian whispers.
“You ready to stop burning?”
His hands are on my wrist and his mouth is so close to my ear that I feel the words go straight to my brain. I nod my head, yes. His hand is on my back and before I know it, we make love in the grass and I don’t mean no harm but inside I’m still burning.
“Ready?” he asks.
He’s halfway up, putting his clothes on in the dark before I’m standing. I get dressed too. He grabs my hand. We slip out of the yard into an alley. We run through the alley like school kids. We’re giggling and knocking over trash cans. Each clatter of metal on concrete is like music. Scattered piles of spilled garbage with rotting food and broken bottles are like paintings. We dance through the streets. He’s always a few steps ahead. It’s a game of Gotcha. I’m it. He’s slipping in and out of alleys, behind buildings, through yards. Maybe he’s my Edward. I’m trying to make my way to him. If I love him, I’ll be able to find him. He’s getting farther away. Now, he’s nothing more than a shadow beneath dim streetlights, a stone tripping down an empty street. I’m on fire. I can’t stop moving. I don’t even know where I’m going. But there’s a brick in my hand and the first window shatters. He makes his way back to me. He’s grinning, proud. We bust out five shop windows before the chill sets in.
The river. We’ve run through so many alleys I don’t know where I am. There are no streetlights here. There’s little light at all but the stars and a sliver of moon. I don’t need light to see it. It’s small, like a trickle, and muddy but I recognize it by the way it moves like breath. It’s been here all along, waiting on me. His footsteps are soft splashes. He’s laughing and sliding his way to the other side. It ain’t no wider than a front room. He holds out his hand. I see Tempe splashing and running her way to Edward, him rushing to her. I reach out my hand but he’s gone. Tiptoeing up the bank. Hands on hips, head cocked, impatient.
“Well, come on!” he yells. “Ain’t nobody gonna carry you over.” I slide down the soft grass. Mud kisses my shoes, sucks and pulls. I fall. He’s on the other side, laughing. I could die here. In the middle of this dirty stream. It’s nothing like the water back home. The word sinks into the sludge. This is home now. I could follow this little bit of river all the way back to Walker’s and it wouldn’t carry me home. Wherever my family is, that’s home. I’m on my hands and knees in the mud in the middle of the night. I won’t die here. You waiting on me. I got a family, I got a home. I stand up, brush the mud and leaves off my dress. I’ll wash it in the morning before anyone’s up. Without looking at him, I head home.
He drips along behind me. I’m pretending he’s not there until he puts his shirt over my shoulders. It’s damp and spattered but I thank him. We hold hands as if they aren’t caked with mud. Our palms flake as we press them tight. I’m walking lopsided. My soles are thick with dirt, one more than the other. I’m stomping, trying to bang the dirt from beneath my feet and keep up with him both. How does he manage? I look to see if his shoes aren’t covered in mud too. His toes, swaddle
d in mud, wiggle when he walks. Behind him he leaves a trail, like manure. I laugh. The more he asks me what I’m laughing for, the harder I laugh. I laugh till my sides hurt, till I’m empty.
“I love you.” He whispers it in the air above me.
I’m still laughing when I say it back. I know it won’t last when he kisses me on the forehead but I slip in the house. It doesn’t matter. Not yet.
Chapter 23
I don’t like him. Tempe’s watching me get ready to go out.
“Why not?”
He won’t be around long.
“He’s gonna die soon? Ain’t there no better way to say that? Maybe sit me down? Hold my hand and say, Spring, don’t fall in love with this one. This one’s going to die.”
I didn’t say he’s dying. I said he won’t be around long. She shrugs.
“Why you jealous? You had everything. A husband, a baby.”
She’s gone before I finish.
Christian and me terrorize the folks of Grammercy for months. Some nights we don’t even make love. Just get right to making havoc. I spend less time being angry during the day. I’m even singing more. Tempe won’t talk to me. I see less of you, Lillian and Franklin, so it’s a while before I notice her getting sicker and bigger and you calling her mama.
I work every day. Get fired from one job and pick up another one. I don’t mind what I’m doing, what hours I’m keeping. I set my life by the sun, slip in the house when it rises, slip out when it sets. As long as I’m bringing in money, shouldn’t matter none. But of course it do. One morning I’m about to slip in the door, I’m taking off my shoes so I don’t clip-clop across the floor, got one hand on the knob and it don’t turn. It must be stuck. I rattle and shake but it don’t budge. I run around to the back, hot as it is the windows are closed. I tap on a window. No answer. Tap on another one, no answer. I’m getting mad now. I’m locked out my own house. I’m back around front, my tapping turns to banging. I’m looking around for something to bust out a window. I got a rock in my hand but I can’t throw it. By the time Franklin opens the door, I’m slumped in the doorway, cradling the rock like it’s my baby.
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