He licked Sarah’s cheek in the town square of some place called Charleston, South Carolina—where the bodies from ships washed up with the tide and cluttered the shore—and said that she still had salt in her and that her arms were just right for chopping cane. They dragged her there from the place they called the Isles of Virgins, a name that made no sense to her given the violations that sometimes didn’t even wait for moonglow. She had been seasoned there. They tried to break her in half. She was young enough so that they had nearly succeeded. But trapped within her mind were remembrances.
The first place she lived wasn’t by a sea. It was deep in the bush, which had protected them, and the ground, from sun, and made their eyes suitable for night. Flowers burst all around her in colors that she hadn’t seen anywhere in Miraguana, St. Thomas, Charleston, or Vicksburg. Fruit was abundant, and the plums were thick with the juice that ran from the corners of her mouth and trembled at the edge of her chin as surely as any dew.
She had not yet arrived at her name, which is to say that she had not grown enough to be given a name since names came from how your soul manifested, and that couldn’t be known until it was time to transition from girl to whatever it was you chose to be after. But everyone had to begin there: girl. Girl was the alpha. Even in the womb, the healers had said, the start was there before anything might change. Circles came before lines; that was what had to be honored. When the babies arrived, they were girls irrespective of whatever peace blossomed between the legs. Girls until after the ceremony where you could then choose: woman, man, free, or all.
A girl with so many mothers, aunts, and sisters, draped in the softest fabrics, no unkind eyes or untoward glances. Sarah remembered the laughter most, but also a wagging finger when she had once tried to slip from under the bush’s protection.
“You want to get gobbled up by a lion, yes?”
“No.”
“Then you come over here right now, child!”
She walked sullenly back to the arms of the many mothers, but she would get gobbled up by a lion anyway. And no one would hear her testimony of the ship. Nothing about its sickening rock or the marks left on wrists and ankles from heavy shackles. Not a word to be heard about the thing in the corner that moved, and she was sure it wasn’t a shadow because there was too little light to cast one. Instead, silence. Nobody wants to hear that old Africa shit. We here now, ain’t we? What difference do it make ’bout before the ship? That was the danger. The danger was alive, you hear? It was living. Nothing there can save us now.
They silenced her, all of them but Maggie, who had a lot of an old thing in her.
Easy, Sarah, O Sarah. Breathe. Rejoice. The memories are still yours to keep.
If they were open to bearing what she carried, she could tell them about how she learned of freedom’s possibility. There were words being carried across waters after she was sold from St. Dominique, that the people had had enough. The same blades they had chopped the cane with were held high, in unison and in charge, and blood spilled such that the ground itself was black and soft no more. Sarah wondered if the soil in Charleston could likewise be transformed. They all had blades. Yovo (now toubab) damn sure put the blade in her hand and expected her to chop the cane as if that was all the blade could be used for. But to raise the blade was to accept the risk that the danger was living. And how could she ever permit that slithering thing the chance to crawl toward her Mary?
Their first kiss was under the arc of sweetgum trees. No moisture in the air, but between them, yes. It was spring and their calm had come from each other’s embrace. Breath. Slow. Blinking. One chin lifted and the other bowed. A stray hair that Sarah tucked behind Mary’s ear.
“Plait it for you later, all right?”
“All right then.”
Maybe it wasn’t just danger; maybe all skin was living, too. Maybe all bodies understood gentle touch. Could bosom and bottom alike be curved precisely for a loosening hand, a knowing lip? All Sarah knew for sure was that when she and Mary were between, they were between: legs entangled, and the dual bushes that each held their own shining stars had joined. Bellies rose and fell and never—never once—did they fail to look into each other’s faces and see what was actually there no matter how many times Charleston had said it wasn’t.
Sarah saw that same look between Isaiah and Samuel, sometimes. Only sometimes because the mean one, Samuel—who seemed to be choosing man because he didn’t understand how that made the other possibilities remote—was fighting against himself because his desire didn’t look like anything he had ever seen before. The other one, Isaiah, had better imagination. She wasn’t sure if he had chosen woman or free, but it was clear he had chosen one or the other because violence wasn’t his primary motion.
Given the numerous times Sarah stepped onto a greedy but unwelcoming shore, it was in her to know. Against dipping suns, and airs dripping wet and smelling of honeysuckle, she saw how Samuel turned his body away when Isaiah turned his body toward. She saw the ax in Samuel’s hands and the pail in Isaiah’s. For Isaiah would milk the cows and Samuel would slaughter the hogs. Isaiah’s hard-earned smile and Samuel’s understandable fists: she could precisely attribute glee to one and despair to the other because one’s spirit had clearly sprouted wings while the other took refuge in the echo of caves. Both, she knew, had a purpose, however imperfect. Life was being clung to, whether with balm or sword.
No one looking could see what she saw because no one looking knew what she knew. To everyone else, Samuel and Isaiah had blended into one blue-black mass, defined by the mistaken belief that it was a broken manhood coating their skin and not, what—courage? Though it could have been foolhardiness, too.
Girl is the beginning, damn it. Everything after is determined by soul.
There were no sweetgum trees on Empty, so Isaiah especially, but Samuel, too, must have had no choice but to settle for the cover of a ratty barn roof that even the pallid moon could penetrate if it wanted to. Their safety was therefore less and she felt for them, but only to the degree that it was rooted in her own memory of what was lost.
Wait.
Not lost, though. This wasn’t something she had incidentally misplaced on a ramble. Someone had devised a separation to be felt acutely between the two wings of her ribs. That was an unprotected space—the unprotected space.
Every time she saw Isaiah and Samuel, it made her curse the distance between her and Mary, and the people who placed it there. And what was in that distance but thorns, green and steely, eager to pierce not just the beating feet racing back to embrace the departed, but the chest for that was where the treasure was. When she saw Isaiah and Samuel, the distance stretched and grew more and more entangled. But seeing them also softened her because she had remembered, too, how it would end.
Was Mary still in Charleston? Probably. There was no need to have sold her, too. The cane was punishment enough. But they would teach her, for the rest of her days, the meaning of sugar anyway. Some days, it was safer to imagine her dead: a plump corpse condemned to the ground, under layers and layers of earth, to become nourishment of another kind. Other days, Sarah couldn’t help but imagine Mary with a blade strapped to her thrashing arm covered not in her own blood. But neither of those was what unfolded. Truly, they had to pry the blade out of Sarah’s hands, not Mary’s. What had they even given it to her for in the first place? If it could chop cane, it could chop man. Her refusals, which they wouldn’t heed, meant she could test the theory. She was too much her people and that was the way it would be.
“We was always doomed, won’t we?”
That was the last thing she said to Mary as they tied Sarah down and carted her off to Mississippi. There was no point in saying the things truly felt because they were already known. Instead, Sarah figured that the time should be spent looking at the face of her One, to study it so that in the deep, deep of night, which was the only time solace could be real,
when her hands were tucked between her own legs—that was the only face she saw. Then, and only then, could she fling her juices upward, hoping they, too, could be etched there like the sky that her Only One, wherever she was, could also see, and when the rain came down, also drink from.
O, Sarah! Empty was another thing. It was the deepest. It was the lowest. It was the down and below. It was the bluest depth. It was the grave and the tomb. But briefly, ever so briefly, you could still come up for air. Despite the blood and the screams and the smothering hot, here, too, was where Essie sometimes sang in the field and made the picking less monstrous, if not less grueling. Oh, she would open her mouth and hit a pitch that made bellies rumble because it was the same vibration as living itself. The butterflies must have known too; Sarah could tell by how they flirted with circling Essie’s head.
And in Sarah’s liminal way, she, like Essie’s butterflies, skirted around the edges of Isaiah and Samuel, giving her the room to not give too much of herself because almost everything on Empty took and took and took, and replenishing was as foreign as kindness. But the one who was the better chooser because he had clearly chosen woman or free had loosened her a bit—a little bit—against her better sense.
Isaiah was down by the river one sunset. Sarah had hated the way the sky could do that—spread its colors clean across creation in violet hues with hints of orange, a moment designed strictly for joining. Yet the rest of nature took cruel turns at denying her breasts the warmth of her lover’s touch. But Isaiah stooped against that backdrop anyway, looking confused. He was without Samuel and Sarah reckoned that Samuel couldn’t stand to be anywhere, joined, where there was no barn cover. She walked closer. Her head was still wrapped from the long day and her dress was wet from labor. She was shining with the combining colors. Isaiah was looking at the blue vervain that dotted the edge of the land but knew better than to get any closer to the river’s lip. He smiled at her approach and pointed to the flowers.
“Blue can hurt, you know,” he said as she stood next to him. She eyed him.
“You don’t know from blue,” she said, waiting to see how he might protest.
He looked at the flowers again. “You right.” He put his head down.
She didn’t expect that. She inhaled deeply before letting her breath out slowly. She closed her eyes for a moment and then took another deep breath, which brought the mixture of wildflowers and river water closer to her tongue. When she opened her eyes, she was looking across to the bank on the other side. She held her gaze.
“Your’n thing an old thing,” she said softly.
Isaiah looked at her. “You mean from before? From where you from?”
“Nobody never listened, but yeah.”
“I wish you tell me,” Isaiah said.
Sarah smiled. A tiny thing, but so kind, she thought. She held her hand to her chest.
“What I can tell you is hold on as long as you can. Nothing but pain is guaranteed. But hold.” She pointed east. “I shoulda.”
He again looked confused but nodded his head. The only reason she told him even that much was because she thought he picked woman or free. So there was a greater chance for a balanced response to her knowing rather than a discarded one. Isaiah stuck his foot in the water and swirled it.
“Keep on,” she said, surprised at how that was even in him to do. “Now stop.”
Isaiah looked at her.
“What you see?” she asked, pointing down to the water.
“Something,” he responded, squinting into the murkiness. “A face? A woman’s face?” Isaiah leaned in a bit closer. “She’s looking . . . at you!”
Sarah’s smile had caught him by surprise. She chuckled. She had wondered why Mary had sent the message through him and not her, but she was glad of it.
“Thank you,” she said to Isaiah, looking at him and just briefly catching his eyes.
“For what?” he asked.
“It don’t make no nevermind,” Sarah said. “You helped me. And you has my sympathy.”
Isaiah just looked at her.
“Can’t be easy having all the peoples with they backs to you.”
“Not all,” Isaiah said.
“Mm,” she said. Then she looked away.
Isaiah looked back down at the waters. “Oh! The face gone.”
Sarah wiped her forehead and touched her head wrap as though she was checking to see if it was still in place. “It’ll be back. Someday.”
Isaiah nodded and was about to swirl his foot again when James approached them. He walked right up behind them without so much as shifting a dry leaf or crunching a stray pebble. He could do that: be as quiet as a trap. His hat was pulled low. His rifle was tight in his grip.
“Time to get on back to your shacks. Don’t you see where the sun is? Quit this dragging. No time for mellow. Get.”
There was no scorn on his face; his lips, however, were bent in sorrow. But even when toubab smiled, they had a streak of despair at the edge of whatever joy they thought they had found. Not regret, no, not that. More like they were waiting for something that they knew was coming but wished it wasn’t—even if they called it down themselves. Sarah didn’t look at James, but she did make a face that arched her eyebrows and shifted her lips to the side. Curious things, these yovo. She meant toubab.
She glanced at Isaiah and started on her way.
“Night, Miss Sarah,” he whispered.
James shot him a look at the word “Miss.” Sarah turned to see Isaiah backing away from James and then jogging toward the barn. She turned back around and stepped on over patches of weeds and sauntered her way back to the dirt path, not quite with Puah’s humor or grace, but close.
See? Isaiah call me “Miss” right in front of that one whose name I won’t say for Maggie’s sake and for mine. Courage or foolishness, it don’t matter. I got another witness. Àṣẹ.
She grabbed a handful of larkspur, and then another. She came quickly upon her shack. Alternately moving and stooping as though in prayer, she placed a portion of the flowers in each of the four corners of the room.
“To keep true close and lie away,” she said before she sat down on a stool with a thud.
Legs spread out, she raised her dress and longed for cool. When none came, she patted her wrapped head, which had started to itch. Memories could do that: come up prickly to poke at the scalp and peck at the mind.
Finally, she unfurled the wrap and let it hang to the ground. It blocked one of her eyes but she could see with the other. She looked at the flowers she put down, cornered.
Not hardly sweetgum. But it’ll do.
Ruth
The moon went elsewhere and Ruth rose from her bed. She walked gingerly across the rug but didn’t retrieve her slippers, nor did she think to cover herself in a housecoat. Her nightgown was enough. She didn’t bother to light a candle or a lantern. No light. No light. She decided to take her chances in the dark. If she should stumble, knock her knee against some forgotten piece of furniture, tumble down the stairs after misjudging one, it would make no difference to her. It would just mean that the broken-outside would finally match the broken-inside and the chips and cracks that were known only to her would no longer be secreted away and wept over in solitude. Then everyone could see and they too would weep because they would finally know that she was innocent. Her tears. Oh! Her tears!
She walked out onto the porch and stopped right between the two main columns. She stretched out her arms for no reason, or maybe to catch the wind, which was rare enough in Mississippi. To feel it now was to welcome it. It dried the moisture on her pale but freckled skin, and she felt smooth to her herself. She closed her eyes and took it in. She swayed a little, almost as if this was a kind of worship like the kind she had claimed or, rather, was given and told it was where she belonged—there, in the secondary space where she, due to the curves of her sex, could
only ever be partial and two steps behind. Head down. Not a whole body; merely a rib.
Though she was awake, she still felt the weariness of the day inside her head and moved over to one of the rockers to sit down. She sat heavily and the chair jerked backward before springing forward again. She let her head roll down so that her chin hit her chest, her bright red hair came forward to her face and hung down in front of her shoulders. Then she lifted her head and inhaled deeply. The day and the night smelled different from each other. The day was musky, the funk of animals, including niggers, spoiled what was supposed to be ruled by the heal-all she instructed Essie and Maggie to plant carefully along the edges of the first garden that belonged to her and her alone. She loved the heal-all most because of how full the purple was, given wondrous shape by how each bloom sat above the other. The flowers opened up like tiny stars and she liked the idea that there was something on the ground that could match the splendor of the night sky.
That was moot. There was too much interference in the day and very little she could do about it that wouldn’t make the stench worse. It was only in the deep night that her plan worked and even the closed blooms gave her a gift to smell. The only shame was in the competing beauty that divided her attentions between where she sat and where she looked up to.
The night, too, was a place to wander. Within certain confines, of course, but it still provided a chance to explore. From one horizon to the other, this land belonged to Paul, which meant that her safety wasn’t only paramount, but guaranteed. She had made all the appropriate sacrifices to solidify the contract. You couldn’t see it, but there was a trail of blood that led from her womb to the woods and followed her wherever she went. Whether it was in downtown Vicksburg to visit the dressmaker, in the front row of the pew at church as the reverend looked at her with eyes that lingered a tad too long, in her needlepoint circle with the women who envied her only because they imagined her in possession of a life that they wanted—and she knew none of them would want her life if they knew about the wandering that Paul’s absence made absolutely necessary, or maybe they would; who’s to say?—the trail moved when she did, always led to her no matter where she stood, and connected her, forever, to the thick and thin separating man from beast. That was why she wandered the wilderness most of all. She was tethered to it for reasons she couldn’t yet understand but also felt on the cusp of the wisdom that she knew would soon come. What she knew for certain was that being in open nature was where she felt most like she was a whole body and not just a stolen piece.
The Prophets Page 12