“Them two?” Be Auntie said, pointing inside the barn.
“Don’t point. But mm hm. Yes’m.”
“I don’t know if Amos . . .”
“Fuck Amos!” Maggie said slightly louder than she intended. She raised her face a bit and looked Be Auntie in the eye. “Ain’t that what you doing.” She inhaled. “Smells like it and smells don’t lie. So please don’t come to me with his consideration when you giving him enough of your’n. He part to blame for this. And if you love him like your blushing tell me, if making a plum fool of Essie ain’t enough to bring you to your senses, you could at least do something to clean the mess you contributing to with your severed tongue and bended knees.”
Be Auntie bowed her head and nodded.
Essie arrived next, moving a bit quickly in her approach. Puah soon followed. Sarah took her time, hesitated before she got to the gate. And once she seemed to talk her herself into moving past it, she walked slowly, like she held a grudge against her own feet and everything they touched.
Maggie greeted each of them at the barn door. She raised a hand, palm forward, and looked at each woman, individually, acknowledged them with a nod and a smile. She folded her hands behind her back.
“I thank you womens for making your way here to this place where we are called to remember and bring forth something out of the dark.” She took a breath. “We all suffer; ain’t no doubting that. But surely we can have some say over how long and what shape it take. Am I lying?”
All of the women shook their heads.
“Now, I know usually this is for us. This ain’t for nobody else’s eyes but ours. No ears are supposed to hear this and goodness knows that what leaves our mouths is for the benefit of the circle only.”
“How it’s supposed to be,” Sarah said.
“Yes’m.” Be Auntie nodded.
Essie didn’t know what to do with her hands. Puah stretched her neck to peer inside the barn.
“I tell y’all this because it the way we have to begin. Don’t matter if you know it already. A long line of womens before us did this work. Used to be men too, until they forgot who they was. Something about men make them turn they back. Don’t ask me what. Wanting nature to bend to they will, I reckon. And there was others, too, but they been split from us. Cast out and forced to be the body and not the spirit. I know because Cora Ma’Dear told me and she never did lie, not even when truth was the death of her.” She paused and looked at the ground before looking out to the field and seeing her grandmother standing there with a light in her mouth. She waved. “But I think we can all come to agreeance that The Two of Them might rightly fit for our blessing.”
“Yes ma’am!” Puah said so fast that it spilled from her lips like water.
“Well,” Be Auntie said, looking sorrowfully at Puah, her top lip pursed in judgment. “You’re young yet and don’t know all of how this works. None of the cost. Don’t be so quick to nod for what might come back on you.”
“I deal with that when I have to deal with it.” Puah forgot herself when she said this. She nearly shouted at Be Auntie, curbed, in the nick of time, only by the knowledge that she would have to return to the shack they shared that evening, and that Auntie’s militia of boys, who maybe didn’t even know they were her militia, might be extra unleashed on her this time. She squeezed the venom out of her tone and returned to delicate voice. “But right now—Miss Maggie, can we help him?”
Maggie looked at her with a raised eyebrow, which was then joined by a tiny smile, nearly completing the circle of her face. “We can help them.”
Then she put her head down. She held her arms out. “Let me be true this day,” she whispered. “Let the blood guide me.” She raised her face and her eyes rolled back in her head. She stumbled a bit, which caused all the women to instantly reach out for her.
“No!” she said to them, shooing away their assistance as she regained her footing. “Ground liable to be shaky on all journeys.” Then, “We ready now. Come.”
The women walked into the barn, moving from fierce sun into tepid shade. Their shadows moved ahead of them before fading, revealing the two groaning bodies on the ground before them. Oh, how fine! How proud even their broken bodies were slumped and no longer clutching each other in the dirt. Puah was breathless. Essie looked away. Be Auntie sighed. Sarah stepped backward, away from the circle and leaned on the barn door frame. Maggie stepped forward and leaned in to get a better look. Two wings of a blackbird, just like she thought. Closer: Isaiah had allowed the tears to come. They rolled out of his eyes fresh and found a place in the ground beneath his face. Oh, yes. The Two of Them fell flat on their faces once they knew that they were out of the sight of judging eyes, and Maggie was certain that was because Samuel would have it no other way. It was also Samuel’s way not to cry. He held it up inside that massive chest of his, which was probably its own underground pond by now.
“Essie, I need you to rip this here to pieces.” Maggie unwrapped an old white dress from around her waist. “It ain’t gotta be even, just so’s I can use it for bandages.”
Essie took the dress. “Mag, this gotta be your finest . . .”
“Go on.”
Essie got down on her knees and began to tear it into strips. She tried to look at Isaiah. She wanted to make sure her friend, no longer friend-friend, was still breathing.
“I can’t even look at them. If I look, it feels like it done to me,” she said.
“That’s blood memory. You ain’t lost yet, thank you,” Maggie said to her. “Don’t let the dress touch the ground. Gotta keep it clean. Don’t wanna cause infection. Puah, I need you to go into the bush and get me four things. We need five, but four you have to do on your own. I help you with the last.”
Puah was crouched over Samuel, who didn’t wish to be seen. Yes, he tried to flatten himself, but to no avail because Puah’s wide eyes saw all, even the things he wanted to hide. The soft things that resided under the layers of rock that were once flesh, but he had to make it something harder in order to exist. She reached her hand. She wanted to bring him the one thing she had to bring: a small bit of comfort, to repay him for his gentle smile, and for being able to see her in a land of creatures that turned their heads, yes, but only to look the other way.
“The marks they put on him,” Puah whispered, nearly touching Samuel’s back, which was laced with new lacerations, or perhaps old ones that had been reopened. “How we gon’ heal this?”
“First,” Maggie said sternly, turning quickly toward Puah, “we don’t speak ill over what we trying to fix! That’s number one. Hush, chile, and listen: Go get me these four things.”
“Why me? I gotta see to Samuel . . .”
“Gal! What I tell you? Hear me now!” Holding up one finger, Maggie spoke: “Listen closely to me. And it gotta be done in this peculiar way. Go behind the Big House to Missy Ruth’s garden. Get to the north side of it, closest to the barn. Pull seven stalks of lavender. You also gon’ find some strands of red hair there. Bring those, too.”
Maggie straightened her back. “Then you gon’ walk east—walk, don’t run. That’s very important. You know that big willow tree in front? Take a handful of weeping leaves from it.”
“You ain’t gon’ need no handful,” Be Auntie interrupted.
“Better too much than too little,” Maggie shot back. She turned back to Puah. “West. Not too far from the river edge, I need as many huckleberries as you can carry. From the plant twined near the dead tree. Know the one?”
“Yes’m.”
“South will be trouble. You gon’ have to go to that other edge of the field, where the overseers and catchers rest. But I need that comfrey right at the edge of they shacks. Make sure your dress don’t touch the ground, you hear me? Long as it don’t, they won’t touch you. Hold it up to your knees. Don’t let it touch the ground.”
“You can’t hesitate, n
either,” Sarah added. “Snatch it up and go.”
“When you get back, I lead you to the yarrow. Then we begin.”
“Maybe they need a little something extra, for protection?” Puah asked Maggie.
“What you think the yarrow’s for? When you get back.”
Puah nodded. She got up. She felt like she should bow, so she did. Then she turned and left.
Maggie giggled. “So nervous when they new.”
“She knew to bow, though. And ain’t nobody told her to do that. Which means her insides are working. You was right for choosing her,” Essie said.
“She choose me. Glowing the way she do, I’d be faulty to walk past her and not notice.”
Maggie walked over to the boys. She got down on the ground and folded her legs in the way she was told the first women did it. She ignored the pain in her hip in favor of theirs. That couldn’t become habit. Too many women lost that way, she thought. But this one last time was okay.
She looked around the barn. They had kept it so neat for what it was. There was no dung, even now, littering the place. Flies crowded around, yes, but there wasn’t anyplace on Empty where that wasn’t true. The horses were clean. The ground was swept and the hay was stacked in rectangles, except for the pile they must have been ready to work on before they were snatched up. And the smell wasn’t so bad once you got used to it.
“I heard it was Ruth what got them beat. Said they looked at her with not a bit of shame. And you know that ain’t nothing but a lie,” Essie said.
“Devil’s tongue,” Sarah said.
“I ain’t think you believe in their words, Sarah. You got a heart change?” Be Auntie asked.
“I don’t believe they words, but it don’t mean they words don’t tell you something ’bout them.”
“I don’t see why Missy Ruth would cause trouble here. What for? She too busy chasing the tongue-face ones.”
“Tongue-face?” Sarah asked.
“Ones that can’t keep they tongue in they mouth when she walk past. Act like they don’t even care that it could get cut off if they caught. Seem like the danger make them wanna do it more!”
“Mm!” Maggie jerked her head.
Wouldn’t that be nice, though? Be Auntie thought. To have hair as straight and red as Ruth’s, or blond, or any color other than deep black. To be her kind of skinny: flat on both sides. To wear pretty gowns and frilly bonnets, and bat not-brown eyes at all kinds of men who would gladly fall all over themselves to see what that put-on blinking might mean. Toubab women moved through the world gracefully. They pointed with soft hands that never knew any kind of labor that they couldn’t somehow escape because every man fancied them dainty and delicate.
No. There wouldn’t be any way Be Auntie could ever be that, no matter how much flour she threw at her own face, looking a plum fool or a haint, one. But she had decided on other means. She would do everything that was inside of her will to do to convince men that she was special, too. The only way to persuade any man of something like that was to agree to be the rug he wiped his shitty feet on. The key to every man’s lock was going along with the untrue assessment of himself as worthy.
“What Missy Ruth want with sodomites?” Be Auntie asked.
“Don’t use they words on them boys. You want the ancestors to heed or not?” Maggie scolded.
“I don’t think she do,” Essie said.
“How you know what I want?” Be Auntie asked.
“’Cause it’s plain, Be Auntie. All your wants plain. To everybody. To me.”
Sarah laughed. “See how quickly mens’ needs have us at each other? Hold, I say.”
“We talking ’bout a woman right now, though,” Essie held.
“And what she did to mens, ain’t it? How ’bout what she do to us?” Sarah looked at Essie finally.
“You know what I mean,” Essie replied.
“Quit that noise! We can talk those big things later. Now we gotta be together. One hand,” Maggie demanded.
There was silence except for the breathing of The Two of Them and the small weeping of Isaiah.
“What you want me to do with these strips, Mag?” Essie asked.
“Hold them ’til Puah get back. Sarah—come and sit by me. I need your steadiness.”
Sarah shirked. She scratched her scalp. She twirled the end of a cornrow. She looked out on the plantation and turned up her lips. “Gon’ stand right chere ’til Puah get back. Right. Chere.”
* * *
—
Puah weaved a mess of big, green elephant-ear leaves into a pouch. She wondered how Maggie knew that strands of red hair would drape the lavender like a spider’s web, marking the precise stalks that had to be pulled. She knew whose hair it was, but why was it there? She didn’t have the sense to burn it so that birds wouldn’t get at it? Fool.
She didn’t like being so close to the Big House. Being that close meant that she was in its clutches in a way that was more tangible than pulling cotton in the adjacent field. Here, toubab were at their most merciless. Home did that to them: made them defensive, hostile, and scared of any dark thing that moved. They were afraid that all that they had accumulated and stored inside the hearth would be snatched away and returned to the unrestful spirits they belonged to.
The house itself was built on top of bones. She could hear them rattling every once in a while because the shacks, too, were essentially tombstones for the land’s First People, often unengraved. Somehow she knew they meant her no harm but also that she might, like anyone else, get caught between the warring parties and die for being trapped in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Puah walked to the front of the house. She took the handful of willow leaves with Ruth watching her from a chair on the porch, holding a bouquet. Ruth smiled at her briefly, which startled Puah. Then Ruth stood suddenly, dropping some of the flowers. Puah thought she raised Ruth’s ire. But Ruth looked toward the barn before sitting down in the chair again. She bent forward to pick up the stray petals and placed them in her lap. For a moment, Puah thought she detected something in Ruth. Regret? Nah. Regret was a high thing, out of reach for most. And there Ruth was: bending, stooping, sitting her behind down. Puah thought that perhaps what made Ruth what she was had something to do with her own beaches—where the tides sung her name gently—being snatched away upon tilting her own head the wrong way. Still, it couldn’t be entirely the same. Ruth’s place had to have had the common sun-bleached sands. And surely the daylight shined forever.
Maybe it was true that the barn was safer despite its proximity to the Big House. It might be better for Samuel and Isaiah if they didn’t insist upon being themselves. The individual always has to give something up for the group. Puah knew what women gave up, time after time, except for maybe Sarah, who created her own difficulties standing in her own spot. So it wouldn’t be completely unreasonable for Samuel and Isaiah to give something up, too, sacrifice whatever force locked them in embrace to appease voracious godlings that saw everything but knew less.
Puah walked slowly to avoid Ruth’s suspicion and headed west toward the river. She made her way down. The water rush soothed her. She stared at it for a moment before turning toward the brush. The huckleberries were right where Maggie said they would be, fat and juicy.
Now, Puah had to head south, past the Big House that she didn’t want to be near again, toward the cotton field and beyond it. She went behind the house this time lest she inspire Ruth’s curiosity. When she reached the edge of the field, she stopped, overwhelmed by the vastness before her, which she had never allowed herself to take in. That was reflex. She knew to never be too open because anything was liable to fly in. And once inside, well . . .
The expanse terrified her. She nearly choked on her breath. She watched birds dive in and out of the blinding sea before her and she wondered how she did it, day after day, back arched and knees
bent, bowing against windless skies. And now, all she had to do was walk across it and into the dangerous land just beyond it for a peculiar plant that grew in an inconvenient place.
With grace, she moved. She never before realized how vulnerable being in the field made her. A span of puffy white heads and there she was: black flesh, easy to spot, easy to target, easy to strike. If this wasn’t for Samuel, she wouldn’t have answered the call. Everybody had their scars, so that was no special reason. But his eyes teased welcome and she couldn’t bear them shut forever. Nor could she endure the slit of Maggie’s disappointment. So she went.
Shoulders deep in it. Only she and her people knew that cotton had a smell. Not pungent or insulting, but something remotely sweet like a whispered song. But how something so soft could wreck the fingers she knew all too well.
She came to the southern end where the field gave way to high weeds. Surrounded now by pale green and dry yellow, she felt less conspicuous, but still exposed. This wasn’t a place she came to very often. Sometimes, she picked over here, but it was mostly the older people who did their work—not their work because it wasn’t voluntary and it wasn’t on their behalf—this close to the overseers’ shacks because they were old enough to recognize the futility of running and how could they anyway on feet already walked down to the nubs?
How many shacks here? About a dozen, maybe a few more, each as ramshackle as her people’s, if a bit larger. Some of them sat leaning, like they were built by unsteady hands. In any event, they formed a crooked line that led off to goodness knows where. Perhaps a forgotten sea or a forest that held captive the flying remains of the ones defeated in order to have a plantation in the first place.
She stepped out of the weeds and onto the dusty ground, worn by the trampling of dozens of feet, which created a kind of border between the plantation and the shacks. That was where they felt it, she thought. Separate from their deeds. Parted from the effects of their own havoc, which they refused to admit was their own doing, so it would, in some future time, long after she was dead she was certain, also be their undoing.
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