Grace (4 page)

“Now, where were we?” Massa say over the ringing. “Yes, the girl . . .” He look at me.

Hazel wails.

Massa say, “Boss, get that fox outta here.”

Boss picks up James, but cain't get a good hold on him. He folds James's limp arms across his chest to make 'em stay put, carries him to the door, leaking red.

I ain't letting go my ears.

Momma's knees creak back and forth on the floor.

“Where were we?” Massa say again.

He staggers toward me and I walk on my knees away from him, the invisible wall that keeps space between us pushes me back toward the fire. He forces me to the side of the table where I knock my head and my hands let go my ears to hold the table.

The pain of what Massa just done rush to me, red-blooded. My neck's getting hot, my hands is sweating. Hazel's cries is louder. She runs over to Boss, pulls his arms from James, beg to let him alone.

Massa say, “Gon' get 'im outside.”

That ready-poker. I see it next to me, pressing me to take it.

Boss opens the door.

I spin around and grab it, launch it deep inside Massa's belly before my mind tell me no.

Massa's mouth falls open.

His eyes bulge.

He begs me to stop but I ain't gon' stop. I push it through him and my hands slide down the pole. His blood squeezes out warm around my fists. And he stops reaching for me.
I want this.

Boss drops James when he see us.

He throws hisself at me trying to beat me loose, but I cling to that poker, shake it in.

Boss rams his fist to my hand. I still don't let go.

Rams my head. My face go numb.

I try to stand, but cain't. I don't wanna fight no more.

I push across the floor, crawling my way to Hazel, half-blind. She's hunched over James trying to fix him. Momma's on top of Boss. Got that poker in his back, the other end in her hand. She's digging it in. His blood rains on the floor.

A second blast races around the room and I throw myself to the ground. Don't know if I'm hit or dead or deaf, the sound exploding from everywhere—a long whistle in my ear. Don't feel myself hurt.

When I open my eyes, Hazel ain't moved from cuddling James. I squint toward Momma, find her staring at me like she just asked a question and she's waiting for an answer. But her calm expression turns painful. She don't let her eyes fall from mine when blood spreads from the middle of her dress. “Momma!” I yell. She hunches over and falls as Massa sits perched on his knees across the room holding that pistol. The weight of it flops his hand sideways and he fall with it.

“Momma!” I say, scooting across the floor to wake her, to make her well, but she ain't moving. Only the wind of her last breath do.

Behind us, Massa takes his last, too.

The wet of her dress makes my hand red. “Hazel! Momma's dead!”

But Hazel won't look away from James. She's holding his hand. I can hear her talking to him. Praying. I try to wait . . . wait long enough and say, “Hazel, what we gon' do?”

Hazel don't get up. She stay praying. Seem like a hour before she say, “Amen.” Finally, she stands, strong as always except when she sees Momma, her knees buckle.

Calmly, she say, “I want you to go, Naomi. Far as you can. Go where cain't nobody find you.”

“Where I'm gon' go, Hazel? I cain't leave you and Momma.”

She nods and goes over to the fire pit, pulls her smoldering Bible out the fire. She presses it on her dress to stop it smoking. And I cain't stop shaking. “Momma's dead, Hazel!”

She comes to me, hugs me, but her comfort ain't enough to stop this pain or the tears that pain makes to carry itself out of me.

Hazel twists two bundles of my hair into one loose braid. It unravels.

“Naomi, listen. Listen! You gotta go outta here. You gotta go north, you hear me? Ain't nothin here for you.” She presses her Bible against my chest. I hold it tight.

“I don't know where North is!”

“Follow the star like I showed you. Go only in the night.” Boss starts moaning from the floor.

I cain't do this no more.

Hazel go over to him, stomps that poker further into Boss's back and he shuts up. She heaves it out and tears her clothes with it; slices into her own flesh, along her ribs 'til she bleed. She brings it to me and puts it in my hand, bloody. “You gon' need to protect y'self.”

“Hazel?” I say.

“You gon' need food.” She gets the stale rolls from next to the oven and shoves 'em down my blouse. “You water yourself in the stream.”

“But Hazel . . .”

“People gon' come lookin, Naomi. Come lookin for all us. Ain't nobody certain you was ever here.” She peels off Massa's dark-brown jacket, rolling his fat, doughy body from side to side when she do.

“Hazel, please!”

She puts his jacket around my shoulders. “We was all attacked,” she say. “I got to be here to tell 'em.”

“But I cain't make it without you.”

She pulls open the front door. “Go, Naomi.”

I creep to it, wiping my tears. “Hazel? Please.”

“Go!” she yell.

She grabs the back of my head, kiss my cheek before she push me out the door. I hurry out, looking up to the starless, clouded sky, running through the dark, holding Massa's jacket high above my head.

“Don't look back, Naomi. You hear me! Don't you look back!”

I cain't breathe.

Maybe Hazel put a mark on the wall for me, too.

4
/ FLASH

S
OME SAY YOUR
life flashes before your eyes when you're about to die.

It don't always.

Not for me.

I didn't have not one flash before I went.

Not everybody gets to see their first birthday again. Their father's face laughing. The day their sister got married. The friends they've loved.

Maybe you won't neither.

Not before you die.

It's only now that I see the flashes. They come and go, and choose what day of my life to show me and I ain't got a say in it. It happens to all of us dead. It's more than just seeing the moment, it's taking part in the memory as if it were happening again. And when you in the flash, you don't even know that what you're seeing is from a time already gone. You get lost in it. Feel like you got all the time in the world. A future. But it's just your old life repeating itself and repeating itself and repeating itself. Those shivers you felt on warm days were just you—in two places at once.

So powerful, these flashes. Ask the dead. Ask the people who survive near death. Ask 'em how the flashes change their whole life from then on.

Or for the empty, it changes nothing.

I guess the most important parts of life ain't measured by years or days or minutes but by moments. Moments that come in flashes here, only some of 'em good like seeing my sister, Hazel, again. I was seven years old in one of them flashes. Twelve in another. My favorite was the time when Hazel was teaching me how to tumble. And in another, I was six years old and she helped me lose my first tooth with a string and a slammed door.

The hell is the bad memories. Going back again and again and not being able to make a damn bit of difference. But God had mercy on me.

It's been said that justice is getting what you deserve. And mercy is not getting the bad you deserve. Grace is getting a good thing, even when you don't deserve it. So if I would've named my good thing, I'd have called her Grace. But someone else named her Josephine.

Part
II

5
/ 1850

Tallassee, Alabama

W
HERE DO WE
start when we tell the stories of our loved ones? On the day they were born or the day they mattered?

Mattered to other people, I mean, did something worth talking about. I guess I could start with who begot who like the Bible do, but where somebody comes from only matters to people who come from something and as it was, she came from me.

Me, and the men who would become her fathers.

See, my baby's real father wasn't the man who loved me. But if wishing could make it so, I'd of traded him for the man I shoulda loved—Charles. I woulda made him the first daddy to her 'cause first means something.

Charles wasn't the man who got me pregnant.

He wasn't first to hold my baby with his hands, either, or feel her tiny bones wiggling 'round in a loose bag of see-through skin. It was somebody else who was first to listen to her soft breaths flutter.

Charles shoulda been all them.

But he wasn't.

When I first knew Charles, I never thought he'd be the kind of man who woulda made a good daddy. He never seemed like he needed
nobody, especially a child. And his body never looked like it could care for one, neither. His hands too big to care for little baby thangs, his face too beastly to call a comfort, his arms too strong to hold something gentle. I'd reckon he'd crush her reaching for sugar. And he was alone when I first knew him. Alone is how he liked it. Safe. Never having to wonder what it would be to give hisself to somebody completely.

But I was wrong.

Wrong, 'cause he chose my baby, Josephine. Wrong, 'cause he once tried to choose me.

I wish he woulda smelled sweet to me like a man looking for love or seemed soft like a man who could love me silly and forgive me for the thangs he didn't know about me. I wish I woulda felt his sun on my cheeks, breathed in his cool air and noticed the difference, like stepping from the cool shade of the trees to the hot sun directly. I wish he woulda scorched goose bumps on my arms so I woulda thought of him regular.

But he was just Charles. Another man, not a miracle.

Momma used to say that when you meet the one God sent you, you'd recognize him at once 'cause we all got souls trapped in our bodies and our souls got memories of a better life before this one; memories that come to us in our dreams, even when we awake.

I didn't remember Charles that way. I mighta loved him if I did. The way Josey did.

She saw through the deep folds and scars on his bald head from when he was set on fire. She saw through the wash of skin on his burned face—healed slick. His nose was flattened to a valley. And still, she managed to love the man I shoulda. A man that became like a mother to her. He'd shepherd his flock of one away from all the things that might hurt her.

For him, couldn't nobody care for her the right way, couldn't nobody do it as good as he could: couldn't feed her right, couldn't hold her right, couldn't watch her close enough.

Everyone was to blame if she caught cold, so up until she was three years old, he wrapped her up at night hisself and worked hard in the day
to get back before them gossiping women let her fall in the stream. And when he labored, he never looked no one in the eye, never gave nobody half a reason to whip him. Never spoke.

By the time Josey was five, everybody could see that his love and Josey were the same thing. The pair of 'em was as wrong as a dog nursing a kitten. And if he knew it, he never said and everybody else was scared to tell him. So at seven years old, when Josey asked him if he was her momma, Charles said, “Love is just love.”

They would talk like that. Honest-like. As if the world had no boundaries and the lush green of East Tallassee, Alabama, was all there was to it. It was the place that became home. The place that became home to me, too. Like a sister to me, Tallassee is—the dirt, the trees, the river, the hillsides. For Charles and Josey, it's home, where the real world disappears beneath forests of perfectly placed vines. They flow through these woods like silken hair, running over treetops as if they were shoulders and along the ground where pink flowers sprout and get tucked behind her ear. Pretty.

Charles and Josey would walk along her creek—Stone Creek—far enough away from cotton fields and mills, hands carrying whips. They could dream of a future here, even though people say negroes are dreamless.

Stone Creek was just a man's skip wide but Josey couldn't make it across without Charles's carry. She was five years old the first time she saw the past there—red beads and pottery. Tallassee would let the past seep in that way, through overflowed waters from the fast and wide Tallapoosa River, scooping buried things and rearranging 'em. Resurrected. Drag marks of black sand and brown mud led to where old things ended up—the storms' treasure turning over lame in the swampy banks. Charles would lower Josey over the water so she could reach down and pick 'em up, the back of her dress knotted in his fist.

“Creek Indians,” Charles told her. “Chased out.”

Josey wondered why they'd gone and left such pretty things. And before she could ask the question, Charles would answer. “The Creek
Indians lived here before the Spanish,” he told her. And he told her how the French came, then the English, then the English again, the second time with a dream to build a new nation.

Men rode the Tallapoosa River almost three hundred miles from Georgia to Alabama. Then just above Tallassee, thirty miles upriver, they built a dam in Montgomery. They came for the water's strength—the waterfalls. They could power a mill with 'em, wet a town. They carved up Tallassee like cuts of meat. Sold her with the promise that she was theirs.

The river splits her in two so the men named one side of her East, and the other West. But she still see herself as one. Be silly to cut a person in half and call 'em now two peoples, treat 'em different. But they did. On her east side, bluffs hold groves of magnolias and oak trees like a fistful of flowers, and plantation houses. The west holds the mills and the workers.

Tallassee didn't say nothin when they split her up. Of course she didn't. She's a piece of land. A mute spirit. Any voice she may have had went when the last Indian tribes left. But you can feel her fury. Angry at how she was tricked over the years—slow and steady. If it was done to her quick, she might have noticed.

These settlers weren't forceful, at first. They were charming-like. Whispering sweetness in her ear as they passed through. Coming back more and more regular. Mapping things. Told her they were drawing pretty pictures of her. It's how they do. Capture things on paper. Would catch the spirit, if they could. Would capture music, if they could. But some things you just got to be there to see. It's why I thank God for making the spirit like running water. Even captured water will steam away. It's what the Creek Indians believed Tallassee was—a spirit, uncatchable 'til she was caught.

Maps is how they did it. They separated East and West Tallassee on their papers, marking squiggly lines that meant “Tallapoosa River.” And on the paper, two waterfalls—the power that would turn the water wheel and give life to the mill. A mill that first made cotton cloth. A
mill that would last make bullets. Even the gray bedrock that the river tumbled over was drawn in, unmoving. Proof you can't capture everything. 'Cause in real life, the waterfalls splash on the green moss blanketing rocks and spray red berries stuck on leaning branches. But that didn't matter on paper. And what don't matter, don't survive. Nothing survives its usefulness to white folk.

The Creek Indians were driven away (they got Africans and poor whites instead) and the waterfalls were made mules, and the river's rocks were used to build stone buildings. Only gravel remained in the water, mostly unbothered. That, and the animals they couldn't catch.

“The past always got a way of coming back,” Charles told Josey, pointing at the beads in her hand. “And this land got a memory.” It's why Charles thought the bridges went down over the Tallapoosa River regular.

Tallassee would always start that happening the same way. She'd send the morning gusts first, high above the ground, rushing it through the treetops that covered the whole five-mile forest like a God-made roof. Even when heavy rains came, hardly a drop got through.

The wind would rush like water above the town, uncatchable, bending trees south. The limbs would lean, layering a thick cover of roof over the world of folks and things underneath, not disturbed.

I once watched a dried orange leaf hang from a branch by a single thread of shimmery web. While it stormed above, the leaf played in the calm space below, spinning, unaware of the darkening skies, nudged only into rocking by a bluebird seeking shelter. By the noon hour, it had been plucked away, stolen like everything else not rooted in the earth, then shoved into the wind-made tunnel that burrowed a pocket through Tallassee.

“This is a day of reckoning,” a white man said, standing on the wet cliff above another fallen bridge. Another said, “You can't contain this landscape. Can't beat her back. These vines are relentless growing in.” But people must beat it back, and they do to live here. Those who been here long enough call Tallassee the green-skirted gypsy of the South.
Full of illusions. She'd set clouds on her hilltops like floating pearls. Even on days when no weather would call for 'em and no storms were on their way, she'd put just one cloud above a cluster of three or four oaks, making it look like the nesting jaybirds were smoking.

Good weather.

“Fertile and stable ground,” visitors would say, while a torrent simmered beneath her trick of “perfect place to make a life and start a family.” The Creek Indians knew her better. A thousand years they respected her, the way Charles and Josey do.

Those men shouldn't have cut her up. Shouldn't have tried to own her. Define her. Not with their caught pictures, their maps. The Creek Indians wouldn't do it until they were forced to. The Creek landmarks became borders. Their asking her permission to stay became demands. Their maps, their boundaries, meant the end of the Indians' world. It's always how white men came to own things: “If you can define it, you can own it,” they'd say. “If you can define it, it can be fought for, killed for. A woman, a slave, a cow, dirt, an idea.” And it is what happened. Thousands lost their lives. The Creek Nation fought the new United States of America. The unshapeable spirit had been shaped into Tallassee's pretty picture. And the lines of her cheekbones became battle lines. And it wouldn't be the last time. There's a civil war coming.

“If you lucky,” Charles said, pulling a broken plate from the water, “when the past comes to greet you, all it want to say is, ‘I remember you,' then smile from longing.”