Grace (9 page)

12
/ FLASH

Conyers, Georgia, 1847

I
AIN
'
T ALLOWED IN
the garden since what happened yesterday.

Cynthia say from now on I got to wake her up in the morning before I start my day's chores, but, “Yours ain't the first voice I want to hear in the morning,” she said. “So just tug on my toe before you go.”

She left for a date on Bernadette's bed a little while ago. Said Bernadette ain't making her money no way so I've been making the most of my time in here alone. I been sitting in front of Cynthia's mirror, twirling her tiny pot of red lip stain. Stroked her small brush across its mouth.

One of the legs on this chair is missing a bottom piece, broken. It wobbles from side to side, like a gimp man dancing.

I read my Bible.

But, if I'm honest, I'm just laying my face on it, crossing my eyes to see the words. Candle wax is cooling in bumpy lines down the candle-holder. I scratch my nails down it, let its softness pack under my nails and push back the meat. I flick it out with my thumb and drop the clump back in the candle's flame. It falls through it but don't melt much. Just enough to stick and harden when it slides to the tabletop.

The flame stutters again when the door blows open. I sit up quick, pretend I'm reading.

It's Albert, the negro. He say, “Sorry, didn't know nobody was in here,” and starts closing the door back on hisself.

“It's all right,” I say. “You can come in.” But he don't come. He stay on the other side of the door speaking to me.

“Cynthia sent me to fix that chair. But I do it some other time.”

“Naw, come in,” I say. “I wasn't doing nothin.”

He creeps the door back open and I slide off the chair and go to my trunk. When I sit, my thighs bulge and spread under my dress like rising pancake batter.

“It's good to see you better,” he say.

He kneels next to the chair and rocks it back and forth checking which leg's broke. Its wood shoe is split. He takes out some sort of grinder from his satchel, some binding glue, and a wood piece from his pocket.

I watch him while he busy hisself fixing it.

He got big ears.

They cupped like hands on the sides of his head. I don't know why they like that 'cause he ain't one to listen in on other people's conversations. His wild reddish hair is so puffy and high, he must got some other blood mixed in him worser than I got. But his eyebrows is black. And thick. He got freckles, too.

Cynthia call him the “Scottish Banshee” on account of all the red. She said when she took him in a few years ago, she did it cause she felt sorry for him. He was a free slave who never made it north. She reckon he afraid to leave, afraid he's gon' get stopped, afraid some white fool gon' ignore his papers and send him back to slavery anyway. Sometimes she say she never shoulda treated him so good in the first place 'cause now she cain't get rid of him.

But he helpful to her.

He fix things, do all the blacksmithing around here, cleaning sometimes, too. Me and him ain't never talked even though we both negro.
White peoples don't like to see black folks together no how. Always suspecting the worse like we plotting, or must be lovers drawn together by some black magic they don't understand. So me and Albert keep our distance.

He reaches for his glue from the floor and smears some on his new piece of wood, then puts it on the broken leg.

“Thanks for saving me,” I say.

He don't answer.

“Cynthia told me you did.”

He nods, holds the new foot in place.

“You do a lot of things 'round here,” I say. “You should know you appreciated, is all.”

He still don't talk.

“Why you don't cut your hair?” I say.

“'Cause it's mine,” he say. “My hair's my freedom. I can do what I want with it, when I want. I'm a free man.”

“If you free, why you here?”

“You ask too many questions that ain't none of your business.”

“You slept wit Cynthia?”

He stops working. Rolls his head 'round his neck like he cracking it and just stare at me. He starts working again.

He's funny.

Easy to bother.

I say, “A young man like you should be finding a wife and a home.”

“I'm thirty-seven years old,” he say, stopping again. “Ain't been a young man a long time. What you? Sixteen, seventeen? I got at least twenty years on you, girl, so don't fool yourself into thinking you know somethin.”

“I know you here,” I say. “But you say you ‘free.' Been here five years and still do what you told, eat when you told to, sleep in the field. ‘Free.'”

“Child,” he say, smiling now, like I'm the one who said something funny. “How you know I ain't saving my money, readying to go north?
Buy some land, build a house, find a strong, feisty woman there and make her my wife.”

“I'll help you find her so long as you take me north with you when you go.”

“Naw, the woman who'd marry me ain't north,” he say, closing his glue pot. “I reckon she's south already. Over the border in Mexico.”

“A Mexican?”

“A negro. Runaways and freed men been escaping south of Texas for years. Even the ones that go into Mexico as slaves is finding their freedom there. It ain't like here.”

“You mean negroes ain't slaves everywhere?”

“Not in Mexico. We got a kinship with Mexicans in Texas. They like us. A captive people, too, but on their own land. This country's their homeland. They didn't migrate here or been stolen and brought here like us. They been moved out, off their land, piece by piece. So they don't allow slavery.”

“Freedom's north. Everybody know that. You said Mexico's south.”

“Freedom is wherever you find it.”

“Then mine's north. Always been north. Always be north.”

“You don't know everything,” he say. “There are men. Good men. Quakers from out east. God-fearing. Risking their lives to get negroes to Mexico. Got the burning in their hearts to do so, and the fearlessness of a child who'd defy his own hunger to free an animal being led to slaughter. They're what you call zealous men. Doing God's work.”

“And taking slaves to Mexico?”

Albert packs his stuff. “Like I said, you don't know everything.”

The door shuts soft when he go. I sneak over to his fixed chair and sit in it. I go easy on it at first so I don't mess up his work. I lean back in the chair to see if it's still lame but it don't clunk no more.

I bring my Bible back to me and start reading from it, catch my reflection in the mirror again, see my top lip disappear when I read the word “thee” or when I smile big.

I'm still flat-chested.

Hazel promised they was gon' grow but they never did. If I knew back then that they never would, I woulda been stuffing my dress with stockings so Hazel wouldn't feel bad that I weren't a woman.

I still pretend that Hazel is sitting with me sometimes, talking to me, reading with me. I slide my Bible to myself again, imagine Hazel saying, “Now you read.”

“The Lord is my Shep . . . Shep . . . hard. Shep . . .”

“Shepherd,” Cynthia say coming in, slamming the door. She throws her money down next to me. “So you can speak.”

I get up quick and grab my Bible on the way back to my trunk. Cynthia pulls her bra straps down from her shoulders. She rolls down her britches and steps out of 'em, then throws 'em across the room to her pile of soiled things.

I clear my throat. “Thank you for what you did yesterday.”

“Um hum,” she say, taking off her dress. She slips her silky gown over her head. Lights a cigarette.

“You weren't scared?” I say.

“Scared? They was the one's who needed to be scared. Jonas was glad he wore his tight pants so his shit didn't fall out near his ankles.”

She folds her dress and with her shoes makes a stack. I take 'em, when she finish. Carry her dress to the basket for washing and her shoes I put with the others. I say, “The way you used them guns . . .”

“Asshole charmers,” she say. “You heard of snake charmers? Snake charmers hypnotize snakes with flutes and shit. My guns do the same to assholes.”

She blows a stream of white.

“And they're a good distraction,” she say. “Keeps 'em in a trance long enough for my girls to pick a pocket, shop, and be back with empty wallets by the time the game is through.”

“But you could kill yourself.”

“And?”

“You could be dead.”

“And by the time of my funeral, my girls would be best dressed. Now, if you finished with your concern, gon' and get my bath water ready.”

“Naomi,” I say. “My name. It's Naomi.”

“All right, Naomi . . . get yer ass up and fix my bath water.”

“Yes'm.”

I run across the hall to the bath where I already put her water. I pour flower oil in it 'cause she like that. I always bathe her and wash her hair. It's nice hair.

I make sure it ain't too cold, pour in a little more hot from my kettle, then cool from my pitcher. It's just right. Five lit candles make the room yellow and warm. I give it one spray of perfume to clean the air and float a lily on top of the calm water.

Cynthia bursts through the door, drops her towel, and stomps in the bath, splashing water everywhere. Her cigarette bounces from her bottom lip, she say, “It's always them little-dick mother fuckers that want me to make the most noise.”

She pushes herself forward in the water so a wave of warm flows back over her. She stops to take a drag of her cigarette, turns to me like she gon' ask me something, but blows out smoke instead.

I mumble.

“Speak up!” she say.

“Christian?” I said. “You Christian?”

“Nope.”

“I mean . . . was you one? You seem to know the Bible and all. The verse about shepherds. I thought . . .”

“Ain't one. Never been one. Ain't gon' be one now, so don't try to sign me up. Here, wash my back.”

I don't want to ask her no more questions.

“I want to show you something,” she say.

She's still wet from the bath and wraps her towel around herself. The oils I put in her water are steaming off her, smelling like a face full of roses. “Where we going?” I say.

She kneels down next to the bathtub and reaches her arm under it, huffing. “Help me with this.”

I follow her around and get on my knees, too, look under the tub and see her fiddling with a copper latch laid on the floor. It looks like a door knocker but I don't see no door.

She taps the knocker with her fingertips trying to lift it. It slips away. She tries again. It flips over this time. Thuds. “There,” she say. “Help me move this tub.”

“Be easier we get the water out first.”

“We gon' move it. Just like it is.” Weren't a question.

I roll to my butt, put my feet against the tub with hers and we push with our legs. Grunt. Push. It moves. We push it all the way back past the latch. She crawls over to it, holding her towel tight against her chest. I sit up on my knees.

The latch is in the center of a square door etched in the floor. Cynthia pulls the door open. Dust rises while clumps of dirt, stuck to the bottom of the door, crumble down the passage and rests on the top step of disappearing stairs. Piano music swells up from the dark hole—an echo of what's going on in the saloon out front. Cynthia starts down the stairs. “You comin?”

I shake my head no. “It's dark down there.”

“Come on,” she say, not asking.

I say a quick prayer and follow.

My white dress powders brown in the dirt as we slowly walk under the brothel. Above us are all of its rooms. Light shines through the floor boards touching our faces. A woman's high-heeled shoes tap and shuffle in the kitchen above us—Bernadette's in there bent over the sink with her boyfriend behind her. She's supposed to be working. Cynthia huffs and keeps walking, steps over some lump in the dirt. I kick whatever it was out the way, thought it was a stick at first but it's a stiff dead thing. My knees buckle and Cynthia grabs my arm. “It's up this way,” she say.

Above us, the slits between the floorboards become wider because of the warped boards. “Water damaged,” Cynthia say. “Fools laid the
new floor right over the rotten joists.” Some of the wood boards under the bar don't even touch. They're opened like a gapped-toothed man, teeth staked in the gums, showing everything inside—food and drink and tongue and voice. I can see everything up there.

Men dance to the fury of fast-playing piano. Their steps hard-fall as they move with hired women captured in their two-step twirl. The bottoms of the girls' dresses make them look like caught butterflies. Prisoners who still smile 'cause it's for the money.

“They cain't see us,” Cynthia say. “I bet if they blew out the candles upstairs, they'd be scared if they looked down and saw us spooks staring up at 'em from under the floor.”

I laugh a little.

Across the room upstairs, a thin man, vested and white-button-shirted, leans over Cynthia's piano with his back to us, hiding the black and white keys but unmasking notes. Cynthia looks back at me and her face is bright like a little girl's—giddy and happy, like she ain't ever been a day in this whorehouse. She covers her mouth with her hand, giggling.

She takes a few steps and swoops her backside down on a bench just ahead. She dusts it off and slaps the space next to her. I sit down, too. She whispers, “This used to be my secret place. Still is. You got to do the secret handshake to be here.” She grabs my hand and hooks her pinky finger around mine, then shakes hands with me.

“I used to come down here all the time,” she say. “At first, to watch my business.” Her voice raises, “People always trying to steal from me. Gotta have eyes everywhere.”