The Prophets(109)

She had sent Puah to her death. How needless. How sloppy of her to push when she should have pulled. Then she heard a splash. And then another. And another. In the darkness, silver flashed and she caught sight of an arm, graceful, shimmering. She was gliding. Puah was gliding across the river as though the forever mamas had laid hands to buoy her. Sarah panted her excitement quietly, to herself. Too bad she couldn’t stay longer to watch her friend-girl fly. But there were jaws everywhere, and flicking tongues.

Puah had asked Sarah where she would go, and Sarah had no idea. I find my way, she had said. She had long given up on safe space but would settle for a living one, where at least a small piece of her soul could sparkle without having mud kicked at it.

Sarah remembered climbing on top once, up where there might have been safety if the world was right sided, and she saw, off in the distance, women as black as caves raising their hands to acknowledge her, beckoning her, telling her that she had an infinite number of mothers who, themselves, were the mothers of infinity. They were the first to give birth to the last, to give life to the woman who is also a man who is also neither, who will gather all of creation, tree and wolf alike, in perfect submission to peace. What had no start would have no finish. And this was the congress of dreams. It is a circle, you see, a wheel in the sky, spinning; bubbles in the sea-foam; a ring of hands joined in the deep, holding mercies in the middle and witnesses on the perimeter, laughing, knowing. These are those of the land that does not eat its young. Ask your blood. For it will tell you.

“You know where I ain’t never been?” she said aloud to all of creation.

She ran over to the cotton field. Between the loosed cows, she went near the edges, until she made it to the other side. She emerged to see the rows of abandoned shacks, lit faintly by Samuel’s light. She walked past them slowly, delighted by the colors they became under scrutiny. She looked to the woods just beyond.

“I ain’t never been this-a-way,” she said out loud.

She meant south. She had never been south because Paul and others had spoken of the Choctaw as though they were the living vengeance anxious to gobble up lost black flesh. But hadn’t they also said that about the infinity mothers, likewise slandered their grace as though they were no longer around to lay waste to those deceits? Nah, if the Choctaw were monsters to Paul and them, they could only be reprieve to her. Whatever lay over there, beyond these new woods, in that other darkness—well, shit. Nightmares walked here. Gobbled up was better than having another set of pasty hands try to pry her knees apart.

“Ain’t that right, Mary?” she asked the darkness in front of her.

But beating behind her heart was the most recent in a long line of women who kept razor blades hidden in the warmth of their mouths. Let toubab try if they wanted to. She tucked in the loose end of her head wrap and grabbed her dress between her legs so that it clung to her thighs like pants. She stomped into the woods, brushing aside branches and bushes with her free hand. Just as she got to a clear spot, there they were, standing in her way: a posse. Some of them ragged and toothless. Some of them tall and thin. All of them lined up like spikes on a pitchfork, waiting to make their jaggedness known.

When they approached, she had figured out something that had been like a splinter in her foot: the easy thing to believe was that toubab were monsters, their crimes exceptional. Harder, however, and even more frightening was the truth: there was no such thing as monsters. Every travesty that had ever been committed had been committed by plain people and every person had it in them, that fetching, bejeweled thing just beneath the breast that could be removed at will and smashed over another’s head before it was returned to its beating place. The splinter pushed out, she could walk evenly, though cautiously, whether the ground was level or not.

She smirked at them. They had already removed her name from all of the monuments and replaced it with the titles of men, thoughtless, violent, cowardly men who were at once afraid of and captivated by the womb that gestated creation—in other words, the cosmos. They had already pulled the goddesses out of the sky and buried them in the deep, hidden away from all but the most gracious. Now what they wanted to do was wipe her face from the record, scatter her remains so that they would never be found again.

She balled her right hand into a fist and with her left, she reached into her jaw and pulled her weapon from where it rested against the interior of her cheek. It didn’t matter what fires were started or how much timber had fueled them. Nah. She wasn’t going to be anyone’s sacrifice but her own.

She swayed with the cotton plants in the distance behind her. The wind danced between her legs. She held a fist out in front of her and her other hand pulled back like a viper before the strike, a fang glistening in its mouth. Delighted by the potential shock that would overcome their faces as she took at least two of them down with her into the places her people thrived—hot places, thick with ruin—she braced herself:

“Come on with it, then!”





1:10


Amos walked to the very center and raised his hands.

“Be calm! This is the dawning of the Lord’s day!” he shouted, his voice mixing with the tumult but not rising above it.

What they didn’t know was that out yonder, tragedy would be plentiful beyond any that could be imagined here at Empty. They knew of course what that fence, long and wide, had confined them to; there was no need to enumerate what was already plain on the flesh. But what it protected them from was what they couldn’t reckon with. Amos knew, though. There was nothing more frightening than patrolling toubab boys, whom some toubab woman’s tears had nourished, gussying themselves up for a ride into the woods to find a gaggle of niggers hidden in some quiet cove or tucked in the branches of a solemn tree.