The Prophets(18)
The next morning, in the picking field, his hands had curved into the position ripe for killing (it wouldn’t be murder because the laws saw no humanity in his kind). He saw how his fingertips touched and bled from the spines, but never had his hands been so strong. With a little gumption, he could strangle at least one of the overseers, starting with James, with little effort. It wouldn’t be so different from pulling cotton: pluck the life from people just as mean, in the same hot sun, stooping, too, into the ache of bones. What would it be to watch another person drop dead for the wages of their condition? For this, he could be of great assistance.
It boiled inside of him, troubled his mind. He entertained, for a moment, suffocating James, shoving the seventy pounds of cotton he had picked thus far right down the man’s throat. Briefly, his lips crept into a grin.
One hundred pounds, finally, when he could have picked double that. But it was important to manage their expectations. Give them your peak and then the moment you don’t perform at that level, the fools want to split your back open and deny healing. Unconcerned with the blood splatter, they would send your sick ass right back into the field and ferret out hundreds of pounds from you at gunpoint. He kept it easy for just that reason.
But Amos felt the managed drudgery dull his mind, close the world in on him, collapse the sky and the ground into one indistinguishable whole. He longed to stretch out his arms, maybe take a deep breath, but the squeeze, the push, the tightness roped around him like he was swinging from a tree. Just a little air, that’s all he needed. And he wouldn’t even take it in through the mouth. Give him some, and he’d be happy to inhale and exhale through his nose. They wouldn’t even know he took it.
But maybe rest, of a kind, was on the horizon.
Seven days later, he made a promise to Essie.
“Never again. I swear it.”
Just as her morning vomiting let them know that, flat stomach or not, she was with a child whose pappy would be unknown until they saw the baby’s skin, Amos went about the business of securing Essie’s refuge. He was loading his final sack of cotton onto the awaiting wagon when the pink sky signaled an end to one dreary day but never tomorrow. He removed his straw hat, which Essie had weaved for him herself, held it to his chest, and looked down at his feet. This was the only way ever to approach a toubab, but especially if you intended to ask for something. They didn’t appreciate gumption; they saw it as arrogance. Amos waited until the others were on their solemn walk back to their shacks, slumped over and sweating, weary and death-glazed. He hoped that the sight of their misery would satiate at least some of the malice in Paul’s heart and leave room for mercy, however minute.
Paul and James were on the other side of the wagon, talking about Isaiah and Samuel. Amos heard the word “bucks” and Paul asked if James watched them in The Fucking Place or not, and James said, “Yeah,” and Paul replied, “If yes, then where are the nigglets?” James had huffed that if they were lame in some way, maybe Paul should consider “replacing them with any manner of good nigger,” but Paul said, “It makes no sense to sell the best two.”
Amos crept around the wagon.
“Massa,” Amos said, shuffling up to them, hoping his insolence would pale in comparison to his suggestion. “I beg your pardon. I don’t means to interrupt. Neither do I means to hear your’n business. But I hope you hear me as I ask: Maybe us niggers need Jesus, too?”
It was the first time Amos had ever used either word—nigger or Jesus—and he had decided that the betrayals would be worth it given that he had already given Essie his word on the seventh day. Paul removed his hat and looked to James.
James chuckled, removed his hat, fanned himself with it, and swatted away some flies.
“Cousin, you look like you could use a drink.”
Amos watched their backs as they walked away from him to the barn, took hold of the horses led to them by Isaiah, and rode off together, leaving him standing in the middle of the cotton by himself. The question high above his head.
He knew better than to ask again. So he waited. His patience was true. For not two weeks later, Paul sent for him. Amos was going to go around the back of the Big House, but the messenger, Maggie, led him to the main stairs. Typically, people weren’t permitted to step foot in the Big House at all, much less enter where toubab usually entered. Other than Maggie, Essie, and a few others, people knew to respect the boundary represented by the stairs that led to the massive front doors. Because of that border, there was room to imagine what was inside. Some people thought it might be a cave or a canyon. Others thought it might be the end. Amos said, “Naw. Just greed, I reckon.” He was right. But it wasn’t that he had some second sight, not yet anyway. It was because he had been such a good witness for Essie.
During the months prior to their bliss being torn up, Essie told Amos that the Big House was too much for three people and that they hung animal heads on the wall like art. “Right next to their own faces and you can’t tell the difference,” she said with a sweet chuckle.
She said that she didn’t realize three people could make so much mess that it took days to make right. Over and over, they demanded order only to wreak havoc and then demand order anew. She said people as cutthroat as they didn’t deserve beds so soft, though she allowed Timothy to be an exception because he evinced a gentle nature.
Essie never saw so many candles lit at once, she said, the soft light coming from so many points, casting the most joyful shadows on every wall, growing and growing until, oddly, they became menacing. At which point, what flooded her mind, and Maggie’s too, she reckoned, was that all it would take was a delicate tap to tip one of the candles over, and maybe the resulting blaze would, likewise, begin as splendor before it became tragedy.