The Prophets(35)

“There’s danger here,” Samuel replied. He cut his eyes, almost with cruelty, at Isaiah and picked up the pitchfork again. Isaiah grabbed him by the wrist. He stared into Samuel’s face, searching for an opening, however small.

“Don’t break us, man.”

“Ain’t I here?” Samuel asked, not exactly returning Isaiah’s gaze. “You see me or nah?”

He pulled himself from Isaiah’s grasp and returned to the pitchfork and his drudgery. For a moment, Isaiah didn’t move. He was oddly calmed by the repetitious sound of Samuel’s forking, the consistency of his one-two motion.

“I could do it, you know,” Samuel said at last. “Make it with all those womens. But I just don’t wanna.”

Isaiah stepped back, turned his mouth to one side.

“You ain’t never think that?” Samuel asked him.

“So you wanna hurt two people, not just one?” Isaiah looked around the barn—at the horses in the stables, at the haystacks, at the tools that hung on rusty nails hammered haphazardly into the barn walls, at the roof and its intersections of wooden beams. He looked and looked as though it were his mind and he was searching for the answer to Samuel’s question, but all he could find were cracks.

“Sometimes I don’t even know you,” Isaiah said out loud, still looking at the barn walls.

“You know me. I be the you you don’t let free.”

Isaiah was going to say, You mean the me I been freed, but didn’t see the point. “Sure they thank you for it,” he replied instead. “The womens, I mean. For being able to. Puah especially.”

Samuel scowled. “You jealous.”

“Maybe. But not why you think.”

“Just saying. If you feel to stay here, be easier if—”

Isaiah cut him off. “Whatever you decide is blessèd.”

With force, Samuel let out some air through his nose and raised it. “You different.” He didn’t mean to say it out loud, but it was too late. It had already middle-finger plucked Isaiah on the forehead, pinched his arm as a cross mother would. All Isaiah could do was rub the places that stung and give Samuel the eyes that conveyed his surrender.

Samuel stood there and, for the first time, was disturbed by the stench of the barn and the way it stuck to his skin. He noticed that underneath the saltiness was something sour, like food left to rot. He held his nose for a moment and suppressed an urge to heave. Finally, he walked over to the pails that Isaiah had put down.

“Let me do this. You pitch the hay,” he said as he picked up the pails and headed outside. He felt Isaiah’s eyes on his back, yes, but also his caress. But he didn’t stop.

He went to the cows. They greeted him tumultuously, mooing their anxiety.

“You looking for ’Zay, huh?” he said to them.

He sat down on the tiny wooden stool and waved away the flies that circled his head.

“I beg your pardon,” he said to the nearest cow.

Then he grabbed her teats and started to pull.





O, Sarah!

The yovo who licked Sarah’s cheek said that he knew she was sturdy because she still tasted like salt water. Yovo was an old thing that Maggie told her no one else would understand, so she might as well call them toubab like everyone else did. A shared language was how they could form a bond despite subsisting on the most foreign of soils. They brought with them hundreds of languages, divine practices, and ancestors. Those who had not had them ripped from even their dreams knew better than to speak them in earshot because betrayal was also a commodity.

“Keep it behind the bosom,” Maggie had told her. “Maybe inside a cheek. Close, but hidden. It’ll be easy to reach when you need it. Trust that.”

Despite sharing a unifying language, nobody wanted to hear Sarah’s ship story. Wagon tales were hard enough. But to sit still as Sarah revealed how, when left no other choice, when closed in tight and surrounded by the heat, dank, and hands of a wayward vessel, vomit could become a meal—that was simply too much. Most of the people she came to live with on Empty knew nothing of ships. They had been born in the stolen land, under the watchful gazes of a people with eyes—mercy!—eyes that seemed to glow in the dark like any pouncing beast. See, the first hands to touch them were without skin so she couldn’t expect from them a willing audience. She wasn’t insulted, then, by their choice to leave her without witnesses. That would perhaps mean that her name would eventually be lost to time, and the girls who came up behind her wouldn’t have her to show them exactly who came before. That was where the real shame found roots. She kept it, then, all of it, locked up in her head with the other things that squeezed themselves into that space without even the courtesy of a “How you?”

He licked Sarah’s cheek in the town square of some place called Charleston, South Carolina—where the bodies from ships washed up with the tide and cluttered the shore—and said that she still had salt in her and that her arms were just right for chopping cane. They dragged her there from the place they called the Isles of Virgins, a name that made no sense to her given the violations that sometimes didn’t even wait for moonglow. She had been seasoned there. They tried to break her in half. She was young enough so that they had nearly succeeded. But trapped within her mind were remembrances.