The Prophets(37)

Wait.

Not lost, though. This wasn’t something she had incidentally misplaced on a ramble. Someone had devised a separation to be felt acutely between the two wings of her ribs. That was an unprotected space—the unprotected space.

Every time she saw Isaiah and Samuel, it made her curse the distance between her and Mary, and the people who placed it there. And what was in that distance but thorns, green and steely, eager to pierce not just the beating feet racing back to embrace the departed, but the chest for that was where the treasure was. When she saw Isaiah and Samuel, the distance stretched and grew more and more entangled. But seeing them also softened her because she had remembered, too, how it would end.

Was Mary still in Charleston? Probably. There was no need to have sold her, too. The cane was punishment enough. But they would teach her, for the rest of her days, the meaning of sugar anyway. Some days, it was safer to imagine her dead: a plump corpse condemned to the ground, under layers and layers of earth, to become nourishment of another kind. Other days, Sarah couldn’t help but imagine Mary with a blade strapped to her thrashing arm covered not in her own blood. But neither of those was what unfolded. Truly, they had to pry the blade out of Sarah’s hands, not Mary’s. What had they even given it to her for in the first place? If it could chop cane, it could chop man. Her refusals, which they wouldn’t heed, meant she could test the theory. She was too much her people and that was the way it would be.

“We was always doomed, won’t we?”

That was the last thing she said to Mary as they tied Sarah down and carted her off to Mississippi. There was no point in saying the things truly felt because they were already known. Instead, Sarah figured that the time should be spent looking at the face of her One, to study it so that in the deep, deep of night, which was the only time solace could be real, when her hands were tucked between her own legs—that was the only face she saw. Then, and only then, could she fling her juices upward, hoping they, too, could be etched there like the sky that her Only One, wherever she was, could also see, and when the rain came down, also drink from.

O, Sarah! Empty was another thing. It was the deepest. It was the lowest. It was the down and below. It was the bluest depth. It was the grave and the tomb. But briefly, ever so briefly, you could still come up for air. Despite the blood and the screams and the smothering hot, here, too, was where Essie sometimes sang in the field and made the picking less monstrous, if not less grueling. Oh, she would open her mouth and hit a pitch that made bellies rumble because it was the same vibration as living itself. The butterflies must have known too; Sarah could tell by how they flirted with circling Essie’s head.

And in Sarah’s liminal way, she, like Essie’s butterflies, skirted around the edges of Isaiah and Samuel, giving her the room to not give too much of herself because almost everything on Empty took and took and took, and replenishing was as foreign as kindness. But the one who was the better chooser because he had clearly chosen woman or free had loosened her a bit—a little bit—against her better sense.

Isaiah was down by the river one sunset. Sarah had hated the way the sky could do that—spread its colors clean across creation in violet hues with hints of orange, a moment designed strictly for joining. Yet the rest of nature took cruel turns at denying her breasts the warmth of her lover’s touch. But Isaiah stooped against that backdrop anyway, looking confused. He was without Samuel and Sarah reckoned that Samuel couldn’t stand to be anywhere, joined, where there was no barn cover. She walked closer. Her head was still wrapped from the long day and her dress was wet from labor. She was shining with the combining colors. Isaiah was looking at the blue vervain that dotted the edge of the land but knew better than to get any closer to the river’s lip. He smiled at her approach and pointed to the flowers.

“Blue can hurt, you know,” he said as she stood next to him. She eyed him.

“You don’t know from blue,” she said, waiting to see how he might protest.

He looked at the flowers again. “You right.” He put his head down.

She didn’t expect that. She inhaled deeply before letting her breath out slowly. She closed her eyes for a moment and then took another deep breath, which brought the mixture of wildflowers and river water closer to her tongue. When she opened her eyes, she was looking across to the bank on the other side. She held her gaze.

“Your’n thing an old thing,” she said softly.

Isaiah looked at her. “You mean from before? From where you from?”

“Nobody never listened, but yeah.”

“I wish you tell me,” Isaiah said.

Sarah smiled. A tiny thing, but so kind, she thought. She held her hand to her chest.

“What I can tell you is hold on as long as you can. Nothing but pain is guaranteed. But hold.” She pointed east. “I shoulda.”

He again looked confused but nodded his head. The only reason she told him even that much was because she thought he picked woman or free. So there was a greater chance for a balanced response to her knowing rather than a discarded one. Isaiah stuck his foot in the water and swirled it.

“Keep on,” she said, surprised at how that was even in him to do. “Now stop.”

Isaiah looked at her.

“What you see?” she asked, pointing down to the water.

“Something,” he responded, squinting into the murkiness. “A face? A woman’s face?” Isaiah leaned in a bit closer. “She’s looking . . . at you!”