The Prophets(38)

Sarah’s smile had caught him by surprise. She chuckled. She had wondered why Mary had sent the message through him and not her, but she was glad of it.

“Thank you,” she said to Isaiah, looking at him and just briefly catching his eyes.

“For what?” he asked.

“It don’t make no nevermind,” Sarah said. “You helped me. And you has my sympathy.”

Isaiah just looked at her.

“Can’t be easy having all the peoples with they backs to you.”

“Not all,” Isaiah said.

“Mm,” she said. Then she looked away.

Isaiah looked back down at the waters. “Oh! The face gone.”

Sarah wiped her forehead and touched her head wrap as though she was checking to see if it was still in place. “It’ll be back. Someday.”

Isaiah nodded and was about to swirl his foot again when James approached them. He walked right up behind them without so much as shifting a dry leaf or crunching a stray pebble. He could do that: be as quiet as a trap. His hat was pulled low. His rifle was tight in his grip.

“Time to get on back to your shacks. Don’t you see where the sun is? Quit this dragging. No time for mellow. Get.”

There was no scorn on his face; his lips, however, were bent in sorrow. But even when toubab smiled, they had a streak of despair at the edge of whatever joy they thought they had found. Not regret, no, not that. More like they were waiting for something that they knew was coming but wished it wasn’t—even if they called it down themselves. Sarah didn’t look at James, but she did make a face that arched her eyebrows and shifted her lips to the side. Curious things, these yovo. She meant toubab.

She glanced at Isaiah and started on her way.

“Night, Miss Sarah,” he whispered.

James shot him a look at the word “Miss.” Sarah turned to see Isaiah backing away from James and then jogging toward the barn. She turned back around and stepped on over patches of weeds and sauntered her way back to the dirt path, not quite with Puah’s humor or grace, but close.

See? Isaiah call me “Miss” right in front of that one whose name I won’t say for Maggie’s sake and for mine. Courage or foolishness, it don’t matter. I got another witness. à??.

She grabbed a handful of larkspur, and then another. She came quickly upon her shack. Alternately moving and stooping as though in prayer, she placed a portion of the flowers in each of the four corners of the room.

“To keep true close and lie away,” she said before she sat down on a stool with a thud.

Legs spread out, she raised her dress and longed for cool. When none came, she patted her wrapped head, which had started to itch. Memories could do that: come up prickly to poke at the scalp and peck at the mind.

Finally, she unfurled the wrap and let it hang to the ground. It blocked one of her eyes but she could see with the other. She looked at the flowers she put down, cornered.

Not hardly sweetgum. But it’ll do.





Ruth

The moon went elsewhere and Ruth rose from her bed. She walked gingerly across the rug but didn’t retrieve her slippers, nor did she think to cover herself in a housecoat. Her nightgown was enough. She didn’t bother to light a candle or a lantern. No light. No light. She decided to take her chances in the dark. If she should stumble, knock her knee against some forgotten piece of furniture, tumble down the stairs after misjudging one, it would make no difference to her. It would just mean that the broken-outside would finally match the broken-inside and the chips and cracks that were known only to her would no longer be secreted away and wept over in solitude. Then everyone could see and they too would weep because they would finally know that she was innocent. Her tears. Oh! Her tears!

She walked out onto the porch and stopped right between the two main columns. She stretched out her arms for no reason, or maybe to catch the wind, which was rare enough in Mississippi. To feel it now was to welcome it. It dried the moisture on her pale but freckled skin, and she felt smooth to her herself. She closed her eyes and took it in. She swayed a little, almost as if this was a kind of worship like the kind she had claimed or, rather, was given and told it was where she belonged—there, in the secondary space where she, due to the curves of her sex, could only ever be partial and two steps behind. Head down. Not a whole body; merely a rib.

Though she was awake, she still felt the weariness of the day inside her head and moved over to one of the rockers to sit down. She sat heavily and the chair jerked backward before springing forward again. She let her head roll down so that her chin hit her chest, her bright red hair came forward to her face and hung down in front of her shoulders. Then she lifted her head and inhaled deeply. The day and the night smelled different from each other. The day was musky, the funk of animals, including niggers, spoiled what was supposed to be ruled by the heal-all she instructed Essie and Maggie to plant carefully along the edges of the first garden that belonged to her and her alone. She loved the heal-all most because of how full the purple was, given wondrous shape by how each bloom sat above the other. The flowers opened up like tiny stars and she liked the idea that there was something on the ground that could match the splendor of the night sky.

That was moot. There was too much interference in the day and very little she could do about it that wouldn’t make the stench worse. It was only in the deep night that her plan worked and even the closed blooms gave her a gift to smell. The only shame was in the competing beauty that divided her attentions between where she sat and where she looked up to.