The Prophets(8)

They whined and she detested the sound. Why they kept the animals enclosed was beyond her reasoning. Animals belonged outdoors. But then again, the Halifaxes were indoors so that meant all of creation had some right to be inside as well.

“Go on,” she said to the hounds, unlatching the door that led out to the garden. “Go find a hare and leave me be.”

All six of them ran out. She inhaled deeply, hoping she took in enough of the field to last her through the day. She kept her hand on the door so that it would close quietly. She limped over to another door on the opposite side of the porch and went into the kitchen. It could have been its own cabin given that it was twice the size of even the largest of the shacks people lived in at Empty. Still, she felt cramped in it, like something unseen was pushing her down from every direction.

“Breathe, chile,” she said aloud and dragged her hurt leg over to the counter that ran underneath a row of windows that faced east and looked out onto the barn.

She grabbed two bowls and the sack of flour stored in the cupboards beneath the counter. She removed a jug of water and a sifter from the cabinet left of the counter. Once combined, she began kneading the ingredients into dough for biscuits: a heavy thing that, with heat, time, and her bruised knuckles, became yet another meal that failed to satisfy Halifax appetites.

She moved over toward the front of the kitchen to get some logs to heat the stove. There was a pile of them under another window, one that faced east. During the day, that window allowed her to see past the willow tree in front of the house, down the long path that led to the front fence and intersected with the dusty road to Vicksburg’s town square.

She had only seen the square once, when she was dragged from Georgia and hauled off to Mississippi. Her old master had loaded her up onto a wagon, chained her feet, and sat her among some other frightened people. The journey took weeks. Once they got past the lumbering trees, the road opened up upon a great number of buildings, the kind of which she had never seen. She was marched from the wagon onto some platform, where she stood before a great crowd. A toubab, filthy and smelling of ale, stood next to her and shouted numbers. The people in the audience looked at her, none raised their hands in pursuit of her—none except Paul, whom she heard tell his young charge that she would make a good kitchen wench and companion for Ruth.

She picked up two logs and headed for the stove, which sat near one of the doors. The kitchen had two doors. The one closest to the stove faced west and led to the covered porch where she slept. The other, facing south, led into the dining room, beyond which was the foyer, the living room, and the sitting room where Ruth entertained when she was up to it. One of the windows in the sitting room faced the cotton fields. Ruth often sat and stared through it for hours. On her face, a smile so delicate Maggie couldn’t be sure it was a smile at all.

At the back of the house was Paul’s study, which contained more books than Maggie had ever seen in one place. Glimpses of the room only intensified her desire to be able to open one of the books and recite the words, any words, as long as she could say them herself.

On the second floor, four large bedrooms anchored each corner of the house. Paul and Ruth slept in the two rooms facing east, adjoined by a balcony from which they surveyed most of the property. At the back of the house, Timothy, their only surviving child, slept in the northwestern room when he wasn’t away at school in the North. Ruth insisted that his bedsheets be washed weekly and his bed be turned down every night despite his absence. The last bedroom was for guests.

Perceptive folks called the Halifax plantation by its rightful name: Empty. And there was no escape. Surrounded by dense, teeming wilderness—swamp maple, ironwood, silverbell, and pine as far, high, and tangled as the mind could imagine—and treacherous waters where teeth, patient and eternal, waited beneath to sink themselves into the flesh, it was the perfect place to hoard captive peoples.

Mississippi only knew how to be hot and sticky. Maggie sweated so profusely that the scarf wrapped around her head was drenched by the time she began gathering the cookware. She would have to change it before the Halifaxes got up to eat. Her neat appearance was important to them, these people who didn’t even wash their hands before they ate and who didn’t clean themselves after leaving the outhouse.

With powdered hands, Maggie rubbed her sides, content with how her figure—not just its particular curves, but also how it never burned and became red under a beaming sun—separated her from her captors. She loved herself when she could. She regretted nothing but her limp (not the limp itself, but how it came to be). The world tried to make her feel some other way, though. It had tried to make her bitter about herself. It had tried to turn her own thinking against her. It had tried to make her gaze upon her reflection and judge what she saw as repulsive. She did none of these things. Instead, she fancied her skin in the face of these cruelties. For she was the kind of black that made toubab men drool and her own men recoil. In her knowing, she glowed in the dark.

When she felt her shape, it evoked in her another outlawed quality: confidence. None of this was visible to the naked eye. It was a silent rebellion, but it was the very privacy of it that she enjoyed most. Because there was precious little of that here—privacy, joy, take your pick. There were only the four dull corners of the kitchen, where sorrow hung like hooks and rage leaped in from any opening. It came in from the spaces between floorboards, the slits between doorjambs and doors, the line between lips.