The Prophets(9)

She threw the logs into the belly of the stove, then grabbed a pan out of the cupboard above. She went back to the counter and removed the dough from the bowl. Tenderly, she molded. Properly, she spaced the shapes into the pan. Then into the oven. But that didn’t mean she could rest. There was always more to do when serving people of invention. Inventors for the sake of inventing: out of boredom, solely to have something over which to marvel, even when it was undeserved.

Their creativity puzzled her. Once, Paul called her into his room. When she arrived, he was standing near the window, the sun rendering him featureless.

“Come here,” he said, his calm laced with venom.

He asked her to hold his manhood while he urinated into a bedpan. She thought herself lucky considering the other possibilities. And when he ordered her to point its slit at her chest, she left the room splashed yellow and drawing flies. She counted her blessings, but still: how confusing.

She tried to remember something Cora Ma’Dear—her grandmother from Georgia who taught Maggie who she was—said to her. She was just a girl then, and their time together had been so brief. But some things printed on the mind cannot be erased—made fuzzy maybe, but not gone. She tried to remember the old word from the other sea that Cora Ma’Dear used to describe toubab. Oyibo! That was it. There was no equivalent in English. The closest was “accident.” Then it was simple: these people were an accident.

Maggie didn’t much mind their brutality, though, because it was what she had come to expect from them. People rarely deviated from their nature, and although it pained her to admit, she found a tiny bit of comfort in the familiarity. Their kindness, however, sent her into a panic. For it, like any trap, was unpredictable. She rejected it and risked the consequences. Then, at least, the retaliation took on a recognizable form and she wasn’t rendered a fool.

When she first arrived at Empty, years ago, she was greeted so warmly by Ruth, who looked to be about the same age as she. Both of them still girls despite the newly flowing blood.

“You can stop crying now,” Ruth said to her then, eyes cheerful and thin lips pulled back into a smile, revealing crooked teeth.

She rushed her inside what was the biggest house Maggie had ever seen. Ruth even took Maggie upstairs to her room, where she pulled a dress out of the bureau. Maggie had the nerve to adore it. She was seduced by its pattern of orange rosebuds so tiny they could be mistaken for dots. She had never had anything so pretty. Who wouldn’t quiver? Ruth was with child at the time—one of the ones who didn’t survive—and used her body’s new shape as justification for giving away such a fine thing.

“They say I’m due in the winter. Terrible thing to have a child in the winter. Don’t you think so?”

Maggie didn’t answer because any answer damned her.

“Well, we’ll just have to make sure the death of pneumonia don’t reach here, now won’t we?” Ruth said to fill in the silence.

Now that was a safe one to answer. Maggie nodded.

“Oh, you’re going to look so pretty in this dress! You so shiny. I always thought white looked better on niggers than it did on people.”

Maggie was young then and couldn’t know the price. How dangerous to be so accepting. The dress could have been reclaimed at any moment, accompanied by an accusation. And, indeed, when it was said that Maggie stole it, after Ruth had been nothing but kind to her, Maggie didn’t deny it because what would be the use? She took her licking like a woman twice her age with half the witnesses.

Oh, Ruth cried her conviction, imagining that it would make her sincerity indisputable. The tears looked real. She also spoke some silliness about a sisterly bond but never once asked Maggie if it was an arrangement she desired. It was assumed that whatever Ruth wanted to piss, Maggie wanted to cup her hands under and drink. So Ruth cried and Maggie learned right then and there that a toubab woman’s tears were the most potent of potions; they could wear down stone and make people of all colors clumsy, giddy, senseless, soft. What, then, was the point of asking, So why didn’t you tell the truth?

Winter came and Ruth gave birth, a girl she named Adeline. She brought the child—pale and discontent—into the kitchen and said to Maggie, “Here. I’ll help you unfasten your dress.”

Maggie had seen other women submit to this and had feared this day for herself. Only with a great deal of restraint could she act as a cow for this child. It had dull eyes and eyelashes so close to the color of its own skin that it might as well not have had any at all. Maggie detested the feel of its probing lips on her breast. She forced herself to smile just to keep from smashing its frail body to the ground. What kind of people won’t even feed their own babies? Deny their offspring the blessing of their very own milk? Even animals knew better.

From then on, all children disturbed Maggie, including her own. She judged harshly all people who had the audacity to give birth: men who had the nerve to leave it inside; women who didn’t at least attempt, by hook or by crook, to end it. She regarded them all with great suspicion. Giving birth on Empty was a deliberate act of cruelty and she couldn’t forgive herself for accomplishing it on three out of six occasions. And who knew where the first or the second were now. See? Cruelty.

Chirrun, as she called them, didn’t even have the grace to know what they were, and neither did many of the adults, but that was on purpose: ignorance wasn’t bliss, but degradation could be better endured if you pretended you were worthy of it. The youngins ran around the plantation, in and out of the stables, hiding in the cotton field, busy as manure flies. Their darting, knotty heads were unaware of the special hell tailored for each of them. They were foolish, helpless, and unlovable, but whatever loathing Maggie felt for them was mitigated by what she knew they would one day endure.