“Look it, Josey!” Ada Mae say. “Look what I got.”
“I thought he was gon’ pass us,” Josey say, bitter, brushing dirt off her knees. “Where’d my bag go?”
Ada Mae squats down and rests her hoop on her thigh and reaches for a weed, pulling it careless, then slices her hand with it. She yelps and sucks the edge of her palm but Josey don’t ask if she’s all right. Instead she say, “Cain’t nothin good come from him favorin’ you, Ada Mae. Not all gifts is good gifts.”
Cotton castaways float up from Ada Mae’s bag and get pushed away by the moving silence of her breath.
12 / FLASH, Conyers, Georgia, 1847
I AIN’T ALLOWED IN the garden since what happened yesterday.
Cynthia say from now on I got to wake her up in the morning before I start my day’s chores, but, “Yours ain’t the first voice I want to hear in the morning,” she said. “So just tug on my toe before you go.”
She left for a date on Bernadette’s bed a little while ago. Said Bernadette ain’t making her money no way so I’ve been making the most of my time in here alone. I been sitting in front of Cynthia’s mirror, twirling her tiny pot of red lip stain. Stroked her small brush across its mouth.
One of the legs on this chair is missing a bottom piece, broken. It wobbles from side to side, like a gimp man dancing.
I read my Bible.
But, if I’m honest, I’m just laying my face on it, crossing my eyes to see the words. Candle wax is cooling in bumpy lines down the candle-holder. I scratch my nails down it, let its softness pack under my nails and push back the meat. I flick it out with my thumb and drop the clump back in the candle’s flame. It falls through it but don’t melt much. Just enough to stick and harden when it slides to the tabletop.
The flame stutters again when the door blows open. I sit up quick, pretend I’m reading.
It’s Albert, the negro. He say, “Sorry, didn’t know nobody was in here,” and starts closing the door back on hisself.
“It’s all right,” I say. “You can come in.” But he don’t come. He stay on the other side of the door speaking to me.
“Cynthia sent me to fix that chair. But I do it some other time.”
“Naw, come in,” I say. “I wasn’t doing nothin.”
He creeps the door back open and I slide off the chair and go to my trunk. When I sit, my thighs bulge and spread under my dress like rising pancake batter.
“It’s good to see you better,” he say.
He kneels next to the chair and rocks it back and forth checking which leg’s broke. Its wood shoe is split. He takes out some sort of grinder from his satchel, some binding glue, and a wood piece from his pocket.
I watch him while he busy hisself fixing it.
He got big ears.
They cupped like hands on the sides of his head. I don’t know why they like that ’cause he ain’t one to listen in on other people’s conversations. His wild reddish hair is so puffy and high, he must got some other blood mixed in him worser than I got. But his eyebrows is black. And thick. He got freckles, too.
Cynthia call him the “Scottish Banshee” on account of all the red. She said when she took him in a few years ago, she did it cause she felt sorry for him. He was a free slave who never made it north. She reckon he afraid to leave, afraid he’s gon’ get stopped, afraid some white fool gon’ ignore his papers and send him back to slavery anyway. Sometimes she say she never shoulda treated him so good in the first place ’cause now she cain’t get rid of him.
But he helpful to her.
He fix things, do all the blacksmithing around here, cleaning sometimes, too. Me and him ain’t never talked even though we both negro. White peoples don’t like to see black folks together no how. Always suspecting the worse like we plotting, or must be lovers drawn together by some black magic they don’t understand. So me and Albert keep our distance.
He reaches for his glue from the floor and smears some on his new piece of wood, then puts it on the broken leg.
“Thanks for saving me,” I say.
He don’t answer.
“Cynthia told me you did.”
He nods, holds the new foot in place.
“You do a lot of things ’round here,” I say. “You should know you appreciated, is all.”
He still don’t talk.
“Why you don’t cut your hair?” I say.
“’Cause it’s mine,” he say. “My hair’s my freedom. I can do what I want with it, when I want. I’m a free man.”
“If you free, why you here?”
“You ask too many questions that ain’t none of your business.”
“You slept wit Cynthia?”
He stops working. Rolls his head ’round his neck like he cracking it and just stare at me. He starts working again.
He’s funny.
Easy to bother.
I say, “A young man like you should be finding a wife and a home.”
“I’m thirty-seven years old,” he say, stopping again. “Ain’t been a young man a long time. What you? Sixteen, seventeen? I got at least twenty years on you, girl, so don’t fool yourself into thinking you know somethin.”
“I know you here,” I say. “But you say you ‘free.’ Been here five years and still do what you told, eat when you told to, sleep in the field. ‘Free.’”
“Child,” he say, smiling now, like I’m the one who said something funny. “How you know I ain’t saving my money, readying to go north? Buy some land, build a house, find a strong, feisty woman there and make her my wife.”
“I’ll help you find her so long as you take me north with you when you go.”
“Naw, the woman who’d marry me ain’t north,” he say, closing his glue pot. “I reckon she’s south already. Over the border in Mexico.”
“A Mexican?”
“A negro. Runaways and freed men been escaping south of Texas for years. Even the ones that go into Mexico as slaves is finding their freedom there. It ain’t like here.”
“You mean negroes ain’t slaves everywhere?”
“Not in Mexico. We got a kinship with Mexicans in Texas. They like us. A captive people, too, but on their own land. This country’s their homeland. They didn’t migrate here or been stolen and brought here like us. They been moved out, off their land, piece by piece. So they don’t allow slavery.”
“Freedom’s north. Everybody know that. You said Mexico’s south.”
“Freedom is wherever you find it.”
“Then mine’s north. Always been north. Always be north.”
“You don’t know everything,” he say. “There are men. Good men. Quakers from out east. God-fearing. Risking their lives to get negroes to Mexico. Got the burning in their hearts to do so, and the fearlessness of a child who’d defy his own hunger to free an animal being led to slaughter. They’re what you call zealous men. Doing God’s work.”
“And taking slaves to Mexico?”
Albert packs his stuff. “Like I said, you don’t know everything.”
The door shuts soft when he go. I sneak over to his fixed chair and sit in it. I go easy on it at first so I don’t mess up his work. I lean back in the chair to see if it’s still lame but it don’t clunk no more.
I bring my Bible back to me and start reading from it, catch my reflection in the mirror again, see my top lip disappear when I read the word “thee” or when I smile big.
I’m still flat-chested.
Hazel promised they was gon’ grow but they never did. If I knew back then that they never would, I woulda been stuffing my dress with stockings so Hazel wouldn’t feel bad that I weren’t a woman.