The house sits on the edge of the woods with its paint peeling and its porch worn by too many steps. Josey holds her arm up blocking the sun when she steps out of the tree line. Sunlight catches her blue eyes and forces her head down. The warmth rolls over her shoulders, then goes cold like a blanket yanked away. My gut is telling me that Josey should turn around ’cause I feel the dark of this place. No birds are singing. No green’s growing. And now that the sun’s passed, everything looks hollow and drowned.
Josey stops.
I reach for her. Hesitate ’cause I cain’t touch her.
Something darts between us, startles us both — a man with the sun behind him so all we can see is a shadow — eyeless, mouthless — a paper cutout in the sky. We look at him where the eyes should be.
When the sun passes, flaring nostrils meet us. She’s a woman. Old and hard-breathing, taking a mouthful of air through her nose, trembling her top lip when she breathe out.
The curly man-hairs on her neck are there like they’ve always been — like they were almost nine years ago — moist like they sweat-glued on. She starts circling Josey, hunched over and slow. Her long dress sways, the back of it is butt-lifted higher than the front. She goes ’round Josey and Josey don’t move.
She holds her breath, hoping the woman will pass, but it’s too late to play dead.
The woman leans into Josey to get a better look. A faint blue circle traces the colored part of her eyes where dried tears chalk the creases in the wrinkles packed underneath her bottom lashes.
She churns her lips, moving something in her mouth — a bit of old food on her tongue — a small yellowish ball like a piece of nut. Her quick blow sends it flying to the ground.
Josey’s cheeks redden.
“Well, well, well,” the witch say. “After all this time. There you is.” Her jowls quiver and her lips clinch together.
“You. . you work on the Graham plantation, ma’am?”
“I should cut you to pieces,” Witch say.
I swear to God, she touch Josey, I’ll learn this moment how to kill a woman.
Josey watches her circle and disappear behind her. “Forgive me, ma’am, I don’t believe we know each other.”
“No, no. You don’t know Miss Sissy, do ya’?” She stops behind Josey. “I know you.”
“Ma’am?”
“You almost made it, didn’t cha, darkie? You thought you was one of them, didn’t cha, coon? But you just like the rest of us.”
Sissy moves herself in front of Josey, staring with dead eyes. “I never thought I’d see the day. Nine years I been waitin for you.”
“Me?”
“Look at cha,” Sissy say. “I’ve seen some get through. Yes, suh. Seen some like you make it pass. And you pretty good. I admit that. But you had to have it all, didn’t cha?”
“I don’t know what you mean?”
“I was up there in the big house, too. Servin high society. Eatin good, dressin good, like a good house negro should. Then you came. A nigga tryin to be a white. Tryin to get for free the place and respect that a lifetime could never get me. But I seen’t ya, didn’t I? Your skin golden all year long, your curls. . the way they fall. Just one drop. One drop, law say. One drop of our blood can ruin any God-created man, poison so strong that maybe we don’t even know our own power. It’s what got white folks scared. But one thang’s for sure. . when I saw you poisoned in her arms, I knew who you were. Takes one to know one.” She flicks Josey’s hair and grins.
Sissy’s aged much faster than she shoulda. Another fifty pounds have reworked her into a different woman. But she’s still in there. Twelve years since the day we first met. Twelve years since the night Annie Graham was given my baby; the same night Bobby Lee left my dead body and his cousins for the road.
He had been pushing forward in the dark for over an hour, following a light a long way off. Bobby Lee’s fear was opening his senses, widening his sight, helping him to see in the dark. To smell sharply. He could smell a fox that had been that way hours before. His dry mouth tasted the sour of leaves that split as he passed.
I could hear what he heard. Hear him talking in his own head. Felt his doubt and the tricks his mind was playing. He was hearing shuffles behind him that he didn’t make, started seeing mysteries in the dark.
It wasn’t long before something was following us. At first I thought his cousins, maybe, keeping him honest, but it was something else — a living thing tasting birth in the air, smelling it on him. Cain’t be sure. We had to find somebody quick, somewhere to take my baby. But there wasn’t no place but that hell.
The jagged parts of wild trees and bushes tore into his thighs, scratched his neck, dug in his eyes. He twisted ’em away and threw their broken pieces to the ground. Bugs were sticking inside his clothes, tangling in the material and in his chest hair. They bit at his arms, his ankles, his face for food, but he kept my baby in a world her own, floating her on a cloud inside his coat, sacrificing his own body for hers — not a scratch, not a bite, not a cry.
The light was finally getting close.
He pressed her against himself and thought about the lie he was gon’ tell when he got there — this is my baby. And the parts that weren’t a lie — my wife is dead. But he was gon’ keep hisself one secret, though. Like how Ray never let him see his wife and baby after they got kilt that night. How he fought Ray and Henry to get through the door where broken chairs and dishes littered the floor and blood pooled but his cousins wouldn’t let him through.
Bobby Lee settled it in his mind to never forgive Ray for not letting him in the door to see his family, dead, and now he can’t accept the empty place in his remembering where he never saw ’em newly deceased. He only saw ’em blue and strange-looking in their caskets.
He put in the place of their death memory his own imaginings, a lie, pretending they ain’t really gone. Instead, he remember how his wife fought off the ones that tried to kill his baby and that she ran away, hiding in the woods with his child until her new husband, a hero, a man who woulda never let this happen, saved ’em both.
So that night with Josey, Bobby Lee got it in his mind to be that man he never was. Be that hero and save my child.
The light from the distance covered us. We were five steps to the porch when he stopped to take a deep breath and a sudden tug at his coat startled him. An old slave woman was peering at him.
She told Bobby Lee, “The plantation mistress is barren. She’ll have the baby.”
Just then, Josey started crying. Bobby Lee bounced her calm. His last chance to be the daddy. And when he looked back for the woman again, she was gone.
He knocked on the front door with his knees bent two inches low, trying to make hisself seem small and pitiful. Knocked again and hugged my baby close, half-wishing nobody never come.
When the door opened, a young white woman stood behind it. Her small voice said, “Good evening, sir. May I help you?” Her thick dark hair hung to her waist, half pin-curled from earlier in the day and the moonlight made her skin blue. Another young woman, a negro girl, cowered behind her, watching Bobby Lee’s tall frame go from bent-kneed to hunched-back, smaller. When the light caught his scarred eye, the negro girl pushed the door closed and said. “I’ll have you know, suh, the man of the house is here.”
“Please, ma’am,” Bobby Lee said. “I don’t mean no harm. I have here this baby that needs tending to.”
It was Josephine’s broken cries that finally sent Annie out to her without caution. Annie searched Bobby Lee and found Josey under his coat. She peeled his coat away from Josephine’s face and we watched my baby yawn.
The cool air made her cry again.