“You gon’ give up whoring?” I say.
“I’m talking about the shit I done wrong. What I do for them out there, I do right,” she laughs. “God understands a girl’s gotta make a living. Thas my job, my business. Ain’t nobody gon’ give a woman work unless it’s doing dishes and I don’t do dishes. I sure as hell ain’t getting married, neither. I’m doing me and my girls a favor. A chance to earn a living for ourselves.” Her foot knocks the chicken bones off her plate and onto a book she got on the floor. She reaches down and picks it up, wipes the bone grease off. “What I hope is for God to forgive me for my wrongs,” she say. “Write my name in his Book of Life. Everybody’s fate is sealed tomorrow.”
“What about me?”
“What about you? You ain’t Jewish.”
She fans open her book. It looks like a diary inside. She thumbs through its handwritten pages without reading it. Closes it.
I say, “So what you s’posed to do on this Yom Kippur?”
“If there was a temple around, I’d go to it and pray all day like my father did when I was young. As it is, I’m a woman. So this is my temple. And after the shit I done this year I got a lot of making up to do.”
She puts her diary down, rests her head back on the wall. “Already fucked up, though,” she say. “I shoulda been fasting since sundown — no food, no drink, nothin. But you best believe I’m gon’ finish off this bottle of wine unless God hisself tell me I cain’t.”
The glass in her hand slips through her fingers, spills on my trunk, the wine gathers in its creases, near her book. She yanks her book away and leaves everything else.
I rush to clean up the wine, wipe it with the edge of my dress — the only thing I got but she don’t move except to plop her thigh over the last part I got to clean. It stains her own leg purple. She looks at her spilled glass. “Well, goddamn — a sign. I’m done. Can’t spend much time in contemplation if I’m loaded.”
I take my dress to the basin, soak it in the little bit of water left over at the bottom, scrub my dress between my hands. I dip it in the basin again, but all the water’s used up.
Cynthia don’t apologize to me, like she don’t care, even though it’s her fault my dress is ruined. “Is there something you called me for?” I say, and throw my hand on my hip.
She lays back against the wall closing her eyes. “You think I’m gon’ be saved, Naomi? In the end, I mean?”
I want her to get up off my sleeping trunk.
I say, “Ain’t for me to decide.”
“Why I even ask you?” she say like she’s mad at me now. “What do you know, exactly? Nothing.” She gets off my trunk with her book, plops down in the chair in front of me. “Why don’t you go over there somewhere, make yourself busy. Better yet,” she say holding her hand up, “if this is temple today, gimme some scripture.”
I don’t want to read to her but I go to my trunk anyway and pull my Bible from under my blanket.
“Old Testament,” she say.
“Why you worried about damnation now, anyway?” I say, and sit on my trunk.
She leans into her mirror, wipes the sleep from her eye, pinches her cheeks to bring back color. “You believe in the sixth sense?” she say. “Reading the past, the future, and all?”
“Only God knows the future.”
“Well, when I was seven years old, He told me mine. Told me I’d die before thirty-five. Come October, I’ll have my curtain call. Maybe I’ll slip into a well and break my neck or get some disease that eat me away.”
“Cain’t nobody know when they die,” I say. “Or how.”
“I can and I do. Now, read me something.”
I open my Bible. “‘The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want. .’” I can feel her watching me. Maybe she seen me talking to Jeremy. Maybe she know I been talking to Albert about south. The worry makes me lose my place reading. I start again. “‘The Lord is my Shepherd. I. . I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures.’”
“I grew up around yer kind,” she say. “My daddy bought and sold peoples like you all the time. Charleston, South Carolina. Charles Towne. Big office on King Street. When the trade dried up he sold whatever he could. Didn’t want to go back to New York with nothing.” She lights a cigarette. “Go on, read.”
“‘He leadeth me beside. .’”
“‘Still waters,’” she say, finishing my verse and staring into her mirror. “My momma wrote hymns and ran Sunday school. She never could get over what Daddy done.”
“Sunday school? I still don’t understand how you ain’t Christian.”
“Y’all ain’t the only ones that go to Sunday school and got scripture, neither. We had it first.” She puts white powder all over her face.
“There used to be a whore that worked here,” she say. “Always reciting the Bible like it made her better than everyone else, even her customers. But there was only one holy of hers these dogs were interested in.”
She blots color on her cheeks, changes her mind and wipes it all off. She draws in her eyebrows straight and plain.
“Is there many of y’all ’round here, now? Not-Christians, I mean.”
“Used to be plenty of us in Charleston. Mostly from Europe. A beautiful continent it is. You even heard of Europe?”
I shake my head.
“You even been outside Georgia?”
“Alabama,” I whisper.
“You runned all the way from Alabama!” She leans back laughing. “You must got some kind of spirit on you, girl. Ran all the way from Alabama and ain’t been nowhere.”
I put my head down in my book, pretend to read so she shut up asking me questions. She reaches over from her chair, flips my Bible closed, got a sly look about her. “I bet you ain’t never been wit a man?”
I don’t say nothin.
Her voice fills with excitement. “Not even a kiss?”
I try to reopen my Bible. Cain’t. She falls back in her chair laughing. “I knew it! Soon as I saw you. Shit girl, you ain’t done nothin.”
I get my Bible open again, put my finger on my verse, follow under the words, look busy, and watch her out the corner of my eye. She grabs her silver cigarette holder, shakes one out, and lights it. “Been with my first when I was ten. Paid a debt for my daddy.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Hell, he had lots of debts, sold everything. Before then, I was like you, didn’t know nothing about nothing. Didn’t know a dick end from a fork end.”
“I’m sorry.”
“What’s wrong with you? Who the hell are you to be feeling sorry for me? Why don’t you go back to reading.”
Sometimes, I think me and Cynthia is friendly, but most times, not. She likes to remind me of who I am in the world. I read, “‘He res. . restoreth my soul.’”
“I killed him, you know. My daddy. One slice across the neck and he was dead, just like that. Ain’t nothing like taking a man’s life.”
She stares up at the ceiling, folds her hands on her chest. “Nobody ever suspected his little blonde baby girl done it.” She laughs. “Shit, I feel better already, confessing. It’s good to get some thangs off your chest. Don’t you get no ideas, neither. Nobody would believe you no way.”
The law believes us sometimes.
They must.
I have to tell myself every day that they believed Hazel when they came looking for Massa and she had to lie about what I done.
Memories of that day flash in my mind like they real again — blood around my fist, the toughness of his skin when I pushed that poker through.