My hands start shaking and I hold them together on my lap.
“My momma kept this here diary,” Cynthia say, flicking her book. “Probably talking about her nothing life. I ain’t read it though, ain’t going to, neither. She don’t deserve for me to hear her explanation why.” She tosses the book at the mirror. “She was dead by the time I killed Daddy. I guess that mean she didn’t mind I did it. It wasn’t like she tried to stop him when she was alive, anyway. You reckon they both in hell?”
“I don’t know,” I whisper, trying to keep myself from crying about Momma. Hazel was so strong in everything she did and Momma was so strong when she saved us, but I’m so weak.
She say, “I wonder if my momma ever asked God to forgive her for what she done to me? What she let happen? I woulda chopped him up and thrown him in the river if somebody did to my baby what he done to me. Instead, she took her own life.” She flicks a glowing orange clump from her cigarette. “If I saw her again, I’d tell her, ‘Fuck you for killing yourself and leaving me.’”
I say, “Not every woman got the same strong.”
“What’d you say?”
“Your momma had the strong to give birth to you, to raise you, to put the strength inside you to do something she never could. Maybe she couldn’t be your strong. In the end, you saved yourself.” My eyes brim with tears, regretting my weakness.
Cynthia brushes her hair in silence, starts her makeup again — plain white. She finishes with something shiny and clear on her lips — no color nowhere today.
My tears tip over and run down my cheeks.
“Why you crying?” she say.
I wipe my cheeks.
I try to stop thinking about what I done, hang my head low over my Bible but she keep staring.
“You done a little dirty of your own, didn’t cha? Where? In Alabama?”
I close my eyes, let new tears slide out.
“I knew it! My sixth sense never lie. What you do?”
“Why you want to know?” I say.
“Hell, girl, you already told it.”
I won’t look at her.
“You kill somebody? Another slave? No, no. . This is something big. Somebody that mattered.” She gets excited again. “A white woman? A man!”
My crying quivers out of me.
“I don’t believe it!” she say, and rushes her face close to mine, almost touching my nose with hers. “You did!”
She lifts my arms, pulling me up to a stand. “Oh, let me look at you. Yep, you a killa. I didn’t see that one right off. Well, one thing’s certain. . you better not try that shit with me.”
After a moment more of her threatening look, she gets excited again, hurries back to her vanity, zips opens her special drawer, and unlocks the silver box she keeps inside. Her funny-smelling tobacca is in there. It looks like dried grasses.
She takes a pinch and pokes it along the middle of her smoking paper, adds tobacco, and rolls a fat one. She lights it with her burning candle and takes a long drag, relaxes.
“Them plantation owners is bad news,” she say. “Always messing around in their henhouses. Thas what happened, isn’t it? Good girl like you. A little rebellious. About sixteen, seventeen. Still a virgin. I say you was overdue.” She takes one, two, three puffs, like she’s swallowing the smoke, then blows it out, coughing. “Don’t worry,” she say, “he deserved it.”
“You gon’ kill me now?” I say.
“Kill you? Hell naw, you gon’ save me. See, what you got is special. Something God sees as honorable — a virgin. I’m gon’ do for you what my momma never did for me. I want God to see me protecting your innocence so he write my name in His Book.”
She puts her hand on my shoulder and shakes me like we got a deal.
But I ain’t got nothin. Less than nothin since I lost Hazel. Momma.
Like all these days here, alive, have been extra time for no reason — a judgment so delayed that even telling Cynthia what I done didn’t bring it. A confession wasted.
There’s no mercy here.
17 / 1862, Tallassee, Alabama
YOU CAIN’T REASON with a fifteen-year-old girl who’s convinced she’s in love.
Seeing Jackson last night on her birthday was all the sure Josey needed. She was awake before eight this morning, smiling before she opened her eyes. She twirled Jackson’s red bracelet around her wrist, then buried her face in her pillow, laughing in it. Took her ’til now to get out of the house and on the road. It’s almost noon.
Her white headscarf is tucked in a bulge above her forehead, wonky, so a single lock of her blonde hair is swaying across her face.
She spent twenty minutes buttoning her skirt but still she skipped two buttonholes, so there’s a bulge there, too.
A sweaty stem of a yellow flower is in her hand. She plucks one of its petals and sends it to the ground where it joins a trail of other petals and bald stems behind her.
“He loves me not,” she say.
She needs to be thinking about eating and watching where she’s walking, not a boy, but this is love. She already stopped two people on the way to the yard, asking if it was almost eight o’clock — the time she’ll meet Jackson again.
She takes the next petal off her crumpled flower — there are only two left — so with the first petal she pulls she keeps the odds in her favor and say, “He loves me not.”
Rain begins to splatter on the ground, spreading dirt into tiny circles. Her new-plucked petal falls, adding color to the mud.
“Josey!” Ada Mae calls, running toward her from the top of the road. Her thousand-toothed smile is like a white corncob set sideways and bent up on both ends. “You hear the rumor?” she say, squealing. “We free!”
Josey’s confused.
I’m confused. Could it have finally come?
Everett overruns ’em and almost knocks ’em over. “More than a rumor,” he say, shouting. “The president signed papers!”
“President?” Josey say. “The man nobody like?”
“But everybody got to do what he say. He make the law. Make the whole world mind him.”
“So, we could just leave?” Josey say. “But what about this war? The war’s still raging.”
“It’s safe, ain’t it, Everett?” Ada Mae say. “But, you think they just gon’ stop the fighting and let us walk on through their battlefield, north?”
“‘Not even a chicken could survive those fields,’ is what I heard,” Josey say.
“Maybe they give us guns to protect ourselves,” Ada Mae say.
“And shoot white peoples?” Everett say. “Well. . maybe if we join our Southern armies. Fight ’longside our masters. .”
“And shoot white peoples!” Josey say. “You think Nelson will turn his back on you with a loaded weapon?”
“Maybe the president will come get us,” Ada Mae say.
“If he could get this far,” Josey say. “If he could win.”
“I ain’t never seen the president before,” Ada Mae say.
“Well, I don’t know if he come, or if he send somebody. .,” Everett say.
“And then take us where?” Josey say. “He’ll be our new Massa?”
“No, we free!”
“I don’t know what you mean, free.”
“Free mean free,” Everett say. “It’s what Mr. Sam’s gon’ say. He about to make the announcement. Tell us what the ’Mancipation Proclamation paper mean. What we got to do to get it. .”
“When Mr. Sam gon’ tell us this?”
“Now!” Everett say. “Everybody going to the meeting now.”
“Now! I gotta tell Daddy!”
“But the meeting’s about to start,” Everett say, grabbing her hand. “Why don’t you come with me. Your daddy’s probably there already.”