I been sitting with her for hours today, studying how she move with that machine, holding firm to that cotton, pacing it through its big wooden wheel when it zip and creak around.
From far away, the wheel looks tacked in the sky on nothin. From here, though, I can see its two wooden hands reaching up from the bench, pinning the wheel between ’em, coaxing the cotton from Mama Dean’s man-sized hands. It slip through her fingers like webs sliding out of spiders. “Simply trial and error, Naomi. Would you like to try?”
Mama Dean speaks better than us. She spent three generations in the Hilden household, teaching and cleaning and caring for Massa’s momma ’til she passed. His momma hired a doctor to come daily with vials of pain medication and had him stay to make sure she’d die of natural causes and not them.
Massa stayed bitter about how the doctor’s visits subtracted from his inheritance.
Then she died.
That’s when Massa told Mama Dean that he needed the spare room to “organize his affairs.” She was slow, he said, and taking up space, he said, and he could use Violet in the house and the field, he said.
So she’s with us now.
“No, Mama Dean. . all I do is tangle it right up.”
“Your mother started off tangling things like you. Then she became the best. She could spin the most beautiful textures for you and your sisters’ dresses.”
I look over at Momma sitting and rocking on the porch all blank-faced and quiet, the same place Hazel put her this morning. Hard to imagine her moving any other way. My mind ain’t like Hazel’s. She remember thangs from when she was two years old. I might have a pocketful of memories from before eight. That was about the time Momma stopped talking all together, the same time Hazel put the sixth and seventh marks on the wall — twin girls.
Hazel say pain’s got a way of etching memories into people’s minds, even a child’s, and holds its place there for a lifetime. That’s why she remembers. She say her memories keep her guilty, blame her for not doing the thangs that only grown folks woulda known to do. She say she’s aged into her bad memories, helpless as the day she got ’em ’cause she still cain’t go inside ’em and fix nothin.
“Naomi!” I hear from behind me. Hazel’s flying out of the woods, calling me and grinning, and calling again. I get up and smile, too, ’cause I know she got something good to say. Trailing behind her is her skinny, big-eyed beau, James. They holding hands even though he ain’t supposed to be here. They been sneaking through the woods together since last summer, going to secret meetings. I followed her one night and saw her meet eight negroes from the plantation down river where James come from. All of ’em was boys except the two piss yellow green-eyed girls and Hazel. All but Hazel was house negroes.
They sat around the fire, real close and quiet, talking private. Hazel started off the group praying, reading the Bible and that was all right, I guess. But after then, they got to talking crazy, talking ’bout running North. But I don’t understand. What do house niggas got to run for? What they got to lose? They live in the big house, get treated good. Now they trying to trade an easy life and a kind master to starve. Worse, get kilt. “Freedom,” they said. “North,” they said. I keep my freedom in my mind.
The more I listened to Hazel, though, I could see her almost fooled by ’em. They probably want to leave her somewhere, make her the ’scape donkey. She nodded her head with ’em saying her um hums, and thas rights. I knew she didn’t mean none of it, though. The only reason she go to them meetings is ’cause a James. He’s sweet.
I’ve seen the way he is with her. When they’re walking, he’ll reach for her side to guide her this way or that, hardly touching her but she’s moved. If not direction, inside herself. Her hardened brick body becomes something looser. Frail. Like crumbling rock. No. . sand. Like she’s made of drying wet sand and any brush could crumble her away. And that night I last followed ’em, he skipped his fingertips along the back of her hand, then around to her palm and through her fingers before settling into the spaces.
She didn’t break apart, though.
Only her gritty edges tumbled away. Changed her. One day, I want to be changed, too.
When she get to me, I say, “Tell me, Hazel! Tell me!”
“We gettin married!”
We both scream and hug and Mama Dean claps her hands, then holds ’em to her mouth. I say, “You gon’ have to practice me now, Mama Dean. We goin to a weddin’!”
I grab James and do a twirl and a jig wit him, do another dance on my own. Hazel puts her hands on my shoulders, trying to hold me in place. “Naomi?”
“I’m just warmin’ up, Hazel!”
“Naomi?” she say, pressing down harder on me. “We goin North. We gon’ run.”
My stomach drops out of me.
My feet stop directly.
All I can think about is Berry and Francis who only made it as far as the creek, then didn’t. “Run?” I say.
“They talkin ’bout war, Naomi. War to free us. The time to be a slave is over.”
I don’t want to die.
I unpin my hair and turn my back to Hazel so she see I want her to braid it, but she only runs her fingers through it once, then pats my head. “We all goin together,” she say. “You and Momma comin, too.”
I start fixing Hazel’s hair real fast and put it how she like it so she forget about running.
“Me and James’ll be like Abraham and Sarah in the Bible.”
“You want your hair up or down?” I say. “It’s pretty up.”
“You hear what I said, Naomi?”
I want her to stop talking about war or leaving so I bend my arms in her face to get her hair good. It’s an accident that I’m smashing my arm in her mouth so she cain’t talk, but her mushed mouth keeps moving anyway.
“It’s your wedding, Hazel. I’m gon’ make you the prettiest bride ever was.”
She untangles herself from behind my arms and yells to Momma on the porch. “Momma! Me and James gon’ ask permission. We gettin married!”
Momma don’t move.
She never do.
3 / FLASH, Faunsdale, Alabama, 1846
THE RAIN’S BEEN slapping the ground all day, soaking through the house, making our floors mud.
Hazel put a fire on to keep us warm. I like to watch it burn yellow and orange and see-through — a halo of colors birthing light through the ruins like the rainbow after the flood. It reminds me that God’s still here.
I been getting better at my reading since it’s been getting dark early. Hazel’s been practicing me for hours today and my butt bone hurt, but ever since she said, “Use the only part of your backside wit some meat on it,” I been tilted up on my thighs so this oak chair don’t hurt so much. If I was big and healthy like Hazel, I could sit any ole kinda way, but as it is, I got to sit crooked.
The boys especially like her healthy. You’d think them boys could see right through her clothes the way they stare at her chest. She keeps her arms crossed when she outside so cain’t nobody see ’em. Peoples think she got a bad attitude because of it. Truth is, the only thing she ever hated was her big tits. I wouldn’t mind if I had ’em even though she say they sweat underneath. I’d be happy to wipe ’em dry all day long but I ain’t even got a bump yet.
Hazel promised that my fat’s gon’ come after I get my period. I ain’t told her it come last month cause I’m gon’ surprise her. Just wake up one morning wit a big fat butt and big tits and Hazel gon’ say, “Why you wearin’ my britches?” And I’m gon’ say, “My ass too big for mine.” Then we both gon’ laugh.