She staggers up her hallway, holding her face, still yelling, “Ungrateful! I don’t care if I never see you again. In fact, don’t you never come back here.”
Her door slams shut.
“What happened?” Jeremy say.
“Where you been?” I say.
“What happened to your hair?” he say.
“How you like my dress?” I turn around in it for him. “I knew you’d come back and I wanted you to see me pretty. Don’t mind this ripped seam. I’ll fix it.”
“Mimi, I’m leaving.”
“What?”
“This is my last day.”
I don’t understand.
“They found gold in San Francisco. A bunch of us is headed up that way to try our luck. Get my head clear.”
“You leaving ’cause of me?”
“There’s some things I need to sort out. I need money. And. .”
“I’ve never seen San Francisco before,” I say.
“Mimi. .”
“Ain’t got much to pack. My brush. Some clothes. You use our money if Cynthia want you to pay for me. .”
“Naomi. .”
“A few pieces. .” I say.
He grabs the sides of my shoulders. “You ain’t comin.”
I shake my head. I don’t understand. If it don’t make sense, it’s a lie.
“I can’t take you with me,” he say.
“That’s not true. You don’t mean that.”
He slides his hands down from my arms to my hands and holds them together.
“We getting married,” I say. “Me and you fooling the world.”
“People will know,” he say, softly.
“We gon’ have babies. A family. Our gamble, you remember that?”
“We can’t hide our feelings. .” he say.
“We’re gonna make vows to God because we love each other. Jeremy, tell me you love me.”
“Dammit, Naomi!” he say, throwing my hands. “Are you dumb or something? Can’t you see me suffering here? I’m going to California without you. Why can’t you just be happy for me, wish me luck? Give me a sweet word to hold onto?”
“We both escape,” I say softly. I don’t even recognize my own voice. “Both escape our suffering.”
He opens the door and goes to the porch like I ain’t even here.
He turns around to me, looking at me like he don’t know me, then lingers there. One last glance. He’s gone.
What’s happening here? I don’t understand.
I just gave up my peace for him.
My protection.
All those chances at freedom I gave up for him. My body — to him, almost to Mr. Shepard — for him. I left part of my soul in a gambling room and now I don’t understand.
What’s love supposed to cost? What’s freedom cost? I’ve already paid it all.
And I don’t understand.
31 / FLASH, Conyers, Georgia, 1847
I BEEN WAITING AT this door for two hours for Jeremy but he ain’t come back yet. Every time I get ready to go, I tell myself he gon’ show up again, see me missing and think I don’t love him. So I’ll keep sitting here on my knees, waiting. I know he still loves me.
He could forgive me.
After what he asked me to do with Mr. Shepard, he owe me. He can forgive my insult. It wouldn’t be fair if he found me unforgivable after all we been through.
When I think of unforgivable I think of how I killed Massa. No, God could forgive me for that ’cause I had to protect myself. Unforgivable is cold-blooded murder, senseless and with no excuse. Like what they keep writing about what I did in the papers that keep coming: “Faunsdale Slaughterer.”
No, cold-blooded murderer is when somebody, for no reason, takes away everything a innocent man ever had and everything he was ever gone have. But what did I do to Jeremy? And who the hell’s he anyway to make me earn forgiveness from him?
I could help him be better.
I could love him.
Lord knows, I do love him. I’d even forgive him for taking a life, cold-blooded, if he’d promised to love me again.
My sour stomach’s making me sick and that’s all right.
I want it that way.
I want Jeremy to see me sick for him, my knees black and blue for him, my eyes swollen for him. Want him to see me loving him the way he say he don’t love me and regret it.
Throw-up’s racing up my throat this time. I run out the door, shoot it all over the rail. “Jesus!” I cry and hollow out empty. The pain comes back again and I hang over the porch in the dark like somebody’s washed and forgot clothes.
“Ungrateful!” I hear Cynthia say behind me.
I look over my shoulder, see her parading across the parlor with an armful of my things, talking to herself out loud, making sure I hear her, see her. “You’re getting out of here tonight!” she say.
She kicks open the gambling parlor door, bumps around through the room, knocks open the side door, my things hurled from her arms: my fire poker, my clothes, my Bible, a jewelry box Bernadette gave me. They clatter when the heavy things hit the ground but I don’t care. Most everything she got rid of was hers anyway.
ALBERT EMERGES FROM Cynthia’s field coming my way. When he reach the bottom of this porch, he looks up at me. His expression is like he feel sorry but I don’t need nobody feeling sorry for me, getting near me, except my man.
He takes a step up the porch and say, “Can I. .” “I don’t want to see you,” I say. “Not you! Not Cynthia! No part of this place. Get the hell away from me! And don’t. .”
A whoosh passes my ear and explodes a glass bottle on the porch, wetting the wood steps. Broken pieces fly and just miss Albert. My ankle burns and a thin red line appears there, just below the hem of my dress where my skin was sliced — the separation cries blood.
I bend down and hold the place with my hand, see Cynthia standing inside drinking from a new bottle she got. She cocks it back to throw it. I leap from the porch! “Ungrateful bitch!” she say. “You better not come back nowhere on this property! Albert, get away from her!”
I take off running.
Keep running.
Running again.
I ain’t got nowhere else to go.
32 / JUNE 1865, Tallassee, Alabama
W E SURRENDERED.
April 1865 the Confederate States of America raised their white flags and gave up. Less than a week later, President Lincoln was murdered like it was done in trade.
“But slavery ain’t illegal,” Slavedriver Nelson said. We can still keep slaves, he reckoned. “It’ll take a constitutional amendment to take away my rights as an American citizen,” he said. And when he found out the proposal for the Thirteenth Amendment to end slavery was making its rounds in Congress last month, expected to be voted on and approved by the end of the year, he got on his new horse and just left, like most people. Slave and free. Nobody’s stopping nobody, ’cause there’s no extra food, no extra men, no extra ammunition, and no hope. Annie didn’t want Nelson here in the first place.
George has been missing for months and Josey and Charles’ll be disappearing from here soon, too. Go someplace where George could never find her. But she got Jackson’s protection now.
For the last six months, Jackson’s been keeping everybody here laughing, telling ’em his war stories. “We ducked down low like this. Me and Collins,” Jackson will start.
He’ll lay on somebody’s floor or in the dirt, depending on who he’s talking to and where, then flatten his belly and aim his imaginary rifle. “They caught me once,” he’ll say. “They weren’t gon’ catch me again. We wasn’t going back without a fight. Northerners telling us they fighting for our freedom, then keeping us prisoner through the war. What kind of bullshit’s that?”