But Hazel won’t look away from James. She’s holding his hand. I can hear her talking to him. Praying. I try to wait. . wait long enough and say, “Hazel, what we gon’ do?”
Hazel don’t get up. She stay praying. Seem like a hour before she say, “Amen.” Finally, she stands, strong as always except when she sees Momma, her knees buckle.
Calmly, she say, “I want you to go, Naomi. Far as you can. Go where cain’t nobody find you.”
“Where I’m gon’ go, Hazel? I cain’t leave you and Momma.”
She nods and goes over to the fire pit, pulls her smoldering Bible out the fire. She presses it on her dress to stop it smoking. And I cain’t stop shaking. “Momma’s dead, Hazel!”
She comes to me, hugs me, but her comfort ain’t enough to stop this pain or the tears that pain makes to carry itself out of me.
Hazel twists two bundles of my hair into one loose braid. It unravels.
“Naomi, listen. Listen! You gotta go outta here. You gotta go north, you hear me? Ain’t nothin here for you.” She presses her Bible against my chest. I hold it tight.
“I don’t know where North is!”
“Follow the star like I showed you. Go only in the night.” Boss starts moaning from the floor.
I cain’t do this no more.
Hazel go over to him, stomps that poker further into Boss’s back and he shuts up. She heaves it out and tears her clothes with it; slices into her own flesh, along her ribs ’til she bleed. She brings it to me and puts it in my hand, bloody. “You gon’ need to protect y’self.”
“Hazel?” I say.
“You gon’ need food.” She gets the stale rolls from next to the oven and shoves ’em down my blouse. “You water yourself in the stream.”
“But Hazel. .”
“People gon’ come lookin, Naomi. Come lookin for all us. Ain’t nobody certain you was ever here.” She peels off Massa’s dark-brown jacket, rolling his fat, doughy body from side to side when she do.
“Hazel, please!”
She puts his jacket around my shoulders. “We was all attacked,” she say. “I got to be here to tell ’em.”
“But I cain’t make it without you.”
She pulls open the front door. “Go, Naomi.”
I creep to it, wiping my tears. “Hazel? Please.”
“Go!” she yell.
She grabs the back of my head, kiss my cheek before she push me out the door. I hurry out, looking up to the starless, clouded sky, running through the dark, holding Massa’s jacket high above my head.
“Don’t look back, Naomi. You hear me! Don’t you look back!”
I cain’t breathe.
Maybe Hazel put a mark on the wall for me, too.
4 / FLASH
SOME SAY YOUR life flashes before your eyes when you’re about to die.
It don’t always.
Not for me.
I didn’t have not one flash before I went.
Not everybody gets to see their first birthday again. Their father’s face laughing. The day their sister got married. The friends they’ve loved.
Maybe you won’t neither.
Not before you die.
It’s only now that I see the flashes. They come and go, and choose what day of my life to show me and I ain’t got a say in it. It happens to all of us dead. It’s more than just seeing the moment, it’s taking part in the memory as if it were happening again. And when you in the flash, you don’t even know that what you’re seeing is from a time already gone. You get lost in it. Feel like you got all the time in the world. A future. But it’s just your old life repeating itself and repeating itself and repeating itself. Those shivers you felt on warm days were just you — in two places at once.
So powerful, these flashes. Ask the dead. Ask the people who survive near death. Ask ’em how the flashes change their whole life from then on.
Or for the empty, it changes nothing.
I guess the most important parts of life ain’t measured by years or days or minutes but by moments. Moments that come in flashes here, only some of ’em good like seeing my sister, Hazel, again. I was seven years old in one of them flashes. Twelve in another. My favorite was the time when Hazel was teaching me how to tumble. And in another, I was six years old and she helped me lose my first tooth with a string and a slammed door.
The hell is the bad memories. Going back again and again and not being able to make a damn bit of difference. But God had mercy on me.
It’s been said that justice is getting what you deserve. And mercy is not getting the bad you deserve. Grace is getting a good thing, even when you don’t deserve it. So if I would’ve named my good thing, I’d have called her Grace. But someone else named her Josephine.
Part II
5 / 1850, Tallassee, Alabama
WHERE DO WE start when we tell the stories of our loved ones? On the day they were born or the day they mattered?
Mattered to other people, I mean, did something worth talking about. I guess I could start with who begot who like the Bible do, but where somebody comes from only matters to people who come from something and as it was, she came from me.
Me, and the men who would become her fathers.
See, my baby’s real father wasn’t the man who loved me. But if wishing could make it so, I’d of traded him for the man I shoulda loved — Charles. I woulda made him the first daddy to her ’cause first means something.
Charles wasn’t the man who got me pregnant.
He wasn’t first to hold my baby with his hands, either, or feel her tiny bones wiggling ’round in a loose bag of see-through skin. It was somebody else who was first to listen to her soft breaths flutter.
Charles shoulda been all them.
But he wasn’t.
When I first knew Charles, I never thought he’d be the kind of man who woulda made a good daddy. He never seemed like he needed nobody, especially a child. And his body never looked like it could care for one, neither. His hands too big to care for little baby thangs, his face too beastly to call a comfort, his arms too strong to hold something gentle. I’d reckon he’d crush her reaching for sugar. And he was alone when I first knew him. Alone is how he liked it. Safe. Never having to wonder what it would be to give hisself to somebody completely.
But I was wrong.
Wrong, ’cause he chose my baby, Josephine. Wrong, ’cause he once tried to choose me.
I wish he woulda smelled sweet to me like a man looking for love or seemed soft like a man who could love me silly and forgive me for the thangs he didn’t know about me. I wish I woulda felt his sun on my cheeks, breathed in his cool air and noticed the difference, like stepping from the cool shade of the trees to the hot sun directly. I wish he woulda scorched goose bumps on my arms so I woulda thought of him regular.
But he was just Charles. Another man, not a miracle.
Momma used to say that when you meet the one God sent you, you’d recognize him at once ’cause we all got souls trapped in our bodies and our souls got memories of a better life before this one; memories that come to us in our dreams, even when we awake.
I didn’t remember Charles that way. I mighta loved him if I did. The way Josey did.
She saw through the deep folds and scars on his bald head from when he was set on fire. She saw through the wash of skin on his burned face — healed slick. His nose was flattened to a valley. And still, she managed to love the man I shoulda. A man that became like a mother to her. He’d shepherd his flock of one away from all the things that might hurt her.
For him, couldn’t nobody care for her the right way, couldn’t nobody do it as good as he could: couldn’t feed her right, couldn’t hold her right, couldn’t watch her close enough.