Marilyn Daniels disliked the man, but she was raised well and so she welcomed him into her husbandless home. She could see the loosely plastered desperation that hung over the frame of the man, the manners tacked on like pictures to hide the cracks. Worst he was a fly-by-night preacher, a man without a home except the one he wore on his back. And that, noticed the seamstress, was of shoddy cloth and make.
When he left for the evening, with a promise extracted from them to attend the revival the following evening, Marilyn could almost feel him marking her door like a male dog — done all the more easily because her husband’s scent of tobacco and bay rum aftershave had long since faded.
Otha Daniels fell in love that next evening sitting in the third pew. Otha and her parents had always kept a quiet house. Reverend Jennings was a trumpet blasting into the tender space under her ribs. She could not understand why he was only the warm-up act for other, less worthy men. She was vexed by this, but knew that the injustice could be rectified — with her help. In that moment she ripped out the seams of her own dreams and patched them into his.
Her mother brought up ridiculous things like age and money. But when she mentioned Fisk and her daddy’s dream, Otha felt the wind leave her sails for a moment. She had been her father’s daughter and had believed and followed him in all things, but she was seventeen years old now, one month away from eighteen, and from everything she had learned of the world, everywhere she looked, women stopped being their father’s girls when they became a husband’s wife.
That next night the Reverend walked her home. There was not so much talking as they listened to their feet sweep along the sidewalk. They passed other Negro couples holding hands on the street and so he reached out and held her tapered, narrow hand in his. He began to talk about her hands, how long the fingers, how delicately they moved, how it had been one of the first things he had noticed about her. Otha had never thought of her hands as anything but agile tools to make lace and stitch. She felt a kind of magic running through her palms that made them want to dance like butterflies in the air.
They walked in circles, around parks, and dragged their feet long after the sun had fallen out of the sky. When they walked right by the graveyard where her daddy was buried, he’d kissed her so sweetly she melted into the earth. It was then that she had done it, given her daddy’s dream back to him. She had done it with tears of sorrow but also with joy, because this new dream was filling her solar plexus like blown glass, scalding hot and liquid at the same time. So they walked back to the church where Minister Bowing made them man and wife.
Her mother had let out a small scream of agony when Otha told her she had married the Reverend. It was the loudest noise anyone had ever made in the house. Otha held her mother, her dark arms wrapped around the older woman’s neck, wet cheek to wet cheek, both crying in the dim of the evening lamps. She whispered into her mother’s ear that he gave her a reason to breathe in and out and that she would follow him and love him for all of her days.
Marilyn held her daughter. She would be hurt, of that Marilyn was certain. Helpless to protect her, Marilyn felt a wildness in her own chest, like a bird trapped behind a glass door. But when she looked in the girl’s eyes she could see that she was already gone so she gave her words to help her in the dark days:
“Your daddy and me named you Otha. It means ‘wealth.’ You were your daddy’s treasure from the time you were born until he died. He used to say there were rubies buried deep inside of you. Remember, baby, don’t never let a man mine you for your riches. Don’t let him take a pickax to that treasure in your soul. Remember, they can’t get it until you give it to them. They might lie and try to trick you out of it, baby, and they’ll try. They might lay a hand on you, or worse, they might break your spirit, but the only way they can get it is to convince you it’s not yours to start with. To convince you there’s nothing there but a lump of coal.
“Honey, one day I’m going to die, and that’s not all, one day you’ll die too. And between the here and the there, God sets us upon the business of collecting life’s true fortune. I’ve gotten plenty: the way your daddy smiled when I met him; the apple pie your grandmother used to make, with whole cinnamon grated in with the sugar; the maple leaves in the fall and how that always meant your daddy’s fig maple syrup would be on our pancakes. And you. You my big beautiful jewel baby. You my prize. And one day you’ll have a child and that child will be your prize.
“Teach them to see it, teach them by doing. But if you can’t, if you done give your treasure away, if you find it hard to make your way in the dark of your own soul, if you forget who you really are, know that it comes back to you when the lie they give you die. That lie don’t die easy, and sometimes it take you with it. But for all that, your bounty yet waits for you to claim it.
“Remember and it will yet shine. Shine brighter when you let love touch you. Shine brighter when you love yourself. Shine on into heaven when you leave this old world.
“Remember what I say Otha. Remember to lay claim to your inheritance. Will you make that promise to me?”
Otha shook her head, eyes spilling with tears. “I promise Mama,” she whispered.
Then she gave her mother a kiss on her dark cheek and went upstairs to pack her bags. She left that hour. Marilyn watched them drive away — the Reverend had waited in the buckboard, never entering her home again, not even to pick up her daughter’s bags.
He was good to Otha for a month, and the days of that month were full of talk and big dreams and pictures the size of the sky painted with flourish. He told her of the South as they rode on his buckboard to Liberty, gentle breezes full of gardenia, and blue-bonnets littering the sides of hills. He talked about seeing and knowing, how he was a grown man and knew what he wanted, how he wanted to shepherd the lost. He talked about the church he would have one day, and the rainbow glass with angel wings. He said how she was a little bitty thing who he would keep under his wing at least until forever.
The thirty good nights filled Otha with a kind of joy that broke her heart. It was too great a feeling to fit into her temperate body, her delicate spirit, so she had to keep breaking apart to accommodate it, only to glue herself back together each morning. By the time they reached Oklahoma she could no longer recognize herself. But Otha liked this new woman in the looking glass, with tired smiling eyes and world wise lips.