She awoke the next morning while the sky was still gray. The sun was miles from the horizon. She leapt up and hit her shin against the log, reminding her of where she was. She had soiled herself. There were coals burning where the fire had been. They had — the men. The back of her head ached. They had — had someone hit her? They? Who? Something tilted inside her. She fell against the log. It was as if a scale had been tipped in the night. Something had happened, but she scratched in the ashes of her mind and could not remember a thing. Had there been a fire? Who stood before it? She had followed her husband? Or had she run from him? Little webs stretched before her eyes with spiders that devoured every thought before it could surface. Nothing remained of the night before so she walked in the dim gray pale of morning through the forest path; her reason snagged on a tree branch. She felt something tickling her thighs and saw that her hands were lacing again. She thought to stop them but they persisted against all signals to stop. So she walked home, opened her door. She scrubbed her privates with a soaped face cloth and climbed into her bed beside the Reverend, sleeping like death.
Easter morning found her awake under the three-star quilt she had made three falls ago, hands furious, her husband snoring beside her. She leapt out of bed and fell down again. Balance lost, the floor slanted until she slanted her head to meet the new angle and was able to walk that way. She put on her robe and fixed breakfast, glad to have something to occupy her hands; holding a spatula and flipping pancakes proved manageable. Keeping them busy was best so she cleaned while the household prepared for Easter Sunday. Otha looked at her husband and felt sick but she could not place where this feeling had been born. He chewed and swallowed and pulled back his chair and put on his hat. He always went early so she found the tail of a voice in her throat and croaked out, “Good day.” He glared at her, but there was nothing unusual about that. She swept and scrubbed and told Ephram and Celia to go on without her, that she had plenty much to see to before the picnic. Ephram kept asking her what was wrong, what was wrong, until she was sharp with him and told him to go to service. Celia gave her her father’s glare. Long a disappointment to her fourteen-year-old daughter, this was nothing new either. Once they walked away, what was left of Otha died right there on the kitchen floor. She felt all that was familiar: the heart that beat for her children; the morning quiet of her garden; even the ever-present low note of sorrow that ran through her marriage; the lavender scent of her mother; her daddy … every memory, every bit of her retreating, retracting. She burrowed like a parasite into little pockets in her body, then she barricaded them from the inside, until there was nothing, until all that she had been ceased to be.
Some new thing emerged that thought to lift her form and walk her into the bedroom. This new thing took off her robe and proceeded to get dressed. It tied her shoes and put on her hat. It decided that it would be best, if she could not stop her hands from lacing, to carry the lacing tat and pretend to work on it whenever someone glanced in her direction. This new being never considered not walking to the picnic because it lived under the sway of the Reverend’s moods. He would already be livid that she had not come to the church. Why had she not come to the church? No, the floor had had to be cleaned and the breakfast dishes washed and so she couldn’t go but she had wanted to, she would tell the Reverend when she saw him. She would explain to him very clearly, very slowly, so that she would make sure she was saying the words correctly because something was tilting her thoughts as well, mixing up the correct sequence. She was planning exactly what she would say as she walked over the hill, which is why the first scream was such a surprise. A little bug of memory collided with the web of her mind again. A child somewhere was screaming bloody murder, but it was devoured just as the Reverend punched her in the face.
The rest of the day was a blur of women and glimpses of Ephram sobbing. Her memory spitting out a dragonfly, in the form of her husband standing beside some girls, but why was he there and he wasn’t really there but why did the girls turn into blue smoke? When she mentioned the girl in the forest he had begun beating her in earnest but even that felt distant, except she needed to see Ephram and tell him something about his bed, perhaps to take a red thing from there, but what, she could not fathom. And then she was too weak to stop someone from hurting her boy, and a pain ripped through her soul as she was torn from him, ripped like a spider from its web, and she was hit so hard the buckboard raced to her head and held it all the way to hell.
The sleeves they wrapped around her were too tight around her lungs so that she couldn’t breathe in deep enough to sustain consciousness. She kept waking up gasping for air and then passing out again. Finally an angry White woman did something with buckles and she was able to stay awake, and then she wished she hadn’t. She found that she was wearing a diaper and that it had been soiled more than once. She was in a room with four other Colored women all wrapped similarly. When she arrived the Reverend had taken her into a room and told a White woman that she had tried to throw her children down the well and had then run naked to the Easter picnic, that she was crazy and that he loved her but what could he do. The White woman had put her hand on her Black husband and patted his back then she had shoved Otha into another room, getting the little jacket over her bruised body. When she cried for her son the woman had pushed her hard against the wall.
By evening Otha’s reason was slowly returning. She was terrified for her children. At the end of a week she began to smell again. She didn’t realize that sense had been lost until she was assaulted by the stench of urine, waste and collective human sweat. She was moved into a great room with ten women and men strapped to beds. A very angry man said that her ribs were broken and she was wrapped up and left there where she developed sores on her ankles and skin burns on her vagina and buttocks from urine soaking and laying so close to her skin for so many days. After a month she was moved to a cell where human decency had long been forgotten. Twelve women shared a filthy room with a tin bucket for relieving themselves. Some women were strapped to their beds. Some screamed all day and wept. One woman played with her private parts until nurses slapped her hands with a ruler. When they were out of sight she would begin again. In spite of this Otha held fast to what was left of her sanity. She did it for one reason. Her son, Ephram. Besides the yawning pain of missing him she was terrified for him as well. She called out at night to speak about her children until two men came in and tied her to her bed with a leather strap over her mouth. Two days later a man came in to talk with her. They took the strap from her mouth then. She had not had water or food for two days. This man did not seem angry. He was a young White man, so young in fact that his face didn’t look as if it would take a beard. He called Otha “Mrs. Jennings” and asked her how she was feeling, so of course she felt tears pushing against her eyes, she told him that she was very concerned about her son and daughter. She did not dare mention pit fires and young naked girls, not in the heart of this beast of a place, but she did tell the man that her husband beat the children in such a way that she was frightened for their very lives. The young man nodded and looked at a piece of paper in front of him. He said that he thought it would be best if she stayed with them for a while longer.
When she insisted that it would not be all right, that she was feeling much better and that the incident that had taken place was a thing of the past, that she was perfectly normal, he simply looked down at her hands and shook his head with a short little nod. Otha followed his gaze and saw that her hands were lacing. It was then that she realized they had been lacing since she arrived and had not stopped, not for one single moment. The young, young man said, “There, there,” when she kept crying. He signaled for help as her cries intensified and left as they were strapping her in, telling her that he would be back to see her in a month. He lied.