Ours, p.21
Ours, page 21
Mr. Wife dabbed his cheek. “Numb,” he said. “Can’t feel the left side of my face at all.”
“You held it there a mighty long time.”
“I did. Can’t hold nothing for too long,” Mr. Wife said, and looked at Justice.
“How long is too long, sir?”
“When it start hurting, the first sign. When you don’t feel nothing, the second,” Mr. Wife said, then asked, “Why you rubbing your thigh, son? Something bit you?”
Justice had been rubbing near the branded E without knowing it. He had no need to hold on to that letter; it did all the holding on needed. He hadn’t told Mr. Wife about what his parents put on him, and Luther-Philip only knew because they went swimming. The dark lake that was his heart trembled. He felt a bit of freezing wind rise from the black water’s surface and pour into his chest. Without thinking, he said “I got a E on me, sir.”
“What you say you got?” Mr. Wife said, shifting the wet towel on his face.
“A E. On my leg.”
Mr. Wife chuckled. “I don’t know your meaning, Justice.” Mr. Wife dipped himself and Justice some water from a nearby bucket. “Here.”
Justice drank the water and sat the cup on the floor. “Luther-Philip seen it. The E. He say I don’t need it but I got it. More like it need me.”
“What E, boy?”
Justice’s lips trembled. “It’s on my leg. It’s so my people could find me in the papers. That’s why I read the papers so much. To see if people do be finding people that way.”
“The papers?” Mr. Wife’s body slumped into itself. He kept his narrowing eyes trained on Justice, who didn’t look away. “Show me,” he said. “Show me what they did to you, son.”
Justice pulled down his pants and hid his privates with his hand. He turned out his left leg and revealed the E burnt into his skin. Mr. Wife made a sound that carried all of history. Pain unfolding pain. A primordial echo of the first hurt finally crawling its way back. And each time Justice thought the pain had finished unfolding, more petals opened from Mr. Wife’s mouth until the pain was in full bloom. After the sound ended, the tears began.
Mr. Wife studied Justice’s face, then examined the brand. He tried harder to speak. Shook his head. He narrowed his eyes to push away the tears, incapable of seeing anything else, not even his own house, his own furniture in it, or the young man standing before him tagged like the slave he had never been, like cattle. The E branded on Justice’s leg had branded Mr. Wife’s mind. How had he missed that ugly scar for all these years? How did Justice hide it so well? And, of course, his damn parents burnt it inside his thigh and not on the outside where it would be most useful if ever needed. Even they knew to be ashamed of branding their boy, so hid it instead of simply not doing it.
Something inside Mr. Wife broke free, but this freedom he couldn’t celebrate. This dead flesh rising up from a living body was too much, just too much.
As Mr. Wife cried and cussed, Justice knew that his all-along suspicions about his condition were right. What his family did to him shouldn’t have been done. He raised his pants.
Mr. Wife stood and threw the chair he was sitting on against the wall. He smashed another chair into the table. He smashed the cake resting on another long table by the oven. He smashed it with his fists and threw the sweet ruin to the floor. Justice turned away. Another chair went flying. Justice shouted, “It don’t hurt,” and Mr. Wife, mid-swing of an iron poker toward the oven, stopped. “It don’t hurt no more, sir,” Justice said.
Mr. Wife dropped the poker. The smell of cake dazzled the air. Pieces of broken chairs, a splintered wooden bowl, dinted tin cups, an upended bag of flour, a table cracked in the center, the old Delacroix newspaper ripped—everything unmade by his hostility, his grief for the living. And though he could no longer see Justice’s gnarled E he remembered as though the image had been burned into his own mind and rested up against images of bags of rice, a stable of horses, fresh-carved bowls, flour waiting to be cupped and measured, loaves of bread handled more delicately than any body, butter, eggs, blocks of ice, a stream of satin, a page of silk, a hill of beans, and a shovel full of cow shit ready for the field. It became another object in the ledger of his memory, priced and allocated no importance more than its function: to feed, to keep warm, to get the job done, to make everything but itself prosper. ‘No,’ he thought. ‘You wrong about it not hurting no more.’ Mr. Wife could smell the smoke rising from that E from where he stood—feet away from the boy he called his own but knew nothing about, not even that he had an insignia branded into his left inner thigh, so what kind of parent was he to Justice if he knew and recalled the time of each bruise’s conception on Luther-Philip’s body but none belonging to Justice?
He closed the space between himself and Justice and embraced him. “You free,” he said. Mr. Wife felt stirring in him another hit of grief, poignant to the point of sending him into a second tirade from which there could be no return. ‘What is freedom?’ he thought. ‘What is this shit?’ He rubbed Justice’s head, just a bit higher than his own, and feeling the flesh of him—the meat and the fat and the warmth—against his own body made him feel sick.
When he released Justice, he looked into the boy’s face, hoping that the meat would become a body again, someone returning from the something that he never had the mind to make the boy into, not before seeing the brand. Luckily, Justice’s eyes brought his own selfhood back to Mr. Wife’s mind. He squeezed the boy’s shoulders and said, “You free,” looking at his reflection in that big pool of Justice’s dark brown eyes. Mr. Wife swam to the pool’s bottom, got lost in the dark. ‘If I can just look in his eyes,’ Mr. Wife thought, ‘if I can just see myself always in his eyes, I’ll know that he seeing me back. We each other to each other. Let this be the freedom between us.’
• CHAPTER 12 •
Dead-Time
[1]
Frances and Joy as a pair were the second and third strangers to enter Ours uninvited. Soon after they had broken through the barrier and moved in with Saint, a move meant to be for as long as it took her to observe their potential for danger, Saint lost track of time. Powerless against it, she decided to investigate the problem, but her memory also lost track of itself as her intentions tumbled about in her head. Hours passed without her having cooked a meal, reflected, read, washed her feet, or chastised the girls for dancing in each other’s shadows. Hours melted into days, then the slow sloughing of weeks until finally a month disappeared in the calendar of her oblivion.
While time warped the house, Selah experienced a terrible headache. Tiny mallets beat the inside of her head, so she relied on Naima’s help. She waited to expel her waste for when Naima bathed her, asking her sister to get a bucket and help her roll over. But Naima had started acting strangely. She sat in room corners most days and stared out into nothing. Then, with a sudden burst of awareness, Naima expelled her own waste in a bucket, bathed, made a quick meal of whatever was lying around, and fed Selah while rubbing her head. After completing those tasks, Naima sat on Selah’s bed, trapped in the box of her mind.
In her short period of salience, Naima relayed that Saint had become the same way, disappearing for hours at a time only to return to accomplish tasks she meant for completion earlier in the day or that were already finished. Saint twisted her hair between tasks with a feverish look, leaving some locs of hair undone until the next day or longer. She cleaned the fireplace three times in two hours, made lunch at night and dinner at breakfast or cooked nothing at all for days at a time. She often went hungry without noticing until the next moment of clarity arrived. Naima had not seen Frances at all, and Joy, the most active, spent more time in Ours than she thought possible under this rapid malady that had infected everyone in the house.
Selah tested the limits of what she called the “lostness” and decided to try healing herself of her paralyzing headaches. It took three days for Naima to find what Selah needed and tie it up for her, so busy she was looking at nothing with her mouth open and collecting dust. Placing the healing gris-gris under her own pillow, much of Selah’s headache dwindled. In a day, she regained the ability to walk and saw for herself the chaos of the house. With that same gris-gris and a tender touch, she raised Saint and Naima from their stupor.
Joy had just left for Ours. Frances had yet to appear, and Selah hadn’t shared her healing gris-gris with her. But before Saint could climb the stairs and check on Frances, Frances came smooth down the stairs, fully dressed, eyes bright as wet coins, asking with an unaware smile what was for dinner.
‘Is that so?’ Saint said to herself. Seeing Frances completely unbothered and unaware of the shift in time took Saint back to when she got Naima and Selah and with them a striking collection of stories promising to haunt her in irrevocable ways.
[2]
After Aba burned down Saint’s first house and thick clusters of lilac had grown in its place, Saint went looking for safety. Her second house, just east of Creek’s Bridge, lodged her and her companion under the then-solid protection of her stones where the low field began to exclaim with woody-stem dewberry and black walnut trees until a full flourish of woods overtook the landscape. She knew that hiding amongst the trees like a fabled witch had to end and in preparation for the great reveal of both herself as not dead and of her second home, she went searching for a safeguard to assist her and her conjure that grew less reliable by the day. She took a three-hour stroll with her companion to the Mississippi River to find the one who could bring to her the strongest protection: a set of twins.
Intuition, a set of legends passed on through hearsay, and memories from once-enslaved Africans she had freed, all dictated to her the benefits of having twins and their natural gift for the otherworldly. Their single face repeating on two bodies could ruin a nation if allowed, and where some chose to kill them immediately after they were born, others chose to honor them. Saint would do neither. What she felt incapable of accomplishing on her own she would accomplish as three. The twins, neither demons nor gods, were still reliable.
Sometimes, Saint felt danger in the trees, in the sky regardless of the weather, regardless of which birds speckled the blue or gray above her. If anything, the birds were an augury awaiting consultation. With her limited time, she decided to assume there existed bad omens in all she experienced, making the desire for twins even stronger. They would be raised to call her Saint, not mother. Any inclination Saint had to coddle their beautiful selves would be resisted. Danger had a way of showing up where love resides, so she made it her duty to never love them. She would educate them in the ways of conjure and teach them everything about the world’s ugly ways and striking possibilities.
Knowing exactly what she wanted, Saint found the strange man who wore the face of a boy and made her request. He had helped her countless times before, bringing enslaved Africans to freedom on his raft undetected in a way that not even Saint understood. Some called him the River Rider. She knew him as Husband and Son, for he said he was both married to the water and born from it. “My mama water,” he said to Saint on more than one occasion, then once added somberly, “She give me my child then take her back.” Politely, she had nodded when she heard the first part for the second, third, and fourth time. It was the other part, the part about giving and taking back, that gave her pause and pulled from her a soft look as though to corroborate his statement. He inspected the river then, maybe hoping for what was taken to be returned. Nothing bubbled forth and with no evidence of his being a spouse or a father, Saint referred to Husband and Son as just Son. When she called his name, she heard his near-toothless mouth smack open with spit as he grinned.
“Can get them for you. Don’t ask where from,” he told her and handed her a stack of papers tied together with twine. “As always.”
‘As always, indeed,’ Saint thought, tracing the twine with a finger. Because Saint requested, Son collected newspaper clippings, pages torn from pamphlets about recent legends and ghost stories and wanted ads offering reward money for exceptionally dangerous Negroes. She didn’t tell him why and he didn’t ask.
Saint looked over the materials in her divining room. The clippings dated as far back as the 1740s, consisting of stories such as:
“Legends along the Apalachicola River: The Rice African,” December 2, 1740: Husband found shot in the head in the forest. He had been arguing with an African male about the amount of rice he had sold to the African.
“Mysterious Negro Not Found after Death of Mr. Gerald Colfax,” February 1, 1802: Witnesses say a well-loved Mississippi planter died mysteriously of a gunshot wound to the head after shooting a free colored in his head for allegedly sleeping with his daughter. The colored wasn’t found.
“Wanted for murder: tall, dark, unmuscular nigger male with unnaturally perfect teeth,” February 3, 1802: Not liking the tone of an allegedly free nigger male who wouldn’t move out of her way, a terrified South Carolinian white woman sent her brothers and husband after him. The four men she sent were found dead of various stab and gunshot wounds. Reward: $500.
“Mysterious Failed Lynching. No Body to Bear the Rope,” August 3, 1810: North Carolina, six men were found burned alive in the woods. The man who discovered the gruesome scene found near their bodies rope, a shotgun, and a knife. The scene resembled that of a lynching though no colored body, dead or alive, surfaced.
From the pamphlet “Strange Deaths in American South, vol. VI,” September 22, 1822: Man found in his Virginian home having choked to death on what appeared to be several issues of The Liberator.
“Sense Killed along with Town,” September 30, 1849: The entire town of Galley Brook, Florida (pop. 73) discovered dead by independent militia in search of a tall negro male who murdered three men and two women one town over. Several bodies bore gunshot wounds to the leg, torso, head, and through the back.
On October 3, 1858, Saint returned to Son and received a single article from a New Orleans paper about the slaughter of two women, described as a “negress and a thin quadroon,” in their boardinghouse by the hands of a “tall Negro savage and his dark mulattress lover.” Unimpressed, Saint nearly tossed the clipping into the fireplace until a phrase at the end caught her attention. “Thirty-five men dead in pursuit of couple.” ‘How on earth?’ she wondered.
A month later, the barrier around Ours trembled so hard that books fell from their shelves in Saint’s house. Pans hanging from the kitchen walls clattered like bells tolling an approaching storm. Galloping by, a family of deer, seven deep, heading away from Turney. Even then, the wisdom of animals.
Saint locked her companion away in a small shed about a quarter of a mile north, just in case this visitor had something as bad or worse than a cursed bell. It was then that a horde of white moths lifted from the sheet of November frost covering the ground and fluttered over her head, into the trees, and disappeared into the sky. Seconds later, it began to snow. What had once been a meager annoyance became an impertinent omen forcing Saint to gather the twins, wrap her hair, dust her face with sage ash, and rush into the freezing cold prepared for battle.
She saw Frances and Joy, the former shaking inexplicably with awe and the latter looking hungry. The wind blew snow into the air one good time and the once-shapeless foreboding of her fears manifested before her. She forgot about Joy altogether. ‘This what’s been coming to me all these years,’ Saint thought, and saw that she had to welcome into her town what she never had the power to keep out.
Now, with Frances smiling at the bottom step all tall, lean, skin aglow, and oblivious as only a man could be, as though the entire household had not been in disarray for over a month, Saint realized her mistake. All this time it never occurred to her that Frances, a woman in her perception, could have been that “tall negro male” mentioned in the stack of clippings given to her by Son. All this time Saint was looking for someone who was looking for her, too. Successful in her search, what now did this untouchable person want?
[3]
While the twins washed the floor, they secretly watched Saint between scrubs. Naima noticed first the squelch orchestrating Saint’s throat, a wet meant to hide a feeling but by hiding it too forcefully revealed it instead. Selah noticed a bit of candlelight in Saint’s chest, an uncertainty burning away a wick’s fragile length.
Joy, too busy noticing Frances’s recovery to notice Saint’s agitation, felt betrayed. Her conversation with Aba hadn’t proven useful. It only supplied for her a journey at the end of which Frances returned to her senses without Joy’s involvement. Not betrayal, then. She had become a burden. Might as well be invisible again. And if invisible, was she to kill again? The thought of blood stilled her. She poked her slice of hen’s meat with a fork and in her mind heard a man’s scream coming from the flesh.
The night Frances had found Joy after the horse kicked her back in Louisiana, she had just killed a man who had raped his own daughter. Invisible with Eloise’s stone in her mouth, she tortured him before taking his life with a smile he couldn’t see. She had knocked him clean out and when he woke, he found himself tied to a chair with his mouth rag-stuffed and secured by a thin piece of twine knotted hard at the back of his head. She indulged in his panic when he saw the sharp instruments floating like marionettes, his house suddenly haunted, the butcher knife finding all the ways to open him. The deeper she dug, the wider she grinned. She remembered what she did to that man’s body with his own fork as she carved into the hen’s breast at the dinner table, Saint asking questions, Joy and Frances answering around them.
“Strange,” Saint said, pulling on a loc of hair. Lethal, the air and the moment. The twins stopped cleaning, the new silence like venom. Frances kept eating. Joy watched an iron gate emerge between the two.
