in front of me. I’ve learned to ignore the fools who taunt me here—name calling, cursing, and those that hide in dark corners.
I hold tight to the sides of my pregnant apron, close my eyes.
He touches my shoulder.
I still don’t move. I hear his footsteps come around in front of me. Just Johnny. The eight-year-old boy that Cynthia dance with. Her son. He squats down beside me with his hands on his knees. Got painted clay marbles peeking between his knuckles like dry fish eyes.
Sunlight floods his red hair and bursts an orange halo around his head while joined-together freckles start a stripe of brown across the center of his face, exploding in specks of auburn and sticking to all the white skin I can see. Even his bare feet are singed.
He picks up my sweet potato, flashing three of his knuckles, all of ’em got picked-off scabs. He puts the vegetable in my hand.
I don’t know what to say.
I hold my throat, show him I cain’t talk to thank him, nod my head instead.
He rubs his tired eyes. The bags underneath ’em are purple and black. Like he ain’t slept in days. Cat naps is all he get and when he’s behind the bar asleep on the floor, he’ll shoot straight up awake sometimes, probably reliving his daytimes in his nightmares—because daytimes is when most the men come for his momma. Men, he cain’t stop.
I saw him attack a grown man once.
I came in from fetching eggs; started my day in darkness and found him waiting like a cowboy at high noon. He had readied hisself for the man to come out his momma’s bedroom, had his painted clay marbles between his knuckles then, too. He caught me watching him so I smiled. He turned away from me, focused.
I hid myself behind Bernadette’s door. From there, I watched the boy watch the man through the crack of his momma’s door. Her noise-making wasn’t motherly. Only the parlor music that spilled in the hall offered relief.
But when Man finished his pleasure inside Cynthia, Man held her the way she holds Johnny at night. So when Man walked out, Johnny beat him around the waist with both fists, caught one in Man’s crotch. Man twisted Johnny’s arms behind him. Told Cynthia, control your son, said, have a nice day.
Happened so fast, Cynthia didn’t do nothin.
Johnny lets men walk by now.
He watches ’em go in her door one way, buckling their belts on the way out. They step over him in the doorway like he ain’t a boy wanting his momma.
We all hear her good reasons through our thin walls and empty hallways. She yell, she got bills to pay, his mouth to feed, clothes and shelter Johnny needs.
We only grumble. Go back to our own hard days and hard nights. I tend to my swollen and parched brown ankles—be on my feet all day—got to shut up the voices in my head telling me to leave this place and go north. But Johnny, he’s tracking years, thinking of the future, wanting his momma’s touches, remembering the present as if it’s time already gone.
So sometimes, he’ll hang on her arm when a customer comes, wanting her to touch him, even if it’s to push him away.
Sometimes, he’ll kick and scream ’til she picks him up—an accident hug—before she sets him at the end of the hallway.
Sometimes, when she in the middle of doing her business, he’ll walk in on her. Stand next to her. Asking for water.
“YOU CAN HAVE it if you want,” I tell him. It’s the first time I’ve spoke since I got here. “The sweet potato,” I say. I speak because I know what it’s like to wait behind walls the way he do, to listen to a mother’s music. But I had Hazel. He ain’t got nobody.
He smiles. He don’t talk, neither. Maybe he a real mute.
“You don’t go tellin nobody I got a voice, you hear me?”
He laughs like a old man, in hoarse shrills.
“What’s funny?” I say. He fixes his happy face on me and his expression reminds me of those times I seen him dance with his momma. Dance ’cause they both hurting. Dance ’cause she save her sinless moves for him.
He shrieks again and the sound makes me laugh the loudest I have since I been here. And it feels good, too.
Our laughter is the only thing we own.
Tallassee, Alabama
AFTER THE VAPORS got Josey, Charles brought her here to the Graham house where she been resting. Got hisself sent home to wait ’cause he was pacing too loud and Missus Graham don’t like to be near him long on account of his burn scars. Some people get nervous around bodies that move or look different, deformed or retarded. She’s one of them. But I ain’t leaving. Been passing time rushing ’round this big house and through its downstairs corridors, along dustless floors and hand-carved finishings. Been in the grand ballroom twice, along its papered walls and white moldings, and up to the ceiling where clear crystals hang.
I settle in this darkened hallway. Useless pretty furniture line the path to the room where Josey is. I go through its closed double door. The sun through the window casts a yellow mist of color, tinting everything. There’s a stillness here. A quiet. This sound of nothing strikes me like deafness.
There’s a chaos here, too. The way things been put together wrong. Like across the room, there’s a statue of a naked baby angel on a white column and its base teeters on the thick edge of an African rug colored a mess of orange and red and green patterns. Above the fireplace, a gold frame holds prisoner the likenesses of a sad white woman and sad white man dressed in black. And next to it, muted green curtains climb the heights of two tall windows. Between ’em is a redwood bed shaped like a dead horse on its back. Mosquito netting swoops down from where the hooves would be and touches the floor.
A tapping near the window brings the sound back to the room.
Missus Annie Graham patters her foot below the hem of her blue satin gown making the fabric bounce and the light reflect off of its sewn-on silver flakes, spitting sparkle. The flakes follow the dress’s neckline and make a trail down her shoulder and her crossed arms, where the white dots of light cast freckles on her angry face. Annie looks broken and old even though she ain’t more than twenty-nine.
“Bessie,” Annie calls to a dark-skinned field negro she’s trying to train to be light. Light, ’cause most housework’s done by the offspring of the raped: mixed-raced and birthed out of broken wombs. “Bessie,” Annie say again, this time with her voice raised. She steps in front of Bessie and puts her hand near Bessie’s neck. The touching makes Bessie shiver like a wet dog, drenched—a common condition for older slaves that Annie buys new. They must have never been shown mercy.
“How many times must I tell you?” Annie say. “Your collar needs to be pressed down. The ends are intended to remain straight throughout the day. Properly ironed and cared for. Not curled up in this fashion.”
“Yes’m, Missus Annie.” Bessie starts crying.
“There’s a particular way to do everything. A right way,” Annie say. “Do you understand me?”
“Yes’m.”
“Why are you crying?” Annie say, stepping away. “Am I harsh in my instruction?”
Bessie puts her head down, shakes it slowly, “No, ma’am.”
“When you do it right the first time, there’s never a need to cry. Never a regret. It’s either right or it’s wrong. The sooner you learn that, the better. This will be what’s required of you if you are to remain in this household. Do you understand me?”
“Yes’m, Miss Annie.”
Annie snaps a loose thread from the second buttonhole of Bessie’s blouse. “Everything in its