his shoes, is all.”
“Shhh . . .” she say, waving me away.
I ease back a little. “They leavin? Momma ready for us now?”
I hear Massa. “I need males. Nine months of waiting needs to pay off bigger for me. These girls ain’t pulling in nothing. No more girls, you hear me? Else they gon’ end up like you.”
“Yes’sa, Massa Hilden,” Momma say. “God gon’ bless me wit a boy this time.”
“And how’s Hazel?” he say. Hazel slides away from the wall slow like she don’t want to hear. She come toward me and I step aside, pretend I ain’t interested in getting in front of her to see Massa’s long baby feet.
“She should be of age now,” he say.
“No suh, no suh,” Momma say in a hurry. “She’s just a baby.”
“You just make sure it’s a boy this time.”
“Yes’sa, Massa Hilden. Yes’sa.”
I tiptoe around Hazel fast so she cain’t catch me before I get to the wall but she don’t race me this time. I smash my face in front of the opening. Cain’t see nothin. I get on my knees and look through the bottom hole. All I see is Momma sad and Massa gone.
Hazel’s on the other side of the room now, sitting close to the candlelight, flipping through the pages of her Bible. Massa’s mother gave the Bible to Hazel and two cousins. Said it would keep every one of us from being a heathen. But Hazel’s the only one she taught to read it. Just the first page before she died. The rest Hazel figured out on her own.
“‘In the beginning,’” Hazel say with tears seeping through her lashes, “‘God created the heavens . . .’” Her voice cracks from the tears caught in her throat. The free ones roll down her face and drip on her page. She looks at me, whispers, “You see that poker near the fire where Momma is?”
I turn back ’round on my knees to see through the hole again. “The one you found?” I say.
“That’s it. You see the end? It’s sharp. I grind it myself. It’s strong now. It’s ready.”
“Ready for what, Hazel?”
The door slams shut in the other room and I jump up. “Come on, Hazel! Momma’s ready for us!”
Hazel reach out to stop me even though she ain’t close enough to get me.
I stop anyway. “But I want to see her, Hazel.”
“Not now.”
“I want to see her.”
“Not now, Naomi!”
I stomp my foot, twist up my arms.
“Momma needs more time,” she say. “Not like before. She gotta try harder, make a baby. A boy baby for Massa Hilden. Get the most money.”
“I know she wanna see us.”
“Naomi, look . . . what Momma’s doin . . . what he make her do. Changes women. Makes ’em different.”
“Somethin’s wrong wit Momma?”
Hazel sighs the way she do when we daydreaming on the porch at night, when she’s telling me about her North. I go close to her, dress myself with her, slipping under her arm and resting there. “North,” she say, “is a place where we could belong to ourselves and to the people we choose, in love and kindness, and in the sharing of God’s good things.”
“Let’s go North,” I tell Hazel to make her happy again. “Let’s find that star. Take Momma and go that way.”
“Ain’t just a direction,” she say. I hold her hand up to the end of my corded braid and she takes it between her fingertips, unbraids it, and combs her fingers through. “The North Star don’t mean nothin to those who cain’t read it. Could mean south or east or west, just the same.”
“That’s why I got you,” I say. Hazel’s my guide, my light in darkness, one of them stars that like a handful of little moons were shrunk to pebbles, then flung to the heavens where they sat.
“Then I’ll teach you,” she say. She wraps her arms around me and pulls me into her softness. “One day, we gon’ go to Boston where it’s safe. We gon’ wear the pretty dresses Momma made us and drink sweet tea all day long.”
Faunsdale, Alabama, 1846
SINCE ME AND Hazel had our birthday four months ago and I turned fifteen, I started to notice thangs. Like how every spring the musty smell of grass and dew warmed by the sun clogs my nose and makes me sneeze. And how the cotton fields throw small balls in the air and twirl ’em around in the wind. The boys trample ’em under their feet and the girls make doll babies with ’em. Sometimes I imagine the cotton pieces are alive ’cause of how they chase me.
I notice how Mama Dean always sits in the same place in the middle of the quad next to that spinning wheel, talking to it. She look young even though her gray hair say she old. Been white since she was fifteen, she told me. Her skin is still smooth and it’s charcoal black—a color only God could paint and make look right.
I been sitting with her for hours today, studying how she move with that machine, holding firm to that cotton, pacing it through its big wooden wheel when it zip and creak around.
From far away, the wheel looks tacked in the sky on nothin. From here, though, I can see its two wooden hands reaching up from the bench, pinning the wheel between ’em, coaxing the cotton from Mama Dean’s man-sized hands. It slip through her fingers like webs sliding out of spiders. “Simply trial and error, Naomi. Would you like to try?”
Mama Dean speaks better than us. She spent three generations in the Hilden household, teaching and cleaning and caring for Massa’s momma ’til she passed. His momma hired a doctor to come daily with vials of pain medication and had him stay to make sure she’d die of natural causes and not them.
Massa stayed bitter about how the doctor’s visits subtracted from his inheritance.
Then she died.
That’s when Massa told Mama Dean that he needed the spare room to “organize his affairs.” She was slow, he said, and taking up space, he said, and he could use Violet in the house and the field, he said.
So she’s with us now.
“No, Mama Dean . . . all I do is tangle it right up.”
“Your mother started off tangling things like you. Then she became the best. She could spin the most beautiful textures for you and your sisters’ dresses.”
I look over at Momma sitting and rocking on the porch all blank-faced and quiet, the same place Hazel put her this morning. Hard to imagine her moving any other way. My mind ain’t like Hazel’s. She remember thangs from when she was two years old. I might have a pocketful of memories from before eight. That was about the time Momma stopped talking all together, the same time Hazel put the sixth and seventh marks on the wall—twin girls.
Hazel say pain’s got a way of etching memories into people’s minds, even a child’s, and holds its place there for a lifetime. That’s why she remembers. She say her memories keep her guilty, blame her for not doing the thangs that only grown folks woulda known to do. She say she’s aged into her bad memories, helpless as the day she got ’em ’cause she still cain’t go inside ’em and fix nothin.
“Naomi!” I hear from behind me. Hazel’s flying out of the woods, calling me and grinning, and calling again. I get up and smile, too, ’cause I know she got something good to say. Trailing behind her is her skinny, big-eyed beau, James. They holding hands even though he ain’t supposed to be here. They been sneaking through the woods together since last summer, going to secret meetings. I followed her one night and saw her