Come lookin for all us. Ain’t nobody certain you was ever here.” She peels off Massa’s dark-brown jacket, rolling his fat, doughy body from side to side when she do.
“Hazel, please!”
She puts his jacket around my shoulders. “We was all attacked,” she say. “I got to be here to tell ’em.”
“But I cain’t make it without you.”
She pulls open the front door. “Go, Naomi.”
I creep to it, wiping my tears. “Hazel? Please.”
“Go!” she yell.
She grabs the back of my head, kiss my cheek before she push me out the door. I hurry out, looking up to the starless, clouded sky, running through the dark, holding Massa’s jacket high above my head.
“Don’t look back, Naomi. You hear me! Don’t you look back!”
I cain’t breathe.
Maybe Hazel put a mark on the wall for me, too.
SOME SAY YOUR life flashes before your eyes when you’re about to die.
It don’t always.
Not for me.
I didn’t have not one flash before I went.
Not everybody gets to see their first birthday again. Their father’s face laughing. The day their sister got married. The friends they’ve loved.
Maybe you won’t neither.
Not before you die.
It’s only now that I see the flashes. They come and go, and choose what day of my life to show me and I ain’t got a say in it. It happens to all of us dead. It’s more than just seeing the moment, it’s taking part in the memory as if it were happening again. And when you in the flash, you don’t even know that what you’re seeing is from a time already gone. You get lost in it. Feel like you got all the time in the world. A future. But it’s just your old life repeating itself and repeating itself and repeating itself. Those shivers you felt on warm days were just you—in two places at once.
So powerful, these flashes. Ask the dead. Ask the people who survive near death. Ask ’em how the flashes change their whole life from then on.
Or for the empty, it changes nothing.
I guess the most important parts of life ain’t measured by years or days or minutes but by moments. Moments that come in flashes here, only some of ’em good like seeing my sister, Hazel, again. I was seven years old in one of them flashes. Twelve in another. My favorite was the time when Hazel was teaching me how to tumble. And in another, I was six years old and she helped me lose my first tooth with a string and a slammed door.
The hell is the bad memories. Going back again and again and not being able to make a damn bit of difference. But God had mercy on me.
It’s been said that justice is getting what you deserve. And mercy is not getting the bad you deserve. Grace is getting a good thing, even when you don’t deserve it. So if I would’ve named my good thing, I’d have called her Grace. But someone else named her Josephine.
Tallassee, Alabama
WHERE DO WE start when we tell the stories of our loved ones? On the day they were born or the day they mattered?
Mattered to other people, I mean, did something worth talking about. I guess I could start with who begot who like the Bible do, but where somebody comes from only matters to people who come from something and as it was, she came from me.
Me, and the men who would become her fathers.
See, my baby’s real father wasn’t the man who loved me. But if wishing could make it so, I’d of traded him for the man I shoulda loved—Charles. I woulda made him the first daddy to her ’cause first means something.
Charles wasn’t the man who got me pregnant.
He wasn’t first to hold my baby with his hands, either, or feel her tiny bones wiggling ’round in a loose bag of see-through skin. It was somebody else who was first to listen to her soft breaths flutter.
Charles shoulda been all them.
But he wasn’t.
When I first knew Charles, I never thought he’d be the kind of man who woulda made a good daddy. He never seemed like he needed nobody, especially a child. And his body never looked like it could care for one, neither. His hands too big to care for little baby thangs, his face too beastly to call a comfort, his arms too strong to hold something gentle. I’d reckon he’d crush her reaching for sugar. And he was alone when I first knew him. Alone is how he liked it. Safe. Never having to wonder what it would be to give hisself to somebody completely.
But I was wrong.
Wrong, ’cause he chose my baby, Josephine. Wrong, ’cause he once tried to choose me.
I wish he woulda smelled sweet to me like a man looking for love or seemed soft like a man who could love me silly and forgive me for the thangs he didn’t know about me. I wish I woulda felt his sun on my cheeks, breathed in his cool air and noticed the difference, like stepping from the cool shade of the trees to the hot sun directly. I wish he woulda scorched goose bumps on my arms so I woulda thought of him regular.
But he was just Charles. Another man, not a miracle.
Momma used to say that when you meet the one God sent you, you’d recognize him at once ’cause we all got souls trapped in our bodies and our souls got memories of a better life before this one; memories that come to us in our dreams, even when we awake.
I didn’t remember Charles that way. I mighta loved him if I did. The way Josey did.
She saw through the deep folds and scars on his bald head from when he was set on fire. She saw through the wash of skin on his burned face—healed slick. His nose was flattened to a valley. And still, she managed to love the man I shoulda. A man that became like a mother to her. He’d shepherd his flock of one away from all the things that might hurt her.
For him, couldn’t nobody care for her the right way, couldn’t nobody do it as good as he could: couldn’t feed her right, couldn’t hold her right, couldn’t watch her close enough.
Everyone was to blame if she caught cold, so up until she was three years old, he wrapped her up at night hisself and worked hard in the day to get back before them gossiping women let her fall in the stream. And when he labored, he never looked no one in the eye, never gave nobody half a reason to whip him. Never spoke.
By the time Josey was five, everybody could see that his love and Josey were the same thing. The pair of ’em was as wrong as a dog nursing a kitten. And if he knew it, he never said and everybody else was scared to tell him. So at seven years old, when Josey asked him if he was her momma, Charles said, “Love is just love.”
They would talk like that. Honest-like. As if the world had no boundaries and the lush green of East Tallassee, Alabama, was all there was to it. It was the place that became home. The place that became home to me, too. Like a sister to me, Tallassee is—the dirt, the trees, the river, the hillsides. For Charles and Josey, it’s home, where the real world disappears beneath forests of perfectly placed vines. They flow through these woods like silken hair, running over treetops as if they were shoulders and along the ground where pink flowers sprout and get tucked behind her ear. Pretty.
Charles and Josey would walk along her creek—Stone Creek—far enough away from cotton fields and mills, hands carrying whips. They could dream of a future here, even though people say