THE DAY MADGE SPIED THE FANCY WHITE WOMAN watching her from across the street, she thought she’d come to expose her. Acts such as hers might be more well-known to strangers in the city. The trick was a good one, well worth the risk, taught to Madge by an itinerant white man back home. A tramp, the sisters had called him. Madge had just had to find the camphor, aqua vitae, quicksilver, and myrrh once she arrived north. Each morning, she washed the mixture over her palms and the flats of her fingers, allowing it to dry. If you rub this here potion on your feet, the tramp had claimed, you can walk right over the top of hot coals. Her face steadied as her hand hovered over the heat. First, the people in the crowd appeared afraid, and finally, a surge of smiles, her act bringing cheer to faces worn down by years of war.
The sisters had warned her about the dangers of the trick over and over, until finally Madge outlined the backwoods trail she would take if someone came after her, the quickest path between the feed store and their three-room house. Ever since the war began, the area around Brownsville had welcomed its share of don’t-belongs: pale-faced skedaddlers, the sick and wounded, the opportunistic. But Madge never once got into trouble. After she brought the trick north, the sisters’ warnings dimmed as she quickly found a paying audience.
For months, she had been living in a rooming house in the second ward of the city, just south of the river, dreaming that someone would come along and rescue her, the idea of such an offer so fantastical that when the white woman finally did arrive, it was as if an angel had swept down and granted her wish.
Across the street, Sadie followed the gathering crowd, leaving her driver behind. She pushed through the onlookers so she could better see the colored girl sitting in front of a fire coming out of a metal bucket resting on four feet. A dirty dress flared on the ground around her, its holes like spots on butterfly wings. The flames flicked up to a tidy point, their dark orange tips licking the air. The girl asked a volunteer to step closer, confirm the heat. Then she squared a hand over the fire, palm down, and began to lower it. Inch by inch, her hand descended into the fire until the flames hugged it, flaring out from its sides. She kept her hand there for five or six seconds, then lifted it, showing the crowd her unburned palm, even inviting the less timid to shake hands with her. They clapped, dropped coins into her basket, and Sadie caught a glimpse of a smile on the girl’s lips.
Sadie squinted, wondered at the girl’s story. She did not know exactly what she would say, but she had handled her late husband’s money long enough to know the power it gave her. As the people dispersed, the widow drew closer.
“Why you wear that dress?”
“What?” Sadie could not hide her surprise. She had not expected the girl to speak first. The woman lifted a hand to draw a hair from her face. It was the same hand that had rested over the fire, not just on its orange tips, but deeper into its blue glow. No visible burn marks. Not even a tinge of pink.
“No, I mean, your dress look awful hot.”
A man in a tattered uniform walked by and gave the two women a curious look.
“Tell me. Can you do other tricks?”
The girl scratched her nose. Smooth, brown skin. The fire had not burned the skin, but it had singed the hair. Up close, Sadie could see she was older than she’d assumed, a young woman.
“Tricks?”
Sadie wanted to know more, but those steady eyes unnerved her.
“I’d like you to work for me.”
“Work?”
“Yes. In my home. As a maid.”
The woman shook her head, displaying an instinct to refuse before she had even processed the question. Sadie understood her suspicions. They were on a street corner, and Sadie had not asked for references. The proposition sounded odd, even to Sadie, but she’d been feeling unusually courageous since hearing the spirit’s voice.
“I will pay you fairly,” Sadie added. She did not know what kinds of wages free coloreds made, but she assumed that sitting on a corner performing tricks for a coin or two was a sign of need. She told the woman about the house, the room she could take.
“I got a name, you know.”
Sadie nodded.
“What is it?”
“Madge.”
“Very well. Come tomorrow, Madge. Ontario Street. There is a bird knocker on the door and an iron fence.”
“You want to know how I did it, don’t you.”
“Did what?”
Madge held up her hands.
“See you tomorrow,” Sadie said.
The widow’s promise was just a beginning. She had not told Madge much of the position, only promised a fair wage, clean living quarters, an indoor toilet, a cookstove. So little to convince Madge: the black dress, a kind of eye-catching fancy she’d never known back home. The woman had appeared on that dust-soaked street like a ghost adrift in a column of smoke.
Madge accepted the widow’s proposition, but she could not shake the feeling that she’d given up some of her independence by doing so. Two questions dogged her: How exactly does one go from being slightly free to being free free to being slightly free again? And what did these degrees of freedom have to do with this hurt that refused to pass?
DESPITE THE GLORIOUS DAYS of sunshine, the widow rarely left the house. Something about the woman unsettled Madge, and she discovered the answer in the pillows. They gave Madge the impression that the house on Ontario Street was not the home of a grieving woman. Certainly, the house contained semblances of sorrow: low lighting, stacks of condolence letters, an armoire of black dresses, measured sunlight filtering through barely cracked drapery. But the energy of the home spoke of something different. There was little . . . saintliness . . . in Sadie Walker’s widowhood. Madge sensed, too, that the husband’s spirit lingered though he had been dead two years. She had been assured he had not died in the house, yet she could not shake the feeling. She did not traffic in ghosts, but she was not a disbeliever either, and the occasional slamming door made Madge think the dead husband still wandered the house he had built but never enjoyed.
Ultimately, it was the pillows that convinced Madge the widow did not mourn her husband’s departure. The stitching was too upbeat, too bright, loopy flowers and vines dangling like the arms of a dancer. In the gloomy house, the pillows were a rare bright touch. Squares roosted on beds, rectangles lounged in seats of chairs, circles lay cozily on the bench in the hall, all of them drawn in a neat hand. Even in the small servant’s bedroom used by Madge there were two, an unexpected adornment in the otherwise plain space. Madge found them amusing, their beauty undeniable, and although others might have viewed their sheer quantity as a sign of the widow’s loneliness, Madge thought they signaled something more hopeful than the black widow’s garb, an unlikely contrast to the dead man’s portrait. From the very beginning, she saw through the veil, knew before the widow ever uttered an insensitive thought of him that the woman had never loved her husband. It was the kind of early maturity that came from living in a house of women.
Clearly, Madge had moved into a desperate house. A maid and butler long departed. The cook, Olga, a terse woman of few words, left to do it all. Cook the widow’s meals, iron anything that wrinkled, stoke fires, clear ashes, wipe lamps, trim wicks, beat rugs. Olga hired out the laundry and the coachman cared for the horses, tamed the run of yard, ran chores, but the house was large enough to cause the German to skip the smaller, less noticeable tasks. The widow did not entertain, and Olga took full advantage of this lack of scrutiny. When Madge arrived, the house was neat and orderly enough, but the cut crystal on the candelabras was coated in dust and balls of grime gathered in corners of rooms.
As the days went by, Madge started to think more and more about a woman she had never called Mama: smoking and chewing as she recounted stories of Madge’s father, Frederick Kingsley, freed by his dead master’s will only to find the document contested by an unscrupulous brother. The three-room house, the tree out back where the women strung up dead animals to bleed out, the last pair of shoes the youngest sister made for her, stored beneath the bed and forgotten during her hasty packing. Although she tried not to think of them, she could not help herself. The sisters’ voices crowded her head. Do it this-a-way, do it that-a-way. Girl, you act like you ain’t never handled no rag.
Still wrapped in the memories of the sisters, Madge did not flinch when the widow called her into the parlor and claimed that a dead man spoke to her.