Trial Day

Letitia was a few months shy of ten the summer Brother was scheduled to stand trial.

Brother was only her half-brother, and his name was Wallace Lee, but Letitia had always called him Brother because, to her, the warmth and strength of that word suited him best. In turn, he’d always called her Lettie, the sassier nickname she preferred, instead of the prissier and cumbersome “Letitia” that Daddy and her stepmother insisted on calling her by. Her stepmother thought nicknames were low-class, and Daddy usually went by whatever her stepmother said, so Brother called her Lettie in secret.

Brother lived with his mama in Live Oak, which was a day’s drive south in Daddy’s shiny new 1927 Rickenbacker, farther than most people she knew had traveled in their lives, so she didn’t see him as often as she wanted to. During the summers, and sometimes for Thanksgiving, Brother took a train to stay with them for as long as two weeks, arranging his long limbs into knots so he could sleep on the living room couch. Brother was only fifteen now, but he’d always been tall. Letitia had never met Brother’s mother, but Daddy was tall enough for two. Letitia and Brother had different mamas in different towns—although Daddy had never been married to either woman—and her stepmother told Letitia the whole thing was a disgrace and a ought to be a source of personal shame to her, as if Letitia could be responsible for any of the doings in the world before she was born. By studying Brother, Letitia decided that his mama must be dark-skinned like her own, and probably pretty too, judging by Brother’s long, thick eyelashes. When he visited them last summer, Brother had been nearly as tall as Daddy and his voice had dropped to a lower register. Letitia had listened to the two of them laughing on the front porch late at night, having a conversation she wasn’t allowed to listen to, and they had sounded to Letitia like two grown men having a gay old time, not a father and son. She still remembered the way they’d laughed, barking out into the night wind. Listening to that sound, which seemed to surround the house, Letitia had fallen asleep with a smile, rocking in their happy noise.

Even her stepmother, Bernadette, stayed out of the way when Brother was here. Bernadette didn’t talk to Brother with her voice shrilled high the way she talked to Daddy, and sometimes Brother could make her laugh, too. When he did, she’d hide her mouth behind a napkin or her hand as if she didn’t want anyone to witness a smile on her face. Most times, no one did. Bernadette’s smiles were hard to come by, and always accidental. Letitia had long ago given up trying to think up ways to bring out Bernadette’s smiles. But Brother could. Laughter and smiles of any kind were hard to come by during Brother’s impossibly long absences, when Letitia began to wonder if she would see him again or if she’d just dreamed him. Of all the reasons Letitia had to love him—and his kindness toward her was unlike anyone else’s except her father’s and poor Mama’s—perhaps she loved Brother most for bringing the laughter and smiles.

So it came as a shock to Letitia when she learned that Brother was in jail. Bernadette told as if she were discussing a stranger she’d read about in the newspaper. “Got himself thrown in jail for armed robbery! That’s what these young boys get for being so wild. They’ll probably give that foolish boy the chair, robbing a white man like that,” she told Letitia. “Your daddy took up with every tramp and hoodoo woman who looked his way, so what else can he expect?”

Letitia was too scared for Brother to be angry about Bernadette’s insults. She knew what The Chair was. The Chair was the electric chair at Raiford State Prison, where colored men were sent to grow old—or to die, if they were destined to take their seat on The Chair. As much as Letitia had heard about Raiford and The Chair in her tender nine years of life, she had never imagined she could know someone who got sent there. Those were the hard-luck stories from people with hard-luck lives.

Daddy was Richard Reaves. He had his own grocery store and a cotton farm. He had a house with two stories and three bedrooms on a thirty-acre parcel of land that had once been owned by slaveholders. Daddy and Cecil Johnson, who owned the colored mortuary, were the two most envied men in the county—and Daddy was most envied of the two because Bernadette was so much more light-skinned than Mr. Johnson’s wife. (Daddy and Bernadette looked like twins, with their straight hair and honey skin.) When daddy installed the new upstairs bathroom, neighbors flocked to the house because they were still using outhouses and they wanted to see with their own eyes how a colored man right there on Percival Street had a working toilet and bathtub upstairs in his house, in addition to the one downstairs.

Letitia’s daddy did not have hard luck, so Brother could not have been sent to Raiford.

“That’s just a misunderstanding, and it’s being worked out. I’m sure Wallace Lee’s home by now,” Daddy said when she asked him, mussing her hair. But he never looked her in the eye when he said it, and Letitia felt a growing, heavy pool of disdain in her belly when it occurred to her that Daddy was lying to her. She had never thought of her father as the kind of man who would lie to a stranger, much less to his daughter. To her.

That summer, suddenly, everything in Letitia’s world began to feel all wrong. Hearing about Brother’s arrest was the first thing. Hearing the lie in Daddy’s voice had been the next. But the hardest, the worst, was yet to come. Letitia just knew it.

Letitia knew many things, mostly things she wished she didn’t. Her teacher called her unusually perceptive, which sounded like a grand thing, but Bernadette instead accused Letitia of mischief and lies, helpless to find anything but wickedness in her. Despite Letitia’s efforts to behave as well as she could at all times to make her presence less burdensome, she knew that Bernadette considered her the very living image of everything was wrong with her life. Letitia had known this about Bernadette when she was as young as five, the first time Daddy had brought her to live with him because Mama was too poor. Bernadette hated her right away, at first glance. Letitia had not known exactly why, but the hatred had been as plain as the moon in the sky. In later years, Letitia had come to realize that Bernadette hated her because she was proof that Daddy had known other women before her, and because she hated mothering a strange woman’s daughter when she could not have children herself.

But knowing why hadn’t made Letitia feel any more welcome in her father’s house. She only felt welcome when Daddy came home at night, when Bernadette locked most of her hatred for Letitia away and concentrated on finding things to dislike about Daddy. Letitia was afraid to enjoy anything about her father’s beautiful house, because none of it was really hers. She could be sent away at any time, and she would hardly ever see Daddy if that happened, like it was before. When Letitia brought powders from Mama to slip into Berndatte’s bathwater, she only wanted her stepmother to stop hating so much.

Bernadette never said these things aloud like an evil stepmother in a fairy-tale, but she didn’t have to. Letitia knew words were only part of who people were, and usually the least important part. Sometimes, she felt she could just see through people, as if they were standing before her naked. She could see into people’s hearts.

At church, people who were stealing from their bosses, cruel to their children, or wooing someone other than the person they were married to avoided locking eyes with Letitia, for fear she might tell on them. When she was younger, she’d blurted things out that made adults gasp, and once a minister had plain slapped her face from the shock of hearing his business told. Now, she’d learned to keep quiet. Letitia’s aunties and neighbors near Mama’s house had theories about why Letitia had her gift: It was said that she had been born with a caul covering her face, which gave her the seeing-eye, the third-eye. Others thought it was because Mama was a roots-woman, and she had tied a piece of High John the Conqueror root around Letitia’s neck the moment she was born. She knew things, and usually knowing brought her only disappointment and trouble, so speculating over the reasons why brought her no joy.

And there would be no joy for some time. That much she knew, too.

This problem with Brother was going to change everything. The problem with Brother was going to make every other problem seem small from now on. The problem with Brother would be up to her to fix, in the end.

One afternoon when Daddy was at his store and Bernadette was taking a nap because she’d overheated herself working in her garden, Letitia went to the corner of the parlor Daddy used as his office, with his oak roll-top desk and electric lamp and stacks of papers in different piles. Letitia climbed up into Daddy’s leather chair and surveyed the desk. Before she could decide exactly what she was looking for, or where to begin, the return address typed on a piece of mail caught her eye: LIVE OAK, it said.

The letter had been opened with a letter-opener’s neat incision across the top. Letitia brought it out to read by the sunlight stealing in beneath the drawn shade. The whole letter was typed, which told Letitia it must be important.

Dear Mr. Reaves,

Regarding the matter of Wallace Lee Hutchins, I cannot impress upon you enough how urgent it is that you appear at the County Courthouse at 1:00 p.m. Friday, July 20. Many cases like this one are disposed of in the blink of any eye, to the defendant’s disadvantage. As an attorney for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), I am investigating the rising number of very troubling capital cases in this county. Your son’s case is one of an alarming pattern.

Please allow me to be frank: Two eyewitnesses, including the shopkeeper, have told police they saw the two boys with a .22-caliber pistol at the time of the robbery. The witnesses and the defendants have quarreled in the past, so one party’s word goes against the other’s—but since the witnesses are white, I don’t have to tell you which version will have more credibility. Mrs. Kelly is fighting the charges against her son with all her soul—she was the one who contacted the NAACP—but I’m afraid she is in a similar position to your own son’s mother. Both ladies are ill-respected in this community.

Again, Mr. Reaves, it is vital that you contact me as soon as possible to help me prepare your son’s defense. My resources in this matter are limited, but I believe if the jury heard the testimony of a respected colored business-owner in his son’s defense, we may get a lesser sentence. You are his best chance. My great fear, sir, is that the prosecutor will seek execution. Two young men were executed earlier this year after being tried in very similar circumstance, where a robbery was committed, but there were no injuries or fatalities. Armed robbery, it seems, is a capital offense for colored boys.

Plainly put, I am asking you to help me save your son’s life. I think we can both agree that if these two young men committed an armed robbery—and although they both maintain their innocence, it’s very possible that they did—they deserve a severe punishment in the eyes of the law. They will go to jail for a long time, as is only proper.

But these are sixteen-year-old boys, and neither deserves to die for the ignorant work of one night, especially not under a legal system that is a sham, in a county where hunting colored men is virtually legal. (There was a lynching not a mile from where I’m lodging the night I arrived—my first exposure to the heinous phenomenon. But it is your son’s case that has been sent to the top of the docket.)

Please help me in this matter. I am trying to prevent another lynching, this one in a courtroom.

The letter was the most important thing Letitia had ever found. It seemed to howl in her hands. She held it so tightly she was afraid she might rip the neat paper it clean in two, reading it and re-reading it, until she’d memorized the words that mattered. She knew she would want to draw upon the memory of this letter for a long time to come, because there was so much to think about. So much to ponder. She wanted to steal the letter and lie about its disappearance, but she couldn’t steal from Daddy.

Letitia understood it all, now: Brother and a friend had been charged with robbing a store with a gun. The shopkeeper and another witness who didn’t like Brother claimed Brother and his friend had a gun, and it was Brother’s word against theirs. The court was rushing to take the case to trial, and they would probably ask for The Chair. A lot of colored people have been getting The Chair lately, and the problem is so bad that a national association for colored people came to see about it. And if Daddy didn’t go, Brother might die. It was all so plain to Letitia, it was as if she’d known the whole story the first time Bernadette mentioned that Brother was in jail.

The letter said the trial was going to start on July 20. Letitia hadn’t thought about what day of the month it was because there was no reason to track time in the summers, but she checked the kitchen wall calendar and learned it was Tuesday, July 17.

Brother’s trial was in less than three days.

“You’re going, aren’t you, Daddy?” Letitia said at dinner, when she finally dared.

Bernadette looked angry before she knew if she should be. “Going
where?” she said in a suspicious tone. She expected to find wrong everywhere. “What are you talking about?”

Daddy’s face became stone. He looked at Letitia quickly, then his eyes passed over to Bernadette’s. “She ain’t talking about nothing,” Daddy said.

“Aren’t you going to Brother’s trial?” Letitia said.

When she said the word trial, Daddy’s shoulders hunched as if a huge weight had suddenly been hoisted upon them.

“Richard . . . Washington . . . Reaves,” her stepmother said. Her voice whispered, but her face was shouting, changing colors in the queer way it often did.

“Now, come on, Bernadette . . . ” Daddy said, pushing himself away from the table. He stared at the floor. “Don’t start up again. We’re sitting to a pleasant meal.”

“We settled that, Richard. You promised.” Her voice was creeping toward a shout now.

“Yes, we settled it,” Daddy said. “Of course we did. Pay Letitia no mind.”

“But you are going, aren’t you, Daddy? If you don’t, Brother could die.”

Daddy started cursing under his breath then, something he rarely did. He stood up from the table quickly, throwing his napkin onto his plate. Then he took Letitia’s arm in a way that felt nearly rough, bringing her to her feet. “That’s enough, Letitia,” he said, thundering. Letitia’s heart seemed to rock backward and then fall still. “You come on with me right now.”

Letitia was nearly in tears by the time Daddy took her to her room and closed the door behind them. Daddy had only beaten her with his belt once before, when she’d sassed at Bernadette, and she’d cried for two days straight. Letitia couldn’t imagine she’d earned another whipping just for asking about Brother. Midnight, Letitia’s stocky black cat, mewed softly from the bed, and the sight of his curious green eyes comforted her. On days like this one, Midnight was her only friend. He rarely left her room the whole day long.

“Have you been into my mail?”

“Yessir,” Letitia said. “But I only wanted to know about Brother.”

“Well, I’m very sorry you did that, Letitia, because that letter was not for your eyes. That letter was from a lawyer from New York who’s just trying to scare us so we’ll do what he says. He hasn’t lived down here, and he doesn’t understand my position. He’s asking me to do something I can’t do, and I want you to put it out of your head. Your brother got himself in some trouble, so he’ll probably go to jail. But I sent some money, and he’ll be just fine.”

Letitia did not remember any part of the letter that said Daddy should send money.

“Daddy, he says you have to go, or Brother will get The Chair.”

Letitia’s father was perspiring now, and Letitia didn’t think it was just because the upper floor was stifling after so many daylight hours of rising heat beneath the angry summer sun. Daddy looked nervous. No, not nervous—he looked scared, the way he looked when he brought his hunting rifle out of the closet because a strange car was driving slowly past their house at night. Some people were jealous of him, he said—some white people—and jealousy was apparently something to fear. There was a bead of sweat on the bulb at the end of his nose, and he could barely make himself keep his brown eyes fixed on hers.

“You’re too young to take all this in, Letitia,” Daddy said, his voice sad and gentle. “You can’t believe everything somebody says just because it’s typed on a piece of paper. That lawyer’s job is to help your brother. But I’m not a lawyer, and I’m no help to him. And besides that, there’s no chance they’ll give Wallace Lee the chair. He didn’t kill nobody.”

“The letter said—”

He shook her, just enough to make his words sink in. “What did I just tell you about believing everything that’s typed on a piece of paper? That’s a spook story he wrote in that letter. That’s so I’ll do what he says.”

“But why won’t you, Daddy? You have a car. You could drive there.”

Daddy sighed, and his breath smelled like pipe tobacco. “Nothing’s that simple, little princess. Wallace Lee’s mother and me knew each other a long time ago. She’s shamed herself in that town in ways that have nothing to do with me, and if I get all tangled in this mess, running off to a courtroom where there’s newspaper reporters and such, then I’ll be shamed too. A businessman can’t afford to be shamed. All a colored man has in this world is his name, Letitia. And besides that, there’s no use me going trying to stir up trouble. The Klan runs that county, and there’s Klan in this county, too. People in a place to make life very hard for all of us. Now, my heart aches for Wallace Lee—but I’ve seen how such things come out in the end, and it wouldn’t do any good for any of us. I would just make this situation worse. Far worse.”

For the first time, Letitia realized that Daddy had a whole list of reasons why he was not going to Live Oak to save Brother, one having little to do with another. As she stared up at him in that instant, he shrank in her eyes, although he was still three feet taller, with thick arms and thighs as solid as the trunk of an oak. He began to look very small, the way he looked to her when Bernadette chased him from one corner of the house to the other with her sharp tongue, his shoulders wincing with every blow.

“It’s ’cause of Bernadette, isn’t it?” Letitia said. “She don’t want you to go.”

Daddy was not the slapping sort, but Letitia realized from the stewing cloud that crossed her father’s eyes that he had probably come as close as he ever had to slapping her in the mouth. She had learned long ago that the truth made people angry, and to speak of it was considered evil. If she hadn’t been so upset about Brother, she would have known better.

Letitia’s room was directly across the hall from Daddy’s, and even when their door was closed, she knew what went on in there when she wasn’t trying. She knew how Bernadette expected Daddy to account for his whereabouts every minute of every day. She knew how Bernadette told him no when he said he was thinking about buying more land or expanding his store, because she preferred him to buy pretty things for the house. And worst of all, Letitia knew how Daddy had to beg—how he had to make his voice sound silly and ask a dozen times or more, each time sounding sillier than before—just to convince Bernadette to lie in his bed with him like a man lies with his wife. Most times, begging or no begging, her answer was no. Letitia did not know much about the private things men and women did together, but she knew that the sound of her father’s begging made her feel sick to her stomach.

If Daddy understood how much she really knew, he would have slapped her for sure.

“Letitia,” Daddy said, a low thunder still roiling in his voice. “Don’t you dare put that magic-eye on me, gal. You best learn to stay out of grown people’s business. I’ve made my decision, and that’s the last I have to say about it.”

You’re so weak, Daddy, Letitia thought. You look big and strong, but you’re weak through and through. And she began to cry. Daddy left her to sort out her tears for herself instead of kissing them from her cheeks the way he usually did. Letitia cried late into the night, stroking her cat, wondering how the whole world could have gone so wrong in so little time.

The next day, as she always did when she had nowhere else to turn, Letitia walked the half-mile’s distance on an unpaved road to see Mama. Whenever Letitia went to Mama and cried about how mean Bernadette was to her, she knew how to fix it. She knew which powders, which doll, and which combinations of roots, bone and blood would make Bernadette more humble, more tolerable, more kind. Bernadette never got completely quiet—something Letitia had wished for often—but after a good ritual or two, Letitia noticed she had two or three weeks in a row when Bernadette did not say a single unkind thing to her. That was all the proof she needed that Mama’s magic worked.

After she heard the story, Mama clucked her tongue in the space where she’d lost three of her front teeth in a riding accident when she was a very young woman. The work of a curse, people said. Everyone considered the lost teeth a great tragedy, since Mama would be very pretty otherwise, but Letitia knew that Daddy must not have minded. Maybe he hadn’t loved Mama because she had no teeth, but he had thought she was pretty enough to court.

“That man, that man,” Mama sighed. “Well, don’t nothin’ change. Always too skeered of what people think.” It was rare that Mama said anything bad about Daddy in her presence.

“I think it’s ’cause of Bernadette.”

“Well, shoot, we know that,” Mama said. “What ain’t the fault of that devil-woman?”

“Do a spell, Mama. Make it so Bernadette will say Daddy can go save Brother. Make her go out her head, or get her real sick.” Or kill her. That was what Letitia really wanted to say. Once, when Mama had made a little rag-doll of Bernadette when she was being more unpleasant than ever, Letitia’s fingers had itched to tear the doll’s tiny head clean off. Instead, Mama had given the doll’s leg a good twist, and Bernadette had been laid up in bed for two weeks because she hurt her knee after falling in a near Daddy’s tomato patch ditch.

But this time, instead of consulting her doll or her large leather pouch where she kept vials of powders, or gathering herbs from the woods alongside the roadway, Mama sighed and shook her head. “Cain’t, Letitia. We hexed that woman five, six times. I told you that kinda’ magic comes back on you. She got protection, and she’s comin’ back strong now. Naw, chile, we mess with any bad juju now, and yo’ brother’s gon’ die.”

Brother’s gon’ die. Meeting Letitia’s ears, those three words turned her blood cold. Tears appeared in her eyes, but froze there. Her entire world felt frozen.

“The spirits is playin’ tricks,” Mama said, running her hand across her tightly-braided hair. Her bracelets of shells and cheap metals tinkled together. “Somebody got a curse on that house, and we got to do a higher ceremony. I think it’s got to be you, ‘cause you’re blood kin to your brother. You need a sacrifice ritual, Lettie. You seen me bleed chickens, and that’s what you got to do. But if you want the message to get across, don’t use a chicken. That might not get what you want quick enough. Use your black cat.”

Letitia had been filled with horror since her mama said the word sacrifice, because no matter how important the cause, she hated to see animals killed. For that reason and that reason alone, Letitia considered it a lucky thing she’d moved away from Mama’s house, because people came for favors and Mama routinely slaughtered chickens, goats and pigs, for rituals or for meals, or usually for both. Letitia had been mortified enough at the idea of killing her first chicken, but nothing compared to her horror of hearing her Mama mention her cat.

Although Letitia didn’t speak, Mama saw it in her eyes.

“Lettie, I know you love that cat. But you’ll make the spirits listen if you bleed something you love. You see how I keep my bleeding chickens apart from my stewing chickens? I treat ‘em special. And I had to do this, too, when I was your age.”

“I won’t,” Letitia said.

“Then you don’t wanna save your brother then, do you?”

Letitia’s stomach hurt as she thought of Brother’s row of smiling teeth. Brother was in a cage somewhere, and soon he would go to The Chair.

“Daddy will go see about him,” Letitia said.

“Chile, yo’ daddy ain’t goin’ nowhere. I know yo’ daddy. I know him. If he was gonna go, he’d’a gone from the start. He woulda been there an’ back. Nothin’ can’t keep that man from somethin’ he wanna do, and nothin’ can’t change his mind, neither. Bernadette’s got him stuck bein’ wrongheaded, to let his own boy die. There’s ways for women to get ahold of men until they can’t fight, an’ that’s how Bernadette’s got him. An’ she was too strong for me, chile. Else, you an’ me both would be livin’ in yo’ Daddy’s fine house, wouldn’t we?”

That was true, too. Letitia had always known it, but it hurt to hear Mama say it. The idea that Bernadette was more powerful than Mama terrified her. But of course she was! By now, Letitia’s her tears had freed themselves, glistening across her face. She hitched back a sob.

“This is one o’ them times you got a choice, Letitia. You can do what you want and hope things don’t turn out wrong, or you can do what you know will make things right.”

Letitia’s next sob escaped throat fully formed. She suddenly wished that her parents had never met for the secret Sunday-afternoon meetings Mama had told her about, because then she would never have been born.

“If you gon’ do it, do it clean and quick, like you seen me. When the blood’s spilt, say this prayer: Spirit, release my daddy an’ give him strength to fight the curse. An’ do it at midnight. See how you named that cat? Like you known it from the start. Mama’ll come bring you a new cat someday.”

That was a lie, too, in its own way. Mama could not afford to bring her hardly anything.

“By myself?” Letitia heard herself ask.

“Just take the cat out back, to yo’ Daddy’s barn. Do it quick.” With that, she handed Letitia a slender, shiny knife from the pocket of her stained old apron. Just the size for Midnight.

Letitia did not remember her walk home, nor did she remember most of the day. She told Bernadette she didn’t feel well—which wasn’t the least bit untrue—and she sat on her bed stroking Midnight’s velvet-soft fur, rubbing her chin against the top of his head while his purr’s roar seemed to fill her ears. As much as she hated to believe Mama’s words, she knew their truth. Daddy had made up his mind, and he would not go see about Brother on his own. And Brother, most certainly, would die without Daddy’s help. If there was a curse on her house, like Mama had said, then the curse on the town where Brother was in jail was a hundred times bigger. A hundred times stronger. It was a curse that had touched many families already.

And the trial day would ruin everything, Letitia knew. If Brother went to The Chair, Daddy would be a changed man. The bourbon bottle he kept hidden in the pantry for special occasions would become his constant companion. Bernadette, full of her own guilt, would be more hateful than ever. And Letitia would grow to despise them both. For all her life, she would judge men as weak and act accordingly, learning from the lesson of Daddy and Bernadette. She might hate them, but she would imitate them all the same. She knew these things as sure as she knew her name. Letitia felt her future unfolding like a clear-minded dream. It was so imminent, poised with terrible ease, that she marveled that Daddy and Bernadette couldn’t see it, too.

But they couldn’t. If they could, Daddy would have left for the trial by now.

Midnight’s green eyes shined up at her like two perfect marbles, and he mewed at her. In Sunday school, Letitia had studied Judas Iscariot, the Betrayer, and the thought made her cry harder. Midnight wasn’t the same as Jesus, of course, but he trusted her. For the past year, since Daddy said she could keep the cat who had planted himself on their doorstep, she had taken care of Midnight, and he had taken care of her. How could she kill a creature that loved her?

But then Letitia remembered Abraham and Isaac from the Old Testament. God told Abraham to sacrifice his son—which she had thought was very mean of God when she’d heard the story, to tell the truth—but in the end it was only a test. Just like Abraham, she only had to show her willingness to do what Mama said, and God would provide another way to save Brother. Or maybe this was the only way, and she and Midnight were making a sacrifice like Jesus had, to save another’s soul.

By sunset, Letitia made up her mind with a deep, ragged breath. She would do it. Just before midnight, she would take the cat to the barn. She would bring Daddy’s catalog-ordered gold pocket-watch, which he kept on his desk at night, and as soon as the tall hand and short hand pointed to midnight, just like Mama said, she would . . .

She would . . .

“I have to do it, Midnight,” Letitia whispered to her cat, who was curled in her lap with none of Jesus’s inkling at The Last Supper that his sacrifice was waiting. “Maybe God will save you. But even if He doesn’t, you can save Brother. I know you can.”

And it seemed to Letitia, miraculously, that the cat mewed a tiny Yes, the way a cat would say yes if it could speak, as if Midnight understood it all and it was perfectly fine with him.

Midnight was happy to be in the barn because Letitia had brought out a dish of milk first. He found the dish and crouched comfortably beside it, lapping it up. She watched him drink, enjoying the slurping sound he made and the sloppy droplets of milk dotting his whiskers. Midnight was two parts cat and one part hog, Daddy always said. That thought made her smile through her tears.

Then, she felt her resolve melting. Watching Midnight, she felt frozen with disbelief at the very thought of what she planned to do, and she and wanted nothing more than to scoop Midnight into her arms and run back to bed before she got caught outside the house. Then, she remembered that wonderful sound of Daddy and Brother laughing on the porch, how that sound had lulled her to sleep. How he called her Lettie. How he hugged her and said he loved her every time he came to stay, never tugging on her hair or teasing the way her friends’ older brothers did.

Only two minutes until midnight. How had the time gone so fast?

Quickly, watching Midnight drink his milk, Letitia said a series of prayers. God, please let Midnight forgive me for what I’m about to do . . . and please let this just be a test, so you will stop my hand at the last moment . . . and please don’t let Midnight die . . . but if Midnight has to die, please let his sacrifice stop the curse so Daddy will go look after Brother and keep him safe.

Her prayer gobbled a full minute. With as heavy a heart as she had ever known, nearly choking off her breath so that her head felt light, Letitia realized it was time. Time to take out the shiny knife Mama had given her. Time to hold Midnight tight and feed his blood to the spirits.

Midnight had once gotten himself covered in mud and Bernadette had demanded that she fill up a tin tub and bathe him or else he could not come into the house—so Letitia knew from experience that it was hard to hold Midnight still for something he didn’t want to do. She knew to watch out for his claws, especially those powerful back claws, and she would have to hook her arm tightly around him. And she knew she would have to keep no space between her knees, because he would back up against her as far as he could.

Now, just like then, she told herself she would think of the task, not of Midnight himself, or else with all his thrashing and complaining, she might feel sorry and forget what was at stake. Daddy was weak, so she had to be strong, and that was that.

Sure enough, Midnight put up a fight. Even if he didn’t know what she was planning, he was angry to be pulled away from his milk, and he was wriggling from the start. Letitia was startled when she felt razor-thin stripes of pain across her forearm from Midnight’s claws, and then she felt angry. The anger helped. She clamped her knees around him and hooked one arm around his middle, tight. Despite the perspiration dampening her palm, she kept a firm grip on the knife and raised it to Midnight’s throat. Mama always used the throat.

Letitia wanted to close her eyes, but she couldn’t. She poked and then slashed with the knife, quickly, and even though the cut wasn’t nearly deep enough, she was amazed to see a ribbon of blood seep through Midnight’s fur, right above his tiny collarbone. While Midnight screeched and renewed his escape attempt, Letitia watched, fascinated, as two fat, crimson drops of blood fell to the dusty barn floor at her feet.

She kept her grip around the cat. Until the very last second, she almost forgot the prayer, but then she began, reciting it as well as she could remember: “Spirit, please help lift the curse and make my Daddy strong so he will go see about Br—”

“What in great red hell are you doing?”

It sounded like it might be God’s voice at first, albeit not as kindly as she’d thought God might sound, but when she gathered her senses above her racing heart, Letitia realized it was only Daddy’s voice. She looked up and she saw him standing in the doorway of the barn, wearing only his trousers. She saw his chest heaving up and down with his breathing. His expression was a combination of rage and shock she had never seen on her father’s face, and it seared her. The sight of him made her drop the knife, and Midnight scrambled from her arms, scratching her chest through her nightgown as he launched himself from her with his powerful hind legs. Letitia did not know if the blood on her gown was hers or Midnight’s.

“Letitia, what are you doing?” Daddy said.

“Mama said . . . she said . . . ” But Letitia couldn’t finish, because she felt too overcome.

Abraham and Isaac, she remembered. God had stepped in and sent Daddy.

Daddy fumbled for his belt, before he realized he wasn’t wearing it. His sleep-wrinkled face was growing more alert, more angry. He wanted to beat her, she saw. He wanted to beat her in a way he had never beaten her before.

“Mama said if I sacrificed Midnight, I’d break the curse and you would go see about Brother,” Letitia said, finally finding the words. She pointed to the droplets of blood that spattered the floor. “See, Daddy? I had to bleed Midnight, but I did it for Brother, Daddy. I did it so you’d go to the trial.”

Daddy stared at her pointing finger, then back at her face, than back at her finger, and his own face seemed to transform. The only light was the dim lantern she’d brought with the bowl of milk, but Daddy’s face wasn’t the same anymore. The only word for it, really, was haunted. He cradled his abdomen, as if a grown man had kicked him in the stomach hard.

“We have to save Brother, Daddy,” Letitia said, a whisper.

Daddy rocked in place, like he did when he’d had too much to drink. Then, he took a lurching step until he was no longer facing her. One step at a time, he walked away. He did not look at her or speak to her. She saw him climb the steps of the back porch, and he was back inside the house. He left the back door wide open. Bernadette wouldn’t like that, Letitia thought. All the mosquitoes could come in.

For a long time, Letitia called for Midnight outside. She finally heard him growling somewhere out in the bushes near the cotton patch, but he would not come to her. Maybe he would never come back, she realized.

But this time, she did not cry.

Letitia quietly washed her bloody scratches clean in the kitchen sink, blew out the lamp and climbed the stairs to go into her room. Daddy’s door was closed, but she could hear Bernadette’s voice through the door, wide awake. “Richard, what’s into you? I said to talk to me, goddammit. You put that suitcase down, you hear me? Do you know what time it is?”

Quickly, Letitia stole into her own room and shut the door. She suddenly needed to tear off every piece of clothing she was wearing, even though her body was shaking. She climbed into her bed, under her covers, seeking sanctuary while her breathing came hard and deep from her lungs. She had a headache. The memory of Midnight’s blood on the knife made her stomach twist, and she was afraid she would be sick.

She had left Daddy’s pocket-watch lying on the barn floor, she remembered. And Bernadette’s bowl from the kitchen. They would be mad about that, she thought. She thought she’d best get out of bed and go fetch them, but she couldn’t move from where she lay.

Letitia heard the door to Daddy’s room open across the hall, followed by his heavy footsteps. She couldn’t see him, of course, but somehow she knew he was wearing his best brown suit and white shirt, with his brown Sunday derby. He was wearing the clothes that told everyone that he was Richard Reaves, a business-owner, and he was not a hard-luck sort of man.

Bernadette had given up shouting, but now she was outright begging instead, the way she liked to hear Daddy beg. “Richard . . . you aren’t thinking clearly. Do you know what they’ll do to an uppity yellow nigger who thinks he can just walk in there and have a say? Think of it, Richard! Don’t be a fool. Don’t get your name mixed up in this mess. That boy’s gonna be all right. You aren’t thinking. What about your family? What about me and Letitia? I swear to Jesus, if you don’t stop this foolishness, I won’t be here when you come back.”

Bernadette’s voice trailed the heavy footsteps down the stairs. Through her open window, Letitia heard the front door open, and the sound of Bernadette’s voice in the night, suddenly shrieking like a woman in pain. “Richard, don’t do this—I love you!”

But Bernadette’s professed love, to Letitia, just sounded like the same old hatefulness. No matter, though. She had bled Midnight, and the curse was broken. Daddy’s ears belonged to himself again and he had his strength back.

Letitia heard the engine to Dad’s choke and sputter, than roar to life. Letitia closed her eyes, smiling. The sound of that purring engine as it drove away was as sweet as the memory of Daddy’s laughter with Brother on the porch that night. As sweet as Christmas morning and as gentle as the stinging of Mama’s loving hands when she pulled her hair into tight plaits between her knees, the way only Mama really knew how.

For once, Letitia’s third eye—what Daddy called her magic eye—wasn’t working. Brother’s future was very blurry and far away, not for her to know. All she knew for sure was that Richard Reaves was on his way to the trial in his good suit to try to save Brother. And that knowledge would last her as long as she would live.

Nalo Hopkinson invited me to submit a short story to her anthology Mojo: Conjure Stories. I wanted to “fix” a broken piece of my family history—my grandmother, the late Lottie (Powell) Sears Houston, clearly remembered her half-brother being on trial for his life, and her father was too intimidated to testify on his behalf, which she considered cowardly for the rest of her life—though I can only imagine the institutional racism standing in his way. Her brother died on Death Row.

Did Brother die in this story? Maybe, maybe not.

But at least Lettie gave her father strength enough to try.