SEVERAL MONTHS HAD PASSED WHEN talk of a secret memorial for the executed couple spread to all the farms. The night of the event kept changing, now that the weather had cooled and the possibility of high howling wind might offer enough cover.
When the night was finally settled upon, it was very short notice, and yet, we all had it in our minds to go. It was a Tuesday, a day when the patrols were typically a bit laxer and more cursory. And we had few worries about getting off the farm, as we knew how to get out of the locked cabin by then. Not to mention, the Lucys had become so nervous about sprees of “murderous Negroes” that come nightfall, they carefully locked their own cabin after bolting down ours.
Late that evening, we pushed the table under the window hatch and hoisted Serah through it. Once on the other side, she grabbed a stool from the loom and placed it down underneath the opening for those of us not so light on our feet.
The walk was long, through a dark, tangled brush, and the strange map someone had drawn on a piece of cloth was blurry and hard to decipher. We bumbled around for a while, until we saw a lookout, a large man posted at the edge of a wide valley who looked us over for a long moment before waving us in. “Watch your step,” he said, pointing to a string of grapevine strung low between several tree trunks. We stepped over it and joined the procession of ashen faces, circling two leg-length mounds of dirt. Whitewashed crosses stuck up out of the earth. Several pots were turned upside down to trap the sound of a fading dirge. Every so often, we heard whistling, pairs of lookouts signaling to each other, confirming no danger was near.
The song rose up again. People seemed to come and go, a throng thinning and thickening. And we were unsure if people were leaving, or just trying to lessen the feeling. By then, we were fastened at the elbow, our arms linked, as if the song might unmoor us. A man was preaching, in a low voice, and we all leaned forward to catch the prayer.
We didn’t notice Noah behind us until he slipped closer to Serah. We allowed him entry into our line, where he slid in next to Serah, his arm encircling her waist. Her body leaned into his, and he bent down and kissed her forehead.
We let them be, fixating instead on the preacher’s voice, the low wheezy tone of it as he spoke about redemption and the riches awaiting us in heaven. He barely spoke about the couple at all and didn’t assuage our worries about the ability of the two souls to get back home.
A sharp whistle cut through the dirge. One short piercing blow, followed by two others.
“Patrollers!” someone shouted. The lookout motioned for us all to run west, hopping over the grapevine and leading everyone away from the galloping horses and drunken men hurtling toward us.
One by one, the patrollers hit the strung grapevine at top speed, the horses and riders thrown to the ground. The men yelped and groaned and cursed.
We laughed and laughed as we ran. Pealing bouts of laughter that slowed us down, but we didn’t stop running, as we didn’t know how long they’d be down for and how many might come after. In the commotion, the large throng split into smaller groups, scattering into different parts of the forest. We slowed down once we got close to Harlow’s property line, and it was only then we realized Serah wasn’t trailing behind us.
* * *
SERAH FOLLOWED NOAH TO a large hulking oak tree with a hollow inside, large enough to hide in. They hurried down into it, crouching along the walls of it, on opposite sides of the opening. They could hardly see, and the longer they sat there waiting, their legs cramping underneath them, the harder it got to tell how long they’d have to remain there. The forest grew louder. The buzzing crickets and whippoorwills, the screeching owls and howling wolves.
The longer they sat, Serah felt as if she was stuck in some strange and timeless void. Unable to see or speak, her feet asleep, tingling and heavy, as if they had grown roots and were now a part of the large tree. Inside her were both queasy cold fear and boiling rage. She could hear him breathing and was surprised that even with all that was happening outside, she had the sudden urge to kick him hard. In the leg or the chest even. Marry a free woman. The gall.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered after a long while.
“Shhh . . .”
“I didn’t mean it.”
“Yeah, you did,” she whispered back.
An owl screeched nearby. She tried to shift her feet, moving the left one first then the right, but they were both so numb she had to push at her ankles to get them to move. “Where you going to find these free women? Maybe they got free brothers.”
They both knew the law didn’t work that way. The condition always followed the mother, but the words still stung the way she wanted them to. She heard him suck in a breath, heard him moving now, blocking the small opening where she could see a small crack of the outside world. She saw the jagged crack fill then clear, and for a moment, she didn’t know if he was inside or out.
“Noah?”
No answer.
He made a noise as he ducked back inside the tree and sat down near the opening. “It’s probably safe now but let’s wait a bit longer. You hungry?”
He unwrapped a bundle of cloth.
“What is it?”
“Corn cake.”
She ate a few pieces and then folded the cloth back over the rest.
“Been thinking a lot about Mexico,” he said. “We could go there.”
“Yeah? Where’s that?
“Way south. I met a man from there when we was moving the cattle, and he sketched it out. He said to follow the river as far as you can and then you keep going some days more after that. He said it’s a long way, and the farther you go, there’s hardly any water at all, but it’s possible to cross.”
“Why would you take me? I ain’t your wife,” she said. She knew she was being silly, but the wound inside her was still itching and angry and she just couldn’t leave it be.
He groaned. “What is it going to take for you to know that I’m serious? If you need me to get permission, to get Sutton to marry us, I’ll do it, but why you need their word on things, I’ll never know. Their word ain’t worth a bucket of spit, far as I’m concerned.”
She knew he was right, and she tried to pin down what it was about the whole thing she wanted. It wasn’t the sham ceremony with the cast-off dress and the bored white man raising his Bible in the air. Was it the witnesses she wanted—the cluster of friends and neighbors who would hold them to this public declaration? Or was it the step itself and what it signified?
“I got it,” he said. “Bind us together.”
“What?”
“Don’t play dumb. You probably been working roots on me since we met.”
“I have not! Whatever you’re feeling and doing is all your own self . . .”
“Then bind us together now, husband and wife.”
“I can’t do it now. I don’t have the right things.”
“You sure that’s it? See,” he said, “it’s you who’s not serious.”
She moved closer to the opening and stuck her head out. “Let me look.” She crawled out of the tree and stood up, feeling off-kilter and stiff-legged. She foraged together a makeshift kit. Some damp earth, some long reedy blades of bear grass, a splinter off the tree’s bark facing the moonlight, and what little she saw of the molted skin of an insect.
“Come out,” she told him. “I need the moon. And some of your hair.”
He crawled out and sat down opposite her, where she had laid out all the things she collected. He pulled a skinning knife out of his pocket and unwrapped it from a piece of cowhide. Slowly, he began cutting off a small chunk of curly hair from behind his right ear. She took the hair, rolled it between her fingers, making one long twist. From her own head, she untucked her plaits, fixed neatly at the base of her skull, and from the end of one braid, she pulled loose a few strands of hair until she got a few pieces that were long enough. Then she approximated a ritual where she braided the bear grass and weaved in hair from both their heads.
She had never done a task like it, had always been cautioned against it, in fact, but conjuring elders who warned of the consequences did so because often they were done without the consent of the other party. They were usually employed by jilted lovers, folks desperately seeking people who didn’t want to be sought. That wasn’t the case here, but she didn’t know of any case like hers. And where normally she’d take that as a sign to stop and ask around, she felt as if the void of the tree had opened something, a space that might no longer be available to her in the days to come.
With more hair from both of them, she made three braids in all, whispering a prayer as she worked, placing the corn cake down as an offering.
“You ready?” she said.
“I am. Are you?” She knew he didn’t believe much in Conjure, but like most folks had a healthy nervous respect for it, believing in its possibility to hurt him but not to sway his mind to do things he didn’t want to do.
She tied one of the braids around his wrist. “I take you, Noah, to be my husband from this day on until death parts us. So help me God, ancestors, and saints.”
The words felt strange in her mouth. The silly grin fell from his face.
“You do?” he said.
“Yeah,” she said, with a shy smile.
He leaned over and kissed her.
“Your turn now.”
He took the second braid and tied it around her wrist. “I take you, Serah, to be my wife from this day on until death parts us.”
They kissed again.
She then dug a small hole in the ground and dropped the last braid in. He helped her fill it back up with dirt.
“That all?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. I never married anybody in the woods before.”
They both laughed.
“Come here, then, wife,” he said, leading her back inside the hollowed tree, where they willed their bodies to merge until light broke in some hours later.
* * *
AS THE SUN ROSE higher, Serah’s happiness lasted only until she reached the farm’s property line. She considered hiding out in the woods another day to try and blunt the wrath she knew was coming, but she wasn’t sure if that would make it worse. She went around to the well first, drank until she was full, then crept to the fields. And though she wanted nothing more than to go to the cabin so she could wash herself and change clothes, she thought she might fare better if she went straight to work. Maybe Mr. Lucy had gotten a late start and hadn’t noticed she wasn’t out there. He was mercurial in his management of the day’s work, sometimes stopping by at particular intervals, and other times, just at the day’s beginning or end. Only around harvesttime did he remain out there the entire day.
She made her way to the row, without stopping by the main yard to grab a pickaxe or a hoe. Instead, she began weeding with her fingers one row over, as if she had been out there all morning. A few hours passed that way, the sun growing hotter as her stomach growled. She ambled over to Patience to ask if she had brought any food.
Patience put a finger to her lips. Quiet. She ducked her head, peering backward over her shoulder. She then fished out a piece of corn bread wrapped in cloth and gave it to Serah. “Lucy knows,” she mumbled, before drifting away.
* * *
WHEN IT WAS TIME for our lunch break, we approached the yard as if it were quicksand. We grabbed some water from the bucket while we waited for Nan to emerge from the cookhouse with a tray of corn bread or ashcake. The door of the small building was closed, which gave us pause. No one could cook in there with the door closed, the hearth produced too much smoke. We shouldn’t have been surprised when the door opened and the Lucys came out. He, with a thick bundle of weeds in one hand and a snake whip in the other, and she, with a tray of food.
One by one, they called us up and made us choose between our hunger or the whip, dividing us in two lines. He called every name but Serah’s, leaving her to wait and watch. Junie and Nan chose hunger and stood opposite Patience and Lulu, who both said they’d take the whip.
The Lucys exchanged glances. Of glee, or surprise, we couldn’t tell.
Harlow then raised the whip, cracking it high in the air. It’s an ugly stupid sound.
He struck both Patience and Lulu each ten times, without stripping them down to the skin. Afterward, Patience was in so much pain, she couldn’t eat, while Lulu pushed through and ate so much she made herself sick.
We weren’t surprised that Serah’s punishment was a combination of the two. No food, surely, and like Patience and Lulu, ten lashes while clothed.
But we weren’t dismissed yet. We were still there when they pulled Serah from her knees and made her stand. Lizzie had to hold her up, while Harlow slid the iron harness over her head, the same one he used years ago. It rang and rang as they secured it in place. “Won’t be no more sneaking off now,” Lizzie said.
“Now get on, the beans aching to be cut,” Harlow added, dispersing us back to the fields.
The harness seemed heavier than before, the bell louder somehow than the last time. Serah complained that it cut through every thought, made her teeth ache. We sent her to work on the opposite end, many rows over, where we hoped wind and distance would dull the sound. When we returned from the fields, we hung around the yard longer than usual, hoping Lucy would appear and remove it, but he didn’t.
In the cabin, we took up her sewing and made her sit or lie still so we could all have some peace. Serah had brought in some mud to slather up there, but we warned her not to tamper with it, for fear Harlow would burst in if he didn’t hear the clanging sound every now and again.
* * *
SERAH, WHO COULDN’T FIND a comfortable way to lie down in the harness, tried to sleep sitting up, the upper part of her back propped against a pillow she wedged in between her and the cabin wall. She’d drift off, then shift in a way that sent the bell clanging, jolting her awake. She had stuffed a rag inside it and loosely fixed it with twine, so she could rip it down if Harlow appeared suddenly. The rag helped to blunt the sound, but even then, she still couldn’t sleep. Even with the medicine Nan had given her, the pain in her back and legs kept waking her up.
She stared into the pitch-dark of the cabin, where the only light depended on the brightness of the moon and its ability to leak through the holes in the roof. This night, there was no leakage and she imagined herself back in the warm cozy cocoon of the tree she and Noah hid in. She did her best to keep her mind there, like a pin fixing a hem it mustn’t let fall. Any worries about whether he, too, had been punished or when they’d see each other again were best left elsewhere, somewhere far from the hollowed tree and the wooded area that surrounded it.