Tallassee, Alabama
GENERAL SHERMAN AND his Union Army—Lincoln’s army—left behind a three-hundred-mile path of destruction, sixty miles wide, all the way from Atlanta to Savannah, the reports say. So Lincoln offered him Savannah as a Christmas present. Our freedom’s coming. But right now, people are hungry, searching for work and food. Whites and runaways. And there’s none—out of spite or shortage—and the reasons don’t matter when you’re desperate.
Almost everybody but us has moved on. Annie lets her hands take what they need from the fields, and leaves beef and pork for Charles and the twelve others still here. And me. I wouldn’t miss this.
JOSEY OPENS THE front door and steps on the sun-wet porch, barefooted, and breathes in the smoke of burning pine and bacon. Her flimsy white dress wind-presses against her body—the winds change—but her sour expression tells me she cain’t feel it.
Her pale skin is drained silver from sickness but not flu. She closes the door behind her and her pupils shrink to pinpricks from morning sun. A fly shuffles the thin blonde hairs on her arm as it staggers over strands, seeking a tangled yellow crumb of cornbread there. She rubs her arms with her bulby fingertips. Her nails are chewed down to the quick, swollen dark pink. A purple color traces the nail beds. She flicks her blanket, scattering crumbs caught in it, and they spread like chicken feed.
I’ll call her name sometimes.
I’ll hover out in front of her and watch her watch me the way a blind man watches someone, not seeing, but seeming so. This time, she looks through me, out toward the trees where those changing winds are bending the world. Naked-bare branches stretch to the left in some dancer’s pose, and brown grasses reach upward from beneath the snow. She folds her blanket and goes back inside leaving me on her steps alone even though it felt like we was talking.
Josey asked Charles about me once.
Maybe more than once, but that one time, Charles’s answer caused me to think Josey was asking about me, and not Annie. It’s not strange for a negro to lose parents and for folks to move on in silence. And that day she asked about me, Charles had come home late from working hard. It was almost midnight when she woke him—a six-year-old rousing a giant of a man. But it was her that made him uneasy when she said, “What happened to my momma?”
She hugged her doll baby to her chest and stood doe-eyed, waiting. Charles told Josey that she needed to go back to bed and he’d tuck her in if she wanted. But she kept waiting and he was tired, hemming and hawing, then a rest came over him when she asked again. He said, “Your momma was beautiful,” he said. “Free,” he said. “Free because she decided so. Because she kept some sliver of hope guarded inside her mind.
“She had courage.
“And when she died, she left that courage inside of you.
“So beautiful a young woman, she was, that she glowed from the inside,” he said.
I felt flush as I listened. Embarrassed that anyone would have those things to say about me. So I decided, no, Charles must have been telling Josey about Annie.
Inside, a fire roars from Charles’s oven keeping the chill a step away. When Josey comes inside, the flames sway. A kettle boils on top of the stove while a wood bucket of warm water steams from the floor just outside the pocket of warm. Charles puts a tall metal rod in the bucket and stirs. The drowned garments wrap around his pole, layer after weighted layer. He lifts the mound and dumps it back in.
Josey sits at the table in front of a bowl of stew that Charles left her. Her parted blonde hair hangs over most of her face and she swoops it behind her ears neatly.
He’s been keeping sharp things away from her. Because sometimes, she cuts. And sometimes, she lies about it. Because sometimes, things can happen that are so hard to understand, so violent in nature, that the mind abandons the body and not all of it comes back right.
It’s what happened to Momma, too.
Charles keeps socks on her hands at night now in case her nails grow and make her dangerous to herself. Everything with jagged edges is a threat. It’s what made her sickness real to Charles.
She spoons a mouthful of stew while Charles churns the clothes in the bucket, his pole knocking on the wood bottom. He lowers hisself to the floor next to the bucket and picks out a shirt. He wrings it mostly dry and does the same with the next piece and the next ’til his water bucket’s empty. He puts the pieces in a wicker basket for Josey to hang.
When she finishes her food, she takes his damp things and joins the wind outside. It gusts in patterns of circles and crosses, blowing her stink off—onion and garlic of stew. Josey hangs clothes on the line to dry, hand-straightening them as she goes. The button-down white shirt that Charles wore for what was supposed to be Freedom Day still has a stain on it.
Josey reaches down for his trousers, her britches, and a dress when giggles of children and the sounds of running-away feet blow by me. Not real.
I hear Josey’s thoughts sometimes. They’re like her prayers spoken that I cain’t answer. I’m not God. But I hear her just the same and I don’t know why. Not just hers.
But those noises of running children ain’t real. The voices, neither. They’re only troubling thoughts. Thoughts like visions that come and go. Not real. Like this fog that she keeps seeing roll in, over the property. Not real.
The real and not real blend together for her like it’s doing right now.
The sunshine. That’s real. The melting snow. Real. These clothes. Real. That fog near the woods and that black shadowy figure sprinting across the yard. Not real.
Josey reaches down to grab her wet stocking from her bucket.
The bucket’s gone.
Our clothes sway on the line to the rhythm of children’s pitter-patter. Real. Not real.
The fog near the wood’s a blanket. Not real.
A child walks out from the woods, between the trees, surrounded by a gray cloud of fog. She’s just a girl. Eight or nine. She waves to Josey, then skips alongside the trees, got a brand-new rolling hoop around her neck. Not real.
The wind blows the hanging clothes and whips Charles’s trousers into a split. Real. They flare and behind ’em is Ada Mae . . . when she was just nine years old. She stands alongside the rest of the trash gang. None of ’em are a day older than seven. They take off running, zigzagging, toward a start line finger-drawn in the dirt. They ready to race. They’re holding handmade hoops—long broken branches with the leaves wiped off, bent backward and fastened in a circle, end to end.
I don’t stop Josey from running over to join ’em. Our hoop is as nice as Ada Mae’s was new. We stand on the start line a foot taller and years older than everybody else. We cain’t lose.
Ada Mae teeters on her tiptoes alongside us with a white rag in her clutches. Her arm falls. “Go!” she yells. And Josey takes off, beating the top of her hoop with a stick, moving in front of the others. Ada Mae crosses my path to the finish line, waving us on. Josey’s gon’ win! Josey’s gon’ win!
A big-busted and big-boned girl runs up next to Josey, six foot tall and feral-looking. A challenger. But we move faster, more nimble, ’til that dusty girl curves around us and makes Josey lose her hoop and her balance. Josey slams into the girl and they both tumble over. Josey leaps up, grabs her hoop, and gets us ready to start again but the girl pushes Josey to the ground. “Don’t hold me!” Josey say. “If you don’t let go, we both gon’ lose.”
The other racers are on their way, not slowing down.
“Let me go!” Josey say, kicking the girl.
By the time she breaks free, the racers are passing us. Ada Mae is at the finish line, waving her white rag, but she’s beginning to fade away. All the racers do. Our hoops do, too. Only Charles’s trousers are billowing. Those, and the feral girl’s.
She throws Josey to the ground and puts her hand on Josey’s mouth. “I ain’t gon’ hurt you. Don’t scream.” Her words trigger Josey’s memory of George sitting on top of her, strangling her, seething through clinched teeth. “You scream,” he say. “I’ll kill you!”
Another girl, a woman, runs out of the woods. Real.
She say to Feral, “You get the clothes. I’ll hold this one down,” and straddles Josey now.
Josey screams, “Da—!” But the woman slaps her hand over Josey’s mouth. Her broken yellow fingernails are murky like grease-soaked paper.
“Stop moving, girl,” the woman say. “We just need warm clothes.”
“Mama!” Feral say. “I got ’em!”
Josey watches the shadow of a tree roll across the ground and touch her shoulder, her neck, all over her stomach. Her eyes widen and her body seizes, helpless from the memories of these trees that once held her prisoner.
“Come on, Mama!” Feral say, running away from our clothesline. She got Charles’s shirt and all of Josey’s clothes, except one dress. They disappear into the silence of Tallassee.
Scattering noises revive.
They’re loud like a flock of nesting birds awakened. It’s coming toward us. A space between the trees sweeps open. A gray Confederate uniform. A black man. Under one arm is a pile of her clothes. Jackson throws his bag from his back and lifts Josey over his shoulder, pushes forward to the house.