Conyers, Georgia, 1847
I BEEN WAITING AT this door for two hours for Jeremy but he ain’t come back yet. Every time I get ready to go, I tell myself he gon’ show up again, see me missing and think I don’t love him. So I’ll keep sitting here on my knees, waiting. I know he still loves me.
He could forgive me.
After what he asked me to do with Mr. Shepard, he owe me. He can forgive my insult. It wouldn’t be fair if he found me unforgivable after all we been through.
When I think of unforgivable I think of how I killed Massa. No, God could forgive me for that ’cause I had to protect myself. Unforgivable is cold-blooded murder, senseless and with no excuse. Like what they keep writing about what I did in the papers that keep coming: “Faunsdale Slaughterer.”
No, cold-blooded murderer is when somebody, for no reason, takes away everything a innocent man ever had and everything he was ever gone have. But what did I do to Jeremy? And who the hell’s he anyway to make me earn forgiveness from him?
I could help him be better.
I could love him.
Lord knows, I do love him. I’d even forgive him for taking a life, cold-blooded, if he’d promised to love me again.
My sour stomach’s making me sick and that’s all right.
I want it that way.
I want Jeremy to see me sick for him, my knees black and blue for him, my eyes swollen for him. Want him to see me loving him the way he say he don’t love me and regret it.
Throw-up’s racing up my throat this time. I run out the door, shoot it all over the rail. “Jesus!” I cry and hollow out empty. The pain comes back again and I hang over the porch in the dark like somebody’s washed and forgot clothes.
“Ungrateful!” I hear Cynthia say behind me.
I look over my shoulder, see her parading across the parlor with an armful of my things, talking to herself out loud, making sure I hear her, see her. “You’re getting out of here tonight!” she say.
She kicks open the gambling parlor door, bumps around through the room, knocks open the side door, my things hurled from her arms: my fire poker, my clothes, my Bible, a jewelry box Bernadette gave me. They clatter when the heavy things hit the ground but I don’t care. Most everything she got rid of was hers anyway.
ALBERT EMERGES FROM Cynthia’s field coming my way. When he reach the bottom of this porch, he looks up at me. His expression is like he feel sorry but I don’t need nobody feeling sorry for me, getting near me, except my man.
He takes a step up the porch and say, “Can I . . .” “I don’t want to see you,” I say. “Not you! Not Cynthia! No part of this place. Get the hell away from me! And don’t . . .”
A whoosh passes my ear and explodes a glass bottle on the porch, wetting the wood steps. Broken pieces fly and just miss Albert. My ankle burns and a thin red line appears there, just below the hem of my dress where my skin was sliced—the separation cries blood.
I bend down and hold the place with my hand, see Cynthia standing inside drinking from a new bottle she got. She cocks it back to throw it. I leap from the porch! “Ungrateful bitch!” she say. “You better not come back nowhere on this property! Albert, get away from her!”
I take off running.
Keep running.
Running again.
I ain’t got nowhere else to go.