Читать книгу The Revisioners - Margaret Wilkerson Sexton - Страница 14

Josephine

1855

MY MAMA HAD TWO BABIES BEFORE ME. A SISTER AND A brother too, but I never met them. Mama said they had more sense than I did, that they only needed to smell the world to know there was nothing inside it for them. So she was relieved when I came out, when I breathed. She didn’t get close to me anyway, assuming I would catch on too, that I’d be gone any minute, but I stuck around. I held my head up, I sat, I stood, I fed myself cut-up swamp rabbits or fish, I spoke. I ran. And she wiped my mouth and hemmed my skirts; she taught me how to make beds out of dry grass and talk to white folks with my head down and my words dull. But she held on to her heart too; she didn’t let it lead her.

Then one morning she was boiling clothes outside the cabins, and Vera screamed for her to come quick. My mama dropped a wet shirt on her foot and didn’t flinch at the burn. She raced up to the cabin where Vera nursed all the babies too young to hold their heads up. Mama realized then that she was wrong—all the hope she thought she had buried with the other children had been there all along, snaking its way through her. She reached me, and it was too late, I was gone.

Vera closed my eyes, clutched my mama to her, and let her wail.

Still there was no use. Vera alerted Tom and Missus, and they told my daddy to carve a pine box, and Mama said the worst part was that she had let herself be fooled again.

They let her hold the body one night. She had to burn sage to keep the gnats and wasps off me, and she did the only thing she could do: she slept beside me on a pallet on the dirt floor. She was awakened sometime before dusk. She stood, but she said it wasn’t her feet she stood on. They were heavier with calluses and age, the feet of a woman who had worked in fields. She said too that she carried a weight on her she wasn’t accustomed to, and even climbing off her pallet was strenuous. The biggest change was in her mind: it had emptied out and narrowed in a way that relieved her. She knew to make haste for the swamplands. Don’t let the sun rise before you’re back, her mother’s voice sounded in her own mind, the same way she had taught her to stitch moccasins, or cut the watermelon for its rind to rinse her face. That voice was gentle but firm, not like hers, which was heavy as a man’s people said, and she knew.

She reached back just as the night sky was fading. She said a pigeon followed her all the way home. She didn’t have to run. She carried a skirt full of green berries, and she built a fire to boil a tea. I still wasn’t breathing, but she tilted my head and watched the liquid stream down my chin. Call those things which be not as though they were. She could hear her mama’s voice but it was her own trembling fingers that lifted the kettle, tilted the cup. It wasn’t until Vera walked in that I sat up and asked for water. They didn’t give me too much; they were nervous at first, but after I finished drinking, I wanted grits and they boiled them over the fireplace, ladled them with fatback, and let me eat bowl after bowl.

After that, Vera gave me the biggest piece of ham at dinner. I stayed out the fields and just played with Miss Sally all day long; she was the one taught me to read. I started seeing that woman then too, that long brown trail of a woman. She was from another world, but she felt like me; I mean, when she spoke, it felt like the words came out my own mind. Most important though, I got to sit with the Revisioners, sing with them, pray with them. Foresee with them.