Natashia Deon - Grace

“I can damn well do it myself,” Cynthia say, getting out her chair, coming for her pitcher. Sam and Ray come back through the door.

“Who you out there talkin to?” Cynthia say to Sam.

“Authorities,” Sam say. “Found the body of a plantation owner over in Alabama. Don’t know who did it. Got the rest of ’em scared.”

My stomach lurches.

“Goddamn niggers, that’s who!” Ray say. “And. .”

“I didn’t ask you, Ray,” Cynthia say.

“Then you tell her, Sam. Tell her what some nigger did.”

Jeremy’s melody starts to fade from my hearing, and the sound of my own heart is loud as a drum at my ear.

Sam goes behind the bar, leaving Ray standing next to me and everybody else waiting for Sam’s answer. Even Jeremy stops playing.

My hands tremble and I hug the pitcher to my chest to stop ’em. Without a word, Sam picks up a wet glass and dries it.

“The whole household was killed,” Ray say. “The nigger stud, too. Three bodies, all. .”

My hearing goes.

He spits as he talks. His words become noiseless sprays on my hands — soapsuds of colorless spit bubbles piled into tiny dome clusters there. They stretch and thin and turn from pink to yellow, then pop in rhythm, one after the other, leaving tiny white circles on my brown skin.

“No one knows who did it,” Sam say, bringing the noise back. “Anything more is gossip.”

“Ain’t gossip,” Ray say. “It’s the truth. Somebody dark was seen running from the scene.”

“Could’ve been a shadow,” Sam say. “Everybody looks dark at night.”

“Not as dark as the nigger who did it. I’d bet on it. Bounty hunters followed his tracks for miles. Damn near to this place.”

“Wasn’t nowhere near here,” Sam say. “Happened ten miles from Faunsdale. That’s still seventy or more miles from here. Could’ve gone anywhere.”

I hold my breath, feel sweat on my face. Jeremy begins his piano again. His low notes like a funeral hymn inside me.

“So it was a him ,” Cynthia say.

“At least six-one, six-two, six-three foot tall,” Ray say, stretching his arms up high like I did the night I ran with the coat above my head. “That’s what the witnesses said. Broad shoulders. But I heard some of their females get big as seven foot in Alabama.”

Ray reaches for the water pitcher in my hand and tugs at it. His quick movements almost send me out my damp skin. I want to let go of it but I cain’t. My hands done taken root in it. Our eyes meet. Dead center. His brown eyes are cold blue. He say, “Where you say you from?”

“None of your damn business, is where,” Cynthia say. “Five feet nothin, she is.”

“She black. Maybe she know who done it.”

“Give that fool the pitcher, Naomi, after you pour me the water I asked for twenty minutes ago.”

“I’m puttin my hat in it,” Ray say. “Me and my cousins. We gon’ find who done it, get the reward.”

I unstick my fingers from the pitcher and pour a glass for Cynthia and take a deep breath before I give it to her, feel my racing heartbeats slow — just a little.

IT’S BEEN SIX months since he got Josey.

Six months since he tore her apart.

Was six hours that day that didn’t nobody come to stop him. Nobody heard nothing. Saw nothing. Nobody but me.

It was in those hours, those too many times, too many ways, that Josey had to surrender. Had to believe everything George was telling her. Had to swallow his words about herself. Her body. He said she was an animal. A dog. Not worthy of human decency. So when she disconnected from her mind and watched all those things happen to her own self, what was real was his voice speaking the truth about her, breaking her mind ’til she believed everything he said. And because she could believe it, she survived.

And now, her revenge is mine.

A kind of self-defense, I’d call it. A third kind. The first kind would be plain self-defense. That’s what Cynthia once called it. “Justified,” she said. “You ain’t responsible for killing somebody if they trying to kill you first.”

Self-defense is what Cynthia almost had to do about those men who came to hurt me in her garden. It’s what I had to do the night I killed Massa.

But I won’t let Josey be a murderer.

I’ll do it.

And I don’t need to be excused by the law: self-defense. ’Cause George don’t need to be in the act for what I got for him. He’s still alive and some danger is always with you. Its suddenness can arise at any time, you just don’t know when. So I call it “defending self,” a second kind of self-defense, a switch of words, a switch of position, where the victim takes control and beats the asshole to it. I need to make sure George never comes back; that I make him stop for good. I don’t need the law to allow it. I don’t need “justified.” ’Cause it don’t matter anyway. I already told you the truth. What I’m after is the third kind.

Satisfaction.

So for six months, I been visiting the spot in the woods where the dead walk hoping to find a soul to help me, to teach me what I need to know to touch the living. But I been unlucky. This evening was no different.

Now, the dark and early morning is sending a sliver of moon over me, following me into Josey’s and Charles’s quarters where it stops at the window. A thin curtain is tacked on it like a used napkin. It rolls from left to right. Wind trapped behind it is fighting its way out. A ripple flaps the edge away, finally letting go.

Charles sits on the floor, sleeping in the corner, wearing the day clothes he been in since yesterday. His arms and legs are crossed, his neck is hooked over, his back is against the wall. The whites of his eyes is showing through the slits, and every once in a while he’ll swat his hand in front of his face and mumble. He chokes hisself awake on his slobber, then wipes it from his chin.

A sheet still hangs from the ceiling to the floor, separating Charles’s part of the room from Josey’s. I go behind it to where Josey’s rolling in her bed covers, sleeping good. I wonder when the memories of that cursed day will stop haunting her dreams the way I suspect they never did for Momma. I imagine Josey keeps reliving it the way I do these flashes. The way Momma must have done before she went silent.

So I talk to Josey. Sometimes I think she hears me. Sometimes not. Maybe my words are just another thought, another voice in her head. I cain’t be sure if it was me who talked her into getting washed up and dressed yesterday.

From first glance, or the second, there ain’t much on Josey that would be a sign that anything happened. Except for the scars on her knees and elbows. She’s even walking right again. But young folks can be that way. The worse thing could happen one day and the next be like any other. But, I know.

If nothing else, the proof of the horror is still in her eyes, even when she blinks, they don’t move, still frozen from fear. Blues fixed in place like a doll’s, painted on and empty, looking nowhere and somewhere or any place you make it look. “Chrissie Ann,” Josey woulda said to her doll baby before six months ago. “See them fields and flowers. Them sparrows.”

But she wouldn’t say that now. Ain’t seen her doll babies since it happened.

Charles been too busy to see her as she is. He’s been sharpening his tools, putting together metal pieces, getting ready to show his work and be somebody’s hired hand. He been running hisself ragged making plans for freedom, to start hisself a new life with Josey. You can pass for white, he told her. Got more chances, he said. None like I got.

And this broke her heart.